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Update on the continuing dramatic saga of DOGE: apparently the Department of Education no longer exists.
Now this could be a sensationalist media headline, but if not I am shocked that the DOGE team and Trump's cadre et al are going this hard, this fast. They must basically be saying they're going to get a ton of legal challenges anyway, so they might as well do as much as possible and keep up the momentum, destroying everything before the dust clears. It's a bold strategy, and frankly as a spectator it's incredibly exciting, I must admit!
Curious for people's thoughts on the Dept of Education getting shut down? Personally I think it's a good thing - our education system has had terrible outcomes with no accountability for far too long.
In other related news, FEMA send $59 Million dollars to house immigrants in luxury hotels in NYC last week, and Social Security has been sending money to dozens of people over 150 years old, among other issues like the system for SSNs not being re-duplicated.
So many people have been saying "we can never fix the deficit because Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are its primary drivers and can't be touched".
And yet, every time we look under the hood of a government program we see waste and fraud. Why should those programs be any different?
Another thing that I've thought of but which nobody has mentioned: the tendency of multiple of illegal immigrants to work under the same social security number. Are people who fraudulently lent out their identity now becoming the recipients of Social Security because of this?
If what Musk says is true, than it might be very easy to realize tens or hundreds of billions in savings simply by "fixing the glitch" and removing fraudulent payments.
I agree! And yes I know @2rafa has been beating that drum. I also think we should easily be able to save tens of billions by addressing the waste in these programs, or making things more efficient.
I've lately become attuned to a harmful pattern of thinking which I might call the "just so fallacy".
Anytime someone talks about ways in which things can be improved, there are others who chime in with the equivalent of "No, that's impossible. You see, all problems are intractable. We're doing the best we can. The exact way things are right now is the best they can possibly be, or at best, it will be extremely complicated and time-consuming to change them". And then they come up with elaborate rationalizations to explain why the current system is exactly the way it is.
And yet China can build an entire metro systems in less time than it takes New York City to add 1 station.
I think that the existence of Musk is proof that things can change a lot more than anyone anticipates. A huge percentage of what the government does is waste. What if we just stopped doing that?
As a society, we are not guaranteed to decline and fall. We can fix it.
Historians take this of reasoning as an axiom. Ask them for a plausible alternative worldline, and you will treated worse than a holocaust denier. Too bad as there is space for an academic, rather than fantastical and fictional, exploration of historical possibilities, but history departments refuse to be that space.
As perfect information isn't avaliable to hissorian specializing in any era or area, any historian who ventures into interpretation or narrativizations (mainstays of historical thought) already leaves the safe confines of evidence. So it can't the fear of speculation.
Bias against counter-factual reasoning, if you will.
That's too bad. Perhaps historians could benefit by spending some time on prediction markets.
I find post-hoc explanations for why things happened to be utterly unconvincing. If there were consistent principles that could be applied to explain historical events, then they could be used to predict future events. But this obviously doesn't happen.
Perhaps there is psychological comfort in thinking that events can be explained.
But imagine if Elon Musk hadn't been born. Or Trump. The world would be entirely different. Random events matter a lot. The number of possible worlds is much greater than most people can imagine.
It's a cheap shot, but I am reminded of this green text.
You know, there was that one viral clip of Sam Harris that is like the inverse of the "But I did eat breakfast" green text. Where he is really doubling down with how, in a different world with different on the ground realities, he would have been correct. Which is a funny way of admitting that in the current world, with the current ground realities, you were wrong. Or way of not admitting. But it's this retreat into counter-factual reasoning to justify yourself after the fact is incredible. And people rightly mocked Sam Harris with "But none of that did happen".
So I guess, counter-factuals are all well and good as thought exercises. Not so great at justifying massive violations of civil liberties.
Agreed. In the real world, we have uncertain information. Maybe Harris is right about their counter-factuals. But we don't even know, for sure, what the baseline ground reality is.
For that reason its better to stick to simple moral precepts rather than complicated rationalizations. Don't kill. Liberty is good. God, family, country. That sort of thing.
Of course, this is nothing new. In "Crime and Punishment", Raskolnikov kills a pawnbroker because he believes he can transcend moral law to bring about a greater good. 500 pages later, he learns this was wrong and finds Jesus.
Experts think that they can start wars, lockdown the population, force their ideology on others, etc... They think they are above the simple rules that have stood the test of time. But they aren't. They are constantly wrong. The world is far too complicated for a person to understand, and even when we know what happened, we lack the ability to explain it correctly.
... sorry for the tangent.
But... starting wars and forcing ideology on others is what stood the test of time. Lockdowns were also a thing, from what I heard. It's not like every time someone started a war they were smitten by lightning from on high.
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Does he learn that it was wrong, or does he realize that he can't and he is better off finding Jesus? I mean Raskolnikov's central thesis, that might makes right for certain people (with Napoleon as a central example) doesn't necessarily get disproven by the end of the novel. Only that he is no Napoleon.
tangent2
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