username
1yr ago
It's also getting harder for women to find mentors because it's riskier for men to enter that kind of relationship. I don't have any ideas, I suppose mentors can do their best to vet their mentee candidates for the risky behaviour, and mentees can find ways to signal low-risk.
Yes, I mentioned that not doing lockdowns when everyone else is doing one would still result in many of the similar consequences.
That said, Swedes' private behaviour is also partially responsible for some of these consequences. Even without lockdowns, many Swedes stayed home, didn't go to restaurants, moved into a bigger house to comfortably WFH. The Swedish government also had distributed relief transfer payments. All of this contributes to inflation.
username
1yr ago
That doesn't sound like a crazy position to me. I think the lockdowns are a proximate cause, e.g. the inflationary policies of covid-aid funds weren't necessary without lockdowns. The tech-sector wouldn't have been able to become over-valued so quickly if it weren't for everyone staying home.
On the other hand, we don't have a lot of good data for what would have happened if we hadn't done lockdowns. Places who did fewer lockdowns still have to deal with the overvaluation of tech, global supply chain issues and cost of housing increases. So we can't really blame these issues on the marginal lockdown. (Although I'd be curious to see how if places that didn't lock down have better flu/RSV situations)
I'm not even sure who we can blame for lockdowns. Places like Sweden who avoided mandated lockdowns still saw large segments of their economies "shut down". Are ordinary people to blame? There's also very little variance in the responses from different countries/institutions, which suggests 'elite culture' bears responsibility.
And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.
username
1yr ago
I don't personally object to hunting, but because you said "I don't know what it is", I'll take a crack at it: Hunting isn't about the food, it's about the sport. It's not crazy to think there's something deontologically wrong with killing creatures for fun.
username
1yr ago
If factory farming is unnatural, is 19th century farming also unnatural? Where do you draw the line? Seems to me you could argue all food, being a product of agriculture, is unnatural, which kind of makes the label pointless.
At the very least, lab-grown meat is a big deviation from the status-quo. I'm not sure it would even count as raw/unprocessed food.
username
1yr ago
Ahh yes, performance agreements. My experience with these is that people don't commit to targets they can't already meet. After all, these objectives are mostly self-imposed, and the exercise is more of a formality. That said, I'm sure it's sometimes the case some execs have to work hard to meet their diversity targets. Thanks for sharing.
username
1yr ago
There are different kinds of meat alternatives,
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Actual lab-grown meat from animal cells, this could theoretically taste close to meat in texture but I suspect the taste will be off for a while. Worse than the taste, we're very far off from producing this at a wide scale.
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Growing animal proteins using yeast. This does not taste like meat but can be done cheaply. I believe milk proteins is actually cheaper than dairy farming. I'm excited to see this gain popularity.
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Impossible/beyond type of meat substitutes. These usually don't have the same nutrition profile, but they probably taste the closest to meat.
I'm hoping we can combine the yeast technology with the artistic skills from beyond/impossible for something that tastes and nourishes identically. On the other hand, there's something that feels wholesome about eating natural food, even if a ton of suffering goes into it. I do have minor concerns about the level of processing that goes into the beyond/impossible tier foods. Hopefully the lab-grown stuff will one day be economically viable and feel "paleo" enough.
username
1yr ago
I didn't say the french policy was racist, just that it led to worse outcomes. I probably won't convince you. You're not a canadian public servant and don't see what it's like. I'm not defending the no-white-male policy or anything. Apologies for the what-about-ism, I made an off-topic comment and now I'm just elaborating.
but employees can learn French if they want to get a promotion, and it actually represents a specific skill that can be of use in employment
Here's a situation I've seen a ton: An employee wants to become a manager, so they go on paid french training, putting their job on pause for weeks or months. When they come back, they inevitably don't use their french because francophones don't care and don't want to slow down important conversations by speaking to a french novice. Once their newly acquired french abilities atrophy, the training cycle repeats. I've seen this happen to a ton of really talented people with passion for their domain.
Also, learning french as an adult is pretty difficult, especially when the public service is not at all immersive. Even francophones usually prefer english because they'd prefer not to learn twice the terminology, check weird grammar rules or slow down communication.
This argument does not seem well considered at all
I see where you're coming from. However the outcomes I've experienced suggest the french-requirements are a worse policy.
username
1yr ago
Thanks for explaining, that does makes sense and is pretty convincing. People who consume the barely legal type porn are definitely marginal ephebophiles, if not full-blown ones.
There's definitely variation among people's taste, though. In my view, someone could have a "youthful" fetish the same way they have a mature/milf or an asian fetish. I suppose whether these are "fetishes" or not is a terminological debate, but I certainly did not have your view pinned down until you explained it.
username
1yr ago
I haven't spoken to many senior managers, mostly mid-level managers. My impression is that senior elites and execs in companies pay more attention to diversity so it would make sense for the public service to match that as well.
I'm very interested in cases where managers in the canadian public service had bonuses tied to diversity requirements. Do you have any examples you can link to?
username
1yr ago
The point is, there are other policies which will impact demographics. I don't want to change the subject too much, but I actually think the french level requirements in the canadian public service lead to worse outcomes than white-male exclusion, even if it were scaled up 100x. It's currently impossible to manage employees or be in a sufficiently senior role unless you speak french, even when the vast majority of francophones opt to read,write and speak in english when working. When my team is hiring, I'd rather work with a "non white male" constraint than a "must speak french" constraint. The french requirements are often unnecessary and make it very difficult to hire talent. As a french speaker, I've leapfrogged colleagues of similar productivity because they were anglophones who couldn't even be considered for a number of promotions.
Still, though, I agree that on the surface one policy sounds a lot better than the other and that they're not analogous with respect to why they impact demographics.
username
1yr ago
I work in the public service and agree that equity was probably not the (main) motivation for the strategy they picked. Most of what you hear about equity is signalling buzz. Most managers I've asked told me they face no pressure to hire for diversity. Seems like this team just found a hack (which I doubt is common) to shorten their screening process. Mostly likely they don't care who will be hired anyway. People here seem doubtful, but the public service and hiring processes are so heavily decentralized. It's totally plausible for a team to do this without being motivated by equity.
Of course, there is obvious bias because they could never get away doing the opposite strategy (e.g, filtering out equity groups). That said, there are policies which increase the proportion of white workers, like requiring citizenship and the ability to speak french.
username
1yr ago
Putting aside people who are bona-fide pedophile and are attracted to actual children, it sounds like in your model, (e?)phebophillia is a more of a fetish or a preference. I do think porn can exacerbate, and even create fetishes/preferences, at least temporarily. So it seems the marginal aspect is a valid concern.
On the other hand, I doubt people with porn-induced/enhanced phebophilia are that much more likely to engage in morally problematic behaviour with minors.
Lollicon probably appeals to an even wider audience who like anime and hentai. Because the visuals are so unrealistic I doubt it's harmful. I don't think anyone is developing a significant bestiality fetish from the wacky stuff often portrayed in hentai (cat-people, tentacles, etc.) and I don't see why lollicon would be any different with respect to pedophilia.
username
1yr ago
Lots of interesting comments are pointing out that CP, including potentially lollicon, can sway the "marginal" pedophile. Do we have any evidence true marginal pedophiles exist? I'm not talking about those who have urges but don't act because of incentives, but sleeper-agent types who would develop urges if they sufficiently engaged with the idea or pornographic content.
My impression had always been that true paedophilia was some kind of mental illness that was much more binary and that "marginal pedophiles" were rare. People who are attracted to teenagers (Ephebophiles?) would fall into a different camp, which would be a lot less binary and have many marginal members.
I'm not basing this model on any real knowledge, but if seems to me the anecdotes of people being molested are usually about younger children, not teenagers. If marginal pedophiles were a major concern, I'd expect higher frequencies of molestation in older children/teenagers.
username
1yr ago
According to the law of large numbers, your payout will converge to the expected value if you repeat an exercise enough times. Since this experiment can't be repeated anymore once you lose all your earths, it doesn't apply here and expected value is a poor decision making tool in this scenario.
username
1yr ago
It's not that simple. Tax cuts increase inflation without directly printing more money. Raises are a big component of inflation. If everyone got a 5% raise do you think prices would remain the same?
username
1yr ago
The truss case is a bit unusual: The inflation hit very quickly and her policies were a very apparent cause.
The average case is a lot muddier. Prices are sticky and it takes a while for inflation to get noticed. Most nations saw a steady inflation increase since 2020. Many of those nations, like the USA, have new leaders since the inflation started. It's probably the case that some leaders picked known inflationary policies before elections to get more votes (e.g. student forgiveness before the mid-terms), knowing the resulting inflation would be delayed and its cause nebulous.
username
1yr ago
It seems to me politics are especially bad at countering inflation. People may be pissed off the "government isn't doing enough" to fix it. However, the levers the government can easily pull to fight inflation (raising taxes/interest rates, cut transfers/subsidies, lower consumption/wages) won't gain them any popularity points. Even worse, there are plenty of socially-desirable policies that'll make inflation worse: tax cuts, raises, loan forgiveness, more transfers. I'm grateful our system is even capable of doing unpopular things like raising interest rates. If monetary policy had heavier democratic influence, I'd worry high inflation would just be the long-term equilibrium.
Ontario's leader is under heavy fire for playing hardball and preventing educational workers from getting large raises. I don't know the details well, but couldn't one argue this is what fighting inflation looks like?
Thinking probabilistically, I don't think trans acceptance, even encouragement, has a very big impact on your odds of having grandchildren.
Do you feel the same fears about your children being encouraged to be homosexual? Homosexuals can still reproduce (especially women), but they have much fewer children on average and homosexuality is much more prevalent than transexuality, certainly the sterilized kind.
username
1yr ago
Interestingly: this argument actually makes me less anti-trans.
This is my view as well. I'm often accused of being conservative but there's something beautifully utopian about people just being who they want to be. It's a little messy today, but if technology were absolutely perfect and low-cost, who wouldn't try switching genders for a couple hours?
username
1yr ago
I'm not woke, but I do think "Race is a social construct" has some merit. It's a terminological disagreement rather than a scientific one.
Someone who has one white parent and one black parent is often considered black, despite the genetic make-up being 50/50. National demographics on race also largely come from self-reported data in surveys, which have a famously growing list of races you can pick from.
As for intelligence differences between races, I think most people are simply ignorant rather than cognitively dissonant. It's not obvious to everyone that racial groups have different mean IQs, it's not something you learn from mainstream sources. Even once this fact is known, it's not crazy to think achievement disparities can be explained by culture and social institutions. We would all be a lot less economically productive if we moved to Haiti. Oppression isn't even a necessary factor.
username
1yr ago
I'm probably misunderstanding georgism, but would it even help without YIMBY/zoning deregulation? If land value prices in zoning restrictions, then a plot of land that can only be used for single family housing won't be worth more than a single family can afford. If land value is independent of zoning restrictions, then it just makes a ton of people poor without letting them build improvements that house more people.
username
1yr ago
I'm not a fan of the vaccine mandates but there's a couple of things I think we should keep in mind here. These facts combined don't justify the mandates, but it does explain some of the situation.
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Vaccine efficacy is the relative risk difference of infection, severe illness or death (3 different measures) between a vaccinated and control groups, over a set duration. This is the standard way to measure a vaccine's efficacy and it doesn't take transmission into account. It obviously doesn't take into account what happens after your experiment duration is over. So we quickly found ourselves estimating efficacy by looking at hospital admissions and vaccination base-rates once experiments were finished.
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The vaccine seemed much more promising against the initial strains of the virus. If I recall correctly it prevented ~95% of infections for a few months. Such a strong efficacy against infection does a lot to prevent transmission.
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There is reason to believe a milder case results in less transmission. You're spreading for shorter periods and expelling smaller viral loads. There was evidence of this. (Admittedly I don't think this is significant enough)
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Testing for transmission reduction would have been infeasible. There is no standard objective way to measure this. Even with infinite money and without red tape it's not clear whether we should have counted covid particles in the infected's breathing air or something like that, and we couldn't have confidently turned into a "X % transmission reduction"
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Regarding vaccinating during a pandemic, maybe Bossche is right, we'll never know. However, so far, it looks like the escaping variants we got mostly came from areas that weren't vaccinated. Perhaps it would be less risky if we didn't "meddle with nature" but we were rightly confident that the vaccines would save many vulnerable people's lives.
username
1yr ago
I believe racial groups have different mean IQs and that some of these differences could be partially explained by genetics. I guess that puts me in the HBD camp.
If HBD weren't real, I don't think I'd expect any major differences between countries. Asia and Africa would still be held back by poor institutions. The fact that the middle-IQ group dominated both the lower and higher IQ groups leads me to believe group IQ differences didn't have a high first-order impact on history. I think the biggest differences would be within countries. I'd expect to see more black and fewer jewish scientists, engineers, CEOs, etc. Racism would still exist on a similar scale. We'd worry less about economic disparities, but still worry about representational disparities. American "guilt" towards blacks would more closely resemble european guilt towards jews.
There's another aspect of HBD which proposes that, although men and women have the same mean IQs, men have higher variance than women. Whether that's true or not, I think the counterfactual would be of higher consequence.
It seems to me this problem has only gotten worse since we started cracking down on paedophilia and grooming. Admittedly, paedophilia is much more reported than it was before, but it's not at all clear to me that cracking down on grooming behaviour is going to make it easier for youth to get mentorship, if anything I'd expect it less mentorship. Your strategy may optimize for least harm, but OP was looking for more mentorship.
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