Arjun Panickssery

• Arjun PanicksseryApr 23, 2025, 8:47 PM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: deep’s comment on: To Un­der­stand His­tory, Keep Former Pop­u­la­tion Distri­bu­tions In Mind

  Regarding the Russians and East Slavs more broadly, Anatoly Karlin has some napkin math that at the very least shows the huge toll that the world wars had on their populations, which barely grow or s:

  (8a) Russia just within its current borders, assuming otherwise analogous fertility and migration trends, would have had 261.8 million people by 2017 without the triple demographic disasters of Bolshevism, WW2, and the 1990s – that’s double its actual population of 146 million.

  Source: Демографические итоги послереволюционного столетия & Демографические катастрофы ХХ века by Anatoly Vishnevsky

  

  (8b) According to my very rough calculations, based on various sources, the population change for each of the following in their current borders between ¹⁹¹³⁄₁₄ and ¹⁹⁴⁵⁄₄₆ was about as follows:

  • Russia – 91M/​97M

  • Ukraine – 35M/​34M

  • Belarus – 7.5M/​7.7M

  Assuming a threefold expansion in all of these populations, we could have been looking to a Russian Empire or Republic with a further ~120M fully Russified Belorussians and largely Russified Ukrainians, for a total Slavic population of almost 400M.

  That’s twice bigger than the number of White Americans today, the most populous single European ethnicity, and almost as much as all of today’s Western Europe.

  (8c) Total population of a hypothetical Russian Empire that also retained Central Asia and the Caucasus, and that hadn’t been bled white by commies, Nazis, and Westernizers during the course of the 20th century, would likely have been not that far off from Dmitry Mendeleev’s 1906 projection of 594 million for 2000.

To Un­der­stand His­tory, Keep Former Pop­u­la­tion Distri­bu­tions In Mind

• Arjun PanicksseryApr 18, 2025, 8:28 PM

  17 points

  11

  in reply to: Sergii’s comment on: Three Months In, Eval­u­at­ing Three Ra­tion­al­ist Cases for Trump

  These indices are probably not meaningful. It’s easy to find news stories of ordinary people in England and Germany being arrested for their opinions or even for mocking elected officials.

  German criminal law actually adds special penalties for “defaming” politicians (Defamation of persons in the political arena, Section 188, German Criminal Code) as part of a dozen free-speech limitations that would violate the First Amendment here. And truth isn’t an ironclad defense the way it is here.

  In England, content that’s merely “grossly offensive” or “menacing” is illegal under their Communications Act 2003, and similar laws date back earlier.

  There are multiple cases even in the last few months alone of these laws being used vigorously in both countries (e.g. this case in England in which someone was jailed for insulting a politician)

  In contrast, in America since Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), speech is criminal only when it is (a) intended, and (b) likely to produce imminent lawless action, or when it is a true threat, obscenity, or narrow category such as child‑pornography.

Three Months In, Eval­u­at­ing Three Ra­tion­al­ist Cases for Trump

• Arjun PanicksseryApr 8, 2025, 8:55 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Sam B’s comment on: Amer­i­can Col­lege Ad­mis­sions Doesn’t Need to Be So Com­pet­i­tive

  > So after removing the international students from the calculations...

  Having a sizable portion of International students necessarily subsidizes the cost of higher education for domestic students

  Maybe I should rephrase the sentence in OP. What I mean is that “After assuming that half of international students scored at or above 1550 and half scored below, the remaining spots are divided among domestic students in such-and-such way.”

• Arjun PanicksseryApr 8, 2025, 5:23 PM

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: Hruss’s comment on: Amer­i­can Col­lege Ad­mis­sions Doesn’t Need to Be So Com­pet­i­tive

  Why is it obvious

• Arjun PanicksseryApr 8, 2025, 7:10 AM

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: Mis-Understandings’s comment on: Amer­i­can Col­lege Ad­mis­sions Doesn’t Need to Be So Com­pet­i­tive

  At the start of the post I describe an argument I often hear:

  But many people are under the misconception that the resulting “rat race”—the highly competitive and strenuous admissions ordeal—is the inevitable result of the limited class sizes among top schools and the strong talent in the applicant pools, and that it isn’t merely because of the reasons listed in (2). Some even go so far as to suggest that a better system would be to run a lottery for any applicant who meets a minimum “qualification” standard—under the assumption that there would be many such qualified students.

  This is the argument that I’m responding to and refuting.

• Arjun PanicksseryApr 7, 2025, 7:25 PM

  12 points

  5

  in reply to: Mis-Understandings’s comment on: Amer­i­can Col­lege Ad­mis­sions Doesn’t Need to Be So Com­pet­i­tive

  You’re phrasing this as though it’s rebutting some remark I made; if so, I’m not sure what remark that is. I know that admissions offices are admitting students according to an intentional system.

Amer­i­can Col­lege Ad­mis­sions Doesn’t Need to Be So Com­pet­i­tive

• Arjun PanicksseryApr 4, 2025, 1:22 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Thomas Kwa’s Shortform

  Didn’t watch the video but is there the short version of this argument? France is at the 90th percentile of population sizes and also has the 4th-most nukes.

• Arjun PanicksseryApr 3, 2025, 10:27 PM

  25 points

  0

  in reply to: leogao’s comment on: Why Have Sen­tence Lengths De­creased?

  Shorter sentences are better. Why? Because they communicate clearly. I used to speak in long sentences. And they were abstract. Thus I was hard to understand. Now I use short sentences. Clear sentences.

  It’s been net-positive. It even makes my thinking clearer. Why? Because you need to deeply understand something to explain it simply.

• Arjun PanicksseryApr 3, 2025, 6:09 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Neil ’s comment on: Ex­plain­ing Bri­tish Naval Dom­i­nance Dur­ing the Age of Sail

  More object-level content: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased? — LessWrong

Why Have Sen­tence Lengths De­creased?

• Arjun PanicksseryMar 29, 2025, 2:48 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: Ex­plain­ing Bri­tish Naval Dom­i­nance Dur­ing the Age of Sail

  That part encourages captains to avoid shirking in general (rather than to use aggressive tactics in particular) because it increases the costs of job loss (due to high compensation) and because there are captains in reserve that can replace them quickly.

Ex­plain­ing Bri­tish Naval Dom­i­nance Dur­ing the Age of Sail

• Arjun PanicksseryMar 8, 2025, 7:54 PM

  9 points

  7

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Child­hood and Ed­u­ca­tion #9: School is Hell

  The prior should be towards liberty

  Right, I was the first strong-disagree and I disagreed because of the implied premise that homeschooling was deviant in a way that warranted a high degree of scrutiny, rather than being the natural right/​default that should be restricted only in extreme cases. I figure that’s why others disagreed as well.

  Elaborated in this thread: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​MJFeDGCRLwgBxkmfs/​​childhood-and-education-9-school-is-hell?commentId=W8FoHDkB3xAkfcwyw

• Arjun PanicksseryMar 8, 2025, 7:49 PM

  10 points

  2

  in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Child­hood and Ed­u­ca­tion #9: School is Hell

  This can hold true even if we grant that mandatory public school is itself abusive to children

  My point doesn’t have anything to do with the relevant merits of public vs homeschool. My point is that your listed interventions aren’t reasonable because they involve too much government intrusion into a parent’s freedom to educate his children how he wants, for reasons based on dubious and marginal “safeguarding” grounds. My example of a different education regime was to consider a different status quo that makes the intrusiveness more clear.

  I feel like all my position needs to argue for is that some children have parents/​caretakers where it would be worse if they had 100% control and no accountability than if the children also spend some time outside the household in public school [emphasis mine]

  This might be the crux: I’m saying that this position isn’t based on any reasonable principle of government intrusion on people’s lives. The government shouldn’t intrude on basic parenting rights with a ton of surveillance just to see whether it can make what it thinks is a marginal improvement.

  More concretely, do you think parents should have to pass a criminal background check (assuming this is what you meant by “background check”) in order to homeschool, even if they retain custody of their children otherwise?

  ---

  Re-reading your previous reply, I noticed this:

  So, what you could do to get some of the monitoring back: have homeschooling with (e.g.) yearly check-ins with the affected children from a social worker. I don’t know the details, but my guess is that some states have this and others don’t.

  No states use this policy and it doesn’t make sense that parents should have to submit to yearly inspections of their parenting practices. It only makes sense from the point of view where homeschooling is highly deviant and basically impermissible without special dispensation, and where the government has the authority to decide in very specific terms what composes children’s educations.

• Arjun PanicksseryMar 8, 2025, 6:24 PM

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Child­hood and Ed­u­ca­tion #9: School is Hell

  I strong-disagreed since I don’t think any of your listed criticisms are reasonable. The implied premise is that homeschooling is deviant in a way that justifies a lot of government scrutiny, when really parents have a natural right to educate their children the way they want (with government intervention being reasonable in extreme cases that pass a high bar of scrutiny).

  In particular, I think that outside of an existing norm where most students go to public school, the things you listed would be obviously unjust. Do you think that parents who fail a criminal background check shouldn’t be allowed to educate their own children (given that they still have custody of their children), or that a CPS investigation should make some kind of intermediate judgment of “not abusive but not worthy to educate the children without state intervention”?

  If we were under a different education regime like universal school vouchers, or just totally unfunded private education, do you think it would be reasonable to have parents’ freedom to educate their children restricted for reasons like the ones you gave, or to introduce mandatory public schooling just for this kind of monitoring?

Notes on the Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion of 1836

You should read Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill via Ear­lyModernTexts.com