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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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By contrast, it's a lot harder to quantify dysfunctional community (particularly among the wealthy donor class's socio-political enemies in the WEIRD West).

Sure, but it's also harder to ... figure that out, if it does exist. And also a lot harder to fix. Dysfunctional just means "bad", and is about as informative. The EA people probably don't even agree with you about that dysfunction! It's not a quantification issue.

However, I don't agree that "literally millions of people" are trying to fix them, otherwise we would be seeing much less grim results than we currently are

Yeah, this is just wrong. Millions of people can try to fix it and just ... be wrong about what they're fixing, fix it poorly, and go nowhere. Which is probably happening, sure, but the problem is not only hard, it's not obvious at all what the problem is, or what can be done - and in a sense half of politics is trying to solve it, but poorly!

Maybe by first fixing their own zoning codes to allow for the development they say they want?

uh dustin moskovitz, the main EA donor, is literally funding yimby stuff on a large scale though

Sure, but it's also harder to ... figure that out, if it does exist. And also a lot harder to fix. Dysfunctional just means "bad", and is about as informative. The EA people probably don't even agree with you about that dysfunction! It's not a quantification issue.

Right, I agree that "making things good" is hard to quantify. Which is why small and local arenas where one has the most information are the best places to start.

Millions of people can try to fix it and just ... be wrong about what they're fixing, fix it poorly, and go nowhere. Which is probably happening, sure, but the problem is not only hard, it's not obvious at all what the problem is, or what can be done - and in a sense half of politics is trying to solve it, but poorly!

My fault; poor language. I agree that it's definitely possible for millions of people to be bad and/or wrong at fixing things. What I meant was that there is no mass-movement towards revitalizing civic associations, mutual benefit societies, churches, families, municipal governments, or rooted neighborhoods; ACS statistics and local election turnout numbers tell us this much.

uh dustin moskovitz, the main EA donor, is literally funding yimby stuff on a large scale though

Yes, this is good (though depends on what he means by "scale" though; I'd be more pleased with him doing something in his own community and then moving outward from there than going state- or country-wide).

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