cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
2yr ago
He will be doing a round of podcasts and talks on the book, and I did find out about it on a substack article that linked to his substack.
cjet79
2yr ago
unless fraud prevention is valued more highly like it is in China.
Is there a story about this, sounds vaguely interesting. It certainly doesn't seem like China cares about companies or consumers in other countries being defrauded by Chinese companies (which is to be expected from a national interest perspective, but it still means my main experience with China is a certain level of casual fraud).
cjet79
2yr ago
but sometimes felt like a Gish gallop against public education
I really think you are using Gish gallop incorrectly here. From wikipedia:
The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. In essence, it is prioritizing quantity of one's arguments at the expense of quality of said arguments.
Providing a bunch of high quality arguments is not a Gish gallop. And with how heavily researched and cited The Case Against Education is, it seems wrong to say they are low effort and low quality arguments. Also Gish Gallop doesn't really apply for book format. There is a nearly unlimited amount of space and time to reply to all of Caplan's argument. In fact, calling it a Gish Gallop creates a catch-22 for an author in Caplan's position. Either they address all the arguments against their case and get called a Gish Gallop, or they only present their strongest arguments and get called out for 'not addressing x problem'.
cjet79
2yr ago
then what does he want her to believe?
He wants her to not believe feminism because:
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Its probably not correct
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Wrong ideas when converted to policy can hurt people
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Having a belief in feminism can be personally detrimental. (being angry all the time is a rough kind of life to live)
It is possible to have a negative preference for one thing while not having a strong positive preference for any alternatives. I really don't like olives on my pizza, it ruins the whole pizza for me. There are lots of other pizza toppings I'm happy with being on my pizza, but no lack of a topping I enjoy will completely change my mind about whether to eat a pizza.
cjet79
2yr ago
But Scott Aaronson was never massively popular either. I'm not sure I could compare their levels of popularity because they are both sort of obscure, but I would feel safe in saying they probably aren't an order of magnitude different in popularity. Just looking at number of book reviews on amazon, they are both in the hundreds.
cjet79
2yr ago
I think you're also missing -- he's right
When you this I didn't think it would be necessary to point out that I think he is right.
it's almost entirely preaching to the choir
I do agree their best move is to ignore it, but movements run on passions and emotion don't always make the best strategic decisions. I feel like Trump and Desantis have weaponized the enraged reactions they get, and have used it as a way to let their political opponents make unforced errors.
cjet79
2yr ago
The internet has a way of dragging things out of obscurity if it finds a good enough target. A person walking their dog in a New York park isn't exactly an example of a mainstream topic, but one such person got dragged onto the national stage.
I guess my belief is that they will just not consider Caplan a good target on this topic.
cjet79
2yr ago
Maybe women aren't a sacred cow. But they are not not a sacred cow. Also Caplan has smart friends, many of them are academics that deal in ideas, and some of them like Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson have achieved their own degree of fame. If his friends say this might harm him, and I think it won't harm him I have to wonder why I disagree with some very smart people that I normally agree with.
cjet79
2yr ago
I hate to say this, but Scott Aaronson has always struck me as more bullyable than Bryan Caplan. And some of the people who revel in "cancelling" others are almost certainly just bullies.
But I also think they approached the debate in radically different ways. Scott Aaronson made an impassioned emotional plea to lay back on the man hating. The response was a bunch of emotional attacks. Scott stepped into their arena and they beat him badly. Bryan Caplan has laid out a logical case for why Feminism doesn't make sense. Bryan setup his own arena and said 'come get me, but play by my rules'.
cjet79
2yr ago
Bryan Caplan has a new book. His typical approach is to tour around the ideas in his book to various libertarian gatherings and podcasts. His latest book is in the form of a letter to his daughter. Various essays are put together. The title says it all:
He has a talk out on the topic here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d4C-Rz3Wv5c
@The-WideningGyre sums up the video:
I watched it, it's fairly short and enjoyable, but it's almost entirely preaching to the choir, I find. There wasn't really any support for helping de-program the other side. (The factoid about prison rape was new and interesting for me though).
Most interesting was the very first slide, where he says the dictionary definition of a feminist ("wanting to men and women to be treated equally") is wrong, in that almost all men agree with this, but only 1/3 of men consider themselves feminists. He instead proposes (paraphrasing) feminists think that "men are treated unfairly better than women" and notes that essentially all feminists would agree with it, but most non-feminists (including ones who agree with the dictionary definition) would disagree.
The rest is kind of the classic stuff -- men die on the job more, are affected by violent crime more, commit suicide more, the pay gap is BS, the "women are wonderful" effect etc. He notes how no one sees anything wrong with the Ukraine not letting any men between 16-60 out, which is a powerful contemporary datapoint.
It's also nice that he notes he wrote this book for his daughter, because he sees the feminist ideology leading to self-pity, antipathy, and injustice, which he sees as bad, and also that he briefly explores why he thinks it so popular, which he sympathetically phrases as "If so many people disagree with me, why do I think I'm right?"
I think The-WideningGyre is correct that most of this stuff is probably not new to a lot of people reading on this discussion forum. What is maybe a little new is someone sticking out their professional reputation to say these things.
That gives us a good opportunity to register predictions on how Caplan's book will be received. He says he had multiple friends come up to him and suggest that he not publish the book, or give it a different title.
Caplan is a tenured professor and shares a department with Robin Hanson (who has also courted some pretty big controversies). Caplan has also released books on controversial subjects in the past.
My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored. The book is never taken down from Amazon or any other publishers for the controversy. Caplan has a dry argumentative style, and tends to laugh at his own very nerdy jokes. I think those aspects play badly for drumming up a culture war controversy. And he has plenty of experience saying controversial things in a way that makes it sound like he is apologizing for the world. He also has a well insulated job and few easy avenues for people to go after him. If I am wrong in my predictions I should update in the direction of thinking that the culture war is hotter and more intense than I previously believed.
cjet79
2yr ago
I think it's variable, but you can usually trust individuals to know something about themselves.
It's like asking people "why do you like your job?" (and asking them where their boss might hear). You are going to get a huge range of answers. A lot of times they might be lying to sound good, maybe they just want the money but they make up something about how solving programming problems is fun. Sometimes they might give you something super specific that is too hard to generalize, "I like working with Sally". Other times they'll throw their hands up and say "your guess is as good as mine".
If you are looking for love try to be the best version of yourself, make male in person friends first (it's both easier than finding love, and can help your chances when meeting women), and try to stop overthinking the issue. Humans have been successfully reproducing for quite a while, and without as much analysis.
cjet79
2yr ago
was there any existing discussion of Bryan Caplan's new project "Dont be a feminist"
cjet79
2yr ago
I think the US might have to relearn a few hard lessons about why voting was done the way it was. People removed a bunch of Chesterson's Fence type rules around voting because of the pandemic.
I wouldn't be surprised if we get a blown up culture war story in the next year or two about some caregiver illegally mailing in a bunch of ballots for the people they take care of. Or a business owner coerces a bunch of their employees. I'm sure the particulars won't much matter in the end.
cjet79
2yr ago
This comment received reports of being antagonistic. Amadan is a moderator and so they asked another moderator to review this comment.
The Review: There is clearly some frustration leaking through from Amadan, and sarcasm is almost always used in an antagonistic way. However Amadan is also defending themself from a slightly antagonistic comment "so you're basically agreeing while saying you aren't" (I consider it a bit antagonistic to put words in someone else's mouth. We all speak and write for ourselves on this website.)
If this was two regular users I'd approve the comment and ignore the reports. Since a moderator is involved I will be a little harsher and give these warnings:
To @amadan: please avoid using sarcasm as much as possible because it tends to hurt honest discussions.
To @Jiro: please be more careful when paraphrasing others. A bad paraphrasing can easily be an insult.
The Meta: I do not like situations where you see something like "The Police have investigated themselves, and found themselves innocent of all wrongdoing". But I'm also not gonna suggest some punishment for a minor incident I would have ignored just to prove that we are willing to handout punishments to fellow moderators.
I should read usernames more often. I responded to this before reading the username. Leaving it up, but user is perma banned. Do not create usernames like "bigdickpepe1488". They violate our discussion terms. The "bigdickpepe" is poor taste. But the "1488" thing as nazi thing is not ok. I've copied the whole original item because it was creating some good discussion, and this way it will be preserved if they delete their account. Nothing about their actual participation was bad, so I'm fine with them coming back under a different username.
I messed up, didn't realize users can change their display name, so a ban is not necessary. Please change the display name.
cjet79
2yr ago
BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.
I'll just interject here that to me, this sounds completely insane. For those less familiar with decision theory, this not an abstruse philosophical question - it's simply a mathematical fact with probability approaching 1 (specifically, 0.49^n for large n), SBF will destroy the world.
I'd never heard of this guy until a few days ago. I saw that same interview and had the same reaction. I was maybe thinking there was something about the "St. Petersburg paradox" that I didn't understand. But it seems basically like a "double or nothing" bet that grade-schoolers can make with a coin-flip. It seemed like it was polite to do at least one "double or nothing" bet. Highly risky to do two in a row, but socially acceptable if you wanted to show off that you were a daredevil. And if you do three in a row you have a gambling problem.
Maybe financial institutions should start offering serious money on double or nothing bets during the interview. And if anyone does it more than three times you happily pay them the money from the bet and then don't fucking hire them.
cjet79
2yr ago
This comment got quite a few reports, the downvotes say a similar thing. This was a low effort comment that was a bit boo-outgroupish. Not bad enough to get a temp ban. Also, Your participation elsewhere in this thread was better. Please have more comments like that and fewer like the one I am responding to.
cjet79
2yr ago
I guess the important part is that you feel superior :marseyeyeroll:
This was unnecessarily antagonistic, don't do this.
cjet79
2yr ago
It's always been a question in economics, "if forms are run through central planning and hierarchy, why can't the whole economy be run that way?" There have been a few noble prizes in economics handed out for people that answered parts of the puzzle.
cjet79
2yr ago
I'd consider myself a pro-capitalist (classically liberal, libertarian, anarcho-capitalist are all labels that apply), but I have no idea about who would be the "founder". I suppose Adam Smith might qualify. His books apparently still hold up, but I haven't read them.
ahh I just realized you were talking about startups. I wouldn't consider that Capitalism, its just small organization formation. Like non-profits can still have cults of the founder.
cjet79
2yr ago
First two or three games are really rough. I felt like I was drowning every time. Comfort on the pool bottom is really the main skill in my mind that separates "rookies" from "non-rookies". Once you can get down there quick and stay in the play for about ten seconds you have graduated.
Ten feet is on the deeper side for a typical underwater hockey match. I personally think 8 feet is best, but it's not always easy to find the perfect pool.
On the other hand underwater rugby is much deeper. I played in a pool that was 14 feet deep, and that is apparently the preferred depth.
cjet79
2yr ago
We moderate more on tone than anything.
It might be true for someone to say "I think you are [an insult]". But we still moderate it because we don't want people hurling insults. The insults tend to hurt open discussion more than the truthiness of a statement. There are other people in this thread pointing out the same thing without being as antagonistic.
I doubt it is clearcut one way or the other. Clout in academia is one measure of popularity. Vaplan probably has more TV news appearances, he has been on national debate stages, and certainly has more social media followers (since Aaronson got rid of his).
I think if you both of them who was more popular theyd give an answer similar to mine.
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