This has nothing to do with expectations - it's an inquiry into why something is worse now, without a clear justification.
121 karma · joined November 28, 2022
> One of the frustrating aspects of arguments like this
Is people insisting on making a society-scale issue into a personal, emotional issue?
> is that proponents of "social efficiency" aren't personally impacted their proposed policies
Oh. Well funny enough, I actually do have a couple serious dietary intolerances - but I don't insist on externalizing my costs onto others against their will.
It may be alien to you, but in fact I am perfectly capable of considering policy decisions that are bad for me but good for society. Some people can't do it, I guess.
This sounds completely absurd and hyperbolic, but let's say I took it at face value - why is this an issue now and not an issue when I was in school?
Free speech "pragmatism" is essentially completely meaningless - if the belief isn't extremely hard-line, it rapidly degenerates to something that has zero moral consequence.
I'm sure you can find an article about peanut allergies at any point in recorded history where they had peanuts.
More or less. The overwhelming majority of legally mandated disability subsidies in the US are horrendously anti-utilitarian.
> It would be "socially efficient" to euthanize our elderly
This type of absurd claim is a crystal clear indicator of someone who's stuck on a zeroth-order approximation of utilitarianism and isn't factoring in any higher-order terms like people's responses to incentives.
If we started killing old people, would that result in a net decrease in pro-social behavior? Obviously.
If we stopped wasting huge quantities of marginal resources on infrastructure due to e.g. ADA requirements, would that result in a net decrease in pro-social behavior? It would not.
> We have, as a society, decided that we value human life and dignity more than any of that kind of "social efficiency"
Another common refrain of the economically illiterate - claiming to "value human life" while simultaneously working against policies that would actually improve human flourishing. It's also very generous to describe the outcome of selectorate mechanics and lobbying as "we, as a society, decided..."
No it's not, but it's a good sniff test for people who have a zeroth-order model of utilitarianism and aren't thinking about things like incentives.
> It’s increasing, for some reason.
I agree - my suspicion is that accommodating the 0.1% of kids with peanut allergies means that another 0.5% of kids (or whatever, made up fractions) never get enough exposure to peanut allergens to develop a tolerance, so the problem is self-reinforcing.
You're right in one sense - living in a low-trust society is very socially inefficient. I just don't think you have a working model of why we're becoming low-trust. It certainly has nothing to do with accommodating rare allergies.
The odds per food item consumed are higher for small food businesses that aren't as easily forced into absurd clean-room manufacturing. This analysis makes no sense.
You are not directly responsible for all of this - there is also a less tolerant culture among commenters, resulting in massively more echo-chamber-ish voting and flagging patterns, as well as a tendency to bother people off-site. I have started using nym accounts because in recent years, people have tried to harass me or my employer over posts that wouldn't have garnered any special attention whatsoever 5-10 years ago. This cultural shift is (I think) partially due to growth, but also partially due to the culture your moderation techniques encourage (intentionally or not). The culture of rigorous open discourse over novel/controversial topics has been almost completely destroyed here, in favor of a culture of facially polite business-friendly chatter (i.e. linkedin).
I think I understand the constraints you are operating under, and this outcome is a not-unreasonable compromise given those constraints, but it is not the one I would have picked. We already have linkedin for this. HN used to serve a different (and arguably more socially useful) function, and it still could, in theory.
Precisely. HN used to be a lot more about discussing novel/controversial ideas freely. That kind of discussion is ruthlessly suppressed now.
It's entirely unsurprising that people who appreciate current moderator behavior also have zero philosophical backbone.
In general, the more pointy edges you introduce to a waveform, the more high frequency artifacts you get.
This aspect of pontryagin duality (narrow in one domain means wide in the other) is also what underlies the heisenberg uncertainty principle. If you "hard clip" a photon's position (with a slit) you get a lot of frequency domain (momentum) noise, leading to a spread-out beam.
One trick for doing nonlinear waveshaping without introducing too much aliasing is to perform the wave shaping at a higher sample rate than the rest of your system and then downsampling with a low pass filter. Thankfully, the high frequency components introduced by nonlinearity tend to decrease in magnitude reasonably quickly.
How are you going to tell me that an L1 norm is equivalent to an L2 norm, for example?
These systems can generate novel content. They manifestly haven't just memorized a bunch of stuff.
It has some, but not all, to do with the people in power. The demographics of a city like NYC are such that you would have to 10x police expenditures and radically expand police powers to get property crime down to those of places like Logan.