what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Based on the descriptions I've seen, Jordan Neely was not actually behaving in any sort of violent way. That's why Hoffmeister has to resort to "statistical reality" about black people, to claim that agitated, annoying behavior can be construed as violent. This is not allowed as part of a legal argument for self-defense, with good reason, just like a woman walking alone can't turn around and shoot a man for following her on the public sidewalk and then make an argument about "statistical reality." A "good bayesian" can conclude anything they would like, given limited evidence, if their priors are sufficiently bad. This is why the law does not tell everyone to act like bayesians.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
You can have decentralized legal systems, but there still has to be some sort of widespread buy-in (or what we might call meta buy-in, where different groups have their own legal system, but still with some other authority to resolve inter-group disputes, and each group still experiences buy-in from its own members). If you could get that level of buy-in, you could probably just make the city government of New York actually enforce laws, and it would be much easier, and with many fewer nasty side effects.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Ok, but it's partly not heritable. A majority non-heritable, if my google-fu isn't too bad. But also, heritability is kind of a tricky metric to interpret. If you reduce the effect of environment on criminality (e.g. raising the standard of living so that most people don't need crime to survive) then heritability of crime goes up, even if the relationship between genes and criminality hasn't really changed.
In any event, this seems like an extremely weak reason to start executing lots of people. High punishment and high crime are almost certainly positively correlated across time and space, because e.g. severe punishment is a natural-seeming response to high crime rates and low clearance rates, and because both reflect the level of violence in the society.
Do you have any numbers that would indicate how long it would take to see a substantial reduction in crime due to the effect of such a mass execution?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
A "reign of terror"? Are you deliberately taking the piss? He's not Jack the Ripper (the marine, however, did kill someone).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Every society had such people and was confronted with such problems. Some of them were ruled by such people and it lead to their collapse. Great Britain exiled a bunch of them to Australia and Appalachia, or just executed them. Notably its crime rate remained pretty high by modern standards, because crime is more complicated than "just kill the bad people."
But we have to ask ourselves: how likely is such a nightmare scenario to become reality?
I can't put a number on that with any confidence, just like you can't put a number on your nightmare scenario. I can at least say for sure that multiple powerful countries have turned into that society in the past 100 years, they've committed (and continue to commit) terrible atrocities. I can also say that worries about overbearing government aren't totally one-sided: There's plenty of right-coded worry about tyrannical and controlling governments (just look at of the discourse around covid, masks, and vaccines, or more recently 15 minute cities).
“how many arrests does it take before we declare somebody scum and he loses his basically civil rights” has some answer that you would consider reasonable?
No number of arrests means that someone should lose all their civil rights. For one, as soon as you establish such a number, I think you immediately try to argue it down to be "1" or to "well they did something that isn't actually violent but is vaguely antisocial" because that's what is actually required for you to be satisfied. But also, why is one person being arrested 4,000 times? If it's because there's not actually any evidence they've committed a crime, then that sounds like the police are either incompetent or harassing the guy. If it's because he is convicted and then gets released, then that shouldn't be the case, but putting a convicted criminal in prison for longer does not require revoking civil rights.
Obviously it sucks to be victimized on the street with nothing you can do about it. It also sucks to be tackled and arrested by a power-mad cop with nothing you can do about it, or attacked on the street by a vigilante who got you confused for someone else. I's not like your (honestly, insane) idea of "execute them all" is a solution anyway, because if you could implement it you could more easily implement actually reasonable reforms.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I don't think you've really thought about it if you consider such a question to be obvious.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Schizophrenia can't be cured (yet) but it certainly can be managed in many (perhaps a majority) of cases.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions and leaps of logic here.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
justified by statistical reality
On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
People really should be less scared of me than they were of Jordan Neely; if they assumed he had a long rap sheet and was capable of violence, they were right to assume that - not only because we know that it’s true, but because people who look and act like him are, statistically, far more likely to have that be true of them than people who looks and act like me are.
The base right of violent criminal activity is low, so even a substantially increased probability may still be low. And no, making a bad assumption and having it turn out to be correct is not right. It's lucky. Our legal system strongly discourages this form of argument--you cannot use information you did not have access to at the time in a self-defense argument, because it is very bad to encourage vigilantism with low standards. The legal system is surely far from perfect at determining guilt but it's a hell of a lot better than letting every random person off the street just decide that they think someone else did something wrong. I don't know the details of your encounters, but there are violent attacks that happen where the aggressor thinks they're completely in the right because they didn't understand the situation, or felt insulted, or think they have a right to other people's stuff, or whatever. Encouraging such behavior is likely to result in more public violence and should be a last resort at best.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Many people are riddled with debt because they absolutely need the latest Iphone or a shiny new car. Why would they consume less and hoard money if products were going to get slightly cheaper next year?
Not everyone behaves the same way, but even your average middle-class would-be homebuyer is probably capable of realizing what deflation means for their mortgage, to say nothing of the huge amounts of capital controlled by profit-maximizing institutions and their legions of finance professionals. The latter are certainly capable of doing basic arithmetic.
They just need to promise any level of profit. A profit in a deflating currency includes the profit plus the deflation.
The problem is it also includes the risk of failure and, most likely, the inability to redirect your investment. Sitting on cash during deflation is close to risk-free and is completely liquid.
It used to be that you didn't need to take on 30 or 40 year loans for the privilege of one day owning a house. It's good when products people need like energy, food and housing are cheap. Turning them into a debt-ridden investment product is harmful for most, beneficial to few.
I agree, but discouraging anyone from ever taking on debt using deflation isn't the way to solve this--improving housing supply is.
The bubble-bailout economy privatizes gains and socialize losses. And why should the government know what a good interest rate should be anyway? They routinely get it wrong, fuelling bubbles and then popping them.
This is a valid argument IMO, but it's an argument for not having government run the currency at all, not for deflation.
(effectively raising the price of houses still further by increasing repayments), reducing the value of houses (since we made them into investment products that are bought and sold with borrowed money), lowering demand and costing governments more in interest on the absurd amounts of money they've borrowed.
How can the price of houses go up while their value goes down? The housing and mortgage market is fairly broken, but as above this is a housing supply issue more than a monetary policy one. You mentioned above that things like food should be cheap--the same is true of housing, but we've been pretending it's an "investment" rather than a consumable good. No monetary policy will fix these issues.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Deflation can lead to what's called a deflationary spiral, essentially a reverse bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Deflationary_spiral
Essentially, if you expect your money to be worth more in the future, than you won't spend it now. This is a reduction in demand, which reduces prices--which further leads to faster deflation. You won't invest it, either: You can risklessly make money by putting cash under your mattress. This has a similar effect, and also reduces future real productive capacity. It can even lead to bank runs, as mentioned in the wikipedia article, since there's no reason to have your money in the bank.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I see relatively little masking. Even in very crowded, indoor events that are heavily left-aligned only a handful of people are wearing a mask. I sometimes see people wearing one who I know usually don't, which in my experience means they really need to not get COVID (e.g. upcoming wedding or international trip) so the same is likely true of some of the few people I see masking elsewhere (or e.g. they live with an elderly relative or immune-compromised partner, something like that).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Of course the problem was the communists, but they didn't ever really go away. They changed their outfit and their choice of lies. The country is still run by a dictator with secret police, it still has a huge stockpile of nukes, it's still attempting to secure an empire. Most of the bad aspects are still there. And yes, this is mostly an issue of the sociopaths in charge, not the regular people.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Coming late due to the quality contributions roundup, but https://web.archive.org/web/20170628142015/https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/highlights_of_the_2001_national_household_travel_survey/html/table_a15.html says about 1.6 people per personal vehicle trip. Since that includes things like whole-family trips, carpooling is probably not very common.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
A lot of people seem to think they can regularly beat the market with skill. Yes, plenty of "regular" people (although only some of them are stupid, others are probably scientists or engineers who are overconfident in their abilities). But it seems like lots of experienced finance professionals are convinced of their own ability to beat the market, even when the evidence shows most of them are over-indexing on luck or are just plain wrong. Some of this is surely marketing by people who know they're full of shit, but I suspect there is a lot of genuine belief because no one wants to accept their job is adding minimal value and they've put tremendous time into studying something but aren't any good at it.
Maybe these people all believe in the EMH for other people and think that they're special, but I would still call that "not really believing in EMH."
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
This is the type of insight only an economist could consider insightful.
I hesitate to call something obvious when so many people don't believe it at all.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
EMH is very close to true almost all of the time. How often do you think opportunities like the one you identified with COVID come about? How confident do you think it was reasonable to be that you would come out ahead? 80%? 95%? 99.5%? It's possible to come out ahead, just like it's possible to beat Stockfish in chess (AlphaZero did so) but you should generally believe that if you think you have identified, on your own, a better move, that you are wrong. Is it literally impossible? No, but it's not likely. Don't forget, the EMH refers to risk-adjusted returns: You can beat the stock market if you're willing to accept high risk. The only way to get a good grasp on what your risk actually is, would be to make more bets. Without knowing exactly what bets you made or when, I can barely even speculate on specifics, but I think you should seriously consider the possibility there were substantial risks you didn't consider and got somewhat lucky on.
Michael Burry is actually a good example--he faced ruinous amounts of risk and almost lost everything.
On the other hand, if you think that this was a once-per-generation opportunity, and wouldn't regularly make such bets, then that sounds like an agreement that EMH is true at least most of the time (or at least that identifying such opportunities is very hard, which amounts to the same thing).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Whether it's "stealing" or not, I think that, in some cases, there is no moral obligation to respect copyright. Copyright is a truce, an agreement, to encourage certain productive behaviors that are otherwise difficult to incentivize. As the US Constitution says,
[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
(emphasis mine). To the extent that copyright etc. accomplishes something useful, then it makes some sense to respect it. But calling it property (as in, "intellectual property") is a lie, a legal fiction. If an agent is abusing copyright law to oppose its intended use--which large music companies and ticketmaster do, for example--then I see no reason to respect it. They are violating the agreement, not as written, because they used their ill-gotten gains to lobby lawmakers in a twisted Kafakesque circle of theft, but certainly in spirit. I certainly don't see a moral requirement to pay a middleman who exploited legal loopholes rather than the actual creator.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
To the extent that's true, I don't think it's caused by longer education. Or, again, not for most of the population. Almost no 15 year old can get a job that will pay the bills. There's some job requirement inflation going into that, but a lot of things are also just way more expensive than they used to be in real terms, like housing. In places that are cheaper to live, job opportunities of any kind may be limited.
And how do you get 25?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
5-15 years seems like an exaggeration. Graduating from high school is not hard for most people and is pretty important for getting a reasonable paying job (also being 18). After that, college is a 4 year endeavor, and very few people spend any time in school after that. Even finishing a bachelor's is something that only a little over a third of those 25-30 have done (although closer to 2/3 have at least "some college" which might indicate a lot of wasted time failing to graduate--this number is probably far too high given the costs of college). The drop in fertility is much more widespread than that.
There's definitely a portion of the population going through higher education, and then trying to get started in a career to pay off student loans/justify so much college, and then don't have a lot of time left in between that and being too old, especially if you have trouble getting pregnant because you only started looking for a partner at age 30. I know people in this situation. (Of course, I also know people in this situation who got married young and got divorced and remarried, nothing to do with college at all). But this group is too small to explain the bulk of the trend.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
So tenure doesn't exist in the UK? Or it only exists in non-government universities? Or was it later re-established?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
the sort of Catholic who wanted to become a preist out of sincere belief was often the sort of Catholic who was the least equipped to deal with cynical status seekers and social climbers, and accordingly the upper ranks of the clergy have come to be occupied by cynical status seekers and social climbers... acedemically-inclined types never really developed that reflexive wariness of bad actors that you see in other populations.
I agree. It's not entirely hopeless (I think the most recent 2 popes are true believers, for example) but it seems like bishops are very hit or miss.
I also wonder if this tendency of academics has any relation to the sorts of easily-abusable policies that they seem to often propose, like "believe anyone who claims to be a victim of a hate crime or sexual assault" or the general slowness on doing anything meaningful about the replication crisis, bordering on acting offended when anyone suggests that fraud and p-hacking are widespread. And seemingly unwavering trust that government bureaucracies will act as "benevolent dictators" in the interests of the people.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
What is the saying? The constitution is not a suicide pact?
Tenure can be very important, but that's because it protects researchers with unpopular but tenable findings or conclusions, or who present those same ideas to students to consider and discuss. It's important that we have the capability to test unpopular ideas rather than just throwing them out at first glance. If it's not actually accomplishing that goal--if universities are not actually bastions of free speech, and tenure isn't even a protection--then why do we have tenure at all?
Similarly, the government should not be telling universities who to hire, what they can teach, etc. But to not do so for a government-funded university is kind of ridiculous! I thought we pretended to care about democracy? Are blue-collar workers required to fund an institution which does not benefit them, and which largely despises them, and that institution has infinite protection from any recourse, regardless of what it is actually doing?
The general point is this: Free speech has to go both ways, otherwise it isn't free speech. Unfortunately, these bills seem practically designed to fail to accomplish much. Removing tenure will just drive all of the up and coming academics to other states or to private universities (including any who might have opposed cancel culture), while bureaucrats, students, and existing professors continue to prevent any actual freedom of speech. Overly broad vague laws are likely to fail a 1st amendment test. Instead, why not push on freedom of speech directly, using money? Tie university funding to adopting and enforcing policies that promote freedom of speech. Deduct funding for failing to protect speakers, treating student groups differently based on point of view, etc. Maybe even a cap on the money that can be spent on administrative staff, although that's probably vulnerable to Washington Monument Syndrome nonsense. The mentioned SB16, prohibiting professors from compelling a student to profess a belief, seems fine to me; a government funded professor teaching a class is acting as an arm of the state and should not be compelling speech.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Sex has a very strange history in America. Recall Albion's seed: A large portion of early elites came from cultures where adultery was strongly and seriously discouraged (the Quaker and Puritan ones). A large portion also came from the Borderers and Cavaliers, where (male) adultery was, maybe in theory considered wrong, but in practice actively encouraged, at least for a portion of the population. I think a lot of confusion about how sex is treated in America comes from failing to distinguish between these 2 groups.
(Also keep in mind, the Cavalier practice--where the male elite can take many sexual partners--is probably the most common throughout world history, at least in practice).
I was going to point to the lyrics of "Baby it's cold outside", a song from 1944, which (at least according to one interpretation) acknowledges the strict anti-sex norms of the time while also being a popular song about flouting them. But in trying to find a better description I found this article, which has some additional historical information: https://time.com/5739183/baby-its-cold-outside-consent/
The 1940s was not exactly a time of extreme chastity. In fact, World War II brought with it a wave of sexual activity. “People behaved in war in ways they wouldn’t behave in peace time,” says Beth Bailey, author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America and the Director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies at the University of Kansas. Many wartime couples “thought they might never see each other again” — and many married young, often ending up with the first person they’d lost their virginity to, because it was considered the right thing to do.
Within this environment, the contradictions were many. According to surveys by Alfred Kinsey, author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, one of the best-selling books in America in 1948, about half of men said they wanted to marry a virgin, more than 60% of college-educated men said they disapproved of premarital sex, and about 80% of college-educated women said they had moral objections to it — and yet, about half of women and more than half of men said they had had premarital sex.
But for women who were caught doing so, the consequences could be steep. Her personal reputation and her family’s reputation was on the line. Abortion was criminalized, and contraception was illegal in most states. Women who got pregnant could be kicked out of their homes and out of college; pregnant high-schoolers could be sent to homes for unwed mothers, forced to give their babies up for adoption, and to undergo a rehabilitation program before they could go back to school, according to Rachel Devlin, author of Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture and a professor of History at Rutgers University.
Without researching, this description makes it seem ripe for underreporting.
Family- or clan-based legal systems are viable (David Friedman's book describes at least one), but that still does involve a process. The part where the male family members went to the other family first is really really key. If they just went and did it, without giving the other family the ability to say "I don't think you're correct, this person was out of town last night" it just devolves into a cycle of retaliation.
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