What Is the “Mffam” Policy?
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faq.nearlyfreespeech.net
For example, I’ve always thought that we could “wind down” the existence of lotteries not by banning them altogether (for surely many people would be upset with such a decision) but rather 1. banning private lotteries; and then 2. having a single state-owned lottery commission, that is regulated by a law that forces it to be this type of “for-profit but we donate all profits” corp, with the profits funneled directly into public statistics education. Hopefully it would work as a negative-feedback system: the more money flowing through the lottery system, the fewer innumerate people there would be who think it’s a good idea to play the lottery, until eventually nobody wants to play the lottery at all and the state-owned lottery commission can close down with no complaints.
Are there other examples of MFFAM that already exist in the world? Or do you have an MFFAM idea of your own that you’d like to see implemented?
I can't tell whether you're being facetious, but this is almost exactly how it works. (Lotteries are state-run, private gambling is banned almost everywhere, profits go to state schools.)
In the US. Perhaps derefr was not talking about the US.
Most other countries are far further from having a MFFAM-like model, though.
For example, using 100% made up numbers, let's pretend the school budget is $100M and the lottery brings in $50M. Well that just means we can now take $50M from the school budget and use it for other things and combine $50M from the "state budget" and $50M from the "earmarked lottery revenue" and fund the schools for $100M. Now if the lottery brings in over $100M then the schools could get more but I'm not sure if that's happening anywhere.
The thing they funded was the HOPE scholarship, which allowed every high schooler in Georgia with a B average to attend a public college in-state for free. It's how I got out of Georgia Tech without loans, and it's also why a certain age range in Georgia considers Governor Miller to be basically a saint.
IIRC, Richard Branson offered to run it with 100% of stakes going to charity. Not sure what his angle was, probably worth it for the advertising?
My hypothetical would make stats (including game-theory) part of the required high-school curriculum, where the lottery commission pays all the public stats teachers a comfortable salary. Teach kids about why lotteries are a bad deal for them before they ever play one.
http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2015/09/one-winning-mo...
1. Students learn how to apply some formulas to specific types of problems. If you ask them to find the population standard deviation of heights from a sample of 10 people, they can plug those numbers into their calculators and come up with the answer.
2. Except for maybe 10% of the class, they never really develop any deeper understanding. It's all surface level, "figure out which kind of problem this is then use the formula" stuff.
3. All this knowledge is forgotten very quickly once the grim specter of exams is gone.
4. Congratulations! "Education" has happened!
The situation is less grim if e.g. you're teaching college students majoring in math or engineering, but would be worse if you tried pushing stats classes on a less selected group like the general high schooler population.
If the lottery funds public education, it allows the general fund from the legislature to allocate less money, with a fairly-clear conscience, to public education. The argument, "Math education is already well-funded by the lottery, and we have $IMPORTANT_CAUSE that desperately requires resources, so we will cut state support for math." is difficult to counter. The net outcome is that lotteries become a state-ordained tax on being less mathematically-literate.
I would welcome any suggestion that counters this slippery-slope scenario.
Taxes on cigarettes that fund anti-smoking campaigns.
Taxes on soft drinks that fund anti-obesity campaigns.
There are many others.
In general, they called "sin taxes," and the money is very often earmarked to eliminate the source of those taxes.
Lotteries/gambling happen to be both, and so are a bad example of a purely MFFAM policy.
The thrust of the original article is closer, but still not quite there: a lot of people do think that racism is just a lack of education as well, so charging rent to racists is both an MFFAM policy and a “sin tax” as well.
Something closer would perhaps be... SomethingAwful’s forum registration policy: “It costs $10 to register; we’ll ban you if you’re acting like an idiot; you can come back as many times as you like, but you’ll need to pay another $10 each time.”
That’s an MFFAM policy in the small — the money goes to paying the moderators that ban idiots from the forum in the first place, so each $10 a troll pays makes it even more likely they’ll be banned again. And it’s not a “sin tax” — there’s usually nothing perceived as morally wrong with what the troll is doing/saying. (The type of people saying things that are morally wrong in the community’s eyes — talking about child exploitation, for example — get perma-banned instead, I believe.)
Counter-protestors are then cheering the Nazis on and hold banners thanking them for their anti-racist activism.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechts_gegen_Rechts
Here is a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysTqSHoTz0M
Yes, lotteries are bad investments. But also yes, many many people play lotteries as entertainment not retirement plan. The people who are addicted, gamblers, or spend more on (any type of) entertainment or luxury good than they can afford have problem. Some psychological, some educational. But those are the problems, not lotteries. If lotteries went away, those people would still have those problems and just manifest them elsewhere.
There are zero-margin lotteries, but we don’t call them lotteries; we call them in-turn crowdfunding. (IIRC there’s a traditional system of charity somewhere in the world built around having groups that pool funds and then donate the pool each month to one member.)
2. Learning math doesn’t seem like an efficient method of coping with an addiction.
I’m sorry, but you likely haven’t talked to many people who buy lottery tickets. I’ve worked in debt relief — I’ve talked to a lot of such people. A majority truly do expect to win small amounts (e.g. ~$1000) over time that offset their losses.
This expectation is subconscious, built mostly from saliency bias: the infrequent wins loom larger in their memory than the frequent losses, so they don’t actually feel like they’re losing money over time.
When you sit them down and “budget” for playing the lottery — help them add up how much they’ll spend and how much they’ll gain over a year — they usually quit playing. They’ve usually just literally never done that.
Yes, economists prattle on about how playing the lottery can be a rational decision, giving people hope, dopamine hits, etc. But there are lots of available options for non-profitable sources of hope and dopamine hits! Lotteries are a bad choice even among those options. Economists are doing the evo-psych thing here, working backward from what they see to make a prediction of how it could have evolved, rather than actually doing the experiment.
If a single 50 dollar win does come in it really does feel like a reason to celebrate while still being a net loss anyway.
The good part is for the big winners whose winnings are completely unearned and go right into the economy more rapidly and completely than almost any other large quantity of dollars can spread.
And I can support that to the limited extent that I can easily afford.
It's worth it for somebody to get a windfall even if it's extremely unlikely to be me.
The main choice I have is if I want to wait for a drawing or buy a scratch-off and be an instant loser.
You're falling into the availability bias from being over-exposed to gambling addicts, who are a small fraction of the lottery-ticket-buying population.
> Yes, economists prattle on about how playing the lottery can be a rational decision, giving people hope, dopamine hits, etc. But there are lots of available options for non-profitable sources of hope and dopamine hits!
Economists are infamous for leaning on examples that only apply to homo economicus. They are prone to a special kind of reductive "rationality" that only cares about optimal game-theoretic decisions; most people don't fit that model. You are falling into that same thought pattern; people aren't going around looking for cost/benefit-optimised sources of dopamine.
These people play the lottery not exactly because they’re addicted, but because the hypothetical maximum reward, if obtained, would bring them out of poverty, and this fact excites them (i.e. gives a dopamine hit when they think about it), so they actually try to act in a Homo Economicus sense, trying to intuitively maximize the likelihood of this happening by buying as many lottery tickets as they can (while still not actually doing the math to see whether their extra spending them is getting them appreciably closer to winning.)
In the best case, these people are rationally ignoring the likelihood ratios (and thus the actual EV) of winning any given amount in the lottery, because they want to hold onto the hope that buying a lottery ticket generates for them: the hope of suddenly being able to afford things.
In most cases, though, these people just didn’t get a very good education, and don’t know how to “just do the math” required to realize that the deal is bad, and that they’d end up with more money (usually far more) by putting each dollar they spend on lottery tickets into a savings account.
Educating this group — when you can get through their stubbornness about it and actually get them to pay attention to what you’re saying — actually changes their mind about playing the lottery, and they tend to stop permanently.
(A light goes out of their eyes when they “get it”, though; it’s like watching someone realize that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. I advise people to only bother with this kind of education if they’re prepared to then go on and explain savings and compound interest and what equivalent investments to their lottery-ticket spend would be getting them. That usually perks them right up.)
Lotteries would not, and could not, exist without there being a large number of these people.
Text, email, or paper mail, something that reminds people that what they're doing will benefit them could help slowly change attitudes where possible.
(I know there are some people who play for fun, who don't figure into this; and others who are habitual players, who probably won't listen; but some could learn and benefit from this.)
> In most cases, though, these people just didn’t get a very good education, and don’t know how to “just do the math” required to realize that the deal is bad, and that they’d end up with more money (usually far more) by putting each dollar they spend on lottery tickets into a savings account.
You don't have to do the math yourself. The fact that the lottery is -EV is common knowledge (in the sociological sense).
> Lotteries would not, and could not, exist without there being a large number of these people.
It's apparent that poverty is a bad thing. It's not so apparent to me that banning painkillers because broken legs shouldn't exist is a good idea.
Not my argument. Lotteries are an irrational “opiate of the masses” to choose compared to other opiates of the masses. Lotteries, in practice — mostly because you can buy multiple lottery tickets per drawing, and some people really go in on that — are more negative-sum (i.e. more extractive on the part of their operators) than almost any other way to trade money for dopamine.
(They’re actually worse than casinos — because casinos kick out gambling addicts, and there are only so many casinos that eventually you’ll be recognized at all of them. With lottery tickets, you can just visit every convenience store in a five-mile radius. Some people do.)
It would be like if you were on the street with a broken leg, and a street drug dealer offered you the option to buy either morphine or krokodil[1] for the same price. They both do the same thing (strong analgesia, addiction) but one has far worse side-effects. Why, other than either ignorance to the costs, or the inability to rationally weigh costs and benefits, would someone choose to self-medicate with the krokodil over the morphine?
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/krokodil-the...
> Not my argument. Lotteries are an irrational “opiate of the masses” to choose compared to other opiates of the masses. Lotteries, in practice — mostly because you can buy multiple lottery tickets per drawing, and some people really go in on that — are more negative-sum (i.e. more extractive on the part of their operators) than almost any other way to trade money for dopamine.
How do the people you are trying to help respond to these arguments? Are they readily convinced to go for these superior sources of dopamine?
Human beings aren't utility maximising functions so often these issues are more complex than simple comparisons of utility estimates.
I've always thought of it as a tax on people who are bad at math. Is that OK?
Personally, I do occasionally buy lottery tickets. I don't ever expect to win, but it provides a few minutes of escapism here and there during the week, and I consider that a form of entertainment. A pretty good value for a $1 investment, compared with movies and pay television.
My mother was a daily lottery player, and I can't count the number of times she got something out of the New York State Lottery. $50 here, $100 there. It was enough to keep her feeding the beast.
Sounds like intermittent reinforcement. If you want a rat to press a lever many times, you don't make it dispense a pellet of food every time but only dispense one sometimes.
I've often heard this as a defence from people who otherwise claim to accept the statistical likelihood of winning the lottery.
And to me, it seems like a variation of infinite regress applies here. Sure, if you can buy a ticket, you can imagine what you'd do if you win. But couldn't you just instead imagine if you had bought a ticket and that ticket won? It's cheaper and provides all the same escapism as playing the lottery.
I mean, if you truly accept that you are unlikely to win the lottery. That the odds are too small to entertain it as a serious thought, I don't see how buying a ticket unlocks a special realm of imagination people who didn't buy a ticket can't access. People who don't buy a ticket are only marginally less likely to win than someone who bought a ticket.
Possibly. I guess it all depends on an individual's ability to disconnect their chosen brief moments of fantasy from reality. To me, if I've actually spent the dollar (which I only do once or twice a year), it provides more enjoyment. Perhaps because the chances are no longer zero.
Still, $2/year is a far better entertainment value to me than what most people spend to watch the latest comic book movie.
First, not long after the lottery came out - I was a young adult swept along by the social phenomenon. The BBC made it a focus of Saturday night TV, the game of "what will you do if you win" was almost as popular in the UK as talking about the weather. It was a social choice, when I reflected on that choice I stopped playing -- "started winning a £1 every week".
Second, in the last decade, we were dirt poor - on the edge of missing meals poor. I played the lottery again, it was desperation and it was something I hid. I managed to keep it minimal and quickly came to my senses. But I imagine a lot of people hit that point of desperation and aren't able to stop digging themselves further into debt and spend relatively large amounts on lottery tickets.
Also, you're basically claiming that spending that money does unlock some special level of imagination inaccessible to "the plebes".
Why does spending a dollar in a statistically futile pursuit make you able to fantasize about beating remarkable odds but a lightning storm doesn't send you into a cowering fit?
I think the better question is why you think someone stating their personal preference is interpreted as disparaging by you, and why you think expressing ageism is an appropriate response?
you're basically claiming that spending that money does unlock some special level of imagination inaccessible to "the plebes".
I stated no such thing. Again, I merely stated how it affects me. You seem to be projecting here.
Why does spending a dollar in a statistically futile pursuit make you able to fantasize about beating remarkable odds but a lightning storm doesn't send you into a cowering fit?
I have no idea. I'm just stating facts.
And where did I express ageism? I didn't say "old man yells at cloud", just "man yells at cloud". I deliberately left off the "old" part.
For someone who is accusing others of projection, I think you should take a look at the log in your own eye.
> I stated no such thing. Again, I merely stated how it affects me.
This argument is of the form "I didn't explicitly state it, so even if the description of my thoughts and actions are a description of the phenomenon, you can't call me out on it".
If you're paying to pretend, you can pretend that you paid. Even better, you can even delude yourself into thinking that you would have chosen the winning numbers.
> I have no idea. I'm just stating facts.
Except the fact that you are stating is that you engage in an irrational behavior.
And you're not willing to step back and reflect on why you choose to engage in it. Or why you have to disparage people who chose other forms of entertainment.
People who play the lottery are bad at statistics. People who claim to know the statistics and still play the lottery apparently don't believe the statistics.
A weird question considering that you answer it negatively on its own literally in the next paragraph.
Basically, it would be like GoFundMe, but users could also pay money to defund a campaign if they so desired.
For example, if there was a campaign that people thought was distasteful, they could pay $10 to take $5 from the campaign and allocate the previously funded $5 and $5 from the defund fee to the antithesis of the campaign (selected by a site administrator).
The remaining $5 of the defund fee would go to site operations, allowing the defunding payments to pay for costs rather than taking costs out of campaigns themselves.
This would allow sites to respond to pressure from the public about controversial campaigns with less threat of being deplatformed by their ISP, host, or payment processor.
Numbers are just examples, a lot of changes on the pricing and fee balancing would have to be determined, but the concept intrigued me.
Sounds like it pays better to be the antithesis campaign. In other words, the site administrator would be the ideological point of weakness.
edit: Oh wait, I see, you pay $10 and get $10 donated. Different problem: the site profits from defunding, so they have an incentive to magnify distaste. And the defund target is still determined by the site administrator.
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2021/01/19/free-speech-in-...
There is an entire class of objectionable speech and activity that is a mixture of phony provocateurs creating honeypots to exploit vulnerable and mentally ill people to create incidents for policy and political leverage. Variations on this MFFAM offsetting policy could mitigate a lot of it by deflating that leverage by normalizing lame speech and letting people recognize it for what it is instead of creating hysteria around it for their own ends.
While I host some sites via github, for potentially sketchy/objectionable websites where I want to give them the best chance of continuing to exist long-term even should some people object, I've used NFS. Are there any better/comparable options that aren't too onerous workload-wise?
I reach for them for anything that could possibly be controversial specifically because I know they won't be the weak link in the chain, but they are also just great as a shared host in general. The pricing is good too.
I can't recommend them enough, especially if you're saying anything that might ruffle some feathers.
Someone who doesn't like those organizations is incentivized to not use NSFN to host sites that those organizations would oppose.
> It helps the people who operate repugnant sites understand that they are here because we tolerate them... barely... not because we endorse them or their views. It also does a pretty decent job of further thinning out the number of such sites, as a fair number of people who run them only believe in free speech when they're the ones talking.
In the end, the only fair and objective way to filter content is the rule of law, as it applies to everyone equally. Every subjective decision will always offend some people.
I personally think the linked page "the long game" [1] found in this page is more interesting on this topic than the original link.
Yup.
> In the end, the only fair and objective way to filter content is the rule of law, as it applies to everyone equally
While it is ideal for the rule of law to be fair and apply to everyone equally, it never actually achieves that idea. The only fair way to govern what content people are compelled to relay is to let people choose what content to relay.
> Every subjective decision will always offend some people.
All decisions, including the decisions to incorporate particular standards are subjective.
There is an alternative that is equally fair: don't let people choose what content to relay.
This also has the benefit of weakening the impact of relayers on the conversation.
This makes me really sad, because otherwise NFSN is a really great outfit.
b) The number of customers who actively want "a little hate speech" on their site is probably zero.
If you want money directed towards an organization you feel makes a positive impact, their are more efficient ways of doing so, like giving them money yourself.
This... does not seem efficient.
What, exactly, constitutes making you enough of a moron to where you involuntarily donate to a grift organization like the SPLC? Or is it a super-secret, shadowban type of thing where you can't know the rules or that you've violated them, only have them enforced against you?
I'm involuntarily donating to all sorts of garbage organizations in the exact same way just by participating in the economy.
This is nothing more than a private transaction that they're talking about publicly.
You don't need to know anything about the details; simply continue to exercise your free speech.
I mean, this is effectively what free speech is. It's already a "right" at least in the US.
But offended people also have the right to blacklist (oops!) you. I think the setup is fine, but we're in an interesting place culturally where it's effectively a McCarthyesque "offense" witch-hunt. I don't really think you can regulate witch hunts.
It's more a matter of enough people saying "ok, enough" and not caving to the whims of a bunch of perpetually-offended twitter crybabies with anime avatars. Once a critical mass of people stop caving to this bullshit, it will eventually just die out, and offended people can go back to writing in their diary instead of getting people fired.
I think the tides are starting to turn here, TBH. Personally I've been more actively speaking out against cancel culture recently. And I'm a communist.
I'm a free speech advocate, but your concept of rights is pretty skewed. Being free from the consequences of your actions is not a right, it's a childish fantasy. The closest thing you get is what we already have: systemic protections for speech against state suppression. Everything else after that (ie, forcing Applebees to let you shout slurs) is oppression in one form or another.
Yes it would. And that's why total unrestricted free speech is too much. But it's still free speech. Like, this is not an argument, just "this logic reduces to <bad conclusion>, so it's wrong."
> Being free from the consequences of your actions is not a right
Disagree, rights only exist to the extent they are free of reprisals - that's what it means for something to be a right. Obviously there's a balance here, I'm not saying free speech implies that your speech can only have positive causal effects, but there's a class of responses that has historically included government sanctions (and that I'd argue should also include corporate sanctions) that do need to be prevented for speech to be considered free at all. Otherwise, the only way for a regime to not have free speech would be to physically sew your mouth shut.
> Everything else after that (ie, forcing Applebees to let you shout slurs) is oppression in one form or another.
Sure, it's a tradeoff. I probably just don't care very much about oppressing corporations.
1. Money is fungible.
2. The one who decides what to do with a dollar is the holder of it.
So, a dollar from a good person and a dollar from a bad person are the exact same thing: a dollar. What only matters is who gets to decide how to spend it. So based on this, the rules for creating moral pressure through economics are:
1. Accept money from bad people. Spend it on ends opposed to their interest.
2. Refuse to give money to bad people. Doing this prevents them from spending it on ends opposed to your interest.
And #2 is pretty much textbook "cancel culture". Eg, don't buy books by Orson Scott Card, because he might spend that money on something unfriendly to LGBT people.
Also, #1 is a bit of a tricky position to take in practice, because it's hard to prove to others what you spent your dollars on, but being friendly with the wrong kind of people easily gets interpreted as being on their side.
NearlyFreeSpeech.net doesn't seem to aim to be the world's biggest low cost host, and their policy is pretty clear. I don't think they would lose a lot of customers if it became known that this part of their policy is in active use.