what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think it's highly unlikely he's never committed any legitimate crime, but spouting a number like "42 arrests" is actively misleading and "reign of terror" is a frankly embarrassing level of unsupported, pearl-clutching propaganda.
Anything's possible. The moon could really be green cheese!
And it's even possible the veteran had mind-reading powers to get any of this information!
You're engaged in mockery, but when the veteran put him in that chokehold, he didn't even know any of this. Literally the only information he had was what he observed, Neely walking back and forth and angrily ranting. This was apparently sufficient to put him in a chokehold for, what, 10 minutes? 15? You can see some of the video here; Neely is barely responsive and the restraint continues. Like, sure, be skeptical of claims that he was as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. But also be skeptical of claims that he spent all his time terrorizing the populace and execution was the only solution.
But I could be wrong, and maybe he's the one subway weirdo that never did anything actually wrong, but New Yorkers singled him out anyways with false accusations.
There's a lot of subway weirdos. I suspect the crime rate would be much higher than it actually is if every subway weirdo regularly committed crimes.
What a sad and boring society it would be if we executed all weirdos.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Yeah, "public nuisance crimes" are not what I would call a "reign of terror." No one knew who this guy was until he was killed. An open container of alcohol in public? Turnstile hopping? This forum will get incensed over the fact the FBI uses loopholes and process crimes to punish politicians and rich celebrities who lied to said FBI, and then turn around and seriously claim that these are very legitimate crimes that prove Neely was dangerous and it was a massive failure of law and order for him to still be on the streets. I haven't found any reference to kidnapping; the only serious or violent crimes I've seen reference to are 4 assaults (over 8 years) and without knowing more about those cases, it's wildly irresponsible to jump straight from "arrested" to "definitely guilty." Like, it's entirely possible that he did commit those crimes, and others, and the DA just let him go out of misplaced sympathy. It's also possible he got into altercations with other mentally ill homeless but it's unclear who was at fault. Or that he was misidentified, or was the victim of a false accusation for being weird and noisy in public (it's totally impossible that someone could overreact to him dancing and being loud on the subway, right? that would definitely never happen?).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
As far as I can tell, urbanists propose quite a lot of reforms that are quite far from "ban all cars." Here's a handful (keeping in mind that not everything on the list is implemented everywhere all at once; the priorities would be for cities, downtowns, and areas near transit):
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Repeal CAFE and replace it with a carbon tax and/or higher gas tax.
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Create more pedestrian areas with few vehicles.
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Build more bike lanes. Having lanes that are protected from cars and in useful places is more important than having many miles of bad bike lanes.
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Repeal or reduce SFR only zoning, along with related policies like parking minimums, setback requirements, minimum lot sizes, etc.
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Build more traffic calming measures. We already have speed bumps and low speed limits, even (especially!) in low-density suburbs, but those aren't really enough.
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Instead of building infinite roads with the mistaken belief it will alleviate congestion, provide alternatives and use congestion pricing. Similar for parking; don't provide free or subsidized public parking.
In any case, dropping subsidies for all modes of transportation is probably reasonable, won't really kill them, and maybe should be done
FWIW, I'm 100% ok with living in Ancapistan, and there are a lot of things I would not object to (or think about differently, at least) in that world. We don't live in Ancapistan, so if I'm being taxed to pay for roads, then I think it's reasonable to expect that e.g. those roads are safe to use.
Now, this is probably a rare position among urbanists. But from an economist's point of view, if you want to subsidize something, it probably makes sense to A) subsidize things with positive externalities or minor negative externalities over those with large negative externalities; B) have a plan for how you're going to handle the increased consumption. I think that walking, cycling, and transit are vastly superior to cars on both of these measures.
In addition, I think that subsidies and regulations are more relevant if you rely heavily on arguments like "I just want to live in a single family home" or "I like to drive." If someone legitimately thinks that building roads for cars, and no infrastructure for anything else, for example, creates positive externalities--then my pointing to subsidies wouldn't be a good counterargument.
No, I'm not. We could install protected bike lanes and traffic calm roads in every last suburb tomorrow (i.e. make it possible to get by without a car everywhere, but not necessarily be faster than a car), but the impression I get from urbanists is that this simply wouldn't be enough for them, and more drastic measures need to be taken. If they're actually fine with only those things, that's cool! But that's not the impression I'm getting.
Do those suburbs still have e.g. laws banning building anything other than single family homes? "Just" putting in bike lanes and traffic calming is not going to undo 75 years of mistakes, but personally I would think it makes more sense if the priority is to legalize some dense suburbs, especially around transit, with those features, and improve downtown cores, rather than redoing "every single" suburb.
(I know that "protected bike lanes and traffic calm roads in every last suburb" sounds like a lot, but given the vast amount of time, effort, money, and regulations that have gone into making almost every last corner of the US dependent on cars, I actually don't think it's very much. This report, for example, finds that 300 miles of bikeways costs the same as 1 mile of 4-lane freeway. What would these suburbs look like if they spent the same amount of money on alternatives as on cars?)
Are urbanists fine with all of those cars in rural areas? (For all the many videos Not Just Bikes has made about the Netherlands, he surprisingly doesn't seem to have covered much of the country that exists outside the Randstad.)
I think you already know the answer, which is: You would have to ask him (he does talk about rural areas in his Switzerland video).
Are urbanists fine with only doing that?
I mean, they'd probably like the option to be car-free in and near cities. Beyond that, I couldn't say, but my internal model of people I know says basically yes. To be honest, the US is so far from even the most basic urbanist goals that I'm confused why this is such a big sticking point. Are you worried that if we make even moderate reforms, suddenly all cars will be banned? You are clearly aware that nothing of the sort has happened in the Netherlands, and what is going on there has taken decades to accomplish.
edit: I looked through the thread you linked and it seems like pretty much every comment is saying what I've been saying... don't need to get rid of all cars, but make other options viable.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Except these same urbanists then turn around and say we need to stop building suburbs
No. We (or at least, I) say that:
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We shouldn't require by law (and encourage by implicit and explicit subsidy) that all suburbs be sprawling and car-dependent. There are many urbanist videos praising suburbs and other areas that are not the middle of downtown Manhattan.
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Central areas, like downtowns and cities, should have as few vehicles as possible.
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Alternatives to driving should exist for as many trips as possible.
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Cars generate a lot of negative externalities, such as noise, pollution, and safety, which should be internalized or regulated (especially when cars are used in populated areas).
Yes, if you want to drive a full size car everywhere (e.g. not a microcar, which the Netherlands allow on bike paths for the disabled), you should probably not live right in the middle of a major city. The unlimited use of any amount of public space for any purpose at any time, is not a right--as everyone agrees, since every time this discussion happens on The Motte you get plenty of people saying how the police should aggressively round up the homeless to stop them from sleeping or using drugs on sidewalks and in parks.
It also still seems to me, based on the alleged contradiction in those quotations, that you are conflating "banning cars" with "making it possible to get by without a car."
only a quarter of Dutch households are car-free (a decreasing figure!).
A few things. First, this number is substantially higher in Amsterdam--I believe a majority of households do not own a car. Second, making households completely car-free is not the only measure of success. The US is at around .89 [cars per person](
(numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita)), while the Netherlands is at .588. The number of multi-car households is quite high (https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-transport-challenges/household-vehicles-united-states/), so there's a lot of room to reduce the number of cars in each household without necessarily making many households car free.
And if people own cars, then planners will do things like build expensive parking garages beneath canals which end up doubling the number of parking spaces, and having more parking spaces is bad because as long as they're there, people will still want to drive (as NJB says).
I just re-watched that section. It seems like he's overall strongly favor, but doesn't like the fact that the underground spaces are cheap while the garage was expensive to build, which subsidizes cars.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It definitely does not match my experience that most American suburbs allow kids to bike 15 minutes to a store. Like, it might be possible but it's not particularly safe, there's not usually infrastructure for it, etc.
DC is one of the least car-dependent places in the US. According to this, it has the lowest car ownership rate outside of the NYC metro area. The White House and immediately surrounding area is very bikeable, in my experience--it's right in the middle of the city! It seems like a weird choice to focus on. What about a city like Houston, LA, or Miami?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
As token_progressive mentioned, there are wildly different "suburbs." Urbanist youtube channel NotJustBikes has a video praising a suburb of Toronto known as Riverdale: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
It differentiates between "streetcar suburbs" or similar, and "car-dependent suburbs" and explicitly states that suburbs are not inherently bad.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
How often do most people actually need that much carrying capacity at once? What's the cost of owning a car vs renting one for those specific use cases (or paying for delivery?)
"What if nobody could drive" is a weakman. Being able to drive is an increase in freedom, in this sense. Being required to drive is a reduction in freedom.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Ambivalent is still the wrong reaction to have. Surface space is valuable, so he should be happy that the space is removed, and that the underground spaces were built (else where would the cars parked on the surface go?).
The people who owned them could no longer have a car, or perhaps store it somewhere outside the city, so it's less likely to be driven around what is clearly a walkable area.
My point was that the amount of surface space taken up can be reduced, by e.g. building multilevel parking garages or double-decker freeways.
You can do those things, although they quickly become much more expensive, and still occupy a lot of space. A double-decker highway 3 lanes wide on either side still carries maybe 18,000 people per hour per direction. Because of parking requirements, apartments and offices in downtowns will often be built on top of several stories of parking, which of course makes the actual usable space more expensive
I'm still not sure what it means by "eight feeder lanes" (frontage roads?) and "six managed lanes" (I'm completely at a loss here). I wouldn't trust anything on that page without verifying with other sources.
The same source says:
- The managed lanes carry mass transit vehicles during peak hours and are only made available to single-occupancy vehicles for a toll-fee during odd-peak hours.
Do you have a preferred source?
Because there's barely any demand for it.
Ok, but why?
I don't know what your experience is, but Google Maps does pretty well at estimating longer times if you are viewing a route during rush hour.
I'm aware that Maps indicates traffic, it just usually isn't sufficiently accurate for me to believe that it can actually tell you what's faster on a regular basis. I don't know if it holds up across countries, etc. I've definitely spent enough time in and around NYC to know for a fact that taking the train can be much faster than driving for many trips.
In any event, NJB has also made videos about how nice driving in the Netherlands is compared to other countries. Part of that is due to how many people take transit instead. These comparisons are not "favorable to driving" in the sense that you can extrapolate the results to a place where everyone drives.
My point was that if you have a standard policy to use a specific pole design everywhere, then it's a mistake to ascribe intent or knowledge to engineers that simply isn't there.
The use of "standards" just sounds like a way to prevent anyone from having to take responsibility for bad decisions. I don't think that a bunch of engineers thought, "man, fuck pedestrians, let's try to get them killed." But any of them could have realized, when they were designing a walk signal with the knowledge that it would be hit by a car. This isn't a question of doing something, without fixing all of the problems everywhere, because you have limited resources or narrow expertise. Designing infrastructure is their whole job.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
A reasonably sized sedan might only be something like 7 x 16 feet, but parking spaces take up more area than that, and the car is using all of that space. Based on my googling, a space in the US can be upwards of 10 x 24 feet = 240 square feet total. It's often less, although 160 is not particularly large.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
How much freedom do those cars provide to children, anyone with a disability that prevents them from driving, people who are too old to drive safely, or anyone for whom a car is a significant expense? Or even someone who just dislikes driving? Who gets to experience those exit rights when housing is so expensive?
Cars are still entirely dependent on the government decides to do. Where roads go, when roads are closed, how lights and signs are used to direct traffic flow, road maintenance, etc. I'm all for freedom, but heavily-subsidized "freedom" is a contradiction in terms and an illusion. Dense, walkable, urban environments with a mix of things are what people created spontaneously. Car-dependent suburban sprawl is what the top-down planners created over the past 70 years.
Yes, cars provide some benefits. They also have a lot of costs.
Okay, this makes more sense than the assertion that they are over-consumed. Which was in contrast to the many tales of Americans actively refusing medical treatment because they'd rather die than pay the medical bills.
There is over-consumption, because it's subsidized, which is why it's expensive. The case where it isn't subsidized then become ruinous.
Yes, if your only metric is capacity, then a single light rail track wins hands-down over a 3-lane highway. However, there are usually other factors people consider in efficiency, such as the amount of people who actually use it, plus other harder-to-quantify factors like the fact that people using the highway can get off and on at any on/off-ramp, and can thus easily make journeys with a wide variety of starts, destinations, and stops, whereas people with the light rail must get on or off at specific stations, and the more stations you add, the slower the light rail becomes, and this limits the amount of starts and destinations people can get to.
Transit becomes very flexible when you add in multiple forms of transportation, such as a walk or cycle near the station. Roads have plenty of their own issues, and will also slow down and/or run much below theoretical maximum capacity, for example due to lights, congestion, and crashes. In the cases where transit exists but is unused, it's usually because the city is designed to prioritize cars and so transit runs rarely, buses don't have their own right of way, it doesn't go lots of places, etc. Yes, there are reasons to have cars. But they're only necessary (edit: this should say, "only necessary for every trip") because of the specific way in which North American cities have been (re-) built since the end of WW2.
I judge each project on a case-by-case basis; I personally wouldn't make generalized statements like saying a mode is inefficient "for any sort of populated area", and in the real world urban planners consider more factors than just capacity.
Who are "real world urban planners"? In much of North America, they consider car capacity and congestion, and basically no other factors. I stand by the statement that cars are, as a general rule, inefficient for populated areas, because they take up so much space.
As for your claim that the Katy freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, is this actually true? The most lanes I could find at any point were 6 lanes each direction. I'm not counting ramps or tollways here, and I don't count frontage roads either since they have stoplights, bikes, and sidewalks, and freeway lane counts elsewhere don't include any parallel roads either. As for the congestion today, that can easily be explained by the fact that Houston is one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the US, and when the expansion was completed in 2011, congestion was definitely reduced, only to slowly be undone by the growing population. I think it makes intuitive sense that any significant population growth or density would put a strain on the transportation system; compare this to the trains in Mumbai which are packed full of people, because so many people live there in such a small area.
This is the description I found:
2 main lanes (six in each direction), eight feeder lanes and six managed lanes. The managed lanes carry mass transit vehicles during peak hours and are only made available to single-occupancy vehicles for a toll-fee during odd-peak hours.
I think however you count it, it's already a lot of capacity, and yet it's still congested, even though Houston is, as you point out, growing, with space for lots more people. Increasing capacity will temporarily improve congestion, but unless maximum demand is capped, it will never last. A combination of induced demand and population growth will put strain on any system if it can't adapt, but transit gives you much much more room to carry people. I mentioned light rail, but a full underground subway line can carry dozens of times more people than a lane of car traffic. It's also standard for transit to have the ability to implement congestion pricing, which is rare on roads.
What, like Tulsa, Oklahoma (pop. 413,066)? There are plenty of buses there and they're pretty empty. And not for a lack of trying; the city keeps running the empty buses under the assumption that if they're there, people will use them, when that's clearly not the case.
That's barely more than the population of Zurich, which has a ton of great transit options which get used by lots of people. I agree that simply running buses in an area that's not designed for it is unlikely to generate much ridership. There are several issues here. One is land use, where transit is often surrounded by parking and empty lots, on the expectation that people will drive to the station, rather than stores and homes. Another is inconsistency. If there's 1 bus or train every hour and it's always late, people won't bother trying to use it. Running more frequent service encourages ridership, and Zurich is probably running dozens of times more trains, trams, and buses than Tulsa, but they're still full. A third is traffic priority--in many cities outside the US, bus-only lanes are common, so buses can avoid congestion. Transit also often gets priority at intersections. These things make it faster than driving in traffic, even with stops to pick up and drop off passengers.
But even assuming that the pole and shear are mounted at ground level, I guess the argument is not-even-wrong? I don't think it necessarily makes drivers safer, though. If the pole breaks away, then that will bring down traffic lights onto the ground with it, which can crash onto drivers on the roadway below. In fact if the driver isn't stopped by the pole then there's also the possibility that they will continue and crash into other vehicles too, if they're approaching from a side road heading towards another side road. If they're approaching from the middle of the intersection, then the pedestrian would be injured anyway (and maybe even pinned against the pole if it didn't break away).
Breakaway infrastructure is substantially safer for drivers who hit in than a solid post or pole in the same location: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RCErGL2WIto
Any combination of events/circumstances is possible, but breakaway poles are beneficial to the driver in the most likely situation and so represent a net benefit. That's why they're very common.
I think the point of the argument is that engineers know that cars regularly drive into the area that pedestrians wait at high speed, but haven't done anything for the pedestrians, and in fact encourage them to stand in this exact spot.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
We certainly use the word "accident" for plane crashes.
Ok, it does exist. I think "plane crash" is a far more common term than "aviation accident" whereas car accident is much more common than car crash. Google trends showed similar results.
The attempts to move away from "accident" as the term for accidents are basically political, either for the perhaps laudable purpose of getting people to take them more seriously to reduce them, or the less laudable purpose of stigmatizing drivers.
As far as I can tell, it's mostly lawyers (because insurance companies use the word "accident" to imply their client is not at fault, hey would you look at that) and people who study traffic safety and have found that a substantial portion of the population does think that most car crashes aren't preventable.
That the NY Times erroneously uses the formula "leaving the scene of an accident" for leaving the scene of an intentional act does not mean "accident" is not used correctly elsewhere; the actual statute the NY Times (VTL 600) is referring to is worded "leaving the scene of an incident".
I think it's more likely that they just defaulted to "car accident" because it's so ingrained that's what we call car crashes.
Pushing someone through accident or negligence or even recklessness is not battery; battery is an intentional act.
Speeding, tailgating, changing lanes without sufficient space, etc. are also typically intentional acts. I'm not a lawyer but a traffic violation resulting in death is literally the example of manslaughter on the wiki page. d
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
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."
Among many other things, yes. You might have been thinking primarily about incapacitation, but your post covers a wide range of points, including speculation on the cause of the long tail and the difference between black and white crime rates (which isn't explained by the mere existence of a long tail). You need to chill out with the accusations of misrepresentation until your writing improves.
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.
Is 3 a year that high? My impression was that the "long tail" included people with hundreds of crimes in their career but for some reason I can't find good data.
By raw numbers, most crimes are never going to get a sentence of "lock them up forever" anyway so it's not a very good hypothetical. (Although, you aren't really locking them up forever-your math for total prison time only counts the time they spend in prison before turning 35; if we could know exactly what age each person stops being a criminal, our job would already be much easier!).
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:
Yes, but the numbers actually matter.
Interesting - it looks like my 33% is not too far off from the actual number of 41% for violent crime.
It's not wildly off for violent crime, but I think it's pretty high for property crime (at least in the US). Of course it's true that most crime isn't murder, but murder generally has the best data (lots of other crimes aren't reported to the police). Anyway, the point was not that 1/3 and 2/3 are individually wildly wrong--the point is that the difference could easily be much more extreme, which would have obvious implications for your napkin math. Hence why I asked, 3 times now, for any discussion at all of how your estimates change based on parameters.
Murder also gets a lot of attention for being so bad. You've mostly been discussing "crimes" as a monolithic entity, but is 1 person with 50 misdmeanor charges for public intoxication, loitering, and petty theft as important as 1 murderer?
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.
Again, you are the one who made an argument and said that it supports your hypothesis. I think there are a lot of very large gaps in this argument. One of those gaps is that you acted like the number you got for what deterrence would have to be is unreasonable, but didn't provide any evidence.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It's also a question of only peripheral importance to the actual topic of discussion, namely that of incapacitation.
The word "incapacitation" does not appear in your original comment, but it does include . Maybe you should be more explicit.
You wrote:
For example, the policy response to (a) is that we need more police to catch a lot more black criminals. The policy response to (b) is that we need longer prison sentences for the criminals we have in order to prevent the same guy from doing 4 more crimes.
You can't talk about policy response with such an incomplete picture. (The real correct response to an 80/20 rule of crime is to focus on finding the serial criminals, not harshly punishing everyone).
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.
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.
What is P(crime|criminal)? The probability that a criminal committed a crime is 1. If you mean probability of recidivism, that is exactly what the study I gave you measured. Someone may be commenting in bad faith here, but it's not me.
These numbers sure seem in the same ballpark as my napkin math, which you haven't stated any particular disagreement with.
I asked some questions about them, like how sensitive they are to the parameter values or what happens if you allow for criminals to be better or worse at not getting caught. 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. 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. 20-35 is probably too wide of an age range; something like 17-25 would be more realistic.
I'm sure your math returns the numbers you say they do. I just don't think they're very useful. They're also so rough that I fail to be impressed by the alleged matching to the data. I don't follow the logic from the stats you quoted to your estimate; can you make this argument in more detail?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I don’t think that my definition is any more obscure than your personal usage of the term. I’ve never heard anyone else use the term like you do, whereas my usage at least conforms to an extant literature. Here’s a sci-hub link to that paper, sorry, it wasn’t paywalled for me: https://sci-hub.st/https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/339673?
This is not "my personal usage", this is just what the word means in English, and how it's used all the time.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/compare
"to examine (two or more objects, ideas, people, etc.) in order to note similarities and differences"
Lots of empirical work depends upon a background mathematical framework. Statistics is no different. And I never said that probability wasn’t applicable if the AoC is true,
Lots of empirical work depends on the mathematical framework, but the axiom of choice is not one that should be very relevant.
all I said was that the AoC would have to be absolutely, determinately false if every uncertainty is to be reducible to precise probabilities.
Again, I think you're making an entirely different claim to the one that was in the paper, but using similar terminology in a way that's confusing.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Perhaps our disagreement about comparability is merely verbal, but for future reference your usage of the term is widely divergent from most philosophical treatments of "comparability" in value theory (e.g. see here), so you may want to change it to avoid confusion in the future.
The author is a statistician, not a philosopher, and based on what I was responding to I think what I said makes sense. Maybe you should assume more common definitions instead of esoteric ones, and explain in advance that you are using such an obscure meaning, unless the context is highly specific. I'm certainly not going to warp how I use words around some academics' redefinition.
Your link is paywalled, so I can't really comment on it.
Well, I don't think that anyone says "the completely precise probability of X is Y" about much of anything, because people usually don't work with completely exact probabilities at all. Which I take to be among the claims of the paper.
That's not how I read it. The author said that the entire notion of probability is inapplicable in situations where you lack the information to calculate an exact probability, as you would with a fair coin or fair die.
That is completely different from saying that it makes no sense to draw conclusions about what would follow if it were true, like values of conditional probabilities, which mathematicians and logicians do all the time.
You can certainly discuss what consequences the axiom of choice implies. My point was that if your position about real-world empirical work (or even pure mathematics) depends on whether the AoC "is true" then you have most likely lost the plot. A statement like "if the axiom of choice, then probability is inapplicable in many real world scenarios, but if not AoC, then it is applicable" is almost certainly wrong.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Most people believe in deontological constraints in addition to value maximization, so even if they thought that saving lives were infinitely valuable, they wouldn’t necessarily force others to try to do so
Yes, exactly. "The value of a soul" and "deontological considerations about forced conversion" are wildly different things that they are comparing, just like the author of this paper would assert is "quantifauxcation."
Making decisions about which thing to prioritize doesn’t require them to be comparable. There is a vast philosophical literature about decision theory involving incompatibilities, exactly none of which affirms that we can never rationally choose one incomparable thing over the other.
This sounds like a quibble over definitions. I would consider any decision between X and Y to constitute a comparison between them, by the common definition of the word "compare." You don't have to agree with that definition, but it seems like you do agree that people regularly decide between 2 things that are extremely different from each other, just like it is totally valid to say something like "the average person would decides to take X dollars in exchange for an increase of Y to their risk of death."
Lots of probabilities are a priori and hence independent of empirical measurements.
I think you're making a very, very different argument than was made in the original paper. Which is fine, but it's not really relevant to my argument. The probability you gave is exactly 1/pi, yes. As far as I can tell, this is is unrelated to the claim that the use of probabilities for complex problems is inappropriate because you lack sufficient information to calculate a probability. As far as I know, no one says something like "the completely precise probability of conflict in the Korean peninsula this year is 5 + pi/50 percent." That's just a strawman.
What you are asserting about mathematical truth is a highly contested position in the philosophy of mathematics, and it’s not clear to me that it’s even coherent.
I don't think most logicians would tell you there's a definitive answer to the question, "Is the axiom of choice true?" Or, perhaps an even better example, the continuum hypothesis. But again, I don't think any of this is relevant to the claims being made in the paper. I guess you think that some of what I wrote isn't literally true, if interpreted in a different context than this thread?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I don't think your empirical claim is true.
No one that I'm aware of has given up all non-essential consumption, and attempted to force others to do so, in order to save more lives.
And I don't know what you mean by "non-comparable." If one factor gets absolute priority, then nothing is non-comparable.
What you said doesn't allow you to compare art and the environment. I already gave this example, so I don't know why you're so confused.
It wouldn't reflect orthodox Bayesianism, that's for sure. Now it seems like you're falling back to naïve operationalism instead of actually defending Bayesianism.
What? This has nothing to do with Bayesianism. We can only measure things to finite accuracy, so we will never know if a result is exactly pi meters long. And the universe itself may be discrete, so that concept may not even make sense. Similarly, we can never explicitly describe all of the possible outcomes in an uncountable set. You could use rational numbers for all of the relevant math we do, it would just be harder for no real improvement.
But I'm not saying it would be undefined, just that it would be imprecise.
So what does this have to do with the paper being discussed?
"If the Axiom of Choice were true, then what would be the probability that a fair dart on the unit interval hits an element of the Vitali set"?
Asking if an axiom of mathematics is true is a nonsense question. We have different systems of mathematics, with different sets of axioms. As long as your system is consistent, it is not any more or less "true" than a different system that is also consistent. What you could ask is something like "within ZFC, what is P(X in V)?" (where X ~ U(0,1) and V is the Vitali set). And this is not a real number. But the original paper makes no such argument--it just asserts that probability doesn't always apply for reasons that are entirely unrelated to this argument. It certainly never mentions that you must assume the axiom of choice for this argument; given the author is a statistician, I would be surprised if he knew any of this. This discussion is also unrelated to science: Such sets are never going to be relevant in practice, and even if you assume the AoC, you can never explicitly define any non-measurable sets.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
But that need not be because of how much money it is, but because money is fungible to other projects that we care about
Yes, obviously, that is the point. You are still comparing a human life to that other project, whose benefits may be in lives saved, but it also might not be, and you're sometimes going to be faced with such a decision.
maybe saving lives is infinitely valuable, but spending more than a million dollars to save one would stop you from saving two lives at 500k each
Until you more precisely define what you mean by "infinitely valuable," this statement is meaningless because 2 infinite things may be identical to 1. But also, in practice, literally no one's behavior reflects such a claim, and since you can't have everything be infinitely valuable, you would still be faced with many other "noncomparable" decisions, like, to use the paper's examples, culture and the environment.
(unless you want to put all of your probability mass on a countable set, as this paper discusses
Is there any instance in which doing so would be empirically distinguishable from a truly continuous distribution or outcome space? We can only make measurements that have rational values, for example. Using real numbers is a often very very good approximation to something that is actually discrete (like molecules in a fluid) and that avoids even more tedious less-than-symbol chasing, but isn't necessary. And if you don't take the axiom of choice, the response to "what about non-measurable sets?" is "What are you talking about? Should I also consider what happens when 1+1 is 3?"
Moreover, that paper says:
Propositions need not get a probability, but may instead be assigned a range of probabilities.
which, as far as I can tell, hasn't actually avoided the alleged problem.
The Vitali set was simply an example, but you could just as well use a non-measurable set to represent an agent’s imprecise credence in a prosaic proposition about which they have genuine ignorance, rather than mere uncertainty.
There are models of ZF (with a weaker version of choice, even) in which all subsets of R are Lebesgue measurable. If you want I suppose you could develop an epistemology where some propositions have undefined probability, but if I choose not to use choice, are you going to say that doing so must be wrong, because my model of the world contains no such sets? After all, the original paper is claiming that there definitely are hypotheses to which probability cannot be applied at all.
I don’t see what’s problematic about that.
Well, for one, if it has an undefined prior probability, how do you do any sort of update based on evidence? If you receive some information on it, how would you know how strongly it supports your hypothesis compared to others, such as "the measurement device was flawed"? But again, even if you would like to think this way, it doesn't mean that an alternative is wrong.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
certainly one that produced demonstrably better results.
Is there any evidence for this claim anywhere?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Seems like it should be hard enough to prove that it's false, but maybe I'm wrong.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Someone does.
...do they? I mean, engineers estimate what maintenance costs and write down a number, but who pushes back and says it's too expensive? Or asks if the road needs to be that wide? Who is actually responsible for determining what sort of expense is justified? Who pushes back when the cost of a project is high and the benefits unclear? Maybe you know, and if so, I would like to know who does it.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
("Two-lane" is the term for a road with one lane in each direction which might cause some confusion.
Perhaps--even having 2 full lanes for a road with minimal traffic is arguably more than necessary.
Also, see my reply to wlxd
Since I was asked to elaborate: Just about every part of this comment is extremely low quality.
Excuse me? A 15 minute chokehold resulting in a dead person is "restraining"?
This is not in evidence. Unless you mean his prior assault arrests, which were not known to anyone on the train and thus irrelevant.
Neither of these remotely justifies death.
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