MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I don't think the Christian response necessarily demands helping people in front of you more than distant people. Part of the whole point of missionaries is that people farther away are easier to help with greater magnitude per effort, so go out there and help them.
In many ways, Christianity and EA are highly compatible. Both believe that you should do things that actually help people, not just meaningless platitudes or virtue signalling.
The main distinction is that Christians believe in souls, and that everyone is doomed to hell unless they are saved by Jesus, and therefore convincing someone to accept Jesus and thus saving their soul is the ultimate good that you can do for them, and all of the material assistance pales in comparison except in so far as it helps convince people that Jesus is good.
Partially stemming from this but independently of metaphysical souls, Christianity also has more of an emphasis on internal change as a form of good. Sort of a teach a man to fish versus give a man a fish sort of thing. If you build schools and teach people better farming techniques, then they can feed themselves. If you teach people to love each other and cooperate instead of hating each other, crime rates will go down. If you love an alcoholic homeless person and teach them to love themselves, you might convince them to turn their life around, give up alcohol and seek stable employment. No amount of mere financial assistance is going to make someone mentally and spiritually healthy, or prevent them from physically destroying their own health, it requires human interactions, which you can only do in person.
Which EA is generally aware of and takes into account as well. It's just a matter of emphasis.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
What would Jesus do? Jesus would probably sit down and talk to them. Get to know them, understand them, befriend them. Go to their house, meet their family. And then help them out of whatever situation they are in that led them to where they are on the street. It doesn't matter whether they're genuinely homeless or a con artist or part of a gang: Jesus hung out with criminals and con-artist tax collectors all the time. If they are con artists, then maybe they need more psychological and moral help than financial help, but they still need help. In some sense Jesus was an effective altruist, meaning actually help people at the root cause of their issues, not just superficial symptoms.
I don't think most Christians are up to this task. I'm probably not, though I'm not a very good Christian in practice. It would take significant time out of your life, especially as building a relationship with people takes many repeated interactions, which would wreak havoc on your busy schedule, probably put you at personal safety risk getting close to dangerous people, and probably require you to spend a decent amount of cash too. But it's probably the actually correct Christian thing to do.
But I think any weaker more realistically implementable Christian responses should be approximations of this. Fix the root cause of the issue, help these people effectively, however they actually need to be helped to get them out of a position where they feel like they need to beg. And if you think they're con men who don't really need financial assistance then figure out how to help them in a way that doesn't enable their behavior.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I've also heard an argument that Social Security and nursing homes are to blame. It used to be that having kids was how people saved up for retirement. You spend 18 years paying for a child, and even if they earned you some money that just reduced the economic burden without removing it, but then they love you and are loyal to you and when you're old they take care of you and pay for you. Which, especially if you have an agrarian society where most of your wealth and income is physical goods not just cash, makes it hard to invest in a retirement account the same way we do now.
I don't think there's way to even possibly actually move the clock back on that though. Even if you ruthlessly cut social security and all financial assistance for elderly people, they could still take the money that would be spend on children (and the resulting decrease in taxes) and invest it in a retirement account.
But if you combine it with the reduced labor laws, together they might add up to being worth it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Does this imply that eliminating child labor laws (and ignoring the ethical issues therein) would drastically increase fertility? Or is there not enough productive labor that children could accomplish in the first world, even on farms? But even then, reducing/eliminating minimum wage for them would allow the market to find some sort of niche. Like, if a poor family could just have a bunch of children and send them off to McDonalds for $6 an hour, 40 hours per week (after school and on weekends would allow this), that's $12,480 per year per kid. I'm sure lots of minimum wage jobs would hire children if they could pay them less than they had to pay adults, and could avoid public controversy. Have 10 children? That's 124,800 per year. Granted, you would have to feed and house and clothe all of those children which would eat most of that money, but that's kind of the point. Have as many kids as you want and the costs and you're just as economically stable as you would have been without them, if not slightly more.
I'm not at all actually advocating for this. I don't know that we want a society where poor children are forced to work 40 hour weeks at fast food restaurants, and poor people literally create children for the purpose of earning a profit. But it seems like it would solve the fertility issue in exchange.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
This sounds vaguely reasonable on paper (aside from shoehorning in some unnecessary snipes at political enemies). It rationally makes sense that if you'd want to be economically secure before starting a family.
But I don't think it stands up to millennia of people in much worse economic conditions having many many children. In fact, poor people tend to have many more children than middle class people do. Even lower class people in the first world are massively wealthier than most people in the rest of the world, in the present or future. And yet they tend to have large families anyway.
Is it just having higher standards? Access to birth control? Maybe poor people having large families makes them even more poor and potentially more miserable, but they do it anyway because they're used to being poor and just tolerate the problems more children causes? Or just don't have birth control and don't really plan it on purpose? Or maybe being intelligent and vaguely upper-middle class in bearing but earning lower-middle class amounts creates a mismatch between standards and income, while traditional poor people expect to be poor so don't see a point in waiting?
Given this trend across human populations, logically it must either be the case that if you and people like you had more money you still wouldn't have children and the economic argument is an excuse, or that you are in a meaningfully different scenario than most other poor people who have many children anyway. I don't purport to actually know, but am interested in how you would explain this discrepancy.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
The abilities to catfish in online dating are going to get so much worse. Illiterate morons just trying to get laid are going to copy/paste eloquent and romantic sprawls of text designed to make them seem intelligent, thoughtful, and competent, only to finally meet in person and be a complete asshole in real life.
Which is going to significantly hurt the signalling abilities of well-intentioned people. Online dating is going to get even worse than it is now.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I would largely put it down to severity of the imposition. It's not exactly positive restrictions versus negative restrictions, but that is a component of it.
To adhere to all Covid regulations and suggestions, you had to
1: Wear a mask whenever you go outside. This requires you to buy a mask, remember the mask exists, have this thing on your face restricting your breating and constantly reminding you of its existence, be unable to see the faces of the people you interact with, and have your adherence be publicly displayed.
2: Not travel to places or spend time with friends and family as much as usual. Not go to work for several months, possibly having severe repercussions on your finances. Change your entire daily routine, and that of your family. Watch your kids miss several months of proper schooling. Have you and your family potentially suffer negative mental health effects.
3: Inject yourself with a newly invented vaccine that may or may not work or be safe (it does work and is probably safe, but that's hard for a 100 IQ person to know when everyone is lying constantly). Multiple times, because apparently the first one isn't good enough.
This was a huge deal. The entire country changed, for years. The economy took a huge blow leading to supply chain issues and massive inflation that it still hasn't recovered from (though part of that is that it rolled into the Russia sanctions, but the bulk of it was Covid). And the rules kept changing every week and people had to keep paying attention and changing their behavior in response. The Covid lockdowns were a big deal. You can argue that Covid itself was a big deal and therefore it was worth the cost, but it was a huge cost.
Meanwhile, to adhere to recreational drug restrictions I have to.... do nothing. I can literally do nothing, go about my daily life, and be in compliance with the restrictions. I can not damage my health by inhaling or injecting foreign substances, and not spend my money on a thing that I don't need or want. People who don't know that recreational drugs exist are in compliance with these restrictions, because it's a restriction against doing something, not requiring you to do something, and it's not something most people want to do anyway. It has literally no impact on the majority of people, so they don't care. You might compare it to if the government outlawed Skiing or something. People would get upset and protest that the restriction was stupid, pointless, authoritarian and evil. But they would be less upset than the Covid lockdowns, because most of them would not be impacted and could comply by simply going about their daily lives not Skiing. And if Skiing had already been illegal for decades then people probably wouldn't get that upset about it, because they wouldn't have made it into a hobby they enjoy or bought equipment for it in the first place.
The ability to use recreational drugs is just not a big deal for most people.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Evolution works much much more strongly on individual fitness than it does on group or species fitness. So it doesn't have to be adaptive for the species to be selected for, it has to be adaptive for the individuals engaging in the behavior. Socially adept males who shame male autists and cause them to drop out, especially within their own social circles will reduce competition and increase their own sexual market value. This is advantageous for them regardless of the value of autists to society. The only way it wouldn't be advantageous is if the target of shame retaliates (either physically or socially) in a way that costs the shamer more than their expected gain. Which is likely the reason why they don't try to shame non awkward people.
Females who shame male autists don't gain from this source. So it probably lines up with your theory better, but with the caveat that probably most of the value is from the individual female herself not reproducing with the individual after she has shamed him and caused him to drop out.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I feel like something like there's some component of the opposite of this though. That is, perhaps socially adept people have evolved to shame awkward men into hiding because if they agree to hide then there are fewer men in the dating pool and the remaining men have a lower male to female density and thus more market value. This only works with awkward and weak men as targets because they are unlikely to retaliate, and are more likely to drop out instead of saying "fuck you" and continuing to ask girls out.
We might consider this a form of artificial selection: humans are nudging the fitness landscape in a way that makes being shy and kind less adaptive than it already was, because they are less likely to find a mate, while more aggressive behavior (shamers, and people who ignore negative feedback) becomes more adaptive.
If this is the case, then the correct response is actually the opposite: you should ignore them and in fact become more proactive about pursuing women because you and people like you are being suppressed by a psy-op from a different phenotype of males, which primarily functions by deceiving you and wins if and only if you believe it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Why does it have to be aliens?
visiting A-bombs, nuclear subs, carriers and missiles
First possibility that pops into my head is Russia or China. Second is the U.S. military itself pretending not to know what its own craft are to keep them secret from the public. Third is CIA or other shady U.S. government agency that keeps secrets from other parts of the U.S. government. Aliens are fourth. UFO stands for "unidentified flying object": if it flies and you haven't identified it, it's a UFO. They can easily exist without requiring them to be extraterrestrial. We already know of a species right here on Earth that has access to advanced technology, can create flying craft, and keeps inventing new stuff that nobody has ever seen before.
Underwater stealth drones or lasers that scramble people's brains are just outside the publicly known levels of technology, it's not too crazy to imagine that one of the governments is experimenting with something like that and people don't know about it yet. Certainly less crazy than secret aliens. So, conditional on these reports being true, that's the most likely scenario.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I think that was sarcasm. The entire post appears to be drawing a sly comparison between the current progressive hegemony and irrational and tyrannical religious practices in the past, without explicitly drawing the connection.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
You might consider a superposition of two states:
In one, gender and sex mean the same thing. Therefore, trans people are both the sex and gender they were born as, can change neither. It follows that they should be legally/practically treated as that sex.
In the other, sex is biological, gender is a social/mental construct. Therefore, trans people are the sex they were born as, but can be whatever gender they want, even totally made up ones. It follows that gender is practically meaningless, there's little reason to ever bring it up or care about it, and all legal/practical behaviors should ignore gender and only use sex as an input.
In either case, the behavioral prognosis is the same: treat people according to their biological sex, at least for the small number of instances where there is legitimate cause to segregate based on sex, such as sports or prisons. It's only by conflating the two via Motte and Bailey shenanigans that trans activists can construct arguments to justify the changing of sex.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Thomas Sowell talks about this a bunch, and if you haven't I strongly recommend reading some of his work and/or listening to interviews with him. One of the main things he blames is the wellfare state, which, in attempting to help poor single mothers with families by giving them financial assistance, accidentally incentivized people to become single mothers. In some cases, there were literal "man in the house" rules, where people would be sent over to houses of people receiving assistance to see if there was a man living in the house (presumably contributing to the finances and acting like a husband even if not legally married to the woman) and then cutting off the financial support if there was one present. These were eventually stopped by the supreme court, but the general economic incentives remained.
If getting pregnant before marriage drives you into poverty and homelessness, you will be extremely careful not to be promiscuous, and to expect marriage from your partner.
If you have relatives who would save you from poverty by financially supporting you, then relatives will apply pressure on all of their female kin to maintain standards, and will criticize them for violating these norms.
If men have to have jobs and get married in order to have sex because virtually all women are holding these standards, then men will get jobs and get married.
But if getting pregnant and having five children with different men just makes the government pay for your kids instead, then there's little downside to it, from an individual perspective. It's been a disaster for the community though.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
he will inform you with more than enough time to prepare and travel to the potential crime scene and he will make sure you don't mistakenly harm the victim. The demon will also make sure you won't be trialed as guilty or that this has any reputational effect on your life at all.
With these guarantees, I'd go anywhere in the world. I would even spend thousands of dollars and up to several months of time if not more. Explicitly saving someone's life, directly, with perfect knowledge and guarantees, and getting to shoot a murderer with no legal repercussions or safety issues, would be a huge self confidence booster. You can supposedly save a life for $X by donating to charity at whatnot, but it doesn't have the same psychological value as directly saving someone's life, and doesn't have the guarantees that whoever is computing that estimate and spending the money is actually doing it properly and isn't accidentally subsidizing dictators or something.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
They seem to be using a broader definition which includes
-Government laws outlawing some behaviors such as incest
-Social pressure such as judging and shunning people who engage in incest or people with serious genetic diseases having children
-Individual efforts such as genetically screening your own sperm and egg donors.
Which is a superset of what is normally considered eugenics, which would normally be the first and maybe arguably the second, but not the third. (Note one could take this even further and add a fourth point by suggesting that pretty much any form of mate selection is a type of eugenics since it prevents undesirable people from reproducing, but almost nobody would actually call that eugenics).
But I think the strongest part of the argument is the appeal to incest laws. Most people agree that we should have top down control outlawing incest, most people justify this on eugenic grounds, or just "it's gross and unnatural", a feeling which mostly derives from eugenic instincts. Therefore, most people are at least slightly eugenic.
And of course they are. It's weird not to be. The reason eugenics is bad isn't because the goal of improving the human race is itself a bad goal, it's because many eugenics activities have bad side effects, are cruel to the targets, and/or are easily abusable by whoever is in charge of implementing them. A government which is allowed to sterilize anyone it declares to be genetically unfit will immediately abuse this power to wipe out people it doesn't like for any reason, rather than using the power only on the actually genetically unfit.
In so far as it's possible to apply softer pressures and smaller actions as an individual towards this goal without those side effects, these limited eugenic goals are good. Siblings should not have children with each other. And, no people or groups are systematically harmed by anti-incest policies, because there are a very tiny number of pairwise relationships prevented by this, and those people are allowed to reproduce with any of the other billions of people on the planet. People with serious heritable genetic diseases should not reproduce with anyone. It is cruel to deliberately inflict that on a child when you know ahead of time what will happen. And while abstaining is a high cost to the people who might want children, and I would hesitate to outlaw it entirely due to the vagueness and slippery slope of what does and does not count, we should absolutely shame them and judge them and criticize them if they do it anyway.
I think the reason why most people draw a distinction between the two definitions of eugenics is because the narrow definition is the bad one, and the broad one is good and most people agree with instinctively, but the word "eugenics" has such a negative connotation that people want to make sure that connotation is only applied to the narrow case that actually deserves it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Okay, you make some good points and I'm largely convinced away from my previous viewpoint.
But then, assuming we treat companies as indistinguishable endpoint users, why do ISPs need to demand that they specifically pay for infrastructure costs? Shouldn't that be baked into their business class service? Isn't the entire point of paying ISPs that they use the money for infrastructure? Is it just that there's an abnormally large amount of demand from a small number of servers that the regular infrastructure can't handle all at once? Does the increased usage from these companies not make their regular endpoint user costs abnormally high to compensate for this without special negotiations?
Right, but people maximize their individual utility, not the average of everyone else, so the equilibrium point may not be the globally optimum point. That's how public goods dilemmas work.
Ie, if we take the above instance, where the speed of each car is (0.99)^x, where x is the number of cars, then total throughput is x(0.99)^x, which is maximized at x = 100. If each person's utility when they drive is u = (personal speed) - 0.1 (and 0 if they don't drive), then the equilibrium (when an additional driver would have a utility of 0) happens at about 230 cars. And by definition at this point everyone gets a utility of 0, the wasted time and cost of driving is so bad that it just barely cancels whatever benefit would be gained from driving. Meanwhile the maximum for total utility among all drivers happens at x = 77, which is actually lower than the max throughput of 100 because those 77 drivers have better speed and thus gain more utility.
These are oversimplified dynamics and numbers, but hopefully they illustrate the concept. People frequently reach inefficient equilibria because they're optimizing selfish individual utility functions that don't consider externalities. And it's precisely those cases where the government can serve a legitimately useful purpose by nudging the equilibrium closer to the globally optimal value while still maintaining the feedback loops. Preferably by making people internalize their externalities in some way so that their personal incentives better line up with the global incentives so that they can still optimize but less selfishly. Hard quotas, limits, and bans tend to lead to worse results and/or have unintended consequences because they're not subject to appropriate feedback loops that reflect genuine preferences.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Unless you run into public goods dilemmas. I am not an expert on traffic patterns, but it seems at least theoretically plausible that at a certain level of crowding, adding a marginal car to the existing traffic might decrease total throughput. Ie, if each car within a certain area reduces the speed of all other cars on the road by 1% (multiplicatively), then once you have more than 100 cars in that area, each new car will reduce the total throughput (speed x cars) by more than it adds, and it would be optimal to have only 100 cars at a time.
It sure seems like this is the case in a lot of crowded cities, where cars are stuck in traffic jams and barely moving a lot of the time, such that half as many cars could go way more than twice as fast.
I will note that this does not necessarily justify this approach. It is icky and orwellian and an abuse of power. But if it would work it'll be important to recognize that and oppose it on other grounds.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Isn't this double billing? Which is a terrible idea and entirely unnecessary.
Someone has to pay for the internet infrastructure. And it makes sense that payment should be roughly proportional to usage. A system in which all users of the internet pay their ISPs for access to the internet, proportional to the amount they use, while companies and other web hosters pay nothing for this, is stable and sane, and what we have now.
An alternate system where companies and other web hosters pay proportional to the amount people use their site would also handle this. I think it's inferior to what we have now, because it strongly discourages the usage of free content (or cheap content paid for by ads), and would require websites to charge microtransactions to casual viewers to compensate for their access, so costs would just pass on to the same people they are now but with more friction.
But this? Trying to make companies pay for bandwidth use that customers are already paying for? That's pure greed, it makes no sense. ISPs are already getting paid for Netflix use, because Netflix users have to pay the ISP directly for however much bandwidth they use, which then compensates the ISP for the costs of building the network infrastructure. Netflix is not the customer of the ISP, the actual customers are. They're already being paid (and more than they deserve anyway given their natural monopoly).
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
A monthly subscription seems to defeat the purpose. A single fee makes it more expensive for scammers and people who get banned and have to make new accounts, but almost trivial for good faith actors who pay once and then keep using the same account indefinitely.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
This is a reasonable point.
I still think it is appropriate to talk about in disproportion to its prevalence due to the unique nature of its advocacy. That is, it is deliberately being promoted and celebrated and spread, as opposed to incidentally spread via cultural knowledge as the other conditions are. As a result:
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It is increasing at a faster rate than the other conditions are. So its prevalence in the future may be greater than theirs even if its current prevalence is not
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It is significantly simpler to reduce. Stop digging the hole. Mental health conditions which are treated as mental health conditions and spread via general cultural knowledge of them would require deliberate anti-awareness campaigns or other anti-memetic shenanigans to reduce this way. Transgenderism just requires you to stop celebrating it. Or, it would have, the cat's probably out of the bag now and it's probably going to stick around for a long time even if a consensus were to be reached that it's negative for its sufferers. But at the very least, stopping its increase would improve mental health in the future. So it's possible to create more value per effort, at least in theory, because of its current position in the culture war.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Any good recommendations for an intermediate economics textbook or lecture series or something that I can use to get a running start at the field?
For background, I have a PhD in Mathematics, specifically studying mathematical models of game theory and agents and ecological competition and stuff. So I know a bunch of game theory, but mostly use it for fitness gradients and incremental behavior adjustments that head towards an equilibrium over time rather than rational agents solving explicit mathematical formulas. And I have very little experience with actual economic theory aside from what I've picked up here and there from being in tangential spaces. Supply and demand curves and basic stuff like that. I'm considering branching out and potentially moving towards jobs that involve actual economics, but feel somewhat underqualified at the moment given that I've never taken a single formal economics class in my life. Or at the very least it would be fun to learn more stuff about it and potentially learn ideas that I could use in my current research even if I'm still focusing mostly on biological organisms.
So I'd like to learn from a source that doesn't require specific background knowledge of words or formulas that econ students would already know as prerequesites, but also respects my intelligence and mathematical skill so doesn't try to handhold me through easy stuff, fastforwarding or skipping the actual basics and starting me somewhere interesting where I can actually learn new stuff.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Are you talking about in absolute terms? That is, transgenderism is significantly rarer than most of those conditions, and therefore fixing it would be less significant in total value than fixing one of the others.
Or do you mean per person? Because transgenderism causes significant distress in many of its sufferers, driving many to suicide, social ostracism, and mental anguish up to the point where they are willing to undergo expensive and permanent surgeries, including castration, in an attempt to alleviate it. The more serious cases (people who seek actual physical transition) seem comparable to the more serious cases of depression and anorexia, which also lead to suicide, self harm, and other forms of self-imposed physical harm to otherwise physically healthy people.
A transtrender who dresses up like the other sex and uses a different name for a few years before going back to normal isn't especially suffering, but neither is someone with minor social anxiety or self-diagnosed ADHD.
I think in comparing like to like it's pretty comparable to most of the others, aside from the disproportionate promotion/opposition it receives from each political side.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I wouldn't consider gender dysphoria to be a red herring, it's more of a flagship. The most prominent example due to it being deliberately spread and promoted above and beyond what most of the others are, and therefore the most obvious example of this trend.
But yes, it is but one example among many, and probably noncentral given that it has significant opposition and thus culture war effects while the others mostly go unnoticed and unopposed.
Not exactly. The true authentic Christian response would be to help all the people at any cost to yourself, in which case physical proximity is not really relevant. The pragmatic response to having a selfish human brain is to help people when you can convince yourself to do so, which will tend to be when there is a high help to cost ratio, or when the direct feedback is strong enough that it actually feels meaningful. People near you are more physically accessible, and more psychologically responsive, so will be easier to directly help than people far away, so physical proximity is relevant.
But physical proximity can change. If someone lives in LA and, rather than stay and dedicate their life to helping the beggars who live there, decides to become a missionary in African and help poor people there, then they are in some sense choosing not to help the LA beggars. Or at least, choosing not to help them as much as they otherwise could.
So yeah, you do have to help the people in front of you. But you do not have to prioritize them to the exclusion of people far away from you, and you do not have to refuse to move to a different location which will change who's in front of you. It's okay to send money to a distant charity even if that diminishes the amount of money you have for people nearby. But part of the helping people you do should probably be non-monetary, in which case it almost has to be for people near you.
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