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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   38610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Not connected to any current culture war, but this dead bird thread is nevertheless interesting.

What is missing from nearly all HBDIQ discourse is how modern society is one big incomprehensible Kafkaesque prison for the left part of bell curve. Dealing with omnipresent bureaucracy and jumping through constantly changing hoops is hard for any of us here, who mostly can claim the title of elite human capital.

Now try to put yourself in the shoes of high school dropout, and imagine to deal with car or health insurance (or health care in general) or other things you need to live. And it is getting worse and worse, with no end in sight.

Idk I agree with the general point but #AdjusterTok is sampling the bottom percentiles of insurance conversations, which are already going to be selected for appearing dumb. Also you're seeing the ones that get 500k views which is, you know, more selection. I think it's a mistake to build intuition for the behavior of a 33rd percentile human based on that!

This is why I always get the bare minimum insurance legally possible. Self-insuring is much simpler; I understand that I am on the hook for anything other than $10,000 worth of damage to other people's stuff, and act accordingly. If their insurance covers me when they total my car, great; if not, or if I am the one that crashes my car, I'll just have to buy another car. It helps that I have never owned a new or expensive car; all my cars have been 10+ years old and worth only a few thousands of dollars on the used market.

But most people are constitutionally incapable of saving money for some reason, so this is not an actionable plan for them.

Similarly, when my job offered me a bunch of different health insurance tiers, I deliberately picked the ones that would deduct the least from my paycheck, on the idea that I probably wouldn't be able to navigate the insurance bureaucracy anyway (I was right; my contract was not renewed, and I barely got a couple of primary visits before my benefits lapsed). I am aware of my own limitations and deliberately try to opt out of interacting with complicated systems whenever possible.

Which is also one of the reasons I have a prepaid phone instead of a monthly phone contract. It's so simple; account balance is near zero or time is expiring means I need to buy another card, same as I buy gas when the tank is empty. What could be simpler than that?

I don't think this makes sense. Good insurance will cover large infrequent expenses, insurance companies have expertise and economies of scale in getting things done, and good health insurance gets you better care than trying to pay your way through the complex healthcare system yourself unless you're quite rich I think

From the perspective of most people, insurance is just another name by which someone else should pay for you.

But most people are constitutionally incapable of saving money for some reason, so this is not an actionable plan for them.

It always cracks me up when five-figure-earning somewhat or very online Westerners complain about things being too expensive when they just must live in high cost of living areas. That they must have furbabies who they spend thousands on each annually. Single mothers complaining about how it’s all so difficult and expensive, especially since men are too shitty to Step-Up.

If only there was some other option than to live in high cost of living areas if you don’t make much money and/or are low in human capital, some way to not have become a pet-owner or single mother…

There’s also the men who complain how expensive vidya is. The women who complain about how expensive makeup, nails, and regular new clothes are (expenses that the patriarchy forces upon them and that the government or someone else should pay for, or at least subsidize, of course).

Can't say I've ever heard/seen a man claim vidya ought to be subsidized. Or women asking for makeup and nail salons to be subsidized for that matter, though I've seen that patriarchy argument. The clothes thing is hilarious because women's clothes are so much cheaper than men's clothes for the same purpose, especially professional clothes, but they rarely talk about that.

I was joking about women wanting the government to pay for those things, but only partially. The "someone else" part was somewhat less joking.

There are quite a few women in spaces like /r/aitah who will argue that a husband/boyfriend WBTA if he doesn't agree with his wife/girlfriend's assertion that her makeup, nails, and clothes should be considered a valid part of the household budget like food, rent/mortgage, and utilities, especially if they each have equal-sized "fun" accounts alongside their household account. Equal pay for equal work isn't fair, because it's just so much more expensive being a woman if she has to pay for her own essential upkeep. A father WBTA if he's not as enthusiastic about paying for his teenage or young adult daughter's make-up and thotty outfits as he is for his teenage or young adult son's sports equipment :jordan_peterson_daughter_question.mp4:

The payment from someone else need not be direct/explicit. I recall a Lived Experience of mine reading an AskaManager letter or comment thread chain where the writer was complaining that her coworker was treating nail (or lash, I forget which, maybe it was both) appointments like medical ones, and would guiltlessly ditch work for hours for her appointments and then return like nothing happened.

There were many sympathetic comments for both the coworker and the OP; the coworker being the victim in having no choice but to use the workday for her nail/lash appointments, and the OP for having to cover for her (in the sense that women have always been the primary victims of women's vanity appointments). I doubt the comments would had been as sympathetic if OP was male (why do you care so much? Her appointments are none of your business, just be a decent person and cover for your coworker), or if the coworker was a man ditching work to play vidya for a few hours.

And thus, in the absence of "someone else," why not the government to fill the gap?

It is kind of a Chadette move to ditch work for your vanity appointments, though. "Leaving for my appointment now, I'll be back when I'm back, be thankful I'm deigning to let you plebs cover for me 💅"

I mean, I've seen feminists ranting about the pink tax- how much more women's hygiene costs. This is usually illustrated with how much more pink razors cost than mens'(reality unisex) razors, despite no functional difference. Never does it seem to occur to them that if there's really no functional difference(I don't know enough about women's razors to say if this is true) just treating the cheapest razor option as unisex is their best option. One suspects that they don't actually care.

There are a substantial number of women who just want you to know how much of the extra mile society(=women) expects from them.

In many countries feminists complain that tampons and pads are taxed at the regular (which is higher) VAT rate, instead of the special (which is lower) one, usually reserved for food and beverages. That toilet paper is also highly taxed doesn't stop their campaign.

When Texas repealed the sales tax on tampons(and sales tax on tampons is at least an actionable complaint, even if reasonable people can disagree with it, unlike most of the 'pink tax' discourse) it also repealed it on diapers, which is an interesting example of consistency on the issue- and not one demanded by feminists.

From the perspective of most people, insurance is just another name by which someone else should pay for you.

Sort of, yes? Back in the day, people had 'informal insurance' from community. If one person's barn burned down, lots of folks in their community would come help them rebuild it, "spending" at least their time to pay for someone else's loss. They community helped, because they thought that "someone else" should "pay" for it, and they were all the "someone else". Financialized insurance formalizes this and abstracts it away from individuals having to spend their own personal time to help someone else who rolled snake eyes, chipping in by a small monetary amount, in exchange for the belief that they will in turn receive the same help if they roll snake eyes.

A big part of the issue is that this formalization and separation from the community aspect, combined with terrible beliefs about redistributive government, caused folks to realize that this is yet another area where if they just control the powers of government, they can free ride and force others to pay for them while giving nothing in return.

High paying jobs are in high cost areas. If you want to participate in this narrow part of the economy (and not spend half your day in a ridiculous commute) you have to shoulder some serious burden.

On top of it, large swathes of these high cost areas are populated by the urban underclasses that decreases your quality of life massively. So avoiding them is another big cost increasing factor.

The five figures I mentioned are not high paying jobs, though.

Total compensation in front office tech and finance jobs is easily well into the six figures for entry-level roles after undergrad, and in many cases (maybe most nowadays) six figures just on salary alone.

Fair, I applied the European salary scale in my head and misjudged the class of people you are targeting. High 5 figure salary easily gets you into 2-3% income percentile or so in most of Western Europe and is only attainable in very expensive cities.

There’s also the men who complain how expensive vidya is.

Skill issue. I have a whole-ass algorithm for getting games on the cheap using Steam. Namely, you may add any game you want to your wishlist. However, you may only BUY the game if the following conditions are met:

  1. The game must be on sale. Steam does so many sales that there is no point to ever buying a game at full price.
  2. The game must be at its lowest price ever. If it was that price once, it will be that price again. You can check a game's lowest price on SteamDB.
  3. The game must be at least 5 years old. This ensures that a game has had time to be patched, had all the DLC released, gone down in price, etc.
  4. The game must be under $19.99. Anything more than that means it's still too expensive.

By following this simple algorithm, you can usually get games that retailed for $50-$60 brand new a decade or two ago for $5 or less.

A note on bundles: Only buy bundles if every single game on the bundle follows this list. Otherwise, the bundle discount will be more than outweighed by the extra price you will pay on the non-compliant items.

There are a few exceptions for #2 -- there is a small genre of indie games what have never returned to their pre-release pricing, with Minecraft and Factorio being the most famous -- but in turn these are high-variance choices, and many in that genre flop badly. Similarly, while Humble Bundle has gone pretty far downhill recently, you can ocassionally find times where the minimum price on a bundle is under the historical sales price for just a couple of the games.

((Although the latter usually means a lot of the games are trash: cfe the current Astragon bundle, which is technically a price savings if you're just gonna play Bus and Construction simulator... but you're not.))

So you still buy single-player games?

Unfortunately this system has a problem...

Phone contracts specifically, I can't believe people pay $50-100 a month, and don't understand what benefits they could be getting from it.

Usually the newest iPhone. They’re expensive, so only paying 20-30 extra over 2 years generally works well for people, especially those who can’t afford 1000 dollars up front or don’t want to pay the whole shot unless they irreparably break it.

If you’re careful with your stuff this is a non-issue but those people tend more often to have 1000 dollars laying around.

Most credit cards have a 6 or even 12-month zero-interest financing period. Amazon store cards have this.

I sold carrier phones for years. I'm on Mint and buy my phone outright and pay it off over 6 to 12 months, usually buying a ~$500 A-series pixel or Oneplus something-or-other. This is what I tell other people to do. Just about no one does. Instead they buy carrier phones.

buying a ~$500 A-series pixel or Oneplus something-or-other

Or a 400-dollar iPhone SE, which is the phone I recommend to everyone either unwilling or unable to install ad blocking on Android (with a side of "I could do this, but I refuse to be tech support for this person") because iOS is a better experience than Android is under those conditions and the hardware is powerful enough that, unlike Android devices, you'll actually get 7 years out of it.

It honestly shocks me that particular phone isn't what most consumers who want iOS want, but then again, sometimes you have to know enough to ask for it (and the pricing on the latest models, which aren't actually any better than the SE outside of the camera and screen size, is significantly more than the SE making consumers think there's a massive difference between the two even though there really isn't).

You cannot begin to fathom my disdain for apple products. It's a personality-type thing, getting an iPhone would be...caving in. I prefer to have something different from what most people have. Even the Pixel is becoming a smidge too mainstream for me.

Also, I take pictures of wildlife I run into, including extreme close-ups of bugs. Camera matters to me. Also, I don't think it uses USB-C yet. Otherwise I agree with you regarding the SE, but the SE doesn't convey wealth/conformity, so of course most people don't buy it.

Huh, is that only the prime visa, or their regular one? I've been really confused ever since they sent me an updated "prime" card just because I did the 1-month prime trial.

Even knowing it's free money I never took advantage of 0% cards until recently, but it's amazing. I have $5k tools that paid for themselves long before I had to pay for them.

The Amazon Visa (from Chase) offers zero-interest financing for six months on Amazon purchases of at least 50 dollars, and for 12 months on Amazon purchases of at least 250 dollars. (There used to be an 18-month, 500-dollar offer as well, but it seems to have been discontinued.) This isn't quite free money: if you take a financing offer, you do not get the 3-percent cash back (5-percent with Prime) that you would get normally.

The Amazon Visa is not the same as the Amazon Store Card (from Synchrony) and the Amazon Secured Card (ditto). The Store Card and Secured Card offer zero-interest financing for six months on Amazon purchases of at least 50 dollars, for 12 months on Amazon purchases of at least 600 dollars, and for 24 months on "select purchases" at Amazon. The same caveat regarding lost cash back applies to the Store Card.

All information presented above is from this page (except for the 18-month parenthetical, which is from personal experience).

Yeah, I saw the difference between the store cards and the chase visa, but my confusion was with the prime vs non-prime chase card. The only advertised difference is the 5% vs 3% cash back, but that's entirely a function of the prime membership rather than the card itself.

Was very confused why they sent me a new (prime) card in the mail two weeks after my prime trial expired.

I understand that I am on the hook for anything other than $10,000 worth of damage to other people's stuff, and act accordingly.

Even that little insurance shouldn’t be necessary. If I crash into your brand new Porsche, me or my insurance should only have to repay you the price of a used kia – else you owning expensive shit is an externality I have to pay for.

How far does this logic extend? Does you accidentally burning down my """needlessly""" expensive home count as me owning expensive things as an externality foisted onto you? The existence of any other not-minimum-viable-product that I own?

It costs me 350 euros per year to insure other people’s cars, but only 35 euros per year to insure their houses and everything else. So the likelihood of me destroying their house is multiple orders of magnitude lower.

But strictly speaking, yes, any accidental destruction should only be compensated at used discount prices. If you have a working class friend and you let him borrow your luxury watch and he loses it you can’t expect him to repay you full price. But again, insuring this is cheap so I’m not going to die on that hill and claim classist oppression on the basis of 35 euros.

People don't typically burn down other people's houses, accidentally or otherwise. People DO get into car accidents every few years. There's a difference.

Sure. But as a matter of principle, if someone ruins my expensive stuff, should they make me whole or instead give me the minimum viable product as recompense?

I would really prefer to be made whole and am unsympathetic to arguments about me having expensive things being a negative externality on everyone else.

The world is irreducibly complex. The complexity of managing the health and economic assets of a modern human is enormous. You cannot make it go away, you can only allocate it.,

There exactly two ways to manage it. Either you manage your own complexity, or some other person is allowed to manage your complexity for you.

In the first case, those below the cognitive or agentic thresholds necessary to manage the complexity will fail. Every year the world becomes more complex, and more and more of the population will find themselves, fat, sick, and in debt.

In the second case, no matter how you set them up, the systems for managing other people will eventually be populated by busybodies who enjoy managing other people's lives. Health care will be rationed by race according to the whims of a she/her in a mask.

Not all complexity is irreducible. In fact, most of it isn't.

Take, for example, the government program of HSA's (Health Savings Accounts). These are meant to help people save for medical expenses. But, since they have an annoying amount of complexity and paperwork, they are essentially impossible for stupid people to use. Smart people, on the other hand, use them for a completely different purpose entirely: to accumulate tax free wealth.

None of this had to exist. What if, instead of coming up with HSAs, the government simply... didn't.

Stupid people get benefits from just about every governmental system that has been erected. And you are harping on one of the few that doesn't help them because they can't "this one trick" it? HSAs solve a problem caused by the government, that being health insurance mandates. Smart people use them to minimize the DWL caused by them.

I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that systems too complicated for stupid people are deeply unfair, even if I personally have no trouble understanding and even benefitting from these systems. When we look at something like credit cards, smart people can gain an edge in convenience and even a net profit from gaming the points systems. People in the middle with sufficient executive function will get the convenience benefit without too much trouble. People that either don't really understand what credit is, don't understand how interest works, or lack impulse control will purchase things they can't afford, accumulate more debt with compounding interest, and ruin their lives. In my previous, more callous thinking, I basically thought, "well, tough shit for them, it's not that hard to understand and they should just do better". Observing people's behavior, that's just not true. No matter what they do, they're not capable of understanding how compounding interests works, even if they grasp it during a conversation, that's going to be right out within a couple days.

This also extends to student loans. While I still have antipathy for people that absolutely can grasp what they're signing, it's just obvious that many people really don't understand what they're signing up for and don't understand the basics of financing. We can see people posting stories about how shocked they are that they've already paid the amount they owe, but the principal is still the same. People think "cancellation" is something that can be done without any impact on the other side of the ledger; they have no idea that there even is a ledger, they literally believe that the only reason their debt isn't cancelled is because some people are just mean and hate them.

Idk I think these are things that many of these people (not the bottom percentile people we see in AdjusterTok, but say the 25th-40th percentiles) would be able to understand if they spent a lot of time just grinding basic examples and thinking through it, over and over, instead of spending that time trying to understand sports or TV or relationship drama. Relatively dumb people can learn to perform simple jobs that'd be outside their capability to do on the fly by just repeating the task over and over. Not to suggest that usual claims of "it's our fault for not teaching this in schools" aren't stupid, just having an extra financial literacy class isn't enough, but I don't think it's a totally intractable problem even without coercion.

There are a number of ways to solve this sort of problem. The only ones within the Overton window is terrible, however -- systems can be arbitrarily complicated, but smart people pay other smart people to help the stupid people navigate them, and the stupid people are let off the hook if they screw up anyway. This means the world becomes arbitrarily difficult for intelligent people while the stupid people (and smart people who can manage to also get let off the hook) get all the benefits for free.

The idea of making all systems simple enough for stupid people just isn't viable; you can't run a modern economy based on -1SD intelligence (and if you try to de-modernize enough that you can, the results will be mass starvation). As @satirizedoor says, the complexity is irreducible.

The idea of a tiered society where stupid people just don't get certain benefits -- e.g. if you're too dumb to understand an amortization schedule, you don't get to have a mortgage -- is pretty much anathema. If you have something like that, then as soon as there's a little crying about inequality, we get subsidization programs to make it go away. Or sometimes they take away the thing for non-stupid people too. The idea of letting stupid people suffer the consequences is also anathema.

I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that systems too complicated for stupid people are deeply unfair, even if I personally have no trouble understanding and even benefitting from these systems.

While I understand the general sentiment, the OP's thread is about car insurance, and quite frankly, the people who don't understand car insurance should not be given sympathy, they should have their licenses pulled. Not only are these people, statistically, terrible drivers, but by not having/not having enough insurance they just are a driving externality on the road. The solution isn't to make insurance easier to understand (its already incredibly easy), the solution is to put it on the drivers exam and fail people over and over and over until they learn. Or learn that they can't learn.

For car insurance, there's also a third option- make people buy a government decided insurance package, maybe allow opt out to buy different insurance after passing a test or financial threshold.

This would turn into a boondoggle immediately, just like federal flood insurance is.

Well the problem is that Americans built a country where the vast majority of adults simply cannot live and work without a personal car.

That was caused by the same people who don't understand insurance moving to cities.

Nah, other countries with similar diversity still have much more widespread public transport.

Because they can't afford cars.

And don't have the space for suburbs.

There's a solution to that, fortunately. Personal cars. Would work even better if it weren't for New Urbanists, Traffic Calmers, Net Zero, and other anti-car types trying to mess things up.

And what of the small but substantial minority of people who are too stupid, high time preference, incompetent, poorly-sighted or irresponsible to drive?

They can go somewhere they can take public transit, and be outside that "vast majority".

‘Let them move to Manhattan’

W. C. Fields may shudder, but there's also Philadelphia.

We can see people posting stories about how shocked they are that they've already paid the amount they owe, but the principal is still the same.

Also commonly seen in stories from first time home buyers. They do not understand amortization (i.e. the majority of your payments are going to interest for the first 10 or 20 years of your loan), they do not understand escrow (i.e., homeowner's insurance and property taxes will increase, therefore your monthly payment will increase), and gods help them if they got an ARM.

The best solution is to make it very easy to declare bankruptcy to discharge loans, maybe as simple as standing up and yelling "I declare bankruptcy." It would, of course, destroy the credit card and student (any unsecured, really) loan markets as they exist now, but it shifts the risk to people who actually have the capacity to evaluate it. Keeping people in perpetual debt who don't have the intellectual capacity to understand interest is kind of obscene.

This also extends to student loans. While I still have antipathy for people that absolutely can grasp what they're signing, it's just obvious that many people really don't understand what they're signing up for and don't understand the basics of financing.

I've been trying to help someone figure out their student loan situation through the latest round of presidential office attempts to put various plans in place, and it just comes across as gambling at this point. We're both about as smart as the average non-technical collage graduate. First a bunch of people were saying to consolidate, because (reasons that I found rather obscure having to do with an executive order?). So they did that, but then the numbers fluctuated wildly for a while, and they got a bill for more than they've ever owed in their life. So they tried submitting some paperwork, which was ignored for a few weeks. Then they tried calling, and the person said they would put it on hold while the paperwork was processed, which might take three months or so, they weren't really sure. Meanwhile, there seems to be a bunch of law fare going on between the president's office and (states? banks? state created financial entities?). It doesn't seem so much like people are stupid, as that the system is wildly unstable, leading to a student loan decisions as gambling situation.

I have a general rule that I do not make big changes regarding financial situations or anything else that are predicated on assumptions about future political or legal actions.

For example, there is a fairly common strategy of converting IRAs and 401ks which are pretax (meaning that you have not yet paid taxes on them but will need to do so upon withdrawal) into Roth IRAs and 401ks (which will be tax-free upon withdrawal). To do this you need to pay taxes today to attempt to save taxes in the future; as such it is basically a bet on your tax rate today vs. at retirement. However the hidden assumption is that Roth vehicles will never be taxed, and I put the odds of that at much lower than 100%. We're going to need to get that UBI money from someone.

That being said I didn't think I'd ever sniff Social Security and I now have <20 years max left (pending changes to retirement age). But I have found that eking out small +EV in life tends to be dwarfed by variance. At the poker table sure, but not when dealing with the vicissitudes of fate.

I've always felt similar about Australia's Superannuation system. There's definitely ways of deriving a tax advantage, but as a 29 year old now I'm not super confident in the withdrawal ages and sanctity of the product for the next half-century.

While I still have antipathy for people that absolutely can grasp what they're signing, it's just obvious that many people really don't understand what they're signing up for and don't understand the basics of financing.

I'm sure it could never work. But I've thought for some time that the just action for some fraction of student loans would be to transfer the obligations from the student to the university, for any student who filed for financial aid and was required to take remedial sub-"college" level algebra by the university that they were enrolled in. Like the university as an organization knew (1) that person has no way of understanding exponential functions and therefor compounding interest (2) would need to undertake a compounding loan in order to pay for the tuition. If you know a person does not have the capacity to understand the considerations of a contract, I find it highly unethical to enter into such a contract with them. It also seems preposterous to be charging US university level tuition for material that's available from a $2.50 workbook at your local grocery store checkout. I've laterally seen students learning to reduce fractions in a top 50 usnews ranked university.

I’ve long held the conspiracy theory that ‘cancellation’ discourse at the level of elected officials is mostly just fighting about who has to eat the cost of these bad loans- if they don’t get paid back, someone has to.

This is, quite honestly, probably one of the biggest pluses of a national governmental health insurance system. The left-halvers, whatever the situation, can contact a health centre and hope to get whatever their problem is fixed without dealing with an opaque jungle of insurance stuff (and in my experience even if you have private supplemental insurance it's quite easy compared to what Americans seem to go through in these horror stories). Not only good for the left-halvers themselves, also good for the workers or whoever it is that has to be in charge of explaining this stuff in a more complicated system.

It’s worth noting that a not-insignificant amount of this bullshit is a direct response to right-halvers that hit ‘defect’. In a system like most of Europe, where the bill is guaranteed to be paid, you don’t have to create end user bullshit to make it harder for right halvers to skip out on the bill.

When I was getting my documents in order to get ready for emigration, I had to spend quite some time at the MFC, which is like the DMV, but for all government services in Russia. And like the DMV, its customers are a representative sample of the general population.

We all live in fucking bubbles. We talk to smart people at work, we talk to smart people online. People that pump our gas and ring up our groceries talk to us through what is basically a very restrictive API and recognizing that is one of the biggest magic tricks. The ladies at the MFC have to talk to everyone and try to solve their problem.

From what I've seen at the MFC, everything in these two threads is 100% true. People on the wrong side of the curve are desperate and confused and can't build a working mental model of, say, who has to grant the power of attorney to who and why the public notary has to be involved.

This is why I firmly believe some degrees of low level corruption (ie just paying a little bit or invoking a relation to work around complex dysfunctional systems) is a massive public and political good.

Without this option, modern societies fall prey very easily to financial engineering or bureaucratic management types who are leeches and will run wild imposing low intelligence taxes on the society for their own benefit or satisfaction.

At some point I hope to make an effortpost about innumeracy, and how people who work with numbers are grossly overestimating the ability of the average person. This old Unz post really stuck with me. The example Level 3 question is literally read a table and pick the smallest number in the appropriate row. Back in 2012 less than half of 15-16 year olds in the USA were able to answer a Level 3 question correctly. I'm a numbers guy, and I really struggle to imagine the perspective of someone unable to do that. And that's half the American population (perhaps a little less, as some people could learn with age)!

wanyeburkett's thread you linked makes a similar/related point. patio11 has some good insights. There's also a good discussion to be had about whether giving these innumerate people an LLM that can understand numbers and complex processes for them is good solution or if that would just encourage more complexity.

While I find Patrick Mackenzie’s writing very insightful sometimes, he also really makes me question if I am as competent in English as I think so. Sometimes I just really can’t parse the guys sentences

The example Level 3 question is literally read a table and pick the smallest number in the appropriate row. Back in 2012 less than half of 15-16 year olds in the USA were able to answer a Level 3 question correctly.

I straight up don't believe the figures for the number of people correctly solving those PISA questions given by that Unz post. If half of US adults didn't agree on which numbers were bigger than others I think there'd be much bigger societal problems than the ones America currently has to deal with.

I have no opinion whether Anatoly Karlin is correct or not, but what sort of problems are you imagining?

How about multiple levels of Verizon customer support not being able to tell the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents? The discussion somehow reminded me of this ancient saga: https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html

Decimals upend people's naïve understanding that "more digits equals bigger number". My 6 year old still gets that confused sometimes.

That's actually a really helpful perspective for me. Funny enough, I had the following conversation with my 6 year old this morning:

Son: I like your new tattoo. Kids like tattoos.
Me: Well this is a permanent tattoo. You can only get temporary tattoos until you're 18.
Son: I'll do that! Will you drive me?
Me: When you're 18, you can drive yourself.
Son: I could drive?
Me: Yes, but you'll need your own car, and they're expensive.
Son: How much does a car cost?
Me: $10,000. You'll have to save up!
Son: I'm going to count my money now. gets his cash box where he keeps his allowance, and spends the next 5 minutes counting out the $45 he has in there

He has no concept of the difference in scale between the $10,000 and the $45 he has. He was counting it, and if he got to $10,000 then he would get a car. He didn't this time, so he needs to keep saving. I find his focus, sincerity, and innocence sweet for a 6 year old. I'd find that level of numeracy terrifying in a 16 year old, but apparently that's where half of all Americans are. "My 6 year old's understanding of numbers" is a theory of mind I can grasp.

That story and analogy reminds me of something a coworker of mine once said while we were talking about some random recent news about a lottery winner who went bankrupt. His theory was that, for the lottery winner in question, the millions of dollars she got was equivalent to infinite money. She had no sense that even 7 or 8 figures can disappear, and disappear quickly if you throw around 6 and 7 figures here and there with abandon, because in her mind, no amount of spending could affect the infinite money that she had. It didn't occur to me at the time that that's similar to how a 6 year old might think of numbers and money, but it does sound about right. And I'd expect more people who think like this to be common in the population of regular lottery ticket buyers.

First Law of Munchkinism: Any finite number can be reduced to zero.

I work in the gambling industry, and having seen more than my fair share of 'man deposits $1k, runs it up to $1.5M, ends up in the negatives' I think it's a fundamental truism that the sort of person who gambles sufficiently to win the lottery tends to be the sort of person who is going to be then gamble that money.

This goes for venture capital and the like.

Also in the above case I'd probably expect it'd be more a product of taxes/ongoing costs of shiny new things/investment ideas than strictly burning a huge lottery jackpot on 'lifestyle expenses'

I'm sure that 1) this guy lost a big chunk to taxes and 2) made some bad investments, but I think he also had some relatives he didn't know he had hitting him up to get bailed out/have their college paid for, and he just said yes every time because he had no concept of an eight figure amount of money not being infinite.

I agree that it was probably not Maseratis and strippers doing most of the damage.

I don't think I agree with this characterization (but in a way that makes the whole situation worse lol).

As part of my job I spend a good amount of time explaining complicated topics to "stupid" people and those who have some permanent or temporarily form of cognitive impairment. If you sit down and explain things calmly, slowly, and carefully you can explain most things to people. But they have to be interested, which is the first problem. Frustration with complicated systems is up and attention spans are down. You also need to have the time, energy, and wisdom to simplify the complicated thing, some combination of those is usually lacking.

Some of this is the fault of parents, school, and society not taking a breath to say for instance "insurance does this, it's not a magic button, it might not make sense to use the insurance, for instance if you have a small amount of body damage to your car......"

Cherry picked examples of people being freaked out and disappointment or angry misses that those people may be in shock about what happened, lying, or engaged in motivated reasoning as an ego defense.

The other big piece is that people involved don't understand these things. Many physicians don't really have a good understanding of insurance as a consumer, and as it results to their roles either. The former is generally a problem interest/time/frustration instead of intellectual horsepower or education. The latter is because of games insurance companies play to not pay. We have dedicated staff whose job it is to deal with insurance, and they don't have any clue most of the time either they just bang their heads against the insurance company until it does what we need.

I've seen people arrive at a DMV in an expensive Italian suit and have to leave because they misread something and they could only come on Tuesday's or need another proof of ID because this proof of ID valid in their old state isn't valid in the new state.

I've seen a professor walk out of a building at an Ivy League school and start to get on the wrong train on public transit because the signage was terrible.

Yes being stupid at baseline, having a poor attention span etc. can make problems more likely to happen but intellect and education aren't protective enough, you need to be attentive and practiced with these symptoms and that's hard to ask.

Some of our systems for the most indigent actually work better (for some definitions of better) than for the upper or middle class. Medicaid sucks and is a pain in the ass but a lot of places have staff whose job it is to navigate those things for the patient, and the specific way the suck happens sometimes makes it simple at least.

I don't know, I guess what I'm saying is that all the systems fucking suck and being stupid makes them worse but they fuck over plenty of smart people and can easily seem like a nightmare for them also.

If you sit down and explain things calmly, slowly, and carefully you can explain most things to people

... Sure, but it's easy to massively overestimate how well they understand what you've explained. One consistent experience I've had teaching average students higher-level subjects is you'll explain something to them, work them through some problems, and they'll seem to get it. And they'll happily say that they get it. But give them the same kind of problem in a slightly different context, or just wait a month and give them the same problem, and they'll totally fall over in a way that makes you question how they even thought they understood it initially.

So I don't think society merely saying it is enough. I think that, like with teaching, you can counteract that by just drilling them hard enough for long enough - it doesn't really build intelligence, but it gets them through tests and would probably get our below-average people through car and health insurance better than they do today.

Medicaid sucks and is a pain in the ass but a lot of places have staff whose job it is to navigate those things for the patient, and the specific way the suck happens sometimes makes it simple at least.

This isn't wrong, but I think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit to improve these systems by reducing their complexity: is there a common application for Medicaid, SNAP, and free school lunches? Section 8? Can we align the the means testing thresholds to eliminate benefits cliffs?

I've gotten the sense in the past that anyone really capable of wrangling all the different systems as they are intended probably has to have it together well enough to have the ability to hold down a job paying well enough to disqualify them from the benefits.

It's too arbitrary. Sometimes you go to the DMV and there's no line and you had all the paperwork and the person you talk to is in a good mood and you are like wtf is all this angst about? Then you go and the line is 3 hours long, they aren't doing the thing you wanted to do but you had to wait in the line the whole time to find that out, etc.

Likewise sometimes you try and sign up for medicaid and it is painless and easy, sometimes you need the help of three people at your primary care doctor's office. It's random.

So when we say "it's hard" or whatever we mean at random times it shits the bed for no reason. If it's universally hard you can write out instructions, have dedicated workers to sign up, but the problem isn't as easy as just being consistently hard.

is there a common application for Medicaid, SNAP, and free school lunches?

In my state there is (and free school lunches are automatic anyway). For young children, especially, people apply for pregnancy medicaid, and the children are automatically enrolled until 5 years or so.

I'm not familiar with the Section 8 situation here.

The state also offers heavily subsidized childcare to people with surprisingly high household incomes, but it's a bit complicated if one of the parents wasn't continuously employed while giving birth/initially taking care of the child, since everything has to line up with finding childcare and work within about a month. Jobs that can be had on short notice likely won't even pay as much as the state is spending on the childcare plus program administration, making it a net loss economically.

Frustration with complicated systems is up and attention spans are down.

My grandmother had no issues using a computer... except when the internet was lagging or the system was slow. That frustration was enough for her to throw her hands up and declare she didn't understand how to do things, and never would be able to use a computer.

Understandably too, it's one thing when you're trying to figure something out and with every action you take there is a discernable pattern emerging, its another thing entirely when things that should work just don't. Imagine trying to teach a kid math but once in a while, instead of marking their work as correct you have to mark it 404 page not found and not explain any further.

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