what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
pro-car pro-suburb traditionalists.
Your footnote says that this is just a name, but I would point out that car-dependent suburbs are relatively new, mostly post WW2. The neighborhoods that urbanists like tend to be the older ones, and in fact often describe this as a "traditional" development style.
If you’re actively involved in the politics of the places where the most valuable land is, you’re dealing with the Democratic Party’s internal politics far more than any interparty fighting.
This is somewhat true, but far from completely. Highways especially are often the domain of the state or federal government, so you have situations like the state of Texas trying to expand I-35 through downtown Austin that the city generally opposes. Or small groups of individuals who join together based on their self-interest rather than political agreement to oppose changes with nitpicky legal maneuvering. In general, lawsuits filed by individuals or small groups are a common tool to prevent development, and the laws these suits are based on can come from any level of government.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
It sometimes legitimately feels like the state does things for no other reason than to frustrate the city and its residents. In this case I think the relevant state officials really do believe that expanding the highway will reduce congestion in spite of overwhelming empirical evidence, but wouldn't be surprised if they felt the ability to throw their weight around and ignore the city's point of view was a bonus.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
To me, this seems like one of those things where the disease is worse than the cure, but people don't realize it. Driving is very dangerous; for example, several times more Americans are killed every year in car crashes (including people outside of automobiles being hit). One could certainly argue about all of the relevant costs of crime vs cars, but at the very least it's worth thinking seriously about, and I suspect most Americans don't weigh them anywhere close to what really makes sense.
(I should emphasize, this doesn't mean I think crime doesn't matter, or people should just suck up having to deal with it, or anything like that. A number of American cities have done themselves a great disservice by failing to do anything about crime, homeless encampments, etc. and having lots of these things in your neighborhood is a legitimate concern.)
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
A twitter thread about a paper on policing: https://twitter.com/jnixy/status/1559568512485470209
The paper itself: https://t.co/sy6LHNMpph
Key points
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The US doesn't have that many police officers given its level of serious crime (homicide), but it does have a lot of prisoners.
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The US is unusually punitive for suspects who are arrested, but also unusually bad at arresting anyone.
Their main recommendation is to trade off more certainty of punishment against less severity. This is an idea with a good deal of support in criminology (e.g. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf claims this, and it is consistent with what I learned when I studied the subject; https://www.jstor.org/stable/41638882 claims the opposite, but agrees this is contradictory to most of the literature). In particular, we could spend less money on incarceration and more on police officers. Interestingly, despite the suggestion to hire a lot more police, the paper takes a progressive stance ("The burdens of the status quo... fall more disproportionately on Black people and the poor, and especially the Black poor, than do the benefits.")
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Addendum, entirely my own opinion: One reform that I would like to try is to make lawsuits default to "loser pays." Almost every other developed country requires the losing side in a lawsuit to pay for the other side's legal fees. I think it's generally well known that lawsuits are often a tool used to bully people into complying by making that cheaper than defending the lawsuit. Meritless lawsuits are still very expensive to defend, and almost every story I read about cost inflation seems to mention lawsuits at some point. Suing over a missed period in an environmental impact review as is common in CA, or suing because a building would be taller than surrounding "historic" buildings like in Miami, or for minor procedural limitations like with Austin's CodeNext, or Cambridge suing Boston because of "visual impact" of a bridge redesign during the Bid Dig, is very common. I think this happens in medicine, too: Malpractice insurance isn't cheap, but probably far more expensive is the vast amount of extra tests done for reasons of "CYA." Loser pays would discourage lawsuits that are likely to fail, but costly to defend.
(The only thing preventing me from declaring this the Solution to All Cost Disease is that I haven't seen a lot of discussion of lawsuits in educational cost disease. However, one might also think about the attitudes described above in both of those contexts: Do we insist on expensive and impressive-looking inputs, regardless of cost or efficacy? Are we highly insensitive to price? Is it considered unethical to reject the "best" solution because it's costly? Do bears shit in the woods? etc.)
But also, I think you can see similar attitudes reflect in the people filing those lawsuits, or otherwise being obstructionist (such as county officials who drove up the price of CA's HSR by demanding it take circuitous routes). They would rather tank an entire project to benefit millions of people, than not get their pound of flesh or deal with a minor inconvenience of something changing or having their property appreciate in value slightly less quickly. Even as a libertarian who's usually very suspect of "people being selfish ruin everything" style arguments, it seems like borderline narcissism or sociopathy.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Did the GOP hurt their own election chances by downplaying COVID?
This tweet claims that Lauren Boebert may lose her race by less than 100 votes, in a district with over 2,500 covid deaths. While one can certainly argue over the effectiveness of various measures, I think a combination of masking, distancing, and (of course) vaccinating could easily be worth plus or minus 8% deaths (the vote is roughly evenly split, so if there would otherwise be about 1250 dead from each group, then we have 100/1250 = about 8%). And the elderly, who were disproportionately affected by COVID, tend to vote Republican.
Note, the original tweet is now out of date; https://elections.denverpost.com/ has Boebert ahead by just over 1,000 votes. The closest House race where the Dem is currently ahead, coincidentally also in CO, unfortunately does not appear in https://geographicinsights.iq.harvard.edu/coviduscongress because it's a new district (CO 8). CA District 13 is also very close, with the Republican ahead by 267 (according to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/10/us/elections/results-house-seats-elections-congress.html, at time of writing) in a district with 945 covid deaths. If this race does flip, it could easily be by just a few hundred votes (currently only 58% counted though).
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
You seem to have fallen for the “induced demand” meme
It's not a meme; it's basic economics which is also backed up by fairly overwhelming empirical evidence.
People want to live in the suburbs and work downtown.
Given Austin's zoning map, a correct statement would be "Austinites are largely prohibited from living anywhere except a suburb or right in the middle of downtown." Also, people may "want"* to live in the suburbs and drive into downtown, but that's not possible. Doubling freeway capacity would not change that, because it is literally impossible to fit the whole population into cars. They simply take up too much space.
*I put "want" in scare quotes because rarely do such people want to pay all of the costs associated with doing so.
The welfare of the area would be increased.
No, it would be a net decrease, because the cost of doing so would be very high, and those resources could be more efficiently used elsewhere. It would suck for anyone who currently lives in the area and has to deal with additional car traffic, construction, and possibly have their property sized to make room. It would separate downtown from East Austin even more, etc.
People hate driving through Austin. Other Texas cities with functional freeway systems are objectively easier to get around.
There's no reason to have the only interstate go straight through downtown. Lots of cities have interstates that go around the core. San Antonio has 410. Houston has 610 and I think others I don't recall the number of. DFW has 635, 20, and again I think others. Elsewhere, 95 goes totally around Boston, while 90 and 93 go into the city. Austin only has 45, which isn't an interstate and is a toll road, so all the trucks and other thru traffic go through the city even though it's slower.
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.
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
As I pointed out in the comment, almost every other rich country has this. In spite of this, you and @Amadan seem to think it's pretty much impossible. Have you checked what those other countries do in response to the situations you describe? For example, you write:
Ok so Exxon tells the other firm their spending $100 million defending the case. Now it’s a bet the company case for the smaller but well capitalized firm. Sure you can have a second arbitration on some reasonable costs standard.
The link I posted mentioned caps on recoverable fees--did you not even look at it?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
This seems like a pure strawman. The bulk of the urbanist content I'm aware of is focused on things like "make walking safe", "have stuff closer together", "run more frequent trains" etc. that all are based around improving the QoL for non car-users. And you even have https://youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k which is about how driving is better in the Netherlands! What, specifically, are you referring to?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Both transit and road subsidies here are reasonable because infrastructure has economic benefits for all of society. If you told a transit operator that riders aren't paying for all of the costs of their services, they'd stare at you blankly and go, "of course they aren't; the point of infrastructure is to get them to their destinations, not to turn a profit".
I believe that some transit can actually pay for itself. For example, the first NYC subway was private (the city took it over after refusing to allow them to raise the fare to account for inflation, bankrupting them). Japan currently has private train lines. If you don't care about that, then fine--but then "I just want to live how I want to" isn't valid either. If you expect that public services will be provided to you at below cost, then you should also expect that you might have to give up some of what you might want to benefit other people in turn.
I disagree that it's an isolated demand for rigor, because I oppose a broad array of government programs on similar grounds. Medicine and education are heavily subsidized, for example, and thus are over-consumed.
(This is somewhat outside the scope of NIMBYism specifically, but it's also the case that if you're going to subsidize some service, you should account for how effective it is and what the externalities are. Driving is low-capacity and has high externalities and negative side-effects, so it isn't a good choice to subsidize.)
In general, I am skeptical of Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns. Strong Towns especially since they've been shown to not be honest with their numbers, and Not Just Bikes for repeating Strong Towns's argument without any criticism, as he does in the video you linked to.
The numbers in the linked video are actually from a separate organization, Urban3. I don't really think that the linked comment "shows ST to be dishonest." gattsuru seems to agree that funding is coming from the state and local government, which is also something that ST has pointed out. They then complain about the fact that ST's comparison between 2 lots is (misleading? inaccurate?) because one lot has more businesses than the other, when in fact that is the whole point. Complaints about which things are being taxed (property vs gas etc.) seem to be irrelevant when the cost of replacing a single piece of infrastructure is 25% or more of the median household income. Overall I would describe this as "someone disagrees with them" not "they're being dishonest."
This rings hollow to me because a significant factor in both car crashes and homicide is a lack of accountability.
Why does it "ring hollow"? I agree that reckless driving doesn't get enough enforcement; I've previously complained about that. But I think this problem long predates BLM protests and backlash against police. Car crash fatalities had been declining prior to COVID, but this is due to the cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features, but deaths of pedestrians and others outside of cars have been increasing. Even the use of the term "car accident" is arguably misleading; we already have a concept of negligence in law, but seem reluctant to even apply it to car crashes, even in theory. What the police do is irrelevant if the legislature and/or courts have decided that nobody is actually to blame. Also, any sort of meaningful enforcement is discouraged because, ironically, of how car-dependent we are. Preventing someone from driving, in most of the US, means they are entirely dependent on someone else to do things like work or buy food.
I am also skeptical that enforcement has/would have a big effect, but I would love to see some empirical research. However, even better than enforcement is prevention. There are ways to design roads and other infrastructure which are safer because they naturally cause drivers to be more careful. For example, posting a low speed limit on a sign does nothing if the road itself is straight with wide lanes. People tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit, so rather than just posting a sign, make the road itself narrower.
Finally, the negative externalities of cars go well beyond deaths related to negligence. They're loud and they pollute, to give 2 examples.
what_a_maroon
9mo 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
1yr ago
Well, many of the stuff they champion as improving the QoL of non-cars also just happens to worsen the QoL of car users, e.g. Oxford's traffic filters plan.
If you look at the video I linked, he makes the point that requiring cars to sometimes take a slightly longer route makes it faster to drive, since some people won't drive, reducing congestion.
Ironically, sprawling suburbs often have these exact same limitations. Cul de sacs are very popular, and suburban roads are often windy rather than direct, because everyone realizes that having cars go through your neighborhood sucks--but for some reason we don't think about these forms of road design as "limiting freedom to drive" or whatever.
NJB's argument about pedestrian bridges seems to focus entirely on how they lower QoL for pedestrians, in direct contradiction to the claim that "so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners." You say this doesn't make sense, but he makes several specific arguments and you don't offer any explanation at all, you just make an assertion about his state of mind.
There might be people who hate all driving and want to ban cars, so fine, it's not a "pure strawman." I still think it's a weakman to boil all arguments in favor of urbanism down to "they just hate cars" so all arguments can be ignored.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I haven't been to Washington. It's probably mostly interstates they're thinking of (they mentioned ND, so I looked at I-94, and yep, 2 lanes paved in each direction in the middle of nowhere), but for example 87 in Northwest Texas and Northeastern New Mexico is 2 lanes in each direction, through an area with about 6 buildings and more cows than people.
It is certainly the case that not all rural roads are like this, I've driven on many that are not, but they definitely exist.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Is this a failure?
If your goal is to reduce congestion, which is typically a major stated goal of these projects, then yes, it's clearly a failure.
And the market makes more money!
I don't think this statement means anything, but also there is no "market" here. The state government just wants to build more highway, regardless of costs or benefits.
a separate goal of 'more people getting to where they want to'
I don't know why every time I end up in a discussion about roads on here, all of the car enthusiasts use the same analogy as if I don't understand that more people driving means that more people are going places. That's not the question. The question is how this particular use of space, money, and time compares to alternatives. It's like offering starving people 1,000-dollar truffle mushrooms as food, and then when someone points out that 98% of them are still starving because you could only afford to feed 2%, you pat yourself on the back because, well, you fed some people, right?
Plus, you can't just completely ignore everyone except for the group who benefits. What about the businesses and homes that would be subsumed by the wider freeway? Are they better off? What about people who live in East Austin and would like to be able to get into downtown without driving? What about people who can't or don't want to drive?
In that case it's not exactly about improving the quality of life of car users, just mitigating their externalities. Which, for the record, I agree with in this case.
It may not be the primary intention, but it does help.
The alternative to a pedestrian bridge is not being able to cross the road at all.
I think there's just a very far inferential distance here. Why are the only options "bridge" or "nothing" in the first place? The thing being complained about is not that "a crosswalk would annoy those damned cars" it's that "pedestrians are forced to take a much longer and more difficult route to prevent cars from experiencing even the slightest inconvenience." It's not that making driving miserable is an end goal; it's that most American cities have unlimited appetite to add the slightest convenience for drivers at the cost of arbitrary QoL loss for every other form of transportation.
The very short mention about the drug users seems to be taken as more of a joke--as far as I can tell, he doesn't linger on it or claim it's because of the bridge. (He does actually talk about public safety around 1:50 in https://youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw&ab_channel=NotJustBikes, with the concept of "eyes on the street".)
What, like this guy with 1.2 million views? Or this guy? Or /r/fuckcars? To some extent I have sympathy here because, to some extent, all movements are plagued by radicals and extremists, but my sympathy wanes when movements don't self-regulate in this matter.
A weakman can exist (that's the whole point) and be popular, but it's still the weakest form of the argument. The original claim was "I find it curious that so much effort is spent trying to reduce the quality of life of car owners, and not in improving the quality of life of non-car owners." There's quite a lot of the latter. I could say something like "people who like zoning are just racist and greedy." Probably there are some people who support strict zoning for those reasons; it wouldn't be hard to find example of NIMBY's using "home values" as an explicit argument. But there are certainly lots of other arguments, and it doesn't matter if the relative size of each group is 1:99 or the other way around.
What self-regulation do you want to see? I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone on this forum even go so far as to disclaim the worst NIMBYs. It's not like NJB or City Beautiful or CityNerd or Oh the Urbanity can do anything about /r/fuckcars or an opposing blog. Would you want to be grouped in with everyone who posts here on TheMotte, and have your arguments dismissed because of who posts here?
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
11mo ago
The best explanation I've seen for non-lawyers is probably from Massad Ayoob: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-j4PS_8R5IE&ab_channel=MrMuscleBilly
This video is long but quite thorough. The specifics of when deadly force is justified start around 27:00. He's being relatively conservative to try to cover as many legal jurisdictions as possible, but given that this is NY it's probably the most legally relevant anyway.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
What if the reverse is true, and covid has so-far unknown long-term effects, but boosters greatly diminish them, so that the unvaxxed are 25% more likely to do? Purely hypothetically, of course. What would the public's response be, and what would be the just punishment for people who said vaccines didn't work and COVID is a nothingburger?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
To quantify costs in a cost–benefit analysis, in effect you must assign a dollar value to human life, including future generations; to environmental degradation; to human culture; to endangered species; and so on. You must believe that scales like “quality adjusted life-years” or “utility” are meaningful, reasonable, and a sound basis for decisions
I'm not sure what this has to do with models, but I don't really like this section. I actually agree that there's a lot of abuse of quantification (combining unlike things or scales, performing operations on values that treat them as cardinal even though they're really ordinal, etc.) and that qualitative analysis can be very valuable. But any policy requires you to compare things that people are, often, hesitant to put numerical or dollar values on. Saying you can't quantify e.g. the value of human culture or endangered species doesn't change the fact that you're going to be faced with proposals to spend $30 million on helping victims of wildfire damage in California, $25 million on food aid for Nigeria, $100 million to invest in carbon-capture technology research, $50 million to buy local art for a park, and $17 million to save the wide-tailed blubberfish from extinction, as well as questions of how to set the property tax rate vs the sales tax rate, whether to require barbers be licensed (trading off very different benefits on each side), and you have to have some way of deciding which of those proposals make sense to support. Refusing to give a quantitative reason for your decision doesn't change the fact that each decision implicitly places a dollar value on each of those things.
There are many phenomena for which the frequency theory makes sense (e.g., games of chance where the mechanism of randomization is known and understood) and many for which it does not. What is the probability that global average temperature will increase by three degrees in the next 50 years? What is the chance there will be an earthquake with magnitude 8 or greater in the San Francisco Bay area in the next 50 years?Footnote12 Can we repeat the next 50 years over and over to see what fraction of the time that happens, even in principle?
There's no actual principled distinction here. The next flip of a coin may also be different from the last--the air currents in the room may have shifted, or the coin was damaged after the first toss. The question is "when are future events sufficiently similar to past ones to treat them as draws from some single empirical process?" which is basically the entire point of models, so this argument appears to be circular.
Also, I believe that Cox's theorem does, in fact, imply that all uncertainty is essentially probability. You do not know how to accurately calculate the probability is not the same as "probability is meaningless here" any more than the difficulty of solving the 3-body problem means that Newtonian mechanics doesn't apply.
That said, LeCam (1977, pp. 134–135) offers the following observations:
Without reading the reference, all of the claims in this section seem to be incoherent or just wrong.
Attempting to combine aleatory and epistemic uncertainties by considering both to be ‘probabilities’ that satisfy Kolmogorov’s axioms amounts to claiming that there are two equivalent ways to tell how much something weighs: I could weigh it on an actual physical scale or I could think hard about how much it weighs. The two are on a par. It claims that thinking hard about the question produces an unbiased measurement. Moreover, it claims that I know the accuracy of my internal ‘measurement’ from careful introspection. Hence, I can combine the two sources of uncertainty as if they were independent measurements of the same thing, both made by unbiased instruments.Footnote14
As far as I can tell, this is a strawman of Bayesianism, and misses the whole point of Bayesian updating. Moreover, I think the author is actually making the error they accuse others of making, just in reverse: Just like giving the same name doesn't make 2 things the same, giving them different names doesn't make them different. Combining different "kinds" of uncertainty--such as incorporating uncertainty in the distribution and the inherent randomness of the outcome into one probability estimate of an outcome--is actually quite easy.
The extended discussion of human biases is irrelevant.
This is just the law of total probability and the multiplication rule for conditional probabilities, but where is it coming from? That earthquakes occur at random is an assumption, not a matter of physics. Seismicity is complicated and unpredictable: haphazard, but not necessarily random. The standard argument to calibrate the PSHA fundamental relationship requires conflating rates with probabilities. For instance, suppose a magnitude eight event has been observed to occur about once a century in a given region. PSHA would assume that, therefore, the chance of a magnitude 8 event is 1% per year.
Distinguishing between a model that accounts for well-understood underlying causal processes, like a simulation of orbital mechanics, and a purely statistical model, is quite important. However, the insight of Bayesianism is that it does make sense to use the tools of randomness, regardless of the details of why an outcome is uncertain. Theoretically, a coin is subject to chaotic physical processes and you could predict its outcome perfectly with enough information. Its apparent randomness is entirely due to lacking that information (and the ability to process it and do physics on the data), which is fundamentally no different from earthquakes. The whole reason we're using purely statistical models for earthquakes, which have basically failed to produce any forecast which does better than "each year has fixed probability X of an earthquake of size Y", is because for earthquakes, we don't have the physical understanding or data.
In contrast, weather forecasts have become substantially more accurate over the past 50 years in large part because we can use models of underlying physical processes like fluid dynamics. All of this is well known. But these claims:
First, there is an epistemic leap from a rate to the existence of an underlying, stationary random process that generated the rate, as discussed above (see the quotation from Klemeš in particular). Second, it assumes that seismicity is uniform, which contradicts the observed clustering of seismicity in space and time. Third, it ignores the fact that the data at best give an estimate of a probability (if there is such a probability), not the exact value.
Are wrong. For his first point, this is not an assumption. Lots of people have attempted to predict earthquakes in a time-dependent way, and they've all failed miserably. Scientists fall back on the time-independent prediction because it's the only one that didn't prove to be completely wrong; he's just completely backwards on this point. For his second, there does sometimes appear to be clustering in some earthquake data, but it's not consistent and hasn't proven to be useful in making predictions. And the third is just irrelevant pedantry--who thinks of these estimates from historical data as being perfect? That these values have error bars doesn't make them useless, or make them not probabilities.
Three recent destructive earthquakes were in regions that seismic hazard maps said were relatively safe (Stein et al., 2012; see also Panza et al., 2014; Kossobokov et al., 2015). This should not be surprising, because PSHA is based on a metaphor, not on physics.
"Relatively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Sometimes 1-in-100 year events or 1-in-1000 year events happen, that's just what those statements mean. Places that rarely get earthquakes will still get them sometime, and if the process producing them is chaotic, then you might never get great predictions, even if you understand all of the underlying physics and have good data, just due to computational power limitations, like with orbital mechanics.
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
Simply put: your vaccine should not significantly increase cardiovascular risk. It should be absolutely negligible. 1 in a million, whereas these vaccines might be 1 in 100,000.
Why? This seems to me like you picked "an order of magnitude safer than what it allegedly is" and if the alleged rate of danger were different, you would have picked a different goal. Unfortunately I can't easily find the serious side effect rate for various common medicines, but https://www.medsafe.govt.nz/consumers/Safety-of-Medicines/Medicine-safety.asp says that a "very rare" side effect means one that happens to 1/10,000 people or less.
I find these numbers to be particularly confusing in light of how dangerous COVID itself is. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext#seccestitle140 says that at age 65, the IFR for COVID is about 1.7%, 1,700 times higher than your alleged risk of the vaccine and 17,000 times higher than what you claim the risk should be.
And according to https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/facts.htm, the baseline rate of ischemic stroke in the US is slightly over 2 per 1,000 people, again much higher than the alleged risk of the vaccine. For those of age 65, it seems to be slightly higher, increasing quickly with age: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/STROKEAHA.120.031659
For additional context, to have a 1 in 1 million risk of dying while driving, you would have to drive less than 100 miles (overall rate is about 1.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States, although I think that number is outdated and is even higher now).
No medicine is completely safe, but this seems like a real no-brainer to me.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
The second link in the post. The sentence "I think it's generally well known that lawsuits are often a tool used to bully people ..." links to https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/greater-justice-lower-cost-how-loser-pays-rule-would-improve-american-legal-system-5891.html
And caps wouldn’t solve the issues I’m talking about. If your suing city of development just create a new entity with no assets.
You mentioned multiple hypotheticals; I responded to one. I even quoted it.
Instead of throwing heat and assuming your right maybe you haven’t fully thought this out.
Now you're just projecting. I think you just posted the first objection that came to mind without considering any ways it could be overcome? What do you think happens in the countries where this is the rule, and someone tries what you suggested? Do you have any idea, or did you just assume there is no solution? Do you think everyone in every other country is so stupid that they've never thought of it before?
Your comment reminds me of this xkcd--playing tricks with fake companies is something that you can already do. Sometimes it gets around the law and sometimes it doesn't, but it's not like suing any company is currently pointless because they all have 0 assets and are actually owned by Cayman Island shell companies. If it were trivial to set up fake companies for legal purposes, why don't companies currently all do that?
Why is transit in the US so expensive?
The starting point for this video is an upcoming report on why transit, most notably subways, cost so much more in American than in other developed countries. However, the discussion covers much more than just transit, and discusses how cost disease effects pretty much all public works projects, from roads to sewage. While there are many individual pieces that contribute to inflated prices (outside consultants, unions, red tape, bureaucrats, etc.), they don't really like this explanation. As Chuck points out shortly after 31:00, each of the 2 major political sides can point to a few of these issues to fuel their particular narrative. But, he says, they're incomplete, and miss the real underlying causes. If I were to summarize their description, it seems like the question is mostly one of attitude:
No one cares about cost. People will say they do, but their actions say otherwise. Voters don't, especially with the ability to borrow from the future by issuing bonds. Which means politicians don't, because why would they? And the appointed heads of agencies don't consider it their responsibility to account for cost; they treat cost as fixed and let the legislature decide how to pay for it. Possible sub-point: We treat a lot of these projects as jobs programs and so end up hiring more people than necessary.
There's an underlying assumption everywhere that everything has to be the best, no matter what. Roads in rural areas, that in other countries would be very narrow and winding, are in the US flat, smooth, paved asphalt with 2 lanes in each direction. We don't treat money as a constraint, we just decide we want a thing and then go and get it without regard for the future. Of course, this attitude depends on what one is used to. Boomers, especially, are not used to having these sorts of constraints; Millennials also feel a certain sense of entitlement, but at least have more experience with these constraints. (The latter sentence seems to be more or less speculation, they don't cite any research here).
The conclusion is that nothing will really get fixed until it accumulates to the point of a major economic recession or depression, at which point we'll be forced to actually do something, but not until after we have wasted enormous amounts of time, effort, and resources on poorly planned public projects. Or, if we collectively decide to actually care about these things before then.
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