erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Part of it is that, yes, replacing the rich mythology of Micras and Pelagia with literally "a wizard did it" robbed the piece of much of its pathos and gravitas, but the other part is that deleting all mentions of Mencius Moldbug and Patchwork was an act of cowardice unbecoming of a scholar.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
It's first of December so of course I am listening to Once upon December.
Excellent taste; Don Bluth is my favorite Western animator.
Classical animations are so eternal and age so gracefully or even at all. I really miss that they don't make them anymore
Have you tried anime? Great 2D-animated movies are still being made, just not in America.
Say it with me: The best way to reduce crime is to keep criminals in prison where they can't commit crime.
The best way to reduce crime is to hang criminals, which is no only much cheaper than prison (or at least it would be if progressives hadn't deliberately made the process as expensive as possible) but also prevents a future administration from releasing the criminals.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
Please, please link to the original version of "Archipelago", not the (horrible) revised edition.
Scott has literally donated money to sterilize drug users.
People who are not logged into Twitter can only see the linked Tweet, not the context.
Here's the whole thread:
Crémieux Recueil: I just saw a cost-benefit analysis of prisons where prisons save society money until you factor out $50,000 per prisoner per year for "suffering", then they cost society "money".
Scott Alexander: I think this is an inaccurate description of the study.
It costs society money if you take the author's mainline beliefs, if you adjust for current incarceration costs (I didn't do this adjustment because then you'd have to inflate crime costs as well, and I didn't know how to do this, but plausibly cost disease has driven up incarceration costs faster than inflation), or if you're thinking about blue states (which have higher incarceration costs than red states). I described it as saving society a small amount of money under the most generous possible assumptions, but being net negative otherwise.
But also, it does seem like low-key torturing hundreds of thousands of people, ~5% of whom are innocent, is a "social welfare cost". The process used to value that cost at $50,000 is no sillier than the process used to value a murder at -$9.4MM, or any of the other crime numbers in the paper.
Crémieux Recueil: I think it is sillier, since a point of prison for many is to punish, whereas there's no justification for murder.
One commenter posited a reductio that should probably be addressed: by this logic is everything you can buy free after accounting for "joy" or "forgone suffering"?
Scott Alexander: Not just free, but positive sum! If we didn't count the value of joy in buying things, we would have to model all trades as exploitative - stupid people getting tricked into giving companies money for no reason.
If we discount the suffering involved in prison because prisoners are bad people, we should also discount the suffering involved in murder insofar as murder victims may also be bad people (eg drug dealers, gang members, etc). I think a virtue-weighted utilitarianism would be fun to think about, but I've never heard anyone seriously propose it.
Crémieux Recueil: A voluntary purchase should be positive-sum to an individual, but if I buy an expensive truck, I may strain the family budget enough to turn it negative at the household level regardless of my personal enjoyment of the truck.
If I'm involuntarily committing someone to prison and generating enormous surplus for society, throwing in suffering for them, that relatively few outside of prison care about, messes up the whole equation by mixing up costs and benefits across levels of aggregation and treating all the numbers alike when they aren't. If the weight for suffering was adjusted to reflect that, that might make things fine, but no one can reasonably stand on a high estimated cost of prisoner suffering if they're doing cost-benefit analyses for the society we live in.
Given that criminals are generally disliked, suffering is being given a value above prisoners' incomes outside of prison (before and after imprisonment), and false-positive rates are low (especially for long-term prisoners), suffering probably adds value to society anyway. That's part of the now academically neglected retributive function of prison.
Scott Alexander: I think this is a good place to apply Thatcher's Law ("there's no such thing as Society"). Benefits go to individuals - people who don't get robbed, people who don't get stabbed, etc. Even indirect benefits go to individuals - people who live in nicer communities. It's perfectly valid to count costs to other people against the benefits to these people.
But also, aren't you supposed to be based and IQ-pilled? Have you met the average prisoner? They've got the IQ and self-restraint of like a ten-year old child. I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".
I'm totally fine with the consequentialist position of weighing their suffering against the suffering of their victims, I could even potentially be convinced that this suggests incarceration at or above current margins. I just don't see why we have to add "desert" into it, which I think implies some kind of failure to exercise a self-restraint that these people never had in the first place. You wouldn't say that a kid deserves to suffer super hard for some arbitrary number of years because they hit their sibling. You'd give them whatever punishment you expected, through deterrence and/or incapacitation, to either make them a better person or protect their sibling in the future. Why hold criminals to a higher standard?
Crémieux Recueil: Making the analysis entirely individual-level is consistent with what I've said. But I don't think the analysis as it was done actually does that adequately, and it ends up extremely overweighting the suffering of criminals beyond all reason. If you're being "based and IQ-pilled" this stands up: those people average far lower incomes before imprisonment than even $50k/yr.
Now regarding desert, having it as a guiding principle in criminal justice doesn't mean to engage in exorbitant punishment, but it does mean to punish people fairly and equally. If you kill a stranger in cold blood and Bob with a 75 IQ kills a stranger in cold blood, you should both receive the same punishment even if Bob didn't really know any better. If you remove desert from the equation, you necessarily move towards illiberal justice, and I have a strong preference for liberalism and find it hard to imagine rational and workable criminal justice without it.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
IQ realist here. When those rules are things like "thou shalt not murder" and "thou shalt not steal", I consider enforcing them by severely punishing the ones who break them to be basic human decency. If they are too impulsive and stupid to abide by such elementary moral standards, then they are not fit to live in civilized society.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Old women do not like age gaps. Young women and older men are happy enough with them. And nobody cares what young men want.
Yes, I've always found it disingenuous the way some people act like their only problem with immigrants is that they are coming in illegally and jumping the queue instead of waiting their turn. The implication is that there is some kind of workable immigration process everyone can apply for and that the only reason not to do so is because you are too impatient to wait a few years or too dismissive of law and authority to bother going through the proper channels.
This is totally false. There is no path to immigration for the vast majority of people. If you support enforcing current immigration law, you support denying millions the chance to live and work in the U.S. for no other reason than they were born outside of it, condemning them to a much worse quality of life in countries full of poverty and violence, and you need to own that.
I support it, because allowing unlimited immigration combined with a welfare state and single-family zoning is unsustainable, but I'm not missing the proper mood; I feel bad about it, but it has to be done.
(Caplan would chime in with the keyhole solution of denying the immigrants welfare, but he's delusional)
It is, of course, hobbled by severe retrograde amnesia, and being stuck to text behind a screen, but those are solvable problems.
Anterograde, not retrograde. It didn't forget something it knew from its life before; it's unable to permanently remember new things. LLMs are like Clive Wearing or Hermione Granger.
Agreed. Governments hate cash for the same reason they hate crypto; it enables people to escape their control. The state can't get of the cash yet, but they are sure as fuck not going to make it more convenient to use by printing bigger bills. Instead, it will watch as inflation slowly makes the $100 bill as irrelevant as the penny.
From "In Praise of Cash" by Brett Scott:
The frontlines, though, are now creeping to poorer countries. India’s recent so-called ‘demonetisation’ was a brutal overnight retraction of rupee notes by the prime minister Narendra Modi to bring discipline to the ‘black economy’. It was an exercise that necessitated choking the poorest Indians, who depend on cash and who often lack access to bank accounts. Originally cast in popular terms as an attempt to stem corruption, the message was later ironically altered to cast cashlessness as a way to create economic progress for India’s poor.
From "Marriage Makes You Rich and Stupid" by Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle:
Marriage allows you to pool nonrival goods, such as Netflix accounts, but also what economist Bryan Caplan calls “semi-rival goods,” such as kitchens and cars:
Two childless singles, each earning $50,000 a year, marry. Both keep working, living by the old-school principle of "share and share alike." What happens to their material standard of living? If all depends on how rivalrous their consumption bundle is.
If all their goods are rival (like food), the answer is "Their standard of living stays the same." $50,000 times two divided by two equals $50,000.
If all their goods are non-rival (like Internet access), the answer is "Their standard of living doubles." They pool their money and buy a $100,000 lifestyle for both of them.
In the real world, of course, couples are rarely at either pole. Most goods are in fact semi-rival. Consider housing. If you share your home with a spouse, you don't have as much space for yourself as a solitary occupant of the same property. But both of you probably enjoy the benefits of more than half a house. If a couple owns one car, similarly, both have more than half a car. Even food is semi-rival, as the classic "You gonna eat that?" question proves.
But this is not the only benefit of marriage. Marriage also enables specialization. Which can be illustrated by a piece of wisdom I have developed in my brief three and a half years of marital bliss and now pass onto my friends who are getting married: “Marriage makes you stupid.”
I mean, I used to know where I kept my batteries and old documents. But when we got married, my husband, who is much tidier than I am, took over organizing the house. Now, unless it’s a piece of my clothing or kitchen equipment, I have no idea where we keep anything. And while I’m pretty sure I used to be able to put up shelves, now all I know how to do is ask my husband to do it.
On the other hand, he has no idea how much money we have, or in what accounts. And he can’t do the grocery shopping, because he doesn’t know what we consume. Individually, we are less competent to survive on our own. But collectively, we eat better, and we have a tidier house and better-managed finances. And our shelves don’t fall down so often.
Obviously, child-rearing is a major area of specialization. One interesting thing I’ve heard from gay parents is that they find themselves falling into roles that you might describe as “Mom” and “Dad,” even though this is obviously not some pre-programmed gender destiny. It just doesn’t make sense to try to jointly manage a kid 50-50; one parent keeps the social calendar and decides what kids Junior can play with, because two parents trying to do it actually makes the task take a lot more time, as both people have to learn about all the friends and the birthdays and the parents, and then negotiate what Junior does with her time. I’m not saying this happens with every gay parent. I’m just saying that gay parents I know report considerable benefits to specialization.
Specialization also allows for external income gains -- perhaps one reason that married men make a lot more than single ones do and married households are richer than single ones. Some of that is selection effect, of course -- stable, responsible men are probably more likely to get married, especially in this day and age.
So while pooling nonrival and semi-rival goods is an excellent benefit of marriage, it is far from the only one. And it doesn’t stop with economics: There’s also better health, less depression, and happier and healthier children to consider. At the end of his piece, Caplan calls being single a “luxury” good. But it’s not exactly an aspirational one.
From "The Simpsons and Cultural Decline" by Free Northerner:
The Simpsons family is intact and stable, if slightly dysfunctional, and hold to functional, almost traditional, family values. They all love each other, however much they might bicker. Homer is a flawed man, often selfish or stupid, but still loving and caring towards his family. Marge is shown to love and respect Homer, despite her occasional anger at his flaws. Bart disrespects Homer occasionally, but it is shown as a clear deviancy for laughs; it also clearly shown that he does look up to and admire Homer. The kids fight, but at heart care for each other.
Compare those family values that to the three highest-rated sitcoms of 2013: Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and Modern Family. The first is about a bunch of (fornicating) nerds and their slut friend who spend the entire show snarking at each other. The second is about a cad, his divorced brother, and his nephew who regularly snark at each other; the cad is shown as cool, while the ‘family man’ is shown as a loser. According to Wiki, the third is about a blended family, a somewhat normal family, and a gay couple; the ‘modern family’ is so screwed up wiki needs a chart to keep family relations in order.
The Simpsons has a subtext of Homer as patriarch. A few times in the first couple of seasons Homer makes a family decision, whether it is selling the TV to attend counseling, buying a new TV, or choosing a camping spot, to name a few examples. The rest of the family complains or looks unhappy, yet it is not even questioned that, however flawed he or his decision may be, it is Homer’s place to decide these things. The show just assumes the father makes the major family decisions. Other than Duck Dynasty, would any modern show simply assume the father’s position as head of the home?
The show assumes that normal people go to church on Sundays and say grace at mealtime. Prayer is a casually accepted part of the show, as is religion. Does any major show today, other than Duck Dynasty, so casually accept religion as a normal, unremarkable, everyday part of life?
Other, less remarkable, moral lessons are also included. The pro-family/loyalty message of Life on the Fast Lane. How Marge’s sisters constant denigration of Homer is shown as negative, destructive behaviour. In one episode, Marge is casually referred to as Mrs. Homer Simpson.
All this is not to say the Simpsons is a font of traditional values, it is a liberal show, it does have some fem-centrism, and is rather subversive, but it is a good example of just how fast our culture is collapsing. Just a couple decades ago, the Simpsons was a controversial show that was held up by the president as an example of family dysfunction. Yet compared to today’s cultural wasteland, where broken families are common, disrespect and degeneracy are the norm, and the husband as the head of the family is, at best, a joke, it is very tame, almost traditional.
25 years is all it took. In 20 years, will Two and a Half Men and Modern Family be relatively tame and traditional?
If I was looking for healthy and natural family values in modern television, I would turn to anime, where girls still dream of getting married and having a child is still a blessing. The spirit of Shinzo Abe lives on.
Tipping the dealer or croupier a hundred on a million dollar win is cheap af. In the other scenario, I'd consider "I got rich, here's a hundred dollar bill" to be insulting.
Duly noted. If I'm ever in either scenario, I simply won't give them anything.
"What do you call a millionaire who tips a hundred dollars?"
"Cheap."
"And what do you call a millionaire who doesn't tip?"
"Cheap."
"Well then..."
If I were personally made a muti-billionaire in this scenario, and the real alternative was in fact me becoming destitute, I would probably give the cord lender a million bucks as a show of gratitude. Someone who gave the cord lender less than, oh, $10,000 in this scenario I would regard as tastelessly cheap.
Really? My intuition is that I would give the lender $100 and go on my way. Largest bill there is, big enough tip to make someone's day, small enough to be trivial to me. I would do the same if I won a million bucks at the casino; give the croupier a hundred to satisfy the social obligation to tip after a big win and think no more of it.
I was actually in a similar situation once, albeit on a much smaller scale. I dressed up nicely and drove to my alma matter to do a video interview (because my house was a mess), but when I got there it turned out that my laptop was too old to run the video software (it was still running on Windows Vista!). I asked one of the students I saw there to let me borrow her laptop for the interview, and she agreed. I used it for about 15 minutes in a chair next to her. When I finished, I gave her back the computer, and asked her if she would like something for her trouble. If she said yes, I would have pulled out a twenty and given it to her. She said no, so I just thanked her and went home.
Now, I found out later that I didn't get the job, but if I had, it would have been worth tens of thousands of dollars a year to me, since I was unemployed at the time. Was it cheap of me to have only offered her a twenty, or to have not insisted after she turned me down once?
erwgv3g34
20d ago
The trans youth issue bothers me. Girls sports, underage irreversible surgeries, and marketing to kids all get under my skin. Adults don’t really bother me
erwgv3g34
23d ago
It's hilarious how some websites light up his picture as much as possible in an attempt to make him seem white.
erwgv3g34
23d ago
That luxury has been reserved for the rich ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. See "When Did Healthy Communities Become Illegal?" by Charles Tuttle.
erwgv3g34
23d ago
Sulla's tutorial got me started with Civ IV; I recommend it in the strongest possible terms.
erwgv3g34
24d ago
Charitably, he's asking where they stand on Jewish controversies that are dividing the current left, such as Israel-Palestine or whether Jews count as Whites for the purposes of affirmative action.
erwgv3g34
29d ago
You pay $6 dollars to enter the bet, so you start at -$6. 50% chance of $10 is $5. -$6+$5=-$1. The bet is negative EV.
His point is that the college already got the money, so they don't care if the loan is dischargeable or not. The one on the hook if the student is allowed to default is the government, not the university.
Most student loans are from the government, not from private banks. And the government doesn't make a risk/profit calculation before lending you the money.
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