curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
The big issue is the co-occurence of the 1/6 riot and the fake electors thing and the attempt to get Mike Pence to not certify the election. I agree it wasn't a real risk to democracy, but if you believe the continuation of democracy is desirable, that should be concerning, when it looks like the leadership of a major party isn't invested in following election results (yes, this depends on a judgement that election fraud allegations are false, imo they are, and we've discussed that to death and they're just not very smart), and is willing to play along with admittedly feeble attempts at violence. (And if you believe democracy isn't desirable, the childishness of the half-assed attempt to overturn it shouldn't be exciting either)
curious_straight_ca
15d ago
There are definitely leftists who know things, they're not the biggest problem with democracy! A democracy off Matt Yglesias and Ezra Kleins would have different problems from today's democracy, and the biggest problem with democracy is all of the low-information median iq voters, half of whom are left wing.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
I don't think it's super surprising. People from different regions who speak the same language use some words and phrases in different frequencies, like the text equivalent of mild accents. And that's exactly the kind of thing it'd be easy for a LLM, trained on word frequencies from a ton of text, to pick up on. And then just make up the 'reasons'.
... I am arguing that, absent changes in the money supply, it reduces the nominal price of labor, but not the real price of labor?
Like, the population of the United States 3xed in the last 100 years. This was a huge increase in the supply of labor. But it did not reduce the 'real' price of labor, or the value of the goods and services that we consume, because labor creates those goods and we exchange our labor for the consumption of those goods, which balance out. And then the second-order effect on the nominal price is specialization, but that's the main effect for the real price. Again, absent concerns specific to characteristics of immigrants, like culture or genetic ones, which are reasonable. But your argument applies equally well to population growth via new births reducing wages ... and it ... doesn't do that.
I kind of want to say that a lot of people here have a blindspot in their reasoning for anti-immigration arguments, in the same way that people on the left have a blindspot in their reasoning for anti-racism arguments?
The rules apply to specific sectors! But they don't apply to the economy as a whole because, in a sense, every action everyone takes is labor. So adding more labor doesn't reduce the real "price of labor", because the whole thing we're doing is exchanging our labor for the labor of others. Adding more labor reduces the price of labor in dollars (assuming the amount of money in circulation isn't actively adjusted based on the amount of labor, which it does, but whatever), but that doesn't matter because you don't have a fixed amount of dollars, you have a fixed amount of time to spend doing labor! So reducing the price of labor in dollars reduces the amount of money you have, but you can buy more with it - nominal vs real wages. And then what matters from importing new immigrants is whether they make the economy overall more efficient, and in general specialization and comparative advantage means it does.
In general, all economic arguments against immigration in general, without respect to immigrant characteristics, such as the one you're making, are also arguments against pronatalist population growth. And population growth doesn't seem to have been bad for America's economy historically. Arguments that take into account immigrant characteristics work better!
curious_straight_ca
19d ago
No? With respect to the health of the economy, it's consumption whether the guy buys a $100 thingy and enjoys it himself, or pays $100 to have some thingy shipped to India. There might be other concerns not directly about the economy but OP was talking specifically about economy
curious_straight_ca
19d ago
The whole point of my comment is that overseas labor does not lower wages overall. It raises real wages overall, by the basic econ 101 logic of comparative advantage and specialization*. It lowers local wages in specific specific sectors where there's a concentration of foreign labor. But by that same logic a concentration of labor in CS is good for farmworkers.
i would question the assertion that writing code in python is a "high skilled" job.
The irony there was intentional - most H1Bs are significantly above average skill, but hardly top 1%.
*I mean in the relatively small amounts from the H1B program here. At larger amounts you could get 'their culture is bad / their iq is too low to work in our economic system' effects, but not at small amounts.
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
When the best ramen shops in Tokyo don't hike up their prices despite massive queues
... Is that good? Not hiking their prices doesn't eliminate the scarcity, so people still end up competing to pay in time waiting in queue, which just burns value in the form of time rather than exchanging it in the form of money. American companies reducing quality when they get big is very common and quite bad though.
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
I don't think it does! Think about it this way - say I make a dollar, and then send it to India. Either that dollar makes its way back to the US, or it doesn't. If it does make its way back to the US, then that's as good as the guy who earned it spending it. And if the dollar doesn't come back to the US, from the perspective of the 'real economy' I created value for others and asked for nothing in return, which is even better! (This is the reduction in the price level)
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors.
"The economy" is not just an abstraction. Benefitting the economy doesn't mean line going up, it means cheaper rice and McDonalds burgers and cars and phones and AI girlfriends for the American working class. It's interesting for the anti-immigration right, after years of saying how importing low-skill immigrants will take jobs away from and lower the wages of Americans who had the misfortune to be born without a high enough IQ to code in python, now objects to us importing Indians with exactly enough IQ to barely write python. The effect on wages depends on the occupation - in theory, allowing in a hundred thousand seasonal fruit pickers should make everyone better off overall, but would lower the wages of existing apple-pickers. But allowing in a hundred thousand javascript monkeys should, because everyone's better off overall, raise the wages of the native fruit pickers! And it's harder to feel sorry for the heritage American FAANG engineers or accountants who'll make 85k a year instead of 95k a year because of Indian competition than it is the 'working class'.
curious_straight_ca
21d ago
A more local government system would probably work better - where the person deciding knows the person being punished
Why do you think this would be better? Many local jurisdictions have corrupt or malicious cops, judges, etc, and every month or two there's a story about how the sheriff and judge of Corn Subsidy, KY had an agreement to put innocent people in jail for kickbacks from the jail or something. A large government lets you have checks against that, so the national media can investigate that and feds or state police or something can deal with it.
Actually, I think you're just wrong there - most people are judged by local judges, and by ... local juries of their peers. And they are given a lot of discretion on sentencing, which they are intended to and do use to give bastards more and down on their luck less time.
I agree that time poorly trades off against punishment, and think some innovation in punishment methods might be good, although I think it's not as easy as just bringing back old brutal punishments - I think most of them often cause permanent damage when done at the level necessary to substitute for months or more in prison.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
Why is this a stronger argument against the death penalty than it is against life imprisonment? Like, I'd rather be in prison for life than die, but it's a close thing, both are about as bad relative to continuing to live my life. Most of the harm is done by life in prison. There is possibility of exoneration for the wrongly convicted, but in practice this only happens in <10% of cases.
curious_straight_ca
28d ago
O3 can do research math, which is, like, one of the most g-loaded (ie ability to it selects strongly for very high intelligence among humans) activities that exists. I don't think the story that they aren't coming for all human activity holds up anymore.
curious_straight_ca
28d ago
I use o1 a bunch for coding, and it still gets things wrong a lot, I'd happily pay for something significantly better.
I dunno, government shutdowns due to ineffective governance and republican infighting sounds exactly like the first Trump administration. Springing this on congress a few days before the deadline when they thought they had everything worked out isn't a great way to introduce your administration, they hate working holidays. And it doesn't work as a show of power if you don't get your desired bill through, it just looks uncoordinated and capricious.
curious_straight_ca
30d ago
Sounds like they shouldn't have a journal controlled by a large corporation as their field's schelling point! They should start their own journal with the old editors. What exactly does Elsevier control that matters, anyway? A name? The only thing would be some amount of prestige you can show to academia as a whole, or the university that employs you. Even then, from wikipedia it "is published by Elsevier and is the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research", so maybe the Society can just endorse the new journal.
curious_straight_ca
30d ago
Enforcement changes habits. Right now 'everyone' does it, so everyone does it. If 'everyone' stopped doing it, it'd feel weird to do it, and many fewer people would do it, and enforcement costs go down. It's like smoking, or littering, or drunk driving. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-war-on-drunk-driving-was-won/
Two underappreciated ideas stick out from this experience. First, deterrence works: incentives matter to offenders much more than many scholars found initially plausible. Second, the long-run impact that successful criminal justice interventions have is not primarily in rehabilitation, incapacitation, or even deterrence, but in altering the social norms around acceptable behavior.
This proves too much! There have been at various points in the past much better ways and much worse ways to fund science than we have today, there are government bureaucracies outside and within the US government that are much more competent than the average in the US, and much less. I'm proposing we go for 'more'.
Academia was once run by people who were good at detecting bullshit. And then people got free money for producing garbage that follows the theme set by the State.
Private institutions that exist today do not produce better work than public ones. The problem is the people and the culture. Free money isn't helping, but the free money isn't just coming from the state, it's coming from all of the people who believe in the system. With zero government funding, superrich people who went to top unis and less-rich people who go to less-top unis would still donate to colleges, and they'd still make money on students. And the academic output would still be as bad as the things those academics post on twitter. There are plenty of people who are the same type of person as those academics, and are immersed in the same culture, but have 'normal jobs', and they say the same things as the academics, because the problem is the people and culture.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Disagree. You can't precisely measure quality, but smart generalists can separate bad articles like "How Young People Portrayed Their Experiences in Therapeutic Residential Care in Portugal: A Mixed Methods Study" and "Missandei deserves better": A case study on loving Blackness through critical fan fiction" from the kinds of humanities academic work you might want published. One can tell the difference between 'this might be valuable' and 'this definitely isn't'. The problem is the people funding this stuff aren't doing that.
Social sciences are, in principle, obviously worth funding. Philosophy (Nietzsche was actually a professor of philology), archeology, digging texts out of archives and writing history rank the highest for me, but there's valuable work in a lot of fields. A lot of the best work in economics has directly affected the way we organize the economy and the way businesses do business.
90% of publicly funded 'social science' is not that. It's hundreds of millions of words of repetitive, uninspired analysis of history or literature, like the work of that Ally Louks who blew up on twitter. The thing wrong with her, contra all of RW twitter, isn't that she's too woke or too communist or anything. Michel Foucault was woke for his time, but is obviously worth reading, and thousands of leftist academics have written things worth reading across many different fields. Her work, and 90% of modern humanities academic work, just isn't. And not in the "only 10 experts could appreciate or even understand it" sense, like in research math, but in the sense that there's no interesting content in it at all. There are a hundred thousand academics at various colleges and universities who either aren't smart enough or aren't independent-minded enough to develop good taste about what to research, and are paid (although not paid very much) to write ... really anything, so long as it's topical and isn't too embarassing, and can get published in a junk journal or turned into a book chapter or something.
Now the most valuable work is very valuable, and if you had to choose all or nothing (which you don't!), the best history and economics is still worth funding the garbage. (The money isn't counterfactually going to whatever you think is valuable, it's probably going to more welfare.) Or that's what I'd say in America, but New Zealand probably has a lot less than 5% of the global top 5%, so whatever.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Disagree, with an insurance-related CEO one can immediately think "that guy's responsible for denying care to thousands of people, literally killing them", and that goes much farther to intuitively justify it than "the CEO of Ford ... didn't pay workers enough? Polluted?". Maybe from very committed anticapitalists it would, but the average person on reddit or twitter isn't one
IMO tacky can also just mean art that is bad, or art that's attempting to imitate good art while missing the point. I think there are objective (at least with respect to human perception and nature as it actually exists) qualities that this has that this doesn't, without reference to status. If I saw someone express fondness for the latter painting I would think less of their taste and them a small amount, but as a practical assessment of their judgement. That something is often misused doesn't mean the original concept isn't there. The same goes for McMansions - in a well architected house the different pieces fit together nicely, and in a McMansion the individual pieces are exaggerated and they don't fit together at all, and it just doesn't work, in a way that is IMO fairly universal in the way humans perceive architecture.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Nobody I know who has children thinks the suffering of pregnancy or childbirth is on the same order of magnitude as the benefits of having children
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
My For You has always been fine, 95% of it is just people i follow already. It's a bit too consistent tbh. I imagine this is because I mostly use Following, so the algorithm's just learned I like that.
Because EOs are just not that powerful of a tool. They don't override laws, and there are a lot of laws constraining agencies.
The other stuff doesn't have much to do with democracy? It's bad policy.
If we assume the election fraud claims are false, Trump attempting to invalidate an election against him is worse than that other stuff? Democracy is a tradition, of peaceful transfer of power every so many years, and Trump tried to break it!
(It is reasonable to not like democracy. It did, after all, give us Trump twice, punctuated by someone too old.)
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