what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
On one hand, this is a nothingburger. On the other, I might be sheltered but it does surprise me when people in positions of seniority, especially Europeans, reveal such base, zoological prejudice, grounded more in axiomatic disgust than in any moral outrage about population replacement, decay of trust, death of the national Logos or whatever.
I suspect this is actually how pretty much all cases of xenophobia throughout the world, and throughout history, operate(d). It never actually mattered who the outgroup was, or what their real behavior was, or even if they had personal spaceships while you lived in a cave. That just means they were crass materialists while you were in touch with the spirits of the world. It's this meme, but unironically, because the meme was always an accurate depiction of reality. It's only relatively recently, and only in some parts of the world, that things like empirical evidence and logical argument started to be considered as valuable, or that beliefs should flow from them rather than the other way around. And so people need to at least come up with a plausible-sounding explanation, grounded in some sort of logic rather than pure visceral tribalism, as to why the other actually is a civilizational threat this time.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Also, the NYC subway and transit system is sufficient, and the city is dense enough, that a majority of New Yorkers don't own a car. Once you have a car, the marginal cost of a trip drops by a lot (although it's still probably higher than people intuitively expect, once you account for wear and tear, insurance, maintenance, etc). But if you can get by without owning a car at all, that's a big fixed cost you can avoid, and it encourages you to take transit for marginal trips.
It's worth keeping an eye on this, because self-driving cars could completely disrupt it, either by dropping taxi prices 50% or more or by allowing cars to drop off their owners and then go find parking on their own.
Maybe, although congestion is so bad that it still might not be worthwhile. I've been in a NYC bus that was slower than walking in between stops, and reducing the price of a cab ride just makes this problem worse.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
I just had a conversation like this with a friend. She was convinced the city she's lived in for years was 90% white. Spoiler: It was less than half (non-Hispanic) white. I think she was used to being in Southern cities which are plurality black, but still; that is an impressive amount to be wrong by.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
It should matter, though. As @Rov_Scam pointed out in a previous thread on this topic, you really do not want to encourage people to be very loose with their standards when it comes to applying violence to another person. It certainly can be difficult to summon lots of sympathy for the average person making a disturbance on the train, but that's missing the point. The kind of person who will aggressively (aggressively as the opposite of "conservatively" here, not in the sense of being the aggressor necessarily) use deadly physical force will likely not limit themselves to people that you personally find distasteful. Offend them on the road by cutting them off? They might take it on themselves to play cop and run you off the road. Take part in a protest they disagree with? Maybe they'll start a fight. Get into an argument at a bar? They might leave to retrieve a weapon, or wait for you outside.
To be clear, I'm not accusing Penny of being this type of person. I have no basis on which to make that particular determination. He might have just made an error in judgement (or he could even have acted in the right--I think this is unlikely, given the witness statements I've read, which don't seem to actually include any actions that Neely took that would constitute a serious threat to human life, but they could be incomplete or wrong). But the use of violence by civilians against other civilians has to be based on high and objective standards, rather than how we feel about the people involved.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
The moment you no longer have free trade with the entire US (and its trading partners) you find that what you thought was your strong economy was actually one cog in a giant machine that no longer has a reason to exist. The UT system? No longer attracting talent from around the world or students from other states. Those big tech offices that have been popping up all over Austin? They're all out. The energy industry in Houston? Some presence will remain but they know they're not hiring Americans from other states if it requires them moving to a new country. All those farmers and ranchers in the Western and Northern parts of the state? Now might have to pay extra to ship their goods to Colorado, New Mexico, etc.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Since I was asked to elaborate: Just about every part of this comment is extremely low quality.
restraining
Excuse me? A 15 minute chokehold resulting in a dead person is "restraining"?
violent
This is not in evidence. Unless you mean his prior assault arrests, which were not known to anyone on the train and thus irrelevant.
drug-addled mentally-ill
Neither of these remotely justifies death.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take?
This is certainly something you could argue, but you have to, you know, actually argue it? Like, why should anyone take this hypothesis seriously unless you present evidence and, ideally, address some likely counter-arguments? For example, if COVID is an issue, why now, and why such a big emphasis on tech? The economy did go through a rocky period, but then seemed to recover; what about the pandemic response, which as far as I can tell has been basically non-existent for almost a year, is impacting the economy now? Some individual tech companies are dealing with specific poor decisions (Metaverse) some of which could be roughly tied to the pandemic/response (Stripe--but even in this case, the mistake seems to have been assuming they would keep their pandemic-related growth up after the pandemic ended), but what this has to do with the rest of the economy isn't clear yet.
Similarly, regularly recurring viruses like flu already vary in intensity from year to year. Is the difference between now and 2019 within normal variation? And what side effects could there have been? I assume your hypothesis here is something like "people's immune systems were weakened against flu because most people avoided exposure during lockdowns. But A) we might have driven 1 strain extinct and B) this hypothesis might mean that extra cases this year are just cases from last flu season that have been delayed (see also https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality).
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
What is the saying? The constitution is not a suicide pact?
Tenure can be very important, but that's because it protects researchers with unpopular but tenable findings or conclusions, or who present those same ideas to students to consider and discuss. It's important that we have the capability to test unpopular ideas rather than just throwing them out at first glance. If it's not actually accomplishing that goal--if universities are not actually bastions of free speech, and tenure isn't even a protection--then why do we have tenure at all?
Similarly, the government should not be telling universities who to hire, what they can teach, etc. But to not do so for a government-funded university is kind of ridiculous! I thought we pretended to care about democracy? Are blue-collar workers required to fund an institution which does not benefit them, and which largely despises them, and that institution has infinite protection from any recourse, regardless of what it is actually doing?
The general point is this: Free speech has to go both ways, otherwise it isn't free speech. Unfortunately, these bills seem practically designed to fail to accomplish much. Removing tenure will just drive all of the up and coming academics to other states or to private universities (including any who might have opposed cancel culture), while bureaucrats, students, and existing professors continue to prevent any actual freedom of speech. Overly broad vague laws are likely to fail a 1st amendment test. Instead, why not push on freedom of speech directly, using money? Tie university funding to adopting and enforcing policies that promote freedom of speech. Deduct funding for failing to protect speakers, treating student groups differently based on point of view, etc. Maybe even a cap on the money that can be spent on administrative staff, although that's probably vulnerable to Washington Monument Syndrome nonsense. The mentioned SB16, prohibiting professors from compelling a student to profess a belief, seems fine to me; a government funded professor teaching a class is acting as an arm of the state and should not be compelling speech.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Arguing it would take a fair amount of effort, effort that I have not chosen to spend, and so it behooves me to admit that it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, and not to expect other people to give my gut feelings any consideration. It's an argument I want to make, but it's an argument I cannot actually back up, and so it's not an argument I should expect others to take seriously.
Can we please pin this to the top of the overall board, and put it in bold at the top of every CW thread?
Putin is a terrible man and he is ultimately responsible for his actions, but provocation is real and we have been poking the bear for a long time for no reason other than a deep-seated hatred of Russians swimming in the very DNA of our ruling class.
I find this these a little unbelievable, when just 10 years ago Mitt Romney was being mocked for suggesting to President Obama that Russia might still be a threat. I don't think there's much that's special about Russia from a US point of view. The military-industrial-professional-intellectual complex wants an enemy, and Russia is convenient and certainly deserves plenty of derision. But in an easy-to-imagine alternate world where Putin chokes on his dinner in 2008, I think they would just focus on someone else instead. Plenty of the "ruling class" spent the cold war desperately trying to make the USSR seem not so bad or otherwise simping for communism; I'm sure they would be fine turning the eye of Sauron towards Hungary or Brazil or whatever.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
I wouldn't be surprised if youtube (and other big platforms like facebook) were refusing to host some Republican/pro-life ads, and they're forced to advertise wherever they can.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
I would support getting rid of private profiles. It doesn't stop someone from keeping their own list of comments from users they might find convenient to bring up in a later argument, or just remembering. It does make it more difficult to track down comments that might be interesting or helpful.
Making alts to avoid bans seems like a no-brainer immediate long ban to me. Replying to yourself on alts also serves no purpose except to mislead other others; I would modhat and ban aggressively if you know for a fact this is happening.
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
There's a rule on the sidebar, "proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." (emphasis mine). I think this rule is a great idea, as it supersedes meandering arguments about burden of proof that would otherwise consist of "no you" back and forth. It also encourages users to, well, do as it says, and provide evidence for things! But, that's only if the rule is enforced. This might be the rule with the highest ratio of violators to modhat comments, in my opinion. Sometimes it feels like I must be crazy, and have to scroll down the sidebar to make sure it still exists, because it feels like no one else knows it's there. Either that, or my idea of what is proportional here is entirely out of calibration with everyone else. I think it would improve the forum greatly, and help cut down on low-effort vagueposting, to more vigorously enforce this rule.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
To me, this seems like one of those things where the disease is worse than the cure, but people don't realize it. Driving is very dangerous; for example, several times more Americans are killed every year in car crashes (including people outside of automobiles being hit). One could certainly argue about all of the relevant costs of crime vs cars, but at the very least it's worth thinking seriously about, and I suspect most Americans don't weigh them anywhere close to what really makes sense.
(I should emphasize, this doesn't mean I think crime doesn't matter, or people should just suck up having to deal with it, or anything like that. A number of American cities have done themselves a great disservice by failing to do anything about crime, homeless encampments, etc. and having lots of these things in your neighborhood is a legitimate concern.)
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
A tuition voucher is certainly worth something, but the "price" of tuition is entirely fake and just dividing the stated price by their hours worked isn't meaningful. The college says it's high so that they can count discounted tuition against their own taxes (I think) but nobody or almost nobody pays full sticker price tuition for graduate school.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Whether it's "stealing" or not, I think that, in some cases, there is no moral obligation to respect copyright. Copyright is a truce, an agreement, to encourage certain productive behaviors that are otherwise difficult to incentivize. As the US Constitution says,
[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
(emphasis mine). To the extent that copyright etc. accomplishes something useful, then it makes some sense to respect it. But calling it property (as in, "intellectual property") is a lie, a legal fiction. If an agent is abusing copyright law to oppose its intended use--which large music companies and ticketmaster do, for example--then I see no reason to respect it. They are violating the agreement, not as written, because they used their ill-gotten gains to lobby lawmakers in a twisted Kafakesque circle of theft, but certainly in spirit. I certainly don't see a moral requirement to pay a middleman who exploited legal loopholes rather than the actual creator.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
but you appear to just be accusing OP of lying, whereas the failure here is on the part of your reading comprehension.
OP starts by accusing a fairly large group of people to be lying, and does not give any indication that they're interested in arguing for their claim at all. Moreover, when they do get around to making something resembling an argument, it's largely a definitional dispute. Calling someone lying because they might have used a different definition of a word strikes me as less-than-charitable. If anything, it reminds me of radical trans activists who scream their lungs out if you suggest that "woman" is defined by, say, genetics.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I have to agree with @Soriek, that "let each religious group live on its own" fits much more with my idea of the Enlightenment than "crush all religions." Also, free-market capitalism is way more of Enlightenment economics than the mish-mash of top down policies imposed during the French Revolution.
Also, was literacy really 70% over the whole continent? I was under the impression it was pretty high in Puritan and Quaker areas, and very low elsewhere.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Others claim Aella is trying her hardest to stir the pot for attention.
The fact that this result is obvious doesn't mean there was no attention angle. A lot of very obvious statements could get heaps of attention; if someone made a twitter bot that just posted inconvenient facts about race/sex/religion/whatever, would you assume it was primarily there to dispassionately convey information to the masses, or to get attention?
That being said, I've met Aella in real life and I doubt her attention is primarily to piss off wokes on twitter. I mean, that might be a bonus, but I think she'd legitimately prefer if the responses were actual discussion of what the result means, meaningful statistical or methodological discussion, etc.
condom use shows no correlation with contracting STDs, which makes me quite suspicious of the data
I don't see a data column for catching STIs (just testing for them). In case I just missed something, then this sounds like a possible result of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox, where anyone who doesn't use a condom is compensating for the risk by tightly screening clients for STI status/limiting the acts they perform to limit chance of transmission. Could also be a limitation of self-report. Alternatively, aren't condoms only moderately effective at preventing infection? Could it be confounded by number of clients?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Yes, at which point their language and culture were brutally suppressed, and they were forcibly assimilated into the WASP culture of whiteness.
But what problems did this actually cause prior to 1914?
No need to wait, just look around you.
Ok, what am I looking at? Is it that the children of those immigrants from the 80s and earlier have started using American names and speaking English? Is it that these 3rd generation immigrants are more likely to describe themselves as American (also more data on language)? What? Or do you not actually have a justification for anything you've written, and are expecting me to just agree because something seems obvious to you?
still carry with them a dagger with which to plunge into the back of the nation that welcomes them
That's a completely wild sort of accusation to make. Do you have any evidence for such a strong claim?
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Sex has a very strange history in America. Recall Albion's seed: A large portion of early elites came from cultures where adultery was strongly and seriously discouraged (the Quaker and Puritan ones). A large portion also came from the Borderers and Cavaliers, where (male) adultery was, maybe in theory considered wrong, but in practice actively encouraged, at least for a portion of the population. I think a lot of confusion about how sex is treated in America comes from failing to distinguish between these 2 groups.
(Also keep in mind, the Cavalier practice--where the male elite can take many sexual partners--is probably the most common throughout world history, at least in practice).
I was going to point to the lyrics of "Baby it's cold outside", a song from 1944, which (at least according to one interpretation) acknowledges the strict anti-sex norms of the time while also being a popular song about flouting them. But in trying to find a better description I found this article, which has some additional historical information: https://time.com/5739183/baby-its-cold-outside-consent/
The 1940s was not exactly a time of extreme chastity. In fact, World War II brought with it a wave of sexual activity. “People behaved in war in ways they wouldn’t behave in peace time,” says Beth Bailey, author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America and the Director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies at the University of Kansas. Many wartime couples “thought they might never see each other again” — and many married young, often ending up with the first person they’d lost their virginity to, because it was considered the right thing to do.
Within this environment, the contradictions were many. According to surveys by Alfred Kinsey, author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, one of the best-selling books in America in 1948, about half of men said they wanted to marry a virgin, more than 60% of college-educated men said they disapproved of premarital sex, and about 80% of college-educated women said they had moral objections to it — and yet, about half of women and more than half of men said they had had premarital sex.
But for women who were caught doing so, the consequences could be steep. Her personal reputation and her family’s reputation was on the line. Abortion was criminalized, and contraception was illegal in most states. Women who got pregnant could be kicked out of their homes and out of college; pregnant high-schoolers could be sent to homes for unwed mothers, forced to give their babies up for adoption, and to undergo a rehabilitation program before they could go back to school, according to Rachel Devlin, author of Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture and a professor of History at Rutgers University.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
I'm interested to know to what extent people agree that (a) the goal of society should be to increase happiness, and that (b) for that goal, achieving a very low level of violent crime and holding it there is probably more important than tackling air pollution, even if air pollution kills many more people.
So I think that your point of view accurately describes how many people perceive risk, but this usually leads to a mistaken perception of how actions and policy affect "happiness and well-being." The effects of e.g. air pollution are very downstream from the air pollution itself, and often manifest as an increase in some condition that already existed, so you cannot identify any specific person as dying because of air pollution. These deaths are also often going to be slow and uninteresting, while murder is big, breaking news that you can put pictures of on the front page of the paper. It's similar to the dilemma the FDA faces, where anyone who dies from an approved drug can be pointed to as a victim of their failure to be strict enough, while no one person who dies from a heart attack while waiting for beta-blockers to be approved can be definitively chalked up to the FDA's overly-strict behavior. So the incentive is for them to be extremely cautious and conservative. However, the effects are still real, and preventing 1,000 deaths from side-effects but causing 10,000 from heart attacks will definitely cause happiness and well-being to go down.
A death from murder and a death from air pollution or a work accident are not exactly the same, sure. People feel differently about them. But to what extent is that a result of fallacious reasoning, like if the news over-reports murder compared to accidents and people take that at face value? Or because people don't know that air pollution can even cause deaths, and so automatically chalk all of those deaths up as tragic but unpreventable happenings of life?
would you rather live in (1) a society where your life expectancy is 80, but your lifetime risk of being murdered, mugged, or raped is 90%, or (2) a society where your life expectancy is 70, but your lifetime risk of being murdered, mugged, or raped is 10%
The badeconomics subreddit has a rule:
Rule V No reasoning from a price change in general equilibrium.
In other words, you cannot ask about the effects of some price changing without establishing why the price changed, because the price is determined by external factors. That underlying cause will determine the effects. For example, you can't say, "if the price of gas goes down, people will buy fewer electric vehicles." Maybe the reason why gas prices went down is because someone discovered an alternative energy source that is way cheaper than gasoline, and people will rush to buy electric vehicles because they're practically free to fuel up. Or maybe they discovered a ton of oil, and electric vehicle sales will decline. You can't even say whether the equilibrium quantity of gas sold will change, for the same reasons.
I have a similar feeling here. Why, if crime plummeted, did my life expectancy drop? There must be some cause, some other cause of death that went up. Is that cause of death painful or painless? And ideally, why did that cause of death change? Is crime low because I'm living in a 1600s puritan-like regressive culture where enjoying anything means I'm probably sinning, and life expectancy is low because we don't have medical technology or expertise? Or do we live in a futuristic utopia, but a lot of people have unsafe hobbies like BASE jumping?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It looks to me like nara is explicitly saying that you can make those claims, you just have to A) provide evidence, and B) frame it in a way that is less antagonistic, dismissive, and strawmanny.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored. The book is never taken down from Amazon or any other publishers for the controversy.
Scott Aaronson was speculating on why, when Caplan visited his university to speak, no one seemed to care. No protests, nobody in the audience even asking snide questions. As he pointed out, by a reasonable definition of feminism ("women are people too"), Caplan is a "feminist" and considers "feminism" to be so obviously true as to not be worth talking about, but in his own experience, stating one's agreement with feminist beliefs never protected one from accusations of sexism or behavior that negatively impacted women. Maybe we've passed peak feminism, but Scott offers his own explanation: The worst actors, the kind who actively take pleasure in tearing down other people, wished to tear him down specifically because he claimed to be an ardent feminist. They enjoyed being able to say, "he said he was a feminist, and clearly he was lying." I have another hypothesis, though: That Caplan actually doesn't care about slacktivists and won't be guilted into capitulating, so he's not as easy of a target.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
I know this breaks Scott’s world model where nerds are always good, and jocks always bad, but they, along with Stalin and Hitler and plenty of others who accrued power by pushing ideologies, were all a lot closer to nerds than jocks, winning power via their essays and public speaking, and they also killed hundreds of millions of people—because intelligence is the most dangerous thing in the universe.
This strikes me as a strawman of Aaronson's views. I think he's well aware that the woke people he resents for trying to destroy his life lean towards the "nerd" end of the traditional nerd-joke spectrum. This isn't about literal nerds and jocks: It's about intellectualism and rationality, vs things that oppose them. Being sucked into a particular ideology, even one that claims to elevate science and reason or that sounds academic, but actually actively opposes truth-seeking by force, doesn't put you on Scott's side. Hiding your lack of understanding with pretentious wordplay is, I think, something most of us can agree to oppose, and I think that's what he's writing against: Destroying something you don't understand because you fear the truth.
And then carries that ahistoric wrongness into being completely anti-human because his values boil down to intelligence=morality=superiority
Personally, my eyes went a little wide when I saw him say that he would take a 2% chance of the world ending to learn the answer to the big questions. But this also seems like a bit of a strawman. He's focusing on the upside: What we could perhaps learn from an AI smarter than we are? I think he is legitimately concerned about existential risk to humanity.
what_a_maroon
2yr ago
Every society had such people and was confronted with such problems. Some of them were ruled by such people and it lead to their collapse. Great Britain exiled a bunch of them to Australia and Appalachia, or just executed them. Notably its crime rate remained pretty high by modern standards, because crime is more complicated than "just kill the bad people."
But we have to ask ourselves: how likely is such a nightmare scenario to become reality?
I can't put a number on that with any confidence, just like you can't put a number on your nightmare scenario. I can at least say for sure that multiple powerful countries have turned into that society in the past 100 years, they've committed (and continue to commit) terrible atrocities. I can also say that worries about overbearing government aren't totally one-sided: There's plenty of right-coded worry about tyrannical and controlling governments (just look at of the discourse around covid, masks, and vaccines, or more recently 15 minute cities).
“how many arrests does it take before we declare somebody scum and he loses his basically civil rights” has some answer that you would consider reasonable?
No number of arrests means that someone should lose all their civil rights. For one, as soon as you establish such a number, I think you immediately try to argue it down to be "1" or to "well they did something that isn't actually violent but is vaguely antisocial" because that's what is actually required for you to be satisfied. But also, why is one person being arrested 4,000 times? If it's because there's not actually any evidence they've committed a crime, then that sounds like the police are either incompetent or harassing the guy. If it's because he is convicted and then gets released, then that shouldn't be the case, but putting a convicted criminal in prison for longer does not require revoking civil rights.
Obviously it sucks to be victimized on the street with nothing you can do about it. It also sucks to be tackled and arrested by a power-mad cop with nothing you can do about it, or attacked on the street by a vigilante who got you confused for someone else. I's not like your (honestly, insane) idea of "execute them all" is a solution anyway, because if you could implement it you could more easily implement actually reasonable reforms.
My understanding is that Robber's Cave involved a lot of manipulation by the experimenters to get the boys to behave one way, and that by changing the circumstances they were able to get them all to work together again. "Fake" is an exaggeration, but the standard interpretation of the results may not be correct. E.g. https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html mentions this.
I'm less familiar with the Milligan experiment, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity indicates that the reported data may be inaccurate or missing key information. The section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replications_and_variations indicates that the results could be highly dependent on situation.
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