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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26840 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections

Stolen from an comment on reddit

This seemed like the most relevant and important part:

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright—we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again. We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care, while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment, is so important.

I think you meant this down lower, and not as a top level comment.

Oops.

Extant hominids, anyway. I don't think it affects the arguments over the Neanderthal or whether H. Habilis and H. Erectus are the same species.

Experts: "Demagogues whipping up distrust in us is irrational, unfair and disruptive to progress."

Also experts: "We can now admit we made up an entire species 50 years ago in a bid to stop construction of a dam."

Jimmy Carter signed a bill that exempted the Tellico Dam from the Endangered Species Act.

I remember seeing political cartoons about this from the 70s, but never heard about the resolution.

I wonder if articles like this are a sign that the green profiteering-through-subsidies wing has finally had enough of the green profiteering-through-lawfare wing. The Inflation Guarantee Act had more than enough billions for both teams: everyone could have been paid a respectable upper-middle-class wage to not build solar farms while filing EPA claims and counterclaims for eternity, never having to stoop to doing declasse productive work for money. And so far that's how it's gone, with all the money vanishing into a black hole.

Maybe a few people are actually interested in getting something done for once

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman

Anyone remember Red Wolves?

Pepperidge Farm remembers! Critically endangered, then died out, then reappeared because it's just what happens when a wolf fucks a coyote.

I was terrified as a kid when Ranger Rick magazine lead me to believe that their impending extinction would extend to all life on earth via the acid rain!

I just did a bunch of red wolf googling and the mainstream position is that red wolves are a separate species and not gray or eastern wolves mixed with coyotes. For one thing, red wolves predate gray wolves in North America.

Red wolves are part coyote and coyotes are part red wolf. There's some amount of mixing between them.

Much of my own skepticism about the evironmental movement comes from a childhood spent reading Ranger Rick, and a good enough memory to remember the predictions it made.

The Boy Who Cried (Endangered Species of) Wolf?

Is it a consensual situation between a wolf and a coyote bitch, or is it a stronger predator forcing himself on a weaker one?

Both wolves and coyotes raise their pups with high-paternal-investment models, so it seems unlikely the odd rape baby would result in a breeding population.

Uh, are you talking about the wrong animal? Red wolves were critically endangered, captured from the last remaining population in Louisiana, and then released in North Carolina after a captive breeding program. They're still critically endangered today. Whether this is a problem or not is a different matter, but the conventional story is basically accurate.

Coywolves are a different thing.

No, I'm not. And no, they're not.

The red wolf's taxonomic classification as being a separate species has been contentious for nearly a century, being classified either as a subspecies of the gray wolf Canis lupus rufus,[9][10] or a coywolf (a genetic admixture of wolf and coyote)

Uh, red wolves are definitely a coherent group in the wild.

I oftentimes wonder just how much microfauna taxonomy is fake. Like, this particular decision had major historical consequences, but the average guy doing minnow or crawfish taxonomy can probably get away with classifying whatever he finds in some obscure South American tributary as a new species without anyone calling him out on it. Are there actually 30,000 species of scarab beetle out there? All of the ones I ever see look the same.

At a broad guess, all of it.

I remember reading once about a particular 'species' of fish that was only found in a specific pond. Basically, it was an inbred version of another species that got stuck by the pond losing its connection to a larger body of water. The author noncritically repeated the argument by the researcher that it was important to save this species.

y tho

It seems arbitrary that we get to decide that all species must be preserved as they are now. Extinction and speciation are integral to how evolution functions. How can we justify trying to preserve the animal kingdom in aspic? Especially when the preservation mostly takes the form of preventing us from building anything.

That said, we obviously need to be preserving the cool ones. It would be a tragedy to lose any more charismatic megafauna.

The charismatic megafauna are the ones that most need to go! They make much more impressive trophies for humanity. We've accomplished so little in the "driving species to extinction" field in so long. We're close to getting some rhino species, but some others are still doing just fine.

Honestly, keeping them alive in an age of technology is the more impressive feat. We live in an age where we can fly into the air, destroy cities, or reduce a mountain to its raw materials. The live rhino is a more impressive trophy than a dead one.

It seems arbitrary that we get to decide that all species must be preserved as they are now. Extinction and speciation are integral to how evolution functions. How can we justify trying to preserve the animal kingdom in aspic? Especially when the preservation mostly takes the form of preventing us from building anything.

It feels remarkably similar in some ways to First Nations: whatever land a given tribe/confederation occupied at the time of contact with Europeans becomes permanently and historically theirs--like a game of Civ ending at an arbitrary cutoff year, then that save state being imported to the expansion/sequel. Doesn't matter when a people took possession of a given tract of land, or who might have been there prior.

I think the same. The old method of setting who owns what tended to resolve conflicts fairly quickly. Your lands are the ones you’re strong enough to keep. If you can’t they belong to whoever can. The reason so much of the world is stable is because their borders were formed before international busybodies could interfere in the natural order.

The problem with that method is that, as armaments technology advanced over the XIX and XX centuries, warfare became increasingly destructive to bystanders who had been minding their own business until their governments decided that they needed a distraction from their own inadequacies.

...are you implying that warfare was better for civilian bystanders in premodern times? I'm under quite the opposite impression.

From the perspective of 1945? Yes.

The upside is that such borders tend to be stable and since they fight to victory or defeat once the war ends the defeated are unlikely to continue rearming to retake territory that they lost substantial men attempting to defend or take. Once the war ends, it’s mostly over.

Like the war over Alsace-Lorraine was over in 1871?

Or Germany, in 1918?

Where exactly in the process of European development do you see that occurring?

Is it permanently and historically theirs, or do you just mean that sometimes people will say that this is “X group” land historically and then go about their business as normal?

The latter. Although I'm still hoping someone/a tribe files a formal lawsuit based on a Land Acknowledgement, preferably incorporating the phrase "put up or shut up."

What determines what a species is, turns out to be rather arbitrary and quite controversial within the field

Independently evolving metapopulation. Still a lot of grey area, but mostly because we can't really measure it very well. Ecological function is often more important anyway for conservation goals.

What's funny to me is that all the "splitters" magically become "lumpers" when we're talking about hominids

@The_Nybbler replied to you above:

Extant hominids, anyway. I don't think it affects the arguments over the Neanderthal or whether H. Habilis and H. Erectus are the same species.

I'm kind of replying to you both. West Africans (and other Sub-Saharan Africans) have an estimated 2%-19% of their genome derived from an archaic hominin ghost population, a population less related to modern humans than Neanderthals or Denisovans (both of whom have introgressed into modern humans, especially Eurasians). That is, this ghost population split from the modern human line prior to Neanderthals and Denisovans.

As this ghost population gets better characterized genetically (or maybe even fossily, but fossils are tough to get in Sub-Saharan Africa) and the admixture percentage in Sub-Saharan Africans is better ascertained, I suspect that there will be an increased push to consider this ghost population as a sapiens subspecies or population (and thus Neanderthals and Denisovans would get lumped in, as well), especially if the admixture percentage from this ghost population in Sub-Saharan Africans is in the mid-single digits or higher.

Can't have Sub-Saharan Africans with the most archaic non-sapiens admixture, especially from an even more distantly related member of Homo.

I mean, clearly all three of these species were capable of producing fertile offspring with H sapiens, that's how the genetics got into the populations. Calling everything one species is therefore following the actual definition of a species.

That's a definition of species (or at least a variant of one), albeit arguably the most popular definition. I'd likely recite a similar definition if I got suddenly cold-called by God. However, see the Wikipedia article on Species I also linked to you elsewhere in the thread for more definitions. There are many cross-species hybrids that can produce fertile descendants, and sometimes even cross-genera hybrids as well.

Several feline taxa are capable of hybridization. The Chausie is fully fertile by the fourth generation, but the jungle cat and the domestic cat remain separate species.

The serval and the domestic cat are in different genera, but can hybridize to make the Savannah cat. Female hybrids are fertile right off the bat, and male hybrids can be fertile by the fifth generation.

Beefalo are fertile. Most Bison herds are actually partially descended from cattle. Yet not only do bison and cattle remain in separate species, they remain in different genera.

Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) and polar bears (Ursus maritimus) can produce fertile female offspring; it has yet to be seen if they can produce fertile male offspring. Brown bears in general are also partially descended from polar bears.

Although hybrids can likely be had via IVF, it's doubtful if unadmixed Great Danes and Chihuahuas can mate due to the massive size and anatomical differences between them. Some on the internet claim that any photos of Great Dane-Chihuahua offspring are all—or at least mostly—hoaxes. Nonetheless, Great Danes and Chihuahuas are not only considered firmly within the same species, they're considered firmly within the same subspecies.

Speaking of canines, wolves produce fertile hybrids with species such as the coyote and golden jackal. Additionally:

In the distant past, there was gene flow between African wolves, golden jackals, and grey wolves. The African wolf is a descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry. One African wolf from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula showed admixture with Middle Eastern grey wolves and dogs. There is evidence of gene flow between golden jackals and Middle Eastern wolves, less so with European and Asian wolves, and least with North American wolves.

Yet, grey wolves, golden jackals, and African wolves are all considered separate species.

And these were just examples using some more familiar animals. So producing fertile offspring does not appear to be a sufficient condition for being considered the same species (and perhaps for genus too); it may not even be a necessary one. To circle-back to the original Homo example, Neanderthals are still "generally regarded as a distinct species", thus likewise for Denisovans. Hence, if race can be dismissed as merely a social construct (except when justifying racial preferences and income/wealth transfers to benefit fashionable minorities at the expense of everyone else)—then so can species—where the social construction aspect is subject to fads, politics, convention, group-think, and outright invention (as in the case discussed by OP).

As a side note—it's funny how, at least within mammals, male hybrids look to have a much rougher go at reproducing than female hybrids. The male burden of performance is not unique to modern humans.

I know there are multigenational ligers. Just keep breeding the mixed females with pure tigers or lions. I don't know if someone is trying to make a stable fully fertile hybrid population.

I was thinking about including ligers/tigons, but I already had multiple examples so I de-prioritized ligers/tigons, and ended up not getting around to them for the reason you mentioned: males have been established to be sterile with a fair degree of certainty.

I went with the grizzly/polar bear example, since at least two female hybrids have been shown to be fertile (in the wild, no less!), it's merely unknown if male hybrids are fertile or not, and brown bears are partially descended from polar bears.

It also made me chuckle that you mentioned ligers but not tigons. Ligers (lion father, tiger mother [not that kind of tiger mother]) are more famous than tigons (lion mother, tiger father), likely due to the large body size of ligers (larger than both lions and tigers, whereas tigons aren't any larger [and may be smaller] than lions and tigers).

Life must be rough for male tigons. Small, infertile, and forgotten, while female tigons, ligers, lions, and tigers put in their Panthera dating profiles: "Don't bother if you're under 10' or 1,000 lbs."

However, it's noteworthy that lions and tigers are able to produce fertile female offspring as it is. They diverged about 4 million years ago. Lions are actually more closely related to leopard and jaguars than they are to tigers and snow leopards; tigers are more closely related to snow leopards than they are to lions + leopards + jaguars. Humans and chimpanzees split about 5.5 million years ago.

As a side note—it's funny how, at least within mammals, male hybrids look to have a much rougher go at reproducing than female hybrids. The male burden of performance is not unique to modern humans.

Not an expert, but I’d imagine this has to do with the male only having one copy of certain genes due to XY while the female has two.

It's indeed a thing called Haldane's Rule:

Haldane himself described the rule as:

"When in the F1 offspring of two different animal races one sex is absent, rare, or sterile, that sex is the heterozygous sex (heterogametic sex)."

Most mammals abide by the XX-XY system, where males with the XY are the heterogametic sex.

West Africans (and other Sub-Saharan Africans) have an estimated 2%-19% of their genome derived from an archaic hominin ghost population.

Really? Could you provide me with some further reading?

Neanderthals or Denisovans (both of whom have introgressed into modern humans, especially Eurasians)

IIRC, Denisovan admixture is only significant among Austronesians, though East Asians have a tiny amount.

Interbreeding between archaic and modern humans, summarizes Neanderthal, Denisovan, and African ghost population admixture.

Current state of affairs suggests Melanesians and some other populations in Australasia have about 4%-6% Denisovan DNA on top of the 1%-4% Neanderthal DNA of Eurasians in general.

Right now you have several posts in the mod queue, some for triggering rage by posting left-aligned contrarianism, but some are just low-effort bait, like this.

You also deleted all your posts after your last posting spree, which gives you the appearance of someone who is just here to stir shit.

Knock it off or since this account is new and has contributed nothing of value, I will have no compunctions about banning it.

Don‘t worry about it. If the powers that be treated every left-of-center opinion as trolling, why, there would hardly be any left-wingers left. Heh.

Anyway, how would the interracial mandate work? Would intraracial couples be put on waiting lists if the quota wasn‘t met? Would love be forced underground ?

And all that gets you is a spectrum of races, the basic hierarchy would be maintained, brasil-style.

No, the real solution requires forcing everyone into a marriage with opposite color at once, so that the entire population-solution is blended into chocolate milk. And to maintain homogeneity after that, outliers are re-blended, and immigrants have to go through the procedure, they can live out their interracial lives on ellis island while their children go on to the post-race paradise.

There are hardly any left-wingers left, in my observation most explicitly left-wing posters who don't quit are eventually deemed trolls.

There are several things going on here:

  1. Explicitly left-wing posters do get reported, constantly, for being trolls. There are a number of regulars in particular who report any left-leaning opinion with the same mindfulness as a knee jerking when the femoral nerve is tapped. We see these reports, we see who is making them, and we ignore them.

(In fairness, a couple of our remaining leftist posters do the same thing, to the same effect.)

  1. Left-wing posters also get dogpiled a lot. This is understandably hard for a lot of people to deal with constantly. Worse is the antagonism and hostility that comes out, which we do moderate when it crosses the line, but below a certain threshold, you're just constantly weathering accusations of bad faith and trolling and ignorance. We do our best to keep anyone from being dogpiled or abused, but as the culture of the forum has definitely shifted rightward, it's certainly true that it's a more comfortable place for rightists and a less comfortable place for leftists. Probably the majority of posters consider this a good thing, which means the cycle is unlikely to break. Even if we managed to get an influx of new posters, including a lot of new leftists, we'd probably shed most of the leftists over time, as has happened in the past.

But this brings me to my last point:

\3. I've commented on this before, and many others have made the same point: this forum, by virtue of the fact that it even allows right-wing opinions, naturally attracts a lot of right-wingers, and not just the civic Republican types, but the Holocaust deniers, the Repeal the 19th types, white nationalists, "pedophile fascists," armageddon-cosplayers like Kulak, etc. We don't attract a lot of leftists, especially not hardcore, ideologically committed leftists, because they have everywhere else on the Internet where their views are the norm and anyone arguing with them will get banned. We occasionally get a new leftist here who is shocked and appalled that we aren't banning Holocaust deniers or people who post about low black IQs. They usually either flame out or leave. Online leftists nowadays mostly just aren't used to dealing with rightists in an environment where they don't "win" by default because the mods are on their side.

So it's not really that left-wing posters who don't quite are eventually deemed trolls; we mods really do try to be fair to everyone, and we're not all rightists. The problem is that the leftists who (a) don't quit because badthink is allowed here; (b) have the persistence to stick around; (c) don't lose their cool and start responding belligerently, is a very small set.

(And again, in fairness, there are rightists who lose their shit that leftists are allowed to post, and they get banned a lot, contributing to the evaporative cooling and claims that we have our thumbs on the scale for leftists.)

What, you don't think "dae women should be property, also all sex is bad and evil and if u don't agree ur a cuck?" for the thousandth time is driving positive or thoughtful engagement?

Ironically it's only the female and the gay posters that have ever provided any worthwhile insight into relationship dynamics; I think about the framing of 'devotion fatigue' [extrapolated from old postings, never quite explicitly stated] quite a bit, since now that I have more language that reminds me it's a thing I just see it everywhere now.

Devotion fatigue sets in faster for the "leftists", partially because the things they tend to be wrong about are more emotionally charged/there's very little emotional validation for what they are right about by comparison; the trick is, uh, not being obnoxious about it. That's harder in a collective for what should be obvious reasons.

Honestly, /r9k/ had a solution to this especially if you coupled an LLM knowledge base trained on threads that go the same way; it would be nice to identify and auto-hide uninsightful consensus positions without having to think about it. Alas, no such platform exists.

That was the joke he was making.

in my observation most explicitly left-wing posters who don't quit are eventually deemed trolls.

Who specifically do you think was unfairly called a troll? And given your objection above, who do you think was banned for being a left winger?

that's the joke

It's hard for me to tell whether you're trolling or just an unusual character. It's definitely the second part—mandating interracial marriage—which has the stronger effect there for me. (The first part seemed a bit more plausible, given that it is kind of cool that Africans have the highest genetic diversity.)

Anyway, Fruck's advice is good.

Because when we post extreme views, extreme right wingers typically have a history of consistently taking positions equivalent or similar, in a variety of contexts.

Well, it's usually pretty clear that those people are serious. In your case, it's not as obvious to me that you're serious (but it's still entirely possible). That's all. I get that objectively both positions are pretty far outside normal overton windows.

you can extend me the same courtesy.

But why should anyone do that when all your responses clearly show you're doing this to get a reaction, rather than sincerely arguing for the position?

What he's saying is that you haven't currently engendered the goodwill necessary to tolerate jokes at others expense. With this post for example, while you may have meant it to stake out your position with the added fun of a lightly barbed jab at your ideological opposites, it looks the same as trolling. And deleting all your posts increases the probability you are a troll pretty severely I would think. So the Tldr would be you have to start posting some stuff with a bit more substance, and ideally stuff that shows you want to be a part of this community or you are going to get banned.

Okay, I'll try to provide an intuition pump. It's somewhat biologically implausible, and exaggerated, but it might help you understand why people find your reaction bizarre.

There's this big family. They don't exactly look like other people; their mouths are a bit big and they're unusually hairy. There are ugly rumours going around that they're all really low in IQ and have a habit of biting people, but you figure it's probably just prejudice based on their looks.

Then, breaking news: back in 1930 a mad scientist a century ahead of his time experimented on the family's patriarch without his consent and spliced his DNA with wolf genes.

Does this make you believe the rumours are more likely or less likely to be true? And, separate from the question of whether you value liberty over eugenics, do you think that spreading those wolf genes across all of humanity is good or bad?

(I mean, I suppose that given the entire paranormal romance genre I have to admit that a significant chunk of the population finds dangerous half-human hybrids "cool", but still.)

Aside from that, "So Africans are even cooler than I thought?" likely came across as a bit sassy under the circumstances.

Is "I think it's a good thing there are significantly less teenage pregnancies" bait?

Might reel in Stannis Baratheon or Weird al-Yankovic....

Black interracial marriages have the highest divorce rate, so maybe not a wise public policy

In fact, marriages between black women and white men have a substantially lower divorce rate in the US than between white women and white men.

The greatest predictor of divorce is whether a white woman is involved:

White woman + black man: more than twice the white/white divorce rate (wwdr)

White woman + asian man: 1,60 times the wwdr

Whereas white man + asian woman is at the wwdr and white man + black woman at half that.

https://www.healthymarriageinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/But-Will-It-Last--Marital.pdf

Uh, does this break out african american vs african african women? Not hard for me to believe(given the paucity of such pairings) that most of the women are from africa blacks who have little in common culturally with AADOS, and despise them in any case.

That is also a very rare coupling suggesting there is strong affinity between the two parties.

Amazingly the version in which the median white person in the marriage is very likely to out earn the median black person.

I'm probably just tired but trying to figure out what you mean by this.

Presumably the implication is that marriage is most stable when the man out-earns the woman.

Let's be honest, there are dozens of possible confounding factors for these kind of statistics. Age-related effects, urban-rural divide, religiosity, socio-economic groups, ... I would need to see a really rigorous analysis before believing any specific claims like “interracial marriage causes higher/lower divorce rates”.

I'll do the work. Here is what @MaiqTheTrue was saying:

Marriages where the male partner outearns the female partner are more stable. Whites tend to outearn blacks. So, all else being equal, a white male / black female pairing has an advantage since the male is more likely to outearn the female.

Note: I don't have stats to back this up, but on the surface it seems to make sense.

More comments

Is there data on the average age of marriage for these racial configurations?

Why is this cool?

Not the previous poster, but unusual-feeling genetics things in general are cool to me, as long as it isn't indicative of some pathology. Neanderthal ancestry? That's cool. Rather high genetic diversity? That's cool. A mix of several relatively divergent populations? (well, this isn't unusual) Huh, that's cool, I wonder what exactly that looks like. Same with this.

This was actually done in Paraguay in 1814 in order to reduce overall race tensions.

In spite of this, the direct neighbor Uruguay has four times the nominal GDP per capita and around two times when PPP adjusted. It is number 3 in South America for HDI while Paraguay is number 13.

One interesting thing about Paraguay is how the Guaranì language remains in use—I think it's the only American Indian tongue where that's still happening on that scale.

Quechua and maya remain widely enough used for Guatemala and Bolivia to be de facto bilingual; Paraguay is however the only country* where you’ll hear non-pure Indios speaking a native language.

*I’m excluding Métis because it’s a creole.

Maya (or languages in that family) is/are widely spoken in Guatemala.

Ah, fair. It looks like a decent amount of Quechua and Nahuatl survived as well, among others.

Without going into the HBD of it all, Uruguay is not a good point of comparison because it's basically the Luxembourg of South America.

Alright I didn't know it had that reputation, but it is in the lower half for all of those stats regardless.

Uruguay doesn't border Paraguay (contra what you implied), and is in a much more productive location (borders an ocean, at the base of the Río de la Plata)

Well you just caused one of the most embarassing moments of my life. Thanks for the education.

You first.

I would guess the rate of interracial marriage on The Motte is above average.

I'm doing my part.

Definitely certain kinds.

Yeah but it’s all WMAF-, pretty boringly common combo

I'm white and my wife is black, so it's not all WMAF at the very least!

I guess (based on other comments) you can worry about divorce less than you otherwise would.

I'd guess lots of white man/Latina pairings as well.

Present

Rationalist types and latinas make quite an odd couple

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This is not twitter/X, we are not looking for quick hot takes that dunk on the people you don't like. This is not a good top level post.

Add more context and add more of your personal interpretation.

Forgot mod hat?

Yes

Bonobos are a similarly fake species. They used to just be regarded as a subspecies of or geographically distinct group of chimps. They were invented to create a species of “woke” or “feminist” chimps that scientists could claim represent what human ancestors were like because chimps are too warlike and patriarchal. This is a redpill most simply aren’t ready for.

I don't know if this statement is true or not, but if you're going to post things this outside the mainstream thinking, you need to bring more evidence than name-calling.

It's exactly the sort of bait post whose only intention is preventing real discussion that I was talking about last week. Watch people spend 50 man-hours engaging with it too.

The really creepy part is watching several new accounts pop up to do this whenever some topics are mentioned. Is it lurkers deciding to jump in, or are there groups monitoring for certain topics to disrupt?

This is a redpill most simply aren’t ready for.

As polite feedback, I think your post would be better without this sentence and that this is almost universally true about this sentence.

I interpreted it as an ironic joke, along the lines of 'billions must die'. Just casually throwing that in at the end.

Skimming the link, at least it seems like both the dam is there and the minnows aren't extinct.

This further undermines the environmental protection position, right? They invented a fake species to try to stop a dam from being built, the dam got build, and the fake species still lives there. At some point, it's more charitable to think that the "conservationists" here are a bunch of liars that just want to stop things from being built than the alternative, which is that they aren't capable of identifying species and have no idea whether the species they just invented will even be impacted.

At some point, it's more charitable to think that the "conservationists" here are a bunch of liars that just want to stop things from being built than the alternative, which is that they aren't capable of identifying species and have no idea whether the species they just invented will even be impacted.

It is never more charitable to call someone a liar than honestly mistaken. More accurate perhaps, but not more charitable.

Never?

I don't buy it. If I'm watching a football game with a huge fan of a team and they express some opinion about a call that's just super obviously wrong, I think it's more charitable to say, "dude, you're a homer" than it is to say, "you don't understand the basics of the rules here".

First, your example doesn't work because being a homer isn't lying. But yes, never. Being charitable is assuming the best of someone, and it is worse to be a liar than to be honest but wrong (or even honest but incompetent).

I think being a homer is pretty analogous to the snail darter situation. The person involved probably does intellectually realize that they're playing fast and loose with the facts, but they want it to be true and they're willing to sand off any rough edges around the facts to get where they want to go.

Depending on the circumstance, there are definitely things where I would prefer that my interlocutor thinks I'm bullshitting them for personal gain than that they think I'm just such a simpleton that I don't grasp the facts. I unironically think it's more of a show of respect to say, "I think you don't really believe that and are making an instrumental argument" than saying, "I think you're incredibly stupid".

I definitely disagree on that, but I think that this simply comes down to a difference in values. Your conclusion follows reasonably from your premises, I just can't agree with your premises at all.

Yep, just an expensive and futile deceit.

We can now admit we made up an entire species 50 years ago in a bid to stop construction of a dam.

What is the actual definition of a species? Like we all learned in middle school biology that it’s two individuals can produce fertile offspring, but there’s tons and tons of fertile hybrids. By that definition a ton of genera would actually be species instead. Declaring this one population of fish a separate species is like the 10,000th most arbitrary decision in that regard. It’s not any worse to make it up so a dam doesn’t get built than that so you can name something after yourself, and these stupid fish aren’t inherently more valuable than some other stupid fish that happens to be part of a different species. They’re slightly different shades of minnows either way.

If anything, I react to this story less with ‘we should trust experts less, because they change the definition of species for political reasons’ and more with ‘we should introduce every species everywhere in the world simultaneously because species don’t matter for biodiversity. Τωι Κρατιστωι!’

*τωι. I guess I now know that you're one of the people who pronounces the ι sub/adscripts.

The Greek extension on my keyboard doesn’t allow subscripts. Edited for the omega.

A breed with an army and a navy, or so it is said.

And Yiddish is just German with https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XtremeKoolLetterz.

A joke. I do agree with your statement.

No joke, I once saw an “In this house we believe…” sign that said (among other left-ish takes) “German is a Yiddish dialect”

From my memories of school long ago: it's actually really ambiguous. There are populations of birds where subgroup A produces fertile offspring with subgroup B. And B with C. And C with D. A and D can not or almost always can not produce fertile offspring. Are A and D members of the same species? By a simple definition of species: no. But they sometimes breed with birds that could breed with the opposite group. So this group of birds is more of a spectrum than a set of objective species.

Anyways, sure, someone could maliciously declare these to be a number of distinct species and then try to block construction and development efforts because of the rare "species".

There are populations of birds where subgroup A produces fertile offspring with subgroup B. And B with C. And C with D. A and D can not or almost always can not produce fertile offspring.

Ring Species.

The one you remember from school is probably the Larus gull (that’s the first example I can recall hearing about), but apparently has since been disputed. Among birds, the… great tit… is another alleged but disputed example.

I wonder if there are populations where A can breed with B, ..., Y can with Z, and Z can with A, but A can't breed with M. In theory it seems possible.

In some sense, every species is a ring species, except through the temporal dimension instead of spatial ones. Leaves in the present can't interbreed, but there's a continuum through time connecting the leaves.

For it to be a true ring, though, some future iteration of the species would have to be able to interbreed with one of the past ones.

What is the actual definition of a species?

There are a lot of definitions of species. I just looked up the Species article on Wikipedia and it's even longer and more muddled than my recollection of the last time I looked it up.

Blank slatists love to claim that race is a social construct. As I mentioned before, species are a social construct, just as race is. In that comment, I also discussed conservationists as isolated fans of splitting.

species are a social construct

To nitpick, the granularity of borders is, but different levels of differentiation is clearly natural, not just social.

The same is true about race.

If you keep talking to a constructivist, eventually they'll admit that all "X is a social construct" means is that it's a human-created category. There being something natural / physical behind a classification doesn't diminish it's social-constructivenesss. The term has no meaning beyond that, but they love that the way it's formulated implies that you could reshape physical reality by changing enough peoples' minds.

Which is a shame, because there are actually valid insights and applications of constructivism in its more limited forms. In the international relations context, constructivism is one of the few 'major' IR theories that recognizes the role of actors as individuals acting according to individual perspectives, and thus able to analyze/predict why key actors would go against a realist/institutionalist paradigm. Things like the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea make considerably more sense from a cultural analysis of a warlord than a state-interest approach.

The prescriptions may be, well, prescriptive- we can change people's perceptions if we do Y so they no longer feel it right to do undesirable thing X- but it also serves as an often much-needed counterpoint to the theories that kindly gloss over individuals as existing at all (realism, institutionalism, etc.) in the name of simplifying the model. People exist. People make crucial decisions. How they make decisions is shaped by what they value in subjective contexts, and those subjective perspectives can change. There's nothing particularly controversial about such limited claims.

It's just that it is as prone to misuse / taken to its absurdist extremes as any other. 'Reshape physical reality by changing enough people's minds' is a fair critique, as is the 'your attempts of social engineering don't necessarily convey the new cultural norm you want them to'- like how the cultural norm of making exceptions to standard values in favor of the favored groups is less 'it is right to favor the favored group' and more 'those standard values aren't actually standards.'

The same is true about race.

Of course.

I suppose I would point to a difference between this (drawing boundaries) and something that seems to be a bit more radically a social construct, like literature or law.

It gets even worse once you start speculating things that adapt quickly and/or perform direct DNA transfer without reproduction, like bacteria.

The definition of species should probably be restricted to animals, plants, and fungi; it's impossible to draw clear boundaries around bacteria and viruses.

Yikes, how uninclusive. Bigot and eukaryote supremacist detected.

It's kind of wild that animals and fungi being more closely related to each other than to plants apparently wasn't determined until the early to mid 90s.

It’s not any worse to make it up so a dam doesn’t get built than that so you can name something after yourself

What?

Preventing a dam getting built prevents thousands of people from having jobs, megawatts of power generation from being built, etc. Naming something after yourself adds a little bit of extra work for encyclopedia and wikipedia editors and other academics. How are the teo actions remotely comparable?

It’s not actually any less stupid.

There was a wild post on r/RealEstate yesterday. It's already been deleted.

Hello,

I'm a young owner of a few rentals - I got lucky young starting a marketing business that worked.

We've been having some wind here lately and it partly ripped off some siding on the side of my house that's way to high for me to reach with a ladder. I look online and call a dude with good reviews - I think he's a solo gig. He pulls up within an hour of calling him and he's like "Oh, no big deal!". I watch him get out his ladder, get up there, screw these screws into the siding that are literally going into nothing (i think he did it so it looked like he was doing something), he pushed the siding back into the trim, and got down. Literally up there for 2 minutes. He said "Okay I'll go to my truck and get a quote"

He ends up coming back to my door like a half hour later and he claims his service call is $3000 and the screws were $5.

I kind of just look at him and I'm like "hahaha how much do I owe ya?"

Him: "$3005. I accept all forms of payment"

Me: "You're joking right? You told me on the phone your service call was $75."

Him: "We never talked sir. You must have talked to some other siding guy"

Me: "If I talked to someone else, how would you have known to come over right away and do my siding?"

Him: "Uhhh.. I mean.. Like I use a contracting app that gave me this job. My rate is $3000"

Me: "I'll give you $100 just to leave. I'm not doing this, that's crazy"

Him: "Maybe I should call the police. Should we do that?"

Me: "Go right ahead but it's a civil manner"

Him: "This is theft of services. If you don't pay, I'm pressing charges and you're going to jail"

Me: "I can promise you if you keep up this immoral scam like behavior you're going to end up in jail"

Him: "I just got out of prison, no sweat off my brow"

Me: "Doesn't surprise me with that prison tat on your neck"

Him: "Look kid you gonna pay me or not"

Me: "No"

Him: "You'll be hearing from my lawyer kid. Hope mommy and daddy can pay for it"

Me: See ya later!

I'm 25 but look 20. I've had people try to charge me crazy prices for things or take advantage of me but this was nuts and criminal (not literally but you know what i mean - just not right). Why are there people out there like this?

There's obviously a good chance that it's a totally fake story. I'd basically assume that it is. I don't even really care if there's even a 0.1% chance that it's actually true; it doesn't really matter.

Part of the reason why people likely believe that it's fake is that it sounds like absolutely outrageous behavior by the contractor. Something that no one would put up with. Something that would shock the conscience if it actually happened and there was a recording of the interaction or something.

So what's weird is that this is the standard modus operandi in the medical industry. It's just the way things are done. Yes, if you have insurance, then instead of telling you to your face that they're charging a ridiculous made up number after the fact, they tell your insurance provider the same thing. But the basic fact pattern is absolutely the same.

I'm definitely not going to go all Kulak and say that since this routinized obscenity shocks the conscious, everyone needs to start going around murderin'. But it absolutely is a routinized obscenity that should shock the conscience. Perhaps my crazy pills are significantly less potent than his, but they appear to still be crazy pills.

Lawyers can debate the legalese of "consent to treat" forms and what they do and do not allow, but it simply cannot be plausible that we will have a functional medical industry when it is the one and only industry that is allowed to simply refuse to provide you a price prior to authorizing work and then go on to just make up whatever the hell inflated price they want after the fact.

The reason people don't care that much is they are insulated from the cost in most cases (and indeed most of the outrage comes from when those cases breakdown - such as Out of network bills).

I don't really care what the ER charged me, I hit my deductible regardless every year. This principal-agent problem is obviously part of the issue with increasing costs.

The bigger problem though is just that there is a very small portion of the population that is very expensive to treat, and you/your loved ones have a small chance of losing the lottery in any given year and being part of that population. That's why premiums keep going up so much/Medicare solvency is threatened and all that. Someone who goes to the ER a few times a year/has a baby with the accompanying IP stays etc. is still a very small utilizer in the grand scheme of things.

I still think posting an obviously fake rage bate just so story to make your point detracts from an otherwise great post.

Why is it obviously fake? "Do something trivial, then demand outrageous payment with an implicit threat" is a very old but still quite common scam. Tbh I wouldn't believe any particular story on reddit and the back and forth is quite stilted to make OP sound based, but the basic incident doesn't look obviously fake to me.

If you've wasted enough time on the internet you can smell these fake stories a mile away. The word choice alone tells everyone it is fake. Perhaps having english as a first language helps in this respect.

Believing this is like believing facebook forwards from grandma. Some other motte posters have already posted good breakdowns of why this is fake ragebait. It is 100% a fake story. I would bet everything own on that.

Lawyers can debate the legalese of "consent to treat" forms and what they do and do not allow, but it simply cannot be plausible that we will have a functional medical industry when it is the one and only industry that is allowed to simply refuse to provide you a price prior to authorizing work and then go on to just make up whatever the hell inflated price they want after the fact.

I can tell you offhand what pretty much every single treatment and consultation in the NHS will cost you out of pocket: Zilch.

(Let's ignore taxes for a moment)

Even in India, it would be highly irregular for a doctor or private hospital to not give you an estimate for care, let alone consultations. You're quoted the rough cost of surgery, meds, an ICU bed, if not with perfect accuracy, to within a reasonable margin. At the very least, we can tell you if it's going to be very expensive.

This seems to be an uniquely American dysfunction.

In india it's never been a "rough cost" for me. It's an exact cost as a nice round and memorable figure - e.g. 80k rs. I have never been charged a rupee more than the quoted figure.

That's true if I get out 3 days early or complications make me stay an extra week or whatever. The hospital treats it as their job to amortize these costs over multiple patients because it is unreasonable to expect patients to predict and guess this stuff in advance. Also, in india, if they changed the price afterwards I just wouldn't pay and they'd be screwed.

This being reddit, I'm guessing that contractor/landlord interaction was completely made up as a parable to illustrate some point about landlords being parasitic/rent being too high.

This is a classic scam for Irish traveller gypsies to pull. You do a shoddy repair job then guilt or intimidate the owner into paying up before moving on to the next town.

It's well known in Ireland, I've seen news articles about this same thing happening in France and Australia and Youtube has some recent American tv news clips linking them with violent crimes and some direct recordings of travellers arguing with police etc so it looks like they've started causing trouble in the US now.

How do irish travellers make it to the US?

They travel!

I'd be surprised if they last very long here though. We lack the long term structures of intense racism, respect for family structures that combine to produce gypsy culture.

There's definitely roma in the US living their traditional con artist lives. Don't know about Irish travellers.

The same way their eastern european counterparts do- bleeding heart pinkos think a well-deserved reputation for being scum of the earth entitles you to come live in the US.

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.

Knock it off with "bleeding heart pinkos" and "scum of the earth." If you want to critique immigration advocates or Irish travelers in a more effortful way, you must make the effort, not just drop your boo-labels.

You've been warned about this a lot. You have a mix of warnings for low-effort random racial slurs and ad hominems, and occasional AAQCs, so you can clearly write well when you choose to, but much of the time you don't care. You've mostly gotten short tempbans because you're overall a fairly good contributor, but you aren't going to be allowed to keep doing this with impunity.

There aren’t that many under-40 (non-Russian, non-Jewish) Eastern Europeans in the US. A few people in tech, some diversity visa winners, some affluent students, some limited family reunification, but the numbers aren’t big.

Gypsies in America came from somewhere.

Sure, I thought most were Roma though rather than Irish travellers.

Yes, I've never seen any travellers, but ziganos are fairly recognizable in a way travellers aren't- dress like arabs with distinctly could be Indian could be south Slav features, talk fast, pretend to be Hispanic a lot, etc. The same behavior from travellers just comes off as normal white scumbags.

They're not travellers, but fully 20% of my irish relatives are just coming off US travel bans for visa overstays in their twenties (Most of them got 10-15 year bans). It was (probably still is) incredibly common to just take a holiday to the US and not come back home for 4 or 5 years.

They all have Irish or British passports so the old school method of booking a holiday and never coming back probably still works.

Some of them just hop across the wall on the US-Mexico border, and there are scattered news stories of Irish people smuggling rings 1, 2.

Some of them have been in America for generations and have become very rich through life insurance scams.

Interesting, thanks.

They probably travel there…. Ok I will show myself the way out

It's pretty clearly a troll post.

It has a couple nice features that make it well-calibrated for engagement.

#1) It gives off a #thathappened vibe. It's just so obviously fake. People can feel smart when they expose it.

#2) It buries the lede. Wait, this guy is 25 and has several properties. He got "lucky" in marketing? So this means he's either a scammer or has money from daddy. Again, this allows internet sleuths something to latch onto and post about.

My favorite form of burying the lede is posts that start with "Me (30m) and my girlfriend (22f)" and then, later on, reveal "when we first started dating 7 years ago...".

I hope you enjoy these helpful hints for getting engagement on your own short fiction on Reddit. I've been considering doing it myself lately. Not sure why. Seems fun.

I've been considering doing it myself lately. Not sure why. Seems fun.

It may be fun for some but if it's not obviously fake then it gratuitously damages social trust by adding to readers' expectations of bad behavior from others. I wish people wouldn't write these.

Damaging people's social trust in Reddit would be doing them a huge favor.

Damaging people's social trust in Reddit would be doing them a huge favor.

It would, but @Incanto's point is not that it's social trust in Reddit that's being damaged, but social trust in people in general. People read a fake story about a cruel or unjust landlord on reddit and slowly grow to believe that landlords are more likely than not to do them wrong, that all landlords are bad, that landlording is evil, that private property should be banned, that the means of production should be redistributed...

The point has also been made about those radio shows (i.e. "Ryan's Roses") where people are caught cheating on their partners, who call in -- they're fake but did damage to the public's trust in relationship fidelity and therefore in relationships in general. The same is true for /r/relationshipadvice and /r/aita.

I don't think Reddit (at least most parts of it) are redeemable.

The only way to interact with an extremist propaganda factory is to mock it. I want Reddit to die and be replaced with something better.

The end result of this is /r/FuckLuigiMangione: an entirely invented drama op that exists purely for lulz.

I won't deny it's given me some belly laughs, but I don't see how it could be good for society. It's not even hurting Reddit: it's volunteer engagement farming that gives them more opportunities to display ads.

The end result of this is /r/FuckLuigiMangione

What's the point of that subreddit? To poke fun at the people who like Luigi, or the people who hate Luigi? It just doesn't make sense to me.

But in general, this is my least favorite aspect of the internet: real discussions boiled down to trolling and why-are-you-so-serious-about-serious-issue type loserdom. The people who care the least shouldn't always win. But nether should the people who care the most always win.

I guess I just see it as another area where the internet destroys authentic connection. If you bring up a serious issue with a real-life friend, you can have an actual discussion about it and maybe learn something. But outside of a few places on the internet, like here, it's lulz vs activism all the way down. Real talk with people who are concerned but not trying to sell you something is rarely possible.

What's the point of that subreddit?

Dramatards hit it big with the abortion bounty hunters thing, and have been chasing that high ever since.

What's the point of that subreddit? To poke fun at the people who like Luigi, or the people who hate Luigi? It just doesn't make sense to me.

Chaos. It's literally an op by rDrama to make people on Reddit of every "side" post angry comments to share and laugh at them.

Stop going on Reddit. Seriously.

It's like complaining about porn recommendations on Porn Hub. You are telling on yourself.

Medicine is worse than that. There was some bureaucratic confusion about whether insurance would be available for my kid's routine visit. I asked at the front desk what it would cost, assuming a normal visit with no complications, in case I couldn't apply insurance. She didn't know. I asked her who would. Didn't know that either. Tried calling the billing department, no answer. Looked up the billing information the hospital is required to publish by state law. The 'common' bills they showed did not include checkups. So basically, I could wait months for a different appointment or I could tell them I was willing to pay whatever price they asked after the fact. It worked out.

Vets, dentists, and the Surgery Center of Oklahoma can all quote prices. Medicine could too. I always thought the rightwing's Obamacare should've been: hospitals have to have transparent pricing and insurance companies can only say to the customer, "We'll cough up X money for your procedure based on your prognosis. We'll incentivize you to spend less than X. You can pay more than X if you make up the difference. You are allowed to spend that money at any hospital." The government can maintain a crappy website that lets you do price compare, with the assumption that Amazon or Walmart would make the actual working website.

Looked up the billing information the hospital is required to publish by state law. The 'common' bills they showed did not include checkups.

Checkouts aren't performed by a hospital, they are outpatient. So of course it wouldn't be there.

Hospitals where I am do outpatient services.

A big problem with medicine, along with other notoriously expensive professional services like law, is that knowing which specific actions to take is part of the service. One can't provide a remotely accurate quote without having already performed the services requested. A checkup for a 10-year-old boy with no medical conditions is a very different service from a checkup for a 58-year-old woman with twelve medications and diabetes.

It's also true for contractors and mechanics as well.

True story, I had a leak above my kitchen, called a plumber who told me that the pan under our utility closet (yay for 2nd floor HVAC/water heater), quoted to replace it. Gets halfway through replacing it, find a bunch of rotted boards underneath and says we really should do those too and that will be whatever-extra$. Dude was 100% honest and his price was, while not cheap, near enough the median charged in the area for that kind of thing.

It happens -- I don't understand why people would expect medicine to be any different. There are a lot of things where both knowing specifically what to do and encountering wild variations in the actual scope of work are routine. A surgery could go well or the patient could crump and be in the ICU for 3 days recovering.

I don't understand why people would expect medicine to be any different.

You had said:

[a plumber...] quoted to replace it

The medical industry currently is different. They refuse to do this part. At all. You can make it not any different. You just have to start giving some quotes/estimates. It's not all that hard; even a plumber can do it. Why can't you? Do we need to tack on some plumber school at the end of medical school or something?

There is a world of difference between a quote and an estimate.

Both can be used in the appropriate time/place. Your plumber didn't seem to have any problems with a quote and then a revision for additional work.

I think that the original poster would be satisfied with a rough estimate for a checkup of the demographic of their kid, with the understanding that this is the money they are committing to pay, not the money it will cost to cure the kid of all ills. If at some point the checkup discovers the need for additional medical procedures, the doctor can simply quote their prices and ask if he should perform them, or if they would like to shop around more.

I mean, there can be procedures where they go "we cut you open, check what is wrong and try to fix it, and depending on what is wrong, this is going to cost you more or less", but even then they could state the costs of the hypothetical treatment options beforehand, with the patient opting in or out of specific treatments.

I mean, there can be procedures where they go "we cut you open, check what is wrong and try to fix it, and depending on what is wrong, this is going to cost you more or less", but even then they could state the costs of the hypothetical treatment options beforehand, with the patient opting in or out of specific treatments.

This works for a basic "checkup" type thing which is bounded, but in a "cut you open" situation, the higher end of the spectrum is "your vitals suddenly collapse and you have to be taken to the ICU for a week, that will be $300K". Nearly every surgery would have to have this as one of the possibilities.

Moreover, that's not one a patient could be realistically given an opt-out from -- they can't just leave you to die.

Absolutely correct. The correct lens to look at this through is informed consent. Patients must be reasonably informed of the known costs/risks/benefits of medical procedures at the point when they give consent. Prices are part of costs, so they need to be reasonably informed of them when they give consent.

Of course, when they're lights out and cut open and something happens, there is no opportunity to inform them of the medical costs/risks/benefits, so we reasonably say that in such situations, it is acceptable to proceed anyway. All you need to do is import the exact same considerations to the question of when you can skip informing them of pricing information. If you feel ethically comfortable not getting informed consent for the medical costs/risks/benefits, sure, go ahead. Otherwise, when you're informing them to a reasonable extent about the medical costs/risks/benefits, you also need to inform them to a reasonable extent about prices. Just tell them what you're planning and what you know about that plan.

Oh definitely. I think that's fine.

I think the other bit is that up-front, the estimate for any surgery with anesthesia is going to be "it's unlikely but as we discussed there are risks in anesthesia and so in the worst case you nearly die and it's gonna be $300K".

Sounds fine to me! Maybe not even strictly necessary to put numbers to all the things. Again, it's just informed consent, just like medical costs/risks/benefits. You can say that there are risks in anesthesia, that unknown complications can happen, and if they do, you'll do what you can (where the actions and price are yet unknown). However, in some cases, where it's a "routine" complication, you can advise a little better. One doctor in these forums suggested that there are some procedures where they know that something happens about 1% of the time, that they plan for it, that they know what they're going to do if that happens (e.g., "If we see X, we're going to remove Y also"). In those cases where you have reasonably known specifics with reasonably known, planned actions, what you do is inform the patient. You can likewise inform them with reasonable information about likely costs of that relatively-known event and following actions. I think people would be perfectly happy with that.

All of this is getting into what is a common situation in hospitals, but is relatively rare for individual patients and in terms of total patient interactions with medical billing. It's kind of an edge case, though it is important to put some thought into. I think people would be pretty fine with a variety of practices concerning informed consent in these edge cases if the industry started getting the basics done on the much more vast world of much more numerous, much simpler services.

This is also true for HVAC work and plumbing. Estimates are a normal part of dealing with these trades.

I think the example cuts the other way -- those trades will give you an estimate but it's by no means binding if unexpected things come up.

To some extent you can just tell the guy to leave in the middle of the job, but that would leave you with a non-functional system, not really an option in medicine.

by no means binding if unexpected things come up

Literally no one is asking for this. They still give you the estimate, anyway, with what they do know. You can do at least that much, too. You can be better than a shitty, druggy, probably criminal contractor.

The checkup itself is pretty routine. If they get referred to a specialist or have to take a test or a vaccine that incurs a separate charge. But surely a base rate for the visit is easy to figure and most added services should be easy to look up as well.

It seems that every time people complain about medicine or law, someone (usually in the industry) will say something like "No, you see it is very very complicated. Our current system is perfect, or, barring that, it's literally impossible to change".

But I don't believe that change is impossible. I believe that there is a lack of political will and that entrenched interest groups have rigged the system for their benefit.

Price transparency is not impossible. But the medical industry won't do it unless they are forced to.

Insurance companies are working on this - ie I've seen presentations about trying to build variable copays into an app so someone trying to go to an urgent care or ER can go to one the company has contracted with at a cheaper rate.

Do those differences show up with different billing codes when you send them over to insurance? If so, how is that difference expressed in the content of the billing codes?

Mechanics have no trouble telling you what it will cost to take a look at your car. They'll post their hourly rate and let you know that if it's just [X] they'll figure it out pretty quick, but it might take [Y] hours if it winds up being the transmission instead. Ask a physician what their hourly rate is for diagnostic services and you will be likely to receive much less transparency and possibly a look of indignance that you'd be so gauche as to reduce their priestly actions to mere labor.

I'll once again note that various excuses about how a treating physician probably can't really know what things cost ring hollow for anyone with a decent veterinarian. That end of things is admittedly a newish experience for me, but when I take my dog to the vet and he presents treatment options, I can inquire what they cost and his reply is, "about [$X], but I can get the exact number for you if you want". That physicians cannot do this for much narrower ranges of practice indicates an incentive structure for not knowing what things cost.

Lawyers can debate...

I genuinely believe this is the part that triggers so many people to feel the way they do about Luigi. Guys like Brian Thompson make tens of millions of dollars and if anyone has a problem with it, they can get their lawyers to take it up with his lawyers, who will all make a shitload of money arguing with each other, lying for hire and making arguments that no one actually believes and that most laymen can't even understand. I'm surprised that others are surprised that profitable Kafka rituals occasionally trigger rage.

Here is an idea: simply allow veterinarians to treat humans.

The human has to be competent and sign a waver that they are aware that the vet's malpractice insurance will only cover a certain amount, so the patient is SOOL if something goes wrong big time.

TMK while canine and feline(the vast majority of veterinarians are trained for these two things and not other animals) biochemistry is pretty similar to people's, with slight differences(eg allergies, dietary requirements), their anatomy is... not.

Lawyers can debate...

I genuinely believe this is the part that triggers so many people to feel the way they do about Luigi.

Or Dick the Butcher from Henry VI, Part 2, who spoke the famous line "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." in Act IV, Scene 2.

To me, the complaint is very clearly with the doctor (or practice/hospital -whatever), not the executive! So I'm not sure why this would make people admire Luigi.

The doctor doesn't want to fuck you over, neither does the hospital or practice. The health insurance executive however, wants nothing else but to fuck you over.

In my experience, hospitals are more than happy to screw over patients in billing as long as they don't complain too much after the fact. Surprise out-of-network anaesthesiologists used to be common (now prohibited), and I've seen hospitals try to tack on not-covered-by-insurance fees that show up much later and weren't disclosed in advance (not that they ever give straightforward billing answers in advance). Yeah, they'll "kindly" remove or waive those if you call and complain a bunch (probably marking it down as "charity"), but it's really annoying and not always worth my billing rate.

Yeah, they'll "kindly" remove or waive those if you call and complain a bunch (probably marking it down as "charity"), but it's really annoying and not always worth my billing rate.

IME you are significantly overstating how much of a hassle it is to get your hospital bill adjusted.

There are scum bags everywhere, for sure, but the perverse incentives start with the insurance companies. You can't pull a surprise out of network anaesthesiologist out of your pocket if there aren't any networks. It's the insurance companies who ban pharmacies and doctors from talking about the price of medication and offering cheaper alternatives. And it was insurance companies who instituted the policy of denying every claim first and forcing patients to pull teeth getting their claim covered.

It's the insurance companies who ban pharmacies and doctors from talking about the price of medication and offering cheaper alternatives.

This claim simply does not pass the smell test.

It's the insurance companies who ban pharmacies and doctors from talking about the price of medication and offering cheaper alternatives.

Can you provide citation/further reading on this? A brief search actually turned up basically the opposite complaint (in multiple articles that were clearly founded on pro-doctor propaganda advocacy), so I'm definitely interested if the surface internet has it all wrong and no one has been talking about these secret bans.

You're right (well, the opposite complaint would be that doctors and pharmacies are banning insurance companies from offering cheaper alternatives, but I think I get what you mean) I merged two problems in my head - the three big pbms (all owned by insurance companies) refusing to stock certain brands making it either expensive or impossible for doctors to prescribe them and insurance companies banning doctors from telling patients they could get their meds cheaper without using insurance.

the opposite complaint would be that doctors and pharmacies are banning insurance companies from offering cheaper alternatives, but I think I get what you mean

I chuckled. But anyway, what I meant (as you probably know) is the insurance company banning doctors/pharmacies from using more expensive alternatives. Dubbed "step therapy" or "fail first", the insurance companies were saying that you had to have the patient try a cheaper alternative first, and only if/when that didn't work would they cover the more expensive drug. I'm sure there are nuanced arguments on both sides of this, and I don't have a dog in that fight. Probably sometimes one approach is good; probably sometimes the other approach is good. Not worth getting involved from the outside.

insurance companies banning doctors from telling patients they could get their meds cheaper without using insurance.

I agree that lack of price transparency here was a problem. At a cursory look, I would agree with the goals of the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act that they cite, which fixed this problem. All we need to do is take that same name, swap in "Medical Services" for "Drug" in the title, and perhaps we can work out a text that can fix more of this price transparency nightmare.

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The insurance companies want cheap alternatives. It's doctors and pharma companies who run advertising for big pharma, patients then demand treatments that are extremely expensive, then insurance has to pay for it.

Hold up, are you saying doctors want patients to spend more money on meds?

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I've expressed before that veterinary care has a lot of medicine, especially the business side, figured out better than humans.

Insurance, for the most part, really is for the big stuff that can't be anticipated, and is priced as such. It's $60 a month to insure my 14 year old beagle with 50% coinsurance. It doesn't cover the cost of exams or checkups. It does cover things like surgeries and cancer treatment.

I once used it for a spine surgery. The total cost was about $7,000, quoted upfront. I paid about $3,500 and the insurance covered the other half. This would have been well into hundreds of thousands of dollars if performed on a human.

I was able to have conversations via email, not through some dumb HIPAA compliant portal.

That most dogs are uninsured probably keeps costs down, as does that typically pet insurance has a higher coinsurance figure than human insurance. There's an unavoidable principal-agent problem that we exacerbate with regulations that practically remove all incentive for people to price shop.

Why did you get insurance with a co-pay of 50%?

Insurance is good if it prevents improbable but huge payments. It has a negative expectation value on your net worth, but should have a positive expectation value on the logarithm of your net worth (presumably defined inclusive enough that the case of going negative does not appear), which is closer to actual utility. LW recently had an article on this, here.

A fixed co-pay seems reasonable enough, the case you want to avoid with insurance is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if you co-pay is a few thousand, then that limits your risk exposure.

But an insurance with a proportional co-pay feels different. I mean, if it is 1% co-pay, one could still argue that it scales the treatment options one can afford by orders of magnitudes. By contrast, a 99% co-pay would not be worth it for anyone, because if you can afford 99%, you can also pay 100%.

I would argue that 50% co-pay is more like 99% co-pay than 1%. If X is the maximum loss you could absorb, it will only be helpful for losses between X and 2X. For example, say you could absorb losses of 5k$ without insurance. Then for any treatment which ends up costing up to 5k$, you would have been better off to just absorb the losses in case they appear without paying a middle man. And for everything which costs more than 10k$, you could not afford your co-pay and thus would not benefit from insurance. Now, if it happens that most vet bills are in that range, then it could still make sense to buy it, but from my priors, they are likely much wider in distribution.

Insurance, for the most part, really is for the big stuff that can't be anticipated

Which is certainly what it should be for healthy people. A high deductible catastrophic plan. But the ACA outlawed that and instead young healthy people have to buy expensive insurance that they largely don't use.

It's called a health sharing plan. They exist mostly as religious exemptions to ACA requirements to cover the morning after pill, but nobody actually checks whether you go to church or not.

Your rate sounds not to far off from what a cash pay health sharing or a ultra high deductible plan would be- and that’s basically what you have.

How much has your pet insurance paid out? Seems that unless you're having major procedures regularly, self insurance is the way to go.

Roughly $5,000, dog had another surgery later on to remove a bunch of tumors.

Got the dog in 2018, at about $60 per month since then, I'm still ahead, but that's very luck of the draw. I'd prefer not to have some other incident that would make the insurance pay out and deliver more value for my premiums, I'd rather he just die in his sleep when the time comes.

These products are regulated and competetive, I expect the rates to be actuarily fair and the median customer to have been better of self insured.

I expect the rates to be actuarily fair and the median customer to have been better of self insured.

That doesn't make any sense. For an insurance to exist as a business, they have to take more then they're giving to the average customer. They have to pay for offices, ads and personnel. Maybe you got lucky and are temporarily ahead financially, but long-term insurance will always result in a net negative for the customer.

I think we agree.

I’m curious if survival rates are similar? That is, if the margin for error is much smaller when operating on humans it makes sense to me the cost may be orders of magnitude higher

Even if survival rates are similar, a dog's life is worth less than a human's in court.

I'll once again note that various excuses about how a treating physician probably can't really know what things cost ring hollow for anyone with a decent veterinarian. That end of things is admittedly a newish experience for me, but when I take my dog to the vet and he presents treatment options, I can inquire what they cost and his reply is, "about [$X], but I can get the exact number for you if you want".

Bingo. It's been a while since I went to the vet, but when I was a kid we had our dog neutered and they asked us to put a budget on lifesaving efforts if things went south for some reason (they didn't, everything turned out fine).

Anyway, yes, I think doctors could do this and it might help everyone involved think a lot more clearly about treatment plans. In fact, because people are so leery of hidden fees, I would not be surprised if it would save lives if doctors were required to post consultation prices and then notify patients of the cost of treatment beforehand. Nobody wants to get a surprise $1000 bill in the mail, if people knew that going to the doctor to check out that weird lump or whatever was only gonna cost them $50 it might be more effective than all the work Obamacare put into making annual visits free.

That's entirely believable to me.

Dealing with reputable HVAC contractors in my area, quotes ranged from $13k-35k for the same job.

A drywall contractor my dad barely showed up while continuously demanding new progress payments. He kept claiming he was too broke to finish the job without getting paid, couldn't afford gas to get to the job, the job was in worse shape than expected, etc.

Dealing with reputable HVAC contractors in my area, quotes ranged from $13k-35k for the same job.

I'm guessing a complete system replacement- they were likely quoting you different systems. Brand, efficiency rating, etc can make a very large difference in pricepoint, much bigger than markup.

No, it does not in most cases make any sense to pay for a more efficient system, although paying for a medium priced over cheap brand might.

Brands were different, largely because each contractor only carried one brand, but each quote required the same SEER ratings and tonnages, so the equipment prices were equal more or less.

Given that reliability and efficiency were more or less similar according to reviews, inasmuch as brand increased prices it didn't really make any difference to the end consumer.

Construction / building works in general are one of the last industries where if you don’t personally know (and are friends with, and can afford to pay well in most cases) somebody competent to oversee building works, you’re pretty fucked.

Seconding this- construction has lots of A) crooks and B) drug addicts. You can find honest people who do good work, but as a complete layman you don't really have a way to do so.

We only employ the local Jehovah’s Witnesses. You have to put up with one attempt at evangelism per visit but they’re great, trustworthy guys who do good work for honest prices.

Seems ripe for disruption by a large conglomerate which lets tradespeople syndicate with them and verifies they are not A) Crooks or B) Drug addicts. It gives them a certificate of approval and then they can use that to prove to prospective clients they are decent and thus get more work, no different to how any certification regime (that's not been captured) works at the moment.

The disruption is always going to take the form of standardization of items into interoperable and easily swappable units. Custom work, that requires some degree of skill, will always be beyond the ability of large corporations to do all that well/efficiently.

The disruption in HVAC, for example, is going to be the decline of expensive and complicated central AC in favor of cheap and replaceable wall mounted mini-split units that can be installed by a clever homeowner or a cheap handyman. When part of the unit breaks, you replace it with another plug-and-play unit. Central AC requires skill in working with high amperage wiring, running ductwork, installing large and complicated and expensive equipment, and balancing the system across multiple rooms. Mini splits can run on regular 12-2 wire, each room has its own unit and its own thermostat so you don't have to balance or run duct, and each distinct element is relatively cheap and so can be replaced rather than repaired by a specialist.

The more you can turn the process into black boxes that an owner replaces in their entirety, rather than requiring skill, you can remove the need for skilled intermediaries and produce profit for larger corporations that can produce black boxes at scale.

Sure, I agree with that. I'm actually surprised by how many american homes have a central HVAC, the rest of the world already uses wall mounted mini split units everywhere (another benefit is that that you can cool down only certain portions of the house rather than running a massive power guzzler all the time). Plus you can upgrade your system incrementally rather than needing to do a building wide scale change if it turns out that you're not getting enough cooling in a certain part of the structure.

I blame the usual American largesse.

As others have mentioned, good contractors have enough customers lined up that they don't care.

One thing I've seen done several times is companies guaranteeing a quality standard. Basically, they are eager to tell you everything about what good framing/plumbing/wiring/stuccoing should look like and will either send a second guy with a checklist or let you do it yourself or hire a third party.

Two drawbacks:

  • this still doesn't scale much. Several hundred houses or renovations a year are a drop in the ocean
  • these companies charge more than good contractors do

One thing I've seen done several times is companies guaranteeing a quality standard. Basically, they are eager to tell you everything about what good framing/plumbing/wiring/stuccoing should look like and will either send a second guy with a checklist or let you do it yourself or hire a third party.

I asked for this once and they had no idea what I was talking about.

As others have mentioned, good contractors have enough customers lined up that they don't care.

I wonder if the right disruptive model here almost goes the other direction: not a clearinghouse for finding tradespeople, but a trusted service you can have "on retainer" effectively to subcontract the work. Ideally, you call 'em up, ask for [task], and they shop various provider options (some perhaps that they use often) with a reasonable expectation of the marketplace, and maybe even for an extra fee can manage the "will arrive sometime between 9:00 and 3:00" part where it's pretty disruptive for folks with full-time not-from-home jobs to let them in and get things done without the usual concerns. Bonus points for being able to make sure the job is done correctly the first time.

Although what I've described sounds a bit like a combination of the network of a general contractor (for larger tasks) and a rental property management company. But I've never heard a sufficiently-glowing review of the latter from a renter to want to consider asking "Hey, I own this house and live here: would you be willing to handle when something breaks?" Does anyone actually do that?

I’ve heard of gated communities, particularly for retirees, that essentially have this for homeowners, where the office will have their company / their guys who both built the homes, did the plumbing etc originally come back to maintain them without the owners needing to do more than call management and pay the bill.

"Hey, I own this house and live here: would you be willing to handle when something breaks?" Does anyone actually do that?

You might want to look into a home warranty company. Disclaimer- quality is generally not very high.

Work on a house is just too sporadic for a retainer that would be worth it to a tradesperson to also be worth it to a homeowner. Property management companies have enough work... but also pretty much care only about cost to do the absolute minimum to keep the renters from leaving or suing (depending on the market).

The good ones have no trouble filling their schedules, there's no incentive for them to join such a system.

If someone advertises you can treat it as signal that they're not good enough to book clients via word of mouth only.

On a small scale, things like Angie's List exist. I've used them a couple times and was happy.

On a larger scale, my guess is that there is a lot of laundering of immigration status that happens which a large company might not be able to do.

But finally, honest contractors do exist. Both my brother and parents did a complete rebuild with a contractor and were not in any way screwed over. Honest ones may be hard to find, however, since they will get so much positive word of mouth they will quickly have a full slate.

On a small scale, things like Angie's List exist.

Angie's List, as it once was, hasn't existed for years. It's now basically just an advertising service for contractors.

Yeah, it's called Angi. I've used it twice and both times got services at a reasonable price. If I had bad service, I could have rated the contractor which would have made it less likely for them to get future work. And it also saved me from having to call 50 places for my $200 job that no one would have wanted.

I know this is an internet forum and it's cool to be jaded. But, I don't know, this corporation provided value to me 🤷. I wish there was an Angi for health services.

I wish there was an Angi for health services.

Their is. Sort of - and they fucking suck.

The industry has essentially landed on patient reviews as the mechanism to do this and you can find all kinds of websites that track this, and certain forms of reimbursement may be partially contingent on patient satisfaction metrics.

The first layer of problems is the usual review issue - most people don't bother to leave a review if they had average care, a small fraction of people who receive great care leave a review, and a lot of people who are mad leave angry reviews, this creates a lack of realistic balance in the reported experience.

The other piece is that what makes for good care isn't usually legible to patients. NPs like to brag about studies where they have higher levels of patient satisfaction and it's often tied to not appropriately saying no to patients or things like unnecessary testing and treatment. People don't like being told "no" or "I don't know" doctors are better at doing that but it pretty uniformly pisses people off. The classic example is telling a patient no when they ask for antibiotics for a viral infection. This is good healthcare but obviously decreases patient satisfaction, and that's not bringing up things like angry patients seeking drugs of abuse and review bombing, or psychiatric patients who are angry because they have poor insight and received good care.

Outside of outpatient clinic medicine things get even trickier. The best hospitalist in the hospital is spending his time not in the room with you running down to pathology and radiology, calling insurance companies or social workers for dispo, teaching students, etc. The worst is sitting in his office playing Sudoko. Both only spend five minutes with you a day, you'll have no way to tell if they are good or not unless you have an avoided near miss or something like that.

I was hospitalized a little while back at my own hospital and was the victim of a pretty severe and unacceptable/easily avoidable medical error. I don't think a non-doctor would have even noticed.

Some other examples - anesthesia.....you'll wake up either way, the horribly wrong outcomes aren't generally the doctor's fault. With good gas you'll have an easier emergence, or if you know exactly what to look for on your anesthesia record you could see you were getting good care. How many people get enough surgeries or have the training to read those tea leaves?

For surgery... a lot of aspects of outcomes are patient and not surgeon dependent (like overall health status, engagement with PT), you don't know if your insides are an avoidable mess afterwards or not. The good surgeon might make your next surgery much much easier but you are unlikely to ever know. Patients will also often jump at the chance to get surgery not realizing when NO surgery is the better outcome. You might be a better doctor for saying no...and get worse reviews.

Exceedingly hard to manage this.

There have been attempts to look at more formal outcomes and this rapidly runs into pretty severe juking stats and perverse incentives.

A classic example is transplant surgeons forcibly keeping patients "alive" to get them to die outside of various thresholds (since that gets reported).

Surgeons will sometimes refuse to operate on risky cases because of the morbidity and mortality outcomes. Some of the best surgeons have the worst outcomes because they'll swing on cases that others won't. Some of the worst surgeons too - they'll swing on cases that they shouldn't.

It's a mess.

I do get asked "how do I find a good doctor then." I don't have good advice for this. In my specialty and my area? I already know who is shit and who isn't and hoard that knowledge like gold. Some related specialties? My specialty further away than I don't know them personally? Sometimes I can guess, but mostly I just have to know someone in that specialty in that region who has the wisdom to be able to determine which of their colleagues are ass.

That is not generalizable.

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Those syndicates put 1000% markups on everything. A conglomerate which can do this will prove unable to restrain its greed.

As a kid, I knew someone who was sued for torrenting (or their parents were) a movie of some kind. The initial fee for settlement (especially after late fees etc were added in) was insanely high, but the parents dragged it out and eventually settled for cents on the dollar. So much stuff is like this, the perpetrators rely on occasionally encountering people who are the perfect combination of rich, dumb and neurotic/anxious to just pay immediately. Even if it’s only 5% of people, it’s more than worth it. Debt collection has worked this way for millennia.

Yeah, there are many scams where the scammer isn't actually doing anything illegal, they're just relying on people's anxiety with saying, "no, fuck off". All the way down to beggars trying to guilt people into giving them money for gas with a ridiculous sob story, all the way up to patent-trolling and blackmail. For the party being harassed, there is both the cost-benefit analysis of what it takes to get your harasser to go away to the skillfully crafted guilt or anxiety inducing attack on their conscience.

As an addendum, one small thing that I really hate about this is how developing the hardened shell of being quick to tell people to fuck off subverts judgment and charitable behavior towards people. Years ago, maybe about a decade now, an indigent looking man in a wheelchair tried to stop my wife and I on the sidewalk. I ignored him on the basis that he was almost certainly trying to get money. My wife stopped; it turned out all he wanted for someone to pick up his lighter that he'd dropped (there was no add-on begging, he thanked her kindly and everyone went about their day). I felt bad about that and still do, but my alternative would be hearing approximately 38 bullshit stories that end in, "so I need $20" for every one disabled guy that just needs a hand with something real quick.

I hate to say it, but people probably shouldn't torrent movies or other IP. The analogy there would be more if this contractor's truck was in the street, maybe he was working on a neighbors house, and the redditor went and swiped a few screws from it. Then, when the contractor noticed, he threatened to sue the guy for OneBillionDollars.jpg. Like, okay, buddy. Silly, yes. But kind of different in kind. Perhaps one could make other analogies to try to make it somewhat more sympathetic, like if the contractor was working on the neighbor's house, and the neighbor swiped the screws and gave them to the redditor. I get that there are complications here, but I think it's really just a different type of thing.

Debt collection should mostly be premised on the validity of a previously-agreed-upon debt. That's usually the first line of defense - "Prove that I owe this debt." When done above-board, the debt collector can produce a document that the debtor signed that specifically authorized the terms of the debt. Things get sketchier as the underlying facts get sketchier. Usually, how sketchy it gets depends on how sketchy the original transaction was. The extreme end of sketchy for underlying debts would be, "We refused to give them a price, just did the service, and then unilaterally made up a price." (Yeah, I guess even more extreme would be that they just didn't even do the service or just totally made up the whole thing, but that would probably be better categorized as obvious outright fraud rather than "sketchy".) I guess if the conclusion is that routine practice in the medical industry is akin to the sketchiest versions of underlying debts that are claimed by debt collectors, that's damning with faint praise.

There is some magic that occurs in debt collection. You can go through more and more layers additional sketchiness and eventually they just call it taxation.

A debt that is owed to "society" because you were born here. Services were sometimes rendered before you were born, and the debt is still being paid off. You get voice in what services are offered via voting, but if you don't vote you still owe money. And a candidate can lie about what they'll charge you to get your vote and suffer no consequences.

Any attempt to make these comparisons through a metaphor just make it sound like you are talking about a criminal syndicate.

And in case you didn't feel like you were taking crazy pills a majority of people think that this is a better and more fair way to pay for medicine.

And in case you didn't feel like you were taking crazy pills a majority of people think that this is a better and more fair way to pay for medicine.

Well, yeah. Organized crime is easier to deal with than disorganized crime.

That said, I wouldn't be against some of the proposals in this thread for laws forcing price transparency, since as another poster pointed out, veterinarians are able to do this, so there should be no reason human doctors or surgeons can't.

Organized crime is easier to deal with than disorganized crime until a point, at which point it becomes completely entangled with the state to the point of being either coup-complete or requiring intercession by some faraway as yet un-completely-corrupted power, as happened during the Italian anti-mafia campaigns where Rome was still able to exert some pressure on the completely corrupted Sicilian political system.

The US is lucky in a way in that mafias have been local enough and ethnic enough that control of institutions has been relatively limited and temporal.

The US has a comparatively unusual system where the Mafia became an arm of the state rather than the other way around.

More common than you think. Look at the relationship in Russia, or how the Yakuza used to assist the Japanese Government (they fell out after a government official was murdered and now the Yakuza is a shadow of what it was. But I heard that a lot of COVID restrictions were informally enforced by the Yakuza).

That would be surprising since I've heard that the great majority of Yakuza members are over 50 now.

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