what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr 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
1yr 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
11mo ago
God I seriously wish that some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free" cities that they think everybody wants so they could realize how terrible it is.
A lot of them have done so, probably most notably NotJustBikes, who moved to Amsterdam.
Most of these problems seem to be unrelated to the extent to which a city is walkable. Car-dependent American cities still have homelessness, crime, and drug use, while many walkable ones in Europe or Japan have much less. Walkability does not mean doing nothing about social problems; Amsterdam did a lot of work (see section 9) to clean itself up.
This idea that "boomers like cars and ruined everything by making car centric cities" is absurd and I can only assume is parroted by people who never leave their goon caves.
This is unnecessarily rude, but also seems to neglect history. Were cities already plagued by the same issues after WW2, when the exodus to car-dependent suburbs began, and is that why people started to leave? Have the policies imposed to make cities and suburbs more amenable to cars, such as knocking down urban neighborhoods to make way for highways, or preventing any housing from being built, contributed to these social problems?
(The actual thing to object to is that boomers aren't responsible for these policies for the most part--it's actually Silent and Greatest, until more recently.)
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
5-15 years seems like an exaggeration. Graduating from high school is not hard for most people and is pretty important for getting a reasonable paying job (also being 18). After that, college is a 4 year endeavor, and very few people spend any time in school after that. Even finishing a bachelor's is something that only a little over a third of those 25-30 have done (although closer to 2/3 have at least "some college" which might indicate a lot of wasted time failing to graduate--this number is probably far too high given the costs of college). The drop in fertility is much more widespread than that.
There's definitely a portion of the population going through higher education, and then trying to get started in a career to pay off student loans/justify so much college, and then don't have a lot of time left in between that and being too old, especially if you have trouble getting pregnant because you only started looking for a partner at age 30. I know people in this situation. (Of course, I also know people in this situation who got married young and got divorced and remarried, nothing to do with college at all). But this group is too small to explain the bulk of the trend.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
In my opinion Randal O'Toole makes arguments that are mostly not worth taking seriously. For example, he writes a bunch about how density and affordability are negatively correlated. Obviously! Places that a lot of people want to live are both denser and more expensive than other places. That's how supply and demand works, especially when supply is artificially constrained! As far as I can tell, he never addresses this reverse causality. The best quality evidence (e.g. natural experiments) show a causal effect of more housing -> lower housing prices.
(This debate always baffles me because on on the one hand, you have some YIMBYs agreeing with most NIMBYs that restrictive zoning increases prices ("home values" from the NIMBY PoV), but then O'Toole is on the side of various leftist groups that claim to hate the rich suburbanites but also claim that building more housing doesn't make housing cheaper. It's literally parody, but real.)
Similarly with the CA growth boundaries. I don't like them as a policy, but the idea that most of the population of CA is "forced" to live in a few metro areas is absurd. Many people want to live near the places that have jobs, other people, things to do, etc. Telling them to live in even further suburbs and drive 3 hours is not a solution!
And, of course, the idea that zoning is a property right. Keep in mind that O'Toole freely compares the aforementioned growth boundaries to feudalism or communism. But your neighbors have basically unlimited right to tell you what you can and can't do with your property, because they're a majority--that's fine! It's one of the most obvious "coming to the conclusion first" arguments I've ever seen. I mean, take this:
Zoning land as a substitute for deed restrictions and then yanking away that zoning betrays the homeowners in such neighborhoods.
You can't just say that one thing is kind of like another thing, and therefore one counts as the other. For one, it's not even the case that zoning is fixed in place--the local government can modify like with any other law, and they often do. Or they put in a nebulous approval process without any restriction at all. But also, you could say the same about repealing any restriction or changing any law. It's a betrayal to alcohol and tobacco companies to legalize marijuana. We can never change IP law, even if it's clearly being abused to enforce a monopoly. Changing how taxes work betrays people who saved based on different laws. Repealing a tariff isn't fair to the company that bought off politicians lobbied for it.
what_a_maroon
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr ago
You want to "fix" the housing problem? Kick women out of the workplace and a married family will be able to raise their kids on a single salary, with mom at home keeping an eye on the schools and housing prices will be within the reach of a single-family income.. as they were until the mid-late-60s.
Is there even the slightest shred of evidence for this claim? The number of new housing units being built has declined compared to population. The incomes of households will not change the underlying fact that there isn't enough housing.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given that this isn't even the 5th boldest claim you've made in this post without providing any sort of argument.
what_a_maroon
1yr 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
1yr ago
Is it a realignment? This article doesn't really provide evidence of that. It shows that Trump is doing better among non-whites when looking at Republican voters and comparing to other Republican candidates. This doesn't necessarily generalize to doing better among non-whites in general, or doing better compared to non-Republican politicians. I believe that Scott has a few posts that show some evidence that he did (or e.g. improved his performance among non-whites from 2016 to 2020), although the effect is not as strong as the one described in this article.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Whether they are wrong or not, it's clearly low quality as it doesn't contain any argument or evidence. It also violates the rules for boo outgroup and speaking plainly.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Without researching, this description makes it seem ripe for underreporting.
Family- or clan-based legal systems are viable (David Friedman's book describes at least one), but that still does involve a process. The part where the male family members went to the other family first is really really key. If they just went and did it, without giving the other family the ability to say "I don't think you're correct, this person was out of town last night" it just devolves into a cycle of retaliation.
what_a_maroon
1yr 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
Narcissism
Sounds like it to me, although I'm no psychiatrist.
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this?
In her tweet, she claims the son is autistic. Could be real, although if it has anything to do with his mother, I suspect "mother seized upon some minor tics to she could feel special by claiming an autistic child" is the most likely relationship.
Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any.
I find it a little hard to believe that you couldn't find any such people if you looked. For example, do you think that megapastors who claim God wants them to buy a private jet are any less narcissistic? (Also claiming that COVID was already over in March 2020 due to prayer and that even those who lost their job should continue to give him money). As far as I can tell, people like Copeland and Joel Osteen are just as delusional and narcissistic as Jones and have suckered in at least as many people.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I actually don't think most of it is psychological, although it may have a vaguely related, CW cause. Autoimmune disease, with allergy being a prime example, seems to be more common in developed countries. One common (although not universally accepted) hypothesis is that the autoimmune system overreacts when it doesn't have anything to do, or otherwise malfunctions if not exposed to pathogens when young. First world countries are so clean and disinfected that our immune systems have started to break down. The idea of increasing exposure to allergens has actually become mainstream enough that the director of the NIH recommends early exposure for kids at risk of peanut allergy (although does caution this isn't universal advice--some allergies probably are just genetic and not caused by a modern sterile environment). The allergies are very real--no amount of psychology will change your immune system's antibodies (although a friend of mine indicated they were able to slightly reduce their peanut allergy as an adult participating in an exposure study).
If you're wondering what the CW angle is, you may notice (if you're familiar with Jonathan Haidt's work, or Nassim Taleb's notion of antifragility) the similarity to the generally-accepted biological fact that muscles grow by being damage, and bones heal stronger than they were to start, and the hypothesis that we need exposure to psychological and emotional adversity in order to be able to handle disagreement and discomfort. And indeed, Haidt uses these biological mechanisms as analogies in his presentations (see the section starting around 26:00 in https://youtube.com/watch?v=B5IGyHNvr7E&ab_channel=PennStateMcCourtneyInstituteforDemocracy). By telling pregnant mothers whose babies are at risk of peanut allergies not to consume any peanuts, we've increased peanut allergies. Are we doing the same for immune systems more generally with excess cleanliness, and for human psychology with helicopter parenting (and general excess adult supervision)?
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
The French Revolution, and the whole downstream branch of purported Enlightenment thinking and subsequent revolutions which took the French Revolution as their model, which appears to me to be the predominant portion both in raw numbers and in intellectual influence throughout the modern era.
Maybe this is just my Amero-centric bias speaking, but it seems to me like the American version is much more influential worldwide. Are there any countries that are currently trying to do what the French Revolution did as far as religion? I agree that the American Revolution is fairly unique among revolutions, but I think this more likely has to do with who was doing the rebelling and the circumstances of that rebellion than ideological influence. For example, the Americans were British colonists, rather than being natives of the country they inhabited, and so were not subject to the same sort of oppression (and technological and economic disadvantage) as, say, the Indians, Haitians, Mexicans, or Congolese.
(One could even argue that the real legacy of the Enlightenment is neither of those 2 big revolutions, but rather the peaceful granting of independence to countries like Canada and Australia much later, and these data points don't even come to mind because of how boring it is. That's fairly speculative on my part though).
Yes, the French Revolution was influenced by and incorporated aspects of the Enlightenment. I think it's a mistake to judge any intellectual movement by its worst "members" since some portion of any group of people will have bullies, narcissists, sociopaths, and people just hungry for power or violence, who are willing to join any movement and utilize it to their own ends, as well as extremists who truly believe but also use it to justify violence regardless of what those beliefs actually are. For example, what exemplifies the "core elements" of Christianity? Is it the Crusades? The forceful suppression of Native American culture and religion? The preservation of Greek and Roman learning through the Dark Ages? Maximillian Koble sacrificing himself at Aushwitz? All of these are some combination of what Christianity teaches and individual behavior by individual people. The French Revolution is the same.
(Communism rightfully gets dragged because all of its examples, at least above Dunbar's number, are horrific.)
No, it doesn't, because what people claim is of far less evidentiary value than what they do. But the flipside of this is the people who claim that Communism is Utopia, and therefore the USSR wasn't really Communist since it didn't create a Utopia. That is what I perceive you and others to be doing with the Enlightenment; you seem to be claiming that good results are part of its definition, and therefore an instance that produces bad results can't have been part of it. I think we should understand ideologies by the methods they employ and the outcomes they produce, not the outcomes they claim to be pursuing. The claims are still helpful in understanding how their agents saw themselves, but those statements should be heavily outweighed by what those agents actually did and the results they actually achieved.
I see what you're saying, and I agree that it's fallacious to just redefine a thing you like to be "good things" and a thing you don't like to be "bad things." However, in this case I really do believe that the individual liberty interpretation is much more in line with what Enlightenment thinkers like Locke actually proposed, and French Revolutionaries were largely taking out their anger with the Church, which was heavily entwined with the monarchy and had benefited from special privileges, rather than implementing an Enlightenment philosophical vision. Particularly when you have a mass movement with individual people from many walks of life... do you think that all of those people had read and digested all of the Enlightenment thinkers? Similarly I'm sure there were aspects of the American Revolution not perfectly in line with Enlightenment principles.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
No, they were actively proclaiming for assimilation and suppression of foreign cultures and foreign tongues, if not explicitly foreign people.
Some people certainly wanted this, but did it actually happen? Or rather, did it actually happen any faster than it does now, or would have happened anyway? German was actually a very popular language in the US, with German newspapers in many towns, until the world wars. Lots of other diaspora communities persisted as well, like Celtish in the Carolina lowlands. My impression is actually that a lot of nativists did the opposite, and wanted the immigrants to remain separate in their own enclaves indefinitely--"No Irish need apply" doesn't seem like it encourages assimilation.
There were never as many Italians or Irish then as there are Mexicans and assorted CA hispanics now.
Do you have data to support this claim? Raw immigration numbers peaked in 1990, with the second peak being 1900-1920:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States#/media/File:Immigration_to_the_United_States_over_time.svg
Adjusting for population, it's clear that we're in a pretty low spot historically (excepting the Depression and WW2)--adjusted for the 4.3x population difference, even the low point in 1900 is equivalent to well over 800,000 today. In fact, even going purely by raw numbers, "the last 60 years" is largely not that high!
Things have changed, and those changes have destroyed the mechanism for the assimilation that you take for granted. Hence the sneering. That machine's broken, it's not going to be rebuilt, and anyone who wants to do so is pilloried.
I don't see much in the way of evidence for any these things. I think people who say this don't sufficiently grapple with the history of assimilation, which I only know a little bit about, but I know enough to know that it's complicated.
This won't happen, because that goose is cooked.
Well, this is a testable prediction, at least. I think it's rather early to conclude it won't happen, when large-scale hispanic immigration is, what, 30 or 40 years old? German language newspapers existed as far back as the Revolution and was quite popular throughout the 1800s, only really declining because of WW1. Do you think that, say, the grandchildren of early hispanic immigrants (so, the children of people born in the US) don't speak substantially more English than their grandparents?
what_a_maroon
1yr 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
Ah - I assume that it's implicit that I think communities belong to the entire community, not to me personally.
What defines a "community"? Is it your neighborhood? Your street? Literally just your family? The town? The state? The country? Right now most of these laws are passed at the municipal level, but municipalities can range in size from millions of people to a handful, and as current events in California indicate, if you change from town to state, you can get very different policies.
In general I don't think that "collective ownership" is a good framework for coordination problems. At some point, a plot of land (or building, etc) needs a person who is going to make decisions and be responsible for the outcome; rule by committee or democracy is marked by lots of public choice problems. A market with individual owners, and Coasian bargaining for externalities, is usually going to be better at capturing everyone's preferences given all of the relevant costs and other information. Complete bans are a very heavy-handed and unnecessarily extreme solution.
It's easy to say you support a policy, when the costs are spread among everyone else. For example, when you live in a neighborhood of all single family homes and drive everywhere, do you pay all of the costs for the roads, infrastructure, and other services? Often not. You might not want to live next to an unmarried couple, but are you willing to pay for all of the costs that come with forcing neighborhoods to be that way?
To take your argument about NIMBYism more generally: In the US at least, we are way past the point of just not wanting to live near homeless people. Highly-paid software engineers need to find multiple roommates just to live near the center of their industry. Professionals with families and white-collar jobs are forced to live an hour commute from downtown, because "home values" are literally sacred. In the most extreme cases, it exacerbates the very homeless problem it attempts to, well, not solve, but avoid. And it imposes, on other people, very similar externalities to the ones you are trying to avoid. Cars are a good example: NIMBYism inevitably requires lots of driving because everything is low-density and stores are required by law to be far away from homes. Driving is incredibly dangerous; car crashes kill several times more people each year than homicide in the US, and a substantial portion of those deaths are not drivers. They're also very loud, they pollute, etc.
what_a_maroon
1yr 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
1yr ago
Man, that's an awful lot of euphemism, nonsense, and irrelevance crammed into such a short post.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
There’s a reason criminal trials are conducted on behalf of the state and not the victims. It’s because justice is something sought by society against transgressors. Getting money isn’t “Justice,” and I feel like the legal profession has just gaslit the entire world into believing it is. Of course, I think it is very difficult to provide restorative justice to someone who has been physically attacked or raped or obviously murdered. The deed is done, and money won’t magically make it go away.
Justice for a rape victim isn’t their rapist writing them a big check, it’s the rapist rotting in prison and unable to rape more people. That’s why I find statements like the press release for the bill that created this cause of action a figment of lawlogic that’s totally alien to my worldview:
This is a point of view you can to take, but it's not at all obvious, and in fact this is exactly how many societies throughout history handled justice, and it's certainly not new. The entire idea of imprisoning average criminals is a few hundred years old at most, and has only been practical for less than that, and only in rich societies. (Aside from payment, societies also used slavery, exile, execution, torture, and probably other methods I'm forgetting). Similarly for the idea that the state handles everything--polycentric legal systems based on resolving disputes between 2 parties are also very common historically.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Why would you expect them to have well-thought-out risk/reward tradeoffs? Other than what's in the other replies, most of what I know about Andrew Tate comes from youtube and instagram bits where he's bragging about how much money he has and insulting men who aren't rich, and how he has a surefire way for you to get rich. Sounds like walking survivorship bias to me, where someone made bad gambles that paid off for a time but have come around to bite him. Also, "plenty" of revenue is never enough for some people.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
I don't really see a better proxy for judging a sense of duty to others than blood/nobility.
I have a hard time thinking of a worse one. The history of "nobility" is largely one of forcefully looting as much wealth as possible from what are effectively slaves, held in place with military force. What was the nobility's reaction to the peasantry being able to demand higher wages after the Black Death, or move to cities for the same end? Was it to encourage this natural economic development which improved productivity even at their own cost? Of course not, they passed laws prohibiting peasants from leaving so that they could not get those higher wages.
The feeling of societal obligation you're talking about--and in particular, a feeling of societal obligation that actually helps other people and does not consider the rigid maintenance of the existing order for the sake of "stability" to be the primary obligation--is extremely rare.
The obvious counter-argument to me is that the trend of sprawling, samey, car-dependent, SFH-only suburbs started in the 40s and 50s, when crime was generally at a low and prior to the riots mentioned by Kulak. The crime wave may have accelerated this trend, but it didn't start it.
The planners who built these places also had no issue planning and building similar developments for blacks, though they were separated because those people believed it was just the natural order of things for races to be separate, not that blacks were inherently incapable of civilization.
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