curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
Okay but I think we should be realistic and note that a massive and unusually competent policy intervention targeting American shipbuilding is really probably just not going to happen. So in the meantime, the Jones act is just unneeded loss. And if it did happen, it'd necessarily be a much larger undertaking than putting the Jones act back in place, such that additionally reimposing the Jones act doesn't make it much harder to do. So I think in the meantime we should repeal the Jones act and gain the 'modest increase to economic efficiency'. And, from what I've read though I haven't checked it, the benefits really aren't that modest relative to other policy interventions. It's really hard to move gdp even by .1%
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
It's true, but it's not as bad as it sounds - their internal polling is still polling, it's still just a noisy estimate. If public polls projected harris had a 50% chance of winning, maybe their internals corresponded to a 35% chance of her winning. "Never showing harris could win" means that, if you take the polling average as exactly correct, she wouldn't win, but that doesn't matter, it just means she probably has <50% of winning
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
I should've been more specific back before the drama about Biden's debate performance, the more reasonable people in the Dem establishment had negative views of Harris's electability. One of the reasons cited for why Biden shouldn't drop out was that Harris was a poor candidate and wouldn't do much better. Matt Yglesias was against harris's VP selection in 2020. And Harris did a lot better than other incumbents did worldwide.
Early on, Harris proved to have exactly the weaknesses one would expect from someone with her profile, and insiders made a hard pivot against her. But that pivot has grown over the past few years into a wild overcorrection to the point of paralyzing the Democratic Party. It’s led to ideas like, “Maybe she’s less electable than a guy who can’t get through a press conference” or, “We should replace the nominee only if we can guarantee the existence of a process that leads to the election of a fresh-faced yet well-vetted outsider.”
I actually think the key problem here is that most English lit and phil professors are, on the object level, not doing valuable work. It's not that they categorically couldn't be, under a hypothetical different academia, it's that they currently aren't - when I think of the median philosophy or literature paper published from a second tier university, I think 'filler or garbage', not 'contributing to human knowledge', and not even 'interesting hobby'. And the vast majority of it isn't even political, it's bad poetry or commentaries on commentaries on commentaries or poor reinventions of existing concepts in other fields. Most people with an innate drive to do something actually interesting got selected out in favor of people with worse taste. That's the reason they should be defunded, not anything more abstract.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
port automation in particular is DOA; see also the Dockworkers Union mafia boss video
It's critical to distinguish 'DOA as a result of contingent political arrangements / coalitions in today's politics', and 'DOA under most possible political arrangements / coalitions'. I don't think port automation is the latter!
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
We currently have the Jones act. We currently do not have a healthy shipbuilding industry. The Jones act appears to have been passed in 1920. The Jones act is not doing anything to get us a domestic shipbuilding industry. I do not see any prospect of state intervention at the scale necessary to get us a healthy shipbuilding industry. Given that, we should repeal the Jones act.
I would gladly consider supporting the reintroduction of the Jones act as a section of a bill that would, in fact, revitalize US shipbuilding. Until then, all this attitude - and it's an attitude that's shared by many people in GOP policy, it's not just you - does is hurt our economy for precisely no benefit. I do not see any harm in repealing it until that happens.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
As context, Harris's campaign did a lot better than we expected, and than the democratic establishment expected. They made a very visible pivot towards the center, especially on immigration and the border. I'm not sure many of us would've predicted Harris, if she ran, would be able to brand herself as a "tough border-state prosecutor" a year ago. It's easy to have an impression that 'harris campaign maximally bad' without keeping context in mind.
Also, of course, what these people are willing to say in public is probably different from what they'll say in private. Criticizing people they worked with, and especially the personal decisions of the candidate, isn't going to do them any favors in the future. That this is true is still a failing of the progressive social system, but keep that in mind.
That said, if I were a progressive, listening to that interview would've left me infuriated. The apex for me was, when discussing why Harris didn't break from Biden more, how they dismissed the idea of directly disagreeing with Biden on any issues. They treated it like it wasn't even an option. Oh, there'd be so many stories contrasting that to her past positions! And she'd be personally uncomfortable with it. With no attempt to weigh that against the benefits of coming out against the currently extremely unpopular president. This is how she ended up saying things like, in response to a question about what she'd have done differently from Biden, "There is not a thing that comes to mind." It's the kind of thing that happens in organizations that don't cultivate agency, where you select for people because they saying the right things, knew and were loyal to the right people, did the tasks assigned to them, nobody has the practice at taking personal ownership of a risky and surprising, but overall good, decision. (Directionally, at least, they still did fine, see first paragraph).
Would a Harris campaign that had openly criticized Biden but done nothing differently won? Probably not, but it should still sting if you're a progressive that these were the people making the decisions.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
I agree this would work, but I'm not even sure it's the hard part. The hard part is convincing the 'best people', those that drive culture and policy, that it's necessary. But if you've done that, it'll probably already trickle down to the masses anyway (and not just via pure cultural diffusion, but because if a set of ideas has convinced most of the 'best people', it's probably a very convincing set of ideas, and it'll probably work for others too! I also think this is a general way in which the influence of the elites on culture is somewhat overstated.)
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
I'm not sure the concept of 'status' as this drive we semi-unconsciously pursue adds any explanatory value. The reason that having kids isn't 'high status' anymore is that the moral values we hold and express have shifted away from ones that name having children and a family as a duty, and a good, to ones that name 'freedom' from the coercion of patriarchy as a good. So if people are having fewer children, it's because they value them less. That it's higher status in Amish and Haredi communities to have children is just a direct consequence of them valuing children more! A reasonable number of people in liberal communities have two children, and some have 3+, because they, personally, value it, even though it's 'low status'.
I think removing that layer explains why this is harder than the government merely telling citizens they should have children - the reasons we value children less are very deep ideological ones tied with the growth of liberalism and progressivism over the past few centuries. And the reason the government isn't doing that is because the people in government, and the voters, don't value having more children. If everyone (or even all elites) valued having children as much as you or Elon do, the game would already be over!
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
I mean with 300M people in a country, if just 5% of the top 99.99% at english lit talent want to be academics that's 1500 full-time jobs, too much for the top 10 institutions.
curious_straight_ca
23d ago
People currently take a variety of things that don't hurt them
They have a lot of comically false beliefs about the benefits of the things they currently take, demonstrating they're not able to correctly identify the effects the supplements have. If unscrupulous firms are allowed to market real drugs in the same way, that market will similarly not be able to discern that the real drugs don't have the claimed effects, and they'll take a lot of the real pills and hurt themselves!
curious_straight_ca
23d ago
I get printouts of most things because my work space cannot be limited to two screens.
you can, and maybe should, purchase more than two large monitors
curious_straight_ca
25d ago
You need an actual argument about magnitudes rather than just imagination.
My argument is we can see how huge and insane the supplement and alternative medicine industries are, and it's good they're not allowed to use medications that actually have effects, because then they'd actually hurt people instead of just being placebos.
curious_straight_ca
25d ago
the thing that makes it difficult for you to not take medications that conflict with each other is that the doctor won't give you both of them at the same time, and this covers >90% of the potential problem cases
curious_straight_ca
26d ago
I think the rate of self-injury from maintaining a car yourself would be quite a bit lower than the rate of self-injury from deciding on one's own medical treatment, and that's the reason for the different kinds of regulation.
curious_straight_ca
26d ago
Now what part of that changes by forcing a doctor into the process
Having someone who's more intelligent than you, knows a lot more about medicine than you, and has had a lot of practice managing patients instructing you on what to do helps a lot. It makes it a lot more likely that someone will benefit from treatment. Most people aren't actively attempting to ignore the doctor's advice, they're just kinda dumb, not really actively pursuing any particular goal, so having someone competent leading the process helps a lot, and the doctor can shut down obviously stupid ideas like 'take a huge dose of estrogen every six months as a Hormone Cleanse' that'd absolutely evolve if allowed to.
Does he monitor you 24/7 so that you don't take specific different medications at the same time
You phrased this very weirdly, but ... yes? The doctor has a list of all the medications you are taking, and when they prescribe a new one they check the list to make sure there aren't any bad interactions. This is an important thing that they do. It doesn't require visiting your house.
curious_straight_ca
27d ago
Prescription medications can seriously harm you if you take them in the wrong doses, or take specific different medications at the same time. And just as importantly, if you don't use them correctly they won't treat your underlying disease. The average person will not effectively treat their diseases if they manage treatment themselves, and you'd get something that looks a lot more like the supplement industry, except instead of the pills doing nothing they'll be able to seriously hurt you.
curious_straight_ca
27d ago
I think there are some confusing claims being made here.
How is meeting people who are closer to your level of intelligence online "fleeing"? These are people who you can do more with, who can teach you more, who can expose you to future occupations that properly use your talents. There are some people for whom the average poster on this forum (which isn't that high of a bar) is significantly above anyone in their small town. "Building an identity around being very smart" - what? - being very smart gives you access to different careers, many of which are significantly higher paying and many of which are, most would agree, more satisfying than those the average person has.
hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that.
Yeah, but not make friends with people with the same interest! I think that's a pretty basic thing to want!
Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content
This is a tangent but I think 'recommendation algorithm addictiveness' is insanely overstated as the cause of any internet badness. The thing optimizing videos for view counts isn't the 'algorithm', it's the people. MrBeast is supposedly the culmination of internet algorithms taking advantage of people, and the formula he converged on was ... game shows, which were a thing on TV too. Internet content would have all the same problems if there was no algorithm and you had to manually click links tbh. The problem is in large part the consumers who demand the stuff.
curious_straight_ca
27d ago
If one values the experiences of the most talented and capable at the same order of magnitude as the least, it's probably not a good policy, sure.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Of course not, but someone here's more likely to have been like that in the past
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
make sure to use o1, it's by far the best at complex reasoning and should be competitive at the later hardest ones, which are the most interesting
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
It's very rare anyone cares about being competent and effective at mass killing. Anyone sophisticated enough to potentially do that is sophisticated enough to have more useful goals (and also is probably embedded in modern social structures that think killing people is, like, bad). If you're a mass shooter who wants to kill people as a form of revenge, killing 100 isn't going to communicate much that killing 5 didn't. https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
It's loosely analogous to 'why are so few suicide attempts successful'? I can't imagine it's difficult to effectively kill yourself if you prepare well, it's just that most people who want to do it are doing it for reasons that don't fit well with effectiveness
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense. People still blow their life savings in casinos, le famous twitter video. If 5x fewer people go to physical casinos, and as a result 5x fewer people blow their savings, does that actually make in-person gambling worth keeping legal? There could be a relative effect, but I'm not sure there is - I could easily imagine the opposite argument, where online gambling, relatively, makes it easier for casual to spend a little, because the friction of going to the place is relatively a higher cost if you only want to spend $20 vs being addicted. Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)
for 95% of politicians if they did not lie they would immediately lose the next election, the average person is just not very intelligent and get swept up by charisma easily* so lying is a dominant strategy. And they can't just all agree to cooperate in the claimed prisoner's dilemma, there are a lot of people who want to be politicians who would happily lie and win anyway. The most obvious lie politicians tell is that they personally support policies because they have good effects, when those policies are actually ones that they think will get them elected. Trump probably doesn't actually like medicare and social security, and doesn't actually think abortion should be left up to the states. Kamala is not proud of being a border prosecutor.
*originally phrased as 'stupid and gullible', which I think is literally true but just saying that seems antagonistic
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