wlxd
2yr ago
The physics we know doesn’t support the idea of ships fast enough to make interstellar travel plausible without generation ships.
For big, wet sacks of thinking meat, maybe, but you can posit many theories of interstellar travel that are congruent with physics.
wlxd
2yr ago
One component of this is that US households are highly degenerate. We have insane levels of single parenting, and old-age divorcees relative to Europe, which does a lot for the median household income. For example, if you restrict yourself to households of married parents with children, the median jumps from $70k to $100k. We also have huge underclass which pulls the median down substantially.
wlxd
2yr ago
US probably has better law enforcers, but as a whole, Europe has better law enforcement. This is because they have more cops than US, but less crime. Because of this, when American cops must heavily prioritize their efforts, European cops are under much less pressure, and can afford to spend their time on investigating and prosecuting much more trivial offenses. The result of this is that all crime is at risk of being prosecuted; shoplifters know that if they get caught, they face jail, and so do people who do drugs (yes, simple possession is illegal and heavily enforced in huge swaths of Europe). This makes people respect law much more, which feeds the virtuous cycle of less crime -> more time to enforce the law -> more respect for law -> less crime.
wlxd
2yr ago
I may be weak-manning it though.
Yes, you missed the argument I make, though to be fair, I did not put it at the front and center:
I will find you ten people who should have been put to death for their crimes, but haven’t, and killed more people after being released.
It's not that I'm fine with "innocent people dying". What I said is that I am "fine with innocent people occasionally being killed by justice system", because the alternative is that we let people who are know are bad go out and commit more crimes. I am not arguing for knowingly killing innocent people for some sort of utilitarian purposes. What I am arguing is that, occasionally, mistakes will be made despite adequate efforts, and this should not prevent us from achieving greater good, which is protecting totally innocent people from becoming victims of crime. Think of it like, say, doctors making a treatment decision, following all the appropriate procedures and standard, but which nevertheless is incorrect in the particular patient's case, leading to his death. Should we prevent doctors from practicing medicine, just because some people will die from wrong, but reasonable decisions? No.
wlxd
2yr ago
Sometimes they work very well, sometimes they work very poorly. There is a great channel on YouTube, PoliceActivity, where you can watch first hand what it is that police has to deal with.
Here are some examples of taser use:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=slgCVJLYP-c Taser temporarily incapacitated the guy, but then he removed the taser probes, recovered and took off.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xcAorLQAqW4 Here the taser has been very effective.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pGEp4EArrHA
Here it was somewhat effective: it made the guy compliant, but not incapacitated.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6w7ARs9qdP4 Here it was only marginally effective: it temporarily incapacitated the guy and caused him to drop his knife, but then it stopped being effective.
Point is, if you watch these videos, you’ll find that the effectiveness rate is more like 50% than 95%.
wlxd
2yr ago
I am totally fine with innocent people occasionally being killed by justice system, yes. Fortunately, this is extremely rare. Justice system almost never snatches and imprisons totally innocent people for violent crimes. When people are released from prison or death row, it is almost always a case of prosecution screwing up some procedural stuff, or defender being deemed lousy years later, or activists pressuring critical witnesses to recant the testimony years after.
You’ll find it extremely hard to find a case where a person without prior criminal record being imprisoned for many decades or put on death row, who simply had absolutely nothing to do with the crime they have been accused of. On the other hand, for every person like this, I will find you ten people who should have been put to death for their crimes, but haven’t, and killed more people after being released.
wlxd
2yr ago
Yet it doesn’t stop people from joining and working for the companies which espouse views they consider false. When I worked at FAANG, I knew plenty of people who were quite based in private, and ridiculed the letter religion. Obviously they considered it false, but nevertheless they stuck with their job and didn’t rock the boat. Sure, you can say they were in there just for the money, but so what? You can join the Mormons just for the wife, that’s not any different. This is exactly what I would have done myself if I needed.
wlxd
2yr ago
I do not, in fact, care about them being highly productive members of society. I am not going for some sort of grand society improvement project. I just want them to stop committing crime.
wlxd
2yr ago
Prison doesn't work if all that happens is you scoop someone up, dump them in there, do nothing about reform, then let them back out to resume their interrupted career once the sentence is served.
This is not so. Men achieve peak of their criminal career between 16 and 30, after that they naturally become more placid. If you keep the worst offenders in prison during that time, you physically prevent majority of the crime they’d ever commit, even if you do absolutely nothing to rehabilitate them. In short, they do not exactly resume their career.
wlxd
2yr ago
What if you look at AP math class literally anywhere else in the country other than New York? How Jewish is it? Does it also have 1400% overrepresentation?
wlxd
2yr ago
shrinking populations are bad, but producing vastly more welfare recipients is perhaps even worse
Shrinking population produce a lot of welfare recipients. These are typically called “retirees”. Unlike the young welfare recipients, the retirees cannot be made to work very effectively.
wlxd
2yr ago
How would visit from the police stop him from murdering the family, exactly?
This is, of course, completely ignoring the fact that your top policy suggestion, taken in the most charitable light, would do absolutely nothing if he was shooting a gun in his back, not front yard (because then there is no way to see it as open carry).
Really, your comment is an extremely clear example of how the policy proposals of gun control people only serve to annoy the out group, and have very little effect on actual criminals.
wlxd
2yr ago
Are you referring to the completely made up and fake story about Brian Sicknick being hit with a fire extinguisher? Well, if your point is that people can lie to provide fictional evidence in favor of their policy goals, you certainly have made it.
wlxd
2yr ago
Indeed, in the country where I went to school, the idea of university being an arbitrator in the personal relationships between the students would be rightly seen as ludicrous. This simply never happens, except, maybe, when you get a criminal conviction (in which case being kicked out of school is probably least of your problems). Even when you get a disciplinary sanction by a university, you can appeal to a regular administrative court (i.e. one ran by the state, not by university) as part of normal process.
wlxd
2yr ago
Sorry, the comment search functions both here and on Reddit are terrible, such that it would be too much work for me to track down that comment thread.
A few weeks ago, in order to get some hands on experience with this whole AI thing, I build a search engine that finds Motte comments by content. It works moderately well, e.g. for the above one, I put your name and "being assaulted on subway" as search query, and it was the top result (neither "assault" nor "subway" actually occur in this comment). When I put the same query and my name, it finds this one. I really need to polish it and publish, it's pretty useful.
wlxd
2yr ago
Housing in Europe is much more expensive than in US, so this is hardly a reason to stay in Europe.
For a concrete example, apartments in Paris are something like 12k EUR/square meter, so a one bedroom 600 sq ft (55 m^2) apartment will set you back 660k EUR. Meanwhile, in NYC, you’ll pay something like $1500/sq foot, so comparable apartment will be $900k.
Now let’s compare wages. A postdoc in Paris will be lucky if he makes 30k EUR a year, so it’s 20 years of toil to buy a one bedroom. A full professor will take 50-70k EUR, so that’s 10 years for 1 bedroom apartment. Meanwhile, in NYC, a postdoc will make at least $50k (typically more like $60k), and full professor will make at least $100k.
And that’s the worst place in the country! Most places are much cheaper than NYC, whereas most European cities have atrocious ratio of pay to housing cost.
wlxd
2yr ago
You know the joke about the communist dissident arrested by secret police for handing out blank sheets of papers in public?
wlxd
2yr ago
This makes sense, but you’d need to do some randomization to check for causation. If, for example, there are people who are “prone to get addicted to nicotine”, it is possible that they would have taken up smoking anyway, even without vaping first. Indeed, that’s what people did when vapes didn’t exist.
wlxd
2yr ago
That’s because the reasons that actually motivate people’s response in those cases are not what they are allowed to argue for in today culture, so that they are forced to make argument in the accepted framework, that is, framework of consent.
I wrote about it at the previous place:
What happens here is the conflict between traditional norms of sexuality, and the ones that have arisen during sexual revolution. This is really simple: a guy who uses his fame and status to pump and dump naive girls is seen as morally repugnant, according to traditional norms of sexuality that most people still hold, either consciously or subconsciously. That’s because traditional norms focus on stability, responsibility, and equity. However, in modern liberal take on sexuality, the core value is individual choice. Ability to choose is what empowers humans, and choosing is ultimate way to express sexuality. The confusion stems from the fact that people laud the norms of the latter, but make moral judgement based on the former set of norms. Hence, the guy is wrongdoer, because he wasn’t supposed to just pump and dump them: instead, he was supposed to validate them, by expending his efforts to signal she has high value. That she chose to do it and consented to the act is irrelevant: that’s not the deal she had in mind when consenting. She was hoping to get traditional deal, but instead she got the modern one.
The context was slightly different, but the point is the same.
wlxd
2yr ago
Literally nobody is starving to death on the streets, so to put is as the only available alternative to renting your womb and selling your baby is fundamentally dishonest.
wlxd
2yr ago
I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.
Please excuse my poor grammar. What I was trying to convey is the following: you said that "[you are] modeling her as »one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, (...)«", which implies that you consider her highly competent on the basis of her deep association with a highly regarded group. Thus, if she turns out to be not so competent after all, this will cast doubt on whether we should continue regarding that group as competent.
Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy?
No, but that's beyond the point. Professional ethicists are not any more ethical than regular people, and progressive liberals somehow keep buying houses in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, after consulting with their peers as to where the "good schools" are. She will almost certainly not express any philosophical objections to surrogacy, and she probably will not even verbalize any explicit objections to it in her head. She will, however, feel deeply repulsed by the idea that she will need to give up such a fundamental human female experience, and hire a random person to do the job. This is very natural, so natural in fact that it probably hasn't even occurred to her that this might be her own fate when she was freezing these eggs in the first place.
wlxd
2yr ago
I'm modeling her as "one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, and who happens to be a woman".
If, say, in 4 years, she is still unmarried and childless, how will that affect your perception of the grasp of the reality of the "founding members of the bay area rationalist circles"?
wlxd
2yr ago
When she was freezing the eggs, do you think she was planning to have another woman carry them for her?
In any case, I think that the medical establishment and media, if they were honest, should really repeat ad nauseam how low success rate IVF has above age of 35, so that women are less delusional about their future. Instead, medical establishment has every incentive to play down the low rates of success, given that they are paid for each attempt. Media, of course, keeps pretending that every woman can have it all, because of course she is a queen that deserves nothing less, and that’s all that matters.
wlxd
2yr ago
At her age, success rate per cycle is around 30%. This means that she’ll almost certainly require a couple of tries before she gives birth, which means that the second pregnancy attempt will almost certainly not happen sooner than 2 years later. By then, the chance of success will halve to less than 20%.
And that’s all assuming she starts tomorrow, instead of needing to find a partner and getting him to commit to having children together, which will take months on its own.
What do Europeans have to do with the discussion? Are you under impression that Europeans ride bicycles a lot, including to work? They don’t, except of couple of places, which is no different than in US.
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