PatrickDFarley
What does the $300 plugin do that “classic block” doesn’t do? I just edit my posts inside a single classic block, which seems to be identical to the old WordPress editor, including the ability to directly edit the html.
The two sides are both trying to make the mandates look as obnoxious as possible, for different reasons.
This is such a thing, I see it all the time, and it is both completely obvious and apparently not noticed by anybody else.
When your goal is to signal to your side rather than convince the other side, and their goal is to signal rather than be convinced, you get this perverse symbiosis of everybody saying ridiculous things on purpose.
Absolutely, the whole blame-avoidance game would tend to make them over-cautious, but other hazards like regulatory capture (which I’m pretty sure is what happened with nutrition) threaten to make them recklessly wrong (as long as they can still find a way to avoid blame).
Your argument is that food guidelines don’t drive outcomes (in America), and also that a particular set of guidelines is correct, because obviously they’re driving outcomes (in Vietnam).? This argument is missing a bunch of pieces.
In any case, if you believe the food pyramid is great for Americans, I’m not interested in convincing you otherwise, so feel free to ignore my point.
Also, if one is forced to get a medical procedure that one doesn’t want, purely because they didn’t have the amount of money that’s required for bodily autonomy in their society, then yeah, I would call that “degrading” and a bunch of other stuff. A company is right to mandate what it wants for its employees, but it is not “hyperbolic language” to call some of that treatment degrading.
Am I the only one here who can easily relate to that twitter guy’s sentiment? Do rationalists not value the whole “dignity of autonomy” thing as an end in itself?
Here’s what Zvi is missing on (D):
I think both that the vaccines are safe and effective based on the evidence, and also that if the evidence did not strongly say they were safe and effective, we wouldn’t be contemplating such policies.
Does “we” refer to the same institutions that got nutrition entirely wrong for decades at a time, both at the micro level (individual foods) and macro level (food groups), whose entirely-wrong takes were taught in schools nationwide? I’m feeling way too much Gel-Mann skepticism here to say “yeah thankfully the powers-that-be will always be correct on vaccines”.
The level of pushback we have now is when, scientifically, the case is overwhelming, and if the vaccines were instead not safe but still much safer than not getting vaccinated, we’d not only not make them mandatory, they’d be forbidden.
Pushback is not correlated with scientific viability, but with political messaging. We’ve passed ineffective/dangerous policies with very little pushback (Patriot Act/NSA), and we’ve received plenty of pushback on effective policies (blocking travel from China). We cannot rely on pushback to bail us out of stupid object-level decisions. I hate to sound like such a libertarian ideologue, but I’m really not seeing a safer long-term policy than “stop giving govt’s (potentially stupid) decisions so much power”.
At this point I (and I think most people) assume we will eventually know the origin of covid, with reasons that correctly model the physical world. I’m willing to sit back and wait for the more dedicated researchers to bring that answer to light.
The more pressing question for many of us is—why did “they” try so hard to prevent us from considering the lab hypothesis in the first place? And why did they use shame and guilt-by-association instead of ever telling us some physical facts that refute the lab hypothesis?
Yeah “bad” is like “don’t climb the ladder or we get the hose”.
People would often reduce their own prize if it means that their opponent’s is reduced more.
This tells me we care more about relative status than absolute. See: anyone saying anything remotely critical of capitalism in the 21st century in the United States.
This poll asked people if they did “malicious online activity directed at somebody they didn’t know”
You mean the default way to gain status on Twitter?
But yes, pure cruelty does exist. What of the fact that chimpanzees are cruel but have no concept of evil? This tells me maybe cruelty serves a self-interested purpose in dominance-based status hierarchies. If the human bullies don’t know that, it wouldn’t be the first evolved behavior that humans do without fully knowing why.
Whenever I try to analyze evil, I find banality all the way down.
not just about the probability you think something is true, but an estimate of your confidence, in some quantitative way?
I don’t think these are actually different things.
The coin example is misleading. Your confidence in the next toss being heads is exactly the same as any other independent 50% bet. Your confidence that “this is a fair coin”, which could be approximated by, say, getting between 45-55 heads in the next 100 tosses, is a different bet and will give a different answer than 50%.
Huh I think the linkpost didn’t fully work
Isn’t that true of all property though?
Ownership is not an innate property of physical objects. It’s just saying that the government will use force etc.
I had that same question. But is there a middle ground, where these companies wouldn’t enforce parents during a global emergency, but would expect to profit from the patents once the emergency is over? And that this expectation of delayed profits is a factor in their original decision to innovate?
Love and value your posts as always. One point of contention:
They talk about this later on, saying that conservatives need to have their autonomy respected. People aren’t stupid. Either something is optional, and they have a choice, or it isn’t and they don’t. You can try to send both messages but you’ll fail.
Doesn’t this basically deny the entire phenomenon of persuasion? “Pure persuasion”, let’s call it, where you don’t improve the material incentives at all, but nevertheless you get the person to do the thing. I believe this is a skill that exists.
Is the red tribe legitimately afraid of the vaccine, or are they just pissed off at being told where to go and what to do every day for a year? Definitely both, but the latter group will be amenable to persuasion. They have a psychological need that isn’t being met, but can be met through a simple message.
Another angle is that a lot of people are motivated by little heroic thoughts, but you need to grant autonomy in order for heroism to exist. If you were masking and distancing and vaccinating only because you were told to by CNN’s version of an expert, then you’re not really any kind of hero, you’re just agreeable, and this distinction is blindingly clear to the red tribe.
So I say tell them it’s up to them. Tell them this is America and they can reject the vaccine for the rest of their lives if they want to, but we happen to believe that actual lives will be saved, in expectation, if they get it.
Coercion concern:
Shouldn’t we think about the counterfactual where the vaccine is not completely safe and healthy? What happens next time, when the thing is even more tribal-affiliated, such that the tribe in power won’t be upfront about the downsides of it? I don’t want a world where politics & power incentivize what medical procedures I should/shouldn’t get. I’d love to keep those spheres as separate as possible.
And that’s where I’m confused—because it’s conveniently very possible to keep them separate in this case: the vaccine works on individuals. You don’t need sweeping mandates for the whole community in order to get it to work. Everyone can just make a medical decision in their own best interests.
If you think not getting the vaccine is healthier, you should be able to live that experiment, as long as its effect on others is negligible. And likewise, in the possible future where I actually think it’s healthier to not do X medical procedure, I hope I can run that experiment without incurring the wrath of politics and power.
your father already knows you got a C-, told you that you’d better not pretend you got a C-,
Second C- should be C+
few will choose to have their wealth made visible to all, because the only advantage it brings is signalling, a thing they won’t admit even to themselves that they care about much
“Accountability” is the word normal people use when referring to pursuing success though conspicuous signaling. People already do opt in to “accountability” for different goals they have. I think the main reason they won’t do it with wealth is for privacy.
I assume you’ve read Zvi’s Choices are bad?
I’m like you, with the agonizing cost/benefit spreadsheets, and lately I try to remind myself that “choices are bad”, which implies that the act of making a choice at all (and moving on) has an inherent positive bias to it, because it frees you from what could become a miserable sunk-cost feedback loop (“I’ve spent so much time on this already, so I’d really better make the optimal decision now, but to do that I’ll need more time...”).
Also, I know offhand what my salary comes down to per hour, so I use that as a rule of thumb when deciding how much time to spend on a decision (given how much value is at stake in the decision).
You can’t Only ask questions that will support your beliefs.
Questions can’t support beliefs. Answers support beliefs (or don’t). What exactly are you asking?
That is definitely a crux, thank you for pointing that out.
This is 100% me. My view is: if your solution requires absolutely everyone to buy in to it—that is, it requires successful coordination across all cultures within the US, or in the world—then you don’t have a solution, you have a wish. The wish is for human nature to be fundamentally different from what it is.
Forcing coordination through federal mandates is different, in that it’s actually possible. But I see a similar kind of wish here. Re the substitute/complement question above, I believe the hypothetical version of the US government that successfully exercises such control over its citizens’ physical bodies and then promptly relinquishes that degree of control, is a US government not run by humans.
I happen to think the vaccine is an actual solution under the strict definition above. As in, I got it, so the pandemic is over for me. The reductions in infection and long-term risk are well documented here, and in my view they’re enough to justify taking the (underrated) benefit of no longer worrying about my covid risk (including caring about the vax status of those around me) (obviously I’m still worried about the second-order effects). I’ve had a really enjoyable summer that was full of social interaction, travel, dating, etc.
Tldr: “Real life” has enough utility that I count my individual vaccination as sufficient risk mitigation to justify it.