ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
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User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
This seems like dangerous game to play. Biden could be easily disqualified from office by a sympathetic medical authority declaring him mentally unsound. Are we going to end up with future presidential elections determined by red and blue states' courts competing to eliminate the opposition from their ballots?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
California must stand on the right side of history.
I'm surprised to see this expression used unironically. How does future consensus opinion make an act morally right? But I suppose it's consistent with the idea that past actions can be judged by current moral standards.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
I think to online Internet lefties, the term for outgroup members is Nazi. IH has signaled that he is outgroup through his jokes. Therefore they call him a Nazi. You're taking too literal a meaning to the term.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
There are a few hypotheses here:
- Judeo-Christian ethics cause people to choose more children, compared to other ethical systems.
- A realistic evaluation of things causes people to choose fewer children.
In 2, there's an assumption smuggled in, which is that absent a "religious" belief system, viewing life realistically means that children are a net negative. But this all depends on what one values. I'd basically interpret a belief system that concludes, after looking realistically at things, that children are a net negative as self-centered hedonism. It's the self-centered hedonism that is the problem, not looking at things realistically. One can certainly value children in themselves while being consequentialist atheist materialist rationalist.
What's needed is a value system that takes a longer view while accepting reality (insert diatribe about blank-slateism causing everything wrong in the world). Basically, future people matter, happier, smarter, better future people matter, and the best thing one can do with their life is make an infinite tree of such people by having kids. It might be that what I'm describing basically is Judeo-Christian ethics, but I think removing the supernatural takes us so far from what the original religions are about that it doesn't make sense to call it that.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
The feeling of disillusionment can happen to everyone. I can give an example unrelated to OP's beliefs but which came to mind reading the post: Caring about CO2 emissions because it poses some existential risk for humanity, and discovering that environmental groups oppose the most feasible solution: nuclear. This discovery caused me to believe most environmentalists are not serious; they're motivated by vibes.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
There are many domains where hidden motives could make for a fun and educational experience.
- College admissions. You have to craft a student body that maximizes the prestige of the university, using only policies that ostensibly achieve other more laudable goals.
- Corporate hiring (similar to college admissions).
- Sims but you're graded on your people's social status. Choices have to have plausible deniability. If your subject doesn't claim to find driving fun, you can't give them a Ferrari without a status penalty for being a phoney or nouveau riche. (I don't play The Sims so for all I know it already works this way.)
There is a lot of opportunity in well trodden game types to introduce new targets or mechanisms.
- Urban planning. People are unhappy if they live close to much richer people and feel envious every day. You have to minimize the local Gini coefficient across the whole city. Using policies with plausible deniability of course.
- Traffic design that minimizes envy and resentment. Different modes getting privileges (e.g. a lone bicyclist getting a green light ahead of 50 cars) makes people unhappy.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
What does ODC stand for?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
Lovely that the Democrats respond to a supply crunch by further increasing demand via these new rules.
Was the idea of raising wages discussed? Politicians tend to think of workers as a fixed number that meet the requirements but in reality the number who would be willing to work this job depends on the wage. How many "qualified" people are just doing more pleasant things with their life right now?
If there truly are not enough workers who meet the legal requirements, then maybe the law should be changed to stop limiting supply. The federal government could make a "shall issue" style law for getting qualified as a caregiver. Or leave it up to facilities and customers to negotiate the level of training they require.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
Vaccine mandates are a good idea - businesses and schools need to be able to prevent the unvaccinated from entering.
These two clauses say different things. Businesses being able to do something (exclude unvaccinated) is different from businesses being required to do it.
Imagine it would be socially allowed for you to have sex with whomever you choose (permissive partner, permissive religion). How many percent of all people of your preferred age and sex would you then consider as sexual partners?
I don't know what this means. If it's "socially allowed" why does the next question offer a reason of "unwanted social consequences"?
The question seems to be treating sexual morality as very rules-based and divorced from any consequences. Kind of like, it's this good thing that only outdated moral rules are preventing people from enjoying. I don't think of sexual morality in these terms. Sex is a means to an end: creating successful kids. Sex that doesn't help with that is a vice, akin to gluttony or sloth (I'm atheist, not Catholic, but Catholics have a good taxonomy of vices). By "vice" I mean something that distracts from useful efforts or that has negative consequences. I checked the box for "I find sex with someone I don't know meaningless" but that is not adequately expressing my stance.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
To apply @BurdensomeCountTheWhite's argument to these situations, the Chinese and Romans would have to establish their rule by force and maintain order. Then they could be judged as least-worst among all the other contenders based on how beneficial the pax China/Romana was. If the subjugated peoples are considering revolt then the rulers haven't done their job yet.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
I don't understand why it's important whether Indo-European invaders were more predisposed to creating civilization than local populations at the time they invaded. The admixed population has evolved since then. Isn't the current state what matters? Similarly, it could totally be the case that the local populations were better in some way. But they're gone now. The comparison isn't against an extinct population, it's against the other populations here now. Not that population-level comparisons even make sense when you can compare individuals.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
Inching closer to the eradication of financial privacy
FinCEN has new rules taking effect over the next year and a half that require basically all companies to disclose the "beneficial owners".
The rule will require most corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities created in or registered to do business in the United States to report information about their beneficial owners—the persons who ultimately own or control the company, to FinCEN. Designed to protect U.S. national security and strengthen the integrity and transparency of the U.S. financial system, the rule will help to stop criminal actors, including oligarchs, kleptocrats, drug traffickers, human traffickers, and those who would use anonymous shell companies to hide their illicit proceeds.
I won't quote the whole thing but it's a short and easy read.
This statement is a bit disturbing:
FinCEN will engage in additional rulemakings to: (1) establish rules for who may access beneficial ownership information, for what purposes, and what safeguards will be required to ensure that the information is secured and protected [...]
This provides another avenue for rogue members of institutions to leak private information to hurt people they don't like. Depending on the rules that ultimately come out, this avenue could be very wide, especially since there is often discretion over when to enforce the rules.
My revulsion to these rules goes beyond the erosion of privacy, though. It should be possible to be a citizen of a place without exposing your entire life to the mercy of its government. You can't avoid being at its physical mercy when you're within its territory, but you can leave now and then. The way financial rules work in the U.S., you have to report and pay taxes on all finances, even work and investments in other countries. You also have to pay taxes on income that doesn't affect anybody else (income you haven't spent). With these new rules, you might have to pay a reputational tax when wealth you were keeping private gets exposed. I would much prefer citizenship or investment in a place to be like membership in a club - you're judged by your behavior at club events, not by your life outside it.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
One reason for special licensing is to make it easier to prevent truck drivers from engaging in law-breaking arbitrage. Speeding to make delivery times, not sleeping, etc. Once someone is doing something for money there is that extra incentive to break laws. You can see the same thing with Uber - as soon as people started driving for money, there were suddenly a lot more violations of no-stopping zones, transit lanes, parking in bike lanes, etc.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
I am continually astonished by the cruelty of other people, often practiced under the pretense of standing up to bullies.
Could you give some examples? This sounds similar to Jonathan Haidt's ideas in The Coddling of the American Mind (safetyism, call-out culture, etc.) but it could also be completely different.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
The author makes a good point but there's something they're missing. The way I would put it is that walking or biking are low-status activities in many places by design. This comment from HN puts it well:
Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?” When you are using transportation infrastructure that’s designed with contempt for you, you know, and you don’t want to be there.
The contempt in the design is, I think, on purpose. Perhaps not explicitly, in a saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud way, but it's a very important implicit goal that I'm sure planners understand. Constituents know that accessible public transport and cheap housing within pleasant walking distance to amenities will lead to people taking advantage of those things. People the constituents don't want around.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that all of the negative aspects of American (sub)urban design post-1950 are basically compensation for not being able to exclude undesirables explicitly.
- Car-dependence excludes poor people. The above article illustrates one facet of this, making walking low-status.
- Zoning codes exclude poor people. Houses must be a certain size, putting a price floor on them and pricing poor people out. Housing must be far from stores, forcing car dependence.
- HOA rules about renting exclude people who aren't conscientious. People who can't hold a steady job in one place, people in and out of prison, people who don't have the credit history to get a mortgage, just can't live in HOA-controlled neighborhoods.
The trouble is, of course, that poor feckless criminals are in fact bad for a neighborhood. If you'd like an extreme example, here's a video of Philadelphia. Would you want to take a walk or ride a bike there? There are wide accessible sidewalks, lots of bike lanes, tons of public transit, and high density. What's not to love?
It's clear that higher density and less car-dependence would be more efficient in some senses: less fossil fuel consumption, less time wasted commuting, and less land consumed by development, for example. It's also clear that there is value in excluding certain people from public spaces. In the extreme, if violent felons are allowed free reign, society as we know it couldn't function. In the less extreme, being less exclusive means more low-level harassment and petty crime and fewer positive-sum interactions among people. Exclusivity eventually reaches diminishing returns, but there's clearly some level at which excluding people is worth it.
Figuring out the right policies that maximize utility between these competing concerns requires taking a hard look at why basically anything is valuable. Why do fossil fuels and carbon emissions matter? Why does it matter whether vulnerable people can walk safely outside at night? As EAs have discovered over and over, people do not in general try to maximize utility. Most day-to-day decisions related to topics like this are for status signaling. Everyone wants their own lifestyle to be the one treated with dignity and privilege.
The problem with the built environment treating pedestrians with dignity is making sure it doesn't assign inappropriate dignity or status to the wrong people. Any system that assigns inappropriate status is going to be instinctively rejected by voters. If everyone is expected to walk and take public transit, there still must be practical ways for average-status people to exclude low-status people and to differentiate themselves from them. One way would be to use exclusive transit (think corporate shuttles). Make the public transit slow and impractical. Or make transit expensive, especially as a high fixed cost imposing a barrier to entry to non-conscientious people (a $500/year membership, but ride free). It's much harder to make pedestrian facilities exclusive without authoritarian policing such as curfews and id checks. To be practical it has to be combined with measures that make it hard to get to the walkable area in the first place.
Assigning inappropriate dignity and status is the core of the problem with many urbanist ideas, this included.
Thanks for sharing these. I've read your earlier writing and found it very good - you explain very well ideas that I'm sure many people who are intellectually honest have every time trans topics come up.
Saying "peace be unto him" is indeed a speech act rather than a statement of fact, but it would be bizarre to condescendingly point this out as if it were the crux of debates about religious speech codes. The function of the speech act is to signal the speaker's affirmation of Muhammad's divinity. That's why the Islamic theocrats want to mandate that everyone say it: it's a lot harder for atheism to get any traction if no one is allowed to talk like an atheist.
And that's why trans advocates want to mandate against misgendering people on social media: it's harder for trans-exclusionary ideologies to get any traction if no one is allowed to talk like someone who believes that sex (sometimes) matters and gender identity does not.
This has made me rethink how willing I am to "be polite" about pronouns and trans identity. It really is a kind of lie to put someone or something into a category that doesn't correlate with their characteristics. Making it harder for a truthful worldview to spread seems like low-grade evil. "Complicity" in the language of the day.
Edit: I tried to finish the article but it is LONG. I have to sleep for my health (I'm sure you can relate). Can I suggest using an editor (whether human or AI) to condense your work?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
Social status is highly heritable, and test scores are a noisy measure of phenotypic social status (there's more to life than taking tests).1 It makes sense for universities to use other predictors of social status such as parental income in order to select the highest quality students.
I'd be surprised (although not that surprised) if the universities used income directly for judging applicants. Aren't they using more oblique evidence like essays and "life experience"?
The part of this that seems a bit immoral is that parental income is commonly believed to be random, and not an indicator of student quality. A few questions here:
- If parental income is an independent predictor of students' future social status (after controlling for test scores), is it acceptable for colleges to use income directly for judging applicants? Why or why not?
- Assuming similar predictive validity, is it more or less acceptable to use essays and other predictors rather than income?
- If there was a test that more directly measured phenotypic social status than SATs, would that be acceptable to use in admissions?
My stance here is that people are smart and they accord status to people who are actually valuable to society, so any predictor of future social status is valid for admissions.
1 See Gregory Clark's works
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
Every month, there is exactly one weekday that is always a multiple of 7. This August it's Mondays. Neat!
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
- As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.
The reasons for a "national divorce" aren't necessarily economic. Much more important are
- The ability to do smaller scale experiments in policy. We could see first hand what a Western country with low immigration looks like, or what the consequences of school choice writ large are.
- Having competition between states for highly productive people forces the states to treat them well. Right now the only real choice for many highly skilled people is to work under U.S. law and taxes.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
I'll second @huadpe's caveat about the organization possibly grifting, but what strikes me about the reviews is how much like propaganda they seem. They're all about how the wrong people like the movie and who the people involved are associated with.
Rolling Stone:
the mostly white-haired audience around me could be relied on to gasp, moan in pity, mutter condemnations, applaud, and bellow “Amen!” at moments of righteous fury
and
organization has far-right affinities
Vice:
The film [...] has been accompanied by a fusillade of laudatory statements from personalities including Mel Gibson, who Ballard claims gave OUR “valuable intelligence” that led to the group and its partners breaking up a pedophile ring in Ukraine, motivational speaker and longtime OUR backer Tony Robbins, and Matt Schlapp, the chair of the Conservative Political Action Conference. [...] It’s also getting approving write-ups from faith-based publications like Catholic World Report and The Christian Post.
There's a ton of weasely connotation-laden words as well: "ilk", "relentless", "hackneyed", the aforementioned audience's "bellow"s, etc. It's hardly worth selecting quotes because the entirety of the articles is like this.
I guess this is valuable to people who are left-aligned but didn't know they're supposed to hate this movie.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
I've been reading the Gulag Archipelago, and despite the depressing tone are some funny lines:
An indignant moralizer insulting someone: "Up yours, and stand still for it too!"
Solzhenitsyn's dark humor at work: "All these parties—the SR’s, the Mensheviks, the An- archists, the Popular Socialists—had for decades only pretended to be revolutionaries; they had worn socialism only as a mask, and for that they went to hard labor, still pretending."
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
The Supreme Court is expected to rule in June on Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and is expected to strike down racial preferences in college admissions. The looming decision is starting to worry people in the DEI industry.
This Supreme Court case could spell the beginning of the end for affirmative action. It’s a looming crisis for corporate America (use reader mode to unmask the article. Paywalled version here).
Gillard and her colleagues in DEI are bracing for a crisis. Gillard created Factuality, a 90-minute interactive game and “crash course” in structural inequality that has been used as an employee-training tool at companies such as Google, Nike, and American Express, as well as at Yale University, among others. Factuality has seen an uptick in demand in recent years, but Gillard is under no illusions about why companies hire her: “I really feel that there are people who participate in these programs and initiatives because it’s required and mandatory,” she tells Fortune, “and that with this decision they’re just emboldened to stop.”
There's some funny stuff in the article too, for anyone who's wise enough to not bring up politics or religion at work:
It’s crucial, too, for companies to diligently vet public statements related to diversity initiatives. For example, in today’s climate, making public promises that a company’s board will be 25% female could create a legal vulnerability, Bryant, the McGlinchey Stafford lawyer, says. “Sometimes messages that are very well intended can get an organization in hot water if it’s not necessarily done and crafted in the right way.”
That’s a lesson several of Carter’s clients learned last year after announcing plans to pay for employees’ travel costs if they have to cross state lines to get abortions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Instead of just applause, they faced controversy and complaints.
“There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”
If the legal landscape does change, this is a chance to empirically test Richard Hanania's thesis that Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. If the majority of woke supporters (at least within institutions) are supporters only because of civil rights law, then support for wokeness could turn pretty quickly.
I would be happy to let corporations discriminate at will, as long as there's no law requiring them to discriminate in a particular direction. Let woke capital duke it out with meritocratic techbros and see which kind of company performs better. There's a lot of iffy research out there claiming that diversity has benefits for team performance etc. but this would be the true test. I'd expect the equilibrium to be a diversity of companies with different hiring policies based on their company goals and the purpose of each job role. Maybe for engineers and accountants meritocracy is best, while for public-facing roles the workers should be chosen by their appeal to customers, including by matching customers' race and other currently-protected characteristics.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
this would be a great time for them to purge all remaining wrongthinkers from their midst, possibly using their AI to pick those who hold such “hateful” ideas as James Damore.
In my experience it's actually the opposite. Companies are laying off outspoken woke people and keeping the small-c conservative people who are just getting things done.
Two anecdotes:
-
At the tech company where I work, almost all of the outspoken woke people were laid off in the last year. The people remaining are disproportionately non-political. There's a lot of hard-working immigrants and non-political "true nerds" who just love the work.
-
Among my friends who work in different tech companies, none could be considered woke and none have been laid off. Weak evidence but it's something.
Reform, secession, and revolution seem like they're a continuum rather than being distinct categories. So I'm not sure the distinction matters very much. What you've said is similar to the Chinese concept of "mandate of heaven" - the ruler has unquestioned authority until it's clear he doesn't, then it's justified to depose him. And this all basically boils down to consensus and power.
I've been contemplating this topic over the last few weeks, that it seems like there's a common thread between cultural consensus, political coalitions, and right to determination that is at the root of all conflict between groups. I'll sketch it out here:
The thing that makes reasoning about right to determination so difficult is that so much of the current social organization is path-dependent and contingent on accidents. There's no objective standard for what's a legitimate government, a legitimate set of borders, a legitimate people, a legitimate set of laws, or a legitimate culture. It's all just power and coalitions. And yet each generation of bright young minds grows up swimming in the particulars of their society and believes it's all objectively legitimate.
P.S. I swear I read this post a day or two ago (with the preamble and all) - did you delete and repost?
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