quiet_NaN
2mo ago
principal / agent problems where middle management pursues empire building instead of efficiency
I think that this is a huge part of the problem. In management, the number of people working under you is kinda your dick size.
Of course, you could have a system where the managers of different teams are internally bidding for firm employees. "I will pay you a bonus of 500$ a month for the project". "I will pay you 400$/month extra, and also you will not have to work with either SAP or Carl on my team".
Then the employee who spends their day on TikTok and only knows how to copy/paste from stack overflow would be readily identified by a lack of enthusiastic bids, once everyone has worked with them for a project.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Still, a product which can be developed in offices in Seattle can also be developed in offices in Romania or India. Granted, there are coordination problems, and teams have to talk to each others, which is more difficult when they live in different time zones, but the option to outsource some team is always on the table.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think that there exist abortion rules which 80% of the country would find acceptable, but as it is a partisan topic, there is a lot of signaling value in either side making extreme demands. "abortion should always be illegal, no exceptions" to "abortion should be legal until the separation of the naval cord after birth".
A six weeks ban means that women has about two weeks after missing her period (per Wikipedia) to get an abortion. Now, a woman with regular periods and high executive function will notice that something is amiss within a week, and then can conveniently schedule her abortion.
But not every woman, and especially not every woman likely to have unwanted pregnancies will make it in that time frame. Perhaps her periods sometimes are a week late due to stress or whatever, and then it only takes a few more days of distraction to miss her window. (I don't have a very high executive function myself ('is it my week to deal with the garbage cans again?', 'I should really schedule a dentist appointment soon', etc), so I am sympathetic.)
Ethically, I am a Singerian who does not find anything fundamentally wrong with baby-killing, but politically that is not a hill I would be willing to die on. In practice, I would be fine with banning abortions without medical indication after a few months of gestation -- give the woman a bit of time to notice 'well, I did have sex and my period stopped, perhaps I should buy a pregnancy test'.
Now, there will be people who think that ensoulment happens at conception (I am not clear how this works with monocygotic twins, do they each have half a soul or is one of them soulless?) and people who have or perform abortions should always go to prison for murder. But I am somewhat hopeful that these are a fringe minority. On the other hand, the number of people who believe that killing what might already be a viable baby is wrong is likely much higher.
In a way, this is a late fallout of Roe v Wade. If the SC had not legislated that abortions are always legal, there might have been room for a sane compromise federal law before the issue became hopelessly soaked with partisan politics to the point where half the raison d'etre of the Republican party was to elect a president who would appoint justices who would overturn Roe.
Of course, opinion articles on both sides will try to dig up the most extreme cases imaginable. 'Woman living in a state with harsh abortion laws lost her life in a way related to her attempt to abort. This is why abortion should always be legal until your kids are of legal age.' or 'look at this poor baby being born alive in a botched abortion in the third trimester. This is why we must ban any abortions everywhere (and perhaps let's ban contraceptives too)!'
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
donated five figures to a candidate
The election budget is 14G$. There are ~161M voters. This means that 86$ are spent per voter.
Of course, the effectiveness of campaign spending is debatable. It could well be that the money required to mobilize the marginal voter is 1000$, but donors keep spending because they have trillions riding on the outcome of the election. But your claim that you need 100,000$ to flip a single vote seems unlikely.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
To be fair, this assumes that you have a horse in the race. If you are legitimately indifferent between Trump and Harris and not enthusiastic about third party candidates either (this is technically known as a Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich dilemma), then skipping a vote with a write-in of 'None of the above' and staying home instead does not seem like a defection against the other people dissatisfied with the options.
Also, if you have reason to believe that you are less informed with regard to the polled issue than the average voter, it might be fair to say 'I don't have a few hours to research the key arguments, and I don't want to vote based on whose name is funnier, so I will skip that item'.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Voting often feels pretty stupid when I look at the results: my decision to vote has never had any consequence.
Besides deciding who wins the state, votes may also have more subtle influences. Kang winning by 48% or by 80% of the popular vote might not change which drooling alien gets to sit in the White House, but it will drastically change how the Kodos party reacts to the defeat. In the former case, they might decide that they need to mobilize their people in key battleground states more, in the other case they might decide to completely reinvent themselves, perhaps become more like the Kang party.
Of course, in countries with proportional representation, you can signal more than a single bit.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Tangential rant: why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting?
To expand a bit on @netstack's comment, I believe that it is not enough that the voting process is fair, it also should be recognizable as fair to the average citizen.
With paper ballots, anyone can observe how many people cast their vote at your polling station, the fact that they are not in the position to prove to anyone how they voted and thus could not be bribed or coerced, and compare how many votes are counted after that, and that they are counted correctly. Passing elementary school basically gives you the ability to verify that.
As soon as the vote count is kept digital, that ability goes out of the window in a heartbeat. You could have a PhD in computer security and still would be highly unlikely that the hardware says what the specification says or that the software which is running on the machine you cast your vote is actually compiled from the unadulterated github sources, and that the formal verification tool which guarantees the vote integrity is itself sound.
In practice, people in IT security tend to be the voices most opposed to computerized voting, because they are the least likely to trust computer systems.
Of course, if you allow people to vote online from their own devices, it is not enough that the server infrastructure is sound (which will be completely impossible to verify, and even the people who build it would likely not bet their lives on it), you also have to trust the endpoint.
Most Americans are woefully unprepared to compute the crypto primitives used by TLS in their head, so they would have to trust the device in front of them. That device likely runs an operating system for which the vendor has stopped shipping security fixes five years ago, with the user having installed "free_legit_photoshop.exe" or the like. Even if you could solve the problem of identifying the user in front of the screen, a compromised device can just intercept your vote for Kang, change it to a vote for Kodos and change the confirmation message to read 'Vote for Kang confirmed'.
There is a reason why any serious bank has their customers use TAN generators, which are separate and very simple devices with a much reduced attack surface have a small shitty display which will show the user the numbers of the transaction they are making, so they can double-check in case their online banking device is compromised and was requesting a TAN for sending all of their balance to Nigeria instead. You could roll out similar devices for voting, which will display KANG before generating the transaction number, but even then you will have the problem that the integrity of the vote is likely not assured by the process and certainly can't be checked by the median voter.
Here in Germany, voting generally happens on Sundays, where most employees are not allowed to work. Within towns, polling sites are often within 500m, and the average time I had to wait in line to cast my paper ballot is perhaps five minutes. Yes, it takes a while for the votes to be counted, but typically we have the tally by Monday morning, which is good enough for me.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
he likes living in super heavy blue tribe areas
Well, he lives in Silicon Valley, which probably has the highest relative density of grey tribe (10%, perhaps?).
SV is also heavily urbanized and thus is overall very blue. But a high population density is kinda required if you want to meet people of your minority. Even if the fraction of people belonging to the grey tribe in rural Texas was equally high, meetups would involve much longer drives.
I agree that from what I know about his cultural upbringing, Scott is likely closer to the blue tribe than the red one. If he spent his youth fixing his car on his farm, he talks very little about it.
Of course, one could also discuss how much Trump himself fits into the red tribe. From my understanding, he was born elite and spent an awful lot of time in NYC. I don't think he ever shot his dog because it was going after the neighbors chickens. Definitely not a redneck/borderer type. On the other hand, he passes (imo) successfully as a working class man who comes to own a big fortune (even though he is nothing of that sort). Where other elites are into refinement, and perhaps subtly understate their wealth, Trump is the opposite, going for straightforward opulence.
Understatement: Jeff Bezos could have named his company Bezos. He did not. Trump likes to put his name on anything he is involved with. While I don't know the truth about that rumor, of all the people who might be able to afford a toilet bowl made out of gold, Trump feels like the person who would be most likely to signal his wealth that way.
Refinement: Other elites might marry sophisticated people with an advanced degree in fine arts. Trump goes straight for hot models. Where other elites would dine on food with fancy French names unknown to ordinary Americans, Trump likes his fast food.
Meaning you don't really respond to him emotionally too much.
I concede that. My reaction is more like 'urgh, please let us not have four more years of that clown', not 'he is a fascist and he will destroy democracy in America (this time!)'.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
maybe concede Crimea
Crimea has been under Russian occupation since 2014. I doubt that Putin has been losing sleep over the possibility of a counter-invasion by Ukraine which would not be contrary to international law, but would be so after Ukraine formally conceded Crimea.
Putin may be an autocrat, but I think it is very possible that his position of power is strong enough that he can de facto surrender in Ukraine without losing his job and possibly his head. That might have an option after his Blitzkrieg had failed in 2022, but to tell the mothers of dead Russian soldiers that their sons have died so that Russia can keep Crimea seems like political suicide.
(And who knows how plebiscites in the oblasts might turn out, once the people who fled Russian occupation are allowed back. Both sides have incentives to engage in ballot-stuffing by sending their citizens to stay there long enough to vote, and the records of who was living there in 2013 could have been tampered with by either side.
independence and neutrality guaranteed by the EU and Russia
Guarantees are not the deterrence you think they are, historically. Also, they are just a precommitment to start a war in certain cases.
Say you are Estonia. If someone invades Poland, that means that under Article 5 you are obliged to go to war (along the US and most of the West) to defend your fellow NATO member.
This might seem like a bad deal for Estonia, and indeed it is not clear how many NATO countries would honor the obligation. But with NATO membership, they get something in return: If they are invaded, Poland is also obliged to come to their aid.
The EU guaranteeing Ukraine would leave Estonia in the same position of having to fight if Ukraine gets invaded, but without (a) any reverse obligation to Ukraine (b) support from the US or the UK, who happen to have the largest nuclear stockpiles in NATO.
Now, I like Ukrainian independence, and support sending them weapons for as long as they care to fight and die for it, but absent mutual obligations (e.g. NATO), I am opposed to starting WW3 lite (between EU and Russia, without US/UK) over it.
--
So, neither the EU (which would have to vote unanimously) nor Putin would agree to your plan. A more realistic peace proposal would concede most of the occupied territory to Russia and see Ukraine (which will then not be in an active conflict) join NATO so Putin can't come for the next slice in a few years. Of course, neither Ukraine nor Russia would likely agree to that.
Or perhaps start with a ceasefire, where both sides can dig in, making future conquests more costly. (Obviously swap the occupied part of Kursk for a piece of occupied Ukraine.) Then again, a frozen conflict a la Korea might be hard to accomplish because both belligerents are very unevenly matched here.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think that most of the members of the red tribe will have a positive or neutral reaction to Trump, but that is about all it tells you.
Scott Alexander, as firmly part of the grey tribe as anyone could be, spent thousands of words to persuade republicans not to vote for Trump. Should I suspect that he is crypto-woke?
I consider myself part of the grey tribe and my reaction to Trump is mostly negative.
There are prominent republicans opposing Trump, does that make them blue tribe?
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
cis [...] men who were raped
In the woke mindset, men are the oppressors, helping them is at best a distraction from the fight of structural oppression. Almost all rapists are men, and any man who rapes other men is a sexual minority. Now, if you are a high status, handsome, gay man of a known-to-be-oppressed ethniciy, and your rapist was some creepy, fat, powerful, bisexual white dude, then that might be enough that fighting for you would be fighting against structural oppression, but anything less does not fit the narrative.
Cynically, if you want people to care about (male) prison rapes, what you should do is claim some 90% of all prison rapes are White Nazis raping some poor Black kid.
Of course, from what I remember most of MeToo was never about violent rape. Instead, it was more about coercion, from 'have sex with me and you will get the role' to 'senior colleague is hitting on a younger colleague, who feels their collaboration might be in danger if she rejects him'.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
if there's a bar fight, as a society we don't want the altercation to progress to shooting.
I think that this is a value judgement of society, and I am not sure I agree. I think that once you rule out escalation, the consequences of punching someone at a bar are rather limited. I mean, if you seriously injure or kill your victim, you will go to prison, and if you lose the fight then you might get beaten up, but I would expect that many non-consensual bar fights do not even make in in the police statistics.
Every bar should be free to declare itself a free-for-all dojo. Sign a waiver, enjoy your drink and punch anyone whose face you don't like, if you kill someone we will sort it out just like we would with MMA. Probably not a great place to pick up women, though.
But absent such a consent, I take a very dim view on violence. If you are a adult person of sound mind who was not drugged against their consent, and you think that violence is an acceptable solutions to whatever the fuck your problem is, I have very little sympathy. If the alternatives are that you get to beat up people until you finally maim someone and end up in prison, or you are either motivated enough by the threat of deadly retaliation to keep your fucking barbaric urges under control, or otherwise your third bar fight ends up with you bleeding to death with a punctured lung, then I will very much prefer the latter world.
What gets me is the pro-Palestinian not also getting charged.
Totally agree. Prosecutional discretion seems bad in this case. Perhaps the old English system where anyone could bring criminal charges would be better here.
But even without the politics, the incentives for the DA are very bad here. They want to win the high profile case, not some minor battery case. And if the defense can point out that the victim was already convicted for battery, that will lower their chances of winning the big case. So they throw that case under the bus, justice be damned.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
This overtime proposal is interesting since it only rewards people who are already working more than 40 hours a week. And it will, of course, hit mostly blue collar workers.
My guess is that the median overtime hour worked may well be by some minimum wage worker struggling to make ends meet, but the median dollar earned through overtime is earned by some doctor or lawyer.
Let's face it, the single mum working three different shit jobs to feed her family is not going to pay a lot of taxes -- nor should she. Tax cuts benefit the people who are in the higher tax brackets, i.e. the well-off.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Doxxing people still seems bad.
The Wikipedia article mentions that some rifling is achieved through electrochemical machining ("reverse electroplating"). Still, I think the barrel is a major bottleneck. Most hardware stores likely don't happen to sell high grade steel piping with an inner diameter of 9mm, I guess.
I also don't quite get some design choices. Is that buffer stock required? Wikipedia implies that there are variants without the buffer, so possibly not? Given that the barrel length is significantly shorter than even the infamous MAC-10, why go for the SMG form factor at all instead of treating it as a slightly oversized hand gun?
Anyone relying on one would rather have a conventionally manufactured firearm or, at least, some professionally machined parts.
Agreed.
It's good enough for self-defense though.
In my opinion, no. Don't get me wrong, I would rather fight an attacker with that thing than with my bare hands. But I don't think it is a good option given the risk landscape in areas with tight gun control, such as Europe.
Generally, people are cheap, don't want to go to prison and don't want to die because their self-defense (or rather home defense -- that thing is a bit large to keep in your coat just in case) option failed, often in increased order of priority.
The FGC-9 is cheap, sure. It also poses little risk of discovery for someone who who has excellent online opsec, certainly less than using a dark net marketplace. (Of course, buying the ammo will expose you to all the same risks as buying a gun and serve as probable cause to search your property if you are discovered.)
However, if one was discovered for any reason (such as using the weapon for home defense), you will not get any rebate for it being a homemade weapon of limited reliability instead of a standard 9mm.
If you estimate it unlikely that you will need a home defense weapon, then getting a 3d-printed weapon is not worth the hassle and risk of prison. Depending on your jurisdiction, there are likely a number of options you can just legally buy, from pitchforks to crossbows.
If you think there is a significant risk that your life will depend on your ability to win home defense fight, then you don't want a homebrew solution which might fail you in that moment. Getting a hunting licence or joining a sport shooting club are often avenues to legal gun ownership, albeit not the ability to carry your guns loaded in public spaces. (Technically, I think you are also not allowed to keep them loaded them for home defense, but 'I only took the gun out of the safe and loaded it when I heard glass breaking' will be plausible, 'I only printed my FGC-9 when I heard glass breaking' not so much.)
Now the main limiting factor for an individual in a restricted jurisdiction (see: most of the world) is ammo.
Agreed. From my understanding, you would need casings, primers, powder and a projectile.
Casings and bullets are mechanical, but I am very doubtful that 3d printing will help very much there (besides casting molds for lead, perhaps).
Primers and powder are chemistry. Both are technically explosives, but with much higher quality requirements than what some bomb-maker would care about. Most people prefer not having to clean their barrels between shots in a gunfight.
In a lot of areas, the option available to private citizens have exploded greatly expanded. The amount of electronic components or machine parts I can order from the internet is higher than ever. For chemicals, the opposite feels true. Substances you would have found in youth chemistry kits in the 1970s will raise eyebrows if you want to buy them as an adult today. Table salt is about the only chemical where you can be reasonably sure not to land on a watchlist if you buy it, and you can't produce gunpowder from it.
(Dear authorities: I have no plans to acquire any firearms, munitions or explosives. I own pepper spray strictly for animal defense and will get rid of it once it becomes verboten.)
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I agree that the sex revolution enabled by effective birth control (and abortion procedures) did have negative side effects.
But then, any important invention had negative side effects. The printing press was near the beginning of a causal chain which lead to a few bigger wars in Europe. The Internet contributed to increased human isolation. The chemical revolution enabled the horrors of chemical warfare.
It was not all sunshine and rainbows before the sexual revolution. For men, raising a family with their wife may be close to the optimal evolutionary strategy, but it can still be improved upon by impregnating a few other women in whose child-rearing you are not invested on the side.
The trope of a man seducing a virgin girl, having sex with her and then moving on, leaving her either 'dishonored' and unfit for marriage in the eyes of their society or actually pregnant, in which case her choices might be suicide, infanticide (which will be punished as murder) or becoming the sex worker society already considers her to be anyhow are pretty omnipresent in German literature, from Goethe's Faust to Mann's Untertan. Or high status men fucking their female servants (who are in no position to object) and then kicking them out of their household in shame as harlots once they are visibly pregnant.
While I agree that the number of unmarried sex-acts per capita has doubtlessly increased since then, I would argue that the negative consequences of such acts -- especially for women -- have drastically decreased since then.
Freedom from consequences is axiomatically harmful to human actualization and that's half our politics.
I guess you don't wear a seat belt in a car, as its only purpose is to protect you from your consequences of your decisions. Granted, sometimes the decision was just 'enter the road when you know that there are unsafe drivers', but that is just the way of life.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
As a part of sex ed, you teach that while contraception can prevent a majority of pregnancies, only abstinence can prevent it 100%.
That is demonstrably untrue. Gay sex and lesbian sex carries no risk of pregnancy, and there are plenty of ways for cishet couples to have sex besides PIV which drastically reduces the risk of pregnancy, such as oral or anal sex.
Based on the past success of a sex education focused on abstinence, I think that a sex education which focuses on anal sex would likely be more effective.
There are cases where reasonably proficiently used birth control methods lead to pregnancy, but I would wager that most unwanted pregnancies result from sexual encounters where birth control was either not used at all or used in obviously deficient ways as a result of a lack of advance planning or intoxication.
If you teach students
It is preferable to learn how to use birth control in a safe and comfortable environment. If you are using a condom correctly, the risk of pregnancy is small. If it fails in obvious ways, you should take Plan B. In the unlikely event that it fails in non-obvious ways, you can get an abortion. Carry condoms with you whenever there is a chance you might end up having sex with someone. that will in my estimate lead to a small number of unwanted pregnancies.
However, if you teach students
Birth control methods are not 100%, so the only safe way to avoid pregnancy is not to have sex. Wear these purity rings and remember that only sluts have sex outside marriage. Don't carry condoms, they will only lure you into thinking it is safe to have sex WHEN IT IS NEVER EVER SAFE.
then my prediction is that the median student will not have any planned sexual contacts. As the sex drive is quite strong in late-teenage humans (selection pressure) and most people don't marry and have kids early, it is very likely that at some point -- typically under the influence of alcohol -- the sex drive wins against Jesus. A drunk makeout session after some party is not a good time to learn how to use a condom even if any of the participants had the foresight to bring some. The mixture of shame and booze will likely not help with acknowledging what happened and seeking a morning-after pill, and might also lead to denial about a pregnancy which will eventually either lead to a late-term abortion or an unwanted kid being born, neither of which I consider good outcomes.
Abstinence education treats the sex drive as a lake whose flooding can be prevented by a huge enough dam made out of fear and shame. I would treat it as a river which can't be blocked, but certainly can be channeled in a way in which it is least likely to cause harmful flooding.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Because these Institutions are feeders into the political, economic, and cultural institutions that rule over us.
I think that this is the real problem.
It is not that Harvard is ten times as efficient at teaching, so if I randomly send one student to Harvard and another to a decent state school, the Harvard alumni will totally destroy the other one on merit.
Or at least, it is not only that. Swimming in money and being able to attract the very best people as tutors will likely help education quality some.
But mainly, I think it is a mixture of two things. First, the pure signaling value. 'That student did something which is very difficult to do and vaguely related with merit, namely getting into an elite school, so we should update towards them being competent'.
The other thing is that you can form connections to other people with high signaling value who have already achieved or will likely achieve positions of power.
I want to contrast this a bit with the system we have in Germany. Here, the choice of university matters a lot less. For example, if you look at the currently serving SCOTUS Justices, you will notice that eight out of nine of them went to either Harvard or Yale. Compare this to the number of universities where the judges of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht studied law. For sixteen judges, I counted some eleven different places of study -- there is remarkably little clustering. Study at Kiel or Konstanz, it will not open or close any doors for you.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Well, I think that it is unfair that happy families were represented and joyless cohabitation projects doomed to end in divorce, trauma and drug abuse were not adequately represented in unicode. I mean, these kids have it hard enough, the least we can do for them is having an emotionally adequate representation of their childhood.
I jest.
What I really think is that rather than trying to enumerate all possible family situations, it might be better to just compose families out of emoticons for individual family members.
Representing 'formerly three adults: an adult of indeterminate gender who left (red X superimposed), a blonde woman and a bearded man who died (bearded ghost icon), as well as a toddler, an female elementary student and dog and formerly a cat (which also left, red X)' in a single character is probably not feasible.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Bayes to the rescue: If you pull a gold coin from a box, that is strong evidence that the box is pure gold (because with a gold box, you will always get that measurement), neutral evidence that it is mixed (because with a mixed box you /can/ get that measurement) and rules out that you have the pure silver box.
If you start with a uniform prior, then you should end up with 2/3 pure gold, 1/3 mixed, which will give the probability you said.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
It also fully covered me for the $100k hospital bill I got when I broke my leg.
What kind of broken leg are we talking about here? A simple fracture of one of the long bones (the central case for 'broken leg', imho), or multiple fractures, including smaller bones, perhaps with a hip joint replacement and some knee surgery thrown in? Because that price for just 'do an x-ray (or even ct), make a cast, perhaps do another x-ray' would be insane.
Or is this just the sticker price, and what your insurance ended up paying was more like $3k?
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Hot take: election prediction should be split into two different jobs: pollsters and oracles.
Pollsters should just ask short, neutral questions and just report the results without any leeway to skew things, like "if today were US presidential elections, who would you vote for?"
If 10% of the respondents are jokesters who reply Lizardman Hitler, they should just report 'Lizardman Hitler at 10%'.
Oracles are the likes of Nate Silver (formerly 538), who have their voting models which takes in polls and any other considerations ('Lizardman Hitler is not on the ballot', 'Shy Tory effect', 'My goldfish Frodo is more depressed than usual') and form a prediction out of them.
If they get it wrong, you can give the oracles shit, but never the pollsters, because they just truthfully reported what people said they were going to vote for. If you trusted people not to lie, that is on you.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I agree that the Wikipedia article is quite illustrative.
I think I have a few objections to STV over simple proportional representation with party lists.
- I don't care for districts. The idea to physically visit my representative's office in town would never cross my mind, the internet exists. The only thing districts exist for are redirecting federal gravy trains to their constituents. I have no problem with voters voting for someone from their own city or state, but that should be their choice, not pre-baked in the election system.
- If you put all the candidates for a parliament onto the ballot so I can rank the candidates who I actually care for, that will be a bloody long ballot. There are 733 representatives in the Bundestag, the number of candidates per seat are likely higher by a factor of five or so.
- While Arrow's theorem affects all voting systems, it does not affect all voting systems equally in practice. With party-list proportional representation, if I have an oracle of how everyone else will vote, there is just so much strategy I can apply. You could check if your vote will influence the possible coalitions (which would be very unlikely but also very powerful), but otherwise, you vote for whatever party best represents your values. (Without an oracle, it is generally a mix of both of these considerations.) However, with STV, strategic votes matter a lot. Suppose my preferred candidate is very popular, and I expect a ton of people to vote for them, so he gets x>q votes, where q is the quota for election. This means that in the next round, my vote will be discounted by factor of (x-q)/x. So if I know beforehand that my preferred candidate will get elected, it would be rational not to vote for them, and instead put all my efforts into backing my next preference. However, this strategy is not stable -- if everyone assumes that their preferred candidate will win anyhow, nobody will vote for them.
- In list-based proportional representation, the one thing keeping representatives in line is that if they don't vote along the party line, they might not find themselves on a favorably spot on the list for the next election. The deal offered by parties is basically: 'be our straw man for voting in parliament, in exchange you get to shape (party) policy in some area and have a relaxed job with good compensation and little heavy lifting'. If there are no lists and getting elected depends on the population searching for your name on the ballot, incentives change dramatically. Your most likely competitors for votes are your colleagues in your party. Your best strategy is to throw them under the bus. If your party is woke, accuse them of being racists. The resulting equilibrium would be that you no longer have parties (yay!), but instead have a parliament filled with 700 independent representatives who were the most successful at selling their own brand like some youtubers. Now imagine having to find a majority coalition among the top 700 youtubers.
While I am a strong proponent of 'one person, one vote' for electing parliament, I don't think it is required that every representative shares the same voting power in parliament. Instead of transferring votes, one could simply say that if a candidate reaches x>q votes, their voting power in parliament will simply be scaled by factor x/q. You would get much smaller fractions where a few key players of each party make up most of the votes, plus perhaps a few hanger-ons whose main appeal is that they represent niche interests, plus some popular independents.
Finally, you are correct that changing voting systems is hard. The powers that be have formed in response to the present voting systems. While it is sometimes in their best interests to change particulars to entrench their party interests (e.g. gerrymandering) it will almost never be in the interest of a supermajority to fundamentally change the voting system, especially not in a way which lets in outsiders.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think you are massively over-interpreting the data.
-
There is some correlation between income and IQ (which is in turn correlated with genetics). Likely, there are different effects at play here: Rich caretakers will invest more in educating which will lead both to higher IQ and better paying jobs, but of course a lot of high-paying jobs (STEM, law, medicine, etc) also have some implicit IQ requirements.
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There is at least some correlation to number of children between generations, parts of it purely cultural. Kids who grew up in large families are more likely to have many children themselves. On the other hand, a significant part of incomes are from inheritance. Most people living in cities spend a huge fraction of their income on rent, and most landlords did not earn their properties through the work of their hands but through inheritance. It stands to reason that a single child whose mother was 40 when she gave birth will on average inherit more money than one born to a five-kids family whose mother gave births between 20 and 35, even if either ones parents owned exactly the same amount.
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You look at the income to fertility curve of blacks in the US and conclude that they true for blacks in Africa. If the relationship between IQ and fertility in each ethnicity was constant, then 10k years (perhaps 400 generations) ago blacks should have been very smart and whites really dumb given that today their intelligence is roughly similar. This is nonsense.
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The source in the plot is cited as "American Community Survey". I am not sure if they are affiliated with the IRS and telling them their income is a bad idea if you are cheating on taxes. Just dismissing Hispanics because "anecdotally they do lots of tax fraud" feels epistemically bad, if you believe that tax fraud is significantly affecting the data, then your data is useless, unless you have statistics showing that 99% of the Hispanics cheat on taxes and only 1% of the non-Hispanics.
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I disagree with your value-loaded adjectives 'dysgenic' and 'eugenic'. All things being equal, a person with a higher IQ is probably more beneficial to society than one with lower IQ in most scenarios. But what you are actually measuring is parental income, which is somewhat correlated to IQ, which then has a strong genetic component. As you use these adjectives, the implications are that a successful drug dealer reproducing is good while a person working an unglamorous job (such as a truck driver) is bad.
As this is the CW thread, we should also discuss how Dobbs will affect this curve. My prediction is that it will mainly increase the fertility of the lower income population. We are selecting not only for parents who were not able to use birth control successfully, but also for people who lack the resources or executive function to travel to another state to terminate their pregnancy. If the IQ 135 math student gets pregnant by accident (not terribly likely, imho), her professor parents will pay for a trip to another state. If the IQ 90 high school dropout raised by a single mom with a substance problem, who discovered sex and booze when she was 14 finally gets pregnant (a more likely scenario), she might not have the financial and executive resources to go on a trip to a blue state.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Hitler is best understood as a Golem figure, built by both Communists and Capitalists to protect against the Other, only to turn on each in their turn.
I have some problems with that statement.
In the subtext, one of the defining features of the Golem is that it is a Jewish creation. If you want to imply that Hitler's rise was the result of him being backed by Jewish interests, please state so outright. Otherwise, a better metaphor might be 'a demon summoned' than 'a golem built'.
Before his rise to power, Hitler was definitely backed by German industrialists. They could see the specter of communism looming, and were seeing Hitler as the strong man who could defeat communism. Industrialists (at least the ones considered proper Germans by the Nazis) mostly fared much better under the Nazis than they would have under communist rule, especially once the anti-capitalist SA was out of the picture. (I guess they had more influence in the Weimar Republic, where they could not be arrested on a whim, but mostly they got to keep their riches as long as they were willing to build tanks when ordered.)
I am unsure how much international backing there was for Hitler in the Weimar time, outside of German expats. I mean, on the one hand he was likely seen as necessary against the commie threat, on the other hand the Western allies had fought a long and bloody war against an expansionist Germany.
Before Hitler became chancellor, communists were strictly anti-Nazi. While united in their disgust at parliamentary democracy, they both had very different and incompatible revolutions in mind for Germany, and both knew that the other side winning would result in their side getting purged and losing.
By contrast, in 1939, Stalin knew that a commie revolution in Germany was not in the cards. It is true that with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he gave a ton of resource aid to Germany which enabled the Blitzkrieg. I am unsure how militarily sound that was as a strategy, in hindsight. I have a hard time imagining Western Allies to decide to enter a land war with Russia to rid the world of communism, so Hitlers defeat of France likely bought the USSR no security.
I am not sure if Nazi Germany ever got significant aid from the Western allies between 33 and 39. At the most, I think that the obligations under the Versailles treaty were not imposed, and he was allowed to amass troops about that treaties limitations.
Of course, both Western allies and the USSR were not in a position to fight a war against Germany in 1933, so Appeasement might have been the best strategy. As the old adage goes, diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice dog' while looking for a bigger stick.
Per Wikipedia, Mariupol was conquered by Russia in May 2022, months after the Putins special operation had been begun.
For NATO to be effective, it does not have to be 100% committed to starting WW3 over a few square miles. Instead, following the method EY outlines in planecrash, it would be sufficient to escalate with a probability which is high enough to make the expected value of the defection of your opponent negative. Even a low but finite probability of responding in a way which will eventually lead to nuclear escalation will be enough to outweigh the gain of a bit of territory.
I think that NATO reactions to an invocation of Article 5 would be quite different from Western reactions to the invasion of Ukraine for game theory reasons.
If a slice of Poland gets invaded, and the rest of NATO is like 'well, they have already ceded so much territory to Russia in '45, surely they can spare another 50 square kilometers', then NATO as a defensive pact is dead. There can be some discussion if present day Russia is a credible threat in the same way that the USSR at the height of the cold war was, but if it was, then the options would be simple. Either your soldiers now fight Russia in your neighbors territory, or they fight them in a year in your own country, or they end up fighting someone else for Russia in two years. So the least-bad option would be to support your allies in a conventional war.
Of course, there have been precious few large-scale conflicts between nuclear powers, so the likelihood of such conflicts staying conventional for long is unknown. But both sides would have an interest to cause attrition to their enemies nuclear capabilities, and at some point someone might decide that faced with the choice between losing the retaliatory capabilities of a missile sub or silo or escalating to a nuclear conflict, it is not in their interest to defer nuclear escalation any longer.
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