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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   4100 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Watching boyfriend replay Grand Theft Auto IV, and it’s kind of crazy how GOOD the dialogue is. Not highbrow, of course, but it’s funny, it’s snappy, even minor characters have complex motivations, hint at backstories. This is from 2008, and yet I can think of only a handful of games with better dialogue. Interestingly I’m replaying Cyberpunk 2077 slowly at the same time, which is generally considered a game with Good Writing™️, and Rockstar is still leagues ahead (even in GTA, which has worse writing than RDR on the whole). The motion capture is a joy, all these exaggerated theater movements, cinematography that the developers have actually thought about etc. I replayed Vice City a few years ago (on iPad lol) and was similarly surprised that, despite the blocky fingerless hands and PS2 graphics, the motion capture mean cutscene animation was better than a lot of modern games released in the last few years.

Niko is a great character, although I wish they’d hired a Serbian actor, not because his actor is bad but because for ‘realism’s’ sake I think more dialogue should have been in Serbian especially between Niko and Roman. It’s also wild that the game implies he participated (or was at least present, which as Serb I guess suggests he likely participated) in the Srebrenica massacre. I love the weirdness and wackiness of the cast. Despite popular criticism (even at the time), many of the women characters have much more developed backstories and motivations than the women do in pretty much any other Rockstar game, including GTA5 and the Red Dead games (other than maybe Abigail in RDR2).

It's a bit funny to me that the general decrease in quality of writing in video games has somehow happened at the same time as a greatly increased focus on narrative and dialogue.

It will be interesting to see how GTAVI will do without Houser and in a much more high-strung social environment.

The protagonist in GTA6 is a minority woman named Lucia.

I strongly suspect they're going to be far more tame, at least in areas relevant to the current Culture War. Towards the middle of V's life cycle, they removed dialogue because of excessive use of people calling others niggers, even if the users were black. I don't think this was in response to any actual backlash, they just felt like getting with the times.

Didn't the black VAs encourage using the word? I remember when some game journo outlet went after Rockstar with some headline like "Rockstar Needs To Take Responsibility For Its Depiction of Black People", because the casual use of 'nigger', referring to women as 'bitches', and all other sorts of vulgarity were demeaning stereotypes.

Except it turned out IIRC that the VAs thought Rockstar's original script and dialogue weren't authentic enough. It didn't feel 'real', and the actors were given discretion in their performances to punch it up, so to speak. And it worked because yes, people in that social rung in those areas with those cultures absolutely do talk that way, even if it makes progressives' skin crawl. Of course, that attempted rebuttal wasn't recognized in the slightest because "We literally gave the black actors the freedom to perform these roles as they saw fit, and they did so enthusiastically" was too inconvenient to even acknowledge.

Were they using the hard R, or not?

yes, people in that social rung in those areas with those cultures absolutely do talk that way

Agreed. Class brings...refinement. That's a very different thing from moral virtue; for a fairly harsh example, consider the polite and refined antebellum Southern gentleman.

Pretty damn ironic that black actors ostensibly performing an aspect of low-class black culture wind up getting roasted. It'd be a little bit like redneck actors portraying rednecks getting roasted for being "too hillbilly".

As indicated in the last part of my post, I'm pretty sure the actors and rappers doing the voice work didn't get roasted - just Rockstar. Whatever defense those assorted performance artists offered to R* might as well have not existed, precisely because acknowledging them would have completely blown up the "horrid white company forcing workers to depict minstrel shows" narrative journalists were going for. So just pretend you didn't see it. Like, Dan Houser shouldn't have given them permission or something, so it's still his fault.

See also RPS accusing CP2077 of being racist, the black creator publicly challenging them on that, and the confused, jumbled responses it elicited. Clear pushback that can't be easily dismissed with a strawman attack are greeted with a curious and embarrassing silence, then immediately forgotten, and the work continues.

That's funny you should bring this up. I just happened to randomly watch this last week: https://youtube.com/watch?v=z4GYo1N5knA

[Epistemic status - totally conjecturing] Has anyone else noticed that women these days refers to their husbands as their "best friends"? I hear it in every wedding vow I've heard from the millennial generation. Was this the case before our generation? Is this the case in more conservative places? I guess I always felt like this is emblematic of marriage becoming less religious and less sacred (i.e. it's just a fun thing I'm doing with my best friend as opposed to a sacred vow I undertake in the eyes of God). Also women are married to the state to such a degree that they don't need men anymore, so marriage has just been relegated to "just for funsies!"

Alternatively, maybe everyone's always referred to their SO as their best friend throughout history, and I'm just wildly projecting.

It's definitely something I've noticed. I think there are three reasons. Firstly, we put more weight on our spouses as our main/only social outlet. People had more friends in the past, so marriage was able to fill a different niche.

Plus, since cohabitation and marriage have become uncoupled, getting married is more of a symbolic choice. Therefore it's more necessary to emphasise how suited the couple are too each other.

Finally, in the past, most couples didn't write their own vows, they just used the traditional church vows. And the lord doesn't care about you 'marrying your best friend'.

Haven't been to any weddings for a while now, but my own parents both used this term when referring to one another in separate books I had them write in where they chronicled their lives. Dad died age 90 and he outlived her a few years. I don't think this is evidence against a possible cultural "trend" of making such references, but it's at least suggestive that making such a statement isn't unheard of. They married in 1966.

I have seen a huge uptick in this, but not just from women.

Time will tell if this is a dumb millennial thing, but I do see the value in tying yourself to someone you genuinely enjoy hanging out with. I feel like a lot of boomer marriages seem profoundly un-fun, with no shared hobbies or sense of humor.

People say men and women can't be friends. I disagree with that personally. I think it's important for a partner.

Then again on the downside it can be used as an excuse to just hang out with your significant other and nobody else indefinitely.

People say men and women can't be friends.

I believe the actual claim is that men and women can’t be just friends. So, it is indeed possible for a man and a woman to develop a close friendship, but only if they’re attracted to each other, at which point that friendship will either escalate to a relationship, or fall apart when one party (usually the woman) romantically rejects the other party.

I disagree with even that. I wouldn't be happy only talking to men-as-friends in my life. I still try to curate and maintain relationships with women, most of which have no attraction component either direction (or low enough level to be totally unremarkable)

So, it is indeed possible for a man and a woman to develop a close friendship, but only if they’re attracted to each other...

We're clearly all operating off of different assumptions, because I would have said that maintaining male-female relationships is much easier when the guy isn't attracted to the woman.

Yes, and I don't really like it.

I'm a nerdy and sporty guy who has stereotypically male interests and hobbies. There aren't enough women with the same inclinations for all men like me to marry their best friend.

I gave up on finding a woman like that and "settled" for someone who is very feminine. We talk freely with each other, sometimes for hours, but she's not my best friend. The camaraderie I have with close guy friends is different. For my liking, she and I spend probably too much of our free time together. Partially that's because we moved to a new country and are having trouble making new friends, but also it's because she has largely absorbed the idea of marrying your best friend, and wants to do more activities together.

We don't have children yet, so I want to spend more of my weekends and spare time in the mountains with other men (no homo), and less in a crowded cafe. Not exclusively of course; sometimes it's nice to be in the city with her, and sometimes she'll come into the mountains with me, but it's not the same.

When we were still dating, she once said "I don't care if you spend the whole day outside without me; I just want you back here sleeping beside me at the end of the day". I'm not sure that attitude has persisted.

I don't think being the best friend is necessary, and it's probably the same "best" as telling your partner they are the most beautiful person in the world, but I think being a good friend is necessary, especially now when marriage is a much more egalitarian relationship even when the husband is the sole breadwinner.

I've explicitly told my wife that we are not friends. If we were in the same social circle, we probably wouldn't be very close since our interests only overlap a little. We're attracted to each other physically and romantically, and also through the camaraderie developed from building a family together.

I don't like the casualness that the word "friend" implies. I don't think husbands and wives should be as casual with each other as male friends are. I've been in relationships like that and it definitely cheapened and degraded them.

I've noticed what I think is the strongest source of Russell conjugations in my life: road rage, specifically with regard to cutting off people. It's amazing how strongly I feel it, even after I've noted the hypocrisy in myself. It's just the first and most basic instinct I feel in any of these situations. And I've even noticed a gendered component of how I think, informed by the political climate.

I merge into the lane, because I need to get into that lane, but they're stubbornly not letting me in.
He cuts me off, because he's a selfish dick who thinks he's a better driver than me and thinks I suck as a driver.
She cuts me off because she thinks that I'm a patriarchal male who thinks he's entitled to the road, which ultimately leads to her acting like an entitled bitch.

I struggle to think of what the Russell conjugations could even be for things like not using the turn signal or driving slowly in the passing lane on a two-lane highway for miles. I experience virtually no road rage at all even when another driver does something exceedingly dangerous, because I can usually imagine an innocent explanation and I've made those mistakes myself on occasion. But inconsiderate actions which are not plausibly the result of some mistake or lapse of attention make my blood boil and, if my wife's not in the car, profanity fly.

Use your fucking turn signal.

Use your fucking turn signal.

Driving is one of the activities that erodes my faith in humanity. People just don't care, and there is no direct consequences to their behaviour, so they will be lazy. Changing lanes without indicating (even in a multi-lane round about), tailgating, petty refusal to let people merge in front of them etc.

I'm reminded of that old joke about 50% of the population being below average intelligence. Frankly I'm amazed at how many traffic accidents don't happen.

I use it on a need-to-know basis -- many people seem to think 'changing into the lane in front of me' == 'cutting me off' and will accelerate to prevent that; those people don't need to know.

The problem is that you may not be a perfect judge of when someone needs to know your intention to turn. What if someone sees that your turn signal is off and thus assumes you intend to stay in your lane, so they think it's fine if they accelerate? Now you've just increased the risk of a collision if you happen to try to merge into his lane coincidentally simultaneously to his acceleration, as well as increasing the likelihood that both of you think the other guy is an asshole, doing your small part to further enshittify the driving culture wherever you live.

And lane changing wasn't even what I was thinking of when I mentioned the turn signal. I had in mind turns at intersections and going into and out of parking lots, driveways, etc.

hat if someone sees that your turn signal is off and thus assumes you intend to stay in your lane, so they think it's fine if they accelerate?

They will be too late, because I've already accelerated and pulled in front of them. I don't, like do this randomly without looking -- drive long enough in this kind of traffic and you know exactly what that guy is up to.

I had in mind turns at intersections and going into and out of parking lots, driveways, etc.

If I'm turning right or left, traffic at upcoming intersections do need to know -- also roundabouts, which a lot of people miss. (annoyingly)

Traffic behind me may or may not need to know; left turns most likely, but unless you are pretty close behind me it's probably none of your business if I'm turning right.

No man -- it's easily testable. When I put the blinker on at freeway speeds, I watch the person speed up to close the gap. Obviously not everyone, but let's say solid 30-40% around here.

perhaps you really are not achieving enough distance in front of them before changing lanes?

How much distance would you think is needed though?

There's a non-zero percentage that will accelerate when I pull into the oncoming lane to pass on a two lane road -- a fast car is helpful here.

I try to fight this by reverse-Russelling everyone who behaves like a dick. You know how the fundamental attribution error works? "I am having a bad day, and he's just a dick"? Well, when someone's being an inconsiderate dick, I tell myself they are having a bad day.

I do that, too, but I guess I only do that when they're really acting like a dick, like zipping between lanes on the highway, narrowly cutting people off, going 100mph. I tell myself maybe his wife is having a baby, and he needs to get to the hospital.

On the topic of road rage, I'm a prolific road rager myself. Russel conjugations included.

However, I did fix the problem with one simple trick. Just.. drive like an "asshole" and don't think too much about it.

Game theoretically it makes sense. There's no way for you to be punished for cutting someone off or just merging in at the last second, especially in a large enough city/town where your reputation can't be at stake. All the rewards with none of the punishments.

Really, I can't convince myself any good reason to not "drive like an asshole".

It's hard to get that mad when you leave the house with the express intent of being a menace. You are the danger, take pride in the fact.

Is this Molochian? Yes. But the way to defeat Moloch is to devise a system where he has less influence not hopelessly holding onto the old system kicking and screaming and begging everyone to just not give into him.

This is why people don’t like game theory and people who use it to justify asshole behavior. You can apply your fancy math stuff all you like, I’ll still think you’re a dick.

And I'll still think you're superstitious and ultimately rely on utilitarian and game theoretic principles anyways when really prodded about it, but is not willing to give up the cake of having your moral high ground.

Dude moral high ground cake tastes better than you can even imagine. Have you tried it?

lol, I'm stealing this

Agree with dag, this is why we need priests, to tell people “just be nice, for god’s sake” without having to explain the game theoric calculations. Do you litter too? This is psychological littering.

Really, I can't convince myself any good reason to not "drive like an asshole."

You'll get there if you keep thinking. Apart from the danger to other people's lives (and also your own life and the lives of your passengers when your unstoppable force meets its immovable object), the most compelling reason to not be an asshole (on the road at high speeds in a 2 ton metallic box, in line at Lowe's, at the table at Red Lobster, or, yes, online): is that it's contagious. Your zooming in front of a frazzled mother shakes her up, she gets so rattled she snaps at her daughter, who is then a little bitch to her brother, who then storms out and throws a rock at a window. It's a cycle of destruction and human misery that is a microcosm of hell on earth. Sure, you get wherever faster and mildly more smug, but you've fucked over your fellow men and women to do so. If explaining why that is not ideal is necessary, it is probably also pointless.

That said, I understand you may have been going for hyperbole.

Here's the thing.

What you said is just about the worst-case scenario of driving like an asshole. And on net that is still probably still morally less worse than.. Using your phone while out on a dinner with friends. The cost is far too diffuse.

Although I am a big fan of thinking about and being mindful of nth order effects, nth order morality not so much. You can just about create a case for not doing anything ever because somewhere down the chain of events, someone gets harmed a non 0 amount.

And driving "like and asshole" isn't much more risky than not driving like an asshole. Certainly orders of magnitude less than um... texting and driving. Speed kills, not cutting in line at 20 mph.

What you said is just about the worst-case scenario of driving like an asshole.

No, it's not, not even close. The worst-case scenarios are low-probability events like cutting off the wrong guy and getting shot in the face or overestimating your own competence, killing someone, and being charged with negligent homicide.

The slope being slippery or not has little to do with how one individual actor should act at a given point in time.

A lot of people believe in useful fictions that are good for the group if everyone believes in them. However, I am saying that you should defect because modern society is such that the costs will virtually never catch up to you.

Hmm. Do you get pissed off when someone cuts you off (and succeeds...Presumably with your view you're not going gently into that good shoulder)?

Mind you if we're talking about reasonably aggressive driving we may be of the same mind--too cautious drivers are also a hazard, which is one reason I enjoy driving the Osaka Loop (especially at night, like being in a sci fi film) and my wife hates it. But that's minus the assholery and maliciousness that "driving like an asshole" suggests to me. Maybe I need examples.

What you said is just about the worst-case scenario of driving like an asshole

I see you've never driven on I-880.

I beleive deeply to my heart in road karma. You are buildign up bad road karma where you shell forever be trapped in the wheel of road samsara (the interstate) or even be road naraka (a roundabout where you are stuck on the inside lane and nobody lets you out for all of eternity)

where as I am VIRTUOUS and GOOD and will reach road nirvana (a working public transit system that takes me to the woods somehow shut up fuck you FUCK)

This is the true and I refuse to think about it.

Really, I can't convince myself any good reason to not "drive like an asshole".

You might get into an accident. The more you demand others react quickly to avoid you, the more likely it is that someone will fail to do so.

Really, I can't convince myself any good reason to not "drive like an asshole".

It's dangerous and I'll hate myself. Those are good reasons. Virtue ethics once again trumps utilitarianism when it comes to actual life satisfaction.

Interesting question: how many people actually live in Gaza Strip?

I mean yes, I know how to use Wikipedia. Or Google. Or CNN or whatever. But all these numbers ultimately rely on either UN or Gaza government (read: Hamas) numbers. UN obviously has budgets relying on the number of "refugees" etc. so it is interested in inflating and overcounting the numbers. Hamas are serial fabulists and also are interested in inflating the numbers since they rely heavily on outside financing, and more people means more financing - moreover, while help for real people must be at least partially shared, since those need to eat, 100% of "help" for fake people goes directly into Hamas coffers. Israel has had opposite motivations, so the numbers between UN and Israel likely could be closer to correct, but since 2005 Israel does not have any capacity to count populations in Gaza. Last estimate I heard was around 700-800k (back then, not now). Now, due to the continuing genocide and ethnic cleansing, it's claimed to be almost triple that. Are there any other sources or estimates that are not hopelessly contaminated about how many people are actually living in Gaza Strip?

Gaza is city with some gardens and some fishing on the coast, but it needs to import overwhelming majority of its food to eat every day.

You need to dig up statistics of food imports into Gaza, if there are any on the open internet. Since Israel controls everything that comes in and out (excepting limited smuggling though tunnels) they should have roughly accurate picture.

since 2005 Israel does not have any capacity to count populations in Gaza.

It remains wild to me how Israel has built strong belief in their intelligence capacity while not actually seeming to know much of anything about the place that you think they'd be pretty invested in knowing things about. Mossad seems much better at fucking with governments thousands of miles away than figuring out what's going on with the enemy next door.

while not actually seeming to know much of anything about the place

I think you are seeing it in too black and white. Israel knows a lot about the place. But counting million-sized populations which have a hostile government with a little interest in the welfare of the citizens, and people living in semi-legal arrangements best described as "middle ages with iphones" does not really make the task easy. It's not an on-off switch - either you know all, or you know nothing. It's you may know a lot, but there's even more of it that you don't know. If anything, the amount of knowledge served Israel intelligence very badly - they knew so much they severely overestimated just how much they know, and thought they know exactly how the enemy thinks. That led to a chain of decisions - in the hindsight proven to be spectacularly bad - that enabled the current catastrophe. It wasn't the problem of knowing nothing, it was a problem of becoming arrogant and complacent.

I was under the impression that Mossad didn't deal with Gaza and that that falls under the jurisdiction of Shin Bet or some other organisation.

Off-the-grid preppers have got nothing on desperate third-worlders living ten to a hovel. At least foreign governments try to make things legible for you.

I just saw this video by Tom Scott on linguistic determinism, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

"Does the language you speak change how you think?" This is the title of the video. And my answer is: Yes! Of course! Obviously! It's a concept I was aware of before, but always took it as a given. I didn't even think that it's a controversial position. But Tom calls it 'not serious' and "easily disprovable."

Usually I will find some snarky blog post or a racist Substack defending a widely rejected theory, but I have not been able to find anything using my usual search terms, eg. "In defense of..." etc.

What are the best essays, papers, and books in defense of linguistic determinism?

I'm going to do the opposite and argue against the SWH, since I consider it to be false in terms of sweeping conclusions, and at most true in largely inconsequential ways.

Why? Well, for starters, I speak two very different languages fluently and am conversational in a third, I'd hope that engenders some insight, even if I'm not a linguist.

My English vocabulary probably outweighs my Bengali one by at least one OOM, so occasionally I find myself trying to translate from one to the other, and till date, I haven't found a single word that is utterly untranslatable, in the sense that even if there's no single word for it, you can't get the meaning across through analogy or chaining concepts together.

For example, neither Bengali nor Hindi (and many other related languages) has a (common) word for yesterday or tomorrow like English does. There might be one, I'm no linguist, but at least it doesn't come up in normal speech. Instead we use the same word "kal" for it, and grasp from context whether it's upcoming or referring to yesterday. Does this mean Indians as a whole are broadly incapable of understanding the distinction between yesterday and tomorrow? Of course not, it's contextual as I just said.

I expect that for any language with major adoption, it's almost always possible to translate between them and there are almost no thoughts or concepts that a speaker of one can hold that the other can't.*

*Here come caveats. Notice I said major, and not some dying tongue spoken by some 95 yo last of the Mohicans ass mf or an uncontacted Amazonian tribe. Speakers of such a tongue might suffer from outright paucity or poverty of concepts, to the extent that for an adult speaker, it might be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to translate from a more full-featured language. Or perhaps you want to consider someone who is non-lingual or wasn't successfully socialized at all like a feral child. But my argument is that for most languages and for almost all purposes, you can build up a common framework and use it.

I recall one example of the SWH being some flavor of Australian aborigine that didn't use left or right, instead always orienting themselves according to the cardinal directions of the compass, including a very accurate ability to keep track of that while indoors or otherwise unable to just track the sun or stars in the sky. Big deal, that isn't so much as an utter inability on the part of the rest of us as much as a skill we hardly have reason to develop, even if it comes more naturally to some. Imagine taking a tribe of the former, blindfolding and spinning them around in circles till they're utterly disoriented, and then letting them loose in an enclosed structure. I expect that they'd end up arbitrarily choosing a direction as "north" and orienting around that, and make the environment rapidly update fast enough, and they'd likely develop self-referential notions of left and right.

Overall, I don't think the hypothesis is particularly impactful, especially when people use it to explain sweeping cultural claims. At most, the weak form of the SWH is true, and that only says that cognition can be guided by language, not necessarily limited or restricted by it.

For example, neither Bengali nor Hindi (and many other related languages) has a (common) word for yesterday or tomorrow like English does. There might be one, I'm no linguist, but at least it doesn't come up in normal speech. Instead we use the same word "kal" for it, and grasp from context whether it's upcoming or referring to yesterday. Does this mean Indians as a whole are broadly incapable of understanding the distinction between yesterday and tomorrow? Of course not, it's contextual as I just said.

The existence of homophones- best argument against the Sapir-whorf hypothesis.

The trivial version's pretty easy to steelman: whether people are raised with a language that distinguishes between two colours are able to identify them better/faster, classically with blue/green. This is still controversial, and there's a whole debate in linguistics about whether every language 'really' has the names for the same colours or not. But you can sit people down in front of a testing center and check this pretty quickly. The effect size isn't huge and I'm pretty skeptical about the evidence just because I'm skeptical of every study at this point, but it's not obviously false under its own premises. (Caveat: you'll have to specifically look for cross-cultural studies; there's a lot of attempts to check by brain hemisphere that are testing something more specific and kinda confused.)

While there's less academic efforts on the process, if you work with artists for long at all, you'll often find that they have a staggering array of terms for everything from color to layout to elemental design (cw: some artist nudes in the Greek sense) that isn't present among casual observers, and as you learn it you'll often find yourself noticing parts to art that you wouldn't have seen otherwise or before.

But that's not very interesting. Conversely, neither is Scott's version -- can we separate a language being changed by its culture from a culture being changed by its language -- particularly interesting to Sapir or Whorf. To some extent the strongest version, of whether removing words from common use a la The Giver would change minds is a fun question, but not a practical one. Most people are interested more in ... basically wordcelism, and whether Word Games can do anything.

Which is a lot harder to test.

Well, that's not entirely true. It's really easy to sit down a bunch of native speakers of a few different languages, especially in the MTurk days. And there's a ton of efforts that have done that. But that's also a space where the replication crisis has hit hardest.

whether people are raised with a language that distinguishes between two colours are able to identify them better/faster, classically with blue/green

Yeah, it's the ultraweak sapir-whorf hypothesis (language influences some things a little bit), you have more practice distinguishing between colors with words for them so you do it faster. But you could, with practice, distinguish colors with words you currently know or non-verbal color classes just as well (and presumably artists or designers would). It doesn't support what people imagine sapir-whorf means, like, there are categories built into your mind that language creates that deeply restrict or guide the way you think. Which is mostly false imo, you can perfectly well learn things you don't have words for, the restriction is more knowledge and experience generally, which is significantly less faux-profound.

I always thought hard S-W has been long recognized as bunk, while soft S-W is kinda wishy-washy area depending on definitions of "influencing" and "changing". Sure, framing is a thing. Pretty big thing actually, even if you discount non-reproducible studies. But it's not an ironclad barrier, it's just a hue in the big palette of things.

A while ago I read this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18579574-the-language-hoax which is very anti-SW. I liked it. I'm not sure I am qualified to judge whether the arguments expressed there are the scientific truth (actually I am pretty sure I am not) but it's surely was illuminating for me.

What is the working definition of hard vs. soft here? My sense was that the popular rejection of S-W was almost entirely motivated by aesthetics rather than hard data, and "linguists think" is a weak argument because linguists are (based on my impression from taking some graduate courses in their department during grad school) not very good at entangling their reasoning with reality. As a matter of fact, with the right framing adjacent academic communities are still quite open to S-W.

My sense was that the popular rejection of S-W was almost entirely motivated by aesthetics rather than hard data

The popular rejection is based on the strong version being basically voodoo that defies laws of physics, and is at times backed by outright fraud. There are "reputable sources" out there claiming language can cause you to not be able to perceive the color blue (a claim made about ancient Greeks), or that you can pick a shade of green from a lineup, that is off by 2 bits on the RGB scale from the others, if your language has more names for the color green.

I think i buy SW in conceptual spaces. There are lots of abstract topics that are pretty difficult if not impossible to discuss without the proper vocabulary. Could you really explain something complex like artificial intelligence to someone from the year 1500 that doesn’t have the language necessary to understand computers, algorithms, or machine learning?

Most languages lacked the vocabulary for that up until a few decades ago, but they adapted rather quickly. It seems obvious to me that if you'd take people from medieval times and confront them with this knowledge, they'd also struggle for a while, but develop the necessary vocabulary and then not really do worse (all else being equal, so not accounting for developmental stunting due to malnutrition etc.).

At that point it would no longer be a medieval language. This would be the case of material conditions creating a need for abstract language, to which the medivial man would in turn adapt by changing his language.

Is it a question of language, or is it a question of them never seeing any of f those things before? If they had a language with those words, would they have a clue what they mean?

I can buy that language affects how you see things, but not what you see.

Hard is that your linguistics fully determines your thought processes, and if in your language "tomorrow" and "yesterday" are the same word, you view time in a fundamentally different way than somebody who grew up with different words. The best book exploring hard S-W that I read is "Babel-17" by Delany. Softer versions are that linguistics may not be the ultimate determinant, but has certain influence - obviously, the strength of influence determines the "softness" of a particular position.

As I said, framing is real (or at least appears so) and confirmed by reproducible studies, and widely used in marketing industry, for example. So that part I think still alive. But something like "people that have same word for wavelengths X and Y actually perceive them differently than those that have different words" is already rather suspect, and even harder claims that go deeper into thought patterns become even more unlikely.

and if in your language "tomorrow" and "yesterday" are the same word, you view time in a fundamentally different way than somebody who grew up with different words

In case you didn't see my own comment, I come from a native language family where this is the case, and we certainly don't think that way.

I did, and that's why I used this example - because there are multiple examples like this which, especially when combined from different languages, kind of make "strong S-W" seem utterly ridiculous.

The word "tomorrow" does not begin at the letter t an does not end at the w. Conceiving it in this arbitrary manner is a strawman.

Specific words give us only a glimpse of what frameworks, processes, non-verbal categories, etc. might exist in a language.

But those words have to be situated in the context of the language as a whole. As you say, your language does distinguish between yesterday and tomorrow, but "words" for those are stretched over the lenght of a sentence and are defined contextually, as opposed to being visibly delineated on a page by a cluster of letters flanked by spaces, and generally existing as definite categories not signified by proper words (which would still be only contextual).

This is why we have to consider the entire linguistic landscape and structure when discussing the depth and limits of a language. Illiterate Uzbeks, lacking abstract language, could not thus correctly employ abstract categorization in a similarity exercise with pictures of a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet. This kind of thought is unexpressible in their language.

I remember reading from a book a while back on how Japanese businessmen were able to conduct business more easily in English than Japanese due to the cultural norms in the Japanese language that made it difficult to disagree and argue which can be a key part of negotiation. Unfortunately I'm unable to recall exactly which book it was. I'll update this post if I can recall where exactly I read this, I will point it the book was probably not related to linguistic determinism itself but probably from a business book.

I did try looking online for examples but most articles talked more about the benefits of having English from a globalization perspective rather than from a language perspective. I did find this article from the CEO of Rakuten, who in 2010 decided to make English the official and required language for as its business language.

There is another benefit to using English in business: The language has few power markers. Its use can therefore help to break down the hierarchical, bureaucratic barriers that are entrenched in Japanese society and reflected in Japanese conversation, which could boost efficiency.

From the article, Mikatani points out how the hierarchical nature of the Japanese language is more easily avoided when speaking in English. I can imagine a scenario where a lower rank employee is unable to point out an issue in Japanese due to having to phrase everything politely, but is able to communicate the issue directly in English (possibly due to that employee focusing his mental energy in trying to speak in English and thus not focusing on politeness).

However, as a non-Japanese speaker who is not familiar with Japanese business culture and norms, it's hard for me to identify how much of this is due to the language itself versus the culture of Japan itself.

Are there any Japanese speakers or people who have worked in Japanese businesses that can qualify or deny the veracity of this claim?

I did find one thesis that discusses the use of English in Japanese corporations.

There is a tight connection between language and culture, and it is argued that they both play a major role in cross-cultural negotiation (Salacuse 1999). Hall (1976:57) goes even further with the connection between language and culture presenting the idea that culture is communication. Even if people are able to communicate in a foreign language, they tend to interpret meanings depending on their own culture and language (Peltokorpi 2007).

As Japan is considered a collectivistic culture, the welfare and harmony of a group is considered more meaningful than individuals’ opinions (Kowner 2002). In Japan, groups aim for long-term and consistent solutions, and therefore personal motivation is not so important (idib.). Listening and being able to adjust to others’ opinions is traditionally valued, and expressing one’s own opinion is not so much encouraged (Yoshida et al. 2013). Even if Japanese people have important information, it is not necessary to express it verbally (Hall 1981:67). Japanese people do not necessarily have to express their personal opinions in business situations, whereas western managers might be expecting Japanese people to tell their opinions (Yoshida et al. 2013). This often causes stress for Japanese people when communicating with western people (idib.). Furthermore, expressing unpleasant issues verbally is avoided by using indirect ways of communication (Eto 2006:91, Hara 2001).

Like many Asians, Japanese people pay a lot of attention to status differences (Peltokorpi 2007, Gudygunst 2013:62). According to Kowner (2002) this also affects business situations in which English is used. Japanese grammar and the way of speaking are different depending on people’s status (Peltokorpi 2007). In Japanese language, there are several levels of politeness. Different forms are used depending on the situation and relationships between people. According to Kowner (2002), Japanese people sometimes feel that their status is violated when speaking with foreigners, since foreigners’ communication style is often more direct and similar to high-status Japanese communication even though foreigners were on same level or lower in status.

It's hard to determine how much of this is due to the culture versus language itself, which the thesis points out:

It is argued that as language is part of culture, it is hard to distinguish the effects of language from the effects of cultural factors (Welch et al. 2005). Both language and culture play major roles in cross-cultural negotiation (Salacuse 1999). However, to understand the role of language, Welch et al. (2005) argue that it is necessary to study language as its own factor.

I tried to read further into the thesis to find more relevant examples, since the primary focus on this thesis is not the effect of the language itself.

The interviewee says that Japanese culture has an influence on the communication style also when speaking English. As Japan is a high-context culture, not everything is spoken. Moreover, it is hard for Japanese people to say ‘no’. The interviewee tells that foreigners face difficulties because they do not understand when Japanese people are saying ‘no’ indirectly. As an example, a phrase ‘I will think about it’, meaning ‘Good idea, but impossible’ is mentioned. Even if the interviewee understands the words, the meaning might be hard to understand.

Again, this seems to point more towards the culture having an impact rather than the language itself. I'm pretty sure it's possible to say "no" directly in Japanese, but seems to be a cultural limitation as opposed to a languistic one.

The sources/studies referenced in the thesis might be worth checking out.

Perhaps a better question is can culture be completely separated from language, and I wonder if Tom's point would have changed if he considered the dominant culture of the language or considered a language like Japanese.

Quoth Betteridge…

Anyway, this article links to some defenses from as late as 2002. I’m left with the impression that it’s a hit piece, but I can’t be sure that it’s targeting the universalists.

It looks as if, by the time one starts publishing serious academic work on relativism, one must have crawled quite far up one’s own ass. If true, this could have dire consequences for the availability of actual experiments.

Thanks!

Going through my old bookmarks and posts on various forums, I noticed that the term "linguistic determinism" is rarely used, though it is still sometimes implied or at the very least can be shoe-horned in. Linguistic relativism is easily defensible. Anyone who disagrees is dumb and wrong. For example, I found this post on Language Log, which I often reference. It's about Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria in 1930s Uzbekistan and Kirghizia and their relevance to our current discussion about language, IQ, and cognitive differences.

This is what Luria writes in the first chapter of Cognitive Development:

The way in which the historically established forms of human mental life correlate with reality has come to depend more and more on complex social practices. The tools that human beings in society use to manipulate that environment, as well as the products of previous generations which help shape the mind of the growing child, also affect these mental forms. In his development, the child's first social relations and his first exposure to a linguistic system (of special significance) determine the forms of his mental activity. All these environmental factors are decisive for the sociohistorical development of consciousness. New motives for action appear under extremely complex patterns of social practice. Thus are created new problems, new modes of behavior, new methods of taking in information, and new systems of reflecting reality.

Here, in line with the Soviet school of psychology, emphasis is put on the importance of material and historical-cultural environmental conditions in shaping language and conscious existence.

It has become a basic principle of materialistic psychology that mental processes depend on active life forms in an appropriate environment. Such a psychology also assumes that human action changes the environment so that human mental life is a product of continually new activities manifest in social practice

In 1930s Luria traveled to Uzbekistan and Kirghizia. There he found that "illiterate (oral) subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them the names of objects, never abstractly as circles, squares, etc. A circle would be called a plate, sieve, bucket, watch, or moon; a square would be called a mirror, door, house, apricot, drying-board." They didn't perceive these figures as abstract shapes but rather as representations of tangible things they knew. While, on the other hand "teachers' school students... identified geometrical figures by categorical geometric names: circles, squares, triangles, and so on."

This is obvious. They didn't yet find a need for abstract geometrical categories and definitions, and it still could be said that the illiterate Uzbeks understood and were able to express the concept of roundness, but unlike us, they understood and expressed it concretely.

However, the following finding is much more interesting. If linguistic determinism is false, then a person's illiteracy should not affect their ability to categorize things into groups based on set criteria. But, it seems like thought that requires abstract categorization is unexpressible in the illiterate and oral language of the studied subjects:

Subjects were presented with drawings of four objects, three belonging to one category and the fourth to another, and were asked to group together those that were similar or could be placed in one group or designated by one word. One series consisted of drawings of the objects hammer, saw, log, hatchet. Illiterate subjects consistently thought of the group not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations — 'situational thinking' — without adverting at all to the classification 'tool' as applying to all but the log. If you are a workman with tools and see a log, you think of applying the tool to it, not of keeping the tool away from what it was made for — in some weird intellectual game. A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: 'They're all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces, If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet. It doesn't do as a god a job as a saw'

So, in a culture and language that is stagnant due to a lack of material pressure to develop abstract language, there can not possibly be a way to "correctly" categorize a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet. It's a thought that is unexpressible under those conditions. While those peoples' potential can be assumed to be the same as ours, they are limited by their language.

Is this linguistic determinism? Yes? It satisfies the cop-out definition widely given online: "Linguistic determinism is the theory that a language determines the way you think of the world." But for linguistic determinism to be controversial and more than something everyone should take as a given, I could have expected it to claim that language determines not only "the way you think of the world" but also the world itself, its material conditions. But as it stands now, it's boring. Back to the dialectic we go.

And in general, is this not the point of Flynn? That it is the twentieth century’s cognitive revolution, "in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories," that made the IQs go up? That this doesn't strictly measure smartness, but reflects the increasing cognitive demand of the times? And, finally, that the undemanding life of 1930's illiterate Uzbeks didn't yet have a place for abstract similarities, used as measures of literacy and "intelligence," and that their thought was determined by this limitation?

Tom Scott is a cuck.

Also I did manage to find in my bookmarks a racist blog post, but I still have yet to read it.

Just Look At the Germans. The way these minds are shackled by man-made categories was really obvious to me, as a foreigner from Spain:

  • In a charity I was volunteering, they made emphasis in having processes, structures, sub-groups responsible for categories of work. Sadly, despite this, not much got done.
  • Their morality is base on some concept of what is MORALLY CORRECT that doesn't leave much place for uncertainty. Sure, let's shut down nuclear plants and crippling the economy and industrial base, because it is MORALLY CORRECT. Let's vote for the Greens, because they are the MORALLY CORRECT party.
  • You wouldn't cross an empty street when the traffic light is red, even if you can see that there aren't any cars coming, because it wouldn't be MORALLY CORRECT
  • Look at the way Switzerland's nuclear weapons programme went: they established a subcomittee to study the possibility, and when that didn't work, they established a second subcomittee, which produced a report, which... you get the idea.
  • The way you learn math is by understanding a finite list of concepts and methods, going subject by subject
    • Rather than by having a problem and looking for an algorithm/tooling/approach which solves it.
  • To understand language and communication, you differentiate between sense and meaning; you seek to understand language by presenting categories for it.
  • Consider Javert from Les Miserables. He is hunting the sympathetic protagonist because he is A CRIMINAL, and criminals are DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY and must be BROUGHT TO JUSTICE.

In a stylized way, there is a common way of being amongst Germans which is something like, implicit Aristotelianism? There are categories, which are so robust that they need not be questioned, and which can be a source of comfort and security in this uncertain world. This is why we should choose a subcomittee to address the subcategory of Strategic Dialogue, which is different from Cooperative Dialogue (of which a different committe is responsible).

To be clear, though, I admire some parts of it, like the work ethic, the strong economy (particularly compared to my more chill Spain), the part of their moral structure that ends up helping other people. Also, do note that this is just one subculture in the geographical Germany.

So, throughout, what alternatives could my stylized German be missing?

  • Deep understanding (vs shallow understanding based on classification)
  • Employing categories as shortcuts (vs as pillars, as fundaments)
  • Rules as constraints that can sometimes be bent (vs as MORALLY CORRECT commandments)
  • Finding approximate solutions through brute force and simulations (vs analytic solutions through applying a finite list of manipulations)
  • Moral relativism (as opposed to moral realism)
  • The Israeli nuclear weapons programme (as opposed to the Swiss)
  • Not having a stick up your own ass (as opposed to having a stick up your own ass)

Now, there is a question, which part of this is language, and which part of this is culture? Yeah, I mean, you can definitely have a chill German, but the tradition, the language games, the way language is used in practice by the richer social strata, the utterances that people make in practice and that they grow up with, do contain and transmit these blindspots.

You've provided a list of almost entirely negative German stereotypes (and the example of a fictional Frenchman from a 19th century novel written in French, for some reason), but no analysis whatsoever on how this is connected to the German language. What is it about German grammar that makes them both morally relativistic and aggressive categorizors/rules followers in your eyes?

German grammar

I am not talking about grammar, I am talking about speech as practiced.

almost entirely negative German stereotypes

based on experience about a specific caste/subgroup of Germans. I contend this is valid, in the same way that, e.g., talking about Puritan ethics or values or attributes is valid. I could go on about the positive aspects, but the negatives are more salient, since we are talking about the limitations of language, rather than, e.g., the benefits of discipline.

and the example of a fictional Frenchman from a 19th century novel

also a 1892 book, in case you find that more persuasive. You might find the Google translation of the title a bit interesting. But I think that the Javert example captures the core intuition. If you are a Javert kid, surrounded by Javert parents and Javert peers which utter Javert phrases, it's pretty intuitive to me how you will grow to mimick those utterances.

German grammar

Actually, now that I think about it, German has the feature that in composite phrases (i.e., most phrases saying anything complicated), the verb is at the end. This makes sentences messier. It's possible that having strong categories could be a crutch to make such long sentences understandable.

Not sure to what extent that is a just-so story, though.

2 separate questions in one.

  1. Have you ever considered getting an ADHD diagnosis? Mainly for easier access to Adderall? (Not all of us can get it in the streets). I've tried a similar drug recently and it was like a magic drug. I got 3 days worth of work done in half a day. I think I might actually have ADHD or some kind of disorder given how far above my baseline it got me. What's your overall opinion on the matter of taking drugs to be a better wage slave?
  2. Do you feel irrationally anxious about food waste? Even though individual food waste is probably a tiny fraction of all the waste that happens in a modern economy? The idea of food waste gives me the heeby jeeebies and this is most likely because I've been indoctrinated as much as a child. It just feels "wrong".

Effectiveness can decline over time and I found it killed my imagination to a substantial degree and made me even lazier when unmedicated, so I stopped using it (lisdexamfetamine). I also found it made me angrier or at least more short-tempered, but ymmv. That said, the drugs 100% do work, they are a cheat code to substantially higher conscientiousness.

Personally I think either Adderall and equivalents should be banned or they should be available without prescription to anyone over 16. The advantage gained is so huge you might eventually see that in certain careers almost everyone is on them. In a way, that would hurt the least conscientious people with the most 'real' ADHD symptoms the most, because they're now competing with neurotypical people who hop on stims anyway.

Also, I think there's something to what @yofuckreddit says, it feels a little rotten to take powerful stimulants just to become a superior wage slave so you can better compete with others who are also going through the same thought process re. adderall.

Yes to both.

I've been able to build whole applications in a single day on Adderall. I don't like using drugs to be a better "wage slave". I think my performance on ADHD medication is too good to be a reasonable expectation of an employer, while without them I'm performing below where I feel my true capabilities lie. It's frustrating.

My anxiety about food waste has been tempered over the years. After working in the restaurant industry you realize that any perceived reduced waste there is just hidden from you. I also realized that I do a far better job of saving and eating leftovers than almost any other millennial I know. It's a fallacy to eat food to not waste it, the cost of ingested calories is non-zero and higher than just letting it rot in a landfill in some cases.

I don't like using drugs to be a better "wage slave".

The archetypical example of labour performed solely for the benefit of the master could be consider the ancient Egyptian Pyramids[1]. Only Pharaoh and the elite could be buried in them, the average Egyptian gaining nothing. But today it is tourists, who are not exceptionally wealthy (except in historical comparison) who enjoy the awesome sight of something so grand and millenia old.

By improving your job performance, unless you are writing code for dating apps for millionaires, you helping the masses. So if you are a slave, you are to the masses, which are likewise slaves to you.

[1] I know the workers weren't slaves. Also while enslaved people picking cotton did make some American slaveowners rich, it allowed clothe and products made from it to be cheaper for the masses.

As others have said, I feel stimulants take away some of my creativity or presence or ability to connect with the world and people around me in a genuine way.

They do make you better at very rational, ordered thinking and clearly outlined tasks. But you lose out on some ineffable characteristics. I worry that if I was on adderall all the time I might, for instance, keep grinding in a career that’s wrong for me rather than taking a step back and finding a line of work that suits me better.

In other words I think stimulants can lock your mindset into short term repetitive gains as opposed to better longer term gains.

  1. No, I have zero impulse to do drugs for work. I would try Adderall in a recreational setting, but daily amphetamine use to crank out a higher volume of work holds no appeal to me.

  2. Absolutely and strongly. So much so that I find it baffling when I see people order things that they clearly didn't intend to actually eat very much of.

  1. No, for the same mor(m)onic reason I don't drink coffee or smoke. Perhaps I've not shown my true potential by avoiding it, but letting extraneous substances take my "baseline" performance hostage doesn't feel like a good bargain.

  2. Global food waste or household food waste? Household food waste is a sign of someone's low efficiency. My lived experience shows efficiency is not a budget that you can save for more important tasks, so high food waste is a relatively reliable indicator of a person's overall spending behavior.

I've definitely considered if I have ADHD, or something like that. But I worry about it I have to take Adderall to function. I already feel like I got hooked on anti depressants to the point that I can't live without them: back in like 2008, I didn't take them, and then I started taking them just to try them, and now I need them or else I feel unbearable dread and guilt. Psychiatrists say that isn't likely that I got hooked, and it's more likely that my depression is worse now then it was in 2008, but I don't really believe them.

Now if I started taking something else that majorly alters my state of mind, it doesn't seem like it's something I want to do. I do wonder if I'd be more effective at work, but is that really worth the risk of being hooked on a potentially dangerous drug?

Re 1, I'm mostly where @2rafa is on Adderall. I used it to get stuff done in college on occasion, and yeah it was wild. I also found that I enjoyed it quite a bit, which deterred me from really ever using it anymore or ever trying a stimulant recreational drug.

As I've gotten older, I similarly enjoy the feeling of caffeine buzz, somewhat more in quality (though not as intense of course) than alcohol. Sometimes I'll find myself taking extra caffeine drinks not because I'm tired or need to focus, but for the buzziness.

I constantly have to cycle down my caffeine tolerance, so that I can build it back up again. Possibly relatedly, I can fall asleep on caffeine quite easily, and sometimes if I'm already tired (fatigued or lacking in sleep), it knocks me the fuck out and I'll sleep sounder on a cup of coffee than not. This is supposedly a symptom of ADHD, so, who knows. (@self_made_human is that true or am I mistake?). I don't know how exactly to describe it, but it works both as a stimulant/nootropic and as a sleepy drug sometimes at the same time.

Finally, and this is probably 100% placebo, but am I the only person who feels like they can snap themselves into adderall-esque state (with out the fun / high feeling)? It doesn't last nearly as long and it's not as intense, but on Adderall, my brain was in a state of focus / flow that I remember quite distinctly, and can basically 'recall it' when necessary to focus.

Finally, and this is probably 100% placebo, but am I the only person who feels like they can snap themselves into adderall-esque state (with out the fun / high feeling)?

At least two! It's probably a somewhat different mechanism, but I can just ... do that. I generally find the attitude that 'I don't want to do X but will take a pill to make me more motivated' disturbing. You do have the capability to be motivated at X if you desired it, you're just in a weird state where you want it in some abstract or socialized sense but not deeply enough to actually do it.

2 is easy, just plain no.

For 1, I've actually tried "street" Adderall, and it doesn't do that for me. (they are actual pills with the normal drug manufacturer markings, so fairly certain they're legit and not some weird random shit). It makes me feel a stimulant buzz and tends to make my head a little spinny; I feel like I have a harder time concentrating on things. I presume this means I do not actually have ADHD. I actually do like it sometimes, but for when I've drunk a lot and am starting to feel sleepy but want to stay up for a few more hours. In that case, it has less of the head-spinny effect and just makes me feel not tired anymore, also it wears off cleanly at a predictable time. I only use it like that once in a while, so I don't mind the higher prices of "street" pills. If I actually wanted to use it all the time, or at least semi-regularly for concentration etc, I'd probably try and get a diagnosis to get it cheaper and more conveniently.

Have you ever considered getting an ADHD diagnosis?

Why yes I have, if only because I actually have ADHD. If I didn't, I'd probably still find a way to get some, and it's frankly astonishing to me that despite how much academic pressure and intense competition there is in India, more students aren't on them. ADHD is practically unknown to the average person.

I think I might actually have ADHD or some kind of disorder given how far above my baseline it got me.

Not much evidence of ADHD by itself, the drugs are powerful and work on both the neurotypical and ADHD alike, and I am lukewarm on claims that it makes a qualitative or quantitative difference for the latter. In my particular case, it takes me from someone who can't read a textbook unless their life depends on it (or I have an exam in a few days) to someone who can grudgingly study for anywhere from 2-6 hours a day, averaging maybe 2 hours of genuine maximal effort. I think it takes me from a literal 2%ile score to something around 50% on conscientiousness, which is a massive difference, outright life changing.

What's your overall opinion on the matter of taking drugs to be a better wage slave?

If it helps you get on the grind, fuck everything else and go for it. Be careful not to use excessive doses, moderate use in amount while spacing it out to delay tolerance.

Do you feel irrationally anxious about food waste? Even though individual food waste is probably a tiny fraction of all the waste that happens in a modern economy? The idea of food waste gives me the heeby jeeebies and this is most likely because I've been indoctrinated as much as a child. It just feels "wrong".

Yes, I always clean my plate where possible, even if I'm past comfortably full, but I try to pack it away or save it as leftovers if the remaining quantity warrants it.

Massive open ai update just dropped. Gpt 4 is 1/3 the cost now with 128k context. And many more.

Anyone working on any LLM projects, startups or just using it in production in any way?

I've been talking about using it to build a MUD or branching CYOA game for a while, but no time to put my money where my mouth is yet.

Super excited to find time soon though, hopefully before others get around to it.

You mean something similar to gwern's idea?

Yep exactly. I'm shamelessly stealing it unless someone else does first

And if you are, how did you get an API key? I’ve been on the waitlist for 6 months.

My employer uses it in production and the devs just use the org key lol.

How do income taxes work in the US? Let's say I am offered a salary of $100k, what's the rule of thumb to estimate my take-home pay?

For comparison, here's how it's done in Russia. Let's say I am offered 9M rubles per year. This amount includes my income tax that will be deducted by the employer and excludes my social security contributions that will be paid by the employer on top of 10M. There are just two tax brackets: 13% on the first 5M, 15% on the rest. So my take-home pay is 50.87+40.85=7.75M rubles annually.

From what I know about various EU countries, it's more or less the same, except the number of tax brackets is higher and there are additional concerns like having a (non-)working partner and/or underage children that affect the tax rate, but your income taxes are done by the employer.

In the US, unlike almost every other developed country, taxes aren’t (edit: universally) deducted by employers. Instead, employees are responsible for filing and paying their taxes. In a way, I don’t think this is a bad thing, it’s probably responsible for moderately more conservative American views on taxation (even if these aren’t reflected in policy).

In addition to federal income taxes (which range from 10% to 37%), there are also state and even municipal income taxes. Some states like Texas prefer to tax property or sales/goods instead of income. Some tax both property and income, or property, income and sales to varying amounts. At various times there have been both state and federal deductions for taxes paid to other jurisdictions. There was a big fight in the last (and start of this) administration about whether and to what extent state and local taxes could be deducted from federal taxes, which benefits high tax (blue) states at the expense of low tax (often red) ones.

What this means is that in some parts of the US - most notably NYC - high earners deal with tax rates that are actually very comparable to and sometimes even exceed those of most Western European ‘social democracies’ (approx 50% marginal rates). The US isn’t a ‘low tax’ society; in ‘lower tax’ states property taxes are often extremely high by global standards for example. It’s just a very rich society, even compared to Western Europe.

EDIT: Also, the US taxes globally. These taxes are deducted from local taxes where the US has a tax treaty (almost everywhere), so in the UK I don’t pay any American income taxes, but if I moved to, say, Dubai or Hong Kong I’d be liable for the full federal rate minus whatever income tax I paid locally. Anyone who makes more than $100,000 a year has to file, and even those who make less have to declare that they do so, provide their bank accounts and so on (of course the US government/IRS already has them, they force all global banks to report the financial data of any US citizen (which makes opening accounts abroad extremely painful), they just want to try to catch you out).

In the US, unlike almost every other developed country, taxes aren’t (edit: universally) deducted by employers.

Every W2 employee has tax withholding which is usually pretty close to their actual owed taxes. The only way to avoid this is to be a contractor, in which case you will need to file payments of your estimated taxes as the year goes by.

You do engage with the income tax system annually, but that is to calculate your final actual taxes owed for the year. If that is less than you paid in via withholding, then you get a refund (this is the normal case), and if it is more, then you have to write a check for the remainder. If it is ever or routinely substantially more, perhaps due to side business activities or investments, then you may be required to make periodic payments of your estimated annual taxes before the end of the year. The IRS very much wants to be giving people a small but positive refund every year, and many people even consider it to be a "bonus" and plan around it.

Withholding is most definitely mandatory, and the IRS will be very unhappy with you if you try to dodge it or intentionally have less withheld than your expected taxes. I'm not sure where you got the idea that it isn't, but it's not true.

Universal Federal withholding was established in the US back in WWII, as a "temporary" measure to get the Feds money needed for the war effort sooner, and never removed. Some fiscal conservatives have advocated for removing it to actually force most Americans to write large checks every year, and thus save for them and make it more painfully obvious exactly how much they are paying. This is most likely a non-starter given how bad most people are at saving for such a high-magnitude future expense and how much effort would be needed to chase down everybody who accidentally or intentionally failed to save enough or otherwise dragged their feet. It's a pretty extreme position that nobody anywhere near actual power is prepared to touch. Pretty much everyone has since gotten in on the act of getting other entities than individuals to actually write the checks for tax payments, as it's much easier to coerce businesses than individuals.

In the US, unlike almost every other developed country, taxes aren’t deducted by employers.

Most W-2 filers do indeed have their taxes withheld by employers.

Sure but it’s not universal in the way it is elsewhere. Here, every single employee has taxes deducted automatically and the government even takes an extreme line against anyone ‘self employed’ who, say, has only one customer to try to pressure people into becoming ‘PAYE’ staff.

Almost every employed American engages with the tax system every year. Many employed Brits I know don’t regularly engage with the tax system at all except when the local council sends the (very small) property tax bill, which they calculate and you just pay (and you typically set it up for debit so that you’d only engage with them if you moved house).

How does it work in practice, though?

Since I'm a sole proprietor, I have to pay my own taxes, but it's a relatively simple deal - at the start of the year my accountant asks me what I assume my next year's income will be and after I make an estimate (typically estimating that it's somewhat more than in the past year), she sends me bills to pay the next year's presumed tax sum in six batches, ie. a batch every two months. Then the estimate gets specified throughout the year on the basis of my actual work, changes to taxation and, say, what deductions I'm getting, so this year I've had to pay a lot of taxes towads the end of the year. Then, when the tax office finalizes the previous year's taxation, if I've paid more than the actual final sum calculated on the basis of the year's actual income and deductions I get a rebate and if I've paid less I'll pay back taxes.

Simple enough, and the whole process means just a few added extra hours the accountant bills me per year, in addition to the usual processing of bills and invoices. In addition to national taxes there are local taxes, but those are all handled as a part of the same process, ie. the local tax rate (along with the assorted deductions) is just slapped on top of the national tax rate and the tax office processes all of it as a part of the same process.

However, every time the American taxation system is discussed, I get the feeling that even a normal worker has to do something infinitely more comples than this. Is it the state/local taxes and their effects? (Of course a normie worker won't need an accountant, but my understanding is that it would be possible for me to do it all myself without that much extra work if I was intent on saving money.)

However, every time the American taxation system is discussed, I get the feeling that even a normal worker has to do something infinitely more comples than this.

Not really. The process is annoying, but it isn't actually anywhere near as difficult for typical filers as Americans make it out to be. For someone that has only typical employment income, they'll fill out a couple forms at their employer that allow the employer to withhold taxes based on their salary and marital status. Those taxes are withheld from paychecks. At the end of the fiscal year, the employee receives a W-2 form, which lays out what they earned and what they paid; this is information sent to the Internal Revenue Service. Using cheapie tax software (I used FreeTaxUSA this year), they can punch some info in to figure out whether itemized deductions make sense, but for someone with standard deductions, they can knock this out in about a half hour. The software will spit out whether the government owes you or you owe the government, then you file electronically and link your bank account to either withdraw or receive a deposit.

State and local taxes are typically similar.

Property taxes are typically billed by the locale and paid as a lump sum for the year, or quarterly payments.

Situations that become horribly complex and require a professional are typically involving business and investment considerations, which really do get comically complex with things like depreciation schedules. For someone that just makes $100K/year at their very normal job, buys a very normal house, and puts a bunch of money into index funds, I genuinely have no idea why they think taxes are hard.

The one caveat I'll give is that filing taxes as a sole proprietor or self-employed worker can be fucked, even at fairly low incomes. In theory it's not the sort of thing that the IRS makes that much hay over unless you do something incredibly wacky, but there are some obnoxious penalties that can come up for stupid reasons.

For someone that just makes $100K/year at their very normal job, buys a very normal house, and puts a bunch of money into index funds, I genuinely have no idea why they think taxes are hard.

It's not hard, it's just tedious and needlessly stressful because you are manually copying data from form to form and a typo can (but often doesn't) result in a lot financial and/or legal pain.

For someone that just makes $100K/year at their very normal job, buys a very normal house, and puts a bunch of money into index funds, I genuinely have no idea why they think taxes are hard.

This isn’t hard, but depending on things like family structure and what state you live in, it can turn into a game of ‘how do I get the biggest refund from the government’, because A) the government likes to try to change middle class consumption patterns with subsidies paid out as tax refunds and B) most workers overpay from their payroll deductions anyways.

The normal US worker will do very little.

Their employer will give them a small half sheet of paper called a W2. If this is their only income, they can file a 1040EZ which takes 15 minutes or so. If they have investment income, they will typically use software like TurboTax to file a 1040. This might add a couple hours depending on the complexity of the return

In most states, they will also have to file with the state, so add 50% to the time.

If you own a business, it's a nightmare. This is no different in Europe I assume.

Again, as a sole proprietor, my taxes and general business bureaucracy are quite simple. I pay my accountant on average maybe 100 € / month, a trifle compared to other costs.

The process for independent contractors in the US is essentially the same, except payments are made quarterly.

In the US, unlike almost every other developed country, taxes aren’t (edit: universally) deducted by employers.

That's not accurate - most employers certainly deduct taxes, and at least some legally obligated to do so. Well, at least each one I have been employed with did. But, if they under-deduct or over-deduct, it's not their or taxman's problem - it's yours.

Also, the US taxes globally. These taxes are deducted from local taxes where the US has a tax treaty (almost everywhere), so in the UK I don’t pay any American income taxes, but if I moved to, say, Dubai or Hong Kong I’d be liable for the full federal rate minus whatever income tax I paid locally.

This is the biggest shit ever and is basically the sole reason I do not want to move long term to the US to get a green card/citizenship.

Really, even considering all the benefits? Wouldn't you income be higher anyway?

... depends on how precise of an estimate you want.

The roughest value is to take your gross income, subtract the standard deduction, and then pass the value through marginal tax rates, for federal taxes. State (and sometimes county/city) taxes follow a similar process, albeit usually with much smaller marginal tax rates. There's also Social Security (6.2% up to 112k) and Medi* (1.45%) employee portions; while employers pay the same amount, this isn't reflected in income.

So for an unmarried US employee with no dependents (mostly means 'no kids') getting 100k USD, you'd take the single standardized deduction of 13,850 USD to give 86,150 USD of adjusted-gross income. The first 11k USD would be taxed at 10% (1,100 USD), the next 33,725 USD at 12% (4,047 USD), and the next 41,425 USD at 22% (9,113.5 USD), for a total of 14,260.5 USD in federal income taxes. SSI/Medi* doesn't use the normal deductions and applicable deductions for them are complex and rare (they're technically payroll taxes, not income taxes, but they're taxes based on income so fuck the IRS), so around 7560 USD for them.

State and county taxes vary a lot. A quick rule-of-thumb for 5% is wrong but not useless, and gives about 5k USD.

So an estimated post-tax-withholding income of around 73,089.5 USD. In practice, probably a little bit more than that due to other withholdings or lower state income taxes, but about that realm.

This presumes that you're taking the standardized deduction: for a lot of people this makes sense, especially at lower income ranges, but there are itemized deductions that can if you do a lot of charity donations, recently purchased your first property, so on. One that used to be more relevant was the state-and-local-tax (SALT) deduction, which let you deduct lots of state taxes from your federal income tax; it's since been capped at the same time that the standardized deduction was increased, so it's less likely to be a sole cause to itemize. There are also some tax credits that sometimes reduce this number (or even turn it negative for lower-incomes). I... honestly don't know off the top of my head whether income automatically directed to social security withholdings are part of your income for tax purposes or not, though the employer side definitely isn't considered part of your income for tax purposes (or even advertised to employees).

Note that this is specifically income taxes; the US does a lot with property and sales taxes, too. You will also probably have some other items taken out of your paycheck (health insurance usually being the big one), and your employer may have certain retirement plans you can choose to go with that are usually good deals but aren't liquid without some cost penalty.

Federal tax brackets are here. It works more or less like what you say about the EU. The exceptions come from deductions, which effectively lower your income. That’ll usually be the “standard deduction,” so your average American can slide those brackets up by $13,850.

Thus, federal taxes on 100K USD, which is on par with those 9M rubles, would be about 14%.

Things get weird depending on state taxes, but I live in Texas, so I don’t really think about them much.

Rule of thumbs: 20% at 50k; 25-30% from 75-100k; 30-35% from 100k to 250k; 35-40% from 250k to 500k.

It works pretty similarly, but states are entirely separate for purposes of taxation and some tax income and others do not tax income but instead have higher property or sales taxes, e.g., Florida has no income tax, but high property taxes and Tennessee has no income tax, but higher sales tax. For a typical employee of a company ("W-2 employee" referring to the IRS form you file for this type of employment), your taxes are broken down in a similar manner. There are payroll taxes and income taxes at the local, state, and federal level. Payroll taxes are split equally between the employee (7.65% of income capped at first 100k income) and the employer and cover programs like social security and health insurance for the poor/old. There are more marginal tax brackets than your example. On 100k, after the standard deduction from gross salary ($13,850), you are in the third marginal tax bracket at the federal level. It's similar at the state level.

On 100k for a single person with no kids in a State like New York:

Payroll:

7.65% on 100k = $7,650 (your employer also pays this amount on your behalf to the government for a total of $15,300 on a "$100k" salary for both of you, but you're only responsible for half)

Income Tax:

NY: Income is $92,000 after 8,000 standard deduction. 1st Bracket: 4% for 0-8,500 = 340. 4.5% for 8501-11,700= 143. 5.25% for 11,701-13,900=115. 5.85% for 13,901-80,650=3,904. 6.25% for 80,651-215,400=709. Sum: $5,213.75

Federal: Income is $86,150 after standard deduction. 1st Bracket: 10% for 0-11,000 = 1,100. 12% for 11,001-44,725 = 4,046. 22% for 44,726-95,375 = 86,150-44,725*.22 = $9,113. Sum: $14,260.

So on a 100k salary, you pay $27,124.25 in income taxes (incl. your payroll) and your take-home pay is $72,875 in the state of NY.

These numbers change with a jointly filing partner or children as your deductions go up for dependents (children) and bracket shift upwards.

Income taxes are not done by your employer in the US. Your employer automatically pays their part and your part for payroll taxes. They also withhold a certain amount of your salary (there are conditions you can get out of this) and send it to the government per paycheck, but employees are still required to file a tax return at least 1x a year in order to account for their income and potentially get a return from the amount already sent to the government by your employer because of withholding or a bill. The same is true on the state level. Most local income taxes are done by the state so it's just an extra section if you live in certain localities on your state return.

Good to see that the brazen fiction of a "paid by employer" part to hide your true tax burden is in some form alive everywhere. I realize it is too diffuse a problem to meaningfully lobby against, but it is fascinating to me that both the original post's 9M rubles and your 100k are abstractions inbetween the sum you cost the employer and the sum you receive.

There are payroll taxes and income taxes at the local, state, and federal level. Payroll taxes are split equally between the employee (7.65% of income capped at first 100k income) and the employer and cover programs like social security and health insurance for the poor/old.

This is a very important point for people who aren't already familiar with the US income tax system. As someone who recently moved to the US and assumed that my income taxes were my fucking income taxes (imagine that!), I was furious when I saw that payroll taxes were this whole other thing that isn't even on the fucking IRS tax transcript (seriously!!) and was literally greater than my supposed "income tax".

US tax code is huge, byzantine and confusing. It's on purpose, because taxation is used as political football, and taxing or de-taxing various things (depending on whether enemies or friends do the things in question) is a favorite pastime among Congressmen.

Employer does usually deduct your taxes, but it's not where it ends, unless you are either rather poor or live very simple life. At the end of the year, you are supposed to check how much you owe, either by reading IRS instructions purposefully made as confusing as possible without rendering them in ancient Egyptian, or pay somebody to do it for you (most people choose the latter). Then you include various additions (e.g. if you own savings account, stock, had side income, etc.) and deductions (charity donations, secondary taxes - property, state, etc., and the football stuff). Then you send them a special form to the IRS, and if you owe the man, you must pay, if the man owes you, they'll eventually send you the money. Not submitting the taxes is a crime, especially if you owe the man (I am not sure they'd aggressively go after you if they owe you).

The whole system has some nice ideas in it (e.g. charity deductions make the US citizens one of the most prolific charity givers in the world) but, as a lot of other systems in the US, with time it grew into unholy monstrosity, and since so many political interests are baked into it, nobody can do any reasonable change, but only add more and more monstrous tentacles to it.

Russia has a lucky chance to reset its system pretty recently, and as far as I remember, banking/taxation were one of very small number of areas in Russia taken over by professionals who were listened to by the Powers That Be. I am genuinely surprised they ended up with the system that actually makes sense.

Let's say I am offered a salary of $100k, what's the rule of thumb to estimate my take-home pay?

There are multiple calculators online, but: a) take home pay doesn't mean you don't owe more on the tax day b) it depends on your state of residence (US is a federal republic, remeber?) and sometimes also city c) it also depends on whether you are married and how much your spouse makes, and how many kids you've got d) it also depends on crapton of other things. So the online calculators will only give you the ballpark figure, if you want something better, you pay an accountant or learn IRS's version of ancient Egyptian.

I am genuinely surprised they ended up with the system that actually makes sense.

There are a few major problems with it:

  • Income tax is a federal tax (actually, only property and land use taxes aren't), so regions are dependent on federal financial support
  • Social security payments are strongly regressive and are paid by the employer

But otherwise it's not remotely as byzantine as the US tax code.

so regions are dependent on federal financial support

That's a feature for The Vertical of Power, I am sure.

Social security payments are strongly regressive and are paid by the employer

The same is true for the US on the regressive part, but "paid by the employer" I feel is mostly a trick since it all figures in total cost per employee, and I'm pretty sure business owners can do that calculation (which is also true for the US, of course). Still, it is not exactly a "problem" as I see - it doesn't make anything different, it just looks different.

The trick means employees don't really feel these payments. Tye government is free to adjust the rates up or down without any reaction from the public.

Of course, it's old and true trick, which the US system uses much more extensively than Russia. I' just saying on the whole, it still makes Russian system look much less broken - which in general would be a weird thing for me to say, but I must admit the truth when I see it.

and the football stuff

And the football stuff?

The stuff that I previously described as subject to political football - all kinds of deductions or special taxes meant to subsidize or hurt certain categories of people, for political reasons. Taxes in the US is very actively used in politics.

A couple of fairly high profile examples- Trump reducing the deduction amount for state taxes incentivized moving to red states. The inflation reduction act contained lots of special deductions for green stuff of various kinds.

The master of trolling is at it again. Hanania:

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with a 14 year-old girl, and will pay her $10 million. The money will go into a mutual fund that will pay out when she's 21. The girl agrees, as do both of her parents. Should this be allowed? And are you male or female?

As of this writing, the results are:

  • "Yes, male" - 5.9%
  • "No, male" - 78.1%
  • "Yes, female" - 1.3%
  • "No, female" - 14.7%

Look at the engagement metrics on this tweet: 94,000 votes, 3.4 million views, 4,700 comments, 273 likes. This might be the most "popular" Hanania tweet of all time.

Now, I am one of the apparent sickos who voted "yes", but I can see some decent arguments for "no". I'm still surprised the results are this lopsided, and I'm also surprised that there appears to be no gender gap.

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with your wife, and will pay both of you $2m. She says she'll do it if you agree. Do you? (This is, of course, the plot of a ridiculous semi-cult movie.)

Some elites are always going to engage in degenerate or socially deleterious behavior. There were many Epsteins before Epstein and there will be many after him. Most people willing to spend $10m to fuck are going to find people willing to fulfil their request, no matter how wrong, no matter how illegal. "Should it be allowed" is really an irrelevant question in this respect.

But - and this is something that the progressive understanding of permissiveness doesn't really have space for - there is a big difference between what is illegal but seen as semi-inevitable degeneracy engaged in by small groups at the very bottom and very top of society, and the vast construct of middle-class and working-class morality. Promiscuity is, to some extent, natural. However the fact that both the Byrons and the dockyard whores of this world have always engaged in it doesn't mean that most people benefit from the sexual revolution.

Instead of Hanania's Indecent Proposal, it's best to consider who the majority of Epstein's alleged victims actually were. They were poor girls from West Palm Beach, a poor part of town beset with a high rate of single motherhood and various other social issues with crime and poverty. And they were (allegedly) poor, often Eastern European girls, recruited by Epstein's associates in the Paris modelling world, who come (or at least came, back in the 90s and early 2000s) from a poor and suffering corner of Europe, far away from home, with no support network, put up by the 'agency' in New York apartments owned by Epstein and his brother.

What might actually have made a difference? Stricter divorce laws, more discouraging rather than encouraging of promiscuity, a culture that sees sex as something important, something to do with love and marriage and family rather than something meaninglesss and throwaway. It wouldn’t have stopped all of what happened, of course (as I say above, that’s an impossible task) but it would have saved some. Most who went to Epstein's mansion knew - in as much as a 14 year old can 'know' - "what they were doing". But they thought it was fine, or at least OK, because in a culture in which girls are raised to think that men who pursue them expect sex and that they should readily give it up to them, why not fuck an old guy for a few hundred dollars? Society failed them long before they set foot on his doorstep.

Of course enforcing sexual morality also means making it harder for old men to fuck girls for money, and as in the Russell Brand case I’m happy when they ‘get caught’, because I’ve seen the damage it can do, but men do what they get away with (something much bigger than ‘the law’) in this regard and always have. The largest part of the problem is a spiritual void in which sex is stripped of any real meaning, and therefore seemingly doesn’t matter, and so ‘getting it’ (or ‘giving it up’) in whatever way doesn’t matter. If sex is meaningless, trying to get people to care about who has it is never going to work.

In a way, this reminds me of a similar question around the Rotherham / 'Grooming Gang' scandal. There, as with Epstein, there is a proximate cause (large scale importation of sexually repressed men with certain views on white/'kuffar' women, plus police who didn't want to be 'politically insensitive'). But the ultimate cause is that the scale of the grooming gang scandals would never have been what it was if a more conservative sexual morality had persisted in Britain. The opportunities for the predators in question, whose modus operandi was (primarily) to get young promiscuous teenage girls from broken families very, very drunk, offer them tons of free alcohol and drugs after school and then pimp them out to their friends, simply wouldn't have been present to the same extent in such a culture. Why white (and sometimes Sikh) girls and not Muslims? Because the Muslim girls weren't out drinking on Friday night at 13 or 14 years old, and because they had a father at home who would rock up with a lynch mob if some group of strangers molested his daughter, anyone else be damned.

Agreed, and I find the whole notion/question incredibly tawdry and symptomatic of cultural rot, even as a thought experiment. I'm sure that sounds condescendingly naive--and perhaps moralistic in a lowclass, statistically illiterate sorta way, apparently. So be it; I wouldn't have to think too much about this to type No.

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with your wife, and will pay both of you $2m. She says she'll do it if you agree. Do you?

He can fuck me in the ass afterwards for free if the price is $2m. I can only quietly give a thumbs up to any person here for whom that isn't life changing money, I'm in no position to say no.

At any rate, my attitude to a family member, even a daughter, doing sex work is pretty much the same as one of them working as a janitor. I don't think it's intrinsically bad, but I'd rather they didn't do it, unless they were paid a sum that outweighs the negative consequences in terms of lower respect from society and everything else. In principle I see nothing wrong with it.

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with your wife, and will pay both of you $2m. She says she'll do it if you agree. Do you?

Absolutely. I don't think I'll ever marry a women who isn't smart enough to separate sex from attachment, and the $4m we get together (in a healthy dynamic it's not $2 million for each of us, it's $4 million for both of us) if anything will make it even more clear that what's happening is a business transaction and there is nothing more going on.

Do the deed, collect the money, pop a Plan B pill afterwards and laugh your way to the bank.

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with your wife, and will pay both of you $2m. She says she'll do it if you agree. Do you? (This is, of course, the plot of a ridiculous semi-cult movie.)

There are much worse fates that people face on a daily, for free. Your wife could cheat with your next door neighbor and not a billionaire and you could be left footing the bill.

That's not really my point, but it helps keep things in perspective. 4M USD is a whole lot of money. You can do a lot with it. A lot. You can feed entire starving villages for years.

Unless you view sex as the most sacred of sacred cows, I don't see how having sex once is possibly worth 4M USD. Ceteris parabus in your current relationship.

The whole thing just boils down to deontologists, consequentialists, and virtue ethicists failing to recognize that this is how other people think about morality, coupled with a layer of modern weirdness about just how destructive teenagers having sex is. The basic perspectives for those three branches are going to be:

  • Deontology - Prostituting teenagers is awful, we have a duty to reject it and try to prevent it. The price doesn't matter, teenage prostitution is unacceptable.

  • Consequentialist - Prostituting teenagers may harm them but receiving $10 million in the future helps someone a lot. This could be a significant improvement in total wellbeing and that's what to consider.

  • Virtue ethicist - Do you really want to be the kind of guy that enables Jeffrey Epstein prostituting teenagers? The price doesn't matter, I'm not that guy.

You can flip the virtue ethicist framing 180.

"Do you really want to be the guy who denies someone 10M USD, just because you kinda feel icky? Talk about narcissism."

You have a straw consequentialist there. They should consider the second order effects of normalizing old guys having sex with consenting children for a lot of money; that being parents suddenly finding a previously untapped (wahey!) reservoir of them for old guys to fuck for lots of money.

The deontologist and virtue ethicist positions don't make sense to me. It just seems like they don't accept the existence of trade-offs. Do their virtues and ethical rules not say that the things $10 million can buy matter? You can do a lot of good and be extremely virtuous with $10 million. This just makes me suspect those ethical frameworks are fundamentally illogical.

How much money would you torture a child to death for? Tradeoffs exist, right?

Depends on the methods and everything, I'd probably do it for $500 million of new goods and services value created. I'd fully expect to end up in jail afterwards for life etc, but $400 million can secure my lineage for a dozen generations (the other $100 million I would use to fight child torture and end up saving hundred of children form being tortured to death), it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make. Of course I would also try to end the child's suffering as soon as possible.

I wouldn't even have moral pangs to be honest, from my point of view I just saved N-1 children from being tortured to death for some large N, and ending up in jail for the rest of my life is worth it for that.

Remove the jail condition and I'd knock $100 million off the price.

And if your next question is to ask about whether I or someone I love would like to be on the torture recieving end of the trade my answer would be an empathetic no, but that's why I'd take precautions to not end up in a situation like that, and if the person is basically being chosen at random the risk to me and my family personally will be on the order of 1 in many millions, and that's a level of risk we take on a daily basis when we travel to work each day, I'll gladly accept it. Doesn't mean I wouldn't fight to try and get out of it, but I'd expect the child to fight as well and that's fine in my book.

And equally the situation we were discussing up thread was one where both the girl and her parents consented to the act, which is not the case if the person about to be tortured to death was forced into it. If you could provide a cast iron guarantee that this person and their close family members all voluntarily and freely agreed to it (I don't know why they would, but maybe they've been offered a large sum of money too) then I'll knock another $50 million off the price.

Of course there are things I would not do for any amount of money, like e.g. shoot my own mother, but that's because of personal selfishness, because I like my own mother and she is worth a lot to me. I would still do a tradeoff analysis and find that the cost is so high that the tradeoff is not worth it anymore for whatever amount of money. It's not that doing the tradeoff analysis is wrong, it's just that the result of the tradeoff analysis is different in this case.

However once again I note that this situation is nothing like the Epstein sex case, in that situation everyone on all sides consented to it and there were third party moral busybodies who wanted to stop the transaction even though it had nothing to do with them. And in much the same way, if someone who fully consented was going to be tortured to death for a large amount of money being handed to all participants I would not be against it as an unrelated third party living in the same society.

If child sacrifice actually worked, and the benefits it got were good enough (e.g. rain to save the tribe's crops and prevent famine) I would also not be against it. I would not want to sacrifice my own children but you could well see people agreeing to it and gestating a child just to sacrifice it to Moloch if the rest of society compensated them enough for it, and that would be just and fine in my book.

(Note: In reality I would not take any money to murder a child with my own two hands either, but that is because of my religious convictions since I know what then penalty on the day of Judgement is for killing an innocent in Islam, the answer above would apply for a hypothetical atheist version of me and I believe that is the right frame to answer the question in since large portions of the people cooking up a stink over the results are atheists too. I can accept God-fearing humans to be extremely unhappy with Epstien offering money for sex and agree with their arguments for it being bad in a society living under a religous framework, but the west is not religious any more, it is atheist and can not hide under the mantle of religion when confronted with things that logically should be perfectly fine under its stated beliefs but in reality awaken a deep and ancient "ick" within us all).

Who determines whether "it's got anything to do with them"? If you say shooting your own mother has a tradeoff of infinity because of your personal selfishness, why can't others put a tradeoff of infinity on "allowing openly purchasing sex from children"?

why can't others put a tradeoff of infinity on "allowing openly purchasing sex from children"?

For the same reason we don't allow people to put a tradeoff on infinity of "letting two gay people do what they want behind closed doors". Sure we let people believe that if they want, but we don't humour their beliefs for a single second and even make fun of people who believe such shit. We can do the exact same thing here.

Society as a whole decides whether something has got anything to do with them. As I mentioned society as a whole generally doesn't allow people to put a tradeoff of infinity on letting two gay people do whatever they want with each other in their bedroom or at least cries foul about other societies that do do this like Saudi Arabia.

The question then becomes what is it about "allowing openly purchasing sex from children" that does not apply to "gay sex between two consenting adults behind closed doors", and pretty much anything you can come up with there has an easy exception where society behaves the other way, thus displaying their hypocrisy and providing an argument for changing how society puts a tradeoff on things (which in the end is all we can do here merely by arguing online).

If you make a maturity argument then you need to realise that there are people who are more mature at 14 than others are at 40, I certainly could have consented to sex at 14, probably even at 10, and I know many other similar people. Now you could make a Schilling point argument about why we have an age of consent and the difficulty in determining who/who doesn't have the ability to consent but that just then implies (as another poster mentions in this thread) we should also forbid black adults from having sex, as most black adults are less intelligent and capable of making good decisions than many white teenagers for whom we forbid sex.

Other arguments for why we shouldn't allow 14 year olds to have sex have similar glaring loopholes where that same argument applies to different groups where we are absolutely fine with them having sex.

So you're going to use society's opinion as a reference for what is or isn't moral busybodying? I am confused then. In the West society certainly does consider it their business to prohibit children under 16 (18 in practice, higher than that depending on how old the other guy is and who you ask) having sex with adults.

Other arguments for why we shouldn't allow 14 year olds to have sex have similar glaring loopholes where that same argument applies to different groups where we are absolutely fine with them having sex.

In practice the attempts to equivocate such situations are sorely lacking. They fail to account for all aspects of child/adult disparity and/or make quite dubious reaches, such as "most black people are less capable than an unspecified percentage of white teenagers". I remain unconvinced.

What you might want to consider is what kind of relationships are currently deterred, in practice, by the age of consent laws as they are now. I do not believe these are the same kind of relationships as would be prevented by "consistent" consent laws that are supposed to match the rest of society to how we treat children.

(I'm also aware you probably think blacks /poors having unprotected sex is worse than children having sex, so no need to restate that unless you're going to deny it.)

So you're going to use society's opinion as a reference for what is or isn't moral busybodying?

No, I am just saying that in the real world society's opinion is exactly what counts for what is/isn't moral busibodying, and this is true regardless of whether the society is the USA or Saudi Arabia. I want to change society's opinion to be more in line with my opinion, no different to what pro-LGBT activists in Saudi Arabia want.

In practice the attempts to equivocate such situations are sorely lacking. They fail to account for all aspects of child/adult disparity and/or make quite dubious reaches,

The onus is on the people who support the restriction to provide reasons for it, what reasons do they have for forbidding sexual intercourse between Jeffery Epstein and a 14 year old where the parents are in full agreement that do not also apply to other situations where those who call for this restriction would be fine with the intercourse? Note the age of consent in China is 14 so a well off Shangai family could easily decide to do this without legal issues, but I expect that westerners would still see a moral problem with this, no different to how Saudi Arabians see a moral problem with gay sex behind closed doors in the west.

(I'm also aware you probably think blacks /poors having unprotected sex is worse than children having sex, so no need to restate that unless you're going to deny it.)

Depends on the people having the intercourse as always. Most children are stupid so I absolutely would not support it for >99.5% of all children, in fact I consider it worse than blacks/poors having unprotected sex because many of these children are going to grow into perfectly good and decent adults and the early intercourse could hurt them and thereby all of society, while certified low productivity yield adults aren't going to be making big contributions anyways...

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We torture children to death every day as a consequence of how we've decided to order our society; suicide is among the top killers of the under-12 (and under-18) population in all Western nations (and Eastern ones, too). Sure, there's a baseline rate of suicide, but given it gets worse around certain times of the year corresponding to things like exams I'm far from convinced it's all natural.

It turns out it's very economically productive to treat them the way we do, and should we create conditions sufficiently bad that they kill themselves to escape we have, effectively, tortured them to death for financial gain. Thus the amount of money for which we would torture children to death might be relatively high, but is clearly not infinite.

No wiggling, please. You, personally, directly, with your own two hands and provided tools, physically until death. How much do you ask for it?

You can consider deontology and virtue ethics shortcuts to considering second and third-order effects. Making child prostitution legal for the right price is likely to make it much more socially acceptable and less illegal in general. Keeping child prostitution illegal amd socially unacceptable is worth more than $10m.

ConsequentialismChads can't stop taking Ws.

Deontologists might also argue that the pursuit of personal excellence is the highest goal; who cares if that sometimes passes through (nominally consensual) prostitution of teenagers? Virtue ethicists might talk about individual freedom or some shit like that. I'm not voting "yes" here - it might be good for the teenage girl, and for the woman she becomes...but probably not good for her parents or society. I guess you could go full consequentialist and say that a human life's worth about $10 million...kind of like what I understand Ancient China to be like. There, you could buy your way out of most crimes with the exception of high treason; murder cost you 200 times a laborer's salary. In US dollars, a modern day laborer construction worker earns $50k/year on average. And the economists have figured a human life's worth around ten million, give or take.

No I wouldn’t, but I’m also not “funding-constrained” as they say.

Well, then you can presumably raise the fee to whatever hypothetical amount is meaningful to you.

Would you deny your 14 year old daughter a life free from financial concern?

But of course, it's not your daughter - the premise is that the parents also consent. Would you let someone else's daughter have sex with an old man?

At the cost of turning sex into a consumer transaction? You might argue this already exists and has always existed in some for of human history, (which you would be partially correct), but I think the consequences of widespread acceptance of this practice are largely damaging to cross gender relationships, especially the perception of women, as well as damaging to formation of families. Even historical practices of marrying women to richer/more wealthy men focuses on marrying and producing heirs, not simply for carnal desires. Women who sell their bodies for money have rarely been treated more than 2nd, or 3rd class people and do it at the cost of having a successful long term relationship.

If the going rate for one sex with a 14 year old is ten million dollars and consent of the parents, then I think it highly unlikely that such a practice would be widespread. If anything it would probably be less widespread than it is nowadays.

Women who sell their bodies for money have rarely been treated more than 2nd, or 3rd class people and do it at the cost of having a successful long term relationship.

Yes, because they don't sell their bodies for enough money. If they sold their body for ten million dollars, they would not end up as 2nd class people.

If they sold their body for ten million dollars, they would not end up as 2nd class people.

But they do, and the evidence of this is clear: how many prostitutes and former actresses have ended up in successful happy functional relationships? The evidence is clear that reputation destruction (and whatever psychological damage that happens during the repeated engagement of promiscuity) that women receive when they engage in these acts is fairly permanent and follows them throughout their lives, even if their acts cause financial success.

how many prostitutes and former actresses have ended up in successful happy functional relationships?

Most of them? Actresses are the highest status women on earth, and settle for billionaires and presidents after they've had their fill of co-stars and producers.

Given the context of the discussion, what kind of actresses do you think we were talking about?

Actresses being promiscuous yet extremely high status refutes your point about the psychological or reputational damage suffered for promiscuous behaviour.

Besides, the ancients didn't bother differentiating between actresses and pornographic actresses, but one still married justinian.

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Not many, but then, most prostitutes sell themselves for much less than 10 million. I imagine there are lots of well-functioning women (and men) out there that might be willing to compromise themselves for such a sum. I would also hazard that the women that compromise themselves for small amounts (or even nothing) probably have pre-existing issues.

It's not really that obvious to me that most women have a reputation that's worth 10 million dollars, and in any case I don't support trying to destroy women's reputation in order to punish them. If you knew that a woman you know was the victim of such a scenario, would you think less of her, or try to destroy her reputation?

So you are of the sincere belief that parents pimping out their children is only a negative when the money isn't managed correctly?

It's absolutely a negative, thing is though that the $10 million on the other end is more than enough of a positive to counteract the negative, provided it is managed well. All good things aren't correlated, tradeoffs exist.

Would the situation sit better with you if the parents disapproved, or if they had no knowledge of the scenario?

I'm against all of it and think adding layers of qualifiers pointless.

My comment was more in response to an earlier one of yours

"Would you deny your 14 year old daughter a life free from financial concern?"

They're aren't a lot of people who would pay $10 million to sleep with a 14 year old, so I don't think there is a risk of it becoming widespread.

'Selling her body' is a terribly misleading metaphor. Chattel slavery involves the selling of bodies, prostitution is more like selling labour for a fixed period. Of course, people use the 'selling her body' metaphor on purpose to frame the practice in a maximally negative way.

If our hypothetical 14 year old girl was selling her body, surely that would mean that Epstein owns her body after the transaction? If he doesn't, then he hasn't 'bought' anything.

Please stop arguing semantics. I hate when discussions devolve into word games as a way of avoiding the actual validity of an argument, and if this is the line of reasoning you're going to choose I'm not going to entertain this discussion further.

If word choice is your problem, is 'renting' better than 'buying'?

Either way, the negative externalities of turning sex into a consumptive act to be exchanged as a market is something that should be discouraged, regardless of age.

If word choice is your problem, is 'renting' better than 'buying'?

Renting out your body isn't anywhere near as bad as selling it, renting your body (and your brain) is what people do for work 8 hours ever weekday.

I'm perfectly happy to discuss the issue itself, I just think that such discussions are much more fruitful when everyone avoids using loaded language.

For example, if I'm arguing against someone who opposes abortion being legal, I'm not going to go along with them using the term 'baby-murder' in place of abortion.

You probably don't think of 'selling her body' as being equivalent, but I think that just demonstrates how successful the activist framing has been. It implies that prostitution is a type of slavery, which it (usually) isn't.

After all, I would argue that a woman who marries a man for his money (to a first approximation, most women who have ever existed) is 'selling her body' to a much greater degree than a prostitute, who is merely renting it. And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel.

And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel.

No one held Anna Nicole Smith in any esteem when she married that geezer, and that was the central example of marrying a man for his money.

That's true, but that was confounded by their gigantic age gap. Plus, I can't imagine the average person thinking better of a prostitute version of Anna who just slept with him for pay.

I find it ironic you consider the idea of a women 'selling her body' as loaded language in recent vernacular when and then proceed to issue the statement "After all, I would argue that a woman who marries a man for his money (to a first approximation, most women who have ever existed) is 'selling her body' to a much greater degree than a prostitute, who is merely renting it. And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel." which is a much more modern interpretation of marriage popularized in the last decade.

It's clear we won't come to agreement. I think the modern materialist/rationalist/objectivist notion that marriage is generally a pragmatic institution based off of materialism and risk aversion is generally false in a historical sense beyond well documented edge cases. This simplification is what largely damaged marriage as an institution and changes the game theory to make marriage seem risky with no real benefit. When marriage was considered a permanent union, people prioritized very different things in a partner than simply material wealth. The modern consumptive and transactional nature of sex and marriage has created significant costs in population growth and stability, family stability, and child rearing.

Women who sell their bodies for money

I.e literally almost all women?

When was the last time a female doctor married a male plumber?

There is not nearly enough effort backing up your substantive point, here. Please engage with effort, charity, and an eye toward writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

That is a very strong "maybe". As something that happens once in a long while and secretly, it might not be terrible, might even be the least bad thing. However, I'm strongly against this becoming normalized and accepted. It's nasty, even if there might be some value to it.

Apparently up until very recently in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, you were allowed to marry at 14, which would have been one way to make this bargain legal. My research for this was not extensive, so I might be overlooking something, like maybe a 14 year old in those states was only able to marry someone who's also 14 or something. But these laws allowing underage marriage in these states with parental consent were overturned within the last 5 years.

The girl agrees

This is the crux of the matter. The whole idea behind various types of ages of majority is that executive functions required to consciously agree to X are sufficiently developed at age Y that only a small minority of people is not mature enough to do that and it's so small that we can identify it via various special needs education. Of course, anyone who's worked as a paramedic or a cop or a DMV officer knows that it's a bold-faced lie and the society would be better off if we had emancipation licenses, but that's a different story.

The whole idea behind the age of consent is that while this specific 14-year old might really understand the implications of having sex for a lot of money with an ugly dude, we have no real way of knowing if she does. If she really was a precocious girl and there was an emancipation test she could take and she took it and passed it, I would agree to treat her as an adult and let her have sex with Epstein no matter what her parents thought about it.

However, I don't know what I would do if she was only ten and took this test and passed it. My first reaction would be "well, obviously this test is wrong, it's too easy, there's no way she could've passed it", but what if it's not, what if she goes "bitch, my parents were killed in Tigray and I've spend the last two years working sixteen hours a day to provide for myself and my two little siblings while learning enough English to be able to call you a little bitch, so what if the dude is a disgusting chomo, so what I'm literally prepubescent, it's ten million US dollars for one intercourse, I could airlift the best doctor in the world to suture the bleeding tears in my vagina after the deal is done, move my family out of this festering shithole to a first-world country, get an education, become a PMC, hire a good head shrink to help me deal with trauma when I'm 35"?

P.S. That's why Twitter must die, how the hell are you supposed to answer this in 280 characters or fewer?

I really don't get why it shouldn't be allowed. This isn't even illegal in many places and in many places where the age of consent is 16, it was 14 not long ago. Is having the age of consent two years lower really such a massive mistake that was causing more than $10 million worth of harm every time a 14 year old had sex? That's more than we're willing to spend to prevent someone from dying.

I don't think he's trolling. I think he's showing how irrational people about sexual morality. It's an excellent poll that reveals the absurdity of most people's black and white thinking on this issue. A lot of people talk as though if it's bad, it should be stopped at all costs, even though no one actually acts like they really believe that.

Every time

Presumably the offer (with the same sum attached) is not extended to every 14-year-old propositioned for sex, but people have a reasonable fear that some Schelling fence would be torn down (what's the exact n such that you can buy consensual sex with a 14 year old for n but not less? What do you say to the hypothetical age-gap couple who point out that they are banned from something that is allowed for millionaires?) which can only end in the age of (free, as in beer) consent just being driven back down to 14.

Also, something about that old Scott post about trading off sacred and profane values.

Also, something about that old Scott post about trading off sacred and profane values.

The modern day west is basically 100% profane. It does not get to claim anything is sacred any more after its behaviour over the past 60 years, any such claims are just hypocrisy at this point and deserve to be called out.

Westerners have killed God, and now they deserve all the consequences of that, good and hard.

I can't find the post now, but it was about a more general sense of "sacred" than the religious one, and revolved specifically around the observation that many people partitioned possible desiderata in two different categories that they refused or downright found it offensive to compare and trade off - so questions like "how many people breaking a leg would be too many to prevent a rape" would be met with "infinitely many" or just incoherent anger rather than serious consideration. In the suggested interpretation, this would be because sexual autonomy is "sacred" whereas mere non-injury is "profane". I don't see our society having renounced things that are sacred in the sense of "how DARE you compromise on anything in this category for the sake of something outside of it".

Many of those scenarios are sufficiently convoluted that the natural reaction is to say "there's someone setting it up, just kill the one who set it up".

Sure, but often (in the case of concrete policy proposals) they are only as convoluted as the reality we now inhabit, so even if that is the natural reaction is quite maladaptive. Besides, I'd consider (a possible interpretation of) The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as yes-chadding the refusal to trade, and even the German constitutional prohibition against (state action) pushing the trolley problem lever is adjacent (though it arguably goes further and prohibits positive action to trade sacred values against each other). Then, of course, the juxtaposition of fierce opposition to child labour and the relative indifference to child poverty and starvation.

Is having the age of consent two years lower really such a massive mistake that was causing more than $10 million worth of harm every time a 14 year old had sex?

I basically agree with your core point, but I want to remind you that most people aren't utilitarians. Hanania surely knows this, so repeatedly pointing out that deontologists (even ones that don't know that's their ethical foundation) aren't utilitarians is just kind of pointless.

Pretty much everywhere it’s 14/15/16 it’s still 18 for prostitution.

Leave it to Americans to make arbitrary age boundaries the end all be all of morality.

  • 18? Too young to have a beer. Old enough to go die in war though. Also old enough to have a say in who the leader of the armed forces of the world hegemon should be.
  • 16? Too young to have sex. Just old enough to get inside a metal body and yeet yourself through the highway at 75 MPH.

16? Too young to have sex

16 is actually the age of consent in the vast majority of states

I agree that driving is more dangerous than having sex, but it's better to learn young, while sex is better to put off.

I'm struggling to even understand this sentence. I didn't bother getting a license until after college (when I finally needed one), and had the best sex of my life between 13 and 20. Because it turns out it's really fun when you have teenage stamina and basically unlimited time on your hands during summer break.

The optimal time to learn to drive is when you're a teenager. You can't learn to drive as well in your 20s.

I didn't have much sexual experience before 25, but I don't remember it being any different than sex at any other age. I don't think there has been any change in my stamina. And free time? How long does it take to have sex?

How long does it take to have sex?

An entire four day weekend ideally, IIRC. Good luck handling that in your thirties: I know I couldn't.

That just seems like an absurd thing to do, even if you're young. How do teenagers even do that when they live with their parents?

Hanania strikes me as the classical Redditor-style "but what if the child consents though?" nonce posting this kind of thing as a normalization attempt.

It's interesting that the percentage of women saying it's ok has been going up while the percentage of men saying it's ok has been go down. When I first saw the poll, the ratio of men saying it should be allowed to men saying it shouldn't was around 1:8, which was higher than than it was for women at the time.

His follow-up made me chuckle. Decent trolling:

"I love how all the people mad at this have names like Bob456Flyers and their photos indicate that they can’t afford a recent phone. Moralism and inability to consider hypotheticals are hallmarks of the lower classes."

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1721306928108954104

Why are the lower classes and dysfunctional people so obsessed with pedophila? I think two things are going on. First, they have low IQs, so can’t understand statistical reasoning and how rare it is. Second, they feel like losers and pedophiles are the one group society ranks lower, so they need to imagine they’re fighting them everywhere.

This is almost certainly true, especially in prison, where murderers and violent drug offenders luxuriate in having someone below them on the totem pole to bully.

Moralism and inability to consider hypotheticals are hallmarks of the lower classes

Yeah, yet another reason why lower classes being handed power via the ballot box is bad for humanity as a whole long term, however equally pandora's box is now open and there is no way that we're getting votes taken away from them.

It's another reason why I am in favour of artificial wombs btw, all you need to do is continue feeding the lower classes memes to reduce their natal birth rates, ideally bringing them to a point as close to zero as possible, while you grow genetically selected superior humans at such a rate that the political power of the low intelligence people is diluted out to basically nothing because there is a large mass of high IQ selected humans out there that can deal with basic economics who will outvote their bad policies.

You don't even need to discourage child rearing in the lower classes, it's fine to let them raise genetically selected children as their own (because growth environment has little impact on adult inteligence and therefore propensity to understand economics once you are beyond a certain floor), all you have to do is convince them to not have biological children and this could be phrased in terms of women's liberation (they no longer have to suffer the curse of Eve), easier parenting (why risk having children with genetic defects when you can get basically a perfect baby delivered to you via courier) or even generic wokeness (why do you care about your own genetic legacy, thats like selfish and bad, mmkay?).

Two generations of this and low info voters will be an irrlevance, much like the Druze are in Israel.

The lower classes will simply not do this, because to the extent they want to raise children, they, like everyone else, want to raise their own children. I suspect the main users of such a system would be homosexuals and infertile couples(that is, it would be a substitutionary good for adoption/surrogacy). Unless you simply plan to sterilize everyone under 100 IQ, you won’t wind up with stupid people choosing to raise someone else’s smart kids.

Anyone who votes no:

  1. Doesn't know the value of 10M USD with 7 years of compounding. Hell, I'd take a bit of molesting myself for that much money at the age of 21. Forget consexual sex.
  2. Isn't aware that losing one's virginity at ages 15-16 is not that uncommon.
  3. Shouldn't be allowed to vote.

I'll bite. I say no.

Age of consent for adult-child intercourse should be treated as iron clad. The second child abuse (especially child sexual abuse) becomes quantifiable through a monetary value, pandora's box opens. These kinds of thought experiments should always be rejected by answering with a blanket no. It's on principle on what laws, morals and values mean to be society. The free-market value of human dignity is pathetically low. That is reason enough to not allow it to interact with money. Nothing good will come out of it.

People conflate questions phrased like 'should X be allowed' with 'should you do X'. What you choose to do with your own free-will is your choice. Whether society chooses to support you is a whole another question all together.

We already quantify it by setting budgets for how much we're willing spend to enforce the laws against it.

Exactly. Everything ever is quantified implicitly if not evident. The quantification isn't visible in what you do, but what you don't. (Not spending trillions of dollars fighting X)

The $10m is just a bullshit mind worm to make readers think about “what price” is worth any psychosexual damage. In practice, any legalization is just an inevitable one-way trip to kids pulling tricks for $50 knock off bags or whatever.

Obsessing over the very high dollar amount is what Hanania’s post is trying to make you do, to question your beliefs. A “fair” question would reduce the amount to $5000 to see what people say.

I absolutely agree that in practice what will happen is that you'd get poor kids prostituting themselves out for trivial sums and that it would be a bad thing overall for society. However when have "the results in practice" ever stopped modern westereners from loosening sexual mores before?

This here is yet another example of something that I would be highly against if it was proposed back in my home country, but would support in the west. Back home we see sex as special, it is a sacred bond between two people who love each other very much, and bringing money into the equation is just soiling this link. I would be dead against this shit, the societal damage caused by weakening the sexual mores of society are far far greater than the $10 million benefit to the girl in question.

However in the west where we have "it's not a big deal, it's just sex duh" ruling the roost sexual intercourse is completely profane when young women can sleep around with guys their alcohol addled brains temporarily found hot, only to never hear from them again and not consider this to be a big deal. In this society the sexual mores have been already scattered to the winds, and so the $10 million benefit to the girl in question is the main consideration when deciding if something is good or bad, because according to the westerners own rhetoric, "it's only sex" so how bad can the consequences be (in reality, really bad, but westerners have long since reached the point where words have no effect on them, only the rod of consequences can teach them anything now).

To any westerners who were fine with the rest of the sexual revolution but don't want to see it taken to its logical conclusion all I have to say is: actions, meet consequences.

What do you see as the practical benefits of stricter sexual mores as practiced in your home country?

Not at all. I think the big number is the point. Infact those who are not willing to move the number slider around are conceding that they are not capable of not thinking in black and white and dare I say by extension, thinking at all. There is no free lunch and everything has a price and a cost, if not evident by real cost, then opportunity cost and cost of substitutes. (You clearly don't condone spending the entire worlds budget to fight children selling sex, so the necessity to fight it is finite)

I think the 10M USD beautifully illustrates that the moral high horse sitters are so irrational that they can't think past "selling sex bad" even when the positive so far greatly outweighs the negative that it's borderline comical.

Let me flip this. We rid the world of hunger, poverty, and disease, but Epstein and only Epstein has to be given free rein to rape any child he wants. You have the power to make the judgement call. There are absolutely no nth order effects.

Also at 5k USD. I would still vote yes. Because I'm a libertarian. The actors in the scenario know better how much X is worth to them than me. Even at 25c. Even if they have to pay for it. But putting all of that out there is just going to bring forth too much noise that I CBA to deal with.

The big number is the point, but in exactly the opposite way. The big number bulldozes opposition, the big number is designed to make you drop all opposition. Is a man GAY if he says he would SUCK ELON MUSK’s DICK for ONE BILLION DOLLARS? Is a woman a WHORE because she would FUCK a RICH GUY for OWNERSHIP OF HERMÉS? These are all ridiculous troll questions.

In practice, it’s a question about prostitution, age and consent. The slippery slope argument applies and is valid. Dealing with a hypothetical that gets the result Hanania wants is giving in.

Is a man GAY if he says he would SUCK ELON MUSK’s DICK for ONE BILLION DOLLARS?

He is gay if he is attracted to men. What he does for how much money is irrelevant.

Is a woman a WHORE because she would FUCK a RICH GUY for OWNERSHIP OF HERMÉS?

A woman is a whore if she sells sex professionally. The rest is irrelevant.

Only absolute brainlets would be stumbled by any of these troll questions or Hanania's question. It's really not that hard. It's a simple yes/no question and thinking otherwise your brain malfunctioning as intended by the poster.

In practice, it’s a question about prostitution, age and consent. The slippery slope argument applies and is valid. Dealing with a hypothetical that gets the result Hanania wants is giving in.

If you are part of the high school debate club then sure. Every twitter post out there is an opportunity to dive into the finer details of ethics and have a stimulating discussion about political morality.

I'm pretty sure Hanania wants majority No's as evidenced by him making fun of the moralizers. This is that red/pill blue pill shit all over again where the moralists can't choose the rational option even when their life depends on it.

“We’ve established what you are, madam, now we’re just haggling over the price.”

And to this I respond that there is literally nothing wrong with being a whore, indeed I respect women who know their value and go out to get it. There is a reason prostitution is seen as the oldest profession. I respect them in the same way that I respect professional sewer divers who jump into literal shit to clean up blockages. I don't go "ew" at them, I thank them for their service to humanity.

What I do dislike though are the women who sleep around for free but still value sex however are not good at handling the consequences of it. Becuase you give away your body so cheaply that's basically an admission you have zero value. I dislike them for the same reason I would dislike someone who goes around diving into shit for fun as a hobby.

There is a massive difference between a whore and a cheap whore.

Professional prostitutes are not the contemptable women in our society, the contemptable women are those who sleep around with 50 different hot guys in vain to try and get one of them to commit to her and keep going even though the last 3 dozen of them bailed because this new guy is "different".

The whole point of a hypothetical is to entertain it at face value. And one of the default priors is that its a one off. Nowhere does it say that the scenario above is going to be repeated enough times in public for everyone to know about such that the social fabric in and of itself is is at stake here.

Nothing in the prior, taken at face value, indicates it's an one-off.

Even if it is not a one off the fact that very few people can pay $10 million per sex act with an underage child means that the net impact will be minimal.

Seeing as approximately no one ever will offer a life-changing sum of money to an underage girl in exchange for sex, much less in a scenario where both parents are fine with this, I'm quite comfortable rejecting such a hypothetical offer and signaling contempt towards the notion of elites literally buying our children.

Contrary to what some rationalists think, you cannot simply win any argument just by inserting arbitrarily large numbers.

Or people who vote 'no' value their morality and beliefs over capital and short-term self-interest. I rather value that most people are unwilling to compromise, at least hypothetically, for something that increases short term capital wealth. Selfish individualism is why I can't get behind objectivism, so the fact that twitter males largely deny the right gives me hope for the respondents of the poll.

Doesn't know the value of 10M USD with 7 years of compounding.

The value of $10M with 7 years of compounding (accessible in 7 years) is exactly $10M, as measured by Net Present Value. Actually it's probably a hair lower, as the beneficiaries likely have a different discount rate than the investment.

I don't get it. Why wouldn't it be worth more after having compounding interest for 7 years?

Because the net present value of me giving you a dollar right now is a dollar.

I'd like to offer you a trade: You give me $20 now, and I'll give you $21 in 1000 years. $21 > $20, so surely my half of the deal is worth more.

The value of $10m invested for any amount of time starting now is (by the linked definition) $10m. If you could guarantee 10% returns, then $10 million today = $11 million next year = $12.1 million in two years = $19.49m in 7 years, etc.

I still don't get it. We're talking about concrete value of money invested, and what it is now, vs what it will be in 7 years. You seem to be talking about some sort of philosophical experiment about what money might hypothetically be worth if we accept certain premises, or something.

I was initially as perplexed as you were, but it seems the crux is present value, which in this case is precisely the amount handed to you today.

But @ulyssessword said:

The value of $10M with 7 years of compounding (accessible in 7 years) is exactly $10M

It seems like either he's saying that after 7 years of $10M collecting compounding interest it's worth $10M for some reason, which is wrong, or he's saying that he doesn't believe in calculating value of predictable future values of money, which seems like an esoteric argument for philosophical purposes, without real-world application. Maybe that 2nd argument is the present value argument, but I still don't get it, or don't understand why it's a useful argument at all, unfortunately :(

Are you sure you are not confusing the Future Value with the Present Value? The present value of $x today, is x. It's future value is the present value compounded over the hold period.

The discount rate you should use to convert between the two should probably be your expected rate of return. If you really want to get into it, it's possible that the expected rate of return and your personal discount rate are different. If you believe even in a very weak form of the Capital Asset Pricing Model though, you should still discount that excess return back to the risk-free rate, because the difference should explained by the difference in risk (Lots of details about the Capital Market Line omitted). Or, put another way, all assets have the same effective discount rate to a risk-neutral measure. The conversion should not depend on the assets you plan to hold over the period.

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In one sense you're right, but his implication is that different people have different (and arguably more or less correct) preferences about when to spend money, or personal discount rates, and that his personal discount rate is much lower than usual, in that he's willing to let it sit for a long time and enjoy it later.

That's a very strange financial outlook, and I didn't get the impression it was implied. You should be spending money during your (or your child's) youth because the returns on a better childhood/adolescence far outweigh the returns on the stock market. As the most obvious example, that's why college loans exist. That rationale could just as easily apply to highschool or earlier, and to non-academic pursuits as well.

I don't think that's true when you're talking about ten million. Like, sure, some excellent tutors and a college education are valuable, but that's not ten million, and there are things you will want to spend money on as an adult that you can't as a teenager.

Hm, sometimes one has thoughts that are stupid, doesn't think about them too much, and writes them on the internet. Grandparent was one of those times. Sorry!

And why does the NPV matter at all? Other than mental masturbation? Also did you not read the hypothetical, it can't be withdrawn for 7 years, present value is irrelevant, the money doesn't exist in the present.

  1. 7 years is a a reasonable amount of time where most peoples discounting doesn't really tip their yes/no decision.

  2. Holding 10M for 7 years is perfectly profitable under a 1000 realistic scenarios. After the 7 years you will be able to buy more things than not. Thats value, everything else is fugazi.

I vote no because Epstein getting to indulge his sick desire is inherently bad. Whether or not the girl is better off or not from the exchange is immaterial.

Why is it inherently bad?

Because it is sick and perverted.

Why does that mean it's bad for it to be indulged?

It simply is. There is no point continuing to ask "but why?" This is what I mean by "inherent".

You may as well ask why is it bad to kill a person. "Because they don't want to be killed." Why does that matter? "Because that deprives them of more utility than you gain by doing the murder." Why is that bad? "It just is".

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop.

Absolutely; miscegenation was always self-evidently awful, disgusting, and against nature, despite the elaborate philosophical frameworks we have constructed to obscure that truth from ourselves.

Sex is not actually a big deal. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate moral/religious frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

Which is mainly why those who subscribe the most to those frameworks are always primarily worried about the spectre of '70s sexuality coming back, even though the dominant model of sexuality encroaching on their moral frameworks and worldviews is quite a bit different these days.

It is certainly self-evident to me that there are certain groups that have strong incentives to equate sex they don't like to murder; whether that equation has any factual basis, on the other hand, is a different story entirely.

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

Which bit are you declaring to be against human nature? I can see three specific possibilities here.

  1. 14-year-olds fucking.
  2. Specifically older people fucking 14-year-olds.
  3. Prostitution.

#1 is very, very obviously not a self-evident wrong. AoC of 15+ is a recent innovation, and still isn't a worldwide thing. #2 also seems a fairly common practice in history with few objections. You can make the argument in the case of #3, I'll admit; revulsion for it does seem extremely widespread, even if I'd question whether that should inform law.

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

This is about as clean a violation of the "consensus building" rule as it gets. Please don't do that.

Would "I hold this truth to be self-evident" be an acceptable formulation?

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Getting a paper cut is also bad, but I'd still get one for $10 million.

Your morality is evil in that is denies someone of 10M USD because you feel icky about the entire thing.

Your morality is evil because it allows billionaires to rape child prostitutes without consequence.

She consented therefore it isn't rape by defnition.

She's 14 and therefore below the age of consent and therefore sex with her by an adult is rape by definition.

That depends on which country you are in.

If she was 4 then it would be much more obviously evil. 14 is too close to 15 (most common global aoc) for 10M usd not to muddy the picture. I'm sure there are 15 year olds with the mental age of 12. Or 18 year olds with the mental age of 16.

No, money doesn't muddy the picture. It makes it worse.

Prostitution is worse than normal sex. Child prostitution is worse than normal statutory rape.

The use of money and power to achieve immoral ends is itself immoral.

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Keeping your facts the same, your arguments are an apology for child sexual abuse.

Children cannot give consent.

In the myriad of child sexual abuse cases that have been reported in the news, statuary rape is certainly among them.

Are you of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is contingent on monetary compensation to the victims?

Children cannot give consent.

I am so incredibly disillusioned by the persistent poor use of language on this topic and the fact that the only tool in the toolbox for the current Morality Police is consent. I've read the professional philosophers on the topic, and once you see it, this sort of base simplification is big oof.

The first basic classification is whether you mean, "Children cannot give factual consent," or, "Children cannot give legal consent." If it's the latter, then the response is simply not relevant to these sorts of hypotheticals about morality. If it's the former, then huge questions remain. Why can't they? What does factually consenting consist of? What capacity do they lack that prevents them from doing so? Why is this particular use of "consent" so different from many other areas where we might use the term "consent" to mean things that everyone agrees a child would be capable of doing? What's the difference?

Now, we could have rich discussions on these questions. I don't know that I personally think they can all be answered in a simple way that comes to the result that you might like, not because I think that child sex is good, but more because I think the "consent only" sexual ethic is probably wrong. But we basically never even get to the meaningful questions, because this oversimplification is viewed as an atomic first principle. It's just a thought-terminating slogan that kills any meaningful progress rather than elucidating anything interesting.

This is why I also think that Hanania's efforts are more low-effort trolling unless he follows it up with something that really pokes people to consider how this question really rips raw their deficient conception of a sexual ethic.

My thinking was both legal and factual, if I understand you correctly. I do not think a 14 year-old is mature enough and understands the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with an adult, simply because of their inexperience. Even if the adult they is a billionaire in exchange for payment. This is not to say younger person could not agree to partake in the activity, but the difference in age and social stature on the part of the child renders any of their agreement to be coerced and manipulated.

I do not think a 14 year-old is mature enough and understands the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with an adult, simply because of their inexperience.

Ah, something like the "knowledge" prong in Westen's parlance. So, then, suppose that we instituted a top tier sexual education to help children understand the social consequence of consent to sexual activity with an adult. Would that make it fine?

This is not to say younger person could not agree to partake in the activity, but the difference in age and social stature on the part of the child renders any of their agreement to be coerced and manipulated.

...and we've taken a massive left turn, actually. This is a totally different and contradictory basis on which to make the claim. It sort of also comes from nowhere. We basically never say that age/social stature differences inherently make agreements coerced/manipulated, invalidating consent. We don't even have to go to hypotheticals about Taylor Swift wanting to have sex with someone... though we could; how could a "normal" person possibly consent to having sex with Taylor Swift, given her immense social stature advantage? This sort of reasoning kills a normal person's ability to consent to the transaction of buying a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert! How could they possibly consent, given the massive different in social stature?!

Replace 'billionaire' or 'Taylor Swift' with gym coach, music teacher or religious leader, I still think the age and status difference between a child and an adult makes such an agreement coercive.

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Instead of bringing up Taylor Swift you should have brought up R. Kelly he demonstrates your point better.

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By "consent" you mean "consent (correctly)", which means you're independently judging there's a non-consent reason the child shouldn't be having sex, which is the reason the child shouldn't have sex. Why not just say '14 year olds shouldn't have sex with 18 year olds for '? Why say they 'can't consent'?

I do not think a 14 year-old is mature enough and understands the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with an adult, simply because of their inexperience.

And I don't think black people are mature enough and understand the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with a white person (or other black people), especially because they commit a lot more sexual crime than the average white person (and crime in general, suggesting a lack of impulse control, understanding of social consequences, and general maturity), and have lower IQs than the average teenager. Allowing them to experience such a powerful stimulus like sex, or have someone else use them to access such, is therefore bad for them.

If we're going to start drawing lines on "social consequences" and "maturity" you ultimately run into the problem where there are objectively better lines to draw on than mere age- so what's different here other than "society now believes it's more proper to discriminate based on age rather than race when it comes to what we think they're capable of [consenting to]"?

(Of course, I'm sure our modern phrenology asserting the subhumanity of the under-25 set is totally correct this time.)

Are you of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is contingent on monetary compensation to the victims?

Very much yes. If its worse to rape someone AND steal from them. It's better to rape someone and pay them. The rest of it is just algebra.

child sexual abuse

I'm going to come out and say this: when debating with opponents of Anglospheric AoC, this term currently obscures considerably more than it illuminates.

The reason is that it is defined in two ways:

  1. legally, as sex with children under the age of 16-18 depending on jurisdiction and context
  2. etymologically, as sex with children that is bad ("abuse")

But the people you are arguing with are claiming that these two things do not coincide! We believe that things satisfying #1 do not necessarily satisfy #2. So the use of this term essentially assumes the falsehood of our claims.

Are you of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is contingent on monetary compensation to the victims?

I can't speak for others, of course, but I'm of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is for the most part dependent on whether it's consensual - i.e., whether or not it's "real" rape. The monetary compensation is not super-relevant; I would consider it morally wrong, for instance, to rape a screaming/struggling 14-year-old and then pay him/her $10,000,000, and I would consider it NBD to have consensual sex with a 14-year-old without money changing hands. The only relevance here of the $10,000,000 is that people will consent to many more things for $10,000,000 payment than for $0.

I am, in fact, opposed to legalizing giving notorious convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein sexual access to underage girls for any sums, not only due to personal disgust about the idea but also considering that one would be creating some huge potential precedents.

I think we should have more precedents where people have the opportunity to obtain millions of dollars.

Why not just kill Epstein and take his shit, in that case? Less morally repugnant.

(Around 15.5M after fees and taxes)

I do think there's a pretty big gap in sexual maturity between 14 and 15-16. I feel no guilt for going "nice" whenever I see a hot teacher get fired for having sex with a male student 15 or older, but when he's 13 or 14 that seems fucked up.

$10 million worth of fucked up?


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