coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I find it impossible to believe that early teaching doesn’t matter. If you look at top chess players and instrument players, there’s clearly an association between top performance and age of practice onset. You see the same thing with language accent development, psychomotor skills…
Any high leverage changes people are able to make but don’t
Create contingent rewards for every hard or boring desired behavior, and make most enjoyable and novel experiences be contingent rewards upon a desired behavior. I saw my cousin trying to get her kid to talk about what she’s doing (she was roaming around and looking at different stuff etc what kids do), and her strategy was to incessantly annoy the kid by asking questions when the kid is busy. This is dumb: not only is there no motive to use difficult cognitive abilities to explain to mommy everything that she’s doing, but the contingent reward (novel exploration) increased by ignoring mommy’s yapping; in fact, the child is learning how to more efficiently ignore her mother’s speech because it thwarts her pursuit of reward. A much better strategy would be to have the child explain what she intends to do and after doing this provide fun novel things to play with, then increase as needed for skill development. Or even something like, “I have another fun thing over here, but first I want you to explain what you’re currently doing.” Or create a game where things/compliments are provided according to task-explanation. Etc etc. Everything is mediated by contingent rewards.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Have all of the ousted presidents been replaced by Jews so far?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Actually, that the argument was bad isn’t the problem. (Judaism is not skin-deep but an ideology and culture, yet Net’s reply instead talked about “skin color”. And my own conclusion was “White Americans are so underrepresented [yet] they are the ones who face the most ruthless black propaganda against their demographic”, ergo the charge of hypocrisy makes no sense.) The problem is instead in the clearly emotional outburst by Net; telling someone to “have some self respect” or saying “behold the ubermensch” displayed an inability to handle the discussion maturely.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Netstack was the only person I ever felt compelled to block on this site. In one of his replies to a post about the over-representation of Jews I made a while ago he launched into an odd ad hominem tirade —
Look at yourself. Trawling lists to tally up your racial quotas. Wringing your hands over the tragic underrepresentation of your preferred demographic. So determined to believe that skin color (or however you can most favorably slice the boundaries) determines moral worth and political value. Behold the Übermensch! You are giving an object lesson in why identity politics suck. You are recreating the field of grievance studies. I have no doubt that you could give me a dozen reasons why the stereotypically progressive position is foolish and immoral, so why are you wasting your time recreating it? Have some self-respect.
I hope his admin privileges are double or triple checked by others because it would not appear to me that his judgment is objective on certain contentious subjects. Congrats to others though.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I once looked into animal studies on exercise and I remember there were papers showing a similar result. Mouses that exercised did not live longer, but they were healthier: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2046-2395-2-14
It’s not impossible IMO that exercise is a consequence of a healthy organism, whose energy is so abundant that it wants to get rid of the excess through physical expenditure. Anyone who has experienced childhood or owned a young dog should be familiar with the phenomenon. Exercise intervention studies would have been compromised by the fact that the already-healthier people would have been more keen to sign up, or if it were randomized more keen to accept, and more keen to remain in the study. When I was young, randomly running required about 5% of the willpower it does for me now — because I was a well-trained athlete as a child? No, just an organism with a lot of health energy to spare.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
incomplete without an acknowledgment of the often very popular anti-Iraq War anti-Bush 9/11-conspiracist peak oil sphere that was publishing 15-part ‘documentaries’ on YouTube back in like 2007. Alex Jones also grew in this world
We could say that the 2007-2011 Zeitgeist began with Zeitgeist the documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist_(film_series). This was very influential at the time.
Hinkle seems as much an ideological descendant of the anti-war left as he does the alt right
IMO the “original” alt right was not pro-war. Back in 2011-13 there was criticism of Obama’s influence in the Middle East and lots of defense of Assad.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The “alt right” was hyped up as a threat, but they did exist and today you can see their influence all over — in the normalization of anti-Judaism on Twitter, in people like Jackson Hinkle, in the reblogs of Elon Musk, in Vivek Ramaswamy posting about a mysterious “they” preventing candidates from winning, in Tucker Carlson’s writers, in the trending trad Christians, in “14% memes” getting 200k likes on tik tok, you name it.
There is no centralized alt right superstructure because the Feds and Media Apparatus in their Infinite Wisdom shut down or infiltrated or had propped up most of the orgs that attempted to do this. And that ensured an organic and implicit cultural cell structure developed in its place, which plays out in tens of thousands of boys’ group chats or discord groups or college republican parties or whatever across the country, with its sole hierarchy being memes / ideology that go through thousands of unique points of evolution and divergence and are consequently filtered into mainstream culture as it has been since 2008 4chan.
So while the alt right does not exist as some kind of third space pseudo-paramilitary group of young men (for very good reason, this would be bad for everyone and pose a threat to the state), it existed and continues to exist as organically-grown ideology factories that affect the mainstream in mostly indirect ways, using nothing but the power of Pepe and persuasion.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I was weighing whether to write a post on the lost psychosocial magic of traditional Christmas, at least
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
“Single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930” shouldn’t be surprising, though. What’s more interesting is the quality of job (front-end clerk? barista?) and what the labor force participation was for married women. It’s not like single women throughout history were unoccupied from work, just lounging around reading books.
That’s interesting, because you mentioning that makes me think you are either uninformed or shilling. It’s a densely populated city, you don’t get to spray and pray because on a different day in a nearby area your soldiers were allegedly fired upon. That justifies killing every male in every location where you have been shot. And there are a lot of locations like this, all over Gaza.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
You understand this comment reads exactly like something Hitler would say in a speech about Jews, right? I suppose he would use the term parasite, or diseased vermin. Just like not every Jew was a Bolshevik extremist (see: Winston Churchill’s comments), not every Palestinian is a Hamas extremist. Punishing Palestinians as a collective is not morally permissible. And incidentally, were Britain to treat the Jewish colonizers like this in the 30s and 40s (punishing the collective for hiding terrorists), it’s doubtful Zionism would ever have got up and running. Their maximum collective punishment was a curfew — should they have bombed them to the abyss instead?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
There is evidence that Israel is “punishing” the civilian population, which is a war crime. The party that is morally responsible for the misconduct is the only party that should be asked to stop. The US has influence over Israel, but has zero influence over Hamas. It’s brought up that Hamas has tunnels under buildings, and this is to explain Israeli actions, but saying “Hamas should surrender” because of potential Israeli war crimes would be a bad precedent for human rights. Consider a Russian and Ukrainian war where Russia targets civilian homes in Kyiv because they could be housing reserve troops. Would you expect the media to bring up the option that “the Kyiv Regime can surrender to avoid being war crime’d”?
(Just in the past couple weeks we saw Israeli snipers shoot women outside of a Catholic church (leading the Pope to condemn the attack as terrorism) and Israel killing their own hostages, who were walking outside waving a white flag without a shirt. This last one is the strongest evidence we have of Israeli misconduct / war crimes. What is the probability that they accidentally shot these men, versus that they shoot men in most situations where they come across young men?)
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Video on League of Legends player who obtained rank 1 in two servers simultaneously, as well rank 1 Korea within two weeks. (That’s a top 99.9999th percentile skill in a highly competitive strategy game with millions of players)
Some interesting takeaways:
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Despite playing the “jungler” role, which is considered cooperative and supportive, the player never listens to his teammate’s ping unless he has independently judged the trade to be beneficial with extreme certainty. The common social expectation of cooperation is ignored, and the player instead focuses on benefits to his character that he can control. Ironically, this produces the most cooperative result, which is winning the game for your team. We see that the social expectation of cooperation is not always the best result for everyone in a group.
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Wins and losses are totally devalued in importance, and instead the “mundanity of excellence” is pursued. The player cares only about whether he made the statistically correct decision every time a decision arises, not whether it failed once or succeeded another time. This results in a player who is immune to “tilting”, ie bad or flippant moods that arise from loss sprees. Quoting from the eponymous classic study, “excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. While these actions are qualitatively different from those of performers at other levels, these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time, terribly difficult […] Every time a decision comes up, the qualitatively correct choice will be made. The action, in itself, is nothing special; the care and consistency with which it is made is.”
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The math on everything is neurotically and fully understood. Every potential trade is understood in second and tertiary consequences (ganking a lane has risk yada yada, but the secondary effect is loss of jungle farm, and the tertiary effect is that your farm spawns irregularly the next time they pop up). There are only a handful of gank strategies that the player has mastered, but he can execute them with precision.
Investments re: Amazon
People today invest in Amazon with the expectation (or desire) to gain around 10% of their investment annually. Bezos early on thought something like, “I could cash in my ownership for a few million, or I can continue to invest until I make 100,000,000% of my potential to cash out (or original salary)”. This is any investor’s dream; no, it’s more than that, frankly an unthinkable fantasy. So if Bezos had to pay his employees more, what would happen? Amazon would lose some of its profit evaluation, so some of the money that Bezos expected to one day earn (via stock) goes to his employees. Does this necessarily mean that Amazon would have to “size down” or grow at a smaller rate? Not at all, (1) investors would be more than happy to buy the stock at a lower price, which spreads the eventual return to less wealthy parties; (2) Amazon could have paid employees in stock options; (3) Amazon could have taken a loan, like most businesses (this year it obtained an 8bil loan).
We can see then that this is simply making our analysis more complicated but not changing the fundamental wealth exchange going on. Considering my coconut example, I could have lowered my yearly salary in exchange for stock and instead anticipated the return in some years. Any profitable business that grows can do this. But if I chose to receive a salary from my coconut business and still grow, there are a number of ways to do this as listed above.
Now who would make money investing in Amazon? Top of the line financial firms pay their starting employees as much as $600,000 excluding bonuses. Out of charity? No, but because the labor pool of worthy applicants is smaller. Were we to constrict it even more, they would be paid even more. Were we to add in investing immigrants, they would all be paid less. But in any case you can see that investors make too much money, and that if we constricted the labor pool for Amazon as an example, the employees make the money that would have gone to wealthy investors and speculators.
Tipping
You have to consider the specific things I’m saying though, otherwise how could you understand my point? I was discussing fine dining tipping, the places mostly frequented by the very wealthy. “So, then, you would expect wait staff to want to leave, as it's a worse deal” would not apply for fine dining; they would just accept lowered earnings because it’s still a good job for ordinarily middle class people. I’m not making a grand claim about all restaurants, I’m saying that we can see in fine dining restaurants that lowered efficiency can help more people.
Who would buy overpriced coconuts?
As detailed in my Starbucks comments, there’s strong evidence that consumers are unwilling to buy things when they feel ripped off. Wealthy people go to Starbucks, not Rich Coffee Co. Starbucks can charge a premium but this premium exists with a ceiling, because why else would Starbucks be the location of choice for those who make 20x more than the median Starbucks consumers? If coconuts get too expensive, they may switch to different fruit. But let’s say all foods get equally expensive? The labor costs of supplying coconuts on the road will lead consumers to opt of the convenience and instead buy coconuts from the store. Any roadside coconut seller would simply have to make less money or leave the industry.
But I think to steelman the argument, “let’s say you own a grocery store. Grocers already compete against each other, yet the corporate owners still make lots of money. If employees had to be paid more, wouldn’t this just increase the baseline of goods, and they would still charge something on top to make profit?” I’d say yes, but paying grocery employees more increases the wages of all the workers who directly or indirectly compete with those employees. The ones who wind up paying more without a concomitant increase in wages would be the top 5-10% of Americans who are already quite wealthy but are too far away from the competition of grocery store workers.
why are you assuming that your wages went down, as compared to only the small businesses? Are you sure that Amazon buys less labor than the businesses it replaces
Small businesses acted as a middle man between producers/sellers and customers. Each small business had his own miniature Jeff Bezos, a hundred thousand CEOs who made maybe 160k a year rather than Bezos billions in earnings. (You can fit one million people making 160k a year within the Bezos net worth). Centralization will always split resources between fewer people. There are then some obscure factors that an economist would never guess, like how these small businesses lived within close proximity to their employees and knew them personally and hired among families/friends, meaning they have to see the humanity in the person they are either benefiting or screwing in pay. Call this the “fine dining tipping effect”: when wealthy people see the reality of another human being, they are morally coerced into pay them more, for fear of losing face face-to-face.
Everyone in the lower/middle class competes in a way with the owners of these small businesses. A worker when deciding their career path would say something like, “I can open up a video rental store or I could become an accountant; I could become an accountant or I could open up a coffee shop…” And then of course, the employer knows this, and to retain employees must pay them more, because they can leave and go elsewhere.
But surely you don't think that every company is bad, just because they are bad for that company's competitors?
The ones with high wealth inequality, I do.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
what's left out is that often that money will go to hire more workers or scale up […]
Profit-maxxing businesses with leadership and investors that make a lot of money have already calculated the best way to generate profit, so they’ve hired the exact amount they think allows them to make the most profit, and scaled up the exact amount. The fact that there is still such high income inequality and still so many billionaires in America shows that there’s a lot of money not going to these things, but instead given to those “at the top.” (I don’t like this phrase but it’s easy shorthand).
Competition should drive profits down towards zero
I do not think this is how real life works for corporations. The competition between two hairstylists at a strip mall is not the large-employee company competition where people sit on years or decades of institutional knowledge, are entrenched in public consciousness and so difficult to compete against, are luxury goods like Nike, etc.
The goal should not be to have people pay more. That's a loss.
There’s one industry that I think sheds light on this, where a “middle class person” can bring home top 2% earnings: fine dining. It’s fantastic to have the wealthy pay more here, because they’re just giving their money to people who need it more. We can imagine a future scenario where tipping is banned, and what will happen is that the owners of the restaurant and the wealthy patron will simply keep more money, wait staff be damned. An example that economic efficiency can sometimes be bad for the median person. This is why eg bar tenders in America make more money.
Why do you think increased quality of life, given that you mention increased costs in the same sentence, with no attempt to compare the sizes of the effects?
I go on to explain this in the coconut, Amazon, Starbucks examples (in my post and also below) —
Fewer workers means I can sell fewer coconuts
But remember, I had a profitable coconut business and my employees all sell the same amount of coconuts (give or take; they shill them on the road). Reducing my number of employees is always going to reduce how much I bring in.
which means I can raise the cost because I don't need to try to sell to quite as many people
Who is going to buy overpriced coconuts? This is something I think is lost on people who think there’s fair/correct pricing today. Wealthy people will literally go to the store and refuse to buy an overpriced steak. They will pass a gas station if it’s too high, they will haggle on contractors. Wealthy people very rarely will buy a coffee more expensive than a Starbucks, which tells us something very important here: a huge number of businesses cannot increase their prices past a certain amount perceived as fair by the consumer independent of the consumer’s income. Starbucks is frequented by people whose income range from 60k to 10 million. Living in a wealthy east coast town, a neighbor might take a private chauffeur into the city but he’s stopping at Starbucks, not Rich People’s Coffee. Yeah yeah there’s an exception among young people in cities with Blue Bottle but even that is not priced relative to the median income of their patron.
What I’m saying is that I cannot sell overpriced coconuts. It’s either that I sell coconuts, or I leave the coconut industry entirely. If I leave it entirely because I demand to be super rich, someone can swoop in and become upper middle class! (Previously I would be able to fight this competition by temporarily lowering the price, to by utilizing my years of industry knowledge). That’s also good. And Starbucks can’t actually increase their prices too much, because there’s little evidence that wealthy people are willing to spend more for something outside the Starbucks price range.
Amazon is very good for me
This is not the easy rational choice that the economist thinks it is. I would need to compare my loss in wages because Amazon caused hundreds of thousands of small businesses to die. Even if I never intended to work at one of these businesses, some of my coworkers may have, which means that the loss of these businesses increased competition for me, ie reduced my wages. Amazon is convenient and obviously pleasurable, like online gambling. The negative consequences of using Amazon are hidden whereas the positive consequences are obvious, also like online gambling.
Or, they'll buy from other vendors online or whatever
Not necessarily, because humans work on habit, and Amazon is the current exclusive habit of many Americans. What’s more, Amazon is so institutional now that I don’t think you can just “compete” with it.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
When you add a lower wage employee, that employee’s demand for goods would be less than adding a middle wage employee, because they have less discretionary income. You are decreasing the “median American’s demand for goods”. As an example in America, a new Honduran immigrant who has three sets of outfits and eats primarily rice/beans/carnitas made at home has a very low demand for goods. Very wealthy people have a high demand for goods, yet they buy a lot of wasteful goods when those resources would be better spread downward… what am I missing here? For lower wage workers, I don’t see how their increase of sum total demand for goods could ever come close to approaching the resources that they miss out on because of surplus labor.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
In a scenario where there is not surplus labor, employees are paid more and (perhaps) prices increase. The price increase is spread equally to everyone, yet the “surplus resources” (the money that would ordinarily go to the top) are all given to the employees and not the top. The end result is that the people with the most amount of money have to pay more, which is a great result. The lower and middle class also have to pay more, too, but this counterbalanced with their increased pay and quality of life. In the end, they benefit the most.
If my business sells coconuts off the highway, I greatly benefit if I can pay my coconut sellers slave wages. What if there are fewer people willing to sling my coconuts off the highway? I simply need to pay them more to work for me, no questions asked, because if I don’t I lose all my money, but if I do I still make money. That part is obvious, but your take would suggest that I would attempt to make the same amount of profit by simply pricing my coconuts higher. This is absurd because there is clearly a ceiling where people will refuse to buy the coconuts. What actually happens is that I might try to sell my coconuts for more money, will probably fail, and ultimately will have to just give more money to my employees. Oh well, I will have to sell four of my six vacation homes.
In America there is a huge number of businesses that generate enormous absurd profits which have this same ceiling. An obvious one is Amazon, and another obvious one is Starbucks. There is a point at which people will refuse to shop online if the prices are too high. Sorry Bezos, you’ll have to sell your half a billion dollar yacht. Starbucks is milking the consumer dry with their overpriced drinks, but they honestly cannot price them at $14 a drink. So, the people in charge of Starbucks Corporate will have to make less money. This applies to so, so, so much of the American economy. It’s people who have a pseudo(?) monopoly and/or have amassed such industry/marketing knowledge that competition is effectively impossible, and they’re making absurd profits when we can just make take and give it to the middle class simply by decreasing the wage pool.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think when the arcane, longterm, complicated multivariable analyses on economic cause and effect conflict with common logic, we must trust common logic unless there are clear real world cases to disprove it. I have never seen anything approximating a simplified model that explains how increasing the low wage labor pool would not result in worsened quality of life when the wealthy hoard resources and min-max for greed. I have never seen any persuasive argument that supply and demand suddenly stops to work as a principle when you constrict the supply of workers.
If I start a business that requires COBOL engineers, I have one choice and one choice only: hiring COBOL engineers. If there are many to pick from who desire work, I can keep more resources and pay them less. If there are fewer on the market, I need to pay more, end of story. There can be so few COBOL engineers that I can’t hire them to start my business, but before this occurs I would cease to be a billionaire or multi-million! Clearly our country is very far away from having insufficient workers if there is still so much wealth inequality. In every scenario I can think of, in every industry, reducing the labor pool should result in greater wealth equality by forcing C-Suite and investors to let go of resources to use them to recruit and retain talent. God, it’s just so simple… why would any NBA team pay 50 mil for Steph Curry? It doesn’t matter if they don’t want to, they need to, if they want to win, and winning means money. How does this not apply to ever industry, magically, only in complicated studies?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I still cannot wrap my head around the idea of low/middle wage immigration to a country with billionaires and wealth inequality. All of the “economic efficiency” is just going to go to the very wealthy, whereas by restricting immigration you force the wealthy not just to pay higher wages and allow greater employer QoL, but to invest in the future of the citizens. If companies with longterm plans realize that they need to hire high-skilled Canadians to work as employees, suddenly you’ll find yourself with widespread maternity programs and more investment in education. Your companies will actually be lobbying the government to increase health and fertility.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The poll is an extreme upper ceiling on support for remaining in Ukraine, which is sufficient to prove to even the most skeptical of skeptics that there is huge public support for independence / annexation among Donbas residents. Reminder by the way that Euromaidan was an armed, illegal ousting of a constitutionally-elected president.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology polled Donbas residents in 2014. The findings are tilted pro-Kyiv in two ways: it’s literally the results from an institution in Kyiv shortly after a coup, but more importantly Kyiv was mentioned whenever the polling was done — those who are wary of Kyiv or anti-Kyiv are obviously going to be less likely to answer an institute from Kyiv. If you look at page 35 Figure 1, 31% want either succession or joining with Russia, an additional 23% wanted to be made an autonomous republic within Ukraine, and 35% want to remain in Ukraine without autonomy. Of that last 35%, only 9% wanted the status quo, whereas 26% wanted expanded powers.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2454203
If the results are this pro-autonomy despite the bias in favor of Kyiv, it’s reasonable to assume that the actual figures are more pro-autonomy. Sadly, there’s no way to get that figure.
cluster munitions
NYT say they have, as do HRW. You think it’s bunk because of an obscure book written by an obscure Russian, probably from an obscure passage you haven’t linked.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Ukrainian culture does not exist as separate from the history of Russians, though. That’s why it is nearly identical to Russian culture, religion, and language.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Note that the “destiny” of a people who declare sovereignty has never been important for Ukraine or her oligarchs, as they waged war against the ethnically and linguistically Russian inhabitants of eastern Ukrainian when they declared themselves sovereign (after a Western-influenced unconstitutional coup). This despite it having widespread support from the people, as shown by third party polling. Before and after Ukraine literally shelled a region with cluster munitions for declaring sovereignty, they waged cultural genocide against indigenous Russian speakers by making it illegal for shopkeepers to speak Russian or for newspapers to be published in Russian without publishing in Ukrainian first.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
When Putin defeated Chechnya, what happened to the Chechens? Were they ethnically displaced? No. Well, were they culturally Russified? Not really. But surely they lost the ability to adjudicate their own matters in their own republic? Nope, they enforce an Islamic dress code and still kill gays…
It’s western propaganda that Russia wouldn’t negotiate with Ukraine, or that Ukrainian culture would be damaged by Russia. There’s no evidence for it. There’s plenty evidence of the exact opposite.
Re: math competitions, I think that’s because real life success requires a ton of soft skills that are neglected from too much deliberate practice (emotional and social intelligence, simple physical endurance, self-motivated planning…). But that doesn’t mean that early life practice isn’t essential for skill development. The top four chess players all started around the age of 5. This is normal for chess grandmasters despite most chess players beginning later in life. There is nothing unique to chess for why this would be, as it’s just visual-spatial pattern matching and longterm memory.
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