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Hyperbole is bad
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User ID: 92
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Hyperbole is bad
11mo ago
I recognize that the real future approach will ideally be somewhere in between mine and what we have now.
Wait I'm confused. Are you advocating for a position more extreme than what you actually believe in an attempt to manipulate society (or this forum?) towards achieving/supporting a middle ground?
here is Science insisting that trans women don’t even have an advantage
This isn't a fair characterization of that article. While I agree they're arguing for trans women to be allowed to compete, their argument is primarily that there is not sufficient evidence to demonstrate trans women have an advantage (i.e. a negative claim), not that trans women don't have any advantage (a positive claim).
My hypothesis is that “progress” only really works in times of peace and plenty. Rich societies can afford such things. Poor ones can’t. Rich societies can expend lots of resources and spend lots of time educating people.
Germany chooses to spend it on more worker protections or welfare, but having excess resources can just as easily be directed at (e.g.) binding women's feet, sacrificing people to the gods or building the Great Pyramids. I don't really have a good way to think about what causes countries to divert resources to one thing or another, but I don't think it's as simple as just having abundance.
If the Jews were behaving like sovereign citizens and (e.g.) refusing to pay taxes or follow laws, then "persecuting the Jews is no worse than a conflict with a foreign state" might be somewhat defensible.
But it sounds like you're saying "Yeah you pay French taxes and follow French laws and have lived in France all your life, but you don't follow French culture, so you shouldn't get the game-theoretic protections of being part of France". If you agree that (e.g.) Mormons deserve to live without persecution, I feel like that should also extend to Jews.
I suspect "often" is doing some weaseling here. After reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_of_the_Jews_in_Europe I see exactly one example, which was in the town of Altona
From 1584 to 1639, as in the Middle Ages, the Jews of Altona paid taxes specific to the Jews, but no further taxes. Each Jewish family was required to pay 6 Reichstaler per year. Under Danish rule this changed: the Jews continued to pay the specifically Jewish taxes plus the same taxes as all other residents.
Do you think it was common for Jews to pay less in taxes than ordinary citizens? Can you provide an example of a kingdom where this happened? Do you think in kingdoms where this didn't happen (I'm guessing the vast majority) Jews shouldn't have received the same rights as other citizens?
It's neither here nor there, but it's kind of crazy that your fourth link cites an increase of female journalists from 33% to 37.5% in 2013, while today 53.4% are female. It's also funny to read
However, women still represent only slightly more than one-third of all full-time journalists working for the U.S. news media, as has been true since the early 1980s. This trend persists despite the fact that more women than ever are graduating from journalism schools.
with the hindsight knowledge that this was the start of huge change in the gender makeup of reporters.
On the other hand, 2/3 of graduates with a degree in journalism or mass communication were women in 2017. If people's careers are 40 years long, then we'd expect the percent of women in journalism to change by (2/3 - 1/3) / 40 = 0.8% per year, which is 4 times smaller than the 3.5% change that was actually observed.
This line of reasoning also makes the change from 33% to 53.4% in 10 years seem crazy -- that's an increase of 2% every year, which seems like it shouldn't be possible looking at graduation disparities, and factoring in how slowly people more into/out of a field. I feel like this necessitates an exodus of (disproportionately) men out of reporting.
even Economics, which promises much when it comes to explanatory power, comes up sorely lacking
What do you mean by this? What do you want from the field of economics?
Our understanding of economics is enormously better than it was 80 years ago. In my opinion what makes Economics respectable is that, of all the social sciences, they're the ones who bother to create models (or, at least, ones that are more complicated than linear regression), and then go through the work of trying to see if those models match reality. If they fail, it's mostly because systems with many humans are really complicated -- they're hard to model, hard to experiment on, and it's hard to measure what we care about (but it seems really unfair to blame Economists' intelligence/motivation/personal failings for that).
I'd go so far as to say that Economics majors care more about well-defined modeling than most STEM majors.
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11mo ago
The defense in the article is
“There’s just more and more layers of stuff that hospitals and physicians’ offices—anyone in healthcare—is being asked to do. Documenting and meeting regulatory requirements—all of these have added to the demand,” Selberg told Healthline. “Has that demand actually gone into creating better outcomes…in less time and with lower costs? I think, as the blog described, the answer is no.”
It's hard to know whether this is accurate or not without finding a trustworthy expert. But if "administrative bloat" is where all the money is going, and if there is no good reason for it, this seems more like a symptom of the lack of competition, which is driven by a ton of factors (failures of governments to prevent monopolization, lack of transparent pricing, etc.).
I know you were explicitly asked "where is the money going", but I think it's worth being clear that "where the money is going" is not necessarily the area where Solutions need to be directed. Blaming "administrative bloat" is like blaming "corporate greed" when the paper mill dumps too much pollution in your river. One of the government's core jobs is keeping people's incentives aligned with being pro-social. Forcing hospitals to downsize or pay administrators less (or whatever) is treating a symptom of the overall screwed-upped-ness of legislation of the medical system.
I'm guessing The China-United States trade war though I guess it depends to what extent one thinks the new tariffs are due to keeping China down vs (e.g.) protectionism, enforcing copyright protection, etc.
More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle.
I guess "stop regarding X as people" is sufficiently poorly defined that you can argue this (you can also claim "being against gay marriage is not regarding gay people as people", "not letting transwomen compete in female sports is not regarding transwomen as people", etc.) but it seems to require some incredible contortion to argue that Utilitarianism, which wants to treat criminals the exact same as everyone else is not treating criminals as people.
It seems to me that you're necessarily making the claim that Utilitarian doesn't treat anyone "as a person". Which, sure, poorly defined words let you say basically whatever you want (see: lots of philosophy). But then "Utilitarians stop regarding criminals as people" is a pretty misleading sentence when what you actually believe is that Utilitarians don't regard anyone as a person.
The plain version of your claim is
Punishing Alice because she wronged Bob is respectful to Alice
This makes it clear that "respectful" is being used in an extremely unusual way. And this wouldn't be too bad, except you clearly mean for "X is respectful" to imply "X is good" (or, at least, "X should be pursued via public policy").
I wish I had a name for this rhetorical trick -- where you convert a controversial word into a less controversial word, with the goal of claiming the original point. It's kind of a very specific form of Motte and Bailey.
Another example is that it's very controversial whether (e.g.) bats are conscious, so instead philosophers argue over whether bats have "qualia". To which I say: either "X is conscious iff X experiences qualia", in which case it's really unclear what value the concept of "qualia" is bringing to the discussion, or they're not equivalent, in which case claiming bats don't have qualia (and letting the shared valence finish the argument for you -- "bats aren't conscious") is bad (though effective) argumentation.
A third example is when politicians claim that "X deserves Y, and then letting "deserve" mutate into "good" in people's minds, so that people hear "giving Y to X is good policy".
Most posters here think quality insights are generally self-explanatory, especially to readers who are ideologically sympathetic or at least are rational and charitable, and so there is little need to invest the time to preemptively solve for [citation needed]. A post without any citation is thus more likely to reflect the original poster's belief that the post will be ideologically well received by the community.
When we were on reddit (and I was scraping every comment anyway) I thought about writing a script to rank posts based on value, and top on my list of useful signals was links, especially links to papers (any link that ends in pdf is probably good, links to arxiv or jstor are great, links to wikipedia are better than nothing (sometimes good, but often just thrown in for no reason).
What I hate is posts that claims controversial things, while the evidence they provide is just whatever feelings the author picked up via osmosis.
I've never really cared about the length of a post, so much as whether the author did anything to rise above the lowest possible level of scholarship, because scholarship is what determines value of a post. A one-sentence comment that drops a link to a paper that answers an interesting question contributes a lot more than 1000 words claiming that it really feels like your in-group is right.
This is one reason why I like when somebody posts about some topic they're passionate about. It's a way that the author can post a comment that, from my perspective, is well-researched, even if the author did absolutely no research for that explicit comment -- they've been woodworking or Mormon-ing or chess-playing for 10 years, and even if their post is valueless drivel to another woodworker/mormon/chess player, it might as well be a well-researched thesis for the right audience.
And where I'm going with this is that variety is good specifically for of this reason (and probably others). I don't really expect random Internet people to spend their free time reading peer-reviewed meta analyses for me, but "I live in Spain and here's is a mile-high overview of current politics that I received via osmosis" is grade-A content from my perspective. Even better is "I'm a researcher who studies X, and this is what I believe" because, again, even if no research went into that specific comment, you're getting decades of research behind it.
On the other hand, the marginal comment where somebody says "I like traditional values and cancel culture is bad" provides much less intellectual value here than it would most other places on the Internet.
(Tangentially... is there an API for this site? I've tried (e.g.) "https://www.themotte.org/comment" which seems like it ought to work based on the code but I get "Method Not Allowed")
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Hyperbole is bad
11mo ago
I guess I wasn’t clear. I’m not saying people actually upvote those links, in saying that they should.
Can you tie together the first part of your post (linking to a blog post about free speech) to the second part (baseless speculation that your outgroup is behaving like dicks)?
The two people that were laid off on my team were lower-than-senior engineers who hadn’t been promoted in a long time. From what I can tell this is the general advice given by consultants to upper management for figuring out who is a weak performer.
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11mo ago
Link?
Thank you for upholding civility standards.
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11mo ago
Saying it about your opponent's point feels a lot less egregious.
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11mo ago
To save you all the read, there is exactly one example of support this claim: Open Philanthropy publicly expressing concern about sexual harassment after a bad PR incident.
2. TIME article from disillusioned women in EA making questionable claims of sexual assault (to which the CEO of Open Phil replied, not the organization itself, as you suggest)
I didn't really see much of a difference, but I guess I can see how some people could.
1. The widespread admonishment of Nick Bostrom among EAs after his comment on factual group differences was leaked
5. Highlights two cause areas (global dysgenic trends and the power laws of crime) that are ignored by EA as taboo.
A social taboo against talking about HBD is not feminization. It was the de facto state of society well before the rise of modern feminism and woke culture. Take a random sample of men at the gym or in an MMO and start talking about how Black people are genetically inferior and let me know how it goes. HBD is not something all men secretly believe and want to talk about (if not for those pesky women!).
Though while we're on the topic, imo the general state of HBD has been the same since at least 2013 (when I started reading about it) -- basically: "Some of EAs believe in HBD and some EAs are uncomfortable with talking about it, and some EAs support strong social norms against talking about it", which should already seem strikingly different from how its talked about in the normal population.
3. Open Phil making donations towards criminal justice causes without any evidential basis for their effectiveness
Open Philanthropy's funding for criminal justice reform has been significant since at least 2016, went down in 2020 (when George Floyd died), and then separated from OpenPhil in 2021 because they weren't as effective as global health.
As we wrote in 2019, we think the top global aid charities recommended by GiveWell (which we used to be part of and remain closely affiliated with) present an opportunity to give away large amounts of money at higher cost-effectiveness than we can achieve in many programs, including CJR, that seek to benefit citizens of wealthy countries. Accordingly we’re shifting the focus of future grantmaking from our Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio (which CJR has been part of) further towards the types of opportunities outlined in that post — specifically, efforts to improve and save the lives of people internationally (including things like distributing insecticide-treated bednets to prevent the spread of malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa, and fighting air pollution in South Asia).
-- OpenPhil
Those don't seem like the actions of an ideologically compromised organization.
4. A highly upvoted post on the EA forum titled “I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.” This post then goes on to critique EA for placing too much emphasis on rationality and not enough on emotion.
I'll admit I missed this (my mistake for posting while at the gym). While I don't think "highly upvoted post on a forum" is great evidence (or I'd prove that EA is okay with Bostrom), it should certainly qualify to be included in a "summary of evidence".
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10mo ago
Was hard for me to find explicit before/after online, so I'll paste the diff I stitched together here:
"Kiss the Girl" changes:
Yes, you want her.
Look at her, you know you do.
Possible she wants you, too.
There is one way to ask her.
Use your words, boy, and ask her
It don’t take a word. Not a single word.
If the time is right and the time is tonight
Go on and kiss the girl
In "Poor Unfortunate Souls" they simply remove the dialog about men liking women who don't talk:
Ursula: That's right! But, you'll have, your man. Life's full of tough choices, isn't it? Oh! And there is, one...more...thing! We haven't discussed the subject of payment...
You'll have your looks! Your pretty face!
And don't underestimate the importance of body language!
...
The men up there don't like a lot of blabber
They think a girl who gossips is a bore
...
It's she who holds her tongue who gets a man.
I have to admit, when I look at domestic box office numbers I mostly just see noise (a big factor imo is competing films entering the market), but to give some reference:
Disney's previous two big movies were Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3.
Ant-Man started at $106M its first week, then dropped to $32M (70% drop) and $13M in the next two weeks.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 went from $118M to $62M (47% drop) to $32M.
The Little Mermaid went from $96M to $41M (57% drop) (also this week isn't finished yet)
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10mo ago
Perhaps the claim that it's related to national defense will result in the prosecution attempting to actually establish that there was something there that anyone should actually care about, but I expect to be pretty disappointed.
That comment was a response to skepticism that the documents were important. Your comment is a non sequitur to that conversation. Not every argument whose valence is against your side demands an argument whose valence is for your side.
Great, now compare those European countries with the United States.
Or do it with South Africa's 2021 GDP instead of its 2004 GDP (34% higher) or its 2002 GDP (50% lower).
I'm not going to argue for or against your thesis but your argument is not compelling.
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10mo ago
Boy am I glad TheMotte moved offsite
This seems irrelevant to me, since
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(afaik) TheMotte doesn't offer an API
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charging 3rd party apps for using your API to steal your users seems mostly orthogonal to free speech
I use Apollo too, but in that case one (e.g. OP or you) would have to claim that themotte.org's mobile website is better than reddit's mobile app. I don't personally believe this (e.g. I find collapsing comments to be unreasonably difficult on the mobile version of this site), and neither of you has claimed this.
To be clear, I have no strong opinion on our move off of reddit. If ZorbaTHut thinks it was worth it I guess I'm inclined to trust his judgement, if only because it was a lot of work and people are usually biased towards inaction. I just don't think the reddit API ban has much to do with it.
Why is our hypothetical anti-gun person trying to get a pro-gun person to admit something that has no practical relevance to the debate? I don’t think the pro-gun person assuming that his interloper is just sound-bite hunting is very crazy.
Saying something like “assume a magical fairy takes all guns out of private ownership in the US, would murders go down?” seems a lot fairer, because you’re making it clear “I’m saying something kind of silly to establish if you’re debating in good faith”.
But if you say “do you admit if there were no guns in the US then there would be fewer murders?”, I don’t think it’s surprising if the pro-gun guy assumes ill-intent.
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