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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28139 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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I had originally posted this in the Friday fun thread but it turns out that it was killing the vibe in there. Not sure what I was thinking. Anyway...

Note: I will completely qualify Portugal Europe and Portland Oregon in this article because they're easy to mix up.

Is liberalism peaking in Oregon?

In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.

Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal Europe model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the 2.3% of the population that's black.

As an occasional drug enjoyer, I do find it a relief to wander the streets of Portland Oregon squirting ketamine up my nostrils like I'm a visionary tech CEO without fear of police. But in broad strokes it appears to be a disaster.

Indeed, the ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions.

By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.

https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/02/21/fentanyl-overdose-rate-oregon-spikes

Oregon's fatal fentanyl overdose rate spiked from 2019 to 2023, showing the highest rate of increase among U.S. states, according to The Oregonian's crunching of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal Europe's system. Some stark differences!

https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf

Briefly, Portugal Europe uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe.

In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.

The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.

Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)

“Portland [Oregon] is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.

That's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.

After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.

The NYT again https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/us/oregon-drug-decriminalization-rollback-measure-110.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/3zksH)

Several prominent Democrats have expressed support for a rollback, including Mike Schmidt, a progressive prosecutor in the Portland area. After the decriminalization initiative passed in 2020, Mr. Schmidt implemented its provisions early, saying it was time to move past “failed practices” to “focus our limited law enforcement resources to target high-level, commercial drug offenses.”

But he has reassessed his position, he said in an interview this week. The proliferation of fentanyl requires a new approach that treats addiction as a health issue while holding people accountable, he said. The open drug use downtown and near parks and schools has made people feel unsafe, Mr. Schmidt said.

“We have been hearing from constituents for a while that this has been really detrimental to our community and to our streets,” he said. Mr. Schmidt said the new bill still prioritizes treatment and uses jail as a last resort. That, he said, could ultimately become the model Oregon offers to states around the country.

The governor has indicated that she would sign.

Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use. I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help, but fentanyl complicates the situation substantially. People need to hit bottom before they seek help (or so goes the popular saying) but fentanyl is so potent and unpredictable that they're dying of an unexpected OD before they find themselves at bottom, ready to seek change.

Frankly, I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.

I believe this shows Oregon is not quite as ideologically liberal as previously led to believe. Or, at least, not anymore.

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.

I was hyped about it myself, even though I had read in enough detail about Portugal as an analogue to have some concerns.

I was also concerned about the location of running the experiment. I wasn't familiar with Portugal's drug culture prior to its efforts, but I am at least passingly familiar with the culture of drug use on the west coast and its role as a haven. Even if Portland's weather is terrible in comparison to San Diego, they were starting off the bat with lax policing and a permissive populace. The referendum was putting in writing what was really already going on.

Was 4 years long enough to run this experiment? Could it have performed better in a more neutral territory to remove some confounding variables?

I thought the same thing too until I saw that Oregon's overdose rate was among the lowest in the country at time the law was enacted and continues to be relatively low even after the recent spike. West Virginia has the worst rate in the country and it saw a similar doubling over roughly the same period, and that isn't exactly a lax jurisdiction. I wonder how much of the surge is simply due to an unusually low base rate in an area where you'd expect it to be higher.

What are the numerator and denominator in the overdose rate?

Critics are out in force, arguing that...the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts... I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help

Object level conversation already lengthy below, but want to take this in a tangent... about this reverse moral proscriptive perspective of government. It's not quite horseshoe theory because it inverts around pure liberalism.

On the one side, you have this idea that the government can prohibit or regulate certain behaviors. Rules against drugs, prostitution, gambling, buying alcohol on Sundays, etc. have traditionally existed within a concept of appropriate government power. These things may be associated with social conservatism, but more broadly the whole range of government's regulatory power is not broadly understoods as allowed only narrowly through a liberal perspective but as a (varyingly constrained) right of the democratic government to govern.

In the middle you've got a liberal ethos, where we should be maximizing personal freedom, only intervening where it threaten's another's freedom. Here most government regulation would be understood as only justified through protecting freedoms.

But then you get to the other side where you allow behaviors but demand socialized payments for the costs of those behaviors. Here the idea is flipped from the right to regulate to the obligation to provide additional services. Instead of saying, 'hey you can't gamble" to the gambler, we say, "hey, you have to subsidize the externalities of his gambling" to his neighbor. The druggy has the right to drugulate, but I don't have a right to not pay for the addict's access to hotlines, resources, etc (let alone the costs I have to pay for the infrastructural externalities).

I'm struggling to find the right words to describe this framework, but it's definitely a phenomenon.

And I want to add that very rarely would any individual be maximally inside one of these three frameworks across their political beliefs, but rather it's about the proportion and scope. All forms of general welfare do exist inside of this third frame, but it's traditionally seen as something to be limited and something that ideally comes from true disadvantage and need, not as a ballooning response to greasing self-destructive 'freedoms'.

To go full circle:

I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help

I completely disagree, and this is a runaway bad idea. If you want to make something legal / unregulated, then it stops being the government's job to prop it up against it's bad effects. Leave that to charity and NGOs.

If drugs are illegal, then I'm all for also pouring tons of money into helping people who use them. I'm all for a flexible justice system that can substitute help and supervised second chances for punishment and imprisonment. But if drugs are legal, then suck it up and use your freedoms responsibly. Don't demand the rest of the public to pay for the government to be the 'cool parent' who bails you out for the rest of your life.

You propose a new dichotomy between right and left in the US at least. A very common online critique of the right is that it is happy to eternalize the cost to companies who defect (food stamps for Walmart employees and bailouts for banks). Your addition would be that the left believes we should do so at the level of the individual (instead of demanding personal responsibility).

It’s a sort of measure of the things we shrug at.

That is a brilliant analysis. Trying to put it in my own words so that I can steal it, I realise that there is a British NHS way of framing it.

The three founding principles of the NHS are that: one, it is funded out of general taxation; two, free at the point of use; three, treatment is based on clinical need, regardless of the ability to pay. The fourth principle was silent; one didn't say out loud. The NHS didn't ask why the patient needed treatment. No-one was refused treatment because their illness was their own stupid fault.

There have always been worrywart who feared that the silence wouldn't hold. Treating liver disease and type II diabetes is expensive. Why is the tax payer on the hook for peoples' drunkenness and gluttony? The question gets asked and used to justify the government intervening in peoples lives, making alcohol harder to get to spare peoples livers, and making fatty food harder to get in the hope of shrinking their waist lines. Both to save the NHS money. Both current UK public policy.

The previous paragraph is very British. An alternative response to the very same question, uses the issue to justify cutting the funding to the NHS. Fund treatment for illnesses that strike at random, but stop subsidizing bad lifestyle choices.

I'm struggling to find the right words to describe this framework,...

Me too. Here is my attempt:

  • tight budget paternalism The government has the obligation to raise taxes to pay for rescuing people from the bad consequences of unwise choices AND the power to limit peoples choices by punishing expensively bad choices, with the aim of discouraging them.

  • no budget freedom The government protects people from others who would tell them: No! Bansturbators tolerate this in return for not having to pay for rescuing people from the consequences of their own bad choices.

  • budget busting freedom The government has the obligation to raise taxes to pay for rescuing people from the bad consequences of unwise choices. Bad choices multiply and get worse until the money runs out.

Another attempt:

When there are potentially bad choices that can be made, do you

Limit the ability to make such choices

Allow them to make such choices (and to suffer the consequences)

Support them in making such choices

I'm keen to get some mention of budget or money into the short name.

Why? I reckon that the way that Support fails is that the proponents come up with a plan. The plan is good in itself, but costs ten times what is politically feasible. The plan goes ahead anyway, with 10% of the funding that it really needs. Fails badly :-(

A good comment reminds us of Scott's epic critique of addiction research. Perhaps we don't have affordable answers to addiction, and Suport has a good plan that requires 100 times the politically feasible funding. Gets 1% of the funding it needs; fails very badly.

I could not agree more.

I can think of very few world views I fight more hostile than one which boils down to "Other people have every right to do self destructive hedonism, but no responsibility to reap the obvious consequences. And you have no right to try to stop them, and total responsibility to deal with the consequences for them." It is the ethos of the spoiled child writ large.

If one compares drug decriminalization, or general decriminalization policies with countries that follow law and order, the later not only have less drug abuse but also don't have to imprison that many people. The influence of such policy of drug criminalization for most of the world with such policies is for people successfully be dissuaded from abusing harmful drugs.

Drug abuse is a societal scourge and it is another example how libertine policies and attitutes lead to greater suffering but also greater imposition on people's freedom than the sacrifice required from making good trade offs and abstaining from harmful behavior. For the loss of what is good by becoming addicted to drugs is quite greater.

At the end of the day the libertine's have a cope that their policy leads to worse consequences but people get good and hard what they choose. But we shouldn't accept this cope way off thinking. The worse outcomes and society sucking more under such policies is good reason to not respect this course.

Same could also be said with obesity, or even the long term problems of lack of children.

We live in an age where there is a crisis of lack of smaller self sacrifices, for ultimate a greater negative end. In line with the proverb "An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure".

Now, you can't force people to have children, or not get fat, in the same way you can enforce criminalization of drugs, although there are things you could do, but the moralists on these issues are correct. Contrarily the people who have been spreading apathy and downplaying have had a corrosive effect on society.

Beyond just policy, there is also a morality involved with society that does end up relating to what happens and pressures people and also affects the law. So we can judge and contrast the libertine morality with more conservative one on drugs and other issues.

The ridicule of the people trying to dissuade people from bad behaviors and such campaigns, especially on drugs have been one of the most unjust reactions and self destructive ones for society. That kind of judgementalism against wise moralism is disastrous. We need the right kind of moralism. A good society is one where there is moral pressure in the right directions. While a completely non judgemental society is impossible.

Now that we see decline in various important issues, we should appreciate more the conservatives of the past who maintained certain good mores and actually fought to preserve them. Of course you need the right balance of enforcement, or conservatism, but modern conservatives have mostly not been too much on the excessive conservative side in the recent past on such issues. Seeing the effect of liberals taking control I do appreciate actual conservatives more, while in the past I had more mixed feelings about them. People should go back and see what each faction was pushing and claiming, examine how things played out and praise those who got them right, and criticize those who got them wrong.

Oh and the point is good trade offs and knowing what you are doing instead of relying on wishful thinking. Drug restriction policies have had a good track record in modernity. So the idea is for a general ethic of societal discipline for long term good on important areas. Still, no reason to enforce restrictions in a manner that the excessive restriction is more damaging to society than the gain. Or at least to persist where it would be unwise. See covid lockdowns which have been the more excessive uncharted waters type of policy, although serious enough diseases could justify such impositions.

If one compares drug decriminalization, or general decriminalization policies with countries that follow law and order, the later not only have less drug abuse but also don't have to imprison that many people.

How do you explain the entire history of the failed War on Drugs, which seems to contradicts this?

The war on drugs policies in most countries that have been followed have resulted in low prison populations and lack of drug abuse.

In the case of the USA, from what I have read much of the drug related prison population was there related to more serious crimes and they got them related to the drugs. Or drug dealers who sell poison to people. USA is a more violent country with more violent crime and so a larger share of imprisonment actually does have a protective element.

We have seen indeed an increase of crime as decriminalization and reduction of prison population has become the goal.

A small percentage of the population commit the most violent crime, so rather than encouraging more people to join them by decriminalization policies (which will not lead to more people imprisoned as crime increases since we got decriminalization), I would side with the majority preyed upon by violent criminals and against the criminals.

Now, you can't force people to have children, or not get fat, in the same way you can enforce criminalization of drugs, although there are things you could do, but the moralists on these issues are correct. Contrarily the people who have been spreading apathy and downplaying have had a corrosive effect on society.

Are you sure you can put the blame for the obesity epidemic at the feet of morality? I don't know how thoroughly the Chemical Hunger hypothesis has been discredited, but it seemed plausible to me and a bunch of the issues they raised make it impossible for me to take morality based explanations for the obesity epidemic seriously - unless you want to claim that there's a correlation between altitude and moral fortitude.

Though that said I am actually open to a more mystical morality play interpretation. The idea that environmental damage caused by oil extraction (the same energy resource responsible for our current prosperity) is poisoning the population in a way that makes them more dependent upon extravagant energy expenditure propped up by fossil fuels is poetic enough that I want to believe it is true even if it actually isn't.

The chemical hunger hypothesis is not the default hypothesis for the rise of obesity. The default is that we have a rise of a more obisogenic environment but it is also hard not to see the rise in general of detrimental behaviors related to superstimuli and people avoiding better for long term health of society self sacrifice.

Anyway, the blame of the individual can be reduced by the fact that people are affected by society and by what habits it fosters. And part of the default thesis is that more addictive "hyper palatable" food is affordable and more available to people today.

People eat more calories, and have larger plates.

I think moralism of the kind promoted by certain people which is only about the individual is going to be inadequate and you need greater societal transformations which go further. Japan is an example of a place where the norms at such that promote lower obesity, while their cuisine still has plenty of tasty foods.

One of my points is that if people adopt good habits early, and a society under the reigns of sensible moralism promotes long term greater happiness with less of the worse outcomes that arise from a society that avoids the self discipline. We know for example that is much harder to lose weight after you become obese than to remain fit. Same with drugs, easier to not become addicted than to get rid of the habit. This also relates to the valuable ancient understanding of freedom which isn't the only way of freedom that matters, but it does. Which is about people being free from their vices and living a life that better fulfills their potential. The later also relates with modern understanding, which we have seen in various metrics a decline upon, even if in other metrics we have seen a rise.

Part of the hostility to this kind of moralism has to do also with avoiding blame, and responsibility, but it is true that the decline in such norms has lead to a more irresponsible society with worse consequences for it. So lets admit that unpleasant truth and seek pragmatic responses.

The chemical hunger hypothesis is not the default hypothesis for the rise of obesity.

I agree with this, but I don't think that actually provides a justification for the "moral failing" hypothesis - the moral failing hypothesis just can't explain what's actually happening. There are just too many odd correlations and relationships within the data for the moral failing hypothesis to be that plausible - at most it can be a small contributor to part of the problem. What's the 'moral failing' explanation for why obesity is correlated with altitude/water-tables? Don't forget that this obesity epidemic is impacting animals as well - it doesn't seem plausible to me that the decrease in willingness to sacrifice for society has caused feral rats to start overeating and getting fat.

You mentioned Japan, but I found myself losing weight there extremely quickly and easily without making any changes to my moral behaviour or character. Similarly, shifts in my weight that occurred outside Japan seemed much more correlated to environmental exposure than to the specifics of diet/behaviour - I have personal experience with rapid weightloss, and the moral failure hypothesis just did not match up to my inner experience at all. I found that when I (accidentally at the time) lowered my exposure to the kind of environmental pollutants hypothesised to cause obesity what followed was a sudden increase in energy and a decrease in appetite. Previously I'd lost weight by caloric restriction and strict dietary control which required a lot of willpower, but that loss was correlated with a lot of negative side effects and lethargy (as the chemical hunger hypothesis would suggest) - whereas I actually had to exert willpower in order to avoid losing weight on the "cut out pollutants" diet, rather than the opposite.

I just can't see the justification for endorsing the morality hypothesis when there are so many facts that it just utterly fails to explain - and there's no real predictive power there either. If you're right, we'd be able to look back at other instances of societal trust/morality collapsing and find obesity epidemics there too - but to the best of my knowledge, this just hasn't happened. I'm more than happy to be convinced that your hypothesis has legs, but you're going to have to provide a bit more evidence and explain a bunch of the questions that chemical hunger raises before I can accept it as more than a small contribution.

I'm willing to believe that our society has less self-sacrifice in it - hell, I'm substantially less willing to shoulder sacrifices for the sake of my society, but I think that's in large part due to my society endorsing and encouraging things I morally disagree with. There are a bunch of corrupt criminals shoving their faces into the collective trough of society, and I see no reason to make personal sacrifices just to empower them and leave me and my family worse off - as far as I'm concerned, making personal sacrifices in support of the Global American Empire is far more immoral than restricting my circle of care to those close and dear to me.

I found that when I (accidentally at the time) lowered my exposure to the kind of environmental pollutants hypothesised to cause obesity what followed was a sudden increase in energy and a decrease in appetite. Previously I'd lost weight by caloric restriction and strict dietary control which required a lot of willpower, but that loss was correlated with a lot of negative side effects and lethargy (as the chemical hunger hypothesis would suggest) - whereas I actually had to exert willpower in order to avoid losing weight on the "cut out pollutants" diet, rather than the opposite.

Could you elaborate on this? What was the pollutant you lowered your exposure to, and how did you do that accidentally?

Sorry for taking so long to reply - I went on a holiday and don't post on the Motte when away from work.

As for the pollutant, I believe it was lithium. I got into drinking black cold brew coffee which required me to filter all of my water, and I discovered an incredibly tasty recipe for roast vegetables. Because I was peeling all the vegetables, I wasn't consuming anything that directly contacted food packaging without being washed. Similarly, the main source of nutrition for me was potato/sweet potato - and the weight just dropped off me with ease. This is exactly what the slime mold time mold people said would happen when I removed lithium exposure from my diet, but I did this accidentally (thank you recipetineats) and before I even heard the chemical hunger hypothesis.

You mentioned Japan, but I found myself losing weight there extremely quickly and easily without making any changes to my moral behaviour or character.

By living in a society governed by a different morality, you were exposed to a less obesogenic environment, with smaller plates, less hyper palatable food, I probably should have mentioned this too, but also food choices that are less calorie dense, and more satiating probably too. You probably also mimicked how other people behaved and how they ate.

Basically, you benefited by the fact that you were living among the Japanese in a society organized and ruled by their laws and public morality. Yes that does kind of change some of the calculus of individual vs collective influences which are the result of multiple individuals behaving in a way that promotes a certain dominant behaviors and habits.

Also, in comparison to someone consuming enough calories that would make them overweight, by behaving in a way that is better for your long term, you did change your behavior in a manner that was an improvement morally. The amount of self sacrifice once society adopts better norms might not be that great, indeed. This is a selling point!

It actually isn't that big of a sacrifice, to follow from the beginning the kind of habit that avoid harmful drugs, don't eat too much calories, you walk around (which studies have shown to reduce depression). The point is that it is a worthy trade off and the decline of moralism has lead to greater suffering that is definitely not worth it. I guess, it is debatable how difficult it is to do so once you have experienced the other habits, and what would happen if we put obese people in places like Japan on the long term and where their weight would stabilize at. I know what would happen if you replaced the Japanese with enough of the obese, Japan will become fat as they will be following those habits and norms and foods and the food industry, laws and public expectations, shaming, all will change.

I found that when I (accidentally at the time) lowered my exposure to the kind of environmental pollutants hypothesised to cause obesity what followed was a sudden increase in energy and a decrease in appetite. Previously I'd lost weight by caloric restriction and strict dietary control which required a lot of willpower, but that loss was correlated with a lot of negative side effects and lethargy (as the chemical hunger hypothesis would suggest) - whereas I actually had to exert willpower in order to avoid losing weight on the "cut out pollutants" diet, rather than the opposite.

But why are the pollutants the issue and not the fact that the available food you had to choose from was less likely to make you fat? Because lower calories and more satiating per calorie. Less amount of oils probably too.

Some foods are also inherently more satiating. Harder to become fat on them than on fast food. Hence, by changing the dominant diet and promoting more Japan style the norm that people should eat say balanced meals, not too many calories, prefer more satiating foods, the result will be a reduction in obesity.

Too bad for the fast food industry which will decline, but a type of food industry is here to stay even with people eating less.

Like the perceived impossibility of crime in places like El Salvador where Bukele was able to deal with it in a manner where the trade off was certainly worth it.

I guess, one could note that action is more effective than convinsing people. Maybe just changing the available food choices would end up resulting in less obesity than just talking about individual responsibility. Although there is a symbiotic relationship between big business and consumers consuming bigger plates, and more addictive hyper palatable food.

I'm willing to believe that our society has less self-sacrifice in it - hell, I'm substantially less willing to shoulder sacrifices for the sake of my society, but I think that's in large part due to my society endorsing and encouraging things I morally disagree with. There are a bunch of corrupt criminals shoving their faces into the collective trough of society, and I see no reason to make personal sacrifices just to empower them and leave me and my family worse off - as far as I'm concerned, making personal sacrifices in support of the Global American Empire is far more immoral than restricting my circle of care to those close and dear to me.

Well, I agree with you that the GAE isn't worth sacrificing your life for it and that is a hostile empire to you and yours. I sympathize entirely with that. I am also not a keen of the negative influence it has by trying to promote cultural marxism, or the warmongering and color revolutions. I am more talking about sacrifices for the greater good of the people involved.

Indeed, parts of the problems of GAE is anarchotyranny and decriminalization policies promoted by elites like Soros, biggest corporations endorsing BLM, etc, etc. The changes I advocate, including other changes not focused upon here will go against plenty of what the people in charge of GAE preach to the detriment of those under their influence.

I agree with this, but I don't think that actually provides a justification for the "moral failing" hypothesis - the moral failing hypothesis just can't explain what's actually happening. There are just too many odd correlations and relationships within the data for the moral failing hypothesis to be that plausible - at most it can be a small contributor to part of the problem. What's the 'moral failing' explanation for why obesity is correlated with altitude/water-tables? Don't forget that this obesity epidemic is impacting animals as well - it doesn't seem plausible to me that the decrease in willingness to sacrifice for society has caused feral rats to start overeating and getting fat.

I recall reading a lesswrong post linked in the old subreddit which argued convincingly against the chemical hypothesis and directly addressed the water altitude arguement.https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium

Ed Yudkowsky doesn't even accept the truth that is CICO, so don't take this as me endorsing rationalist thinkers as an authority. Just on its own merits I found then when I read it that article to be good and made a better case than the slime mold time mold blog.https://slimemoldtimemold.com/

That article would do a better job arguing specifically against the chemicals hypothesis than I would, so I would recommend you read it for the counter.

By living in a society governed by a different morality, you were exposed to a less obisogenic environment, with smaller plates, less hyper palatable food, I probably should have mentioned this too, but also food choices that are less obisogenic and more satiating and less calorie dense probably too. You probably also mimicked how other people behaved and how they ate.

But why is the pollutants the issue and not the fact that the available food you had to choose from was less likely to make you fat? Because lower calories and more satiating per calorie. Less amount of oils probably too.

I ate vast quantities of extremely fatty and oily luxury cuisine, to the point that I had ¥9000 breakfasts five days in a row. I also had more than one occasion where native Japanese people told me that I was eating a lot. At the same time, I had much more oily and fatty food - ramen, A5 marbling wagyu, otoro tuna, bizarrely flavoured gourmet kit-kats, crepes, viennese coffee, montblancs, fried street food, etc. I still lost over 5kg in three weeks. At the same time, my subjective experience matched up to when I accidentally adopted a diet similar to the potato diet recommended by the chemical hunger crowd - I felt like I had vast amounts of energy and simply ate whenever I was hungry or wanted to taste something interesting. In contrast, when I used willpower to eat an incredibly restrictive diet consisting largely of unpalatable food (protein sparing modified fasting) I found myself with intense cravings and lethargy that I only overcame with the usage of caffeine and whatever other stimulants they included in preworkout powders). This is why I blamed the pollutants rather than any sort of moral difference - because that's how it matched up to what I actually experienced.

I recall reading that counterpiece and then the SMTM refutation of it - but I'm not too eager to rehash that argument given that I haven't bothered keeping up with the literature for the past two years. If there are any argumentative data/food nerds here, I'd love to read a serious discussion on this hypothesis! I took a quick glance at the SMTM blog and they are still doing research on the basis of the chemical hunger hypothesis, so I'm not too sure that it has been comprehensively defeated. But even if it was, my own personal experiences are not ones that match up to the moral failing hypothesis at all. That all said, I do think there is actually a moral element to societal influence on food choices. The biggest difference from my perspective was that if you try to eat cheaply in Japan without access to a kitchen you would largely be eating riceballs, seaweed, fish, soybeans and other largely healthy choices. Trying to do the same in western nations leads to eating some incredibly unhealthy products (HFCS, McDonalds, etc), and this is the kind of issue that I think a healthy government would step in and address - but god knows I wouldn't trust current western governments to do this well...

CICO is just a fact which we know from countless experiments of bodybuilders who count the calories they eat and from randomized control trials.

I ate vast quantities of extremely fatty and oily luxury cuisine, to the point that I had ¥9000 breakfasts five days in a row.

I guess this supports the fact that while the environment matters, people are also going to eat more out of their own desire and change the environment too. If there was a greater share of people with your desires over average Japanese, this would affect the Japanese food industry...

At the same time, my subjective experience matched up to when I accidentally adopted a diet similar to the potato diet recommended by the chemical hunger crowd - I felt like I had vast amounts of energy and simply ate whenever I was hungry or wanted to taste something interesting. In contrast, when I used willpower to eat an incredibly restrictive diet consisting largely of unpalatable food (protein sparing modified fasting) I found myself with intense cravings and lethargy that I only overcame with the usage of caffeine and whatever other stimulants they included in preworkout powders). This is why I blamed the pollutants rather than any sort of moral difference - because that's how it matched up to what I actually experienced.

French fries are a food that was associated with obesity but potatoes are otherwise a satiating food.

The best diet advice is against people going with very restrictive diets either in terms of removing food categories, or dropping drastically calories. Going more smoothly down but keeping at it and not reverting back, until you reach the point where it would be a good weight to maintain. Of course if you go very restrictive in diet you will have significant cravings.

There are people who have success with more restrictive diets, but it isn't necessary. And it necessitates more investigation and effort to get all the vital vitamins, minerals.

If you examine the history of food, there have been restrictive fad diets that were unnecessarily restrictive. I am more about wise self sacrifice and willpower relating to that.

Also, the willpower required to turn things around is different one someone becomes obese. Becoming that changes your appetite. It is still worth it, even if harder and there are also always ways you can fall down worse. Avoiding getting diabetes, heart disease, and other problems is well worth it, or reducing the severity. But it is even more important to do things right early, so people don't become obese to begin with.

Anyway, you decided to buy the meals you mention, and same previously. Surely, willpower plays a role in that? Although it was still bellow what you usually eat in the USA if you lost weight. Maybe you also were more active.

I guess a part of this has to do with having the right norms individually and collectively, and the term willpower might not capture it entirely, because it also relates with correct knowledge and action relating to that. While another part of it does relate with self sacrifice for one's own greater benefit but also a will to promote this norm in general. Moreover, like it or not, how much individuals decide to consume does affect the industry. And what the industry tries to market and promote, does affect the consumer.

The biggest difference from my perspective was that if you try to eat cheaply in Japan without access to a kitchen you would largely be eating riceballs, seaweed, fish, soybeans and other largely healthy choices. Trying to do the same in western nations leads to eating some incredibly unhealthy products (HFCS, McDonalds, etc), and this is the kind of issue that I think a healthy government would step in and address - but god knows I wouldn't trust current western governments to do this well...

Yes, I agree.

I took a long break from posting to go on holiday so feel free not to respond to this post in an ancient thread, but I wanted to reply anyway.

CICO is just a fact which we know from countless experiments of bodybuilders who count the calories they eat and from randomized control trials.

Yes, and I'm not disagreeing with it at all. This particular sort of diet intervention involves tackling the CO part. The claim is that these particular diets change some part of your internal chemistry in a way that prevents calories out from decreasing along with calories in. If this hypothesis is correct you can essentially get a free ECA stack with no side effects by shifting food consumption patterns in ways that prevent you from consuming environmental contaminants. That's absolutely worth investigating, and it would be regardless of whether CICO is true or not (I think it is, for the record).

Anyway, you decided to buy the meals you mention, and same previously. Surely, willpower plays a role in that?

In the sense that I actively wanted to eat tasty food that I could only purchase and consume during my limited time in Japan, yes. I wasn't paying any attention to my diet.

Although it was still bellow what you usually eat in the USA if you lost weight. Maybe you also were more active.

I don't live in the USA (but I do live in a FVEYS nation so not much of a difference). At the same time, I stopped going to the gym and working out while I was there - so while I did walk a lot more, I'm not sure how the total amount of exercise changed beyond losing the lifting portion.

Ultimately the core of my disagreement with your view of willpower being the determinant is that I have lost weight both through a lengthy and sustained act of willpower (protein sparing modified fasting + intense exercise routine), and through a dietary intervention that required no willpower at all - and in fact actually required me to exert mental effort/energy in order to eat enough junk food that my weight was stable rather than falling. There was a very clear subjective difference in my inner experience between the two, and the second felt a lot "healthier" - I had more energy and was more capable in a variety of ways when going through that second diet, and having gone through both types of intervention I'm actively trying the potato diet because I found that something equivalent worked that much better for me.

There are studies that show that the addition of vinegar in a carb rich meal lowers glucose and insulin response in healthy individuals, which is associated with weight loss.

My understanding is that Japanese food has a lot of vinegar in it, which may have contributed. I don’t know if it would offset 9000 calorie meals.

I had a lot of obviously bad food that didn't have any vinegar in it - but it probably was present. That said the meals themselves were 9000 yen, not calories (big difference).

Doesn’t the phrase “law and order” assume the conclusion?

There is a trivial way to have a perfectly law-abiding society: just don’t have laws. Descend into the Hobbesian state of nature. The problems with this approach make it very unpopular, of course, in a manner I’d describe as lacking “order.” Thus, Portland.

I’m making this distinction because decriminalization has not, in fact, raised the prison population. This Laffer-curve equivalent is cute but probably not accurate.

No, it is disingenuous and anti-intellectual to pretend that the phrase law and order assumes the conclusion. The conclusion that law and order is different than decriminalization is a given, and it is an exercise in trying to promote confusion and misunderstanding of reality for political purposes to make this an issue.

The kind of gotcha split hairing that submits nothing that is out there to win everything that is bad for discussion and for societal norms. Not for the motte which doesn't matter in a special way, but for society which matters and is lead astray by any prominence of such approaches. You are trying to shut down discussion here since if we can't distinguish between decriminalization or law and order policies, we can't actually discuss the issue. Furthermore, we are also diverted to discussing what we shouldn't be wasting our time on.

Not everything is negotiable. If your approach is a decriminalization approach, you should own it.

There are sufficient differences between different approaches to earn them different qualitative descriptions. There is really a libertine, decriminalization approach on drugs that supporters value and a law and order approach that is valued by its supporters. Different supporters believe in different narratives, one of which is correct and the other incorrect.

And we should NOT be wasting time making this clear, but spending the time examining the trade offs and wisely choosing based on having wise priorities as a society.

Plus, it is especially unwise to raise this distinction in response to a post that argues that decriminalization drug policies lead to societal decay and drug abuse and law and order policies promote better functioning society. It is like you were hyper focused on winning a point.

I’m making this distinction because decriminalization has not, in fact, raised the prison population. This Laffer-curve equivalent is cute but probably not accurate.

But my comment was about non decriminalization policies. I wasn't commenting about decriminalization resulting in more imprisonment. I was claiming that drug decriminalization lead to destructive societally drug abuse, while drug criminalization policies don't end up having to imprison that many people.

Although, if drug decriminalization policies raise behaviors that are criminal but come along with policies of general decriminalization, including certain areas in a city lacking police enforcement and becoming den of junkies, that is also a problem. Effectively, you raised crime but aren't enforcing it.

You aren't really addressing the substance of the issue.

There is a trivial way to have a perfectly law-abiding society: just don’t have laws. Descend into the Hobbesian state of nature. The problems with this approach make it very unpopular, of course, in a manner I’d describe as lacking “order.” Thus, Portland.

Of course if you don't have laws, you obviously don't have law and order but the opposite and someone defining this as law and order is promoting inaccurate labels and diverting understanding to a lower level. Plus distracting people through having them to discuss with their inaccurate description from the substance of what is happening. Actually, by not having laws you are obviously going to have huge problems with all sorts of crimes, and people in the state of nature societies are full of rape, murder, etc, etc.

The ideal of state of nature being idealic is just a falsehood that crumbles when meeting with reality and actually examining hunter gatherer societies. Civilization, and societal norms don't constrain people from an idealized state, but most of them tend to lead to societies that lack the kind of abuses found in hunter gatherer ones. So, I wouldn't even describe as philosophy but as a wrong concept the idea of an ideal state of nature that is undermined by civilization. I wouldn't describe the very idea of less strict law, if relating to a particular law as anti intellectual as it can be valid of course.

But you absolutely after a point too low and you got libertine norms and decriminalization, and after a point enforcement you got law and order and maybe after a point of strict laws you might even have totalitarian societies. There might be a subjectivity to any of these standards but they do exist and deserve a label so we actually understand the world. Only by disagreeing with an example should one disagree with the label, as general deconstruction is anti-intellectual.

In a similar note, understanding that perfection doesn't exist anywhere, I would distinguish a free society, from an unfree one based on degrees, with the free one having to pass a sufficient standard to qualify. And as always there are trade offs. I am willing to admit that some things I am willing to support might come at a cost of certain freedoms. For example, if I supported lockdowns on the basis of thinking the result to be worth it, I would be asking for a sacrifice of certain freedom, based on seeking a certain benefit.

I would be engaging in partisanship and sophistry if I didn't admit it. Which is part of our problem, people want to have their cake and eat it too. Still, certain trade offs are better in terms of other trade offs since the sacrifice is smaller versus benefit, and even in freedom there is also both a sacrifice but also a benefit. What fits in the proverb of an ounce of prevention, a pound of cure, where the sacrifice is less than the necessitating later sacrifice, including what people are going to have to do to treat themselves and we expect and know they will do to deal with. As the alternative of not caring about even treatment will be even worse. An idealized claim of libertine freedom doesn't deal with that pragmatically.

So when it comes to not admitting anything, I would just marginalize this kind of sophists who try to deconstruct us from useful understanding often in partisan directions, so this kind of fruitless debate is rare and also the public norm and morality is to look down to it and focus on reality. With having an understanding and distinction between sophistry and actual valid points. Indeed a lot of our problems relate with people preferring convenient narratives over what is true. Including politically correct narratives which are meant to shut down further analysis.

I don’t believe I’m pretending anything, thank you very much.

Up until 2020 Portland had law but not enough order. After decriminalizing in that year, it had less law and less order. But this didn’t magically give it “greater imposition on people’s freedom.” I don’t think you can show that decriminalization made people less free. It made them more free to make bad choices.

Portugal is the usual example. People became more free, and made bad choices. But they remained a law-abiding, ordered society. Their situation has improved a lot since implementing the policy. Decriminalization is compatible with order.

How does your theory explain Portugal?

The idea that not only the freedom to consume drugs matters, but also the freedom from addiction, or from crime, is not something that can be so easily dismissed as "magically" giving an imposition. It is a real trade off where there is a net loss for freedom. Similiarly a hunter gatherer society might lack certain rules, but the freedom of its members is undermined by all the crime, especially the murders and the rapes.

Not taking that seriously is an intellectual blindspot which makes policy failures inevitable. Especially a blindspot that is dismissive from you when I already made the argument. So what I would conclude is that you would just prefer those genuine problems of freedom relating to bad choices that affect others but also might result in a loss of autonomy for the person it self, to not be taken seriously. But they should be put on the scale, even if you prefer they weren't.

Now, the Portugal case is a more complicated one, and a case of a decriminalization that is closer to the center than what happened in Portland Oregon. Which isn't to say I consider it centrist, but definetly closer than Oregon's.

I don't have the one sidedly positive view you have about Portugal's reforms. See bellow for a contrary view.

https://www.dalgarnoinstitute.org.au/images/resources/pdf/dart/The_Truth_on_Portugal_December_2018.pdf

Even the Wanshington post which rather partisan in the liberal direction is willing to promote some criticism

Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/

Portugal still forces drug addicts to follow treatments and selling drugs is illegal. Even its supporters claim that "Cops still work aggressively to break up major drug gangs and arrest people committing drug-related crimes like theft. They also disrupt open-air drug markets like the ones that have emerged in some U.S. cities."

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/25/how-portugal-eased-its-opioid-epidemic-while-u-s-drug-deaths-skyrocketed/

Cops also pressure drug users to follow programs.

The reality is that the decriminalization side who bring Portugal as a positive example, or claim to be trying to do something similar, tend to be quite partisan and lacking in intellectual humility that requires genuinely dealing with trade offs. Ultimately, they operate based on tunnel vision. The end result is the negative story of the problems I mentioned of rise of drug abuse, violent crimes, certain areas becoming full of junkies. If this side were seriously trying to deal things in a wiser manner from various angles, some of these issues would have been ameliorated.

See also this: https://unherd.com/newsroom/blue-states-are-learning-the-wrong-lessons-from-portugal/

On all sorts of issues we have seen this vulgar excessive policy and movement as more representative of what you are getting in response to the more conservative and restrictive in those directions past, rather than a right balance between getting rid of only some conservative restrictions but only in a considerate way. Or even compensating by some new restrictions like forcing drug users to get treatment. Changing things while retaining the benefits of the more conservative time is really hard. At worst is like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Since this discussion is about Oregon, bringing up Portugal as a winning move is trying to find a loophole. When actually the vulgar policy is what decriminalization movement is more represented by today and pushes.

The pro decriminalization side in the USA promised in fact that they could push not only drug decriminalization but other policies of decriminalization, reduction of imprisonment without rising crime rates, and other problems. This failed to be the case. Contrarily those that wisely predicted the rising violence and social problems were proven correct.

This shows why it is so important that in practice we can and should distinguish between a law and order side and a decriminalization side whose approach does undermine law and order in outcomes.

The point of bringing up Portugal is that there must be more than one way to get to “order.” Going full Reagan is no guarantee, or America would look pretty different. Going full Portland obviously doesn’t work either. But there is a Portugal option where decriminalization with teeth improves the situation.

And it did improve—the Australia link makes a big deal out of going from 3.4% to 3.7% having used any drug. Never mind that those numbers went back down in the next five years. They’re doing the thing where picking the right endpoints lets them support whatever they want.

Very compelling and cogent read. Thanks for the post. I agree, seems obvious to me now that we are in a dynamical system where we need to push and release to get balance. Child care, criminology, whatever it just seems basic that you cant just slide over to one end of the scale and expect good results...

mostly I just see this as a problem with citizen's ballot initiatives, in general.

Any "citizen" can put anything they want on the ballot. All you need is signatures... a lot of signatures. 120k for a statute in Oregon, which is way more than any normal citizen can gather from their friends and family. But it's peanuts for a PAC, just pay a bunch of pros to go canvas the streets all day. They can gather that many signatures for anything, from bored/crazy people who just want to be left alone.

Once it's on the ballot... who knows? Who's got time to read that shit? Most voters are not exactly legal experts. They vote for team D/R, plus their local incumbent, and that's it. They do not weigh the fine points of "how is this thing implemented." They just take a quick look and see if it feels good.

If they vote against it... well, just reword it slightly. It'll be back on the ballot again next election. Keep trying, it will eventually pass.

Once it passes, it becomes state law. Possibly even part of the state constitution! Now the state legislature can't touch it, they have to implement it as it is. No amendments, no legal challenges. The police don't know what to do, so they just leave it be.

In this case, their was a noble idea (we should help drug addicts instead of throwing them in prison) but the ballot measure was worded in a terrible way (just let them do drugs) and that's what we got. Frankly I'm impressed Oregon was able to repeal it. We're still stuck with the fluoride ban, the arts tax, and the bottle deposit, which have also had disastrous effects, all from stupid ballot initiatives.

I was going to ask if you had evidence for the PACs farming signatures, but I realize that’s kind of why they exist. Organizations designed for collective action are doing stuff that’s too big or tedious for individuals.

So…how should it work instead? Do you rely on the legislature to do everything? What if it’s gridlocked, held up by one brinksman, or otherwise nonresponsive? The optimal amount of shitty ballot initiatives is not zero.

Why do you think that ballot initiatives are worth the costs?

Oh, I’m not sure they are. Or rather—the marginal ballot initiative probably isn’t worth it. I support them in principle.

I wrote about my experience with the Texas process here. All but one of these passed. Not surprising, as contrary to the OP, Texas requires 2/3 majorities in its legislature to put something on the ballot. In another state, all of these could have been passed outright. We just had to comply with our infamously tough constitution.

But what about that last one? Texans decided not to make a modification to judge retirement ages, even though the legislature already thought it was fine. I suspect this arose from a reflexive distaste for one-time exceptions.

So there’s the steelman for ballot initiatives. Sometimes the game of telephone results in a misalignment between people and policy. Maybe it’s from partisanship, or misinformation, or different incentives. The ballot initiative lets voters correct such an error directly. That sort of civic responsiveness is good for morale.

I don't know, man. Political science is hard. But it seems to me that banning ballot initiatives and having all laws go through the legislature of professional lawmakers is not a bad situation.

One simple improvement might be to increase the pay of state legislators. A lot of them get paid pathetic salaries, like less than minimum wage. So either they're rich people doing this as a hobby, or they're indebted to lobby groups. Make it a full time, paying occupation.

I’m generally in favor of technocratic governance. In this case, though, I think more insulation from the voter base is a bad thing.

Yeah, sometimes voters are going to make bad or short-term decisions. Sometimes lawmakers will do that too, no matter how well you pay them. The incentives aren’t always aligned. Letting the professionals work may be more efficient, but it also errs towards regulatory burden, caution, graft.

I’d say that the ballot initiative is best suited for procedural and constitutional changes, since those are most likely to be misaligned.

State legislators just don't do that much work for it to need to be a full-time occupation. If anything, state legislators should be doing less work less frequently and there should be enough of them that being a state legislator is a hobby for regular people, e.g., in New Hampshire there is 1 state legislator for every ~3,500 residents and they only meet intermittently for a few months every year.

If we look at federal legislators, they do make good money and command substantial office/staff budgets. Does this stop them from being indebted to lobby groups? Does it make federal law better? It doesn't look like it. Laws are still badly written with frequent intralaw contradictions.

For additional evidence for the signature farming: the existence of companies like Fieldworks, or the fact that you can find the job "Political Canvasser" on job search engines and it pays $25/hour. Not a lot of places for that money to come from but PACs.

Bit of a tangent, but what disastrous effects have been caused by having a bottle deposit?

It has effectively become a tax to subsidize vagrancy and drug addiction, because its an easy, low commitment way to get cash. A little while back oregon doubled the bottle deposit to $0.10 per bottle, and a dose of fentanyl is about $0.80. Junkies root through trash cans looking for redeemable cans (leaving any non-redeemable trash they remove on the ground, of course). Another very common occurence is that they will buy cases of bottled water with food stamps, immediately dump the water out into the parking lot of the grocery store, then come back in and redeem the now-empty bottles for cash. The large bottle redemption centers have become magnets for crime and violence to an insane degree.

Meanwhile, Oregonians have a very high default rate of recycling in general (they are, after all, "good progressives" with all the good and bad that entails). The city of Portland has also decreed that residential trash pickup is biweekly, while recycling pickup is weekly, so recycling in general is heavily incentivized. I suspect that if they got rid of the bottle deposit it would make a minimal difference in the rate of can and bottle recycling.

Another very common occurence is that they will buy cases of bottled water with food stamps, immediately dump the water out into the parking lot of the grocery store, then come back in and redeem the now-empty bottles for cash.

So you're telling me there's a business opportunity to make the largest cases with the largest number of the smallest bottles possible that can be stamped with a bottle deposit, so as to reduce the wasted expense?

yeah, all of that. the only thing I would add is that it has become a real hassle to actually return bottles, because of all the crazy homeless and security around bottle drop sites.

Another very common occurence is that they will buy cases of bottled water with food stamps, immediately dump the water out into the parking lot of the grocery store, then come back in and redeem the now-empty bottles for cash.

All-time great "solve for the equilibrium" moment.

In Washington we have a rich guy funding initiatives to roll back unpopular laws that there was no popular demand for. For example, a capital gains tax, or the state withholding the location of runaway children if they say they’re transgender.

Our legislature has a problem in that we’ve been colonized by Californians fleeing the results of their voting and it’s become incredibly unlikely for Democrats to ever lose control. But we do have this one check on their most outlandish ideas.

Who is the rich guy?

Bryan Heywood, he started Let's Go Washington: https://letsgowashington.com/

Right. The state legislature did touch it in this case! They rolled parts of it back and re-criminalized drugs.

Initiative petitions are often a clown-show, but on the other hand, they're a good vehicle for testing risky policy that career politicians might never put their name on. If it's a huge disaster the career politicians can step in and take credit for rolling it back.

This seems good, actually!

In this case, their was a noble idea (we should help drug addicts instead of throwing them in prison)

Was it noble?

It looks like the sort of help on offer was help to do more drugs.

Prison is a kind of help.

The same logic can be used in favor of banning private gun ownership, and for that matter private knife ownership too.

You can take a fraction of those overdose deaths on yourself if you want to, and it makes some sense in pure cause-and-effect calculation. But I would not say this is a good argument against liberal drug policy. If you lived in a country where private knife ownership was banned and you voted to legalize private knife ownership, you could also take some of the resulting knife deaths on yourself, and that too would make some sense. But it would not necessarily be a good argument against private knife ownership.

There are already laws against most of the obnoxious behaviors that heavy drug users often engage in. Society can simultaneously legalize recreational drugs and at the same time do a better job of enforcing the laws against those obnoxious behaviors.

I think criminalizing both proxies and also directly the harms is sometimes beneficial and is already the case in other cases:

-Child molestation is illegal AND so is convicted pedos living near schools or even working with children.

-Causing a traffic accident is illegal AND so are speeding and driving the wrong way

-Speeding and driving the wrong way are illegal AND so is driving while high or drunk.

Portland is not quite progressive enough. Why not go all the way like Canada and have MAID for drug addicts? Now that's a compassionate way to handle social issues.

As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of.

Don't worry, there is still time for even more deaths for your buck.

  • -23

Antagonistic, we've asked you many times not to do this. Last time was a 3 day ban.

7 day ban this time.

Wow ... . You're just <negative outgroup stereotype 1> and <negative outgroup stereotype 2>. There are a hundred thousand comments like this every day on twitter, and I like that this forum is a break from that.

Which 'negative outgroup stereotype' are you referring to? Is MAID not an existing policy? Is drug tolerance not also an existing policy? What bothers you specifically, that I refer to these 2 existing policies and associate them with the people who generally support them, or that I refer to these 2 existing policies in conjunction?

Are we not allowed to talk about specific policies if somebody can hypothetically infer that these policies lead to bad outcomes?

This sort of extremely sarcastic and antagonistic writing style is against the rules of this forum.

Why not go all the way like Canada and have MAID for drug addicts?

This feels mostly boo-outgroup. Setting aside both the moral arguments and factual issues of how Canada uses MAID, it's obvious that most of the drug addicts already have access to effective lethal injections if they wanted to use them, so the ones who are alive are probably ones who don't want help dying.

it's obvious that most of the drug addicts already have access to effective lethal injections if they wanted to use them, so the ones who are alive are probably ones who don't want help dying.

Yet fentanyl is a notoriously lethal drug. It appears hard to argue that somebody voluntarily taking fentanyl or products routinely laced with fentanyl is not somewhere, seeking death.

Perhaps I just have a tendency to find slopes slippery, but a community that chooses to turn a blind eye to this type of practice seems to be practicing some form of soft MAID. If supporters of 'soft-MAID' are uncomfortable with calling it MAID, why is that? Is there something wrong with helping people end their suffering?

I don't really know about this fuzzier sense of "seeking death". Maybe that is what some of them are doing. Speaking as guy who fully expects to take his eventual death into his own hands but doesn't expect to ever abuse opioids, it's not what I would do if I were seeking death, but I can see how it could be that way for some. Certainly it's not a thing to do if you're unwilling to risk death. Regardless, I don't think most of the ones who are alive are seeking death in the immediate sense -- the sense in which they would actually choose to make use of a MAID kit if it were offered to them.

I grant there's not a bright line between

(1) "refrain from taking away the means for people to kill themselves"

(2) "actively give people the means to kill themselves",

(3) "kill people at their request",

(4) "kill people people at your discretion"

It's appealing to try to erect a fence between (1) and (2), which separates decriminalization of potentially lethal drugs from MAID. A fence between (1) and (2) looks like making it generally permissible to possess but not to distribute. But of course this runs into problems with the presumption of "intent to distribute", and with the substantial overlap between users and distributors.

Personally, I don't care so much if people who want to die actually do so, and don't believe it's possible or desirable to spend a lot of effort to prevent this in general. It is worth spending effort to make people less inclined to self-destruction in the first place, and maybe keeping them from initially getting their hands on substances that set them off down the spiral is an important part of that. Ultimately I just don't know enough about why these people are abusing these drugs in the first place -- hard to believe it's that they don't know what road they're stepping into when they start.

I suspect the root of the problem is that we don't know how to build the "rat park" mentioned elsewhere in this thread, neither can we actually stop the movement of the fentanyl, so none of this going to get "solved" in any way that doesn't look like brutally grinding a bunch of unfortunates under society's heel. It's not surprising that this is unpalatable enough for people to try just looking the other way.

Where do you think "not providing free Narcan" would fall on that scale?

I consider the whole thing itself as just another aspect of a sick society. It is valuable to go and attempt to rescue some of these poor souls, like a one-man Rittenhouse crusading against urban Covid super-spreaders, but ultimately, it's like bailing out with a spoon.

It's hard to say exactly where charity should be placed, but there does appear to be some more effective approaches to drug containment, namely in El Salvador or the Philippines, we don't necessarily have to throw our hands in the air. 'Aaaah these people are just desperate, no can do, drugs will just keep flowing' Which I suppose would still largely be included in

"solved" in any way that doesn't look like brutally grinding a bunch of unfortunates under society's heel.

Whether your child OD's, cuts their genitals, becomes a girlboss dogmom, a journalist, join the reddit volunteers for Ukraine or immolates themselves for or against Israel... It's all some failure of parenting that's unfortunately incredibly common because overcoming the odds requires some serious skills in this century.

It's cute we can still laugh at the "A|B testing" ravaging our cities like this is all a Sim City game and we can load after the aliens destroyed the map.

It's cute we can still laugh at the "A|B testing" ravaging our cities like this is all a Sim City game and we can load after the aliens destroyed the map.

It is cute but I think it's actually good to run experiments? Don't we bemoan vetocracies and general unwillingness by politicians to take risks? Initiative petitions (referendums) appear to be a good outlet for some direct democracy.

We do get some good outcomes from time to time and the fact that we rolled back so quickly is a credit.

If you asked this question two years ago I'm sure the sentiment would have been that the West Oregon leftists that dominate state political power would never roll back such a pro-drug law that was wrapped in racial justice.

Sick society, sure, hard to argue with that, but I can't believe a Philippines-style approach makes it any healthier -- what's the evidence that executing however many thousand people there even improved the problem at all? Last I heard, the outgoing Duterte government didn't make much of an attempt to quantify the positive effects the several-year "reign of terror" had on stopping drug crime. Certainly haven't heard the compelling evidence that it worked well enough to justify normalizing the "shoot a guy and sprinkle some meth on him" tactics that police were empowered to use against civilians (and maybe civilians against each other).

I don't know who's laughing about how the need to test our policies to see if they work entails the risk of making people's lives worse, and I'm certainly not seeing how some Judge Dredd approach is so self-evidently superior that it wouldn't need to be empirically evaluated.

Many of us are living proof.

Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th . The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114

Based on murder rates in the Philippines it looks like it worked. The murder rate dropped from 10 per 100k in 2016 to 4 per 100k in 2021. The Judge Dredd approach also worked in El Salvador which is now safer (with respect to murder) than the USA.

It looks like it took the police killing at least 6k people, possibly up 12k or even higher, to reduce the number of murders over that period by ~15k cumulatively. Probably a fair bit of "substitution" there, assuming drug gangsters were murdering each other at high rates before -- some of this must be criminal-on-criminal killings being replaced by cop-on-criminal killings. Still, it does look like it was plausibly a net win on that measure -- have to be believe at least that police killings were better targeted at criminal elements than the background murders were. And it sounds like Filipinos broadly supported the effort. Still not sure how much it cut down on the actual drug use, but cutting down on the associated crimes is probably more important.

El Salvador, yeah there it does sound like they made big gains with locking up all the gangsters, don't know if they had to kill a lot of people to do that, or if US accusations that Bukele cut deals gang leaders are true. Easier to know who to go after in a place where the criminals are basically tattooing their criminal affiliations on their faces.

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Fentanyl is only lethal because illegal manufacturers and distributors can't control the dose well enough. In terms of therapeutic index, it's safer than other opiates -- that is, the ratio of a lethal dose to an effective dose is high. The problem is that the absolute amounts of both are low.

Sure, but, what do with this information? Have the state manufacture pure fentanyl and dose junkies up in safe use sites?

I stick with the libertarian answer: legalize drugs, enforce only purity restrictions. But as @iprayiam3 notes above, this requires not socializing the costs of addiction either. At most socialist they would be paid for with taxes on the drugs. Otherwise the addict's addiction is his problem and any problems he causes he's liable (civilly and or criminally).

Fentanyl is only lethal because illegal manufacturers and distributors can't control the dose well enough.

I imagine it stems more from a lack of trying than an absolute technical problem, a certain carelessness perhaps, or an outright malevolence.

Drug dealers don't generally want to kill their customers as a general class. Some, specific customers, like ones that are extorting drugs from the dealer at knifepoint, sure, but as a general class no. Dead people don't buy more drugs, and drug dealers want to sell drugs.

The problem with fentanyl is that the lethal dose is so small (LD50 is like 1-3 mg) that "a grain was passed through whole rather than dissolved" or "a grain stuck to the apparatus instead of being cleaned off" can be all it takes (note that LSD does not have this problem, as while active doses are tiny it has a fuckhuge dose ratio and as such lethal is still ~1 gram).

It's not impossible to counteract this, but you need big batches, high-quality equipment with fine tolerances, and nobody messing with the product between the fine-tolerance dilution and the end-user - which works fine in the hospital system, but which is very difficult for illegal supply chains to do, as the people further up the distribution chain can't dilute it without increasing the volume and ruining fentanyl's notorious ease of smuggling, and the people at street level don't have the scale to do big batches or afford high-quality equipment (not to mention that the people at street level don't always follow "manufacturer recommendations").

And sure, they could maybe do it anyway and jack up their prices to account for the much-greater risk and expense, but the safety of illegal drugs is quite illegible to the end-user, so there's a collective-action problem there.

Drug dealers don't generally want to kill their customers as a general class. Some, specific customers, like ones that are extorting drugs from the dealer at knifepoint, sure, but as a general class no. Dead people don't buy more drugs, and drug dealers want to sell drugs.

No offense but have you met many drug dealers? Like everyone has their cool guy that hooks them up with the best LSD imaginable like it's some sacrament but that is not the norm at all. My Ayn Rand view of them was shattered when I bought drugs on the street a few times. They often don't know what they're selling, in the concentrations that they're selling. They don't particularly care about repeat business. They don't care if they kill you. They're also generally too dumb to even think about testing their stuff or weigh things. If they are smart enough to weight things they're probably not going to buy the $300 milligram scale when the whippet shop sells some that advertises milligram precision for $20. They may be addicts themselves. They are not rational economic actors.

Drug dealing doesn't primarily attract smart entrepreneurial people who to make a fortune. It attracts rather unsmart, not well people who have very few other options for making money.

Sure, I’ll believe they cut corners and accept that drug users have a high mortality rate. But even quite dumb people with undiagnosed mental illnesses generally understand that repeat business is good for them, personally, and want to maximize their cash flow that way.

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As an alternative theory, fentanyl may be both an extremely pleasurable and extremely addictive substance that (desperate and not especially well-informed or conscientious) people try without grasping the full consequences of what they're doing.

That said, the people who are most hands-off on fentanyl proliferation do not appear to give one crap about the people suffering from addiction to it. It's decentralized MAID. Naively a misanthrope might consider it an effective way to get rid of undesirables, but even that makes no sense: its an addiction that reproduces itself for each new doomed-to-die cohort.

(desperate and not especially well-informed or conscientious) people try without grasping the full consequences of what they're doing.

So we need some kind of public awareness campaign? That would improve the issue? I do believe that some of the issues with the Drug War was that the government was doing fear-mongering and not really providing accurate information, but still. I think a lot of people take it because it's the best they can get. Perhaps if the most desperate of sinners were provided safer high quality drugs then they would not resort to fentanyl? Or perhaps we need to refashion society in such a way that constantly seeking a new high is not a marginally acceptable alternative to being a semi-productive member of society.

Naively a misanthrope might consider it an effective way to get rid of undesirables, but even that makes no sense: its an addiction that reproduces itself for each new doomed-to-die cohort.

Does it really? A lot of these addicts seem to have quite a decent life expectancy, what with all these good samaritans going around with Narcan. The addiction itself is accessory. Desperate people would become addicted to something else if fentanyl and the other street stuff was completely eradicated. They are just a symptom of a sick society and they rightfully pile up in these progressive cities, in front of the very eyeballs that need to connect some dots, but that has not worked so far.

Last year, over 800 people died in San Francisco to overdose. Compare that to 56 homicides and 27 traffic deaths. Or, heck, the ~700 COVID deaths from 2020 to the end of 2021.

Addicts have a shockingly low lifespan. And fentanyl is the key component of their mortality: approximately nobody dies from crack or meth, the usual drugs of choice. Which isn't to say they're not damaging or that I don't want to see them off the streets, but fentanyl stands out as particularly evil.

Nitpick, but "approximately nobody dies from crack or meth overdose". I'm guessing methamphetamine addiction would have been involved in a decent chunk of those murders, even if the numbers are still obviously lower than those from fentanyl.

I think some of that might be substitution effect, too- meth users who would eventually OD on the stuff die from fentanyl first.

I think this is partly just Oregon being Oregon. Oregon has historically been a leader in direct democracy and ballot access (first to use ballot initiatives, first to directly elect Senators, first to use universal vote-by-mail), and as such they sometimes pass half-baked initiative policies that are unwound later (like the initiative-based supermajority requirements on local tax increases).

Fortunately, Oregon seems pretty open to actually testing policy to see how it works -- this is the state that literally A/B tested Medicaid expansion. It was also, surprisingly, the first state to roll back federal covid quarantine requirements, and kept them rolled back after seeing that they were no longer making any difference.

You may be right though that disillusionment is setting in with certain liberal policies. Oregon's green-space-preserving laws that make development outside of cities almost impossible are also coming under attack recently as the housing situation worsens. At least Oregon finally overrode labor interests and its general nanny-state tendencies enough to let residents pump their own gas.

First off, I'll note the schadenfreude, as someone who has absolutely zero percent sympathy for users of what surveys would describe as "other substances". What did they think was going to happen? As usual, progressives don't bother to check what the European policies they plan on aping actually are, or what context makes them work.

But "public drug users still get beaten by the police and forced into treatment" speaks to a lot of progressive biases. First, drugs are at least not-evil, they aren't the cause of problems, quitting drugs is mostly ancillary to improving your life. Second, requiring people to make good decisions for the sake of themselves is anathema. Covid vaccine mandates were justified with the danger to grandma, not to yourself. Third, the hard arm of state power should scrupulously avoid hitting already unfortunate people, even though the already-unfortunate are the ones that most need to be smote by state power.

Now I have opposite biases, but the general progressive ideas seem both interesting to note and explanatory as to why the idea appealed.

What did they think was going to happen? As usual, progressives don't bother to check what the European policies they plan on aping actually are, or what context makes them work.

While this is true, isn't it the case that the decriminalization of hard drugs has failed in Europe as well?

It failed much more softly because "decriminalization" may be the term in use for what Portugal did, but it is not an accurate term. As far as I know Portugal's drug legalization turned out to be a bad idea, but it was not a disaster.

It's peaked, in as much as they can't get any more liberal and have nowhere to go but down.

More effort than this, please.

It's a fair cop. I'll do better.

A quick aside: Oregon is a sea of under-populated red surrounding a couple of blue cities, mainly Portland. The Portland metro area has about half the population of the whole state, and therefore Portland mostly controls state-level politics. Where goes Portland, so goes Oregon. So my analysis is mainly focusing on Portland, because that's both where the problem mainly is and where the political will driving all of this originates from.

So: In my opinion, many far-left beliefs are luxury beliefs adopted for their value as status signals. The practical considerations tend to be secondary to the value as a social signal and the costs of these beliefs aren't paid by the people espousing them. People who want to abolish the police aren't typically at risk of being robbed, people who want to subsidize homelessness don't usually live near the homeless, people who want to ban all guns don't usually need to physically protect themselves from violence, people who want to legalize drugs don't interact with drug addicts.

The current state of Portland makes the costs of these luxury beliefs ubiquitous and impossible to ignore. Several events have compounded each other to produce this situation:

  1. Portland has incredibly lax policies around street homelessness that approach subsidization. This started with then-mayor Charlie Hale's "Housing State Of Emergency" in 2015 which forbid sweeping homeless camps and has gotten worse ever since. Homeless camps filled with people literally driven insane by drugs are ubiquitous. Local governments have gone as far as distributing tents (22,000 in two years!) and even foil and straws for smoking fentanyl to the homeless.

  2. Following the nine-month anti-police protest/riot/siege at the Portland Justice Center in 2020, the city has massively de-policed. This is a combination of the police deliberately reducing enforcement as a "silent strike", the cops being massively under-manned, and city policies that prevent police work. We are talking multiple-hour response times for everything except life-threatening violent crimes actively being committed. Someone I know personally caught a guy trying to steal the catalytic converter off of his car then followed the perp in a car chase with 911 on the phone for an hour and a half until he lost him. The cops never showed, they contacted him by phone the next day to take a report.

  3. We legalized drugs completely, as you noted.

These factors have combined to make the drug/homelessness problem so bad at this point that it is seriously negatively affecting everyone in the city. Every person I know who lives in Portland has, in the last couple of years, has been victimized by crime and had multiple negative interactions with the drug addicted homeless. Business are closing and the downtown core of Portland is dying, office workers are refusing to return from work-from-home because of how unsafe it is, and Portland is losing population for the first time in living memory as people flee the dysfunction. The luxury beliefs are finally extracting their costs from the belief-holders, and that's why the tide has turned on this specific issue. However, I don't think you can extrapolate this shift to any greater shift in progressive sentiments. I've had a lot of conversations with people about this: almost universally being a "good progressive" is still very much a core part of the identity of most Portlanders and they are only very begrudgingly ceding ground on drug legalization specifically. They absolutely do not draw any conclusions from this about any of their other beliefs; this threat to their identity is compartmentalized away.

A quick aside: Oregon is a sea of under-populated red surrounding a couple of blue cities, mainly Portland. The Portland metro area has about half the population of the whole state, and therefore Portland mostly controls state-level politics. Where goes Portland, so goes Oregon.

This is basically every state in the US, except the exact balance differs. Every single city is blue, every single rural area is red. Only the population balance determines the "red-state/blue-state"

This is basically every state in the US, except the exact balance differs. Every single city is blue, every single rural area is red. Only the population balance determines the "red-state/blue-state"

While roughly true there's significant variation in just how red or blue the cities or rural areas are. Urbanisation by state correlates with partisanship but only moderately, with notable outliers (Utah is among the most urban and most Republican states, whilst Vermont is among the most rural and Democratic states).

Certainly, my point was just that Oregon politics are more or less uni-polar centered around Portland.

Great comment overall in general.

I'm still astonished that the Oregon legislature re-criminalized. Maybe this won't affect anyone's sense of liberal identity, but it at least shows luxury beliefs have a limit, and can be abandoned if confronted with enough harsh reality.

I hadn't thought of it until your comment, but this is another argument in favor of deeply held personal belief in a transcendent value system.

Yes, I'm talking about Christianity. Or, more inclusively any sort of tradition rooted religion.

Back to the main point - I think it's close to common knowledge that everyone develops a sense of identity throughout their life. Failing to do so, in fact, is recognized not only as a major developmental failure, but potentially a mental illness. What you anchor that identity in is incredibly important.

With the fall of religiosity and the rise of secular humanism, I'd say it's a safe assumption to make that people are now anchoring more and more of their identities in politics and culture. These aren't inherently bad things on which to build an identity. The problem is they can and will change. The above post makes this clear. For a long time, being a "good progressive" meant militant support for drug legalization. That happened and it failed. So ... which part of the identity gives? The past-identity that was pro-legalization, or the now-identity that is using evidence to update beliefs? Either way, it's a loss, because you'd have to point to your identity at some point in time and go "I was wrong." This is destabilizing even for the most ... stable person.

How does religion solve this? Religiously informed beliefs are, at their core, transcendental. They are most important in an after-life situation and can neither be confirmed nor disproved in this life in this world. That's a sort of summation of the notion of faith in general. From an identity perspective, this lets believers commit themselves to something they known will never change because it never "was" in the same sense that material things are. I'd be remiss not to tag @TheDag at this point given his post on materialism from earlier today.

The summation here is straightforward; castle made of sand, shifting foundations et cetera. Build "who you are" (whatever that means) on things that are, frankly, eternal. I've seen people who have rooted their identity in seemingly "forever" things have some nasty reality checks; military dudes ("I'll always be a Marine!"), career A-types ("Nobody can take away the fact I was the youngest VP in corporate history!"), and even family ("My sister and I will always be close").

Hot take: the unfalsifiable identity anchor thing is behind the evolution of Wokism to Transism. You can argue with citations about the forces of Whiteness™, but when trans ideology comes down to gender as a metaphysical / spiritual thing which someone experiences, rather than physical sex or physically detectable brain or hormonal abnormalities, it enters the realm of unfalsifiable identity anchor. Previous attempts at having Whiteness or The Patriarchy fill the role of unfalsifiable spiritual force are less personal, and more antagonistic, whereas Transism is about personal identity.

Hot take: the unfalsifiable identity anchor thing is behind the evolution of Wokism to Transism.

That's not a hot take, that's the entire point of the argument. Unfalsifiable identity anchors are natural for humans, they're not just behind Wokism and Transism, they're behind Chrstianity, Islam, Buddhism, national identities, etc. New Atheists promised that if we get rid of the Unfalsifiable identity anchor of religion, we will usher in a new era of rationality. Christians warned that people will simply replace it with a new one ("god-shaped hole"), and there's a good chance it will be worse than any of the traditional religions. Time seems to have proven them right, and the most depressing thing about the whole ordeal, is that this is hardly the first attempt yielding the same result.

What?

Assuming you’re correct about needing this particular thing you're labeling “identity”—which I don’t think is quite the right word—that’s still a terrible reason to believe something false.

Embrace any of the existing traditions, and you’re anchoring your “identity” back to material, falsifiable beliefs. Now you can be shaken by schisms and sex scandals!

If those are off the table, you don’t have a “religiously informed belief.” You have some personal experience that you decided to parse as transcendent and meaningful. In short, vibes. There’s no guarantee that those will stay, either. Job 1:21.

From my very secular perspective, it’s far better to pursue a durable, secular philosophy. Something that allows updating your beliefs without too much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Something that lets me adapt to the truth without grasping it too jealously. I think a religious version of this acceptance is possible; I don’t believe you’ll get there by anchoring to a transcendent belief as if it were your football team, or your political allies. You need a healthier relationship with the belief, and with your belief in belief.

“identity”—which I don’t think is quite the right word

That's fine. May I solicit an alternative term or concept definition?

Now you can be shaken by schisms and sex scandals!

Big issue here. Schsims and sex scandals relate to belief and/or allegiance to an institution (to wit, the Catholic Church). My post argues that's a a bad thing to wed yourself to. Values are where it's at. As much ire as I have for secular humanists, it's quite likely I have more for legalistic Catholic doctrine Nazis who seem to view the Catholic faith as SCOTUS arguments on steroids.

If those are off the table, you don’t have a “religiously informed belief.” You have some personal experience that you decided to parse as transcendent and meaningful. In short, vibes. There’s no guarantee that those will stay, either. Job 1:21.

I agree with this passage on its own, but I get a little lost in how it threads into your overall argument. I am sorry for not catching your point.

From my very perspective, it’s far better to pursue a durable, secular philosophy

What is the rubric for durable?

Something that lets me adapt to the truth without grasping it too jealously.

Is it possible to fully known "truth"? I'd say both religious tradition and secular philosophy (Popper comes to mind here) would argue it is not, though we may approach it.

I don’t believe you’ll get there by anchoring to a transcendent belief as if it were your football team, or your political allies

I agree with this. If you turn a transcendental belief into something materialist, worldly, and immediate, you've ruined its value. The Christian proverb here is "Be in, not of, the world"

You need a healthier relationship with the belief, and with your belief in belief.

Prayer traditions are largely based on constant re-examination of belief-in-belief.

I think a religious version of this acceptance is possible.

This makes me quite happy.

Alright, I've been chewing on this for a bit. I appreciated your response, and I'm still not confident that I've done it justice.

The reason I wouldn't choose "identity" is because I believe there are two phenomena at work. Identity as prediction and shorthand for social-interactions: call it "role." Identity as a set of value judgments: call it "touchstone."

Roles support if-then reasoning. If I go to this party, then I'll be associated with the cool kids. If I mention these talking points, then my tribe will know I've got their back. If I experience a certain emotion in church, then it's something understood by my tradition, and I can feel comfortable sharing it with my fellow Christians.

You can't apply the same reasoning to touchstones, because they're operating at a different level. I value associating with the cool kids. I value my political tribal alignment. I value my fellow Christians.

I think your points about developmental failure and mental illness make sense for roles, but not touchstones. A person who fails to model others' reactions has a serious disadvantage. One who picked unwise touchstones? Not so much.

Picking transcendental beliefs is only addressing touchstones. The question, then, is whether stability comes from the touchstone or from the role. If the latter, then holding an unfalsifiable belief--an immutable touchstone--would still leave one exposed.

When I talked about "durable" philosophy, I was thinking about the ability to adapt to new evidence. Whether this is accomplished through serenity or courage, it demands a certain resilience. I don't think this comes from the touchstones, but from how one reasons about them. Consider the Homeric heroes, oath-bound to besiege Troy. The cosmological beliefs are set dressing. Their particular honor culture was one of countless that followed the rule: if one swears an oath, then one must keep it. I'd call that a role.

When I talked about "durable" philosophy, I was thinking about the ability to adapt to new evidence. Whether this is accomplished through serenity or courage, it demands a certain resilience. I don't think this comes from the touchstones, but from how one reasons about them.

This is awesome. Very well said.

I think the only addition I might offer is to ask the following; is there a risk in confusing or, maybe a better word, misplacing a touchstone value for a role based value?

Why does this very nothing to do with religion post deeply remind you of Christianity? Because there are policy mistakes/changes happening being linked to causes/luxury virtue signaling beliefs? These beliefs being disprovable unlike the bedrock trueness of one of 10,000 religions? That is a pretty weak segue into a sermon.

Regarding people being upset when their reality changes vs religious people. As you say, hard to have a reality check if you don't accept reality.

What about when religious people become atheist or leave their religion. Have you see what that can do to families and people? Especially in those many many religions that treat an apostate like garbage.

Is that not a greater risk as rather than updating a small part or even a large part of your political or scientific world view? Your whole unchangeable/unchallengeable forever belief system has crumbled to dust instead. Often taking with it your family and friends.

These beliefs being disprovable unlike the bedrock trueness of one of 10,000 religions?

Never asserted this. In fact, a major thrust of my original comment was that religious belief is neither provable in a positivist sense nor falsifiable. Faith itself is an ongoing and continuous act.

What about when religious people become atheist or leave their religion. Have you see what that can do to families and people? Especially in those many many religions that treat an apostate like garbage.

Bad things are bad, I agree. But my comment wasn't looking at people-within-social-circles, it was looking at the self and identity (the self-concept of self).

Your whole unchangeable/unchallengeable forever belief system has crumbled to dust instead.

Forgive me for nitpicking. A belief system is one thing, the anchor to an identity is another. I agree with you that a belief system ought to be informed by rigorous epistemic evaluation. I think identity is a separate concern that cannot be totally built on a simple amalgamation of "facts." It put it up there with abstract concepts like "justice" - these are not definable in a mathematic proof sense.

As you say, hard to have a reality check if you don't accept reality.

Couldn't agree more.

The fact that abstract concepts exist doesn't mean we should believe in actual magic. Also something being abstract doesn't make it worthy as an identity touchstone. Lateness is an abstract concept, it doesn't follow that we should anchor our identity on being punctual.

Fine say you're not shunned when you lose your faith, your world has still be turned upside down and now your concept of self is shattered if that is what built your identity on. Unprovable and unfalsifiable is the same as not existing at all, and should be treated with the same weight.

Thanks for the tag! For what it's worth, I wrote about my conversion experience below, and this was another factor that helped me along the way. I have had many various ideologies I've tried to pin my identity to throughout the years, from communism to anarchy to libertarianism to effective altruism. Ultimately I've found that Christianity has been far more 'stable' for me, in part because it's transcendental, and in part because there is plenty of room for doubt and even periods of lack of belief while still being welcomed back such as with the parable of the prodigal son.

This sort of reminds me of teh debate over statistical trends right after somewhere legalizes prostitution.

I'll say the same thing I have there: the long-term new status quo of a dramatic policy change is hard to deduce from the short-term reactions, and the trends in a world where something is legal everywhere are different from the trends where it's illegal everywhere except for one place.

Of course it would be better for the legalization argument if the day after everything was legalized, overdose deaths dropped 50% and never went up again. But that was probably never realistic...

The long-term vision is that we move to a model of treatment rather than criminalization, and lifting stigmas and fear of arrest makes it easier for people to find treatment or be targeted for it. But was a comprehensive and experienced treatment infrastructure deployed on the same day that the measure took effect? Did insurance start covering such treatment? Was the social stigma immediately lifted?

The long-term vision under legalization is that reputable, regulated corporations can start selling safe versions of drugs, complete with doctor-approved dosing instructions and Surgeon's general warnings and hotlines to call for help on the side of the package, instead of people getting unsafe street drug fro dealers that are incentivized to push them into more and more addictive shit. But did the measure even make it legal for corporations to operate in such a way, let alone have they actually started doing so?

The long-term vision is that people growing up under legalization can seek treatment and talk to people about the problems early in the process, and be less stigmatized and less pushed into a criminal part of society, and therefore make better decision and have better average outcomes. But what we're seeing today is mostly existing long-term heavy addicts suddenly having an easier time getting their fix, not anything about long-term trends for people growing up in the system.

And, of course, if a particular vice is legal one place and illegal everywhere surrounding it, lots of 'enthusiasts' will travel/move there to indulge, tainting the statistics.

Again, obviously this data is not good for the legalization argument, it is in fact evidence against it. But there's lots of reasons to expect short-term reactions to be bad in a way that the long-term equilibrium might not be. Especially in the case where you want to replace a bad solution to a problem with a good solution to a problem, but have so far only taken the step of removing the bad solution, which is mostly what I think is happening here.

I'm still optimistic about long-term trends, particularly if people actually devote the resources and effort into installing the new solution.

I think a difficulty is that providing treatment at the scale required is expensive and the people using the services that do exist are generally indigent and therefore cannot contribute to those programs. The ROÍ for treatment is also mostly to the individual getting treatment, not the public as the new rehabbed patient is likely to be replaced with someone else. So from the public tax point of view, rehabbing druggies is a cost sunk, and a relatively expensive one. Getting the public to approve of enough taxes to fully fund rehabs is running against the problem that there’s no large scale benefit to paying that tax. So there won’t really be enough money for enough treatment centers to make rehab a viable part of the program. What it leaves is “decriminalize drugs.” Which brings with it homelessness and street crime.

This, plus the fact that we have no idea how to do "treatment" that actually works. Scott posted loooooong ago that honest studies on rehab for alcoholism fail to beat a placebo. The end goal of most rehab studies for harder drugs like potent opioids isn't even "stops using potent opioids"; it's "maybe uses potent opioids slightly less and gets up to criminal mischief slightly less often". The true believers in the idea that we're just going to "apply 'treatment' directly to the forehead", if we just try hard enough politically and decide to spend enough money, and that it will magically convert addicts into non-addicts/non-users, are just banging their heads against reality.

Scott's post is worth re-reading.

I can't really imagine it being at all likely that the long term equilibrium would have fewer drugs. Legalization has a normalizing effect, so you get more of it. I would imagine that there is more marijuana use in all the states that have legalized it than previously.

Social stigma can serve a useful role: it keeps use down somewhat.

Lowering drug use is a worthwhile aim, the decrease in use of cigarettes has been a good thing.

It could be true that legalization, if done in the right ways, could result in lower overdoses: you could easily imagine making the companies producing the drugs liable for any overdoses due to them. But there would still be overdoses due to misuse.

And, of course, I don't think the only harms are overdoses.

Agreed that 'what are the real harms beyond overdoses' is the important question here.

And I think it has to be a lot more nuanced than 'making it legal means more'. I think in a sense that's true, sure, but it overlooks usage dynamics.

Like, if you legalized fentanyl and nothing else, sure more people will use fentanyl. But fentanyl is 'popular' right now because it is more addictive and cheaper to produce than other drugs, drug dealers prefer to push it on clients and mix small amounts of it into other drugs to increase their potency and addictiveness, it's not popular primarily because people are freely choosing it over other alternatives on a free market.

If you legalize fentanyl and oxycodone and hydrocodone and opium and heroin and extasy and lsd and shrooms, and you get corporations to make them so they're pure and clearly labelled and have warning labels about their addictiveness and risks, and they're all mas produced commodities with reasonably comparable prices, do you still have the same level of fentanyl epidemic?

I do believe you get 'more' drug use, but I'd expect it to fall more to less harmful drugs, and less destructive patterns of use. I'd expect more people to be getting clear guidance and feedback from friends and family to slow the rate at which they increase their dosage, keeping them less messed up for longer. I'd expect commercial drugs to be less expensive in ways that limit how much people have to sell everything they own and turn to crime ot afford their fix. I'd expect it to be harder to fund an addiction with criminal activities when you're buying from a respectable businesss with security cameras and transaction records the police can subpoena and corporate liability to watch out for, instead of from another criminal off the books.

Etc.

Basically, I think the generic 'amount' of drugs used doesn't correlate that much with the amount of harm caused, compared to the effect of changing the social and legal regime in which that use happens.

I'll say the same thing I have there: the long-term new status quo of a dramatic policy change is hard to deduce from the short-term reactions...

How do we define "short-term" reactions? A year? A decade? A century? How do we disambiguate from the highly convinient and entirely degenerate "n + 10 years, where n is equal to the current time since the policy's introduction"?

Does this argument work the other way? If ODs had in fact dropped 50% the next day, would we likewise be asking if this was only a temporary effect, and entirely dire outcomes were still to be expected at some indeterminate future date?

and the trends in a world where something is legal everywhere are different from the trends where it's illegal everywhere except for one place.

If implementing a policy locally will cause it to fail disastrously and the only way to do it properly is to implement it globally, isn't it on the people supporting the policy to know this ahead of time and not to push for local implementation?

Of course it would be better for the legalization argument if the day after everything was legalized, overdose deaths dropped 50% and never went up again. But that was probably never realistic...

I would certainly agree that complete drug legalization dropping OD deaths 50% is not a realistic expectation. Of course, I am not an advocate for total drug legalization. What did the advocates expect? What predictions did they make about what their policy would achieve? were those predictions accurate? If not, why should people trust their new predictions?

But was a comprehensive and experienced treatment infrastructure deployed on the same day that the measure took effect? Did insurance start covering such treatment? Was the social stigma immediately lifted?

If these steps were necessary for the policy to succeed, how did the policy address them, and when it became clear that they would not or could not be addressed, why was the policy not promptly reversed?

...Every point you make superficially resembles a valid critique, but at no point do you explain why these issues were not foreseen and accounted for, or why the policy was implemented despite them. Would you expect this policy, as implemented, to dramatically increase drug deaths, drug abuse and human misery generally? I would, because I think the policy itself is ideological lunacy spouted by idiots who have no understanding of how the world and humans in it function. If you think the general idea was good but the implementation sucked, it behooves you and people like you to make that clear in advance, and to fight like hell to prevent the bad implementation from happening. Because what actually happened here, it seems to me, is that a standard pillar of Progressive ideology was implemented under favorable conditions by true believers, promptly failed catastrophically, and that you are now explaining why we shouldn't learn anything actionable from the highly visible and extremely dramatic results. This is probably the best possible play, given the givens of situation and commitments, but one feels justified in pointing out that it is not a very good play in an objective sense.

Meanwhile, other questions linger. How many people has this policy killed? How many lives has it ruined? Where does it sit on the scale of contemporary American atrocities, in a concrete sense? I have no actual idea, but I'd be interested to know. It's very easy to be carried along by the journo-engineered affect of a story while establishing zero grounding to what the facts of the story actually mean in concrete terms. This story describes a lot of bad things, but "a lot" is not very specific. Maybe it really is not that big of a deal! But if it is a big deal, people should be able to recognize the bigness, right?

If Reds implemented a policy with similar consequences that you feel were entirely predictable, would you take a similar long view? How does this compare, in concrete terms, to the Red repeal of Roe v Wade? Better? Worse? Different, and if so, why? I'm sure if Roe has resulted in a dramatic, undeniable uptick in horrifying outcomes, that information should not be hard to find. If, in an objective sense, this policy killed more people than the repeal of Roe, should we consider it a worse policy than the repeal of Roe? If people nonetheless considered this no big deal and Roe a five-alarm emergency, is that interesting information? And obviously the facts could go the other way, and the reverse would be true as well, and Roe is a national policy versus a state policy in this case, etc, etc, but I imagine you get the drift.

How likely do you think it that some other location within the US is going to try the same policy again, and are you willing to predict the results of a reproduction? I personally think it's quite likely, given the long history of our social systems proving incapable to learn from experience, never mind example.

Does this argument work the other way? If ODs had in fact dropped 50% the next day, would we likewise be asking if this was only a temporary effect, and entirely dire outcomes were still to be expected at some indeterminate future date?

I bite the bullet on this. I claim that America's experience with the 18th and 21st amendments is the template for how these kinds of things usually play out.

Its starts off with X fully legal and embedded in society, despite a vociferous minority pointing to the substantial harms that X causes. Eventually X is prohibited by law. The shop shelves are swept bare. The factories shut down. Xaholics get a brutal wake up call. Many quit X cold turkey. Some get medical help tapering. Perhaps some die of withdrawal or toxic substitutes. By the end of the first year prohibition is looking like a great success. Skeptics predicted a tidal wave of prosecutions for X-offences, but it doesn't materialize, because people cannot get X.

(Possession of alcohol was never illegal, just manufacture, sale, and transportation. Initially that was tactically shrewd. Ordinary people could see it coming, stock up, and then consume their private stocks, expecting others to do the hard work of campaigning for the 21st amendment. The day of the last bottle of wine was different in different households, weakening coordination against prohibition. In the long term that was perhaps the undoing of prohibition. Only the seller faced legal penalties, so the black market that developed was asymmetrical, with lots of undeterred buyers and a few sellers, well paid for their legal risk.)

Time passes and the initial success wears well. At least it seems to. Networks of friends are gradually forming. Brewing at home. Making a still. Getting hold of a bottle of wine to share with trusted friends over Sunday dinner. It is all metaphorically flying under radar. The Prohibitionists don't see that their victory is rotting. Now-a-days there would be drone smuggling, literally flying under radar :-)

Home brewing and piece meal smuggling are annoying for those who just want a drink. Money starts changing hands. The black market grows. Prohibitionists start to realize that alcohol is still for sale, but covertly and for a fancy price. Some are inclined to turn a blind eye. If it is too expensive for people to afford to become alcoholics, that mitigates the harms. Other prohibitionists resent the disobedience and insist on stronger penalties.

Full time employment in the black economy now splits into insiders and outsiders. Outsiders get rich on the high price of booze, but they sometimes get caught and go to jail. Insiders don't get as rich because they share their money with the police as bribes. It gets complicated. The bribe-taking police need to make a show of doing their jobs. The insiders resent the endless supply of outsiders in search of easy money, increasing the supply and lowering the profits. Fortunately they have the police on their side to enforce their monopoly of the alcohol supply. They tip off "their" policemen. It gets more complicated, with rival groups of insiders setting their own paid-for police on intruders on their turf who are also insiders, just bribing other policemen.

Meanwhile the smugglers are tackling the volume issue. The secret compartment has a limited volume V. The more potent your version of X, the more doses you can fit in V. In the 1920's that meant smuggling spirits rather than beer. Today that means smuggling fentanyl rather than heroin. Then there is the business of cutting drugs, adulterating them to increase the bulk after smuggling.

Eventually the situation is out of control. Every-one who wants X knows the secret handshakes and the special places. They get their hands on it. Some of it is adulterated and death rate is higher than before prohibition. The point I like to emphasize is that this takes twenty or thirty years. By the time the death rate comes back up and exceeds the old death rate from legal X, the world has changed.

The world has changed, but how much? You get one group of public health experts saying that prohibition has failed and must be repealed. Others saying that we must pivot to harm reduction. Still others say that the world has changed a lot and for the worse. Thank God that we have prohibition keeping a lid on the problems of X. If we repealed prohibition the death rate would soar still higher. Who is right?

My claim is that prohibition is a dangerous policy option because it may well fail, and that the American experiment with the prohibition alcohol was untypical in exactly one way: it proved possible to repeal it. You should expect that prohibition of X works well for the first five years. When thirty years have gone by and it has clearly failed, you will not be able to repeal it. Campaigners for prohibition will have happy memories of the first five years, and consider that short term success proves the eternal correctness of prohibition.

prohibition of X

I think this reasoning fails to get off the ground, for reasons that may be coincident with what FC is getting at. "Prohibition of X" is different for different values of X. What is the nature of X? How does it come to be? Where? By who? What is its size? Use? Alternatives? Etc. That is, people have prohibited alcohol, drugs, prescription drugs, small guns, large guns, of course you can throw in F-16s and nuclear weapons, or even just Chinese drywall. The list goes on. People have also tried prohibiting things that are less than tangible, like encryption or killing babies, or all sorts of stuff. I see almost no reason why there should be a single schema that dictates how every possible prohibition of every possible X will (not) work. Different things are different. Some may be extremely difficult to prohibit; others may be relatively easier. It is likely impossible to do any with 100% success everywhere, because 100% success is just not a thing in law/public policy (I guess there's probably some guy out there who is just really determined to bring over some Chinese drywall... and for Sagan's sake, we can't even get to zero killed babies), so we usually have to use some other metrics for success.

I accept that you are 95% right about the big picture. The huge difference between coffee and fentanyl is the only thing that really matters.

Notice though, that I zoomed in on the specific issue of timing. Who dares to doubt an intervention that works well for the first year? I dare.

Looking at my reasoning, we see that it is mostly about social dynamics. Friends put out feelers to friends. The black market slowly becomes monetized and professionalized. Since it is illegal to offer bribes to policemen, there are several years of nudges and winks before police corruption takes hold. The social dynamics set a slow time scale that is not obviously related to specifics of what has been prohibited.

Do you believe prohibition to be simply impossible to implement well, or is it just that we did a bad job of it?

I believe that prohibition works less well than its mainstream advocates expect. I think the gap is huge. Mainstream advocates of prohibition never grasp how poorly it works and never admit the extent of the problems. Within the constraints of Western Morality (you cannot just take the addicts out and shoot them) the problems are unfixable, we didn't merely do a bad job of it.

On the other hand I notice a fatal flaw in my reasoning. I assume, based on pure optimism, that there is a good solution to the problems of substance abuse. I see that prohibition works very badly. Legal permissiveness is an alternative. I have my unjustified axiom that there is a solution, so I hope that legal permissiveness is that solution and does actually work. This is embarrassingly silly. In general terms nothing prevents legal permissiveness from being an even worse disaster than prohibition.

Of course the details of the particular substance in question are decisive. Legal permissiveness works very well for coffee, but it might turn out to be a mega-death disaster for fentanyl.

If these steps were necessary for the policy to succeed, how did the policy address them, and when it became clear that they would not or could not be addressed, why was the policy not promptly reversed?

I think the key point here is that without federal legalisation, there can be no reputable drugs industry, which means state legalisation just lets the criminals run rampant and magnifies rather than eliminates the dirty-drugs problem. I think you are correct that without federal legalisation everyone involved should have HCFed and not attempted state legalisation anyway.

I honestly have to ask who the hell thought this was a good idea. Junkies, notoriously prudent and sensible people, will use the new policy wisely and rationally. Yes, that seems plausible.

I understand people want to be compassionate and to avoid harsh criminal penalties where rehabilitation is better, but this was like handing the keys of an off-licence to an alcoholic and expecting them to stick to the no-alcohol beer section.

I suspect Rat Park has something to do with the modern view on addiction and these bleeding heart laws.

The moral framework is

  1. drug addicts exist
  2. but they wouldn't, if society wasn't failing them in some way (too much like rat cage, not enough like rat paradise)
  3. since it is society's fault, we should not be putting addicts in jail. that's just cruel
  4. so, lets not put them in jail
  5. instead, offer them high quality mental health services instead!

That is, someone who was happy and healthy and content with life would not be an addict. Lets fix, I dunno, global capitalism or something.

I guess the problem is we, by far, can't offer anything like rat paradise. Further, high quality mental health services don't work very well at curing addiction. Worse, what the state offers isn't high quality but rather what you'd expect. Worse still, addicts in the full depth of addiction often don't want treatment. And finally, making life more like rat paradise doesn't stop people from becoming addicts.

As per Scott's critique Against Rat Park, people that are totally content and have every reason not to want to be hopelessly addicted tent city fentanyl addicts end up there anyway. Drugs really do re-wire your brain.

Many of us would strongly prefer Rat Park be true. The moment I heard that explanation I adopted it as my default view of addiction — the idea is too good to check. And it's one of those rare too-goods-to-check that transcends political faction. Are you a bleeding heart progressive? Rat Park morally pardons the downtrodden. A small government libertarian? Rat Park makes drug repression and imprisoning people for bodily choices unnecessary and barbaric. A political extremist of any variety? Rat Park condemns our current society as dystopic and in need of correction.

Sadly, it seems I (Party B) must admit that true bodily autonomy does actually create a class of useless junkies, who must either be supported or left to die in the street. It's a hard pill to swallow.

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