GaBeRockKing
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User ID: 3255
GaBeRockKing
15d ago
I think I need to urbanism-pill you.
Suburban vigour is essentially illusory. The per-capita cost of providing infrastructure and services is higher in suburban and rural areas, which makes annexing suburbs fundamentally a drag on urban economies. New, fashionable suburbs often look well-run-- providing a good balance of services to taxes, but that's often a product of debt-financed ponzi schemes.
And-- car-centric infrastructure (highways, parking lots) designed to serve suburbs have turned out to be dramatically negative for cities.
What you say here:
As a result the outlying areas will view the city politics as corrupt, dysfunctional, machine politics until those kinds of voices are represented.
... may accurately reflect the perception of these outlying areas, but does capture the truth. Because what you say here:
These are all well run... areas. Those populations would have a moderating and improving impact on City politics.
Is definitely wrong. These areas appear well run, but that's a consequence of an unusually beneficial status quo. It's a consequence of-- and I hate to use this term-- "white supremacy." No, seriously. Politicians during the era of suburbanization and white flight prioritized structuring their cities to benefit their ingroup-- which turned out to be the white people living in the suburbs, rather than the black people living in the inner cities. Those people are gone now, but infrastructure lasts for a long time, and second-order effects last for even longer. You can still see the traces of roman city planning in modern european city centers. Their roads have disappeared but their grid patterns have not.
The reason businesses are dependent on commuters is because commuter-friendly infrastructure made it feasible for people to move outside the cities in the first place. That's not an argument for cities continuing to cater to commuters, it's an argument for cities incentivising people to move into the city limits, boosting the city's tax base, economy, and political power all at once.
And-- at least in the cities where NIMBY's don't hold sway-- we're seeing exactly that happen. The 15 minute city concept is infuriating for suburbanites, and it should be. But as an urbanite, I'm very pleased at all the new apartment complexes with integrated shops on their bottom floors, the traffic calming measures, the expansion of public transit, the proliferation of parking meters, and so on and so forth. And all those things are happening despite the fact that I live in a very red state.
So wrapping around to your original point-- that non-urbanites don't trust cities... well, I won't say they're wrong to do so. But their reasons for mistrusting cities are the wrong ones entirely.
GaBeRockKing
16d ago
You can, but only if your side has a principled, self-interested commitment to truth as an asymmetric weapon married to a genuine, shared concern for the mutual welfare of its adherents.
So in short, it's impossible for any group larger than Dunbar's number and also impossible for most of the groups smaller than it.
GaBeRockKing
16d ago
as it makes almost every decision made at least potentially political.
It's darkly hilarious to see this complaint because it's such a horseshoe moment. The rightwing has fully embraced the idea that the person is political-- along with all the annoying drawbacks thereof. It's like a carcinization of politics... every ideology descends inevitably identitarian marxist populism, including the ones that hate all three of those things.
GaBeRockKing
16d ago
Most violence happens within the ingroup. 54.3 percent or people murdered were killed by someone they knew. The same doesn't exactly hold for assassinations, but there's a trend of assassins having more in common with their targets than their targets' political enemies. Charles J. Guiteau was definitely on Garfield's "side." Lee Harvey Oswald was closer politically to Kennedy than Nixon. John Hinckley Jr was nonpolitical, but at the same time had been attempting to become an entertainer.
And given how the US presidency works-- with the designated survivor being the vice president-- this really makes perfect sense. If you hate the president, replacing him with a vice president you also hate that meanwhile becomes much more radically against you is a terrible idea. But showing "your side" that they shouldn't risk betraying your cause/better go even further in your direction makes more sense.
With all that being said, I wouldn't blame specifically trump for the assassination attempts since it's not like his rhetoric exists in a vacuum. But it's not like we're not seeing equivalent forms of radicalism in the democratic base. See: BLM, pro-palestine protestors sabotaging their own side. Trump's base just happens to be more male, more armed, and therefore more violent.
GaBeRockKing
16d ago
I think that's a direct restatement of what DirtyWaterHotDog said. Was that your intention, or were you trying to argue with him?
GaBeRockKing
16d ago
I respect the self-consistency here. Guns AND drugs-- no dividing them! Either people have a right to hurt themselves or they don't. Though like the nanny-state liberal I am, I want pigouvian taxes on both guns and drugs. The average citizen should be able to afford LSD and an M82, but pistols and wrapping papers should be way more expensive.
GaBeRockKing
16d ago
Until we get annexation of metropolitan areas it's just going to be like this.
If you're advocating for this policy on the basis of culture-war reasons, prepare to be dissapointed. If you're advocating for this policy on the basis of being part of a non-urbanite interest group, prepare to be very dissapointed. In the short run you'd probably stand to benefit, which is why I as an urbanite would oppose you. But in the long run I think I'd get the last laugh.
The ultimate redpill is that none of this culture war stuff actually matters. It's all just cynical economic interest groups. The republicans are the rural party, the democrats are the urban party, and that's been true since they were called "Federalists" and "Democratic-republicans." And, historically, integrating provincial/national and metropolitan governments tends to benefit urbanites, not rurals. Consider the likely results of removing the electoral college as being illustrative. Or look at paris/france, rome/rome, vienna/austria, moscow/russia, etc.
Some states are disproportionately rural/suburban and to have their power balanced between multiple cities. In those cases, it's actually feasible for a rural/suburban coalition to partially dominate the urban areas. See: the missouri state government's control over Kansas City's police force. But that's ultimately a fragile equilibrium given anticipated climate-change driven migration from heavily urbanized coastal areas plus the new ideological YIMBY trend towards densification. Our future is destined to be more urban, not less-- even actual degrowth would hollow out suburbs and rural areas first. (See: what's happening in Japan.) Any effective attempt to oppress urbanites will just motivate people to move to rural/suburban areas and mold them in their image.
Ironically a republican success on immigration would only boost this trend. More homogenous cultures accommodate denser living-- the reverse of what caused the original white flight/suburbanization. It doesn't actually matter what that culture ultimately ends up being. Democrats would adapt to serve it, and then turn around to put their boots on ruralite necks.
GaBeRockKing
16d ago
Yes, but for a non-repeatable event it’s also very easy for a pollster to say they were right.
I respect the thrust of this argument in general, but Nate Silver specifically came the closest to predicting Trump's victory out of the major pollsters. Most pollsters just look at the headline probabilities but fail to properly take conditional probabilities into account. They looked at poll after poll and did the fairly standard "average everything, find the STDEV, there's your confidence interval, 99% clinton victory." What made Nate Silver special is that his model accurately identified the sorts of universes in which trump was likely to win by finding out the ways in which various poll results and errors were correlated. That allowed him to more accurately assess the possibility of a systematic underpolling based off of purely statistical guesswork-- he didn't need to understand why the polls could have been (and ultimately were) biased for clinton, he just had to set up his model so it spit out that possibility on its own.
Based on the reality we live in, it's probably true that even Nate's estimate was wrong-- that it wasn't rolling a 5+ on the six-sided election day dice that gave trump the win, but that underlying factors put trump's win probability somewhere north of 50%. Given the data available though, Nate was the most effective poll-aggregator available.
Prediction markets are like a super-nate. Aside from each individual user having having access to all the same tools nate did (and the retrospective + incentive to use them), every vote on every market is a sort of poll, and all the people playing arbitrage force the markets to take into account conditional probabilities. They're still not going to be "right," all the time-- they're not even necessarily going to outperform your average pundit. But as a casual observer without inside knowledge, following the markets is a dominant strategy over basing your worldview on any particular pundit or basket of pundits. It's like the "always buy SPY" investment advice. Rare people, in rare cases, can consistently outperform the betting markets. But without some very convincing reasons, you shouldn't assume you're one of them.
GaBeRockKing
16d ago
Thank you for these informative and interesting links. I'd wager that the starlink decision specifically has more to do with elon musk's behavior re: threatening to cut service to ukraine (and other related ukranian-russian war shenanigans) but will otherwise concede the point.
GaBeRockKing
17d ago
Sure, then you treat people you fear and despise with respect, impartiality, and professionalism
What actual evidence do you have of a government official doing otherwise to elon musk? What actual evidence do you have that they did so because of "mean tweets." What actual evidence do you have that their behavior is either common to the point of ubiquity or present at the highest levels of government? (I don't care what some random state senator or city councilmember said unless there are a lot of likeminded people saying the same thing.)
And-- why do you think elon musk is somehow especially and irrationally persecuted?
GaBeRockKing
17d ago
Sorry, no, it’s the fact the tweets are too “mean” now. Our elites simply cannot abide it.
This is an uncharitable strawman. Actually, it's two uncharitable strawmen. First, of the people who hate Elon musk, you're defining the Elites as only tthe people who hate him because of stuff he's done on twitter. Secondly, you're asserting that they are most motivated by-- what-- a purely emotional reaction to the content he propagates? I'm honestly having trouble not strawmanning your argument because you refuse to clearly state what you think these people are complaining about and why it's bad. You're using the negative connotations of "scare quotes" to avoid actually having to state your claim.
And anyways-- people absolutely hated and continue to hate Zuckerberg. And he's definitely been the subject of a lot of lawsuits. The difference in the quantity of hate is merely proportional to,
- The greater ideological difference between Elon and his userbase vs. Zuck and his userbase
- The more visible and proactive measures Elon has taken to promote his ideology (see: being not only a CEO of twitter, but also a very prominent right-wing influencer on it)
GaBeRockKing
17d ago
You insist on viewing this from a moral perspective, but I'm speaking from a consequentialist one. "War" is a rational choice if and only if the expected value of starting a war is higher than the opportunity cost. And given the massive costs of war, the only way for your EV to be positive is if you are SURE you will win. War is the extension of politics through other means. And in that same vein, politics are an extension of war through other means. If you exist in an equilibrium where you can win a war if and only if you can win a political conflict, it only makes sense to start a war if you already have an overwhelming political advantage. And given the scenario in question here is Trump losing an election while he's already president, it's clear he lacks that overwhelming political advantage. Either his grasp on the levers of power is so weak as to allow a palace coup, or his grasp on the population is so weak as to guarantee a loss in a civil war, or both.
Refusing to certify an election is exactly isomorphic to claiming, "I'm going to stay in power because my faction would win a civil war." The specific details-- whether the election was actually stolen, whether you have convincing evidence of that, the actual vote totals, etc-- matter only insofar as they make your claim more or less believable to the other party. If your claim to power is sufficiently believable, you might get lucky with your opponents backing down. All the logic about the EV of starting a civil war applies to them too.
But self-evidently, Pence did not have convincing evidence of election theft, and did not have an expectation of winning a civil war. It would have been stupid for him to refuse to certify the election, and it would have been just as stupid for JD vance to refuse to certify the election.
GaBeRockKing
17d ago
Basically. Hating powerful people that promote an ideology you don't like is common (and rational) cross-culturally. See also: republicans hating the soros brothers, reddit right-wingers hating Ellen Pao, everyone hating on Zuckerburg at various points for various reasons, etc.
GaBeRockKing
18d ago
He should have refused to certify the election
Unless you actually and truly believe the election was stolen, and you can prove it (to the satisfaction of the voters, not the courts), that would have been a preposterously stupid plan. Remember: democracy is just a proxy for civil war. Parties prefer to use the proxy when things are close, even if they lose despite in theory posessing a military advantage. (See: republicans not declaring war despite the fact that they control a majority of fighting-age men, and democrats not declaring war despite controlling a majority of the total population.) But the instant you click that "defect" button, your opponents do too. Unless your evidence is so convincing the majority of the other party will tuck their tails between their legs and admit malfeasance, refusing to certify an election is exactly equivalent to starting a civil war. Which would be a truly stupid thing to do, unless you control such a proportion of the population that you can expect total victory.
GaBeRockKing
18d ago
Equivocating autocratic control over one of the most potent mass-media apparatuses ever creating with "mean tweets" is disingenuous and you know it. I won't pretend leftists care for any high-minded free-speech related reasons, but frankly it's perfectly reasonable to fear and despite anyone with the kind of power elon musk has regardless of their ideology.
Every politician should be a mix between "leader" and "representative." It's up to the voters to choose exactly how they want their mix tuned.
Trump's populism has recently proven the current electoral effectiveness of being representative. Democrats have adapted to the meta.
I think gender differences have more to do with which groups each party and politician is better at representing than any preference for different styles. You could use gender essentialist framing to argue that women should prefer a "leader" because they're less able to lead themselves and be equivalently wrong because either way, it's a just-so story.
GaBeRockKing
20d ago
Late response, but...
The world's cultures are massively heterogenous at any specific point in time, and 5000 years of unprecedentedly rapid social change only increases the heterogenity. What "worked" for the past 5000 years wasn't any fixed culture, but a massive variety of intermeshed cultural niches developing in both cyclical and progressive ways. Even trying to reason from some sort of hypothetical majority culture is fallacious. Some adaptations become useful precisely because they're in a minority. Raiding farmers from horseback stops working if you kill all the farmers, but that doesn't mean you should become a farmer yourself.
"Norm-shattering" is a good description, but incomplete. What trump is is the first person to recognize and reify a wholly new strategy for executing politics. That being: to organize his supporters not as interest groups, not as a cult of personality, not as ideological compatriots, but as a fandom.
Recently, we've been seeing a lot of ink spilt on the subject of the social media-depression link. Particularly where it concerns children, but I hold that the problem extends universally across age groups. Ubiquitous smartphones with social media is (so far) the ultimate realization of the "bowling alone" trend-- where the world inside the screen becomes so addictive that people lose social links outside the screen. Consequently, in-person social links become scarce despite being just as valuable as ever. More valuable, perhaps, because in-person interactions retain all their old benefits while also making you a high-priority person to someone who has potentially valuable virtual contacts.
People on some level realize this, so they still optimize for some level of in-person contact. And they do that by engaging in fandoms. Large, energized masses of people with a shared understanding of a universe easily gel together when they meet in person. That fact that these universes are fictional doesn't matter. In fact, the very fictionality of these universes is what makes them so effective. They can optimize for being interesting and pleasurable over being true. (See: epistemic minor leagues). And unlike traditional social groups that performed the same function (e.g., fraternal societies, religions) they demand very little from you personally outside what you were already willing to give: the free time you already wanted to spend doing something fun, and the opportunity cost of spending time with people who aren't into the same things you are anyways.
Trump is the first modern politician to truly realize the power of fandoms. I want to say, "unwittingly" because I think he's an idiot, but given his success with TV and branded enterprises I can't rule out genuine epiphany. He's creating a shared universe than his fans can all be passionate about, with interesting characters, noble heroes, and evil villains. And in organizing his political supporters into a fandom, he's invalidated all the usual tools of traditional politics. Fact checkers; negative news coverage; research papers-- none of that stuff is effective against a fandom. In fact, it's actively counterproductive. Every youtube video about how star wars physics aren't realistic just keeps people interested in the star wars fandom.
Indeed, the only thing that can successfully oppose a fandom is an equal and opposite hatedom. Whether his enemies deliberately organized themselves into one, or were simply forced by selection pressures to fit the mold doesn't matter. What matters is that when someone says, "Drake and Josh are amazing singers," you don't bother telling them that they're overproduced corporate slop. Instead, you go out and create a powerful social group of your own, by telling them, "look at all these idiots that love something Dan Schneider, a pedophile, created!"
The hate against the clintons for being slimy, the "bush is stupid" people, and the the obama birtherism were essentially prefigurement for this. They cultivated proto-fandoms with their charisma that made traditional policy attacks less effective, and therefore were subject to proto-hatedoms. Bernie came the closest to emulating trump with his own dedicated online fandom, but he definitely didn't consciously understand what was happening, and in any case failed to take advantage of his devotees like trump did.
Until technology dramatically changes the social environment again, I predict that every future president will act like trump and be treated like trump. He is to social media as Kennedy was to television as Coolidge was to radio-- laying out the path for every candidate after.
GaBeRockKing
21d ago
You don't want large swaths of states (large the rural parts) to be grossly less developed than the rest of the state. Culture and politics aside, this eventually results in economic degeneracy.
Speak for yourself. Subsidizing inefficient sectors of the economy for political reasons is ALREADY economic degeneracy.
GaBeRockKing
21d ago
If you're a member of category A and want to become a member of category B, the individual judgement you'll receive will be the product of how people feel about the rights and responsibilities conferred about groups A and B and their assessment of your relative fitness to bear those rights and relative suitability to execute those responsibilities.
So I don't think it's necessarily inconsistent for people to support transgenderism and not transracialism. I can easily imagine, say, a racist that believes in gender egalitarianism. Or in reverse, a racial egalitarian that believes in traditional gender roles. Or even just someone who isn't making ideological but tactical decisions-- believing in principle that neither transgenderism or transracialism matter because in the utopian future no one will see race or sex, but in the present advocating for differential treatment in some areas and egalitarian treatment in others as pragmatic steps toward achieving said utopian future.
GaBeRockKing
21d ago
One trillion would be a dramatic underestimate. Being the smartest person out of the nearest million credibly puts you in millionaire-tier even before network effects. Geniuses competing with geniuses would make massive strides in every concievable theoretical field before the decade is out.
Plus, most societies have to deal with the fundamental constraint that norms have to be designed so that unusually smart people and unusually dumb people can't screw things up for everyone else, which adds a lot of frictional inefficiency to every interaction.
What I am disagreeing with you is the idea that this will lead to some kind of average IQ convergence- more than likely the black/white gap will grow for a bit and then stay about the same.
To the extent that any IQ difference is caused by genetics, we should expect to see that IQ difference decline as greater admixture rates have been achieved. To the extent that IQ differences are caused by environmental factors, we should expect to see that IQ difference decline as those environmental differences have been declining.
For the gap to stay the same or increase despite changes to the putative causative factors would imply that something is off about our understanding of IQ and/or racial IQ, though I couldn't say in advance what.
Including my responses to your other comment here
I mean, the hybrid vigor hypothesis for IQ specifically seems pre-falsified- most of history's greatest geniuses were purebred members of endogamous groups
There’s a large number of countries where mixed-race people are the majority(most of them Spanish speaking) and the best and brightest from these countries seem to, generally, be not mixed, often specifically descended from high-IQ immigrants.
Re-reading my original comment, I think you're right that my hot take doesn't follow from its premises. So I'll alter it a little. "If theories about racial intelligence are correct* we should expect..."
(Here taking "theories about racial intelligence" to mean specifically theories about a genes that have reached fixation due to selection pressures at the race level.)
So far, you're right that we haven't actually seen much evidence of hybrid vigor in the domain of intelligence-- which is kind of the problem with these theories about racial intelligence. If you told me, "different corn breeds have different disease resistance capabilities," then I could posit that "it should therefore be possible to engineer hybrid varieties with superior disease resistance to any heritage line," and prove us both empirically correct. But I'm hearing "different races have different intellectual capabilities," and yet not seeing any of the superlative hybrid strains. I'm aware that isn't proof for the negative case (that no genetic intellectual difference exists), but it makes me unwilling to reject the null hypothesis.
If you (or the original study) do in fact convince me of racial differences, I'll switch to believing that hybrid vigour should occur, and that we just haven't tested the right crossbreeds yet.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
If we're talking about political economy, The People also hate hate hate to hear about innocent (or at least, insufficiently proven-to-be guilty) people being executed. They're also mad about people being falsely imprisoned, but to a far lesser degree.) There's no objective reason we should be spending our resources to satisfy the vengeance-lovers over the mercy-lovers, and plenty of practical reasons why we wouldn't want to encourage "vengeance" as a core value of our society.
GaBeRockKing
1mo ago
Okay, I've found a graph from 2019 that compared against TFR: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1238575/total-fertility-rate-us-education/. There's also this graph that subdivides by race that shows different race-based curves, which is an objection someone brought up elsewhere.
The hook-shaped curve is evidence for what I'm talking about-- that selection pressures have returned to favor educational attainment (and therefore, by proxy, IQ). Especially since the true strength of the relationship is going to be obscured by older women with less education who already had all their children, and obscured by an inability to differentiate between then-young mothers who won't and will later get additional education.
Elsewhere someone brought up the objection that even if positive selection pressure in favor of education has begun to apply to whites and hispanics, it doesn't seem to apply to blacks, which would mean we should expect to see racial iq differences (if they exist) to continue to diverge. But I reject that reasoning on the basis due to the fact that base rates of education have always been lower for blacks for structural reasons (i.e., racism, poverty), that black TFR started from a higher modern basepoint and has dropped faster, and that therefore the existing obscuring effects of having an older, less-educated cohort would be stronger.
In the interest of honesty I also found this graph for birth rates in 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/195970/number-of-births-by-educational-attainment-of-mother-in-the-united-states/ but I'm having a hard time comparing it against the original graph because it splits things up into different brackets.
I'm not saying personal antipathy didn't play a role, but that same news article provides a list of other arguments. "Mean tweets" is just the attention-grabbing headline-- the meat of the dispute is a bog-standard environmental/bureaucratic power struggle.
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