This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
In his 261 word "manifesto"[1], the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin cited that the US is 42nd in the world in life expectancy but first in health care spending. Cremieux reviews it in more detail here and makes something similar to the RCA argument that the US spends more because it's wealthier and gets more medical procedures done and offers alternative explanations for why the US has low numbers.
By coincidence, while this CEO shooter drama was going down, I was listening to Peter Attia's podcast where he interviews Saum Sutaria, the CEO of a health care system[2]. He drops the following claim (copied from the show notes):
He further argues that US life expectancy is reduced by factors like cultural issues: gun violence, car accidents, etc. Indeed, the US has high infant mortality but also high rates of teenage pregnancy, which are risk factors for higher infant mortality. This echoes Crimeiux from earlier.
Anyway, I went about looking for a source for the claim that longevity rankings increase as we age in the US and found one in Ho and Preston (2010)
US life expectancy at birth sucks versus peer countries, and even still sucks around age 40. But as you get into retirement years it reverses, and the US eventually climbs to 4th place among the 18 countries
The paper tries to explain this but mostly doesn't find anything satisfying.
One interpretation (not from the study, mine and perhaps the Tenet Health CEO's) suggests if you don't get murdered, or into a car wreck, or overdose, or kill yourself, or your mom didn't attempt a home birth at age 16, you actually have good survival odds. The best in the world. The health care system can actually help you. That's what that $10k/capita is all about.
There's some obvious alternate explanations too. Maybe those extra ten years of life are when you're stroked out and have a pretty terrible quality of life and it would've actually been great to meet a health care system with a death panel that said "mmmm actually, there's no treatment available for this condition. so sorry" and you could die with dignity and your family (or someone's family, or maybe collectively) could have an extra $400,000.
Whatever this is, I think it's pretty clear that the health care system in the US exists and can deliver results. Whether or not these results translate to best QOL is more murky and we can debate that effectiveness. Either way, that doesn't have the same revolutionary zeal!
Coming up for air here, and approaching the
#assassinbaestory from a different angle, at what point can we consider misinformation surrounding this life expectancy vs health expenditure chart as stochastic terrorism? I don't know a single left-of-center person who has more than 2 brain cells to rub together who doesn't allude to this as Exhibit A in every discussion about how corrupt the US health care system clearly is[3]. And it's arguably wrong. And it's now getting people murdered. It's not quite as psychotic and singular as Alex Jones, but it's definitely something sinister. Maybe even more dangerous if it's the start of a trend.people are beating him up for writing such a short and lame manifesto but he might not have intended it as a manifesto, more of a confession
guessing this is the last we're going to hear from a CEO of a health care system for quite awhile, so this was well timed
which isn't to say it can't be corrupt, just, again, the health care system failing to save people from high rates of car accident deaths and also for maybe keeping grandpa alive because their family doesn't want them to die is not exactly a stinging indictment of health care itself
Are teenage girls giving birth not covered by their parents' insurance?
I've been informed by LLMs that, despite how biblically popular it is, that teenage women are still physically immature and giving birth is higher risk as well.
See also other underclass issues raised separately in replies.
Think selection bias here, not causation. Especially given that teen pregnancy has become "more unhealthy" ever since it was relegated to a vice of the lowest of the underclass.
Pointing to biology is like suggesting that Lincoln Navigators must have a design defect that causes drive-by shootings and running red lights.
More options
Context Copy link
A minimum of 200,000 years of evolution (this stretches much further back than mere humanity, so this is probably closer to 225 million years of evolution) suggests otherwise, though of course that depends on what you mean by "physical maturity".
An organism that dies after copying itself once is obviously going to be less fit than one that stays alive to copy itself multiple times. If we assume that it was common (outside of the last 100 years... but a lot about the last 100 years is anomalous) for women to get pregnant quite soon after that was physically possible, and they died at outsized rates (because it would injure their body too much in an age where medicine did not exist), then we should expect that the average age of "ability to survive a pregnancy" [which is probably not what you mean by 'physical maturity'] should match the average age of "ability to get pregnant" reasonably closely.
And, for the most part, it does; whether an LLM (or the society that trained it) believes biological truths about maturity are secondary.
Probably explained more by the demographics of who is more likely to do this than anything else (and the fact this is more likely to be handled through unofficial channels; it is irrefutable evidence of a quasi-capital offense in the modern West, after all). Other than that serious confounding factor, environmental endocrine disruptions and better nutrition may be able to push the age of "able to get pregnant" under "able to survive pregnancy" more often, but we don't have good data on that which isn't statistical noise and modern medicine is miraculously effective at trivializing the health risks of pregnancy (I'm not convinced the youngest documented mother survives that pregnancy 1000 years earlier).
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, it's an LLM. I suspect that giving birth at 16 and giving birth at 22 have identical risk profiles if everything else is equal(and obviously sixteen year old mothers and twenty two year old mothers are different populations), but ChatGPT is not very eager to point out that sixteen year old births are dramatically lower risk than thirteen year old births(which was widely recognized as extremely dangerous so far back as to be an aside in Romeo and Juliet).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link