MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
11hr ago
These are some good points, and I notice some parallels to arguments against Communism that I definitely agree with when applied there. If your thing can't be implemented then it's pointless to try, as the expected value of trying is equal to the weighted sum of the outcomes that probabilistically occur. But I'm slightly more skeptical when applied here, mostly because we observe the actual historical track record of it and its alternatives. Capitalism when implemented leads to mass prosperity for most people, but also mass inequity (though the poor tend to be much richer than they were before the new development), while Communism leads to genocide and mass poverty (and also moderate inequity).
Meanwhile, liberalism seems to mostly work most of the time, with comparatively manageable bugs. For hundreds of years since the enlightenment, we have (usually) not had wars of Protestants and Catholics murdering each other in the streets. We have mostly not had Jihads and Crusades of Muslims and Christians running around America slaughtering each other en masse. We have mostly not had lynchings and race wars, in the most literal sense of fielding armies with generals and battlefields. Collectivist illiberal violence is measured in the ones or tens instead of the thousands or millions. When you look at illiberal societies like the Nazis or the Colonial Monarchies or all of the Old pre-enlightenment civilizations you see wars and bloodshed and slavery and oppression on huge scales, justified largely on the basis of illiberal intolerance. Almost certainly secretly motivated largely due to economic demand for more land, but morally justified to the people and thus enabled on the basis of intolerance.
I think saying liberalism doesn't work is an overreaction to wokeism as a temporary phenomenon. It's a cancer, but I don't think it's a terminal case. Liberalism as defined by the enlightenment has kind of sort of worked for hundreds of years, gradually getting better and more refined, and most of the things it has caused have improved the world. There are bugs and issues and overreaches that have made things worse, but only in comparison to a hypothetical better liberalism that keeps 90% of its features and discards the 10% bad ones, not some brand new overhauled system that tosses it all away and starts from scratch.
In the end, I think your arguments about practicality work against you here. Hypothetically a totalitarian regime with eugenics, mass cultural reprogramming, mass incarceration etc led by a perfectly benevolent AND perfectly competent god-king who used them for the greater good would be better than what we have now. But in practice trying to implement that would be rolling a d20 and hoping for a nat 20, while all other results will lead to corruption, abuse, and most likely genocide (of the more violent sort, not mere sterilizations). Liberalism's got the better track record here.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12hr ago
Because the entire tactical advantage of wokeism is that instead of the old style of racism, which everyone agrees is bad, it's racism which is really really really good at camouflaging itself. Which means pretending to be "liberals" while condemning the actual liberals who have existed for decades.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
I'm not sure what the alternative is. It seems to me like all of the problems with liberalism amount to "what if people try to impose not-liberalism?" Which, sure, difficulty practically implementing a set of ideals is a form of criticism against it. We should try to uphold liberalism, and when people try to tear it down and create unfair and unequal laws and norms we should oppose them and maintain the liberal order. That's how you uphold any order. The solution to "people trying to stop liberalism" certainly isn't "voluntarily stop liberalism", that's just surrendering immediately.
And even if you make some other order, it doesn't escape "what if people complain" unless you suppress them somehow, like if the alternative is "uphold a brutal dictatorship where we genocide anyone who opposes our regime" which tries to prevent dissidents from organizing that way. But that seems like a bad society that I don't want to live in, even if the dictator happens to share my skin tone.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
It requires belief in oneself, a firm hand, and commitment to the ideal.
How do you keep untalented people who just happen to be minorities from crying “discrimination” when they’re passed over for promotion or don’t get into the college they want to etc.?
You don't prevent them from crying discrimination. They're allowed to speak. And then you investigate in a fair and unbiased manner that neither privileges them nor disprivileges them in comparison to other races, and upon finding a lack of discrimination you dismiss the matter. If they keep whining you ignore them. They're allowed to whine, you're allowed to ignore their whining. Same way the law does when white people whine now. There are no exceptions to the rules.
How do you keep the government run by politicians running for office from turning directly to the racial spoils system and promising all kinds of set asides, promising to appoint a given group into high positions?
In principle, you continue to hold to the ideals. Racial spoils are discriminatory and racist. Don't do that. In practice, it seems hard, but no harder than it would be in any other kind of system. How do you prevent the pre-enlightenment government from doing the same to their preferred demographic? I'm not sure how pointing to a flaw where the current system is being illiberal and say "see, liberalism doesn't work". Obviously we need more color-blindness not less. There are no exceptions to the rules.
Islam is especially illiberal and discriminatory and bad. The solution is to call them out and push them back instead of treating them as special victims who can do no wrong. Liberalism doesn't mean never being harsh to anyone, it means being harsh to someone if and only if the content of their character demands it. There are no exceptions to the rules.
The problems with wokeism are the abandonment of liberal ideals, not their continuation. I don't think this was inevitable, I don't think the seeds were planted long ago, and I don't think it's unavoidable. You simply do what liberalism actually says to do and don't be a hypocrite or a grifter. Now in practice convincing and/or forcing other people to go along with this is hard, but no harder than convincing and/or forcing people to go along with anything else that isn't immediately self-serving. So unless your proposed alternative is anarchy or some Randian "everyone act according to their own self interest at all times", it will run into the same problems of people trying to defect and exploit it for personal gain.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
I didn't do it, I swear! I smelled like that when I found it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
I've heard this "liberalism doesn't work" idea before, but never really been convinced by it. Equality of opportunity doesn't need to be taken so literally that you toss it all away when one person is born with 1 IQ point less than another. Treat people equally before the law, and generally socially and culturally. Treat people according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Most of the "counterarguments" I've heard are that if people are born with different talent or even just different inherited wealth from their parents then this doesn't work because they don't really have equality of opportunity, but... so what? If people are born with different circumstances then equality of opportunity doesn't inevitably lead to equality of outcome and that's okay. Set up a society in which everyone has an opportunity to thrive and carve out a happy healthy life for themselves, and let them sort themselves out. Maybe the 70 IQ person have a small apartment and a job at a fast food place while the 130 IQ person lives in a fancy manor and works at Google. Let them. I don't see how liberalism or the enlightenment prevent this. Instead, it is the regression from this ideal that wokeism represents that is the problem. We went from "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions" to "people should be treated according to their own actions" back to "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions". Wokeism is explicitly illiberal, not a failing of liberalism.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
Do you have a link to people discussing and/or providing evidence on outer wilds? Because I definitely found it weird how he kept abandoning trails and ignoring leads but stumbling onto important locations anyway, but at the time chalked it up to some combination of luck and intelligence.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
Pop is a verb. It means things. People use it to talk about non-beverages, creating potential collisions in language usage. While collisions in language happen all the time and are manageable, it's still a point against.
Coke is a horrible term to use, because Coke is a specific beverage. Use of brands for generics, like saying "Kleenex" for tissues only works when those things are interchangeable. If you ask someone for a Kleenex and they bring you a Puffs tissue you can just use that instead. You might not even notice. If you ask someone for a Coke and they bring you a Sprite you're in for a rude surprise
Soda is clearly the superior choice. The only collision is for things like Soda Water, which is just carbonated water that they use in soda, or sodium compounds in chemistry (which the majority of people don't talk about).
You have been Culturally Imperialized, by the correct and dominant Empire. You are welcome.
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
So it's more an issue of extremism? The conservatives care about the environment in a balanced way with tradeoffs, while the progressives want to move fast and break things and damn the side effects? Because that generally tracks with my overall model of how the sides operate. But then why don't we hear more about moderate conservative conservation efforts?
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
But in practice I almost never hear conservatives talk about the environment or recycling or trying to impose climate agreements or sanctions on other nations with heavy pollution.
I suppose in practice my immediate family is reasonably conservative and cares about recycling and not littering. But I never hear about it from conservative politicians or political advocates.
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.
It has always confused me why conservatives aren't the party of environmentalists and climate conservation. It's literally an attempt to prevent change. I can easily imagine a world where progressives are trying to build an economic utopia of plenty in order to make cheap goods for the poor, while the conservatives rail against the evil bureaucrats for destroying our god-given nature just to make numbers on a spreadsheet go up. And blaming foreigners for having terrible pollution and recycling policies (which they do).
You occasionally see this point trotted out as a counterpoint to liberal climate change policies (our country barely contributes to climate change, look at China's emissions), but always as a gotcha to shut down interventions, not because they actually care about China destroying the environment. It's weird. I don't understand why we live in the world we live in other than "left = government intervention" I guess. But the right usually supports government intervention if it's to prevent something they consider evil, and I would expect the destruction of nature to count.
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
If you're reciting vows, make sure you have a printed copy of each person's vows and not actually two copies of your own vows, leaving your partner awkwardly confused at the altar until her sister manages to find a copy she was texted for review on her phone saving the day but leaving everyone slightly miffed at you.
...no reason in particular that comes to mind... Nope. Just something all people getting married should double check. Yup.
MathWizard
Good things are good
25d ago
I don't think the distinction matters all that much as far as I'm concerned. Way too many people conflate legality and morality. If anything, it being technically legal means they won't be punished via official routes and it's more important to impose social sanctions against them as a substitute. If a man murders my entire family, I'm making damn sure he gets arrested and convicted. If I discover that there's some obscure loophole in the law that made his behavior technically legal, but for all practical purposes he still deliberately murdered them as opposed to it being an accident, then I'm getting my gun.
So if the Democrat Party administration willfully defrauded the American people AND it's legal so they won't get in trouble for it via official routes, then I'm going to make sure they are penalized via whatever unofficial methods I have at my disposal: in this case never voting for them and using this to denounce them and convince other people not to vote for them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
28d ago
This. We need disprovability and statistical averages, not anecdotes. How many incidents that might plausibly create casualties that need laundered occur, how many accidents involving military personal happen, and then do these correlate with each other more than we would statistically expect?
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I don't think I mind the mythologizing all that much. There were a lot of brave people who helped slaves before and during the civil war, they deserve credit. As long as it's directionally true (Harriet Tubman did actually help slaves), I don't mind her being a stand-in for the credit that they deserve.
What I do object to is attempts to elevate her beyond that, especially in the role of a political leader, which she was not. Andrew Jackson was the President of the United States. He's on our money because we put Presidents on money (And Benjamin Franklin, because he was important in founding the nation). All of the leaders in Civ games are Presidents, Kings, Chiefs, etc: actual historical rulers, because you as the player are making the decisions controlling your nation. Harriet Tubman was not. Every single thing she said could be true and she still wouldn't belong on money or in Civ because, despite being a good person, she wasn't actually a political leader. It's a category error.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Yeah. Trump's MO is usually to say exaggerated things and demand the moon to start from a strong negotiating position and then either get concessions and compromises for the things he actually wants, or at least have someone to point the finger at when he and his supporters don't get what they want.
My guess is this is mostly just because Trudeau is left-aligned so Trump wants to make him beg and plead to please not do this and then Trump will not do this (because he was never really intending to) but either get some sort of concessions out of it or just make himself look strong and Trudeau look weak.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
So, when we are trying to decide who the liars are, it seems likely that Trump and Vance were speaking closer to the truth, even if the specifics were off, than everyone else...
That's generally my impression of Trump and the Maga phenomenon in general. Most of what they say is technically false, but an exaggerated version of something true and important. The Truth is 1, Trump says 2, his supporters say 3, and the Democrats/media say -3.
You can't literally take them at their word, but as tentative allies we might make some progress in that direction, which is better than the opposite.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Coverage mandates may be another issue. The government mandates coverage for treatment x, which adds $y to the premium. How many consumers, when fully informed, would a priori actually be willing to pay an extra $y per year for x to be covered?
I think this is part of what I mean about it being mandatory. It's not just that the government forces you and/or employers to buy some sort of insurance, but also that insurance has to have certain properties, which if applied universally across all of them prevents competition by undercutting.
So perhaps the analogy would be if all foods sold must contain at least 2% caviar by weight. The store is going to sell potatoes for $10 per pound because they have to in order to cover the costs of the caviar that comes with it, and they can't be undercut because all the other stores have similar prices for the same reason. Maybe I decide to forgo potatoes and buy carrots instead, but those come with caviar too. It's only 2% of your diet, but it ends up being a much larger percent of your budget.
I do agree with your other points about things contributing to the cause. Lack of price transparency is also an issue (although the latter is tied to the role insurance companies paid, since they're the ones paying rather than customers, leading to principal agent problems). But if it was normal for the majority of people to not have health insurance then there would be strong pressures for more transparent prices and I think that issue would resolve itself.
Regulations requiring overly limited medical degrees is also an issue that this would not resolve. Although is similarly the government's fault.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
"Convincing" is a subjective property, a function that varies based on the listener, as opposed to something like "correct" which is mostly objective. I certainly find it convincing, but if people are not convinced by it then tautologically it's not convincing.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Part of this might also just be typical mind fallacy. I was a weird introvert who liked reading books and playing videogames more than going out partying with friends. I never even befriended party friend people anyway because they didn't like me and I didn't like them. I never did drugs as a kid, I never had sex as a kid, I never drank as a kid, and I considered myself morally and intellectually superior to all the degenerates who did.
I had issues, got into fights, got in trouble, but typically it was either spats with my brothers when they annoyed me or I annoyed them, or being lazy and then getting angry and lashing out when I had to do boring, time consuming, and unfulfilling things like clean my room or waste hours going to a museum that could have been spent reading or playing videogames.
I would be great at raising a kid who was exactly like kid me. I know me, I understand me, I'm pretty introspective and, above all, I really really like me and respect me and my values. And I think I would emphasize and know how to explain the importance of things that little clone me wouldn't want to do. I would be able to explain game theory way earlier which would make social things make so much more sense to little me's brain.
I would have absolutely now idea how to raise an extrovert, or a sports jock, or a depressed goth, or a slut. My explanation for why not to do drugs is because "drugs mess with the health and integrity of your body, and they're expensive, and don't accomplish anything you can't get from videogames, and worst of all, you'd have to hang out with the kinds of icky people who do illegal drugs, and you're better than them." And a lot of people would not find that convincing and in fact might rebel harder because it makes me sound like a jerk. But it's how I convinced myself. And while I'm confident on illegal drugs, I'm not sure how to handle other things like sports. What if my kid wants to play football? Football is stupid and gives you head injuries, also the equipment is expensive, but everything has tradeoffs. How can I tell how important that is in comparison to the potential positive value (both extrinsic as a form of exercise and financial opportunities if they're good, and intrinsic via letting them do a thing they enjoy), when my own valuation for it is negative. It seems stupid and boring and pointless to me even without any injury risk, but obviously a kid asking to do it doesn't see it the same way and I don't know how to evaluate that. My instinctive response is "don't play football, it's stupid" and I can't disentangle all of the legitimate reasons from my instinctive gut response.
I think a lot of the "not knowing what it's like to be a kid" is actually typical mind fallacy in disguise. There are lots of different types of kids, and each parent was only one of them. If they think that's how kids are then they won't understand when their kid diverges from that, and the reasons in their own head that convinced them to not be that way won't be convincing to their kid.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
That's merely the distinction between why they think it's wrong in the first place, not the harm reduction variable.
That is, a general form of the "Harm Reduction" argument says that if thing A is bad because it leads to bad outcomes, then a decriminalized harm reduction environment where it can be done more safely with fewer negative outcomes is good because, although the thing is still bad, it's less bad here and they were going to do it anyway.
The tradeoff is that you are implicitly endorsing the behavior in exchange for this harm reduction. This argument doesn't really depend on the type of harm involved. If someone is being non-consensually harmed by DV, and this is extra bad, then the harm reduction is even more good, and the implicit endorsement and incentives are more bad, and presumably these are proportional so it should still be worthwhile or not for the same reasons as with drug use.
I suppose you could try to make specific mathematical arguments about the tradeoff values where harm reduction facilities for DV would be less effective at reducing harm and more legitimizing to DV such that the net effect would flip signs for this but not for drugs, but we've never tried it before, nobody has that data, and nobody who advocates for harm reduction for drugs seems to do any math or acknowledge tradeoffs in the first place.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Mutual insurance already exists! Some of the biggest insurance companies of today started as mutuals, I think Liberty still is one.
I am immediately suspicious. Because if so why do they have so many ads? If they're not profit-driven, that seems negative sum.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Is there some clever way that someone could make blockchain insurance? Like, a decentralized, transparent, nonprofit system where everyone pools money (probably in the form of some cryptocurrency) together, and then when someone makes a claim there's an algorithm to decide whether it's legitimate and how much money it should pay out (possibly variable depending on how much free money is in the system due to the frequency of past claims).
Legally and practically I don't think you could do this with health insurance due to patient confidentiality issues. But maybe for auto-insurance or homeowners insurance or something? Or if there's a mechanism to anonymize medical records prior to submission. And I've pretty much handwaved away the hard part which would be deciding which claims are legitimate to prevent bad-faith exploitation. But is that solvable? And would this actually be usable if it worked? The goal would be to remove the profit motive from insurance companies taking a cut as middlemen, as well as the adversarial relationship between them and both healthcare providers and patients. I suppose a mostly traditionally run but non-profit insurance company would have some of the benefits, but even those have some potential for corruption, and I'm wondering if a transparent and user-run blockchain thing would clear that.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I agree with your opinions regarding violence. However I think the issue with insurance is when it becomes mandatory or defacto mandatory, because then you lose proper economic controls on the price via supply and demand. Demand for car insurance is artificially inflated by it being literally illegal to drive a vehicle without it. Demand for health insurance is artificially inflated by regulations requiring companies to provide it to employees, and tax penalties for private individuals who don't have any. Therefore, prices artificially inflate. (Similarly, healthcare prices are artificially inflated by regulations requiring severely limited-supply medical degrees).
Now, these regulations exist for reasons, but that doesn't undo the economic damage this causes to people. And then all the perverse incentives with their battles against healthcare providers and customers creates tons of paperwork and principal agent problems. I am wholeheartedly convinced that the existence of insurance companies and their role in our society is uniquely responsible for healthcare prices in the U.S. Now, this isn't necessarily the fault of the CEOs, it's really the politicians who created this niche, but I definitely understand the anger people have for them.
Theoretically insurance could be a useful and legitimate service. But that requires it be voluntary so that people can choose of their own free will whether they think it's worth the cost or not, which in turn forces companies to provide a product worth paying for. Just like with every other good and service. The current system is extortion with extra steps.
I'm not entirely sure, I'm mostly making this claim on the basis of observation. A lot of people are convinced by it, therefore by definition it is very convincing. I don't think I fully understand it, but I think a large part of it is a mastery of Motte and Bailey tactics. There's a subset of aggressive lunatics who use fully woke ideas to cancel people and commit violence, a subset of humanities academics and mainstream media who are really good at manipulating language and public consensus who launder woke ideas as liberal ideas, a large subset of moderates who think mostly reasonable liberal thoughts but don't think very hard and believe the laundered ideas. And there's also a complementary set of classical racists and sexists who get outraged at all of the woke ideas but voice their outrage in very awful ways so the media have a scapegoat to point at. Whenever the woke do something outrageous the more principled liberals and the racists both get upset, and the media can just point at the latter as examples of people being upset at wokeism.
I'm not entirely sure why wokeism in particular is so good at this as opposed to any other movement in the present or past. Maybe it is a unique failing of liberalism that allows for this exploit. "Pretend to be tolerant and falsely portray your enemies as intolerant so you can justify your intolerance against them" only works in a society that values tolerance. But if we generalize it further, maybe it's not so unique. The camouflage of "Pretend to be X which is seen as good so you can tarnish your opponents as not-X and therefore evil, even if they're actually more X than you" is a strategy that has been tried and worked many times in the past. Inquisitions allowed evil and cruel people pretending to be good Christians to persecute and do very un-Christian things to people they didn't like. The Red Scare allowed people to accuse others of being communists do very authoritarian and un-American things to people they didn't like. The Pharisees pretended to be good Jewish followers of God and persecute people they didn't like. The esteem given to the Catholic Priesthood allowed pedophiles to slip in and molest children, relying on the high esteem to keep them above question. Any time you have a class of people generally considered "good", bad people will want to camoflage themselves under that label to avoid criticism for their misbehavior. So wokeism might just be the most recent example of this succeeding. But I call it really really good at it because unlike some examples (like the Catholic Priest one), it can get called out and noticed for what it's doing and still get away with it by opposing its detractors directly instead of merely relying on stealth alone. You can point out exactly what they're doing and how, a moderate but naive liberal can read literally everything I just wrote and still not really believe what's going on because it's complicated enough that they either don't understand or are not convinced by the evidence. For some reason. I'm don't fully understand it myself because from my perspective it's clear. But it's not merely a lack of intelligence, because lots of smart people are similarly unconvinced. Whatever the woke are doing, it works to convince lots of people, otherwise it would not have gotten away with so much for so long, it would have died shortly after people noticed.
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