shamgar
29d ago
Europe seems to be the opposite of what you suggest as a solution, but as far as I can tell it's also way more successful in dealing with homelessness and the problems it can cause than the USA or apparently Canada.
shamgar
2mo ago
The anti immigration right wing populist parties have won elections in various European countries like Italy, the Netherlands, Austria and Poland.
shamgar
2mo ago
This got me thinking a bit about surrogacy laws and how this plays out in the culture war. In my own country, the Netherlands, specifically commercial surrogacy is banned, but if you can find someone who wants to do it out of altruism, it is legal. This runs into some complications where people go to countries with laxer laws (usually poor third world countries) and get a commercial surrogate there. My impressions is that while this touches on a lot of culture war issues, it somehow is a rare issue that does not always follow established culture war lines. What I mean is that while conservatives are generally opposed to it, I have seen progressives both ardently in favour from a perspective of support for LGBT people but other leftists ardently opposed because they view it as something which in practice often amounts to rich white men exploiting poor brown women in third world countries. I suppose there is also probably a libertarian line where you don't care about it as long as everybody involved consents.
This leads to the strange result that when I look at a map on wikipedia concerning surrogacy laws, it appears at least commercial surrogacy is banned throughout most of the world, but it is legal in for instance California, Vermont, Texas, Florida and Russia. California and Vermont being on the same side as Texas, Florida and Russia on a controversial medical-ethical practice which touches on LGBT culture war stuff, with places e.g. Norway, Germany, Michigan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on the other extreme, is pretty remarkable to me.
I'm afraid I won't be able to provide your steelman for you though, because as far as I'm concerned, at least if Sam Altman and his husband paid for the surrogacy they ought to be jailed for human trafficking.
But what if an upstanding and polite civil society is the very thing I want to preserve? Ratfucking the Democrats simply means joining them in tearing it down. If I want to preserve traditional Western morality and institutions, I don't see how surrendering my political movement to a libertine billionaire with autocratic tendencies is going to help me win that fight, however skilled he may be at winning elections. In the short term it might improve a few issues because he will give some political quid pro quo pandering to actual conservatives, but I find it hard to believe surrendering a political movement to a figurehead who is hostile to its very principles is the winning play to bring about those principles.
shamgar
2mo ago
What do you make of martyrdom in light of that view? It seems to me that favouring morality over survival has worked in the past at least in some instances and at least some martyrs have had quite a say in morality.
shamgar
4mo ago
My point is simply the hard problem of consciousness. The existence of a conscious AGI might further bolster the view that consciousness can arise from matter, but not how it does. Definitively demonstrating that a physical process causes consciousness would be a remarkable advancement in the study of consciousness, but I do not see how it answers the issues posed by e.g. the Mary's room thought experiment.
shamgar
4mo ago
If some LLM or other model achieves AGI, I still don't know how matter causes qualia and as far as I'm concerned consciousness remains mysterious.
shamgar
4mo ago
I think that the tendency you are describing has to go back at least to Plato, well before Christianity entered the scene. If anything, Christianity opposes that trend by making the bodily resurrection a key element of its theology and affirming that the material world was good when it was originally created. Of course many influential Christian theologians have been influenced by (neo-)Platonism, so there is plenty of Christian theology out there that is susceptible to this heresy, but I am pretty sure its origins in Western thought is Platonism rather than Christianity.
shamgar
4mo ago
I was writing a reply about my anecdata that led me to the view that Eastern Europe is less progressive about gender than Western Europe, but when I was trying to fact check some related claim I wanted to make I stumbled across the Eurobarometer about Gender Stereotypes. Quickly scanning through some of the results, it doesn't actually seem like there is a clear trend of EE being more or less sexist than WE.
I guess I remember reading about sexual harassment in Japan being more common, like women getting groped on the subway and stuff. But yeah, to be honest, I don't really know why the idea is my in head that they are less feminist now that I think about it.
This did get me thinking on how you would quantify feminism in a country. There are things like the Global Gender Gap Report and the Gender Inequality Index, but I am generally pretty sceptical of these types of reports, because they tend to oversimplify the matter at hand. For what it's worth, the Global Gender Gap Report has the East Asian countries a bit lower than Western countries but the Gender Inequality Index has Japan and South Korea right up there with Western European countries.
However, my argument might still stand with other examples. Eastern European countries tend to have low birthrates as well, if anything usually lower than Western European ones. Although it is anecdotal, I do know some people from various Eastern European countries and have discussed cultural differences with them and as best I can tell, countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine all have low birthrates as well despite having generally much more conservative ideas about gender roles than say Sweden or the Netherlands.
shamgar
5mo ago
Japan, South Korea and China aren't exactly bulwarks of feminism compared to western countries and yet they have even lower birth rates than most European countries.
shamgar
5mo ago
My guess is in most cases he would be better off learning to deal with his disagreeability in a way that does not prevent him from forming meaningful relationships with his local community, as opposed to fleeing into an online bubble of like minded people and becoming atomized and terminally online and building an identity about being very smart. If anything your example makes me more convinced kids should not be on social media, not less.
Also, the fact that in some very specific circumstances social media might have a positive effect on children, does not necessarily mean it is a good idea to have children on social media. I have not looked into it too deeply so I am open to having my mind changed about it, but I have the impression Jonathan Haidt shows pretty convincingly that social media have had a catastrophic effect on teenage mental health, so if that is true it might still be a good idea to ban or at least disincentivize social media for children.
Finally, banning social media is not the same as banning the internet. In a world where social media is banned, your hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that. This would raise questions about the definition of social media. Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content, so kids could look up stuff about coding or politics or find an online community that they like, while not being allowed on tiktok or youtube or whatever and be exposed to algorithms that are basically trying to get you addicted to the platform's content. Or this type of algorithmic feed could become a separate 16+ feature of these platforms or whatever where everyone can use these platforms and look up stuff whereas you have to validate your account and prove you are 16+ before you get access to the addictive features. I am just fantasizing on the spot about specific policies, but trying to get kids off of addictive social media platforms does not have to mean a blanket ban on everything fun and useful on the internet.
shamgar
11mo ago
I have recently passed 30 so it might be ageing is a part of it, but I guess I hoped significant deterioration of my immune system to start later than my early thirties. I did also get covid for sure once but probably twice. If it does have a longterm impact on the immune system that could very well be it.
shamgar
11mo ago
As for vitamin D, sleep, alcohol consumption and stress, I don't think there is a significant change in between the earlier period where I barely got ill and the past year where I caught colds/flu multiple times.
shamgar
11mo ago
Previously I would maybe catch 0-2 colds a winter, never get too ill due to it and recover quickly, but in the past year I have gotten a cold/flu maybe like 4 or 5 times and I think I am getting worse symptoms (e.g. having a mild fever one or two days when I catch a cold, which I never used to) and taking longer to recover than I would previously. This has led me to wonder whether something might be affecting my immune system, but I am pretty sure that I did not make any significant changes in obvious factors like sleep, diet, activity level, stress, etc. Does theMotte have any other ideas what might cause one to get ill more often and more severely and what can be done about it?
Houston seems to be quite successful with the housing first policy indeed, although providing housing for homeless people isn't quite the same as deregulating housing. Deregulating housing probably does make it cheaper to provide housing for homeless people, so fair enough. Houston isn't the only place with liberal gun laws, so I'm not convinced gun laws have anything to do with it though.
I tried looking up some statistics for a bit to check my intuitions in homelessness overall, but the statistics seem to be not very straightforward. For instance, the list on wikipedia for countries by rate of homelessness has the USA at 19.5 per 10.000 people and France at 48.7, however the table also a column called 'unsheltered per 10.000' and there USA scores 12, whereas France scores 4.5. So I have no clue whether France or the USA has more people living on the street now based on these statistics. I've never been in the USA personally, but I have been to lots of places in Europe, including non-touristy bits and not so nice parts of various towns and I've never seen a fent zombie or anything like that and I've never been harassed by a homeless person beyond obnoxious begging and I do know various Europeans who were shocked at the amount of (visible) homelessness when traveling to the USA. Whether there are more or less of them I do not know, but homeless people anecdotally sure seem to cause more problems and be more visible in the USA, despite the USA's liberal gun laws. I don't know that much about housing regulation in the USA, but I certainly would not describe housing in my own country of the Netherlands as deregulated.
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