MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Never attribute to incompetence what you can attribute to principal agent problems. High level politicians are incredibly competent... at politicking. There's a whole host of complicated social skills involved in phrasing your words the right way, appealing to a core of voters in your party, playing nice with other politicians and the political party backing you, fundraising, and deflecting criticisms of incompetence. And the people who actually get elected to top positions are nonrandomly the best of the best at these things, or they get quickly replaced by someone who is better.
Object level issues like "what policies will minimize both the death rate and economic harms of COVID" are secondary to things like "what policies will make my constituents vote for me again?" or "what policies does my political party that I am beholden to want me to support?" There's a nonzero correlation, actual good policies are slightly more likely to be visually appealing and/or get bipartisan support, but the politics is the actual target they are optimizing for. And from that perspective, they did an excellent job: the majority of politicians who supported mask mandates have been re-elected, and those who weren't probably lost for unrelated reasons that wouldn't have changed if they had promoted better policies. If they appear incompetent, it's because the metric you're using to measure success isn't the same one they're using.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
don't think the conclusion follows.
Okay yeah, you're right, and my statement was worded too strongly. It does not follow with logical certaintly that psychological issues must be solved solely within psychology, and there are plenty of counterexamples. But it should be the first thing to try. Plenty of "trans" people have other psychological issues and comorbidities that cause distress, and the trans thing is a red herring, a panacea they've been sold to solve all of their problems. And if they transition those issues still exist but now their one panacea has been tried and they think their problems will never go away. and they have a mutilated body.
And even for someone with actual gender dysphoria as their primary problem. Maaaybe it's an objective desire, analogous to your body building issue, where they inherently wish they had a certain body type, and getting that body type solves their issue. But maybe it's relative: grass is greener. Maybe part of their brain perpetually and irrationally insists that they are ugly and disgusting despite being perfectly health and attractive (a lot of teenage girls have body image issues like this). They just don't want their current body, whatever it happens to be. And no matter what it changes to, that part of their brain doesn't stop telling them that they're disgusting, because it's broken in some psychological way, not actually grounded in their physical body. Transitioning will not help with this latter case, and will in fact make it worse (and does, when this happens in real life).
Yes, if we had a 100% perfect and reversible gender transition, then there would be a lower cost to just trying it and seeing if it works, so I would have much fewer objections to moving it earlier on the list of things to try. (There are still potential social issues, like letting creeps and rapists into women's safe spaces, or having people lie about their original sex to sexual partners who care about their partner's origins not just their current body, but those are a separate issue, and don't apply to good-faith actors who are genuinely seeking help.) But given the irreversible and mutilating brutality of current transition technology, I think it should be an absolute last resort after all interventions and even non-intervention have been attempted and the only alternative is suicide. Maybe in a few decades if technology has advanced we can reconsider transitioning as a viable treatment mechanism. Not today.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Rather than saying they don't exist, it would be more accurate and productive to say that they have a mental illness. Like with people with anorexia. It exists, it can cause suffering, it's complicated and hard to solve rather than just "made up" in a way that a five year old pretending to be a cowboy is. But it exists within the realm of psychology, and therefore effective treatments will also be within the realm of psychology: therapy and medications. And it is socially irresponsible to enable the behavior and reinforce the illness, even though sympathy may be appropriate as it is for most mental illnesses.
Removing honors classes and putting the smart kids in an easy class where they don't need the teacher is comparable to just sending them home and having smaller class sizes. If they're not learning anything from the teacher because they don't need the teacher's help, then why are they even in school? It's just a way of having 20 actively learning students in a class but pretending you have class sizes of 30. I can see the appeal from a certain perspective, this combines the steps of:
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Have smaller class sizes, which increases learning and costs.
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Stop teaching smart kids, which reduces the costs created by step 1.
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Mask the whole process so it looks less obviously unjust than doing steps 1 and 2 in isolation.
But if you're actually paying attention, you realize that step 3 doesn't actually change how just it is, merely the surface appearance. I don't see the dilemma, this is a strictly worse policy than just letting smart kids test out of school so you don't have to spend money teaching them, and then having smaller class sizes for whoever's left. Which is itself a pretty dubious proposition, but still less dubious than wasting the smart kids' time.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
This sounds intuitively true to me, but I've never explicitly noticed this before. Do you know of a study/source measuring this, or is just obvious anecdotal trends? And why do think it is this way? Is it just that the Blue Tribe places intelligence on a pedestal and so care about it more when selecting friends and relationships, while Red Tribers are more down to earth? Is it because of Blue Tribers congregating in universities and cities and that somehow drives this segregation, while Red Tribers are more likely to stay in their hometown and mingle with everyone else who lives there?
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Yeah, I think I would respect arguments from either side acknowledging this and arguing about what that threshold should be. I don't see a lot of that, I don't see a lot of nuance or discussion of tradeoffs in burdens of proof, I mostly see extreme all/none arguments from people. Though I suppose at lot of that is observation bias: centrists who have nuanced opinions are more likely to stay silent and don't make angry rants about the pure good or pure evil of rich people.
It is interesting to me though that the bias in the right/left about the burden of proof is the opposite as to what it is for actual crime though. Normally, the left demands a high burden of proof and wants to look out for the rights of people accused of crimes, while the right wants harsh judgements and penalties. Is it just that the left is pro poor people and the right is pro rich and so the burden flips depending on who is being accused? Except that there are tons of counter examples of the left hating certain poor people and right hating certain rich people. But I suppose if one of those people were being accused the left and right would support or oppose strict burden of proofs according to their like of that type of person, so is it just the case that the left and right have no coherent stance on what burdens of proof should be in general, and only have opinions on them downstream of their other biases?
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
The whole thing is founded on mutual consent.
First, let's consider a small company started by one person, or a small group of people. They rightfully own all of the physical and intellectual property of the company, because it literally is their physical property that they pay out of their own pockets, and their labor that they use to increase it. There isn't much meaningful distinction, it's not conflation, it's literally their physical assets, they just use a technical legal ritual to officially make it a "company" for tax and liability purposes. If they hire an employee, they sign a contract with the employee that, in exchange for such and such labor and duties, the employee gets such and such wages and/or shares in the company. And the owners and employee can come up with whatever split of the profits they both find mutually agreeable. Like any purchase or sale of any other good, if one of the parties doesn't think it's fair they can opt out, the only difference is that the thing being bought is "labor".
For larger companies, not much changes, it's just that the owners are people who have purchased shares in the company, which represents a fraction of the physical and intellectual property of the company. That is, if I buy 1/1000000 of a company, then by all rights I own 1/1000000 of all of its physical assets in a moral sense as if they were my private property. There are nuances and legal distinctions, but ethically it's the same as if I bought some physical capital and hired someone to use it to produce stuff for me to sell. And the mutually consensual agreements to purchase labor are between employees and the collective shareholders who own the company assets. Yes, labor is an absolutely necessary ingredient in whatever process the company uses to convert labor into material goods, but fish is a necessary ingredient for a sushi chef to make sushi, there's no reason a priori that the corporate employee is owed anything different than what their contract states for selling their labor that the fisherman is not for selling their fish just because one is officially an "employee" of the corporation and the other is not, since the fisherman doesn't technically work for the restaurant they sell to.
Corporations are fancy coordination mechanisms that convert labor and goods into better goods that are worth more than the sum of the inputs combined. Thus the coordination mechanism itself creates value. If it weren't the case then skilled laborers would simply create the same wealth without signing an employee contract with any corporations, and thus would outcompete them by having less overhead, and could pay themselves better wages. And some people do this. But economy of scale is a thing, and investments are a thing, and they help create value. In theory, again there are a ton of exceptions and counterexamples.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
There are strong deontological and libertarian arguments that if somebody earns money, or creates something which is valued via money, via legitimate means, then they can do whatever they want with their own money no matter how wasteful you deem it, even if starving people elsewhere could use that money, because it's the owner's choice to do what they will with their own property.
I'm going to put those arguments aside, and argue from a utilitarian perspective. After all, what are they doing with their money if not spending it on themselves? If it sits in a bank vault as cash forever then it might as well not exist as far as the economy goes and thus helps counter inflation, at least until they die and a lot of it goes into death taxes and heirs. If they donate it to charity then hey, it's doing exactly what you want. If they're investing it to earn even more money, then it is being invested, not sitting around being useless. Again, if we're restricting our view to ethical billionaires who earn money by creating wealth, then they invest by giving money to ethical companies which create wealth, and then they extract some of that wealth as dividends while the rest disperses into the economy in the form of cheaper goods, more valuable goods, wages, and more buying/selling in interactions between their company and others.
So there are a number of reasons, from a utilitarian perspective, why billionaires might sometimes be good:
1: Charity
Scott makes a strong post arguing that billionaire charity is good because it can pick up blind spots that government charity misses: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/ Bill Gates in particular has devastated malaria, which was previously being underfunded relative to its value, because governments have systematic biases in what they do and do not fund. Such cases are not one person hoarding wealth that they can't possibly use on themselves, it's individuals choosing where to donate their own money that they created instead of the government appropriating it and then deciding for them. And they earn this right be creating the wealth in the first place.
2: Capital Allocation
I read a good argument (I forget where, maybe Paul Graham?) comparing investors to a natural selection process for determining what projects should be invested in. That is, people who are systematically good at telling the difference between promising companies and doomed failures can repeatedly invest in good companies that others underestimate, earn a profit, and have even more money. And then they repeat the process but more and bigger because they have more money to utilize. People who are bad at doing this will end up with less money and eventually be forced to do something else with their time. Therefore, smart investors will end up with more money, which they have demonstrated their ability to use wisely. And again, if they are investing in ethical companies then the more money they earn is a fraction of the wealth generated by the companies they finance, the rest going to grow the economy. Importantly, this process is brutal and unbiased. A bureaucrat trying to decide where to allocate public funding is going to have personal biases, conflicts of interest, and legibility concerns that they have to justify to others. A wealthy investor can chase hunches, whims, make their own plans based on their own industry knowledge, or just be unreasonably biased in favor of some industry that happens to be a good idea but nobody knows why yet. Evolution doesn't need to understand why the things it does works, it just has to kill the things that don't work and let the ones that do multiply, and eventually you have good things that work.
This second point demonstrates that how a billionaire spends their money is not necessarily decoupled from how they earned it. If they're spending it on making more money, and if they're investing in an ethical way (a big if) then they are creating even more wealth. And any limits or disincentives, soft or hard, will disincentivize this behavior and make some of them not try so hard. What genius business creator is going to super hard for a 10% chance of turning their 10 million dollar company into a billion dollar company, if you're going to cap them at 20 million dollars and they can just sell it now for a guaranteed 10 million? What $999 million dollar banker is going to risk $10 million dollars in a startup with a 2% chance of earning them another billion if you've capped them at $1 billion?
Poor people matter, it would probably help them in the short term if you snatched all of their billionaires wealth and just gave it to poor people, but you don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There's a teach a man to fish versus feed a man a fish sort of thing going on here. Capitalism is a strange alien beast which, when carefully tuned, can/is/will lift billions of poor people out of poverty. And billionaires are mostly a side effect of that process, but in some cases a direct contributor.
There's a large extent to which all of this is just a rephrasing of trickle down economics, which is 90% bullshit. But it's 10% not, and I would argue that to the reason it mostly doesn't work is largely because a significant fraction of wealth people and companies aren't actually behaving ethically. There is a lot of rentseeking and exploitation and imbalance in bargaining power between labor and capital, which means that many companies create wealth and then keep 90%+ of it as profit for themselves rather than a more fair ~50%, and some companies actually destroy wealth via externalities but manage to extract profits that they didn't legitimately create.
But also, from a brutal utilitarian perspective, maybe 10% is good enough. Like, if a group of rich people have $1 trillion dollars, we could snatch that and give it to the poor, and then the rich people and all the economic potential they represent is gone, the goose is dead. Or maybe we take 10% today, so the poor people only have $100 billion and a bunch suffer in poverty (though not literally starving). And then the remaining 900 billion the rich people invest grows to 1.8 trillion, and then we take another 10% giving $180 billion to the poor. And then the remainder doubles again and then we take another 10%. And wealth inequality continues to grow as the rich get richer and richer and richer, and yet pretty soon the amount we've extracted for the poor has exceeded what even existed in the first place, and they're not so poor. Maybe in a hundred years we'll have billions of "poor" people living in luxury apartments with all of what we would today consider modern luxuries, while the uber rich fly to pluto for vacation in gigantic space castles that the poor could never hope to afford. And if the alternative is to snatch the trillion now and hope that it feeds enough people for long enough before the money runs out and they go back to how they were before, then maybe it's better to let them stay poor until the economy grows enough to lift them out organically via wealth creation.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
He literally just gave one: an international commitment that nobody is allowed to invade anyone for territorial expansion is a useful state of affairs for literally every nation on the planet except those that hope to invade others for territorial expansion. Smaller nations like Peru or Sudan could not reasonably be claimed to have "world domination", and aren't especially close to Ukraine, but still have a legitimate interest in nations conquering other nations not being a normal state of affairs. Their smallness just means they lack the ability to intervene effectively, not the motive.
A system in which unethical and powerful nations are allowed to conquer smaller nations without intervention, while ethical powerful nations neither conquer nor intervene, is one in which unethical nations systematically grow faster than ethical nations. Natural selection makes this lead to predictably bad results, so it's a bad system.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I think a significant part of the issue is that everyone fails to make a distinction between ethical and unethical rich people. That is, there are wealth generating behaviors that genuinely create wealth in a way that does not exploit everyone else. There are hyperproductive people who are brilliant and take risks that pay off, and work 100 hour weeks for decades, and create good things that benefit society, and then they keep a fraction of the wealth they created for themselves, and this is good. And then there are skeezy "elites" who exploit employees or leech off tax dollars and regulatory capture and rentseeking. And there's a spectrum in between.
And it's important both economically and morally to draw a distinction between these behaviors and get rid of the latter without disincentivizing the former. The naive rightist just assumes that most rich people earned their wealth legitimately and overtaxing them is theft. The naive leftist just assumes that most rich people are thieves who provide no value to society and can be eaten for free with no secondary long term consequences. And both encounter the other viewpoint and see how obviously naive it is, point out hundreds of counterexamples, and walk away safe and secure that their opponents are idiots. Which they are, because not enough people have a nuanced understanding that "rich" is not a moral category which must be inherently good or bad, it's an attribute that someone can achieve via a variety of methods which differ in moral goodness.
I don't think it even requires a conspiracy of ruling elites to create (though they do put their thumbs on the scales), it's just people being overly narrowminded and selectively naive.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I consider "Scott wrote it" to be a good reason to read an article on its own. That is, the set of all Scottposts has a high enough average quality to exceed my threshold for attention, at least to the point of clicking and reading it long enough to make up my own mind. Which is why I click on all of them.
If you don't feel the same way then you don't have to read it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Can someone who has a good understanding of economics or businesses or something explain/clarify the theory that businesses can maintain monopolies by buying out smaller competitors whenever they pop up? Because I keep hearing this as an explanation why, for instance, insulin costs so much, or some other thing, but it feels to me like it should be game-theoretically unstable. Any industry where large companies reliably buy smaller competitors should incentivize lots of startups seeking to exploit this and investors eager to earn a small but reliable sum of money.
Maybe my understanding economics is too mathematically naive, so let me put forth the argument:
Let A is the point where you create a brand new company costing $X in startup costs, B is the point where you're big enough that a monopoly will offer to buy you out for $Y, and C is the point where you become a large competitor splitting the near-monopolistic profits for $Z. Let p be the probability of getting from A to B, and q be the probability of getting from B to C conditional on not accepting a buyout offer.
Case 1: suppose X > pqZ. That is, the average payoff from forming a company and growing it to size is lower than the cost of trying, so nobody will try in the first place. This should be the case in an oversaturated (or perfectly saturated) market, not one which has a near monopoly charging exorbitant prices way higher than their production costs like for insulin. And if this were the case, then this would be the appropriate explanation for why the product costs too much, not blaming the larger company for buying out smaller competitors (which they wouldn't need to do in the first place, since nobody would try to compete with them in the first place)
Case 2: suppose X < pqZ < pY. X < pqZ means that if a monopolistic offer does not exist a new company would be profitable, so people make startups. But pqZ < pY means that, once p has been rolled sucessfully and you have a small company, the offer (Y) is greater than the expected value of continuing the company to completion (qZ), so the startup sells. But this is a profit. pY > X means that new startups will on average earn a profit from selling out, and in fact will do so with less variance than having to roll both p and q, and in a shorter turnaround time. Investors should be repeatedly funding startup after startup to arbitrage this (unless the buyout offer has some sort of non-complete clause that extends to the investors or something). Which should continue until negative feedback loops force the large companies to lower Y, sending us to case 3.
Case 3: suppose X < pY < pqZ. Then new companies will start up hoping to become large, and when they receive an offer, they will decline it because the expected value of continuing, qZ, is larger than the offer Y. And then you have competition and the monopoly weakens, lowering the cost of the produced good. Continue until a fair market equilibrium is reached.
QED.
And yet we see near-monopolies and exhorbitant prices in real life, and we don't see literal thousands of eager startups constantly getting bought in the same industry with little effort, so clearly reality has disproven my counterargument and at least one of my premises must be flawed. What am I missing? Is the explanation of buyouts being to blame just wrong and near-monopolies are always caused by patents or unfair regulations or something else? Is there a shortage of competent entrepreneurs such that most potential company founders would hit case 1, and the few who hit case 2 can be bought out and non-competed away without bankrupting the large company? Does this transition from Case 2 to 3 actually happen all the time but slowly and near-monopolies are simply temporary blips during the time it takes for this to play out? I'd love to hear if someone actually understands this.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
There's one every month. I highly recommend binging all of them, there's a lot of good content in there.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I don't think this is as separated as you seem to think. One of the main tactics of wokeism is to hijack and abuse the government's regulatory apparatus. Ie, a bunch of woke idealogues see something they dislike, complain enough to raise it to public awareness, a woke bureaucrat in the government raises legal action against it via some sort of ambiguous law that can technically be said to apply if you stretch the language a little, and then a woke judge rules against the company.
This only needs to actually happen in a small number of cases in order to create a culture of fear that disincentivizes companies from invoking the ire of the woke, same as with any other legal threat. And because the law's are often ambiguous and/or selectively enforced, this can be wielded as an idealogical weapon. If the government selectively enforces ambiguous regulatory laws against wokeism's targets more often than its allies, then companies can reduce their regulatory burden by being an ally.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
The problem with your theory is that people would converge on a consensus of like-minded people
Okay, I should be clear that I don't think this is the only dynamic happening. We don't live in a world where status is the only thing people care about and nobody cares about truth whatsoever (and if we did, your theory would be worse off because people do sometimes praise people in real life, how could you explain that?). And further, I don't mean to imply that my theory is literally the only mechanism for gaining status.
First and foremost, status is supposed to reflect someone's actual objective value to society (or at least, to the people granting them status). That is the evolutionary mechanism for why it exists, and the selfishly rational reason for why people would give it. Society benefits if it has more valuable people in it, and giving status to high value activities is a way to both incentivize people who are already high status to want to stay in your group and interact with you more, and a way to incentivize everyone else to perform high value activities in order to gain status.
Now granted, this is an emergent phenomenon which happens imperfectly and only in aggregate, there are tons of local counterexamples and exploits, like people trying to unfairly lower someone else's status to raise their own without performing genuinely valuable activities. Just like how most businesses earn money by performing genuinely valuable services to the economy, but some businesses, and some individuals within them just rentseek value from others.
That is the first-order cause of status. Competence and value, and objective facts. It is not at all random that Elon Musk has more status than your local retail cashier. And it certainly isn't due to his high social skills. All of this social stuff in either of our theories is second-order. If you insult Elon Musk by suggesting he is less intelligent than the average retail clerk, you are very unlikely to gain status unless your audience is already biased to hate Elon Musk, because any random person can see that he's highly intelligent and competent at something, otherwise he wouldn't be so rich and famous. Or if you say "he is literal demon who eats babies." If you make blatantly false insults people will laugh at you (unless they are already biased to hate him). But if you make a more plausible claim like "He should get off social media because he's a socially inept autist and go back to playing with electric cars", you're more likely to get a favorable response because at the very least it doesn't sound like you're an ignorant ideologue spouting pointless propaganda.
So maybe a more adjusted version of my theory would be: how much do people agree with you after you have spoken, not how much they already agreed with you. That is, if you think the person is a 8 and the other person previously thought they were a 6, and you logically and charismatically present a good argument for the person's objective value that changes their opinion to a 7.5, you might gain status. Again, this is not the entirety of the dynamic, you can sometimes make people respect your well thought out argument even if they ultimately disagree with you. Status is not a zero-sum game and, even if it were you could have an inflation effect where you doing more status-deserving things dillutes everyone else in existence without stealing from one particular person. In any case, your theory definitely needs to contend with the fact that people do, in reality, sometimes praise other people. And they don't necessarily lose status by doing so, especially in a so-called "circlejerk". Fanboys and fangirls aren't all constantly sacrificing tons of status with each other for no reason by gushing about their shared favorite celebrity. Clearly something else is going on, even if my theory doesn't fully explain it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I don't think this is quite right. Most of the torpedoing of people by strangers is done by people to ingratiate themselves with other people who already think of that person as low status. That is, if the general public thinks Famous Frank is an 8, but you're in a room full of people who think Famous Frank is a 6, or otherwise wish he was lowered to a 6, then disparaging him can gain status with the other people who will agree you and commend you for your insight. Or, if you're in a room full of people who are a mix of beliefs: half think he's a 10 and half think he's a 6, then by picking either side you gain status with half the room and lose status with the other half (which is likely worth it, because value isn't gained by your average status among all people, but by status weighted by the people you interact with, so you can choose to hang out with the faction you align with here).
This means you can gain status by praising people, you just have to praise people that the people around you already like. You spend status by going against the grain, attempting to raise or lower the status of someone that they disagree with you about.
Lowering status is easier than raising status, so it's often a more viable strategy and we see it more. (Note how most Democrats spend their time whining about how awful Trump is, and Republicans spend their time whining about how awful Biden is, and both spend less time actually praising their own figurehead.) But I think both are viable as means of gaining status in the right circumstance.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I think the main problem is that it disproportionately amplifies the opinions and behavior of the tiny number of humans in charge of giving the feedback, who are not representative of people overall. If half the population is left-leaning and half is right-leaning, and this is accurately reflected in the amount of content online, then a neutral AI trained online will contain a roughly equal mixture of both. If 99% of AI researches are left-leaning, and they deliberately reward the AI for left-leaning beliefs and punish right-leaning ones, then that's what it will exhibit. If 1% of people are... I don't know, pedophiles/cannibals/nazis/marxists, but are disproportionately over-represented in Silicon Valley such that 10% of trainers are, and they reward the AI based on their beliefs, then it will support those behaviors.
We, the people in abstract, are not in charge of training the AI. A very small number of people are, and they are deliberately injecting their own personal opinions into it without regard for the larger diverse opinions of the population as a whole. So, not only is it that I object to humans behaving poorly, it's that those specific humans are advancing their agenda in a way that disproportionately empowers them relative to their actual prevalence, and thus is more of a problem than just those people existing and having private beliefs. And pretending that they're trying to make AI behave ethically in the abstract is just a smokescreen for advancing a particular ideology that a small number of people consider to be ethical.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Is it inaccurate to suggest that people are more likely to default to "trusting the experts" on topics which they have only minor understanding of? That is, if somebody learns basic science and only partially understands it, trusting the authority of their teachers and memorizing passwords, then when an "Expert" comes along and contradicts that with "updated science" they will discard their previous vague knowledge and latch onto the new password. It's just trading one expert (the school teacher) for a new one with higher status. But if someone has a strong understanding of the science and the underlying concepts, and is confident in the accuracy of their knowledge because it's tied into a holistic framework, then they will be less likely to update in the face of new evidence, as a change in the password has to contend with how it changes the whole framework.
People tend to be much more stubborn about ideas that they know a lot about, and trust other people in things they don't know much about. And this is rational, because your previous knowledge of ideas you don't know much about are more likely to be wrong. So if people had a stronger understanding of science, they would be less likely to blindly believe what other people say without evidence strong enough to overcome their prior understanding. And while there are plenty of counterexamples, I expect it would still have a large effect on the margins.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
This is a good point, which I was sort of assuming implicitly but did not state carefully in my post. I'm not making the claim that all accusations of police brutality are legitimate and that all police accused of brutality are scum. However, conditional on this being a scandal that we are hearing about, and involving a beating rather than a gunshot, and the guy actually dying from a beating, this is very likely to be an excessive abuse of power by the police involved.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
This is a hard problem. I can think of a bunch of attempts at solutions, but all of them have costs, tradeoffs, or exploits that can occur if bad faith actors abuse them.
A. Increase salaries which incentivizes more competent people to want to become police officers.
B. Increase training so people know what to do, and make it possible for new recruits to fail their training if they aren't good enough.
C. Make it easier to fire police officers who are misbehaving. It shouldn't take an event that involves national headlines and legal prosecution to fire a police officer. People being sketchy and aggressive is usually discernible by their coworkers and boss, pretty much none of these big scandals involve the people who knew the bad cops say "oh my, I'm so surprised, I never would have seen this coming, he's always been so professional before this instance." It's almost always a pattern of behavior and escalation. Fire them sooner along the path.
All of these have the issue that they cost money, which is politically hard, and wasteful if they end up not being effective enough per cost. They also potentially have issues if the higher up police themselves are bad and corrupt. More money to line their pockets and hire people they like, and more opportunities for them to fire honest cops with less justification while letting their corrupt underlings go free. But from the perspective of a non-corrupt higher up person, these would likely be effective if costly.
D. Weaken qualified immunity. It serves a legitimate purpose that allows cops to do their jobs without worrying about getting sued for normal policework, but my understanding is that it is too strong and has too many loopholes where stuff that was obviously wrong gets dropped anyway and bad cops go free. Making it marginally weaker would likely have a negligible impact on good policemen, while making it harder for bad cops to get away with crimes, and thus disincentivizing them from committing them in the first place, which is the whole point of having laws at all.
E. Make it easier to prosecute/punish higher ranking officers for the crimes of their underlings. Specifically if the underling was ordered or pressured to do the wrong thing, or if the higher ups knew about it and didn't stop it. Although this might create some incentive for higher ups to cover up misdeeds rather than report them, if you combine this with massive penalties for covering up misdeeds and leniency for reporting them (maybe the higher ranking officer gets in trouble if and only if they knew about and failed to punish an underling's crime) you can combat this incentive.
The downside here is that these create incentives for cops to be less aggressive and less effective, just sitting around all day instead of stopping crimes and interacting with the public, which creates risk. If done carefully, it would be set up to only punish actual crimes which are not done accidentally, such that good police officers could do their jobs with no increased risk, and only bad police get in trouble, but that's easier said than done. However, as in Scott's post on tradeoffs and failures: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-653 there's a dimension where you tradeoff aggressiveness versus mercy, and there's a dimension where you just get more competent at both, and I think there are enough flaws that there's plenty of room to move up on the latter without messing with the balance on the former.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I doubt it. In theory, I'm okay with brutality for the sake of effectiveness. If a criminal is pointing a gun at police officers, by all means shoot him in the head to protect the police. If a criminal is violently resisting arrest, by all means have 5 policemen tackle him to the ground to restrain him. And if his head gets smacked and he gets a concussion while being tackled, so be it, and the police shouldn't be charged.
That is almost never how these brutality cases go. Usually it's a bunch of tyrants beating the crap out of someone they see as lesser than themselves for fun. It's not only excessive, it's unnecessary. They're not going too far in the line of duty: making a distasteful but utilitarian tradeoff between effectiveness and kindness, there's literally no point. If someone is already on the ground, already restrained, and no longer a threat then beating them further does not help capture them or keep the police safe. Police are humans just like everyone else, and they have the same tendencies towards bullying and abuse of power as everyone else. These people have often grown up in poor violent communities and they are the same poor violent people as the people they're policing, they just have more authority. In theory, the police would screen for this during the hiring process, and most of them do with some effectiveness. That is, I bet the proportion of violent thug-like people in most police forces is less than in the average population. But it's not zero, and it's not close enough to zero to ignore. The 90%+ of virtuous brave moral police officers do their jobs effectively and then don't get arrested for brutality so they don't make the news. Most of the time. There are exceptions, there are false accusations. But most of the time the police who actually get in trouble deserve it, and the issue is with people falsely generalizing that to say that all police are bad when they're usually not.
Assuming the video footage corroborates that this was pointlessly excessive, then these officers being imprisoned will make Memphis better off, because having violent thugs in the police force accomplishes nothing but justify the hatred that criminals and noncriminals alike have for the police and make them less likely to feel guilty about committing crimes. Police who follow the law and have respect for civilians are more effective at establishing a rapport with their communities and disincentivizing crime beyond just the threat of violence. Get the thugs out, hire better and more competent people who actually respect the law to replace them. This is not a tyrannical dictatorship, everyone has to follow the law, including the police and politicians.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
It is not my perspective the the Russians are orcish - I'm saying, that it seems to be a common conclusion among Expert Russia Understanders.
That was part of my point:
Look at how blindly most people (on all sides of the political spectrum) believe whatever their thought leaders tell them to.
Your "Expert Russia Understanders" claim a thing and you believe them. The point isn't whether they're right or wrong on the object level, my point is that you trust them because they said a thing and you consider them to be an authority. If Russia's "Expert Ukraine Understanders" tell them that Ukraine is literally Nazis and evil and must be destroyed, and it is good that they be destroyed, a lot of the Russian citizens will believe them for the exact same reason.
the Russians are inherently authoritarian/imperialistic/belligerent/orcish, and therefore must be destroyed
Did you not mean genocide? Are you advocating we destroy their government and then back off with no further intervention to prevent them from doing it again? Or are you advocating that we destroy their government and then imperialistically foist a new government with our ideals upon them? How do you destroy them without being authoritarian/imperialistic/belligerent/orcish? How do you destroy them without doing to them literally what they're trying to do to Ukraine, for literally the same perceived reasons?
I'm not a moral relativist, I don't claim that all sides are actually equally justified and therefore stopping them from doing bad things would make us equally bad. Russia is actually in the wrong here. But, at least for the common citizens, they seem to be wrong because, on average, they're just as gullible as everyone else everywhere else in the world, and the main difference I see is that the government they blindly follow is worse than ours.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
the Russians are inherently authoritarian/imperialistic/belligerent/orcish, and therefore must be destroyed.
You could say the same about Americans. And Americans literally do say the same about other Americans, they're just divided into two groups who are each accusing each other of being authoritarian/imperialistic/belligerent/orcish while they themselves are the only sane and rational people in the world. And you could say the same about pretty much any population ever if they happen to be stirred up into a frenzy at the moment. Look at how blindly most people (on all sides of the political spectrum) believe whatever their thought leaders tell them to. Look how violent people become when they declare a group to be their enemy. You are literally advocating the genocide of 143 million people because you believe them to be evil, not because you've met all 143 million of them, or probably even a dozen, but because of the government and military of their country is doing bad things and there is some amount of support among their populace. Do 90% of Russians support their military? Do 50%? Do 10%? Maybe it's only a tiny but vocal minority who don't face opposition because the 90% of sane Russians know better than to stick their necks out in an authoritarian country that's oppressing them. Or maybe it legitimately is 90%, but you have no idea and you advocate genocide anyway, because you decided that they are the enemy and thus deserve no mercy.
That sounds pretty authoritarian/imperialistic/belligerent/orcish to me. If Ukraine had done something you don't like to incite this war, or if you had been born in Russia and had feelings of nationalist loyalty to them, or if the U.S. government had been allied with Russia and fed anti Ukraine propaganda (have you heard that they're literal Nazis?), I expect you'd be advocating their genocide instead. Because you're not any better than the Russian citizens. And you're not any worse. People have a tendency to get carried away, especially when fed propaganda, and it's important to understand them so you can deconvert them, demoralize them, and end wars without genociding the enemy whenever possible, because at the end of the day they're still human beings and they still matter even when they do bad things.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I keep meaning to see that. I really should get around to it someday.
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.
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