@MathWizard's banner p

MathWizard

formerly hh26

0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC 

				
User ID: 164


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
formerly hh26

				
				
				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 164


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom New Old Controversial
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And ideally you would tax that too.  A sophisticated version of Georgism would include pigouvian taxes on behaviors with negative externalities, or natural monopolies, intellectual property, and other economic niches with fixed supply that one person snatching up deprives others of being able to do.


It's just that land is the easiest to assess and the most high value, and the most reasonably confident that most of its value is not created by the owner.  Even if say, 5% of land value is created by real estate developers on their own property, that would mean 95% is not, either inherent to the land itself or created by other people nearby.  So even if land value taxes are not entirely costless (although the more zealous Georgists pretend that they are), they're still one of the least bad taxes possible (only being beaten out by pigouvian taxes which disincentivize negative behaviors like pollution)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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:


    

  1. 

    Have smaller class sizes, which increases learning and costs.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Stop teaching smart kids, which reduces the costs created by step 1.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Mask the whole process so it looks less obviously unjust than doing steps 1 and 2 in isolation.
    

    4. 



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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I personally have no interest in banning contraceptives because, again, who cares.




I want literally the opposite, largely because I am pro-life.  I am tentatively in favor of forcing unmarried people to use contraceptives, except that there's no reasonable to enforce it without authoritarian government control that I'm not in favor of.  At the very least, we should bring back all of the shame and stigma that used to be attached to unmarried sex a couple centuries ago, but only apply it to people who don't use birth control.  Also make it free to incentivize people to use it.


First and foremost, this will reduce abortions.  The argument against outlawing it is that people will just do it anyway but in unsafe ways.  If so, the only way to truly prevent abortions is to prevent unwanted pregnancies, so we should be pushing legal and social pressures towards doing so.


Second, I believe it is immoral to bring an unwanted child into existence.  They will not have the love and support from their parents that a child deserves.  Again, pro-choice people use this as an argument in favor of abortions, but I think having an unwanted child is less evil than killing them (otherwise we could replace orphanages with euthanasia clinics).  But it's still evil, and more birth control would also reduce this.


Thirdly, I believe it is immoral to deliberately have a child as a single parent, even if you want one.  I feel less strongly about this, and I'm not sure I would go so far to call it "evil", just misguided and irresponsible.  All of the science shows that children with two parents have significantly better life outcomes, I don't think one parent alone can fulfill all of the responsibilities of both paying for and actually educating and caring for a child, and doesn't have the full breadth of wisdom and life experiences to impart, since they only have their own perspective.


Unmarried people should not be conceiving children, because it inevitably leads to one of these scenarios (unless you have a shotgun wedding, which is still likely to lead to suboptimal results if your partner wasn't someone you were previously planning to marry).  Therefore, unmarried heterosexual people should not engage in unprotected sex, at least in any form with a nonnegligble chance of conception.  I'm not convinced it is the responsibility of the government to prevent this, I don't think it's within the range of powers they ought to have.  But at the very least anyone who does this is a bad person and we need social pressure that disincentivizes people from doing it.  Slut shaming is a lost cause, but I hope that unprotected-slut-shaming (Of both sexes.  Men are equally culpable for their actions.) can make a comeback.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
    

  1. 

    The same would apply to a lesser degree when working for the government in a prominent position.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Conservative women's clothing exists: women go to court all the time.  A non-binary/gender fluid/trans person who stuck to their guns that they are genuinely a woman and didn't believe their gender nonconformity was obnoxious and unprofessional could wear respectable women's clothing to court.
    

    3. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Precisely.  The government's one and only legitimate role in this would be to mandate that it has to be labeled correctly and can't be falsely advertised as ordinary meat.  Other than that, they need to stay out of it and let the people make up their own minds on what they choose to purchase.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


"well, it's the culture...", which not only gets called racist but still suggests AA.




How does that follow?  The solution to "it's the culture" is to fix the damn culture.  Hold black people to the same job/college standards that everyone else is held to, no more no less, and if any assistance is provided then it should be in the form of teaching them how to escape the broken culture so that they can meet those standards.


I can see how that would be viewed as racist by people who think that thug culture is authentically black, but I view those people as the real racists because thug culture is awful, and to purport that black people are unable to avoid it is to suggest that black people are inherently awful.  And also wrong (as demonstrated by the many who do avoid it).


Genes play a part, because of course they do, but pretty much every trait is a mix of nature and nurture.  To the extent that nurture is a lever we can pull, and nature is not, let's pull the nurture lever and see how far it gets us.  My guess is like 80% of the discrepancy is culture and 20% is genetic, but even if it's 50-50 or even 20-80, solving the cultural issue would solve a non-negligible portion of the issue, and see massive gains for black people and for everyone who ever interacts with them.  Which multiplied by millions of people is a huge win for society.  And then after we've dealt with that we can figure out what to do about HBD if anything still needs to be done by then.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The most reliable way to mitigate it is to independently fact check anything it tells you.  If 80% of the work is searching through useless cases and documents trying to find useful ones, and 20% of the work is actually reading the useful ones, then you can let ChatGPT do the 80%, but you still need to do the 20% yourself.


Don't tell it to copy/paste documents for you. Tell it to send you links to where those documents are stored on the internet.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Sexual abuse for my entire life has refered to using children for the sexual gratification, not just "abuse that involves primary sexual characteristics". Why not call it "child abuse" or "child disfigurement" except to free ride on the negative associations of the term? Same with "grooming".




I don't think this is true.  The effect on the child is much more important than the perpetrator's motives, which are themselves mostly inferred and of minimal consequence to the outcome.  For example, let's consider some scenarios.


    

  1. 

    An adult with no sexual desires at all physically beats a child to punish them.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    An adult with no sexual desires at all sodomizes a child with a broom to punish them.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    An adult with a BDSM fetish physically beats a child because they secretly enjoy it (but makes no explicit targeting of sexual organs).
    

    4. 

  4. 

    An adult with a BDSM fetish sodomizes a child with a broom because they enjoy it.
    

    5. 



I would argue, and I think most people would agree, that 2 and 4 are sexual abuse, while 1 and 3 are not.  Meanwhile, the motive theory would categorize 3 and 4 as sexual abuse but somehow have to argue that 2 is not.  And yet, as far as the child, or the law, or anyone who isn't a mind reader are concerned, 2 and 4 are indistinguishable, as are 1 and 3.  I don't think it's any sort of free riding of negative associations of the term to group things together if the harms to the child are the same.


In the medical transition case, whether they are mutilating the sexual organs of a child for internal sexual gratification, or to punish the child, or to help the child because they genuinely believe it to be a good thing, or to virtue signal, or to "get back at the right", or for literally any internal reason, the sexual trauma to the child will be the same.  Calling it sexual abuse is primarily a claim that the magnitude and type of the harm is comparable to other forms of sexual abuse.  You ignored a significant part of /u/KulakRevolt 's claim, which I agree with




I cannot express how NOT euphamistic and how NOT a motte and bailey the accusation of grooming is. Right wingers do not believe "gender affirming care" is anything but butchery, that any transition social or biological is irreparably destroying a child's mental health and at the point of medical transition, their bodies as well.






These are not metaphors, these are not euphemisms, this is literally what the right believes is happening and they have THOUSANDS of weeping detransitioned boys and girls who no longer have sexual organs because some doctor hacked them off that they can point to.




It's not free riding, because medical transition is similar to in kind but actually worse in magnitude than most other forms of sexual abuse.  Most sexual abusers don't permanently disfigure their victims in the course of their abuse.  Some do, but those are the worse offenses for that reason.  And sure, the medicalization and supposed consent and anesthetic surgery and whatnot make the process less violent and thus less severe in some aspects than violent rape would be, but that's exactly what the groomer label refers to: gradually indoctrinating children into agreeing to a sexual action that they don't fully understand the ramifications of, can't morally consent to, and will probably be bad for them.  It doesn't matter what the internal motivations of the groomers are, what matters are the effects on the children.  And again, the medical transition is similar in kind but worse in outcome than grooming for pedophillic sex would be, so it's not unfair to call it that and carry over the connotations.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was not previously aware of this event, but my guess is that this is an isolated demand for rigor.  All of the major news outlets are biased and unreliable when it comes to politics and science, and have tons of skeletons in their closet regarding mistakes that have either not been retracted, or not retracted very publicly or noticeably.  They probably all belong under "generally unreliable", and I would support Fox News being put there IF all of the other major news sources were subject to the same level of scrutiny and most of them placed in the same bin.


If it's being considered in isolation though, then I expect people to use this as an opportunity to discredit and censor right-wing positions by holding it to a higher standard than everyone else.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It reads like a joke that someone forgot the punchline to and butchered the delivery.  Would have been much better if they had figured out how to get it in the correct order.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 12, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd put myself somewhere in the middle.  I treat all of my stuff with some degree of respect.  I'm not like super cautious and offended if they get some wear and tear, but I'm not going to deliberately damage them.


Someone who cuts their books in half is comparable to someone who cuts their furniture or plates in half.  Like, you're allowed to do that, but unless you're doing a very specific project that requires this, why would you?  Now you have torn up damaged stuff instead of nice new stuff.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think I defined it fairly unambiguously:




Let's suppose that we know with certainty that people in group X have a statistically higher rate of bad feature Y compared to the average population, whether that be criminality, laziness, low intelligence, or are just unpleasant to be around. I'm taking the fact that this is accurate as an axiom. The actual proportion of people in group X with feature Y is objectively (and known to you) higher than average, but is not universal. That is, Y is a mostly discrete feature, and we have 0 < p < q < 1 where p is the probability of a randomly sampled member of the public has Y, and q is the probability that a randomly sampled member of q has Y.




It's "accurate" in that the literal proportion of people with trait Y in the general population and the group, in real life are p and q respectively, with p < q, and we also believe this to be true.  As opposed to an inaccurate stereotype representing a false belief.  In-so-far as Y actively impacts merit, then membership in X does provide a real signal correlated with merit.


Obviously actually measuring merit directly is superior to imperfect correlations, but if you are, for instance, hiring someone for a job, imperfect correlations are the only thing you have up until you actually hire someone and watch them perform the job.  Literally everything you judge on is going to be an imperfect correlation of some form, so it's just a question of which ones you use and how much weight you put on each.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Like pretty much every point the left has, there's a genuine underlying issue that they identify: a kernel of truth, and then it has been exaggerated and distorted and taken way too far.


Representation matters a little.  You should have a reasonable diversity of characters in different roles in different media.  People should be able to identify with different characters that share characteristics with them other than just skin color.  But not every single film has to have a rainbow cornucopia matching every single distinct subset.  Every character in Mulan is Chinese (or a Hun), because it takes place in ancient China.  Most characters in Peter Pan are English, because it's a story from England/Scotland.  A lot of characters in Disney's Princess and The Frog are black, because it's set in New Orleans.  A lot of American TV shows have a large diversity of characters interacting, because there's a lot of diversity in America.  As long as all of these things exist, you will see both heroes and villains of each race.  You will see bullies and victims and romantic love interests and weak cowards and loyal friends and scheming backstabbers, and lots of different people slotted into those roles.  That doesn't require that every single piece of media have every single race in every single role.  In some films the bad guys might be black and the good guys might be white.  In some it might be the other way around.  The point being: anyone can be anything, you are the arbiter of your own fate.  As long as Hollywood does not converge all around the same consistent patterns such that one race is always slotted into a particular role, in which case children will pick up on those patterns and form those stereotypes.  The left is right that this is bad.  The left is wrong that doing it in the opposite direction to how it was in the distant past is good.


We already solved this problem.  How many decades of under-representation, you ask?  I turn the question, how many decades did we have it solved for?  I don't know that every single issue was completely hammered out, but the 90s and early 2000s seemed reasonably fine to me.  My generation grew up with healthy diversity and colorblindness on TV, and then we threw it away to punish our ancestors.  The 50s were 70 years ago, who are you trying to teach "not to do this again"?  Kids today are just going to learn that race and gender and identity categories are super important and you need to treat people differently according to their category and stereotypes, they're not unlearning stereotypes from the 50s because they didn't grow up in the 50s.  They have no decades of learned racist baggage to unlearn because they haven't been alive for decades.  They're learning the racism they're being fed on TV right now.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for August 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Proposal: display upvotes and downvotes separately rather than adding them.


I find vote scores on my own comments to be useful in determining how many people say/engaged-with/agreed-with posts I wrote as a sort of feedback mechanism for determining what is and is not good content I should make more of (and partly just as an ego-boost).


However there's an important distinction between a post that got 1 upvote, and a post that got 30 upvotes and 29 downvotes.  The first is a thing that nobody care about, the second is a thing that lots of people cared about but was controversial.  And I suppose to some extent the number of comment replies will be proportional to this, but I think the raw votes would be useful not just for the author but for the people viewing the comment.


Alternate Proposal: make three different vote buttons.  "This is quality content, I agree with this, I disagree with this".  And nothing for low-quality content other than ignoring it or reporting it if it breaks rules.  Explicitly separating quality from agreement makes people's intentions more transparent.  (Though too much complexity risks reducing engagement with the system)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Should lifetime prisoners be incentivized to kill themselves?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Given a robust background in game theory, I'd say that utility functions can be whatever it is that you think ought to be optimized for.  If maximizing pleasure leads to "bad" outcomes, then obviously your utility function contains room for other things.  If you value human flourishing, then define your utility function to be "human flourishing", and whatever maximizes that is utilitarian with respect to that utility function.  And if that's composed of a complicated combination of fifty interlocking parts, then you have a complicated utility function, that's fine.


Now, taking this too broadly, you could classify literally everything as utilitarianism and render the term meaningless.  So to narrow things down a bit, here's what I think are the broad distinguishers of utilitarianism.


1: Consequentialism.  The following of specific rules or motivations of actions matter less than their actual outcomes.  Whatever rules exist should exist in service of the greater good as measured by results (in expectation), and the results are the outcome we actually care about and should be measuring.  A moral system that says you should always X no matter whether it helps people or hurts people because X is itself a good action is not-consequentialist and thus not utilitarian  (technically you can define a utility function that increases the more action X is taken, but we're excluding weird stuff like that to avoid literally everything counting as stated above)


2: Moral value of all people.  All people (defined as humans, or conscious beings, or literally all living creatures, or some vague definition of intelligence) have moral value, and the actual moral utility function is whatever increases that for everyone (you can define this as an average, or a sum, or some complicated version that tries to avoid repugnant conclusions).  The point being that all the people matter and you don't define your utility function to be "maximize the flourishing of Fnargl the Dictator".  And you don't get to define a subclass of slaves who have 0 value and then maximize the utility of all of the nonslaves.  All the people matter.


3: Shut up and multiply.  You should be using math in your moral philosophy, and expected values.  If you're not using math you're doing it wrong.  If something has a 1% chance of causing 5300 instances of X then that's approximately 53 times as good/bad as causing 1 instance of X (depending on what X is and whether multiple instances synergize with each other).   If you find a conclusion where the math leads to some horrible result, then you're using the math wrong, either because you misunderstand what utilitarianism means, you're using a bad utility function, or your moral intuitions themselves are wrong.  If you think that torturing someone for an hour is worse than 3↑↑↑3 people getting splinters it's because your tiny brain can't grasp the Lovecraftian horror of what 3↑↑↑3 means.


Together this means that utilitarianism is a broad but not all encompassing collection of possible moral philosophies.  If you think that utilitarianism means everyone sitting around being wireheaded constantly then you've imagined a bad utility function, and if you switch to a better utility function you get better outcomes.  If you have any good moral philosophy, then my guess is that there is a version of utilitarianism which closely resembles it but does a better job because it patches bugs made by people being bad at math.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think these are good points, but we run into a similar issue of incentives if there are not long term repercussions either.  If we have a statute of limitations that nobody ever pays for their misdeeds, or any misdeeds that are done don't have to be paid if more than 50 years have passed, then there are incentives to destroy your rivals, steal their stuff, pass it on to your descendants, and then maintain control and prevent more sympathetic and guilt-feeling people from gaining power until the clock runs out.


I think the optimal incentive aligning solution might be something like a global penalty pool.  Most of the damage done by terrible atrocities is done to people who die and thus cannot be compensated.  And the most terrible damage will be when entire families are wiped out together, meaning the only people who could be compensated are more distant relatives, and the more complete the genocide the fewer legitimate surviving victims.  So... make them pay anyway, it doesn't matter who they pay.  We have a central pool, wrong-doers are forced to pay penalties into it proportional to the actual damages (including what is owed to dead people), and whatever portion of the money is damages to actually surviving people or their recent descendants can go to them, while money for dead people or people from long long ago can be used for humanitarian aid or something.


Obviously there are still incentive issues with whoever is in control of assigning penalties and determining how the money gets spent, but it solves the issue of rewarding victims proportional to how few of them remain.  I am very very strongly opposed to being forced to pay reparations to people of certain races because multiple centuries ago people who shared their skin color were oppressed by people who share my skin color (but neither were our direct ancestors).  But I don't think I would mind having some of my tax money go into a global pool for humanitarian aid, if it was spent effectively on people who actually needed it.  I'll consider that charity.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This seems absolutely terrible, comparable to affirmative action in nature.  Artificially increasing demand for a thing lowers the standards it has to reach in order for the market to accept it.  This can't have a positive impact on the amount of genuinely quality Canadian content, because content they make that is comparable to non-Canadian content is/was able to compete in a fair playing field without regulations demanding it be spread.  So this only impacts low quality content that wasn't previously good enough but now is accepted anyway to meet quotas.  If you want people to consume your product, make a good product that people genuinely want to consume out of their own free will, don't force it on them.  Now the average piece of Canadian content people encounter will have a lower quality than it did before, which actually reinforces stereotypes and breeds annoyance and resentment.


I can only see this going poorly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think you're missing distinction between base land value and capital improvements.  You don't tax the buildings themselves, or the entire property value, you set the tax rate according to the underlying value of the land itself (which can be assessed separately from the building's value, and real estate agents do this all the time).  Which is entirely externalities from other nearby stuff.  Whatever value a property has from invested capital improvements contained within itself is exempt from the land value tax.  If done properly, the incentive to build is the same as the incentive to invest money in any other form of capital (and the same the vast majority of people have when they build in the current system): you can either extract money from it over time, (which is not taxed in a full Georgist system), or sell it for a profit, which people are willing to buy because they can then extract money from it over time.  In fact, people are more incentivized to build with land value taxes, because it's becomes the only way for a landlord to earn profit.  You can't just buy a piece of land and sit on it as it appreciates in value, or extract rents based on its favorable location that everyone wants to be in.  You have to build and upkeep structures that create value such that people are willing to pay to live there, or useful buildings that earn profit, above and beyond the taxed land rent value.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Why Are Women Hot? – Put A Number On It!
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
From a game theoretic and psychological perspective, I'm not sure this would be meaningfully different from first past the post.  To a first approximation, everyone just votes for the same person they would now: red team or blue team, and then one of them has 50%+ and wins (I guess it eliminates the electoral college if this is in the U.S.)


Theoretically, it might help third party candidates, because you can vote for one and if they lose your vote won't be wasted, but this is only true if you're certain that candidate is going to delegate to the correct side.  For instance, if Scott Alexander was in a standard election and had a good shot at becoming President I would definitely vote for him over pretty much any politician (because they're all scum).  But under normal circumstances I would not delegate my vote to him in your system because he's not going to win, and then he's very likely to send it to some Democrat, and I think they tend to do slightly more damage than Republicans.  Even if he delegates it to an above average Democrat, they're also going to lose and then the vote stays in house until eventually it ends up with Hillary Clinton, or whoever else ends up on top of the Democrats that year (I'm using the 2016 election as an example since it's a strong case of when I'd very strongly prefer my vote not stray).


So in practice, all the high up Republicans and Democrats end up in bed with each other and refuse to send votes to the other side, all the voters loyally vote for someone on one side or the other, and their vote stays in house, until eventually whichever side got more votes ends up sending them all to the most popular person on that side.  Theoretically, this would allow someone to vote say Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton, but then he loses and delegates the votes to her and she has them all, which is kind of what the primary system already does, it chooses the most popular person on each side to pre-emptively delegates all of the votes to.  If anything, this system makes things worse because if someone had a preference for, say,  Bernie > Trump > Clinton, then Clinton unfairly siphons votes by being vaguely associated with a more moderate person even though she isn't him.  Your system will incentivize more moderate people to run for office, on both sides, but only for the purpose of siphoning votes for their party's main candidate.


And the strategic thing for voters to do in response would be to not trust any of the moderates who are unlikely to win and are just going to siphon their vote for one of the two main parties, and instead just vote for their favorite party directly rather than risk choosing the wrong moderate.  And then we have FPTP again.