non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
non_radical_centrist
24d ago
Personally, I've had 0 success on Bumble, and some moderate success on both Tinder and Hinge. Which app works best for an individual isn't very easily predictable.
non_radical_centrist
17d ago
I'd be more worried about the conflict dragging in Pakistan/India/China who are borderline undeveloped themselves and already have nukes
non_radical_centrist
19d ago
I recommend Khan Academy as an intro. They have video lessons, and built in problems for their website. And being able to actually solve some problems is necessary to really understand economics, stuff like macroeconomics can be pretty unintuitive to think about.
non_radical_centrist
22d ago
For some people it's a core part of their identity. For other people it's just a shorthand to describe their dating practices. That's true for all sexualities.
non_radical_centrist
22d ago
Sexuality covers a wide range of things. Ultimately they're just a shorthand to describe what sort of sexual activities someone gets up to. The words don't necessarily represent just what gets someone's dick up. Someone could get horny at the sight of both men and women, but ardently only sleep with one gender; are they bisexual? I think it's entirely up to them whether they want to call themselves bisexual or not.
non_radical_centrist
27d ago
So how does a politician apply that rule when it comes to an issue that's a values judgement, like abortion, or the best amount to redistribute from the rich to the poor, or gun rights, or freedom of speech vs hate speech?
non_radical_centrist
28d ago
Those might be better options, but that dodges the question of what responsibility the politician has when their voters say they really want price controls but would in reality prefer one of those options, or even doing nothing, over price controls.
non_radical_centrist
28d ago
So is a politician justified in restricting the rights of minorities, if the populace is deeply bigoted and actually want the politician to go even further?
non_radical_centrist
28d ago
That's kind of my point. The people think they want one thing, but they really want another. I don't think people really want to erase minority cultures or kill a minority population with roving death camps either, they just get tricked into thinking they want it. But what rights do politicians have to bypass what the people think they want?
non_radical_centrist
29d ago
People are already achieving that level of communication with randos in online comments sections. Pen pals rarely formed very tight bonds.
non_radical_centrist
7d ago
I read the Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania a couple weeks ago. I was going to write a more in depth review covering more sections, but got bored after writing my thought process about how employers aren't allowed to use discriminatory tests and never got around to writing more, so I'll post what I did write.
Let’s all people have a factor that you can represent numerically how good they will be at a job. Let’s call it the m, for mystery, because exactly what will make someone good at a job- e.g knowledge, skill, conscientiousness, etc. can be very difficult to measure, and knowing how important proportionally each sub-factor is to the final m factor or even what every sub-factor maybe is also very difficult. But, we can still try to estimate someone’s m. If you have a job that largely involves lifting heavy boxes and moving them around, you can get a decent estimate by having a candidate try to lift a heavy box- if they fall, they almost certainly have low m for that job, and if they succeed with ease, they’ll likely have a high m for that job. If you have a CEO position for a large multinational corporation, you can like at a candidate’s previous job experience- if they’ve previously been in charge of a corporation that hit records profits during their tenure, they’ll likely have high m. If while previously in charge of a corporation, it went from high profits to bankruptcy, or they’ve only ever held a job as a janitor, you can guess that they’d have low m for the position.
We can say with confidence that on average, black people have lower m than white people for most jobs. Whether this is because of genetics, culture, discrimination, or something else isn’t relevant to this discussion, because this discussion isn’t about increasing their m, just about what are fair hiring practices. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed, both Congress and the general population of America overwhelmingly wanted two things: For black people to not be actively discriminated against, but also for people to be able to still select the best employees for a job, even if all the best employees were white. But what is “discrimination”? That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer.
Let’s say an employer has 1000 job candidates, and needs to select 100 to fill a newly created job. The employer wants to get the 100 employees with the highest m- he is unlikely to succeed perfectly, but he still wants to get as close as he can. If the employer asked all potential job candidates to fill out a brief questionnaire as the first stage of the application process, and one of the questions was “Are you black?”, and then the employer threw out every single application where someone answered “Yes”, the average m in the remaining pool would likely be higher, although he also would’ve likely tossed some candidates who did belong in the final pool. Whether it’s a good idea from the employer’s perspective may vary- maybe the employer really has no good ideas on how to figure out which candidates have higher m, and his next step will just be to randomly select 100 candidates from the remaining pool, in which case he’ll have done better in terms of average m score than if he didn’t purge black candidates.
But, I think almost everyone would agree that purging black applications like that is discrimination, in the letter of the ACR, in the spirit of what Congress intended it, and that the majority of Americans don’t want to see that sort of candidate selection happen, not from government employers and not from private employers either. The government would tell any employer that tried to do that something like, “Stop that, rework your hiring practices so that you’re actually more directly testing for m, and not just discriminating against blacks”.
So the employer goes back to the drawing board, and comes up with another test. He will take a pencil, and slide it into the hair of a candidate. After releasing, if the pencil falls out of the hair, the candidate proceeds to the next stage, if it stays in, the candidate is removed from selection. That’s the Apartheid South African Pencil test, and in practice that’d basically be the same as the previous test, although it’s hypothetically possible some black people would pass and some white people would fail. Or maybe the employer tries to be slightly less blatant, and instead does a swimming test(black have worse buoyancy than white people). Unless the job actually involves swimming in some way, I think most people would still agree that such a test is discriminatory, not actually measuring m in any way, at least not more than a generic fitness test does, and would only have predictive power in job performance because it’s managing to exclude blacks.
The employer now comes up with a fourth test. It will be a straightforward algebra exam, the sort you’d see in a 10th grade math course. If the job does not involve algebra in any way, like it’s a job moving boxes around, or maybe it’s a cashier job at a retailer, or even a more high class job like a lawyer that doesn’t really involve math, then this test will also disproportionately fail black candidates, who tend to be worse at algebra. But, is it actually discriminatory? Where the previous tests only would have any predictive power for job performance in so far as they measured whether or not someone’s black, and black people on average did worse at the job, the algebra test might have real predictive power, because it’s not just measuring algebra skill, it’s also measuring general intelligence, and general intelligence would be a major component of m for almost any job.
Whether the test is actually discriminatory now comes down to whether “general intelligence” is real, and also that if it is real, can it be measured by an algebra test? I don’t think that question, in the absence of formal studies, has an obvious answer. I think reasonable people could very easily come to believe that algebra skill is divorced from other intellectual tasks like public speaking, literacy, chess skill, etc. My understanding of the literature is that that is not true- that there is a general intelligence, and skill at all intellectual tasks are relatively closely correlated. And that that general intelligence is also closely correlated with job performance in pretty much every job. But, reasonable judges who aren’t good at parsing scientific studies themselves can be convinced that general intelligence does not work like that.
Richard Hanania, in The Origin’s of Woke, writes that judges and bureaucrats expanding the definition of discrimination to also include tests that really measure future job performance is one of the key origins of wokeness. I wouldn’t disagree. Where I do disagree with him is that I don’t think it’s easily possible to permit real skill tests but ban actually discriminatory test, because they can look very similar. Ultimately I don’t disagree with his conclusion that the laws should be altered to allow for discrimination though, because I think where in the 60’s the Civil Rights Act may have been needed to prevent employers doing discrimination along the lines of a Pencil Test for employees like how the American people wanted, today the vast majority of Americans are no longer anti-black racist, despite what many on the left think. I think you could remove a lot of anti-discrimination protections, and unlike in the 60’s, a combination of few people today being actually racist and non-governmental social pressure to keep the real racists in line will prevent the sort of racism Americans hate.
non_radical_centrist
18d ago
I don't read much of Kulak's stuff, I find most of his writing to be wrong in some way. I would call this piece he had pretty racist too, since it implicitly dismisses any possible environmental cause for India's woes. The amount of extreme government disfunction, poor nutrition and poor healthcare many, many Indians receive I think are very plausible candidates for low human capital there, which he doesn't address at all.
non_radical_centrist
23d ago
He might be able to be sexually attracted to and have physically pleasurable sex with a strange woman, but would feel mentally very uncomfortable doing something so intimate with a stranger and would not actually enjoy the experience.
non_radical_centrist
27d ago
5000 years ago people knew that short haired cats had short haired offspring.
Yet no one put together the theory of natural selection. People also knew objects fell when you dropped them, but it took millennia for people to really start formalizing it.
If something exists then it is 1. Benefitial, 2. Bening, or 3. Extinted/In process of disappearing
Or 4., linked to another trait that is beneficial, such that the two traits are passed down together.
Darwin's theory let him make predictions about nature. Before him, people weren't making predictions about nature, about how different environments would lead to different traits being more prevalent.
non_radical_centrist
2d ago
Sure, but anyone who's getting a sentence of a year is unlikely to be deterred by a single physical punishment.
There are two types of crimes really. Crimes made impulsively, and crimes that are planned. We can use corporal punishment to deter planned crimes, especially planned crimes that are so minor that sentencing someone to even a day of prison would be overkill but hitting them once with a cane is appropriate, like shoplifting. For crimes made impulsively, like a person having their mother insulted then committing assault against the insulter, we use prison to keep them off the streets because we just can't have them as part of society.
non_radical_centrist
19d ago
I still find it somewhat useful as a quick link to the people whose profiles I can check for new comments.
non_radical_centrist
27d ago
A politician's constituents are less likely to be as unified on these issues as they would be on abundant and affordable housing and energy.
Across a nation? Sure. But I'm certain you can find some smaller constituencies where the voters are quite unified in what they want their representative to do.
Can you define hate speech?
I can't, and the voters might not be able to either, but that won't necessarily stop them from demanding something be done. I have a similar response to the rest of your questions: I am not trying to argue for specific policies, I am asking what a politician has the obligation to do when their voters start angrily making demands that something should be done, but what they say they want is not what they really want long term.
non_radical_centrist
28d ago
As for actually answering your question—the only winning move is not to play. Reneging on a popular promise is suicide. A politician ought not to make ones he thinks are stupid or immoral. He should run on a positive platform that just happens to deprioritize or counter the popular thing; it’s much easier to be ignored than be told you’re a dumb idiot.
Sure, but say 2 years into a 5 year term there's a massive gasoline shortage, and the majority of people start calling for price caps like in the 70s. What do the politicians do then?
non_radical_centrist
6d ago
In Canada, 2016 one student had to say it out loud when we were reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I remember how all the white kids were really awkward about it but the black kids didn't care and were laughing a bit.
non_radical_centrist
6d ago
That post-secondary isn't going to work out for you, and to enlist in the military.
non_radical_centrist
19d ago
I just read a good chunk of The Mystery of the Kibbutz. I'm not reading more because it got to be an awfully repetitive book, but the first few chapters were pretty interesting about how Jewish communes were relatively successful despite how one might expect a society without free markets to fail.
non_radical_centrist
19d ago
I don't think Cuba is doing that well, even if they're doing better than some of the Caribbean nations. Maybe they're evidence that authoritarianism can be better than democracy, when the voters inevitably elect populists who just turn the country into authoritarianism with a veneer of democracy anyway. I don't think Cuba is evidence that centrally planned economies are better than free markets.
https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/in-cuba-the-terminal-stage-of-communism
non_radical_centrist
27d ago
Would this fit better in the Culture War thread? It's roughly on topic and certainly seems fleshed out enough.
I sometimes like the lower standards of the smaller threads. Less pressure to thoroughly defend my position.
non_radical_centrist
28d ago
It'd probably be easier to make the automation with a chrome extension that automatically fills out the fields when you navigate to the webpage. Creating an android app interface feels like a lot of work, especially for a beginner, when you're the only one using the app. The only reason I'd see to use the app is if you often want to do the parking requests while you don't have access to your laptop. And even then, I'm pretty sure it's possible and not too much more difficult to do browser extensions for a phone browser.
To what degree should the politicians do what the general population wants, when what the general population wants is stupid? The most clear cut case of the general population wanting stupid stuff I think is price controls- the idea of keeping rent or gasoline below a certain hard cap is very popular with a lot of ordinary people. But it of course would be counter-productive- it'll only result in a lower supply of something people desperately want, and force them to start paying with their time in long lines instead of paying just with their wallets. So if 90% of the population say they want a cap on prices of something, does their elected representative have a responsibility to say "No you guys are stupid, I know what you really want" and not implement price controls?
Another example would be nationalism. A lot of times, people will be chauvinistic about their culture, and want to oppress minority cultures. Not really so much in the US recently despite all the fuss about race relations, but there are many extreme cases internationally. The majority will try to inflict on the minority restrictions on using their minority language in schools, prevent access to elected and civil service jobs, take children away from families, forcibly expel people, even execute the minorities with roving firing squads or death camps, in a brief list from least bad to worst actions chauvinism often leads to. Does a politician have any obligation to say, "No, I will not implement this policy. Not only is it immoral, it won't actually make life better for you" to the people who elected him if the 90% majority population wants to inflict those degradations on the 10% minority?
The obvious slippery slope is a politician thinking he knows better in a case where he doesn't actually know better, or deciding laws based on his own personal values instead of the general population's in a case where there is no option that's better on all metrics. E.g, abortion laws always have a trade off between the preferences and health of the mother against the fetus, and where you want abortion laws to be at depends on the ratio of which you value mother:fetus.
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