curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
The big issue is the co-occurence of the 1/6 riot and the fake electors thing and the attempt to get Mike Pence to not certify the election. I agree it wasn't a real risk to democracy, but if you believe the continuation of democracy is desirable, that should be concerning, when it looks like the leadership of a major party isn't invested in following election results (yes, this depends on a judgement that election fraud allegations are false, imo they are, and we've discussed that to death and they're just not very smart), and is willing to play along with admittedly feeble attempts at violence. (And if you believe democracy isn't desirable, the childishness of the half-assed attempt to overturn it shouldn't be exciting either)
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
... look, if I wanted to see posts like this, there are hundreds of thousands of them on crypto twitter. I come here for a higher standard of quality, and your post probably breaks the 'low effort' rule.
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
rule-by-executive-order
Because EOs are just not that powerful of a tool. They don't override laws, and there are a lot of laws constraining agencies.
The other stuff doesn't have much to do with democracy? It's bad policy.
It seems to me that there are a lot of actual threats to democracy, and this does not even come close to topping the list.
If we assume the election fraud claims are false, Trump attempting to invalidate an election against him is worse than that other stuff? Democracy is a tradition, of peaceful transfer of power every so many years, and Trump tried to break it!
(It is reasonable to not like democracy. It did, after all, give us Trump twice, punctuated by someone too old.)
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Any system that doesn't just unleash total replacement of the native population (see Canada) will inevitably the majority of well-meaning fine people who want in
Letting in all Indians at or above self_made_human's intelligence / merit would not lead to total replacement of the native population, though? They aren't all doctors or FAANG engineers
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
They do not get directly against the Impoundment Control Act. Take USAID. The appropriation by Congress doesn’t say “spend X dollars on items A through AAA every week.”
This would be more convincing if Elon hadn't attempted to pull almost all USAID workers off of their jobs, sending many of them back to the United States? Which is one of the things a judge blocked. Also if Elon and Trump weren't publicly clear about their desire to dismantle USAID. Judges observe the words you say online.
I agree that if Elon and Trump were smarter, they could've been creative, and tried to massively change the missions of agencies like USAID while still appearing to fulfill the requirements of legislation. He isn't doing that though.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
I do not think you're thinking clearly about this. Elon does not get different information if he cuts everything now, vs sending out an order to cut everything in 60 days. In both cases, he has to make factual determinations about how important the womens' organizations in Myanmar are.
Are you implying that all these programs clearly star what they're actually doing, and no one will try to hide their operation under a title that's more palatable to the current administration?
I don't understand how immediately freezing funding makes it easier to collect this data, I think that's something that was imagined after the fact to justify the freezes. (And, again, most of the freezes have themselves been blocked, so...)
How do you collect that information without the freeze? USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, that's the entire reason their funding was frozen
I do not think this is true? DOGE staff were inside the USAID building and had access to their computer systems. Freezing USAID doesn't affect their ability to do that.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
And what would that accomplish?
... From the OP: "forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”, without also shutting down the anti-fentanyl work in mexico. obviously?
I also think the only reason people are protesting his actions is that they know this is the only thing that would work.
It is not working yet! Judges have blocked almost all of his big cuts. Because they aren't legal by established law and precedent (Impoundment Control Act). If I thought govt spending was about to permanently decrease by more than 20%, I'd be saying very different things (even though I also don't like the focus on cutting spending vs making govt better, more effective)
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors.
"The economy" is not just an abstraction. Benefitting the economy doesn't mean line going up, it means cheaper rice and McDonalds burgers and cars and phones and AI girlfriends for the American working class. It's interesting for the anti-immigration right, after years of saying how importing low-skill immigrants will take jobs away from and lower the wages of Americans who had the misfortune to be born without a high enough IQ to code in python, now objects to us importing Indians with exactly enough IQ to barely write python. The effect on wages depends on the occupation - in theory, allowing in a hundred thousand seasonal fruit pickers should make everyone better off overall, but would lower the wages of existing apple-pickers. But allowing in a hundred thousand javascript monkeys should, because everyone's better off overall, raise the wages of the native fruit pickers! And it's harder to feel sorry for the heritage American FAANG engineers or accountants who'll make 85k a year instead of 95k a year because of Indian competition than it is the 'working class'.
No putting people on admin leave is crucial. It is what happens when you think a business is doing crazy shit because you don’t want those people to continue to do crazy shit.
I do not understand what you are saying here. How is putting them on leave now, vs in 60 days, "crucial"? They have been doing that "crazy shit" for decades.
(And, again, judges have blocked all his big moves here, as was entirely predictable, so he hasn't even actually stopped them.)
You're doing the thing I mentioned in the above comment where you come up with post-hoc justifications for things Trump/Musk have done that are smarter than what they're actually doing.
From Musk on twitter: "We spent the weekend feeding USAID to the wood chipper." "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.". Trump on TruthSocial: "USAID IS DRIVING THE RADICAL LEFT CRAZY ... CLOSE IT DOWN!"
If you say that, and then fire all the employees, I can reasonably conclude they're not planning to spend the money on different kinds of foreign aid. If they were planning to do that, they could just Tweet/Truth it. Instead of that. They aren't.
I agree that Musk and Trump could be effectively accomplishing their goals and improving the government on net if they did different things than they are currently doing.
I also still consider it entirely possible Musk, who is very smart and capable, will realize the current approach isn't accomplishing as much as he thinks and do something else. But he hasn't done that yet.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
Making a lot of people enthused is important in politics. You have to ride the wave and short-circuit resistance. Blitzkrieg is a strategy for a reason.
The resistance doesn't feel particularly short-circuited to me. Judges have blocked most of DOGE's biggest cuts.
Giving fundees 90 days to saturate the media and hide all the bad spending wouldn’t work
What does 'hide all the bad spending mean'? How would they even do that? All of the data on their spending is, and was already, public.
The Cathedral likes long drawn-out detail-oriented battles, and the first rule of warfare is not to give the enemy what they want.
IMO, the first rule of warfare is to destroy your enemy, or at least their capacity to wage war. That isn't currently happening. (USAID funding is not even a percent of the reason the liberal media exists). "Not giving the enemy what they want" is, in this context, the first rule of being mad at your enemy on twitter.
(Yes, this is conflict mindset not mistake mindset. With mistake mindset it looks stupid and damaging to do it this way, naturally.)
This isn't about conflict vs mistake! I'm not entirely against all the libs spontaneously combusting. It's about, like, winning the conflict, which is harder than making a lot of awesome posts.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
Isn't it? Trump, 50 R senators, and a R majority of the House could pretty much immediately nuke the filibuster and repeal/revoke all of that. They're not going to, and that's, depending on your perspective, the checks and balances working, or the checks and balances failing, but they could.
The rules apply to specific sectors! But they don't apply to the economy as a whole because, in a sense, every action everyone takes is labor. So adding more labor doesn't reduce the real "price of labor", because the whole thing we're doing is exchanging our labor for the labor of others. Adding more labor reduces the price of labor in dollars (assuming the amount of money in circulation isn't actively adjusted based on the amount of labor, which it does, but whatever), but that doesn't matter because you don't have a fixed amount of dollars, you have a fixed amount of time to spend doing labor! So reducing the price of labor in dollars reduces the amount of money you have, but you can buy more with it - nominal vs real wages. And then what matters from importing new immigrants is whether they make the economy overall more efficient, and in general specialization and comparative advantage means it does.
In general, all economic arguments against immigration in general, without respect to immigrant characteristics, such as the one you're making, are also arguments against pronatalist population growth. And population growth doesn't seem to have been bad for America's economy historically. Arguments that take into account immigrant characteristics work better!
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
I'm not impressed by deontology because those declarations have to come from somewhere, and in practice they either come from explicit utilitarian-ish cost-benefit math done by some philosopher or elite in the past, or from cultural selection on random views where the selection is, also, doing a sort of cost-benefit analysis on what gets selected for. (Well, generally a mix of both)
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Trump is not popular! His approval/favorability is terrible compared to past presidential candidates. He's only winning the election because Dems managed to nominate someone worse. Kamala isn't eighty, she can say more than ten words in sequence without pausing or stuttering. She's not a good Dem, but she's still just a mediocre generic Dem, and that's good enough for a lot of voters.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
This is pretty "Your honor, I did not 'conspire to commit fraud'. I simply had an innocent hypothetical conversation with my good friend, who happened to commit fraud a few weeks later. That the friend's actions were related to my hypothetical is a coincidence and has no bearing on my guilt.". If the Appointments clause was intended to prevent things like this, cute tricks shouldn't and won't prevent judges from finding that no, de facto, he's the administrator.
(Also, this is another example of my point about how Trump isn't even trying to pretend to follow the law, and pretending to follow the law is an indispensable tool for minimizing legal exposure if you're trying to break the law. Whatever his goals are, it isn't smart to not have figured out who the DOGE administrator is until this point, or to have made it a little less blatant that Elon's directly calling shots without a superior)
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap
Where did you get this idea from? I don't see any strong reason to assume this will fully happen within the next decade, or that the funding for the PEPFAR replacement will be as large as PEPFAR currently is. It might happen, but it also might not happen. And in the meantime, a lot of medical treatment won't be provided.
don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.
Because he was making a political joke on twitter. Please read his twitter bio: "I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns." He's made plenty of complicated arguments about EA on his blog. People are holding this tweet to a much higher standard than they would any other tweet because they really want to own the libs, but it's a fine tweet.
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
The whole point of my comment is that overseas labor does not lower wages overall. It raises real wages overall, by the basic econ 101 logic of comparative advantage and specialization*. It lowers local wages in specific specific sectors where there's a concentration of foreign labor. But by that same logic a concentration of labor in CS is good for farmworkers.
i would question the assertion that writing code in python is a "high skilled" job.
The irony there was intentional - most H1Bs are significantly above average skill, but hardly top 1%.
*I mean in the relatively small amounts from the H1B program here. At larger amounts you could get 'their culture is bad / their iq is too low to work in our economic system' effects, but not at small amounts.
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
I don't think it does! Think about it this way - say I make a dollar, and then send it to India. Either that dollar makes its way back to the US, or it doesn't. If it does make its way back to the US, then that's as good as the guy who earned it spending it. And if the dollar doesn't come back to the US, from the perspective of the 'real economy' I created value for others and asked for nothing in return, which is even better! (This is the reduction in the price level)
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Trump, Harris, and Walz are all quite smart, as one would expect from people who've managed to get some of the most coveted positions in American politics. They're not particle physicists, but it's a strong selection effect. They sound dumb in public, just like Vance did in the OP, because the score they're optimizing for is the one from voters, and voters aren't smart and aren't noticing the things you are.
Since you asked, to give the other side, I think you should split up, so long as you're young-ish and would be dedicated to finding a new wife afterwards. You're going to spend two decades of your life raising the children, each individual moment working, consciously or not, to help your children be successful in life. And the highest impact thing you can do to ensure the kids have successful, interesting good lives is to ensure they have good genes. The idea marriage is about entirely personal romantic feelings detached from other material considerations is a modern one, an idea of irrational, overpowering romantic love isn't new but it coexisted more with real interests in the ancestry and health of the children. I wouldn't worry about the lower-class part - a lot of of smart people come from middle-class families - but the intelligence part is more important.
Also, HBD generally refers to the association of race and IQ, which is very contested. The heritability of individual intelligence is less contested, it is the mainstream scientific consensus, and it's just extremely obvious.
Is that alone enough to say I should break up because that shows how I don't really love her etc
You probably do love her? Romantic love isn't an overpowering metaphysical principle that overrides other facts or beliefs. You can genuinely love someone and at the same time rationally (or mistakenly) think being with them is a mistake.
To some of the points from other commenters:
It seems to me like you are far too focused on the idea of children getting good genes. Having children isn't a eugenics program, it's something you do (or don't) because it's meaningful in itself.
I understand why this feels true, but does it actually mean anything? Having children is - literally, words mean things - a eugenics program, in that your instincts for sexual attraction, both physical and social, are very clearly selecting for some sense of good genes to pass onto your children. Being successful and intelligent are attractive! And surely their intelligence and general mental qualities are more important than how tall they are or what their waist/hip ratio is! Most of the people replying to you, like most people in general (due to assortative mating), will likely marry someone of their social/economic class, as that's just what we instinctively do. (Assortative mating for class is stronger than for IQ, which on an individual level is imo a mistake). The experience of your children in life in the future surely does matter. Imagine if your five year old fell off of a bike without a helmet and lost 10 IQ points. I feel like that'd be tragic! Part of the "meaningfulness" of being a parent is protecting the kid from things like that! And yet... (I'd enthusiastically bite the bullet on every unintuitive consequence of this thought experiment)
Let's turn it around and say you're the prole dum-dum and she's the elite status genius. How would you feel if she harboured these doubts about you? Called it off because although you click on every level, she just doesn't want her kids to be stuck going to a state school because they inherited your midwit genes?
Interactions between people aren't symmetric when the interactions have other effects! It's good when a company fires a bad worker, even when the person firing them wouldn't want to be fired themselves. It's a good thing that the smartest archaic human 500k years ago tried to pick a smart partner and didn't settle for a dumber one because it'd be mean to do that! It's how we got here.
More generally, I think the standard Rationalist discourse on intelligence is badly flawed. To put it bluntly, I do not observe a correlation between intelligence and "correctness" in any objective, holistic sense
This is just, like, false? Whether it's high school math, basic facts about how the world, government, economy, etc function, or the ability to accomplish one's goals, intelligence is enormously important. To the point that if your wife was 85 IQ (or even 100), you wouldn't have gotten together in the first place because the contrast would be too apparent.
I strongly suspect the last commenter's wife is not an average person, they're an intelligent practical-minded person, and a genuinely randomly-selected person would produce different intuitions. It's berkson's paradox https://brilliant-staff-media.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tiffany-wang/1Mvt8RPtlU.png for "academic" vs practical intelligence.
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
The reason the libraries are woke is not because any government encourages wokeness, but because the kind of person who'd maintain a liberal arts oriented community space is woke. I don't think we should defund religious soup kitchens because the people doing them are religious, and I don't think we should get rid of libraries because the people who show up are on the other team.
(Libraries in particular are less important now because of the internet, but the same thing applies to museums, which still matter a bit)
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Jurisdiction is a word, though. It means - from merrian-webster - "the power, right, or authority to interpret and apply the law; a matter that falls within the court's jurisdiction". From wiki - "the legal term for the legal authority granted to a legal entity to enact justice". Where did you get the idea this meant more like "subject of the government", when they picked a term that specifically refers to being subject to its laws?
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
I think that's a great example of aggressive reinterpretation of the constitution effectively changing the meaning. To some extent I think that - constitutional statesmanship, legal realism - is a good thing - I don't think the country would be better without the interstate commerce hack, I like that I can buy food in Alabama and know it's bound by federal regulations. (The alternative isn't no regulation, it's just having individual states set all regulations, I odn't think that's necessarily better).
I don't think that's a good example of a 'lack of checks and balances' for 'the administrative state'. It's an example of a negotiation between different centers of power, where the judiciary grants somewhat more power to the legislature at the expense of the states. The legislature has selectively granted a small amount of that power to the administrative state.
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
I don't think so? Grocery stores have security guards, you can just let them arrest people.
I'm sorry, no, Trump's just being retarded. This isn't, like, an innate property of being right wing or anything. If Curtis Yarvin got to choose the top 50 people in the Trump admin, it'd be different. (Or so I'd like to think...) But, no, Biden didn't send innocent people to a prison in El Salvador, and then pretend it's a state secret so he doesn't have to tell a judge who they are. He doesn't randomly Truth out new completely pointless tariffs twice a week. (I'm not huge on tariffs, but I am a fan of targeted and competent state intervention in the economy, and you could use tariffs in such a way. That's not what Trump's doing). When Biden did something truly insane (announcing the Equal Rights Amendment was in force), everyone basically ignored it, instead of agreeing and amplifying.
I think people are overstating the total impact of Trump's direct actions a bit. Most of them don't matter that much, other than USAID closure (which will, if it lasts, really counterfactually kill millions of people over a decade), tariffs (trump take bitcoin :(( ). But that's mostly just because Trump's only one branch of a three-branch government designed to restrict the whims of politicians and the power of a single election, Republicans have tiny majorities in the second branch that can't get anything done in normal circumstances, and he's not even pretending to follow precedent, which makes things tough for the third branch. The actions Trump is taking, judged relative to their potential impact, are mostly just stupid. Biden would not have launched Biden Coin.
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