Thales of Miletus was a philosopher—so committed was he to thinking carefully that once he was walking along contemplating deeply and thus fell into a well. The locals made fun of him, commenting that philosophers were so busy attending to the stars that they could not see what is in front of them.
Since coins were recently invented (or recently brought to Asia Minor), Thales was involved in a discussion over the power of money. His interlocutors didn’t believe that a philosopher could become rich, but he insisted that the power of the mind was paramount. To prove the power of having a reasoning mind, he devised a way of predicting weather patterns. He used this knowledge to buy up everyone’s olive presses when the weather was bad and managed to corner the market, becoming quite wealthy when a very good season followed soon after.
In “Self-poisoning of the mind” Jon Elster uses the Thales olive incident as an example of a perverse cognitive bias:
In his retelling of the [Thales olive] story, de Montaigne (1991, p. 153) explicitly asserts that when he condemned money-making, Thales ‘was accused of sour grapes like the fox’. Although Thales wanted to ‘show the world’ that the accusation was unfounded, one could also imagine that he had made a fortune in order to demonstrate to himself that his philosophy was not the product of sour grapes. Not content with thinking that he could have acquired riches had he wanted to, he might have decided to actually acquire them to deflect self-suspicion. [Emphasis in original.]
What Elster is pushing is that, since we are aware we edit reality to suit our self-images, we constantly suspect ourselves of doing so, and perversely believe the worst of ourselves on very flimsy evidence.
I don’t buy that Thales indeed predicted any weather patterns so well, that he became rich be cause of those pattern predictions of him. Just an urban legend from those times.
While I agree that this is the more probable explanation, I’m not sure one needs to predict the weather particularly well to know “it’ll likely be different at some point soonish”, which seems to be all he needed for the above story.
I agree. With the strong incentives for people involved in the olive trade to be as good as possible at predicting the weather, it’s hard to believe a philosopher could become better than the subject matter experts of his time; especially with the armchair methods popular at the time, and especially^2 since we still can’t predict the weather very well. Also, the story switches from “the power of money” to “the power of thought” abruptly.
especially with the armchair methods popular at the time
Thales was arguably the first Western philosopher, and despite the ‘well’ story, he was noted for being particularly observant and empirical. The primary distinction between Thales and earlier philosophers was that where other philosophers made explanations based on supernatural forces and agents, Thales preferred explanations referring to the natural properties of objects. Notably, he was the first recorded person to study electricity.
Indeed a likely explanation—Aesop in particular was fond of writing about the exploits of Thales, and we know how often he drifted from fact for his subjects.
all of the economic analysis I’ve seen indicates it is more efficient to maximize wealth and then buy what you value directly. Forgoing money because it would harm someone is probably less efficient than making money and donating to givewell.
The problem is that “college” is not an atomic thing. If you break it down by major, some are very much not worth the money and time, while others are very much worth the money and time. I mean, check out Table 7: computer software engineers with a bachelor’s degree have twice the lifetime earnings of teachers with a bachelor’s degree, who themselves barely earn more than the average person with “some college.”
And so when you hear that the number of people seeking journalism degrees is growing, you start to wonder if those people don’t know that journalism is a collapsing field, or if they don’t care.
A person enrolling in an architecture degree program in 2004 probably estimated that their employment prospects were quite good. Too bad said person graduated in 2008. Predicting job prospects at the moment of matriculation is a ticklish thing.
I have long been of the opinion that much of that is a result of privilege more than actual benefit of college education. I myself was able to find my way to an income above the national average per individual (and at that on the lower end of average for my industry) without even an Associate’s degree. (I’ve actually done this twice, in two different industries. After the housing market crashed I had to essentially start over from scratch. I made some economic strategy re-assessments after that external wrecking-ball destroyed the path I was then on, and am now once again on a track to an early retirement; it is my long-term goal to have sufficient capital reserves to be able to live comfortably off of 3% APY returns by the time I’m 55. The economic downturn delayed me from 50 to 55. And I will note that I’m doing this without engaging in entrepeneurship of any kind; my sole foray into that field demonstrated I do not have the necessary social skillset to succeed in that venue.)
And I have no student debt to pay off, at that.
My parenthetical is actually demonstrative of my point here: I have achieved all of these things not because I am especially gifted, or especially insightful, or especially privileged. I have started with little to no social safety net and have built/rebuilt myself a total of three times, once from personal failure which I assessed and acted upon to adjust as necessary, once from external failure.
The only thing I can claim to have is what Eliezer would call, I suspect, a “winning attitude”. One of my primary supergoals is, simply: “do what works.”
Whether the wage premium is a signalling issue or a skill issue, it’s still a fact.
Yes but correlation isn’t causation.
(EDIT: I want to point out that the statement “going to college gets you good wages” is just as magical thinking, when expressed solely in that manner, as “It rains sometimes when I dance.” Demonstrate a causal link between the two if you want the fact of their being correlated to be treated as meaningful.)
And while I congratulate you on your own good fortune, you are generalizing from one example.
I am expressing a general principle through a single example, yes.
You’re staring in the face of a giant availability bias.
“We are the 99%” is filled with people who can afford a webcam/camera, a computer, and internet access. Some even have gone to college. That’s vastly richer than the average human being.
That’s vastly richer than the average human being.
But still representative of somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of Americans. (The computer / webcam part anyhow). Especially with the advent of camera smartphones.
You’re staring in the face of a giant availability bias.
We have, I suspect, a definition problem. When I state “99%” I am referring to those who describe themselves by that title.
But still representative of somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of Americans. (The computer / webcam part anyhow). Especially with the advent of camera smartphones.
Yet still a far cry from actually representing the 99%.
We have, I suspect, a definition problem. When I state “99%” I am referring to those who describe themselves by that title.
No, you’re not. You’re generalizing from the hundred or so pictures you saw on a single website that’s only tangentially related to the movement. Hence, availability bias.
Yet still a far cry from actually representing the 99%.
99% of what, exactly? Furthermore, if 80% of a population has characteristic X, then interviewing those with characteristic X will yield patterns that would hold, all other things being equal, for 99% of said population as well—to within specific limits. (That’s what the whole notion of “statistically relevant sampling sizes” are about.)
No, you’re not. You’re generalizing from the hundred or so pictures you saw on a single website that’s only tangentially related to the movement. Hence, availability bias.
Who said anything about it being from a single website? Who said the submitters were the ones with the computers?
Furthermore: As I just explicitly stated, by “99%” I refer *solely to those who self-apellate in this manner.
Even, thusly, if we somehow allow for an “availability bias”, the simple fact of the matter is that said bias simply isn’t sufficient to the task of overcoming the fact that I have taken a statistically relevant sampling size of the protestors who self-apellate as “99%”, and found that the overwhelming majority of them exhibit seriously poor economic planning abilities in various ways. (Not a single description on a single sign showed good planning done in by external forces. Not one. Out of one hundred. Of a movement numbered less than one hundred thousand individuals.)
I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to provide better, sounder, reasoning if you expect my beliefs on this matter to be revised in the direction you appear to insist.
I have taken a statistically relevant sampling size of the protestors who self-apellate as “99%”, and found that the overwhelming majority of them exhibit seriously poor economic planning abilities in various ways.
Can I see your data ? I was thinking of collecting some myself, but if I can just piggy-back on your effort, then I don’t have to :-)
Not a single description on a single sign showed good planning done in by external forces...
Well, there’s this one, but it’s just a single random sign off of a front page of one website, so it’s probably not statistically significant all by itself.
Can I see your data ? I was thinking of collecting some myself, but if I can just piggy-back on your effort, then I don’t have to :-)
Only archived in wetware, I’m afraid. Watched enough videos (many I’m sure on youtube) where the signs were legible, and seen enough of the signs via reddit to accumulate to over 100.
Well, there’s this one,
… dude works for 20 years at minimum wage, and then when he gets sick with a non-acute ailment expects everyone to drop their shit and make his life better as a free ride—and that’s an example of “good planning done in by external forces”?
… dude works for 20 years at minimum wage, and then when he gets sick with a non-acute ailment expects everyone to drop their shit and make his life better as a free ride—and that’s an example of “good planning done in by external forces”?
That summary is incorrect. He worked for 20 years at his chosen profession, lost his job, then found work at minimum wage instead of no work at all, then got sick.
Could he have saved more during those 20 years, and therefore done better? Undoubtedly. What size should an emergency fund be? Let’s ask Google:
Though personal finance experts agree emergency funds are necessary, there’s no consensus on how much is enough. Some say you need save a year’s salary. Others believe $1000 is sufficient. Most advice tends to fall someplace in the middle.
… dude works for 20 years at minimum wage, and then when he gets sick with a non-acute ailment expects everyone to drop their shit and make his life better as a free ride—and that’s an example of “good planning done in by external forces”?
He worked in some ambiguous field for 20 years until he lost his job in the economic collapse, then he started working minimum wage, and with the insurance available to him on that job he was unable to afford treatment for cancer. Cancer is among the more acute ailments one might reasonably expect ever to face; if a tumor is malignant, that is, cancerous, then if untreated, it is unusual for it to be nonfatal.
If you start completely mischaracterizing data that is held up as a counterexample to your position, it’s a good sign that you’re being controlled by your preconceptions.
This doesn’t really touch your broader point, but my understanding is that “acute)” refers to the progression of the disease—how quickly it comes on and runs its course—not its severity. Most cancers are highly lethal if untreated, but also long-lasting, making them chronic diseases.
and with the insurance available to him on that job he was unable to afford treatment for cancer.
And then found it surprising that private institutions weren’t paying his way for it, as per his own words.
Cancer is among the more acute ailments one might reasonably expect ever to face; if a tumor is malignant, that is, cancerous, then if untreated, it is unusual for it to be nonfatal.
And then found it surprising that private institutions weren’t paying his way for it, as per his own words.
Common wisdom is that nobody in this country is supposed to get turned away from necessary life saving treatment due to personal inability to pay. I have been told this by EMTs myself. He is testifying that this is, in fact, incorrect.
Common wisdom is that nobody in this country is supposed to get turned away from necessary life saving treatment due to personal inability to pay.
For acute conditions.
I have been told this by EMTs myself.
Yup. It’s the law. No emergency medical establishment can refuse care for someone currently suffering an acute, life-threatening condition regardless of ability to pay.
See, that’s what they mean when they say “necessary life-saving treatment”.
Where people get this notion it applies to cancer therapies, I don’t know—but nobody in the medical industry has ever actually said that. They wouldn’t; it’s not true. It’s also not what the law says.
So do you think that because he was dying of something that was not rapid-onset, and couldn’t pay for treatment because he had lost his job in the economic crash and the job he was able to find in the meantime didn’t give him enough to cover it, he had only himself to blame?
Edit: I also don’t think it makes much sense to blame people for assuming that when they’re told that they won’t be turned away from treatment for necessary life saving procedures due to inability to pay, that it means what it sounds like it means.
As Desrtopa and dlthomas pointed out below, your summary of this guy’s situation is incorrect; I think that your wetware-based data collection policy may have something to do with this.
Speaking more generally, I am not sure I understand your “big picture” view. You say:
...and then when he gets sick with a non-acute ailment expects everyone to drop their shit and make his life better as a free ride...
Does this mean that you’re against the very idea of having a social safety net ? Or are you merely saying that, while a safety net is a good idea, this particular person’s expectations are unreasonable ?
As Desrtopa and dlthomas pointed out below, your summary of this guy’s situation is incorrect;
In that I misread where he stated he was earning minimum wage, yes. I acknowledge this.
I think that your wetware-based data collection policy may have something to do with this.
It’s not exactly as though I planned to publish research papers on this topic. I expect that my own personal observations are replicable but they are not directly share-able.
This is no more unusual a “policy” than for anyone else who uses his or her own direct observations of a class of event to make judgments of said event. Please try not to use such loaded language.
This is no more unusual a “policy” than for anyone else who uses his or her own direct observations of a class of event to make judgments of said event. Please try not to use such loaded language.
Fair enough, you’re right, I shouldn’t have used such a loaded word.
Does this mean that you’re against the very idea of having a social safety net ? Or are you merely saying that, while a safety net is a good idea, this particular person’s expectations are unreasonable ?
I make no statements whatsoever about a social safety net. Which, by the way, according to that same posting has now “caught” him, although it has done so only once he was “officially” disabled. We can talk about the moral justice or expected social utility of that history some other time—because right now, in this world, it is a matter of truth that it is irrational to expect private institutions to pay for your ailments without a vested interest in doing so.
So where, precisely, is his justification for the claim “despite what you were told”? Nobody was saying that.
because right now, in this world, it is a matter of truth that it is irrational to expect private institutions to pay for your ailments without a vested interest in doing so.
I believe that the OWS crowd explicitly wants to change this situation; this is one of their long-term goals. Of course, they would probably prefer it if public institutions achieved this task, not private ones. We could argue whether this is a worthy goal or not, but hopefully we can both agree that it’s an achievable one, at least in principle.
So where, precisely, is his justification for the claim “despite what you were told”? Nobody was saying that.
There’s a general perception in our culture that hospitals are obligated to heal the sick (I used to believe it myself until relatively recently), and that the churches provide charity and support for the same purpose. In fact, churches actively market themselves based on this latter notion.
Presumably these people started out as speaking for 99% of Americans, but now that the movement has gone international, that no longer makes sense. It’s the nature of this beast to be slightly incoherent.
Who said anything about it being from a single website? Who said the submitters were the ones with the computers?
You originally linked to a website called “We are the 99%”, which I had alluded to earlier. You didn’t say anything about looking at other websites, so what else was I supposed to assume?
While it’s true that they themselves may not directly own the computer, merely having access to the Internet is something that many poor people in the United States simply don’t have. That “those who describe themselves as the 99%” do not actually represent “99% of Americans” or “99% of people” is orthogonal to my point about availability bias.
I have taken a statistically relevant sampling size of the protestors who self-apellate as “99%”, and found that the overwhelming majority of them exhibit seriously poor economic planning abilities in various ways.
To estimate any scalar quantity from a population size of even 50,000, at 95% confidence, with a 5% margin of error, one would have to sample around 380 people. You’re not even doing anything as rigorous as statistics. Nevermind that your criteria for judging “seriously poor economic planning abilities” is likely ad-hoc.
Conversely, if you want to convince anyone else about your beliefs regarding the protest movement, you’ll just have to provide actual evidence.
Uh, no that’s not what it’s saying. It’s railing against the top 1% of people that have huge capital. People who have webcams/cameras etc. are contained in the 99% of Americans. They aren’t the “average” of the 99%. Each is one of the 99% who do not have huge capital and together they make up the 99%. In other words, in order for you to have a problem with their claims, you need to show that someone who says “We are the 99%” is actually part of the top 1%.
If you prefer, they could say “I am one of the 99%,” but that’s not as catchy.
paper-machine was pointing out that those who post on that blog come from a particular subset of the “99% movement”, and so only looking at people from that blog will skew your judgement of the entire mass of people.
Were you disagreeing that making inferences about a movement based on one blog constitutes availability bias?
I haven’t read that many bio-snippets, so you may be right. My gut feeling is that the OWS protesters are mainly complaining about our lack of a social safety net and a broken political system, but I have no hard data to verify this.
That said, I think your next sentence rests on some incorrect assumptions. You say:
Honestly; if the 99% is comprised of people who after two years of schooling have 60,000 in student debt knowing they have no career opportunities ahead of them … why are they doing it?
You are implicitly assuming that a). the primary purpose of college is to prepare you for a specific career; and that b). it is relatively easy to pick a career, put yourself through training for that career, and then reap the financial rewards. IMO both of these assumptions are wrong. I’m prepared to defend my views, if you’re interested (assuming I interpreted your comment correctly, that is).
I think that’s a fair point, but I also think that it should be possible to acquire an education without going into massive, unrepayable debt. Society as a whole would benefit if that were the case.
It is possible to get an education without going into massive unrepayable debt. The rate of $60,000 over two years (italicised in the original comment) seems to also be part of the quibble.
I think this depends on your field of study. My own education cost less than that, but by no means an order of magnitude less; and I was able to get a few scholarships to supplement the loans. This was a long time ago, however; and AFAIK the scholarships today are harder to get, and the costs are higher.
In most parts of California, the education you get at a community college is comparable to that in your first two years at a four-year institution (better in some ways, worse in others, and depends a little on your focus, of course). That cuts the cost nearly in half.
In most parts of California, the education you get at a community college is comparable to that in your first two years at a four-year institution
I think this depends quite strongly on the institution, as well as your area of study (as you said). FWIW, I went to a community college for two years in order to save money, just as you said. I then ended up having to to re-take several classes at the university anyway, and thus lost a lot of valuable time (and money). I could be an outlier, though.
The answer to the question (“if you’re so smart then why aren’t you rich ?”) is often, “because there are many factors beyound my control that determine to my net worth, and these factors weigh a great deal more than my intelligence or work ethic”.
American proverb
A propos:
Thales of Miletus was a philosopher—so committed was he to thinking carefully that once he was walking along contemplating deeply and thus fell into a well. The locals made fun of him, commenting that philosophers were so busy attending to the stars that they could not see what is in front of them.
Since coins were recently invented (or recently brought to Asia Minor), Thales was involved in a discussion over the power of money. His interlocutors didn’t believe that a philosopher could become rich, but he insisted that the power of the mind was paramount. To prove the power of having a reasoning mind, he devised a way of predicting weather patterns. He used this knowledge to buy up everyone’s olive presses when the weather was bad and managed to corner the market, becoming quite wealthy when a very good season followed soon after.
In “Self-poisoning of the mind” Jon Elster uses the Thales olive incident as an example of a perverse cognitive bias:
What Elster is pushing is that, since we are aware we edit reality to suit our self-images, we constantly suspect ourselves of doing so, and perversely believe the worst of ourselves on very flimsy evidence.
Also, Welcome to Less Wrong, apparently. Your handle looks familiar for some reason, so I didn’t notice you were new.
Isn’t that SisterY of The View from Hell?
Right, that SisterY. You’re probably right.
Not a fan of rhetorical questions? How about meta-jokes?
-Chuang-tzu
That’s witholding potentially important information. Also, you still have to address other people’s erroneous beliefs about their points.
No and yes.
I recall a user by that name on Overcoming Bias.
This being markdown, begin the first line of that blockquote paragraph with a greater-than sign and replace the italics tags with asterisks.
I don’t buy that Thales indeed predicted any weather patterns so well, that he became rich be cause of those pattern predictions of him. Just an urban legend from those times.
While I agree that this is the more probable explanation, I’m not sure one needs to predict the weather particularly well to know “it’ll likely be different at some point soonish”, which seems to be all he needed for the above story.
I agree. With the strong incentives for people involved in the olive trade to be as good as possible at predicting the weather, it’s hard to believe a philosopher could become better than the subject matter experts of his time; especially with the armchair methods popular at the time, and especially^2 since we still can’t predict the weather very well. Also, the story switches from “the power of money” to “the power of thought” abruptly.
Thales was arguably the first Western philosopher, and despite the ‘well’ story, he was noted for being particularly observant and empirical. The primary distinction between Thales and earlier philosophers was that where other philosophers made explanations based on supernatural forces and agents, Thales preferred explanations referring to the natural properties of objects. Notably, he was the first recorded person to study electricity.
Indeed a likely explanation—Aesop in particular was fond of writing about the exploits of Thales, and we know how often he drifted from fact for his subjects.
If you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart? -- Traditional reply. (I’m not sure it makes much sense, but then neither does the original question.)
To which, of course, the reply is that they don’t need to be, and so why waste the effort? That is, they are smart, on the level that’s important.
Oddly, this reply works equally well for the original quote.
Exactly.… to me this is always a sign of a strawman argument..
Or rather, a fully general counterargument.
Or maybe both statements are equally ridiculous.
If the only thing that’s important is money, yes.
Or if money were fungible.
“It takes money to make money.”
- Titus Maccius Plautus.
Because my utility function includes moral constraints.
is that your true reason or is it a reason that allows you to assert status over those wealthier than you?
If so, then my utility function places status/morality above wealth. Which also answers the question.;
all of the economic analysis I’ve seen indicates it is more efficient to maximize wealth and then buy what you value directly. Forgoing money because it would harm someone is probably less efficient than making money and donating to givewell.
A better phrasing might be: “If you’re so smart why aren’t you fulfilling your Goals/Utility Function”
Effort.
The Occupy Wall Street movement would like to have a word with you (or rather, with your proverb).
Have you read many of the “99%” bio-snippets? Having gone through about a hundred of them now, I am struck by nothing else save how exquisitely bad those people are at the skill of making sound economic decisions. Honestly; if the 99% is comprised of people who after two years of schooling have 60,000 in student debt knowing they have no career opportunities ahead of them … why are they doing it?
The college wage premium is large and growing.
The unemployment rate is much worse among those who do not have a college degree.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, basically.
The problem is that “college” is not an atomic thing. If you break it down by major, some are very much not worth the money and time, while others are very much worth the money and time. I mean, check out Table 7: computer software engineers with a bachelor’s degree have twice the lifetime earnings of teachers with a bachelor’s degree, who themselves barely earn more than the average person with “some college.”
And so when you hear that the number of people seeking journalism degrees is growing, you start to wonder if those people don’t know that journalism is a collapsing field, or if they don’t care.
A person enrolling in an architecture degree program in 2004 probably estimated that their employment prospects were quite good. Too bad said person graduated in 2008. Predicting job prospects at the moment of matriculation is a ticklish thing.
I have long been of the opinion that much of that is a result of privilege more than actual benefit of college education. I myself was able to find my way to an income above the national average per individual (and at that on the lower end of average for my industry) without even an Associate’s degree. (I’ve actually done this twice, in two different industries. After the housing market crashed I had to essentially start over from scratch. I made some economic strategy re-assessments after that external wrecking-ball destroyed the path I was then on, and am now once again on a track to an early retirement; it is my long-term goal to have sufficient capital reserves to be able to live comfortably off of 3% APY returns by the time I’m 55. The economic downturn delayed me from 50 to 55. And I will note that I’m doing this without engaging in entrepeneurship of any kind; my sole foray into that field demonstrated I do not have the necessary social skillset to succeed in that venue.)
And I have no student debt to pay off, at that.
My parenthetical is actually demonstrative of my point here: I have achieved all of these things not because I am especially gifted, or especially insightful, or especially privileged. I have started with little to no social safety net and have built/rebuilt myself a total of three times, once from personal failure which I assessed and acted upon to adjust as necessary, once from external failure.
The only thing I can claim to have is what Eliezer would call, I suspect, a “winning attitude”. One of my primary supergoals is, simply: “do what works.”
Whether the wage premium is a signalling issue or a skill issue, it’s still a fact.
And while I congratulate you on your own good fortune, you are generalizing from one example.
Yes but correlation isn’t causation.
(EDIT: I want to point out that the statement “going to college gets you good wages” is just as magical thinking, when expressed solely in that manner, as “It rains sometimes when I dance.” Demonstrate a causal link between the two if you want the fact of their being correlated to be treated as meaningful.)
I am expressing a general principle through a single example, yes.
You’re staring in the face of a giant availability bias.
“We are the 99%” is filled with people who can afford a webcam/camera, a computer, and internet access. Some even have gone to college. That’s vastly richer than the average human being.
But still representative of somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of Americans. (The computer / webcam part anyhow). Especially with the advent of camera smartphones.
We have, I suspect, a definition problem. When I state “99%” I am referring to those who describe themselves by that title.
Yet still a far cry from actually representing the 99%.
No, you’re not. You’re generalizing from the hundred or so pictures you saw on a single website that’s only tangentially related to the movement. Hence, availability bias.
99% of what, exactly? Furthermore, if 80% of a population has characteristic X, then interviewing those with characteristic X will yield patterns that would hold, all other things being equal, for 99% of said population as well—to within specific limits. (That’s what the whole notion of “statistically relevant sampling sizes” are about.)
Who said anything about it being from a single website? Who said the submitters were the ones with the computers?
Furthermore: As I just explicitly stated, by “99%” I refer *solely to those who self-apellate in this manner.
Even, thusly, if we somehow allow for an “availability bias”, the simple fact of the matter is that said bias simply isn’t sufficient to the task of overcoming the fact that I have taken a statistically relevant sampling size of the protestors who self-apellate as “99%”, and found that the overwhelming majority of them exhibit seriously poor economic planning abilities in various ways. (Not a single description on a single sign showed good planning done in by external forces. Not one. Out of one hundred. Of a movement numbered less than one hundred thousand individuals.)
I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to provide better, sounder, reasoning if you expect my beliefs on this matter to be revised in the direction you appear to insist.
Can I see your data ? I was thinking of collecting some myself, but if I can just piggy-back on your effort, then I don’t have to :-)
Well, there’s this one, but it’s just a single random sign off of a front page of one website, so it’s probably not statistically significant all by itself.
Only archived in wetware, I’m afraid. Watched enough videos (many I’m sure on youtube) where the signs were legible, and seen enough of the signs via reddit to accumulate to over 100.
… dude works for 20 years at minimum wage, and then when he gets sick with a non-acute ailment expects everyone to drop their shit and make his life better as a free ride—and that’s an example of “good planning done in by external forces”?
I think not, sir.
That summary is incorrect. He worked for 20 years at his chosen profession, lost his job, then found work at minimum wage instead of no work at all, then got sick.
Could he have saved more during those 20 years, and therefore done better? Undoubtedly. What size should an emergency fund be? Let’s ask Google:
says GetRichSlowly
says LifeHacker
says About.com Financial Planning
says Investopedia
says… um… nowhere, as far as I can tell.
This seems to leave you more vulnerable to many biases.
I don’t disagree.
He worked in some ambiguous field for 20 years until he lost his job in the economic collapse, then he started working minimum wage, and with the insurance available to him on that job he was unable to afford treatment for cancer. Cancer is among the more acute ailments one might reasonably expect ever to face; if a tumor is malignant, that is, cancerous, then if untreated, it is unusual for it to be nonfatal.
If you start completely mischaracterizing data that is held up as a counterexample to your position, it’s a good sign that you’re being controlled by your preconceptions.
This doesn’t really touch your broader point, but my understanding is that “acute)” refers to the progression of the disease—how quickly it comes on and runs its course—not its severity. Most cancers are highly lethal if untreated, but also long-lasting, making them chronic diseases.
And then found it surprising that private institutions weren’t paying his way for it, as per his own words.
In medicine, an acute disease is a disease with either or both of: # a rapid onset, as in acute infection # a short course (as opposed to a chronic course).
Common wisdom is that nobody in this country is supposed to get turned away from necessary life saving treatment due to personal inability to pay. I have been told this by EMTs myself. He is testifying that this is, in fact, incorrect.
For acute conditions.
Yup. It’s the law. No emergency medical establishment can refuse care for someone currently suffering an acute, life-threatening condition regardless of ability to pay.
See, that’s what they mean when they say “necessary life-saving treatment”.
Where people get this notion it applies to cancer therapies, I don’t know—but nobody in the medical industry has ever actually said that. They wouldn’t; it’s not true. It’s also not what the law says.
So do you think that because he was dying of something that was not rapid-onset, and couldn’t pay for treatment because he had lost his job in the economic crash and the job he was able to find in the meantime didn’t give him enough to cover it, he had only himself to blame?
Edit: I also don’t think it makes much sense to blame people for assuming that when they’re told that they won’t be turned away from treatment for necessary life saving procedures due to inability to pay, that it means what it sounds like it means.
As Desrtopa and dlthomas pointed out below, your summary of this guy’s situation is incorrect; I think that your wetware-based data collection policy may have something to do with this.
Speaking more generally, I am not sure I understand your “big picture” view. You say:
Does this mean that you’re against the very idea of having a social safety net ? Or are you merely saying that, while a safety net is a good idea, this particular person’s expectations are unreasonable ?
In that I misread where he stated he was earning minimum wage, yes. I acknowledge this.
It’s not exactly as though I planned to publish research papers on this topic. I expect that my own personal observations are replicable but they are not directly share-able.
This is no more unusual a “policy” than for anyone else who uses his or her own direct observations of a class of event to make judgments of said event. Please try not to use such loaded language.
Fair enough, you’re right, I shouldn’t have used such a loaded word.
I make no statements whatsoever about a social safety net. Which, by the way, according to that same posting has now “caught” him, although it has done so only once he was “officially” disabled. We can talk about the moral justice or expected social utility of that history some other time—because right now, in this world, it is a matter of truth that it is irrational to expect private institutions to pay for your ailments without a vested interest in doing so.
So where, precisely, is his justification for the claim “despite what you were told”? Nobody was saying that.
I believe that the OWS crowd explicitly wants to change this situation; this is one of their long-term goals. Of course, they would probably prefer it if public institutions achieved this task, not private ones. We could argue whether this is a worthy goal or not, but hopefully we can both agree that it’s an achievable one, at least in principle.
There’s a general perception in our culture that hospitals are obligated to heal the sick (I used to believe it myself until relatively recently), and that the churches provide charity and support for the same purpose. In fact, churches actively market themselves based on this latter notion.
Presumably these people started out as speaking for 99% of Americans, but now that the movement has gone international, that no longer makes sense. It’s the nature of this beast to be slightly incoherent.
You originally linked to a website called “We are the 99%”, which I had alluded to earlier. You didn’t say anything about looking at other websites, so what else was I supposed to assume?
While it’s true that they themselves may not directly own the computer, merely having access to the Internet is something that many poor people in the United States simply don’t have. That “those who describe themselves as the 99%” do not actually represent “99% of Americans” or “99% of people” is orthogonal to my point about availability bias.
To estimate any scalar quantity from a population size of even 50,000, at 95% confidence, with a 5% margin of error, one would have to sample around 380 people. You’re not even doing anything as rigorous as statistics. Nevermind that your criteria for judging “seriously poor economic planning abilities” is likely ad-hoc.
Conversely, if you want to convince anyone else about your beliefs regarding the protest movement, you’ll just have to provide actual evidence.
Uh, no that’s not what it’s saying. It’s railing against the top 1% of people that have huge capital. People who have webcams/cameras etc. are contained in the 99% of Americans. They aren’t the “average” of the 99%. Each is one of the 99% who do not have huge capital and together they make up the 99%. In other words, in order for you to have a problem with their claims, you need to show that someone who says “We are the 99%” is actually part of the top 1%.
If you prefer, they could say “I am one of the 99%,” but that’s not as catchy.
I have no idea what you’re responding to here.
paper-machine was pointing out that those who post on that blog come from a particular subset of the “99% movement”, and so only looking at people from that blog will skew your judgement of the entire mass of people.
Were you disagreeing that making inferences about a movement based on one blog constitutes availability bias?
Oh, reading through it again, I just seemed to misunderstand both people.
I haven’t read that many bio-snippets, so you may be right. My gut feeling is that the OWS protesters are mainly complaining about our lack of a social safety net and a broken political system, but I have no hard data to verify this.
That said, I think your next sentence rests on some incorrect assumptions. You say:
You are implicitly assuming that a). the primary purpose of college is to prepare you for a specific career; and that b). it is relatively easy to pick a career, put yourself through training for that career, and then reap the financial rewards. IMO both of these assumptions are wrong. I’m prepared to defend my views, if you’re interested (assuming I interpreted your comment correctly, that is).
I think the quibble is more to do with why anyone would accrue $60,000 of debt knowing they’d have limited means of repaying it.
I think that’s a fair point, but I also think that it should be possible to acquire an education without going into massive, unrepayable debt. Society as a whole would benefit if that were the case.
It is possible to get an education without going into massive unrepayable debt. The rate of $60,000 over two years (italicised in the original comment) seems to also be part of the quibble.
I think this depends on your field of study. My own education cost less than that, but by no means an order of magnitude less; and I was able to get a few scholarships to supplement the loans. This was a long time ago, however; and AFAIK the scholarships today are harder to get, and the costs are higher.
In most parts of California, the education you get at a community college is comparable to that in your first two years at a four-year institution (better in some ways, worse in others, and depends a little on your focus, of course). That cuts the cost nearly in half.
I think this depends quite strongly on the institution, as well as your area of study (as you said). FWIW, I went to a community college for two years in order to save money, just as you said. I then ended up having to to re-take several classes at the university anyway, and thus lost a lot of valuable time (and money). I could be an outlier, though.
Gotcha. It’s something you need to be careful with, but not (I think) much more so than at a university.
Your education is important. Tens of thousands of dollars? Also important. Be aware of what your goals are, how you’re meeting them, and at what cost.
Community college worked out very well for me, but I did have the advantage of living near one of the better ones.
To put it in a somewhat less glib way:
The answer to the question (“if you’re so smart then why aren’t you rich ?”) is often, “because there are many factors beyound my control that determine to my net worth, and these factors weigh a great deal more than my intelligence or work ethic”.