I have empathy for people in west Africa dying of malaria. But I also have empathy for the children that will be spared a life of misery as a result of not being sired due to malaria, or for the more environmentally adapted people that could be inhabiting their lands were they not already occupied.
It's not that I want Africans to suffer, it's just that I think saving the lives of somebody not capable of sustaining themselves actively decreases net utility due to second- and third-order effects.
Or, to put it into more industrial terms - there's no such thing as insurance without paying your insurance fees. What insurance fees has sub-saharan africa been paying to us, exactly? Their gracious donation of workers from the social caste currently responsible for the highest crime rates?
nand
1yr ago
This post seems confused by its own argument. You setup an equivalence between a negative externality of X and a positive externality of not-X, which is logically sound. You then ask why we're treating X as a negative externality instead of treating not-X as negative externality. This does not follow from your reasoning.
Indeed, the logical equivalence of "X is a negative externality with respect to not-X baseline" and "not-X is a positive externality with respect to the X baseline", means that which framing you choose to do the calculation in, cannot possibly alter the result. Minimizing f(x) and maximizing -f(x) gives you the same value of x.
nand
1yr ago
Imagine if a democrat arrested 20 republicans for possessing an illegal firearm because they misunderstood an ATF statute and the ATF webpage said that particular modification / accessory was legal. And when Rs got mad about it, a democrat said "think on the meta level - from a pure signaling standpoint - if we want to prevent people from knowingly committing gun crimes, we have to arrest people who commit gun crimes, even if they possess a defense.".
This argument makes complete sense to me. Otherwise, you get exactly the implication that people will start intentionally violating gun laws because they know that "I thought it was allowed" is a valid legal defense.
nand
1yr ago
This kind of proportional retaliation would likely reduce the amount of "cheating" in the game because people would be less likely to cheat in the first place if they received some sort of punishment for it.
My own experience and reading on this subject leads me to believe that this is an absurdly wrong conclusion. Retaliation tends to be disproportional, because people tend to underestimate harm caused to the other in doing so. This is the reason behind the common saying, "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind".
nand
1yr ago
I think the most interesting question is whether or not Shutterstock (et al.) is itself capable of deploying AI-based stock art generators. Why fear new technology displacing your business model, rather than simply adopting that new technology and using it to further cement your market position?
With their existing portfolio, surely they have the easiest means of all to train an AI on their own corpus, no? Or is access to AI-capable hardware and the necessary know-how that gatekept?
I think the interesting nuance comes to considering the possibility of both of these things being true:
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Social reinforcement is a real effect, significant enough to be worth counteracting, and disproportionately hurts women.
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The upper end of the merit distribution naturally skews male, due to biological differences alone.
In such a world, which I have strong reason to believe we occupy, the meritocratic solution would be to enforce male/female quotas that are tuned to counteract 1 without negating 2. In other words, we want to find the correct ratio p of men:women that cancels out the evaporative cooling of women in tech but without lowering the resulting quality of tech workers as a result. (In other words, we want a policy that correctly identifies and counteracts any time a more skilled woman is usurped by a less skilled man because of gender bias in hiring/exposure, but without ever hiring a less skilled woman to replace a more skilled man just to fulfill a ratio)
The combination of my two assumptions leads to a correct ratio that's somewhere in between 0.5 and 1.0. For example, say that 90% of tech workers are currently male, then perhaps a '20% women in tech' quota would be net beneficial for overall merit. I think we would arrive somewhere fruitful if the discussion was about where on this scale that figure lies. But this is a discussion that can't happen, because insinuating p>0.5 is extremely taboo in the blue tribe, while insinuating that quotas could be beneficial at all is taboo in the red tribe.
nand
1yr ago
For somebody mostly ignorant of politics: How come Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea was largely ignored by the west, or at the very least, did not receive such widespread popular culture support (e.g. Ukrainian flags everywhere)?
nand
1yr ago
Baltic Pipe is also scheduled to start operating at the start of October, delivering gas from Norway to Poland (via Denmark). So the destruction of Nord Stream doesn't hurt Poland much and puts them into a good position to sell gas to other countries.
if he lied, or even was misinformed, Ukrainian credibility will take a hit.
The one thing I have found consistently weird about the entire Western perception of this conflict is the universal mass-amnesia of the fact that Ukranian and Russian are birds of a feather. I personally tune out everything that comes from the mouth of a slavic leader as an obvious fabrication, and wait for the independent corroboration of events.
nand
1yr ago
Presumably the rest is coming from rare variants (the cutoff in this study is a minor allele frequency (MAF) of < 1% which is quite high), structural variants, or some genetic dark matter implying that our heritability estimates are too high or not being driven by DNA (?).
Or environmental factors (e.g. prevalent nutritional deficiencies)?
Incidentally, how do heritability estimates discriminate between genes that "causally" influence height (e.g. a gene that, when expressed, somehow biostructurally increases bone growth), and genes that dictate "unrelated" behavioral patterns which, in turn, affect the desired trait (e.g. craving/distaste for junk food)? Am I right in thinking that this is another major weakness of GWAS - even if you identify candidate genes, those genes might completely fail to transfer to, say, another population in which junk food doesn't exist?
So if you run a GWAS identifying N promising genes for affecting height on US citizens, you couldn't use that to reliably increase the height of European babies?
nand
1yr ago
The libertarians and fiscal hawks were saying we only had 30 years in the 90s, 20 years in the 2000s, 10 years in the 2010s... and now its next year or the year after.
Do you have a citation on this? (Especially the implied consensus)
nand
1yr ago
It's not altruism if I'm getting something in return (or have already gotten something in return and am therefore indebted).
nand
1yr ago
We can see this in cases like Kyrie Irving mentioned below, and Kanye West, where if anyone says anything bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory, they are pounced on and labeled as fascist and far right.
Major nit: There's a difference between saying something "bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory" and saying something that can, without much interpretative effort, be understood as literally meaning "I want to systematically kill Jewish people".
Using Kanye West's outbursts as an example to prove a point about how you can't criticize Jews without being deplatformed is at least as misrepresentative of reality as claiming you're being victimized by somebody's (unwitting) use of the 'OK Sign' hand gesture.
nand
1yr ago
Note: the guy who kicked the other developers out was rather inactive as far as actual development of the project goes, so that does make this a bit of a pointless move. In open source, power is awarded to those who do. Merely holding the keys does not make you the supreme ruler. If you kick out the majority developers of a project, they will fork the project and leave you holding an empty bag. What this kid tried to do is take over a project he's not a majority, or even substantial, contributor to. That is a faux pas and a no-go in open source, and the project should rightfully be "deplatformed" (*) because of it.
Not because of his political opinions.
(*) But, please, call a duck a duck. A hostile take-over is bad enough, why does the media have to distort and lie and frame this as "malware"??
Yet I've never met anyone who seems to have achieved quantifiable improvements in their lives due to it, or said that they've been "fixed" or "cured" from whatever was wrong with them and don't need it anymore.
I feel like I satisfy these criteria and I'm willing to discuss this with you in further detail, if you'd like. I can quantify improvements on the following metrics post-therapy:
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Self-assessment of life satisfaction and mood (measured daily).
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Number of friends, number of minutes spent engaging in meaningful social connection (by daily self-assessment).
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Sleep schedule consistency (measured by, for example, number of appointments missed due to sleep issues).
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Income and work schedule consistency (measured by my working hours, which I log).
As well as a similar number of harder-to-quantify but very personally noticeable improvements to my quality of life, such as my excitement and eagerness to try out new things, my decrease in aversion to social risk, and the fact that I can now stand in front of a mirror and admire my appearance instead of hating it. I attribute my decision to go to a therapeutic rehab for 3-4 months, as well as the ~2 years of follow-up talk therapy, as the major causal factors in arriving at these results. And while "cure" is a strong word, I previously satisfied the diagnostic criteria of three major mental illnesses (major depression, personality disorder, and social anxiety), and post-therapy I no longer satisfy the diagnostic criteria of any of them.
Specific factors that helped me:
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Being thrown into an unfamiliar social environment and having no other option but to learn to engage with the people around me and engage in unfamiliar hobbies (since I had no PC during all of this).
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Receiving encouragement (and social pressure) to leave my comfort zone and overcome fears.
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Better understanding my own emotions, wants and needs, through talk therapy and critical analysis of my behavior.
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Providing exposure to, practice on and familiarization with alternative behavioral strategies to deal with negative emotions.
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Literally just having a parental surrogate figure that cares about your well-being and is not themselves mentally disordered in the same genetically inherited ways you are.
But I will go out and say that therapy is not an abstract thing - the most effective interventions are also the most visceral and concrete. I would broadly speaking characterize it as the process of reprogramming my emotional reactions to certain stimuli. No amount of thinking will do that, you have to experience the world in a different way, to arrive at a different result.
I will also, quite frankly, propose that the success rate of therapy depends more on the individual receiving it than the practitioner, and that a better outcome is generally correlated with other good stabilizing factors - so ironically, those most in need of therapy are those least equipped to benefit from it.
nand
1yr ago
Shower thought: I live in an area that has 100% green electric power generation. If I use more power than necessary, does this increase or decrease my net carbon footprint? Say I pay out of my pocket to run 1 MJ of green power through a resistor. What effect does this have on my carbon footprint, as defined by the difference in overall emissions compared to the counterfactual world in which I didn't do this?
I have conflicting thoughts:
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Power is power. If I didn't use that power, it could have been used instead of coal-derived power by somebody else. And obviously, most people would prefer to use greener power rather than less green power, if given a choice - and this argument holds all the way down the chain to the person using the least green power available. So the net addition to my carbon footprint when wasting 1 MJ of energy is determined by whatever it takes to produce 1 MJ of power at the tail end (i.e. coal). Or a slightly refined version: By supply and demand, increasing demand on green power just drives up the price of green power, causing more people to use non-green power because of the price differential, thus leading to the same 1 MJ to be burned in coal plants to cover the waste.
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As a consumer of green power, I am essentially paying for the construction of green power plants. So all I'm doing is subsidizing the production of more green power, so my net carbon footprint is the sum of what it takes to build that infrastructure, minus whatever benefit will be derived from it after I'm done using it - so probably effectively neutral (or slightly negative).
nand
1yr ago
When people talk about big tech failing my first thoughts are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Apple. Not exactly companies designing industrial manufacturing / CAD software.
nand
1yr ago
I guess the part I'm confused about is how it isn't an obvious foregone conclusion that it was an accident, just based off the complete absence of plausible motive. Why would they deliberately attack two random farmers in the middle of nowhere?
A Ukrainian false flag would make more sense than a deliberate Russian attack, but even so, why would you false flag with something that looks like an obvious accident.
nand
1yr ago
I suspect (and nodding to the other post downthread) there's probably a gender angle to this; under the lens of rational self-interest it makes more sense for women to be progressive-conservative (PC for short), because reinforcing power structures is their evolutionary specialization (being the supply-side gender, they want their prices as high as possible), and more sense for men to be liberal, since they prosper when power structures flatten (more available and accessible ways to pay said price). Which is probably why that's what we see borne out in opinion polls, voting splits, and chosen professions.
This is an intriguing framing and something I'd like to learn more about. Do you have any references to recommended reading?
nand
1yr ago
But if there is no reprisal, then Poland, at least, has to be asking, what's the point of belonging to NATO? NATO, the alliance that was specifically created to deter Russian military incursions?
But... Russia has not taken hostile military action against Poland. The missile, if it even was theirs, was clearly aimed at the Ukraine. Two farmers died. Nobody gives a shit.
nand
1yr ago
Even "softcore" urination is banned there, for example. Also public nudity is a very gray area and, from my understanding, de-facto prohibited.
nand
1yr ago
Do the relationships between crime and economic equality get any more interesting when you break crime down into subtypes? Somehow, my naive imagination is that poverty would primarily motivate material theft, while wealth primarily enables psychopathic crimes (murder, rape, etc.).
Not necessarily. This just requires the distance-related empathy function scaling sufficiently slowly so as to sum up to a manageable amount of suffering.
Although admittedly, even one cent is too much for this argument, because one cent multiplied by a population of ten billion is still orders of magnitude more than I would even be capable of feeling compelled to provide. As a counter-perspective, if I would be happy donating, say, a grand sum of $10,000 (after factoring out uncertainty) to raise the quality of life of the world as a whole in a utilitarian way, this maths out to a millionth of a dollar per person even if we assume a completely even distribution. Or, you know, a tiny fraction of a cent. (Of course, in reality, I would prioritize those $10,000 differently, so the proportion of it allocated to remote africans would probably be less than a millionth of a cent)
So not valuing an african at even a cent seems quite realistic. It's actually an absurdly high price to put on an anonymous life.
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