PerseusWizardry
No bio...
User ID: 1815
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
musings
Thank you!
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
Even on utilitarianism, meritocracy is useful. The erosion of meritocratic norms and increasing resentment may cause more harm in the long run than it benefits a few black Harvard students.
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
Even on utilitarianism, meritocracy is useful. The erosion of meritocratic norms and increasing resentment may cause more harm in the long run than it benefits a few black Harvard students.
I thought Wolfers conceded to Caplan on his blog that the effect size is ridiculously small (like, you would need a million dollars in yearly income to actually raise your happiness by 1 SD). Wolfers responds to Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/wolfers_respond.html Caplan: http://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/the_wolfers_equ.html
Not convinced? Consider: Wolfers’ result implies that to raise happiness by one standard deviation, you have to raise income by 1/.35=2.86 log points. How much is that exactly? In percentage terms, that’s (e^2.86)-1 – an increase of 1,640%. So if you currently earn $50,000, Wolfers’ coefficient implies you’d need an extra $820,585 per year to durably increase your happiness by one lousy standard deviation. In math, that’s not “zero effect of income on happiness.” But in English, it basically is.
Moonshot Personal Growth Idea
There are a lot of smart, hyper-informed people on here (don't be bashful). Each probably have 1-5 topics they know A LOT about, who could deliver a knowledgable spiel over voice or text without much effort and intelligently field any number of follow-up questions. So it occurs to me there might be a big educational opportunity for me here if I can capture some of this low-hanging fruit.
I don't know much about American politics, health, business, etc., but eagerly want to know more, and I'm happy to talk over discord/phone/voice or text depending on your preferences. Some topics to jog your brain; if it strikes you that "hey, I actually got obsessed with topic 23 one time and learned everything you could possibly know about it over a 6 month period," please consider reaching out to me. I'll adopt a position indicated by either "pro" or "con" provisionally just to inspire engagement (my actual views here are very low-confidence and "pro/con" means something more like "I've heard interesting arguments for this side of the issue that I want an intelligent person who knows more than I do to explain the merits of to me" than "this is what I believe.")
-
“The current level of military spending is justified.” Pro
-
“The typical white male is utterly blameless for the circumstances of the African American community” Pro
-
"The growth of transgender identity and bisexuality have the character of a social contagion" Pro (Is bisexuality created or only revealed by the environment? Is anyone bisexual because of encouragement, or is the absence of discouragement the only environmental factor that does anything to affect rates of ID?) (Caplan)
-
“Asian romantic preferences are morally permissible.” Pro
-
“De facto interrogational torture by the US is justified.” Pro
-
"Extraterrestrial life is the best explanation of some UFO sightings" Con
-
“Any minimum wage fails a purely utilitarian cost benefit test due to disemployment effects.” Pro
-
"Joe Biden's Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Would Be Disastrous," (Or: Cost benefit analysis puts several other environmental causes ahead of climate change.)
-
"Feminism is bad for women." (a la Bryan Caplan)
-
"Conventional medicine barely makes us healthier" (as seen in Robin Hanson's case for radical medical skepticism, from the RAND Health insurance experiment to the replication crisis http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/feardie.pdf)
-
"Dietary research is of such poor quality that we know almost nothing about whether any given major diet fad is truly the ideal diet." (Pro) (I would be willing to take the even stronger position that we don't even know ANYTHING about the right diet just to see what a smart, informed person would say in response to better calibrate my reasoning on this issue)
-
"Most of life is a prestige-signaling game./Social status is the closest thing to a one-variable explanation for everything, and does far better than the traditional rival models like sex or money."
-
"Diversity is our strength." Pro
-
"Society does not clearly treat one sex more unfairly than the other." (Pro)
-
"IQ is real and a major determinant of social outcomes" Pro
-
"Racial groups differ in socially relevant ways for genetic reasons." Con
-
“Capitalists deserve their success.” Pro
-
"Money doesn't really buy happiness." Pro
-
“The solution to traffic is congestion pricing (tolls)” Pro
-
"Actions taken by the Biden Admin during the Covid pandemic were generally justified." Not enough info to sway either way
-
“We should deregulate construction completely.” Pro
-
“Workers are not underpaid in competitive business environments.” Pro
-
Question: How do taxes work, and how SHOULD they work?
-
“Affirmative action is immoral/harmful.” Pro
-
“State-mandated wealth redistribution is immoral./Wealth inequality is not a serious social problem” Pro
-
“Abortion is morally permissible.” Pro
-
“We should put America First” pro
-
“It is not possible to be a good criminal defense lawyer AND a good person.” Pro
-
“We should privatize everything.” Pro
-
“The poor generally deserve to be poor.” “American wealth inequality is generally fair.” (as seen in remarks made by Caplan re: the so-called "success sequence")
-
“Gender is essentially biological.” Pro (Tomas Bogardus, Alex Byrne)
-
“We should remove confederate monuments.” Con
-
“We should not provide trigger warnings/safety culture actually harms mental health.” Pro (Jonathan Haidt)
-
“We Should Stop Talking about Privilege” pro
-
“Immigration is Not a Human Right.” Con
-
“The Death Penalty is Immoral” pro
-
“The typical meat eater does nothing wrong.” Pro
-
“Political correctness is just politeness.” Con
-
“There are no positive rights; There is no right to healthcare or education.” Pro
-
“Utilitarianism is a bad moral theory.” Pro
-
“It isn’t morally wrong to misgender a trans person.” Pro
-
“Artificial intelligence is not an existential risk.” Pro
-
“We should not have gun control.” Pro
-
“We should segregate intimate public spaces by biological sex.” Or: “it is not morally wrong to do so.” Pro
-
“It’s morally wrong for the average voter to vote; we should try to decrease voter turnout.” Pro
-
“It’s morally permissible to racially profile.” Pro
-
“Psychological egoism is false.” Pro or con
-
“Ethical egoism is false.” Pro
-
“Racial discrimination is not inherently immoral.” Pro
-
“Businesses may racially select their customers.” Pro
-
“Equality of opportunity is morally undesirable.” Pro
-
“Mixed martial arts don’t violate anyone’s rights.” Pro
-
“We are morally obligated to tip servers.” Pro
-
“Hazing should be permitted on college campuses.” Pro
-
“It is just to punish criminals for the sake of causing suffering to people who deserve it.” Pro or con, preferably con
-
“If we ought to be taxed more, we ought to donate our excess income.” (“Rich socialists/distributive egalitarians are hypocrites.”) pro
-
“It’s morally permissible to sell oneself into permanent slavery.” Pro
-
“There is no duty to hire the most qualified applicant.” Pro
-
“We should completely deregulate the provision of healthcare services.” Pro
-
“We should not require occupational licensing by law (for doctors, plumbers, or lawyers).” Pro
-
“Workplace quality and safety regulations are bad for workers.” Pro
-
“We should not dispense racial reparations to the black community.” Pro
-
Con “alcoholics (and drug addicts in general) are nonresponsible victims”
-
Pro: “Race is biologically real”
-
Pro:“The rich pay their fair share”
-
“Exploitation isn’t wrong.” Pro
-
“Free market pricing is a better distributor than queuing” Pro
-
“Price gouging is fine.” Pro
-
“The casting couch is just prostitution” Pro
-
“Affirmative Action is systemically racist” Pro
-
“Colleges are guilty of negligent advertising” pro
-
"We should we abolish civil rights law" (Richard Hanania)
-
“Gender is essentially biological” pro
TL;DR Looking for someone to explain American politics to me, preferably over discord voice. Especially interested in topics like happiness, relationship success, American public policy (esp. healthcare and the budget)
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
I would like to request an effort post in which all of the dubious medical claims made by Robert F Kennedy Jr. in his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience are examined, if false, refuted.
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
What other issues might there be?
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
I wasn’t arguing against evolution, which doesn’t address the origin of life. Evolutionary theory explains how life became diverse/descent with modification happened, but it’s not even an attempt to explain life’s origins. Abiogenesis is still the leading explanation.
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
Suppose you were sentenced to death by firing squad but a thousand marksmen ten feet away missed their shot. Would you say you don’t have to explain how this happened (by design, presumably—a conspiracy not to kill you), because being in a position to ask it requires already existing?
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
I didn’t intend this as an argument for Christianity and am not myself religious. Obviously the probability of Christianity is greater given deism, though, and I guess fine tuning suggests a god with an interest in our lives. But it’s indifferent with respect to Christianity vs some other religion like Islam, and I don’t think it’s strong enough evidence that it implies that “one of the world religions must be true.” A Christian would have to use it in a cumulative case for their religion that also invoked some more specifically pro-Christianity evidence. Supposedly they have done so in the form of historical support for the resurrection of Jesus, but I am very skeptical.
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
People mean different things by “the anthropic principle” so let me clarify what you have in mind. Sometimes the idea is supposed to challenge the fine tuning argument by pointing to the multiverse and invoking the law of large numbers. That argument works if you have some reason to think the multiverse exists and is more probable and theoretically virtuous than theism.
But I also hear much more naive and confused sounding appeals to the anthropic principle. For example, sometimes people seem to be suggesting that because a phenomenon involves the creation of observers, the phenomenon requires no explanation, which is silly. Imagine if I prayed for a parachute while falling from a plane, one spontaneously manifested out of thin air and deployed to save my life, and I reflected afterwards about why that happened. I conclude, “well, I wouldn’t be here to ask the question in the first place if that didn’t happen, so there must be no explanation needed.”
Or imagine saying the theory of evolution is dispensable because “if it didn’t happen we wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be here to wonder about it if not, so what is there to explain?”
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
The minimally replicating natural system would need:
-
Some way of reproducing dynamically in response to mutations. It can’t just be able to reproduce itself perfectly, but otherwise not at all; it needs an information carrier that can vary the assembly instructions in ways that would result in multiple different possible viable offspring. Otherwise, evolution would’ve never happened, because there would only have ever been one organism, or the one organism would have died very early on.
-
Some machinery for assembly of parts,
-
a way of reading the instructions,
-
An outer membrane that holds all of this stuff together,
-
A way to catalyze it’s own chemical processes
How is RNA sufficient for all of the above?
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
I don’t have a specific number in mind but the reason theism predicts life is that
-
it’s (by comparison to the multiverse) simple in terms of number of parts involved,
-
it can explain the order of the universe (as god executing a design plan as opposed to it being a lot of arbitrary detail)
-
life would be preferred by god because life is necessary for most, if not all, good things to exist, and a rational being would prefer the good. (This part involves value realism, but if you don’t like that then you can just add it into the hypothesis alongside theism and, as long as you don’t think the prior probability of moral realism is prohibitively low, it wouldn’t cancel out the explanatory benefits of theism with respect to fine tuning)
What do you think the probability of life given non-theism is, and why?
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
People mean different things by “the anthropic principle” so let me clarify what you have in mind. Sometimes the idea is supposed to challenge the fine tuning argument by pointing to the multiverse and invoking the law of large numbers. That argument works if you have some reason to think the multiverse exists and is more probable and theoretically virtuous than theism.
But I also hear much more naive and confused sounding appeals to the anthropic principle. For example, sometimes people seem to be suggesting that because a phenomenon involves the creation of observers, the phenomenon requires no explanation, which is silly. Imagine if I prayed for a parachute while falling from a plane, one spontaneously manifested out of thin air and deployed to save my life, and I reflected afterwards about why that happened. I conclude, “well, I wouldn’t be here to ask the question in the first place if that didn’t happen, so there must be no explanation needed.”
Or imagine saying the theory of evolution is dispensable because “if it didn’t happen we wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be here to wonder about it if not, so what is there to explain?”
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
From the Wikipedia article on abiogenesis:
“The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process“
That sounds very complicated. Many different parts are involved with many different mechanisms, which had to be in place at the right time in many different stages. By “A relatively simple reaction that managed to propagate” are you imagining some kind of one-step jump to a self-replicating organism?
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
From the Wikipedia article on abiogenesis:
“The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process“
That sounds very complicated. Many different parts are involved with many different mechanisms, which had to be in place at the right time in many different stages.
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
From the Wikipedia article on abiogenesis:
“The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process“
That sounds very complicated. Many different parts are involved with many different mechanisms, which had to be in place at the right time in many different stages.
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
Why do you think the multiverse exists?
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
This is question begging. You observed the naturalistic origin of life? You can’t say “I know life originated naturalistically because I observe the existence of organic life but not its initial origin.”
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
Your point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true. It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived. But we don’t have an analogous knowledge of there being billions and billions of universes with different parameters and physical laws, exhausting enough of the possibilities to eventually create life.
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
What do you think of my example of the “made by God” world? Wouldn’t your argument be equally applicable in such a world, so that it wouldn’t be evidence of theism?
PerseusWizardry
1yr ago
I’m not a Christian, just weakly committed to deism based on the fine tuning argument. (Or at least I think the probability of deism is greater than maybe 30%, maybe greater than 50%)
But anyway, yes, if I think something is evidence in favor of something, then its absence is evidence against it.
Your first bullet point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true. It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived. But we don’t have an analogous knowledge of there being billions and billions of universes with different parameters and physical laws, exhausting enough of the possibilities to eventually create life.
Should I explain why I find the multiverse hypothesis less plausible than theism as an explanation of fine tuning, or do you already agree with me that it is?
Your second bullet point calls for some subject matter expertise that I obviously don’t have. You mention that RNA can be self-catalyzing. I suppose this raises the question of “just how hard would it be to create RNA by chance circumstances.” How complex is RNA in terms of number of parts and mechanisms?
To your third bullet point, I’m not as surprised that organisms which were already created in such environments can now live in them as I am by the suggestion that they were created in the first place. I agree that this is evidence in favor of their possibly being created in them, though, of course, because if it was impossible for an organism to live in such an environment, it would be impossible for them to be created in them. But anyway, I’m not sure this is a strong item of evidence in favor of abiogenesis and don’t weight it very heavily.
I don’t understand this sentence:
“ of the 402 proteins which have been highly conserved in bacterial metabolism, 380 of them are highly stable at the pressure, temperature, and pH of these mineral-emitting thermal vents.”
What are proteins “which are highly conserved in bacterial metabolism?” And why is this significant?
I would love to chat with your friend, please consider giving me a point of contact. (If it matters, I’m not a Christian, I’m a weak, almost-reserving-judgement-but-not-quite deist with a sense that there is something to the cosmic fine tuning argument for life.)
Wait, do you think it’s physically impossible for a fighter jet to arise from natural processes, like random quantum fluctuations and collisions? I thought it was just unlikely. Don’t most physicists agree that with enough chance events this could occur? Sean Carroll has given weirder examples of things he thinks happen due to the multiverse existing, such as that there must be a universe somewhere where unembodied human brains just appear in the middle of a tiny space due to random fluctuations of “something something quantum mechanics”, with a supportive environment that allows them to live.
Life offers a Better "Minimum Deal" to Women than to Men - Change my Mind?
Men are vastly more likely to be victims of the worst kind of violent crime: murder. In the US, 82% of total homicide victims are male, 18% are female. Women probably endure more sexual violence, but men definitely endure more violence overall given the 4:1 murder ratio.
Men do the overwhelming majority of the nasty, dangerous work, such as roofing in the summer, oil rig operation, management of sewers, garbage collection, etc.
Men are much more likely to be homeless (70%:30%) or imprisoned (93%:7%). I think this speaks to the greater competitiveness of the male world: If a man fails in life, he's judged a complete fuckup, and ends up a homeless low-status loser. If a woman fails, she can almost always just get married.
Men are much more likely to kill themselves (4:1). Although women attempt suicide more than men, men use dramatically more lethal means (hanging, gunshots, jumping). Because I'm not so sexist as to claim that women are too stupid to know how to actually succeed in killing themselves, I conclude that the difference in suicide methods reflects a difference in willingness to die. (And in any case, even when controlling for method, men manage to kill themselves more effectively than women.)
Men spend much more time on the job than women (41weekly hrs:36.3hrs/week). (This remains true well after the children leave the nest. And no, I'm not persuaded that childcare is harder than conventional employment.)
The law heavily favors women in child custody and child support disputes, and the institution of alimony transfers far more male wealth to women than female wealth to men.
Men are much more likely to die in combat; in fact, during serious military conflicts, they face military slavery (“the draft”). (In Iraq, women were 2.9% of all American combat deaths, men the other 97.1%; in WWII, of the 292,000 members of the US military who were killed by enemy fire, only sixteen were female. Women made up only 0.1 percent of the military's 405,000 war-related deaths.)
Our culture automatically cares more about female suffering and wellbeing than male suffering: "The ship is sinking! Save the women and children first!" Male job candidates are significantly more penalized for crying than women; subjects express that it appears that a woman in distress is taken more seriously than a man in distress.
The dating market is more competitive for men than for women; women are far more selective than men about sex partners. Imagine an attractive person of the opposite sex walking up to you on a college campus and saying, “Hi, I’ve been noticing you around town lately, and I fnd you very attractive. Would you have sex with me?” How would you respond? If you are like 100 percent of the women in one study, you would give an emphatic no. You might be ofended, insulted, or just plain puzzled by the request. But if you are like the men in that study, the odds are good that you would say yes— as did 75 percent of those men (Clarke & Hatfeld, 1989). As a man, you would most likely be flattered by the request.
Women are more likely to be superficially treated as mere "sex objects" by men. That said, men are more likely to be superficially treated as mere "success objects" by women.
Women now comprise nearly 60 percent of enrollment in universities and colleges and men just over 40 percent.
The "minimum deal" of life for men is worse than for women. The "minimum deal" for women seems to be "get married." The minimum deal for men seems to be: become homeless and kill yourself, if you aren't murdered first. Yes, men make more money and enjoy greater prestige because men are overrepresented at both the top and the bottom levels of society. But the degree to which being at the bottom of society hurts you is greater than the degree to which being at the top helps you. That is, it's so much more bad to be at the bottom than it is good to be at the top. Just ask yourself: would you rather experience the greatest amount of pleasure possible for 20 seconds, followed by the greatest amount of suffering possible for 20 seconds? Our response tells us that there is not a 1:1 ratio of pleasure to suffering. How about 30 seconds of the greatest possible amount of pleasure for 20 seconds of the worst possible amount of pain? 40:20? 50:20? I think this is why men kill themselves more.
According to Christian legend, God told Adam and Eve before their ouster from the garden of eden: "man shall live by the sweat of his brow, and woman shall suffer the pain of childbirth." Modern technology has greatly minimized the pain of childbirth, but has it equally lightened the burden on men's shoulders?
I won't deny that men do much less childcare and housework than women, and non-custodial fathers provide little financial or parental support for their children. Also, men are the perpetrators, and women are the victims, of the vast majority of sexual violence. (Although I'm not sure what the stats at prisons do to this balance; apparently rape in male prisons is a huge epidemic and is vastly greater than rape in female prisons. Considering the ridiculously disproportionate number of men in prisons, it's possible that this balances out.)
Anticipated objection: "But men are often the primary perpetrators of the issues facing men." This is irrelevant to the post title, but in any case, I think this is like saying "it's not bad that humans are victims of murder because, after all, all of the perpetrators of murder are also humans." The identity group to which the perpetrators belong is irrelevant to whether an individual was treated unjustly if the perps and victims are different individuals. This simple-minded identity-politics is like saying "someone with red hair beat me up when I was 12. Therefore, it's okay for me to beat someone up today, so long as they also have red hair (regardless of whether they are the same person)."
For some reason copy/pasting my post over to this website deleted all of the hyperlinks. It would be a big time waster to fix that so I'm just going to suffer the blow to credibility that may or may not cause. (For what it's worth, a simple google search should give you all of the same ratios above.) I originally drafted this for CMV on reddit, but the mods took it down.
More options
Context Copy link