Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
On an episode of one of Vox’s podcasts, Ezra Klein said something that I can’t get out of my head, and that bothers me on a deep level. He said that in the present age, with the internet, myriads of think tanks, public intellectuals, universities, and ideological outlets, that any intelligent well-educated person can come up with a strong and hard-to-conclusively-refute argument, with copious citations, expert opinions, interpretation, and analysis, and supportive anecdotes, for almost any position they like in politics.
It really is bothering me because at some level I suspect it is true. I think of how often I see thousands of words used in internet arguments, with copious quotation and citation of experts, for many different sides of an issue, and they all seem pretty convincing if I took them on their face, and it would probably take me dozens of hours of research to be able to engage with them.
You could spend years just reading the output from libertarian intellectuals and outlets and experts, or liberal ones, or socially conservative ones, or anarchist ones, or marxist ones, etc. and still have more to consume without ever challenging your ideological preferences. If you encounter an expert or opinion that is disagreeable to your worldview, you can use Google to pretty quickly find a very articulate and well-cited counterargument to, if not that particular argument, at least that worldview and that position.
You can spend years becoming an expert on a particular issue, and read every expert and source from all sides, and still you’ll probably find people as well-informed as you with the opposite view.
I wouldn’t say this is the fault of, as many people in the rationalist community put it, the mindkilling ability of politics (I think there is truth to that, but I don’t think it’s strong enough to explain this). Rather, I believe it’s because understanding politics involves the intersection of two notoriously difficult areas of study, the social sciences of large groups/societies on the one hand, and ethical and political philosophy on the other. They’re hard because they’re subject matter is so vastly complicated, in a way that is extremely difficult to comprehend and think about.
But, we’re still political animals, and we have to do politics, so we have to keep thinking about this stuff (or, at least, some subset of intelligent people do) to keep society functioning and (hopefully) improving.
It becomes necessary to use intuition and other means of attempting to infer the truth.
I did not return to Nationalism because of overwhelming statistical evidence, but from a set of broader observations about the conditions of terrorism, the social fabric, incentives on actors, and so on.
The number of political operators using statistics badly is high, and they often either fabricate statistics using bad methodology (occurs in Feminism with things like the formation of the Duluth Model), or just exclude any statistics that don’t agree with them. Sometimes they don’t even realize they’re doing it.
Other times they just don’t even think of things that are against the argument. To take a recent example that many of you will disagree with me on, “but we gained so much economic value from immigrants from the middle east!” in response to wanting to limit travel and immigration. It doesn’t account for the estimated $2 trillion cost of 9/11, which then created the “justification” for the Iraq War (also very expensive) and further erosions of civil liberties and the advancement of the surveillance state. It also doesn’t account for the fact that the US’s immigration demand exceeds immigration quotas, and therefore every one of those slots could have been filled from another country instead.
I dunno I’m only 5 episodes into voyager lol
you are at a trump rally and suddenly the floor is equal rights
“D-drugs!” Trump shouted as the floor became the physical embodiment of an abstract concept. He began to scramble - not because he was afraid of “equal rights,” but because abstract concepts don’t always hold a lot of weight - for higher ground.
“Huh, actually, that’s not actually a bad policy idea. Where did you first hear it?”
“Oh, some Singaporean time travel blog on Tumblr.”
“Singaporean time travel blog?”
“Well it mentions Lee Kwan Yew a bit and the author seems interested in authoritarianism in Asia, so either that or the United States given that it keeps talking about a North American Union.”
“…what?”
“If I might remind you, sir, you ordered that we answer all your questions as honestly as possible.”
This is Rationalist Tumblr man,
answering things way too literally is what we get paid for
and also what we do for fun
(don’t ask who’s paying, it gets way too complicated)
(and that’s not so much a defense as just, “yeah bro the locals are weird”)
Sometimes the mask becomes the reality, bbbb, and sometimes with no mask there is no reality. We are social creatures, not solitary ones. Sometimes we need context to be provided for us to be at our best.
Some of the existing problems in society are due to the breakdown in scripts. Not everyone is a social adept that can figure it all out on the fly. The framework provides something to fall back on.
Who wants to live an unexamined life? Golden handcuffs are still handcuffs
That doesn’t mean you don’t examine things. I don’t know why you immediately jump to “handcuffs” as if the presence of structure makes motion or mobility impossible.
One of the weirdest policy proposals is where you put an expiration date on cash, to encourage spending.
ooh I’ve played with that one, it also fits well with some basic income proposals
inflation
All the kool kids nowadays are talking about negative interest rates.
They’re not yet talking about forming quasi-autonomous state agencies that compete for assignment of implementing government programs, with contracts that can be renewed, but
Shhhh, they aren’t supposed to know about it yet. I only know because I’m from the future.
Politics is just a mask for a lot of complex personal problems, huh
how dare you drag my mother into this discussion of tax policy
…consider: politics is complex personal problems.
a nation is just a very large group of people. democratic politics is the fine art of getting them to come to some kind of consensus about how they want to live. interpersonal mediation on the grand scale. with guns.
That’s all well and good, but most of these people should probably work on their own lives before they turn to Utopian visions of how the world around them should be different. Especially teenagers on Tumblr.
I’m not sure how much this is about me (considering that my typical post is something along the lines of “Actually, having governments and borders and taxes is Good, and polygamy/cousin marriage is Bad”), and certainly I do have my own matters to work on, buuuut…
Much of the Rationalist Sphere on Tumblr and those around it are neurodivergent in some way, and thus have different natural intuitions sometimes, leading to Weird Politics.
Though I guess also there are teenagers. I do try and put on a reasonable face for teenagers when I know they’re watching. It’s important that people that are looked up to model good behavior. (Conservatives kind-of know this but also have too much threat pattern-matching as if to balance out leftists not having enough.)
Sometimes the mask becomes the reality, bbbb, and sometimes with no mask there is no reality. We are social creatures, not solitary ones. Sometimes we need context to be provided for us to be at our best.
Some of the existing problems in society are due to the breakdown in scripts. Not everyone is a social adept that can figure it all out on the fly. The framework provides something to fall back on.
@obiternihili And I lean towards that, and am asking for examples indirectly
The new masculinities are out there being formed right now in the vast chasms of the net, but many are too liquid now and not yet crystalized.
Some are pulling from the future, where gender is more dissolved than it is now, and mixing outwards transgressions with confidence.
Others pull elements from the past without taking the whole thing. Some degree of sexual promiscuity has always been present in human society, but not always with the same rules, social punishments, and social status.
I don’t think new stable equilibria will be fully identifiable for a while.
dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.
I think we’re more than prepared to concede masculinity to the opposition. What redeeming qualities does it have? Everything I’ve seen masculinity be is aggression, envy, or pride, all of which are, uh, mortal sins.
…are you joking?
Or have you just already defined masculinity as everything you hate?
If it turns out that a significant number of straight women actually like masculine men and haven’t been brainwashed into it, what is your plan?
How can a male build a healthy self-identity if to be male is nothing more than to be a flawed woman?
In that last line, being male and being a Man™ are different things. You can be male or female and you can be you by having your own goddamn identity and thinking for yourself instead of bullying the sick weak nerdy kid into it for not conforming to some arbitrary set of interests
like I might disagree with bbb on this because being a real man to me is just being an adult. But being a Man™ or even the subset of Men™, the dudebro - is giving up defining my own identity and giving up making maturity, not interests or the way I express myself, the performative element.
dudebro was pretty much always meant to refer the kinds of people we think of as stereotypical frat boys anyways. Dumbasses who don’t give a shit about consent or abuse or anything like that except fucking people ±over. That’s not being a man. That’s being garbage.
And if a lot of women are attracted to abuse, why? And are we sure? Are we sure underlying factors aren’t distorting the really important values?
And like if definitions differ definitions differ. Get over it. The line beginning with “Or” is not actually a point however smugly it’s phrased.
Have you considered that maybe it’s your conception of masculinity which is very narrow and culturally limited, here?
There is more than one way to be masculine and exploring and normalizing new masculinities could be very helpful (and still attractive to cishet women and thus not self-erasing on the long-term). Conceding masculinity to the opposition is a terrible idea.
I fail to see something better that convinces me to change it.
But it sounds like you’re widening the definition past the point of coherence, in which case we’re in the same camp but different labels.
I’m not widening it past coherence.
There are multiple paths which are congruent with the male gendered trait cluster and are compatible with cishet sexuality. Dudebroism in its original meaning and not a generic misandrist or outgroup insult is only one of them. We can take the same colors and paint a different image.
It only appears incoherent if you already pre-define masculinity as only the “dudebro” version, which is a terrible idea if your goal is better men that are willing to work with your movement.
Of course, men themselves will have to build these new identities mostly. Feminism cannot do so for them. But you don’t want them to think Feminism is incompatible with them being masculine. Remember the post I was responding to said masculinity was seen to be only of sins and just fine to let the opposition monopolize.
dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.
I think we’re more than prepared to concede masculinity to the opposition. What redeeming qualities does it have? Everything I’ve seen masculinity be is aggression, envy, or pride, all of which are, uh, mortal sins.
…are you joking?
Or have you just already defined masculinity as everything you hate?
If it turns out that a significant number of straight women actually like masculine men and haven’t been brainwashed into it, what is your plan?
How can a male build a healthy self-identity if to be male is nothing more than to be a flawed woman?
I don’t think people should build self-identities as men or women. I think they’re stifling. The notion that because I was born with a penis I should want to cultivate A traits and not B traits is silly to me. Let boys play with dolls if they want and let girls play with trucks if they want. Let men be tender, let women be slobs. None of this should mean they’re not doing a good job at being a complete person.
These conversations always get so abstract so tell me what you think masculinity and femininity are and I’ll explain what I dislike.
Masculinity and Femininity are a partially socially-constructed, partially biological phenomenon.
Essentially, gendered trait distribution resembles two overlapping bell curves, controlled by hormonal levels at key points in development, along with genes, epigenetics, and environmental factors.
Pre-natal testosterone levels - in females, not just males - track with later toy preferences for mechanical/systems toys vs social ones. While the effects of sex hormones are not simple, they are very much not a placebo.
Society then layers its gender roles on top of this, driven in part by previous economies and incentives that may no longer exist. Often it exaggerates, or essentializes, and so for this reason people go “well dresses are obviously not biological and not all people like the assigned roles, therefore male and female are exactly the same and all apparent differences are caused by societal brainwashing.”
So we might think of masculine/feminine as the axis of opposition for gendered traits. (Intelligence does not appear to be one of these traits, as the center point seems to be the same.) Alternatively, we might think of it as the center points of the respective bell curves.
It’s important to remember, however, that the masculine woman and the feminine man are both legitimate, as well as various other mixes on more than one trait. Humans are complicated and biology is quite noisy and also complicated. But the clustering is still real.
The issue with your plan is that cishets seem to actually want someone who differs on the gender axes from them in that masc/femme way in terms of their attraction (which they don’t consciously control), and the idea that we’ll abolish gender and not have them identify as the labeled gender clumps associated with their respective sexes (cishets in specific) in the name of some modern idea of liberation… well I’m confident that won’t work out very well.
What I’m saying is that the very idea of masculinity and femininity will inherently invalidate the masculine woman and feminine man.
I don’t care if it just so happens that most men will prefer one thing and most women will prefer another thing, I don’t think we should try to cram people into holes so there’s some kind of sameness.
But if you even put masculinity and femininity up on the pedestal as goals for men and women should aspire to, that will inherently invalidate the masculine woman and feminine man. The ideas themselves should be annihilated, the idea that people born into certain different types of bodies SHOULD want certain different things. If, later, of their own free will, they do naturally end up mostly wanting those things, that’s no skin off my ass.
There should be no gender roles whatsoever. Everyone should be told they can be whatever kind of person they want to be and do whatever things they wanna do.
The existence of straights as a category does not invalidate the existence of gays, and it’s possible to prepare people for the default of being straight, which we’re talking 90%+ probability here, while still saying “yeah also you could be gay, which is okay too, here is some information about gays”.
As such I don’t think it invalidates the femme/masc for there to be masc/femme, and if you don’t do a default and just abolish all the roles and scripts and so on instead, what you’re going to find is not a paradise of liberation, but a bunch of confused people struggling with introspection over their preferences,
like Rationalists wondering why their sex drives aren’t ‘logical’ after hitting a wall of personal experience.
dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.
I think we’re more than prepared to concede masculinity to the opposition. What redeeming qualities does it have? Everything I’ve seen masculinity be is aggression, envy, or pride, all of which are, uh, mortal sins.
…are you joking?
Or have you just already defined masculinity as everything you hate?
If it turns out that a significant number of straight women actually like masculine men and haven’t been brainwashed into it, what is your plan?
How can a male build a healthy self-identity if to be male is nothing more than to be a flawed woman?
In that last line, being male and being a Man™ are different things. You can be male or female and you can be you by having your own goddamn identity and thinking for yourself instead of bullying the sick weak nerdy kid into it for not conforming to some arbitrary set of interests
like I might disagree with bbb on this because being a real man to me is just being an adult. But being a Man™ or even the subset of Men™, the dudebro - is giving up defining my own identity and giving up making maturity, not interests or the way I express myself, the performative element.
dudebro was pretty much always meant to refer the kinds of people we think of as stereotypical frat boys anyways. Dumbasses who don’t give a shit about consent or abuse or anything like that except fucking people ±over. That’s not being a man. That’s being garbage.
And if a lot of women are attracted to abuse, why? And are we sure? Are we sure underlying factors aren’t distorting the really important values?
And like if definitions differ definitions differ. Get over it. The line beginning with “Or” is not actually a point however smugly it’s phrased.
Have you considered that maybe it’s your conception of masculinity which is very narrow and culturally limited, here?
There is more than one way to be masculine and exploring and normalizing new masculinities could be very helpful (and still attractive to cishet women and thus not self-erasing on the long-term). Conceding masculinity to the opposition is a terrible idea.
dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.
I think we’re more than prepared to concede masculinity to the opposition. What redeeming qualities does it have? Everything I’ve seen masculinity be is aggression, envy, or pride, all of which are, uh, mortal sins.
…are you joking?
Or have you just already defined masculinity as everything you hate?
If it turns out that a significant number of straight women actually like masculine men and haven’t been brainwashed into it, what is your plan?
How can a male build a healthy self-identity if to be male is nothing more than to be a flawed woman?
I don’t think people should build self-identities as men or women. I think they’re stifling. The notion that because I was born with a penis I should want to cultivate A traits and not B traits is silly to me. Let boys play with dolls if they want and let girls play with trucks if they want. Let men be tender, let women be slobs. None of this should mean they’re not doing a good job at being a complete person.
These conversations always get so abstract so tell me what you think masculinity and femininity are and I’ll explain what I dislike.
Masculinity and Femininity are a partially socially-constructed, partially biological phenomenon.
Essentially, gendered trait distribution resembles two overlapping bell curves, controlled by hormonal levels at key points in development, along with genes, epigenetics, and environmental factors.
Pre-natal testosterone levels - in females, not just males - track with later toy preferences for mechanical/systems toys vs social ones. While the effects of sex hormones are not simple, they are very much not a placebo.
Society then layers its gender roles on top of this, driven in part by previous economies and incentives that may no longer exist. Often it exaggerates, or essentializes, and so for this reason people go “well dresses are obviously not biological and not all people like the assigned roles, therefore male and female are exactly the same and all apparent differences are caused by societal brainwashing.”
So we might think of masculine/feminine as the axis of opposition for gendered traits. (Intelligence does not appear to be one of these traits, as the center point seems to be the same.) Alternatively, we might think of it as the center points of the respective bell curves.
It’s important to remember, however, that the masculine woman and the feminine man are both legitimate, as well as various other mixes on more than one trait. Humans are complicated and biology is quite noisy and also complicated. But the clustering is still real.
The issue with your plan is that cishets seem to actually want someone who differs on the gender axes from them in that masc/femme way in terms of their attraction (which they don’t consciously control), and the idea that we’ll abolish gender and not have them identify as the labeled gender clumps associated with their respective sexes (cishets in specific) in the name of some modern idea of liberation… well I’m confident that won’t work out very well.
dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.
I think we’re more than prepared to concede masculinity to the opposition. What redeeming qualities does it have? Everything I’ve seen masculinity be is aggression, envy, or pride, all of which are, uh, mortal sins.
…are you joking?
Or have you just already defined masculinity as everything you hate?
If it turns out that a significant number of straight women actually like masculine men and haven’t been brainwashed into it, what is your plan?
How can a male build a healthy self-identity if to be male is nothing more than to be a flawed woman?
getting random sharp pain in your organs is a lot like when your check engine light comes on in your car. you dont know what it means so you just ignore it and hope you dont blow up
I thought it meant that you get out the CANbus analyzer and read the error logs in all the control units to figure out what exactly is wrong.
I, too, look forward to Transhumanist cybernetic implants that monitor my health status and can tell me I’m definitely not having a heart attack.
:)
I think of my friends as the correct gender identity even if I met them before they came out. However, my mind feels super sure that all my friends and associates who knew me before I came out still think of me as a woman and it feels awful and there’s no way to confirm or deny they aren’t just being polite
Would it make you feel less awful if they told you they do still think of you that way subconsciously after you asked, instead of just being polite?
(For my part I read all your posts with the voice of that SU character you have as your avatar.)
“Of course,” said the moderate, as the ethnic violence increased in the country and multi-generational child sex trafficking rings set up in the cities, “some may die, but isn’t our vision of a tolerant and diverse society worth it?”
: /
I know, this is very deeply uncharitable of me. Something about this latest attack has me on edge. I think it’s that I see a path from here to ethnic tension criticality in England, which, with the previous attacks being a cycle of terrorism vs military campaigns, I didn’t.
If the State fails its duty to ensure the security of the citizens, if it will not actually ensure that it has a true monopoly on violence within its territory, IT WILL LOSE ITS LEGITIMACY.
A ‘retaliatory’ van attack by a white guy is survivable for the government, if this isn’t a sign of a coming pattern in which this picks up. The government needs to put its foot down hard NOW and crush the origin of the Muslim van attacks somehow or else things are going to get very bloody later. If the UK gets a wave of tit-for-tat sectarian vehicular homicide, each new one is going to erode public faith in the government’s hold on the territory, causing the next wave of marginally-most-vulnerable-to-radicalization to become radicalized (as they judge “no one will protect me”) and initiate the next attack until armed militias form.
fuck
All this talk about open borders and the marginal dude is okay and so on… the tail risk end is civil war.
You are 16.
fuckin’ millennials at it again
👋Redistribute👋avocados👋to👋millennials👋
the👋claps👋only👋go👋between👋the👋words👋mum
“The ‘Emoji Death Front’, first known as the ‘Death to Emoji Working Group’ and then ‘Emoji Extinction Dot Net’, is a distributed terrorist group which first emerged in Sydney, Australia, in 2033, coming to prominence in an attack on the Pyongyang Olympics in 2036. The stated aim of the group is the removal of emoji from Unicode, a goal for which it is willing to-”
- excerpt, Google Automatic Summary for “emoji death”, May 2, 2038
The thing I like about the idea of mandatory safety insurance is that it introduces a new actor with new incentives into the problem.
Let us return to aircraft.
The State has determined that every airline company must carry two million dollars in insurance per passenger per flight, to be paid out in the event that the plane is destroyed and they die. It has set certain rules, for instance that the insurance company must be sufficiently well-capitalized and it can’t just waive paying out because the company did something stupid.
Executive Todd has plans to reduce the maintenance on Tumblr Airlines aircraft. He will be at the company for five years. There is a 90% chance that if he does this, there will be no crash, and he gets a million dollar bonus and leaves. There is a 10% chance that a plane will crash before he leaves and he’ll only have a personal fortune of ten million dollars and a mansion on Hawaii left, which he can retire to.
So Todd orders that the maintenance should be cut.
However, Blue Hellsite Insurance, Inc., Tumblr Airlines’ insurance company, depends for its funding entirely on carefully calculating risk and then charging a bit more than that, on an ongoing basis. To do so, as part of their contract (and thanks to provisions passed in law by the State), they can set insurance agents out to inspect processes, planes, and so on.
BHI’s reaction to a plan that results in a 10% chance of a plane crash is “you WHAT?!” Whereas the risk isn’t necessarily quite so visible or quantified to all others in the organization, or else they may have motivations to ignore it for the same reason as Executive Todd.
So BHI come back and say that either Todd’s plan isn’t going to fly, or the insurance rates are going to go up.
So what was an invisible cost that could have gotten kicked down the road to a successor is transmuted into a stubborn operating cost right now.
Tumblr Airlines makes less profit (upsetting shareholders), raises ticket prices to compensate (thus pricing the risk into the market and making them less competitive), or else doesn’t go through with the plan.
The State could even require that the portion of the cost which is the risk premium is printed on the ticket, informing consumers of roughly how dangerous a given flight is. This is actually an enormous information gain by consumers, who as non-experts find it very difficult to not only judge airline safety, but obtain inside information about aircraft maintenance procedures.
@e8u What about Todd the Insurance Executive?
An astute observation. I actually left off that part in order to conserve length.
This entire scenario still depends on state intervention, which is why AnCaps and most Right Libertarians will not be in favor of it, even though it loosens the details of regulation to the markets and allows riskier behavior (but just prices it more).
Here’s what the State needs to do to cause this to happen:
I would say that there have to actually be enough competing insurance companies, but the market will take care of that, since this should be a reasonably profitable field. And the insurance company itself is a longer-term investment vehicle than the airline, since its practice of distributing risk changes when investors will get paid.
So, the question then is, is a system of competing insurance companies with competing insurance regulations more or less efficient and effective than a system of top-down, politically-driven regulation where government decides the details of regulations?
And that question is an empirical one. In systems as complex as economies, we can’t just assume the efficient market hypothesis. After all, this plan is in many ways in response to the existing market distortions of limited liability corporations and destruction of value being easier than creation of value.
Do it right, however, and you can also chip away at information asymmetry - the risk pricing by a moderately profitable insurance company that actually has to pay out if the product is dangerous or defective, as a share of the product’s price, communicates a lot of information that the customer previously often didn’t have.
“You need not fear, captain,” said the man. “We are not Social Justice Warriors, but Discourse Monks from the East.”
The guard captain nodded, and the procession of Rationalists filed into the city.
And so, thanks to some sneaky last-minute shopping, convenient circumstance, and a thoughtful gift idea, it would be a happy Father’s Day after all.
Why would you ever like/want to read age gap where a grown adult is with a teenager!?
Maybe because it’s the only way to write about someone inexperienced with someone experienced without being mocked or told you’re writing “Born Sexy Yesterday” (and then being mocked and condemned for that particular offense).
I feel like the second you write anyone over 20 as sexually inexperienced, people either start laughing at how pathetic it is or start wondering what’s wrong with the character. The older the characters get, the more intense it gets
If you’re single at 30, most people assume it’s because you have a few failed relationships under your belt (or are widowed). Being 30 and inexperienced (or never have dated/married) is almost a crime to some people.
They literally can not wrap their heads around it.
Hell, that whole “Born Sexy Yesterday” video pretty much embodies this! The entire video is basically screaming: “How dare you write about a grown woman who has no sexual experience!? The only way they’d be that ignorant is if they’re a teenager or a child!!!”
those tags though
Welp, I just helped someone discover that someone else was impersonating them online using their name and picture to discredit them. I’m really mad at whoever’s responsible for this, but I’m glad I could help.
It’s strange, really. If there’s a good reason to hate someone, it’s the truth. And thus, this behavior implicitly admits that the hatred of them is likely wrong.
“And thus we propose, to protect the common man from this social status war of all against all, the creation of a Social Sovereign, who shall define the boundaries of the ingroup and the outgroup,”
- The Leviathan, Part II, by Post-Neoreactionary thinker and furry artist THobbes85,
why is it that there is nearly always someone accusing all my favorite characters of being dudebro neckbeard PUA creeps
Snape? entitled Nice Guy
Kylo Ren? whiny white boy with man tears
hpmor!Harry Potter?
Sheldon Cooper on steroids, an amped-up version of every neckbeard asshole I knew back in high school and college who thought being male and possessing some semblance of intelligence made him fucking king of all he surveyed.
>Sheldon Cooper
>neckbeard
huh I wonder why this mysterious pattern keeps happening
ＳＴＡＴＵＳＷＡＲ
There’s also this weird assumption that the market is infinitely wide and infinitely deep and people have perfect information with which to price risk, so that absent regulation everyone ends up living in an apartment with exactly the chance of being burned to death that they wanted.
The “efficient market hypothesis” is bad, it begs the question.
Surely if it was bad it would have been replaced by a better hypothesis in the discourse, since this has not yet happened-
In which the Discourse Monk Argumate demonstrates the difference between truth and virality.
essentially privatising the FAA and NTSB, although the NTSB already seems to do really good work and it’s unlikely quality would improve with privatisation.
Though really, I wanted to use aircraft to talk about building safety. The field of aircraft is already pretty safe in general.
What I’m thinking with this building materials issue is that in addition to the Executive Todd Problem being worse (because the real estate will change hands more often than the aircraft and the builders will too), and there being no insurance requirement, a lot of problems (like asbestos, or that cladding) were either known beforehand, or would not have been that difficult to figure out if someone had bothered to check first.
Additionally, the insurance company, the builder, or the owner would be losing money for every month that problem was not repaired. So instead of fighting a long legal battle and not fixing it, it’s more likely at least one of them would fix it now, then have the long legal battle about who finally gets compensated.
That would be the plan, anyway. I have other insurance-based plans to distort the markets as well.
The thing I like about the idea of mandatory safety insurance is that it introduces a new actor with new incentives into the problem.
Let us return to aircraft.
The State has determined that every airline company must carry two million dollars in insurance per passenger per flight, to be paid out in the event that the plane is destroyed and they die. It has set certain rules, for instance that the insurance company must be sufficiently well-capitalized and it can’t just waive paying out because the company did something stupid.
Executive Todd has plans to reduce the maintenance on Tumblr Airlines aircraft. He will be at the company for five years. There is a 90% chance that if he does this, there will be no crash, and he gets a million dollar bonus and leaves. There is a 10% chance that a plane will crash before he leaves and he’ll only have a personal fortune of ten million dollars and a mansion on Hawaii left, which he can retire to.
So Todd orders that the maintenance should be cut.
However, Blue Hellsite Insurance, Inc., Tumblr Airlines’ insurance company, depends for its funding entirely on carefully calculating risk and then charging a bit more than that, on an ongoing basis. To do so, as part of their contract (and thanks to provisions passed in law by the State), they can set insurance agents out to inspect processes, planes, and so on.
BHI’s reaction to a plan that results in a 10% chance of a plane crash is “you WHAT?!” Whereas the risk isn’t necessarily quite so visible or quantified to all others in the organization, or else they may have motivations to ignore it for the same reason as Executive Todd.
So BHI come back and say that either Todd’s plan isn’t going to fly, or the insurance rates are going to go up.
So what was an invisible cost that could have gotten kicked down the road to a successor is transmuted into a stubborn operating cost right now.
Tumblr Airlines makes less profit (upsetting shareholders), raises ticket prices to compensate (thus pricing the risk into the market and making them less competitive), or else doesn’t go through with the plan.
The State could even require that the portion of the cost which is the risk premium is printed on the ticket, informing consumers of roughly how dangerous a given flight is. This is actually an enormous information gain by consumers, who as non-experts find it very difficult to not only judge airline safety, but obtain inside information about aircraft maintenance procedures.
why the egyptians and not, say, the aksumites.. songhai, the malian empire or great zimbabwe? nubia, even..
There’s a rich history of dynasties and great empires throughouit that continent but why is there a particular focus on egypt?
There are many amazing societies and civilizations that never get the appreciation and attention they deserve because egypt constantly gets white and black washed.
some kinds of common knowledge are a massively valuable public good, and a centralised authority is typically the most efficient way of providing it.
It’s related to that idea that we all have time and love to comparison shop between everything. It’s basically saying “you’re going to get screwed by that crucial detail you didn’t know was important beforehand.“
and that you have the time and resources and are still alive to pursue damages through the court system against those with deep pockets who have screwed you over.
I’d be interested to learn more about different models for decentralized accreditation services – consumer safety, etc. You see a little of this with professional guilds and etc I guess? But I’m not sure how much money you’d need to throw at meta accreditation to get good trust levels, or how much duplication of work you get in a free market of accreditation services, etc. It really does seem like a central authority is a good way to go…?
I think the tricky part is enforcement and incentives. Structural engineers were complaining about the cladding long before buildings started burning down, and fire fighters were shocked when they tried to put out the fires, but in order for that to translate into it not being sold, purchased, and installed on buildings there needs to be someone who says “no” when the architect says “cheap!”
The thing that gets me with the Libertarianism thing and safety regs is that, precisely because of all the losses of information in the process and limited information resources available to buyers, I feel the regulation process really does have to bottom out somewhere with “men with guns come and say no, you can’t do that.”
And I know they hate that, but their plans often effectively give out huge subsidies in the form of unaccounted-for externalities, information asymmetry, and so on, to capital.
“Make them all buy insurance” requires a strong state to come through and force the issue and also make sure that that insurance will pay out. But if you don’t do at least that, then you allow people to engage in arbitrage against peoples’ lives (more than they do now). One could argue, even, about smoothing out lifetime earnings with loans to help pay for safety, but financial markets are waaaaaay too frictional for that and the future is too unknown.
So I don’t feel too bad about the building safety codes.
And some of the Asian countries prove you can have the building safety codes and even earthquake standards without the part that causes housing prices to quintuple.
some kinds of common knowledge are a massively valuable public good, and a centralised authority is typically the most efficient way of providing it.
It’s related to that idea that we all have time and love to comparison shop between everything. It’s basically saying “you’re going to get screwed by that crucial detail you didn’t know was important beforehand.“
Explore vs. Exploit strikes again.
The aircraft engine maintenance example is instructive for other reasons: airlines have strong financial, legal, and moral incentives not to kill hundreds of people, and their passengers obviously agree with this, as do the crew of the aircraft, so all the incentives should be aligned. But they still fucked up.
It turned out that some airlines took shortcuts that did not actually harm the integrity of the engine mounting, while American Airlines and some others did dangerously crack the mounting and leave it vulnerable to failure on take off, as eventually happened.
But this damage could have been noticed with regular inspections! They used a shortcut procedure – despite warnings from the aircraft manufacturer – and did not check to ensure that the shortcut was safe.
Once again if people actually did their damn jobs we wouldn’t need regulation, but believing that the market will accurately price risk in its absence is just silly.
Ah, but here’s the trick: Corporations are not unified agents. While Tumblr Airlines might have incentive not to destroy aircraft through negligence, killing hundreds, and customers of Tumblr Airlines might have incentive not to die horribly due to lack of maintenance, Executive Todd does not personally lose $400 million when the aircraft is destroyed and can effectively extract the money ‘saved’ by cutting maintenance and move on before the consequences can catch up to him. Also, each additional dollar he earns feels less real, and its loss will hurt him less dearly than the dollar before it.
Also he’s not fully rational because he’s still human.
All the NTSB recommendations are technically trade offs that have costs; consider American Airlines Flight 191 which crashed on take off killing everyone on board and two people on the ground after an engine separated from the wing due to improper maintenance procedures had cracked the pylon.
While 273 people may have died, the improper shortcuts taken during engine maintenance saved 200 man hours per aircraft! Why, the meddling FAA banning this procedure may have done more harm than the original crash!
Nah it’s alright fam,
If we assume that the GDP per capita is $55,000, and that the typical passenger has 35 working years remaining, we can just have the state bill the company and its shareholders $525,525,000 and put them into debt bondage and sell off their assets if they are unwilling or unable to pay.
Now you may object to the state rolling around and charging huge sums of money as payment for accidental deaths, but I have it on good authority that everyone signed over their trusteeship to the state rather than get kicked into the ocean, entirely of their own free will. Quite remarkable, really. So I assure that this plan is entirely Capitalist.
@argumate is this your thing now
WE WILL CONTINUE TO POST PIXELATED ART OF QUESTIONABLE QUALITY (AT RANDOM INTERVALS BETWEEN TWO HOURS AND SIX MONTHS) UNTIL OUR DEMANDS ARE MET
- DONALD TRUMP WILL IMMEDIATELY STEP DOWN AND BE REPLACED AS PRESIDENT BY A WORKING GROUP OF SELECTED PERSONNEL FROM GOOGLE, AMAZON, AND IBM’S MACHINE LEARNING DIVISIONS, AND THE RAND CORPORATION, WHO WILL BE DIRECTED TO GOVERN IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST. A $1 BILLION DATACENTER WILL BE CONSTRUCTED TO FULFILL THEIR COMMANDS
- MILITARY-GRADE POWERED EXOSKELETONS WILL BE IMMEDIATELY LEGALIZED FOR CIVILIAN OWNERSHIP
- DETROIT WILL BE DECLARED A SPECIAL AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT ZONE AND PUT UNDER THE IRON HAND OF A CEO FROM ASIA BACKED BY HEAVY MILITIA FORCES, PAID AS A PERCENTAGE OF DETROIT REAL GDP ANNUALLY
- MARTIAL ARTS TRAINING WILL BE MADE A MANDATORY COMPONENT OF THE HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM AND AN ANNUAL TOURNAMENT WILL BE HELD TO DETERMINE THE ‘MOST BADASS HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR IN AMERICA’
ADDITIONAL DEMANDS
- THE GAZA STRIP WILL BE YIELDED TO EGYPT, THE WEST BANK WILL BE YIELDED TO JORDAN, THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY WILL BE DISSOLVED, AND EVERYONE WILL SHUT UP ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST FOR A PERIOD OF NOT LESS THAN TWO (2) MONTHS
- CALIFORNIA WILL BE SPLIT INTO FOUR ADDITIONAL STATES AND WESTERN CALIFORNIA WILL BE PROVIDED 5,000,000 PERMANENT RESIDENCY PERMITS TO ASSIGN AS THEY SEE FIT ON THE CONDITION THAT THEY ARE PROHIBITED FROM VOTING ON IMMIGRATION MATTERS AND JUS SOLI IS ENDED
- MUNICIPAL POLICE WILL BE REORGANIZED INTO AUTONOMOUS AGENCIES THAT COMPETE ACROSS MULTIPLE METRICS INCLUDING RATE OF FATALITIES AND DONUT CONSUMPTION AND MAKE METRIC-WEIGHTED BIDS FOR ACCESS TO MUNICIPAL CONTRACTS. A SOFTWARE-MANAGED EVIDENCE EXCHANGE WILL BE BUILT TO COORDINATE THIS. NO MORE THAN A RUNNING AVERAGE OF 1.2 DONUTS PER DAY PER OFFICER WILL BE PERMITTED.
- THE REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRATIC PARTIES WILL ABANDON THEIR IDEOLOGIES AND ADOPT THE IDEOLOGIES OF NATIONAL POPULISM AND GLOBAL TECHNOCRACY RESPECTIVELY. DEFECTORS WILL BE CONSCRIPTED TO SERVE AS EDITORS FOR THE NEW FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF CLICKBAIT FOR A PERIOD OF NO LESS THAN FIVE YEARS
Now, the original posts here are a joke, but…
(1) A group selected from such high IQ people, including one pool that has direct experience with US politics, would probably outperform Donald Trump, and they could do some real data-crunching using all that computer hardware to develop the kinds of new policies we need. Of course that’s not an actually practical hiring-for-President mechanism, but performance in other sectors of government might be improved by such things.
(2) Access to defensive military hardware is relevant to the 2nd amendment and will continue to be as we go farther into the 21st century. Part of the very idea of arming the populace is that it introduces last resort accountability.
(3) Detroit being put under the rule of a gifted businessman with flexibility in policies could radically alter its economic fate in ways that, under the current path, are not feasible.
(4) Martial Arts training as an option would likely increase interest in Physical Education and help lower obesity, in addition to increasing national defense readiness.
(5) National identities being useful doesn’t mean they’re immutable and vice-versa. The entire political infrastructure in Palestine has this whole opposition to Israel element built into it, and I’m not sure who the Palestinian identity is really benefiting anymore. Jordan and Egypt are both faring better and would likely improve overall conditions in those areas without them being owned by Israel. Of course, there’s probably some reason this won’t work / catch I’m unaware of.
(6) California isn’t actually a monolithic blue state, and if they want to have sanctuary cities and the like so much… why not let them kinda do it, but torpedo the effect on voting demographics so there’s no incentive to undermine the national immigration policy just to win more at politics?
Actual racists won’t like the policy, but the opposition to immigration is not driven purely by racism despite what many proponents say.
(7-1) A lot of policing police focuses on individuals, however, if the entire police department could be effectively fired at once, that provides organization-level incentives to use best practices better policy. Costs of externalities, and public benefits, are worked into the bid so that it isn’t flat lowest-cost. For instance, add $500,000 virtual price to the bid for every police-related fatality provides organization-level incentive to provide more training / be less gung-ho about the use of guns.
Alternatively, just make them take out insurance that pays into an offset fund.
(7-2) Cops need to be physically fit for their jobs, even though counting individual donuts is overkill. If a cop in this country is bulky, it should be because he’s built like a weightlifter.
(8) If this shift occurred, it would make both of their policy angles less stupid.
it was the best of timelines, it was the worst of timelines
“Picking nits is an accepted group bonding activity!”
“Yeah, in orangutan culture, maybe!”
“Hey, orangutan culture is valid!”