erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
If your copy of chapter 4 begins with "Even before Erica finished formally adjourning the meeting", you are reading the original web serial. If instead it reads "Even before Valerie finished formally adjourning the meeting", you are reading the edited book version.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
I'm getting $7000, which is almost 10% of the median household income. (Also how the heck can people be making that little?)
I don't understand the question? I make $16/hr plus commissions which amount to about $1/hr, so approximately $17/hr, and work 4 days a week in eight hour shifts for a total of 32 hours. That works out to $2,176 a month or $28,288 a year. My yearly expenses are mostly room and board, for which I pay $1,300 a month or $15,600 a year. Let's add a few more thousand for things like gas (about half a tank at Costco twice a month), car insurance (legal minimum), etc. and round up my budget to $20,000 a year. That still leaves me with a healthy surplus to add to my bank account every year.
I don't know what a "household" is, but if I was married to a woman who made a similar amount as me, that'd bring us up to about $60,000/yr, and of course we could share the same room.
From "Servants Without Masters" by Harold Lee:
Singapore’s policy on guest workers would make for an interesting essay in its own right. Briefly, though, the government makes it easy for guest workers to come if they can find work in various industries, including domestic service. Once in, you get a visa for a couple years, which does not come with voting rights or many of the perks of citizenship. But because this system is so rigorous in ensuring that would-be guest workers are net economic positives, it’s politically feasible for Singapore to take in a lot of guest workers. Proportionally, Singapore’s guest worker population is equivalent to the US taking in about two-thirds the population of Mexico – with huge net benefits to them and their families.
Which is all well and good from a policy perspective, but did nothing for me when faced with the reality of interacting with my host family’s maid. There, in the flesh, was a middle-aged Filipino woman who was just there to attend to my needs, as a guest of the family. I was expected to ask her to wash my clothes, for example, and prepare whatever I wanted for breakfast. And for all my admiration of the political needle-threading of Singaporean immigration policy, this situation completely freaked me out. It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me.
And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. My emotional reaction was not really about being an American with sturdy frontier values of self-sufficiency. I was perfectly happy to farm out menial work – as long as it was done by a faceless worker in a uniform, rather than a single person I was expected to have a relationship with. This incongruence was one of the major lessons I took from my trip to Singapore. Even after I returned to the Land of the Free, I kept being struck by the ease with which I blithely accepted the service of servants as long as they were framed as business transactions with dehumanized service workers.
And I noticed that the same blind spot applied in the other direction, in people’s attitudes towards submission towards superiors. The very word “submissiveness” tends to raise people’s hackles in our culture, but in fact we are happy to accept it – if and only if it’s submission to a faceless institution, rather than to someone’s personal authority. In an old-school apprenticeship, the master essentially runs your life for seven years and can bring you back if you run away, possibly with a flogging for good measure. This seems incredibly coercive today, and is probably one of the reasons apprenticeship and other forms of demanding mentorship are in short supply. But at the same time, it’s considered completely unremarkable for someone to go into nondischargeable debt to go to grad school and work hard to satisfy every whim of their professors. For a more barbed example, it’s considered entirely unremarkable for a woman to be submissive to her boss, but sounds terribly suspect to expect her to be equivalently submissive to her husband.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
I prefer the way Scott puts it in "Book Review: Age of Em":
There’s an urban legend about a “test for psychopaths”. You tell someone a story about a man who attends his mother’s funeral. He met a really pretty girl there and fell in love, but neglected to get her contact details before she disappeared. How might he meet her again? If they answer “kill his father, she’ll probably come to that funeral too”, they’re a psychopath – ordinary people would have a mental block that prevents them from even considering such a drastic solution. And I bring this up because after reading Age of Em I feel like Robin Hanson would be able to come up with some super-solution even the psychopaths can’t think of, some plan that gets the man a threesome with the girl and her even hotter twin sister at the cost of wiping out an entire continent. Everything about labor relations in Age of Em is like this.
For example, suppose you want to hire an em at subsistence wages, but you want them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Ems probably need to sleep – that’s hard-coded into the brain, and the brain is being simulated at enough fidelity to leave that in. But jobs with tasks that don’t last longer than a single day – for example, a surgeon who performs five surgeries a day but has no day-to-day carryover – can get around this restriction by letting an em have one full night of sleep, then copying it. Paste the em at the beginning of the workday. When it starts to get tired, let it finish the surgery it’s working on, then delete it and paste the well-rested copy again to do the next surgery. Repeat forever and the em never has to get any more sleep than that one night. You can use the same trick to give an em a “vacation” – just give it one of them, then copy-paste that brain-state forever.
Except for the babies part, sounds like a just-so-story that is perhaps applicable to some couples but is not generally applicable and probably not majority. The higher-IQ shape-rotator is better at most of the activities involved in organizing and cleaning the house than the wordcel. To the extent it is true that males have better spatial IQ or are successful males from the male longer right high-Q tail, they are also better at cleaning the house (unless they are from low-IQ tail that goes lower than women, but who brags about that?).
Shape-rotator vs wordcel is not the relevant comparison here. You can make a living as either one (e.g. engineer vs lawyer) and while women are almost never shape-rotators, all the top wordcels are men as well.
The biggest difference is thing-oriented vs people-oriented. Remember, "Kinder, Küche, Kirche". Keeping house by cooking and cleaning is only about a third of what a housewife is supposed to do. She is also supposed to raise the children, which is something women are much more suited to as they are naturally much more soft and nurturing. And she is expected to be in charge of managing the family's social life, which is again very likely her comparative advantage because women are much more people-oriented than men.
Men who will effortlessly memorize every detail of the Roman empire will struggle to remember their friends' birthdays. Housewives are the social glue that holds communities together. They are the ones who send greetings, schedule visits, organize parties, matchmake singles. Little wonder we are so atomized, with their numbers thinning.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
Have you read the recent ACX post about Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids? I want to have a top level post about it, but haven't thought of anything interesting to say for that. I enjoy Scott's honesty about being an introverted professional writer with twin babies and a wife who's probably something like him, and very much not a Christian twenty-something who's happy about vacuuming. His wife is apparently staying with the kids, but he feels guilty (presumably she's overwhelmed, not happily keeping a clean house and warm meals), and hires a nanny. Even with the nanny and wife at home, they are still overwhelmed.
That was truly ridiculous. Scott makes enough money that his wife can afford to stay at home and be a homemaker, plus he works from home himself so he is available to help out when necessary, and he still feels the need to hire her a nanny. What exactly is she bringing to the marriage besides her uterus? It can't be pussy, because Scott is asexual. At this rate, he would have been better off just paying a surrogate and going at it as a single father.
It's been 50 years, you and I should be able to make our own Star Wars if we want, and it is insane that we can not. At the least it is insane that we won't be able to once Lucas is dead + 70 years because somebody paid money to buy an exclusive license to our collective experience.
Actually, the original Star Wars movie was published in 1977, just seven months before the Copyright Act of 1976 went into effect. So it falls under the 95 years from publication rule and will enter the public domain on January 1st, 2073.
Only 48 more years to go!
(The sequels are more complicated; do they count as works for hire, in which case they also fall under date of publication + 95, or are they the personal creation of George Lucas, falling under death + 70?)
I'm also a Bryan Caplan fan. I really like his arguments against education, his arguments for having more kids, and, more recently, his arguments against feminism. I also like his thoughts on living as a contrarian in a conformist world; I would have benefited A LOT from reading those when I was younger, and it makes me feel a deep sense of kinship with him. And I enjoy the way he applies economic reasoning everywhere. He's a must-read for any rationalist, in the same tier as Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, or Richard Dawkins.
The biggest disagreement I have with him is open borders. I mean, I can kind of see it if you are an universalist utilitarian who thinks everyone has equal value, but I still can't understand how he possibly thinks norms and institutions like strong property rights, non-nepotism, etc. would survive. But that's OK, every great thinker is guaranteed to have at least one idea you strongly disagree with, because the kind of mind that looks for heresies in one area looks for heresies everywhere. I can disagree with Caplan about immigration just like I disagree with Scott about polyamory or disagree with the Dreaded Jim about anime. Rule thinkers in, not out.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
From "The Right to Marry" by Sister Y:
Sensing that marriage is now an empty institution, some couples have specifically contracted for the rights marriage traditionally gave them (but no longer does). In the California case Diosdado v. Diosdado, 97 Cal.App.4th 470, a husband and wife contracted that if the husband had an affair with another woman, he would pay the wife $50,000 on top of the divorce settlement, and vice versa. The husband did in fact have an affair, but the California court refused to honor the couple's agreement. The strong California public policy of no-fault divorce, the court said, prohibited courts from even enforcing the voluntary contracts of a mature adult couple:
The family law court may not look to fault in dissolving the marriage, dividing property, or ordering support. Yet this agreement attempts to penalize the party who is at fault for having breached the obligation of sexual fidelity, and whose breach provided the basis for terminating the marriage. This penalty is in direct contravention of the public policy underlying no-fault divorce.
That's right: in California, as in other states with a strong no-fault public policy, you can't even voluntarily make a credible promise of marriage and expect it to be honored by the courts.
A few states - Lousiana, Arizona, and Arkansas - allow what is called "covenant marriage," marriage that may only be dissolved on fault grounds. However, couples may not even use covenant marriage to credibly promise lifetime partnership, because either partner may simply relocate to a non-covenant-marriage state and initiate no-fault divorce proceedings there.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is probably the single worst law since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
Don't forget 2 Thessalonians 3:10 ("He who will not work, let them also not eat").
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
I'd point out that a belief that "all women want sex, they just act coy about it" is going to get you straight into the old path of "no doesn't mean no, it just means she wants you to push harder to make her say yes" which will get you, and any young men you teach about 'what women really want', into trouble.
There are women who act coy about it. There are also women who genuinely don't want sex, or not casual sex, or who don't experience "oh my god I'm so horny right now I need to jump on the first guy I see" at all.
Do you see what the problem is? If there are women who say no because they don't want to have sex, and there are also women who say no but are just acting coy about it, then the only way for a man to find out which is which is to keep pushing and see which ones give in and which ones put up real resistance. Any man who stops the second a women lets out a token "no" (or, worse, believes in affirmative consent) is never going to get laid, because that is simply not how women work. Modern notions of consent make a rapist out of every sexually successful man.
Seems to me like this is the fault of women, not of men.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
I've used AI to write cover letters on job applications. One of those applications got me a teaching job which paid $20,000 more than what I was doing before, so if the cover letter made any difference ChatGPT Plus has more than paid for itself.
On the same job, I used it to generate a slogan which the administrators liked, and some images including the school mascot which had a very positive reception.
Sadly, it didn't save me from getting fired at the end of the year for failing to control the kids.
Seconded. I would no more introduce a child to gaming than I would introduce them to porn, or gambling, or alcohol. Or social media, for that matter.
Video games are fundamentally synthetic work, presenting you with fake skills to master and providing you with illusory rewards. They are explicitly designed to be much more fun and addictive than any real work could possibly be. And maybe this would be fine if we lived in a post-scarcity world where there was no real work to be done, or if at the very least if you were already financially independent and romantically successful and there was nothing left for you to do but enjoy life. Anything short of that and video games become a permanent drain on your ability and willingness to get things done; "devourers of life’s potential" as jimrandomh called them.
Any purported educational benefits of video games are bogus. All research on transfer on learning is that it doesn't exist. You don't get good at X by doing completely different activity Y that arguably has some kind of underlying similarity to X; you get good at X by doing X and by training under somebody who is better than you at X.
I game, but I would have been better off if I had never been introduced to the hobby. At most, some of the very best video games I have played (Metal Gear Solid, Fire Emblem, Days of Ruin, Cave Story, Iji, etc.) have provided approximately the same level of enjoyment, emotional release, and intellectual stimulation as a great movie or a good novel, except that they took much longer to do so (your average video game takes 20+ hours to beat, compared to 2 hours for a film and however fast you can read a book). At worst, games like Tetris and Civilization IV have consumed countless hours of my life through highly-optimized dopamine loops with nothing to show for it.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
From "More Ominous than a Strike" by Dalrock:
Dr. Helen has a thoughtful post up asking if the title of her book [Men on Strike] is an accurate description of men’s response to the changes in the law and culture. While the title of her book is extremely effective in opening the discussion (which is what it needs to do), it isn’t an accurate description of problem we face in the West. A strike can be negotiated with; offer them a bit more and they’ll get back to work. Better yet, offer a few of them a side deal and break the cohesion. True strikes require moral or legal force to avoid this sort of peeling off. The problem for the modern West is far worse. What we are seeing isn’t men throwing a collective temper tantrum, noble or otherwise. What we are seeing is men responding to incentives. Even worse, inertia has delayed the response to incentives, which means much more adjustment is likely on the way.
There was an old joke in the Soviet Union to the effect of:
We pretend to work. They pretend to pay us.
The problem for the Soviets was this wasn’t a movement. They knew how to handle a movement, and Siberia had plenty of room above ground and below. The Soviets were masters at coercion through fear, but the problem wasn’t a rebellion, it was that they had reached the limits of incentive through fear. In the short and even medium term fear is a very effective motivator. But over time if overused it loses some of its power, especially when it comes to the kind of productivity which requires creativity and risk taking. Standing out is risky; you don’t want to be the worst worker on the line in a fear based system, but you also have reason to fear being the best worker on the line. This doesn’t happen so much by conscious choice, but due to the influence of the incentive structure on the culture over time. Conscious choices can be bargained with, and threats of punishment are still effective. The culture itself is far harder to negotiate with. No one is refusing anything. So the Soviets had no choice but to assign quotas, and severely punish those who failed to meet them. But while the quota/coercion system keeps production running, it works against human nature. If you become the best producer you end up being assigned a larger share of the quota burden; from each according to his abilities. Over time the logic of this works its way into the culture, as everyone gets just a little more inclined to go with the flow and not do more than required. The problem is while momentum causes the response to be slow, it also means it is very difficult to deal with once you have enough of it to recognize.
The problem we presently face in the West is similar. While we have a small number of men who have decided to slack off as a form of protest, the far more insidious risk to our economy is the across the board weakening of the incentive that a marriage based social structure creates for men to produce at their full potential. We’ve moved from a mostly reward based incentive structure to a model the Soviets would have been proud of.
You can see this at the micro level with a man whose wife goes Jenny Erikson on him. The courts understand that throwing a man out of the home and taking away his children naturally reduces the man’s normal incentive to work to support his family. How could it not? It isn’t that most men in this situation will stand by and watch their children starve, but they won’t be motivated to produce quite as much. You can confiscate a percentage of his income in the form of child support, but he no longer has the incentive to fight his way quite so high up our progressive tax structure. This is why the courts have to assign the man an income quota he has to meet, Soviet style. Imputation of income isn’t incidental to the child support family model; it is essential to the function of the model. Note that this doesn’t mean the courts have to formally calculate an income quota for each man who ends up in the new child support family structure; in most cases the man has already assigned himself a quota based on past production. All the family courts need to do in most cases is make sure he doesn’t fall below this quota.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
From "The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project":
Here’s something interesting: every single person I mentioned above is of Jewish descent. Every single one. This isn’t some clever setup where I only selected Jewish-Hungarians in order to spring this on you later. I selected all the interesting Hungarians I could find, then went back and checked, and every one of them was Jewish.
This puts the excellence of the Hungarian education system in a different light. Hungarian schools totally failed to work their magic on Gentiles. You can talk all you want about “elitism and a spirit of competition” and “striving to encourage creativity”, yet for some reason this worked on exactly one of Hungary’s many ethnic groups.
This reduces the difficult question of Hungarian intellectual achievement to the easier question of Jewish intellectual achievement.
I say “easier question” because I find the solution by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending really compelling. Their paper is called A Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence (“Ashkenazi” means Eastern European Jew) and they start by expressing the extent of the issue:
Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112 – 115. This fact has social significance because IQ (as measured by IQ tests) is the best predictor we have of success in academic subjects and most jobs. Ashkenazi Jews are just as successful as their tested IQ would predict, and they are hugely overrepresented in occupations and fields with the highest cognitive demands. During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the Turing Awards [in computer science]. They account for more than half of world chess champions.
This doesn’t seem to be due to any advantage in material privilege; Ashkenazi Jews frequently did well even in countries where they were persecuted. Nor is it obviously linked to Jewish culture; Jews from other regions of the world show no such advantage. So what’s going on?
Doctors have long noted that Ashkenazi Jews are uniquely susceptible to various genetic diseases. For example, they’re about a hundred times more likely to have Gaucher’s Disease, a hundred times more likely to get Tay-Sachs Disease, ten times more likely to have torsion dystonia, et cetera. Genetic diseases are so common in this population that the are official recommendation is that all Ashkenazi Jewish couples get screened for genetic disease before marriage. I’m Ashkenazi Jewish, I got screened, and I turn out to be a carrier for Riley-Day syndrome – three hundred times as common in Ashkenazi Jews as in anyone else.
Evolution usually gets rid of genetic diseases pretty quickly. If they stick around, it’s because they’re doing something to earn their keep. One common pattern is “heterozygote advantage” – two copies of the gene cause a disease, but one copy does something good. For example, people with two copies of the sickle cell gene get sickle cell anaemia, but people with one copy get some protection against malaria. In Africa, where malaria is relatively common, the tradeoff is worth it – so people of African descent have high rates of the sickle cell gene and correspondingly high rates of sickle cell anaemia. In other places, where malaria is relatively uncommon, the tradeoff isn’t worth it and evolution eliminates the sickle cell gene. That’s why sickle cell is about a hundred times more common in US blacks than US whites.
The moral of the story is: populations can have genetic diseases if they also provide a useful advantage to carriers. And if those genetic diseases are limited to a single group, we expect them to provide a useful advantage for that group, but not others. Might the Jewish genetic diseases provide some advantage? And why would that advantage be limited to Jews?
Most of the Jewish genetic diseases cluster into two biological systems – the sphingolipid system and the DNA repair system. This is suspicious. It suggests that they’re not just random. They’re doing something specific. Both of these systems are related to neural growth and neural branching. Might they be doing something to the brain?
Gaucher’s disease, one of the Ashkenazi genetic diseases, appears to increase IQ. CHH obtained a list of all of the Gaucher’s patients in Israel. They were about 15 times more likely than the Israeli average to be in high-IQ occupations like scientist or engineer; CHH calculate the probability that this is a coincidence to be 4×10^-19.
Torsion dystonia, another Ashkenazi genetic disease, shows a similar pattern. CHH find ten reports in the literature where doctors comment on unusual levels of intelligence in their torsion dystonia patients. Eldridge, Harlan, Cooper, and Riklan tested 14 torsion dystonia patients and found an average IQ of 121; another similar study found an average of 117. Torsion dystonia is pretty horrendous, but sufferers will at least get the consolation prize of being really, really smart.
Moving from medicine to history, we find that Ashkenazi Jews were persecuted for the better part of a millennium, and the particular form of this persecution was locking them out of various jobs until the main career opportunities open to them were things like banker, merchant, and doctor. CHH write:
For 800 to 900 years, from roughly 800 AD to 1650 or 1700 AD, the great majority of the Ashkenazi Jews had managerial and financial jobs, jobs of high complexity, and were neither farmers nor craftsmen. In this they differed from all other settled peoples of which we have knowledge.
They continue:
Jews who were particularly good at these jobs enjoyed increased reproductive success. Weinryb (1972, see also Hundert 1992) comments: “More children survived to adulthood in affluent families than in less affluent ones. A number of genealogies of business leaders, prominent rabbis, community leaders, and the like – generally belonging to the more affluent classes – show that such people often had four, six, sometimes even eight or nine children who reached adulthood. On the other hands, there are some indications that poorer families tended to be small ones…as an example, in a census of the town of Brody in 1764 homeowner households had 1.2 children per adult member while tenant households had 0.6.
Now we can start to sketch out the theory in full. Due to persecution, Jews were pushed into cognitively-demanding occupations like banker or merchant and forced to sink or swim. The ones who swam – people who were intellectually up to the challenge – had more kids than the ones who sank, producing an evolutionary pressure in favor of intelligence greater than that in any other ethnic group. Just as Africans experiencing evolutionary pressure for malaria resistance developed the sickle cell gene, so Ashkenazim experiencing evolutionary pressure for intelligence developed a bunch of genes which increased heterozygotes’ IQ but caused serious genetic disease in homozygotes. As a result, Ashkenazi ended up somewhat more intelligent – and somewhat more prone to genetic disease – than the rest of the European population.
If true, this would explain the 27% of Nobel Prizes and 50% of world chess champions thing.
The method of execution should be public — I favor hangings, although I’m open to other methods which are similarly visually evocative without being overly torturous.
Hispanic cultures used the garrote, which seems very comparable to the Anglo method of hanging. Firing squads are appropriate for military personnel.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
I want to do the opposite; go back to the Philadelphia Convention, offer to take a handful of delegates to the future, let them stay for one year, then send them back to tell their fellows about how their ideas play out.
Erased (AKA The Town Without Me) is one of the most beautiful stories I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. It's also only one cour long.
The Promised Neverland is a borderline case. The first season is incredible, and ends at a very natural stopping point, but definitely leaves room to continue the story. The second season is legendary for how bad it was, and most fans pretend that it doesn't exist. If you choose to treat it as a single-cour anime, I think it meets your criteria. I wrote a longer review on /r/rational.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
Maybe juice is not the right word... I'm talking about stuff like chicha morada and agua de jamaica, not fruit in a blender.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
I gave up real sugar and high-fructose corn syrup years ago in favor of artificial sweeteners like Splenda, aspartame, and stevia. Last week, I decided to also give up zero calorie artificially sweetened drinks on Jim's advice. It's done wonders for controlling my hunger. On the minus side, non-sweet tea and juice taste awful; I would rather just drink cold water at that point. So that's another source of enjoyment gone from my life.
My guess is that you quit roughly one episode too early. The series was recommended to me by a friend, I started watching the first episode, and thought, "okay, this is fairly standard magical girl stuff, I'm not even remotely interested", and then shelved it.
Even if you went into it completely blind, the very first scene of Madoka running through an Escher print and emerging into an apocalyptic cityscape where Homura is fighting an eldritch abomination while "Magia" plays in the background should have tipped you off that this wasn't exactly Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura.
Now that's how you start an anime.
He kept bugging me, so a couple months later I watched the first episode again, okay, nothing too crazy, watched the second episode, sure, whatever, watched the third episode... and I think it's episode three or four where the story is done winding up, and starts throwing punches.
Madoka is largely responsible for establishing the three episode rule (in the old days, fans used the four episode rule instead, but that was a limitation of VHS technology).
Prediction markets were probably viable as soon as the first stock exchange was established in 1602. But Robin Hanson did not invent them until 1988, and they are still mostly illegal. If humanity ever gets it act together, we are going to be kicking ourselves for a long time.
(Okay, yes, the idea relies on the efficient market hypothesis, which wasn't really popularized until 1970, but people had already noted that the market was unpredictable as early as 1900. The core insight of "market movement is unpredictable because the current price of an asset already incorporates everyone's best guess about its future value" took a surprisingly long time.)
As far as historical examples, we can add the printing press (much better than scribes), the codex (much better than scrolls), Arabic numerals with a dedicated zero symbol (much better than Roman numerals), and the alphabet (much better than logographs; looking at you, China).
More options
Context Copy link