what_a_maroon
No bio...
User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
On the other hand, I still find it plausible that it's just art-school, shock-the-normies, absolutely cringe bullshit. If it's the latter, these people are merely gross and pathetic rather than unbelievably evil. I
I do think it's more likely that "artsy" types who are under constant pressure to be creative and put out new things and push boundaries, and who rely on public acclaim (or at least on not being too widely hated) for their career, are in fact pushing boundaries, than it is that they are subtly admitting to possibly the most despised crimes in modern culture.
Like with bullies and mass shootings, the best way to discourage it is to just not take it seriously. Outrage and engagement are what they're looking for. Just roll your eyes and pretend to be bored while saying "don't cut yourself on all that edge" like they're a 13 year old writing poems in black eyeliner and swearing on counterstrike.
Maybe I just find it hard to get outraged about a child holding some stuff they probably just didn't understand, when earlier this week an 11 year old was killed because someone modified their truck, the brakes failed, and so far they've only been charged with misdemeanors. Where's the pearl clutching and outrage here? Why can you speed and ignore signs, kill someone, and get a misdemeanor?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Agriculture is, itself, pretty separated from nature, and has only become more so over time (assuming you don't consider the entire notion to be incoherent because humans are a part of nature, and so are the things we do, like how beaver dams are part of nature). If you want to be connected to or part of nature, then hunt and forage.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
It seems odd to me to talk about immigration in America without talking about, you know, immigration in America. "A nation of immigrants" is a cliche but America's current population pretty much all arrived in the past 400 years from other places. And in that time it went from being a handful of starving colonies to the most powerful nation in world history (as well as one of the richest). At times the Italians, Irish, and other Catholic nationalities were considered to be a mean, mongrel group who could never be trusted. Now a white nativist probably couldn't tell them apart from any other American. The Chinese were also once believed to be uncivilized barbarians; now they along with other Asian-Americans are literally too successful to avoid being discriminated against by college admissions. (Yes, recent immigrants are not a contiguous group with most of the ones who migrated in the 1800s to work in California--but neither genetics nor culture is going to change that much in 150 years. Modern immigrants are richer, but almost all the European immigrants were poor too. If they had been allowed to, the Chinese immigrants of the 1800s could have assimilated trivially easily).
All through these times recent immigrants and their families often provided large amounts of cheap labor, settled new frontiers, and gradually improved their lot--the American dream. When they arrived, they often formed immigrant enclaves, but gradually assimilated over a few generations--other commenters seem to sneer at this possibility, but as far as I can tell it's literally exactly what has been happening for many years. The first generation that moves as adults is mostly the old culture, their kids are a mix, and the grandkids are just like other Americans. Sometimes it happens faster than this, but even if it does take this long it doesn't seem to matter.
In light of all of this history, most of the fears proposed by modern anti-immigration activists seem to ring hollow.
what_a_maroon
10mo 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
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
Technically, if true, all it tells you is that African Americans are more likely to make this specific kind of error. An error is not necessarily tax evasion (which at least to me implies intent), and there are probably lots of errors that are not counted. I would say more such errors is Bayesian evidence in favor of more actual evasion, but it's weak, and the error being made is this one.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
It's been all over the news in Colorado.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Not sure about CA, but all of the "help wanted" signs I'm seeing in the US are advertising bare minimum 16$ an hour, or about 32k a year. That is for starbucks baristas, grocery store stockworkers, etc; if you have any experience, it's probably closer to $18. And I'm not in a city which is particularly high COL (not the lowest, but not like the Bay or NYC either--basically like most growing cities). The average employee making this amount sounds low to me, given recent inflation.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
You could be secretly using a computer chess program. You would just need someone with access to the program to play your opponent's moves, and a way to communicate the program's moves back to you. Hence the reference to various bizarre forms of communication that he maybe used.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I agree with you. I would personally ban unions for all government employees, since it leads to the same results whether in police or teaching: 0 accountability and promotion/pay based entirely on seniority rather than competence. Thus the incentives are just to avoid committing the most egregious offenses (and even then the bar is apparently incredibly high), to follow rules as written even if they don't make sense, and do whatever is easy/safe/satisfies metrics. Obviously not everyone behaves this way, but there are plenty of examples.
I also see no benefit to allowing the police to lie about evidence in interrogations. Ending the war on drugs and having a separate non-police traffic enforcement bureau would reduce the number of chances for mischief. Qualified Immunity was wrong the moment it was conceived and must go. Improved legal training would also help (it's completely absurd to me that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" but police can act based on not knowing the law at all, like trying to stop bystanders from filming in public, and not be punished in any way). Police need body cams with teeth (they shouldn't have an on/off switch, footage should automatically be backed up to multiple 3rd party servers in real time, anything preventing the camera from working as intended like taping over it is presumptive evidence of wrongdoing on part of the officer until proven otherwise, etc.)
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Libraries are a lot more than just a warehouse for books. They provide a lot of services, including research help, internet and computer access, rooms that can be booked (hah!) for various purposes, and often a variety of other programs (tax help, kids programming, etc.). Also, just because some books are cheap doesn't mean that borrowing books as no purpose. Some people are still poor, or just have limited space, so "books are cheap" isn't that strong of an argument.
what_a_maroon
10mo 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
10mo 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
11mo ago
That would be my guess as well. In addition, these likely reflect reports rather than any sort of confirmed illness (edit: I would guess coming from https://vaers.hhs.gov/). In attempting to make its point seem stronger, in my opinion, it actually makes it weaker: how could a single vaccine (not even a new idea, just a different way of making them) causes eye injuries (something the article itself admits is unusual for a vaccine), vascular disorders, skin and tissue, ears, respiratory, breast or reproductive... the list goes on. It also is clearly doing the thing of "Big! Numbers!" by pointing to the number of different categories, even though looking at the list a "category" may be extremely specific, such as differentiating "vaccination site pain" "...swelling" "...discomfort" and then repeating them all for "vaccination site joint X".
Oh yeah, and the author is also advertising their book, which looks like a very reasonable and dispassionate review of scientific evidence.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
In the US, each side pays their own legal bills. Pretty much every other developed country defaults to the loser paying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fees)
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Here's the point, at last. Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.
This is valid, but then you have to make sure this is actually what's happening. It seems like it might be easy to assume that this is happening, without looking closely at the history of the ideas. Or you might even have different groups coming to a vaguely similar conclusion, but independently--neither is trying to "fix" the other.
My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments. The DTP example seems like it refers to different sets of claims of what to do rather than reasons why we should it. The moderate liberals aren't coming in and cleaning up after the radicals made a mess, tidying up the support columns after they accidentally built a beautiful cathedral. They're both reacting to perceived injustice, but one is going further in the other direction than the other. Sometimes the arguments they use ("racism is bad") will overlap, sometimes they won't ("we can entirely replace police with X"/"no we can't").
Scott's post seems to blur this distinction as well. It's a combination of "social dynamics that cause strange groupings of people" and "what is actually correct?" If all you, personally, care about, is whether God exists, then you should only care about the strongest arguments from the most reasonable proponents. If you, personally, are just trying to decide on what public policy to support, then it shouldn't really matter what the relationship is between moderate reform liberals and radical DTP leftists. But it does matter politically, for the reasons Scott describes.
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
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
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
If a college degree is required for most well-paying jobs, then of course that's what people are going to focus on: Graduating easily and hopefully picking up some useful skills along the way. And most of the population is going to want to go to college. If a university has no need to teach practically useful information, because it's mostly educating either future academics, priests, and scribes to continue its own existence or a small group of future elites so they have the correct status markers, then the more esoteric and useless the information, the better. And let's face it, even most of the information that STEM and social science students are taught is useless outside of continuing to study that exact subject. Earning a degree in pure math, physics, etc. just tells employers you're probably good at the more relevant aspects of math and basic problem solving. Almost nothing I learned getting a math degree is useful to anyone who isn't studying math (or a particularly math-heavy subfield of physics or CS or something along those lines) in academia.
I enjoyed most of my core requirements (art, humanities, language, etc.) but that's just because I personally liked discussing those subjects and reading those great texts.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I don't think I've seen the claim that having covid now will greatly increase your chance of dying over the next decade expressed anywhere. Can you provide some evidence for this claim? (Obviously the mainstream belief is that vaccines reduce deaths in the short term, because there are very large RCTs that got a lot of scrutiny showing that this the case.)
I think they would put it at 1% per infection, and with infections every six months that’s about 20% mortality in a decade
I also don't think a lot of people would give you these numbers or anything particularly close. I know a lot of liberals and leftists who took covid fairly seriously (and even continue to do so) and I don't think they would say this if you asked.
On the other hand, graduate student workers tend to provide specialized services. So a reasonable question (that I don't have an answer to yet) would be: how much would a professional grader of introductory writing courses charge? What about one for differential calculus? What about one for organic chemistry? From that perspective, $43/hour sounds like not such a bad deal.
You could probably estimate this by looking around for tutors for these subjects. I live somewhere cheaper than CA, and 35-50 dollars an hour seems common even for less specialized (although possibly more practical) tutoring. Given that they're working with many students, I agree that 43$ an hour is probably a good deal comparatively speaking. The real question is whether this should be subsidized by the government; just because some people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a nice car, doesn't mean that official government vehicles should be that expensive.
edit: I forgot to also say, graduate students occupy this weird split between workers and customers. What grad students I know have told me is that a lot of what the students are getting is training (a graduate degree does allow you to earn more money), which is actually the most expensive part (showing someone how to do hands-on scientific research is much more wasteful than just hiring a technician or postdoc to do the research). On the flip side, colleges can recover a lot of that cost because they take a large portion of most grants that researches are awarded.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Overall, while whites have the largest amount of people intermarrying simply due to sheer logistical numbers, they are statistically the least likely to date outside of their race, and relatively equal rates for both men and women. I brought this up to him the next time I saw him, and he was quite shocked at this. He brought up an interesting question.
Wouldn't a lot of this phenomenon be due to the simple number of potential out-of-race partners? Whites are still a large majority in the US, so you would be much more likely to marry a white person no matter who you are (although there is of course still segregation by proximity, work, education, language, etc). This is true for whites, and blacks, but the latter is inter-racial while the former is not. Similarly the 54% for Asian women--Asians are only a few percent of the population. This number still means that Asian women strongly "prefer" marrying intra-race. If they married randomly, and are about 5.4% of the population, the inter-racial portion would be a whopping 95%! (I put "prefer" in scare quotes because it's probably a combination of personal preference and other factors that simply have them in contact with more
What this can't easily explain, and is therefore more interesting, is within-race differences; such as this fact:
The most dramatic gap in all the data exists between college educated black men and women... Black men are twice as likely as black women to have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity (24% vs. 12%).
This is quite interesting. There might still be interactions with the size of the available population (blacks are less likely to be college educated, and I have no idea if there is a gender gap here) but it would probably be more complicated to compute.
She wants to have a Hindu wedding; I want to make Christian vows
FWIW I know at least one Hindu/Jewish couple who just had both types of ceremony. Possibly this comes down to how strictly religious you are individually, since I definitely know several inter-religion marriages.
Most of the successful interracial relationships I’ve ever seen have always had a shared religious belief between them.
Possibly related: there are multiple memes like this that I've found on /r/PCM (another one involves a more modernly-dressed white man and hispanic woman but is basically identical).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
reregistering as Republicans and voting with Never-Trumpers for a particular non-Trump candidate in every state, or at least states which are key electoral states for the primary vote
Isn't this the exact opposite of what they supposedly did in the midterms, where they (allegedly) promoted Trumpists who then got trounced in the general? And wouldn't this trouncing imply that supporting Non-Trump Republicans is not a good strategy?
You mean, Kyrie Irving, his former teammate. They aren't related.
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