guajalote
2yr ago
As an American who has traveled a fair amount in India and East Asia, I fully agree about bidets, though I prefer the East Asian style over the Indian "shower head" style.
I think the resistance to bidets in the US and UK is connected to a reflexive prudishness about them. When I had bidet toilets installed in my house a few months ago, my wife asked if they were "some kind of sex toy" and my plumber acted like I had asked him to indulge some weird fetish of mine.
guajalote
2yr ago
There are (conservative) cultures where it's considered semi-acceptable for married men to have sex outside the marriage. For example, I have met multiple women from Mexico who have expressed sentiments along the lines of "wives should never cheat, but if husbands cheat once in a while that's unfortunate but understandable."
guajalote
2yr ago
I agree this is a problem, but it's a different one than the OP pointed out. People should be free to speak as they wish.
guajalote
2yr ago
I agree with your overall thesis, and I think it applies widely to many things including most economic policies. Also things like Covid lockdowns and school closures, which I'm surprised you didn't mention - even if only small costs were associated with these things, those costs would still be a big deal when distributed across the population.
But I think this is a weak example of your thesis:
Trans women are women: If some people experience pain because they're not considered to be in the social category they want to be in, what is the harm in everyone else agreeing that they are actually in that category? Why not consider trans women to be real women? This argument doesn't take into account the fact that words and categories are useful. In particular, they're useful to all the other people who are using those words and categories. For people who only want to date partners with whom they can reproduce, and for anyone who wants to predict others' behavior by knowing their biology, diluting the meaning of social categories and blurring their boundaries makes those categories less useful.
"Woman" was always a noisy signal for fertility and behavior. Only a tiny percentage of people (<0.5%) are transwomen, and only a fraction of them pass well enough that you would be confused about their birth sex. Injecting a tiny amount of noise into the predictive power of the term "woman" (which already had relatively weak predictive power) is I think too insignificant a cost to worry about, even when spread across the population.
That said, there are plenty of other costs associated with "transwomen are women." Things like transwomen in women's sports, the possibility of regret or detransitioning, and the fact that people are being censored for disagreeing with the orthodoxy.
guajalote
2yr ago
90% of confidence plus or minus blah blah blah
Unless you are using some transparent methodology to calculate the confidence interval, this is even worse than just saying 90% because you are now claiming to know both your priors and the uncertainty of your priors with high levels of precision.
guajalote
2yr ago
I think the normies are at least partly correct here. I think it's a mistake to say "I don't have a methodology for actually calculating my Baysean priors, but let me put a number on it anyway just to make myself more clear." You are not actually clarifying your position, you are obfuscating it.
In science, the concept of significant figures is extremely important because you have to represent the precision of your knowledge accurately. Lets say I have 1kg of lead and lead has a density of 11342 kg/m3, how many m3 of lead do I have? 1/11342 = .0000881679. Is it accurate to say I have ".0000881679m3" of lead? No, because that's representing an inaccurate degree of precision in my knowledge.
I think people reporting a Baysean prior of "90% confidence" are usually committing the same mistake -- they're misrepresenting the precision of their knowledge. Normies pick up on this and interpret it (correctly) as ludicrous overconfidence.
guajalote
2yr ago
It’s interesting that if you ask woke people to name their movement, they usually won’t have a name in mind, or they’ll say something general like “I support human rights for everyone” or “I believe in basic human decency.” If you’re not woke it’s easy to recognize the woke movement and its adherents, but a woke person is reluctant to apply the label because it has derogatory connotations.
I think we’re seeing sort of the same thing in reverse with the movement on the right for low status males that you describe. Its adherents don’t really have a name for it, but its critics are not shy about labeling it using terms like “incel,” “fascist,” or “semi-fascist.” I don’t know what term will ultimately stick, but I suspect it will be some kind of sneer term, similar to how “woke” is a sneer term.
guajalote
2yr ago
If those “tacked on” fines aren’t part of the sentence, by what authority are they being imposed? If you are legally obligated to pay a sum of money as a result of a criminal conviction, it seems to me you have been “sentenced” to pay that sum of money.
I take your point, but can you think of any examples in the past couple of years of a politically correct organization putting out a statement defending free speech without some kind of caveat like "...but that doesn't mean freedom from consequences" or "...but we also acknowledge that free speech has been used to perpetuate systems of oppression." I can't think of any examples besides this one. I certainly can't think of any other examples that included a statement like "the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant."
guajalote
2yr ago
This is what surprised me about the brief. If a "transgressive" comedian like Dave Chapelle or Matt Stone and Trey Parker had filed this amicus brief I wouldn't have batted an eye. But the Onion has obediently toed the party line for quite some time. And the party line has been hostile to full-throated defenses of free speech. The fact that a politically correct institution is defending free speech with no disclaimers is a positive sign.
guajalote
2yr ago
In recent years being a "2000s liberal" who is "generally progressive, but not to the point of speech controls or whatever" has been increasingly labeled as right-wing or "right-adjacent" (e.g. Dave Chappelle). The fact that the Onion is able to occupy that space without getting tarred for it is a good sign, I think. Progressive friends of mine who have previously denounced people like Dave Chappelle and who opposed the Musk purchase of Twitter on the grounds that it would result in too much free speech are now sharing this Onion amicus with approval. I've seen literally no criticism of the brief from anyone. It feels like a subtle, yet tangible, vibe shift on free speech.
guajalote
2yr ago
The Onion filed an amicus brief a few days ago in a case called Novak v. Parma. It's been making the rounds on social media lately because it's a legitimately funny and well-written document. It may well be among the best briefs I've read in my ten years as a litigator. Attorneys often seem to forget that job one of writing is to produce something readable. Nowhere is this more important than in amici, since judges are not required to read them in the first place.
What's the culture war angle here? Surprisingly (to me, at least), the brief is an unreserved and unapologetic defense of free speech by a respectable mainstream organization. This wouldn't have been so strange a few years ago, but it seems like the mainstream line on free speech has recently shifted from "free speech is important and must be defended" to "free speech is important and must be defended as long as it's not that kind of free speech." The ACLU has famously moved away from its robust defense of free speech, and nearly every publisher and platform has caveated any pro-free-speech views with disclaimers that carve out "bad" free speech like "disinformation" and "speech that causes harm."
But the brief doesn't even allude to caveats, and in some ways can be read to expressly repudiate them. One heading is titled "A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody" and boldly proclaims "True; not all humor is equally transcendent. But the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant." Nowhere do words like "harm" or "hate" or "disinformation" appear in the brief. Nowhere does the brief even allude to the popular idea that free speech can be used to "punch down" or "marginalize."
What makes this perhaps even more remarkable to me is the fact that Novak v. Parma isn't primarily about free speech, it's primarily about qualified immunity. It would have been extremely easy to dodge the free speech issue and emphasize a much woker angle, e.g., qualified immunity prevents people of color who have been harmed or killed by police from recovering damages to compensate them and therefore qualified immunity contributes to systemic racism, etc. I suppose this theme would have made for a dour and un-funny document, but given how woke schoolmarmery has tended to destroy humor over the past decade (see, e.g. The Daily Show), it's still a pleasant surprise to see they didn't go this route.
Maybe my optimism is unwarranted, but I'm marking this down as one small data point in favor of the theory that the woke tide is receding. I don't think it's going away completely, but I do think people are getting tired of it and I'm hopeful we'll start seeing a bit less of it in our daily lives.
guajalote
2yr ago
Forgive me if I'm interpreting you uncharitably, but you seem to be arguing that public opinion would consider an invasion of Haiti justified because white people were killed in the Haitian slave revolt of 1804? And your support for this claim is the fact that Czech expulsion of Sudeten Germans after WWII was considered justified? As far as I can tell, these two situations are not remotely analogous, either in reality or in terms of public perception.
guajalote
2yr ago
In my experience "capitalism" in these kinds of discussions just means "all the ways in which society has failed to live up to my expectations."
guajalote
2yr ago
-
A billionaire building a private army to conquer territory isn't going to be looked upon kindly by existing world governments, for obvious reasons.
-
Haiti has a horrific colonial history, and it's going to be easy to credibly accuse an invader of colonialism and geocide.
-
"Invade country with military to bring peace and prosperity" has a terrible track record. Pretty likely the billionaire just fails miserably.
guajalote
2yr ago
Five of my favorite podcasts have zero ads and are consistently high quality: Econtalk, the Fifth Column, Blocked and Reported, the Glenn Show, and Chapo Trap House.
guajalote
2yr ago
Complicating this is that both facial claims are probably always at least a little true.
Yeah it's a pretty trivially silly distinction. Even if something is "100% genetic," environment is still hugely important. For example, let's imagine math ability is 100% genetically determined. Nevertheless, a math genius born in a modern developed country is going to have a much different set of life outcomes than the same person born in a hunter gatherer society.
guajalote
2yr ago
There are three main reasons, as I understand it, why many economists think rent controls drive up rent:
-
When renting to a new tenant, the landlord has to set the rent based on the expected market price over the next, say, 10+ years the tenant may occupy the property, instead of setting the price for the coming year knowing it can be raised later. This raises rents.
-
A rent controlled apartment is effectively an asset that gets more valuable the longer the tenant holds onto it. This reduces apartment turnover, which reduces supply, which increases price.
-
Rent control makes building new housing a less attractive business model, so fewer apartments get built, thereby reducing supply and increasing price.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. If I didn’t have a physics degree, I would need some other science or engineering degree to do patent law successfully. And as far as such degrees go, physics is one of the best because it is very broad and heavy on math so it provides a great foundation for understanding many areas of science and technology.
And more generally, what I mean by "flexible" is that many different types of jobs in many different fields will accept people with physics degrees, whereas most other degrees have a narrower range of job options. You can go into almost any field, other than certain highly specialized ones, with a physics degree.
guajalote
2yr ago
I think it's an example of the simplistic political thinking most people have, where they assume a regulation to prevent X will actually prevent X, and repealing such a regulation will cause more of X to happen. Most people think rent controls reduce rent and repealing rent controls will cause rent to rise, despite mountains of empirical data suggesting the opposite is true. It's just much easier to assume that laws do what they say they do, rather than thinking about all the complex ways that stated intentions can fail to manifest in the real world.
guajalote
2yr ago
I have a physics degree, went to law school afterwards, and now have a lucrative job as a patent attorney. Several of my classmates went to medical school with physics degrees. Physics is probably the most flexible degree you can get.
guajalote
2yr ago
Music and spoken language are two unique categories of learning because evolution has been optimizing our brains for language and music acquisition for at least hundreds of thousands of years. These are basic human social technologies that our brains are tuned to acquire quickly.
guajalote
2yr ago
Spoken language is unique. It doesn’t need to be taught because our brains have been fine-tuned by evolution to learn language and grammar for at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.
Writing is a few thousand years old, and since the invention of writing the majority of people have been illiterate. Evolution has not had time to optimize our brains to learn to read. Same with math, same with driving. These things have to be taught.
A not very bright friend of mine in college got stoned one time and was trying to express some kind of stoner thought about relativity, but kept referring to Einstein as "Frankenstein" and was confused why I kept laughing my ass off at him.
More options
Context Copy link