curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
I don't understand your argument - military spending isn't socially useless because you'd get invaded if you didn't do it, it's directly useful for the security of the world. There's no action we could take to get to a 'better' world without military spending. (Also, power and the ability to use force are good.) Whereas you could just ban crypto.
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
... look, if I wanted to see posts like this, there are hundreds of thousands of them on crypto twitter. I come here for a higher standard of quality, and your post probably breaks the 'low effort' rule.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
IMO memecoins are significantly worse than expensive collectibles because they allow, and the community encourages, normal people who aren't that smart or careful with their money to put in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions into these coins, and then to attempt to dump your bags on other people who are more gullible and less quick before the price drops. And the creator's taking a cut of all that.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
I suspect that he's far more sceptical on the trans issue than he lets on
I mean, subtle people can take different positions on different parts of the trans issue. One part is - are "trans" people really, in any sense, "actually women" - are they typically male or female in terms of psychology, the "brain"? Are they literally "women trapped in a man's body"? Even if not, do they at least have strong and deeply set desires to be the other gender, such that not satisfying them inevitably leads to pain and suffering?
And another part is - even if you don't believe any of that, even if you think it's just a weird social phenomenon caused by something like the modern social environment being inhospitable to real masculinity, lack of exercise for youth leading to low testosterone, xenoestrogens - you can still believe that the kind of person who thinks they are trans should transition, and live as a woman. Because it's the best option for them, or because they want to.
I think Scott probably is concealing, or at least being evasive about, some beliefs in the first category. But I think he's solidly progressive in the second. (I'm anti on both, even though I find most anti arguments generally bad)
Also, there are a lot of trans people in the rationalist community, so I think Scott has a lot of trans friends, so given his previously stated aversion to conflict believing or stating those people aren't their claimed gender, or shouldn't be trans, is something that might be tough, if he was otherwise inclined to believe that.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
The minute, or hour, after he posted it was definitely a good time to buy SOL. Now ... probably still is a good time, but not necessarily because of Trump, more because the momentum in the crypto ecosystem seems to be behind it.
But this entire exercise illustrates how, IMO, speculative cryptocurrency trading is a negative sum, socially useless activity that should be at least shameful, if not illegal. Your profit on SOL or BTC isn't coming from 'transforming the financial system', it's coming from the kind of people who are buying Trumpcoin. That's not to say that cryptocurrency overall is bad, blockchains are cool and the current crypto financial system has a lot of advantages over tradfi by virtue of being native to modern tech, but that doesn't justify the speculation.
Donald Trump launched a shitcoin!. Trump Memes - $TRUMP - on Solana. It has a market cap of $5B, comparable to actual company $DJT, and a fully diluted value of $29B. For those who are unfamiliar, a 'shitcoin' or 'memecoin' is a term for a tradeable token that lives on a blockchain, like Ethereum or Solana, that doesn't make a claim to have value or future profits, and whose price relies on a large number of retail traders who think it'll go even higher, or that it's funny. Trump Memes joins coins like Shiba Inu, Fartcoin, Pepe, and Dogwifhat, and is now #4 for market cap. They function to redistribute huge amounts of wealth from gullible crypto enthusiasts to the token developers, smart traders, and people who happen to see it first. And, of course, 80% of all Trump tokens that exist were allocated to the coin's developers, locked up for some time period.
FT: The president-elect of the US is promoting a shitcoin?
Is this good for crypto? It doesn't hurt to have a friendly President - Trump and his team were embracing crypto, planning crypto-friendly executive orders, designating it as a 'national priority', and even seriously considering a 'strategic bitcoin reserve'. It might be bad, in the long run, though - it's the perfect setup for the next Dem administration to crack down on crypto. Or even a bipartisan crackdown, especially once Trump is too old to be politically relevant, or just dead from old age, and the grip of his personality over the Republican party is gone.
And, what a thing to do a few days before your inauguration. As much has people do irrationally hate Trump, I kind of buy the liberal claim that, because we all know Trump is corrupt and depraved, and the way in which he is so is incredibly funny, people don't hold him to the same standards they'd hold their political enemies, or anyone else. Joe Biden's done a lot of bad things, but if he blatantly scammed his supporters for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, the response from his allies would be a lot stronger!
I don't like the impersonal process-oriented bureaucracy, the expert elite, the oligarchy behind democracy, whatever you call it. They are hypocritical, corrupt, dysfunctional, whatever else. But they're not infinitely that. Society still more or less works. If the alternative (whether that's just more MAGA candidates winning elections, or a moldbuggian new regime) is concentrating power in strong individuals, and this is the kind of individual that smart right-wingers - empirically - chose to concentrate power in, is that really better?
curious_straight_ca
10d ago
rule-by-executive-order
Because EOs are just not that powerful of a tool. They don't override laws, and there are a lot of laws constraining agencies.
The other stuff doesn't have much to do with democracy? It's bad policy.
It seems to me that there are a lot of actual threats to democracy, and this does not even come close to topping the list.
If we assume the election fraud claims are false, Trump attempting to invalidate an election against him is worse than that other stuff? Democracy is a tradition, of peaceful transfer of power every so many years, and Trump tried to break it!
(It is reasonable to not like democracy. It did, after all, give us Trump twice, punctuated by someone too old.)
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
The big issue is the co-occurence of the 1/6 riot and the fake electors thing and the attempt to get Mike Pence to not certify the election. I agree it wasn't a real risk to democracy, but if you believe the continuation of democracy is desirable, that should be concerning, when it looks like the leadership of a major party isn't invested in following election results (yes, this depends on a judgement that election fraud allegations are false, imo they are, and we've discussed that to death and they're just not very smart), and is willing to play along with admittedly feeble attempts at violence. (And if you believe democracy isn't desirable, the childishness of the half-assed attempt to overturn it shouldn't be exciting either)
curious_straight_ca
17d ago
There are definitely leftists who know things, they're not the biggest problem with democracy! A democracy off Matt Yglesias and Ezra Kleins would have different problems from today's democracy, and the biggest problem with democracy is all of the low-information median iq voters, half of whom are left wing.
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
I don't think it's super surprising. People from different regions who speak the same language use some words and phrases in different frequencies, like the text equivalent of mild accents. And that's exactly the kind of thing it'd be easy for a LLM, trained on word frequencies from a ton of text, to pick up on. And then just make up the 'reasons'.
... I am arguing that, absent changes in the money supply, it reduces the nominal price of labor, but not the real price of labor?
Like, the population of the United States 3xed in the last 100 years. This was a huge increase in the supply of labor. But it did not reduce the 'real' price of labor, or the value of the goods and services that we consume, because labor creates those goods and we exchange our labor for the consumption of those goods, which balance out. And then the second-order effect on the nominal price is specialization, but that's the main effect for the real price. Again, absent concerns specific to characteristics of immigrants, like culture or genetic ones, which are reasonable. But your argument applies equally well to population growth via new births reducing wages ... and it ... doesn't do that.
I kind of want to say that a lot of people here have a blindspot in their reasoning for anti-immigration arguments, in the same way that people on the left have a blindspot in their reasoning for anti-racism arguments?
The rules apply to specific sectors! But they don't apply to the economy as a whole because, in a sense, every action everyone takes is labor. So adding more labor doesn't reduce the real "price of labor", because the whole thing we're doing is exchanging our labor for the labor of others. Adding more labor reduces the price of labor in dollars (assuming the amount of money in circulation isn't actively adjusted based on the amount of labor, which it does, but whatever), but that doesn't matter because you don't have a fixed amount of dollars, you have a fixed amount of time to spend doing labor! So reducing the price of labor in dollars reduces the amount of money you have, but you can buy more with it - nominal vs real wages. And then what matters from importing new immigrants is whether they make the economy overall more efficient, and in general specialization and comparative advantage means it does.
In general, all economic arguments against immigration in general, without respect to immigrant characteristics, such as the one you're making, are also arguments against pronatalist population growth. And population growth doesn't seem to have been bad for America's economy historically. Arguments that take into account immigrant characteristics work better!
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
No? With respect to the health of the economy, it's consumption whether the guy buys a $100 thingy and enjoys it himself, or pays $100 to have some thingy shipped to India. There might be other concerns not directly about the economy but OP was talking specifically about economy
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
The whole point of my comment is that overseas labor does not lower wages overall. It raises real wages overall, by the basic econ 101 logic of comparative advantage and specialization*. It lowers local wages in specific specific sectors where there's a concentration of foreign labor. But by that same logic a concentration of labor in CS is good for farmworkers.
i would question the assertion that writing code in python is a "high skilled" job.
The irony there was intentional - most H1Bs are significantly above average skill, but hardly top 1%.
*I mean in the relatively small amounts from the H1B program here. At larger amounts you could get 'their culture is bad / their iq is too low to work in our economic system' effects, but not at small amounts.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
When the best ramen shops in Tokyo don't hike up their prices despite massive queues
... Is that good? Not hiking their prices doesn't eliminate the scarcity, so people still end up competing to pay in time waiting in queue, which just burns value in the form of time rather than exchanging it in the form of money. American companies reducing quality when they get big is very common and quite bad though.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
I don't think it does! Think about it this way - say I make a dollar, and then send it to India. Either that dollar makes its way back to the US, or it doesn't. If it does make its way back to the US, then that's as good as the guy who earned it spending it. And if the dollar doesn't come back to the US, from the perspective of the 'real economy' I created value for others and asked for nothing in return, which is even better! (This is the reduction in the price level)
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors.
"The economy" is not just an abstraction. Benefitting the economy doesn't mean line going up, it means cheaper rice and McDonalds burgers and cars and phones and AI girlfriends for the American working class. It's interesting for the anti-immigration right, after years of saying how importing low-skill immigrants will take jobs away from and lower the wages of Americans who had the misfortune to be born without a high enough IQ to code in python, now objects to us importing Indians with exactly enough IQ to barely write python. The effect on wages depends on the occupation - in theory, allowing in a hundred thousand seasonal fruit pickers should make everyone better off overall, but would lower the wages of existing apple-pickers. But allowing in a hundred thousand javascript monkeys should, because everyone's better off overall, raise the wages of the native fruit pickers! And it's harder to feel sorry for the heritage American FAANG engineers or accountants who'll make 85k a year instead of 95k a year because of Indian competition than it is the 'working class'.
curious_straight_ca
23d ago
A more local government system would probably work better - where the person deciding knows the person being punished
Why do you think this would be better? Many local jurisdictions have corrupt or malicious cops, judges, etc, and every month or two there's a story about how the sheriff and judge of Corn Subsidy, KY had an agreement to put innocent people in jail for kickbacks from the jail or something. A large government lets you have checks against that, so the national media can investigate that and feds or state police or something can deal with it.
Actually, I think you're just wrong there - most people are judged by local judges, and by ... local juries of their peers. And they are given a lot of discretion on sentencing, which they are intended to and do use to give bastards more and down on their luck less time.
I agree that time poorly trades off against punishment, and think some innovation in punishment methods might be good, although I think it's not as easy as just bringing back old brutal punishments - I think most of them often cause permanent damage when done at the level necessary to substitute for months or more in prison.
curious_straight_ca
24d ago
Why is this a stronger argument against the death penalty than it is against life imprisonment? Like, I'd rather be in prison for life than die, but it's a close thing, both are about as bad relative to continuing to live my life. Most of the harm is done by life in prison. There is possibility of exoneration for the wrongly convicted, but in practice this only happens in <10% of cases.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
O3 can do research math, which is, like, one of the most g-loaded (ie ability to it selects strongly for very high intelligence among humans) activities that exists. I don't think the story that they aren't coming for all human activity holds up anymore.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
I use o1 a bunch for coding, and it still gets things wrong a lot, I'd happily pay for something significantly better.
I dunno, government shutdowns due to ineffective governance and republican infighting sounds exactly like the first Trump administration. Springing this on congress a few days before the deadline when they thought they had everything worked out isn't a great way to introduce your administration, they hate working holidays. And it doesn't work as a show of power if you don't get your desired bill through, it just looks uncoordinated and capricious.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Sounds like they shouldn't have a journal controlled by a large corporation as their field's schelling point! They should start their own journal with the old editors. What exactly does Elsevier control that matters, anyway? A name? The only thing would be some amount of prestige you can show to academia as a whole, or the university that employs you. Even then, from wikipedia it "is published by Elsevier and is the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research", so maybe the Society can just endorse the new journal.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Enforcement changes habits. Right now 'everyone' does it, so everyone does it. If 'everyone' stopped doing it, it'd feel weird to do it, and many fewer people would do it, and enforcement costs go down. It's like smoking, or littering, or drunk driving. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-war-on-drunk-driving-was-won/
Two underappreciated ideas stick out from this experience. First, deterrence works: incentives matter to offenders much more than many scholars found initially plausible. Second, the long-run impact that successful criminal justice interventions have is not primarily in rehabilitation, incapacitation, or even deterrence, but in altering the social norms around acceptable behavior.
Okay but we're putting the heavy drinker or the cat in the position of commander in chief of the United States military! That's bad. Like, if the surgeon operating on you is drinking a 'normal amount' at 2am the night before, you should be concerned about that whether or not he's a mormon.
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