erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
14hr ago
The women will tell you this themselves:
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/american-women-are-giving-up-on-marriage-54840971?
(sadly I can't find a non-paywalled version)
In Zhengzhou, a Foxconn worker told a researcher: “The groom’s family is expected to provide a car and a new apartment. That’s more than 200,000 yuan. Our average farming income is 5,000 yuan a year.” He paused. “Having two sons,” he said, “is considered bad luck. It means you have to provide two apartments.”
A quick Google search shows that 200,000 yuan is about 30,000 USD. I have more than that in my bank account. Great! So where do I go to find a Chinese bride? I can't, as far as I can tell. Or, rather, the process would be something ridiculous like learning Mandarin, applying for a visa, moving to China, courting local girls, and then paying for the car and apartment.
To understand why this is absurd, imagine if each time I wanted to buy a Chinese trinket, I had to move to China and haggle with the local shopkeeper in Cantonese on an open air market, instead of having merchants compete with each other to sell me Chinese gadgets every time I log onto Amazon or visit Walmart.
Libertarians economists write innumerable blog posts about the inefficiencies of the labor market caused by national borders, but much fewer posts about the inefficiencies in the dating market caused by the same. Though Bryan Caplan, at least, seems to have noticed.
Yes, I could just marry a Filipina, but Chinese women are more intelligent, and more beautiful.
The "blackpill" is that this factor doesn't get turned off if a woman gets married and has kids, so a guy is never fully safe from being supplanted if he loses status or a higher status male sets eyes on his woman. The high status males need to be reined in as well!
No, no, no! This is exactly wrong. You cannot solve this problem by placing additional restrictions on men. We have been trying that for decades. It doesn't work. High status males don't need to be reined in. Women need to be reined in. But this is so unthinkable, even your otherwise redpilled comment instinctively veers off from that conclusion.
A man needs to know, when he marries, that he owns his woman from that day forth, the same way a man needs to know, when he buys a car, that he owns that car from that day forth, and that he will be allowed to defend that car with deadly force if needed, and that the state and his community will back him up if Daquan tries to dispute the ownership of his car. And if he does not, do not be surprised when nobody buys a car. The arguments for secure rights over women are isomorphic to the arguments for secure rights over any other form of property.
For marriage to work, a man needs to be able to kill his wife when he finds her in bed with another man. Instead, she files for divorce and gets rewarded with cash and prizes.
From "Why We Need the Double Standard" by the Dread Jim:
Sperm is cheap, eggs are dear. Therefore we should guard eggs, not sperm. What this means is that it only needs a small number of badboys to render a very large number of women unmarriageable. Thus curtailing male badboy behavior is not going to succeed. And if we restrain prosocial well behaved upper class men from being badboys, the girls are going to get their kicks with Jeremy Meeks and Muslim rapeugees. Restraining male behavior results in upper class women fucking men low IQ men who live on towel folding jobs, petty burglary, drug dealing, and sponging off their numerous high IQ high socioeconomic status girlfriend, men whose careers are not going to be adversely affected by a few rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraint orders. The lawyerette does not fuck her fellow lawyers, she does not fuck judges, she fucks Jeremy Meeks. If we let upper class men be badboys, if we stopped afflicting judges with rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraining orders, at least she would be fucking judges.
The problem is that law and society strengthens shit tests against well behaved, respectable, affluent men, but has limited success in strengthening shit tests against Jeremy Meeks. She fucks men against whom rape charges, underage sex charges, child support orders, and domestic violence restraining orders have limited effect, because they can pass her shit tests, and you, even if you have a nicer car and a nicer hotel room than Jeremy Meeks, cannot. Plus the police and the courts just don’t seem to be pursuing rape charges against rapeugees, perhaps because of disparate impact.
All these laws have the effect of holding men responsible for female bad behavior. It is a lot more effective to hold women responsible for male bad behavior, because women, not men are the gate keepers to sex, romance, and reproduction. If you stop some men from behaving badly, women will just find men you cannot or dare not deter.
The problem is that we need to guard what is precious, guard eggs, not sperm. We need to restrain female sexual behavior, not male sexual behavior.
First, we need to change the social order so that the lawyerette fucks the judge instead of Jeremy Meeks. Then we can address the much harder problem of preventing her from fucking either one.
From the comments of "The Reactionary Program" by the same:
One pin can pop a hundred balloons. We have to control female sexuality, not male sexuality.
If you try to control male sexuality, that just means that uncontrollable anti social males father a large proportion of the children.
Eggs are precious, sperm is cheap. You guard what precious, not what is cheap.
And from the comments of "COVID Public Service Announcement", idem:
If a thirteen year old is permitted to wander where she pleases, she is going to be pleased to wander where someone can “rape” her. It is not the janitor that is the problem, it is the thirteen year old girl unsupervised. One pin can pop any number of baloons. We need balloon control, not pin control.
If you execute or castrate ninety-nine fuckboys, but miss fuckboy number one hundred, he gets to spoil a hundred nice girls.
Whereas if you lock up and marry off ninety-nine girls, but fail to control girl number one hundred, you get ninety-nine happily married wives and one fallen woman.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Yes, over here it's a vocab word; something you would expect to see in Shakespeare, like "wherefore" or "betwixt".
erwgv3g34
2d ago
I've never seen fortnight used like that.
What's wrong with bimonthly? Okay, it means something slightly different, but it's close enough for practical purposes.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
Replayability (or replay value) is not new; it's been used to judge games for decades. It makes a lot of sense if you are time-rich and money-poor, like a student; you buy a new title every few months and hope it keeps you entertained as long as possible. For full-time working adults, it makes a lot less sense.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Please bring back the—
No, we are not going to bring back the link roundup. That is not what this place is for.
...oh.
PAs probably fit the role designed better. Nurse practitioners have more variety in the standards of their training programs and can operate totally independently in many states which seems to be going to far to me.
It's worth noting that PAs do get a somewhat condensed version of the physician curriculum, but NPs do not actually learn regular medicine.
That sounds ridiculous and it is. It should also stress you out and if it does, good.
It doesn't. I would much rather have half a doctor than no doctor. Specially when I am not legally allowed to buy any useful medicine without a prescription.
The day when MDs and PAs are so numerous that they are working for minimum wage and you can find a clinic on every street corner is the day when I agree that NPs should be held to a higher standard. Until then, I am in favor of anything that increases the supply of healthcare.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
Yes, this would add four years of practice per doctor without lowering quality.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
According to Scott, the real bottleneck is residency slots, not med school. He himself spent a year without practicing because he could not find a residency after graduation. Residency is expensive for the hospital, so it depends on government subsidies, and the government doesn't subsidize enough residency slots to keep up with demand.
As I understand it, one common workaround has been to give more power to nurses and other assistants, while having the actual doctors simply look over and sign their names after the fact, effectively turning them into managers. For example, whenever I go to the local community health center, the person who sees me and prescribes my medicines is always an APRN or a PA, never an MD.
Of course, would be easier to abolish residency.
Back in my day, the big three of the Manosphere were Roissy, Roosh, and Rollo (Dalrock was a distant fourth). But those were bloggers, and it seems like the new meta is streaming? Yet, when I think of big manosphere streamers I think of Andrew Tate, Kevin Samuels, or Richard Cooper. I've never heard of the guys in this documentary.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
Social pressure was one of the ways women were coerced into marrying nice guys, along with religious indoctrination, the threat of economic privation, and physical force as a last resort. But you really need all of them.
You can't change girls. What you can do is force them to be with non-assholes. Which we did, for a very long time. Until we suddenly decided that we are too good for that. And now we are going extinct.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
What would it actually look like if we had quadrant flairs here? I'm guessing most would be Auth-Right with a significant minority of Lib-Right, a handful of Centrists, the occasional Purple Lib-Right, and virtually no Auth-Left or Lib-Left (sorry, Emily).
erwgv3g34
9d ago
The cancelled flights have been great for our hotel. People are getting stranded and getting desperate for rooms. Doubly so with spring break; we're selling them for $300 a pop, and we're still selling out! We haven't had this much business since Winter Storm Fern.
erwgv3g34
15d ago
From chapter 1 of Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck, "Inadequacy and Modesty":
I once wrote a report, “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics,” that called for an estimate of the economic growth rate in a fully developed country—that is, a country that is no longer able to improve productivity just by importing well-tested innovations. A footnote of the paper remarked that even though Japan was the country with the most advanced technology—e.g., their cellphones and virtual reality technology were five years ahead of the rest of the world’s—I wasn’t going to use Japan as my estimator for developed economic growth, because, as I saw it, Japan’s monetary policy was utterly deranged.
Roughly, Japan’s central bank wasn’t creating enough money. I won’t go into details here.
A friend of mine, and one of the most careful thinkers I know—let’s call him “John”—made a comment on my draft to this effect:
How do you claim to know this? I can think of plenty of other reasons why Japan could be in a slump: the country’s shrinking and aging population, its low female workplace participation, its high levels of product market regulation, etc. It looks like you’re venturing outside of your area of expertise to no good end.
“How do you claim to know this?” is a very reasonable question here. As John later elaborated, macroeconomics is an area where data sets tend to be thin and predictive performance tends to be poor. And John had previously observed me making contrarian claims where I’d turned out to be badly wrong, like endorsing Gary Taubes’ theories about the causes of the obesity epidemic. More recently, John won money off of me by betting that AI performance on certain metrics would improve faster than I expected; John has a good track record when it comes to spotting my mistakes.
It’s also easy to imagine reasons an observer might have been skeptical. I wasn’t making up my critique of Japan myself; I was reading other economists and deciding that I trusted the ones who were saying that the Bank of Japan was doing it wrong… … Yet one would expect the governing board of the Bank of Japan to be composed of experienced economists with specialized monetary expertise. How likely is it that any outsider would be able to spot an obvious flaw in their policy? How likely is it that someone who isn’t a professional economist (e.g., me) would be able to judge which economic critiques of the Bank of Japan were correct, or which critics were wise?
How likely is it that an entire country—one of the world’s most advanced countries—would forego trillions of dollars of real economic growth because their monetary controllers—not politicians, but appointees from the professional elite—were doing something so wrong that even a non-professional could tell? How likely is it that a non-professional could not just suspect that the Bank of Japan was doing something badly wrong, but be confident in that assessment?
Surely it would be more realistic to search for possible reasons why the Bank of Japan might not be as stupid as it seemed, as stupid as some econbloggers were claiming. Possibly Japan’s aging population made growth impossible. Possibly Japan’s massive outstanding government debt made even the slightest inflation too dangerous. Possibly we just aren’t thinking of the complicated reasoning going into the Bank of Japan’s decision.
Surely some humility is appropriate when criticizing the elite decision-makers governing the Bank of Japan. What if it’s you, and not the professional economists making these decisions, who have failed to grasp the relevant economic considerations?
I’ll refer to this genre of arguments as “modest epistemology.”
...
I once heard an Oxford effective altruism proponent crisply summarize what I take to be the central argument for this perspective: “You see that someone says X, which seems wrong, so you conclude their epistemic standards are bad. But they could just see that you say Y, which sounds wrong to them, and conclude your epistemic standards are bad.” On this line of thinking, you don’t get any information about who has better epistemic standards merely by observing that someone disagrees with you. After all, the other side observes just the same fact of disagreement.
Applying this argument form to the Bank of Japan example: I receive little or no evidence just from observing that the Bank of Japan says “X” when I believe “not X.” I also can’t be getting strong evidence from any object-level impression I might have that I am unusually competent. So did my priors imply that I and I alone ought to have been born with awesome powers of discernment? (Modest people have posed this exact question to me on more than one occasion.)
It should go without saying that this isn’t how I would explain my own reasoning. But if I reject arguments of the form, “We disagree, therefore I’m right and you’re wrong,” how can I claim to be correct on an economic question where I disagree with an institution as reputable as the Bank of Japan?
...
The converse side of the efficient-markets perspective would have said this about the Bank of Japan:
CONVENTIONAL CYNICAL ECONOMIST: So, Eliezer, you think you know better than the Bank of Japan and many other central banks around the world, do you?
ELIEZER: Yep. Or rather, by reading econblogs, I believe myself to have identified which econbloggers know better, like Scott Sumner.
C.C.E.: Even though literally trillions of dollars of real value are at stake?
ELIEZER: Yep.
C.C.E.: How do you make money off this special knowledge of yours?
ELIEZER: I can’t. The market also collectively knows that the Bank of Japan is pursuing a bad monetary policy and has priced Japanese equities accordingly. So even though I know the Bank of Japan’s policy will make Japanese equities perform badly, that fact is already priced in; I can’t expect to make money by short-selling Japanese equities.
C.C.E.: I see. So exactly who is it, on this theory of yours, that is being stupid and passing up a predictable payout?
ELIEZER: Nobody, of course! Only the Bank of Japan is allowed to control the trend line of the Japanese money supply, and the Bank of Japan’s governors are not paid any bonuses when the Japanese economy does better. They don’t get a million dollars in personal bonuses if the Japanese economy grows by a trillion dollars.
C.C.E.: So you can’t make any money off knowing better individually, and nobody who has the actual power and authority to fix the problem would gain a personal financial benefit from fixing it? Then we’re done! No anomalies here; this sounds like a perfectly normal state of affairs.
...
But the Bank of Japan is just one committee, and it’s not possible for anyone else to step up and make a billion dollars in the course of correcting their error. Even if you think you know exactly what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, you can’t make a profit on that. At least some hedge-fund managers also know what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, and the expected consequences are already priced into the market. Nor does this price movement fix the Bank of Japan’s mistaken behavior. So to the extent the Bank of Japan has poor incentives or some other systematic dysfunction, their mistake can persist. As a consequence, when I read some econbloggers who I’d seen being right about empirical predictions before saying that Japan was being grotesquely silly, and the economic logic seemed to me to check out, as best I could follow it, I wasn’t particularly reluctant to believe them. Standard economic theory, generalized beyond the markets to other facets of society, did not seem to me to predict that the Bank of Japan must act wisely for the good of Japan. It would be no surprise if they were competent, but also not much of a surprise if they were incompetent. And knowing this didn’t help me either—I couldn’t exploit the knowledge to make an excess profit myself—and this too wasn’t a coincidence.
This kind of thinking can get quite a bit more complicated than the foregoing paragraphs might suggest. We have to ask why the government of Japan didn’t put pressure on the Bank of Japan (answer: they did, but the Bank of Japan refused), and many other questions. You would need to consider a much larger model of the world, and bring in a lot more background theory, to be confident that you understood the overall situation with the Bank of Japan.
But even without that detailed analysis, in the epistemological background we have a completely different picture from the modest one. We have a picture of the world where it is perfectly plausible for an econblogger to write up a good analysis of what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, and for a sophisticated reader to reasonably agree that the analysis seems decisive, without a deep agonizing episode of Dunning-Kruger-inspired self-doubt playing any important role in the analysis.
When we critique a government, we don’t usually get to see what would actually happen if the government took our advice. But in this one case, less than a month after my exchange with John, the Bank of Japan—under the new leadership of Haruhiko Kuroda, and under unprecedented pressure from recently elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who included monetary policy in his campaign platform—embarked on an attempt to print huge amounts of money, with a stated goal of doubling the Japanese money supply.
Immediately after, Japan experienced real GDP growth of 2.3%, where the previous trend was for falling RGDP. Their economy was operating that far under capacity due to lack of money.
Now, on the modest view, this was the unfairest test imaginable. Out of all the times that I’ve ever suggested that a government’s policy is suboptimal, the rare time a government tries my preferred alternative will select the most mainstream, highest-conventional-prestige policies I happen to advocate, and those are the very policy proposals that modesty is least likely to disapprove of.
Indeed, if John had looked further into the issue, he would have found (as I found while writing this) that Nobel laureates had also criticized Japan’s monetary policy. He would have found that previous Japanese governments had also hinted to the Bank of Japan that they should print more money. The view from modesty looks at this state of affairs and says, “Hold up! You aren’t so specially blessed as your priors would have you believe; other academics already know what you know! Civilization isn’t so inadequate after all! This is how reasonable dissent from established institutions and experts operates in the real world: via opposition by other mainstream experts and institutions, not via the heroic effort of a lone economics blogger.”
However helpful or unhelpful such remarks may be for guarding against inflated pride, however, they don’t seem to refute (or even address) the central thesis of civilizational inadequacy, as I will define that term later. Roughly, the civilizational inadequacy thesis states that in situations where the central bank of a major developed democracy is carrying out a policy, and a number of highly regarded economists like Ben Bernanke have written papers about what that central bank is doing wrong, and there are widely accepted macroeconomic theories for understanding what that central bank is doing wrong, and the government of the country has tried to put pressure on the central bank to stop doing it wrong, and literally trillions of dollars in real wealth are at stake, then the overall competence of human civilization is such that we shouldn’t be surprised to find the professional economists at the Bank of Japan doing it wrong.
We shouldn’t even be surprised to find that a decision theorist without all that much background in economics can identify which econbloggers have correctly stated what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, or which simple improvements to their current policies would improve the situation.
erwgv3g34
17d ago
But would you rather be a poor person now or a billionaire 100 years ago?
CLEPs help (each exam costs $100 and is usually good for three credits, while a single credit at a state university like UF or FIU costs $200) but are seriously hampered by:
-
Limited selection. There are only 34 CLEP exams, most of them targeting introductory college courses like calculus (or, in some cases, high school courses like algebra).
-
Credit caps. Most schools will limit the number of credits you can earn by examination.
Using UF and FIU again as examples, you can see from their tables that CLEPs only award credits for courses at the 1000 (freshman) and 2000 (sophomore) levels, and are limited to a maximum of 45 credits. So, at most, you might be able to shave a year and a half from a four-year degree and fulfill your general education requirements by exam.
Still, I'd definitely recommend anyone doing a bachelor's degree save time and money by maxing out their exam credits, both CLEP and AP.
erwgv3g34
20d ago
It's not just the piece of paper: the school is also, in theory, certifying that you actually read the books, watched the lectures, and can answer questions about the material. Otherwise you get lots of "I slept through half the video and only have a facile understanding of a fraction of the material" cases. Good schools generally (in theory) require deeper understanding.
Does it cost $10,000 to give a test? Of course not. But giving such tests directly is illegal. And using the most general test that predicts your ability to learn the material before you even do so is most illegal of all.
erwgv3g34
20d ago
And maybe AI obviates the entire discussion, but the other fun bit is that AI is probably going to make college completely obsolete even if it never improves from its current state. You can now get instruction from the equivalent of the greatest professors in any given subject for like $20 a month.
This doesn't help. For decades you could already read books (e.g. The Feynman Lectures on Physics and watch lectures (e.g. Walter Lewin) created by the greatest professors in the world, at a fraction of the price of going to college. It made no difference, because what's valuable about university is the piece of paper, which is the only legal way to discriminate between job applicants.
A normalized horror.
#RepealThe21st
More options
Context Copy link