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Notes -
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)
Don't have Discord, so you're getting text here.
13: it depends what "diversity" is code for; I can think of at least three different meanings i.e. "diversity of opinions", "racial diversity per se", and "skimming off the top of ROW's IQ pool". The first is mostly a strength under capitalism because it maximises efficiency at generating alternatives; the second is a weakness because racial animus lowers societal trust; the third is a strength, at least selfishly, for obvious reasons.
28: The adversarial justice system requires that criminal defence lawyers exist. So if this statement is true, you kind of have to accept one of the following propositions:
"This system is fine, but it can't work without bad people" (this raises issues of "if society requires these bad people's badness in order to do good, are they really bad people?")
"The adversarial justice system is bad" (this isn't clearly false - there are benefits and drawbacks - but it's such a big proposition that it really kind of subsumes your original point).
"Criminal defence lawyers should exist but should all suck at their jobs" (a trial that always ends in conviction seems dominated by skipping the trial and proceeding straight to imposing sentence).
29: You can't stably privatise the police force and army; if you try, soon there will be a coup d'état, after which the police force and army will again be connected to government. A government with no monopoly on force is not much of a government.
There are also things like market failures or externalities that are fairest when done coercively (the fire brigade has a classic free-rider problem where if I refuse to pay for the fire brigade, they will still usually prevent fires from reaching my house due to all the people nearby who have paid for it). There are technically ways a labyrinthine system of free contracts can in-practice implement this coercion (in this case, the homeowners of an area all sign a contract that they will pay for the fire brigade and won't sell their homes to anyone who doesn't enter into the same contract), but in many cases it's less paperwork to have one such contract - the social contract - and run it through government.
42: I agree with proposition #16, and that's basically where the "AI is dangerous" thought comes from. If IQ is power, then something with IQ 10,000 (whatever that means) is powerful indeed - and if that something thinks Earth would be a better place without humans (much as, say, humans think Earth would be better off without malarial mosquitoes), the default outcome is that we go the way of the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger when men showed up. This is really the core point; most of the argumentation in practice centres on a bunch of... well, the nasty word would be "cope", that attempts to carve out some sort of reason this general argument shouldn't apply.
45: I live in Australia. Australia hasn't polarised nearly as badly as the USA has; it's commonly conjectured that this is because we have compulsory voting and IRV, which forces our two largest parties toward each other via the Median Voter Theorem (you can only win in the centre, because extremists on your side are already forced to vote for you) and thus doesn't leave a lot to get polarised about. I think you're probably right about the marginal effect of slightly increased vs. decreased turnout from what the USA currently has, but this local dependence reverses when you get very far from that.
52: With the obvious exception of "doing MMA to people without their consent or some genuine cause", sure.
61: On the margin you certainly have a case, but the optimal amount of such regulation is importantly nonzero. With zero, you get bosses imposing hazards but not telling workers/customers about them, which generally means you don't get to have nice things.
The existence of competent, good-faith
criminalsuspect defense lawyers forces the system to only bring to trial those suspects they can reasonably expect to convict. Those lawyers are there to protect the citizenry from overzealous policing, badly motivated judges, win-hungry prosecutors and easily swayed juries.Calling them criminal defence lawyers is accurate; they practice criminal law (the law that deals with crimes) as defence attorneys.
I am also aware of why they exist; like I said, there are benefits to the adversarial system. With that said, inquisitorial systems don't always result in a police state.
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The US also has the median voter theorem applying. But the primary process ends up pushing more extreme candidates to the fore, and then you try to paint the other side as extreme to persuade the median voter to go for you.
With voluntary plurality voting, policies that appeal to the base may increase turnout or increase the percentage that vote for you instead of wasting it on a third party; this breaks the MVT.
IRV + compulsory negates that; those far from the centre are forced to preference you as long as you're one micron better than the other guy.
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