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There's a general argument pattern that goes like this: "here's a problem, look how bad it is, we need to do something!" and then "this is something! I'm doing this to solve the problem, how can you oppose what I'm doing? Do you think the problem is actually good?" Finding a problem in the world does not give you a blank check to do whatever you want as long as you can write some words arguing its related to solving the problem.

So the answer here is they should do nothing until they find an action that's actually effective and doesn't have much worse side effects than the actual problem. This is same thing anyone trying to fix any other problem in the world should do.

You are giving the impression that the culture war is so important to you that it's worth burning the world to make sure your side wins. There are other things in the world that are important besides the culture war and once you start destroying those other things as part of some sloppily-targeted crusade, it's a pretty reasonable conclusion to say that you shouldn't have power.

I'm not convinced. Humanity has a long and successful history of breeding for strict usefulness - which often ends up being the same as fitness.

We also have a history of breeding fragility. Dogs are the usual example. As far as I know, wolves (or sometimes hybrids) remain more fit anywhere with their range, and a lot of dogs are useless (e.g. toy breeds) or damaged (e.g. overly-large German Shepherds with hip dysplasia). Ornamental plants, too. Sometimes they seed and "go wild", and typically later generations lose their showiness very quickly.

However, just paying people more doesn’t change the fact that you are paying them for their labor, meaning they are making themselves into a commodity, a thing, which cannot have anything but bad knock-on effects on the psyche.

It's not the case that capitalism is "just paying people more". There's no real mechanism to accomplish that. One cannot simply come up with a deus ex machina to keep everything else the same, but just increase how much you pay people.

Instead, what "paying people more" means is that people increase in productivity, usually via specialization and trade. The trade part is then integral to the means by which people get "paid more". The only real way we know of to increase productivity is specialization and improvement of ideas.

One then must consider the separate question of alienation. In a world of specialization and increasing of ideas, there are many opportunities, some of which are highly specialized, and some of which are the production of ideas. There are now strictly more types of things one can choose to do. I find that alienation seems to be a subjective attitude toward the things that one does. One person may feel alienated from the work of a research scientist; another may feel alienated from the work of a farmer. A thousand years ago, if you were someone who had the subjective experience of feeling alienated from the work of being a farmer, tough luck. Now, you have options. If someone has the subjective experience of feeling alienated from any work other than being a subsistence farmer, living off the land and only their own toil and sweat, they can choose to do so. Most people don't. They feel some stronger alienation that is repelling them from that choice. I don't see why we should force them to experience that greater alienation.

The more general spiritual malaise many feel probably does arise from the abandonment of religion and even half-hearted metaphysics/metaethics. That's pretty orthogonal to questions about wealth, productivity, and what people do for work.

No, this really wasn't much better than posting a LMGTFY. Don't do this.

I suppose if you place zero or negative value on the lives saved by PEPFAR, then yeah, obviously. End it yesterday.

How much of the lives of the Americans paying are you willing to sacrifice to allow Africans to have happy fun times without consequences?

Even refrigerants that completely satisfy our modem sensibilities (low global warming potential, zero ozone depletion potential) work as well as they always did. There's no magic sauce in those old fluorocarbons.

Part of the magic sauce is that they work at lower pressures. Other magic things include that they don't form HF if there's any water in the system, they're compatible with less expensive non-hygroscopic (remember that HF?) oils, they're single component so there's no need to replace all the refrigerant if there's a leak, and the very fact that the environmentalists hate them most makes them cool better. OK, maybe the last one is a myth.

Hell, even propane and CO2 are basically ideal refrigerants (but require a complete redesign of the cooling circuit, with much beefier parts to allow for much higher pressures).

Propane runs fine in a system designed for R-12. The issue with it is flammability.

Slavery was universal in the ancient world, and in some form (state slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom/peonage) right up until shortly after the Industrial Revolution. If non-slaveowning societies really were so much better than slaveowning ones, you'd think some great emancipator would have come along and started wrecking all those slave societies, but they didn't. So slavery's economic inferiority is not inherent in the human condition but a product of modernity. Probably before you have machines, treating people as machines pays off.

As a matter of basic logic and follow through, I get a little peeved that if one agrees with the stance that "we, via the coercive power of the state, need to do something" then by god one should make sure it actually is effective. Frequently, this evaluation step is skipped.

Or the evaluation is done and it says the thing was effective. Regardless of whether it was. Because the institutions that do the evaulation are captured by the proponents of the proposal.

How is monetary policy an accounting identity?

When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest

I realise I'm replying quite late (got here for the Quality Contributions thread) but I don't think this is the case. There are plenty of studies that show that gendered opionions (both positive and negative) neutralise with age. Older women are treated like men. Not worse than men, the same as men.

Shakeri and North found that, in general, women were viewed more positively than men, and younger and middle-aged adults were viewed more positively than older adults. However, when looking specifically at intersections of age and gender, the results revealed a more nuanced picture. Younger and middle-aged women were both rated more favorably than their male counterparts. But when it came to older adults, perceptions of women and men were virtually identical, suggesting that gender differences in attitudes tend to level out in later life. This pattern provides empirical support for what the authors call the “gender convergence effect,” where distinctions in attitudes based on gender diminish with age.

TLDR: Women are wonderful, until they get old, at which point they lose the benefits of their femininity and get treated like men. At no point are they treated worse than men.

I believe Lewis himself thought that Faces was his best book. But it never enjoyed the popularity of Narnia. I understand why, but I always go out of my way to recommend it. The Four Loves is a good companion, and a more explicit charting of Lewis' thoughts on the kinds of love and their perversions.

The optimal level of coercion is not zero.

Sure, but principles that don't demand you sacrifice anything for them can hardly be deemed limiting principles. I'm sure you can do the work of designing those properly, but I don't really see that work being done and that doesn't bode well.

I'll commend Scott (or at least his past self) for doing some of that work. But I don't think it was anywhere near close enough.

no one in EA leadership was encouraging or validating Ziz or SBF with awareness of their actual behavior/intent and denounced it all upon discovery

Marx specifically disavowed Guesde and called himself "not a marxist". That's my point. Dr Frankenstein isn't absolved of the responsibility of building his Golem by casting it out.

Are you an anarcho-capitalist?

No, I don't see anarchy as a realistic proposition. I guess I'm a paleo-liberal at this point or something to that effect.

3 of them this month? Good to see that aura AAQC farming is a skill I haven't lost. Maybe I should do more stupid things if I get good essays out of them!

Retrovirals work. They let people lead normal lives, and make HIV no longer a death sentence. We now have semi-experimental vaccines that stave off the disease, and I strongly expect a full cure being on the market within a decade at most.

Even if PEPFAR wanted to run indefinitely, it will face the guinea worm 'problem' of not having a disease to tackle, and unless you're 70 years old, it'll happen in your lifetime.

That's like saying that medical care is pointless, because even I save a child from dying of anaphylactic shock, they'll grow old and die anyway. Then they might have kids, who will, if they're not prone to atopy, still inevitably die.

I'm not an EA, and I don't particularly care about people with HIV in Africa, but I still find this a weak criticism at best. They believe that extending/saving lives is good, which I can't disagree with on a general principle. I'm certainly not on the shrimp welfare train, but I must concede that if you care about that inane cause, you might as well make sure your money is as effective as it can be.

I think you're vastly underrating the earnestness and good will of communists. People very rarely start with murderous intent. That tends to proceed from the grinding of relatively benign dictums against the realities of power.

Moreover, please don't do the whole "it's just a few kooks on college campuses", one loses use of that argument after their first SBF. You and I are not beyond lynching kulaks, there is just a precarious set of incentives that allows us to maintain the moral rectitude to not do so. And I'm arguing that most EA people have, as part of their utilitarian construction, jettisoned important parts of those incentives.

To wit, I recommend rule utilitarianism and a higher degree of humility before history and the human condition.

But, as anyone here is likely to know, random traits are randomly distributed (often on a Gaussian scale), and the more you filter your results on one axis the more you'll have to tolerate imperfections on the others. So if you filter the child on height, BMI, eye color, you'll have to make some compromises on ADHD and IQ, most likely.

I'm not convinced. Humanity has a long and successful history of breeding for strict usefulness - which often ends up being the same as fitness.

Wild hogs interbreeding with escaped factory farming sows have led to feral hog sounders orders is magnitude more troublesome than wild hogs ever where in the past.

Pick any natural environment that ever had wild horses. You'll find a breed of domesticated horse that, when allowed to go feral, would outcompete the native wild horses, and quickly. Humans have made them larger/stronger/sturdier than nature ever could.

My fear is that selective breeding will allow humans to do the same to their children. And just like street dogs, which effortlessly outcompete coyotes and wolves in urban environments, those designer babies could end up strictly superior in the environment they are made for. As with the hogs, some interbreeding with the "wild" population might improve the end result significantly.

Now, with horses, hogs and dogs we need thousands of generations to get results. The question is how much this process is accelerated by direct gene selection.

Just move to the Netherlands, bro...

From a purely physical/technical perspective, modern refrigerants are fine.

Even refrigerants that completely satisfy our modem sensibilities (low global warming potential, zero ozone depletion potential) work as well as they always did. There's no magic sauce in those old fluorocarbons. Hell, even propane and CO2 are basically ideal refrigerants (but require a complete redesign of the cooling circuit, with much beefier parts to allow for much higher pressures).

If legacy AC systems seem to have more power, I'd assume they come with a more powerful compressor, and without pesky electronics that limit that power in any way.

It was ages ago, it got reinstated, I know I should get over it.... but man, every time something like this happens, I can't stop thinking about an article from a 50 year old magazine, that I had to have shipped from half way across the world, and manually re-type, that got deleted by the mods for being a "bare link"...

I'll gladly betray all mankind past present and future twice over and then some for tall woman with unusual face. That just always gets me.

EDIT: and as you can see from the responses below, it seems that some prominent posters here seem to think that this is a good thing? Do you understand now why I would pick the woke?

Whether good or bad, it's a thing that had to happen. You can bemoan it or regret it or celebrate it or stand puzzled by it, and still I'd ask you to answer this question: What would you have asked the enemies of the woke to do? Leave academia alone, no matter the degree to which it has been weaponized against them? Come to their senses and realize they're on the wrong side? What else?

Counter anecdote: many parts of Switzerland have serious restrictions on residential AC. Some cities have outright banned them (Basel, Geneva), others require the AC to be powered by solar panels, others just don't allow the heat exchanger of a mini split to be attached to the facade of a building. Those two are de-facto bans on AC in apartments.

When you're talking about Europe, regulations like that will vary wildly between locations, and you'll always find anecdotes supporting whatever side you picked.

I'm not exactly sure how much the OSHA/FLSA graphs are supposed to prove. It's not like occupational safety laws and measures or general labor laws and measures where things that were nonexistent before OSHA/FLSA, right? Aren't these furthermore the points where these things passed from improvements being workplace-based and affected by labor union advocacy to the state taking control, making the anti-union point less clear?

It seems like there are two not-quite-identical problems being identified here. The first is overtly named "developing a classical liberal power base", while the second is not explicitly named, I think it has significant overlap if not being identical to "crony capitalism".

Some natural questions arise. What is a "power base"? What is necessary for it; what is sufficient? It is the "power" to do what? A natural concern is that, depending on how one views that power/power base, and the necessary conditions for it, perhaps it inherently contains a sufficient "amount of power" with suitable orientation so as to be inherently suspect vis a vis crony capitalism.

This is essentially the starting point of 'state capacity libertarianism', but some might say that it's also the starting point for constitutionalism and limited government to begin with. The question of the adequacy of those tools devolves quickly into many offshoots, each which contains its own version of, "Yeah, but how do you get the power to do that?" As I've observed here before, often times, that's sneaking in some bullshit goalposts. For if one could outline a simple set of steps to be done, one other could always respond, "Then why haven't you done it yet?" Yet history marches on, and despite some claims that nothing ever happens, while nothing happens much of the time, some things do happen and change over time.

But enough about real things; let's be silly! Let's go full Great Man Theory and assume we could elect a variant of Donald Trump. Trump has already made some moves toward reducing things to what is required by statute and the Constitution. He's also made some moves, uh, opposite of that. But he has shown how you can sort of just boldly go in and do stuff, forcing the system to adapt around you. What are some of the most hilarious things our variant President could do to drive the system in the direction we want? I'll throw out a good starting one; it's even got the sort of 'hardball negotiating' sense that Trump tries to put off. Our variant President tells the American people that his hands are tied. He's read the Constitution. He saw what it says, and lots of people are talking about it. The Constitution just doesn't authorize an Air Force (or a Space Force, for that matter). Obviously, he doesn't want to abolish the Air Force. It is yugely important for the power and prestige of America. But the Constitution is the Constitution, so unless Congress and the States pass an amendment to the Constitution in the next 90days, he's regrettably going to have to shut the whole thing down.

You start here specifically because it is one of the most absurd places, where technically-proper formalism has not been followed, but everyone gives in and shrugs their shoulders because they prefer power instead. Nobody will have any real argument against formalizing the Constitutionality of the Air Force, either, so it'll probably get done. And that sends a message, giving you political cover. "Now that everyone has agreed that it's important to strictly follow the Constitution and formally authorize any deviations from its very limited grant of power, I'm going to start shutting everything down that isn't properly authorized unless you can get sufficient supermajorities to save it." You could probably take a nice slice out of much of the cronyism. Probably won't get all of it. Could you actually restore a norm of Constitutionalism and limited government? Maybe. Maybe for a while. But then I think we're probably nearing another goalpost that I think is probably also mostly bullshit. Not only "how do you get your policy preferences implemented", but "how do you keep your policy preferences in place forevermore"? That's essentially an unsolvable problem, and it's unsolvable for essentially every political position, not just classical liberalism. It would be an isolated demand for rigor to require it of that political position alone.