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Plans you're not supposed to talk about

dynomight.net

846 pointsdynm635 comments

The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!"

I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."

One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False":

"""This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him."""

https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/

This sentiment seems completely useless (actually incredibly dangerous) without at least some attempt at explaining how we might distinguish between aspects of society which seem terrible but are actually secretly good even though no one knows why, and aspects of society which seem terrible because they're terrible.

You're not wrong.

However, the system works "well" for the status quo, and questioning their rule and methods can also be dangerous. You could end up with your name smeared in the media, tortured for years, and imprisoned without a fair trial.. Or chainsawed up. Or sent to prison for trumped up charges. Etc

Honesty is very, very necessary in figuring out how to solve the problems we are facing as a species - but lies are cheap, and power corrupts, and a lot of people just have other shit to do than pick through the mountains of manure to find truth nuggets.

The GP said aspects of society you don't understand. You changed "don't understand" to "seems terrible". Those aren't the same thing. This doesn't require you to accept things that you find terrible.

No, I only mentioned the ones that seem terrible because those are the ones you would be most inclined to change.

Ah, well I think the answer would be to investigate whether something that seems terrible, is in fact actually terrible or not, and then act on that rather than a superficial impression.

The most terrible ones could also be the most difficult ones to change.

Because if they're so terrible, the hidden reason to keep them in place must be specially strong. Or they could be extremely difficult to change because of some shadowy societal forces that lead to unintended consequences.

You ask a difficult and important question.

The two relevant ideas I know are:

1. Chesterton's Fence: "I don't understand why this exists, so let's tear it down" is an big and tempting error. Wait until you understand.

2. Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable, which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy. The sane approach is to change society incrementally, see what happens, and adjust and learn as you go.

The educated reader may notice that 1+2 is pretty much the sane version of Conservatism.

I'm not a conservative myself, but as I've grown older and wiser, I've come to understand and respect the philosophy.

> Chesterton's Fence: "I don't understand why this exists, so let's tear it down" is an big and tempting error. Wait until you understand.

Right, but the quote I was questioning seemed to indicate that this principle should be applied in cases where no one knows or perhaps even there is no way to know what the purpose is or even in there is one.

That’s a much stronger claim than Chesterton’s fence, because a fence is at least a pretty clear indication of human intent (prevent creatures or objects of a certain size from traveling from one particular area to another), and the class of reasons to build a fence is fairly bounded and can feasibly be investigated.

Also, I’m not sure how Chesterton’s fence is used in detail, but I wouldn’t agree that you must discover the original reason for the fence to justify removing it. You should investigate all the normal reasons a fence would be there, and if no extant reason turns up, tear down the fence and maybe keep an eye out for a while in case you missed something.

I don’t want Chesterton’s fence to devolve all the way to the precautionary principle. Sure, maybe the fence was never needed as a traditional fence, and instead was built by ancient people because they were visited by aliens who said they will destroy Earth if there is ever not a fence in that location. Sure, that’s probably physically possible, but keeping the fence around because of that possibility is terrible epistemology.

> You should investigate all the normal reasons a fence would be there, and if no extant reason turns up, tear down the fence

No, you should give up the idea that you can justify tearing down the fence by any intellectual investigation. If you really believe it would be better if the fence came down, then you need to work to convince everyone who has an interest in the fence to agree with you. If you succeed, then the fence will come down on its own without you having to force anything. And if you don't succeed, perhaps your belief that it would be better if the fence came down was wrong.

I think you’re conflating multiple things here. As far as I know, Chesterton’s fence is not about anything like property rights. We’re not talking about justifying entering your neighbor’s land and tearing down their fence without permission. Presumably the analogy is a fence on some land you’ve just acquired, or a fence on public lands. The debate isn’t about whether you have the right to unilaterally tear down a fence, it’s about whether it’s a good idea for the fence to be removed.

> The debate isn’t about whether you have the right to unilaterally tear down a fence, it’s about whether it’s a good idea for the fence to be removed.

And the point is that no individual person can figure out, just by using their own reason, whether it's a good idea for the fence to be removed. The only way to know that is for the long-winded social process of people interacting with each other to either eventually convince them that the fence should be removed, or not.

> And the point is that no individual person can figure out

That clearly doesn't apply to every argument.

There are lots of times when "society" was wrong, and regular people could see that, and also aught change it.

Yes, sometimes society makes makes mistakes, or, even worse, does things for fully understandable, but bad reasons.

"which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy"

A more judicious takeaway might be that revolutions often have tragic periods.

The French revolution had its blood-soaked Terror and Thermidor, lead to the Napoleonic wars in which many perished, etc. But it also liberated millions, spread an ideal of democracy and human rights cherished by much of the world today.

The U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction were in every sense a revolution against slavery. Who can deny that despite it all, this revolution was necessary, and did not go far enough in achieving its aims?

Your rosy view of the historical consequences of the French Revolution is, to say the least, questionable. I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths), while rosy language about "liberation" and "democracy" kept people from learning the obvious lesson that maybe revolutions just aren't a good idea.

As for the Civil War, the U.S. had to spend a million lives in that war to end slavery. (And, as you appear to recognize, that still didn't really improve the lives of the former slaves all that much--more than a century of Jim Crow was still to come.) The British Empire did it without spending any lives at all, and has never had the kind of Jim Crow issues the U.S. has had. So what is the advantage of revolution, again?

The only reason we no longer live under hereditary monarchies, ruled over by privileged-by-birth nobles who are very explicitly and shamelessly above the law, is because revolutions have done a great job of either killing off those monarchs and nobles, or by scaring the surviving ones into giving up their power.

I don't think you have any appreciation for how the basic rights you take for granted were a direct product of the rivers of blood shed in those struggles.

I live in the U.S., so the basic rights I take for granted were already in place before the French Revolution. They are the result of the American Revolution, and before that the English one a century earlier. (And before that a long history of England and Britain gradually transferring power from the monarch to Parliament, going all the way back to the Magna Carta.) While neither of those revolutions were bloodless, they were a lot less bloody than the French Revolution, not to mention a lot more stable once they were done. Britain's unwritten constitution has not changed all that much since 1688 (the monarchy has continued to lose power, but it had already lost most of it by then); The U.S. Constitution is still in place; France since its revolution has had a reign of terror, an emperor, another monarchy, another revolution, and five republics.

So if I were to pick a revolution or revolutions that set the pattern for guaranteeing basic rights, it would be the English and American ones, not the French one.

Oddly enough, you're omitting the English Civil Wars, which have killed an order of magnitude more people than the French Revolution.

But since they were mostly soldiers and peasants, as opposed to aristocrats and bourgeois, history doesn't make as big a deal out of that mountain of corpses.

Also, the American Civil War, which was pretty instrumental towards the establishment of some rather basic human rights... Many of which immediately backslid during reconstruction, because the Union's policy of appeasement and compromise with the losers

And that's just the English-speaking world. In much of the rest of Europe, it took the industrial-scale slaughter of the first world war to destabilize its monarchies of the early 20th century. Autocrats rarely give up power without violence, or the threat thereof.

I agree that the English Civil War was much bloodier than the French Revolution. However, that was not what started the pattern of guaranteeing basic human rights in England. The English Civil War was followed by Cromwell, whose regime was anything but a respecter of basic human rights, and then by the restoration of the monarchy, without very much in the way of change. The Revolution of 1688 was the one that really changed things in terms of respect for human rights in the English system.

I mentioned the American Civil War and its death toll in the post of mine that started this subthread. I agree that it did also establish basic human rights for the former slaves, who had not had them recognized before in the U.S.

The backsliding you refer to, however, did not happen during Reconstruction, when the Union's policy was anything but appeasement and compromise: the former Confederate states were basically under martial law. What started the backsliding was the back-room deal that gave Hayes, the Republican candidate in 1876, the Presidency in exchange for the Republicans agreeing to end Reconstruction, after the election went to the House of Representatives. In any case, the backsliding was not a matter of changing the actual legal status of basic human rights; it was simply state and local governments in certain regions deciding to just ignore that actual legal status when they felt like it, and the Federal government being either unwilling or unable to override them. What eventually changed that was the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

> I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths)

uh Why? Because of the rights of man and the metric system? Think you need to elaborate.

The French Revolution inspired the Russian one, which created the Soviet Union; and the Russian revolution inspired the Chinese one, which created Communist China. Those in turn inspired further Communist revolutions in various countries, the most salient being Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge. Those Communist regimes were responsible for more than a hundred million deaths in the 20th century.

Uhhh...... No the french revolution did not cause Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Just No.

All revolution does is put a different group of people in charge than previously.

The outcome could be good bad or ugly. Look at the iranian revolution. It has not resulted in a better outcome at all. In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry.

> In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry.

'Most' revolutions of the modern age were anti-colonial revolutions, in places like India and Africa, in the aftermath of WWII.

Life under colonial rule in those places was, as a rule of thumb, not great.

We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s[1]. Would you also describe those as a 'worse outcome for the citizenry'?

[1] Which could also be described, if not as de-colonization, as an end to Soviet imperialism.

A war of independence is a quite different thing than a revolution!

For one thing, when it's won, the losers go back home. After a revolution, they stay around. Which is you often end up killing them.

>the losers go back home

It should be noted that often when wars of independence happen there are still many people who identify with the side of the "losers" whose homes are on the "winners" side, and vice versa.

For example Greek independence did not magically transmit the Turks living in their borders to Turkey, nor did it transfer the Greeks living in Turkey to Greece. What was needed to resolve that situation was ethnic cleansing via the deportation of the populations to their respective countries, in such that a country where they hadn't lived before can be called "theirs".

The American Revolution and the American War of Independence are synonymous.

> We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s

And the most salient fact about all of those is that they were hardly even revolutions. The Soviet Union stopped supporting its puppet governments in those countries, and the people of those countries, who had been more than ready to quit Soviet rule for quite some time, just did it. No fighting was necessary because practically nobody in those countries wanted Soviet rule anyway. This has been true for few if any other revolutions in history.

That still sounds like a revolution to me.

If we get to simply exclude all of the successful and largely bloodless ones, then of course revolutions are messy and risky. It is that way by definition!

> That still sounds like a revolution to me.

The term "revolution", while it does not have to imply bloodshed, does imply some kind of struggle involved. My point about what happened in the countries of Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union fell was that there was no struggle at all, not even a bloodless one. Everyone just said "about time" and went about the business of running their own countries.

And by definition, the bloody revolutions would not have been bloody if the people in charge just acquiesced to the demands of the revolutionaries, and gave up without a fight.

This is absolutely a case of survivorship bias.

> by definition, the bloody revolutions would not have been bloody if the people in charge just acquiesced to the demands of the revolutionaries, and gave up without a fight.

In other words, if the actual facts had been different, we would use a different word to describe what happened. Yes, indeed. That's why we have different words: to capture meaningful differences in the facts we are using the words to describe. If we simply called every change in government a "revolution", the word would be useless.

My point is that when a revolution starts, the participants have zero idea of whether or not its going to be bloody or relatively bloodless. If you're going to condemn revolutions as a whole, you have to condemn the bloodless ones as well, for that same reason.

> when a revolution starts, the participants have zero idea of whether or not its going to be bloody or relatively bloodless.

I think that's rarely the case, at least not when the people starting the revolution are reasonably sane (by which I mean they have a reasonably good grasp of reality and use that to guide their actions). I think the people in Eastern Europe who started "revolutions" when the Soviet Union fell had a pretty good idea that little or no bloodshed would be required.

It's quite possible that the people who started the French Revolution didn't realize how much blood would be shed, but to me that just means those people were not reasonably sane. And there is plenty of other evidence that they were disconnected from reality.

(By contrast, I think the people who started the Russian Revolution, and the Communist revolution in China, were well aware that much bloodshed would be required, and they were perfectly OK with that. That makes them reasonably sane by my definition, but it does make them "insane" by other definitions--psychopathic or sociopathic, for example.)

The revolution itself was absolutely brutal, but overall had a positive effect on all kinds of emancipation.

While it ended in Napoleon, this cannot only be attributed to the revolution itself which basically ended serfdom in France and no monarch could bring that back.

Today we take for granted that a government is a servant to the populous and not the other way around, but it was the revolution that popularized that thought.

That you had insane murderers rising to the top was a side effect. Expecting the end of monarchy to not spill blood is also a pretty rosy perspective.

liberty equality fraternity - yes, the revolution was bound to happen. You have to compare the dead to those that die under monarchist and totalitarian regimes. And democracies plainly perform better, I don't think that can be disputed.

> Today we take for granted that a government is a servant to the populous

You must be joking. Even ostensibly democratic governments have no problem at all treating the people as subjects instead of as masters.

> That you had insane murderers rising to the top was a side effect. Expecting the end of monarchy to not spill blood is also a pretty rosy perspective.

There are lots of ways to end a monarchy which, while they are not bloodless, do not involve insane murderers rising to the top. But the fact that insane murderers did rise to the top in the French Revolution was not a "side effect"; it was an obvious consequence of the way that revolution was done, dictated from the top down by a small group of people who claimed to be able to totally restructure society based on "reason".

> You have to compare the dead to those that die under monarchist and totalitarian regimes.

The totalitarian regimes that killed more than a hundred million people in the 20th century were not "monarchist". They were, as I have said, inspired by the French Revolution, and by the horrible idea that a small group of people can totally restructure society based on "reason". Every time it's been tried it has ended in, to use your phrase, insane murderers rising to the top.

> democracies plainly perform better, I don't think that can be disputed.

You do realize that "democracy" is also the term that regimes like the one installed by the French Revolution, and the Soviet Union, and the other totalitarian regimes that arose from small groups of people who claimed to be able to totally restructure society based on "reason", used to describe themselves, right?

> Wait until you understand.

But you might never understand; that is part of Hayek's point. Which means you can never just "tear it down". Your #2 is really the essential point.

But this isn't a falsify-able conjecture - if you claim that this thing could never be understood, but nevertheless essential and helpful for you, you're asking people to just put in faith. This borders on the idea of religion, rather than scientific, rational thought.

> but nevertheless essential and helpful for you, you're asking people to just put in faith

Accepting that it's essential and helpful is also blind faith.

"Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable"

Let's imagine for a second that we really believe is this idea - society is in a fragile equilibrium, and any change is dangerous and could be for the worse.

Well, first obvious effect is that any change regarding woman rights, etc. would not have happened the way it did. That's in line with the Conservative viewpoint.

But more importantly, the society changes all the time from technology and market forces- it has changed massively with globalization, introduction of mobile phones, and social networks. Nobody talk about that!

No mainstream conservatives proposes 'let's ban kids form having mobile phones and Facebook until we fully understand their effect'. So if you are not willing to apply the principle consistently, are you just using it a a charade to mask some irrational belief of personal gain? It seems hypocritical, a bit like 'pro life' people not supporting healthcare reform.

> society is in a fragile equilibrium, and any change is dangerous and could be for the worse.

That's not what the GP said. He only said the consequences of societal change are unknowable. That doesn't mean we should never change society because we're afraid it will break. It means we should change society slowly, gradually, recognizing the limitations of our knowledge, instead of forming grandiose plans and trying to impose them top-down.

Women's rights is actually a good example of gradually changing society. Women didn't insist all at once on changing everything they thought was wrong. It took centuries for changes relating to women's rights to happen (and they're still happening). And even then we're still figuring out how to deal with unintended consequences of those changes. But I don't think any reasonable conservative would say we shouldn't have made those changes.

> society changes all the time from technology and market forces

Yes, that's quite true. And we're still figuring out how to deal with unintended consequences from those changes as well. And I would say that the changes that are the most problematic in these areas are the ones resulting from some one person's top-down intentions, rather than from bottom-up evolution based on the natural interactions of many people. For example, Facebook isn't a problem because of gradual social evolution; it's a problem because Mark Zuckerberg has grandiose visions about how social media and society should work.

> "Women didn't insist all at once on changing everything"

Are you sure about that? I think they felt quite strongly about their cause

"The suffragettes had invented the letter bomb, a device intended to kill or injure the recipient, and an increasing amount began to be posted... the former home of MP Arthur Du Cros was burned down. Du Cros had consistently voted against the enfranchisement of women, which was why he had been chosen as a target"

Women’s rights historically aligned well with gdp/capita growth.

> Women’s rights historically aligned well with gdp/capita growth.

How much of this is simply a consequence of the fact that if you take care of your kids, it is not counted as a part of GDP, but if you pay someone else to take care of your kids, it is a part of GDP. So the GDP would increase even if the kids get exactly the same care, and even if all the money the woman makes is spent on paying the babysitters.

The man makes $1000, the woman stays at home with kids = GDP $1000.

The man makes $1000, the woman makes $1000, they pay $1000 for babysitting = GDP $2000.

In the latter scenario, GDP is twice as high, but the family only keeps $1000 either way.

In the latter scenario, an extra person made an extra $1000.

> Well, first obvious effect is that any change regarding woman rights, etc. would not have happened the way it did. That's in line with the Conservative viewpoint.

I don't think you fully got my point.

The idea is not to oppose every change, but to change incrementally, letting society adapt, and learn from it when you do the next change.

Women's rights changed gradually over the whole 20th century as society gradually changed. To me that's a very well executed set of incremental changes!

> No mainstream conservatives proposes 'let's ban kids form having mobile phones and Facebook until we fully understand their effect'. So if you are not willing to apply the principle consistently

Instituting a new, wide-sweeping government ban is itself a major change. It's not unusual for conservative families to implement those sort of rules in their households.

>Let's imagine for a second that we really believe is this idea - society is in a fragile equilibrium, and any change is dangerous and could be for the worse.

Surely you see the problems with technology, you don't think that the world was more social, people less polarized, and less isolated? Why do we have to assume its not when its obviously true, smartphones did change society greatly, so did online dating apps. They are not beliefs or guesswork.

>No mainstream conservatives proposes 'let's ban kids form having mobile phones and Facebook until we fully understand their effect'.

American conservatism isn't about preventing changes, its about less govenment control. In fact to other countries they are considered very liberal. Nancy Pelosi banned ecigs to protect the children, does that mean that she is conservative?

>It seems hypocritical, a bit like 'pro life' people not supporting healthcare reform.

They think aborting which is killing an unwanted baby is murder, but they ignore who takes care of the child after, its something I have a problem with too.

> They think aborting which is killing an unwanted baby is murder, but they ignore who takes care of the child after, its something I have a problem with too.

But this also seems like sloganeering since the data suggests they also donate more to poor children. It’s a good slogan though.

Is it about less governmental control? Conservatives are more opposed to drug legalization and are more supportive of police than liberals.

>Conservatives are more opposed to drug legalization and are more supportive of police than liberals.

Who legalized marijuana in California, and said he inhaled on video?

>more supportive of police than liberals.

NIMBY are not liberal or conservative, when did you last hear defund the police?

Pointing out a single pro legalization politician does not invalidate the claim that conservatives are more opposed to drug legalization than liberals. Look at any poll out there.

>Look at any poll out there.

I don't trust polls. Dehumanizing people into numbers is pointless. People are not numbers, and the elections showed how worthless they are.

During Obama there were raids on dispensaries. These labels are meaningless.

We are not liberal or conservative. We are people with many different often hypocritical viewpoints, nobody is consistent. Nixon’s universal healthcare would have been more comprehensive than Obamacare, but Senator Kennedy rejected it. Politicians are opportunistic, Obama said he was not pro gay marriage, and Nixon said he’d never put in price controls (he did). Clinton was a carbon copy of a republican and weakened welfare and popularized super predators as well as deregulate heavily.

Let’s not fight over labeling, let’s agree all politicians are dishonest.

I’m a fan of lower taxes (I think it’s silly to expect to give money to government and expect a bigger return), deregulation in over regulated markets that serves to only help big businesses, entropy in energy waste/use, removing subsidies from farming since it’s harmful to the environment and health, making natural resources into corporations so they have the sane rights as citizens and can sue for damages done.

If labels are meaningless then why claim that conservatism is about less government control?

Polls like any statistical sample are not perfect but they aren't worthless. https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-... Also polling people isn't dehumanizing them.

83% of Democrats support legalization vs 48% of Republicans. These margins are too great to be explained away by poor polling.

So again if Conservatives were actually about less government control then they wouldn't support the government making marijuana illegal.

>If labels are meaningless then why claim that conservatism is about less government control?

Republican and Democrats are not conservative or liberal.

Example: Nancy Pelosi banned ecigs to protect the children, does that mean that she is conservative?

Clinton defunded welfare, was racist, and also deregulated the market. Is he conservative?

Trump mentioned he would like to deregulate all drugs. Does that make him liberal?

Obama raided on dispensaries for federal reason, does that mean he is conservative, or does that mean he is liberal for strong central government?

I mention these heads because the polls don't matter, the policy makers do. The politicians do not work for the people, they are not beholden to their promises or any morals. Does it matter that a bunch of people want weed to be legal and have no way to make it legal, or does one person who can sign it into law matter more? I know my answer, hundreds of my pot smoking friends have less power than one politician.

>Polls like any statistical sample are not perfect but they aren't worthless.

Lets look at the example of "Political ideology"

How do you quantify that? If I consider myself liberal, I am liberal? If I consider myself conservative, I am conservative? These are not concrete definitions. I don't vote downballot. People are hypocritical. What value does this poll give to anyone? What use will it have? What can anyone use it for? When Trump ignored polls he won. When Florida was a bellwether, it is not anymore. I don't see any use in them at all.

Would you call Schwarzenegger a liberal despite him being Republican? Do moderate Democrats share the same value as the ones that are openly communist? Do fundamental christians, libertarians, tea party members, and Trump's MAGA cult of personality really deserve to be lumped together? They are all hypocrites like all humans. I edited my comment, I care about values, not parties and neither party is either or.

I hate politics usually, but I hope my point is clear: I see conservatism as devolution and and I am happy Oregon is deregulating all drugs, there are more democrats than republicans, many unaffiliated with either and they are not letting central government push them around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Oregon

In another thread I mentioned how Bob Dole's achievements are very left wing. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/us/politics/bob-dole-dead...

>He was most proud of helping to rescue Social Security in 1983, of pushing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and of mustering a majority of reluctant Republicans to support Mr. Clinton’s unpopular plan to send American troops to Bosnia in 1995.

>Russell Republicans approached Mr. Dole in 1950 to run for the Kansas State Legislature — they saw the hometown war hero as an easy sell. But he had not yet picked a party, though his parents were New Deal Democrats. He said later that he had signed on with the Republicans after he was told that that’s what most Kansas voters were.

also:

>It was a surprising turn for Mr. Dole, who was long linked in the public mind with the glowering Nixon. He had defended that beleaguered president so fiercely that one critic branded him Nixon’s “hatchet man,” a label that stuck.

Lets not focus on labels, and lets focus on policy, and remember nobody follows the rules, especially politicians.

Perhaps I'm being too US-centric but I feel like you at-best mean conservatism with a lower-case 'c'. Even then the very definition of conservatism explicitly avoids any change:

> commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation

I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing.

I called it "the sane version of Conservatism". There are many others. Political scientists probably have a more specific name for mine. I should learn that some day.

Yeah, many people with very different ideas call themselves conservatives.

> I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing.

Have you never known conservatives wanting to lower taxes, deregulate the economy, and decentralize decision making?

>Have you never known conservatives wanting to lower taxes, deregulate the economy, and decentralize decision making?

I know its not conservative or liberal, it depends how you look at it. Deregulation of markets was seen as liberal at one time, devolution is pretty well supported except by some that support strong central government control, and lower taxes is often seen as American conservative, instead of offering services that they skim, or taxing you and giving you back more money (lol) they just won't take it in the first place. Milton Friedman's negative income tax is a beautiful way to help the poor without sudden cutoffs for when they try to become wealthier too.

I would say that these labels aren't as useful as top down control (big government, tell people what to do) or bottom up control (power to the people, let them do as they want to). Both can be useful for different reasons. The ozone hole and banning freon was top down but the tragedy of the common would mean it would never get fixed. The federal government also shouldn't raid dispensaries and prevent weed smoking.

Most conservatives I know want to decentralize decision making, lower taxes, and deregulate the economy.

Except as regards gay or abortion rights, military funding, and drug policy. Right?

I know that's the case for every conservative I know, at least. They stand for those values in the abstract, as an ostensibly philosophy to undergird their politics... But oppose those values in practice.

Under the current Roe v Wade regime, abortion law is centralized to 9 judges on the Supreme Court.

Republicans want to decentralize this to democratic decisions in each state.

Why not decentralize this democratic decision further - let individuals choose whether they're pro-choice or pro-life?

If we talk about politics even the conservatives are liberal, both want society to be better with different methods. Few conservatives say do nothing, one critique of conservatives is "what exactly are they conserving?" Amish are one of the fastest groups to adopt solar panels and have done so for decades.

> commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation

Trump was not traditional, and Obama was very moderate, even stating he did not support gay marriage. Don't trust general labels!

Even in the US that's a very uncharitable interpretation of conservatism that sounds like something I'd say in the heat of a Thanksgiving dinner argument.

The more charitable one is called "progressive conservatism". Progressive conservatives believe, among other things, that "instant change is not always the best and can sometimes be damaging to society, therefore cautious change that fits in with the nation's social and political traditions is necessary." [1] Progressive conservatives were the driving force behind abolition in Britain as well as natural conservation and the national park system in the United States, for example, so it's hardly a philosophy that resists all change.

A few presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower have called themselves progressive conservatives but in reality, the philosophy underpins the entire US Constitution and system of government going back to the founding fathers. It's the checks and balances that keep our (ostensible) democracy functioning. It's the court systems that can delay or outright kill hasty legislation. The conservatives want to let the progressives leap into the future while they focus on conserving the good things about the present so that they don't become casualties to progress.

To be clear the GOP is neither conservative, nor progressive, nor progressive conservative. They're just the elephant in the room.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_conservatism

Eh, I agree the GOP is reactionary rather than conservative, but I think this is an equal charitable take, especially this statement -

> It's the checks and balances that keep our (ostensible) democracy functioning.

I'm a fan of TR and Eisenhower to a lesser extent, so this isn't exactly a criticism. The US Constitution was definitely founded under the model you describe, but those things aren't necessarily indivisible from each other. The progressive conservatism you defined is a commitment to a hierarchical model of liberalism. Many of the achievements of both Roosevelts and Eisenhower were in the name of warding off Socialist and Communist movements in the early and mid 20th century. They were progressive in giving more rights and services to the common person (well, some of them, some of the time) and conservative in maintaining the ability of the wealthy to continue on with their necks and bank balances intact.

Although some of the critiques of conservative liberalism (as opposed to the historical, royalist conservatism) can be waved off as "the Republicans aren't actually conservative any more", there is a still a valid critique to be made if you believe that 250 years is more than enough time to embrace a more egalitarian model.

The differentiator between conservatism and progressivism is whether you seek societal change. If you believe that change should happens incrementally then you're a progressive. The examples you've given just sound like branding.

I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully. Presumably GP would take a position in favor of "reform the system" over the platform of "abolish the system", which is popular among Progressives today.

Whether this is actually what Conservatives believe (or rather, what percentage of them believe it) is debatable, but I could see this sentiment actually being widespread enough to be the main source of resistence to Progressive political movements.

After all, isn't the whole goal of Progressivism to create a society so good that one wants to Conserve it?

> I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully.

This sounds like a position that a conservative would take, because it paints them as eminently reasonable (and progressives, by comparison, must be unreasonable).

Politics is simply preference, some people prefer to speed, some would rather drive below the limit.

They are both right for their own reasons, but they both appear insane to the other at first glance.

That characterization doesn't match my experience at all. You presume we all want to go in the same direction, but that our main disagreement is about speed.

In my experience, the main source of political conflict is direction, not speed.

I should have said velocity to clarify that people aren’t trying to go to the same place, again due to the diversity of preference.

My point was that the definition of progressivism is, literally "support for or advocacy of social reform", while conservatism is "seeks to promote and to preserve traditional social institutions." If you want to see social change, then you're progressive. How you think that should happen -- whether it is measured or radical -- is secondary.

Under that definition, a self-proclaimed libertarian would be a progressive, as would someone who wants to replace public schools with religious institutions. A neocon, who wants to forcefully bring democracy to a foreign country, would be a progressive in that country. Perhaps different terms are more useful.

A terminology zoo is helpful when you want to encode additional information about political context, but if you're trying to draw parallels then less is more. In this case, "keep the status quo it might be important" and "ditch the status quo it might be the cause of our problems" are battle lines that get drawn again and again and again over many different issues under many different circumstances. It makes sense to draw the parallel.

I feel like this is very true, and why I am glad there are other options than: conservative, liberal, or generically "progressive".

These gradients feel more armchair philosophical than things that speak to the actual problems and patterns of the world as I, at least, know it. I can't imagine getting so hung up on some naturalistic sociological question of consensus, with the idea that would actually change our general trajectory. It all very much reeks to me of a history walking on its head.

Lincoln took great care to root his arguments against slavery in the principles of the Founding Fathers.

That definition does not say “avoids any change”. It says it opposes change, which can reasonably be taken as a general leaning. I mean, just think about it, do you think you could find even one single small-c conservative who argues that every possible change is bad?

Of course the big issue with the incremental change approach is getting stuck on local minima far far far away from the real good stuff

> Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable, which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy. The sane approach is to change society incrementally, see what happens, and adjust and learn as you go.

> The educated reader may notice that 1+2 is pretty much the sane version of Conservatism.

Incremental slow change sounds good if you are reasonably happy with the current situation. If you children are getting killed, beaten, and imprisoned by the legal system, and have no access to good education, you might want to move a little quicker.

> If you children are getting killed, beaten, and imprisoned by the legal system, and have no access to good education, you might want to move a little quicker.

"People are suffering now" is not a good blanket argument for rapid change. First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.

To use your example, last summer many people were arguing for quickly defunding the police. While that would certainly solve the problem of children suffering under the legal system, it might also result in vigilante groups stepping up to enforce the law, or in increased urban gang activity, or in increased domestic violence, any of which might end up with increased overall victimization of children.

My personal opinion is that individual jurisdictions should experiment more at a small scale. Maybe SF abolishes the police, and Minneapolis increases funding for social work, and the Chicago police install robocops at every corner, and Nashville provides benefits only to families which stay intact. Then after two years it will be obvious which policies _really_ don't work, and after five years there will be a good handle on the set of policies that might work, and after fourty years most of the magnitudes of the possible second- and third-order effects will be understood, at least as well as it is possible to know them.

But it is impossible to have local experiments when the popular call is for immediate action on the national level. Alas, one is left with digging through the archves of history and trying to see where natural experiments have been done, and what confounding variables there were.

> First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.

I'm not sure this is always true. Or at least, it is important to specify what confidence you demand here. If you demand an infinite regress of dissertations before taking any action, you can perform a denial of service attack on all progress. Almost any policy change can have chaotic and unpredictable effects and demanding flawless prediction of the outcome is demanding the impossible.

And further, "some bad outcome will come from this change" should not be sufficient to stop progress. You cannot make perfect be the enemy of good, and net progress can be achieved even if there are some things that regress with a new policy.

At almost every step of major social progress, agitators were told that they were unruly and moving too fast. In hindsight, can we really say that women's liberation or civil rights or gay rights movements actually moved too quickly? We can even have a historical example of aggression being more effective than respectability politics. Women's rights movements largely failed in the late 19th century and it wasn't until the "disrespectful" suffragette movement ("suffragette" was a derogatory term to contrast with the more respectful activists of the prior generation) that real progress was made.

> "People are suffering now" is not a good blanket argument for rapid change. First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.

It's a necessary and important argument, but not sufficient by itself. I agree that decisions must be analyzed closely.

At the same time, that approach is used to create endless delays by people who are unmotivated for or opposed to change. Police reforms have been delayed for generations. It's not credible to either say 'people are suffering' or 'we must think it over'. Analysis can happen quickly.

> last summer many people were arguing for quickly defunding the police. While that would certainly solve the problem of children suffering under the legal system, it might also result in vigilante groups stepping up to enforce the law, or in increased urban gang activity, or in increased domestic violence, any of which might end up with increased overall victimization of children.

A bit tangential: 'Defund the police' didn't mean defund the services, just shift them between departments. The idea is to move many services to other government agencies. As a simple example, move response to mental health crises from police to mental health agencies. For a long time, police have (reasonably) complained that they are somehow expected to solve all of society's problems.

The short answer is, you can't. But you might be misinterpreting what Hayek is referring to by "the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society". Here is what he says a little later on, when he is comparing the individualist approach he advocates with the alternative:

"So long as he knows only the hard discipline of the market, he may well think the direction by some other intelligent human brain preferable; but, when he tries it, he soon discovers that the former still leaves him at least some choice, while the latter leaves him none, and that it is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one."

We say that women cannot eat this food, its religion. We don't question it. They study the food and find it is toxic, causes abortions or fetal development issues, but the meaning was lost, its now our religion.

Don't eat pork because it spoils quickly. A rule deprecated by freezers, but still practiced quite often.

Don't drink alcohol because... well, luck favors the bold...

I thought pork was just full of worms. I heard in the middle east it was just not as productive as chickens, which would not only give meat but eggs, they used to eat it there.

Chicken spoils quickly too, but you aren't usually storing it in large quantities. But maybe it was also worms, just reinforces the point.

Pigs make lots of manure, lbs of it.

If you think pigs are bad with the environment, watch until you see the environmental damage that goats do. They literally graze everything to the ground. They fatally wound most trees. They leave behind desert.

Pigs (especially older breeds) do basically the same thing and will also go through the extra step of finding and eating roots.

There's a reason a pen containing goats is typically thought of as a pasture whereas a pen containing pigs is generally thought of as a mud pit.

The only time I've seen the quote, or similar ones to it, trotted out is to imply that the person being addressed by it is ignorant or doesn't understand something. It's an easy way to dismiss facts or arguments without really considering or addressing them in good faith.

This is exactly the reason why social media is so dangerous.

The strength of Western society was that we had freedoms that were managed by a elaborate social and information architecture that ensures we don't drift too far beyond the bounds (such as ethical failure in public office and being anti-science). Once you remove this it you find that there is a limit to how much 'free' speech can correct itself, and we discover how easy it is to divide and manipulate people with misinformation.

Another problem here is that the when society reaches scale of extreme complexity is the point when cultural practice stop being shared. After all, sharing unstated culture is clearly hard than sharing overt culture.

>You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have

sounds like Chesterton's fence to some degree

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

>In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

The good form is protective, the bad form just normalizes something that is common at the time.

Is there any particular reason a woman cannot lead a prayer?

Is there any particular reason why we exchange work for money?

Is there any particular reason why not to eat pigs?

For each of those, the answer may be yes or no depending on your time and place.

The reason yes or the reason no may also be different.

Except many of those do have reasons, those reasons are just outdated or immoral or context dependent.

The statement doesn't mean to keep the status quo, its meant to encourage tracking down the "why" before tossing things away. If a society says to not eat pigs you can't just decide to one day toss out the law. For all you know the pigs of that region are infected and will make you sick. Throwing away that status quo before tracking down why might end up making things worse.

Yup. The issue of course is that there are many false positives for ‘why’ that can also result in it being thrown away to great suffered - and many folks who frankly don’t have the time to spend.

Best one can do is where it clearly gets in the way of doing what YOU need to do, try to tear it down, but with one look over your shoulder to see if anyone is coming to get you for doing it.

If they do, they at least feel a need to keep it, even if nonsensical to you.

If no one does, then apparently no one remembers or cares enough to keep it there, so entropy wins and put it goes.

Might be a mistake, but might not be - and at least your problem will be easier to solve, which you concretely know and can experience, which is something.

>For all you know the pigs of that region are infected and will make you sick.

Even if the pigs themselves were fine, perhaps there are other benefits that come from not eating pork.

I'm not an expert by any means, but I could definitely see how eating Kosher could have helped prop up Jewish businesses in the areas where they were a minority.

> the bad form just normalizes something that is common at the time.

Exactly. I think there should be a blanket negative to customs, practices or systems that objectively cause harm. It would be reprehensible to see someone try to defend, say, Female Genital Mutilation… using “Chesterton’s Fence”. Just don’t fucking do it to people; stop doing it right now, the “why” might be for anthropologists to ponder at a later date.

Chesterton liked to be restricted, as his own adoption of Catholicism instead of looser Anglican faith attested. He also liked to restrict others, as with his abominable fence that we can't move or even stop talking about long after he's dead. I'm not philosophy kink shaming but it's just not right without consent.

Why not just "genital mutilation"? You don't have to be that specific about it as if there were some acceptable cases of it.

Ah yes, the curious culture of circumcision in the United States is a great example of something that could use a bit of reexamination.

Mr. Kellog, the Corn Flakes guy, in the late 1800s led a zealous crusade against masturbation. Eventually, he somehow managed to sell doctors and the public on circumcision as the answer to one of the hot-button social issues of the day: preventing teen boys from having the occasional wank. Freud would have likely deduced that Kellog himself was a hopeless and compulsive fapping addict.

All jokes aside, I have some friends who feel very resentful about not having had a choice in the matter. And other friends who strongly defend the practice, also likely due to not having had a choice in the matter.

My thinking is that American foreskins will remain on the chopping block until a majority of doctors change their views.

Society does not care as much about males?

Just because "society" is doing something doesn't mean that you have to. Society lies, steals, murders, rapes, but I don't have to.

I agree with you. Fwiw I was speculating on the motive. I thought about it and that was honestly what I think is most likely. Society doesn't care as much about males so if you make it about females your argument looks stronger. And I think people do it for this reason without consciously realizing it.

Isn't that the point though? The implied meaning of Chesterton's fence is simply: Understand the root motivation that belies a rule/norm/etc before you contest it.

A big problem is that people don't agree on the root motivation.

I believe that policies against women being religious leaders is based in historical misogyny. But if you go ask people in these organizations, they'll say that women are fundamentally less capable of leading religious groups and that God made this rule for a reason.

What do you do then? I'm pretty darn sure that the stated reason is not actually true and bigots rarely say "the reason we are oppressing this group is because we hate them" but instead make up rationalizations for their policies. A bias towards keeping social systems and policies as long as there appears to be a justification for it enables oppressive systems to defend themselves more effectively.

> they'll say that women are fundamentally less capable of leading religious groups and that God made this rule for a reason

Thats kinda of rather easily pointed out as misogyny tho. What makes them less capable?

I don't see how that's an issue.

You can take their argument at face value, then deconstruct it and refute piecemeal.

Rationalisations generally fall apart under further scrutiny, and if they don't, then maybe they aren't just rationalisions after all.

Yes, this is key: even the "bad examples" you gave, might have particular (non explicitly obvious) reasons behind them.

Things that are normalized because they're "common at the time" is not the only failure (false positive) mode.

Another is the (false negative) of "things denormalized because they're not popular anymore" (when they have utility that people can't readily see).

Hayek was talking about something more fundamental. There are countless of beliefs and behaviors we have to accept and internalize before we can even talk about changing a fence. "What is a fence? Can people respect access to property? Why can people own property? Why should we respect a fence?"

For the most part we do so unconsciously and unquestioningly.

We could not function in society if we stopped to question everything. Society is far too complex for any one person to understand "all of it."

The only reason society works at all is because we all tacitly agree to follow most of the rules without question. It's only when we shine a spotlight on a particular rule that we thin about it at all.

Similarly, nobody understands the free market. (This is likely why there's so much interest in socialism, as the mind yearns for order and predictability.)

Yet the free market works well despite this lack of understanding, and even contempt, of it.

The free market works well in spite of downvotes, too!

I believe the free market is like Darwinism for economic organisms: unintuitive and little understood by the regular folk, however working just fine nevertheless and able to solve and explain any issue without needing the intervention of an intelligent designer/regulator.

People will still look for a planner though…

While you are admiring Darwinism, keep in mind that all-natural ecosystem collapse is a thing, and 6 all-natural mass extinction events had >90% of all living things disappear.

> 6 all-natural mass extinction events

Are you sure about that? Or have people just not discovered the cause yet?

Pick one, let's explore it.

Sure, the Oxygen Catastrophe, 2.3 billion years ago.

I do, wonder, given that all the extinctions happened before humans existed, what possible alternative to 'natural' could there be, aliens?

> possible alternatives

Asteroids, vulcanism are the usual culprits. There also could be cosmic ray bursts from exploding stars.

> the Oxygen Catastrophe

There seem to be many hypotheses about that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

and it isn't clear to me there was a collapse, but a gradual replacement.

P.S. Evolution is not a stable system, and free markets aren't stable, either. Socialism promises stability, but history shows it's even less stable, as it is unresponsive to market changes.

"Asteroid and vulcanism are the usual culprits"

That is nature, thats my point - it is brutal and murderous.

If you don't want to die from them you don't rely on Darwinism and if you don't want economic collapse and famine every time a new strain of flue evolves you dont wait for 'muh free market' to save you.

You might want to investigate the economic collapses caused by government run monetary systems. Like the Weimar Republic you mentioned - that collapse led to Nazism. Not a ringing endorsement for central banking, amirite?

BTW, are you enjoying the 9% haircut we all got in the last year courtesy of central banking?

"Not a ringing endorsement for central banking, amirite?"

Which type of spherical cow free-market economy should i compare it too? No matter what system i pick, from medieval gold based systems to modern floating currency, someone goes "ThaTs NoT Real Free MaRKet!" It's like communism, not real life system was ever the real deal.

You can't, it is a religion.

I really think it is, amits ironic because they are ideologically oppose communists but act in the same way. Horseshoe effect in real life!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory#:~:text=In%....

> Which type of spherical cow free-market economy should i compare it too?

The US system of free banking before 1914.

Nature is unpredictable and always changing. This is why any attempt at planning markets is destined to fail. And it has - the specter of famine was always-present during my life under communism.

Darwinism means adaptation. In markets, when people are free and allowed to keep their (majority of) gains, they will struggle to learn, change and adapt. Planners are neither motivated nor able to do either. They are the ones bringing the economic collapse. Look at the ham-fisted way they "avoided" last year's crash: not only we all paid a 9% tax, but we are now in a more fragile position than ever, dependent on a monetary policy we know is completely unsustainable at best.

"Planners are neither motivated nor able to do either. They are the ones bringing the economic collapse."

Erm, no, its the briliant free market optimised supply chains that have failed and gave us this inflation.

The free-market has ensured that the entire continent of North America produced Zero medical masks in the first year of the pandemic because there is no meltblown production on the entire continent. There was zero stock because everyone is 'just in time manufacturing'

It is also free market that controls the velocity of money, and when people can't get the goods they need because they are all stuck on the other side of the olanet, they start outbudding each-other and yiu get inflation. Eve all central bankers stopped existing before this crisis, the inflation of consumer economy would be exactly the same

There is no free market when it comes to producing and selling medical equipment in the US. I remember reading about a business able and willing to start mask production but choosing not to because of the onerous requirements and not being allowed to raise price to the required levels.

In other, less-regulated countries, KN95 masks where missing for just a brief period of time in March then they were readily available again for the rest of the pandemic, of course at a higher price reflecting the demand.

> briliant free market optimised supply chains that have failed and gave us this inflation

Such a statement is quite funny in the context of the FED printing a fifth of all USD supply just in 2020.

Even funnier is to comply about disrupted supply chains in the context of countless heavy restrictions imposed by... you know... governments.

"In other, less-regulated countries, KN95 masks where missing for just a brief period of time"

"heavy restrictions imposed by... you know... governments."

I don't think we live on the same planet, UK government was trowing tens of billions at anyone who could supply masks, it took almost a year to fix supply while frontline doctors and nurses were dying. You could literally sell them masks that didn't actually work and they would take em.

I am not getting the feeling we are having reasonable discourse, it doesnt matter what happens, you always blame 'regulation', did regulation get millions of containers stuck in US, causing shortage of containers in China? Did regulation make it so you only have 2 ports that can unload giant container ships?

I live on the planet Eastern Europe and we had all the KN95 masks we needed from sometime around May 2020. In June people were vacationing in Greece. Don't know about UK, but in US I know ppl were complaining about not even finding surgical masks (which don't even compare).

> Did regulation...

Well I am no expert in those specific cases and I agree that there may be other forces at work as well, but I am betting there are tons of regulations about opening and operating ports unloading ships and tons of politics like unions and local administration to appease. So I do not know if regulation did it, but it sure isn't free market's fault.

so it only happening 6 times over the 2.3 billion years is not a bad record. Human designed systems have barely over 5000-10000 years of history, and most only last a couple hundred.

> I believe the free market is like Darwinism for economic organisms: unintuitive and little understood by the regular folk, however working just fine nevertheless and able to solve and explain any issue without needing the intervention of an intelligent designer/regulator.

I feel like that's a bit of a charitable description considering the whole monopoly problem (and various other regulations in place to make the system actually work). Perhaps we just disagree on what "working just fine" means though :)

Monopolies (including the so-called "natural monopolies") are not a problem for the free market, but rather opportunities - bounded only by human ingenuity, imagination and capacity to innovate.

In reality most monopolies we encountered were actually created or sustained by governments, through their dear friends patents and regulations which raise the barrier of entry and compliance costs, create unintended second-order effects and generally dampen competition.

Markets are also created and sustained by governments.

Nope. Markets require just a couple of free participants willing to exchange goods or services. No governmental involvement there.

"Markets are" <-- actual existence

vs.

"Markets require" <-- some kind of logical construction

"Guy's you're just not doing it right" or "there would be more competition if we would just remove those pesky regulations on the meat packing industry". It's very convenient that the answer is always just "remove regulations" as though most of them weren't put in place to solve existing problems that otherwise weren't getting solved by the market itself.

I'll give you a different suggestion - what you're saying may work fine on a small scale, but not on a scale where consumers can no longer realistically have any idea how something was produced. Consumers can't select against things they don't know about or don't understand.

> may work fine on a small scale, but not on a scale where [...]

"Evolution may work fine for a small organism like bacteria, but it would never evolve something as complex as the human eye"

> consumers can no longer realistically [...] Consumers can't select

Your lack of trust in consumers is only surpassed by your lack of imagination. Repeat after me: "If consumers actually need something, a free market will provide".

Too much choice and quality too hard to check? Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, Trip Advisor and any other aggregator with reviews like Booking.com or even Amazon will help. Food not killing me instantly (thanks, regulation!) but sickening me slowly with production-boosting chemicals (for nothing...)? We now have organically grown, local co-ops and various near-sourced grass-fed ethically slaughtered meats.

No regulation to thank to, just the good old free markets.

"the free market works well"

Unless there is too much inflation like in Weimar Republic, too much corruption like in Russia, too much monopoly like with Standard Oil, too many shenanigans leading to 2008-style meltdown (imagine that without central bank support), given working police and the justice system which is missing in many developing countries, given basic infrastructure like roads and electricity etc, etc.

> Unless there is too much inflation like in Weimar Republic

The government money printing press is not free market.

> too much corruption like in Russia

The government's role in a free market is to prevent corruption.

> too much monopoly like with Standard Oil

Standard Oil was very good for consumers, as SO brought about something like a 70% reduction in kerosene prices. Besides, SO never was a monopoly. It was accused of attempting to create one.

> imagine that without central bank support

Don't need to imagine it. It happened several times in the 1800s. Recovery tended to be as quick.

> given working police and the justice system

Free markets require a working police and justice system

"The government money printing press is not free market."

Oh no, not again this 'No True Scottman'-'Free market' myth.

Let's go down this path - what does 'free market' theory say, how much money should be in the economy? How should it be created or destroyed? There is no natural process for it, whoever has lisense to print money can rule the world or collapse the economy. 'Free market theory' provides no answer, just like it provides no answer to most important economic questions.

Is using a physical valuable substance as money, let's say gold, free market? That's Mercantilism and it brought national economies to a standstill due to lack of liquidity. People couldn't trade goods, take loans, nations went to wars over silver.

Do you want to have gold standard and fractional reserve banking? Is it freely floating currency and a system where banks create money out of thin air? (governments don't print money any more by the way). Which one of these three totally different systems is the mythical true 'free market'?

Are private currencies owned by banks free market? That's what we used to have, they used to collapse all the time. That's why we invented central banks.

> how much money should be in the economy? How should it be created or destroyed?

Great questions.

Money is created when money is loaned out against collateral. Money is destroyed when the loan is repaid and the collateral returned. It's a natural process. The pressure on it is to have the supply of money match the value in the collateral.

> whoever has lisense to print money

Under a free banking system, anyone can print money. Of course, anyone printing money has to convince others that it has value. Did you know that anyone can print money today? We call them "IOUs", "checks", and more recently, "credit cards". We're all familiar with having to convince others that our IOUs, checks, and credit cards will be honored.

I'm not aware of any that managed to rule the world or collapse the economy.

> no answer

I just gave you one! I can only surmise you've been talking to the wrong people. May I suggest Milton Friedman's "Monetary History of the United States". It's tough sledding, but worth it if you really want to know.

> Is using a physical valuable substance as money, let's say gold, free market?

Of course. Are you familiar with the commodities marketplace? It's the same thing, but would you call that mercantilism? Shipping gold around to settle debts, however, is clumsy, expensive, and dangerous, hence the rise of trading receipts for the gold instead, and later those receipts turning into bank notes, and even later became electronic entries in a ledger.

> Do you want to have gold standard and fractional reserve banking?

That's how free banking worked in the United States. It's free market.

> they used to collapse all the time.

Not all the time, but banks did fail from time to time.

> That's why we invented central banks.

That was the public reason. The real reason was to inflate the money. As for collapse, now we have fewer bank failures, but when they do fail, it's a doozy (Great Depression, 2008, etc.). Also, did you notice that as of this month 9% of the money you had last year disappeared? You can thank our fiat money system for that.

I grew up in the Carter stagflation years, and learned to never keep more than pocket money around. It's all in things that aren't inflated into worthlessness by the central bank.

P.S. How do I know all this stuff? My dad spent the last years of his career as head of the finance department at a college. We had many long and happy conversations about how banks worked. It isn't an easy subject, but I wish more people could have such an experience.

"Money is created when money is loaned out against collateral. Money is destroyed when the loan is repaid and the collateral returned. It's a natural process."

But there is nothing natural about it - the limit on money supply is how easy it is to get a loan. Bank could give out mortgages with 0% deposit, they could give out loans equal to 120% of the house value, and they indeed have done so.

What regulates the money supply is not 'natural process' but the rules set by the regylator on minimum reguirements. Is having no rules free market? But then it will be creating 2008 style event every tuesday.

Furthermore, this whole thing only creates money in our current floating-money system, right?

If you have medieval-style economy where you count literal gold coins, you can not create money, you would just be loaning out other people's deposits. The amount of money in the system would stay fixed, right?

So then the only 'natural' money supply is your ability to mine gold?

> But there is nothing natural about it

The natural pressures are the law of supply and demand. If the bank creates too much money relative to the collateral, it risks a run on the bank. Too little, and the bank goes out of business because it isn't making money.

> Is having no rules free market?

Yes (other than you cannot force people to do business with you nor can you defraud them).

> The amount of money in the system would stay fixed, right?

Nope. You don't actually loan out the coins. You loan out a receipt for the coins. As long as people don't redeem the receipts, you can loan out a multiple of the coins in the vault. This is called "fractional reserve banking". After a while, instead of trading coins, people trade the receipts. The receipts evolved into bank notes.

It's a fascinating history.

> So then the only 'natural' money supply is your ability to mine gold?

Lots of commodities would work. People in colonial America used tobacco leaves. Today people "mine" bitcoins.

'If the bank creates too much money relative to the collateral, it risks a run on the bank.... This is called "fractional reserve banking". '

I dont fully understand the system, and its clear neither do you, or most people commenting here

We have not been using fractional reserve banking for at least 60 years now, as you sibling comment and this paper by the bank of England Explains. The only thing limiting hiw much bank can loan are capital requirements in the rules passed by parliament.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

It is true that the FDIC has eliminated the risk of a bank run.

It's still a fractional reserve system, at least in the US. The "capital requirements" sound like fractional reserve, too.

BTW, this will blow your mind. Let's say you have $300 in your bank checking account. You borrow $1000 from the bank. You bank checking account now has a balance of $1300.

Where did the thousand bucks come from? Where was it moved from?

Nowhere!

The bank just changed the amount in the electronic ledger from 300 to 1300.

Crazy, right?

Yes, crazy, but not exactly "nowhere". It "comes from" future earnings and the (projected) demand for US military protection and access to the markets which it enables. The bank (really the government) is helping you shift future consumption to the present, because you didn't save enough in the past. And why should you or anyone else be held personally accountable for not saving in the past? /s Because the US and its allies have god-like firepower, baby!

My mind was actually blown recently learning that fractional reserve banking has turned into a widely believed myth. Banks are still making low-interest loans and there's no reserve requirement!

I'm sorry, but if your definition of free market literally includes a government printing money to get rid of its debt (like the Weimar republic did), then your definition is just broken. The 'free' in free market literally refers to governments (or other actors) not interfering in trade. There is no prescribed free market monetary policy, but if you intentionally manipulate the market through monetary policy (as is common policy - the fed's goal isn't only monetary stability, they also account for things like unemployment), it's absurd to blame free markets if this goes wrong.

Using gold as your currency also isn't mercantilism. Mercantilism is about increasing exports while reducing imports. e.g. China today is quite mercantilist, despite not using gold.

It's definitely fair game to critique capitalism and free matkets based on actual implementations, not theoretical optimized scenarios.

If we're going for perfect scenario, communism is absolutely a great idea. Unfortunately, the real world is a bit different, and it turns out that capitalism and free markets can survive reality and bad actors just a bit better. And that's what counts in the end. Still, we shouldn't dismiss the failures of the system, since this is what shows misaligned incentives.

The Socialism and Capitalism dichotomy has nothing to do with markets or planners. Socialism is when the workers own the means of production. Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor.

Socialism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners. Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners.

The point I'm making is that the mechanisms by which an economy chooses what to produce are distinct by the mechanisms which determine who is in control of those choices are distinct from who the proceeds from the production accrues to.

> Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor.

That's Marx's explanation, all right.

What free markets are, is when people freely decide to make transactions with each other, without using force or fraud.

The simplest case is you have an apple tree, I have an orange tree. You have too many apples, and no oranges. I have the reverse problem. We trade. We are both better off. I exploit you for apples, you exploit me for oranges.

But we don't "have" trees. Owning a tree is dependent on a highly abstract concept of ownership, enforced by an organized state that monopolizes the use of force.

Saying a transaction is without force or fraud is only begging the question. If it is legal, and someone thinks it is illegitimate, then it logically involves both fraud and force from their perspective. It was fraud to write the rules down, and it is force to use guns to make people comply.

It's too easy to defend "free markets" while ignoring that the usual description is circular.

It's a little too easy to dismiss arguments by trying to redirect it into a debate about what words mean.

You and I both know what the terms mean.

It's also a little too easy to avoid arguments you find inconvenient by refusing to examine the assumptions that underpin the position you put forth.

Sorry, I've been down the tiresome path of what does "is" mean too many times. You can explore it if you like.

I don't think that's a fair assessment.

You absolutely have hidden assumptions about what the words mean. We all do.

Be open minded towards other interpretations you may take for granted.

From https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/john-locke-justificat...

'"He that is nourished by the Acorns he pickt up under an Oak, or the Apples he gathered from the Trees in the Wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. No Body can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, When did they begin to be his? When he digested? Or when he eat? Or when he boiled? Or when he brought them home? Or when he pickt them up?"

Locke answered these questions by selecting the last of these options. The acorns became the private property of the owner when he picked them up, for it was in the gathering that labor was first expended. "That labour put a distinction between them and common. That added something to them more than Nature, the common Mother of all, had done, and so they became his private right."'

I'm not endorsing or dismissing this, but notice how it conflicts with ownership of the tree.

You're still comingling the concepts of capitalism and markets. I actually 100% agree with your entire post (as a description, anyway, not as an ideal or with respect to the conceptual foundations of property rights), but is in no way a refutation of what I said or what Marx said. It's somewhat tangential entirely, really.

EDIT: Also, I wouldn't use the word "exploit" in such a simple descriptor of commerce.

Who picked the apples and oranges?

Free markets are a game with rules set by the government. "Without using force or fraud" just means not breaking the rules of the game set by the government. It's a very deceptive way to describe rule-following. It implies a very idealistic, unrealistic vision of what those rules are and how they are made.

The people who benefit most from the rules control the system, making sure rules don't change.

The benefit they receive from the rules is to be in a parasitic, extractive, predatory relationship to most of humanity.

Why not use "force or fraud" to liberate yourself from predatory relations?

> just means not breaking the rules of the game set by the government

You can make up your own definitions of things as you like. It's a common rhetorical device to divert a conversation into a swamp. Me, I'll stick to commonly understood meanings.

that's literally YOUR own definition, as you said elsewhere in the thread

> Free markets require a working police and justice system

You're greatly misinterpreting what I wrote. The government is needed to implement a free market. The government does not define a free market.

> The government does not define a free market

Complete fantasy.

Centrally planned capitalism doesn't exist. Private ownership, while technically separate from market vs command, definitely has an influence on it. Even market socialism has central planning elements (e.g. initial public investment).

> Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners.

how can there be capitalism when central planners tell the owners of the capital what to do with their capital? that sounds like authoritarianism to me (which is basically why all communist countries must be authoritarian, since without it, the natural tendency of humans is to be capitalistic).

> the natural tendency of humans is to be capitalistic

"Commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonyms. The former has existed for ages. The latter is comparatively recent.

Which is almost entirely my point. There's at least three concepts that are quite distinct components of an economic system that people commingle when they talk about these broad categories like capitalism and socialism in popular discourse.

This naive conflation of commerce with capitalism is certainly one manifestation of this conceptual confusion.

the thing is, there is no way for the workers to own the means of production, unless its a set of tools or stuff like that. But with a factory, you only have 2 options: owned by capitalists, who's goal is maximizing gain, and owned by the state, who's goal is in theory common wealth, in reality it depends on the people actually making decisions. And those people can be corrupt, or ideological lunatics, or just unmotivated clerks waiting to hit the clock at 5PM.

Why is there no way for workers to own the means of production? Do many of us software people not own shares in the companies we work for? All that needs happen is that all shares are owned by the employees of the company and, voila, the workers own the means of production. Obviously this is quite a simple and un-ideal implementation of said concept, but the practicalities of worker owned enterprises are not some kind of far fetched impossibility.

Because owning something means you have the right to trade it and sell it. Most workers, if they came into ownership of such shares, would quickly sell them to a few people who would build up many such shares: Capitalists.

You can't declare who will "own" what in the long term. The people who own it decide whether they will continue to own it - not you. They will decide not to.

If you say the workers can't sell the shares of their workplace, then they don't really own those shares. In fact, it's more like the shares own them. They are forced to continue "owning" part of their workplace, which someone decided should be their workplace. Variations of this are how authoritarian communism work.

(This is ignoring lots of other such issues with worker ownership, e.g. it becomes very complicated or impossible to bring new people on even if desperately needed since existing workers/owners don't want to dilute their shares. Also how can a new worker join if he cannot afford the shares to do so?)

Work well as long as you don't care about externalities such as polution, congestion; poisoning, maiming and killing consumers and employees

Communist countries have a much worse track record on that.

I don't know if its related, but I think of taxes. It may be rational for one person to not pay taxes, but if everyone was "rational" it would be disastrous for society.

> (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.)

Why do you say that? What does it mean? I think of the internet, but not a person, I always thought of him as a free market economist. When I think of individual and society, I think of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents where the individual can never be free.

> may be rational for one person to not pay taxes

it's rational to pay the lowest tax you can legally get away with, but not to evade taxes illegally especially if the chance of getting caught is high (as would be in a digital world where records of transactions are stored and analyzed). Much easier in a cash based society - case in point the Greek economy has a lot of tax evasion, and thus their gov't revenue shortfalls consistently.

Hypothetically it’s all cash based. It’s the tragedy of the commons. What is rational in isolation is not overall like pollution.

I think you are talking about the problem of Collective Action and the Free Rider problem... I think they are a little different, because those are situations about needing to cooperate for the best outcome, but having no way to enforce cooperation while having individual incentives to not cooperate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

Yes that is it! Thanks!

I wonder if that idea also makes sense in an organizational context. Big corporations often seem very ineffective on first sight, yet they produce something meaningful nevertheless.

How does ingrained racism line up with that reasoning? Um, not too good. How about ingrained wealth inequality? Not so great. Or, as I already harped on elsewhere, how about an economic-industrial system structured in such a way that your future is looking quite bleak and the people currently charged with its control have no incentive to change it because they'll be dead when the consequences come to roost? Really not great.

Yes there is a sort of institutional logic, or at least an evolutionary path to some sort of functional structure to the world that often isn't obvious. And individuals, almost always blind to hidden forces and instincts of self-preservation and improvement of their survival/control of resources, may not see how civilization-level structures "work" for the whole if it is bad for them.

But let's not pretend that the conservative cultural view is a good one. Slavery was clearly immoral, evil, exploitative, bad bad bad. It took the bloodiest war in US history to dislodge it and move to a slightly less exploitative, explicitly oppressive, slightly less evil structure of society.

Between global warming, species extinction, habitat destruction, general plastic/industrial waste pollution, and the like, there are so many aspects of modern regulation-resistant lobbying-paralyzed capitalism-imbalanced civilization that you can't argue that it's "good" or even "sane". The world as it is structured now is insane and suicidal.

Simple example, but racism is simply a form of genetic ingroup preference.

Can you imagine, perchance, how groups who practiced ingroup preference would, over time, come to outcompete and ultimately defeat/destroy/dissolve groups that didn't?

Does it seem clear to you why all historical societies practiced ingroup preference, and the vast majority still do? Or are you confused on how that works?

Our society's concept of who the ingroup should be defined as is novel and still in flux. In fact it's pretty much the core question that is dividing our civilization at this point. Confusion on this point may well still lead to our downfall in the long term, so don't feel so certain about the simplistic moral narratives that are taught in school.

We still don't know how any of this will turn out. Certainly rival societies like China are not following our path - be humble enough to recognize that they may turn out to be right.

Have you ever experienced racism or do you have friends who have experienced it? Imagine telling your friend what they went through was simply evolution.

Murdering all of the men of the losing side of a war and taking their women as slaves to bear more of your children is evolutionarily adaptive - and I would presume that as a result I'm descended from at least one person who did so, and so would be the person I was talking to in your scenario.

"Adaptive" and "morally horrifying" can both be true of the same behaviour.

I hope that the things I consider moral win in the long run, but that's unfortunately not guaranteed.

Yes I have experienced racism, of various types and many times over the years.

The fact that I understand why it happened doesn't harm me. Does it make you feel better to believe that the bad things that have happened to you are due to spiritual evil? Personally I find a mechanistic, value-neutral explanation more conforting (and far more useful since it's, yknow, correct).

Lets look at a recent real world scenario. The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture.

Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible as quickly as possible. And since there was a wide range of those countries with varying degrees of “rate of cultural change” you could really study the results. Those that changed more and faster, ended up much better than the “slow and steady” approach.

In my humble opinion what’s going on here is not that changing a society quickly is better, its that there is not just the society you live in. You might not understand why certain things are in either, but you can certainly observe the results.

A lot of the baltic state’s citizens didn’t _really_ understand how the west was structured, but they liked the results and figured “they must be doing something right”.

You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.

Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.

I’m always inspired by Rwanda’s story - such an incredibly troubled place, and the president upon taking power - packed his bags and _just traveled_ along the world with his cabinet to investigate why some small newly developed countries were successful. Talk to them, emulate it and low and behold - it helped their country enormously.

> The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture.

At least in Poland it wasn't perceived as "changing the culture" as much as "reforming the economy" and "returning to where our culture would naturally be if not for partitions and soviet occupation".

Which you can argue about, but if not anything else - presenting it that way was a successful social hack. Unemployment was 20% for a while in 90s but there were surprisingly few attempts to reverse the reforms. In fact only now that the perception is "we made it" - all the cultural problems are resurfacing.

> Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.

This sounds like a classic sort of "those were the bad old times, but now we live in modern times" argument. How should I know when facing a problem whether we live in the modern times when solutions are well mapped and I should copy someone else's, or the bad old times (relative to that problem) when solutions are poorly understood and/or implemented and I'm better off with gradually exploring the possibilities myself?

You could just as easily argue that it was the Baltics that took the slow and steady approach. They built up a civil society to support the economic changes.

At least from the outside, it looks like the bigger country to the east just handed out private ownership to the upper echelon, because surely that's what made west economically successful.

Not sure how accurate that description is, of course. Their economies were vastly different from the start. The Baltic region also has historical and cultural ties to the Nordic region. But at least there are different viewpoints here.

>You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.

You might choose to emulate the wrong parts and disregard parts of that contributed to the system's overall functioning and results. For example, it looks like Finland has problems successfully running the world famous Finnish educational system. Since the PISA success of the 00s, the Finnish education has gone downhill, fast. In recent national evaluation [1], the kids today have more difficulties with tests from 20 years ago.

[1] https://yle-fi.translate.goog/uutiset/3-12220417?_x_tr_sl=au...

LOL imagine a black person believing any of that bullshit

Alain de Botton has a book called "Religion for Atheists". His central point is that religions have gone through hundreds or thousands of years of cultural evolution and likely contain rituals and rules that benefit us even if the religion literally isn't true. Discarding religions because we don't literally think there's a bearded guy in the clouds watching over us is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

Religion isn’t about believing in the bearded man in the sky. To me it is about developing a wiser and healthier mind. That includes understanding things which are at times hard to believe at first. But that mustn’t necessarily be whether there’s that man in the sky. It could also mean whether there’s actual other life in the universe, maybe even more intelligent life which eventually degraded into the bearded man due the lack of a wise, developed mind. Maybe.

I'll have to check that out. It's something I (as an atheist) feel as well. There seem to be a number of religious practices which align quite nicely with mental health practices. The ones that immediately spring to mind are responsibility transfer (short-circuiting anxiety spirals by throwing faith into an imaginary party who says it will all be ok), and "gratitude" practices - practicing thankfulness for what you have, meeting quite nicely with the practice of saying grace before a meal.

At first glance it seems foolish for a poor family praising their god for the pittance of food in front of them, but the idea that pausing to be grateful for what little they do have may make them feel better mentally (regardless of the wider injustice of the situation) has merit.

It seems like the process could be - do a thing, see positive results (maybe from improved outlook), interpret it as gods reward for pleasing him, codfiy the practice.

This reminded me of https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-sma...

> "You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."

I just imagine Moses saying "Who am I to question our being enslaved in Egypt, our society being organized this way, the order of things may reflect knowledge I may not have, hence I have to respect it. Let's just stay here, for ever."

Our society revolves around and is being organised by people challenging, bending or breaking social practices. If I have to choose, what to respect, I gonna respect this.

This reminds me of CEO-speak.

A CEO cannot speak their true mind or their true assessment of a situation. They can't say "wow we're in trouble here" because then people will jump ship and then the company will be even more in trouble (and the CEO would get sued for breaching Fiduciary Duty)

What a CEO says is merely wishful thinking for a goal they want people to follow. They can never speak their true plan. (And of course, it's all just game theory, a more elaborate version of https://youtu.be/S0qjK3TWZE8)

That was surprisingly intense!

This reminds me of the Wallfacers in the Three Body Problem, the (totally contrived) leaders of humanity that for plot reasons must plan to save humanity from the aliens without ever elucidating what the plan is so the aliens can’t figure it out.

To give a bit of credit to the book (hints of a spoiler ahead), the aliens were different from humans in a few ways, so it made a little more sense than what someone might think from your description.

But yes, "contrived" is a great term for a lot of it. I loved the descriptions of how humans would react to aliens and in the future, the build up was amazing (or maybe I hyped it up in my head), but I felt like some of the physics got a little unbelievable, and I did not find the ending satisfying.

Overall I'd recommend it though. I had meant to read it for years, then accidentally read the 2nd book (Dark Forest) and got hooked because of the first few pages, which explains the "differences" that I'm referring to above.

The book contains a lot of fantastic thought experiments, and the contrived-ness of certain things required to set up those thought experiments was a price I was happy to pay.

I suspect whether the books are something a given person would enjoy are significantly down to said person's comfort with that in their taste in fiction.

(though also I suspect my father would've hated them because he wouldn't've found the characters sympathetic, and if you need to actively like the protagonists of something to enjoy it that's probably also a good reason to spend your reading time on something else)

Which is why its useful to form a cult of worshippers

There is almost no utility of having objective thinkers as clientele

It is a problem of going from an open-loop to a closed-loop (feedback) system. The CEO's speech affects the outcome. "We're in trouble here" might be the output of an objective assessment of the situation. But coming from the CEO it is now also an input into the situation that changes the assessment (CEO has lost faith! Panic!).

Good examples. These feel like "noble lies". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie It's a delicate act to pull off, obviously, since you absolutely have to be right, and must assume that the other party is okay with it , assuming you're right. If you're wrong, the whole thing falls apart once the other party finds out.

Or, the CEO is the kind of person who doesn’t think, “oh shit, we’re screwed,” but constantly labors for the path forward. The kind of person I would follow in an “oh shit” situation because “oh shit” is not a vector but a point of origin.

When leaders say and act a certain way that rallies people, what evidence suggests they’re being disingenuous?

Which is one of the reasons I took a double take when Elon Musk cancelled the thanksgiving weekend for SpaceX and said the company has "quite frankly, a disaster" and a "a genuine risk of bankruptcy":

https://spaceexplored.com/2021/11/29/spacex-raptor-crisis/

Of course the funny thing was that most shrugged it off as just "Elon being Elon" and discounted his statement as hyperbole.

The green flames coming out of those engines make me think there earnestly is serious trouble with their Raptor engines. It looked like they were burning copper; an engine burning itself up is the big challenge of a full-flow cycle and doesn't bode well for re-usability. If they can't get those engines to work properly, I think Starship is bust. And if Starship is bust, I think SpaceX probably is as well.

Musk's raising of capital - and hiring of staff - depends pretty much entirely on people who're at least one of 'comfortable with extremely high risk' and 'think the goals are really really cool'.

So in his specific case leaning in to his public persona is probably a net win. How much of it is deliberate versus him just actually being that much of a lunatic is of course very debatable, and my opinion is mostly "no idea, but I hope we get cool spaceships out of it anyway".

What you call CEO speak is more or less part of normal human communication. Normal in the sense, that when you communicate towards a group, you anticipate the effect your words will have and choose them accordingly. The actual content becomes secondary.

In order to achieve the same desired effect for all recipients, the words have to be crafted very carefully and certain things are being described in ways that might look very different in retrospect. Sometimes you even have to lie, but if you are good, you can avoid that.

Politicians do this non-stop.

This reminds me of a set of poems, Knots, by R.D. Laing, the first of which goes:

> They are playing a game

> They are playing, at not playing a game

> If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me.

> I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

It's a lovely collection, and though I haven't thought about it recently, I think there's a lot of value in considering these kinds of unspoken self/group contradictions.

I lost the game.

Same here. Had such a long streak going as well.

sorry, can you clarify what you mean by you lost the game?

The game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

Ahhh. I lost, but will make sure my family will win. Ipcontentfilter='...'

Thanks for the Wiki link. This part is hysterical:

> in several schools, The Game has been banned.

Good for them lol, its nice to see schools provide environments for winners !

Not until I read your message, ugh

Thanks for sharing! Knots has lovely metre, which feels/sounds like the famous Bene Gesserit litany against fear.

I must not reveal the game / Revelation makes me the rule breaker / Revelation means alienation that brings total ostracization

> The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,

> But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;

> And He that toss'd you down into the Field,

> He knows about it all — He knows — He knows!

- Omar Khayyam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind

Reading this gave me a kind of horrifying idea that goes something like:

You know about a deadly disease whose most serious outcomes can be avoided by getting a shot.

Many members of a group in your society have decided they don't want to get the shot. You are annoyed by the way they talk about a lot of things, including the way they talk about avoiding the shot. They, in turn, call you "smug" for the way your group talks about having everyone get the shot.

You realize that if the other tribe keeps acting this way, a lot of them will die -- 1% of them overall, and as many as 10-15% of the oldest members of the tribe, with them having a fresh chance to die with every mutation and reinfection every 12 months.

You realize that smugly insisting that those people should "get the shot" will make them dig in their heels and insist they will never do any such thing. This will, in turn, kill them. This will diminish their tribe's size and political influence. Is this a plan? Is it a thing you are doing on purpose?

1% decrease doesn't diminish their size and political influence substantially, even of the disproportionate elderly population. Then only a fraction of the remainders that lose a loved one would re-evaluate, a large fraction of them would still be bounced back when they realize the other ideas "your group" inherits is even harder to accept as a personality trait. Most of them will inherit just enough to not think further about the matter.

It's 1% of the whole population, but a much larger percentage of certain political ideologies.

well, sure yeah.

far left spiritualists and naturopaths are a tiny population, far right people occupy sparsely populated areas.

funny application of horseshoe theory.

IIRC some swing states were decided by less than 1%?

That would be Arizona (0.31%), Georgia (0.24%), and Wisconsin (0.63%), with 37 electoral votes collectively. The total margin in all those states combined was only about 42k votes.

If Trump had won all of those instead, there would have been an electoral college tie, which would have resulted in the House deciding on a one-vote-per-state basis. It wouldn't have been pretty.

Biden also won Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, by 1.16%.

There was an interesting situation in New York. After the 2020 census, they lost a seat in Congress because their population size shrunk proportional to the rest of the country's. If New York had just avoided 2 or 3 of the larger nursing home COVID outbreaks, they'd have kept the seat.

Very roughly, there's a House seat per 750,000 people in the US. They were really close enough that a couple nursing home populations (in the hundreds) made the difference?

Yes, by 89 people. Incredible.

Elections swing on fairly small margins. Also, the older folks are more likely to vote than young ones, so the fact that the virus is more deadly to the elderly increases the effect.

but why are you so adamant on making everybody so perfectly safe?

there used to be something about freedom and risk; heck, about life and risk.

it's risky to be alive but it was more risky live way back in the day

at what point does safety begin to stifle the drive to live?

we as humans originally evolved in a risky environment, we thrived in it, we made it safer for ourselves; but maybe, just maybe, we also acquired a need for this risky behavior and without it our lives feel emptier?

the point I am trying to make (granted not very eloquently) starts out from this idea [1] that humans are kind of crazy, and that maybe this crazyness is what makes us so successful; so I put that too much safety may undo this crazyness, it puts it to sleep?

see also anti-fragility

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97jBvbmY03g&t=252s

Less about making those people safe and more about making you safe by making those other not spread the disease to you.

For example: Go ahead and drive drunk, I don’t care, just do it on your private property so you don’t kill me.

Similarly: Go and don’t get vaxed, honestly I don’t care. But viruses don’t respect borders like cars do, so if you are going to do it then make sure you are isolated on a private island where you don’t leave, or Antarctica, or mars or something.

"Our vaccines are working exceptionally well. They continue to work well for Delta with regard to severe illness and death - they prevent it, but what they can't do anymore is prevent transmission,"

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky

Preventing transmission != reducing transmission rates.

The vaccines absolutely do the later.

This seems to be so hard for some to understand that it smacks of dis-ingenuity.

are you sure about that? - seems right now the most vaccinated states also seem to have the largest spike in cases - I agree the vaccine, at this point anyway, seems to be reducing deaths - but not sure I agree on transmission - seems like it it still spreading worse than before.

And no, I am not an antivaxxer i I am triple vaxxed myself and work in the healthcare field.

The only real overlap right now is new england, places like the PNW have high vaccinations and low case rates. Regardless, there are so many factors that affect transmission, you can't easily learn much from geographic comparisons due to the impossibility of eliminating the confounds.

However the science is clear, all else being equal, covid vaccines reduce transmission rates.

Hmm did he mean that it doesn’t affect transmission (as in reduce R0) or that it literally can’t prevent transmission (R0 reduced, but still >>0)?

The latter is trivially true. I’m guessing he said it anyway because it was intended for a different audience.

I don’t think they literally reduce illness and death to zero, but just pretty close. I would assume they were using the same definition of “prevent” in both places in that sentence.

Vaccines don't prevent spread of Covid.

They do reduce it, by a lot, enough to avoid overwhelming hospitals -- which are borderline right now in many countries and being filled up by anti-vaxxers. Those freedom loving people are taking up valuable beds, putting the lives of people at risk that have other medical issues.

Essentially, all of these anti-vax arguments boil down to: "You cannot definitively, absolutely, completely prove that the vaccines are 100.00% effective AND 100.00% safe for everyone always. I mean sure, you're not technically forcing me to take it, but your suggestion that I do my duty to society is too authoritarian. I would prefer to think of myself as a universe onto myself and take the personal chance of death comparable to climbing Mount Everest or driving F1 cars. Because freedom! Or something..."

Also: "Grandma can take her chances with getting COVID from me on the odd occasion that I visit her in the cheapest hospice I could find to offload her onto."

I don't think there is any proof of that - look at VT, or in fact most of the New England states - among the highest percent of vaccinated people anywhere in the US and yet for many of those states, the cases are at a much, much higher level than at any time during the pandemic.

Look at Florida, decent % of people are vaxxed, but nearly as many (as a %) as in most new england states and yet the spread of cases is much more muted on a population adjusted basis. These data anomalies need better explanation from non-political scientists - one is not an anti-vaxxer for pointing these inconsistencies out.

I agree vaccine seems to be keeping people alive and that is a good thing, and despite your snide remarks, it is actually possible to be in favor of people getting the vaccine (I am tripled vaxxed myself) and yet still valid to question the official (and always changing) narrative we are being fed that this is only a pandemic of the unvaccinated - the facts don't back that up.

Vaccines didn't prevent the spread of smallpox either, until they finally did.

We're not smallpoxing Covid out of existence without a much better vaccine.

It might not be a feature of the vaccine, but a feature of the combination immune system + virus which doesnt allow us to smallpox Covid out of existence.

> We're not smallpoxing Covid out of existence without a much better vaccine.

Are you sure? At this point we can vaccinate almost everyone, and we wouldn't have to reduce the R factor by all that much.

But if you've already gotten the shot, you're protected from the disease. So, what is someone else not getting the shot going to do to you?

This ^. If the shots are truly protective, I don't understand what the hubbub is all about.

Is it really all about protecting those who truly can't get the shot for whatever reason? I doubt it.

And if you can still transmit the disease even after getting the shot, then it doesn't protect those people anyway. They will still have to exercise whatever caution is necessary to protect themselves, which they would have to do anyway, because there are other diseases as well.

Yeah, it's a partial measure that carries no guarantees... which makes it a poor candidate for a fix to roll out to everyone, in my opinion.

It doesn't make sense to me why officials aren't focusing just on getting as close to 100% as possible of the vulnerable vaccinated. It's well known that surviving covid is a much better protection, and thus contributes more to herd immunity, than the mRNA shot+boosters.

Perhaps "following the money" can provide answers? A vaccine mandate is a great way of making a lot of money for some people...

> it's well known that surviving covid is a much better protection,

Getting sick sucks though. Especially when people get "long covid" that doesn't ever go away.

> Perhaps "following the money" can provide answers?

Perhaps the answer is not a secret conspiracy but a rational, human desire to protect people.

> Getting sick sucks though.

Yeah, but that's really up to me, isn't it? There's a reason I choose not to live in China, Laos, or Vietnam.

Now that the vaccine is so widely available: (a) health officials should drop all orders and regulations, and (b) hospitals ought to say "look, here's our COVID capacity; if we're full we can't serve you, sorry" -- with that capacity set at a reasonable, sustainable number for them.

... unless the shot isn't what they say it is in terms of effectiveness or safety. But if it is really that effective and safe, I don't see any reason not to implement (a) and (b).

> Perhaps the answer is not a secret conspiracy but a rational, human desire to protect people.

That's not what I see when people's basic human rights and freedoms are being removed. People in Australia are being kept in freakin' internment camps.

When a 91+% effectiveness shot is available for free to everyone, the bar of rationally protecting people has been more than cleared. This doesn't appear to be about that anymore.

> Yeah, but that's really up to me, isn't it?

No. You can still get breakthrough cases with the vaccine. Your chance is higher the more un-vaxxed people around you. You can't control that number easily. People who work in service industry really cant control that.

Additionally, the more the virus spreads the more it'll mutate to avoid the vaccine, so the more likely that you lose that control.

> There's a reason I choose not to live in China, Laos, or Vietnam.

Well, really you were born where ever you were born, which is probably where you are now, and getting a visa to one of those countries really isn't solely up to you, because they need to let you in. I vaguely see your point (except most people dramatically overstate global mobility), but if you actually wanted to avoid getting sick you'd move to australia because their rates are really low - for reasons you allude to.

> hospitals ought to say "look, here's our COVID capacity; if we're full we can't serve you, sorry" -- with that capacity set at a reasonable, sustainable number for them.

But we don't do that here, in the civilized world. We don't turn people away. Its inhumane to not help people and turn them away. Doctors take an oath to help all in need.

It would solve the hospital problem to say "tough s*t if you get sick, did you try the vax?" but thats not a practical response. No politician or organization wants to take responsibility for that measure, and no doctor would turn away someone sick.

In what world is turning sick and ill people away at the hospital a valid response to all this? I would MUCH rather wear a mask than have hospitals turn people away.

> people's basic human rights and freedoms are being removed.

In america? I haven't seen any freedoms being removed except the freedom to feel safe. Vaccine mandates and masks aren't an infringement on your freedoms. What bill of rights protects your right to not breath through paper?

Hell, speaking of freedom, if everyone who complained about masks and vaccine mandates in america cared equally about the infringed freedoms of minorities then this nation would be the land of the free for everyone.

> Your chance is higher the more un-vaxxed people around you.

People keep repeating that line, as if unvaccinated folks who have survived Covid present the same risk as those who have had neither. In fact, surviving Covid is more protective than the vaccine (studies have shown this).

Conflating unvaccinated Covid survivors with those who actually put the population at risk is at best disingenuous.

Classical epidemiology teaches us that everyone will eventually get Covid, just like everyone will eventually get influenza. Treating it like the plague (which it isn't) is creating a concentration of power among certain elites, which is never good for society.

> Vaccine mandates and masks aren't an infringement on your freedoms.

Masks aren't, but vaccine mandates and other regulations certainly can be, depending on how they are enforced. For example, restrictions on freedom of assembly (which is articulated in the bill of rights), including churches (who did sue in California and win on constitutional grounds).

> But we don't do that here, in the civilized world. We don't turn people away. Its inhumane to not help people and turn them away. Doctors take an oath to help all in need.

> It would solve the hospital problem to say "tough s*t if you get sick, did you try the vax?" but thats not a practical response. No politician or organization wants to take responsibility for that measure, and no doctor would turn away someone sick.

> I would MUCH rather wear a mask than have hospitals turn people away.

Great points, I appreciate your thoughts.

> It doesn't make sense to me why officials aren't focusing just on getting as close to 100% as possible of the vulnerable vaccinated.

That's what the priority classes were for. But at this point we have plenty of shots for everyone, at least in the US. So anyone who will take the shot is a good target.

> A vaccine mandate is a great way of making a lot of money for some people...

We've already done so many shots that a vaccine mandate wouldn't be that much in terms of profits. And in the longer term it could easily mean less shots total, if we shut down the virus.

If you catch the flu once your immune system remembers it and can easily deal with exposure much better, but this memory fades in time. Your immune system isn't perfect either, and there are breakthrough cases, and this is more frequent in the elderly, albeit frequently milder. The vaccine offers protection similar to catching the flu (albeit much better in the case of the mRNA and J&J ones (<10% infected compared to ~50% infected in traditional technology) but protection is not guaranteed.

I'm disappointed I'm explaining this, I thought it's common knowledge that vaccines offer great protection but not invulnerability.

I know all that. I can fully accept that the vaccine doesn’t make me invulnerable. I have the vaccine and am fully prepared to go back to living my normal life while accepting that I still have some risk. I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low). At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom.

Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. If you want to remove the risk of dying, get the vaccine. If you want to take the risk, don’t. People are free to do other risky things like skydiving or free climbing. If you don’t want to accept the risks of those things you can opt out of doing them.

> I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low).

It objectively does... the hospital capacity risk, the risk of variants spreading among the unvaxed, or the breakthrough cases.

> At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom.

That is an opinion not all agree with.

> Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point.

What about "long covid"? That sounds also miserable.

What about people who have already survived Covid?

Studies are pretty clear that they're somewhat more immune than folks who've had the shot.

According to the Mayo Clinic[1] 72.2% of the US population already have at least one dose. Presumably the people with one dose will continue to get the second one.

Among the people who aren't vaccinated, some of them will have already had it and have a natural immunity. Some of them will get the vaccine eventually even without a mandate.

So, there's some number < 27.8% of the US who could theoretically be forced to get a vaccine with a mandate who wouldn't otherwise get it. How much does vaccinating those people really reduce the risks you mentioned?

Only a small percentage of cases require hospitalization. Are we at an extreme risk of hospital overload now?

The variants that have emerged so far seem to be trending toward being less serious and the current vaccine still provides protection against them. So what are we really gaining by forcing more people to get vaccinated?

There is probably a higher risk of contracting a breakthrough case, but how much? And how risky is it to get a breakthrough case anyway? It seems like with the vaccine, if you get it, it's not really all that serious.

Meanwhile, there are real costs in increasing division and creating further animosity among people by mandating a vaccine that the vast majority of people are already willingly getting anyway.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

> So, there's some number < 27.8% of the US

In Wyoming, < 50% of people 18-65yo are vaxxed. (citation: your link). In Massachusetts? Its > 80%. I just picked two states at either end, you see similar pattern for other states. The highly politicized nature of the vaccine also means that some people that should get the vaccine, and normally would, are holding out. This is disservice to everyone. I have extended family members where people have died because an immune-compromised person didnt get the vax because their care-taker was too focused on the politics to help them get it, only to later bring covid into the household.

The issue is not 27% of the US, its 50% of that state. Some localities are more at risk, or at a lower herd immunity potential.

> Only a small percentage of cases require hospitalization. Are we at an extreme risk of hospital overload now?

Yes. [1].

> current vaccine still provides protection against them

still provides protection against them, but less protection.

> So what are we really gaining by forcing more people to get vaccinated?

1. Less hosts for virus, so less room to mutate, or slower mutations. 2. Less hospital beds used by covid patients. See earlier point. 3. Less people sick, and less death. 27% of america is millions of people.

> with the vaccine, if you get it, it's not really all that serious.

We don't know the long-term side affects of the virus if you get it while vaccinated. We know that a statistically significant cohort of un-vaxxed people get "long covid" where they have long-term side affects. We don't have data on breakthroughs yet getting long covid.

> increasing division and creating further animosity

Most people who mandate masks and vaccines are trying to save lives, however misguided or unnecessary you and others think the chosen implementation of that goal is. I've seen (here in HN) people say that getting covid is "basicallly optional" and therefore if hospitals are at capacity we should just turn away covid patients because its their own fault. I think the division and animosity is borne by those that don't seem to care about others very much, tbh, and therefore maybe health policy isn't "divisiveness" as much as a disregard for other's lives.

I appreciate the numbers-game aspect of saying the risk of death is down to x% of 27% of america, (and shrinking). Its the right approach to proving that the costs are being amortized across less lives saved, because one day (today, tomorrow, whatever) we do have to say that we've saved all the lives we can bear and we have to move on. I don't have a target number, and neither do politicians - maybe the CDC or others should state an actual goal to use to base policy decisions off of.

That said, based on the {unknown long covid risk, hospitals still being at capacity, mutation risk, regionalized risk} i personally still support covid policies to continue to be in affect, despite the (truly minor) inconvenience. I don't really care about the animosity of people who think we should let our fellow neighbors die in the street.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...

I never said anyone should be left to die. People should be treated, even if their problems are because of their own poor choices. If we refused to treat anyone who made bad choices, we could close most hospitals, because we wouldn't treat hardly anyone.

WY has 576,851 people. MA has 7,033,469. So, at 50% and 80% vaccinated, there are 288,426 unvaccinated people in WY and 1,406,694 in MA.

WY is also nearly 10x larger at 97,914 sq mi. vs. 10,565 sq mi. in MA. So, in MA there are ~133 unvaccinated people per sq mi and a little less than 3 per sq mi. in WY.

If you want to minimize your chances of encountering an unvaccinated person, your odds are much much better in WY, despite the percentages! It's misleading to talk about percentages when the absolute numbers are so different.

Also, think about a rancher living on 1,000 acre ranch in WY who spends most of their time outdoors chasing cattle (and is in great shape) and goes into town for groceries every other week vs. a sedentary office worker in MA who takes the T into downtown Boston every day. Very different risk profiles for catching Covid and having a serious case. You're not gaining a whole lot by forcing the rancher to get vaccinated.

> The highly politicized nature of the vaccine also means that some people that should get the vaccine, and normally would, are holding out.

And who politicized it? Who wrote articles comparing the percentages of "Red State" vaccinations vs. "Blue State" vaccinations? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't the people in the Red States. Now the vaccine is tied in to people's identities. Now getting the vaccine is a "liberal thing" so now people are forced to go against their tribe to get the vaccine. Sure, I guess it helps you score political points with your in-group and get lots of likes on Twitter when you can dunk on the dumb conservatives who won't get vaccinated, but it is literally killing people. The mandates are not about saving lives, they're about having a political cudgel to make one party look good and the other look bad. People are getting vaccinated anyway, they would be getting vaccinated faster and with less resistance if one party were not trying to use it is a ploy to appear sanctimonious.

As a bit of anecdata, both of my parents are conservative Republicans. My dad especially is an ardent Trump supporter. They both got vaccinated the second it was available to them and got the booster as soon as that was available. So, it's not even an accurate characterization. The vaccine was developed under Trump (although back then, it was Biden, Harris, and the rest of the Democratic party who were pushing vaccine hesitancy). There was an opportunity to paint this as a bipartisan triumph that could have brought people together, but that wasn't allowed to happen.

The shots are NOT truly protective.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has an effectiveness of about 91%. That means in about 9% of cases it is not protective.

I'm amazed we are this deep into this pandemic and people still have black and white thinking wrt to vaccinces.

I think most people consider 91% to be “truly” protective. Nothing is 100%. The vaccine is more than effective enough to reduce the risk of Covid to the general background risk level of life in general (things like car accidents, slipping in the shower, eating red meat, contracting a flesh eating amoeba from swimming in a lake etc.)

Car crashes kill 30K people a year in the US. COVID has killed 400K in the US in 2021.

It's literally 10x worse than cars and 30K from cars is horrific.

How many vaccinated people have been killed by Covid? I’m talking about the risk after you’re vaccinated.

91% is truly protective, as long as that effectiveness lasts long enough to be meaningful.

In fact, 91% is an amazingly high number - I don't know if any pre-mRNA vaccine has ever reached that level of effectiveness.

So I return to my original point -- if they're really that effective, why the hubbub?

Not to be condescending, but because people have been saying for a year now or more now that the virus will rapidly evolve and any vaccines will become less effective over time because of it.

And the virus rapidly evolved and the vaccines we have became less effective to new strains, as expected. A quick deployment of vaccines would greatly reduce that risk (see: Japan currently having infections in the double digits following a rapid deployment in vaccines and universal masks, leaving little room for new strains to adapt).

The pandemic has been a long chain of some insightful people saying "This bad thing will happen if people don't take X precaution." People say that's a lie--then don't take X precautions. Bad thing happens. People get angry and say they were lied to because bad thing happened when they were told it wouldn't happen (because loads of people took no precautions). Then there's a warning about another bad thing happening, followed by denial.

It's quite clear that the person who wrote the comment I'm replying to believes that "truly protective" means 100% protection, and that if the vaccine was "truly protective" you no longer need to worry about getting COVID.

This is a very dangerous idea and why there is so much confusion and misinformation.

By insisting that 91% is "truly effective" in conversations like this you are not helping.

Yes, broadly speaking. That is the principle of herd immunity. We managed to eradicate smallpox with mandatory vaccination programs without all this political fuss.

Smallpox was way, way worse than Covid. If Covid were killing and permanently disfiguring children en masse, you can be sure there would be no resistance to the vaccine.

Just because seatbelts are "truly protective" that doesn't mean that getting into accidents is risk free.

Just because driving a car isn’t risk free doesn’t mean you outlaw cars. You take the sensible precautions that are available and accept that a life worth living involves a certain amount of risk.

We did outlaw driving without seatbelts. Against strong protests at the time.

We don’t know what happened in the alternate universe where there were no seatbelt laws. Maybe there are people here who died because they stubbornly refused to ever wear a seatbelt because they had taken a public stance against seatbelts and made not wearing a seatbelt into a noble fight against tyranny. Maybe in the other universe they’re still alive because they were able to come around and change their mind without feeling like they lost a fight and were admitting defeat.

But I guess we’ll never know, because if you think something is a good idea what you should do is immediately use the government to coerce everybody into doing it under threat of fines and punishment.

Are you seriously arguing that without seatbelt laws more people would've been saved by seatbelts?

Have you never heard of the saying “you catch more flies with honey”?

Is the law really the driving force behind why most people wear seatbelts? I don’t think so.

If we count all the lives saved by extra organs donated, maybe?

Exactly! We don't outlaw cars.

But we have speed limits, stop signs, seat belt regulations, airbag requirements, crumble zones, crash tests, driver training and testing, significant drunk driving laws, ...

If we had equivalent sensible precautions for COVID as we have for cars, mask mandates and vaccination requirements would be the minimum and carry significant penalties.

What it will do is that when those people who haven't got the shots start to be sick, they will throw their beliefs in the bin and go to the hospital. They will stretch the capacity and then when I need to go for an ailment different from this disease, I'll be queued up behind them and the treatment I get would be subpar. Disclaimer: I don't have the stats on hospitalization rates/capacity in places that have low rates of vaccination but high rates of infection.

That is a concern, and I think we need to be much louder and angrier about why, 2 years into a pandemic, we still haven’t built up additional hospital capacity that we know we need.

There are also other treatments that we know greatly reduce the severity (and thus would decrease the need for hospital capacity) that haven’t been rolled out as widely and aggressively as the vaccine has.

> we need to be much louder and angrier about why, 2 years into a pandemic, we still haven’t built up additional hospital capacity that we know we need.

Hospital capacity limits are mostly about personnel and not equipment/space. Equipment and space are issues too, but temporary measures are possible.

Everywhere is having trouble hiring because employers don't want to pay enough wages for people to do the work. The same is true in the healthcare setting, but nursing requires a significant amount of training (AFAIK, 2 years for entry level nursing, I think more time needed for ICU nursing) and doctoring is even more. Hospitals (and healthcare providers in general) are not incentivized to retain enough staff to deal with spikes in demand. AFAIK, there hasn't been increased training, and probably a lot of training was delayed while in-person education wasn't an option. Healthcare workers were also a lot of the early victims. COVID mitigation measures probably reduce healthcare productivity too, requiring even more workers.

Not enough ICU (too late when you get there anyway) is a political problem. In my country they reduced it with state funding (you got money for reducing beds, active monetary incentives) and now they ponder about vaccination mandates.

This is infantile blaming of others in my opinion. Worse, you don't even hold those that are really responsible to account. So my sympathy if you fail to get an ICU is limited.

It is not practical to have hospitals to cater to extreme spikes - it takes trained doctors, nurses, infrastructure to run all which is in limited supply. Further, even if that can be managed, during normal periods, all that excess capacity wouldn't maintain itself. You need a balance of additional capacity and responsible behaviour supported by science/medicine/evidence. Ignoring that is infantile.

True, but that was a policy in the last summer and now non-vaccinated people are blamed. This does not match.

Because 0.3 * 1 = 0.3

And

0.3 * 0.3 = 0.09

Why does someone unvaccinated pose a risk to you?

Ok but what's the point of taking risks for its own sake? It makes sense to take risks if you stand to gain something. But a risk with only downside is just a bad idea.

some people, mostly young people, might consider it 'fun'.

also, at a certain point, a real experiment may yield nothing in return, i.e. a risk was undertaken yet nothing at all was gained.

> the point I am trying to make (granted not very eloquently) starts out from this idea [1] that humans are kind of crazy, and that maybe this crazyness is what makes us so successful; so I put that too much safety may undo this crazyness, it puts it to sleep?

You are blurring the lines between taking a personal risk in one occasion at a specific time and taking the risk of not wearing a mask or washing hands or cooking meat every day all year long.

Craziness for the sake of craziness is just random trial and error.

What is wrong with cooking meat?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2769029/

there should be a "not" in front of it :/. I should have used "washing vegetables" or "not cooking chicken" or something less ambiguous.

sure, but on one hand, you have being mildly inconvenienced by a shot, and on the other hand, you have conspiracy theories that can get loads of people filled. People are crazy, we should embrace that, but that doesn't mean you let everyone drive drunk.

What does this have to do with the actual topic of the parent post?

Because it brings the healthcare system crashing down with them. It's not a personal liberty if it's at the direct expense of the lives of others. Get the fucking shot.

If 'You' is a goverment in a country with socialised healthcare, you want your population as healthy as possible to keep costs down. Preventative care (vaccines) is much cheaper.

Yikes don’t say that out loud!

But seriously, the left needs to think more like this. The right plays dirty and if the left plays like this they get the same outcomes of playing dirty but is not saying anything bad or wrong.

You do realize that you're responding to a comment reframing the USA left-establishment's covid vaccine rhetoric, right? Point being, how do you know the left isn't playing like this?

The comment you are replying to is not a novel take. This stuff has long since been thought of by some strategists on pretty much every side of every issue for about as far back as we have record of this sort of thing. Heck, revise the wording a little bit and it could pass for something some enlightenment thinker half a century ago would have said about whatever issue they were talking about that minute.

Social conditioning by years of right-wing media to distrust everything any scientist says is what will cause the outcomes we're seeing, not a cartoonish reverse psychology plot.

Breitbart actually published an article making exactly this argument, with an in-built implication in the way it was argued that that meant getting vaccinated was a way to 'own the libs'.

I hope it caused a few more people to get vaccinated.

I like the thought experiment, but i would counter that i suspect the 1% that would die would be replaced by a larger volume of new group members - due to the divisive nature of "us vs them", everyone has to choose, and so the forced unity ends up increasing overall members. Forcing people to choose increased membership of both parties.

Not a statement, just a thought.

Consider that causing 1% of the group's population to die might not weaken the group and in fact might make the group stronger.

Disease doesn't kill "weaker" members of a group, it kills susceptible ones.

The Spanish Flu notably had a much higher mortality amongst younger, healthier people.

I didn't mean some sort of darwinian thing where the average strength goes up. I mean that the strength of the group as a whole could very well increase.

COVID however is most fatal to the eldery. Letting it simply rage out of control could push back the social security crisis a few years.

I don't think anything as Machiavellian as this is going on. I think it was all just a culmination of decades anti-expert propaganda and knee-jerk obstructionism coming to a head in a terribly fatal way.

The elderly though often serve an important part in society. In particular, they can care for grandchildren.

He’s effectively describing Trump’s leaked plan to let covid ravage blue urban areas before the election, but here framing it as a liberal plot as a narrative device

Maybe he’s a Republican astroturfer

Someone just learned the root language of real human economics taught to us as abstractions through story and pie chart.

Alternatively, maybe he's a Democratic astroturfer using reverse reverse psychology to convince holdouts to go get vaccinated.

People laughing about people believing in conspiracy theories spreading conspiracy theories. No useful comments come to mind, can only watch in awe.

Consider it a form of entertainment if you can stomach the more morbid aspects of it.

>Trump's leaked plan

Can I get a source?

Correction - it's not 1%, it's 100%. Of both tribes.

could you please elaborate on this?

The vaccine does not grant immortality. So when you take the long view, everybody dies.

You had me until the last paragraph. If "smugly" insisting X would make them dig in their heels, what are we supposed to do? Say "Oh of course it's totally in your rights, please send your unvaccinated children to the same school my kids go to"? Because I don't think it will change their minds either.

What happened to "personal responsibility" that these people like so much? If the whole country tells these people to get vaccinated, they don't, and they die, then I don't think I should be held responsible for being smug, or snarky, or whatever.

That would be a very, very bad plan we are not talking about, because it would make people so radical, that in the end they rather shoot people of the other tribe, than getting the shot. (and that already happened)

It would make them form secret circles, where they only talk or listen to each other further radicalising themself. And they do not have a choice, because they have their dogma of vaccine == poison - so they feel pushed to connect stronger in their own circles of "awakened minds".

And with the deadly disease not at all deadly enough to kill them all out - this "no talk about plan" will just make them stronger effectivly.

Before they were just weirdos spread out. Now the weirdos are organizing and arming themself.

So I mean, the very first antivaccine movement involved firebombs (https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/1/82) not to mention some questionable research ethics; maybe none of this is really new.

Your comment reminds me of something I read a few years back and CANNOT find again which I think said something like:

* The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for a delusional disorder have sort of a carve-out for religion.

* Specifically if a lot of people live together in a community and all believe something disconnected from reality but it isn't hurting their day-to-day life this isn't a mental illness, it's just part of their culture and it should not be diagnosed as a mental illness.

* Modern use of the Internet has made it easy for people who share common interests to come together in a community and hang out together, where previously they would have formed an extreme minority of their community and had what were obviously non mainstream views.

* For example, people who believe that radiation causes terrible illness (electromagnetic hypersensitivity) can all live together in a city with no cell phones or power lines and maybe none of them would have any kind of mental illness because their beliefs were a norm - which previously would have been impossible.

I was struck by this observation but could never find it written down again.

Well, I don't know anyone who has the absolute truth, and people claiming they do is a good sign for me to avoid them.

So in general I am very tolerant for weirdos and the general right of people to live their own ways, if they are not harming me.

But I think it is a bad idea pushing people further into radicalisation amd isolation and this is what I see is happening now worldwide, on a new scale unseen before.

What's the difference between: A) smugly telling them to do it so that they won't do it, and B) genuinely telling them to do it because you care about public health, but they interpret it as smug?

Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.

I don't know, most people like to at least have the illusion of making their own choices.

The most highly approved of DMs do tend to be good at concealing the railroad tracks...

I was trying to scroll through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DM but couldn't find anything fitting... Am I too old or two young or too out of touch? :D

I think they mean Dungeon Master, the architect / narrator of multiplayer role playing games. A good DM will guide the players through a well-planned story, in part by making the layers feel that they are in control of the story themselves.

This exactly.

I'm not into gaming so didn't make the connection. Thanks!

> Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.

I can't tell if this is tongue in cheek, but it seems to be happening on huge swaths of adults as we speak.

Why do you think that??

> it seems to be happening on huge swaths of adults as we speak.

I am fully convinced there are vast swaths of legal "adults" who are not fully emotionally developed. On my really bad days, I'm one of them. The one thing that saves me is I tend to snap out of it eventually and think of the long term. I think that many "adults" never do.

Events in recent years have only reinforced this point of view.

New study shows that 90% of the adult population feels that most of the rest of the adult population are not fully emotionally developed (sidereel: Fundamental Attribution Error said to still be at large)

When I was 12, I equated a really big house with being very important and successful. Now that I'm a emotional adult, I see that a big house is less effective at being shelter than a modestly sized house and that it is an expression of ego, not practicality. This weekend while taking a walk I saw someone in their 70's exit their 10,000 square foot home. I am fully convinced you're right.

Imagine you have a close relative (parent, sibling or child) that you love very much and don't want them to die or get very sick but they are refusing to get vaccinated. You could either keep pestering them about getting the shot, tell them they are stupid for not getting the shot, etc. Or you could sit down with them and listen carefully to their reasons and talk to them about why you decided to get the vaccinated. The first approach will most likely make them defensive and not likely to get vaccinated. The second approach may or may not work, but you would have made your best effort.

I don't need to imagine. You sit them down and you learn that they inhabit a completely different reality from your own. You try to describe your reality, and they dismiss it because it disagrees with their "reality". You try to anchor them in factual reality by pointing to people you both know who died of covid, but not before infecting others... who then also died of covid, etc., but they always have a way to dismiss whatever you have to say because it disagrees with their "reality". Because apparently online propaganda is more real to them than everything they see in person and everything their loved ones tell them.

I envy you if "sitting down" with them worked for you.

I think most people did give their best, repeatedly, only to be blown off, repeatedly. At some point, the people you care about stop being those people and start being abusive assholes, being personally responsible for killing your friends and family with their stupidity, and dragging us all deeper into this crisis.

Or you avoid the topic, keep your fingers crossed that they won't get sick, and can at least have a normal conversation about the weather without hating each other.

Interesting, the Ostrich algorithm as applied to RealLife(tm): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_algorithm

Sure, but that does not solve anything.

That does not help your relationship, because interpersonal relationships where you can't express your honest feelings and ideas are hollow, fake – worse than useless.

That doesn't help anything about COVID, because they're still acting recklessly based on their delusions.

And that doesn't help their deteriorating mental ability as they succumb to propaganda, because their idiocy is left uncontested, only reinforced by their self-selecting ingroup.

At some point you gotta choose what you actually love about such people – their meat and bones, your nominal connection to them (e.g. blood relation), your past shared experience, their personality and ideas, or something else? Because some of those are unaffected by their progressing stupidity and selfishness, but others are poisoned more and more as time goes on and they sink deeper.

I don't have a solution. I just wish people would stop pretending that this brainwashing can be solved by talking, understanding, or simply by ignoring its existence. Often it can't. As a society we're in deep shit, and it has little to do with COVID. It will stay with us well after the pandemic too.

I had come to accept my brother's COVID denial after this loop played out a few times. Now it looks like the world is going for another spin, and sure enough, the arguments rev up again.

Particularly, Rogan interviewing the quack Peter McCullough set my brother off again. I sent him info on McCullough's membership in AAPS[1][2], which seems to be made up of fringe pseudoscience-enamored doctors. That only changed the goalpost, "It's not about him dude, x and y and z and blah blah".

I find it suspect when my views align with abhorrent people, at the very least giving me a signal to reconsider my conclusions.

I'm sorry for the anecdotal tangent, but your comment fit perfectly with what I'm going through. I am doubly frustrated that I can't seem to muster the intellectual power to figure out how to get him to at least reconsider his viewpoints. I WANT TO FIGURE THIS PROBLEM OUT!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_A._McCullough [2] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic...

> What's the difference between

How and who says it. A in a patronizing and rude way, B in a way they respect and understand.

My wife does something similar to me all the time. If she knows that I’m uncertain about a fact, she’ll feign a kind of mistaken certainty in the (true) fact to bait me into taking a bet against it. Then I lose the bet.

Same thing in politics - If you know the other side is uncertain about a position that you have high confidence in, stake your position and then politicize it so the other side is forced to either concede or stake their claim to the weaker position.

We just have to wait till the mid terms to see how much the tribe has been reduced... I mean you have to be right, the TV said the same thing!

> We just have to wait till the mid terms to see how much the tribe has been reduced

I realize you are saying this just to be snarky and wage ideological battle, but the fact is that we don't.

The data is readily available about political affiliation as a predictor for vaccination rates, and vaccination status as a predictor for COVID mortality. 90+% of Democrats are vaccinated, and mortality rates are around 20 times higher among the unvaccinated. It is not an exaggeration to say that materially all of the COVID deaths over the past few months have been among conservatives.

May I gently suggest that 100,000+ preventable deaths among your ideological fellow-travelers deserves reflection beyond the political consequences next November?

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/10/01/for-covid-1...

https://dshs.texas.gov/immunize/covid19/data/vaccination-sta...

>You realize that smugly insisting that those people should "get the shot" will make them dig in their heels and insist they will never do any such thing

LOL

There is also the old fashioned way of earning people's trust, by being honest and demonstrating with your actions that you are trustworthy. Censoring discussions, enforcing vaccinations, displaying double standards (elite partying unmasked) and so on are the opposite of that.

Also, to many it may be acceptable to risk some lives in exchange for freedom. In fact society does that all the time, sending people to police the streets, or to wars. Individuals also do risky things for the sake of freedom all the time, for example riding motorbikes or seeking adrenaline kicks in dangerous sports.

If Democrats/the left could pull back enough to model the minds of Republican voters, they could have framed the vaccine as "the war against China's virus". They could have talked about a great foreign threat to our nation, and that we need to band together as Americans to fight it. Degenerates in other countries might not be taking the fight seriously, but Americans are, because we are the greatest nation on earth with the best people.

Who cares if it leaves out a lot of nuance, and is not literally true, if it works?

I think this would work in the scope of vaccines, but I fear the effects of inflaming xenophobia. There were plenty of reports of random violence against asians the past year; I'd rather avoid increasing that.

Isn't the reasoning that few might die for vaccine, but overall it's a better result?

You know we could have. We could have sacrificed a whole lot of our values to capitulate to people who think Facebook posts counter decades of research, we could have capitulated to one of their several abhorrent values like xenophobia so that they might finally go along with something that’s good for themselves and the country.

Frankly I’m not interested in that sort of capitulation anymore. I’m not even interested in the phrasing of the argument. The unvaxxed masses need to figure out how to capitulate to us. They need to step back and model our minds to figure out how to frame their views in an acceptable manner.

Otherwise they can continue to lose their jobs, get kicked off internet platforms, and keep filling hospital beds gasping for the vaccine after it’s far too late to help them.

Fuck em

The underlying issue, and one that bugs the hell out of me, is Policy vs Truth.

You can say true things all day, and convince nobody. You can enact policy based completely on Truth (e.g., Trust the Science), and completely fail. People don't care about Truth, they care about what changes they need to make, and who is asking them to make them.

Good policy is only partially based on truth, it's more based on easy implementation and high acceptability. In the article, you don't talk about the real reasons (truth), you do what you need to do to steer the ship. That probably includes bullshitting, compromise, apparent-hypocrisy, etc.

I'm afraid we've completely forgotten to separate the means from the end goal.

I've tried to explain this to people, and I've been met with blank stares from even the most intelligent folks.

As suggested though, it works wonders if you're at least a little good at magical thinking or self deception. (If I run these 3 miles, I'm much more likely to get that raise)

>I've tried to explain this to people, and I've been met with blank stares from even the most intelligent folks.

That's definitely an experience I've had with similar topics. I particularly remember talking to a friend who I generally respect and admire about something that isn't socially acceptable for no obvious reason, and upon explaining my thoughts and asking what the deal was with it, they completely shut down and acted like I was totally insane.

It's just particularly annoying that so many people claim to be for truth or actions based on some ultimate moral value, but then act totally differently because all they were ever really for was tradition which includes hypocrisy about what it's for.

>...about something that isn't socially acceptable for no obvious reason...

What was the thing?

Being a furry. It seems like they get a lot of shit for no good reason.

They're really weird and lots of them are gay so the social mechanisms that stop us giving groups a lot of shit for no good reason are weaker for them.

This is not a particularly comforting explanation, but I'm unaware of a better one (and I've discussed this with a bunch of smart furry friends over the years).

This is related to an issue I've studied a lot and recently written about. In "Don't make a fetish of having a flat organization" I try to address this in the context of business, making clear that a well-designed bureaucracy can empower an organization to be more flexible at scale, but for various reasons we don't often think of it this way:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/dont-make-a-fetish-of-havin...

But perhaps more relevant, in the context of government and policy, I've tried to make the point that we should think of government and bureaucracy as machines that produce policy. Every machine is optimized to produce certain kinds of policies. If you advocate for a great policy, and you've the facts on your side, and yet no one will listen to you, then you need to think about the structure of that machine, because it will take a change in the machine to get that machine to start producing the kinds of policy that you want:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...

Institutions don't create just policy, but also culture. And they create the kind of culture that preserves the institution.

The power and foolishness of democracy lies therein. A good story is more motivating that the complicated truths of life. It is probably better for all of us to link every tornado and hurricane to climate change in a neat little story than refrain from doing so because we cannot link the particular storm on man-made climate change. The story has power to effect positive change.

You don’t think people commonly notice the manner in which they cover this and other stories, and conclude that Teh Liberal Media (tm) is a bunch of liars who have taken them for rubes?

> It is probably better for all of us to link every tornado and hurricane to climate change in a neat little story

And then when someone points out that the number of severe tornados per year was larger a couple of decades ago ....

Thanks to improvements in monitoring equipment, we know about tornados and hurricanes now that we wouldn't have recorded before.

True. Yet, misinformation persists and tends to be as or more motivating that the truth.

While practical and maybe inevitable, this approach will alienate exactly the kind of people you want on your side if you want to _actually_ reach your goal and course correct when needed.

Instead you will attract people who will happily pretend to be on the right path and will keep performing rain dances on titanic.

What you propose can work if it is a technocratic conspiracy where people who know what's going on maintain power and can update direction relatively easily (we were always at war with Eurasia). Then again, there is always a risk of losing real power to one of the mid-rank rain-dancing activists and screw up the whole project, maybe for good.

Technocratic conspiracies always fall very quickly to the mid-rank rain-dancing people unless the rain dancing is really complex and has really visible effects.

It's not even something to see as a risk, it's certainty.

It's not all or nothing. Good policy accomplishes the goal and attracts masses.

For whatever quality metric you assign to a voter, you can't get the majority without including some of those below the median.

In large populations, for example, 'knowledgeable' implies you need to convince people who know less than average as well as the most knowledgeable. And the average is real, real low on specific knowledge about complicated issues.

The alienation issue is real ... but it's simply another thing that has to be factored in to effective policy work.

Trade-offs all the way down.

> I'm afraid we've completely forgotten to separate the means from the end goal.

I'm afraid we've completely forgotten "the ends don't justify the means". ;)

I tend to think about it as: The ends never justify the means, but sometimes the ends are important enough that you do it anyway.

As a limiting example, I don't consider violence to ever be a good thing per se, but I still accept its use in self defence. I don't like using the word 'justified' to describe that acceptance, though that may say more about how I see 'justified' as a concept than it does about anything concrete.

There's a term for this and it's called 'Public Communications' sometimes into the domain of propaganda.

This is not a 'new' concept it's as old as time and 100% of people with real power have an awareness of this, it's almost a defining feature of an elite class.

Policy should obviously be guided by 'Truth' and we need transparency, at the same time, irrespective of how smart individuals are, as crowds, we act with a lowest-common-demoninator IQ and things need to be communicated effectively.

A great example of 'Truths We Cant't Handle' are vaccination-caused deaths.

All the vaccines cause death, and AZ is particularly tricky. But it's really hard to find exact data on that because it's very well suppressed. I suggest it's probably available with some digging but if you imagine a 'chain of communications' from the doctors, to health officials, to politicians to media, all of whom are ostensibly trying to act in the interest of the 'Public Good' - it's not going to come out.

Bonnie Henry in BC is a great Public Health official, I listen to her communications almost weekly, very smart, generally open, data-driven, smart journalists asking good questions - but they have never broached the subject of 'How many have died form vaccines'. The information is just too explosive. So they don't talk about it. We're learn more about it after the pandemic.

I'm guessing that's because both the actual number is very low relative to the number of doses given out and that fewer people have died from the vaccine than would die as a consequence of fearmongering by a particular political party here were there open discussion of that. There are a handful of topics like this where there seems to be near-universal agreement that the best thing for society is to just not poke the bear.

That's ridiculous. Not only are any such deaths carefully tracked, they are massively publicized in mainstream media. The first reported AZ deaths were on the front pages of every newspaper. Might as well have been a presidential election.

Of course vaccine deaths are tracked, I didn't deny that (FYI it's a very difficult thing to make perfect correlation between a vaccine and death, esp. with so many overlapping conditions).

The media has hugely downplayed the issue. Of course they have to do perfunctory reports on public information if it does happen, but it's not something they talk about otherwise.

Dr. Fauci doesn't come on TV and talk about the materiality of vaccine related death.

CNN is not doing their emotive vignettes on the 'Family destroyed by death due to vaccine' and interviews with sobbing family members.

There's obviously no narrative around that, in fact, the narrative is in the opposite direction, i.e. 'Blood Clots Can Happen but the Vaccine Is Still Safe'.

While there is some information about the AZ vaccine, there's scant info about the others, after doing a perfunctory search all I could find were 'The study showed a total of possible 3 deaths from the vaccine during such and such period' without any qualifying data.

The data is obviously being collected but it's not being fully shared and definitely not being communicated other than in a perfunctory way.

There are two ways to improve situation, both are for the very far future (assuming humanity will survive long enough). Either change the human brain itself artificially, to remove hacks and shortcuts made by the mother nature, and make people really rational (I am not speaking about removing emotions, just removing their ability to cloud the judgement) and with minimum of cognitive biases and fallacies, or to make an AGI to rule the humanity (probably a worse solution since it will be uneven relationship).

> change the human brain itself artificially

so you're saying what basically amounts to eugenics (but instead of race, it's based on some other criteria) is required to "correct" humanity.

Or for an AGI, a higher being of infinite wisdom to rule over humanity (aka, losing freedom of action).

Humanity already corrects itself in terms of better adaptation for denser and wider social life. Modern urban society requires less emotional response than people were able to give centuries ago. You have to accommodate wider circle of people that you interact with, including the incredible amount of strangers that you meet through whole life. With population growth and more urbanization this process will only continue.

Eugenics is not the only way to change the human brain. What about drugs?

In fact, eugenics is not even the only way to change human gene expression -- again, drugs! The mRNA vaccines!

21st century is going to be all about human bioengineering.

The comparison of different voting systems is what clued me in to this. A number of "generally" more optimal voting systems have degenerate outcomes in certain edge cases which would lead to poor acceptability. It's not enough to have an optimal voting system- people also need to find the outcome somewhat acceptable to consent to the result.

The current two-party-first-past-the-post system in the US is an example that is not especially optimal, but does pretty well on acceptability of outcome. People get mad their candidate lost, argue about voter fraud, argue about the electoral college... But the system never produces a selection people see as flat-out broken & invalid, unlike some more optimal systems. That is a pretty important feature.

> But the system never produces a selection people see as flat-out broken & invalid

No, it absolutely does. Imagine a campaign issue where 60% of the electorate wants to plant more trees, and 40% wants to pave all the forests over with parking lots. Candidate A proposes planting oak trees, Candidate B proposes planting maple trees, and Candidate C loves him some asphalt. The final results: 30% for A, 30% for B, 40% for C. Vote-splitting like this is an unacceptable outcome of FPTP; it may not show up when we arbitrarily limit the system to two parties, but it's preposterous that we need to limit the vote to two candidates in order to avoid this outcome, and the two-party system produces all sorts of other problems on its own. This isn't to say that other voting systems are perfect, but they're all better than FPTP, which has no virtue other than being the simplest thing that can be called democracy at all (which mattered a lot in a world of illiterate people who had little familiarity with self-governance, but not so much these days).

How do more optimal systems produce a selection that is "flat-out broken & invalid"?

Are you saying that it will be perceived that way just because people don't understand the system?

> You can enact policy based completely on Truth (e.g., Trust the Science)

Is this a joke or a real statement of your epistemic model?

Yes lot of good laws can't be implemented because it'd do more harm to actually implement them in earnest. Ie Indian govt decided to reward people for catching snakes, but people started to raise snakes and when program ended they released all leftovers to wild, worsening the situation.

You're stating the overall position of most western public health policy, and the outcome of that thinking hasn't been good.

Manipulating stated goals from real goals and influencing behavior via nudges rather than argument can be effective for small outcomes, but as a whole the practice is antidemocratic. More practically, if the approach is repeated, you begin to poison the well - people learn to work the system they're in, and any kind of split between stated goal and actual goal gives wiggle room to work an angle.

Consider the failures of mask mandates after initial anti mask messaging from the CDC. The CDC's initial goal was to tactically protect the n95 supply for maybe two months.

There seem to be many more examples along the same lines:

– Managers not talking about potential M&A or layoffs to avoid distracting the team.

– Leaders not talking about their backup plans to avoid demoralizing their organizations.

– Athletes not talking about strategy and tactics to avoid tipping off opponents.

– Investors and traders not talking about ideas and methods to maintain their edge.

– Business owners not talking about outsized returns to avoid attracting competition.

– Economic leaders not talking about systemic risks where widespread awareness would increase likelihood of occurrence.

– Politicians not talking about policies known to be ineffective but implemented to placate voters.

– Members of exclusive groups not talking about internal dynamics to maintain exclusivity.

These are only examples of security through obscurity.

They likely have a better open alternative.

You are you. You read book reviews on Slate Star Codex [since renamed] which are half the length of the books themselves. You write essays which are both satirical and completely sincere where you lampoon social practices using the Alien Describing Human technique (again, to good effect). You are too rational and intelligent to make sense of the world in other ways (but you don’t talk about that (directly)). You have had oddball interests and hobbies your whole life, but sometimes you feel like something is missing.

Eventually you come to the conclusion that everything which you thought was irrational is in fact that. You pat yourself on the back for the humility that you have displayed. Then you go back to reading that book review on Slate Star Codex [since renamed].

As an authorial technique starting off with a just so story about how marriage came to be that lasts several paragraphs and is obviously not at all how marriage came to be and doesn't even have the excuse of referencing some sort of supernatural source for being wrong might seem interesting but bored me too much to continue.

I'm supposing the rest of it is also wrong and badly argued.

It is not talking literally about how marriage came to be. It is just laying out a set of incentives that probably play a role in the success of marriage as an institution.

yes I realize it is not literal, but the structure of that part of the text as you progress from two people in love come up with a plan to always stay together ends up a just so story about how marriage was created.

Does it work as a list of incentives for how marriage came to be a successful institution? Well since it structures it as an origin story of marriage that you realize is an origin story of marriage at the same time you realize this is obviously not at all how marriage came to be, no it does not work. And I mean - for how marriage came to be a successful institution even has the phrasing came to be inside it. How do you explain the lasting success of an institution based on a fairy tale of it's creation - well lots of things are explained as fairy tales but not rationally. This document has a style that argues the author believes they are making a rational argument, which grates.

It's frankly idiotic the more I think about it! Which I guess would be ok if it was something you told your 5 year old when they asked hey how did marriage come to be. Fairy tales can be charming and funny, but I think the author thinks they're being clever and serious.

So now I went back to read more just to be sure they didn't deal with the fairy tale aspect better further in, but it was a waste of time.

It's a just-so story.

The term comes from Rudyard Kipling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories

There is no hyphenation.

It's not supposed to explain the _origin_ of marriage, it's supposed to explain the _incentive structure_ of marriage.

It's phrased as an origin story purely for narrative purpose.

Still, the incentive structure of marriage until basically yesterday was "hey, I am publicly announcing this woman is mine and I will brutally kill anybody who tries to seduce or rape her, because that would put me at risk of spending lot of resources on an offspring that's not mine. You can't say you have not been warned. Also, my family of origin and her family of origin now have a shared interest (namely, making this family prosper so that their grankids can flourish) and it's better for everyone if they go along, so let's throw a huge party and keep good vibes" Like, we know that. We don't need wild conjectures about what is the incentive structure of marriage, people have been pretty upfront about it for centuries. And if you really have to chase wild conjectures rather than empirical evidence, the least you can do is not to start from laughably culturally specific assumptions: the idea that a social institution serves to maximize individual happiness, when for most of history (and in most of the world still today) that notion would have been bizarre if not frowned upon, can only lead to wrong conclusions. Again, people across cultures and centuries have been pretty upfront about the fact that the point of marriage was not to help any of the spouses be happy but just to keep society working in an orderly manner, or to help spouses adhere to some transcendent morality. The only thing you can get out of this story is a huge warning about the implicit modus operandi of rationalism: the dangerous idea that you can deduct reality, from first principles summarily chosen from what seems common sense in XXI century America, and that the result of building a huge tower of these frail bases can somehow be substantial.

I agree with your substantive criticism of the article.

> The only thing you can get out of this story is a huge warning about the implicit modus operandi of rationalism: the dangerous idea that you can deduct reality, from first principles summarily chosen from what seems common sense in XXI century America, and that the result of building a huge tower of these frail bases can somehow be substantial.

It's written in the same vein as "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" [1]. (Read it. Then read the Wikipedia article.)

[1] https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir...

Surprisingly I did not spring fully conscious and new formed onto the internet a few hours ago and have read things in the past.

I appreciate the recommendation to actually read it; it would have been a mistake to look up the article instead of just reading it. It wasn't long and I got a lot from it that I would have skipped over if not for actually reading it.

I don't understand what the point is of commenting about not having read the post. That's not even what it's about.

> just so story

Thank you, this is the term I was looking for, and indeed, pretty much all of the "plans" the author lays out are "just so stories", untestable and with the implication that they are the true reasons things are as they are.

In religion this is nothing new: it's known as hypocrisy, which is despicable because a hypocrite inevitably ends up exploiting true believers, taking advantage of their trust and goodwill. It's a well-studied phenomenon in religious literature (at least from what I know of Christianity and Islam). Tolstoy wrote much about the hypocrisy of the Orthodox leadership in the Russian Empire, and hypocrisy is a central theme of the Koran.

Religious people are well aware of the fact that many of their fellow practitioners (including leaders) do it for societal/family/community/health/power benefits without actually believing in any of the rhetoric. Hence the classic clergy child-abuser, for example. Talking about hypocrisy is not forbidden, rather it is necessary for a person to regularly question themselves to recognize hypocrisy and remain true to their beliefs. Someone who doesn't believe should leave, because otherwise they may inadvertently or knowingly turn into "a wolf in sheep's clothing".

>Someone who doesn't believe should leave

Which was basically (and in many cases literally and directly) death for most human history.

>Cutting back on CO2 emissions would clearly work, but it’s expensive and painful.

This is so painfully backwards. "Saving the Planet" doesn't mean spending tons of money and doing tons of work, quite the opposite. The absolute best thing for the Planet would be for every human being to do nothing at all. Stop driving, stop working, stop eating entirely, and then things will quickly recover. Obviously that's a bit extreme, but it's to illustrate that less activity, not more, is what's best for the Planet.

It's so odd that all our frantic doing is what's thrown the Planet out of balance, and for some reason we think we're going to fix things by doing even more. The less active and industrious human beings are, the less they obsess over money and work, the less taxing we are on the Planet.

IMO this is technically true in a totally uninteresting way.

People aren't going to stop doing stuff. That's just fairly obviously not really on the table, despite the minority of people who are into ideas of going back to some pre-modern agrarian societal model.

So, how do we let people continue to do stuff without totally messing up the planet? That's the crucial question humanity is interested in solving (or, maybe more accurately, needs to solve).

I mean we could do less.

COVID showed that (a lot of us ) really don't need to be commuting and flying all that much. It's tragic that 'society' wasted a perfectly good pandemic by not learning any of the things it showed us.

If anything I was more surprised at the lack of impact. Emissions only fell by around 6.4%

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3

> COVID showed that (a lot of us ) really don't need to be commuting and flying all that much. It's tragic that 'society' wasted a perfectly good pandemic by not learning any of the things it showed us.

I'm flying a lot more post Covid. It showed me how precious travel and meeting people face to face and experiencing new cultures is. Based on current air travel statistics, I'm not alone.

This seems to be the standard response, I've certainly heard it before, but all I'm suggesting is doing less. I'm not a luddite, I'm not arguing for a "pre-modern agrarian societal model", I'm arguing for a post-modern agrarian society that balances technology, industry and the ecosystem.

We consume enormously more than we need, and far more than the Planet can handle. I feel like the one of the few sane people when I'm saying it's imperative that we lower our consumption right now.

Funny enough you are falling into a similar situation as item 5 from that list. You are "pushing a view that has absolutely no advantage to anyone". You feel like one of the few sane people because you are of course technically right. However no one will listen to you because "even if that’s true, there’s no profit in thinking about it" as it is currently impossible from a societal standpoint. There is no way to get a critical mass of people to return to an agrarian society until they have no other real choice because collectively modern consumption makes our individual lives more enjoyable. That is why reducing emissions is expensive and painful because the cheap and easy answer of just not consuming isn't feasible.

Some part of modern consumption however is not really making lives any more enjoyable at all, for instance all the low quality clothes and items sold in large quantities to fill some internal void for people for a short while.

If there was for instance a carbon tax on the raw materials and transport then I’m fairly sure the price difference between high quality and low quality items would become minimal so people would start buying more sensibly for the planet because our systems would make it more sensible for them individually.

>to fill some internal void for people for a short while.

You just answered your own point there. It makes people happy. Maybe that feeling is fleeting, but it is still a good feeling that people will not give up voluntarily unless there are no other options.

>If there was for instance a carbon tax on the raw materials and transport then I’m fairly sure the price difference between high quality and low quality items would become minimal so people would start buying more sensibly for the planet because our systems would make it more sensible for them individually.

I don't disagree, but a carbon tax is in the expensive and painful bucket above not the cheap and easy one. It makes the low quality goods more expensive so people consume less of them. That is not people voluntarily giving up those good for the benefit of the planet.

Nah, I don't buy that. People wouldn't be "giving up" anything for the benefit of the planet by not buying a new pair of shoes every month or something. It would actually be for their own benefit to be more content.

That's kind of the whole problem, the people who would lose are the sellers and advertisers who cultivate the insecurities in discontent people for their own benefit, not the consumers.

Just to be clear, you are saying that you know what makes people happy better than people know themselves. And even if you are right, people's current behavior shows that they disagree with you on what is best. Therefore they won't voluntarily give up buying new shoes. You will have to force people to agree with you and this type of paternalistic "I know what is best for you better than you do" leadership is rather dystopian.

Also the human desire for endless consumption predates advertising as evidence by the lifestyles of much of history's royalty, aristocracy, and wealthy. People consume because it feels good.

I’m not talking about forcing anyone to do anything.

I talked about carbon taxes to make people pay the true price of their consumption so the market forces can find the right equilibrium, which they can’t when the price doesn’t include all the information.

It seems like we are talking in circles. The original debate was that there were two options for dealing with climate change. One was expensive and painful and the other was cheap and easy.

The cheap and easy one is we just all decide to voluntarily reduce consumption. That isn't feasible for the reasons listed in previous comments.

The expensive and painful one is a combination of disincentivizing consumption, offsetting carbon emission, creating carbon capture technology, etc. As I said before, a carbon tax is part of the expensive option because it obviously makes consumption more expensive.

That isn't to say a carbon tax is a bad solution. I generally support one. It is simply a recognition that a carbon tax is not the cheap and easy solution of us all simply reducing consumption. If you want a cheap solution either people need to voluntarily give up consumption or they need to be forced to give up consumption.

I agree with that. The only thing I have an objection to is that it would be so painful to give up a portion of the consumption, because some of it is truly excessive and encouraged mostly by advertising and 'influencers'. To which I don't have a solution except trying to reduce the relentless consumerism and trying to convince people they'll be much happier with stuff they can buy outright and truly own (see Right To Repair) than with stuff they have to buy on credit and don't really own anyway (see iPhones and Audible collections).

> I’m not talking about forcing anyone to do anything.

What's your plan for folks who refuse to pay the carbon tax?

Remember, Eric Garner was killed as part of enforcing NYC's cigarette tax. (He was selling "loosies".)

Most "loosies" are brand name cigarettes bought in a store (so with the tax already paid on them).

I should have written "regulatory system."

It's not legal to sell single cigarettes in NY regardless of source.

That said, the "only registered sellers are allowed" system is intended to combat cigarette smuggling/tax evasion.

>for instance all the low quality clothes and items sold in large quantities to fill some internal void for people for a short while.

For clothes, for the purchaser, have you done the math to show it isn't worthwhile? I find it's cheaper[1] to buy low quality clothes than to buy high quality ones in the long run. I'd buy shoes that would last only 6-9 months, but paying double wouldn't make them last twice as long, etc.

[1] Cheaper for the purchaser, not society.

True and I should have worded it differently. Not necessarily cheap but low quality. You can get designer stuff at high price points that are not really much better quality, just better marketed.

It’s hard to find really high quality clothes today because there just isn’t the incentive to provide them when all the crap can be sold and segmented into fashion seasons so you “have” to buy a new jacket now.

This is not just clothes of course, I’m for example very susceptible to feeling a need to buy the latest gadget because it has more RAM. I might need it someday. Maybe.

>>> I find it's cheaper[1] to buy low quality clothes than to buy high quality ones in the long run. I'd buy shoes that would last only 6-9 months, but paying double wouldn't make them last twice as long, etc.

This doesn't match my experience. I had dress shirts made-to-measure for about $50-60/each....that was 9 years ago and they are still going strong. For footwear, I mostly wear $150+ combat boots or dress boots, they all last for years and years of hard use.

>You are "pushing a view that has absolutely no advantage to anyone".

Really? I'm of the opinion that doing less, working less, and doing things like having your own garden would lead to much greater health and happiness for the average person. The only way I can see "no advantage" is when viewed through the lens of modern capitalism, then my suggestions are certainly blasphemous.

It's not they're blasphemous, it's that there's no clear way to incentivize a critical mass to change their behavior. Put another way: the destination is clear enough, but how to get there isn't. Reminds me a bit of nuclear disarmament.

Exactly, it is more the transition that is impossible rather than the end state. You can't tell people to give up international travel, visiting family members, eating non-local foods, air conditioning, and the overwhelming majority of society's leisure activities and replace it all with gardening. Maybe that is a desirable end result that would be healthier for both humanity and the planet, but there is no way to get there voluntarily. That is just asking people to give up too much.

You're ignoring his more important point that you will not be able to get the critical mass necessary to make it useful and true on a collective/societal level. Believing that you can ask people to work less, and that the lost income (and subsequently access to critical resources like food) can somehow be supplemented with a garden that many people wouldn't even have access to the space necessary to implement, betrays a lack of understanding of the economic situation of most people. How many proles rent rather than own, and how may have access to fertile ground?

I don't know how we solve for the people that get a dopamine hit from a sales transaction.

My MIL is a great example of this, she goes shopping just to go shopping and get a deal. She buys more than she could ever want or use. Christmas is especially bad, buying so many presents she has a hard time wrapping them all in time.

Consumerism embedded into the American psyche is no joke and I don't know how we change it given relentless marketing campaigns, habit, etc.

I wish we could pull back but I don't know how we do it at a large scale that people will agree to.

I think it's interesting, and here's why.

Think about this as it relates to other common problems humans face like debt or the need to lose weight.

I can put all of my energy and focus into making more money so I can get my debt under control, but that won't matter if I have really bad spending habits.

I can put all of my energy into exercising more and burning the calories I take in, but that won't matter if I'm eating more calories than I can reasonably burn in a day.

I'd argue that doing less is still doing something. It's just looking for a solution in a different place. It's focusing on the cause, instead of trying to put a band-aid on the effect.

This falls into the category of "low hanging fruit", and one of the easiest potential sources of meaningful change. Inventing new things, increasing energy efficiency, etc. are all possible optimizations, but are not guaranteed. Eating less, spending less, and burning less energy are all but guaranteed to have a positive result.

The real question of interest is now: how much are people willing to not do?

Well I’ll take a stab at this one:

Privileged folks like those on HN will not cut back much. Folks who are already being forced to cut back will continue to do so, and with massive amounts of suffering.

Really a simple solution!

This is rather pessimistic, trivializes the argument and assumes that it’s directed only at individuals.

Doing less doesn’t have to mean it’s only an individual’s responsibility. Applying this more broadly, doing less is a category of potential solutions to much bigger problems.

Relying on individuals will never move the needle very far.

This is the opposite of assuming it’s directed only at individuals. I’m saying we are already doing this, systematically, at massive scale. What it looks like is people fleeing particular regions, turned from farmer or industrial worker to… “doing less.” It looks like mass migration and failed states. This happens either because the economics cease to make sense (the sort of levers any systematic solution would have available), or ecological facts require it (the sort of solution that will be forced upon us in lieu of action).

In either case, it’s clear that the “doing less” approaches are bound to start with the people who are already doing the least.

You said none of this in the prior comment.

> In either case, it’s clear that the “doing less” approaches are bound to start with the people who are already doing the least.

This is not clear, and does not logically follow anything that preceded it.

If you constrain "doing less" to a very specific and restrictive definition of who/what this means, then perhaps. But as a general approach to solving certain kinds of problems, this can take many forms:

- Policy decisions

- Social movements

- Creation of new product categories that remove prior requirements for more

And it's also not necessarily always just a "thing", but a mindset, or another lens through which to consider options for solving burning problems.

The truth is if we're going to make it work, individuals are going to have to sacrifice.

For something like spending or calories, you probably have to cut back under 20% or under 10%, and even that is hard enough on its own.

Trying to simply cut back for CO2 needs something like a 90% reduction to actually solve things. It could theoretically work but it very quickly hits diminishing returns and becomes a bad allocation of effort. Projects like actively replacing all our power plants, and making sure all cars have a minimum electric range, are much more "low hanging fruit" than trying to directly cut consumption that far.

We can divide possible strategies into four groups: those that help the ecosystem and hurt humans in the short term (like your extreme example), those that hurt the ecosystem and hurt humans in the short term (like nuclear war or Agent Orange), those that help the ecosystem and help humans in the short term (like moving from fossil fuels to solar), and those that hurt the ecosystem and help humans in the short term (like expanding the use of fossil fuels). (And of course there are many things that are on the borderline.)

You are setting up an opposition between strategy groups 1 and 4, but ignoring the existence of the other two groups. But group 3, the Bright Green group, is where all the action is!

Let's get even more pedantic!

"Save the planet" is misleading entirely: the planet isn't going anywhere. It will survive extinction events.

"Preserve nonhuman species and the current state of the environment" is where your "get rid of all the humans and their activity" proposal would fit.

But is that actually what anyone wants? The real goal for most people would be, I wager, much more like: "Preserve both human and non-human life, with 21st-century-wealthy-country-standards-of-living, and also preserve the current state of the environment."

In short: you're making "save the planet" into a very particular strawman that misrepresents what people who say it mean.

So when people say "save the planet" they also mean preserving a completely unsustainable standard of living? I disagree, but if I wanted a strawman to shoot down that's a good one.

To be clear, I meant protecting the current ecosystems and I don't believe we need to regress or eliminate the human race to do that either.

How about transforming an unsustainable standard of living into a sustainable one?

"Kill all humans" is so defeatist. So is "kill most humans and go back to being hunter/gatherers". That's not even trying. That is flipping the board because you think you're losing.

To repeat what I said already, "Obviously that's a bit extreme, but it's to illustrate that less [human] activity, not more, is what's best for the Planet."

That was why I brought it up, I wasn't suggesting that we actually kill everyone, that's unrealistic and absurd, nor did I say that we should go back to being hunter/gatherers. I suggested we do less, which means consuming less and is part of a sustainable standard of living, so I'm a little confused by your comment...

I think I ruffled some feathers by pointing out that every human being dropping dead right now would be the best possible thing to happen for the health of the biosphere. It's an ugly truth, I was hoping it would motivate people to change.

I don't think the OP is being pedantic to make a strawman, rather I think they are pointing out that the bulk of policy proposals are for the most part internalized assumptions about what is to be desired.

"Why is climate change undesirable?" is the fundamental question which is not often talked about. Is it bad because it will affect humans adversely? Is it bad because it affects non-humans adversely? Is it bad because there is some particular state the Earth should be in?

> The absolute best thing for the Planet would be for every human being to do nothing at all.

Actually the planet doesn’t give a shit either way. People have been busy changing it, and it has simply reacted. Now they are selfishly unhappy with it because it’s less congenial than it used to be for vertebrates, or specifically humans. They just want an earth that will support them in continuing to do the things they want.*

Perhaps in 30 megayears the cockroach archeologists will marvel at all the weird endoskeletal animals in the fossil record and wonder if any of them were intelligent.

* this is why I don’t like population-based arguments about the climate. If you believe the earth should be optimized for humans, how can you simultaneously say “but only for these ones?” Making people is an activity some people choose to do.

This is a bit like saying that the planet would be better off without humans. And maybe that's what you believe, I don't know. It might even be true!

But I don't care: I'm a human and I love other humans and I want humans to prosper as much as possible. Which requires activity which contributes to our shared prosperity. Ideally that prosperity would also include a nice planet to live on though. Earth is a reasonable choice.

> The absolute best thing for the Planet would be for every human being to do nothing at all.

The planet doesn't care what lives on it or if anything lives at all. There is no best for the planet outside of goals humans set for it.

> It's so odd that all our frantic doing is what's thrown the Planet out of balance

The planet has never been in balance. And even if we stop anthropogenic climate change something else will throw the planet out of balance again too.

FYI, when people are talking about helping "the Planet" they're not talking about lifeless rocks, they're talking about preserving the diversity of life on the Planet.

And by balance I mean not precipitating another extinction event. Sure, they're going to happen anyway eventually, but we probably shouldn't cause an extra one if we don't have to...

After the dinosaurs were wiped out, millions of new species evolved. So causing a climate disaster that wipes out humans scores higher on the "diversity of life" scale than keeping humans alive. Live evolves. The Planet, "Planet" here as Gaia, will survive our extinction.

Humans making it to other habitats beyond Earth will likely set off new explosions of diversity (in geological time) than another reset on Earth.

In contrast, if Earth life doesn't achieve the ability to colonize other bodies, it is doomed to have diversity of zero once the Sun expands, if a global natural disaster doesn't kill all life before then.

How do you propose to wipe out humans and leave the animals intact?

Humans might indeed cause one or more large extinction events, but there are also several known causes (and perhaps many more unknown ones we could discover) of large extinction events which seem to be unpreventable except through the actions of humans (or another intelligent and technological species). If you were to permanently halt all technological progress now, or perhaps revert to before nuclear weapons or even before the industrial revolution, you could prevent extinction events from, say, human-caused climate change, nuclear war, or Skynet. But you'd also effectively guarantee some other eventual extinction event, perhaps from an asteroid impact, a supernova, or any number of phenomena we haven't even discovered yet.

> they're talking about preserving the diversity of life on the Planet.

Do we know for sure that climate change will decrease diversity? I’d imagine making colder areas of the planet warmer would allow more life to thrive. I mean compare now to the last ice age. Surely there’s more life now.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally on board with team climate so I hope this doesn’t come across as blasphemy.

Any fast change to the global environments is going to cause more extinctions than speciations. That is loss of diversity.

Their is no minimal time for extinctions, whereas the time to speciate significantly requires hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

Having the climate change in conjunction with pouring plastic into the environment, the CO2 effects on ocean life, overfishing, destruction of wild land and life, chemicals leaking into the environment, etc - and the problem multiplies.

> FYI, when people are talking about helping "the Planet" they're not talking about lifeless rocks, they're talking about preserving the diversity of life on the Planet.

I disagree, I think this is the virtue signaling projection but most people only care about global warming because they think there's a non negligible chance they'll see real impacts _on their own quality of life_ either during their life or during the life of their direct offspring. I think there's likely plenty of individuals who truly value biodiversity but with all the evidence around us I'm pretty sure the majority doesn't actually care about saving even a non-cute mammal, much less actual diversity like thousands of species of insects or bees or whatever.

> Sure, they're going to happen anyway eventually, but we probably shouldn't cause an extra one if we don't have to...

Honestly why not?

(To be clear, I don't think we should, but I know my reasons. They're not science based, because the question "Should we care if humanity causes an extiction event?" can't have a scientific answer.)

> Honestly why not?

It can have a scientific answer if you set a scientific goal for the planet. We get to decide what the purpose of this planet is, insofar as we quite clearly control the planet and its condition in most respects.

The planet may have the potential to produce more variations of intelligent life yet, given its seeming rich potential for such in its current more docile condition.

I think it may be a worthy cause to preserve the planet in such a condition that it can continue to act as an incubator for more intelligent life for a long time to come yet (many millions of years perhaps, or as long as it can until something catastrophic happens that humans aren't primarily responsible for).

Why that specific aspect? High level intelligent life (I'm obviously not talking about elephants or dolphins here) may be extraordinarily rare in the universe, and this type of incubating planet may be extraordinarily rare (that is, far more rare than is already suspected). So the scientific goal I've chosen to set for the planet is that I'd like to see other intelligent life spring up from this planet; you can disagree with that goal, that doesn't matter, I've set the goal and may choose to pursue it at will (bio-engineering, artificial intelligence, and so on) and so may a billion other people. The scientific reason to preserve the planet in a rich condition for safely incubating intelligent life, is that I would like to see what other types of intelligent life can be created. The question is: what other / how many other types of intelligent life are possible?

All scientific answers result from a person having a subjective reason for wanting to pursue an answer (I want to because of x y z). They obviously don't just magically spring out of nowhere, the goal is set by the self-interest of the person acting on it.

You can only get a scientific answer to an "ought" or "should" if you believe that morality is objective in the universe. Otherwise, you have a hidden principle "We should do what we like best", which itself cannot be justified and must be taken as given.

FYI they're not talking about diversity of life either, they are talking about preserving their own habitat, nothing else.

> "they're talking about preserving the diversity of life on the Planet."

Something utterly worthless to humans unless humans are part of said diversity. There is no advantage to a planet full of marmosets patiently waiting for the Sun to die. We are all there is in the way of serious tool users, and quite possibly now we've drained the surface coal and oil and tin and iron, all there ever will be. There isn't time left in the world to go through another fossil fuel era, another Dinosaur era, another mammal evolution.

Edgelords and their "Humans are a cancer, everything would be better if we die out" are advocating not just human genocide but committing all known life in the Universe to end. We are currently the only known chance of anything getting off-world, ever. Any people, any machines, any bacteria, any fungus, any tardigrades, anything. We should be flinging life at Europa, Venus, Martian polar regions, asteroids, as much as we can. If life could be screaming at us to save it from being single-planetary, it would be.

I'd suggest you dig out and read a copy of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis. It's obviously all new age whackery, but the more you read about it the more sense you'll see in it. Definitely worth tracking down.

In what way is it new age whackery? In his book Novacene he describes it non-mystically; a planet with two kinds of daisy. As the planet cools, the dark petalled daisy thrives and absorbs light and radiates heat into the atmosphere. The atmosphere warms. The dark daisy doesn't do so well in warmth, the pale daisy thrives. It reflects sunlight before it can be turned to heat. The planet cools. The dark daisy blooms. The daisys adjust the planetary environment and temperature through feedback loops, not through new-age whackery or Mother Nature/deity intelligent planning.

He comments that such a thing happens on Earth and that if we were looking at Earth from outside, we would think it uninhabited because it is too close to the Sun to be in the Goldilocks Zone and appears too hot, radiating too much heat - but it's the radiating of all that heat which is what keeps Earth cool enough for life.

(And that it's the feedback systems which are old, inflexible and stretching past their limits which is going to cause life problems with overheating).

I was assuming the poster I was responding to would be sceptical of the idea, so I was saying 'you'll not agree with this, but as you read more and think it through it'll make more and more sense'.

It didn't come across very well, and i'm certainly not suggesting the idea has no merit, which is why I raised it in the first place!

If by:

> do nothing at all. Stop driving, stop working, stop eating entirely, and then things will quickly recover.

you mean: let humans go extinct. Then yes, that would work. It has the elegance of Multivac’s answer to Asimov’s “The last question”

“And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.”

The practical issue for me is: how to do less and still feel like I’m a member of a functional group of people? Doing less is easy. Being part of a group of people that do little is doable. But I’ve yet to find such a group that isn’t made of crazies or depressive people.

Doing stuff and consuming resources and spending is a religion. We don’t have temples to make offerings. Our entire cultural environment is dedicated to the symbolic activity of producing and sacrificing. Taking part in it is a requirement to be recognized as a legitimate member of society. Problems that are seen as legit are all related to this religious endeavour.

> Stop driving, stop working, stop eating entirely, and then things will quickly recover. Obviously that's a bit extreme, but it's to illustrate that less activity, not more, is what's best for the Planet.

How do I get the food without a currency I earn at work?

Will I be given perpetually free stuff from some benevolent government? I believe I've heard that pitch before and it hasn't ever worked and never will.

This is a nonstarter and completely disregards just how the world actually works.

>Stop driving, stop working, stop eating entirely, and then things will quickly recover.

... after "stop eating", stop breathing will soon follow. Why don't you go first? Why haven't you gone first already? Is it because humans just don't work like that? At all?

I mean, thanks. Your argument demonstrates precisely why "make less CO2" will never work: You believe it, and yet even you are still breathing.

(please don't stop breathing. i don't think your suggestion is serious, so neither is mine).

Haha this is nice, really a question of how much we live in excess and if do we really have enough for everybody in a sustainable manner

Are you trying to say that it’s NOT expensive or painful to just lay down and die en masse?

If your ideal world is for humanity to be exterminated, I'm afraid we are mortal enemies.

If it's not, you need to express yourself clearer.

There is a perverse, stable equilibrium. When traffic becomes better, its much more convenient to drive. When flights are cheaper because demand is lower, more people can and will travel. When the price of beef declines because some people stop consuming, others will buy more. I don't believe there is any way to fix our problems by doing less.

I would really appreciate it if someone could help me understand what the last few sentences of it meant, it kind of flew over my head:

"So I guess this is kind of an argument in favor of humility, or against open-mindedness. If you have high openness to experience (and if you read this without a gun to your head, you probably do) you might wonder why so many people have low openness. Maybe this is part of why."

What is "this is part of why" referring to, the entire article? I just don't really see how any of it would lead people to be less open minded

People might be less open to questioning certain things, because those things work well for them, and they work well because they aren't questioned. There is an adverse selection for questioning them.

For example, let's say everyone in your society has an arranged marriage. The marriages produce children who then get arranged marriages themselves. This keeps the society going by providing a steady supply of new people. If someone starts to question it, they don't get an arranged marriage, and don't have any children. The questioner does not get promulgated.

(Note this is not an argument for or against arranged marriage. There are obviously many ways to arrange society and raise children.)

A big part of "the normal way" things are done is related to subtle (and by-design, unspoken) social reasons.

If you are open-minded, you're open to considering that the normal ways things are done might not be the best way -- which it is not along all axes, but it does incur some advantages for reasons that must remain unspoken for the advantages to be incurred.

This has two potentially bad consequences: (1) you might come to miss the advantages provided, and (2) you might erode the effectiveness of the deceitful mechanism.

An easy example is open relationships. They're difficult to navigate and often end in drama. (Personal opinion: they're awesome but require a ton of emotional maturity, and some time, to make work.) The lie here is that romantic commitment is a sacred value -- in reality it's a way to bind yourself to avoid the instability and hurt that can easily result from open relationships.

If you're not able to handle open relationships, your open-mindedness will have hurt you. And if you want to return to monogamy, your lack of belief in romantic commitment might be an impediment too.

People get burned by their open-mindedness a few times, or see examples of people getting burned around them, and they shut that part down.

It's the essence of conservatism: a belief that it's easier to break something that works than to improve things. (Forget politics, you can just think about this at the personal level.)

I'm fairly certain that not all marriages are based on fear of the potential pain of open relationships. Sure, some folks may be motivated along the lines you speak of, but there's plenty of us who got deep into it because we value the depth that comes from that one forever-friendship that is intimate on a level that can't be experience with the guys from the bar.

So, yeah, careful about painting with too broad a brush there.

> I'm fairly certain that not all marriages are based on fear of the potential pain of open relationships

I don't think that's what the parent comment was saying. I read it as "being too open-minded can backfire on you, and here's an example of how," and not as "people only get married because they're afraid of open relationships," which is how I read your sentence.

On the other hand, you assert that you "got deep into it because [you] value the depth that comes from that one forever-friendship that is intimate on a level that can't be experience[d] with the guys from the bar."

But can't you have that relationship _without_ marriage?

And so in that case, why marriage at all?

And the obvious answer to that is that now we're back to OP's example of the unspoken plan to get married to bind the other more tightly to you, with the side effect (or perhaps main effect) of making separation painful and difficult, thereby increasing the chances of both of you staying in that forever-relationship.

In other words, you don't _need_ to get married to have an intense forever-relationship with someone, but if you want safety and security and the knowledge that they won't (can't?) leave you, then you get married for all the reasons in OP's blog post.

I endorse this message!

Marriages are based on agricultural tribal societies finding it more efficient to not have males compete for females too hard.

I think you can find beauty / intrinsic meaning in marriage, and that it can be done for other reasons than forced commitment.

But I'm not trying to explain why you (or anybody else in particular) committed to a single person romantically. I'm trying to explain why it's popular in general.

Imagine we could reset social norms around monogamy. Maybe you would still be monogamous for other reasons. I suspect many monogamous people, without the normative baggage, would go polygamous -- i.e. they don't consider monogamy to be intrinsically superior/good the way you do. I also suspect that over time the norm towards monogamy would creep back in for purely pragmatic reasons.

> careful about painting with too broad a brush there.

Which is precisely what every single "plan" from the article does.

I don't think monogamous relationships have something to do with them being sacred and more with partners that have incentives and expectations for their emotional involvement. I believe open relationships are the opposite of maturity and lack commitment and of admittance to yourself and your own needs. But I have no experience here, it just seems silly to me that if two people are unhappy to pull even more people into it.

To equate open mindedness with your preference in relationships or sexual ambitions is quite reductive. Might have been different just 30-40 years ago, but today it seems to be more controversial to say that you do not want to see displays of sexuality everywhere or that you look for classic relationships. There are also almost no expectation of society towards any forms in relationships. I could not name you a single one aside from some tax laws.

Your definition of conservatism is turned around in my opinion.

I knew this was going to turn into a debate on polyamori lol. I'm not going to answer your comments, but it suffices to say you probably don't suffer from your open-mindedness :)

(Agreement or disagreement on open relationships being immaterial to open-mindedness. The open-minded attitude is to consider what might make a stance true. Instead, to preserve your priors on open relationships, you're forced to assume a bunch of things, such that I am lying, and that I am unhappy, etc...)

Your comment about the social zeitgiest is interesting. Where I live (in western Europe) open relationships are quite unpopular (despite being more popular than they've ever been). I actually expect the same to be true in the US, outside of some affluent circles (if we're talking about in-the-flesh relationships).

How would you define conservatism?

(I don't consider my definition as negative btw. I have a conservative mindset on quite a few things where I think improvement is hard, or we're stuck in a local optimum and the cost of getting out would be currently unbearable.)

You described conservatism as moving on and breaking things, that seems to be turned on its head. I would think it is more about gradual changes instead.

Open relationships is a fun topic to discuss, especially on the internet.

For many such relationships are out of the question, perhaps due to insecurities and not being aware of their self-worth or for other reasons. Personally I don't think I want to be engaged romantically with more than one person at a time. Why? Because I do would get jealous and I likewise want to commit myself to someone. For myself and my partner. I also don't really feel a desire to romantically engage others.

But those that advertise open relationships it often comes with some patterns. For once that is mentioning the required emotional maturity and attributing it to participants. That is interesting because I perceive this as fishing for confirmation for personal choices. But perhaps my skepticism has the same motivation. But where do you think you need maturity? I assume it means to accept compromises? Where is that needed in such a relationship?

> You described conservatism as moving on and breaking things, that seems to be turned on its head. I would think it is more about gradual changes instead.

No you've got that backwards. I wrote "conservatism thinks it's easier to break things than to improve them". If you think a change is more likely to break things than to have a positive impact, you don't do the change. Hence, conservatism.

As for the rest, I'm not especially keen on debating or even discussing open relationships. I'll humor you for a sec, but won't reply further:

Of course everyone says it requires maturity, because it does. It's so obvious, I agree it's not a very interesting point to make, but I think the point is to acknowledge that open relationships often fail, and are not for everyone.

> That is interesting because I perceive this as fishing for confirmation for personal choices.

Man I was making an example in answer to a question lmao.

> But where do you think you need maturity? I assume it means to accept compromises? Where is that needed in such a relationship?

Jealousy is a naturally-occuring feeling. And it's quite natural to have some insecurities too. The maturity part is the ability to acknowledge them (first and foremost, to yourself), and to be open and talk about them, in a very open way, i.e. not loaded with assumptions and what the other person thinks/wants/feels.

This is part of why - it’s no good for society for too many people to question some of its fundamental precepts

"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far." - Lovecraft

Why does it take me something like one paragraph to recognize that someone is from the Lesswrong sphere? (I was myself a part of the community at one point, before it became a cult)

Before clicking the article I read your comment and guessed that the article might start with a lazily-technicalizing analogy, like "So what does shame feel like? Well, imagine you have two beehives, named A and B, with hive A having A_n bees..." and it more or less does. I say its lazy because when you write there's work in translating your mind-pictures into prose but the lesswrongs are content to describe the sketch. It's like reading someone's pre-verbalized verbal reasoning "So the hmph goes on the blah which is nnh so it's ok".

Because rationalists gonna rationalize. They like deep-sounding stories that justify the things they are emotionally invested in.

You know that your vote doesn't matter in large-scale elections. Being a busy person, you don't go out of your way to vote. When discussing an election with a friend, you mention you didn't vote. Your friend and others in the group socially ostracize you. You don't understand why, but after a few times you just say that you voted. In all future elections, you leave work early and indicate to your friends that you voted. You know your vote doesn't matter, but you also know expressing that sentiment has no benefit. You secretly wonder if the pressure to vote is a social norm engineered by one side. After some time, you hear a new friend indicate they did not vote. You publicly scorn them, for the social benefits.

Does your vote not matter? I agree in most cases your vote won't change the result.

But, it does act as a signal. Also, not voting puts you in the group of people politicians don't need to care about.

Nice job author :-)

> You secretly guess that the group is sustained by a minority of true believers who make up critical mass for a larger group of people you, but you never talk about this and neither does anyone else. When you have kids, you feel weird about explaining your thoughts about all this to them, but you don’t parrot back what the religion says when you’re talking about the meaning of life either.

Bahaha. Maybe author doesn't know that these people (like them) make up the outer candy coating to many a cult. They aren't super committed, but they can't really rule out the core truth possibilities. So they stick around, and their don't-push, don't-pull style kind of encourages others to stay in a loose orbit like themselves. (To outsiders they are definitely cultists; to core insiders they are seen as weak; I've been in cult leadership)

To me, here's a, maybe _the_ big issue with people in this profile: They believe in being open-minded and actively avoid being closed minded. So they end up with this kind of question of vacillation on their hands. But IMO their problem is not best framed as avoidance of closed mindedness, it's better framed as a problem in developing and testing new, fresh alternatives. So they end up stuck in a troubling, secret dichotomy like that. Stay OR go...A OR B. There is no C, no D, and no, they don't really think about, or plan for that issue often enough. So many times the best options are found down in C-Z territory.

Just my experience. Thoughtful post, I enjoyed it.

I've been in cult leadership

That sounds interesting. How'd that happen? Is the experience something you're able to talk about, and if so how would you rate it?

> I've been in cult leadership

Um, wow. Do you want to talk about that, or have you written about it elsewhere? No shade if you don't, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested.

This could just be managing an Apple store.

I would share more but for now it goes very deep, I was raised in a religious fundamentalist family and trained to be in leadership from childhood.

There are soooo many stories and lessons that I'm probably going to have to start putting them in one place so I can link people. Wish I had time to go into it more here.

Very understandable. :)

If you're out on a trail, where your environment is the trail, and your compadres are your compadres, sure talk to them. You have shared goals, your adversity comes from the non-sentient or sub-human sentient environment. Truth is clarity, clarity is action, action is goal.

But then you're not out on a trail, your environment is other people, and your compadres are transient. You need to have a public face, a policy for your sentient environment. And you want to save the truth and clarity for when you have a thing to do with someone that shares your goals. Obfuscation leads to non-interference, leads to less adversity, smoother action, closer goal.

There are many levels and gradations to this. Push it too hard for the situation at hand, and you get confusion that leads to demoralization, and mass hysteria that drives harmful public policy.

First we farm the land, then we domesticate the animals, then we govern the people. The toolkit is the same toolkit.

At any given time some people are your land, some are your animals, and some are your compadres or adversaries. You don't owe any truth to your enemy, nor your sentient environment.

This is indeed very difficult if you're high in openness, but that's how it was before you got here and it keeps on rolling like that. There was no reason it should change, so it didn't.

It's not like deception came into disuse at any point. Lying is what it is, human. Part of the way communities work, and social dynamics develop.

What was the point of the article? Acceptance?

That's an individual thing. A situational thing. You shouldn't just roll with deception, but you should expect it everywhere.

This reminded me of today's Dilbert strip: https://dilbert.com/strip/2021-12-14

I had no idea there were still Dilbert strips. What!?

The real fun is talking about other peoples' plans they aren't supposed to talk about. That's the best part about the internet -- there aren't any real consequences for doing so.

This part sort of looks like a real life SCP-style [0] anti-meme:

Even more interesting are plans that work best if you yourself don’t understand them. For these, your best hope is that you inherit a culture that’s figured them out for you (and also forgotten about the reasons for you) so you can get the benefits just by going with the flow.

[0] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

Regarding number 3, I should probably be in the same place since I hang around here and have had a bit of both biology and astronomy and astrophysics in school, except 2 things:

- Besides it being massively useful[1] I've experienced too many weird coincidences now. So many that I cannot in good faith say I think it is just placebo or just survivorship bias.

- Recently I have also realized that if I were to leave my religion and believe in Big Bang as the sole explanation that would also be a belief. Just because it is now as common as Catholicism once was doesn't mean it isn't also a set of more or less fundamentally unprovable beliefs.

Do I recommend it to others?

Well. I don't recommend hasting into something. Definitely not letting others use it to assume power of your life.

But if anyone experience the same as I did, that life just doesn't work, yes, my life has massively improved, and if you wonder how to start, ask the $deity of your tradition in private and say you are seriously interested. If that doesn't work try mine (I just asked "God" in the language of my childhood.)

[1]: A framework for delaying gratification is massively useful. Also I married someone with a long history of the same belief and there are so many problems I don't have to worry about.

I hope noone _believes_ in Big Bang. It's a hypothesis about the origins of the visible universe with a lot of observational data to support it. Nothing more. It creates just as many questions as it answers, and it's as useful for an explanation on our greatest existential questions as the hypothesis that we live on a spherical body suspended by gravity in vacuum and not on a flat disk supported by four giant turtles.

Exactly.

And if anyone goes back and checks my comments they will not find any comments denying Big Bang, in fact I can comment fine on both evolution and big bang, my religion doesn't quite care exactly how the world was created and after all "all models are wrong, but some are useful".

What I meant is that a number of people will believe Big Bang as a form of magical creation story that somehow proofs nothing else can be true way stronger than the average Muslim or Christian around here it seems.

Regarding plan 1, the prenup is the most romantic idea of all. Why? Because you stay together not out of fear, but out of love. Sadly, there are limits to what prenups can do (they can't apply to time-sharing the children, in most states). Note that not getting married is not enough; common law marriage applies if you live together long enough.

As for the rest, it's disturbing and I don't want to think about it. So I won't.

I agree. I don't understand how people could want to be with someone who's only there because of ulterior reasons to love: public embarrassment, finances, messy legal proceedings. In a relationship, you are purely there because you want to be with another person. I get that a marriage adds stability, but it's because it makes extends a relationship into situations that only exist because of other reasons.

this is the best explanation I've even seen for a positive aspect to secrecy.

yet I still distrust secretive practices on principle, because evil deeds require secrecy 99% of the time

transparency is a deflection and most of the implementation is based on lies

many forms of good deeds also rely on secrecy

> transparency is a deflection and most of the implementation is based on lies

transparency(openness)-opacity(secrecy) are not the same as honesty-deceit.

all language-based 'explanations' can be argued to be lies by nitpicking with increasing precision.

For example, consider whether the circle constant PI is equal to 3?

well yes it is but in fact it's 3.1

well yes but it's actually 3.14159... and so on

in any case, this article is playing around the distinction between transparent and honest and opaque or secret and deceitful. the difference can be very blurry

> You consider telling everyone “OK, here are some promises that we’ve designed to maximize how embarrassing it would be for us to break up”, but decide it’s better not to make that explicit.

I didn't understand this sentence. Anyone care to clarify please? (E.g., what would be an example of a promise that would be embarrassing?)

Thanks.

It's talking about wedding vows during a marriage ceremony where the couple says in front of many people about how much they will do for the other person "for better or worse, in sickness and health", "til death do us part." If you divorce, it's embarrassing because you betrayed all those public exclamations.

But such vows ("till death do us part", etc.) are commonly said explicitly.

The article says: "You consider telling everyone... but decide it’s better not to make that explicit."

I'm asking for examples of something people "consider telling everyone" but decide it's "better not to make that explicit."

It's not explicitly said that the reasons for the public devotional is to dissuade the couple from an embarrassing betrayal of those public vows. To the author, being explicit would mean saying "and we say all this so we'd be more wary of breaking up, given we just told all of you how much we're going to stick by each other."

I'm on the side of honesty here despite the argument for secrecy, but I want to note your argument can be firmed up interestingly.

You say "evil deeds require secrecy 99% of the time" which means that P(need_secrecy | evil) = 0.99

However, you are saying you don't like secrecy because of this, which means you are accessing a different fact, P(evil | needs_secrecy)

This is one of my favorite examples of flawed reasoning of all time because it is almost entirely hidden until you formalize things in one of a few ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor's_fallacy

Comment note: P(A|B) = P(A&B)/P(B) is the "conditional probability" and is read "Probability of A given B".

Neal Stephenson's latest novel Termination Shock, is largely related to point number two -- Geoengineering the atmosphere using sulfur filled bullets fired from really big guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)

Does that cause a problem with acid rain?

According the (fictional) Texan billionaire who is championing the project -- not if you can launch it high enough.

I was skimming through a translation of Seneca, and one of the dialogs starts out with an agreement amongst the participants, to the effect of: "Of course we believe in the stuff that the philosophers believe (about death, the afterlife, etc.), not the stuff that the people believe."

Is is possible to have some kind of vote, how many actually agree with his unsaid plans.

For me,2 captures why I don’t join a church. It seems hypocritical. One day I will ask who really believes the tenants of the church and what is the churches stance on being a member without believing them.

I didn't understand the premise or point this article was making. I have some college level credits in philosophy. Maybe it has been too long.

I'm not any sort of expert, but the topics TFA article covers are many that weigh upon my mind, and quite frankly, the author comes across as smug and egotistical, ironically the traits he seems to rail against in the "edgelord" section.

For one thing, there is a lot of begging the question going on in most of these "plans that shall not be named", with a side order of heavy cultural colorings the author does not even appear to realize they operate under.

Is there anyone married here that use jewellery, signed contracts with the state and threw a big wedding party as a strategy to be very embarrassing and costly to you, the couple, to break up?

Or "joined a religion" at the age of 30 for that purpose.

There's so much here to argue. I disagree with the fundamental idea that there are good reasons to not talk with the intent to let misconceptions and delusions thrive in a society. Society and the progress of humankind hugely benefits from increased knowledge and understanding of facts acquired through scientific method.

I think Richard Dawkins makes a convincing argument on this with his book "The God delusion" in regards to the article's "dilemma number 3".

Nice philosophical expressions here, but I'll give you two, short takes.

My wife and I happily lived together before marriage, and discovered that there are a number of legal advantages to just getting a civil marriage that are doable with a bunch of paperwork, but largely untested in court. I won't go into the details, but it particularly convoluted if you want to have children. The legal issues are an exercise left to the reader. Hint: They all hinge on whether you want your significant other at the helm if something bad happens to you, or your family. If your answer there is "my family" you have other issues to think about.

I was born and raised on a family that went to church. As was my wife. I grew up with a bunch of doubts that only increased. Same with my wife. We are atheists now, and have been for some time. We raised our kids as atheists. We don't feel any shame in that, even though some people think we should. My kids are completely comfortable in that as young adults. We talked about it regularly as they grew up, we didn't want to be quite about it.

There, I just talked about it. And not for the first time. And likely not for the last.

This is like abstract art for the overly analytical mind.

> Force everyone to solve the problem entirely by reducing CO2 emissions.

I know it's not the point of the post but that's not the only other option. We can also keep CO2 emissions high, or even increase them. We just need to recapture them later. This is already being worked on, supported mostly by companies like Stripe and Microsoft. If we just invested more into this, we wouldn't have such a rough choice.

Recycling was once proposed not because it was a viable mitigation but because companies knew it would be an effective distraction. [0]

I'm not saying recycling or carbon capture is all bad. But they should be last resorts. That's why it's reduce, then reuse yourself, then recycle if there's no alternative.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

This seems more like the hubris and false choice fallacy list. Where you keep quiet because you don’t want the criticism.

The Global Warming one was weak. The inherent contradiction in modern life is that you participate in the economy as part of "modern life".

But that is unquestionably leading to a future such that if this were coalesced to a single (rational) person and telling them they will certainly get painful, awful cancer if they do X anymore that any sane person will stop doing X.

You can't change the sheer inertia, and even if you did, there is a powerful set of people (this would be, say, the part of the brain addicted to a drug that will kill you with painful awful cancer) whose influence over society is far more powerful.

So you either become an "edgelord" and pick rational sanity but everyday life is so bad it is functionally insane, or you go along with the flow and pick rational insanity, but everyday life is a lot better and therefore really the sane choice.

As one of the church goers that genuinely believes in God and the afterlife I'm surprised and saddened to hear people attend in disbelief. It's a shame the same community can't be found amongst others that hold similar beliefs. It's sad that someone can't be true to their own beliefs.

> It's sad that someone can't be true to their own beliefs.

Have you considered how strong of a vortex it is to not sway from a close groups' (including your entire family) belief about the most important thing in the entire world?

A spouse could lose their marriage. A child could estrange from their parents and siblings. A pastor that loses faith would lose his job, marriage, and entire community.

Yeah I come from an agnostic and atheist friend and family group. Many don't want to have much to do with me anymore. I became a Christian over a decade ago. It was a big change for me. I'm in a very secular county here in NZ.

Among my atheist friends, a number of them have been quite involved with churches, for the social support, and because they thought it was good for their kids. I once dated an atheist who was appalled almost to the point of deal-breakage that I didn't want to teach my kids the Bible. She couldn't imagine where else they'd learn morals from.

Hint - that was not an atheist. (And not widely read either, because Aesop or De la Fontaine are fabulists with much more easily digestible morals for kids than the bible...)

Google "orthopraxis" for more on this. People who do all the actions, but do not have the belief.

Some people have pointed out that this article makes case for "traditionally" conservative issues and I agree. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm greatly influenced by Taleb way of summarizing knowledge in his books and how he deals with this issues, so I'll give it my take: - if something existed through out cultures, it was probably tested and it exists for a reason(1,3,4) - word used today in English might not have completely (etymological) different meaning (3) - question of progress is not a yes/no question but "at what speed" (4,6) - high value signals have "value" if there is skin in the game(1) - you don't experiment on complex systems(2) - the idiot-yet-intellectual (5) - it's the outcome that matters (6)

Society traditionally is overall a mechanism of farming slaves, so that elites don't have to work.

If you don't know the reason for something in society, it's usually that.

(You aren't going to find democratic or moral reasons for things in society, but exploitative strategies.)

So I'm guessing you don't see a connection between your comment and point 5 of the author, nor the closing paragraph at the end?

Nothing edgy about what I said. Just injecting some realism. Slavery was abolished less than 200 years ago. Jim Crow was abolished less than 100 years ago. This kind of bullshit about "society has reasons" cannot ever play in black communities because they have living memory of these historical experiences.

Most of these seem to imply you don't remember the plan while still following it, so in a sense, you don't have a good reason not to talk about them, since you actually wouldn't know what to talk about.

That means the only thing I take from this is that you get really good followers by indoctrination which is a combination of leading by example, shaming/rewarding people at a social level, and possibly force or power, and that requires you to be sleazy about it, by never divulging the real motives to others. Maybe you can get yourself to believe in it as well to a point and forget, but that seems less likely to me, most likely you just got others indoctrinated to follow your plan without knowing the real reasons why, which eventually get forgotten to history.

Hobo-Dyer? That's clearly inferior to either the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection or it's oblique aspect, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyou_hemisphere-in-a-square_p... .

The author is not making these arguments. Look:

> This might be a bad plan [...] But I emphasize that I know nothing and I’m just parroting the opinions of others.

If you're posting about how these plans aren't accurate, you've missed the point. The author is making a broader observation, that you can conceive of plans that actually benefit from secrecy, and lead to all sorts of interesting human behavior. The particulars are irrelevant, it's about how the parts fit together.

Number 5 is the 'He who smelt it, dealt it' world view.

Is this supposed to be laced with opinion & personal philosophy? If so fine, but if it's meant to be objective then it fails quite badly & quite obviously.

This is all a pretty good argument in favor of conservatism, especially the last bit. There are plenty of cultural practices that preserve or promote something valuable in society, and maybe we don't even know why they work. But they do.

Kind of like NNs...sure, maybe if you spent enough time, you could figure out exactly how each one is doing what it's doing. Or, you could accept the general principles and enjoy the results.

This reminds me of rhetoric used in politics on many levels.

The relevant concept here is what’s called “common knowledge.”

Systems behave differently is everyone knows that everyone knows that… (repeat ad infinitum)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge

man that was painful to read

Can you expand on that? There were definitely some parts I didn't understand or agree with, but the main idea seemed interesting.

In some cases it tried to make observations in an objective or granular way, while at the same time mixing in sweeping generalizations and hand waving,

> You’re in love.

> Critically, you get everyone to agree that it’s gauche to discuss the strategic logic of all this.

I'm thinking no. Lots of people talk about the expense of marriage. Some go so far as to say "it's just a piece of paper". Everyone doesn't agree there is strategic loss or that "you're in love" is a singular recognizable concept to justifies anything in particular.

Nobody talks about this except every atheist from high school forward. Rather than have a nuanced or an informed insightful analysis we get these short statements that both seemed lazy and misrepresenting a supposed underlying zeitgeist.

etc

It's like reading an antivax manifesto.

I got something different out of both of your examples.

Its not that many people talk about the expense of marriage, its that people would invalidate the people who talk about the financial intertwining and folly of marriage as both a cultural institution or contract.

Just like you pointed out that only people in the religion of anti-religion are the ones who talk ad nauseum about it, instead of just being non-religious people.

To me, this reads like smugness and egotism. The author clearly passes off his personal opinions as detached explanations and "neutral" contextualizations, while writing in a way that places him above the rest of the human population, as if he were looking through a lens over the anthill.

Sometimes I like to collect some of my online comments into documents so I have a reference the next time I need to repeat myself. This article reads the same way. The difference is that I wouldn't publish them in an article, because online comments rarely do an issue justice.

My first thought was that these were the personal thoughts of a stranger whose values I do not share and who does not do a good job of sharing or explaining those values.

I don't know who the author is, I tried to find out but I couldn't find anything interesting. On the other hand, I did find the Reddit and Twitter links in the header of the site.

It turns out that indeed, most of his tweets are of identical quality. In fact, each of the points in this article was posted as a thread on Twitter.

Looking closer at their Twitter, it seems that the author of this article just read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons and decided to write his own version, using the same format. However, his version lacks depth and is too transparent about his own beliefs and not exploratory enough. I believe that this format should be used to challenge the writer and thus the reader. It should not be about finding stories to explain your deeply held moral principles.

I honestly wonder why this content has received so much attention on HN. Linking to the Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons on says, archive.org, would have generated a much better conversation.

I felt nothing, except intrigued.

Who is the author? I read the About page but it offered few details, just links to some articles. It’s fair enough to say that the work should stand alone, but it’s also fair enough to apply Sturgeon’s Law when encountering a new blog.

Conservatism: the article.

Kinda shit, tbh. Philosophical suicide and just so stories. Disgusting.

Can someone explain why marriage works better if the parties don't talk about the game theory aspect? I don't understand why that would change anything.

Based on the tone of the marriage section of the article, I suspect that the author thinks that marriage is silly and that people do it only out of willful ignorance.

It's very clever. But if you think Mao was some benevolent genius modernizing his people with a sly trick, you need to read more history.

If you have a big plan, you don't need to say it aloud to different people. Do it in silence and let your action speak for it.

This article is a sad way to look at the world

Executing strategy #5, I see.

No, it’s empathy. There is something human about our irrationality. Rising above that, we lose a bit of that magic that makes us unique.

That's neither true (humans are less irrational than chimps) nor inspiring (screwing up and letting people die is bad, not good)

The ways we are irrational is a difference in kind to a chimp

Neat article. I don’t understand what he’s saying for number 4 though.

Like discovering the ancient concept of 'Public Communications' by accidental recourse of self aware rhetoric.

Every single thing we do, if the public were to have access to the raw facts, it would cause 'outrage'. The entirely of leadership is putting the difficult facts into the difficult context and making the trade offs.

We 'don't talk about' the fact that we don't give medical aid to COVID patients past a certain point because we have to put a dollar figure on it (i.e. triage), similarly the fact we have $1200 'solutions' to COVID that could probably wipe it out without vaccines if we could get everyone the tech, but we can't 'afford' it, or that masks do not protect you like wearing a gas mask through a chlorine cloud, rather, they're minimally protective but nevertheless we believe 'do make difference' and we want people to wear them, so we don't talk about it in detail, rather, just suggest or require them as policy in some locales.

Because people make decisions based on the emotive strength of the rhetorician, the magnitude of impressions, emotions, group consensus, 'opposition', politics, their instinct for the validity of the source ... and not conscientious and dispassionate civic reasoning ... we worry about what is said on 'mass media'. People will do largely what their favourite 'talking head' say to do ... so we have to be careful about what 'talking heads' say, at least in some situations.

I think Covid handling is an example where the public has extensive access to the raw facts; it's quite surprising just how much data is available to the public. I can get time series of covid cases, hospitalisations, vaccination rates, by area and by age... It's really surprising how much info we have.

What I can't quite tell is whether the mental alarm bells of people with ostensibly responsible mainstream views legitimately aren't going off at all, or they too know what this whole thing is, and they just think their complicity will spare them.

We do, but at the same time, we can't contextualize it very well necessarily.

For example 'spikes' can mean all sorts of things. CFRs and test positivity rates have to be hugely contextualized.

We also have 'studies' about Ivermectin some of which are good, some of which ar flawed, that lack context i.e. 'study shows Ivermectin works! - if that's all they see, well, then they might be inclined to believe it.

And a huge amount of anecdotal data that is very misleading as well.

It's good the data is out there, but we also need sources to make sense of it.

> We 'don't talk about' the fact that we don't give medical aid to COVID patients past a certain point because we have to put a dollar figure on it (i.e. triage)

That's not how triage works.

> similarly the fact we have $1200 'solutions' to COVID that could probably wipe it out without vaccines if we could get everyone the tech, but we can't 'afford' it,

What is this mysterious cure?

> or that masks do not protect you like wearing a gas mask through a chlorine cloud, rather, they're minimally protective but nevertheless we believe 'do make difference' and we want people to wear them, so we don't talk about it in detail, rather, just suggest or require them as policy in some locales.

That's a known fact. Masks don't really protect the wearer unless it's a properly fitted N95. They reduce the aerosol emitted which reduces the chances of transmitting it to other people. They protect a group of people if most wear them by limiting transmission.

That's high school level biology.

> Masks don't really protect the wearer unless it's a properly fitted N95. They reduce the aerosol emitted which reduces the chances of transmitting it to other people. They protect a group of people if most wear them by limiting transmission.

Many people seem to respond to this with a line of thought akin to Why would I take on a minor inconvenience merely to help save the lives of other people? Surprisingly few seem to think I'd better get some N95 masks then. They've been in ready supply for months.

Wearing a properly fitted one isn't comfortable at all.

Regular masks work great if everyone is wearing them correctly.

--- "That's not how triage works."

Triage: "the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties."

Seems exactly like triage.

--- "What is this mysterious cure?"

Monoclonal Antibodies are a very effective treatment that we would use almost ubiquitously were it not for the cost.

If they were $1 and easily administered, they are in some ways as effective as vaccines, and pragmatically 'could be the first order solution'

" there was a significant reduction in COVID-related hospitalization or death of 71.3% (1.3% vs. 4.6%; p<0.0001) in the 2,400 mg group and 70.4% (1.0% vs. 3.2%) in the 1,200 mg group, as compared to placebo." [1]

70% effective, taken at onset of symptoms, is more protective than my current AZ vaccine.

But at $1200 ea. we can only use it in specialized scenarios.

FYI - 100% of 'Rich Americans' will have access to this if they contract COVID and want to take it - but only a minority of poor and middle class Americans will.

If the Media ever wanted to highlight this discrepancy, there might be a revolution, but it's not in anyone's best interest at this point, i.e. 'We Don't Talk About It'.

--- "Mask Protection Are a Known Fact"

No, it's not, in the minds of most people, and the specific facts are purposefully avoided in the interest in the simple, basic communication of: "Wear Your Mask" which is in the public interest.

My parents and everyone in my family get jitters if 'one person in vicinity' isn't wearing a proper mask, because their 'instinct' is more along the 'N95 belief'.

'One person without a mask' is along the lines of 'working in a smokey nihgtclub for a week'. While not good, it's probably not going to hurt you. If everyone worked in smoke-filled nightclubs, it wold cause harm for sure, just like if we all didn't wear masks, R0 would nudge up.

The 'Public Communication' on masks has definitely not been nuanced to the point wherein they spend time going into the details, and so the resulting 'common understanding' isn't perfectly consistent with reality.

And it gets much better:

Vaccines kill.

We knew this, and we have a better understanding of it now, but even the most 'transparent' Public Health communicators completely avoid the subject. The visceral impact of 'So and So Died from a Vaccine', even as we know that on the whole, the vaccines are effectively safe and we want people to take them, is just to much. A single anecdote of 'someone dying' is easily enough for anti-vaxxers to propagandize and misrepresent the materiality of risk.

Go ahead and try to get the 'hard data' on exactly where vaccines have materially caused death, good luck, it's hard to find. That is basically a level of 'transparency' that is basically a problem for the 'Public Good' and basically that information is actively suppressed. Maybe not 100% hidden, but absolutely suppressed i.e. 'We Don't Talk About It'

[1] https://www.idsociety.org/covid-19-real-time-learning-networ...

> Go ahead and try to get the 'hard data' on exactly where vaccines have materially caused death, good luck, it's hard to find.

The Paul Ehrlich institute for example publishes exact numbers of possibly vaccine related deaths. What more do you want? Do you want them to publish names and photos of every person that died after getting vaccinated?

Does it have data on the country in which I live, or just Germany?

But that's besides the point.

The issue is 'Communications'.

How many times has Dr. Fauci gone on TV and talked about all the people have died from vaccines? How often has even even communicated that it's lethal?

How many vignettes has CNN done on the 'terrible tragedy bestowed on the family when their child died of a vaccine?'

Zero.

Because that's a 'Truth' that the public 'Cannot Handle'.

If we focused any amount on the people dying from vaccines, even though it's rare and rationally it would not change policy ... the anti-vaxx movement would have a field day with it and it would cause harm.

Now, they're not lying, but their definitely not going to present us with all the ugly details. They're going to present us with some basic facts, and their recommended policy. If you really want to find the info on the number of dead from vaccines, you can dig, and maybe come up with something.

In a Public Emergency, this issue is even more acute.

Obviously it's a challenge and you need incredible integrity in the system, otherwise, data gets manipulated for naked political reasons (i.e. elections, not health outcome) and we pay the price in lives, which by the way I think has happened to some extent in the US.

'Data' and 'Communications' are separate things.

Public health is hard. How important is the truth if you know lying will save millions and millions of lives? Of course you can’t lie too much, or people will ignore you even when you tell the truth. What if your research on the disease model of alcoholism shows it to both be effective and a fantastical fabrication? Is it noble to publish this? Is it elitist to selectively distribute this knowledge?

As for masks— when I reviewed the research last, there were clear benefits in the case of SARS-CoV-1, especially when compared to influenza (which appears to be unaffected by surgical masks.)

So, the interesting and, perhaps, less controversial discussion is what sort of masking we would do if we were talking about a pandemic where the body of research data very strongly implied zero (or even slightly negative) effectiveness with masks for that specific contagion. And then the same scenario with a very high effectiveness. I’m not sure we would do anything different either way, and everyone would feel smugly correct while arguing based on the title of studies rather than their content.

Totally agree. It's very hard.

To your point, even with marginal data on mask usage, to the extent it doesn't interfere with Health System usage, then we probably want to get people using them even with 'limited data'.

And then how do you 'mask mandate'?

Very hard.

Aside from the people who will just 'do it because the doctors said' you need large swaths of people who are 'community minded' and who will do it out of their civic orientation, a recognition that they need to 'play along' because on the whole, it's in the interest of Public Good.

The later part is tough in an individualist society.

We don't talk about this stuff because we've lost the ability to have honest adult discussions about the cost/benefit of anything that involves not just harm, but risk of harm, let alone death.

There's a classic engineering ethics problem involving an overpass. Build a cheap overpass with a support in the median and eventually someone may die crashing into it. The odds are low and the cost of a bridge with no support is high.

Modern, western, white collar society is unable to look itself in the mirror and say "we're building the cheap bridge" for anything but the most ludicrously extreme cases.

If it wasn't Covid that made this clear it would have been something else.

It has little to do with 'Modern' 'Educated' or 'White Collar'.

'Public Communications' is more ancient than as the joke goes 'the oldest profession'.

PR is probably the oldest profession.

Even Egyptian Pharaohs were overwhelmingly concerned with their perception among the Plebes, the Nobles, and their Enemies, and almost everything they did was oriented towards that. Every group or individual in a position of power since then has that as a fundamental concern.

Imagine writing a Constitution that says 'Everyone is Created Equal' and then still having slaves, you need some serious narrative formation to keep that paradox from bubbling up. (FYI I'm not taking a postmodern view of history here, just saying the issue is real).

COVID is a gigantic example.

emphatically agreed. ssshhhhhhh...

They lost me at the dangers of ultrasonic humidifiers.

I think you misinterpreted that part. It's talking about how cults who believe in weird stuff grow, despite there being no real danger of ultrasonic humidifiers or whatever.

There is a non-zero risk of aerosolizing bacteria/mold etc if you don't maintain an ultra-sonic humidifier properly, which doesn't exist with other methods. Of course with a boiling humidifier, you've got a container of scalding hot water laying around.

The author is a part of that 'cult': - https://dynomight.net/air/ - https://dynomight.net/humidifiers/

So from context I think that the Hobo-Dyer projection and using bromine are both supposed to be superior to current common approaches, but, like ultrasonic humidifiers, normies don't accept these superior new facts even though the arguments for them are strong and flawless.

I still don't get the point of the last two paragraphs in that part.

I hadn't realized that.

If you put tap water in an ultrasonic humidifier, there actually is a level of danger created.

Here's what appears to be a fair and balanced google search result - https://www.childrenscolorado.org/conditions-and-advice/pare...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made a similar observation in 1991, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29559021

> ultrasonic and impeller (or "cool mist") humidifiers can disperse materials, such as microorganisms and minerals, from their water tanks into indoor air

You're the (US) government. You want to prevent deaths from Covid. Research keeps generally concluding that previous Covid infection natural immunity is roughly as good as vaccine induced. You realize if you message this to the public and allow equality to vax-passes, never-vax people will be incentivized to now try and get covid so they can be restriction-less without being vaxxed, further spreading covid. You decide not to message this, leaving some astute researchers perplexed.

Is anyone really surprised by this? All evidence suggests that getting the vaccine strictly increases your immunity to Covid, even if you've already had the disease.

Definitely but unfortunately minimally. In a hypothetical world of 67% vaccine induced and 80% previous infection (hard to know the actual), we would have people more fearful of being around the 80%'s than the 67%'s. If so, we have a similar noble lie situation as the Mar 2020 "masks don't work", where we are so focused on getting the 80% to 85% (and other dilemmas alluded to by my previous comment) we are damaging trust with possibly worse knock on effects.

Natural immunity might be as good (or even better) than vaccine induced, but comes with a risk of hospitalization or death. If you're cynical, this means lost tax revenue for your government.

1/6 confirmed (up to maybe 1/3 unconfirmed?) of Americans already had Covid. They aren't facing the no-immunity hospitalization or death anymore.

I keep my tax plans secret.

A) Because I paid alot for the CPAs, tax lawyers, private letter rulings and case law.

B) Actually talking about it to those struggling with taxes would result in them noticing they can't participate any more than driving to the neighboring municipality for cheaper gas tax, instead of anything more convenient, and could result in the tax laws changing from their widespread annoyance.

C) tax clickbait publishers like ProPublica won't figure it out for them for another two decades, which is long enough.

I don't talk about my side gig for the same reason.

If it was widely hyped among the people who have the capital to enter it all the money would be driven out of it.

I am very susceptible to this kind of thing. Most of my life I have read articles about most tax shelters being dodgy, watched by the IRS, and concluded all I can really do is 401k and tax loss harvesting. But now that you mention it, this feels the same way as me not realizing all the effort people to to look better on camera, because they don't really talk about it. So I end up not competing in the areas of tax avoidance, presentability, or clout, giving those who kept their plans secret an even bigger advantage.

Sadly it is a factor of exposure. There are many odd and noncompliant strategies out there, and many compliant ones.

Even if G*d didn't exist, one probably can't prove either way. So, from a risk/reward payoff, it seems believing is a higher payoff than not.

And from a purely emotionless approach, if you're a Western religion (Christian) you don't have a high bar to cross. Just believe, no deeds or acts are required.

That is a high ROI trade either way. <shrug>

[Edit: I am not endorsing a specific Western Religion, I'm giving an example. I don't know Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc enough to say what the bare minimum is]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

What if believing in one specific god pisses off the “real” god when you die and you go to hell for believing in the wrong god, while not believing in any god gets you a free pass?

If we’re making up unfalsifiable claims then this seems just as likely to happen as not.

Any enlightened G0d would know that humans minds are limited, and thus the worship of any G*d is actually meant for them. Thus no problem. [Italics are being inserted by HN]

God is not a swear word. You don't need to censor it.

If it is enlightened do you even need to be believer?

One will not know, but the downside risk is greater if you must at least believe.

You can make up arbitrary properties about the god you believe in all day. Some very mainstream beliefs include such ideas as "you have to spread your religion over others". You cannot chose which arbitrary properties you make your wager on.

>"you have to spread your religion over others". That just seems like growth hacking (to put it in startup parlance). I find it illogical that a creator would see someone with a good heart, pure intentions, and kick them off to their "hell" because they didn't "spread your religion over others".

But you find it logical that a creator with absolutely no evidence of their existence would, if existing, care or even perceive that you are "not worshipping god in general".

No. Personally, I believe a creator would be busy with the countless other universes and couldn't care mostly about people's day to day.

What I mainly suggested was the ROI of believing in a creator vs not was a high ROI, low effort return (a la Pascal's wager) - but that I also believe Pascal stopped too soon in the next logical step to heavily weight the probabilities towards a conclusion.

This idea is called Pascal's wager.

What if what G*d really wants is for people not to believe in G*d and those that do are sent to hell? How do you know the mind of G*d?

Yes it is. But taking the highest probabilistic chance, with the highest ROI, and lowest downside seems the best right? It is better than arguing what ifs, and nuances all day?

Highest probabilistic chance is that there is no afterlife.

Like when you are in deep anaesthesia during serious surgery. The one without dreams (no lights at the end of the tunnel). They switch you off and when everythings goes ok switch you on again. Your mind is in void. When you wake up it was just moment for you. Nothing in between. Whet if surgery goes bad? You think that you are going to wake up in to the death? Void is bigger card.

Or the void we all experienced. The one before you was born.

Edit: obviously I'm talking about my believes here.

Pascal's wager.

But the big flaw there is rather straightforward: which god? Is worshiping a false god better or worse than not worshiping at all?

Should one avoid eating pork in case the Jewish/Islamic god is real? Or maybe avoid eating beef in case the Hindu religions are the true ones? Or maybe the Jains have it figured out, and you should really be vegan to be safe? Perhaps the Aztecs were right, and we're way overdue on our sacrifices?

I think Pascal's wager didn't take the final logical step. A G0d knows that any worship on Earth is meant for them. It's like a symlink

Well, the god of the Christians doesn't seem to know that as there is a commandment written to not worship other gods.

Either many gods seem to have missed the memo that they are identical to all other gods of their type or your conception of religion is more about you than the religions that actually exist, and I would bet on the latter.

I would bet that humans, especially in the early times that interpreted all of the now current religious texts - were poorly educated, biased, and also human. So ... there were "additions/mis-translations/an individuals belief/better if phrased this way" type of interpretations over thousands of years.

My bet... in the grand universe scheme of things, a creator doesn't give two craps about which human created, modified, "game of telephone" religion a person follows. As long as that person attempts to be good, and improve themselves, and kind. And ask for forgiveness of mistakes.

I believe G0d is smarter than all of us, and looks past all these individual human infightings of "my football team (errr religion) is better than yours" type.

Not high bar ?

Financially there is significant amount of contribution expected to be made, in some countries like Germany the state even now would collect it on behalf of the church ( Catholic) ! I don't even know if it is possible to officially declare Catholic to the State and not pay the taxes.

Ethically joining a religion would also mean you are tacitly approving every horror that religion as an institution is committing now (like child molestation or coverups, corruption, treatment of native residents say in Canada, blatant discrimination ( is a black-gay-trans pope (or equivalent) possible ? ), or has in the past( genocides, conquests in the name of God, racism, witch hunting, anti science stances and so on).

More than half the wars in history have been in the name of religion, how would you without emotion accept all that baggage ? No rational person with a modicum of ethics can accept it, only indoctrinated faith from a early age can sustain this construct.

All of the encumbrances you listed are made by humans. You can sit in the forest with the religious book of your choice and get you all you need... and never have to talk to a soul, or participate, or give money. You listed human blockades

Belief ( or lack of ) in God is not what the article is really about.

My impression is article is largely about social constructs and intent of the way each plan/topic is written is designed to make you think on the structure of the social agreement and impact on how we operate as humans.

Religion is also a social construct, those blockades are the problem that needs discussions, personal spiritual journey and learning complex ethical topics using allegory is well personal choice and nobody else's business.

What if threatening people causes suffering on earth?

Of course it does. Every country in the world has caused grievances on itself, it's people, and others in the name of a religion. Never particular to one region, religion, or belief.

Most teach some sort of humbleness, kindness, etc. But humans still act like crappy, unintelligent, low level beings.... because we are just that, low level.

> if you're a Western religion (Christian) you don't have a high bar to cross. Just believe, no deeds or acts are required.

That is true only for some Christians. Protestants - and not sure if all of them.

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