Mercy

Karma: 254

Mercy Jul 27, 2011, 4:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: Matt_Simpson’s comment on: A potentially great improvement to minimum wage laws to handle both economic efficiency as well as poverty concerns
What worse policies are you thinking of? Only this sounds like the socialist argument against the welfare state...

In terms of liberterian arguments for the minimum wage, Chris Dillows takes the same tack http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2010/11/small-truths-about-the-minimum-wage.html but the opposite conclusion- fighting to get rid of the minimum wage is a distraction from the problem of unemployment, given it’s low magnitude.

Mercy Jul 25, 2011, 4:24 PM
3 points
on: The importance of Not Getting the Joke
(1) seems pretty common, and from what I know of Mr Sailer, I imagine it underlies most of his examples- there’ll be an article highlighting some inequality or problem and the “facts which undermine the premises of the piece” are the suggested causes, the “joke” is that the author’s see the outcome as undesirable while Sailer sees attempts to change the outcome as foolish.

Conspicuous wrongness sounds close to belief as attire (the article with the pagan lady who believed something she obviously didn’t think was true) but with the addition that someone believes it’s true, so the motive is not to disagree with them. I think ideologues often identify each other by the viewpoints they can be certain nobody else shares- how else to explain why the unreadable Atlas Shrugs remains more popular than Rand’s other books, which are no less strident but considerably more appealing to outsiders.

Mercy Jul 3, 2011, 6:52 PM
2 points
in reply to: knb’s comment on: Gender and Libido
I’ve also seen “women can’t enjoy Penis-in-Vagina sex and any who believe they do are sufferring from Trauma Bonding” but only among people who, as far as I can tell, identify as anti-third wave feminists first, and radical feminists second.

Mercy Jun 24, 2011, 11:35 PM
0 points
in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: What are the best news sources to read for *insightful* discussions?
I do like the economist, but they suffer from a recent graduate syndrome I’ve become increasingly aware of as the blogosphere allows the sort of person who forms the majority of their staff greater access to the limelight, the very convincing on areas you know nothing about, horribly amateurish on areas you are familiar with, concatenate the last three AP reports with a dose of the old Washington Consensus style. It’s a style formed by throwing in enough second hand research that one’s editorially mandated conclusions seem authorative, which can see it in blogs like Lenin’s Tomb. Of the big European weekly don’t-pretend-to-be-unbiased newspapers, I find Le Monde Diplomatique much more useful because it doesn’t rely on that style so much. But the economist is worth reading, and I don’t think the NYT is most of the time, and anything owned by Murdoch certainly ain’t.

Also: the Guardian has a similar attitude to the NYT, with much higher journalistic standards- depressingly, the best in the UK at the moment, purely on the basis that they’ve declined the least out of the respectable papers. Combine that with the Financial Times (which is done by the same sort of people as the economist, but aimed at an audience they actually respect) gives you a decent breadth of coverage. Add in Red Pepper if you want to keep up on the latest labour issues.

Mercy Jun 20, 2011, 1:49 AM
14 points
on: What are the best news sources to read for *insightful* discussions?
I haven’t read this Salam but that “not a partisan so they must be unbiased” heuristic is pretty dodgy, particularly for an American columnist- that two party duopoly means you have a lot of right-libertarian and socialist/green analysts who regard each party as identical but are toting around some pretty serious ideological blinkers of their own, not to mention the cult of the sensible centrist people.

The right-wing meltdown you’ve got going on kind of screws with this though- for most countries I’d suggest that heterodox/lesser-of-two-evils party members from any group tend to suffer the least from illusions, but the impression I get is that in the US, the conservative variety no longer feels comfortable with the Republican party. This is all second hand though...

Mercy Jun 12, 2011, 1:38 PM
4 points
in reply to: atucker’s comment on: General Bitcoin discussion thread (June 2011)
It’s funny you should mention that, because just about the time of the collapse a bunch of posters on the Something Awful thread mocking bitcoins decided to see if they could crash the market by posting SELL SELL SELL messages on various discussion boards. From the posts there they think it’s coincidence though- the crash was caused by a single big seller.

Mercy Jun 12, 2011, 1:32 PM
4 points
on: General Bitcoin discussion thread (June 2011)
I’ve kind of stayed out of this discussion because I think one’s interpretation of the product depends on more on your views about economics and politics than any disagreement about bitcoin’s properties. And Tyler Cowen’s skepticism makes me think that bitcoin proponents are deep enough into Rothbardville that our lines of engagement would get fruitlessly broad.

But I’m curious on one point—why do some people have this dramatic ’coins’ll be worth thousands or nothing” attitude. I can see the zero, and I can get my head round the viewpoint where it’s plausible that a large chunk of the economy gets covered by bitcoins and they’re worth thousands. But what about it staying where it is now, as a complementary used for drug deals, money laundering and Konkin t-shirts? Is there some reason that wouldn’t be stable?

Mercy Jun 10, 2011, 9:37 AM
0 points
in reply to: Mercy’s comment on: London Meetup 05-Jun-2011 - very rough minutes
Okay just looking at this now I realise I’ve failed to heed my own advice, there’s one style of “humour” that doesn’t involve multiple levels of awareness and is very common among joyless ideologues, which is the style of mean spirited mockery, vicious down-putting of out-groups.

It kind of rises into proper humour if you exaggerate it to the point of ridiculousness, and it’s my impression that the people who do that are also comfortable with self mocking and silly humour, and are capable of talking amiably with people not on “their side”.

Mercy Jun 9, 2011, 8:23 PM
2 points
on: London Meetup 05-Jun-2011 - very rough minutes
I’ve often thought that comedy is useful because it breaks down compartmentalisation, and more generally because it creates a sort of mental safe space in which ideas can be thought about without triggering the usual mental defences. I’ll go as far as to say it’s the safest way of breaking down compartmentalization- that if you do it while precommitting to accept the result, you’ll tend to select the synthesis consistent with your most cherished beliefs, rather than the one which most accurately reflects reality. On a related note, humor-intolerance is a great warning sign for mentally dangerous ideologies.

I’d be wary of attempting to derive any universal “theory of comedy” though- this doesn’t account for clowning or really any types of physical humour for instance. The only thing that seems to be universal about comedy is that it demonstrates awareness of/ability to manipulate multiple levels of meaning or interpretation—which isn’t a sufficient condition.

Mercy Jun 7, 2011, 11:22 PM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: General Bitcoin discussion thread (May 2011)
Looks like one of those instances where pyramid scheme is used as a catch all term for scams which aim to look like a franchise or investment. Could be that they are thinking of the miners as franchisees but that would only make sense if the founders were selling graphics cards.

I believe the technical term for what the bitcoin founders are making the right moves to be doing is a pump-and-dump.

Mercy Jun 7, 2011, 11:10 PM
0 points
in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Should a rationalist be concerned about habitat loss/biodiversity loss?
Do you mean the thread because that’s hardly missing from the broader discussion, much of the funding goes towards towards seed banks and so on, on a broader scale too a lot of conservation is effectively ecological cryonics- zoos and so on just keep endangered species in a holding pattern. Criticism of these is, as far as I can see, mostly ecological eg: reintroduced tree species will fail to thrive if introduced to soils where their traditional symbiotic fungi have gone extinct in their absence.

Mercy Jun 6, 2011, 11:51 PM
16 points
in reply to: brazzy’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: June 2011
“They” is the tricky bit there. Presumably some people wanted a canal, and some people other people wanted jobs, and for that matter presumably some people wanted money to go to the construction company who’ve got an opening for a government liaison consultant coming up in five years time. There’s little reason to think the equilibrium is welfare maximising.

Mercy May 24, 2011, 10:58 PM
1 point
on: Should I be afraid of GMOs?
A few people have mentioned monocultures and it’s worth pointing out that one of the biggest advantage of GM is not in really novel out there breeding but in simply doing the sort of selective breeding we did during the Green Revolution quickly and cheaply. Potentially then it can get us out of the monocultures that dominate agriculture currently, by letting us bring ancestral varieties of rice/wheat/etc, or currently marginal crops up to the same standards that we’ve raised the main wheat varieties and such like to.

It is my understanding however, that the incentives for this aren’t there under the current economic set up

Mercy May 24, 2011, 10:47 PM
−2 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Should I be afraid of GMOs?
Terminator tech is effectively banned, and while I’m highly vulnerable to anti-corporate/capitalist rhetoric especially in the case of Monsanto, and so may be overcompensating, I think this is generally a bad thing. This is both because it makes biosafety more difficult, and because it reduces the ability of the big biotech companies to capture the benefits of GM research. This is good in the short term (though in a few cases it disproportionately benefits the largest landowners) but ultimately means that research is underfunded and mostly focused on relatively monetizable stuff like pesticide resistance for the big four plants and not things like more nutritious tef. Of course, we could lay this problem at the feet of the neoliberal hegemony- a massive Green Revolution style public investment campaign would circumvent the problem, but that just ain’t the way business is done in universities nowadays.

Note the problem on biosafety is more that good GMOs will be banned because they’d spread pesticide resistance to weeds without terminator tech, not that they will be introduced illegitimately and spread pesticide resistant genes to weeds.

Mercy May 24, 2011, 1:32 PM
1 point
on: [LINK] Pixar works to make the future better
Magic is a little ambiguous, I assume it’s used here to mean illusion- the impossible act which proceeds directly from intention to effect with no stopping for mechanism. This is the magic of the deus ex machina and “a wizard did it” but also of the stage magician. I think they are correct that Pixar lacks this. It might not be clear how the setting came to be, but the causes driving the actual plot are always clear and logical.

EDIT: I have to say though, that auteur theory already throws too much information away, treating a whole production company as a consistent author is silly and it shows up in how the writer has to chuck half the movies out.

Mercy May 9, 2011, 4:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: Nova_Division’s comment on: Terrorist leaders are not about Terror
This is hardly new, didn’t he say something similar himself in his videos? The point was to trick the US into radicalizing the populace via increasingly barbaric acts of warfare and secret policing. He wouldn’t be the first terrorist to make such a claim and, tempting as the “don’t you see you are playing into their hands!” argument is, it always smells like post-hoc justification for a failed military campaign.

Edit: Sorry should have read the article didn’t realise it mentioned the mans own arguments.

Mercy May 9, 2011, 4:28 PM
1 point
in reply to: fburnaby’s comment on: Climate change: existential risk?
This is a big issue, there’s a lot of bright young people doing the equivalent of cleaning oil off seabirds because they feel they gotta do something about environmental risk. On the other hand, theres a lot of greens arguing against nuclear power and for growing tomatoes in greenhouses to save on aviation fuel, so maybe there isn’t enough brainpower being dedicated to the topic....

Anyway the flipside of marginal utility here is comparative advantage: what skills do you have that can help with AI research?

Mercy May 9, 2011, 4:18 PM
1 point
on: How would you spend 30 million dollars?
Why so many projects? With such a large amount of money you might reach the point where investments reach diminishing returns but donating for instance, to two different cryonics firms is silly. If you had six million dollars, you’d want to figure out which one could use the money most efficiently, and give it all to them. Have you read any of the threads on efficient charity?

Mercy May 9, 2011, 4:08 PM
2 points
on: [POLL] Slutwalk
Most demo organisers I know are quite upfront about the fact that they a tool for recruitment and networking rather than PR . They don’t use those terms obviously but criticise groups like Stop the War which don’t have a clear strategy beyond the protest, and focus on speeches more than route when police interference isn’t an issue. Anti-fascist counter-protests are the only example I can think of where putting boots on the ground is the point.

Take back the night style events like this are a pretty good example of the form: the point isn’t to convince people who wouldn’t attend of the campaign’s views but to drag in as many wavering fence sitters as possible (hence why they are so big on campuses) and give them a big confidence boost in their beliefs. The main effect on framing is probably from the attendees going on to express those views in their personal life, rather than from the media coverage of the protest.

Mercy Apr 21, 2011, 3:59 PM
0 points
in reply to: Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment on: Link Sharing Thread—April ’11
Language Hat has a roundup of responses.