quiet_NaN
3mo ago
He then goes on to say that "there’s nothing unfair, and certainly nothing unconstitutional, about facing social opprobrium for unpopular speech and behavior." He seems to support that sort of cancellation, whichever side of the aisle it is coming from.
I think that people treating assholes differently from other people in their local community is likely older than the modern human. Of course, in larger societies, the more basic social norms are generally codified into laws. But there is still a zone of behaviors with negative externalities which nobody bothers to make actually illegal, not every minor annoyance is worth a criminal case, after all.
Like criminal law, social shunning is a double-edged sword in that it can be used both to enforce good norms (don't run around randomly insulting people) or bad norms (don't have gay sex, don't criticize the Fuehrer). However, where laws are at least factually clear (such as StGB 175, which used to prohibit gay sex in Germany), the norms enforced informally have less scrutiny. It is easier to argue against a bad law than against a bad norm which is enforced informally, and laws can be more easily changed.
All of this applies to pre-social-media villages. In a village, if someone says or does something which one percent of the villagers hate totally, while the rest are 'meh' about it, nothing much will happen. With some 22% of the US population on twitter (probably heavily selected towards 'activism'), 1% is still a rather huge mob.
For offline celebrities, it is a bit different. They are selling themselves as a brand, after all, so if anything they do they do is bad publicity, that may have repercussions on how they are treated by companies.
But the average person on the street should not lose their job over icky opinions they post online. Either what they say is actually illegal, in which case it should be a matter of civil and criminal law, or they should be allowed to keep their job.
For pseudonymous opinions, I only see two cases in which doxxing might be justified:
- directly to law enforcement for things which are actually illegal to say (but not to the general public)
- the doxxing of doxxers is fine with me, live by the sword, die by the sword.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
Of course, the assumption that the top 100 books of this century have already been written is a level of pessimism on the NYT's part which makes Eliezer Yudkowsky look like a hopeless optimist by comparison.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
Cynically, every movement is just a cover for one of Scott's backscratching clubs.
However, this does not mean that the people in the movement are cynics who just pay lip service to the movement for status gain. The best way to pass for a true believer is to be a true believer. Humans are very capable of believing anything, while their subconsciousness keeps a careful lookout for their self-interest.
I think that most environmentalists want to help the environment, but often do not pick the solutions which offer the most bang for buck, and sometimes may be indeed net-negative given a specific set of goals.
The fact that their goals are actually tractable exposes them to criticism. I mean, nobody is giving the Christians shit about how raising kids is actually a terribly inefficient way to populate heaven, and the utility of running embryo-farms which could produce a baptized soul for a few dollars each would be much higher.
It is always easy to say 'person P took an action X which was not the best action towards goal G, thus by revealed preference P does not care about G', because modelling humans as a single rational actor is a gross oversimplification.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
I assume we are still talking about the US, here?
Since the universal declaration of human rights was signed in 1948, the per-capita inflation-adjusted GDP has quadrupled. Jim Crow laws were still going strong. The witch-hunt on suspected communists was just getting started.
The idea that that any previous age was the real Golden Age and today we are just witnessing the decline is false for the US. Sure, the rent is too damn high, and a significant fraction of the population are pursuing grievance studies instead of something productive, but rumors of the impending collapse of the US or civil war are highly exaggerated.
Now, I will grant you that there is a tendency to claim that more and more stuff are human rights. Someone using the wrong pronouns or some ethnicity having worse outcomes in some field (but equal outcomes when correcting for skill) is not a human rights violation. Still, the idea that human rights are only for whiny wokes is wrong.
Almost nobody will say: "This country was so much better when we had slavery. If we abolish due process and just have the police shoot any suspected criminals, that will be much better. And if the whiny liberals complain, we should be able to make a law against criticizing to government and shoot them as well."
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
And the man says, “I guess you had to be there. “
Ouch, what a burn.
I think that a lot hinges on the intended audience. Mailing jokes about murder victims to their relatives would be terrible poor taste. On the other hand, one man's tragedy is another man's statistic, and if you are in mourning you should know better than to check what wisecracks on twitter say.
By revealed preference, most societies do not treat the lives of all human persons as sacred. Apart from being about a dead person, the was/were joke seems pretty mild and does not assign a lower value to trans persons, and such jokes can be a reasonable way to deal with far-removed tragedy.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
I think it is uncharitable to assume that Trace picks his stories to support some weird niche centrist agenda.
But even if his selection of stories was totally partisan, this would mostly be a problem if he was the only news source on the market. Last time I checked, he is not.
If there was a news story about how one in three gay men will eat babies which he would not cover because it does not fit the narrative he wants to push, I am sure that some investigative journalist somewhere could also pick it up.
From what I have seen, Trace provides truthful, relevant information. Such a thing is net good.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Or perhaps chosen a progressive target if the conservative ones proved less gullible than he hoped?
Well, given that Trace has spent a ton of time documenting the FAA hiring scandal which made the progressives look terrible, I conclude that he is actually interested in the truth rather than a partisan for a side in the culture war.
I concur with you sentiment that the FAA thing is fundamentally partisan. The 'equality of outcomes' demand which set the bad incentives which resulted in officials doing what they did was very much a demand of the progressive side, not bipartisan.
Personally, I think the test cheating is a direct consequence of the law making unrealistic, contradictory demands. "You have to hire based on merit, but you also have to hire enough black people, otherwise you are a dirty racist" is not a consistent goal in a world where black people are on average less qualified for whatever reasons -- something has got to give. So yes, I fully blame the progressive 'equality of outcome' laws for that.
The left-wing media shares my sentiment, because they elected mostly not to cover that story at all for what I assume are partisan reasons.
Suppose party X got rid of all restrictions on gun ownership and all public funding for mental health. Then some psychotic person buys an auto rifle and shoots up some mall. For some weird reason, Trace is the only one to report on it. He also says something like (changed words in italic):
People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of policy failure. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that shooting, wants to defend it.
We should give Trace 100 truth points for covering the issue. We can debate if we should deduct a point for also calling it "not a fundamentally partisan issue" or if that was taken out of context, but either way, his credentials as someone who is willing to hurt progressive causes in the name of the truth are established.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Of course, human rights aren't real. The only thing I can be certain about is that that something which runs my mind exists. All the other stuff, electrons, sun flowers, homeless people, other entities which experience qualia, laws of mathematics or societies and so on are at best useful models to make sense of my sensory inputs.
Of course, most of these concepts were not made up at random by people who were high. Instead, they were invented to solve problems -- from describing their sensory experiences ('reality') to trying to prevent the repeat of bad outcomes in society.
The US was one of the forerunners with regard to the idea of human rights, and I would argue that this played a significant role in their economic success.
Fortunately for you, there are all kinds of countries who share your disdain for human rights. Mainland China, the Taliban regime, Iran or Somalia all agree with you that the convenience of important people like yourself should trump the desire of some less important people not to be sent to some gulag or shot in the streets.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
By today's standards, these camps would be a human rights violation. Of course, the state of the imprisoned had set a really low bar for human rights.
I would still argue that there is a difference in degree between Nazi soldiers who plunged Europe into war and genocided millions and homeless who shit in the streets of San Francisco. Sometimes you have to commit actions of dubious human rights status to stop more severe human rights violations from going on, and the severity of what you try to stop should be considered.
There are some more differences to consider, though:
- The Nazi soldiers were used to follow the orders of their officers. Military prisoners can self-organize in a way that ideally limits the amount of prisoner-on-prisoner violence.
- The people in these camps were selected only by their willingness to surrender instead of dying the Heldentod for their Fuehrer, and as such represented a normal cross-section of men in society. Granted, they were indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda, but it is not like they had any Jews or commies to victimize. By contrast, the people populating civil prisons -- or even homeless camps -- are heavily selected for aggression or mental health problems, respectively.
- Most of the prisoners were there for a single summer. This would explain the exceedingly low death toll (6k over 2M, per Wikipedia). However, the Endloesung to the homeless question proposed in this thread was basically life imprisonment. Bad weather and infectious diseases and the inability to control food distribution would likely cause significant attrition even if no explicit violence took place among the inmates.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
I agree that the minimum viable prison is just a fenced-off area with some guards watching the fence who optionally throw food in.
Unfortunately, such a prison would also be a human rights violation. If you imprison someone, you take away most of their agency which they could have used to look after their basic human interests, such as being housed, fed, adequately medicated and neither raped nor murdered. I think it is reasonable that the society who imprisoned a person should take care of these necessities.
And caring for a bunch of people who have already failed to be deterred by the grossest disincentive society has against bad behavior (prison) and preventing them from raping and murdering each other is going to be more expensive per capita than running a boarding school.
I would be surprised if the cost of imprisonment was that high because bleeding heart liberals had pushed for daily changed satin bed sheets and a wide selection of organic food for the prisoners. My money would be on general cost disease, possibly with a sprinkling of market failure (e.g. regulatory capture by the prison industrial complex).
Even in Texas, the costs per prisoner per day are 77$.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
What I mean is that if some magic fairy turned me into a women tomorrow, I would go along with it and not embark on a long quest to get my real body back, just as I would not embark on a long quest to find such a fairy in the first place. My gender is not tied strongly to my identity. By contrast, if a fairy cursed me to say become computer illiterate, I would grudgingly do whatever I had to do to undo that curse.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Especially if you can actually move the prediction score because the other side is prevented by that maximum bet rule to call you on your bet.
Buying shares to hype up your candidate in the absence of an efficient market might not even be the least effective way to spend money on them, outcome-wise.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
I would argue that politics operate much on level 4 because the stakes are so low.
The life of the median US voter will not be affected drastically by the outcome of the US presidential election. They are unlikely to get fired or imprisoned or even have their income change by 10% no matter who sits in the White House. Trump will not turn the US into a totalitarian dictatorship. If Biden drops dead in a year, Harris will likely become an unpopular one-term president, not the downfall of the US.
Most people can be somewhat rational when they have skin in the game, but here they don't have that. It is like supporting a football team. If every fan whose team won the cup got a 20% raise, there would be an actual incentive to figure out if fan support can affect the outcome of a match, and what their optimal behavior regarding the object level should be. Instead, it is just performative, vibes, kayfabe. Politics is mostly the same, only the hatred for the other team is stronger.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Sorry if this is insensitive, but is species dysphoria a thing?
I don't doubt that furries are a thing, but I would have classified them as some kind of kink or cosplay or roleplay thing rather than genuine dysphoria.
I can totally get gender dysphoria, say someone with the Y chromosome feeling that they should really be in a lesbian relationship or being a caring mother or whatever. "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" (or vice versa) kinda makes sense to me.
Using s/gender/species/, species dysphoria would be "I am a felis silvestris trapped in the body of a homo sapiens", which seems incongruent to me. A nimble nocturnal hunter of rodents? That does not sound like a fulfillable aspiration this side of the singularity.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
As a cis-by-default, I have accepted that some people care as much about their gender as I care about e.g. my sexual orientation, and some of them (sometimes very smart people) are trans. Having this mixing matrix between gender and sex chromosomes seems to be worth it to accommodate them. The amount of effort they put into it (from hormones to changing their legal name/gender) clearly indicates that it is something they care very much about.
Of course, this does not preclude that some teenagers decide that they are non-binary because it is a high-status thing to do and moves them considerably upwards on the woke victimhood pyramid.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Long term incarceration is expensive. In California, it is about 350$ a day. And you would have to be prepared to lock up a lot of people, because the chronic homeless population is heavily slanted towards people who are unable to follow their long term incentives -- jail one to deter 100 will not work.
If we ignore the utility to the homeless themselves (as you seem to prefer), the question becomes whether the negative externalities of the median homeless person are above that sum. I don't doubt that there are some whose negative externalities can reach 1k$/day, but I don't think that is the typical case.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Okay, this seems more reasonable.
But it is also not very different from how rape laws used to work in western society.
Basically, the central rape case (not involving drugs) would be "he said, she said". Because criminal law operates on the principle "in dubio pro reo", the testimony of the victim is probably not to secure a conviction on its own. Audio or video evidence, third party testimony or physical marks of a struggle can all tip that balance, of course.
Every day, countless men try to seduce women. Most of the time, the woman in question makes it clear that they are not interested, escalating appropriately until he gets the message. Sometimes, she fails to do so, and sometimes he does not take no for an answer, which are the cases where rape cases stem from. And sometimes she might actually consent.
Unlike traditional Islam, I have no problem with (explicitly or otherwise) consenting adults having sex. Nor do I model the median adult woman as being a sex-crazed maniac who loses all her agency and will drop her pants the moment some stranger touches her arm.
As a straight guy, the thought "what if some gay person manages to seduce me and assfucks me, I better keep away from seductive (but non-rapey) gay men just to be sure" had not even occurred to me, because I am sure I would make my displeasure known at any attempt.
Sometimes, some people might pre-commit to not undertake some action, and intentionally avoid situations which would weaken their committment. If you want to stay sober, it is probably not a good idea to go to a party with a lot of booze. If you want not to have sex with a person X to whom you are mutually attracted, it is probably not a good idea to visit them to watch a romantic comedy. But again, the 'bad' outcome you want to avoid is a matter of personal preference, not criminal law.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
The best solution to solve the social neuroticism: you can no longer accuse a man of rape if you willingly spend time with him alone.
Your solution seems utterly incompatible with the way of life of most societies.
Perhaps you think a strong gender segregation like traditional Islam has would be enough to solve the scenario of your uncontrollable men, but it is not.
Even in traditional Islamic countries, I think there is a presumption that men can constrain themselves from rape in some contexts. A man might trust his brother to chaperone his wife without raping her, or his son to chaperone his daughter.
Of course, if we were to excuse rapes of women in voluntary 1-vs-1 situations because real men don't have self-control, why should we stop there? What about chance encounters, they might not be willing, but at least negligent? If we blame women for getting into situations where they are get violently overpowered, should we not also blame them for entrusting themselves to a chaperone who gets overpowered by some rapist? And if you can't trust one man not to rape one woman, why should you be able to trust n men to not coordinate to rape k women?
Also why should only heterosexual rapists get a pass when gay men can get just as horny? The logical conclusion would be that in any gathering, whatever subset of people can violently overpower the others gets to do as they please.
Luckily, your 'vigorous men' who are so high-T that they can not control their impulse to rape whenever a plausible opportunity arises are exceedingly rare today. Even in ancient societies, where being rapey was an adaptive trait, there was doubtlessly a selection for men who were might rape enemy civilians in wartime or slaves, but had enough restraint to not rape their chieftains daughter or a temple virgin.
Today, millions of women and men encounter each other as strangers 1-vs-1 in taxis, while jogging and in countless other settings many million times a day. Almost none of these encounters lead to rape. Empirically, this puts sharp limits on the prevalence of your 'vigorous men' who would rape at every opportunity in the wider world, outside of monasteries and prisons.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
I played Sunless Sea some time after it came out, and found it epochal.
Sunless Skies was fine, I guess. Better than 'a house of many doors', which was also ok.
But going from "you and your crew are living on some steam boat on a subterranean ocean" to "you and your crew are living on a steam locomotive driving through the void without tracks" somehow broke my suspension of disbelief.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
To be fair, the only time Trump has accepted the outcome of an election he was involved in was when the election went in his favor. Say what you will about HRC, but she did not contest the outcome of the election for the next four years.
I think keeping Trump of the ballot is bad because one of the advantages of democratic elections is that they are a means of avoiding armed confrontations within a country. The deal with democracy is that everyone gets to vote for their guy, and if your guy did not win this time, the best path forward is to try to convince more people of your point of view next time. If your guy is not on the ballot, you might decide that the best way forward is armed resistance, and get utterly crushed by the federal government.
There are situations where it is a good idea to keep an enemy of democracy off the ballot. Kicking the NSDAP off the ballot in 1933 would have been worth however many shootouts with their Sturmabteilung that would have resulted in, because the Weimar republic was fragile, with a lot of the government apparatus not sold on democracy and very willing to help Hitler along.
But Trump 2024 is not Hitler 1933. If he is elected and has a majority in Congress, he will still not be able to transform the US into a Fuehrerstaat. The SCOTUS may be friendly to him, but they are not his minions. And unlike Weimar, the US is full of bureaucrats who are very invested in the status quo. They might gerrymander a bit here and leak a bit of embarrassing info there for partisan reasons, but they will not dismantle democracy.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Fair point. I can see why such policies might be instituted to solve the problem of basically-cishet-guys hitting on lesbians, as well as how this would affect the odd genuine trans-lesbian.
There is still a difference between deciding "no dicks allowed" for a bar than deciding that for one's own sexual partners. Ideally one would have a different lesbian bars with different admittance policies (no dicks, must present female, must self-identify female) and let the market do its work. This would likely result in all the guys deciding to claim female identity as a ploy to get laid ending up in one bar, where they can then give each other BJs if they really feel it is bigot to not be into cocks.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
I can see the point you are making: if vaccines are in short supply, then it does not matter who is taking them.
As an intuition pump, consider the trolley problem with one person on each track 1 and 2. The train would go to track one, but the operator has some petty personal reason to redirect the train to track two. Perhaps he has just cleaned the ground around track one and does not want to start over from the beginning.
I have some sympathy for almost every decision a trolley operator could make for selfless reasons -- the religious person who does not act lest he kills someone through his actions, the utilitarian who estimates QALYs, the art connoisseur who sacrifices a kid to save a great artist. But the man who decides who should die based on "track two was scheduled for a hosing anyhow" is a monster.
Of course, it is not even true that discouraging people in the Philippines from taking vaccines is utility neutral. For one thing, vaccines are physical things with limited shelf lives. Distributing them throughout the country is already a challenge. Sending surplus vaccines backwards through the distribution pathway is not realistic. Of course, one could set up the distribution in such a way that the amount of vaccines which are left over is minimized, but it is not reasonable to assume that such efforts were taken. It seems more likely that the health officials were vastly overestimating the vaccine enthusiasm.
The other thing is that not all countries are equal. Given that the vaccine originated from China, it is likely that mainland Chinese ended up being the benefactors of the DoD intervention. Mainland China followed a zero-COVID policy until December 2022. If the DoD-induced unpopularity of the vaccine abroad caused Chinese citizens to be vaccinated a few months earlier, the amount of lives that saved might have been fairly minimal.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Someone saying "no, no I only date people with a biological sex of female, you see..." is told, "that's not a sexual orientation, that's just bigotry."
I am kind of with Scott on this one. Love is the one area where one can discriminate. People are attracted to what they are attracted, which includes presenting gender, what kind of interface the other person has between their legs, skin color, body type, hair color, relative height, dialects, high nobility, potential for offspring, appearance, socioeconomic status, criminal record and anything else under the sun.
And for what it is worth, I don't think that this "either date transgender or be called a bigot" will fly even in the LGBTQWhatever community. If some hairy dude goes into a lesbian bar, declares that he identifies as a woman and challenges some lesbian to take him home or be a bigot, then the queers will not be on the side of the dude.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
The gist of it is that Zack claims that identifying the word "male" with having the Y chromosome is carving reality at its joints, while saying that whoever decides they identify as male should be called male is a strictly worse way of describing reality.
The post implies that EY and Scott kinda agree with the biological definition being more robust in principle, but endorse the trans-favoring position out of political considerations.
I am mostly on board with Scott and EY here, even though I agree with Zack that in theory the chromosome-based definition is more robust. Being willing to die on definitional hills seems stupid. Once, "Sir" referred exclusively to English noblemen. From that, I could make the argument that the service industry should not refer to male (whatever's definition) customers as Sir unless they are indeed OBE or whatever.
But this is would be extremely stupid. Language evolves. Definitional battles are not worth it. What the Sequences would recommend doing would just be to taboo the words "male" and "female" to dissolve the conflict. Instead, we just swim with the tide.
Contrary to common belief, most interactions of humans in our society are not resulting in common offspring. The utility of tagging humans by whom they could breed with is basically zero (and in any case we would also want to encode fertility information if we were serious about that). Social genders are simply a weird leftover remnant, just like "Sir". We can adapt such words whatever we want them to mean.
Unlike blankly denying the possibility of any HBD because it would be to ugly to be true, calling a trans-man a man has no significant real life or epistemic costs. It would be different if we insisted that the cis-/trans-prefix and talking about sex chromosomes is verboten, and society would advise a trans-man, and cis-woman couple to just try to following a cycle calendar or specific sex positions if they have trouble conceiving a child.
The woke definition has big upsides for trans people for little costs, so I would prefer it even if I was language czar and could decide what "male" means. The ratsphere pushing back against that would be as ludicrous as if the New Atheists had decided that their No 1 priority was getting rid of "OMG" in chats.
I think the crux for me is how colleagues in protected classes became aware of the distasteful opinions of their colleague.
If it was because he came to work wearing a swastika shirt, then firing him sounds like a great idea.
If he ran an offensive twitter account under his real name, but with no link to the company, I would argue that this should not be a firing offense for a lower level employee -- don't google stalk people if you can't handle what you might find.
Even more so if he ran a twitter account under a pseudonym and got doxxed.
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