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Moonshot Personal Growth Idea
There are a lot of smart, hyper-informed people on here (don't be bashful). Each probably have 1-5 topics they know A LOT about, who could deliver a knowledgable spiel over voice or text without much effort and intelligently field any number of follow-up questions. So it occurs to me there might be a big educational opportunity for me here if I can capture some of this low-hanging fruit.
I don't know much about American politics, health, business, etc., but eagerly want to know more, and I'm happy to talk over discord/phone/voice or text depending on your preferences. Some topics to jog your brain; if it strikes you that "hey, I actually got obsessed with topic 23 one time and learned everything you could possibly know about it over a 6 month period," please consider reaching out to me. I'll adopt a position indicated by either "pro" or "con" provisionally just to inspire engagement (my actual views here are very low-confidence and "pro/con" means something more like "I've heard interesting arguments for this side of the issue that I want an intelligent person who knows more than I do to explain the merits of to me" than "this is what I believe.")
“The current level of military spending is justified.” Pro
“The typical white male is utterly blameless for the circumstances of the African American community” Pro
"The growth of transgender identity and bisexuality have the character of a social contagion" Pro (Is bisexuality created or only revealed by the environment? Is anyone bisexual because of encouragement, or is the absence of discouragement the only environmental factor that does anything to affect rates of ID?) (Caplan)
“Asian romantic preferences are morally permissible.” Pro
“De facto interrogational torture by the US is justified.” Pro
"Extraterrestrial life is the best explanation of some UFO sightings" Con
“Any minimum wage fails a purely utilitarian cost benefit test due to disemployment effects.” Pro
"Joe Biden's Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Would Be Disastrous," (Or: Cost benefit analysis puts several other environmental causes ahead of climate change.)
"Feminism is bad for women." (a la Bryan Caplan)
"Conventional medicine barely makes us healthier" (as seen in Robin Hanson's case for radical medical skepticism, from the RAND Health insurance experiment to the replication crisis http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/feardie.pdf)
"Dietary research is of such poor quality that we know almost nothing about whether any given major diet fad is truly the ideal diet." (Pro) (I would be willing to take the even stronger position that we don't even know ANYTHING about the right diet just to see what a smart, informed person would say in response to better calibrate my reasoning on this issue)
"Most of life is a prestige-signaling game./Social status is the closest thing to a one-variable explanation for everything, and does far better than the traditional rival models like sex or money."
"Diversity is our strength." Pro
"Society does not clearly treat one sex more unfairly than the other." (Pro)
"IQ is real and a major determinant of social outcomes" Pro
"Racial groups differ in socially relevant ways for genetic reasons." Con
“Capitalists deserve their success.” Pro
"Money doesn't really buy happiness." Pro
“The solution to traffic is congestion pricing (tolls)” Pro
"Actions taken by the Biden Admin during the Covid pandemic were generally justified." Not enough info to sway either way
“We should deregulate construction completely.” Pro
“Workers are not underpaid in competitive business environments.” Pro
Question: How do taxes work, and how SHOULD they work?
“Affirmative action is immoral/harmful.” Pro
“State-mandated wealth redistribution is immoral./Wealth inequality is not a serious social problem” Pro
“Abortion is morally permissible.” Pro
“We should put America First” pro
“It is not possible to be a good criminal defense lawyer AND a good person.” Pro
“We should privatize everything.” Pro
“The poor generally deserve to be poor.” “American wealth inequality is generally fair.” (as seen in remarks made by Caplan re: the so-called "success sequence")
“Gender is essentially biological.” Pro (Tomas Bogardus, Alex Byrne)
“We should remove confederate monuments.” Con
“We should not provide trigger warnings/safety culture actually harms mental health.” Pro (Jonathan Haidt)
“We Should Stop Talking about Privilege” pro
“Immigration is Not a Human Right.” Con
“The Death Penalty is Immoral” pro
“The typical meat eater does nothing wrong.” Pro
“Political correctness is just politeness.” Con
“There are no positive rights; There is no right to healthcare or education.” Pro
“Utilitarianism is a bad moral theory.” Pro
“It isn’t morally wrong to misgender a trans person.” Pro
“Artificial intelligence is not an existential risk.” Pro
“We should not have gun control.” Pro
“We should segregate intimate public spaces by biological sex.” Or: “it is not morally wrong to do so.” Pro
“It’s morally wrong for the average voter to vote; we should try to decrease voter turnout.” Pro
“It’s morally permissible to racially profile.” Pro
“Psychological egoism is false.” Pro or con
“Ethical egoism is false.” Pro
“Racial discrimination is not inherently immoral.” Pro
“Businesses may racially select their customers.” Pro
“Equality of opportunity is morally undesirable.” Pro
“Mixed martial arts don’t violate anyone’s rights.” Pro
“We are morally obligated to tip servers.” Pro
“Hazing should be permitted on college campuses.” Pro
“It is just to punish criminals for the sake of causing suffering to people who deserve it.” Pro or con, preferably con
“If we ought to be taxed more, we ought to donate our excess income.” (“Rich socialists/distributive egalitarians are hypocrites.”) pro
“It’s morally permissible to sell oneself into permanent slavery.” Pro
“There is no duty to hire the most qualified applicant.” Pro
“We should completely deregulate the provision of healthcare services.” Pro
“We should not require occupational licensing by law (for doctors, plumbers, or lawyers).” Pro
“Workplace quality and safety regulations are bad for workers.” Pro
“We should not dispense racial reparations to the black community.” Pro
Con “alcoholics (and drug addicts in general) are nonresponsible victims”
Pro: “Race is biologically real”
Pro:“The rich pay their fair share”
“Exploitation isn’t wrong.” Pro
“Free market pricing is a better distributor than queuing” Pro
“Price gouging is fine.” Pro
“The casting couch is just prostitution” Pro
“Affirmative Action is systemically racist” Pro
“Colleges are guilty of negligent advertising” pro
"We should we abolish civil rights law" (Richard Hanania)
“Gender is essentially biological” pro
TL;DR Looking for someone to explain American politics to me, preferably over discord voice. Especially interested in topics like happiness, relationship success, American public policy (esp. healthcare and the budget)
I know it's not a claimed position but I'm curious why you lean on torture being acceptable but not execution.
Come to think of it I'm curious why you lean towards torture being acceptable at all given it's uselessness both inherent and relative to threats.
I had an argument about torture here just a few weeks ago.
Bluntly, I absolutely do not buy that torture is "inherently useless". It's an extremely counterintuitive claim. I'm inherently suspicious whenever somebody claims that their political belief also comes with no tradeoffs. And the "torture doesn't work" argument fits the mold of a contrarian position where intellectuals can present cute, clever arguments that "overturn" common sense (and will fortunately never be tested in the real world). It's basically the midwit meme where people get to just the right level of cleverness to be wrong.
Inherently useless as a means of gathering intelligence. Torture works great if all you want is to discourage people to fuck with you. Ask the Cartels.
I share your skepticism of convenient narratives, and this is a topic that is necessarily polluted by them. But the evidence just doesn't add up. If torture was so effective we wouldn't have had to purge it out of our judicial system because people kept admitting to things that weren't true.
And frankly I like my common sense better than yours. Torture is useless barbarism, simple as.
I'm glad that, at the start, you (correctly) emphasized that we're talking about intelligence gathering. So please don't fall back to the motte of "I only meant that confessions couldn't be trusted", which you're threatening to do by bringing up the judicial system and "people admitting to things". Some posters did that in the last argument, too. I don't know how many times I can repeat that, duh, torture-extracted confessions aren't legitimate. But confessions and intelligence gathering are completely different things.
Torture being immoral is a fully sufficient explanation for it being purged from our systems. So your argument is worse than useless when it comes to effectiveness - because it actually raises the question of why Western intelligence agencies were still waterboarding people in the 2000s. Why would they keep doing something that's both immoral and ineffective? Shouldn't they have noticed?
When you have a prisoner who knows something important, there are lots of ways of applying pressure. Sometimes you can get by with compassion, negotiation, and so on, which is great. But the horrible fact is that pain has always been the most effective way to get someone to do what you want. There will be some people who will never take a deal, who will never repent, but will still break under torture and give you the information you want. Yes, if you have the wrong person they'll make something up. Even if you have the right person but they're holding out, they might feed you false information (which they might do in all other scenarios, too). Torture is a tool in your arsenal that may be the only way to produce that one address or name or password that you never would have gotten otherwise, but you'll still have to apply the other tools at your disposal too.
Sigh. The above paragraph is obvious and not insightful, and I feel silly having to spell it out. But hey, in some sense it's a good thing that there are people so sheltered that they can pretend pain doesn't work to get evil people what they want. It points to how nice a civilization we've built for ourselves, how absent cruelty ("barbarism", as you put it) is from most people's day-to-day existence.
I did once find a study comparing the use of torture in Spanish Inquisition vs. modern USA, which concluded that the former was much more effective because of differences in methods and social context. I hope you will pardon me if I copypaste another a post of mine from elsewhere:
There’s this paper claiming (in the case of the Spanish Inquisition) that there are circumstances in which torture can yield reliable and verifiable information, but only in a very specific setting that is very different from, say, yanking a suspect in an alley and beating a confession out of them. You need extensive prior investigation until you have most of the facts available but think that someone is still withholding information; you need to torture multiple people, repeatedly, while comparing and verifying all the statements you extracted between each instance. At that point you might as well scrap the torture and still be left with the vast majority of reliable information.
Even then, you’ll still end up torturing a large number of innocents, and you will learn very little in the process you didn’t already know. And you will inevitably end up a vast, overbearing police state where everyone lives in terror.
(an interesting point is that, while the “ticking time bomb” is the scenario most commonly given as justification for torture, it also happens to be the scenario in which torture is least likely to work, because you don’t know if you have the right person, the suspect - especially if guilty - knows they have to resist for a brief time, and you can’t verify any statement until it’s too late)
End copypaste.
So, I admit this is a well-written, convincing argument. It's appreciated! But I still find it contrasts with common sense (and my own lying eyes). I can, say, imagine authorities arresting me and demanding to know my email password. I would not cooperate, and I would expect to be able to get access to a lawyer before long. In reality there's only one way they'd get the password: torturing me. And in that case, they'd get the password immediately. It would be fast and effective. I'm still going to trust the knowledge that torture would work perfectly on me over a sociological essay, no matter how eloquent.
Admittedly passwords make for something like an ideal case for torture in that they can be easily communicated in full and be quickly and unambiguously checked for correctness. I don't know if any other kind of information meets those requirements. Overall, given precedents, I think a blanket ban on judiciary torture is worth a lot more than the marginal improvements in investigation effectiveness, even from a coldly utilitarian perspective, much like a blanket ban on killing patients to harvest their organs is well worth the loss of a small number of additional organs, even if those are perfectly good for use.
Absolutely. And I'm totally being a pedant about a policy I'm in complete agreement with. But this nitpicking is still valuable - if we as a society understand that we're banning torture for very good ideological reasons, then we won't be so tempted to backslide the next time a crisis (like 9/11) arises and people start noticing that (arguably) torture might help us track down more terrorists. Like how some people forget that free speech ideals are important beyond simply making sure that we don't violate the 1st amendment.
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Well yeah, I don't disagree with any of it either so I don't really see what your point is?
Why should they notice? Institutions do immoral and ineffective things literally all the time for centuries on end. And we're talking about the CIA, the kings of spending money on absolute bullshit that just sounds cool to some dudes in a room, and that's not saying nothing given the competition for that title in USG.
The Stargate project ran for more than 20 years. Does this mean I should think there is something to psychic warfare?
But ... if you agree there are scenarios where you'd never get a particular piece of information without torture, then I don't understand how you can claim it's "inherently useless"...? I'm confused what we're even arguing about now.
A fair point! I'm never going to argue with "government is incompetent" being an answer. :) But still, agencies using it is evidence that points in the direction of torture being useful - incompetence is just a (very plausible) explanation for why that evidence isn't conclusive.
I get at this in the other threads: because I think in practice those scenarios are exceedingly rare, and specifically for the US who purports to not be a totalitarian state, essentially nonexistent.
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Would have William Buckley, the CIA officer, give out information about his entire network of agents if he was merely threatened?
What I do know is that given the techniques employed I would have had serious doubts about the information he provided. People injected with narcotics are not reliable sources of information.
And indeed, if what I've read about the Buckley case is accurate, Hezbollah had to work on the man for over a year and chase wrong leads, made up dead ends and suffer a whole lot of inaccurate internal suspicion on the word of a wrecked man.
Frankly I doubt that much of it was actually about intelligence gathering, getting leads was probably just a side effect of making some footage to send to the Americans, get revenge, and entertain al-Azub.
But imagine the sort of stuff you could learn out of a CIA paramilitary officer if you had some heavy leverage and didn't turn him into a bumbling wreck that screamed at random intervals. What a waste.
If you want comparison case between this and less brutal interrogation techniques you can look at Abu Zubaydah who was interrogated by the FBI and the CIA, gave all the actually useful information in the classical interrogations before being subject to torture or through other means than interrogation. If you believe the reports that is.
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Just like any tool there are situations where it can be effective and situations where it isn't. If your goal is getting true information the key is having ways to confirm the information then come back if the information was incorrect. Repeat. Another method is having multiple people with the same information, you then separate and torture them until their stories match.
But you see the contradiction right? Torture is a clumsy tool that's only comparatively useful in situations where nothing else is available, but those conditions are precisely when it is least effective.
Rejali points this out in Torture and Democracy:
In the sort of scenarios you describe, where the intelligence can be checked and consequences applied for inaccuracy, threats to hostages are a superior form of extracting information or behavior since they don't degrade the subject, the interrogator, organizational capability, and aren't subject to as many moral hazards.
Hence why, outside of contrived circumstances, torture is useless as a means of intelligence: it's a bad tool in the absolute, and it gets even worse when the conditions call of it over other methods.
This sounds like a just world fallacy.
I'd really like to see someone admit "sometimes torture works the best, but we still shouldn't do it".
The world has no obligation to be just, but it has no obligation to be maximally unjust either: it may be suspiciously convenient that sacrificing children to Moloch for rain doesn't work, but it also happens to be true.
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It's kinda funny because the whole reason for torture to be immoral in the first place is that it's unnecessary. So you can accuse any argument as to its inefficacy of this without cost. Sometimes the world happens to be just.
I hold that torture is worse than any other method of obtaining intelligence unless you do not care about the stated problems. Or, like I assume most people who engage in it, don't actually care at all about intelligence gathering.
Torture is a tool of psychological warfare, not intelligence.
This is true of all methods of doing all things.
No it's not? Sigint doesn't have any of those specific problems.
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I’ll bite. There are rules, it’s good to have to have rules. Maybe those rules could be broken occasionally, but not in the sort of clandestine, oversight-avoiding scenario that prisons encourage.
Of course, this is a lot easier to say precisely because I have little faith that it’s implemented effectively. Not leaving as much on the table.
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I don't know if I'd be considered an expert or anything, but I've long had a pet theory/argument regarding torture. It seems intuitively strange how so many people seem to have enthusiasm for it despite the enthusiasm in other circles for declaring that it "doesn't work". I think this can be resolved by my statement that torture works really great at what it's actually for - suppressing dissent in an authoritarian regime.
Some may say that it doesn't work very well for actually investigating dissident movements. But working well at that was never a factor. If you grab and torture some poor fellow and he gives you 3 random names out of desperation, and you do nasty things to them too, that's a feature, not a bug. Justice was never the goal, terror is. You've successfully terrorized 4 people, and anyone else who can see what happened to them, out of having anything to do with opposing the regime, whether or not they wanted to in the first place. And you've also made it so the security forces can never defect from the regime, either individually or en masse, as too many people hate their guts.
I guess it's a question of definitions. Torture as punishment and deterrent works, unquestionably, but I wouldn't call it that, rather "corporal punishment" or something like that.
But the debate isn't so much about that (because as such it is trivially against the moral principles the United States stand for) but about it as a means of extracting information. And at that it really sucks.
Though it works more than you might expect (we have credible reports of various historical factions getting information they deemed useful at nontrivial rates) the false positive rate is so high that the information you get is practically unusable and use of torture actually lowers the quality of information you could even get out of someone because pain and disorientation hurt the ability to recall at a neurological level. And the inaccuracy grows the more torture you apply too.
Compound that with the availability of another method that doesn't fuck with the wits of the prisoners in the form of threats to hostages, and torture is objectively a terrible means of intelligence that's only really useful if you don't care about accuracy and just wish to implicate as many people as possible.
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I agree with this. Torture for getting information is a poor tool, because you're never sure if you've squeezed every drop of information out of the guy no matter how much you've done to him (maybe he's holding back that one tiny but vital scrap of information), and then you get to the point where he really is just naming names and agreeing to whatever you say in order to get you to stop.
Torture as "we're the new masters in town, we can and will do whatever the fuck we want to you and there's nothing you can do about it so bow down" is effective, on the other hand. Is Guantanamo Bay actually providing any useful information any more, or is it just about revenge and 'we can do what the fuck we want'?
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