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Notes -
Moonshot Personal Growth Idea
There are a lot of smart, hyper-informed people on here (don't be bashful). Each probably have 1-5 topics they know A LOT about, who could deliver a knowledgable spiel over voice or text without much effort and intelligently field any number of follow-up questions. So it occurs to me there might be a big educational opportunity for me here if I can capture some of this low-hanging fruit.
I don't know much about American politics, health, business, etc., but eagerly want to know more, and I'm happy to talk over discord/phone/voice or text depending on your preferences. Some topics to jog your brain; if it strikes you that "hey, I actually got obsessed with topic 23 one time and learned everything you could possibly know about it over a 6 month period," please consider reaching out to me. I'll adopt a position indicated by either "pro" or "con" provisionally just to inspire engagement (my actual views here are very low-confidence and "pro/con" means something more like "I've heard interesting arguments for this side of the issue that I want an intelligent person who knows more than I do to explain the merits of to me" than "this is what I believe.")
“The current level of military spending is justified.” Pro
“The typical white male is utterly blameless for the circumstances of the African American community” Pro
"The growth of transgender identity and bisexuality have the character of a social contagion" Pro (Is bisexuality created or only revealed by the environment? Is anyone bisexual because of encouragement, or is the absence of discouragement the only environmental factor that does anything to affect rates of ID?) (Caplan)
“Asian romantic preferences are morally permissible.” Pro
“De facto interrogational torture by the US is justified.” Pro
"Extraterrestrial life is the best explanation of some UFO sightings" Con
“Any minimum wage fails a purely utilitarian cost benefit test due to disemployment effects.” Pro
"Joe Biden's Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Would Be Disastrous," (Or: Cost benefit analysis puts several other environmental causes ahead of climate change.)
"Feminism is bad for women." (a la Bryan Caplan)
"Conventional medicine barely makes us healthier" (as seen in Robin Hanson's case for radical medical skepticism, from the RAND Health insurance experiment to the replication crisis http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/feardie.pdf)
"Dietary research is of such poor quality that we know almost nothing about whether any given major diet fad is truly the ideal diet." (Pro) (I would be willing to take the even stronger position that we don't even know ANYTHING about the right diet just to see what a smart, informed person would say in response to better calibrate my reasoning on this issue)
"Most of life is a prestige-signaling game./Social status is the closest thing to a one-variable explanation for everything, and does far better than the traditional rival models like sex or money."
"Diversity is our strength." Pro
"Society does not clearly treat one sex more unfairly than the other." (Pro)
"IQ is real and a major determinant of social outcomes" Pro
"Racial groups differ in socially relevant ways for genetic reasons." Con
“Capitalists deserve their success.” Pro
"Money doesn't really buy happiness." Pro
“The solution to traffic is congestion pricing (tolls)” Pro
"Actions taken by the Biden Admin during the Covid pandemic were generally justified." Not enough info to sway either way
“We should deregulate construction completely.” Pro
“Workers are not underpaid in competitive business environments.” Pro
Question: How do taxes work, and how SHOULD they work?
“Affirmative action is immoral/harmful.” Pro
“State-mandated wealth redistribution is immoral./Wealth inequality is not a serious social problem” Pro
“Abortion is morally permissible.” Pro
“We should put America First” pro
“It is not possible to be a good criminal defense lawyer AND a good person.” Pro
“We should privatize everything.” Pro
“The poor generally deserve to be poor.” “American wealth inequality is generally fair.” (as seen in remarks made by Caplan re: the so-called "success sequence")
“Gender is essentially biological.” Pro (Tomas Bogardus, Alex Byrne)
“We should remove confederate monuments.” Con
“We should not provide trigger warnings/safety culture actually harms mental health.” Pro (Jonathan Haidt)
“We Should Stop Talking about Privilege” pro
“Immigration is Not a Human Right.” Con
“The Death Penalty is Immoral” pro
“The typical meat eater does nothing wrong.” Pro
“Political correctness is just politeness.” Con
“There are no positive rights; There is no right to healthcare or education.” Pro
“Utilitarianism is a bad moral theory.” Pro
“It isn’t morally wrong to misgender a trans person.” Pro
“Artificial intelligence is not an existential risk.” Pro
“We should not have gun control.” Pro
“We should segregate intimate public spaces by biological sex.” Or: “it is not morally wrong to do so.” Pro
“It’s morally wrong for the average voter to vote; we should try to decrease voter turnout.” Pro
“It’s morally permissible to racially profile.” Pro
“Psychological egoism is false.” Pro or con
“Ethical egoism is false.” Pro
“Racial discrimination is not inherently immoral.” Pro
“Businesses may racially select their customers.” Pro
“Equality of opportunity is morally undesirable.” Pro
“Mixed martial arts don’t violate anyone’s rights.” Pro
“We are morally obligated to tip servers.” Pro
“Hazing should be permitted on college campuses.” Pro
“It is just to punish criminals for the sake of causing suffering to people who deserve it.” Pro or con, preferably con
“If we ought to be taxed more, we ought to donate our excess income.” (“Rich socialists/distributive egalitarians are hypocrites.”) pro
“It’s morally permissible to sell oneself into permanent slavery.” Pro
“There is no duty to hire the most qualified applicant.” Pro
“We should completely deregulate the provision of healthcare services.” Pro
“We should not require occupational licensing by law (for doctors, plumbers, or lawyers).” Pro
“Workplace quality and safety regulations are bad for workers.” Pro
“We should not dispense racial reparations to the black community.” Pro
Con “alcoholics (and drug addicts in general) are nonresponsible victims”
Pro: “Race is biologically real”
Pro:“The rich pay their fair share”
“Exploitation isn’t wrong.” Pro
“Free market pricing is a better distributor than queuing” Pro
“Price gouging is fine.” Pro
“The casting couch is just prostitution” Pro
“Affirmative Action is systemically racist” Pro
“Colleges are guilty of negligent advertising” pro
"We should we abolish civil rights law" (Richard Hanania)
“Gender is essentially biological” pro
TL;DR Looking for someone to explain American politics to me, preferably over discord voice. Especially interested in topics like happiness, relationship success, American public policy (esp. healthcare and the budget)
Lot of reports on this post for it being low-effort. There are lots of downvotes as well.
I'm putting my mod-hat on to give an official response. However, I won't be giving an official warning to /u/PerseusWizardry, since this does not seem to clearly violate any existing rules.
I thought this was fine as a user, and I said so. But it seems many other users might not agree. This post was maybe a better fit for a stand-alone post, rather than a top level comment within the culture war thread.
As a general suggestion: Omnibus posts (where you link a bunch of different unrelated issues) in the culture war thread are often a bad idea, and posters should try to avoid them.
Low effort isn't a rule?
Also, if it doesn't violate any rules, but it's obviously something bad for the group, you should add it to the rules so that you can give out a warning next time someone does it.
Low-effort-to-volume ratio, maybe. This clearly had some thought put into it.
I would support adding a "no laundry lists" rule to cover the situation. The ninety-five theses may have had plenty of effort, but this board is not a church door.
95 these are probably a little different, since they aren't 95 disconnected things, but an overarching argument (or maybe a few connected ones). I'd think that it would be more acceptable than this. If some one took one of the long posts we have here but attempted to present it syllogistically, I see no reason why that would be a problem, even though it would then be a long list of statements.
Point taken.
Intuitively, I’d prefer the longpost version to a list. Something about the amount of space it takes up. I’m not sure I can defend that intuition, though.
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Low effort is a rule, but I didn't think this post was strictly a violation of that.
And we try to avoid having tons of rules.
The post is low effort per claim, even if it isn't low effort total.
(And a post is supposed to be high effort because of depth, not because of quantity. Multiplying low effort by 73 is high effort in the sense of total quantity of effort, but it's of low depth. Calling this high effort is just taking advantage of a loophole in the rules.)
I didn't see the post as a request to argue for these 73 points on this specific post, but rather as an invitation to engage in a more in depth conversation elsewhere. The poster seems pretty sincere in that desire to engage elsewhere. If they had said "here are my 73 positions, fight me here" then yah, I would have agreed it needed sanction. That is not what they said or seemed to intend, that is just what people did.
I find the invitation to engage elsewhere to be one of the worse aspects of the post. It seems somewhat exclusionary and against the purpose of the culture war thread, which I believe is to have discussion on the issues in the thread.
That sorta makes sense to me. But at the same time we don't really offer audio discussion here.
Maybe if they had asked to have private text conversations elsewhere it would be more of a problem.
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But it probably doesn't belong as a comment in the culture war thread, then, and would be better put elsewhere?
Yes, and that is what I said in the post with my modhat on.
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I think it depends a bit on what you mean by this. Colleges are not being upfront about very critical information (from a student point of view) and especially where the quality of the programs on offer differ even across the same major in different colleges. A computer programming major in one college in one school can be world class, while another program can be utter garbage as far as educational value goes. The same is true of other programs. There’s simply no reliable self reporting of student outcomes for a given major at a given school.
This is a problem precisely because almost all students are going to college for job training and networking, unless they’re rich and well connected enough that their college experience doesn’t matter. This forces everyone to essentially try to use proxy measures: famous professors, prestige of the institution, famous graduates, or perhaps the beauty of the campus (an indication of wealthy donors). But these don’t really tell you much about the quality of instruction (yes, there’s a famous professor of physics at your college. You might see the back of his head once or twice, and your teacher is actually a harried graduate student.), thus making the process expensive. Most Americans spend decades paying off educational expenses, making the quality of the educational product extremely important. This likewise doesn’t help employers find qualified employees among recent graduates, forcing them to do things like hire based on the “name brand” of the school, or give pre-employment screening tests, or require internships— because they can’t know whether program X from Y university is rigorous and teaching useful skills, or garbage tier and graduating anyone who pays course fees on time.
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The casting couch is much more immoral than prostitution because the resources that are being traded for sex often do not truly belong to the person trading them. When the director chooses to hire the actress who gives him sexual favors over the actress who refuses but would be better for the role he is essentially defrauding the production company and anyone who has financial interest in the film.
That is a standard that nobody meets. People regularly favor others based on aspects that aren't strictly job relevant.
Besides, what if the director was using it as a tie-breaker between two equally competent actresses?
This conflates "Not being a hive mind ceaselessly optimizing for profit" with "making a multi-million dollar decision with your dick" which seems like a pretty lossy equivalence ("yeah he killed 15 men, but come on -- everyone commits some kind of crime").
The claim is "If a person who is given money to make a movie uses some of that money to have sex and make the movie worse, this is worse than hiring a prostitute with his own money". Do you disagree with that claim?
"It's just a tie breaker" has been said about affirmative action in software engineering for decades and it's always struck me how only somebody who has never actually done software engineering could believe it -- go ask some startup founders if they've ever had to choose between two equally good candidates. Maybe this philosophy is sensible for other kinds of work (e.g. low-skill jobs, or jobs where interview question give you no signal about employee quality), but not software engineering.
I'm inclined to believe that actors are at least less fungible as software engineers -- it seems like a no-brainer that casting can (and does) make or break a movie.
I don't disagree, but the vast majority of people handed money to make movies have insufficient leverage to get laid off it, unless they used the money to hire hookers instead.
Established actors? Maybe. But someone no name blonde 8/10 trying to make it in the big leagues is functionally interchangeable with any other. The more unique you get, the less you need to get a leg up by spreading them.
Even then, the casting couch is still wrong. It is akin to bribery, no different to a hiring manager being offered $10k for himself personally by candidate A to choose himself for the job over "equally good" candidate B. We should be against it for the same reason we are against bribery. In fact just like how we are against situations which even give the impression that bribery could be going on (Caesar's wife and all that), we should be against situtations which even give the impression this form of prostitution could be going on (by e.g. always mandating two people present at these interviews etc.)
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That's an interesting argument but I think it misses. There are two distinct differences, though between the casting couch and prostitution:
Prostitution is explicit. There's no question at all up front what the prostitute has to do to get paid. If casting calls had "Must perform sex acts on producer" along side other requirements, it would be different. But the vast majority of castings, from Hollywood down to commercials and community theater in Idaho, don't require the actors to do anything out of the ordinary. Even when it does happen, there's rarely any explicit demand for sex; the guy usually just hits on the actress and there's an implication that it wouldn't hurt to sleep with him.
On the other side of the coin, what you get out of sleeping with him isn't explicit either. A prostitute knows that she's going to get paid; that's part of the deal. Since the casting couch is by its nature implicit rather than explicit, there's never any guarantee that satisfying the guy's demands will get the desired outcome. He could think you're a terrible actress but worth a roll in the hay and use his power to convince you that sleeping with him will get you the part even though he knows up front there's no chance in hell of that happening. And when it comes to producers like Harvey Weinstein they aren't even the ones necessarily making the final decision. The director and casting agent are the ones who are supposed to come to that conclusion; while producers have considerable influence and can put in a good word (and even possibly demand it), they aren't technically the ones who get to decide, at least not since the end of the studio system.
So if there was some explicit statement up front that sex with the producer, or director, or casting agent, or half the employees of MGM was required for the role, and it would only have to be done at the end after they'd already been picked, then, yeah, I would liken it to prostitution. But the way it is now is way too vague in comparison.
It is common to pay people for attempts rather than for successes, as the former is more under their control. I can't see why it is wrong to pay an agent money to promote your book, even if the agent might not get you a book deal. I don't think you can claim book agents and Harvey Weinstein are wrong for the same reason. The same applies to most agents, sports included.
The requirement is that the actress must be able to plausibly fake being interested in having sex with Weinstein et al. That requires real talent and is an actual test of acting. Allegedly, most Hollywood actresses meet this bar.
Do you know this? My sources claim that people are very explicit about expectations. Actresses have agents who set these meetings up, and they explain in great detail, what is expected. For every John, there is a pimp.
Luckily all this will be made moot by AI. No-one, and I mean no-one, is going to ask the AI developer for sex, (except the sexbot that AI developer him(or her)self made).
Even if this is a real requirement, the producer should hire a professional from the pornographic industry to test the actress out on, at most he should get to watch the act (to judge the merits etc.), not participate in it.
Why is Weinstein not a professional at this? Allegedly he has been doing it for years. He is like the Robert Parker of actresses. Parker's big advantage in wine tasting was that he had tasted all these allegedly fabulous vintages that are no longer available. Who but Weinstein could compare the charms of actresses across the decades.
Because he should only care about how good the scene looks on film, not how good it feels. You don't need to actually have the sex to decide on the merits of what is captured on screen and how it will be seen by viewers (who themselves also won't be having the sex being shown). In fact it is better to not be the person actually having the sex as then you can look at the scene from different perspectives and distances (which you'll have on the final film) that you can't if you're having sex.
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After about 2 years of lurking (ever since the end of Slate Star Codex), I dont know why this is the factually inaccurate thing that got me to finally register and post, but real book agents do not charge you money to promote your book. Anyone claiming to be an agent who asks for money in order to have your book promoted is scamming you (and yes, there are scams where people do this edit: to clarify, they take the money but don't actually promote your book). Real agents only take on books that theyre fairly certain they can sell and make money from their commission.
I would like to think this was true, and I am sure that reputable agents do not charge money, but I imagine there are a lot of disreputable agents out there.
In a similar vein, never give equity (or god forbid, cash) to someone who claims they will help you fundraise.
They exist, but it's very well known in the publishing business that money flows to the author, not from the author. Any but the most naive or desperate of authors knows this, and an agent charging money is quickly known in the industry. It's true that with the advent of self-publishing and Kindle Direct there are a lot of new business models, most of which range from predatory to outright fraudulent, so you will find, for example, "hybrid" publishers that claim to be selective but act a sort of half-vanity press, half publicity agency.
But the established industry practice is that agents get a cut when they sell your book, and nothing before then. Any agent deviating from this is pretty much by definition not a reputable agent.
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Not really, no. Unless, again, you're talking about scammers. Anyone looking to publish is warned about agents asking for money to represent you, and publishers would be unlikely to work with such people. If by "disreputable agent", you're talking about someone who takes your money with zero chance of it leading to actual publication, then we're just splitting hairs over our definitions of scammer.
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It doesn't sound like you're responding to my point at all. You're just adding another difference on top
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Alternatively, an actress who refuses the casting couch does not really want the role, and will be trouble on set. The casting couch is a quick and reliable way to see if actresses are biddable. Can you think of a better test to see if an actress is willing to do what the director asks her to?
I wonder what the corresponding task you should set a man is? Perhaps very similar.
Several hundred hours of grinding leetcode is plausibly more degrading...
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This goes back to the OP's original observation about the principal-agent problem. Film is a collaborative medium; while it might be in the director's interest to have an actress who does whatever he or she says, it is not necessarily in the interests of the producers of the film.
This is why producers are the ones who run the casting couch, presumably. It is their money on the line, so they make the decision.
As Wikipedia says:
Neither [3] nor [4] give any evidence for the claim "Predominantly". If there is a female producer or casting director using the couch, she is flying under the radar.
I am talking about the production company .
Weinstein was the co-owner (with his brother) and founder of Miramax, the production company that made Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction, Heavenly Creatures, Flirting with Disaster, and Shakespeare in Love. It was his money on the line.
I am talking** in general**, not specifically re Weinstein. The casting couch existed long before Weinstein was born. Plus, Miramax was owned by Disney for much of the time inquestion.
Producers are the usual people to run a casting couch, and they normally own a large part of the production company.
The casting couch was more common under the studio system, but I do not know if the movie moguls were the ones on top at the time: They were Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Bros., Adolph Zukor at Paramount, William Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck (at 20th Century Fox from 1935), Carl Laemmle at Universal, and Harry Cohn at Columbia.
If someone has to have sex with the new young starlets, I imagine the job, like most difficult things, is past off to the guy in charge. If you want something done, ask a busy person.
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How about something difficult that isn't immoral and which won't risk tanking your reputation and getting you into legal trouble?
Even if there's merit to the idea of giving actresses tests which are overkill relative to the actual demands of the job, for an executive to assert that this test must be sex is odd, clearly in danger of being motivated by sexual desire alone, and risky for business.
Parkinson suggested the following test to reduce the number of candidates for an attractive position:
It is very hard to find a test that will distinguish the people who want the job from the people who really, really want the job. For an actress, the major issues that come up are a willingness to get naked on camera and pretending to engage in quite atypical actions (for some reason, this seems to be the sticking point for most actresses. They object to nude scenes, but not to killing people, defacing works of art, or jaywalking). How can you test if an actress is willing to do this? Some things come to mind but are significantly weirder than the casting couch.
Feminists will doubtless suggest that movies should not have gratuitous nudity. That raises the question as to whether the nudity is gratuitous or not. My guess is that Gwyneth Palthow's performance in Shakespeare in Love would have been received differently if she had worn more clothing, and thus Weinstein got the job done. Julia Roberts, who was supposed to get the role had a policy of keeping her top on. I could be completely wrong about this, but there certainly is a trend for more female nudity after a lull. We are now back to 70s-era levels of nudity in films, and especially in cable channels (or whatever they are called now), and possibly beyond that. Hollywood could be wrong, and perhaps more people would watch movies if there was less nudity, but "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." The same perhaps applies to morals.
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This makes the assumption that normal humans treat sex like ordinary financial transactions. This assumption is false.
I don't think Hollywood actors are normal people. Asking the actress for money would not be the same kind of test at all. You need a test that will show that the actress is willing to do whatever it takes. Acting is weird, and people do things in movies that are very out of character, as people like watching strange things. Furthermore, directors think that they know best and want people who will do what they say.
Consider Ms Depp's recent show, The Idol, (which to be honest, I have not watched). My faith in humanity suggests that less than 1% of women would consider acting in that role. Much of modern film is probably indistinguishable from pornography on set at times.
I think that the casting couch is deeply immoral, but I understand why it reliably selects actresses who are desperate and willing to do anything to get and keep a role. There is a difference between understanding how something functions and approving of it.
The point is that plenty of people are willing to do "anything at all" as long as the anything at all doesn't involve sex. Sex is treated differently and you can't conclude much about unwillingness to do other things based on unwillingness to sleep her way into the job.
(And for nitpickers, no, I don't mean that people would be willing to murder to get the job.)
Much of the difficult things that actresses are asked to do involve simulating sex. Hence Ms. Depp in the above post. Game of Thrones pushes the line a little beyond simulating at times. If actors were made fight other people with swords, joust (incidentally, the only jousting school is in LA. Can you guess why?), jump out of planes (with and without parachutes), and scale high buildings, cliffs, etc. then this might be analogous. Some actors actually do these things, and allegedly their movies are the better for it. You test actresses with sex as that is the thing they are most likely to balk at on the actual job.
For example, just today Joanna Lumley complained about nudity in movies.
You can't conclude much about unwillingness to do other things, which includes simulating sex, based on unwillingness to sleep her way into the job.
Human beings aren't like that.
Girls who are willing to sleep with people for roles are usually willing to simulate sex on screen. At least, that is what I am told. To be honest, I find the idea that there would be a strong correlation between the two things plausible. They both involve sex.
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As a person who used to send long lists of questions like this many years ago (example), I applaud this attempt. But I agree with the other commenters that it seems a little low-effort for this particular thread.
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None of these one-liners, if posted individually, would come even close to meeting the thread's quality standards. I don't think combining them into one huge (and very unwieldy) post makes up for it. It's the same as posting them one by one sequentially, except the format makes it even harder to discuss. (After writing this, I saw that @iprayiam3 said basically the same thing.) If you didn't want any discussion here and this was just an invitation to chat with you, that belongs in the Sunday or Friday thread, not here.
Another problem with your list:
This is just asking how you personally should feel about the lawyers. It doesn't result in any policy prescriptions. Weird to include it together with the much more concrete questions like 7 and 19.
In general, you mix strictly normative questions (28, 39, 40, 48), strictly positive, empirical questions (6, 7, 11, 19, 22) and questions that are a complicated mix of both:
9 requires you to define "feminist" (there are many very different definitions and settling on one, even just for the purpose of a single discussion, may not be easy) and "bad" (which requires an entire moral theory), followed by a complicated discussion of empirical questions
30, again, requires a moral theory to define what it means to "deserve" something and what is "fair", followed by a complicated discussion of empirical questions; for example, two people may agree that the poor deserve to be poor if equality of opportunity exists and the poor are just lazy, but they may disagree on the empirical question of whether equality of opportunity does in fact exist; or they may simply believe, as you apparently do (per 51), that equality of opportunity is morally undesirable
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Completely? This is how you get shoddily-built buildings collapsing en masse and killing tens of thousands of people, as in the recent earthquake in Turkey or the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. (Regulations existed but were not enforced due to corruption, but we would expect similar outcomes if there were simply no regulations at all.)
You are presumably some kind of libertarian, so you might prefer a more market-based system. Instead of the government creating and enforcing regulations, for example, it could require construction companies to buy insurance in case their buildings collapse. This would allow the market to discover what regulations are necessary or cost-effective. But it still requires some degree of government regulation and enforcement.
I would like you to elaborate on these two. They are far from the only points I disagree with, but these are very unusual positions and I would like to hear why you believe in them.
Not OP, but my most blackpill moment was discovering that the median voter was obviously casting ignorant votes. I'd heard complaints about "I had to stand in line an hour to vote!", and they seemed kind of weird because that's still just a small fraction of the several hours minimum it takes to do a half-decent investigation of candidates, but of course the answer was that nobody does that minimum, they just press the button and get the sticker.
I can't argue with rational-ignorance theory, I totally get it if someone just wants to vote for President because they're deluged with information in that one case alone, but then maybe don't cast votes for the other offices too?
I still don't think "try to decrease voter turnout" is the solution, though. I'm not sure what the solution is. Something more like a deliberate liquid democracy might help, perhaps? Even people who would push the "just vote for everyone with the correct letter after their name" button on their own behalf might feel more weight of responsibility if ten friends have placed trust in their decision-making. That might greatly increase voter turnout in midterm elections, too; you might think to yourself "I don't have time to figure out who the next city councilor should be", but if you know someone more politically interested who you trust then your vote can go through them rather than being abdicated entirely. I might not be sure who I can trust as the next Railroad Commissioner, because that takes research time, but I could name several people I would trust to do that research for me, because personal experience is "free".
And, if someone complained that they had to wait for an hour at the DMV to take their driver's test, would you say that that seems weird because it is a small fraction of the hours it takes to study for the test? Or if someone complained about waiting an hour at a real estate office to get in to see his agent to finalize a purchase, because that is a small fraction of the hours it takes search for a home to buy? The complaint in all cases is about poor customer service, and if I have to wait for an hour to do any of those things, someone has screwed up, regardless of how much time I put in to prepare.
You know what is really dumb? Doing an "investigation of candidates" in a general election. As if you can actually figure out anything accurate about the personal characteristics of the candidates, and, more importantly, as if their personal characteristics are particularly important, compared with the policies that they are likely to support. And in a general election, the party of the candidate tells the voters far, far, far more about the policies that they are likely to support than hours of research is likely to uncover.
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This post and the thread in response is unreadable, as it and most responses are a long collection of unrelated ideas and only the ability to respond to some before branching off into dead ends and redundancy.
I suggest we don't do this. It's extraordinarily annoying.
Perhaps you meant the thread discussion to be confined to the meta-discussion about discussing such topics, but it clearly didn't turn out that way and you shouldn't have itemized several dozen.
A top level post that throws out 73 disparate discussion topics is an abuse of the concept of topics. This is essentially 73 low effort posts that amount to "controversial statement... discuss."
Agree.
I also disliked that the pitch was to privately discuss these topics on Discord voice chat, rather than here on this message board. It would be alright in another thread, but seems out of place and exclusionary in this one.
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Depends if you're for the US dominating the world or for a more multipolar world. If the former, then the answer is largely yes. If the latter, then no. The US could easily defend itself almost just as well as now with much lower defense spending.
Not utterly blameless but almost utterly blameless.
Yes.
Yes. Sexual preferences are inherently amoral. Asian romantic preferences are the same as preferring skinny women or whatever.
Maybe in extreme "save a million lives when the bomb is ticking" type of situations but generally no, torture is vile and abhorrent.
Probably not but I'm not 100% against the idea.
Not sure. Actual economics are more complex than any abstract models.
They might be, but I'm not convinced that they would be.
Absolutely and obviously no. The typical argument that "Women in non-feminist societies are happier than women in feminist societies" is contradicted by the argument that so many of the guys who make the argument also make, which is that "It is not enough for men to be happy, men must be virtuous and strive blah blah blah". Same for women. Feminism making women happier or unhappier is orthogonal to whether feminism is good or bad for women. And outside of the happiness argument, there is no good argument for why feminism would be bad for women.
Obviously false given historical statistics.
True. If there was an actual ideal diet, it would be widely known and relatively uncontroversial by now.
Not sure, might be true. Some people really do want sex for sex's sake. On the other hand, I imagine that almost no-one wants money for money's sake, since that would be rather absurd given that the point of having money is to use it to get other things.
Depends on what kind of diversity. Also, who is "us" in this case? For example, I do not care about my country or my race as groups, so who is "us" for me?
Yes, it treats both fairly and unfairly in different ways.
Intelligence is real and obviously a major determinant of social outcomes. IQ is correlated with intelligence but not as much as some think. For example, it is obviously possible to get better at IQ tests through practice without having actually become more intelligent in any significant sense.
Almost certainly true.
Depends on how they came by their success.
It does to some extent.
Not sure.
Not sure.
Probably not. I cannot think of any example of completely deregulated construction that is better than the US model.
Depends what you mean by "underpaid".
Too much for me to think about right now.
Not sure about immoral. "harmful" depends on what group you belong to.
Maybe but all complex society depends on some degree of state-mandated wealth redistribution/No, obviously not, but that does not mean socialism/communism would be better.
Not sure, but personally I am pro choice because I value the comfort and independence of adult women over the lives of fetuses.
No, America is great in many ways but not in all ways.
No, without defense lawyers we would have no fair justice system.
This is not possible without society regressing to anarchy and a collapse of modern technological civilization. At minimum, there must be some non-private authority that regulates disputes, otherwise you would just have 100 small warlord states that don't privatize everything instead of what we have now, which is 1 big state that doesn't privatize everything.
Depends on what you mean by "deserve".
To some degree yes, but nonetheless there are masculine women and feminine men so definitely not entirely.
It should be up to a vote of the local community, but there should be no law that enforces removing them.
Yes / mostly yes.
No, privilege is a real thing but in many ways not what wokes think it is.
There is no such thing as a human right.
Yes, at the very least it is immoral because it kills innocent people sometimes.
No. I eat meat but I do not pretend that there is nothing wrong with it.
No, it is too totalitarian and anti-truth to be just politeness.
Yes but at the same time, to have a successful society we must sometimes act as if there were.
Not sure. My big argument against utilitarianism is that it is not possible to predict the future well enough to really know what actions are more utilitarian than others.
Yes, especially given that if I call for example a transwoman "he", it is almost certainly not because I have any ill intent against him.
It is, but I think that the Yudkowsky types have gone off the deep end when it comes to this matter.
Mixed. We need some level of gun control, but I do not support total gun control because I value publicly owned guns as a way to deter powerful groups from becoming too dominant.
It should be up to the users of each space, as defined by their biological sex.
Not sure.
Yes in an immediate "get rid of crime sense" but no in a "create a long-lasting classical liberal society" sense.
Probably true. I have experienced mental states that seemed genuinely altruistic to me.
Yes, it begs the question.
Yes, but it is often immoral in particular cases and is not a good way to build a classical liberal society, which I value.
I support it in cases where that will significantly prevent physical harm from coming to people. For example, Uber drivers going to dangerous neighborhoods. Otherwise, not sure.
Hard to say, because we have never seen it in any society.
Yes.
Not sure, but probably yes. They take the jobs on the premise that they will be tipped at roughly a certain rate.
Probably yes, but only if it is clearly and explicitly spelled out for people wondering about joining the frats (or whatever) what the hazing will consist of, or if at least it is explicitly spelled out that "we reserve the right to surprise you so be warned!".
No, that is just revenge.
Largely yes.
Yes, but it is also morally permissible to renege on the contract and run away afterwards.
Depends on whether you are working for a vulnerable mom and pop shop or some giant corporation.
No, we should maintain a tightly regulated healthcare sector but also have a separate unregulated sector so that people can choose between the two.
See above.
See above.
Yes except in cases where there is a clear trail of harm that can be objectively established.
No, but that does not mean they should be cast out into the street.
Yes, though it is a spectrum and more complicated than the stereotypical 19th century "caucasian/mongol/black" sort of distinctions.
Not sure.
I am not a utilitarian, so I lean in favor of thinking that it is.
Seems that way based on historical experience.
Not sure. One man's price gouging is another man's "what I have to do to keep my business afloat". Depends on the context.
Pornography is essentially prostitution but I support both being legal.
Yes.
Yes.
Depends on which laws.
This is a repeat question.
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Don't have Discord, so you're getting text here.
13: it depends what "diversity" is code for; I can think of at least three different meanings i.e. "diversity of opinions", "racial diversity per se", and "skimming off the top of ROW's IQ pool". The first is mostly a strength under capitalism because it maximises efficiency at generating alternatives; the second is a weakness because racial animus lowers societal trust; the third is a strength, at least selfishly, for obvious reasons.
28: The adversarial justice system requires that criminal defence lawyers exist. So if this statement is true, you kind of have to accept one of the following propositions:
"This system is fine, but it can't work without bad people" (this raises issues of "if society requires these bad people's badness in order to do good, are they really bad people?")
"The adversarial justice system is bad" (this isn't clearly false - there are benefits and drawbacks - but it's such a big proposition that it really kind of subsumes your original point).
"Criminal defence lawyers should exist but should all suck at their jobs" (a trial that always ends in conviction seems dominated by skipping the trial and proceeding straight to imposing sentence).
29: You can't stably privatise the police force and army; if you try, soon there will be a coup d'état, after which the police force and army will again be connected to government. A government with no monopoly on force is not much of a government.
There are also things like market failures or externalities that are fairest when done coercively (the fire brigade has a classic free-rider problem where if I refuse to pay for the fire brigade, they will still usually prevent fires from reaching my house due to all the people nearby who have paid for it). There are technically ways a labyrinthine system of free contracts can in-practice implement this coercion (in this case, the homeowners of an area all sign a contract that they will pay for the fire brigade and won't sell their homes to anyone who doesn't enter into the same contract), but in many cases it's less paperwork to have one such contract - the social contract - and run it through government.
42: I agree with proposition #16, and that's basically where the "AI is dangerous" thought comes from. If IQ is power, then something with IQ 10,000 (whatever that means) is powerful indeed - and if that something thinks Earth would be a better place without humans (much as, say, humans think Earth would be better off without malarial mosquitoes), the default outcome is that we go the way of the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger when men showed up. This is really the core point; most of the argumentation in practice centres on a bunch of... well, the nasty word would be "cope", that attempts to carve out some sort of reason this general argument shouldn't apply.
45: I live in Australia. Australia hasn't polarised nearly as badly as the USA has; it's commonly conjectured that this is because we have compulsory voting and IRV, which forces our two largest parties toward each other via the Median Voter Theorem (you can only win in the centre, because extremists on your side are already forced to vote for you) and thus doesn't leave a lot to get polarised about. I think you're probably right about the marginal effect of slightly increased vs. decreased turnout from what the USA currently has, but this local dependence reverses when you get very far from that.
52: With the obvious exception of "doing MMA to people without their consent or some genuine cause", sure.
61: On the margin you certainly have a case, but the optimal amount of such regulation is importantly nonzero. With zero, you get bosses imposing hazards but not telling workers/customers about them, which generally means you don't get to have nice things.
The existence of competent, good-faith
criminalsuspect defense lawyers forces the system to only bring to trial those suspects they can reasonably expect to convict. Those lawyers are there to protect the citizenry from overzealous policing, badly motivated judges, win-hungry prosecutors and easily swayed juries.Calling them criminal defence lawyers is accurate; they practice criminal law (the law that deals with crimes) as defence attorneys.
I am also aware of why they exist; like I said, there are benefits to the adversarial system. With that said, inquisitorial systems don't always result in a police state.
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The US also has the median voter theorem applying. But the primary process ends up pushing more extreme candidates to the fore, and then you try to paint the other side as extreme to persuade the median voter to go for you.
With voluntary plurality voting, policies that appeal to the base may increase turnout or increase the percentage that vote for you instead of wasting it on a third party; this breaks the MVT.
IRV + compulsory negates that; those far from the centre are forced to preference you as long as you're one micron better than the other guy.
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You seem inordinately preoccupied with moral questions. That's your biggest hangup. They don't have objective answers without fixing a moral framework. And even then, well-informed people mostly disagree.
Well, sure, but:
You could say the same thing about aesthetic claims. But if your friend told you “hey I know you think the new Marvel movie was good but I think it sucks, let me tell you why”, you wouldn’t tell him “first we need to decide on a framework for aesthetic evaluation”. You would just hear him out, and you would assume from the start that it’s the sort of thing that you two could have a reasonable conversation about, and that he is capable of giving reasons that you may be responsive to, reasons that may ultimately cause you to change your position.
People’s moral psychological profiles and modes of ethical inference are more similar than is generally assumed. Almost everyone agrees that theft is wrong for example, and if you give an argument that purports to show that some particular act is isomorphic to theft (e.g. “I can’t take your ice cream cone without your consent, so why can the government take part of your income without your consent?”), then people won’t just blow it off: they’ll feel compelled to either accept your argument, or point out some relevant difference that causes the isomorphism to fail.
I understand your point. Though I posit that people generally understand there are differences in taste in a way they don't understand differences in morality.
Be that as it may, my concern was more narrow, specifically that @PerseusWizardry will have a better time if he drops all of his moral questions. They are simply not questions that can be resolved through conversation or better data.
You've never changed your mind on a moral question, due to more information?
I'm racking my brain and coming up blank. As an adult I'm reasonably sure the answer is no. Have you?
Well, I'm rather young, so my "as an adult" timeframe is limited, and my memories aren't timestamped.
Maybe going from anti- to pro-sweatshop would count? I'm sure there are other specific examples. Does that count as a moral question?
For more overarching moral theory, I've become aware that there are decision-theoretical theorems that I would want whatever theory I embrace to manage to either agree with the conclusion, or disagree with the premises.
Yes, many of the questions are moral questions, but they are specific moral questions. You can point to things that could play relevant factors in their moral analysis, since we tend to moralize according to principles to some extent, it's not arbitrary.
For a lightning rod, let's look at one example he gave: “Abortion is morally permissible.” Pro
Here are some relevant questions that might affect your opinion in one way or another:
What normative ethical systems seem plausible enough to you that we should take them into account? What things might plausibly give humans moral value, under the way you think about ethical systems? How do you value animals? How do you value 3-day olds? The mentally ill? What do you think about population ethics (and, of course there are all sort of arguments there as to what systems within that make sense)? What about harms contributed to the mother? To the father? To society? Demographically, are we trending toward overpopulation or underpopulation? Aren't they cute? But don't you feel bad for that girl in Ohio? Is AI going to kill everyone before they live a proper life anyway? Might they have lasting souls? If Christianity's (or any other religion) right, will killing them send them to paradise? Or hell? What about rights—can they place an obligation for you to let them use your body, like the musician thought experiment? Do you share any guilt or praise for harms or, I suppose, benefits from differentially aborting groups that society could do better or worse with more of (see China's birth ratio)? And I'm sure there are many more.
All of these can affect your opinion on that issue, which means that arguments bringing up those features aren't useless.
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Why do you only want one side to argue their arguments, for many of these? Is it that you think you already think you understand the opposite relatively well, or you think that the opposite side is likely to be wrong, and so you'd rather not waste your time learning arguments for wrong thing? I suppose it doesn't need to be the same reason for every question.
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I'd be interested to hear where you're coming from on this one. Is this the "social mobility hollows out the working class" / "desegregation destroyed Black America" argument or something different?
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As in preferring Asian women? I feel like there's a lot to unpack here in which men may prefer Asian women for certain attributes that aren't necessarily racial.
Most of my dating has been WMAF and it's more due to wanting a petite, intelligent, agreeable socially-conservative woman without somebody else's kids. 90% of that stock in my area happens to be Asian and therefore I date a lot of Asian girls.
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I know it's not a claimed position but I'm curious why you lean on torture being acceptable but not execution.
Come to think of it I'm curious why you lean towards torture being acceptable at all given it's uselessness both inherent and relative to threats.
I had an argument about torture here just a few weeks ago.
Bluntly, I absolutely do not buy that torture is "inherently useless". It's an extremely counterintuitive claim. I'm inherently suspicious whenever somebody claims that their political belief also comes with no tradeoffs. And the "torture doesn't work" argument fits the mold of a contrarian position where intellectuals can present cute, clever arguments that "overturn" common sense (and will fortunately never be tested in the real world). It's basically the midwit meme where people get to just the right level of cleverness to be wrong.
Inherently useless as a means of gathering intelligence. Torture works great if all you want is to discourage people to fuck with you. Ask the Cartels.
I share your skepticism of convenient narratives, and this is a topic that is necessarily polluted by them. But the evidence just doesn't add up. If torture was so effective we wouldn't have had to purge it out of our judicial system because people kept admitting to things that weren't true.
And frankly I like my common sense better than yours. Torture is useless barbarism, simple as.
I'm glad that, at the start, you (correctly) emphasized that we're talking about intelligence gathering. So please don't fall back to the motte of "I only meant that confessions couldn't be trusted", which you're threatening to do by bringing up the judicial system and "people admitting to things". Some posters did that in the last argument, too. I don't know how many times I can repeat that, duh, torture-extracted confessions aren't legitimate. But confessions and intelligence gathering are completely different things.
Torture being immoral is a fully sufficient explanation for it being purged from our systems. So your argument is worse than useless when it comes to effectiveness - because it actually raises the question of why Western intelligence agencies were still waterboarding people in the 2000s. Why would they keep doing something that's both immoral and ineffective? Shouldn't they have noticed?
When you have a prisoner who knows something important, there are lots of ways of applying pressure. Sometimes you can get by with compassion, negotiation, and so on, which is great. But the horrible fact is that pain has always been the most effective way to get someone to do what you want. There will be some people who will never take a deal, who will never repent, but will still break under torture and give you the information you want. Yes, if you have the wrong person they'll make something up. Even if you have the right person but they're holding out, they might feed you false information (which they might do in all other scenarios, too). Torture is a tool in your arsenal that may be the only way to produce that one address or name or password that you never would have gotten otherwise, but you'll still have to apply the other tools at your disposal too.
Sigh. The above paragraph is obvious and not insightful, and I feel silly having to spell it out. But hey, in some sense it's a good thing that there are people so sheltered that they can pretend pain doesn't work to get evil people what they want. It points to how nice a civilization we've built for ourselves, how absent cruelty ("barbarism", as you put it) is from most people's day-to-day existence.
I did once find a study comparing the use of torture in Spanish Inquisition vs. modern USA, which concluded that the former was much more effective because of differences in methods and social context. I hope you will pardon me if I copypaste another a post of mine from elsewhere:
There’s this paper claiming (in the case of the Spanish Inquisition) that there are circumstances in which torture can yield reliable and verifiable information, but only in a very specific setting that is very different from, say, yanking a suspect in an alley and beating a confession out of them. You need extensive prior investigation until you have most of the facts available but think that someone is still withholding information; you need to torture multiple people, repeatedly, while comparing and verifying all the statements you extracted between each instance. At that point you might as well scrap the torture and still be left with the vast majority of reliable information.
Even then, you’ll still end up torturing a large number of innocents, and you will learn very little in the process you didn’t already know. And you will inevitably end up a vast, overbearing police state where everyone lives in terror.
(an interesting point is that, while the “ticking time bomb” is the scenario most commonly given as justification for torture, it also happens to be the scenario in which torture is least likely to work, because you don’t know if you have the right person, the suspect - especially if guilty - knows they have to resist for a brief time, and you can’t verify any statement until it’s too late)
End copypaste.
So, I admit this is a well-written, convincing argument. It's appreciated! But I still find it contrasts with common sense (and my own lying eyes). I can, say, imagine authorities arresting me and demanding to know my email password. I would not cooperate, and I would expect to be able to get access to a lawyer before long. In reality there's only one way they'd get the password: torturing me. And in that case, they'd get the password immediately. It would be fast and effective. I'm still going to trust the knowledge that torture would work perfectly on me over a sociological essay, no matter how eloquent.
Admittedly passwords make for something like an ideal case for torture in that they can be easily communicated in full and be quickly and unambiguously checked for correctness. I don't know if any other kind of information meets those requirements. Overall, given precedents, I think a blanket ban on judiciary torture is worth a lot more than the marginal improvements in investigation effectiveness, even from a coldly utilitarian perspective, much like a blanket ban on killing patients to harvest their organs is well worth the loss of a small number of additional organs, even if those are perfectly good for use.
Absolutely. And I'm totally being a pedant about a policy I'm in complete agreement with. But this nitpicking is still valuable - if we as a society understand that we're banning torture for very good ideological reasons, then we won't be so tempted to backslide the next time a crisis (like 9/11) arises and people start noticing that (arguably) torture might help us track down more terrorists. Like how some people forget that free speech ideals are important beyond simply making sure that we don't violate the 1st amendment.
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Well yeah, I don't disagree with any of it either so I don't really see what your point is?
Why should they notice? Institutions do immoral and ineffective things literally all the time for centuries on end. And we're talking about the CIA, the kings of spending money on absolute bullshit that just sounds cool to some dudes in a room, and that's not saying nothing given the competition for that title in USG.
The Stargate project ran for more than 20 years. Does this mean I should think there is something to psychic warfare?
But ... if you agree there are scenarios where you'd never get a particular piece of information without torture, then I don't understand how you can claim it's "inherently useless"...? I'm confused what we're even arguing about now.
A fair point! I'm never going to argue with "government is incompetent" being an answer. :) But still, agencies using it is evidence that points in the direction of torture being useful - incompetence is just a (very plausible) explanation for why that evidence isn't conclusive.
I get at this in the other threads: because I think in practice those scenarios are exceedingly rare, and specifically for the US who purports to not be a totalitarian state, essentially nonexistent.
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Would have William Buckley, the CIA officer, give out information about his entire network of agents if he was merely threatened?
What I do know is that given the techniques employed I would have had serious doubts about the information he provided. People injected with narcotics are not reliable sources of information.
And indeed, if what I've read about the Buckley case is accurate, Hezbollah had to work on the man for over a year and chase wrong leads, made up dead ends and suffer a whole lot of inaccurate internal suspicion on the word of a wrecked man.
Frankly I doubt that much of it was actually about intelligence gathering, getting leads was probably just a side effect of making some footage to send to the Americans, get revenge, and entertain al-Azub.
But imagine the sort of stuff you could learn out of a CIA paramilitary officer if you had some heavy leverage and didn't turn him into a bumbling wreck that screamed at random intervals. What a waste.
If you want comparison case between this and less brutal interrogation techniques you can look at Abu Zubaydah who was interrogated by the FBI and the CIA, gave all the actually useful information in the classical interrogations before being subject to torture or through other means than interrogation. If you believe the reports that is.
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Just like any tool there are situations where it can be effective and situations where it isn't. If your goal is getting true information the key is having ways to confirm the information then come back if the information was incorrect. Repeat. Another method is having multiple people with the same information, you then separate and torture them until their stories match.
But you see the contradiction right? Torture is a clumsy tool that's only comparatively useful in situations where nothing else is available, but those conditions are precisely when it is least effective.
Rejali points this out in Torture and Democracy:
In the sort of scenarios you describe, where the intelligence can be checked and consequences applied for inaccuracy, threats to hostages are a superior form of extracting information or behavior since they don't degrade the subject, the interrogator, organizational capability, and aren't subject to as many moral hazards.
Hence why, outside of contrived circumstances, torture is useless as a means of intelligence: it's a bad tool in the absolute, and it gets even worse when the conditions call of it over other methods.
This sounds like a just world fallacy.
I'd really like to see someone admit "sometimes torture works the best, but we still shouldn't do it".
The world has no obligation to be just, but it has no obligation to be maximally unjust either: it may be suspiciously convenient that sacrificing children to Moloch for rain doesn't work, but it also happens to be true.
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It's kinda funny because the whole reason for torture to be immoral in the first place is that it's unnecessary. So you can accuse any argument as to its inefficacy of this without cost. Sometimes the world happens to be just.
I hold that torture is worse than any other method of obtaining intelligence unless you do not care about the stated problems. Or, like I assume most people who engage in it, don't actually care at all about intelligence gathering.
Torture is a tool of psychological warfare, not intelligence.
This is true of all methods of doing all things.
No it's not? Sigint doesn't have any of those specific problems.
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I’ll bite. There are rules, it’s good to have to have rules. Maybe those rules could be broken occasionally, but not in the sort of clandestine, oversight-avoiding scenario that prisons encourage.
Of course, this is a lot easier to say precisely because I have little faith that it’s implemented effectively. Not leaving as much on the table.
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I don't know if I'd be considered an expert or anything, but I've long had a pet theory/argument regarding torture. It seems intuitively strange how so many people seem to have enthusiasm for it despite the enthusiasm in other circles for declaring that it "doesn't work". I think this can be resolved by my statement that torture works really great at what it's actually for - suppressing dissent in an authoritarian regime.
Some may say that it doesn't work very well for actually investigating dissident movements. But working well at that was never a factor. If you grab and torture some poor fellow and he gives you 3 random names out of desperation, and you do nasty things to them too, that's a feature, not a bug. Justice was never the goal, terror is. You've successfully terrorized 4 people, and anyone else who can see what happened to them, out of having anything to do with opposing the regime, whether or not they wanted to in the first place. And you've also made it so the security forces can never defect from the regime, either individually or en masse, as too many people hate their guts.
I guess it's a question of definitions. Torture as punishment and deterrent works, unquestionably, but I wouldn't call it that, rather "corporal punishment" or something like that.
But the debate isn't so much about that (because as such it is trivially against the moral principles the United States stand for) but about it as a means of extracting information. And at that it really sucks.
Though it works more than you might expect (we have credible reports of various historical factions getting information they deemed useful at nontrivial rates) the false positive rate is so high that the information you get is practically unusable and use of torture actually lowers the quality of information you could even get out of someone because pain and disorientation hurt the ability to recall at a neurological level. And the inaccuracy grows the more torture you apply too.
Compound that with the availability of another method that doesn't fuck with the wits of the prisoners in the form of threats to hostages, and torture is objectively a terrible means of intelligence that's only really useful if you don't care about accuracy and just wish to implicate as many people as possible.
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I agree with this. Torture for getting information is a poor tool, because you're never sure if you've squeezed every drop of information out of the guy no matter how much you've done to him (maybe he's holding back that one tiny but vital scrap of information), and then you get to the point where he really is just naming names and agreeing to whatever you say in order to get you to stop.
Torture as "we're the new masters in town, we can and will do whatever the fuck we want to you and there's nothing you can do about it so bow down" is effective, on the other hand. Is Guantanamo Bay actually providing any useful information any more, or is it just about revenge and 'we can do what the fuck we want'?
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I'll take the Con side of 34 if you'd like.
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a lot of these I'd rather argue the other side but you can hit me up for #6. discord works.
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Always down to talk COVID. Prefer text only for op-sec reasons
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This sounds like a fun idea.
I think the ones I disagree with you on are not ones where I feel heavily researched.
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Poverty's shit but there's severe diminishing returns past upper-middle class affluence seems pretty coherent to me
I think Kanye West summed it up pretty well for me, "Money isn't everything, not having it is."
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I thought Wolfers conceded to Caplan on his blog that the effect size is ridiculously small (like, you would need a million dollars in yearly income to actually raise your happiness by 1 SD). Wolfers responds to Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/wolfers_respond.html Caplan: http://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/the_wolfers_equ.html
I think this question is very hung up in the complexity of the concept of 'happiness' (and possibly also confounded by correlations between who does and doesn't have money. The richest people I know are also the most stressed out because they are rich because they're broken in a never ending quest of career and financial improvement. But if you took a well adjusted middle class family man and paid of his house, I bet he'd become happier.)
In terms of the complexity of happiness, I am a pretty happy guy dispositionally. I have a positive attitude, I'm relatively low stress and I love the simple things in my life. It's true that on a daily hedonic level, it would be hard to make money adjust by day-to-day mood all that much. I suspect it's also true of people dispositionally unhappy, restless, etc.
On a more fundamental level, my sense of value and meaning in the world is tied to my philosophical and religious beliefs as well as some deep ingrained pre-dispositions (like hating change, and being naturally nostalgic). Again, I doubt money could change that much, or possibly negatively.
But between my deep sense of happiness and my daily mood/disposition, I think there's a middle concept of happiness that would be helped greatly with more money. If the stress of working, saving could be reduce, the opportunity cost of my time, etc. It would affect my ' middle happiness' quite a bit.
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Once you've got to the point of "all my basic needs are met, I'm not in debt, I've helped out my family who need it, and now I have fuck-you money left over so if I lose my job in the morning I'm okay", then you don't get much extra value from more money.
At that level, now you're comparing yourself not to your former circumstances, but the new levels of rich people around you. Sure, I have ten million, but that's not rich, that's just comfortable! That guy has twenty million, and that other guy is a billionaire! I'm nothing compared to a billionaire!
And then the billionaires are at the levels of "okay so I own three superyachts, but I don't have my own space rockets like that other guy".
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Income isn't just skewed, it has a very long tail. Many variables have much more compact distributions. Happiness doesn't have natural units and could be distributed however you want depending on how you measure it, although it would be weird to me if the range of feelings human brains were capable of expressing spanned such a wide distribution (also something something CLT handwaving arguments, emotions are the sum of many small features).
1 SD can be a substantial impact, but if the result above is correct, it would be very difficult to obtain by increasing one's income from typical means (promotion, career change, getting an advanced degree, etc).
I'm pretty sure this is not correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule only applies to the normal distribution and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality gives no minimum at all for the portion of the distribution within 1 SD. And of course, this is all assuming that the standard deviation is even finite, which it may not be.
I don't follow. Ordinal data can't have a SD, since it by definition corresponds to an ordering or categorization of data, without meaningful numeric values assigned.
But 1 SD income seems like a lot, while 1 SD of height (about 2.5 inches) seems like it's not a lot. I don't think it's meaningful to talk about 1 SD being intuitively big or small since it depends on the variable in question.
That's fair (although the correlation isn't even defined if income has infinite variance).
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I think it depends on what's really at stake. I don't think money can buy happiness in the sense that I'd be significantly happier with a bunch of stuff I don't already have or couldn't already afford. I think it can buy happiness, though, in the sense that I'd be a lot happier if I never had to worry about money. A million dollars invested in 30 year treasury bonds will net you about 40k/year in tax free money, a pretty nice supplement to your existing income. 2 million would give you damn near enough to retire on if you invested what you would have been paying in taxes into a retirement fund to get ahead of inflation and maybe take up a part-time job as a raft guide or ski instructor for beer and cigarette money. For most people enough extra money to pay off their mortgage or student loans would make them feel like they were independently wealthy.
Back when I did consumer bankruptcy the effect that financial problems can have on people's lives really hit home. People would find themselves in untenable situations that caused a ton of anxiety and strained relationships (just due to stress and arguments, not borrowing money) and the constant fear that they were one step away from living in a cardboard box. When I told them to stop paying their bills until they had enough money for my fee and then after that the way out was pretty straightforward, the emotional catharsis was always palpable. Some people would break down crying when I told them there was a way out (usually after they had cried considerably when they explained their position). That aside, I couldn't begin to count the number of times clients called to schedule their filing meeting and told me how they felt like they were walking on air as they were leaving the initial consultation. Now to think that there are people who go through that anxiety all the time because their problem isn't so much debt as it is not making enough money, or not being consistently employed, then I can believe that an injection of money large enough to provide a decent cushion would make one significantly happier.
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