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what_a_maroon


				

				

				
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User ID: 644

what_a_maroon


				
				
				

				
1 follower   follows 2 users   joined 2022 September 05 17:19:51 UTC

					

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User ID: 644

l;dr: Transportation has traditionally been "fast, inexpensive, public; pick two", and Elon Musk is trying to pick all three at the same time.

Lots of cities all over the world already have this. The United States used to have this. This is not a real problem. It's a fake problem invented terrible urban planners in the 1950s. A reasonably dense city and suburbs, with a combination of pedestrian and bike infrastructure, subways, trams, and buses, can absolutely accomplish this. Your post is seriously written as if you cannot combine multiple forms of transportation in a single trip, and as if bikes and surface trams (which don't require tunnels at all) don't exist.

In addition, "inexpensive" is, at best, relative. TBC claims they're going to be charging $5 for a short trip across downtown and $10 from downtown to the airport. This is about twice the cost of using transit (e.g. Chicago charges $2.25-2.50 for most rides with 25 cent transfers, or $5 to get to O'Hare). At best, this project represents a different point on the tradeoff curve between price and speed.

There's a lot of reasons for this. Cost disease, in general, is one of the big ones, and if Boring Company gets hit by cost disease then this entire thing might be doomed. I think they're more resistant to this because they are not having cities come to them asking for services, they are going to cities to propose services, and if they're expensive, they won't get any contracts. Note that Boring Company has already turned down a contract because the company was going to waste a lot of money on things that weren't the tunnel, and they just didn't want to be a part of that. I'm going to just cross my fingers that this doesn't happen

It sounds to me like this doesn't really solve any of the most important problems. We used to have the ability to make subway tunnels for a reasonable price, and other countries still can. Technology can offset some of the costs imposed by bureaucracy, environmental review, etc. but so far the Las Vegas project seems like a one-off that got a cooperative city government to help. Basically, your actual solution is "don't build anything in cities that don't agree to cut through red tape" which has nothing to do with the Boring company. You could start a private subway-tunnel-building company and do the exact same thing. In addition, many places have non-artificial limitations on building tunnels underneath things, like water tables on the coast or crumbly bedrock around Austin. Which brings us to...

Cars are much smaller than trains [citation needed] and don't require as much sheer size.

In order to carry anywhere near as many people, you need a LOT more space. If the individual tunnels are small, then you're going to need a lot of them. As Houston's Katy Freeway has indicated, you can easily fill up several dozen lanes of car traffic on a single route and still have substantial congestion. I don't think you've solved the fundamental problem of individual cars in populous areas, namely that they use a lot of space per person.

It seems like there's a ton of whitespace, both within and between posts, and even in between commenter name, comment text, and the interactive buttons below the comment. It makes the reading experience feel weird in a way that's hard to describe. I think it's slower because it requires more scrolling.

I mentioned this in the post, but I'll reproduce it here:

I saw it, it's just wrong. Unless you are defining "fast" to mean "the speed of uncongested car traffic on a highway" or some similarly useless definition which is designed to make your argument tautologically true. Obviously no existing form of transportation will travel through a city at highway speed. There's stuff and people in the way, that's what makes it a city. But well-designed cities can be traversed, explored, and used in a very reasonable amount of time (especially once you realize that walking and cycling provide exercise, and transit lets you do things like read or work). You called Uber, Lyft, and private cars "fast" but this is only true when there is no congestion. If these mods of transportation count as "fast" when their speed during congestion (often around 10-20 mph) is accounted for, then you absolutely have "fast" mass transit. A e-bike compares favorably with that, let alone the subway, and where congestion is really bad (I think the average speed of a car in Manhattan is something like 6mph), even a casual ride on a regular bike is faster.

New stuff always costs more, and it costs relative to the competition and to its own supply. TBC is already kind of overloaded in some cases; as they expand, they can drop prices, and they can drop prices based on available competition. In addition, they're still scaling up - lots of things are expensive until they get cheaper.

The prices given are currently estimates for the future. They could go down; they could also go up, as many infrastructure projects run over-budget as time passes.

These aren't big issues; there are plenty of metro systems under the water table or in areas with bad rock. We've dealt with this before, we'll deal with it again.

Yes, but those metro systems take up much less space because a train carries many more people than a lane of cars.

This is correct. I don't see an issue here. There's a lot of space underground.

Well, in some places. But more importantly, it makes the cost much higher. You can't directly compare the cost of one LVCC-style tunnel to one subway tunnel. TBC's project in Vegas costs $47 million per 1.7 miles, or 27 million per mile. Subways can carry around 15 times as many people as 1 lane of traffic, so you would have to spend 27*15 = about 400 million per mile. This is worse than what other developed countries spend on subways, and since much of the cost of American infrastructure appears to be artificial and TBC could carefully select the best city for their test project, you should expect that actually building car tunnels in other cities would be substantially more expensive, probably on par with our subway projects.

When comparing to surface light rail, the situation is even worse for underground tunnels. Light rail can be built for similar cost per mile even in the US, while carrying up to 8 times as many people as a lane of cars.

These 3 things all have different causes of "not liking how you look," different proposed interventions, and different consequences for those interventions.

Being overweight is mostly the result of being exposed to and embracing an environment unlike the one we evolved in, with easy access to high-calorie foods and reduced need to engage in physical activity. It has a lot of negative medical consequences. It should be no surprise, nor considered unexpected, to not want to be in this state. The process of losing weight is mostly eating a more normal amount of calories and engaging in physical activity, which are both entirely "natural" (in the sense of reflecting the evolutionary environment) and which have positive medical consequences even aside from losing weight. I think calling this "dysphoria" in the same vein as obesity is equivocation and not useful in understanding what's going on.

Age-based appearance change is "natural" (expected, typical, whatever) and thus the only interventions available, other than partial mitigation by the same kind of healthy living mentioned above, rely on modern technology. There might be some negative effects of age which can be mitigated this way (like improving vision by tightening the skin around the eyes) but mostly cosmetic surgery to change appearance has little effect on physical health.

I don't know much about the history of gender dysphoria, but a description like "feeling like you're in the wrong sex body" indicates that something is going wrong. It's weird to use language "not working properly" in an evolutionary context, because evolution does not have purpose. However, if we can say that a complex brain does something which improves fitness, then the brain operating in this way is probably not doing that, like how a brain that hallucinates is not improving the fitness of the organism its in. There are ways to affect one's appearance (breast binding, hair, clothes, etc.) but sex-change surgery or manipulating hormones is very new, it's a pretty serious and irreversible intervention, and it certainly doesn't reliably solve all of the relevant issues (not even appearance, reliably).

I'm aware that the studies don't show huge effect sizes, but I'm also skeptical of their quality. For example "intention to treat" does not mean the subjects actually adjusted their diet and exercise as much as intended. That people are bad at following the interventions is certainly relevant information to have, but it doesn't mean that diet and exercise aren't relevant, just that people are bad at sticking to these sorts of changes.

Some other limitations to interpreting results like this:

  1. The included studies range in duration from 10 to 52 weeks, average 33, and the meta-analysis reports an average of 13kg or 28 pounds lost with diet and exercise combined. In my mind, that's quite good. It's certainly much more than 4% of body weight. I don't expect these changes produce immediate results; most people who are obese have been slowly adding fat and weight for man years, and it takes time for them to become healthy.

  2. Drop-out rate of included studies ranges from 15-25%.

  3. Out of the included studies, 1 was male-only, 3 were female-only, and 2 had both. So 28 pounds is an even larger relative reduction.

But on the other hand... I kinda figure that intent-to-treat is a fairer representation of real life? In the sense that in real life people don't have the option of getting locked in the nutritionist-box indefinitely. And if two treatments are both effective as-prescribed, but the first one has much worse intent-to-treat efficacy, I want the second treatment.

Sure, but that wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making is that obesity is caused, in the first place, by poor diet and lack of exercise.

There might be some sort of interaction between genes and environment, where some people are more susceptible to modern lifestyles causing obesity. But the obesity rate has increased rapidly across many countries, so whatever it is, is not wholly genetic.

(Not sure if you got the chemical contaminant hypothesis from Slime Mold Time Mold, but apparently a lot of their claims are not well supported.

A twitter thread about a paper on policing: https://twitter.com/jnixy/status/1559568512485470209

The paper itself: https://t.co/sy6LHNMpph

Key points

  1. The US doesn't have that many police officers given its level of serious crime (homicide), but it does have a lot of prisoners.

  2. 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.")

A within-US comparison would be interesting, although I suspect that data points like Baltimore are mostly causal in the other direction (more murder -> hire more police). Clearly neither such an analysis, nor this analysis, would be definitively causal (although you would need more than 1 or 2 data points to draw the conclusion that you drew here).

So if the places that have most of the homicides also have more police than average, why do they also have murder rates (and infamy for police brutality) far in excess of the trend instead of the opposite like we'd expect? It'd be interesting to see an intra-state comparison as well as the national trend, and based on the above I'm not convinced it'd support the conclusions as strongly.

The linked thread actually points to a section in the paper which gives a possible explanation for why underpolicing (few police per homicide) could cause police brutality.

That said, adding 500,000 people to government payroll (in other words, making 1 in roughly 300 US workforce participants a cop) might arguably be intensive enough of a welfare program to have a non-trivial effect in crime reduction by itself (i.e. they do nothing but eat donuts all day)...

That much I doubt, since the people who are most likely to commit crime are not going to become police.

edit: The Graham Factor post linked above includes some state-level data.

Thanks for the link. I actually thought about that as I was writing, but thought including it would be going too far afield, and I wasn't sure where to get actual data on the question. But, I was under the impression that certain rights are much more limited in other countries.

It's not obvious to me that civil rights are the only knob that could be tuned to make policing more efficient. Some of what the Warren Court decided was certainly conjured from thin air, but I do like having the 4th Amendment around. There is an enormous amount of process that could probably be streamlined, or at least sped up, by hiring more judges and lawyers (with the savings coming from having shorter prison sentences, like the original article mentions for police).

Police training seems to be sorely lacking. Your article mentions this, and for some reason finding good numbers seems to be hard, but I believe American police tend to have much shorter training periods than in other countries.

Ending the war on drugs would free up a bunch of police resources directly and indirectly reduce the number of homicides.

Non-police could do some of the things we currently have police do, like giving traffic tickets. Safety rules are generally enforced by other means (think of building inspections, or restaurant sanitation).

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.)

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.

Based on what I know of cheaters in Magic: the Gathering, this sounds correct to me. In addition, most cheaters are not actually repentant. There are, of course, people who stupidly cheat in the moment and are caught or otherwise realize that's wrong and they shouldn't do that. People who cheat multiple times probably don't actually see anything wrong with it. The probably famous cheater in Magic, Alex Bertoncini, got banned multiple times, then posted a long apology and then proceeded to get banned for life for continuing to cheat anyway.

That all being said, there's no guarantee Hans did actually cheat in this case. Cheaters can also be good players (in fact, you often kind of have to--if you're bad, cheating won't save you; you can even cheat against yourself).

I suppose that could depend on what you consider a "bad societal result" but I would say yes, definitely.

There is a lot welfare usage and active abuse, like the comment you replied to mentions in the bottom. There probably isn't a lot of "public" violent crime like gang murders (although I did find a report of a dynastic struggle in Jerusalem that lead to street brawls). However, I expect there's quite a lot of abuse that goes unreported and/or unresolved because, like with most cults, any such problems are swept under the rug or "handled" internally and victims (especially young or female victims, or victims of anyone with social power) are expected to not make waves for the sake of community cohesion. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism#Controversies or search Google for something like "Hasidim and domestic violence."

In addition, members are typically made completely dependent on the community, and made to believe that any contact with people outside the community will make them unclean (like with the Roma or FLDS) so any violations of norms can be punished with shunning which is obviously legal but devastating. As with these others groups, even members who would like to leave may struggle to do so because they have no relevant skills, poor English, no outside family or friends, etc.

There presumably is a lot of indoctrination into a very regressive religious world view (what else are they going to do in a religious school that doesn't teach basic English) which leads to conflicts with the outside world, such as Hasidic men refusing to sit next to women on airplanes.

One could argue that, given how academically inclined Jews typically are, a failure to teach basic English and Math is much more damning of the Yeshivas than of urban public schools.

There are fundamentalist LDS groups that seem to be pretty similar to the Hasidim, including not officially marrying to avoid taxes and collect additional benefits and using lots of welfare. They are generally located in the middle of nowhere, and there have been efforts to stop them, but as far as I can tell these are mostly limited to prosecution on the basis of serious crimes (like child rape) which I think the Hasidim avoid. Mainline mormons and the mainline LDS church seem to be at best ambivalent about these efforts, and sometimes oppose them. There are some other legal issues that might also apply to the Hasidic communities (like misuse of public funds and effectively having a privatized religious police force) but they might also be better at staying on the "maybe legal" side.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints#Short_Creek_raid and the sections immediately below.

Did you mean to reply to someone else? I can't imagine how that's a reasonable reply to what I wrote.

A reasonable response may be to assert that there are other differences between the groups of countries and regions with high-prevalence that may mask the effect. However, those other shared factors may also be invoked to explain the difference in the effectiveness of ivermectin. So unless a clear case is made to explain the discrepancy, the hypothesis is, at the very least, incomplete

While this is technically true, it doesn't really support the use of ivermectin until you know what those factors are. For example, poor countries also have lower average ages, and so that might explain why control groups in low-worm areas have relatively high death rates (assuming that is indeed true). If your story is true, that would indicate that ivermectin works among the young, but not the old. But, for one, the young don't need that much help, and more generally, if the factor is something else, then giving it to the young and not the old won't help much. If you can't make predictions, you're still in a crisis.

Basically, it's up to you to show that ivermectin works, in face of the low prior probability that any given drug treats any given disease, and even if you fully disproved the worm hypothesis, you wouldn't have proved that ivermectin works.

Yeah, my problem is not with considering Fox unreliable. It's with not subjecting every other major news outlet to the same level of scrutiny. CNN, NBC, MSNBC, etc. are all full of partisan nonsense.

I wonder how much of that is people watching while WFH. I don't watch twitch a lot, but I see a fair amount of it later on youtube, because the streams themselves happen during normal-ish working hours.

This post had me wondering about how much untapped talent is out there. Is there someone who would have been the GOAT of their sport if they had been born in September instead of May? I would say probably not; at least for baseball, although there is an advantage, there's still a good number of players with unlucky birthdays: https://www.billjamesonline.com/article1191/ indicates the effect is about 20% for one year. This is substantial, but a top-tier natural talent will still most likely emerge. Of course, that also makes me wonder: how did they get all 75 to be from 1 third of the year? That's an incredible effect size. It would require mental development to be VASTLY fast and more consistent than physical development, which doesn't sound right. The link above even says

In fact, Gladwell says that children on the younger end of their grade are underrepresented in colleges and universities by over 10%.

Which is nowhere near enough to get the result described. I wonder if there was any other filter in this process:

Gladwell invited 75 seniors from the University of Pennsylvania to participate in an experiment

As far as solutions go, I wonder if it's feasible to separate kids into finer-grained groups when they're young. Say 4 months? Not for everything, but anything competitive or comparative ("don't make kids compete until they're 10 or so" seems like an even better solution, but I don't see any way to require that to happen). Given teacher shortages and limited participation in various activities, it's probably not practical. On the other hand, kids used to all gather together at wildly different ages, especially in low-population areas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-room_school). If children are manifestly wildly different, with few children even within a year of each other, perhaps you also avoid this problem as you can't possibly compare children to anything but their own age.

I'm confused by this comment, because it seems to be missing the point. You would still have orderings after age-norming, or after changing the structure of activities and institutions to avoid this phenomenon. They would just not be correlated to what time of year you're born in. To take the reductio-ad-absurdum to the other end, would you directly compare a 3 year old and a 10 year old, and expect to get a meaningful prediction of which of them is more likely to be a professional athlete based on their relative athletic performance now? Of course not. But we do exactly that on a smaller scale when we put 3 year olds and 4 year olds on the same team.

There are ways to influence society with greater leverage than that. Instituting policies at your company, and spreading them via professional conferences and such (if they're successful), is one possibility. Another would be to influence politicians, who can certainly be rented for what one company or rich person can afford to spend. A third is to sponsor research.

Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

Lobbying politicians and funding research (think George Mason, Hillsdale College, or private think tanks) come to mind.

Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?

A lot of tech companies have attempted to make hiring as merit-based as possible. Have several people interview every candidate. Make teams set up rubrics so that candidates can be evaluated according to specific, objective criteria that correspond to their ability to do the job. Everyone fills out their feedback separately, then if needed, everyone meets for an open discussion. If you have a personal connection to the person, you're separated from the hiring process. Similarly for salary, raises, and promotions: These are all based on specific factors which get written down, collected, and evaluated by multiple people. Also, make sure that the job requirements actually match the job; unnecessary college degree requirements will unfairly exclude a lot of minorities. Some companies are working towards salary transparency as well, where the salary range for every position is available to the whole company and employees are not discouraged from discussing salary with each other.

These measures have the advantage of reducing a wide range of negative hiring practices, not just those based on race. For example, it prevents a charismatic but unqualified person from charming their way through.

In theory, it shouldn't be. But self-defense law contains some statements that are open-ended (really all laws contain such statements, because natural languages are ambiguous). And one's political view could influence how you read and interpret these phrases. Now, some people seem to go much further and just don't know what the law says at all, and seem to think that you can (and should) only use a gun in self-defense against someone who doesn't also have a gun if you already have been stabbed or beaten and are imminently going to die. AFAIK this is not the law in any US state. However, the actual principles behind self-defense will include phrases like "reasonable belief." What is reasonable? Different people could disagree. One person might say that if you are a minor, and an adult is running after you, yelling at you, and throwing things at you, that you reasonably believe they are trying to (and able to) harm you, while another might say that isn't a reasonable belief. Or the law will contain terms like "reasonable means to escape." Again, what is reasonable?

I believe this is a slight simplification. After all, claiming self-defense is relatively rare. Given an altercation without video or additional witnesses, how could you ever convict someone who just claimed self-defense? I think that there is some (relatively minor, but still existent) hurdle the defendant has to pass before being allowed to claim self-defense, and only then does "reasonable doubt" apply.