tikimixologist
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User ID: 257
As it happens, I liked the administrators in question. THAT"S THE POINT: The nature of any organization is that agents, such as school administrators, often are incentivized to act in a manner not conducive to the mission of the organization,
Here's the most I can make out of your reasoning:
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Agents don't necessarily act in the best interest of the principal.
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...
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A second set of agents will somehow fix or improve things.
Can you fill in (2)? The closest you come is "teachers know more about their students than administrators do", but you now seem to be backing away from this claim.
If you're not claiming the second set of agents is somehow better aligned with principals, what are you claiming? Or maybe you aren't claiming (3) at all?
such as pressure to teach how to game standardized tests, and pressure to rubber stamp principals' funding priorities.
Ok. I'll bite.
Teaching the mechanics of testing along with techniques for ballparking and figuring out certain answers are definitely wrong is not an unreasonable demand. I know there's a claim that "teaching to the test" somehow involves techniques that don't convey the material, but in the rare occasions someone has shown me what it actually involves it's mostly teaching the actual curriculum instead of whatever the teacher feels like.
If you want to argue this claim of mine, a great way to do so would be to a real high stakes standardized test from CA or NY and explain the mechanics of getting students to do well on this test without also learning the material well. A bad way would be saying the words "teaching to the test" or "game the test" with no specifics.
Teachers have no demonstrated ability to be administrators or competent stewards of funds, so I don't know why I should care what they think about funding priorities.
But employees should also get some way to push back against being asked to wear diapers at work.
They do. It's called McDonald's, Walmart, or any other non-Amazon job which - according to /u/limestheif - pay more than the competition in return for demanding more from workers. This isn't some kind of monopsony-ish situation where only one employer in the state needs their specialized skillset.
You seem to want to eliminate the opportunity to work harder and get more money for those that want it, I guess cause you know better than they do or something.
(I'm ignoring the fact that the diaper story is mostly FUD based on exaggerations/universalization about a problem that happens to many older adults.)
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Yes, in nearly all cases, including basically 100% of cases where the request is made to a specific corporation.
The main case where they might not be is if the request is so diffuse that the government has no power against folks who ignore it. E.g., I can see Bush's post 9/11 requests that the American people be nice to Muslims as not being coercive.
Things I've admitted to thinking:
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Trump seems pretty ok.
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"I have sexdar. It's like gaydar, but I can predict pronouns with >99% accuracy!" Admittedly the trans thing was just starting but wasn't so crazy as it is now
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Women aren't in tech cause they don't want to be.
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Assorted environmental things
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Poor people have it good in America and their problems are mostly self inflicted
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I don't vote, no one should. (This was to a girl who was in some voting encouragement NGO.)
But again, I'm not arguing these points. I'm trolling, entertaining myself and exerting playful intellectual dominance. You can have a prediction contest, but the first bet involves the loser buying the next round of drinks and the second bet puts her at risk of losing clothing.
Would you be able to off-handedly mention if the topic comes up, "Yeah, I think Ben Shapiro is basically right" and also not act like Ben Shapiro?
"It's so sad, Ben Shapiro is 100% right on everything yet he'll never know the love of a woman." If you aren't saying it with a smirk, don't say it.
I also can't stress enough that an important part of the delivery is being >6'1", benching your bodyweight and having flat abs.
Meanwhile the young ladies would be advised by their families, and the prospect of an uneugenic marriage would be regarded with the same scorn and detestation as incest. Forget falling in love, that's romantic nonsense the young are confused by,
A common fallacy I've seen is to compare one historical ideology/cultural practice with modern life, and use that comparison as a point against the historical version.
But a much more fair comparison would be the one Galton made, which compares his proposed eugenic society to real life 1860-1870 England:
"The best form of civilization in respect to the improvement of the race, would be one in which society was not costly; where incomes were chiefly derived from professional sources, and not much through inheritance; where every lad had a chance of showing his abilities, and, if highly gifted, was enabled to achieve a first-class education and entrance into professional life, by the liberal help of the exhibitions and scholarships which he had gained in his early youth; where marriage was held in as high honor as in ancient Jewish times;" - Galton 1869
Note the alternative Galton is comparing to is marriages based on inherited title and income. Do you believe that real world alternative in 1869 was better than Galton's proposal?
The Nazis just took it to the logical extreme,
No. The Nazis did their own thing that was not particularly related to actual eugenic proposals. Since you invoke Galton, here's the rest of the quote above:
"where the pride of race was encouraged (of course I do not refer to the nonsensical sentiment of the present day, that goes under that name); where the weak could find a welcome and a refuge in celibate monasteries or sisterhoods, and lastly, where the better sort of emigrants and refugees from other lands were invited and welcomed, and their descendants naturalized." - Galton, 1869
Galton was generally a friend to Anglo-Jewry and viewed them favorably, as anyone who actually read him would realize: https://galton.org/essays/1900-1911/galton-1910-jewish-chronicle-eugenics.pdf
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Recall that the question you were answering is premised on the Trump wing beating the Cheney wing. You are now saying the Trump wing has not successfully beaten the Cheney wing yet.
That's true, but kind of a non sequitur.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
In this scenario representative share is important. Seeing a lot of people like you doing something makes it feel a lot more possible than seeing a few people do it.
There's two ways of interpreting "representative share."
One is as a proportion of the role the model inhabits. I.e. what percentage of CEOs are Asian American? What percentage of doctors were Asian American at the time the answer to that question went from "approx 0%" to "basically all"?
A second is proportion of people that the modeler observes. I.e. what percentage of Asian Americans that a young Asian American sees are doctors, CEOs/business executives/etc? I think you are alluding to the latter. By definition this will be biased towards highly visible roles such as rapper or sports player.
The natural solution then is to reduce the number of black people in highly visible professions. We could ban rap music and penalize sports teams where whites/Asians are underrepresented. Then black kids will have fewer rappers/basketball players to look up to and might turn to people they know in real life with more achievable professions.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Well my opinion is irrelevant. The poor people who are refusing to look for work are the ones deciding that problems continuing is better than the remedy. The folks refusing to leave Flint for San Antonio (or other functional city) are similarly the ones deciding they want the problem to continue.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
The word "incapacitation" does not appear in your original comment
The concept however is clearly spelled out: "...we need longer prison sentences for the criminals we have in order to prevent the same guy from doing 4 more crimes."
Moreover, your napkin math has nothing whatsoever to do with how crime is distributed among criminals--it just compares different policing and sentencing strategies. The distribution of crime at no point enters into your calculation.
"Suppose the average criminal commits crimes at a rate of 3/year between age 20 and 35, meaning that in the absence of policing his career will consist of 45 crimes."
I suppose it was slightly badly phrased, I should have described it as a "representative criminal" instead of "average criminal". But yes - my napkin math shows that in the regime of high #s of crimes/criminal, locking them up forever is a very effective strategy.
The question of distribution of crimes/criminal is how much crime actually comes from that regime. You previously said you think it's a lot:
I believe that crime does roughly follow an 80/20 rule, with a few people having a rap sheet many pages long
Do you want me to disagree? I can do that. 2/3 is not that high of a clearance rate; on the flip side, 1/3 is not that low.
Interesting - it looks like my 33% is not too far off from the actual number of 41% for violent crime. The "high" numbers you're providing are only for murder, which is a red herring - most crime isn't murder.
You state that the effect of deterrence would have to be 70% (although only account for prospective criminals, not those who have already been arrested in the past), but don't actually give any reason to suggest that this is unrealistic.
You're the one making the claim deterrence is the best. Kind of strange how you haven't actually provided any estimates of elasticity here.
I don't follow the logic from the stats you quoted to your estimate; can you make this argument in more detail?
Not in this thread, because I don't see any reason you wouldn't ignore what I say and misrepresent me as you've already done repeatedly.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
At any point, did you google to see if there is any empirical research on what deters criminals? This is an empirical question.
It's also a question of only peripheral importance to the actual topic of discussion, namely that of incapacitation. The paper you linked is irrelevant because it's not even attempting to measure the crime prevented by incapacitation.
In fact, you explicitly assume these effects to be 0.
Given how many misinterpretations of my comments you seem to be making, I'm beginning to think they might be deliberate.
Just on the off chance you are discussing this in good faith, let me quote a sentence in which I very explicitly do not assume deterrence is 0: "In this scenario, for doubling clearance rates to work even as well as harsh prison sentences, it would need to cut num_criminals [deterrence] by 70%."
The thing you linked to is primarily about recidivism probability. What is its relevance in this context?
You could try reading the first comment I wrote, which explains clearly that a) I'm looking at one particular graph which is an approximation of P(crime/criminal) b) it's weak evidence and c) I'm asking if someone has better data.
I did dig a bit deeper and found this somewhat dated study: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpr94.pdf
Basically the 272k criminals released from jail in 1994 are believed to have committed 100k violent crimes and 208k property crimes within 3 years.
As per table 12, 55% of people who were released from prison in 1994 had 7 or more arrests previously and about 75% of this group would be arrested again within 3 years. 44% of the group had been in prison at least once before, and this group also has a 75% 3 year rearrest rate after getting out.
These numbers sure seem in the same ballpark as my napkin math, which you haven't stated any particular disagreement with.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Generally having a highly certain and rapid pipeline from crime -> arrest -> trial -> punishment is a stronger deterrent than just a longer sentence.
I do some back of the envelope arithmetic here, based solely on example numbers involving many crimes/criminal, and get totally different results: https://www.themotte.org/post/329/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/58654?context=8#context
Can you be quantitative about what, specifically, you disagree with in that analysis?
We may have long prison sentences, but violent criminals do not spend much time in jail.
...with a few people having a rap sheet many pages long). Are they doing a lot of crimes because we find them and let them off easy, or because we never find them in the first place?
If as you say they have a "rap sheet many pages long", that means we did in fact let them off too easy the first time. How could a crime be on their rap sheet if we didn't find them earlier?
The paper you link is entirely unrelated to the question I'm asking, namely "how fat tailed the distribution of number of crimes per criminal?"
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Are you claiming 13/53 is not representative of non-murder crimes? Or are you merely claiming the data isn't easily available?
In any case, criticizing the lack of data in a comment that explicitly acknowledged incomplete data and asked where to find better data is a little silly. It's adding nothing.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
What's bad faith about asking for a simple existence proof?
The Chinese Robber Fallacy wouldn't be a fallacy if you could literally not find a single non-Chinese robber.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
At this point we're talking about a breakaway civilization and the wealthy don't need most of those resources.
Jeff Bezos current plan for getting resources is the following:
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Deliver goods and services to hundreds of millions of people.
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Those people provide him some of their productive output.
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The amount in (2) exceeds (1) by a marginal amount, which Bezos keeps.
The flip side of (3) is that of the resources Bezos controls today, the vast majority are devoted to creating value for the world rather than himself.
However, in this hypothetical the productive output of (2) is negligible. Bezos doesn't need to trade with the world anymore, he can just make whatever he wants with his own robots factorio style. He has no need for the vast resources he previously controlled in order to serve the world - just whatever he and his buddies need.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Principals, whose jobs depend on how students perform on state tests, have an incentive...[to do things that]...I never claimed...worked.
I'm pretty confused here. Principals push you to do things that don't improve performance on tests because...they are incentivized to improve performance on tests?
On the flip side:
I don't have all the details on what was in the proposed curriculum because I threw it away.
we also have teachers refusing to teach the curriculum they are assigned.
It is in the interests of students that a teacher need not fear being fired for focusing instead on the analysis standards.
At least it is if you assume some random teacher knows better about what students should learn than the semi-democratically chosen school officials who created the curriculum and decided what was important enough to be on the tests.
I discussed #2 at some length.
No, you mentioned things teachers unions do. You did not explain how they improve decision making or benefit students in aggregate. If you're merely claiming that in at least one case they do (but might be negative value in aggregate), I don't disagree with that claim.
Yes, teaching how to game the test is not utterly devoid of value. But that is a red herring. The issue is whether teaching that, in lieu of teaching substantive material
If what you describe actually exists and takes a non-trivial amount of time, that would be bad. Can you please explain how to actually do this for a real standardized test in one of the 10 largest US states which was given in the last 10 years? I claim that it's not possible, except for some very trivial stuff that doesn't take much time such as "if you can rule out 2 choices out of 4, select one of the remainder at random."
I've had people tell me a few theories about how this might happen when I press the issue, but on the rare occasion they don't refuse to be specific, googling actual standardized tests suggests that their theories are impossible. Would you care to provide mechanics, as well as a link to the specific standardized test on which you think it works?
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I just tried to find this debate on youtube to understand what you're talking about. Searche queries like "fetterman oz debate unedited" find me nothing but short clips chosen by the mainstream media.
Plausibly, some people voting for Fetterman might just be completely unaware of what you saw. I'm not completely sure - I couldn't confirm it, though I certainly see the signs of youtube trying to make it impossible for me to do so.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I don't know the percentage,
Let me suggest that if you want to make a utilitarian case for something, not knowing even the most basic numbers regarding things you are concerned about kind of undermines your seriousness.
In any case, I do know the percentage. It's 11%.
The number one problem is insecurity -- having to constantly worry about stuff other people take for granted. Another problem is stigma/low social status.
Do you believe their "insecurity" is a rational or irrational response to subsisting mostly on wealth transfers? How do you expect more wealth transfers to fix this?
The low status of the poor comes from their poor behavior (refusing to work, having children out of wedlock, doing drugs, etc). How do you expect more wealth transfers to fix this?
As for the specific goods and services you imagine the poor need, I'm guessing you don't know the percentage. I'm not going to cite numbers because I don't know how you define "decent" housing, but you can easily educate yourself: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html
Anyway, consider the possibility that conservatives don't support your purported utilitarian proposals because they have an accurate picture of what poverty is actually like, and are not just basing their theories off journalistic narratives that have been false since the 80's.
tikimixologist
10mo ago
I think objectively you'd have to be pretty cucked to vote R in Florida as a naturalized or even 2nd gen Chinese immigrant right now.
Can you explain this statement?
tikimixologist
11mo ago
I never said he did. He did, however, campaign on BUILDING A WALL and DEPORTING ALL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS. Maybe you missed it.
And he did more or less everything he could to accomplish this but failed to defeat the deep state. The courts shut down basically everything he did. In contrast, remember Bush teaming up with Pelosi to pass amnesty?
I do not dispute that Trump failed in this goal. I dispute that Trump was "business as usual."
tikimixologist
11mo ago
Perhaps. But then study Guiliani era NYC, not Hong Kong.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
the idea that Wall Street and Exxon are left-wing now,
Is a straw man you invented, along with the rest of your comment.
(1) Reading up on the intra-community accounts from a couple years back
I am aware of the occasional mentally unstable woman (e.g. Kathy Forth) making vague claims that plausibly mean very little. E.g. her only concrete claim is that someone touched her leg and her complaint about such resulted in his immediate expulsion. Keerthana Gopalakrishnan has similarly minor concrete claims (asked out 3x in a year) plus internal narratives ("felt unsafe").
I am not aware of anything that suggests rationalist communities have a problem worse than communities which are not considered problematic (e.g. cardiology, anti-moneylaundering, education, journalism). Perhaps if you want to make this claim you can provide evidence of it. The Time Magazine article and the various conclusions you drew (but which it did not actually say) are not such evidence.
By the same token, given the community norms, the weird/kinky/awkward/shy are encouraged to not be afraid and to let it all out. That then causes problems such as guy thinking "okay, we're friends, right? so it's perfectly normal for me to talk about jerking off in front of her" in relation to a woman who is not part of that particular community and does not know the norms.
No one claims this happened except you. Time Magazine does not. The guy who believes Time Magazine is referring to him says something entirely different happened. No one disputes him, and in the event of a dispute there is highly likely to be plenty of evidence.
I'll note you also claimed it happened during a job interview and he was her boss, which you seem to have retreated from. Why do you keep making claims such as these? Do you have some firsthand knowledge that the rest of us lack?
What did you mean when you said "I can believe it, because [insert rant about quokkas]"? I assumed it was referencing this which is entirely about my Claim 2 - that innocent rationalists will be harmed by evil and dangerous journalists/grifters/etc if they don't develop defense mechanisms. Did you mean something else?
tikimixologist
1yr ago
If you want to claim that poor Americans and residents of Flint lack agency and cannot make good choices for themselves, then the natural question is why do we allow them the freedom to make choices?
My 2 year old daughter wants to watch TV and eat candy all day. But she is not competent to make that decision and has her freedom restricted.
Even a perfectly rational agent will notice that there are costs to finding a job and benefits to having one, and that if the costs or benefits change, the cost benefit analysis changes. A rational agent "choosing not to have a job" is making that choice in the context of the current market
Yes. It seems that for some folks, idleness (supplemented by wealth transfers) is more fun than work, and that's why we have poverty.
Which media do you believe is actually conveying this message?
There's two methods of stopping crime: deterrence (not committing a crime due to fear of getting caught) and incapacitation (not doing crimes because he's in jail). Most of the "harsh sentences don't work" arguments are based on ignoring incapacitation.
But this is exactly where it's important to distinguish between scenario (a) and (b) in my comment above.
Suppose the average criminal commits crimes at a rate of 3/year between age 20 and 35, meaning that in the absence of policing his career will consist of 45 crimes. Two methods of policing:
a. Put a lot of effort into clearances, solve 2/3 of crimes, and lock him up for a year. He commits an average of 1.5 crimes before getting locked up for a year, meaning every 1.5 years he commits 2 crimes and then spends a year in jail. He commits 10 crimes before age 35. Total crimes = num_criminals x 10, total jail time = 10 years.
b. Solve 1/3 of crimes and lock them up forever. The criminal successfully commits 3 crimes before getting caught on average. He's locked up forever and has committed 3 crimes before his 35'th birthday. Total crimes = num_criminals x 3, total jail time = 14 years.
In this scenario, for doubling clearance rates to work even as well as harsh prison sentences, it would need to cut num_criminals by 70%.
In a "few criminals, lots of crimes/criminal" scenario, even a low clearance rate results in any individual criminal eventually getting caught.
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