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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28480 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Society - even liberal society - is governed by countless rules, minor and major, designed to prevent some parties taking advantage of others even if it is "consensual". You can't pay someone $2 an hour even if they consent, you can't sign up to 30 years of indentured servitude even if you consent, you can't practice as a self-taught surgeon even if all your patients consent. You can't engage in duels or cannibalism even if both parties consent. So we agree that clearly 'consent' isn't everything; we're not (for the most part) ancaps. Some things are social negatives, and it is understood that tolerating them is bad for society, period.

One man's modus ponens and so on. While I'm not a full on libertarian, it seems clear to me that society has no business interfering in any of those situations.

I dispute that most of those are even societal negatives. Being unable to pay less than minimum wage prices out subpar but better than nothing labor, leading to marginally nonproductive people on welfare, and why kids these days in the West struggle to get a summer job when it would cost the same to get a grown adult to stand behind the counter at McDonald's.

Indentured servitude is just one extreme of the practise of selling one's labor for money, and I see no reason any sane individual shouldn't be allowed to do so, even if it's a stupid idea unless the payoff is crazy.

Cannibalism? It's no skin off my back, pun intended. Duels? Duel culture is bad, but not so bad I would legislate it away, especially when you can just say no without losing all social status.

Kids are subsidized by their parents. Letting them get jobs where they can underbid people who need the jobs to put food on the table and pay rent is basically legalized dumping. And parents subsidizing their kids isn't subject to market forces.

I never considered it from this angle before. I'm usually in favour of letting kids work for the character benefits but you do raise a good point.

Indentured servitude is just one extreme of the practise of selling one's labor for money, and I see no reason any sane individual shouldn't be allowed to do so, even if it's a stupid idea unless the payoff is crazy.

In most cases, contracted indentured servitude is nothing but a way to take advantage of people - or, put another way, a way to burn shared surplus to take rent for yourself. The average case of (bad) indentured servitude will end up looking like someone who's desperately poor, stupid, or in a temporary state of bad judgement agreeing to a contract that pays them much less than they would in a similar position, and one a reasonable person in their situation wouldn't agree to.

Nevertheless, there are cases where something resembling a contracted transfer of personal authority is probably good. Consider rehab, mental institutions, halfway houses. Maybe a drug addict is net/net better off if they can enter a program that'll force them to act in a certain way for a few months or years. Maybe habitual criminals too. And maybe private slavery indentured servitude is the best way to achieve that. It probably isn't though, and such institutions should probably be regulated or otherwise exist in sufficiently different social systems that 'contracted indentured servitude' is a poor description of them.

Duels? Duel culture is bad, but not so bad I would legislate it away, especially when you can just say no without losing all social status.

I don't have a strong position on this, although duels are very bad.

Indentured servitude is just one extreme of the practise of selling one's labor for money, and I see no reason any sane individual shouldn't be allowed to do so, even if it's a stupid idea unless the payoff is crazy.

I suspect the word "sane" is doing a lot of work there, and that this is relevant to its worth to society. Most people who will consent to long-term indentured servitude in modern society are, by selection, going to be people with a serious case for non est factum, and that's going to gum up the court system.

Don't get me wrong; in a colonial era (past or future) the institution makes a lot of sense; in that societal circumstance a lot of sane people will agree, and the societal benefit is also greater because of the Parfit's hitchhiker problem. But we're not in one of those now, so it's less work to just ban it outright.

(I think I agree on duels.)

The first argument that I find convincing against the standard libertarian positions is that most people are actually really stupid and a paternalistic government that treats them like children generally creates better outcomes(this is the real secret to Singapore). Take a normal Algebra or English class at a middle of the pack state school, most of the people in the room are still just guessing passwords. I am skeptical that anyone under 110 IQ can actually understand Algebra or get anything from text beyond the explicit meaning of the words without heavy priming. I would put the bottom 60% of Americans in approximately the same bucket as thirteen year-olds and think a kind government should make more choices for them, not less.

The second argument is zero sum positional status games, we would all be better off if society could collectively agree that all jobs get two months paid leave(or whatever) and don't allow any 'sane individuals' to trade that away for higher pay, because they all will, even though the marginal value of an extra dollar is trash, because humans.

Let’s say they are dumb. It doesn’t follow from that government is the rigger decider. First, government is also staffed with a lot of stupid people. Second, government suffers from Acton’s problem coupled with little skin in the game. Third, dumb people with local knowledge will outperform smart people lacking said knowledge (Hayek’s key insight and proven with the Soviet experience). That is, even a government of angels often will underperform.

Singapore is interesting but my perhaps faulty understanding is that Singapore depending on the issue is either super authoritarian or super liberal. It doesn’t get stuck in the middle.

I think things like clean air and water, cfc ban, lead, seat belts, and social security are all examples of governments being able to do exactly what I think they can do/want them to do, so I don't feel much need to argue about the platonic ideals of various organizational structures which imply that my preferences are impossible. They are possible, we live in a world where they are being satisfied to an extent, and I just want more.

I am skeptical that anyone under 110 IQ can actually understand Algebra or get anything from text beyond the explicit meaning of the words without heavy priming

I think I disagree. I have limited experience teaching dumb-seeming people algebra and they were able to solve simple linear systems of equations eventually.

My experience teaching dumb-seeming people is just tons and tons of password guessing with no fundamental understanding of what they were doing or why. I was constantly confronted with what I started to call 'magical-thinking' where I would notice that students had no underlying grasp on or seeming belief in a consistent reality governed by legible rules. They were just memorizing strings of characters that they were told produce certain other characters. The learning plateau is so short for these people I doubt education beyond basic reading and arithmetic has much real value. Anything they don't use for a month will be lost.

I suspect that there are IQ thresholds for 'cognitive milestones' in the same way that a new born is incapable of object permanence, the two big ones that have stood out to me are reading comprehension and algebra. Again, in a school environment these people can pass a class that is ostensibly testing this skill, but my single biggest frustration as an educator was noticing how good students are at guessing passwords. I also saw this as a student, I am not as highly educated as the average motte users, I took classes at a community college and three different middle-tier state schools all of which are full of students who can pass these classes(and plenty who can't), but try digging into what they read even a little bit outside of the script that they memorized for class and they have no idea what is going on. I suspect that smart people in general overestimate the cognitive toolkit that average and below average people are working with and underestimate the ability of such people to fake it.

I presume they weren’t referring to “2x + y = 10, y = 4, what’s x?”.

While I use the content of HS algebra daily, I remember nothing about how it was taught in high school, lol. That said, looking up 'algebra 2 exam pdf' on google, and I think an average IQ person could, with high-quality instruction, get a B or A. Things like the quadratic formula, factoring, reduced form, solving equations equations with polynomials, multiple variables, and ratios, drawing graphs, word problems, etc. My memory of tutoring is the slower students (still not below-average iq I think) were able to grasp that eventually, but maybe there was still some selection bias. This is the sort of thing one's default intuition might be bad for.

Looking for data on algebra knowledge for current students, the closest measurement I can find is that "Only 26% of 12th grade students scored at or above the proficient level on the NAEP math assessment". 38% were basic, the remaining were below basic. But apparently NAEP proficiency measures a significantly higher level of skill than grade-level, algebra is grade 8-11. Some of this is just guessing passwords I suppose. But when tutoring, students who were blatantly guessing passwords on specific kinds of problems, even things as basic as 'x + 1 = 2 ... durr .. x = = 3 ????' were perfectly capable of learning the real thing if you taught them well, so I think that with good tutoring most median IQ people could grasp most of algebra. I'm not entirely confident in that though, and I can't find any very strong evidence on this.

I'm not sure about calculus, and anything above that is probably beyond the limits of most, although I'm uncertain where the lines are.

I note you didn’t reply to the idea of letting anyone declare themselves a doctor, though.

More from laziness, in that I expected most people to have a ready argument, than anything else!

I'll bite the bullet, medical practise itself should not be regulated, but terms such as doctor, general practitioner etc should be protected.

Let anyone give medical advice, or perform procedures, as long as the patient is clearly aware of the credentials involved. The government should be enforcing truth in advertising.

After all, I'm honest in admitting that modern ML systems are competent enough that you should be willing to trust their judgement, or at least only check up details on anything serious, rather than treat them as a magic 8-ball.Would it thus surprise you that I'm not fond of medical regulations in general, even if they sometimes benefit me in terms of salary and job security?

Even Scott agrees that FDA delenda est.

That’s not an especially hard one for the ancap to resolve; you can just let private medical licensing authorities award medical-qualification ratings based on their preferred criteria and create an accreditation marketplace. If I choose to go to an amateur surgeon despite him having low ratings, that’s up to me.

Of course, I wasn’t implying that professional licensing is an issue ancaps haven’t discussed. But the person I was replying to isn’t an ancap!

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