domain:alakasa.substack.com
TitaniumButterfly
28m ago
So look my response here (the one I'm writing at the moment) is not intended as a petulant argument, but I feel a bit frustrated and I'm trusting you to interpret it in the spirit in which I mean it, and thanks in advance for taking the time.
First things first, I appreciate the ethos you're laying out here. As I understand it, this space functions based upon an axiom that anyone should be able to participate in good faith without having to suffer what amount to unnecessary indications of being unwelcome. If someone is of the opinion that entire classes of people are fundamentally incapable of participating in valid ways, that's a problem, because The Motte takes as axiomatic that people of all classes should be welcome to participate as they're able and those who disagree damage the capacity of the site to fulfill that function.
I think this is basically good and right. Not for reasons of niceness, but for reasons of epistemic humility, as you say. It's all too easy for any of us to be flatly wrong about something if for no other reason than because we've simply never encountered someone who could have corrected us if we'd bothered to discuss the matter with them. And, particularly when it comes to evaluating such matters as the one under discussion at the moment (to what degree long-divergent ancestral groups should be considered as belonging in the same class), it's intuitively very important that those of the ancestral groups in question have as much of a chance at participation as possible in order to maximize the chances of this happening.
So far, so good.
"Blacks are animals" - not okay.
Arguendo that was my position (it wasn't; see below), how about "I think blacks are animals"? It's a useful test case because we get to the heart of whether the issue is with the opinion or the phrasing. Though FWIW, again, I think the term 'animals' here was a poor choice which generates vastly more heat than light, at least without defining it in detail and in ways that would probably trigger a lot of disagreement per se.
It's about... at least pretending that you believe those people are people who have a right to disagree with you.
I just don't think I ran afoul of this, is the thing. If I say that I don't think eight year olds (and those who are mentally at that level regardless of their adult bodies) generally don't have the capacity to function as responsible adults, I doubt anyone would react with horror and disgust, and I also think the difference is entirely political. Similar opinions about women and, er, genetically-less-mentally-developed ancestral groups were nothing if not mainstream and considered prima facie obvious not too long ago and for most of human history.
Yeah, saying that is gonna upset some eight year olds, who are a lot less likely to participate precisely because they are juvenile and react accordingly. And I'll even allow that somewhere out there are a few who would make better citizens than many existing citizens. But it would be crazy to object to the observation on those grounds. And the "I think" in the claim is qualifier enough, in my opinion, or in the case of my OP, "I call it". Hedging my statements like that is a practice I picked up here, actually, for exactly the reason that signaling epistemic humility by doing so is useful for the tone of the space and even as a little reminder to myself. I've gotten lazy about it, so again, I concede that you had grounds for correcting me.
If you said the first thing - "I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - a black poster here, assuming they were willing to engage, has something to engage with. They can disagree with your premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask you why you think that...
All good and well.
But what is a black person supposed to say to "You're an animal"?
They can disagree with my premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask me why I think that...
In short, they can behave exactly as I'd expect myself to behave. Or, if they can't, well?
Finally, and I realize this is likely to come off as splitting hairs but I wasn't talking about 'black people', and frankly I sincerely doubt that any of the people I was talking about would ever show up here in the first place for the same reason that eight year olds don't. (Perfectly-lovely and intelligent black people do show up here from time to time and I consider a couple of them friends and hang out in other spaces and even occasionally go to one for advice on medical issues.) I'm talking about comparatively-genetically-mentally-incapable people. In this particular case, heavy overlap with black, yes. But slavery is not a uniquely black issue and neither is being what amounts to a feral savage who will behave as such regardless of attempts at forcible civilization. In any event there's enough admixture at this point that blanket statements about SSH-descended inhabitants of the US are a lot less appropriate than they were two hundred years ago.
So -- I guess I just want to get the above off my chest. This isn't really an objection to anything you said in particular, I again acknowledge your correction, and (hopefully obviously) I don't intend any kind of gotcha argument. It's just a difficult situation. I'm glad to be in a place where we're at least trying to navigate such a thicket together in good faith.
helmut_hofmeister
35m ago
Husband to a US physician here and I have to say that this comment and some of your previous ones strike me as very accurate based on my observing her med school / residency / fellowship and placement experiences. They can’t pay people enough to work in underserved areas. $500k a year is good money but not necessarily worth it to live in a cultural desert full if resentful unhealthy poor people, boring food, bleak weather, etc. some doctors HAVE to choose their specialty for financial reasons, etc.
jeroboam
36m ago
Why not? Are you claiming the other 186k per month were shipped back to their home countries?
Only 330,000 people have been deported since 2021: https://www.ice.gov/spotlight/statistics
ResoluteRaven
44m ago
Even if in absolute terms the percentages are small compared to the US or Europe, the change has been rapid and very noticeable, particularly if you visited Tokyo, Seoul, or Taipei 20 years ago and only went back recently (I will amend my statement to exclude mainland China, where the percentage of foreigners has fallen since the pandemic). The proportion of East Asian or East Asian-looking (i.e. Vietnamese) immigrants is also significant in terms of things like running into people who don't speak the local language well, although they may be indistinguishable to outsiders.
Throwaway05
46m ago
If you sacrificed your college experience and didn't have any fun of any kind in your 20s and took on a half a million dollars in debt in order to become a surgeon then yes, obviously.
As I said in my other comment we don't need to speculate about this. Many medical trainees will refuse to practice in that environment and will drop out or just choose to make less money practicing in a bigger city with a worse patient population or job.
Granted your specific example isn't a good one because being in mid-Atlantic is attractive and there are a few nice healthcare providers in the area. Change it to anywhere in Indiana.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
51m ago
Apparently, the National Information Standards Organization (discovered via this video) publishes standards on such topics as bibliographic references, indexes, contributor roles (not just authors and editors, but also supervisors, administrators, validators, data curators, conceptualizers…), and library shelving.
ebrso
52m ago
Great outcomes are gone yes, as are the good and okay.
Just to be clear, is your position that a life making $200k/year practicing internal medicine in a small town 50 miles outside Philadelphia is not an okay outcome? Why not?
As far as I understand it Lincoln wanted to ban the spread of slavery to the territories. From the Republican platform of the Chicago convention of 1860, clause 8:
That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom; that as our republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no "person should be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law," it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.
So no, Lincoln didn't want to ban slavery, but he wanted to prevent its spread into territories that had not yet been granted statehood.
This is in contrast to the Southern Democratic Party that wanted slaveholders to be allowed to bring their property (i.e. slaves) into all the territories, effectively making slavery legal everywhere that was not already a state. Now, once these territories were granted statehood, the new states could ban slavery as before. From the Southern Democratic platform of 1860, clause 1:
That the Government of a Territory organized by an act of Congress, is provisional and temporary; and during its existence, all citizens of the United States have an equal right to settle with their property in the Territory, without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation.
This clause was completely unacceptable to the North for obvious reasons, on top of recent rollbacks of previous compromises (the Kansas/Nebraska Act undid much of the Missouri compromise), hence the party split and Lincoln's victory in the election.
Throwaway05
21m ago
People underestimate how bad working in healthcare is. Admin and regulatory bloat is the worst it is in any field. Perks are thin on the ground, the chair in my office during residency was older than I was, I frequently had to talk half a mile to the hospital at 4am, etc. Some people work a 24 hour shift every 4 days for years. You can get sued for anything. During residency if you quit or get fired your career is over.
It sucks. The pluses make it worth it, but they get eroded year after year and that includes the compensation.
Many doctors will tell kids interested in medicine not to do it. And that's with said salaries as they are.
People don't get it.
NullHypothesis
48m ago
We live in an era of information bombardment so it's crucial to be able to figure out what deserves your attention and what doesn't. By the way, I defer to the experts for a lot of my knowledge too, it's unavoidable. I couldn't get anything useful outside of Terrence Howard's ideas except amusement so I didn't listen to the whole thing. Maybe you see something of value in there I don't.
I think I would enjoy his ideas if it was presented as a system in a science fiction novel but it's being presented as reality and I can't decouple that to take his ideas seriously.
Throwaway05
51m ago
Do the math. When do similar high education fields start cracking a million? I'm not talking about a partner at McKinsey or a top level google engineer. I'm talking an average person in consulting, finance, or tech making low six figures. Way way earlier if they aren't spending like an idiot. Compound interest is a hell of a drug and physician don't start getting compensated until into their 30s and have a done of debt.
Yes 4.5% is a lot of money in real dollar terms but it is a drop in the bucket in terms of percentage and you know it. It's politically popular sure, but there is so much admin bloat, insurance nonsense and regulatory bullshit which is way easier to target and a much larger slice of the pie. Salaries are empirically not the problem.
And said salaries are what's propping up the system. Doctors do almost all of the revenue generation and work stops without them.
People do not understand how bad working in healthcare is. Nursing are being offered six figure for 36 hours a week of work and they are just refusing to do it.
No other job asks you to do things like work 100 hours a week, 24 hours straight, get sued even when you did everything right with regularity etc etc. If you halved salaries then a lot of specialties would die on the spot. Nobody is going to procedural work or surgeries of any kind in the U.S. under that model. Nobody is doing radiology etc etc. Being a doctor in the U.S. requires too much sacrifice.
As always the problem is not a doctor shortage it's an allocation shortage. That's the issue we have right now. Because we won't pay to get people to do the things we need (primary care and rural medicine). Cutting salaries is the opposite of the solution. And we don't need to theorize what would happen if you just increased the supply. We already did that with mid levels. They made the problem worse.
Oopz
57m ago
I'm trying to have an accurate view of the world so I'm (somewhat) constantly checking my confidence levels in certain beliefs. But yes you are correct the latest findings in string theory does not affect my ability to function in the world day to day.
You could say "why are you trying to have an accurate view of the world ?" and to that I don't have a real answer other than truth is a terminal value to me.
Since you're deferring to the experts for subjects you don't understand, why are you listening to Terrence Howard, who is an actor and not a mathematician or logician or philosopher or scientist?
Okay forget the word "expert" and replace it with the phrase "people with above average interest and time spent on a subject". Terrence Howard and Professor Dave have both spent more time on this subject than me so I'll listen to them both. I mean you also listened to Terrence Howard no ? Listening is not necessarily an endorsement and he popped on the biggest podcast in the world.
KMC
40m ago
Of course it is curved, and furthermore a geoid.
You can't tell that from walking around a mere mile. You can barely tell that at all. You certainly can't derive that from first principles without significantly more information.
That's the point. The flat earth model is a good one, for many things. Imagine, if you will, your house. It has walls, and those walls are vertical. For simplicity, let's say that a plumb bob was used, and that therefore the walls are plumb, and the ceiling which joins the walls at right angles is level. Except, it's not. The two plumb bobs are not parallel, and in fact converge. That doesn't matter for your house, because there's no difference at that scale. It's wrong to assume a flat earth, yet we do it anyway in many circumstances because the differences don't add up and aren't apparent.
In your example, if you travel for 1 hour, and at the end are 1 mile away, then you could say you averaged one mile per hour. However, in reality you were above and below that speed at many points throughout the hour. I say your hypothetical does not reflect reality, it merely approximates it locally.
I watched the first twenty minutes, and the utter contempt is expected, but this part bothered me. He mocks an interview where Howard says he can rebuild Saturn without gravity, and claims that any simulation would need gravity, yet that's not true at all! You can build a model to any specifications you want, including not having any gravity. He explains this in the podcast that Dave clearly didn't care to watch, that it's based on electrostatic forces and vortexes that meet at deliberate angle of incidence.
If you can create a model of the universe without including gravity, and can run that model a recreate known and observable phenomena, then congratulations, you can in fact rebuild Saturn without gravity.
I still don't believe 1x1 = 2, but when you choose not to understand I'm not going to give you much credence. He just completely repeats that everything is meaningless and counters with the established science as an appeal to authority.
If you can't prove this shit from first principles, or explain how it was first proven from first principles, then you don't know anything. This video in forty five minutes long, it can't be an issue with time length.
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