curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
[unnecessarily long, unoriginal, we've discussed this many times before, tldr jews good genes why so hard to notice this]
It is - in a literal sense - true that many minority groups are, sometimes, overrepresented. Again in a literal sense - it's true that having an unusual upbringing sometimes pushes someone towards success.
Say I have $200k in gold bars stashed under my mattress. I'm suspected for corruption, the cops raid my house and find it. Have I done anything wrong? Well, there's nothing wrong with keeping private property in your house. And it's a gift from a friend. Who doesn't get gifts from friends, a bit of money here and there? Again, both - literally - true. You can squint and imagine there's a syllogism there - taking gifts from friends is fine, the gold bars were gifts from friends, so...
The dose makes the poison. If the laundromat's getting a few thousand extra bucks every year, that's usual variation, maybe he's good at advertising. A few million extra bucks ... something needs explaining.
How overrepresented are Jews, exactly? Are they represented about as much as Muslims? What about Hispanics, Blacks, or Native Americans? There's a lot of diversity and unique life experience to go around. Does this help all of them?
But, like, Jews make up 25%-50% of all Nobel prizes, aside from Peace, awarded to US citizens. (note that some of those are half-jewish, but this isn't that important.) They're also 2% of the US population. That's quite the difference! What about Hispanics, Muslims, Indians?
It's not just Nobels. I, like everyone, just click links around Wikipedia sometimes. Especially in math, science, technology. And enough of the names are jewish that you can't help but to notice! In the arts, journalism, or politics - there are fewer jews than in math, but still a lot more than you'd naively expect.
I also spend a lot of the time on the internet, in various places. I'm quite intelligent, as other people are here, so I select for communities of smart and driven people. And in each community, there's an obvious hierarchy of competence and smarts. And, as I spend more time in a community and get to know the smarter people - a lot of them end up being Jewish. Even here, the person whose writing I (currently) appreciate the most happens to be Jewish... This happens in real life too!
But my impression is that this is surprisingly true of many minority ethnicities and religious groups--almost as though having a mainstream upbringing results in a milquetoast adulthood. Or, alternatively, that being heterogeneous to the modal citizen of your country is quite naturally going to result in placement at one of the bell's tails
Does this really, when we take another look at it, even come close to explaining overrepresentation? A lot of Hispanic immigrants, and Muslims, have fascinating cultures and home lives. And gives them a boost in niche, well-known fields. I guess that's why our community sprung from the blog of Scott al-Iskandar, in turn inspired by the rationality writings of E. Y. Khowsjee, and don't forget the reactionary critic Carlos Yarvin.
There is something to explain here. Looking away isn't virtuous, and telling the 100k who liked that tweet to pretend this is just like every other ethnic minority won't help. The usual rationalist explanation is just 'jews have high IQ because genes'. Which seems to fit fine, here, although our friend SS would disagree.
The claim that jewish achievement isn't remarkable, or isn't unique, or something, is something I hear sometimes. Or, it's claimed that said achievement is remarkable, but is, like, cultural, because of the Torah or just trying really hard at school. I don't think these are plausible, when compared to the average non-Jewish example of a white family that really pushes for success at school, or immigrant family with some niche ethnic tradition.
Sometimes one makes an intellectual mistake and it's just - okay, I forgot something important, I did the math wrong - but other times you're just not looking. I think to explain away Jewish achievement in politics or elsewhere with 'every minority is like this' can only explained by not looking.
In the case of politics specifically, that infographic seems to be about the cabinet. So, how Jewish is the Biden cabinet? Let's completely ignore the 4chan graphic, which ... even if it's accurate, it's still not worth looking at as a source of real information, because it's a 4chan graphic. Let's go with Wikipedia. Jews: Blinken Yellen Garland Mayorkas Hanes (half) Bernstein Lander Klain Zients. And then twenty more of other backgrounds. So a little under third are jewish, which is a ton relative to 2%. And then two Asians, two Indians, one Hispanic. (Also five Black) I don't see muslims. Non-jewish whites are are about where they should be by % of population. *1
This is ... significant. And a lot more so than Asians and Indians, or even Hispanics. It's reasonable to notice, and wonder why. It's reasonable to notice that people don't want you to notice that. It's especially reasonable to notice that if White people were 2% of the population and 30% of appointments, the standards that you'd expect to be applied would declare this to be an extreme case of racism. And then it's ... of less obvious reasonableness to start Heiling the Furher, but it clearly does lead there.
Cardiologists aren't worse people than the average doctor. But people think they are if they aren't subtle thinkers and are disproportionately exposed to anecdotes of them acting poorly, leading them to create and share those anecdotes in a cycle. But before you accuse someone of Chinese Robbering, you should check to make sure the claimed pattern isn't there! Before explaining a claim away as motivated reasoning, it's good to check if it's actually true!
And when you miss something like this, as I did in the not-so-recent past - it's worth asking, why? When I think about something, I'm trying to understand it, not just rationalize whatever the common beliefs and taboos are. And that was as true in the past as it is today. But the explanation that Jews just have good culture, or it's just pattern recognition out of control, came easily to past-me too. Just as easily as the 'rational arguments for God' came to Christian apologists. It's unpleasant to realize you are (ie past-me was) just lazily making up arguments for an assumption you aren't questioning because it's just, like, true, and also it's be terrible if it wasn't true. But it's true! And I got into many arguments about this, and made several very competent defenses of "there's nothing going on here" before, after I bumped into the wall for the fifth time, I noticed the wall.
And if you're bumping around the intellectual plain, guided by invisible walls you aren't even aware of, you might be led to the wrong places.
Now, you're right that minorities often specialize in specific occupations. Patel Hotels, etc. But market-dominant minorities are, usually, high IQ minorities. Indians are well-represented as tech company CEOs. But we've also had a billion of them to pick from by immigration.
And, yeah, when you relate to the elite jews by seeing them on TV and in the news, rather than being in their social circles, that easily leads to conspiracies based on resentment. And the Anna-Marie Loupis from the tweet is a well known covid conspiracist, with claims like lasers caused the hawaii fire because blue color didnt burn. I'm not sure what the right rhetorical move here is if you want to fight antisemitism, but being honest about the cause of elite jews might be better than keeping up the current incorrect norms and creating conditions where people on the alt-right notice the lies!
*1 I'm just including everyone the page lists, not bothering about some people joining late and others leaving early, I don't think that matters here.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
We've all seen "man arrested for having his dog give hitler salute" or "man arrested for calling a player on his football team a slur after they miss a kick" coming out of MiniTrue in Oceania. The pattern is clear, but I wonder what led to this? How common are these arrests (obviously they're much less frequent than slur use or offensive speech generally), what classes of people support and oppose them, what social or intellectual trends led to the implementation of these laws there while America retains support for and enforcement of the first amendment? Any insight from locals?
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now
This just isn't true. Most bush-era democrats or academic leftists, or any way you can interpret 'pushing DEI' back then are not now pushing the idea that blacks have lower average IQ and that this has significant policy implications. Where do you get these ideas?
The last time we discussed UFOs was here in response to Tucker positively mentioning UFO speculation, and my critical response was here and in subthreads.
What's happening here is, essentially - there are several million people employed in, or as contractors for, the US military and intelligence community. The number who hold positions like 'generational officer of the United States Intelligence Community with a Top-Secret Clearance who currently works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center' are smaller, but (if we're allowed to lump together all kinds of quackery, instead of just aliens) at least 1 in 100. And any time you have ten thousand people, a few dozen of them are going to be, variously - gullible, insane, stupid, have committed to several important intellectual mistakes, intentionally lying for media attention, or are just of average intelligence when actually understanding whether a radar signature shows aliens or noise requires being above average + got sucked into 'exposing aliens' because they genuinely believe it's important. This is how you get things like "the CIA investigated astral projection" or "nobel prize-winning scientist believes in homeopathy" or the fake "bomb detector" that was just a dowsing rod used by 20 different countries' militaries (but, again, that doesn't mean their whole militaries endorsed/used them, just some people in them). It's not surprising that one in a thousand military people believes in aliens if one in a hundred 'normal' people believe in aliens. Yet 999 in 1000 don't believe in aliens. (edit: it's probably significantly above 1 in 1k even among those who are high iq / work in technical fields)
Additionally - there have been dozens of supposed firsthand accounts of interactions with aliens like this one, and all of their details are both incompatible with verifiable history and incompatible with each other. E.g. "arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally" - which technologies? All of the biggest scientific and engineering discoveries have very legible and sensible histories. The progress of science and engineering over the past hundred years hasn't been a secret thing, it occurs in public. Maybe everyone's been tricked, but that should require more evidence than one guy asserting it.
That's not what's happening here. "Bussy", in the literal sense, refers to a man's ass/asshole in the context of gay men. It then became a queer meme, and then ussy became a broader quirky teenger-taboo sex meme. It's not anti-trans in any way.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Anonymity with respect to other internet users and anonymity with respect to law enforcement after you've just killed someone, who'll physically possess your electronic devices and subpoena your ISP and every internet service you've ever used are different! I doubt he, or many here, have it in the second sense.
These measures would be extremely, two orders of magnitude, too harsh for a well-run social media site responding to scraping. Twitter doesn't have it any worse than every other site, and they accept some scraping and can identify bots and ratelimit excessive load. Limiting most of twitter's real users to just half an hour of use per day is absurd, I can't think of any situation that would call for it.
(roughly) For scraping to really harm twitter this much, it'd have to be significantly higher-load than twitter's real users as a whole. And requests = (requests/users) * users, so if all requests are from authenticated users (after login wall but before this) and scrape_requests >> real_requests, either the scrapers are making many more requests than real users per user (in which case a much less strict limit works), or there are many more scraping users than real users - very unlikely because creating accounts is hard (maybe requiring unique phone numbers), because it wasn't 'no ratelimit for accounts created before 2020', and because that many bot accounts would be noticed and could be distinguished from real users.
If it's just covering for an outage ... that'd be a 12-hour long outage at this point. When Facebook has an outage, let alone a 12-hour long one, they don't lie about the cause and only communicate it via the totally-not-CEO's personal account on the site with the outage. Twitter's status page is still green.
What must Tucker on Twitter be thinking now, or anyone else in or contemplating a professional relationship with twitter? The advertisers they're trying to court? The $1000/mo gold checkmark holders?
I have no good explanation for this decision. (edit: to be clear - if the real reason is scraping, the poor technical decisionmaking - otherwise, the decision to cover for an internal issue by pretending the issue is scraping). Maybe Elon's really on drugs? He put someone incompetent in charge who's feeding him bad information? The deadline for the Google Cloud bill they weren't paying was June 30, i.e. yesterday - supposedly they restarted payments, but maybe they didn't really? Maybe firing so much of Twitter plus all the changes he's made led to a buildup of problems, and this is what he had to do to keep twitter up for now? Idk. Either way, this is a much more significant failure than any of Twitter 2's previous missteps, which still could be explained as part of a high-variance strategy. Burning the credibility of verified, boosting shitty paid replies ... eh, it's bringing in money. Not paying bills ... aggressive approach dealmaking. This is just gross incompetence no matter the explanation.
And, "put any Fortune 500 CEO in charge of America and it'll immediately improve" ... feeling even worse than it did a year ago
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
You keep posting the same thing. The fact is, there are many happy couples with very below-average looks. The wife of an ugly man is not, on average, 'deeply disgusted' with him. (I'm not sure what effect this has on e.g. cheating, any observations will be very confounded by the association of unattractiveness with other things).
You're a decent writer, you seem capable of having interesting ideas. Do you have anything else you might be moved to write about? Why not try that? Maybe just vignettes from your life like george_e_hale, maybe some interesting technicality from your job, perhaps a commentary on ancient philosophy. Just anything else.
David Friedman (son of Milton and ACX commenter) has several blog posts (second) on the topic.
He claims that climate change makes yields lower in some areas, and higher in other areas, as there are many areas that are colder than optimal for agriculture, and climate change helps those areas as much as it hurts optimal or warm areas. This would require human adaptation - moving farming to different parts of the world - to respond to - but the modern economy adapts to new situations or technologies rather well. There's also the direct effect of CO2 - increased concentrations increases the efficiency of photosynthesis, increasing crop yields. There's a negative effect on nutrition per gram because the extra carbon bulks up a more fixed amount of minerals, but this is smaller than the yield effect and probably doesn't matter. All of this means the sign of the effect on the food supply isn't obvious.
It's probably real, but luck. He just does this constantly, right? If he does this for an hour a day every day for two years, and each round takes a minute, that's 40k rounds, and one in 40k seems like enough room for luck if he's already a bit accurate. And if he was this accurate with any consistency, he wouldn't have acted so shocked about it!
And you can get a lot of detail from a .1 second flash of an image. Some internet video memes flash various images by at ten per second, and if you pay attention you can get a lot of detail. Various studies find that even with <100ms people can still identify things. And that'd only improve if you practiced a lot, so I could see him narrowing it down to a general region from that, and then getting lucky.
no clear tells
I think if you're smart and you look at a hundred different (location, image) pairs, you'd pick up on a lot of associations between "how things look" and the location. Types of plants, style of buildings/roads, etc. If you've only seen a few hundred pairs signage style might be your only option.
This isn't a piece of modern architecture that intentionally disrupts mainstream understandings of aesthetics or w/e. It's a functional building. The couches, tables, and shades aren't nice and wooden, but they're good for outdoor conversation. The solar panels are probably there for green reasons, but even purely on economics they're a reasonable choice. And the roof isn't an ugly metal slope or anything, just normal tiles.
I don't think anyone finds it beautiful, but it seems fine. Even if you want marble columns in your $5M mansion, that's still secondary to the material function of the house - spending your day there, having people over, etc.
Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students?
Consider what harvard graduates do. They become doctors, surgeons, chemistry professors, CEOs, judges, politicians. Each of these (except perhaps the last) greatly contributes to the well-being and/or advancement of society. Better surgeons mean you're less likely to die on the operating table. Smarter chemistry professors mean that, via convoluted causal channels, in twenty years your computers will be faster and your consumer products will be cheaper. CEOs, again, more capable society and cheaper consumer products. All of these matter much more even by sum-hedonistic ethics than the individual effect of Harvard on a student. Take the best individual tutor in the world and he can probably raise a 105iq person's SAT score more than the top scorer (who has a perfect score), but that's a waste of society's resources. Who benefits more from college-level mathematics, a child young tao or a randomly-selected underrepresented minority?
The claim is that the most 'meritorious' people are smarter and more capable, and will be better able to create, understand, and improve society than the less intelligent. G, IQ, intelligence, whatever you want to call it, some people are clearly more capable, generally, than others. And much of the cause is genetic.
Consider, from the parable of the talents, Scott Alexander's brother, who
When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class.
A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now with me in my Introductory Piano class.
A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there.
Well, one thing led to another, and my brother won several international piano competitions, got a professorship in music at age 25, and now routinely gets news articles written about him calling him “among the top musicians of his generation”.
Of course it's framed, in the story, as an example of how different people have different talents, a personal berkson's paradox. But, absent a strong genetic effect and some shared cause of general capability, how plausible is it that Scott, a talented writer followed by some of the smartest people in the world, just happens to be the brother of a world-class musician? Clearly Scott's brother had something that made him generally capable, and whatever it was was shared somehow. I think the marginal treatment effect of piano classes was larger for Scott's brother than the average child. This is why merit matters! And why society-wide tracking of skill and targeting the most skilled for training is very useful.
(note: this post has an aggressive tone, because, well, your posts do too! I'd still love to be corrected if I get any, or especially many, details wrong)
REAL Banned Books are decades out of print with publishers who refuse to rerelease them despite used copies going for hundreds of dollars due to pent-up demand
The actual books you list later 'go for hundreds of dollars' because there's very little volume, demand, or supply, so the 'spread' is extraordinarily wide and the market is very illiquid. Hundreds of dollars is the ask, not the bid. If there were hundreds of bids at hundreds of dollars, independent reprinters - think people like dropshippers - would just print a run of low-quality copies and sell them. The modern economy is quite decentralized for low and medium volume items, anyone can start selling these 'banned books' if there's demand. And, indeed, various far-right individuals have started selling old right-wing books on the internet as that movement has grown! I think it is extremely unreasonable to use 'this book costs hundreds of dollars on amazon' as evidence for a ban, when it's also evidence for 'not many people want to buy this. There are so many out-of-print books that cost hundreds of dollars.
Wikipedia editors, and librarians slowly remove and suppress references to the work that they increasingly become impossible to even be aware of.
As far as I can tell, this straightforwardly does not happen in the present day. Can you please provie a single example of this? I feel like you're just making that up because it fits a narrative. Wikipedia loves talking about things like the Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf (and, yeah, how bad they are). Various leftist academics I follow on twitter just love digging up an old and forgotten far-right thinker to discuss.
and for an even rarer subset, mere possession can result in years if not decades in prison even in countries all the indexes and US diplomats proudly label “Full Liberal Democracies”.
... Yeah, some non-Ameican countries are terrible about free speech. I think these books are the ones it's reasonable to describe is banned. As you say, though that's "an even rarer subset".
If the book is truly effectively banned, if the post-totalitarian state has truly effected its disappearance, it will not appear anywhere one might search for a forbidden work, even in mention. It will have merely disappeared… as if it were never written
I don't think this is slightly true for any of the books you mention!
I remember digging a copy of James Burnham’s The Machiavellians
... . James Burnham "chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy" and "was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics". The Machiavellians is in his wikipedia infobox under 'notable works'.
(you said on twitter) Burnham was $700 on Amazon 8 years ago… the fact he’s back in print now after a major effort does not change the fact he was disapeared
He was not disappeared! People became less interested in him, so his work was printed less. Then people became more interested, so it was printed again.
I glanced at the "full list" image, and the first thing that I spotted was a book by Jimmy Carter - Palestine, Peace not Aparthied. A US President? ... Really? I found some controversy over the book, but was unable to find something that seems to be a "ban" as you'd describe above.
So ya, I’m already trapped like Johnny Depp in this oldest and most dangerous of obsessions
On War, Mein Kampf, Various books by nazis
Not currently banned, widely available for purchase, on reading lists for university history courses, etc. Less popular ones than Mein Kampf are harder to find because they're ... less popular, not becuase they're bannd. It feels like you're mixing "currently banned by our post-totalitarian regime" and "banned in the past right after a war by a state significantly less liberal by current standards than we are" into the same "vibe".
David Irving’s Hitler’s War
When was this banned or suppressed? Note that it has an incredibly long wikipedia article dedicated to it, discussing it and subsequent rebuttals. Remember what you claimed:
Wikipedia editors, and librarians slowly remove and suppress references to the work that they increasingly become impossible to even be aware of.
This is not happening.
... In general, this seems like a quite decent list of "divisive, controversial, taboo, and sometimes banned" books. It is just not a list of banned books. You don't even attempt to justify the "banned" status of most books on the list. I get that wildly exaggerating your claims is your whole "thing", but I think in the very long run it hurts you and your positions more than it helps, by fractionating your potential audience such that the exact people you want to reach - people who are extremely smart and mostly disagree with you but are interested in hearing you out - are put off by your work. And in the 'barberpole model' of culture, this means you're missing out on converting people at the top of the pole, and everything flows down from them. Also, it means you'll end up believing a bunch of incorrect things and developing ideas carelessly, which might end up meaning you focus on things like the aesthetics of historical warfare and romanticizing the idea of looking sexy as a moral value while your progressive enemies keep their eye on the ball and obsess over and gain increasing control over the most powerful technology of the century and maybe all of history. Hypothetically.
I will say, this post is a great window into how those unreliable, huge 4chan political image collage memes are made.
curious_straight_ca
10mo ago
Nuking the third-party apps and killing pushshift are both overall surplus-destroying moves, especially since Reddit's search function does not work and their mobile app sucks (and mostly in ways that are orthogonal to extracting money from users!). I'm not entirely sure how the admins benefit from making the API prices this artificially high to kill apps? If you're worried about ads, why not just introduce an ad SDK for third-party mobile apps or require them to give you 50% of their in app purchase revenue or something. Also not sure that banning pushshift and requiring paid API access will stop scraping for LLMs, because normal web scraping of HTML the way archive.org, google, and everyone else does still works.
curious_straight_ca
26d ago
Funnily enough:
One of the earliest described cases of BID was termed apotemnophilia by Money in 1977
Yes, that John Money!
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
If you're gonna reppost your substack piece here, please at least put in the effort to copy the whole contents of the post into your toplevel. If Ymeskhout can do it, you can too. And maybe less of "Remember to subscribe"?
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
This post needs a lot more elaboration. Many mottizens are straightforwardly conservatives, so 'degenerate tendencies in Con politics', conservatives coming from 'lost causers', 'proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion' aren't going to land as anything other than insults. And even if we were all on your team, it's still better to explain why something is true than just state it. As someone who disagrees - I don't love 'conservatism' either but just don't see the strong connections to the South - why should this persuade me?
This is a somewhat popular opinion on 'the left' though, I've seen it on twitter a bunch.
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
When something is presented to a legislature, that doesn't mean the whole legislature endorses it, just that some members found it interesting enough to present. The congress has over 600 members. I'm sure most are intelligent and don't believe in aliens, but it only takes a few. And belief in extraterrestrials is popular - polls find >1/3 of americans believe - so it's very plausible some congress members just genuinely believe. Or are pandering to constituents who do, or trying to get attention. This parsimoniously explains why 'governments do aliens', without reaching for any hidden strategy. Imo, this explains every case of 'large institution endorsing UFOs', one of which I described here.
The UFO researcher [who presented this], who appears regularly in Mexican media to present his purported findings, has previously been associated with claims of discoveries that have later been debunked. In 2015, Maussan unveiled the existence of what was alleged to be an alien body unearthed in Nazca, Peru. Later, though, that "alien" discovery was debunked, and the mummified corpse was shown to be that of a human child with a head deformity, according to fact-checking website snopes.com. In fact, such elongated skulls have often been explained by anthropologists as the result of an ancient practice of artificial cranial deformation. As a part of what could be an ancient religious ritual, young children had their heads bound in cloth, rope and even wooden boards, according to snopes.com.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Disagree with below - it's very different from what he usually says. Discussing your emotional distaste for LGBTs analytically or unemotionally discussing the lower mean IQ of blacks while still ultimately promoting democracy and race-blind meritocracy, arguing the MSM is still better than the right-wing media and talking about how jews are universally successful due to their genes, claiming that veganism is a strong moral position even if he still disagrees with it - is very far from denouncing the "ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite" and promoting the Turner Diaries. e.g. Doglatine wouldn't have claimed Hanania was a very interesting writer if he was still doing the second.
I also think Hanania is more correct now than he was ten years ago, and suspect he has, to a significant extent, actually changed his mind (compare to Karlin's more limited moves in that direction). Although obviously he's still going to strategically conceal some ideas that are too distasteful.
I have not been particularly impressed on the occasions that Hanania has been linked.
If you are very right-wing, he might be a breath of fresh air to see support for stronger right-wing ideas (IQ and merit and correlation with race, crime) coexist with lambasting of weaker right-wing ideas (universal anti-immigration, populism, ...).
Twitter's backseat CEO has announced his intention to rename twitter:
And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds
If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow
He then reposted an animated X
There's a delirious, fantasy quality to Elon's management of twitter. Is this a joke? Does anyone know? Why make consequential business announcements on your personal account, mixed with memes and joke business announcements? Either way, it's hilarious.
I wonder how Linda feels about all of this. Does she have much internal responsibility?
I think the rename is a poor business decision, if not that consequential of one - a lot of people really like the 'Twitter' name. And 'X' is not a very distinct name, if that's what he'll rename it to.
Imagining a future neoreactionary tech-CEO deciding to rename the United States during a manic episode
Let's say we add the new lanes, and congestion stays the same, and travel times stay the same. Is this a failure?
Let's say you have a single supermarket in a town. It's too crowded, the lines are always long. A second supermarket opens in a town. There's enough demand that, now, both supermarkets are too crowded, and the lines are too long. Is this bad? No, it's strictly an improvement - more people are buying food now! And the supermarket makes more money!
The same is true of 'induced demand' - the goal of 'reduce congestion' wasn't accomplished, but a separate goal of 'more people getting to where they want to' was. The extra people who drive on the new highway are benefitting greatly from the change - they can now get to places they couldn't before!
No, it would be a net decrease, because the cost of doing so would be very high, and those resources could be more efficiently used elsewhere.
That's ... not a net decrease. That's a 'suboptimal policy'. It's only a net decrease if those resources would be used more efficiently elsewhere absent the highway. Which, I think you would agree when looking at the rest of the city budget, they're not likely to be any time soon.
It would suck for anyone who currently lives in the area and has to deal with additional car traffic
A net decrease would require comparing that 'dealing with additional traffic' to the new jobs or new activities the people the additional traffic brings, or the economic benefits from the businesses employing / serving the additional traffic. And ... I can't see how that comes out net negative. Having your property sized does suck, yeah, and I'm not sure how to factor that cost in - but that's basically a universal cost of development, so it doesn't obviously bring the total negative.
curious_straight_ca
24d ago
I don't sense much anger tbh. I might see a post get downvoted because it's too left-wing or something, but all the responses are still usually polite even when they disagree. Even when someone's accusing the outgroup of destroying civilization it's done in a very literary way over multiple paragraphs, as opposed to what you see on twitter
From the article UnHerd cites:
“He hides his fingers, keeps them flexed, leading to impaired dexterity, localized pain, irritability and anger,” Dr. Nadia Nadeau, of the department of psychiatry at Université Laval wrote in the journal Clinical Case Reports. He grew more determined to find a way to get rid of fingers he considered “intrusive, foreign, unwanted.”
“He had contemplated asking a friend to watch over him and be prepared to call emergency services in case his attempt led to a need for resuscitation,” Nadeau wrote.
After undergoing elective amputation, the nightmares and emotional distress immediately stopped, Nadeau said. The post-op pain resolved within a week, there was no “phantom pain” at one month follow-up and, without the two missing fingers, “he was able to pursue the life he envisioned as a complete human being without those two fingers bothering him.”
It’s not the first time amputation has been used as a treatment for BID. In the late 1990s, a surgeon in Scotland amputated one leg above the knee each in two men who’d felt a “desperate” need to be amputees, and who had been turned away by other doctors.
Despite the scandal that erupted, “At the end of the day I have no doubt that what I was doing was the correct thing for those patients,” the surgeon, Dr. Robert Smith, told a press conference.
The fact that there were only two fingers involved in the Quebec case, as opposed to a complete limb, made the decision to proceed easier for the medical team, Nadeau said.
If this now-amputee were me, I'd try to just get over it. Stop taking any action to either sate or resist the discomfort, meditate real hard, just feel it and let it burn out. I think it'd work for me.
But it's a mistake to not understand the other side's perspective. You have a guy who's constantly distressed, whose daily life is significantly impaired, who's begging for help, where many pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions have failed, and a simple operation will fix his problem permanently. It makes a certain amount of sense, right? This guy's had this problem since he was a child, and it is a doctors' job to fix it, and nothing else is working.
It reminds me of
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
But I think the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue.
Amputating a few fingers is somewhat more invasive than putting a hairdryer in your car. But it's the same principle, right?
That's from the categories are made for man, which Zack's spent a lot of time disagreeing with because, yes, it was about trans people and how to treat them. I didn't even remember that was why Scott told that story until I looked it up again today.
And, it's a good analogy, because this is what it feels like for a medical professional dealing with trans patients. You have adults who beg for hormone treatments, claim to be and appear to be in severe distress due to lacking them, and do indeed appear to improve after taking them. This is what it should look like! There are issues with kids, issues with surgery, but none of those undermine the obvious case for accepting trans people and treating them with hormones - it seems to make them happier and better. Again, yeah, edge cases, but the trans people I know are not perpetually depressed psychological wrecks like you'd expect from rw twitter memes, they're generally normal and happy.
Claiming otherwise requires some sophisticated reasoning, like one that claims happiness or sexual satisfaction are of little value themselves, and only matter when done for in line with a greater purpose - in this case, marriage and having children. And since trans individuals imitate the appearance of sexuality without the fertility backing it, it's bad. I agree with something like that.
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured
If A is evidence for B, B should be evidence for A, yes? "One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens?" If we took this case being a novel case of unnecessary amputation as evidence that trans ideology has thoroughly captured the medical system, or something like that, and then we observe that this isn't novel - I think we should doubt the reasoning that led to the claim of ideological capture.
edit: here is the paper about the case.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
It’s an entrenched mythology of capitalism that companies lower prices based on competition. This hardly ever works in the real world
Huh? Then why have the prices of wood, steel, food, electricity, computing power, plastic, televisions, phones, and literally every material good ever declined by orders of magnitude over the past four centuries? When we observe any specific one, what we see is that new, more efficient or productive techniques enter the market at lower prices and drive out higher priced competitors, over and over. What am I missing?
Our immigrant pool is ... fine, certainly not awesome. It could be so much better than it already is if US immigration was intentionally administered in the interest of good immigrants. IQ tests, demonstrations of technical skill, unlimited in number but very expensive paid sponsorships, maybe with a culture exam or something if you care about that. Instead, there's generic administrative stasis and a political tug of war between 'poor mexican immigrants :(' and 'And Some, I Assume, Are Good People', and only minor improvements get done by pro skilled immigration interest groups.
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