If you want to increase your fish-size, articles / comment threads which generate lots of upvotes are a good way to do it. And since your fish-size is small already there’s not much to lose if people don’t like it.
Moss_Piglet
Karma: 677
The idea here is interesting, but I wonder if anyone has tried to actually put it to the test. Not out of any personal desire to replace reasoned argument with statistics, mind, but simply because it’s pretty clear now that anything short of repeatedly replicated psychometric data will be dismissed without consideration if it disagrees with the doctrine of HNU.
Apparently there are such things as a Guilt Inventory, so assuming it’s actually as reliable as it’s supposed to be it seems to reason that one could take Guilt Inventories of various populations and see what shakes out.
Which one?
That it’s a classic that everyone need to see and revolutionized the Super Robot genre, that it’s unspeakably bizarre and will make you want to slap the annoying protagonist silly, or both, or some third reputation?
(I haven’t actually seen it, but you can’t swing a cat in some areas without hitting a bunch of people talking about it so there’s been some osmosis.)
You and Eugine seem to be talking past one another;
He’s saying that society tends to see it as (at worst) a bit of a faux pas for a gay man to try to get a straight to switch teams whereas a gay converter is one step off from an SS officer in terms of the hatred they get.
You, on the other hand, seem to be talking about how annoyed straight guys get when being harassed by gays trying to convert them, and presumably vice versa. That people get pissed off, with good reason, when people try to dictate terms to them on whom they desire.
Oddly enough, both of you are right. It is much more acceptable for gay men to be “straight chasers” and try to get straight guys to “come out” than it is for Christians to be “deconverters” and try to get gay guys to “find Jesus,” at least everywhere I’ve lived (admittedly, my favorite cities tend to be pretty deep blue). People confronted with this kind of obnoxious behavior don’t appreciate it in either case, but the straight guy has to be a lot more careful not to say anything “offensive” to the guy grabbing him (God forbid throwing a punch) than the gay guy who can tell the pastor to go to hell and walk off with the full force of the law / media behind him.
I’m not sure if you’ve considered any of the various High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT / HIIE) type programs like Tabata which have been floating around, but they were a huge help for me in the last year or so. Essentially the idea is that you do short bursts of highly intense exercise separated by short rests, usually using a timer app, giving you a fairly compact (4-20 mins is typical) workout which is paradoxically very good at building muscular endurance.
In terms of credibility, it’s pretty solid seeming; the Tabata program was developed by the eponymous scientist Izumi Tabata in the late nineties and looks to have accumulated a fair amount of confirming evidence (and avoided disconfirmation) as it and HIIT in general have become more popular and thoroughly researched since then. I’m not comfortable saying it’s a sure thing, since I haven’t really read much of the literature in detail and it’s not really my field, but as I said before it seems solid from what I have read.
Usually people do this with traditionally aerobic exercises like running or cycling and tend to use treadmills and stationary bikes, although since the advantage is really just about the timing you can adapt it to use pretty much any exercise and don’t need any equipment outside of a free app; I personally do body weight Squats/Push-Ups/Sit-Ups/Dips according to Tabata timing (20s on, 10s off, 8x sets per exercise), and it requires ~20mins my free smartphone app and a chair for the dips. Originally, I didn’t even need the chair because I did jumping jacks in place of dips, but that leads into my next paragraph...
There is a real risk of injury doing any HIIT workout. The high intensity, especially with jumping/running type exercises, can be really tough on your joints so if you, say, have had undiagnosed tendinitis / bursitis for years it’s generally a poor idea to do four minutes of high-intensity jumping jacks every day for six months. I got off fairly easy and am still doing a modified more-joint-friendly routine, but the general rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t do it more than about 4x a week and watch out for any joint pain. Also don’t think you have to jump in 100% right away; something like the 8-week plan at the bottom of this silly article can help you ease into it rather than leaping in blindly like I did.
I hope that helped, and either way good luck on your exercise routine.
Likewise, a lot of that looks like nitpicking. Even if there’s disagreement about when a problem should be said to be “fixed”, a prerequisite for a problem being “fixed” is that it’s not getting worse.
The thing is, that’s sort of the problem; a lot of these disasters it’s not clear what the parameters we’re counting even are or even whose response we’re looking at. I’m not trying to nitpick (I cut a lot out of my first comment’s examples for that reason), I honestly don’t know how we’re supposed to slice most of these. And that seems rather important if we’re going to judge whether issues are fixed in a timely manner.
Like, for example, “the Mongols”; the Mamluks did a really excellent job of putting together a defense once it was clear that Cairo would be next in line after Baghdad, the Song sat there and watched for decades as Genghis put his horde together before bothering to defend themselves, and the Mongols themselves did nothing to prevent their own wonky system of succession from predictably breaking their empire apart in between. That’s three different Mongol disasters with three different responses by three different groups, each with different outcomes, and I have no idea which one we’re even talking about (or if we’re talking about a fourth one entirely).
The ones you pointed out from my previous comment, (European) slavery in Africa and smoking, have similar issues; what exactly is the disaster, how long is too long for a solution, and who is responsible for stopping it?
The Quakers decided slavery was immoral in 1783, founded the ‘Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ in 1787, and twenty years later had killed the slave trade in the British Empire (with the rest of the Europe’s slave trade crumbling soon after). It’s tough to see how they could have been more prompt once they had invented the modern concept of abolitionism, and it’s pretty odd to call out earlier Christians for not responding to something only an abolitionist would even call a disaster in the first place. Sure we’re all abolitionists now, but that’s largely an accident of history; the idea is fairly non-obvious on it’s own, especially from a consequentialist point of view.
With smoking, the death rates are increasing but primarily in the developing world where cigarette smoking is still pretty new. In the US, our regulatory incentives and education have done a good job reducing the death toll and nowadays people generally know the risks when they pick up a pack (as do their insurance companies) all in just a few decades; domestically, it looks like the main disaster now is that the people who do choose to risk their health are increasingly able to externalize the cost of that decision through the government. My guess is that those developing countries with functioning governments will probably follow our example and we’ll see falling rates globally pretty soon as well, but even so it’s not far-fetched to say the disaster here is dealt with and theirs are separate (albeit similar) crises.
If we’re going to say people haven’t responded to a disaster quickly enough, actually defining said disaster the timescale and who the responders are is fairly crucial. Slicing out big chunks of time and space where things we don’t like are happening is easy, but for the purposes of understanding how people tend to respond to crises it makes more sense to try to cut as closely to the issue as possible.
Well hold on a second; what does “didn’t get fixed in time” even mean for most of these examples?
Was Hitler not “fixed in time” because he killed as many people as he did, or did he “get fixed” before he could kill the much larger number of people he would have preferred to kill in Eastern Europe? Was the (European; presumably we’re ignoring the Arab slave trade) Slave Trade in Africa stopped “in time” for guys like the Mende tribesmen freed in the Amistad case, or not “in time” from the perspective of those already enslaved? Does it count as a “fix” if everyone smoking tobacco now knows the health risks or will it not count as fixed unless it is completely eliminated, and again when is the cutoff for being in time?
A lot of this looks like complaining that these things happened at all rather than whether the responses to them were reasonably prompt and effective.
Market socialism was tried pretty extensively in Eastern Europe during the cold war; Joseph Stiglitz wrote a pretty thorough examination of it in his book ‘Whither Socialism.’
The information problem which kills explicit central planning is still extant in market socialism because it is based on reductionist economic models which do not capture the full complexity of market behavior. In other words, neglecting easy-to-miss microeconomic issues (like information asymmetry in purchasing, to use the example he focuses on most) means creating systemic dysfunction on the macro scale. Economic models can be useful abstractions when it comes to predicting trends in real markets, but they are not what they symbolize and building a “market” around their assumptions leads to collapse.
You’d be surprised how quickly even normally very rational people go to the “but… Versailles! Droit du seigneur!” emotive argument when someone suggests that there can be socioeconomic benefits to a high level of inequality.
The same scope insensitivity which makes people care more about a single sick puppy than millions of starving people makes it very difficult to see that the highly-visible opulence of the elite costs much less than the largely invisible ‘welfare’ superstructure which provides our underclass their bread and circuses. Not to mention that one produces value for society while the other annihilates it.
If a rationalist knows anything it should be how easy it is to forget to multiply or use inappropriately anchoring null hypotheses, especially when ideological sacred cows are involved.
I understand the desire to make sure people aren’t suffering, but can’t we think about the suffering of future generations as well?
Paying for people to do nothing incentives doing nothing; fewer people will participate the more comfortable laying around gets compared to actual work. Worse, removing the natural selective pressures against low-IQ / high time-preference people means they will reproduce and leave the next generation with even more unproductive people for every productive person remaining to have to support. With IQ now negatively correlated with fertility, that’s a recipe for genetic disaster and societal collapse.
Buying the happiness of our generation’s underclass at the expense of who knows how many of their descendants when the system finally collapses under it’s own weight is the opposite of compassion; it’s just pushing the suffering far enough into the future that you hope you can’t see it anymore. If we really cared about making people comfortable, why shouldn’t we look for a solution where we promote the traits which lead people to build their own happiness in the long run?
Actually, it turned out the problem was on my end. Sorry for the fuss.
It looks like there are roughly one million legal immigrants a year plus another eight million visa seekers, just looking at the US numbers. A professionally administered IQ test can go for anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; it’s hard to find a good number, but I’ve seen everything from $300 on the low end to $4000 on the high end. So it’s not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone without thinking about administrative costs or government waste.
Now you’re right to say that any individual tested would be worth more than that; either avoiding a burden or gaining a productive worker would more than make up the difference. But it seems that in most cases you could get the same decision with a resume and a color swatch; the value of the whole program dpeends on the corner cases where casual observation and psychometric tests disagree, and the shape of the normal curve implies that this region is a fairly small one to carry such a large price tag.
In other words, why not use the data we have rather than going through an expensive data collection process if that data is unlikely to change our decisions to a degree which would justify the costs?
Please ignore my many typos; my computer is riddled with viruses and my smartphone appears to be possessed by some sort of evil text-eating demon.
As my stats professor used to say “data costs money.”
For every IQ test you need to pay a psychologist trained in using that test to administer and score it. And since this is supposed to be scaled up for millions of people that means paying full-time trainers, scoring committees, not to mention buying large amounts of testing materials from whichever company winds up winning the bidding process.
Race is a weak measure but it also happens to be a very cheap one. Setting quotas based on race and providing exceptions by educational/professional merit would let in most of the high-IQ workers we want while preventing dysgenic and culturally destabilizing mass immigration.
(This ignores, of course, the massive numbers of illegal immigrants who would still be free to come in at will and stay as long as they care to. That is a serious issue as well, and one unlikely to be resolved by psychometric testing.)
What the hell is going on with all the ads here? I’ve got keywords highlighted in green that pop up ads when you mouse over them, stuff in the top and sidebars of the screen, popups when loading new pages… all of this since yesterday.
Normally I would think this sort of thing meant I had a virus (and I am scanning for one with everything I have) but other people have been complaining about stuff like this as well over the last few days.
I would be glad to donate if the site needs more money to stay up, but this is absolutely unacceptable.
[Edit: Never mind, it really was a virus.]
One obvious problem with that system; what happens with habitually bad posters?
Let’s say I write something so insipid and worthless that it’s worth every downvote on the site… and then a better-quality poster writes an excellent point-by-point take-down of it and gets tons of upvotes for it. Should I then benefit from “generating” such a high quality rebuttal, or is that just going to weaken the already weak incentive structure the karma system is supposed to be creating?
I can think of a good case just in the last few days of a poor-quality poster who would seriously benefit from this system, and as a long time poster here you can probably think of more.
Surely you can’t actually believe that.
Very astute of you to notice that.
No, I’d go so far as to say that out of the six non-capitalist systems I mentioned only four were unarguably guilty of democide (the case against the mercantile powers relies on a stubborn refusal to understand how epidemiology works) and one of them is wholly innocent of murder on anything greater than the scale of a village.
The case for hunting and gathering just gets better and better.
Well, “outside” of capitalism was pretty thoroughly explored in the 20th century and while they produced some really splendid music the 200 million dead by the hands of their own governments was admittedly a bit of a bummer. But maybe “before” has a better answer?
Well, capitalism’s immediate predecessor, mercantilism, was a pretty sweet setup all told (although I doubt it would seem particularly appetizing to you). Divine right of Kings and the virtues of a natural aristocracy is admittedly a tough sell, but the results were pretty phenomenal; each of the great golden ages of the European empires, one after another, for centuries. But still, going a bit further back couldn’t hurt.
Well now we’re in pre-Renaissance times, pretty good for our third bullet point, but the results aren’t so encouraging. Manorialism was a pretty inefficient system even in it’s own time; it’s probably for the best that the serfs were emancipated and all those usury laws got repealed, that would really put a damper on a post-industrial society. Still you can’t argue that all those Castles and Gothic Cathedrals weren’t a blast, and you could still find some un-enclosed Commons to farm if you wanted them. Put that one in the “maybe” column then.
Before that we’re into the Classical era and they didn’t even have a proper economic system, not to mention the way slavery choked off incentives for developing labor-saving technology. And the way masters choked off the slaves, er, literally… maybe best to just slide past that one too.
Maybe go all the way back to the Bronze Age; they must have had to have had something really interesting if they were cool enough to convince aliens to help build all those monuments. Well there was a lot of collective farming, that sounds right up your alley, although the whole Pharaoh thing seems like a bit of a drag. At least you get lots of nice pyramids and ziggurats, that’s pretty bad-ass.
Well what about if we go Full Environmentalist; leave the neolithic behind and embrace the hunter gatherer! There’s certainly something to be said about it nutritionally, that’s to be sure, and there does seem to be a bit of truth to the idea that it builds a man’s heroic character. Still, that doesn’t seem likely to scale well for 10 billion people and there’s that whole “no internet or penicillin” thing to consider too. I’m still a bit attached to looking at cat pictures and not dying of diarrhea, makes it hard to get into the back-to-the-earth spirit.
So I guess you were right; a little look at history really does put “the iniquities of capitalism” into perspective. Thanks!
It’s worse than not good; if you read the news about this, it looks like the whole thing got kicked off by UnitedHealth complaining about 23andMe’s affordability to the FDA. Who, being the dutiful little stooges they are, immediately went and started making unreasonable demands to 23andMe leading up to today’s nonsense.
My guess on the reasoning; since insurers aren’t legally permitted to use DNA tests to determine rates or eligibility, letting consumers figure out their own disease risk cheaply would give us an advantage in selecting plans and thus drive down their bottom line. That’s just speculation, but it seems to fit pretty well.
Actually, that was pretty good; pithy and introduces actual object-level issues to debate rather than abstract ideological concerns.
This is pretty important actually; you see a lot of EA talk around here which basically assumes children are fungible (“If I don’t have any kids, but spend the money to save n African kids then I’m in the clear!”) without taking into account that those n kids will likely need > 2n kids-worth of aid themselves in a few decades and you’ve squandered the human capital which would otherwise be able to support them.
If effective altruists can justify having a well paying full-time job for charity, why not raising morally-upright intelligent kids to be successful as well? It’s a lot tougher to do emotionally and financially, but comparing one-time payouts to investments with reliable returns seems like a no-brainer.
You’d probably do better with a hook about condom distribution / vaccination; they’re still very cheap ways to save a lot of lives, but also avoid compounding the population issues there by slightly reducing overall fertility. It doesn’t make sense to “help” in a way which creates even more people in need of help further down the line unless you’re actively aiming to enforce dependency.
Direct monetary handouts are a bad idea even ignoring time preference issues, simply because even relatively well-governed African countries like Kenya are institutionally corrupt to a degree it is difficult to picture without going there. A friend of mine just got back from an anthropological study in East Africa and it’s really hard to believe. Giving aid in GM seed grains (thinking more Borlaug than Monsanto here) mosquito nets or condoms makes a lot more sense than sending cash electronics or herd animals (yup, an actual thing).