ChestertonsMeme
No bio...
User ID: 1098
If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.
This is a ridiculous stance. Being better than other people in some way is the whole basis of our social hierarchy and much of the motivation for striving at anything.
Edit: On reflection, this brings to mind Michael Malice's razor "Are some people better than others?" Someone right wing says yes; someone left wing gives a speech. I'd characterize the left wing stance here as counter-signaling. "I'm so far above everyone else that I don't need to participate in this competition to prove my worth." It's cool to personally bow out of a competition, but destroying the competition so others can't get value from it is very rude. You could say the same thing about leftists' policy preferences regarding taxation, housing, and immigration. In all of those areas the leftist policies make it harder to prove one is better than others by having wealth/living in an expensive area/being a citizen of a powerful nation.
ChestertonsMeme
25d ago
This is a bit hard to parse, but I think the answer is
It would be helpful if the rules for pairings were delineated more clearly.
ChestertonsMeme
1mo ago
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
Doing the math, you're responsible for 26 minutes of each casualty's life. Pretty okay trade for advancing humanity's knowledge about what policies are effective.
ChestertonsMeme
1mo ago
What would it look like if the richer side needed the money more? Could that ever happen?
Sounds a lot like the situation with many unions. If you are the owner of a business, depending on the local laws the people who happen to work for you get a free monopoly on your labor supply if they form a union. If it's a capital-intensive business then the owner has more to lose.
Reform, secession, and revolution seem like they're a continuum rather than being distinct categories. So I'm not sure the distinction matters very much. What you've said is similar to the Chinese concept of "mandate of heaven" - the ruler has unquestioned authority until it's clear he doesn't, then it's justified to depose him. And this all basically boils down to consensus and power.
I've been contemplating this topic over the last few weeks, that it seems like there's a common thread between cultural consensus, political coalitions, and right to determination that is at the root of all conflict between groups. I'll sketch it out here:
- The right to free speech is about building consensus through common knowledge, including consensus on who is in good standing with whom.
- The right to free association is about formalizing political groups so they can act on behalf of their members.
- The right to revolution is a "safety valve" for when the rights to free speech and free association, combined with the extant political system, do not allow the coalition that should win to actually win. Either they can't form consensus (censorship), they can't formalize their coalition (suppression of political parties), or they can't enact their will because the political system doesn't make it possible (authoritarianism). It's not a real right in the sense of something the state protects; it's just a thing that happens because that's how power works.
- Secession is basically the same as revolution.
The thing that makes reasoning about right to determination so difficult is that so much of the current social organization is path-dependent and contingent on accidents. There's no objective standard for what's a legitimate government, a legitimate set of borders, a legitimate people, a legitimate set of laws, or a legitimate culture. It's all just power and coalitions. And yet each generation of bright young minds grows up swimming in the particulars of their society and believes it's all objectively legitimate.
P.S. I swear I read this post a day or two ago (with the preamble and all) - did you delete and repost?
ChestertonsMeme
4mo ago
This seems like dangerous game to play. Biden could be easily disqualified from office by a sympathetic medical authority declaring him mentally unsound. Are we going to end up with future presidential elections determined by red and blue states' courts competing to eliminate the opposition from their ballots?
ChestertonsMeme
4mo ago
California must stand on the right side of history.
I'm surprised to see this expression used unironically. How does future consensus opinion make an act morally right? But I suppose it's consistent with the idea that past actions can be judged by current moral standards.
ChestertonsMeme
4mo ago
I think to online Internet lefties, the term for outgroup members is Nazi. IH has signaled that he is outgroup through his jokes. Therefore they call him a Nazi. You're taking too literal a meaning to the term.
ChestertonsMeme
4mo ago
There are a few hypotheses here:
- Judeo-Christian ethics cause people to choose more children, compared to other ethical systems.
- A realistic evaluation of things causes people to choose fewer children.
In 2, there's an assumption smuggled in, which is that absent a "religious" belief system, viewing life realistically means that children are a net negative. But this all depends on what one values. I'd basically interpret a belief system that concludes, after looking realistically at things, that children are a net negative as self-centered hedonism. It's the self-centered hedonism that is the problem, not looking at things realistically. One can certainly value children in themselves while being consequentialist atheist materialist rationalist.
What's needed is a value system that takes a longer view while accepting reality (insert diatribe about blank-slateism causing everything wrong in the world). Basically, future people matter, happier, smarter, better future people matter, and the best thing one can do with their life is make an infinite tree of such people by having kids. It might be that what I'm describing basically is Judeo-Christian ethics, but I think removing the supernatural takes us so far from what the original religions are about that it doesn't make sense to call it that.
ChestertonsMeme
5mo ago
The feeling of disillusionment can happen to everyone. I can give an example unrelated to OP's beliefs but which came to mind reading the post: Caring about CO2 emissions because it poses some existential risk for humanity, and discovering that environmental groups oppose the most feasible solution: nuclear. This discovery caused me to believe most environmentalists are not serious; they're motivated by vibes.
ChestertonsMeme
5mo ago
There are many domains where hidden motives could make for a fun and educational experience.
- College admissions. You have to craft a student body that maximizes the prestige of the university, using only policies that ostensibly achieve other more laudable goals.
- Corporate hiring (similar to college admissions).
- Sims but you're graded on your people's social status. Choices have to have plausible deniability. If your subject doesn't claim to find driving fun, you can't give them a Ferrari without a status penalty for being a phoney or nouveau riche. (I don't play The Sims so for all I know it already works this way.)
There is a lot of opportunity in well trodden game types to introduce new targets or mechanisms.
- Urban planning. People are unhappy if they live close to much richer people and feel envious every day. You have to minimize the local Gini coefficient across the whole city. Using policies with plausible deniability of course.
- Traffic design that minimizes envy and resentment. Different modes getting privileges (e.g. a lone bicyclist getting a green light ahead of 50 cars) makes people unhappy.
ChestertonsMeme
5mo ago
What does ODC stand for?
ChestertonsMeme
5mo ago
Lovely that the Democrats respond to a supply crunch by further increasing demand via these new rules.
Was the idea of raising wages discussed? Politicians tend to think of workers as a fixed number that meet the requirements but in reality the number who would be willing to work this job depends on the wage. How many "qualified" people are just doing more pleasant things with their life right now?
If there truly are not enough workers who meet the legal requirements, then maybe the law should be changed to stop limiting supply. The federal government could make a "shall issue" style law for getting qualified as a caregiver. Or leave it up to facilities and customers to negotiate the level of training they require.
ChestertonsMeme
5mo ago
Vaccine mandates are a good idea - businesses and schools need to be able to prevent the unvaccinated from entering.
These two clauses say different things. Businesses being able to do something (exclude unvaccinated) is different from businesses being required to do it.
Imagine it would be socially allowed for you to have sex with whomever you choose (permissive partner, permissive religion). How many percent of all people of your preferred age and sex would you then consider as sexual partners?
I don't know what this means. If it's "socially allowed" why does the next question offer a reason of "unwanted social consequences"?
The question seems to be treating sexual morality as very rules-based and divorced from any consequences. Kind of like, it's this good thing that only outdated moral rules are preventing people from enjoying. I don't think of sexual morality in these terms. Sex is a means to an end: creating successful kids. Sex that doesn't help with that is a vice, akin to gluttony or sloth (I'm atheist, not Catholic, but Catholics have a good taxonomy of vices). By "vice" I mean something that distracts from useful efforts or that has negative consequences. I checked the box for "I find sex with someone I don't know meaningless" but that is not adequately expressing my stance.
ChestertonsMeme
6mo ago
To apply @BurdensomeCountTheWhite's argument to these situations, the Chinese and Romans would have to establish their rule by force and maintain order. Then they could be judged as least-worst among all the other contenders based on how beneficial the pax China/Romana was. If the subjugated peoples are considering revolt then the rulers haven't done their job yet.
ChestertonsMeme
6mo ago
I don't understand why it's important whether Indo-European invaders were more predisposed to creating civilization than local populations at the time they invaded. The admixed population has evolved since then. Isn't the current state what matters? Similarly, it could totally be the case that the local populations were better in some way. But they're gone now. The comparison isn't against an extinct population, it's against the other populations here now. Not that population-level comparisons even make sense when you can compare individuals.
ChestertonsMeme
7mo ago
Inching closer to the eradication of financial privacy
FinCEN has new rules taking effect over the next year and a half that require basically all companies to disclose the "beneficial owners".
The rule will require most corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities created in or registered to do business in the United States to report information about their beneficial owners—the persons who ultimately own or control the company, to FinCEN. Designed to protect U.S. national security and strengthen the integrity and transparency of the U.S. financial system, the rule will help to stop criminal actors, including oligarchs, kleptocrats, drug traffickers, human traffickers, and those who would use anonymous shell companies to hide their illicit proceeds.
I won't quote the whole thing but it's a short and easy read.
This statement is a bit disturbing:
FinCEN will engage in additional rulemakings to: (1) establish rules for who may access beneficial ownership information, for what purposes, and what safeguards will be required to ensure that the information is secured and protected [...]
This provides another avenue for rogue members of institutions to leak private information to hurt people they don't like. Depending on the rules that ultimately come out, this avenue could be very wide, especially since there is often discretion over when to enforce the rules.
My revulsion to these rules goes beyond the erosion of privacy, though. It should be possible to be a citizen of a place without exposing your entire life to the mercy of its government. You can't avoid being at its physical mercy when you're within its territory, but you can leave now and then. The way financial rules work in the U.S., you have to report and pay taxes on all finances, even work and investments in other countries. You also have to pay taxes on income that doesn't affect anybody else (income you haven't spent). With these new rules, you might have to pay a reputational tax when wealth you were keeping private gets exposed. I would much prefer citizenship or investment in a place to be like membership in a club - you're judged by your behavior at club events, not by your life outside it.
ChestertonsMeme
7mo ago
One reason for special licensing is to make it easier to prevent truck drivers from engaging in law-breaking arbitrage. Speeding to make delivery times, not sleeping, etc. Once someone is doing something for money there is that extra incentive to break laws. You can see the same thing with Uber - as soon as people started driving for money, there were suddenly a lot more violations of no-stopping zones, transit lanes, parking in bike lanes, etc.
ChestertonsMeme
7mo ago
I am continually astonished by the cruelty of other people, often practiced under the pretense of standing up to bullies.
Could you give some examples? This sounds similar to Jonathan Haidt's ideas in The Coddling of the American Mind (safetyism, call-out culture, etc.) but it could also be completely different.
ChestertonsMeme
7mo ago
ChestertonsMeme
8mo ago
The author makes a good point but there's something they're missing. The way I would put it is that walking or biking are low-status activities in many places by design. This comment from HN puts it well:
Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?” When you are using transportation infrastructure that’s designed with contempt for you, you know, and you don’t want to be there.
The contempt in the design is, I think, on purpose. Perhaps not explicitly, in a saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud way, but it's a very important implicit goal that I'm sure planners understand. Constituents know that accessible public transport and cheap housing within pleasant walking distance to amenities will lead to people taking advantage of those things. People the constituents don't want around.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that all of the negative aspects of American (sub)urban design post-1950 are basically compensation for not being able to exclude undesirables explicitly.
- Car-dependence excludes poor people. The above article illustrates one facet of this, making walking low-status.
- Zoning codes exclude poor people. Houses must be a certain size, putting a price floor on them and pricing poor people out. Housing must be far from stores, forcing car dependence.
- HOA rules about renting exclude people who aren't conscientious. People who can't hold a steady job in one place, people in and out of prison, people who don't have the credit history to get a mortgage, just can't live in HOA-controlled neighborhoods.
The trouble is, of course, that poor feckless criminals are in fact bad for a neighborhood. If you'd like an extreme example, here's a video of Philadelphia. Would you want to take a walk or ride a bike there? There are wide accessible sidewalks, lots of bike lanes, tons of public transit, and high density. What's not to love?
It's clear that higher density and less car-dependence would be more efficient in some senses: less fossil fuel consumption, less time wasted commuting, and less land consumed by development, for example. It's also clear that there is value in excluding certain people from public spaces. In the extreme, if violent felons are allowed free reign, society as we know it couldn't function. In the less extreme, being less exclusive means more low-level harassment and petty crime and fewer positive-sum interactions among people. Exclusivity eventually reaches diminishing returns, but there's clearly some level at which excluding people is worth it.
Figuring out the right policies that maximize utility between these competing concerns requires taking a hard look at why basically anything is valuable. Why do fossil fuels and carbon emissions matter? Why does it matter whether vulnerable people can walk safely outside at night? As EAs have discovered over and over, people do not in general try to maximize utility. Most day-to-day decisions related to topics like this are for status signaling. Everyone wants their own lifestyle to be the one treated with dignity and privilege.
The problem with the built environment treating pedestrians with dignity is making sure it doesn't assign inappropriate dignity or status to the wrong people. Any system that assigns inappropriate status is going to be instinctively rejected by voters. If everyone is expected to walk and take public transit, there still must be practical ways for average-status people to exclude low-status people and to differentiate themselves from them. One way would be to use exclusive transit (think corporate shuttles). Make the public transit slow and impractical. Or make transit expensive, especially as a high fixed cost imposing a barrier to entry to non-conscientious people (a $500/year membership, but ride free). It's much harder to make pedestrian facilities exclusive without authoritarian policing such as curfews and id checks. To be practical it has to be combined with measures that make it hard to get to the walkable area in the first place.
Assigning inappropriate dignity and status is the core of the problem with many urbanist ideas, this included.
Thanks for sharing these. I've read your earlier writing and found it very good - you explain very well ideas that I'm sure many people who are intellectually honest have every time trans topics come up.
Saying "peace be unto him" is indeed a speech act rather than a statement of fact, but it would be bizarre to condescendingly point this out as if it were the crux of debates about religious speech codes. The function of the speech act is to signal the speaker's affirmation of Muhammad's divinity. That's why the Islamic theocrats want to mandate that everyone say it: it's a lot harder for atheism to get any traction if no one is allowed to talk like an atheist.
And that's why trans advocates want to mandate against misgendering people on social media: it's harder for trans-exclusionary ideologies to get any traction if no one is allowed to talk like someone who believes that sex (sometimes) matters and gender identity does not.
This has made me rethink how willing I am to "be polite" about pronouns and trans identity. It really is a kind of lie to put someone or something into a category that doesn't correlate with their characteristics. Making it harder for a truthful worldview to spread seems like low-grade evil. "Complicity" in the language of the day.
Edit: I tried to finish the article but it is LONG. I have to sleep for my health (I'm sure you can relate). Can I suggest using an editor (whether human or AI) to condense your work?
ChestertonsMeme
9mo ago
Social status is highly heritable, and test scores are a noisy measure of phenotypic social status (there's more to life than taking tests).1 It makes sense for universities to use other predictors of social status such as parental income in order to select the highest quality students.
I'd be surprised (although not that surprised) if the universities used income directly for judging applicants. Aren't they using more oblique evidence like essays and "life experience"?
The part of this that seems a bit immoral is that parental income is commonly believed to be random, and not an indicator of student quality. A few questions here:
- If parental income is an independent predictor of students' future social status (after controlling for test scores), is it acceptable for colleges to use income directly for judging applicants? Why or why not?
- Assuming similar predictive validity, is it more or less acceptable to use essays and other predictors rather than income?
- If there was a test that more directly measured phenotypic social status than SATs, would that be acceptable to use in admissions?
My stance here is that people are smart and they accord status to people who are actually valuable to society, so any predictor of future social status is valid for admissions.
1 See Gregory Clark's works
ChestertonsMeme
9mo ago
Every month, there is exactly one weekday that is always a multiple of 7. This August it's Mondays. Neat!
If environmental racism causes decreased intelligence, then people affected actually have decreased intelligence. But progressives deny this conclusion.
More options
Context Copy link