Corvos
22d ago
I would guess that those jobs (butler, housekeeper etc.) need a lot of strictness and attention to detail, to produce the appearance that everything just sorts itself out. Like putting on makeup very carefully to look like you aren’t wearing makeup. It would make sense for them to be sticklers.
I think there are also social dynamics involved. If you’re working those kind of jobs, you can’t socialise with your employers because that’s not how it works, and your underlings don’t want to socialise with you because you’re their boss and a stickler. So it can be very isolating.
Corvos
27d ago
Fair point, I didn’t really mean it literally. I was just thinking of people like Einstein and Terence Tao and von Neumann and they mostly seemed to be just ordinary guys who were very successful in academia. Edison is a better case for doing his own thing.
The most interesting deviances are probably going to be where the paired trait is "two-sigma good luck" (what did they do with an uncommon opportunity they stumbled into) or "two-sigma bad luck" (what did they do to recover when the usual script failed them).
I think you’re right about this, the most interesting lives often occur when the standard script fails. See, eg. George Washington not getting his royal commission, or Dr. James Barry, a woman in the 1800s who escaped poverty when her family collapsed by pretending to be a man and becoming a very highly regarded physician. (Not trans, as far as anyone can tell, but she hid her gender until death. Rather sad but very impressive).
Corvos
27d ago
I’m pretty can still feel pain if I pinch myself while on Ibuprofen. Different receptors? I assumed it was low-strength but didn’t think too hard about what that meant.
I couldn't believe the audacity of employees wanting to use their employer's profit making organisation for their own political ends
Very few of the employees would have seen it like that. The thought process is roughly as follows:
A lot of the time in vocational jobs like newspapers, publishing, research etc., the boss feels like just another irritating stakeholder that you have to satisfy. At worst, a wrecker that you have to sabotage. I imagine that goes double for a legacy, non-founder company.
To put it another way, the LA Times isn’t their employer’s business. He’s just paying for it, often with other people’s money. The employees are the ones who build it and sustain it, so by rights it belongs to them. The owner is really just a sponsor.
That doesn’t mean you can get away with anything you like - the law and the board have the whip hand - but the idea that you owe fealty to whichever bozo bought the paper wouldn’t compute at all.
Corvos
28d ago
It would be interesting to do a deep dive on what two-sigma or better IQ people do with their lives. My suspicion is that most of them become normies - very successful but not deviating much from life’s usual scripts.
British. The government estimates that each (legal) migrant is a net loss of 150,000 GBP between arriving at 25 years old and reaching the pension age of 60. If they survive to 80, the bill becomes 500,000 pounds: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/12/low-skilled-migrants-cost-taxpayers-150000-each/. The largest cited reason for recent immigration is to join their family in the UK (i.e. not working).
There is also the issue of, frankly, racial politics. There isn't reliable data for the last few years, apparently, but English migration is primarily Polish, Indians, and Pakistanis (and I believe that the proportion of Eastern Europeans is dropping off now that Poland is becoming more prosperous). The Indians and the Pakistanis are extremely clannish, and many hate us for historical reasons. Then they have children who get the full woke treatment at school (often surrounded only by members of their own race). BurdensomeCount's "we will colonise you like you colonised us" is a sentiment I've heard several times now, and not as trolling.* There are maybe 55 million white English, our birth rates are terrible, and we import 0.7 million every year now. The future for us in a multiracial county looks like the future of Christians in the middle east.
illegal homeless people could just be deported
Right. I'm happy to do the other stuff you suggest, as long as this doesn't have to be given up.
*Obligatory reminder that while the British colonised India, they were not settler colonists in any meaningful sense.
EDIT: I’m sorry, this doesn’t really answer your point. I think you are right about the different patterns of immigration causing different priors. I think due to a combination of poverty and political problems at home, many people are very reluctant to return.
We're saying that my house is my house is my house, no matter how many other people come in. There is no remainder whose wellbeing has to be balanced. It's role ethics, if you like.
If someone is in somebody else's house, and that person doesn't want them there, there is an escalating series of possibilities, ordered by decreasing preference.
- The owner asks the intruder to leave. The intruder leaves politely.
- The owner asks the intruder to leave. The intruder leaves shouting curses or threats.
- The owner asks etc. The intruder refuses to leave, the owner threatens to call the police and the intruder leaves quietly.
- The intruder refuses to leave, the owner actually does call the police, then the intruder leave quietly.
- The intruder refuses to leave, the owner has to call the police, there's a fight, the intruder leaves on a stretcher.
- The intruder refuses to leave, the owner has to call the police, they beat the intruder and drag him away.
- The intruder refuses to leave, the owner has to call the police, they shoot the intruder.
Again, 1 is clearly preferable to 7. But you seem to be arguing that at some level on that list, the owner has a moral requirement to allow the intruder to stay on the basis that the benefit to him of the intruder leaving is not comparable to the damage the intruder incurs.
This just doesn't work as a way to run a society. It gives power to the most bloody-minded people at the expense of the kind and the reasonable, and makes a mockery of ownership and citizenship. It's how you get the bike theft meme. I once saw a drunk man with no ticket hold up a bus for an hour by standing in the doorway, because he knew it was legally dangerous to physically remove him.
I would think very badly of somebody who starts at 7 but if the intruder refuses to leave then the owner cannot be blamed for escalating. The possibility of escalation is what allows most conflicts to end at 1 or 2.
Corvos
28d ago
I'm saying that for twenty years now right-wingers have gone up on platforms and said variations on, "I think maybe the immigration rate should be a little lower. I don't dislike immigrants, I'm not Hitler, I have immigrant friends please don't hurt me". It's a humiliation ritual that doesn't stop people calling them Nazis and makes them look pathetic. Raw politics is about impressions a lot of the time, and repudiating views you genuinely don't hold looks bad. It looks defensive and makes you dance on other people's strings.
In short, even though Trump is not a Nazi and has a platform that is definitely un-Nazi, it is not a good political move for him to spend time repudiating Nazi accusations.
Corvos
30d ago
Look at how much of a change to the tone of politics buying Twitter had compared to starting Truth Social. Controlling the moderation strategy of the world’s most important social media company is (for short term politics at least) vastly more important than rockets or electric cars. Actual monetary profit is irrelevant.
Corvos
30d ago
To some extent, I agree with you, and I’m frustrated by my government’s tendency to roll over the moment that America clicks its fingers. The less American values us, the more desperately we throw away any possible basis for independent foreign policy in an attempt to please it. (Granted the alternatives are the EU / Russia / China none of which are great choices, but we should play the field a lot more than we do).
But still, if you come home and find a bear in your apartment, whether you play hardball with the bear or feed it all your biscuits, your life is now going to revolve around the bear.
Corvos
30d ago
In the adjacent district to my part of London (and I won’t tell you which bit sorry) all the street signs are now in Arabic. I walked through and didn’t see a single white person.
Corvos
30d ago
Putting aside our inability to read minds, if they conduct the war the same way the latter speech does seem preferable to the former. Rage and hate are pretty unpalatable in anyone not already firmly on your team.
I don’t think that ‘the remainder’ is the right way to think about it. By that logic, if two people break into my house (where I live alone), then I should be removed by the police for the net benefit of the remainder.
(Or I should let them squat permanently on the basis that the trigger-happy police are unacceptably likely to harm them. )
You could of course say that this is the position of the Māoris/Aborigines/Native Americans etc. and you’d be right. This is why I’m fixated on getting immigrants out of the country while they’re still new arrivals and 15% of the country and not the established multi-generational 40% they are swiftly becoming given observable birth rate disparities.
I think your ideas are sensible. I’m entirely happy to try what you suggest, and I expect it to have some effect.
The prior that I have and you don’t, is that being a beggar or a criminal in a rich country is as good or better for many people than their original situations. Realistically, it is hard to demand that every service require citizens ID. If we only implement your proposed scheme, it seems to me that the jobless illegals will go to soup kitchens, or run drugs and then spend their money legally in supermarkets. Hospitals will continue to take them if they break their leg, and every instance where someone is denied help for not having an ID will generate huge negative press.
Reducing ‘pull’ factors has to be part of the solution. Incentives matter. And indeed we already had that: the ‘hostile environment’ was British policy for a decade. But I think that it won’t work completely and the ones who remain anyway will be the most violent or desperate of the bunch. So I would be happy to implement your solution in conjunction with more active removals.
I am also dubious about relying on clever-clever legal schemes that work through unmeasurable incentives. They can be watered down in a hundred different ways by a hostile legal establishment and subject to perpetual warfare from international bodies. They can also be gimped from the start by the same government that lied to me about reducing immigration for 15 years. Whereas somebody is either deported or not, and it’s visible for all to see.
Corvos
1mo ago
Thank you for giving a serious and clear answer (to both posts). I respect your conviction, but I think that there is no realistic chance of Not-Hitler satisfying your conditions.
The only positive outcome for these people is being allowed to stay where they are; they know it and we know it. That’s why the destroy all of their original documentation. So anyone who can credibly promise to deport people is going to be someone for whom positive outcomes for natives ultimately trumps (ha) positive outcomes for immigrants.
as long as your government can credibly promise to do it humanely
I’m fine with this, but it depends on where you set the bar for credible. As far as I’m concerned, all modern Western first world societies (including Trump’s America) hit this bar by default. Note that China isn’t deporting anyone, they’re dealing very harshly with a permanent population, which I would expect to encourage more cruelty rather than less. Once you deport people you don’t have to worry about their future behaviour.
Personally, I don’t believe that Trump is secretly Hitler.
His response to being called a fascist by his ex-Chief of Staff was to call him a lying degenerate, not even to rotely say "I believe in freedom and compassion"
This is just standard politics. Saying “I believe in freedom and compassion” makes you sound like Hitler being mealy-mouthed. Being made to recite slogans is a standard feature of any show trial because it’s humiliating and it makes you look guilty. Calling your accuser a liar is the better look, regardless of your political inclinations.
Corvos
1mo ago
one of the reasons we work stupidly long shifts is because someone so sleep deprived they are drunk is safer than having someone else come in for a complicated patient.
How do you handle this when you do eventually have to switch off? I'm imaging trying to hand off a tricky piece of software to a new team every 24 hours - I guess a short interview plus some notes? How complicated is a complicated patient?
A very good first start, and something we already do in the UK as far as I know. But what happens when they refuse to go? Most of these people don't come from nice countries, it's why they destroy their papers when they arrive. When they start organising unofficial employment and shadow economies, or become criminals? Are we allowed to deport them then?
And to move on to the more contentious area of legal immigration, if a leader like Boris Johnson or Angela Merkel has a rush of blood to the head and imports millions of people over the protests of the native population, it doesn't seem right that we're just stuck with them forever. You can tinker with citizenship requirements but you end up with the same problem once all those visas expire: what do you do when you have millions of people in your country who have no right to be there and refuse to leave?
(The fact that mass migration allows governments to inflict permanent demographic and cultural changes that can only be reversed by applying force on a vast scale is why I think that "the government will neither permit, nor facilitate, large-scale migration" must be an absolute principle of any functioning democracy, on a level with or higher than free speech and habeas corpus.)
(And yes, I am willing to concede huge capulations on climate change in exchange for making immigration near-zero. Climate policy can be reversed decades or centuries later, immigration can't.)
Corvos
1mo ago
Would I be right in saying that the belief "with a proper training regimen and careful attention to fit, people will organically want to do what society needs them to do" is both true in your opinion and load-bearing for your proposal? That seems like something concrete that is either provable as mostly true or mostly false.
That seems reasonably fair. Maybe add:
3.a. norms are sufficiently strong, and the mechanisms of government sufficiently firmly in anti-Trump hands, that there was never a real danger of this escalating to a coup. Trump probably knows this. So the norm violation is not of itself as dangerous as it looks, and is intended more as a signal of not rolling over than serious dictatorial intent.
Are you saying that nobody can ever again organise large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants because Hitler once used it as an excuse 80 years ago? Or that they can only do it if their arguments are purely economic and make it clear at all times that they love and approve of immigrants & hate Nazis and Xi?
(And of course everyone will take these professions at face value and not at all accuse him/her of being a secret Nazi trying to sound harmless.)
Other than mass amnesty, what is your proposed policy?
Do such IfThisThenThat apps exist? I was under the understanding that mobile phone operating systems usually prevent apps from controlling system-level functions like Wi-Fi because of the obvious security problems. So you’re stuck with whatever parental controls your phone does or doesn’t provide natively.
The other problem in my experience is that there are always exceptions: you don’t need Wi-Fi at 2am because you should be asleep… except for when you get lost after the company Christmas party is an area you don’t know. You don’t need 4g on your home phone at work… except when you need to authenticate your work email with 2-step verification. There are ways around these if you prep in advance, of course, but I’ve always had to disable the controls eventually.
I am not American, but the primary thing that keeps me earning more money than I need is the lack of ability to put down and pick up high paying work.
If I took a break for a couple of years, or a 3 day week or something, I would be very pessimistic about being able to come back in at the same level.
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