@MathWizard's banner p

MathWizard

Good things are good

0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC 

				
User ID: 164


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Good things are good

				
				
				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 164


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					All
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it's like half of the puzzle.  Or maybe slightly less.  It's almost equivalent to the "Supply" half of "Supply and Demand".  Which means that it's ignoring demand.  A pizza rotting in a warehouse takes the same amount of labor/talent/capital/ingredients to produce as a pizza in a highly popular restaurant.  Lots of Soviet failure stories involve factories producing tons of unnecessary items that ended up unused because they were being measured according to oversimplified metrics.  Tiny nails when measured by quantity produced, gigantic nails when measured by gross weight.  Food rotting in warehouses instead of being distributed because someone forgot to care.   You can make two products with nearly identical amounts of labor, skill, and ingredients, and have wildly different output value based on which of them is actually needed by the people around.


In a sufficiently competitive market where there are lots of fungible inputs, lots of people who could perform the same tasks, lots of customers who want whatever is produced, and the outputs themselves are mostly fungible, then yeah, the price of goods will drop down to approximately the price of its inputs, which can convert to labor.  Which basically says that if you simplify and fix Demand as a constant, and fix all of the non-labor parts of Supply, then labor is all that's left.  It's an important component, and certainly better than having no economic theory whatsoever, but you need to actually satisfy customer desires if you want to actually create value.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This seems backwards.  You're arguing that people are willing to trade lots of labor to recruit Taylor Swift because they expect to receive value in return, which implies that she creates tons of value above and beyond the labor she actually outputs.  Or rather, there is high demand for her labor in particular, meaning labor alone is not just a source of value, but depends on other factors such as skill, and consumer demand.


Value is created by a combination of skill/knowledge/organization, labor, land, and customer demand.  Once you introduce enough of these factors and mutate your "labor theory of value" to be robust and accurate and account for all of this and related factors... you just have normal economic beliefs and aren't a Marxist anymore, and none of the Marxist claims about inequality follow.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Ironically, if the victim and his boyfriend had been the far-right figures they stood accused of being, they'd be in a much better position to weather the whole controversy, with sympathetic allies to spread a counter-narrative, presenting them as martyrs and providing a community to retreat back into. Part of the tragedy of the whole sequence is that the ostracization was so effective only because the two of them were inches away culturally and politically from the leftists celebrating the assault




Interesting.  I've never thought about this before but it makes sense.  This potentially has an impact on the optimal thresholds for evidentiary standards to balance false positives versus false negatives when using social rather than legal punishments.  That is, if we decided that punishing one innocent person was equivalently bad to failing to punish ten guilty people, then you might naively try to balance your standards so that the false positive threshold was ten times smaller than the false negative.  But if the innocent people are actually getting significantly worse punishments because the impact of social shame is higher, then the appropriate threshold would set the false positive rate possibly several times lower for social punishments than it would be for other types of punishments.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for August 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Proposal: display upvotes and downvotes separately rather than adding them.


I find vote scores on my own comments to be useful in determining how many people say/engaged-with/agreed-with posts I wrote as a sort of feedback mechanism for determining what is and is not good content I should make more of (and partly just as an ego-boost).


However there's an important distinction between a post that got 1 upvote, and a post that got 30 upvotes and 29 downvotes.  The first is a thing that nobody care about, the second is a thing that lots of people cared about but was controversial.  And I suppose to some extent the number of comment replies will be proportional to this, but I think the raw votes would be useful not just for the author but for the people viewing the comment.


Alternate Proposal: make three different vote buttons.  "This is quality content, I agree with this, I disagree with this".  And nothing for low-quality content other than ignoring it or reporting it if it breaks rules.  Explicitly separating quality from agreement makes people's intentions more transparent.  (Though too much complexity risks reducing engagement with the system)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The trusted people are often authority figures such as politicians, news anchors, or celebrities that they don't actually know in real life, and you are not and could never become.  Though they can also be influenced by more close trusted people such as friends and family.  Thus, if you befriend an NPC you can potentially change their mind on issues, but this is a package deal, you grind reputation which allows influence on all beliefs simultaneously, and requires an awful lot of effort if your goal was one particular idea.  They aren't deciding on their beliefs based on the object level ideas of those beliefs, but on their relationships of the people espousing them.


I don't know that reputation copying is the only way an NPC can treat beliefs, The core characterization of the NPC is the ignoring of logic and object level facts about the beliefs because they're formed for completely unrelated reasons, so you could have different subclasses.  And obviously pretty much no one in real life is literally a pure NPC to this extreme of a level, but the more similar someone comes to this archetype the more appropriate the label becomes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think NPC-ness is characterized primarily as someone who contributes no cognitive work to a discussion or topic, and simply absorbs and regurgitates memorized lines that they heard from someone else.  Not only can you not change their mind by talking to them, but you will not learn anything that you couldn't have learned by listening to pretty much any talking head on the same side of the issue.  It's not so much that they're irrational or failing to be rational or even incapable of being rational: they're not even trying to be rational.  They are not engaging the critical thinking part of their brain, at least with regard to the issue or set of issues at hand.  X says Y, they trust X, therefore Y.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


they probably do not simply mean "his executive policies got slow rolled because the civil servants in charge of executing them were liberals who didn't believe in the policies".




They probably mean something directionally parallel to this.  The more radical ones would claim or at least imply literal conspiracies of this, while more moderates believe in emergent conspiracy ie "The Cathedral", while more moderate still mean literally what you said, with the additional comment that this alone is bad and the ability for unelected civil servants to undermine elected officials is bad and they have too much power.


I'm not entirely sure that the term "The Deep State" alone is a Motte and Bailey just because different people believe different things about how much power it has or should have.  It's only when it's used to equivocate between explicit conspiracy and emergent biases that it takes on that role. Maybe it would be more principled for the moderates to use a different term to refer to the biases.  But if the actual outcome on politics is identical to the supposed conspiracy the more radicals believe in then I'm not sure the distinction is all that important.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I vote power supply.  I had a similar issue in terms of crashing and refusing to start up until some time passed, though I didn't have to do as much troubleshooting to determine the source.  I'm pretty sure power supplies have some sort of safety thing to shut off if they overheat, but apparently it's not perfect because during some of the crashing and overheating some of the components in my power supply melted which made it rattle even during normal use (and I think made it less efficient and even more prone to overheating), which made it come to my attention as the most likely candidate.  When I replaced it all the problems went away.  (Also I discovered a massive clog of hair and dust trapped inside the old power supply which I think is what caused it to start overheating in the first place.  Oops.  Clean the inside of your computers.


Looking at your symptoms and comparing them to mine, that seems like the most likely culprit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm still uncertain of whether this term actually applies to this trend or if there are subtle nuances making it a mismatch, but it might be "Californication", the mechanism by which Hollywood distorts and perverts culture and art and beauty by amplifying its own degenerate tendencies.


People are not actually rational calculating agents, a lot of learning happens implicitly by associations.  So suppose Hollywood gathers a bunch of incredibly beautiful people, suppose they have 3 times average beauty.  And then they get older which drops their beauty by 20%, and then suppose they get botox which counters 10% from the aging but adds a separate 30% loss multiplicatively.  So now you have a bunch of older botox women whose beauty is (3 * 0.9 * 0.7) = 1.89


That is, these botox women are still almost twice as beautiful as a random average person off the street.  In reality, this beauty is entirely from genetic and selection effects: Hollywood finding and collecting the most beautiful people it can find.  But what people see is really beautiful people with Botox.  If enough people do this, then some people may start mentally associating Botox with beauty, implicitly assuming that that's what distinguishes Hollywood women and causes their beauty, rather than it being selection effects.  This self-reinforces especially among people who actually live in Hollywood and encounter these people regularly in real life, which is how distorted memes like this spawn and spread.  One or two beautiful but psychologically damaged people do X, people in Hollywood falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more, people outside Hollywood see them on TV and falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My understanding from having seen a couple interviews with him is that he will refuse to attend the training regardless of whether he wins or loses the court appeals.  In which case it's likely they will escalate and revoke his professional license as punishment for refusing to comply.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think noblesse oblige comes from hard times, I think it comes from a combination of culture, tradition, education, and honesty about privilege.  The nobles of yore were rich and wealthy because


    

  1. 

    Their parents were rich and wealthy.  Therefore their parents could educate them and teach them about how to properly handle being rich and wealthy with the proper composure and respect for each person in their position.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    They happened to be lucky enough to be born into said family.  This makes it clear that their position is one inherited, not earned by their own efforts.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    The peasants underneath them work hard and pay taxes to them.  This makes it clear where the wealth is coming from: the efforts of the peasants under them.  Of course the nobles did their own estate management and politics and whatnot, but the core production and farming is done by the peasants and with no underling peasants the noble has no income.
    

    4. 



Further, the peasant noble relationship is less distributed.  You don't have millions of peasants paying taxes which are combined and then divied up among a bunch of nobles, each noble family is in charge of specific peasants.  If those peasants thrive, the noble thrives.  If the peasants suffer, (at least economically) the noble suffers.  You can't tax what isn't there.  These together create an environment in which noblesse oblige can thrive.  A Lord which makes good decisions will simultaneously benefit their peasants and themself.  A Lord which makes bad decisions will have poor peasants and thus make themselves poor.  A Lord which makes very bad decisions will have suffering peasants who have a very specific target for their anger and can rebel against the Lord specifically, rather than trying to overthrow the entire kingdom which consists of a mixture of good and bad elites.


Modern elites rise and fall in power and influence in a massively distributed system in which increasing your ability to capture larger slices of the existing pie dominates over trying to tend your own garden and increase the size of the pie.  The ability to charisma and politick your way up the ranks causes new elites to rise higher than they deserve, while the competent value creators end up in middle management.  And the high mobility across space means that terrible mistakes are met not with rebellion and death, but with an escape to a new job with a blank slate reputation, or a cushy golden parachute retirement.


I don't see how hard times would change this, there were both good times and hard times in the past, and noblesse oblige was present through both, though was universal in neither.  It's the skin in the game by which peasants and elites shared good times and bad times that enabled and incentivized noblesse oblige at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Married guys of The Motte, where are your wives hanging out and can I join in?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You are probably in the thousands of people worldwide at filter (2) and probably less than 10 people at filter (3). There are literally dozens of you.




Is that not sufficient?  If there are 10 people on this site who meet the criteria, and all/most of them eventually see this post (either directly or by someone recommending it to them), then OP has gone from 0 to 10 friends to discuss these things with, which appears to be what they're looking for.  Once your last filter is "people who I will actually encounter" you can tolerate tiny numbers making it through, conditional on them wanting a small group to talk with rather than trying to form a brand new splinter-motte that requires a few hundred people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How does class-based  AA disadvantage blacks?  If blacks are disproportionately poor, then they're disproportionately likely to fall into the category that the class-based AA is looking for.  Granted, they'll have to compete against poor white and asian students for those slots, but they won't have to compete against wealthy Nigerians.  Obviously if you measure "black" as a class and look at the average outcomes across all of them it will go down as benefits shift from wealthy black people towards poor white people, but it's not obvious to me (possible, but not obvious) that poor black people, as individuals, would lose out by the switch.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If you tell certain groups that it is the culture, the conclusion they'll draw is that racism caused that culture




This is probably a reasonable conclusion to draw.  Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" paints a pretty convincing picture of how black slaves, stripped from their homes in Africa and brought to the southern U.S., picked up the lazy violent redneck culture of the people around them, which over time morphed into its own variant, but still shares enough similarities that you can trace its lineage back to the same source.


Now, several centuries later, I don't think it's fair to primarily blame modern white people for inculcating it into their ancestors when more of the blame would be appropriately placed on the more recent generations of black (and white) people who have propagated it and resisted attempts to change it.  To the extent that reparations were deserved by black people for slavery, I think making all of them U.S. citizens with all of the same rights fulfills that (Look at the average living conditions of people who were enslaved and brought to the U.S., and look at the average living conditions of people born in Africa today.  I think our debts are paid.)   Further, I don't think we have more of an obligation to help lift black redneck/thugs out of their degenerate culture than we do to help lift white rednecks out of theirs.  But I don't think we need to have a burden of guilt in order to recognize actions that would help people and do them anyway, because it's the right thing to do.  I don't feel any personal responsibility for causing black people to have the culture or the economic or social problems that come with it, either via slavery or Jim Crow laws or racism, none of which I or my immediate family contributed to.  I would like to help them anyway if possible.




Especially since a lot of interventions have to start late - Harvard isn't going to set up pre-schools so it's easier to do it come admissions time.




To the extent that Harvard wants to get involved in humanitarian efforts to uplift underprivileged people, it should do it in a race-neutral way.  Because the root cause of black people's issue is some combination of culture and genes (and this particular argument does not depend on what the ratio of those actually is, even exclusively one or the other) rather than racism, Harvard cannot influence them to actually solve the issue.  Race-based affirmative action only serves to help out the fraction of black people who aren't underprivileged (because they didn't grow up in thug culture, or because they happen to have enough high IQ genes [even HBD is about averages, and thus allows for uncommonly intelligent black people via variance]).  Further, holding people to lower standards decreases the signalling strength of their diplomas and thus retroactively justifies rational racism on the part of people looking to hire people with Harvard degrees.  If instead you hold everyone to the same standard, then even if fewer black people get through, the ones who do will actually gain full values from their degree.  Which, especially if culture is the dominant factor, creates a gateway to success for black people who want to escape that culture and become successful.  But even if genes predominate, this still enables a way for above-average intelligence black people to distinguish themselves from the average.


I think some of the points that AA advocates make are legitimate, I can create thought experiments in which some individuals benefit from it.  It's just that the costs tend to be higher, and the entire strategy is strictly inferior to a class based AA, which carries fewer costs and more benefits.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


"well, it's the culture...", which not only gets called racist but still suggests AA.




How does that follow?  The solution to "it's the culture" is to fix the damn culture.  Hold black people to the same job/college standards that everyone else is held to, no more no less, and if any assistance is provided then it should be in the form of teaching them how to escape the broken culture so that they can meet those standards.


I can see how that would be viewed as racist by people who think that thug culture is authentically black, but I view those people as the real racists because thug culture is awful, and to purport that black people are unable to avoid it is to suggest that black people are inherently awful.  And also wrong (as demonstrated by the many who do avoid it).


Genes play a part, because of course they do, but pretty much every trait is a mix of nature and nurture.  To the extent that nurture is a lever we can pull, and nature is not, let's pull the nurture lever and see how far it gets us.  My guess is like 80% of the discrepancy is culture and 20% is genetic, but even if it's 50-50 or even 20-80, solving the cultural issue would solve a non-negligible portion of the issue, and see massive gains for black people and for everyone who ever interacts with them.  Which multiplied by millions of people is a huge win for society.  And then after we've dealt with that we can figure out what to do about HBD if anything still needs to be done by then.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where Have All the Good Men Gone and Where Are All the Populists?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think 2 is the actual best option for an out, but doesn't play out in practice.  I think this is something related to the phenomenon pointed out in Scott's "The first offender model"


https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/


If all the companies behave ethically and then one steps out of line, then people can notice and coordinate and boycott them.  If all the companies behave unethically, people get generally annoyed but can't coordinate to single out one of them out to crush.  Walmart pays their employees like crap and extorts farmers and suppliers, and people shop their anyway.  And Target probably does a bunch of crap too.  McDonalds pays their employees like crap and is terrible to their franchisers.  Jewelry shops buy diamonds from slaves and warmongers.  Nestle murdered babies in Africa, people still buy their stuff.


A large part of the problem is also that it's way too easy for companies to own companies which own companies.  I just googled and found out that apparently Nestle owns Kitkat?  Except Hershey has distribution rights in the U.S., but Nestle owns it everywhere else.  How do I boycott that?  And apparently they own Purina.  I don't think bags of Purina pet food say "Nestle" anywhere on them, and I doubt most people who buy it know that it's tainted by baby murder.  Companies are not actually held to standards, which is largely the fault of customers not caring more, but largely the fault of it being way to easy for a company to just put on a skinsuit and avoid their tainted reputation.


If an individual human regularly put on convincing disguises and committed crimes with some of them but tried to leverage the good reputation of others, people would notice and be outraged.  Companies get away with it.


I don't need companies to get involved in charities and politics and sacrifice money to change the world to make it better.  Just don't be evil.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where Have All the Good Men Gone and Where Are All the Populists?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd like to chime in here, because although I lean libertarian in general, am very fond of capitalism as a system, and don't think corporations are fundamentally evil to the very core as /u/ScrimbloBimblo states, I do think that in practice most large corporations are evil.  And I mean that in the same sense I would if an individual person behaved the way they do, I would call that person evil too.


Because human beings are not profit maximizing agents.  In-so-far as a person might be described as rational and thus utility maximizing, their utility function is not literally just money.  People value lots of things like friendships and relationships, and honesty, and reputation, and their conscience.  If you leave a bicycle unlocked, most people aren't going to steal it even if they could get away with it.  Obviously if enough people pass it it will eventually get stolen, but the amount of people that have to pass it is more than one.  If you make an informal agreement with someone, most people are not going to obsessively look for opportunities to screw you over.  If your friend lends you $5 they are unlikely to obsessively hound you about paying them back and calculate the exact amount of interest you owe them.  Obviously people like this do exist, and they're assholes, and most good-natured people try to avoid them.  The more greedy, money obsessed, and sociopathic someone is, the more corners they're willing to cut.  And even if they follow the law and restrict themselves to nominally consensual economic deals they still force people around them to constantly be on guard about what deals they make because the sociopath is trying to trick them to get more money.


And a large corporation nonrandomly selects for these people and promotes them and socially and legally insulates them from the consequences their actions would face if done as an individual.  It's much harder to shame someone for scamming an old granny out of her life savings if it's a faceless bureaucrat "just doing their job" than if it's the local small town repair shop run by Tom.  It's much harder to pressure Tom to give the money back, or spread the word that Tom is a jerk and everyone should boycott him, if Tom just acts on behalf of a multinational corporation with only two meaningful competitors, both of whom are equally scummy because they similarly promote sociopaths.


Ethical corporations should seek profit in the same way that you do when selling your labor: as an important consideration that you want to get a fair value for and need in order to survive, but not literally the only thing that matters in the world such that you're willing to tradeoff literally all other concerns for marginal slivers of extra cash.  Technical "consent" is neither necessary nor sufficient to define ethical behavior, though it is an important component.   Corporations, and the people making decisions within them, should be held to the same ethical standards that everyone else is when making economic transactions.  And I think ethical companies do exist, but typically the larger one is the less likely that becomes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If strong-arming them works to reduce abortions then do that.  And quite a few adults are bad at calculating risk and dislike condoms, so strongarm them too.  Somewhere around a million abortions happen each year, which means millions more are not using birth control.  Whether that's from "access" or cost, or social acceptability, all of those are levers to push.


The point being, more birth control usage = fewer abortions = good, and most pro-life people are leaving hundred dollar bills on the floor by ignoring this avenue for solving the problem.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That model would predict that people would be equally opposed to all forms of birth control, which is not what we observe.  You don't see people having angry protests outside condom manufacturers and calling them murderers the way you do at abortion clinics.


It makes more sense if you model pro-life as following directly from the personhood of fetuses, and this belief being highly correlated with religion, which in turn is correlated with a separate but lesser opposition to birth control.  And also correlated with being deontologists and thus irrationally unwilling to tradeoff on a tacit endorsement for promiscuous sex that's already happening in exchange for solving the mass murder of millions of unborn babies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are you talking about like the morning after pill?  Because those are bad, but I'm referring to the ones that prevent women from ovulating during pregnancy so they don't just keep conceiving babies month after month while already pregnant.  I know they make IUDs that do that, but there might be pills for it to.


I actually am not super familiar with the habits of promiscuous people and their typical birth control preferences, so "most" might not be the right phrase to use here.  But if it turns out that most forms of birth control are abortive, but some aren't, that just increases the potential benefit of a pro-life promotion and subsidization of the ethical ones.  If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $20 for non-conceiving hormones, and they don't think fetuses are people, they're likely to take the abortion pills.  If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $0 for non-conceiving hormones because the government and/or pro-life charities pay the $20, then no child gets conceived in the first place, and thus none die.  Assuming that the goal is actually to prevent the conception and subsequent deaths of fetuses because they die, and not just to increase the number of childbirths, this seems like a massive win to me.


Now maybe it would be healthier for society and relationships for people to just not have promiscuous sex in the first place, but that ship has sailed, pragmatically there's nothing we can do to fix that, and it seems much less of a priority to me than the millions of deaths at stake that free non-abortive birth control could prevent.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Hormonal birth control is just early abortion.




Which kind?  There are kinds that make you miscarriage after the egg has been fertilized, in which case I'm inclined to agree with you.  But there are kinds that prevent ovulation in the first place, in which case it's no different from abstinence or condom use, at least as far as life is concerned, since no child is conceived in the first place which could then die.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Simple first principles:


(1): Human lives are inherently valuable for their own sake, not just as instrumental value towards some economic or political end.


(2): Human fetuses are human and alive in physical form in a way that satisfies the criteria for (1).


(3): Imaginary hypothetical humans who do not exist in any physical form are not inherently valuable unless and until they come into being


All of these are axiomatically independent: you could form a coherent belief structure out of any combination of them.   (1)+(2) implies pro-life.  (3) makes abortion meaningfully distinct from preventative birth control.  I'm fairly certain that the vast majority of people across political and religious beliefs agree with (3) in practice, which is why they don't advocate that celibate people be treated the same as serial killers.  Even religious fundamentalists who are adamantly against birth control and in favor of having lots of children don't think that failing to procreate is literally equivalent to murder.  Only weird straw-utilitarians who want to tile the universe with hedonium or literally maximize the number of living humans to the exclusion of all else would reject (3).


So then, conditional on people accepting (3), we can broadly categorize "pro life" people as accepting both (1) and (2), and "pro choice" people as rejecting one or both.  Theoretically you could find weird exceptions where someone rejects (2) but is pro life anyway because they want to mysogynistically control women's bodies, or someone who accepts all three but only a weak version of 1 such that the right to bodily autonomy outweighs millions of valuable fetus lives.  But in practice most of the contention is in (2): pro-choice people reject the premise that fetuses are meaningfully human in a way that makes them valuable and gives them rights.  And to a lesser extent they contest (1), a lot of atheists think that human rights are derived from the State and not inherent to personhood thus non-citizens who the State chooses not to protect and can't advocate for themselves do not have inherent rights, while more religious people think that rights are inherent, inalienable, and God-given.  Although the existence of God is neither necessary nor sufficient for human rights to be inherent and inalienable, the beliefs do tend to be strongly correlated, as postulating an objective morality without a higher authority to define it requires some epicycles and philosophical justification.


All this to say... murder and abstinence are incredibly different, and nobody treats them the same, not even you.  That's why you aren't panicking about not having unprotected sex right now the same way you would be if you were accidentally killing someone right now.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But if the Evangelicals unilaterally decided to support free birth control then, with bipartisan support from pro-choice people, it could get passed without requiring the Catholics to get on board.  Maybe they'd perceive it as a betrayal or something, but they could still stand united on the abortion bad part.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Maybe I should clarify my position as someone who is both pro-life and utilitarian.  It is about "harm" for me, and a non-negligible proportion of pro-life people I have encountered.  Human fetuses are human and alive, human life is good, death is bad.  Seems pretty straightforward to me.


Of course for a different non-negligible proportion of "pro-life" people it's about punishing people for their sins and forcing people to bear the consequences of their premarital sex.


I just wish my... subfaction? were more influential than the latter so we had more control over the movement and its messaging.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Besides the pro-life movement opposes birth control.




That's precisely my point.  It needs to change.  A lot of people are lazy and stupid, or just poor, and those are the people most likely to also be too lazy to pull out or time when they have unprotected sex, or think about long term consequences like pregnancy.  The pro-life movement needs to be on the forefront of not only providing and promoting free birth control, but pressuring people to use it.  Don't shame people for having premarital sex, shame people for having unprotected premarital sex, because that's the kind that actually causes harm.


If you're a rational person who plans ahead, I don't think there's a large practical difference between $10-20 per month and just free, for something as impactful as birth control.  But if you are lazy and impulsive there's a huge difference between not having condoms in your pocket and having sex anyway because you want to get laid, versus having a pile of condoms in your cabinets because the government and/or pro life movement keeps mailing them to you.  Or maybe they just keep having sex all the time without condoms but all of the women have IUDs because those are free now and they got tired of people pressuring them to please get one.  Or maybe it becomes a rite of passage for a girl to get one on her 18th birthday or something and it's just normal for everyone to have them until they actually want kids.


If people were smart and responsible, none of this would be necessary.  But also the abortion rate would be near 0 already.  The fact that it's not is pretty clear evidence that people are not smart and responsible.