ShemTealeaf

Karma: 144

ShemTealeaf Apr 7, 2021, 5:24 PM
24 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Don’t Sell Your Soul
Unless you’re really desperate, it just seems like a bad idea to sign any kind of non-standard contract for $10. There’s always a chance that you’re misunderstanding the terms, or that the contract gets challenged at some point, or even that your signature on the contract is used as blackmail. Maybe you’re trying to run for office or get a job at some point in the future, and the fact that you’ve sold your soul is used against you. The actual contract that Jacob references is long enough that even taking the time to read and understand it is worth significantly more than $10. Even with the simpler contract that you’re envisioning, who knows what kind of implications it has? It’s just not worth exposing yourself to these risks for the price of a burrito.

ShemTealeaf Mar 15, 2021, 9:56 PM
1 point
in reply to: Idan Arye’s comment on: Defending the non-central fallacy
France’s 2015 taxes of 75% made rich people secede, so we can take that as a supremum on the minimal tax burden that can make people secede. Of course—France’s rich didn’t have to go live in the woods—they had the option to go to other countries. Also, they did not have the option to not go to any country, because all the land on earth is divided between the countries.
Right, but they’re presumably moving to another country where they’re still paying taxes and participating in the state. If they had the option, do you think that they would prefer to opt out of the state completely (with all the associated downsides), rather than just moving to a country with somewhat lower taxes?
Does the state have the right to prevent its citizens from doing business with whoever they want?
I think we can sidestep this question, because I don’t think the state even has to do this with force. If they just say “anyone who does business with Person X loses access to roads, police, courts, sanitation, etc.”, that’s a very strong disincentive.

ShemTealeaf Mar 12, 2021, 3:15 PM
1 point
in reply to: Idan Arye’s comment on: Defending the non-central fallacy
I agree in theory; I just don’t think that the hypothetical bears much resemblance to reality. The tax burden of the richest individuals in the US is just a tiny rounding error in the federal budget. Even if you could stop the tax payments of every billionaire in the country, the federal government would barely notice the difference. You’d have to stop the tax payments of millions of people before it would start having a noticeable impact on the government ability to enforce its will.
Also, on a practical level, I think that the downside of losing membership in the state is so enormous that it would outweigh almost any tax burden. Just to start with, you would lose the ability to enter into most countries, since you would not have a valid passport. Even if your former government is willing to let you travel through their territory to leave your property (something which they are under no obligation to do), where are you going to go? How are you going to maintain your income? Realistically, how high would the tax burden have to be for you to accept those costs of secession?

ShemTealeaf Mar 11, 2021, 11:40 PM
1 point
in reply to: Idan Arye’s comment on: Defending the non-central fallacy
That’s fair; maybe I didn’t understand the hypothetical. If the person is so rich that they are providing 100% of the funding for the government, my criticism doesn’t apply. If you can fund the services that a government would provide on your own, I can see the case for opting out. In practice, I don’t think that applies to more than a handful of people. If the argument is that the top 0.01% richest people and a few loners in the woods are being unjustly prevented from opting out of taxation, I’m willing to concede that point. I don’t think it changes the overall picture that the overwhelming majority of people would not want to opt out.
Also, I wasn’t really talking about an organized uprising in terms of why the person opting out would need protection. I assume there are plenty of criminals who already exist that would enjoy the chance to engage in some theft without risking jail time. The community would just put up a sign outside the rich person’s property saying “this house is not protected by community laws or police”. Maybe if the rich person wants to use a public street, make them wear a shirt that says “this person does not have the protection or backing of any nation” to ensure that they’re not free riding on the police protection that they’re opting out of. None of that involves the community threatening violence; it’s just withdrawing protection.
Furthermore, legal protection is just one of many services that the state provides. At the most basic level, it’s pretty hard to get around without using public roads, and it’s pretty hard to stay rich if the government decides you can’t do business in its territory.

ShemTealeaf Mar 11, 2021, 7:29 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: Defending the non-central fallacy
If the rich person is giving up the ability to use public resources and have the protection of the community’s laws, are they still going to opt out? Sure, they’ll have more money, but they’ll have to use that money to hire bodyguards, since the other members of the community are now free to rob or kill them. They’d also have to make sure they have some way of enforcing the contract with the bodyguards, since they can’t use the community’s court system. Presumably the rich person has some source of income that is making them rich; will they be able to maintain that without the community’s cooperation? Honestly, I think just losing access to the legal system would be enough to prevent virtually everyone from opting out of membership in a modern liberal democracy.
In order to successfully opt out, you’d probably need to have enough people to form a competing community that can sustain and protect itself. After some time goes by, that competing community probably doesn’t look all that different from a government. I recognize that this might not apply to people who live self-sufficiently in the woods, or to billionaires who actually could afford a private defense force, but it applies to the vast majority of people.

ShemTealeaf Feb 11, 2021, 6:58 PM
2 points
on: Covid 2/11: As Expected
I have one correction on the obesity/overweight numbers, unless I misunderstood the claim being made. In most contexts, including the NCHS numbers cited above, the cutoff for overweight is a BMI of 25, not 30. The cutoff for the vaccine is a BMI of 30, so only ~40% of people qualify, not ~70%.

ShemTealeaf Jan 15, 2021, 3:29 PM
1 point
on: Covid 1/14: To Launch a Thousand Shipments
I’m curious if someone more knowledgeable can help me understand how to think about a vaccine that is 80% effective. Is the idea that each person will have a high chance of being essentially immune, and a low chance of having minimal protection? Alternatively, does it offer approximately 80% protection to everyone, the way that masks and social distancing would?
If it’s the latter, it seems like risk compensation could largely undo the effects of an 80% effective vaccine. If I see my family once a week without a mask, and I start going back to the gym, I could easily increase my risk by a factor of 4-5x.

ShemTealeaf Jan 8, 2021, 12:05 AM
0 points
in reply to: mike_hawke’s comment on: A dozen habits that work for me
Fair enough; thanks for the advice!

ShemTealeaf Jan 7, 2021, 2:46 PM
1 point
in reply to: mike_hawke’s comment on: A dozen habits that work for me
Interesting; I will give that a try. Any particular type or brand that you recommend?

ShemTealeaf Jan 7, 2021, 2:46 PM
1 point
in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: A dozen habits that work for me
How long did it take you to adapt to the CPAP? I have mild sleep apnea and tried to use a CPAP for a bit, but I absolutely could not sleep with the mask on.

ShemTealeaf Jan 6, 2021, 11:31 PM
3 points
on: A dozen habits that work for me
Are nasal strips useful for something other than preventing snoring? I already use earplugs, and I’m always on the lookout for more improvements to sleep quality.

ShemTealeaf Dec 25, 2020, 2:25 PM
17 points
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Covid 12/24: We’re F***ed, It’s Over
At the moment, the poor person and the rich person are both buying things. If the rich person buys more vaccine, that means they will buy less of the other things, so the poor person will be able to have more of them. So the question is about the ratios of how much the two guys care about the vaccine and how much they care about the other thing… and the answer is the rich guy will pay up for the vaccine when his vaccine:other ratio is higher than the other guys.
This is only true if the rich person is already spending as much money as possible, so an increase in spending on Item A must cause a decrease in spending on Item B. For someone like Jeff Bezos, an increase in spending on Item A probably just results in slightly less money spent by his great-grandchildren in 100 years.
It might be the case that it is separately desirable to redistribute wealth from the rich guy to the poor guy. This would indeed allow the poor guy to buy more things. But, conditional on a certain wealth distribution, it is best to allow market forces to allocate goods within that distribution.
I don’t see why this has to be true in all scenarios. If we want to make sure that the starving guy gets some of the food, can’t we just allocate the food to him directly, rather than having to give him enough money to win a bidding war with Jeff Bezos? Perhaps we desire a system where, in general, Jeff Bezos can use his money to do whatever he wants, but we have safeguards in place to prevent him from outbidding a starving guy on the food he needs to survive. I recognize that this may not be efficient in monetary terms, but it could be efficient in terms of overall human utility.

ShemTealeaf Dec 24, 2020, 7:58 PM
21 points
in reply to: Joe Collman’s comment on: Covid 12/24: We’re F***ed, It’s Over
Agreed on all points, except for about how clear the author was being about the use of the word “value”. Although he does make the reference to willingness to pay, his rhetorical point largely depends on people interpreting value in the colloquial sense. He writes, in the previous post:
If we’re not careful, next thing you know we’ll have an entire economy full of producing useful things and allocating them where they are valued most and can produce the most value. That would be the worst.
Imagine if you alter the phrasing to this, which is roughly equivalent under the “value = willingness + ability to pay” paradigm:
If we’re not careful, next thing you know we’ll have an entire economy full of producing useful things and allocating them to people who can pay the most money for them and where they can generate the most wealth for those people. That would be the worst.
Many people might reasonably object to that scenario, even though it sounds silly when we phrase their objection as “I think we should allocate resources to people who value them less”. My own feelings are probably closer to the author’s than those of the hypothetical objectors, but I’d prefer it if we could avoid these kind of rhetorical techniques.

ShemTealeaf Dec 24, 2020, 4:17 PM
73 points
on: Covid 12/24: We’re F***ed, It’s Over
I said it last week, people righteously said that things are not worth to the customer what the customer will pay for them because poor people have less money than rich people, and no, sorry, that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works.
It seems easy to construct a scenario where this is untrue, or at least conflicts with an intuitive definition of “value”. If I’m trying to auction off a rare food item in a room with Jeff Bezos and a starving person with no money, Bezos can easily win the auction if he has the slightest desire for the food. A tiny rounding error on his fortune is more than the starving person’s entire life is worth (in a monetary sense). Bezos clearly puts a higher monetary value on the food, but it seems absurd to suggest that this is an example of the food being allocated to the person who values it the most. To use a more realistic example, it’s hard for me to agree that a billionaire values their tenth vacation home more than a homeless person who is in danger of freezing in the winter.
I’m generally in favor of free markets, and maybe allowing Jeff Bezos to do whatever he wants produces an overall better world than the alternative. However, it seems disingenuous to say that his vast fortune means that he can value an item of trivial importance more than other people value anything at all.

ShemTealeaf Sep 14, 2020, 3:15 PM
3 points
in reply to: Tim Liptrot’s comment on: Covid 9/10: Vitamin D
I apologize; I made an error in my original comment. I was actually referring to high blood pressure rather than diabetes. 15 out of the 26 people in the control group had high blood pressure, which is greater than the number of people who needed ICU care. Using your (maximally generous) assumptions, we would have zero non-hypertensive patients from either group needing ICU care.
Firstly, two risk factors were more common among the treatment groups: <60 years of age, immunosuppressed & transplanted.
Absolutely true, but the overall risk factor prevalence was still significantly higher in the control group. Furthermore, I’m not sure if all risk factors are created equal. Regardless, the overall point is that the two groups had significant differences in important characteristics.
*In order to achieve a p<.05 the lack of blinding/fuzziness would must have failed to send 16 of the 46 treatment group members to the ICU.* That is still not likely without deliberate fraud.
I think it’s more likely that they sent a few of the control group members to the ICU unnecessarily. If you figure that the difference in risk factors between the two groups accounts for a couple of the extra ICU cases, the placebo effect accounts for another couple, and unnecessary ICU admission accounts for another couple, it brings the P-value up pretty dramatically. I’m not statistically literate enough to know how to properly adjust for those factors and get an exact number, but it doesn’t seem to require deliberate fraud.
Just to be clear, I still think that there is probably at least some sort of real effect here. I’m just advocating caution in interpreting the results of a tiny study with clear flaws. I don’t really understand why there was no placebo control or double blinding, and that makes me more suspicious that there are other flaws that I’m not educated enough to notice. For example, the way that they describe the ICU admission criteria suggests that the presence of a comorbidity is itself a factor for ICU admission. If that’s the case, the differences in the risk factor numbers become even more important.

ShemTealeaf Sep 10, 2020, 7:22 PM
9 points
on: Covid 9/10: Vitamin D
Regarding the Vitamin D study, it doesn’t seem like it was placebo controlled. Given the lack of placebo control, I’m not sure how it could be double blind. There were also a number of risk factors where the treatment and control groups had significant differences, most notably diabetes (present in 2.5x as many patients in the control group). If you combine the differences in the characteristics of the groups with the lack of placebo control and blinding and the “fuzziness” of ICU admission criteria, that could start to explain the effect without any deliberate fraud.
Of course, it’s still an impressive enough result that we absolutely need to be doing further research. I just think we should be cautious about how much weight we put on a single tiny study with unclear controls and blinding.