MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
If strong-arming them works to reduce abortions then do that. And quite a few adults are bad at calculating risk and dislike condoms, so strongarm them too. Somewhere around a million abortions happen each year, which means millions more are not using birth control. Whether that's from "access" or cost, or social acceptability, all of those are levers to push.
The point being, more birth control usage = fewer abortions = good, and most pro-life people are leaving hundred dollar bills on the floor by ignoring this avenue for solving the problem.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
That model would predict that people would be equally opposed to all forms of birth control, which is not what we observe. You don't see people having angry protests outside condom manufacturers and calling them murderers the way you do at abortion clinics.
It makes more sense if you model pro-life as following directly from the personhood of fetuses, and this belief being highly correlated with religion, which in turn is correlated with a separate but lesser opposition to birth control. And also correlated with being deontologists and thus irrationally unwilling to tradeoff on a tacit endorsement for promiscuous sex that's already happening in exchange for solving the mass murder of millions of unborn babies.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Are you talking about like the morning after pill? Because those are bad, but I'm referring to the ones that prevent women from ovulating during pregnancy so they don't just keep conceiving babies month after month while already pregnant. I know they make IUDs that do that, but there might be pills for it to.
I actually am not super familiar with the habits of promiscuous people and their typical birth control preferences, so "most" might not be the right phrase to use here. But if it turns out that most forms of birth control are abortive, but some aren't, that just increases the potential benefit of a pro-life promotion and subsidization of the ethical ones. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $20 for non-conceiving hormones, and they don't think fetuses are people, they're likely to take the abortion pills. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $0 for non-conceiving hormones because the government and/or pro-life charities pay the $20, then no child gets conceived in the first place, and thus none die. Assuming that the goal is actually to prevent the conception and subsequent deaths of fetuses because they die, and not just to increase the number of childbirths, this seems like a massive win to me.
Now maybe it would be healthier for society and relationships for people to just not have promiscuous sex in the first place, but that ship has sailed, pragmatically there's nothing we can do to fix that, and it seems much less of a priority to me than the millions of deaths at stake that free non-abortive birth control could prevent.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Hormonal birth control is just early abortion.
Which kind? There are kinds that make you miscarriage after the egg has been fertilized, in which case I'm inclined to agree with you. But there are kinds that prevent ovulation in the first place, in which case it's no different from abstinence or condom use, at least as far as life is concerned, since no child is conceived in the first place which could then die.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Simple first principles:
(1): Human lives are inherently valuable for their own sake, not just as instrumental value towards some economic or political end.
(2): Human fetuses are human and alive in physical form in a way that satisfies the criteria for (1).
(3): Imaginary hypothetical humans who do not exist in any physical form are not inherently valuable unless and until they come into being
All of these are axiomatically independent: you could form a coherent belief structure out of any combination of them. (1)+(2) implies pro-life. (3) makes abortion meaningfully distinct from preventative birth control. I'm fairly certain that the vast majority of people across political and religious beliefs agree with (3) in practice, which is why they don't advocate that celibate people be treated the same as serial killers. Even religious fundamentalists who are adamantly against birth control and in favor of having lots of children don't think that failing to procreate is literally equivalent to murder. Only weird straw-utilitarians who want to tile the universe with hedonium or literally maximize the number of living humans to the exclusion of all else would reject (3).
So then, conditional on people accepting (3), we can broadly categorize "pro life" people as accepting both (1) and (2), and "pro choice" people as rejecting one or both. Theoretically you could find weird exceptions where someone rejects (2) but is pro life anyway because they want to mysogynistically control women's bodies, or someone who accepts all three but only a weak version of 1 such that the right to bodily autonomy outweighs millions of valuable fetus lives. But in practice most of the contention is in (2): pro-choice people reject the premise that fetuses are meaningfully human in a way that makes them valuable and gives them rights. And to a lesser extent they contest (1), a lot of atheists think that human rights are derived from the State and not inherent to personhood thus non-citizens who the State chooses not to protect and can't advocate for themselves do not have inherent rights, while more religious people think that rights are inherent, inalienable, and God-given. Although the existence of God is neither necessary nor sufficient for human rights to be inherent and inalienable, the beliefs do tend to be strongly correlated, as postulating an objective morality without a higher authority to define it requires some epicycles and philosophical justification.
All this to say... murder and abstinence are incredibly different, and nobody treats them the same, not even you. That's why you aren't panicking about not having unprotected sex right now the same way you would be if you were accidentally killing someone right now.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
But if the Evangelicals unilaterally decided to support free birth control then, with bipartisan support from pro-choice people, it could get passed without requiring the Catholics to get on board. Maybe they'd perceive it as a betrayal or something, but they could still stand united on the abortion bad part.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Maybe I should clarify my position as someone who is both pro-life and utilitarian. It is about "harm" for me, and a non-negligible proportion of pro-life people I have encountered. Human fetuses are human and alive, human life is good, death is bad. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Of course for a different non-negligible proportion of "pro-life" people it's about punishing people for their sins and forcing people to bear the consequences of their premarital sex.
I just wish my... subfaction? were more influential than the latter so we had more control over the movement and its messaging.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Besides the pro-life movement opposes birth control.
That's precisely my point. It needs to change. A lot of people are lazy and stupid, or just poor, and those are the people most likely to also be too lazy to pull out or time when they have unprotected sex, or think about long term consequences like pregnancy. The pro-life movement needs to be on the forefront of not only providing and promoting free birth control, but pressuring people to use it. Don't shame people for having premarital sex, shame people for having unprotected premarital sex, because that's the kind that actually causes harm.
If you're a rational person who plans ahead, I don't think there's a large practical difference between $10-20 per month and just free, for something as impactful as birth control. But if you are lazy and impulsive there's a huge difference between not having condoms in your pocket and having sex anyway because you want to get laid, versus having a pile of condoms in your cabinets because the government and/or pro life movement keeps mailing them to you. Or maybe they just keep having sex all the time without condoms but all of the women have IUDs because those are free now and they got tired of people pressuring them to please get one. Or maybe it becomes a rite of passage for a girl to get one on her 18th birthday or something and it's just normal for everyone to have them until they actually want kids.
If people were smart and responsible, none of this would be necessary. But also the abortion rate would be near 0 already. The fact that it's not is pretty clear evidence that people are not smart and responsible.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
The pro-life maneuver with the highest expected value, as measured by abortion reduction multiplied by probability of actually getting passed in the legislature, is to promote free birth control. Most people on the left already want this, so it shouldn't be hard to get bipartisan support. Then way more people will use it, way fewer accidental pregnancies occur, and actual abortion rates plummet regardless of whether it's legal or illegal.
This might have the bonus affect of making it much easier to pass restrictions on abortion afterwards. If fewer people have needed one or known someone who has needed one, and the only people who ever get abortions are morons who forgot to take their free birth control, people in general will be less sympathetic. Lazy people just using abortion as birth control will have cheaper alternatives and so care less. People worried about being forced to give birth to an unwanted child in some hypothetical future will be less worried because they can just use their free state-provided birth control. And the messaging that pro-life people just want to enslave women as breeders forced to give birth against their will just dissolves away because we're actively trying to prevent them from getting pregnant.
But even if nothing else changes legislatively, even if the silly pollitical warmakers would consider this a loss because the pro-choice get everything they want, this would be a massive win for pro-life and effective altruism. I don't think people trying to have tons of promiscuous sex "deserve" to have their degenerate lifestyles subsidized by my tax dollars, but I'm going to offer it anyway because "deserves" matter less than saving lives.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Unless colleges themselves start dropping Gen Ed requirements (which they should), AP courses of nonsense subjects are incredibly useful because they let you bypass them in college. I took AP Psychology and AP Government in highschool, they were mostly pointless, I passed the exam, and then when I went to college I had two fewer useless class eating my time and money so I could learn math and physics. (I also took AP classes for some of those too, but that just let me fastforward to more advanced ones in my major)
I think I agree with your analogy but, rather than say "both are okay" like you might expenct, conclude "Neither is okay, at least if you're being obnoxious about it." And consistently I support social but not legal sanctions against obnoxious behavior. Someone simply passively being hot, or being rich, is a positive quality that they should be somewhat proud of, but also potentially humble as it's not entirely due to their own merit. And to the extent that it is within your own control, you should strive to be more of both and encourage people who succeed in becoming more of either.
But a hot person (of either sex) flaunting their body in revealing clothing should be perceived and treated similarly to a rich person flaunting their wealth with gaudy expensive jewelry and luxury goods. There might be a time and a place where it's appropriate to display, like at a fancy party or something, and if it just happens to be visible as a side effect of normal behavior that's fine. But if you're going around showing off in public and deliberately going out of your way to exaggerate it in order to make people jealous that's obnoxious and you should be mocked and shamed for it (in proportion to the level offense). It should still be legal, because it's not the government's responsibility to codify what "obnoxious" means, but people should recognize it for what it is and discourage it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I'm 99% convinced that the U.S. military or CIA has at least one fancy stealth aircraft that isn't public knowledge, because of course they do, it would be stupid if they didn't. And probably it has some components which are designed differently from typical aircraft, because it's advanced and experimental, and thus looks strange to people used to seeing typical aircraft. And I bet if you see it flying around, or especially if they deliberately put fancy lights on it, it would look strange and alien to someone who's not an expert.
Or rather, how could you even tell the difference in principal? If we assume the military's secret projects are at least 5-10 years ahead of public knowledge, then even things which aren't commonly known to be possible are still plausibly human. And then you take a fifty year old senator whose perceptions of even modern common knowledge are probably a few decades out of date. Have you seen China's drone shows? https://youtube.com/watch?v=VvemT96Rozc . They're fancy! In order for something to be demonstrably "non-human" it would have to be remarkably strange above and beyond this. Because humans are already capable of some pretty impressive stuff.
An actual expert with long-term firsthand experience dismantling an alien aircraft could reliably determine that it's non-human. But otherwise, you would need straight up teleportation or something to identify something as non-human from a distance: even hovering, laser beams, and sonic rays aren't out of the question for humans with billions of dollars and a slight scientific head start.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Whose push? If he's just a puppet letting someone else pull the strings, then isn't that person or group effectively the President? How do you have Democracy and accountability if the literal President is just a figurehead representing unknown people in a political party? Does every Democratic Senator vote to decide what Joe Biden's next position should be? Does Nancy Pelosi call all the shots unilaterally and functionally equivalent to being the president herself except she gets none of the blame or credit if things go badly? Is Hillary Clinton the puppetmaster and electing Joe Biden was politically equivalent to electing her? Is the CEO of CNN actually influencing Joe Biden by implicitly threatening to smear him if he doesn't do what they want? We don't know. And next election cycle, if Joe Biden steps down and another puppet steps up you might have the exact same person/people pulling their strings, bypassing term limits, and pretending to be starting fresh with a new reputation, forgetting all the mistakes they made in the past.
I very much want a President who has policies and agendas, declares what they are openly, honestly, and publicly, and then sticks to them as much as reasonably possible. Because then we the people can decide which collections of policies and agendas we actually agree with and vote for whichever President has the best. Because we the people are supposed to be in charge, not shady politicians making secret deals behind the scenes and avoiding responsibility.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Yeah. I wouldn't mind some high effort white nationalist posts so their points can be addressed and discussed and possibly rebutted in an intelligent way.
And to some extent, forcing high quality posts from people with misguided views may force them to educate themselves and accidentally de-radicalize in the process.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I'm struggling to imagine a scenario in which anything involving aliens was kept hidden for this long but didn't count as national security data to be exempted from such a clause. Like, if aliens were real and we captured their flying saucers of course that would be secret national security data! What is Scheumer's bill expected to do in the first place?
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
This is another piece of evidence that if you're going to IQ test your applicants (a very good idea) you should just use Pearson or Wonderlic or another big company that specializes in these things rather than making your own homebrew test.
Except that this is precisely the pro-monopoly incentive structure that causes all the megacorps and ruins the competitive landscape and free market principles. Megacorps snatch all of the rents and economic surplus in many economic niches because they can charge monopolistic prices and any potential small competitors get lawsuited to oblivion.
Which I guess doesn't mean as an individual actor it's unwise to do it, tragedy of the commons and whatnot, but it's more evidence that something structural needs to change that enables this in the first place.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I've been reading a bunch of fiction on Royal Road, including Industrial Strength Mage, Tunnel Rat, Paranoid Mage, and A Practical Guide to Sorcery although each typically releases one chapter per week which is why I've been keeping up with all of them simultaneously. While none of them are exactly rat-fic, they scratch a similar itch with protagonists that win by thinking, planning, and outsmarting opponents, and trying to munchkin the magic system of their world in ways that other people don't.
When waiting for chapters on these I've been browsing other stuff on Royal Road, but have kind of been missing having an actual proper completed series to binge, so am probably going to find a new series from elsewhere to pick up.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I think that if we buy this argument, the solution would be for the government to directly run its own public supply with 0 or controlled nonprofit tuition costs, the same as they do with the water supply and public schools, not subsidize the costs of private universities. If the government just says "every college student gets $50k towards their tuition" and applies this equally to all schools, then the long term result is that all colleges raise their tuition by almost $50k, because that's where the new market equilibrium lies.
If instead the government has its own free universities, then all of the fancy ones need to offer a better product with cheap enough tuition in order compete.
You can't just subsidize profit-maximizing companies and naively expect them to divert all of the extra money towards the customers. That's like trickle down economics fallacies but worse.
There are no (or negligibly few) children who voluntarily have sex with adults and are happier afterwards.
Citation needed. Lots of teenagers agree to have sex with adults. Many of them later regret it, but many of them do not. I doubt there are any good statistics on it because of the highly controversial nature, but I would be willing to bet that the number that are "happier" is nonnegligible, if you're measuring happier based on the same sort of self-report that the trans children are using. Go ask a fourteen year old girl with a 30 year old boyfriend, or one who's sleeping with her gym teacher, whether she'd be "happier" without them. And for some of them they might actually be right. My ballpark guess, pulling numbers out of my ass, would be somewhere between 30-70% of underage people who have uncoerced sex with adults would "be happier" being allowed to do it, conditional on not receiving significant social or legal backlash from society, or being pressured to lie or cognitive dissonance themselves. Which is also where my ballpark guess for children who undergo medical transition is.
There isn't some magical force of nature that causes all relationships that pass the magic barrier of 18 years old to be automatically predatory and unhealthy, such that they are all actually harmful. However, I think that as a society it's useful to have Schelling point of "do not have sex with anyone under 18 for any reason", because it safeguards the significant portion who are coerced or groomed into it, or just have bad judgement and don't consider long term consequences properly because they're kids/teenagers, even if that harms the few who would be fine. If the potential harms are 5x greater than the benefits (compared to the outside option of waiting until they're 18), then from a utilitarian perspective it's worth preventing all of them if the proportion of those who would regret it are at least 1/5. We're not dooming people to never have sex ever, or never transition ever, just wait until they're 18 and have the mental and emotional maturity to figure out what they actually want long term.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I agree, but I think the rape affect is appropriate, at least with regard to trans issues. Medical transitions are a form of genital mutilation which cause massive harm similar in kind but greater in magnitude to rape. I would rather a child be groomed into sex with a pedo than groomed into undergoing medical transition, because the former would leave fewer long term irreversible trauma and could hopefully eventually be healed and recovered from.
With regards to LGB, grooming is only an appropriate accusation if the ideologues are trying to convince the children to be more sexually explicit, promiscuous, and/or think sex with adults is okay (things which would be a prelude to pedophilia). Almost nobody is accusing normal LGB people of being "groomers", and I disavow the ones who do. The efficacy of "groomer" comes from the rape affect, and in order to preserve that as a useful tool we need to use the word only in cases where that implication is accurate.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
There's no such thing as ambition, there's just 'long description of personality traits which people typically describe as ambition'.
I don't think you've said anything meaningful here other than implying that ambition is a multifaceted concept and not a single numerical value. Which of course it is, pretty much all personality traits are multifaceted and not single dimensional sliders even though people sometimes describe them as such.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Update to this post: https://www.themotte.org/post/498/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-21/101809?context=8#context
where I wanted advice on getting an engagement ring for my girlfriend. I have since proposed before getting the ring (as planned), it went wonderfully, and we are now engaged. After looking at a bunch of examples together and honing in on concepts and features she found appealing (turns out she doesn't simply like flowers, which I already knew, but she really really really likes flowers), we settled on this ring
from Taylor and Hart. It uses diamonds, but they use lab-grown diamonds, so I'm happy with that. We considered substituting some colored gems in the flower, but then there's also leaves which would look a bit weird if we made them green, but would also look weird if we colored the rest of the flower but left them white. Most importantly, my now-fiance thinks it's really pretty exactly how it is, so we don't want to change things in case it accidentally ends up looking worse.
Thank you for everyone who offered advice, regardless of whether I ended up using it or not.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Steel-manning here, because I mostly agree with you, but theoretically any sort of "told you so" can potentially be used to
1: Convince the other side that you know what you're talking about and they should listen to you on other topics
2: Convince the other side that they're wrong on this particular issue and should change their stance in order to stop digging themselves deeper into the hole.
3: Convince third parties that the other side is wrong and stupid and they should join you instead of the other side.
1 pretty much never happens in politics ever. It rarely even happens in local personal interactions, although it sometimes does. 2 can sometimes happen, and that seems like the most feasible route here. Mass immigration and demographic replacement is bad, now the left has more of a reason to agree that it's bad, even if for completely different reasons than the right, and maybe pointing this out will make them more amenable to coming together to solve the issue. 3 seems plausible. Each person has a reason or a set of reasons why they're on the side they're on, and how wholeheartedly they're on that side. I'm center-right specifically because every time one side does some insane nonsense I try to distance myself from them, and both sides do it frequently but I perceive the left as doing more damage with their crazy schemes so I distance myself more. Although most people don't treat things the same way I do, I think there is some of this effect, especially in younger and more undecided people. Even if pointing out the insane hypocracies on the left is unlikely to change the minds of people who are firmly on that side, anyone on the fence can see that and, if they agree, be more likely to become right, or at least a more intelligent left that doesn't replicate that flaw.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
My best guess is that UFOs are a combination of U.S. military or alphabet agency craft doing secret experimental flights, made up stories seeded by military and alphabet agencies to camoflage discredit the real ones, paranoid people with mental health issues making stuff up, and clickbait media agencies hopping on the bandwagon and having no journalism standards so that they can earn money from signal boosting said stories.
Maybe there are some foreign spy craft mixed in there too, but it's probably mostly domestic or imaginary.
I'd like to chime in here, because although I lean libertarian in general, am very fond of capitalism as a system, and don't think corporations are fundamentally evil to the very core as /u/ScrimbloBimblo states, I do think that in practice most large corporations are evil. And I mean that in the same sense I would if an individual person behaved the way they do, I would call that person evil too.
Because human beings are not profit maximizing agents. In-so-far as a person might be described as rational and thus utility maximizing, their utility function is not literally just money. People value lots of things like friendships and relationships, and honesty, and reputation, and their conscience. If you leave a bicycle unlocked, most people aren't going to steal it even if they could get away with it. Obviously if enough people pass it it will eventually get stolen, but the amount of people that have to pass it is more than one. If you make an informal agreement with someone, most people are not going to obsessively look for opportunities to screw you over. If your friend lends you $5 they are unlikely to obsessively hound you about paying them back and calculate the exact amount of interest you owe them. Obviously people like this do exist, and they're assholes, and most good-natured people try to avoid them. The more greedy, money obsessed, and sociopathic someone is, the more corners they're willing to cut. And even if they follow the law and restrict themselves to nominally consensual economic deals they still force people around them to constantly be on guard about what deals they make because the sociopath is trying to trick them to get more money.
And a large corporation nonrandomly selects for these people and promotes them and socially and legally insulates them from the consequences their actions would face if done as an individual. It's much harder to shame someone for scamming an old granny out of her life savings if it's a faceless bureaucrat "just doing their job" than if it's the local small town repair shop run by Tom. It's much harder to pressure Tom to give the money back, or spread the word that Tom is a jerk and everyone should boycott him, if Tom just acts on behalf of a multinational corporation with only two meaningful competitors, both of whom are equally scummy because they similarly promote sociopaths.
Ethical corporations should seek profit in the same way that you do when selling your labor: as an important consideration that you want to get a fair value for and need in order to survive, but not literally the only thing that matters in the world such that you're willing to tradeoff literally all other concerns for marginal slivers of extra cash. Technical "consent" is neither necessary nor sufficient to define ethical behavior, though it is an important component. Corporations, and the people making decisions within them, should be held to the same ethical standards that everyone else is when making economic transactions. And I think ethical companies do exist, but typically the larger one is the less likely that becomes.
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