PokerPirate
1d ago
Story time.
I have 4 small kids and a SAH wife. Even with this modest family, the government has made basic errors with our taxes every year the youngest has been alive (3 years in a row now). For example:
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I live in California, and the California tax form 540 only has space for 3 children. For larger families, the official instructions are to write a letter explaining the situation to get the extra tax credits. Apparently this is so infrequent that there isn't even a form for it! Two out of the 3 years, California has lost this letter and not applied the tax credit for the 4th child until I do dozens of back-and-forths with the tax board.
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This year, the IRS had a mistake reading one of the SSNs of the children, and so they didn't count any of the children as deductible. (Apparently the OCR system they use didn't like the font of my pdf writer, but it's the same font as before... and they should already know all the SSNs...) We've been doing back-and-forths with the IRS since April and they still haven't resolved this for us.
So I don't trust the government at all to properly handle any sort of tax breaks/etc for large families.
PokerPirate
7d ago
Homeopathy is a stupid example for two reasons:
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It has no moral valence and so whether or not to believe in homeopathy is a purely empirical claim. Take something instead like abortion. Under what conditions we should allow abortions is much more of a claim about our underlying axiomatic systems. It seems quite obvious that exposure to different media/arguments can drastically change the typical person's views on abortion, and even for the particularly strong willed/thoughtful will nudge the person's opinion.
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Up-to-lizardman-constant, no one believes in the "strong homeopathy hypothesis" that diluting chemicals with water makes them more powerful. But there are many "weaker homeopathy hypotheses" that I'll bet I can convince you of: Consider your typical hypocondriac that goes to a doctors office and always demands getting some sort of medication. This person will experience lots of negative side effects of medication. Their health will be meaningfully improved by becoming convinced that homeopathic medicine works and taking those "medications" instead of actual prescription medications. One type of maximally persuasive argument about homeopathy would argue for a weaker hypothesis like this, but you could just state that this isn't actually arguing for homeopathy, and so is axiomatically not the maximally persuasive argument.
dammit, yes
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