cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
30d ago
Bikes yield to everyone on nature paths and it has not effectively banned them at all. Instead such paths are filled with bikers.
I'd be fine with bikes only on streets in areas of less than 30mph speeds. As soon as it hits 35 though they are asking cars to generally slow down to accommodate them. At 45mph I think they are a danger to themselves and all other drivers.
I'm fine with effectively banning what I'd consider "racing cycling" this ain't the tour de France. Just like highways aren't NASCAR or formula 1. All people in shared commute spaces have to sacrifice the top speed of their vehicle for the safety of themselves and others.
cjet79
3mo ago
Or you end up with something like the Jones act and basically destroy the industry by making sure they never compete and they turn into parasites.
cjet79
1mo ago
I think Caplan's biggest miss is actually on theory of mind. He is a very conscientious and non-neurotic individual. The idea of mental illness seems basically incomprehensible to him. He accepts that these people exist, but his personal interactions with them are heavily minimized because he is good at cutting them out of his life.
He lives in immigrant heavy Northern Virginia. He is aware of and happy with many cultural changes that happen due to immigration. He can go in depth on crime statistics with people, and the take-away is that immigrants are relatively low-crime compared to native born Americans. They sometimes look high crime because young men are high crime, and immigrants also skew towards young men. Any objection you think you have about immigration that Caplan has not answered, he has certainly heard and answered.
One last thing I'd add, he is much more of a microeconomics professor than a macro one. I consider that a huge plus, because macro is voodoo stats BS.
cjet79
5mo ago
DO NOT POST AI CONTENT
We've only said this sporadically in the past. I'm talking to the other moderators and maybe we will have it added as a rule under the "content" section. Or maybe I'm wrong and all the other mods like AI content (highly doubt that).
We all know how to go and use an AI. If you want to have a discussion with AI themotte is basically just a bad intermediary. No one is here to have discussions with AIs. Thus posting AI content is in no one's interest.
You can of course consult AIs on your own time, and maybe they can be used as a sort of sanity or quick polling check.
cjet79
3mo ago
It's partly that they flipped all the standards of evidence on their head.
Interventions were considered safe until proven otherwise. Masking young kids in school, widespread adoption of a novel medical treatment (MRNA "vaccines"), puberty blockers, etc.
Covid is basically a flu/cold virus. All intuitions about such things turned out to basically be correct. And there was good evidence that was true in 2020 but they spent nearly four more years dragging it on. Unless you were part of a BLM protest, and then things were fine.
Biology can often be weird and unintuitive I get that. But when it gets weird is when you need more evidence and research, not a political wall of silence saying "you are a bad person if you don't believe us".
I literally cannot imagine a non life threatening scenario where hormone therapies would be allowed for kids. Hormones are definitely one of those systems that we don't understand very well. We know that getting it wrong can even cause life threatening conditions. We correctly vilify anyone giving out steroids to teen athletes, this seems just as dangerous and permanent.
Where is the American Dream?
There has always been a dream of wealth and fortune in America. Drawing immigrants and inspiring the population. A sense that you can start from nothing or very little and pull yourself up through hard work, a bit of smarts, and a bit of luck. But I find myself a little unsure of how do this lately.
Learn to code
A decade ago there was a refrain among the elite "learn to code". That was how the coal miners in West Virginia would replace their dirty global warming causing jobs with something less harmful for the environment.
I know how to code. I've been coding for more than a decade. I'm out of a job and unlike in previous years I'm not being assaulted by job offers on LinkedIn every day.
The talk I'm hearing (and believing) around twitter and silicon valley is that AI is replacing coders. Or at least that is enough of a perception that hiring is down.
I'm at least a senior web developer, but for the new kids coming out of college... I don't know. I used to know guys a few years younger than me asking for help finding a job out of college and I'd do a resume tune-up and send it back to them and they'd tell me thanks but they managed to get a job already.
Nowadays I don't even think telling people to go into coding is a good idea.
Heal the sick
There does seem to be a consistent growth industry in medicine. I'm certain this is true. However I feel this is a bad omen.
Medicine has this feel to me like it is a consumption industry. The typically unhealthy are often old people that aren't really producing lots of goods and services anymore. It's savings that they are using to prolong their life.
Maybe if all the medical spending was on life extension I'd feel this was a good use of money.
But forget about how I feel about the industry. Is this any place to get rich as part of the American dream? If you enjoy terrible hours, lots of bureaucratic red tape, and years of mandatory training then it's all for you. It's certainly not available as a quick career pivot.
Become a social media star
Another avenue of wealth open to seemingly everyone is to go on social media and become an internet sensation. Sell advertising and related products.
Im honestly not sure if this is a realistic avenue these days or not. I do enjoy quite a few niche media things. They seemingly make a living even if they aren't wealthy.
The downsides seem numerous.
- Your business is beholden to the social media sites you live on.
- You may end up with fame, but without the traditional trappings of fame that would protect you.
- You are very connected with customers and consumers who are very accustomed to getting exactly what they want. It's a brutal set of obligations.
Where do I go make money?
Some of this really just boils down to my personal job security. Where do I go to start making money?
But the the rest boils down to where do my kids go to start making money?
My mom was able to give me good advice a decade and a half ago to go into coding. It worked out well for a while.
Now I'm in a bind of figuring out what to do next, and what paths to lead my kids down for good career paths.
The AI-lephant in the room
LLMs certainly change things. I'm sorta operating on an assumption that language based things will be solved and done for. If it involves typing up or reading and comprehending a thing that seems like something current AIs can generally do better than 95% of people.
I'm assuming other distinct areas will not be solved for. Not because I think they are unsolvable, but just planning becomes meaningless at a certain point. But they also don't seem currently solved.
cjet79
8mo ago
Scott Alexander endorses basically anyone but Trump
The main points:
- Trump will move the needle towards right wing strong man authoritarianism.
- The democrats might seem worse, but they aren't.
- Some of us want to punish the democrats for being bad by voting for Trump, but this isn't a good thing to do if Trump will be actually worse on the things we care about punishing the democrats.
I went back and read Scott's 2016 anyone but Trump election endorsement.
The main points:
- Trump doesn't have solutions, he just wants to blow up the system.
- Trump is high variance.
- He will lead to anti-intellectual populism dominating the conservative movement.
- Trump won't do as much about global warming.
- Trump pisses off the libs, and this will further radicalize the libs rather than bringing us back to a better spot.
I would maybe suggest in the future that these posts are counter-productive. The most recent one moved my needle more in favor of Trump. I can't believe I'm considering voting for a major party candidate (I've voted libertarian the few times I've bothered to actually show up). Going back and reading the old anti-endorsement was even worse. With hindsight answering the criticisms:
- Trump did not blow up the system. People blew it up in an attempt to oppose him. Generals lied to him about troop deployments. Prosecutors invented novel legal theories for going after Trump. The FBI encouraged censorship of a story by heavily implying it was false when they knew it was true. Pharma companies held back the release of their vaccines to not give any perceived benefit to Trump. Congress and intelligence agencies spent three years persecuting Trump based on an accusation that was entirely made up by the Clinton campaign.
- Trump had a high variage twitter account. Crazy things were said sometimes. But the actual day to day governance was fine. There were fewer major wars and foreign entanglements started. War seems like a very high variance problem especially wars with a nuclear power involved.
- I feel that the conservative movement has come to a healthier space where they differentiate the university and educational establishment that they hate from intellectualism in general. This worry did not materialize.
- He didn't do much about global warming. I'm happy about that. Honestly worrying about something with consequences 20 years out feels a little silly at this point. It was nice when we had such long time horizons.
- He did indeed piss off the libs. Trump Derangement Syndrome did not go away. He also didn't "crack down" on them. He didn't send Hillary to jail, despite how much her Russia hoax thing probably meant she deserved it (I know she would have gone in for other reasons, but seriously talk about norms breaking). Trump has weathered a great deal of hate. He seems uniquely suited to it. I am happy with him in this role. It has helped a large number of people learn to basically ignore "cancel culture" attempts. Or to immediately look with suspicion at any story of someone doing something awful.
I really feel like there is some gell-mann amnesia going on with Scott. He reads these horrid stories about Trump. With the details sensationalized in the worst possible way. And he accepts them as fact. Meanwhile the New York Times threatens to dox him so they can run a hit piece article on him that they sourced from a weirdo on wikipedia with a knack for rules-lawyering.
He talks about how Trumps norms violations are loud and unsubtle. While the democrats only subtly and slowly violate norms. But this is a framing that has been shoved down our throats by the media. Every minor violation of Trump's is blown out of proportion, and every major violation of the democrats is minimized and not talked about. How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition? And the people doing this knew it all along. I don't think democrats or liberal leaning people seem to realize how much the Russia Hoax thing has utterly fucked their credibility on everything. Especially after the Hunter Biden laptop story came out, and it turned out that the intelligence agencies helped them cover up exactly what they had been accusing Trump of doing.
This is supposed to be a government system where one side wins, implements their things, becomes a little too unpopular for going too far, and then the other side wins and get to do their thing for a little while. They switch back and forth. We all learned in 2016 that no, this is not actually how it operates. There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state. If they don't like the president they can decide not to let him do his thing. People are righteously pissed off about that, and many of them would happily see that bureaucracy and deep state dismantled if it meant they never get to use their veto again. And one way to test if they still have the veto power, and one way to give someone an incentive to fix it, is to keep electing presidents that we know they will "veto".
Trump is a vote for restoring norms. For restoring the ability of democracy and the vote to actually pick a direction for the country, rather than have that direction dictated by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. I dislike Trump on most of his policies, but it wouldn't be a vote for his policies. Its a vote for voting on policies.
cjet79
1mo ago
Base voter preferences would still be mostly the same, and I think politicians mostly respond to voter desires.
There would end up being two types of politicians. The demagogues that flaunt the risk, and the timid that shy away from it. The demagogues would have even more power because there would be few to opposed them.
cjet79
2mo ago
I read your posts and just hope your children against the odds manage to become well-adjusted adults despite your efforts
Perhaps this is my bias as a parent, but insulting the way people raise their kids is often a step beyond insulting them personally.
"You are an asshole" is less antagonistic than "Your kids are assholes, and it is your fault".
Take a time out. 3 day ban.
cjet79
2mo ago
I don't understand why you kept putting classical liberal in quotation marks.
I'm pretty adjacent to classical liberals. It might be the second or third term I describe myself with (an-cap and libertarian being the other words). I feel it necessary to respond to your descriptions of classical liberals.
"Classical liberals" like to hit sentimental ideologues with cold hard facts.
This is a fun thing to do. I think I liked doing it before I was ever an-cap/classical liberal/libertarian. Back then it was arguing evolution vs creationism with people in myspace groups. But other people like Ben Shapiro are not classical liberals, and that is like his whole shtick. The classical liberals are also sentimental about quite a few things, Adam Smith, the founding fathers, the enlightenment, etc. So I'd call this a weird and mostly uncorrelated description of classical liberals.
A true "classical liberal" would treat his ideas the same way he treats everyone else's, as hypotheses to be tested against reality.
I'd say that is more of the rationalist's shtick. Its again another weird description where it sorta fits, but fits other groups better, and also doesn't fit in some glaring cases. Most classical liberals will point to American and Britain in the late 1700s and 1800s as sort of shining beacon examples. They do in fact happily and openly privilege ideas coming out of those time periods.
"Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities? As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one.
The results have not been stellar, but they've also been fighting back against it longer than conservatives have even been aware that it is a problem. FIRE is one such organization. They have also carried out and implemented their solution. Classical liberals generally outnumber conservatives in the university. Ya they are both super outnumbered by liberals and the left. But the libertarianish/classical liberal guys have go on a targetted campaign to develop stellar academics and an academic support network that can allow their own to survive in an otherwise hostile environment. Do they have society wide solution for the problem? No, of course not, they don't have society wide power to even think about implementing such a thing. That is for the conservatives to carry out. But there is no point in trading one enemy for another.
Haidt seems to object not to the specifics of what DeSantis did, but to the notion that any radical changes could be made to even a single college unless they're driven from within the academic caste.
Quick aside: I hope you don't think Haidt is a classical liberal, here is a quote from the man:
"But it’s also that once I switched my research over from culture to politics, and once I began criticizing the ideas on the Left and the Democratic Party — for many years I was doing it to try to help them win."
He calls himself a political centrist these days, but I still think he is mostly a democrat that thinks the democrats went a little too far. Either way he is not a classical liberal.
There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.
You are right in the first sentence. It is certainly not classical liberal. Which is why most classical liberals don't like it. Most classical liberals do not think universities should be subsidized at all. You'll find some that are sort of adjacent to classical liberals that think basic research should be funded (Tyler Cowen). But anyone with an ounce of understanding of economics can realize that education is a private good, and that private goods are handled just fine by markets. It misses the mark so badly that I can't help but think maybe you are again talking about some other group. Until I read your last few paragraphs, and you seem to have understood their actual ideology all along.
I don't know who you are reading that is calling themself a classical liberal. I'd read these guys if you want an actual example of classical liberals examining higher education: https://www.amazon.com/Cracks-Ivory-Tower-Higher-Education/dp/0190846283
cjet79
1mo ago
I've been reading the murderbot series after watching a few episodes of the show and deciding I liked it and didn't want to wait.
cjet79
4mo ago
Third kid arrived on Friday, little baby goblin. Slowly starting to look more like a baby girl instead. Still cute and makes my heart flutter holding her.
Just came home from the hospital. Babys two older sisters love and adore her already.
I'm doing my part to be above replacement rate for population growth.
cjet79
30d ago
Original article was proposing enforcement of rules against bikers. I do know that cities often have cops on bicycles.
Maximum speed and some enforced guidelines on sidewalks sounds great. Where places are less dense enforcement would be hard but also less necessary as there would be fewer pedestrians.
Roadways for motorized vehicles, sidewalks for human powered things.
cjet79
2mo ago
It doesn't seem worth noting unless you care about the history of chemical warfare and it's supporters. Churchill had a complicated political history with chemical and gas weapons.
cjet79
3mo ago
This seems like a solved and understood problem. And Cowen himself is aware of the solution and has had interviews with the people that proposed it.
The solution is skin in the game. The person making the decisions needs to be personally impacted by outcomes.
That impact doesn't have to always be punishment, as @faul_sname points out below.
There is probably some low hanging fruit for accountability. Military projects should be tied to specific generals that care about a good legacy. And possibly a politician as well. Let those names become a curse or a word that means reliability to the grunts.
School boards should require that they have kids at the school. And possibly they should only be elected by those who have kids in school. It's possible that mixing in traditional politician accountability systems has made these positions worse. They should maybe be anonymous, or at least part of the board should be.
We require that politicians live in the areas or districts they represent. That is a decent start. Economic tie ins or closer representational tie ins should also exist. Lords of an area used to share their name with the area.
It mostly just feels that accountability is an afterthought. Something added in as a shitty ineffective process, because no one really cares about the hard work of real accountability systems. This feels backwards. The power shouldn't be allowed to exist in the first place without accountability. The Constitution was written partly as a way to say "this is how we won't make the same screwups as the last government".
Let the people in power figure out their own accountability systems, or just don't let them have power.
cjet79
2mo ago
You misread me.
Imagine an alternate world where no one claimed gas chambers and said 2-3 million Jews were rounded up and effectively murdered through horrible conditions and starvation. My assertion is that the end result would have been much the same. It was still a horrible atrocity and large scale genocide carried out with the machinery of the state, and under the guise of a racial ideology. I believe there still would have been a push for a Jewish state, the Nazi ideology would still be viewed as evil antichrist stand in, and this alternate history world would be mostly indistinguishable from our own.
(It should be worth noting that they did not need to be rounded up. So the death rate should be compared to the general civilian population, not the general prison camp population. The choice to round them up in such large numbers was still that: a choice.)
And yeah I will still say I don't really care if they lied about the method of death and doubled the numbers. But I mostly don't care because everyone that would have perpetrated the lie is dead and out of power. Had this lie been 10 years ago, yes I absolutely would care, and I'd want to punish the liars.
I've self assessed this on other issues I care about. I care about communism being an evil ideology that leads to mass murder and starvation. The New York Times is now known to have had active communist agents on the payroll in the 30s-50s. And that these reporters actively helped cover up the atrocities committed by the USSR. But it all doesn't actively bother me very much. And it bothers me far far less than the errors and lies perpetrated over covid. I have a recency bias, and WWII is not recent.
cjet79
24d ago
No graphical sex depictions in arkendriyhthrist. More of a fade to black style. Arks has a lot of middle but also a lot of ending. Honestly they could have stopped before writing either of the last two books and it would have felt complete.
The world building is top notch in arks, autist levels of details and background. The story probably drags a bit too much because of the level of details provided. So that might be a plus or minus depending on your preferences.
The church of most of the gods are good. There is a god of magic that is a little crazy and not good.
Protagonist is not OP in the story for at least the first 5000-10000 pages.
Governments vary quite a bit. Some are basically third world shit hole tier levels of incompetent and evil. Others are highly competently run by millenia old metal life forms.
On mobile so I can't dig up the specific stories.
The Perfect Run has a time loop aspect, superheroes setting, main protagonist has a save point he can set. It's complete and doesn't faf around as much.
Millennial mage is filled with likeable characters and nice humans.
OP characters are admittedly very common and that is short circuiting a lot of my recommendations.
cjet79
1mo ago
Very good summary, and matches many of my feelings on the topic.
Some thoughts:
- I am reminded of Isaac Asimov's series of stories on "The Three Laws". It basically assumes away the hardest part of AI alignment "how do you enforce the rules". But then he still manages to write about a dozen stories about how it all goes horribly wrong.
- I also read a bunch of Zvi's substack roundups. That man is single handedly one of the best information aggregators I know of.
- There is definitely an assumption by the AI doomerists that intelligence can make you god tier. I'm not sure I'll ever buy this argument until I'm literally being tortured to death by a god tier controlled robot. Physical world just doesn't seem that easy to grok and manipulate. I think of intelligence as leverage on the physical world. But you need counter weight to make that leverage work. Humans have a lot of existing "weight" in the form of capital and spread. A baby AI would not have as much weight, just a data center.
- Robin Hanson has a great critique of AI doomerists. Many of them said "AI would happen this way" and that turned out to not be the way, but their predictions still haven't changed much.
cjet79
24d ago
Mother of Learning is usually my first recommendation, if someone doesn't like it then I just tell them the genre is not for them.
Sympathetic protagonist my favorite might be Ar'Kendrithyst. Its an incredibly long story, but it is complete! The protagonist and his daughter get pulled into another world with a system that has stats and skills and leveling up. The protagonist is a bleeding heart liberal in the best sense of that term. He is a kind man that cares about others and for a long time has reservations about even killing monsters (the monsters in the setting are generally totally unsympathetic, they are either straight up evil, or amoral killing machines). He genuinely wants to make the world a better place for everyone, and the story is about how he accomplishes that getting over increasingly large obstacles. Main reason it might not be for you (or anyone really) is that the protagonist is bisexual. No graphic sex scenes, and its not very shoved in the face, but its present.
Any other aspects of MOL you liked? I've read like 200-300 stories in this genre, and about 20-30 of them are ones i might recommend for various reasons. That hit rate sounds terrible I guess, but lots of mid stories that just have better versions of them out there.
cjet79
29d ago
Yeah the BLS does good stats.
They also do various measurements for "unemployed" too https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
cjet79
2mo ago
$1 million donation is chump change at those levels. Possibly the donation was to secure the sit down dinner where they talked, not actually a promise for any kind of outcome. That seems way more in line with that amount of money.
cjet79
24d ago
Have you enjoyed any progression fantasy or wuxia novels?
I really like the genre but I bounce off of some stories real hard. Reverend Insanity is one that I could see recommended a thousand times and on the thousand and first time I'd still say "Our tastes are just different and I won't like that novel." I'm not even willing to give it a shot and try reading it.
If I see we have any overlapping preferences I might be able to recommend stuff.
cjet79
2mo ago
My full original comment:
I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories.
I haven't tried too hard to generate my own. But if one of the stories I was following on Royal road turned out to be an AI story I wouldn't be unhappy except that most of them have a release schedule that is clearly within human abilities, and I'd want more. Once they got revealed I'd expect them to stop sandbagging it.
My limited attempts to get AI to generate interesting stories have kinda sucked. In one instance it took my writing and declared it too adult and I legitimately wasn't sure what the hell it was talking about. Those were early chatgpt days though.
I still have this unverified sense that AI can produce pop, but not jazz. Meaning average mass appealing stuff, but weird individuality is harder for it to generate.
Re-reading my first sentence as standalone I guess it could be interpreted one of two ways:
- I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories, as they are now.
- I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories, if I could not tell the difference between them and human written stories I already enjoy.
I meant it in the second sense. I definitely think the AI stories right now are a lot of hot garbage, for all the reasons you've mentioned.
cjet79
2mo ago
The US government was small enough to be funded by tariffs and alcohol back in the day. I'd like it if it was that small again.
The US imports about 4 trillion in goods and the government budget is about 7 trillion. It's mathematically impossible to fund the budget with tariffs.
Protectionism and revenue raising are also at cross purposes for tariffs. For protectionism you want the tariffs high enough that the goods do not flow into the country. For revenue you still want the goods flowing because otherwise the tariff doesn't get paid and doesn't raise money
This is a little wild of a prediction given that it already seems to be proven wrong.
Current gen AIs already seem poised to be pretty disruptive.
I think the main reason they are not as disruptive is because they aren't done cooking. Why try and squeeze out work from an AI right now when the AI will be better and cheaper in 6 months?
More options
Context Copy link