Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it?

The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of  US society.

This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.

What if we talked about monolingual White children the way we talk about low-income children of color?

Excerpt from a satirical blog post from The Educational Linguist that makes a good point about which language skills we value as a society and the problems with talking about a “language gap”. 

(via lingrix)

[someone linked this to me]

---

Suppose we took this seriously - that we decided monolingual white children weren’t gaining a sufficient intuitive understanding of language as a generalized concept, because their households were too monolingual.

What, then, could be done about it?

Children across America are made to learn foreign languages throughout their schooling, but it rarely sticks.  Why?

Insufficient density.

Quite simply, there just aren’t enough speakers of the language per population in a given area to support conversing with it regularly.  It becomes useless, and the brain does what it always does with information that doesn’t get used - purge it.

Any response focused on a great diversity of languages, then, would be ineffective.  There are simply too many different languages.  If we limit instruction to only those languages with at least one million speakers, and keep children in school eight hours per day, each language will have just over one minute of instruction devoted to it.

To truly grasp the idea of language on a deeper conceptual level, fluency and depth of understanding would be required.

To create the number of speakers required to sustain fluency, then, we must pick one second language per geographic area, then make it mandatory in school.

I propose this be done at the regional level.

Mandarin Chinese or Japanese for the West Coast.  German for the Midwest.  French for the East Coast and New England.  Spanish for the South and Southwest.

Not only will this bring about regional cultural differentiation which will increase the cultural diversity of America and support for later Regional Federalism (instrumental for unification with Canada and Mexico to form the North American Union and ensure continued dominance into the late 21st century), but it will add truly exciting new slang to the language.

Yes, the resulting drift will make old documents harder to understand, but the insistent descriptivists have already thrown that out the window as unimportant, so why stop there?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

The National Delegation

[mitigatedchaos]

In case you haven’t noticed recently, democracy has major issues.  Every major developed state is strewn with dysfunction and programs that are actively at odds with their intended purposes.  Our politicians are either incompetent idiots or shrewd operators working against our interests.

Policies routinely have reasonable stated values, but terrible efficacy.

Organizations such as the RAND Corporation knew the Iraq War would be a lot tougher than the Bush administration said it would be.  Policy plans coming out of think tanks seem to be better than the actual policies we get.

If we didn’t know they’d immediately get subverted, we’d almost be better off with think tanks running the country.

Better results are necessarily different results, and systems produce the outcomes they incentivize, so to change the results it is necessary to change the system.

The truth is, it may be possible to get something like think tanks in charge of the government, a hybrid between them and political parties, but we will have to add selection pressure to ensure they work towards correctness.

I propose a new legislature, composed of a new kind of corporate entity, the Delegate Candidate Organization (DCO).  

Every three years, at election time, each voter delegates their vote to a DCO.  The top 50 Delegate Candidate Organizations then form the legislature, becoming that term’s Delegate Organizations.  This legislature is known as the National Delegation.

In a second election, those DCOs that did not make the cut delegate their votes to members of the top 50.

(In an optional alternative, the vote could be split between DCOs by categories by voters, allowing a truly innovative level of representation.  Bills would have to pass on all categories to pass, and the tax category would determine how funding is obtained, but not total expenditures.  Sadly, this is probably too complex for typical voters.)

A Delegate Candidate Organization receives its funding exclusively from the State.  For each delegated vote it receives, the DCO receives $5 in annual funding, and an additional $5 times its percentile standing in a legislative outcome prediction market.

(That might sound like a lot.  America has around 300 million people, so you could potentially be looking at three billion dollars.  I would answer that the 2016 Presidential election cost $2.6 billion by itself, and that money had to come from somewhere and is already influencing our political process.  The size of the US economy is $18,570 billion dollars.  The real question is whether better policy by the DCOs could improve that by 0.016% or more, which would make the National Delegation pay for itself.  I believe that it would.)

The key factor that makes DCOs behave more like think tanks is that a significant chunk of their funding depends on correctly estimating the outcomes of legislation.  What keeps them honest?  First, competition with other DCOs that will pressure them against spoiling the metrics.  Second, voters.

When a piece of legislation is to be passed, DCOs make predictions on outcomes and bet on them in a virtual currency called Credibility Score (or just “Cred”).  Each outcome must be represented by a basket of multiple metrics, to prevent min-maxing.

This structure allows us to build a differentiation between a policy’s values and its efficacy.  Previous discourse has often viewed policy as solely a matter of efficacy, but of course in practice people have different preferences and are not a unified mass just waiting for enlightenment into [your political ideology].  Preserving the values component (in part through voting) also allows bits of efficacy that have slipped through to be represented on the other side of the equation.

The bets serve two purposes.  The first is to reward policymakers that are actively effective at achieving their stated objectives, and punish policymakers that are too unaligned with reality.  The second is to effectively tell voters what the plans will actually do, not just wishy washy language pols want people to hear.

“This bill will reduce gun crime.”
“By how much?”
“Uh… a, uh, lot.”

Not only can the DCO specify what its % estimate for a decrease in gun crime is, but it can also communicate its level of certainty - by how much it bets on the outcome as a percentage of its current Cred reserves, data that can be mined by political scientists and journalists.

DCOs must be able to amend predictions when new legislation is passed.  A court will also be required to punish those who tamper with metrics, and resolve other disputes.  The details of that are a challenge in themselves, but should be feasible to work out.

Each DO has as many votes in the legislature as have been delegated to it.  A majority is required to pass legislation.

The accumulated Credibility Score/Cred across all bets is used to determine the percentile standing of all DCOs, used to determine funding (as above).  Percentile standing is listed on the ballot next to the DCO’s name, but to simplify things for voters, DCOs are listed in the order of votes received in the previous election.

---

Practical experiments will be necessary to assess the viability of this model, but I have high hopes for it.  If we want to advance as a civilization, then we must develop new organizational technologies.

[mitigatedchaos]

Think you need to take a closer look at Robin Hanson, something I thought I’d never say

Specifically, the problem is that predicting the results isn’t the issue, it’s predicting the change in results given some policy change

I think Hanson has people bet on outcome both with and without policy

I may have to look into that, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable. Betting for outcomes based on whether the bill passes or fails to pass certainly provides more information for our voters/etc.

One big problem is that people are going to use this not to predict, but to hedge

It will be financialized

If you believe Hanson that markets are perfect, that’s not a problem it will all work out

if you haven’t had your skull smashed with a brick every day for the past 20 years or worked in the econ dept at GMU, you should be skeptical.

Sorry, I guess I should have been more clear in my intentions earlier.

While the probability estimates produced by the prediction market are interesting, the real purposes are more like: 

1. Punish politicians that are actively at odds with the truth/reward those who have some idea what they’re doing, so that eventually the system is dominated by more clueful politicals who spend less time huffing ideology.  Hopefully, this will result in more effective policy which is more aligned with reality.

(I’m of the opinion that there are many policies that it’s said you can’t do, because markets etc, but which you could do if you were smart about it.  So I want those to come up, actually testing some of these policies before they come up, etc.)

2. Make politicians be more specific and truthful about the outcomes of policies in measurable ways, making it more difficult to do one thing and say another.

3. Track the effectiveness of policies over time so that better policy can be created in the future (through the metrics gathered to feed the market, not the market itself).

Would hedging interfere with those?  I’m not so sure.  It is, itself, information.  It may also depend on the market’s design itself.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

i really don't understand your focus on percentile rankings of prediction market performance rather than the raw results. it adds a distortion to the incentives of whatever underlying prediction market system you use and LMSR and such are designed to have incentives for accuracy already.

I want the DCOs hungry enough for money to [edit: make better policy], but not so ludicrously hungry that they’ll work hard to sabotage all the metrics and cause the state itself to become delusional.

Does that make sense?

Therefore, while their pay must be coupled to their performance, it needs a layer of indirection.  They bet with a fake currency that can’t be directly converted into real money, and they are paid based on their overall performance over multiple bets, which is unlikely to rise or fall quite so sharply that one of their personnel will freak out and cause an incident of corruption.  

There may be other ways to accomplish this goal.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

The National Delegation

In case you haven’t noticed recently, democracy has major issues.  Every major developed state is strewn with dysfunction and programs that are actively at odds with their intended purposes.  Our politicians are either incompetent idiots or shrewd operators working against our interests.

Policies routinely have reasonable stated values, but terrible efficacy.

Organizations such as the RAND Corporation knew the Iraq War would be a lot tougher than the Bush administration said it would be.  Policy plans coming out of think tanks seem to be better than the actual policies we get.

If we didn’t know they’d immediately get subverted, we’d almost be better off with think tanks running the country.

Better results are necessarily different results, and systems produce the outcomes they incentivize, so to change the results it is necessary to change the system.

The truth is, it may be possible to get something like think tanks in charge of the government, a hybrid between them and political parties, but we will have to add selection pressure to ensure they work towards correctness.

I propose a new legislature, composed of a new kind of corporate entity, the Delegate Candidate Organization (DCO).  

Every three years, at election time, each voter delegates their vote to a DCO.  The top 50 Delegate Candidate Organizations then form the legislature, becoming that term’s Delegate Organizations.  This legislature is known as the National Delegation.

In a second election, those DCOs that did not make the cut delegate their votes to members of the top 50.

(In an optional alternative, the vote could be split between DCOs by categories by voters, allowing a truly innovative level of representation.  Bills would have to pass on all categories to pass, and the tax category would determine how funding is obtained, but not total expenditures.  Sadly, this is probably too complex for typical voters.)

A Delegate Candidate Organization receives its funding exclusively from the State.  For each delegated vote it receives, the DCO receives $5 in annual funding, and an additional $5 times its percentile standing in a legislative outcome prediction market.

(That might sound like a lot.  America has around 300 million people, so you could potentially be looking at three billion dollars.  I would answer that the 2016 Presidential election cost $2.6 billion by itself, and that money had to come from somewhere and is already influencing our political process.  The size of the US economy is $18,570 billion dollars.  The real question is whether better policy by the DCOs could improve that by 0.016% or more, which would make the National Delegation pay for itself.  I believe that it would.)

The key factor that makes DCOs behave more like think tanks is that a significant chunk of their funding depends on correctly estimating the outcomes of legislation.  What keeps them honest?  First, competition with other DCOs that will pressure them against spoiling the metrics.  Second, voters.

When a piece of legislation is to be passed, DCOs make predictions on outcomes and bet on them in a virtual currency called Credibility Score (or just “Cred”).  Each outcome must be represented by a basket of multiple metrics, to prevent min-maxing.

This structure allows us to build a differentiation between a policy’s values and its efficacy.  Previous discourse has often viewed policy as solely a matter of efficacy, but of course in practice people have different preferences and are not a unified mass just waiting for enlightenment into [your political ideology].  Preserving the values component (in part through voting) also allows bits of efficacy that have slipped through to be represented on the other side of the equation.

The bets serve two purposes.  The first is to reward policymakers that are actively effective at achieving their stated objectives, and punish policymakers that are too unaligned with reality.  The second is to effectively tell voters what the plans will actually do, not just wishy washy language pols want people to hear.

“This bill will reduce gun crime.”
“By how much?”
“Uh… a, uh, lot.”

Not only can the DCO specify what its % estimate for a decrease in gun crime is, but it can also communicate its level of certainty - by how much it bets on the outcome as a percentage of its current Cred reserves, data that can be mined by political scientists and journalists.

DCOs must be able to amend predictions when new legislation is passed.  A court will also be required to punish those who tamper with metrics, and resolve other disputes.  The details of that are a challenge in themselves, but should be feasible to work out.

Each DO has as many votes in the legislature as have been delegated to it.  A majority is required to pass legislation.

The accumulated Credibility Score/Cred across all bets is used to determine the percentile standing of all DCOs, used to determine funding (as above).  Percentile standing is listed on the ballot next to the DCO’s name, but to simplify things for voters, DCOs are listed in the order of votes received in the previous election.

---

Practical experiments will be necessary to assess the viability of this model, but I have high hopes for it.  If we want to advance as a civilization, then we must develop new organizational technologies.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

What GOP Must Do to Avoid an American NHS

Alright, US Republicans, listen up.

You think your goal right now is to “Repeal Obamacare”.  

But that has issues.  Given your values, your goal should not just be to repeal Obamacare, but to prevent the emergence of a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, in which the US Federal government monopolizes 1/5th of the US economy in a botched attempt at recreating the NHS.

This does not mean trying to pass laws to sabotage the attempt.  They’ll just get overturned, and that will be celebrated as a Democratic party victory.

You have to deflate the demand for single-payer healthcare.  That is what is necessary for market-based healthcare to continue to exist in the United States.  As long as the demand is there - and it is growing, as middle-class families come under increasing pressure - the desire for single-payer will re-emerge.

Yelling at people about how they don’t deserve healthcare because they haven’t worked hard enough will not help.  You just picked up a bunch of rural voters that got laid off at the factories and can’t meet their deductibles.  You have to focus on preserving the market-based allocation.  

There is a simple way to do this.

• Each year, every American receives a healthcare voucher for $2,500.  (Maybe more - this is way below our per-capita healthcare spending - but even you can do this much.)  You can hide this as an earned income tax credit for the poor, a tax deduction for the middle class, etc, if you have to.
• The voucher can only be used to purchase valid medical services and medical insurance.  We have licensing for doctors, so this shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.
• Any of the voucher not spent rolls over into a no-tax/low-tax Health Savings Account, where it builds up.  
• Private money can also go into the account.
• Tax is only assessed above a certain amount / on death.
• By default, it goes to a zero-interest government account, but this can be changed by opening a suitable interest-earning HSA account at any American bank or credit union.
• Hospitals are still required provide emergency care for the uninsured/poor, however, up to ½ of future vouchers can be garnished, proportional to the size of outstanding claims.
  
• Vouchers and money from the HSA can be given to spouses or children for their HSAs, though not other relations (normally).  It can also be disbursed in a will, but if so then it will be taxed as normal income.

Now, first objection is probably that this will bid up the price of medical care to the new floor.  I believe that is unlikely - because the voucher accumulates and people don’t actually like randomly buying healthcare, it makes much more sense to save it up and spend it later as you normally would, or else just buy insurance.

Second objection is that people might launder the money to get it for themselves.  In this case, the person they are screwing over is mostly their future self, so they have incentive not to do this.

Third objection, which I’m likely to get from my left-wing readers, is that this isn’t enough money.  That’s probably true, but this is likely of more benefit than whatever the Republicans are currently cooking up.  In the current situation we have some poor people buying the mandated insurance, but unable to actually get medical care because they cannot afford the deductible.  Under this system, they can go get medical care tomorrow.  Likewise, for pre-existing conditions, this ensures that at least the value of the voucher is available each year to pay for it.  

Later administrations could raise the amount, but the benefit for the Republicans here is the preservation of the market mechanism.  This is likely to be a popular program.

This could be coupled with a variety of other reforms to reduce overall healthcare costs, such as requiring hospitals to post information about their prices, success rates, etc.  Don’t just cross your fingers and hope the market works.  Education alleviates information asymmetry and lubricates markets.  Create the right framework for suitable informed competition to take place in.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Speaking of independent prosecution agencies for police misconduct, we should have those.  Can’t have the prosecutors that depend on the cops for all their other prosecutions, bad cops could retaliate to cover for their buddy by refusing to cooperate with later prosecutions.  Otherwise at least try it in another jurisdiction.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[theunitofcaring]

The form of direct action against abusive employers that I personally find the most tempting (this doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or anything, just that I daydream about it):

Employees often don’t file legal complaints about wage fraud and illegal conditions because they can’t afford to lose the job because they’re living paycheck to paycheck. I expect that many people in this situation would quit their horrible job and file a legal complaint if they would be given like $1200 to tide them and their family over while they found a new job. 

So here’s what I’d be tempted to do: ask people online to tell you about a business that’s engaging in wage and hours violations/otherwise really shitty but still its employees’ best option. Find one with like 10-15 employees. Fundraise money within your activist group and online to get enough money for every single employee to walk away. 

Then the employees go to their boss and say ‘the next time you take half our tips even though you’re not legally allowed to take any/make us come in when we’re really sick/deduct damaged merchandise from our paychecks/etc, we all walk away. We have filed a wage claim in court. If you retaliate for that, we all walk away.’

And then, you know, next time the employer breaks the law, any employee who wants to follow through on the threat gets $1200 to support them once they’ve quit. And then you publicize the heck out of it, and scare other shitty employers, and hopefully the wage claim is successful and your employees get recompensed the money they were owed. And you open online applications for the next place.

You’d have to be very careful to go after places with real, documented, verified workplace conditions violations, because most of the benefit is in the publicity and the scaring other employers into shaping up. And you can’t scare people into shaping up if they don’t know exactly what they need to do (meet their legal obligations). You could only go after small places, because you need most of the employees on the same page and because fundraising larger sums of money would be harder. 

But with the right fundraising and PR team, I bet you could create conditions under which employers are way more scared to cheat their employees. 

[mitigatedchaos]

Because employees lack negotiating leverage, the government should have a network of secret labor law informants, such that no business can be entirely sure they won’t get smacked down hard for flagrant violations. Simultaneously, the labor laws could be simplified.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

We propose that the packaging of mandatory binding arbitration clauses as a condition of employment masks the true price of these agreements due to a mismatch in the available leverage of firms and employees in many markets.

To increase the efficiency of the market for the waiver of legal rights of redress to wrongdoing by private parties, we propose that mandatory binding arbitration clauses as a condition of employment shall be prohibited and struck out as null and void.  Binding arbitration agreements shall then be negotiated between employers and employees, offering material compensation, allowing them to float in price so that the market can work efficiently and determine the true price of cyberpunk dystopia.

@collapsedsquid

[collapsedsquid]

How do you prevent the company from simply firing anyone who does not sign the arbitration agreement in a week?

[mitigatedchaos]

Well I tagged that as #shtpost for a reason.

My actual proposal depends on just how much power I’m being given to reshape the economy.  

Assuming I could only impact arbitration, my move would be to require compensation at a minimum of $4,000 per-employee annually or X% of salary, whichever is greater, pro-rated by the number of hours compared to fulltime employment.  Or something along those lines, perhaps.  Maybe.  I’d have to think about it.

My temptation is to set a huge “anti-monopoly trap” instead that triggers when the amount of binding arbitration in a district exceeds a certain percentage and tragedy of the commons the companies for irony purposes, but of course that’s a bad idea.

But the real move, with greater power, would be to severely limit binding arbitration and make all employers take out employment health and safety insurance for all employees (and for their products) while reducing regulations and creating a special court system and regulatory regime for the insurance that pays out much more regularly than one-sided corporate arbitration would.  I would then require that the workplace health and safety insurance amount be listed prior to employment, informing prospective employees of just how dangerous the job is.  This would all be occurring in a scenario where wage subsidies reduced working class desperation by increasing available jobs.  (That would have its own program.)

This specialized insurance court system would be streamlined to lower the regulatory legal burden on both companies and individuals, while making it easier to file and resolve legitimate claims.  It would be possible to appeal to higher levels of courts as well.

This would accomplish the stated goals of binding arbitration - reducing regulatory burden, reducing legal expenses on small matters without overloading the court system, etc - while wrecking the unstated goals of screwing over employees and consumers.

It also distributes the costs in a smoother, more predictable way.  (That is, your bakery in specific doesn’t end up on the hook for $100,000 just because there’s a one in a million risk of a $100,000 bakery injury, and your bakery just happens to be the one it happened to.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[theunitofcaring]

The solution to this, of course, is to just give low-wage workers money instead of making laws that try to force their employers to do it. No one should have to live on the money they can bring home from $9/hour? Agreed! Give them money. 

[ranma-official]

What will happen as a result is, of course, that companies will routinely underpay their employees, effectively outcompeting companies that pay fair wages purely on the taxpayer’s dime, which is by the way what already happens when people who work are paid low enough to be eligible for welfare.

This is a fact.

Factual solutions only. No pandering.

[wirehead-wannabe]

Do you actually disagree with any factual statement Kelsey is making here? All I see are value disagreements about “underpaying” and “fair wages.”

[ranma-official]

A factual statement is what I said.

When companies underpay the employees and you pay those employees instead, you reward companies for underpaying employees.

The correct course of action is to force companies to pay fair wages to employees. The incorrect course of action is to provide companies with more market incentives for not doing so.

That is a factual statement also.

A value judgement would be if you’d disagree with me that people like me are not literal subhumans (which is by the way the universal opinion of people who endorse underpaying as much as possible).

[mitigatedchaos]

It depends - do we have individuals paying the low wage workers and not a subsidy to all low wage workers by the State? Then the problems with the libertarian plan will ruin it, that’s how the economics works. Do we have state action instead? Then the leverage of all low wage workers will be increased by other economic effects.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@discoursedrome

Honestly, from a business perspective, it’s a totally reasonable and justifiable thing to do. Many of the biggest business costs are tied to peak rather than average throughput, and the previous attempt to solve this, JIT scheduling, was drastically awful. I think the market-wisdom rationale for Uber’s surge pricing was mostly bullshit spin, but in general, you do kind of need to be able to raise prices when there’s excessive demand for an inflexible supply. So my take on it isn’t exactly “oh those capitalists sure are cartoonishly evil.”

But it’s a good example of how capitalism as a whole – and, let’s be honest, most if not all of the alternatives – is kind of horrible even when everyone is behaving reasonably. It’s economically rational for the wealthy and privileged to be charged less for most things and extended advantages others lack, and for the poor and underprivileged to be charged extra and denied opportunities. The natural effect of everyone doing the sensible thing is to exacerbate inequality in a vicious cycle, so it’s little wonder that policies that aren’t sensible have perennial appeal.

I think a lot of such issues could be managed if “we” were more clever about it.  (And also had the political will.)

There are a lot more market-flexible initiatives that could be done but which simply aren’t.  

We could change the overtime laws so that everyone gets overtime and it ramps up with each additional X hours over, so that businesses can push but are incentivized not to.  Or a big city could auction off business start and end times over a two hour window on each side in a revenue-neutral way, spreading out the incredible load on our transit infrastructure from businesses all opening and closing at the same time.

Plans like those don’t say “you cannot,” they say “you can, however-”, which lets the effect be allocated in a more market-efficient way.  Friction, rather than a hard wall.