Of course :D
There’s a strain of thought that would say price allocation of society’s production itself is only ethical when everyone has the same amount of money, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
spkoc
Karma: 205
To treacherously switch sides to the pro-price gouging side:
The obvious solution is for shops to jack up prices as soon as an emergency situation occurs, thereby taking the wind out of speculators’ sails. Now businesses are not going to want to do this, since it’ll ruin their reputation with customers for minor short term gain.
So the actual solution is for the government to mandate price-gouging in emergency situations, this way businesses can do it, without having to bear the public opinion penalty.
If an area is declared a public disaster area, all shops are obligated to immediately implement scarcity prices. Scarcity prices work like this: as the stock of an item goes down, the price goes up by 100% of base cost for every 1% of missing stock. So by the time you only have 90% of toilet paper left in store, you’re already paying 10 * base cost for it.
Of course private citizens are also allowed to come in and sell whatever they want.
I’m not sure what incentive this creates for shop owners, like maybe they want to not bring stocks back up to normal, but whatever, I’m sure it’ll work out.
Modern society gives people too much incentive to live in floodable/hurricanable/earthquakable areas anyway, a bit more spice in their lives would shift populations to more reasonable regions to live in so it’s all good either way.
Triple prices or empty shelves is a false dichotomy.
Everyone gets the supply and demand curve. That’s not the point. Society exists to counter-balance natural bad luck not to amplify it. Social policies that make a disaster even more disastrous for an individual are going to produce rage. Your house got flooded, you have no heat or electricity, you really need some oil for your generator and now that oil is 10 times more expensive.
I get that price signals are a good way to coordinate everyone in a community consuming less of a good, but people will fundamentally dislike it because it makes a bad situation worse for an individual.
Also the actual reasons economists are against price gouging are hilariously theoretical universe of frictionless spheres type arguments. Supply chains can take ages to react to price changes even in situations where there is no government boogie man tweaking things. Just look at the microchip supply crisis.
The actual solution to these issues is having effective emergency supply delivery handled by the government. The whole price gouging conversation is societal bike shedding. Modern governments can and do provide emergency aid almost in real time as disasters happen. If X developed world government lacks that capability, smack’em at the ballot box and tell the next crew to copy whatever the other dozens of countries are successfully doing in that department.
Given that they said we’ll spend the money on the NHS instead of on EU, I don’t see how that was what Cummings campaign implied.
http://www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/leave_ministers_commit_to_maintain_eu_funding.html
Thirteen Government ministers and senior Conservatives have today committed that every region, group and recipient of EU funding will continue to get that money after a ‘Leave’ vote in the EU referendum. In an open letter, the signatories—who include Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Priti Patel - assure those people and organisations who currently receive money from the European Union that their funding is safe if we Vote Leave.
In the letter they say:
’There is more than enough money to ensure that those who now get funding from the EU—including universities, scientists, family farmers, regional funds, cultural organisations and others—will continue to do so while also ensuring that we save money that can be spent on our priorities.
’If the public votes to leave on 23 June, we will continue to fund EU programmes in the UK until 2020, or up to the date when the EU is due to conclude individual programmes if that is earlier than 2020.
‘We will also be able to spend the money much more effectively. For example, some of the bureaucracy around payments to farmers is very damaging and can be scrapped once we take back control.’
The cynic in me finds turkeys voting for christmas endlessly entertaining, but this sort of blatant lying is why western societies’ trust in government is evaporating.
There’s no point to have farming subsidies for pig farmers. In a society where people on average eat too much meat, pork should cost at the supermarket the economic price it costs to produce pork and not less because of government subsidies. Brexit allowed to get rid of bad policy like that.
“Farm subsidies are bad” is literally the type of elitist white collar values attitude that vote leave campaigned against. They tricked tons of working class people to vote for them under the assumption that the tory party would then take care of them. And of course because labour and the lib dems haven’t represented the working class since the Blair era.
Oh but they said ‘we can’ not ‘we will’. This isn’t a court of law. What was implied is very clear.
Rhetoric about Project Fear was meant to explicitly make all warnings about brexit downsides seem ridiculous and overblown. And tons of people actually believed that they would kinda sorta trundle along and be ok. Well, most of us are gonna be ok, but some turkeys definitely got plucked hard.
Cummings’ accomplishments are kinda pathetic, actually? He was associated with the successful Brexit effort. OK. So were lots of other people. Cameron was lukewarm on remain and Labour was basically pro-brexit but couldn’t talk about it. In retrospect it’s not that shocking Remain lost when neither major party was fully campaigning for it. Also this is literally his only meaningful accomplishment.
Then he later gets into government as Johnson’s fixer, which given that Johnson is averse to actual work means he can basically do whatever he wants. He then fails to dark arts manipulate anyone at a high level and leaves government having done basically nothing.
Now he’s back to being a blogger, nerdsniping rationalists. He’s basically mental viral noise and the #1 source of my self-confidence lowering updates.
I read his stuff and it sounds good. Then his results are atrocious. Maybe my instincts suck.
Also “Oh the Brexit campaign didn’t lie to people as much as Remain”, this is delusional. Voting for brexit is polling at 36%(https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/daily-mail-buries-poll-showing-voters-have-turned-against-brexit-295935/) at this point. Tons of examples of business sectors/voting groups who believed the promises that they wouldn’t get shafted that did get shafted
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/brexiteer-farmer-vote-leave-eu-uk-patriotic-295861/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-49742567
People thought the tory government would replace the EU development funds to poor regions. Yeah, about that, not they didn’t https://www.ft.com/content/56b8c767-0b79-4221-8c33-a10a4705224e
He was part of a campaign that lied to people. People then got financially hurt as a result.
Whatever the long term impacts of brexit(and I’m open to the possibility that it’ll turn out well), it was sold actively and intentionally by lying to the people it would most severely impact about the cost of the policy.
I really liked the post, but I couldn’t help ironmanning the so-called fabricated options at every step. Documented below, read at your own peril(or most likely skip the wall of text).
Example 1
Every time price gouging is brought up online, I see it strawmanned. The proper ironman is something like anti-bank run measures.
Price gouging measures are meant to … solve a coordination problem. Supply is … not necessarily as limited as people might think, if everyone just kept consuming at the same rate or even slightly reduced consumption but not to a self-harming degree, we’d make due.
But in a tragedy of the commons/prisoners dilemma style we expect everyone to defect so we all defect. Withdrawal limits and various other mechanisms exist to prevent bank runs, because these sorts of things can be positive feedback loops otherwise. Everyone thinks toilet roll is gonna run out and so they wanna stock up for the whole year today … well yeah, the supply chain is unchanged but it’s expecting smooth consumption not mass psychosis.
Then you have the clowns that are buying up sanitizer or toilet roll anticipating that they’ll be able to resell it on ebay later.
I think a lot of people hate … price changing because of the investment value of a good rather than it’s use value, ie. people buying houses to hold and resell, rather than to live in them. It’s a potentially endless positive feedback loop making the underlying good unusable for practical purposes. See also the cost of using gold or diamond for industrial purposes.
But the market will just make more of house/gold/diamonds! Well, like, the whole reason why these goods are investments in the first place is because it is not market feasible to endlessly boost supply. It’s shocking that housing bubble apologists(talk about straw manning my opponents :D) ignore the rationality of the people purchasing houses as investments. You’d think they’d worry about the supply getting flooded and ruining them! Oh...
Price gouging done by actual corporates(ie. all supermarkets in an area agree to triple prices during a supply disruption) ends up looking like monopoly / oligopoly / market capture pricing. Look at the telecom situation in the US, where most people have access to one provider. Eh, it’s complicated.
Also you get unlucky and an earthquake destroys your house. Now we’ll double up that bad luck by making everything super expensive for you. Society is about the opposite of that. But then the government is the only entity that can do disaster response. Well. Yeah.
Example 2
There’s a cynical joke about pro-life people really loving unborn babies, but not being so hot on social policies for actual born babies. But realistically, I’d expect a lot of pro-life people to also be opposed to free healthcare for expecting mothers, so really they just hate the idea of fetuses dying on purpose, as opposed to due to societal neglect and poverty.
Stepping back from politi-tribal jokes. The real debate for most people is probably about what stage should elective abortion be banned and what should be done in edge cases where the life of the mother is at risk and a medical late-term abortion is needed to protect her(which again, is pretty rare). Vast majority won’t oppose first month abortion and won’t support randomly for no medical reason deciding to abort a baby in the 8th month of pregnancy.
Example 3
I mean, how do you know? If there is a clear cyclical pattern, maybe you expect it to last forever… But people age and change naturally anyway. I’ve seen myself and my people in my friend group pretty ruthlessly cut out crap parts of our behaviours/personalities as we entered our 30s and started feeling what it would mean to carry those anchors around our necks for the long haul. Growing up is a real thing, lots of people do it, surely?
But it’s a mental health thing, not just growing up, etc. Eh? Not enough details, but it could just be shitty mood management. Is it something that requires chemical treatment? Is it something that can be controlled by will power? That being said, it’s probably something a professional psychiatrist should advise on, rather than random friends or even(and perhaps especially) the person in the relationship.
Example 4
It’s 100% true that not having block lists is not acceptable, but block lists taken to an extreme are also unacceptable in a much more insidious difficult to explain way.
People who are trapped in cultish group think always think they are persecuted and perfectly legitimate to be cultish. Mainstream society’s social bubble thinks some cults are legitimate and some are not.
The real victims, usually, are the cult members. Being in a cult-bubble is harmful to the members because they become more and more isolated from the common memespace and thus are increasingly harmed on the rare occasions when some normie meme penetrates their bubble.
Self-isolation continually increases fragility and vulnerability. Once you start self-isolating, there is no clear point at which it becomes easy to rejoin the common environment.
Conversely, I don’t want to spend every day being exposed to abuse or people coughing in my face. And beyond some level of stress, your mental or physical immune systems aren’t actually getting stronger due to exposure, they’re being ground down.
I think block lists are necessary, but every time I mute/block someone I feel a bit worried that I’m building a wall of mirrors around my mind.
The actual healthy alternative is spending time in the real world with people that care about you more or less regardless of what dumb opinions you have and realizing that it doesn’t matter if you dislike X-people in the abstract as long as you are decent with X-people that you actually know. Also everyone spend less time thinking about (and virtually arguing with) straw Bad people and just interact with regular meat people.
Our only hope is irrational empathy and cognitive dissonance.
Example 5
Kids are ephemeral idiots. Who cares what 5-year old me wanted. That dumbass was dead by the time I hit 7. Parents think their kid would thank them later for X, because the parent would have thanked their own parent for X. I would have thanked my parents for a whole bunch of Xs that at the time I would have hated(god, why didn’t they force me to exercise more and take those dance lessons when I was like 8-10… I didn’t even whine that much about it and it would’ve made my teens so much better).
Really young kids are not actually the people you should care about. The person you should care about is their twenty something incarnation, since that’s probably around when their personality stabilizes. At least that’s what it was like for me. 16 year old me was a moron. 25 year old me was sort of figuring things out. I’d hope 40 year old me looks at present me with some measure of tolerance and perhaps even gratitude.
Under no circumstance should a parent favor their 10-year old, who won’t meaningfully exist in 3 years time, over their 20-year old, whose gonna be around for decades as a reasonably stable entity. Of course, the real problem is that predicting the future is hard and you can think that you’re setting the kid up for success but aren’t actually.
Also it’s true that the child shouldn’t form a continuous and stable over time impression of the parent as an enemy. Like, throw them some bones and as they enter their teenage and especially late teenage years give them increasing autonomy, since they’ll need to practice that with the parental safety net before entering adulthood. That being said, lots of parents are super future focused with their kids and lots of those kids turn out well and drag their family up the class structure of their society. I’m emotionally predisposed to suggest a happy medium is the place to be, but I don’t know if rationally that’s even true. Certainly don’t push the kid to a mental breakdown, though.
(Disclaimer, I mostly agree with your perspective on the world, though I do think … public perception is pulling the fabric of (some) developed societies apart at an alarming rate. Part of the core cause: reforms to the system don’t mean collapse into socialism or anarchy, nor are massive upheavals needed to address lots of present day complaints people have. But reformism is so unfashionable these days :/ )
I see ‘debates’ like this and they really trigger my solipsism. Every modern society is a mixed system of some capitalist competition with various social safety nets and regulations.
“Capitalism” isn’t good or bad, it’s a tool in the societal design kit. Every country on earth tweaks it to their needs, nobody’s doing like anarcho-capitalism or any sort of purist implementation(at least not anymore, though I’d argue, not in the past either).
Yes, tweaking the innate game-theoretic flows of the capitalist economy has some amount of unintended, or at least surprising side-effects. But it’s not like, oh we banned heroin and child labour and now everyone in our society is growing an extra head due to a hilarious Rube Goldberg series of events. Woe is us, Our Lord and Saviour Capitalism is such a fickle beast sometimes! Time to toss more children into the coal mine pyres to appease it.
Answering, for instance, “Let’s ban gambling elements in video games!” with “But capitalism” makes no sense, when all sorts of other substances and activities are successfully regulated. The complexity is not actually infinite, and as various countries experiment with regulations, lessons can be learned about which slippery slopes are dangerous and which are not.
Government officials claiming “oh that’s far beyond our ability to do” when asked to help with some societal ill also reeks of “x-party member believe the government is incompetent and then get elected and prove it”. I don’t understand why Americans put up with, “Government can’t help with Y-thing-that-dozens-of-other-countries’-governments-do-without-much-fuss”-rhetoric from PEOPLE WHO ARE THE GOVERNMENT. Like, do your jobs, you jerks!
On the other side absurdist anarchist thinking at the level of, “we can’t get paid parental leave without violent overthrow of the capitalist economy” are also insane.
These threads are so soothing to me these days. A reminder that most of the world is basically out of the literal mass death phase and just back into the politicians are long-term harmful, short-term irrelevant phase of life.
America’s not spicy enough, but don’t worry I’ve got Romania and Bulgaria taking another swing at unintentional herd immunity:
Look at that gorgeous vertical. “But it’s OK, like everyone there is vaccinated by now, right?”
“But it’s OK the governments are gonna lockdown and take control.” Yeah, no nobody cares. Restaurants are as packed as the morgues.
There’s a ritual in Romania where old people go and kiss a chest containing the bones of a saint. They queue up in big disorganised nose to nose crowds for it. Fortunately this year only a third of the usual number seems to be showing up. So like 15k+ instead of 50k+.
Yeah.
On the plus side literally anyone can get any vaccine and all my elderly family/friends have their boosters done. If you want a 3rd, 4th, 100th dose, just pop over, there’s a vaccination centre at the airport, non-citizens welcome. Not really any queues. Everyone already knows the PLANdemic is a Bill Gates plot to sterilise bat populations around the world.
Please send help, someone shut down facebook for good this time.
“But it’s not really facebook that’s the problem, right?” Here’s a flyer being handed out at a protest against lockdowns in a major city like a few days ago:
Some people can’t handle the internet.
I think this still undersells the mutative capacity of an institution. You’re worried about a fairly obvious abstraction that puts you in their target group. But institutions are living organisms, not evolving logical rulesets and can mutate much more radically.
The organisation is basically training hammers and those hammers will keep looking for nails. This is why means vs ends debates are so central to morality. Humans and organisations are 99% defined by what they do, not why they do it. You might do a terrible what for a good why, but once you achieve your initial goal you’ll be looking for other reasons to keep doing the terrible what that you’re now an efficient professional at doing.
I’m still so confused(through no fault of your own, I think you’re right, it just doesn’t fit in my head). Let me try to walk through my thought process.
I assume heritability of SAT score is probably different if you sample across USA, or just upper-mid class suburbs or just South Side Chicago, or just rural Eastern Europe, or just Malawi during a famine. Right? Given that environments are pretty radically different.
What heritability score are we using to determine if policy interventions matter or not? Is the first step to make sure that the region we want to improve has an environment that mimics ‘successful’ regions? Heritability would be very high in a homogenous environment(since that’s the only variation), but it goes down as more varied environments are added to the sample. Heritability is very high if we just look at rich area USA schools, lower if you sample all USA and even lower if we sample the whole world?
Also how is this linked to amplitude of effect? Super high heritability of SAT/IQ in say homogenous Denmark, but presumably the actual variation in scores is lower than in a global sample. Is there a way to say genetics account for +/- 5 points of IQ? So if you’re measuring IQs of 95-105 in your area that’s probably all genetic effects and policy interventions can’t do much?
Edit. I realize now that this is mostly Insub’s point below, but less coherent.
But isn’t this exactly the mainstream intuition that the OP dissolves? My understanding:
a) Heritability measures don’t seem to make sense for really complex traits like intelligence.
b) Heritability measures are not stable outside the environmental conditions in which they were measured.
For instance, some people have sickle cell anemia, which helps them better survive malaria(but otherwise is slightly harmful). If you measure heritability of infant mortality in environment with malaria and then in environment without malaria you get opposite effects. You get a lighter case of malaria with it, so sickle cell probably positively correlates with intelligence if there’s malaria in the environment.
There’s also weird epigenetic multigenerational effects: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07617-9 (quote is about a reference in this study)
The findings from the Överkalix cohorts imply that grandparental access to food during their slow growth period can modify diabetes and all-cause mortality in grandchildren. Cardiovascular mortality on the other hand was associated with parental, but not grandparental, nutritional experience. The authors interpret their results11 as “proof-of-principle that a sex-specific male-line transgenerational effect exists in humans”, which they consider likely to be epigenetic rather than genetic, cultural or social. A summary of the Överkalix findings is available in19. Their findings have been discussed in renowned peer-reviewed journals20,21,22,23,24 and are cited over 2,000 times (October 2018).
I have this vague memory about reading an article claiming that grandparents’ access to food influenced their grandchildren’s height, moreso than their immediate childrens’, but I can’t seem to find it. Perhaps nonsense.
Re free speech: Social media is an existential problem to our civilization. The chinese solution of mass censorship, that the west seems to be outsourcing to private corporations’ dumb algorithms, is not my preferred solution, but I honestly don’t know if it’s worse than the status quo.
The amount of misinformation I see forwarded even on my family whatsapp group is awful. Not even the older members of the family really buy it, but it definitely contributes to cynicism. Then there’s the Q horror stories, crazy conspiracy crap and so on. This is not sustainable, society can’t function with constant disruptive weaponized propaganda being thrown at us.
Maybe the Taiwan strategy of having an official government meme police that doesn’t ban fake news, but sends out official responses to it very quickly can work. Maybe not. I feel like the US government, for instance, doesn’t have the popular trust that the Taiwanese government has to pull something like this off.
I’m terrified by the idea of serious mass censorship, but misinformation is tearing apart western democracy. Maybe I’m being overly dramatic, maybe us younger people are more resilient. Then again, zoomer/milennial online mobs for dubious causes spring up all the time as well. I think it’s wishful thinking for younger folk to say fake news is just a boomer problem.
Something needs to happen. The truth is not beating falsehood by a wide enough margin(or sometimes at all!). Dismissing this as just 1984 ministry of truth memes is silly. Anti-vaxx shit alone has probably killed tens of thousands of people. Stupid Q conspiracies led people to storm the capitol in the US. This is only going to get more severe as time goes on.
If we don’t want the world to adopt China’s model, we need to be very serious about creating an alternative.
Ooh, this is a fun theory. Possibly causality reversed? Adam Smith’s old doozy is “the degree of specialization is limited by the extent of the market” or something like that. If the empire is collapsing and trade becoming more difficult practices switch to more local economies. Some products require a certain scale of market to be viable. Feudal Western Europe was quite fragmented, 100 different toll gates as you went down the Rhine and whatnot, so trade was very reduced, extent of market low and so specialization low and so capital requirements for production had to be low.
Stone quarries could be abandoned because there was tons of stone available for reuse and the current owners didn’t care about civic pride the way the old ones did(can’t afford to care about it when you’re fighting for your life). Feudal/medieval monumental construction meant castles and cathedrals, not bath houses.
Roof tiles as compared to straw roofs, ceramic amphorae compared to wooden barrels, cremation compared to burial, the use of glass, even the toga seems to have required extensively boiled wool
These are Mediterranean things, as the Western Empire is taken over by Germanic people’s why would Gaul preserve these building styles.
For amphorae: what is the dominant mode of transport? Barrels will survive land transport in a more localized economy a lot better. How much capital does barrel production vs amphorae production require. If the economy is more village centered maybe clay-related production becomes uneconomical.
My opinion: chain mail is better than Lorica segmentata, but more expensive to make(require more iron actually, is heavier, better protection, better maintenance since a segmentata you just have to scrap if it cracks, way more manual labour to produce). It’s not really clear why the segmentata was used in the ~50BC-300AD period. Maybe it was just cheaper to mass produce. By the time lorica hamata(the chain) production caught up they abandoned the segmentata.
Also related to market size: if you had to buy armour for yourself you’d buy hamata, since it’d be way more maintainable, and generally better protection and mobility. Well oiled and maintained you could probably pass it on to your son or resell it. The segmentata is much more of an industrial army’s armour, it needs to be fit much better to the individual and any puncture requires a professional to replace the segment.
I agree, but keep in mind just the city itself was like twice the size in the later period. Population wise 2nd Punic war Rome was around 3-500k, 410 Rome was around 8-900k. Presumably the greater southern Italian region was also way more populous, tho also less able/interested in coming to the city’s aid.
Different comparison: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7v15js/why_was_roman_military_so_small_during_the/ Late Roman armies were crippled by a loss of 75k men, despite similar losses being overcome by just Rome’s Southern Italian coalition centuries earlier.
Synthetic ‘civilization’ scores are unavoidably subjective
Just to be clear, the Ian Morris graph is Western Eurasia vs Eastern Eurasia(since it can’t be Western Europe vs colloquial East, as Western Europe was a backwater pre-Rome)? I’m very skeptical of these historical score approaches, they obscure more than they enlighten and depending on how actual data is weighted the author can come up with any conclusion they want.
For instance, why wouldn’t population density be the defining characteristic of a successful society(higher energy density, more efficient use of space, all sorts of engineering style arguments favour that)? China would utterly dominate Western Eurasia in that model. I don’t necessarily prefer that metric, I’m just pointing out synthesized metrics are very subjective though of course they have pop-history appeal.
Pet theory: Rome collapsed because all the greedy farmer soldiers became serfs
The fall of (Western) Rome has been the subject of 15 centuries of scholarship, so I’ll just toss my personal favourite single cause to rule them all(it wasn’t just one cause, it was multifactor but whatever): the collapse of the small-scale citizen farmers and the rise of the latifundia and the general demilitarization of roman citizens.
Disclaimer: the Romans were the historical villains of the region, in my opinion, I’m not glorifying them or their society.
The key contrast: Hannibal killed >100,000(?) roman soldiers while in Italy, yet never felt able to besiege the city. His army was maybe 100,000 strong. In 410 Alaric takes Rome with ~40,000 soldiers, despite the city being larger than the one that faced Hannibal, with no resistance worth mentioning.
The problem is the composition of Roman society had changed.
Growing Rome was a society where most fighting age males knew a bit of how to fight and could be drafted and would answer the draft out of patriotism/religious/civic devotion or greed. Late Rome was a society where a lot of people were coloni(proto-serfs) or fully slaves. They were purposefully not allowed to fight since their owners were afraid those skills might be turned against them. Late Roman society also wasn’t expanding ⇒ the wars being fought wouldn’t result in plunder ⇒ the incentive for citizens to join the army was greatly reduced.
Early Roman soldiers had arguably unlimited upside, conquer some rich city or tribe and your share of the loot leaves you set for life. Late Roman soldiers just had a salary and much more competent enemies.
There were tons of rich land owners in the Italian peninsula, tons of people? How could the city fall to a mere 40,000 soldiers? No one really cared to defend it. The latifundiaries made their own deals with the ‘barbarians’, not caring about the fact that their families would slowly lose control of the land over the coming centuries. The religious(?) obsession with long-term legacy of the Republic and early empire were gone, the men of the Late west were short term focused. Early Rome elites cared about their prestige in Roman society, they saw themselves as part of the population of one city, at the end of the day they’d fight together against external societies. Late Roman elites had their wealth and power in the provinces and didn’t see other latifundiaries as part of their in-group and worth fighting along with.
Plot twist: the latifundia grew because the farmer soldiers were too successful and wouldn’t stop
The reason the latifundia grew and the old Roman system collapsed was the very success of the old Roman system flooding Italy with slaves and money and allowing elites to buy out small landholders. Furthermore a good reason for the Roman state to allow this process to happen was that the old get rich quick Roman war strategy ended up being used against Rome itself as Imperial pretenders persuaded our heroic yeomen farmer soldiers to turn arms against the state(since there wasn’t much worth conquering outside the borders). Damned if you do damned if you don’t.
Just for fun: modern democracies fuse roman legalese, revived roman civic religion, dying christian feudal ideas of obedience to authority and feudal cultural practices for peacefully transferring power
Epistemic status, wild fun speculation.
I’d argue that Western Europe continued evolving culturally and politically after Western Rome collapsed. The key technology that developed in Western Europe was the (comparatively) peaceful transfer of power from one monarch to another upon death, without lobotomizing the monarch and replacing him with a weaselly bureaucracy the way the Ottomans/Chinese harem systems solved the endless succession civil war problem.
The ability to ACTUALLY transfer power, as opposed to sidestepping the succession by having real power embodied in a constantly regenerating collection of people is the enabling cultural technology for modern republican democracies. Better put: both elite and popular culture expects a peaceful, legally codified transfer of power. It’s this ingrained instinct that’s valuable and is essential(and can be lost, as Republican Rome lost it and Imperial Rome never acquired it in the West), rather than the formal rules for how you transfer power.
That and Europe’s weird obsession with separating the person of the king from the institution of the monarch(see Britain’s linguistic weirdness around King/Queen-in-parliament, possibly related to Christian weirdness around the Trinity, maybe the religious mental calisthenics got applied to political ideas as well) creates a neat interface where you can cleanly replace a monarchy with an elected government and it sort of all just works the same in the minds of everyone involved.
I have a shallow read a few posts about it overview of the post-rationality vs rationality debate, but to me it just seems like a semantic debate.
Camp “post-rationalism isn’t a thing” argues that rationality is the art of winning. Therefore any methods that camp “post-rationalism” uses that work better than a similar method used by people in camp “post-rationalism isn’t a thing” is the correct method for all rationalists to use.
The rationalist definition is sort of recursive. If you live the ideology correctly than you should replace worse methods with better ones. If it turns out that bayesian thinking doesn’t produce good(or better than some alternative) results, rationalist dogma says to ditch bayesianism for the new hotness.
Taken to an extreme: in a brute survival context a lot of the current … aesthetics or surface level features of rationalism might have to be abandoned in favour of violence, since that is what survival/winning demands.
But it can’t be that simple or there wouldn’t be a debate so what am I missing?
I need to read that Huemer book, it sounds very interesting from what you’ve quoted in this and the other thread here.
You’re right, I am being unfair to the actual philosophy. I have a negative emotional reaction to the political movement that uses the name. I have quite a lot of … sympathy(?) for the actual philosophical movements’ conclusions, however I still think it collapses to being a bunch of heuristics on top of utilitarian arguments in the end. Also I think objectivism(libertarianisms’ radical grandkid(?)) is … evil? Not utilitarian compatible, at least.
I feel like you side stepped the core issue in the party analogy: if I/we/the state can’t restrict access to our property because someone might die without it … that kinda means we can’t restrict access to our property almost at all. Is anyone dying in the world of a preventable disease? Clearly the state isn’t providing enough healthcare access or private healthcare providers are immorally restricting access to care.
The actual criticism then goes back to: States do not have legitimate claims for their property. I realize you address this in:
Second, it is perfectly consistent to argue for property rights in the abstract while holding that most actual claims to property in the real world are illegitimate.
But there’s no legitimate property if analyzed on a long enough time horizon. At some point some primitive human bashed some other human in the head and every one of us is the infinitesimal beneficiary of that crime. Hence Christian redemption and baptism, actual legal code statutes of limitations, moral principles that only active purposeful harm is morally bad and all sorts of other coping mechanisms civilizations have developed over the ages. The alternative is literally eternal blood feuds or wars that can only end in complete annihilation of one of the factions.
The question then becomes why don’t these coping mechanisms apply to states, but apply to every other human organisation? What makes state ownership illegitimate, but corporate ownership built on top of government contracts legitimate? At what degree of indirection does the sin wash off? What about children of employees of companies that sold goods to slavers?
Yes, it’s consistent to argue for property rights while recognizing the illegitimacy of current property allocation… but the only moral remedy for that(if taken as a serious axiomatic moral principle) is some sort of tabula rasa society, which would obviously be crazy utility destroying and nobody supports. Ok, Bakunin et al, but come on.
I don’t think libertarian principles have something unique and practical to say about where to draw the line when it comes to ‘tainted’ ownership rights. Even in that Nozick quote: why are we stopping with the USA? What about even more ancient history in Europe, or indeed North America. Obviously an absurd rabbit hole. We stop when there are still living descendants that are angry about this issue… well if you start providing a monetary incentive for grievance you’re going to find a lot of historical grievance. Hell, looking outside the US bubble there’s plenty of historical grievance globally right now everywhere.
Hopeless attempt at clarity
Trying to clarify my criticism for myself as well: libertarianism seems to present axiomatic moral principles, commandments that if unbroken will produce a just society. In practice, even philosophers treat the axioms more like heuristics layered on top of utilitarianism: “You mustn’t violate private property rights … unless you have good reason for it. Property should be justly acquired but if enough time has passed we gotta move on and get things done.” Well, ok, so what does this actually produce for us?
Government should do useful things with tax money. Unironically revolutionary idea in Locke’s time, but this stuff is in the water like flouride in the modern era. And going full circle, actual political movements that use the label seem built around objectivists, in that they’re willing to say: the principle is more important than the utilitarian outcome of its application. Taxation is bad even if it helps people. Except, of course, modern political movements are awful and don’t say that in public, that’s just for the inner circle. In public they just lie(in my opinion) and claim that all government activity is net utility desroying.
Before I go off on a rant about “taxation is theft”, I want to respond to the actual theme of the post: the fallacy depends on your metric(?) function(not sure what the term is). How do you graph types of events, how do you determine proximity?
For instance, are micro-aggressions just as bad as physical violence? Or at least should we attempt to prevent them with similar amounts of force and regulation?
If your metric is physical damage done then probably not. If the metric is self-reported emotional or physical suffering, then maybe. But the category becomes very different if you change the metric. For instance, people inflicting pain in ways that don’t leave a mark is a failure case for metric 1, but not metric 2. People lying about their inner state is a problem for metric 2 but not 1.
This then breaks down into an argument over what the ‘true’ metric should be. If someone calls this fallacy against someone, presumably they’re flagging a disagreement about the metric being used.
Rant about taxation is theft
I hate the taxation is theft argument(in general, it’s a good one to bring up in this post). States are associations of citizens with particular rules, that own the land of their territory(and various other assets), if you don’t like their rules leave. But all the land belongs to some association… so what? Tough cookies?
Disclaimer: not a libertarian, but trying to take the ideology more seriously than its advocates seem to, at least what I’ve encountered so far.
By remaining resident/citizen of a country you are implicitly consenting to the laws of that country, including taxation. Just like using a website implies you tacitly accept its Terms of Service(legal interpretation of how enforceable this is varies for private company ToS, of course).
The only countries where this argument is at least emotionally persuasive are those that don’t have exit rights, ie. you can’t leave and renounce citizenship. Even there, in a geopolitical anarcho-capitalist sense, you don’t have the right to just be resident for free. The state owns the land you are on, you owe it money. The only real moral wrong here, in my interpretation of natural rights libertarianism, is that you are being denied exit rights.
Granted even if you leave one country you’d still have to be accepted by some other country where you end up paying some taxes.… buuuut and this is why I hate this argument so much.… that’s because citizens have ‘collective’ private property ownership over the sovereign nation they are a part of. The libertarian argument against taxation reduces to abolition of private property!
Also obviously, taxation is explicitly consented to if you are an immigrant.
As strawman libertarians might say, you don’t have a right to healthcare. Well you don’t have a right to standing on dirt owned by the United Commonwealth of SomewhereLandia either. But every piece of dirt is owned. Tough luck. So is every piece of diamond. Build a rocket and sail off west young fellow.
I feel like the herd immunity section is overly simplistic given how much IFR varies based on age group.
Using https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v7
The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85.
65+ is like 45,000,000 in the US. Half of them get infected, generously let’s say 3% die that’s 600,000 dead. A big part of the IFR in the spring for NYC and Sweden(and probably lots of other places) was determined by the virus getting into care homes or not.
This being said I am leaning towards herd immunity being a decent solution with 2 major caveats:
1. You really need the 65+ demographic to stay reasonably locked down while you’re burning through the rest of the population. And for countries where multiple generations are living together that’s not possible. And for countries where a ton of older people don’t worry about the virus that’s also not possible.
2. You can’t variolate(?) too quickly, otherwise you just blow out your hospital system and suddenly those nice 0.4% death rates blow up into ?? who knows.
Briefly looking for estimates of hospitalization rates I found https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7493765/
I’m super worried about Europe, because I think several countries are going to get pushed to medical system collapse and beyond. Assuming the study above is reasonably representative, let’s say 4% of 40-59 year olds are admitted to hospital, based on the graph above(a group with an IFR of like 0.2%). If the hospital is full what percentage of people that needed to be admitted dies? Does he IFR go up x3? x5?
Was hoping to visit my family in Romania for the holidays, but at this stage I’m probably hunkering down in good old blighty til spring :(
EDIT. Basically I think the situation for herd immunity is both better and worse than what I derive from your post: The IFR for the groups of people we want to get the disease is well below 0.4% on average. But we REALLY want at risk groups to be in close to lockdown mode while variolating.
As an extra wrinkle, viral load seems to have a significant effect on disease severity. If a country is purposefully going for herd immunity, at the peak of the process viral load in closed spaces will be a lot higher than it is these days. That may or may not shift IFR higher for a while.
Regarding the direct example
I feel like it’s self-subverting. There’s an old canard about https://www.watersafetymagazine.com/drowning-doesnt-look-like-drowning/ Given how staggeringly disproportionate the utility losses are in this scenario I think even a 1% chance of my assumption that ‘I have 15 seconds to undress’ would lead to death means I should act immediately.
In general when thinking about superfast reflex decisions vs thought out decisions: Obey the reflex unless your ability to estimate the probabilities involved has really low margins of error. My gut says X but my slow, super weak priors-that-have-never-been-adjusted-by-real-world-experience-about-this-first-time-in-my-life-situation say Y… Yeah just go with X. Reflect on the outcome later and maybe come up with a Z that should have been the gut/reflex response.
There’s an old video game Starcraft 2 advice from Day9 that’s surprisingly applicable in life: Plan your game before the game, in game follow the plan even if it seems like it’s failing, after the game review and adjust your plan. Never plan during the game, speed is of the essence and the loss of micro and macro speed will cost you more than a bad plan executed well.
Don’t plan during a crisis moment where you have seconds to react correctly. Do. Then later on train yourself to have better reflexes. Applicable when socializing, doing anything physical, in week 1 of a software development 2 week sprint etc.
Regarding the more general point of people having … self-consistent utility functions/preferences
I fundamentally disagree that you shouldn’t criticize someone for their utility function. An individual’s utility function should include reasonably low-discount approximations of the utility functions of people around them. This is what morality tries to approximate. People that seem to not integrate my preferences into their own signal danger to me. How irrelevant is my welfare in their calculations? How much of my utility would they destroy for how small a gain in their own utility?
People strongly committed to non-violence and so on are an edge case, but I’d feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
How intrusively should people integrate each other’s preferences? How much should we police other individual’s exchange rate from personal utils to other people utils? No good answer, it varies over time and societies.
Society is an iron maiden, shaped around the general opinion about what the right action is in a given scenario. Shame is when we decide something that we know others will judge us badly for. Guilt is when we’ve internalized that shame.
The art of a good society is designing an iron maiden that most people don’t even notice.
It seems irrational to me to not internalize the social moral code to some extent into my individual utility function. (It happens anyway, might as well do it consciously so I can at least reject some of the rules) If the social order is not to my taste, try and leave or change it. But just ignoring it makes no sense.
I’d also argue that the vast majority of preferences in our, so-called, ‘personal’ utility function are just bits and bobs picked up from the societal example palette we observed as we grew up.
People’s utility functions also include components for the type of iron maiden they want their society to build around other members. I want to be able to make assumptions about the likely outcomes of meeting a random other person. Will they try to rob me? If I’m in trouble will they help me? If my kid is playing outside unsupervised by me, but there’s always random people walking by, can I trust that any of them will take reasonably care of the child if the kid ends up in trouble?
I strongly do not want to live in a society that doesn’t match my preferred answers on those and other critical questions.
I absolutely do not want to live in a society that has no iron maiden built at all. That is just mad max world. I can make no reasonable assumption about what might happen when I cross paths with another person. When people are faced with situations of moral anarchy, they spontaneously band together, bang out some rules and carve out an area of the wilderness where they enforce their rules.