what_a_maroon
No bio...
User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?
Maybe not super popular here, but NIMBYism. IMO, the level of entitlement of certain suburbanites rivals that of woke college students. You don't have the right to arbitrarily control land you don't own. You don't have a right to consistent and large increases in property value. You had kids and now people need somewhere to live. Your neighborhood is not "full" it has fewer people than it did 50 years ago. Your car creates tremendous costs on other people that you don't even acknowledge, and your way of life is incredibly subsidized. You don't want the gas tax to go up, even though that was originally how the federal government was supposed to pay for those highways you need. You do everything possible to reduce traffic in your own neighborhood while driving to everywhere else and objecting to anyone else who doesn't want you to drive in their neighborhood.
Environmental review gets used as a bludgeon to stop anything that might help the environment, or is applied wildly inconsistently. Half the land area of downtowns, the most valuable space in the country, is devoted to highways and parking lots. We can find money and space to make 6 lines of roads for only cars, but bikes get to stay in an 18-inch space between stripes of paint which oh by the way regularly crosses over turn lanes or is next to the line of cars whose drivers will door you without a second thought. Our engineers design infrastructure that is simultaneously something cars are expected to hit, and pedestrians are supposed to stand next to.
Why we ever let this sort of thing become normalized is beyond me.
Also, opposition to nuclear. We might never have heard the phrase "global warming" if "environmentalists" hadn't thrown a fit in the 70s.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
here is Science insisting that trans women don’t even have an advantage.
This includes the line:
No, Vilain says. The lab studies of athletes’ hemoglobin and muscle mass say nothing about whether trans women can run faster, jump higher, or throw farther. “You have to demonstrate that before excluding” transgender athletes, he says.
I'm probably preaching to the choir, but this is utterly backwards. The default is that men can't compete in women's sports. If you want to assert that some set of procedures the man undergoes makes it fair for them to compete, that is what has to be demonstrated. One study with n = 8 doesn't cut it. I'm sure that a wokeist would screech in rage that obviously transwomen are women, but such claims are just definitional assertions that are not-even-wrong and convey no information.
That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!
This is true, and we could have many additional splits when it comes to sports. In fact, we do have other splits. An obvious one is by age (minimum or maximum), but we also have teams composed of only students from one school or university, we have weight classes in combat sports, etc. The goal is to make competitions that are relatively fair and competitive, although of course some people have massive natural advantages over others like being tall in basketball, and AFAIK there isn't really a "average height basketball league." It all seems somewhat arbitrary to me, to be honest, but I think the solution is something like a trans division (probably not enough population to make it competitive though).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I would guess Kulak is angry, at least in part, because of cases like these: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/02/statutory-rape-victim-child-support/14953965/
California issued a similar state court ruling a few years later in the case of a 15-year-old boy who had sex with a 34-year-old neighbor. In that case, the woman had been convicted of statutory rape.
In both cases, it was the state social-services agency that pursued the case after the mother sought public assistance.
"The Kansas court determined that the rape was irrelevant and that the child support was not owed to the rapist but rather to the child," said Mel Feit, director of the New York-based advocacy group the National Center for Men.
Of course, the money is in practice going to said rapist, because custody is irrelevant and there's 0 oversight to make sure the money is actually being spent for the benefit of the child. And speaking of custody, no one seems to care about the child rapists raising children.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
In my mind, in support of this claim: https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/yjbefg/oc_how_harvard_admissions_rates_asian_american/
When looking at alumni interviews, which actually meet the applicant, Asian applicants do better overall and pretty much identical on "likability, courage, kindness." Asians only do worse when ranked by the committee that doesn't meet the applicant.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
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.
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?
Secure Signals is applying the standards of a modern criminal investigation rather than of history. In particular, the level of evidence that is required to convict someone. A person who goes missing under suspicious circumstances is sufficient to consider the possibility of homicide, and if you do have a body, you can absolutely say that a murder likely took place even if you can't prove the specific sequence of events leading to it to the standard that a court would require in order to convict a suspect.
In contrast, in the study of history, we often are required to use slim evidence in order to conclude anything at all, and the further you go back, the less evidence. For example, I've read that Hannibal is not referenced by any primary source, nor by any known source at all until at least several decades after he died. (This is sometimes given as a contrast to Jesus, for whom we have several different records within a few decades of death, by people who allegedly knew him personally, which is fairly unheard of for a regular person from 2000 years ago, and so by historical standards, it is considered quite likely that a historical Jesus did exist. You can object to this standard--but then you should probably be rejecting everything we allegedly know about history prior to the year 2000 or so, rather than quibbling over the details of one particular event).
For example, they write:
The Holocaust is the only controversy where you can just list a name, Date of Birth, "some sort of police document" and then claim that she was murdered without any factual basis.
This is probably more evidence than we have for the existence of victims of most historical atrocities, including the Holodomor, Rwandan Armenian Genocide (not sure how I made that mistake), Rape of Nanking, the Belgian Congo, deaths of slaves in the Western Hemisphere, murder and invasion of Native Americans, Gengis Khan's pillaging, etc. Maybe they think we shouldn't believe any of those happened either, but it certainly is not the case that the Holocaust is being held to unusual standards.
I think this is a great instance where Bayesian reasoning is helpful: If the Holocaust happened pretty much as claimed by most historians, then what evidence would you expect to still exist and have been found? Would you expect lots of detailed records to have ever existed for most people in that time period? Would you expect them to survive the war? On the flip side, if it didn't happen, would you expect any of the evidence that faul_sname points out in his comments? Standards for scientific journals or criminal trials exist for a reason, but that doesn't mean that those standards have to apply to every question.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I've used Feeld and this is such a bizarre description. I did not recognize it at all from the article until they named it. AFAICT the app is aimed at people who are interested in kink and/or polyamory. Most of the profiles that have any information at all include one or both of those things. This group is not necessarily more mature than anyone else, the age range seems pretty similar to other apps (maybe slightly more late 20s than early), and it's not any more hookup-focused than the average non-relationship-type-specific app. Lots of people on it are looking for serious, longer-term relationships. It's probably more progressive than average, but few people explicitly put anything like that on their profiles--again, not much more than any other app if you're in a big city. They would probably rate higher on the Big 5's openness to experiences measure, and are more likely to be upfront about what they want out of a relationship, but that's about it.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
a group gets to determine its own membership
Isn't the problem that this is circular? In order for the group to make a determination, you have to ask the people in the group. But knowing who gets to contribute their opinion is exactly the question you're trying to answer in the first place. The "simple" answer is freedom of association, where you can have multiple groups that do or do not overlap, or include each other as subgroups, and which have their own rules that may come from consensus, democracy, a charter, a dictatorship, etc, and members can come and go as they please. But this doesn't work when one group has special privileges that are being fought over.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I just had a conversation like this with a friend. She was convinced the city she's lived in for years was 90% white. Spoiler: It was less than half (non-Hispanic) white. I think she was used to being in Southern cities which are plurality black, but still; that is an impressive amount to be wrong by.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
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.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
What is the solution to all this? Disapproving of homosexuality doesn't seem to work. Disapproving of all sex doesn't seem to work. The kinds of protections that need to be put in place to keep kids from ever being in positions of risk undermine youth mentorship, they force kids to lean purely on increasingly disjointed and "mixed" family lives when they have no male leadership outside the family. I grew up with older male role models all around me, from Scoutmasters and Priests to coworkers and bosses, in addition to my father. How would I have grown up if I had been isolated from those men by barriers of propriety, and if like so many boys I grew up without a father?
I went through training for this when I worked for the Scouts. If you even had the opportunity to commit abuse, you had already broken most of the rules we learned, which for the most part seemed pretty reasonable to me and I don't think would prevent any mentorship if followed.
Does any organized group avoid child sex scandals over the long term?
No, because as your list of examples indicates, the group itself has basically nothing to do with it, except around some details. I won't pretend to be a mind reader and say why people sexually abuse children, except that, as the saying goes, "power corrupts." (Some) people will do whatever they feel like if they think they'll get away with it. Spend all your free time thinking of a justification to yourself, and you'll find one. Tell yourself enough times "how bad can it be?" and you'll start to believe it. Ideology is irrelevant, just like communist leaders often direct much consumption to themselves.
Also don't forget that caring about power, and about your own position, will always be an advantage over people who are actually selfless when it comes to taking power. Narcissists, sociopaths, and the generally power-hungry are willing and able to lie, to pretend, to work themselves into positions of trust and authority. People are willing to cover for their friends, or to maintain their own power, or for many other reasons. Again, ideology is irrelevant; in some sense, this is just one particular instantiation of "who watches the watchers?" You could also ask why some CEOs steal from their company, or why some politicians take bribes to favor one group over another, or why police abuse their authority and then cover for each other. Has anyone solved this problem?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
There is definitely a legal difference in actively provoking a fight. And if there isn't, there should be. Counter-protesting is protected speech. Speech isn't really protected if doing so negates your basic rights.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
How often do the working poor ever organize politically, and when they try, is it ever effective? It wasn't effective at stopping the destruction of many poor neighborhoods to build roads through American cities back in the 60s (when the upper class, with more money and political capital, organized, they were able to stop it in their neighborhoods).
Political movements are almost always drawn largely from the middle class, often being more educated than average. As far as I'm aware, this is true of groups from Occupy Wall Street to Islamist terrorists to the Bolsheviks to the far more milquetoast political parties of modern developed countries. You could probably make a political organization called "more stuff for poor people now" and it would be 90% college-educated middle-class or richer (99% in leadership).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
The replies to https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hm1kjn/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_06_2020/fxjpqjx/ have some counter-arguments, at least. One user investigated the account's breaks in activity, and found they don't line up as well with Ghislaine's life events as is implied. Some other users chime in that the p-p-p-p-penguin reference isn't that obscure. At least one user points to activity from long ago that would make the Ghislaine hypothesis extremely strange (such as claiming to be living in the far east back in 2010--if this is just a lie, why would they use their real name and reference their home in their username?).
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
German immigrants for comparison had a homicide rate of about 15 per 100k.
Of note, this is about 3 times the homicide rate of the whole US today. Homicide rates have dropped precipitously across groups, which is also important to keep in mind when discussing solutions. For example, pointing to the Irish provides evidence that poverty and discrimination are a factor; they're clearly not that genetically different from other Europeans, but being mostly Catholic, were subject to colonization by the English and discrimination in the US. The data point about Koreans in Japan is also very interesting; I'm reasonably confident that Korea's murder rate is not 14 times higher than Japan's. So this likely reflects either selection bias in who ended up in Japan, or some form of discrimination (or some other theories: An effect of finding yourself in a very different society than the one you're used to, a lack of good institutions, etc.)
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
A tuition voucher is certainly worth something, but the "price" of tuition is entirely fake and just dividing the stated price by their hours worked isn't meaningful. The college says it's high so that they can count discounted tuition against their own taxes (I think) but nobody or almost nobody pays full sticker price tuition for graduate school.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Others claim Aella is trying her hardest to stir the pot for attention.
The fact that this result is obvious doesn't mean there was no attention angle. A lot of very obvious statements could get heaps of attention; if someone made a twitter bot that just posted inconvenient facts about race/sex/religion/whatever, would you assume it was primarily there to dispassionately convey information to the masses, or to get attention?
That being said, I've met Aella in real life and I doubt her attention is primarily to piss off wokes on twitter. I mean, that might be a bonus, but I think she'd legitimately prefer if the responses were actual discussion of what the result means, meaningful statistical or methodological discussion, etc.
condom use shows no correlation with contracting STDs, which makes me quite suspicious of the data
I don't see a data column for catching STIs (just testing for them). In case I just missed something, then this sounds like a possible result of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox, where anyone who doesn't use a condom is compensating for the risk by tightly screening clients for STI status/limiting the acts they perform to limit chance of transmission. Could also be a limitation of self-report. Alternatively, aren't condoms only moderately effective at preventing infection? Could it be confounded by number of clients?
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Seems to me like locals might not want to live in an environment you consider "interesting" or "unique." The US was full of dangerous, dirty cities and poor farms in 1900. Then after WW2 everyone who could afford to moved to the clean and safe (ish) but absolutely boring, sterile, repetitive suburbs that no tourist would ever want to visit. Partly this was due to top-down changes that other places have the capability to avoid, but people would like to be rich, and with that comes convenience, safety, etc. (Both because those things cost money, and because your time is more valuable and dying is worse when you're reach).
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
Also, the NYC subway and transit system is sufficient, and the city is dense enough, that a majority of New Yorkers don't own a car. Once you have a car, the marginal cost of a trip drops by a lot (although it's still probably higher than people intuitively expect, once you account for wear and tear, insurance, maintenance, etc). But if you can get by without owning a car at all, that's a big fixed cost you can avoid, and it encourages you to take transit for marginal trips.
It's worth keeping an eye on this, because self-driving cars could completely disrupt it, either by dropping taxi prices 50% or more or by allowing cars to drop off their owners and then go find parking on their own.
Maybe, although congestion is so bad that it still might not be worthwhile. I've been in a NYC bus that was slower than walking in between stops, and reducing the price of a cab ride just makes this problem worse.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
There seems to be a bit of "weak leftists hate a forum where other views are tolerated" in this reaction thread. While those people exist, I do think that we need more "arguing in favor of a position" and less "hiding a weak argument by cynicism about other people Not Getting It." There were always conservatives posting (the accusation of pro-conservative bias goes back to the original SSC's comment threads), and that didn't prevent all non-conservatives from posting. "Having pushback" isn't discouraging; it's why I liked posting in /r/SSC originally. Having a weakly-argued rant get upvoted while a reply asking for evidence gets downvoted and ignored is discouraging.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take?
This is certainly something you could argue, but you have to, you know, actually argue it? Like, why should anyone take this hypothesis seriously unless you present evidence and, ideally, address some likely counter-arguments? For example, if COVID is an issue, why now, and why such a big emphasis on tech? The economy did go through a rocky period, but then seemed to recover; what about the pandemic response, which as far as I can tell has been basically non-existent for almost a year, is impacting the economy now? Some individual tech companies are dealing with specific poor decisions (Metaverse) some of which could be roughly tied to the pandemic/response (Stripe--but even in this case, the mistake seems to have been assuming they would keep their pandemic-related growth up after the pandemic ended), but what this has to do with the rest of the economy isn't clear yet.
Similarly, regularly recurring viruses like flu already vary in intensity from year to year. Is the difference between now and 2019 within normal variation? And what side effects could there have been? I assume your hypothesis here is something like "people's immune systems were weakened against flu because most people avoided exposure during lockdowns. But A) we might have driven 1 strain extinct and B) this hypothesis might mean that extra cases this year are just cases from last flu season that have been delayed (see also https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality).
A twitter thread about a paper on policing: https://twitter.com/jnixy/status/1559568512485470209
The paper itself: https://t.co/sy6LHNMpph
Key points
The US doesn't have that many police officers given its level of serious crime (homicide), but it does have a lot of prisoners.
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.")
More options
Context Copy link