fighterpilot

There was a miscommunication. I meant that one of the biggest differences between Democrats and Republicans is the level of tertiary education, and this gulf has been widening over the last 20 years. Scott Alexander has written on this demographic shift

That's really interesting. I would think that growing polarization specifically around education has something to do with the acceleration of conspiracy acceptance on the right that you've described.

Yes, there's a niche part of the left - the new age/hippie types, very high in openness and very low in conscientiousness - that is profoundly anti-science (or perhaps just ignorant of it). They tend to buy into woo-woo of all sorts and buy into science denialism around GMOs and synthetic pesticides. They would also never accept the tentative evidence that marijuana damages the brains of teenagers.

Can you share that hypothesis? You are obviously contributing to this thread in a balanced way and in good faith and I really want to hear it.

I know two anti-vaxxers.

One is not political at all but isn't that smart. Very nice and generous person. Bit prone to conspiracy thinking and bought into fake news on Rumble or something.

The other is very conservative and it's a team/tribe issue with him. He has a strong distrust of institutions that he thinks are run by leftists and would distrust anything they say.

Unconvincing. The author ignores the most egregious examples of cancel culture in order to argue their case. See:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow...

The left has its fair share of growing anti-science sentiment. I agree it's quite a bit worse with Republicans but it is growing in both directions, which is a concern. People pick their science a la carte as long as it confirms what they want.

- Denial of the science of sex differences

- Denial of the science of intelligence differences, the relevance of intelligence in life outcomes and how heritable it is

- Belief without evidence that black/white racial differences in outcome are completely due to racism and not partly due to a byproduct of cultural differences

- Anti-nuclear sentiment that wildly exaggerates the risks of nuclear power

- Historical revisionism (e.g 1619 project and NYT begrudgingly making stealth edits)

Is there a privacy/surveillance aspect to the argument? Or is the data that the IRS will collect the same either way?

Do private tax prep companies have an argument they advance about why automatic filing is a bad idea? Or is it just pure behind scenes lobbying?

Surprised I need to spell out what should be the obvious to an educated crowd, but intelligence is a spectrum with gradations of smart and gradations of stupid. The 90th percentile learns much faster than the 10th percentile and mixing them into the same class will handicap the 90th percentile, or leave the 10th percentile behind, or both.

Your argument is that the cost and side effects don't matter, the war on drugs must be won no matter what. You hand wave away the negative consequences (illegal immigration can be magically dealt with with better enforcement!). If that's your perspective then I can't change your mind because it's coming from a place of ideology.

  "The only people who 'state' right-leaning people's interests are left-wing publications trying to create strawmen. Perhaps listen to others instead of imagining their interests?"

What? Illegal immigration, taxes, crime and the economy are among the top issues for conservatives, and your drug war is making all of those things worse. If you think these aren't concerns for conservatives you are just wrong. Polling of conservatives establishes this clearly as does the rhetoric of leading conservatives. The economy, crime and illegal immigration were all big parts of Trump's platform.

I vote conservative for the most part. I'm just not one of those authoritarian dick head conservatives that try to control other people's lives over victimless crimes. And no, the person who smokes pot isn't a victim. Tobacco and alcohol are worse for the body than the occasional vape, so I completely reject your premise.

You're arguing that tests for intellectual ability aren't perfect, and they're therefore useless. This is a bad argument.

The only part of that which is dumb is the ill-advised label, which can easily be changed. Everything else makes sense. Borderline intellectually disabled people and Terence Tao-level prodigies should not be in the same class. That is the dumbest fucking idea ever.

It's terrible branding because it makes other parents jealous and then this happens.

This is the Handicapper General playing out in real life. Stunning to see the social consequences of seething jealousy manifest politically.

I will be a big supporter of the right to private education going forward, there needs to be a backup in case public education goes to the shitter (as it has here).

Ok, you are not a hypocrite, but I still think it's objectively bad policy from a cost-benefit standpoint, and it's bad from every political perspective. Four arguments that might move a right-leaning person:

- The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.

- The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.

- The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.

- The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.

So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests. Add to this a number of other reasons (how bad it is for the black community, how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl, how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack, how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal, how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime), and the case is clear cut to me.

Opportunity cost of tax revenue.

  "Why should everything be taxed be default?"

The opportunity cost point was the least important in that list. If you don't want to tax it, that's fine with me.

Ok but what is the tail risk here. Can you outline a series of causal steps where a molten salt reactor will cause more than 100,000 to 500,000 deaths? If you're just saying that perhaps maybe there will be 2,000 deaths, well that's still an incredible safety profile compared to the number of deaths caused by other energy sources.

Drug gangs destroying South America, tens of thousands dying due to Fentanyl-laced pills, lost tax revenue, huge taxpayer expense, petty crime used to fund overpriced drugs, are all signficiantly worse things than what you are afraid of. It's a laugh to see all these right-leaning people who pretend to be libertarians (not sure if that's you, but in general) but are actually in favor of a large state and authoritarian government intervention on topics such as drugs.

You don't need to be able to discriminate well, you just need a small non-consensus signal that may not even be perceptible to humans.

But you're right to be sceptical. Hedge funds are largely a sales job. How can you convince gullible investors to overlook the terrible performance of your sector and invest in you anyways, and then take a large slice of the profits when you get lucky? Buzzwords and neat sounding strategies help.

It's not really free when I'm paying via advertising revenue. It's just indirect payment. I don't see a fundamental difference between paying $20/year and contributing $20/year in ad revenue.

Anyway the laws I was proposing wasn't so much for free account closure, it was more for things like false search results, impersonation, account hijacking. These amount to defamation and psychological abuse and these companies are allowing it to happen without providing any human customer service fix.

We need strong consumer protection laws and a body that can issue large fines in response to violations. The stick is the only thing that's going to cause change. It is not acceptable, for example, that Google is allowed to ruin someone's life by associating their photo with a convicted rapist for weeks, and then not have a human that that person can talk to to address the issue. Such things should be punished with a large fine.

Yep got locked out of Google for no reason and it was impossible to get in touch with a human. Extremely rage-inducing. There needs to be far better consumer protection on a government level with big tech (mostly Google and Twitter/FB, not so much Amazon or Netflix or Apple). Some of this is just unacceptable. I was reading one case of a person who had their name/image associated with a convicted rapist on Google and they couldn't get hold of a human to have it fixed. This kind of thing just shouldn't be allowed and there needs to be large fines going out. The onus should not be on a small time individual to fork out tens of thousands of dollars on a lawsuit.

What did it look like before 1950?

What do economists think about this explanation?

Let's take a step back. What about molten salt reactors? I feel like it is a mistake to think future nuclear reactors have the same safety profile as old ones when thinking about tail risks.

Not all value add is compensated, that's the concept of positive externality, and it's a market failure.

If we want to get really precise, we can say that people give other people money for any number of subjective reasons, but the large majority of the time it's because the person wants something from the other party that the other party isn't willing to do without compensation. So money most of the time represents subjective value add that wouldn't otherwise have occurred without it. Cleaning services, manufacturing, specific engineering work, construction, etc.

That's why I said I could go on about why it's not perfect. I admit there's downsides, but I still view it as a great thing on net, due to the general tendency to align incentives with value provision.

In a free-market system, merit is defined by your peers. If you can add unique subjective value to them, they will give you money in return for that unique subjective value add.

That's by and large a great thing, because it means that the people getting the richest are largely the same people who are providing the most value to others, and so it aligns incentives with useful production and useful work in a decentralized way.

We can zoom into examples to understand better. Why is George Clooney so rich? Because he added a little bit of value (say, $3 worth) to the lives of millions via his acting skills, and he got a slice of all that value add.

This is not to say it's perfect, and I could go on about why it's not, but the central point is that "merit" (i.e. income/profits) is defined by one's peers opinions about your unique value add to them.

> This is basically the the same logical errer again

It's not necessarily a logical error. Extreme value theory should be the default tool for understanding tail risks (e.g. earthquake magnitude), unless we have good theoretical/logical reasons to depart from an understanding that's mostly informed by historical data.

Nuclear weapons are where I agree with your perspective. The tail risk is significantly larger than what is present in historical data, and attempts to understand this risk by looking at historical data are flawed.

Nuclear energy, like earthquake magnitude, is where I disagree with your perspective, unless you can present a coherent rationale about why nuclear power tail risk is drastically underestimated by the historical data, especially after taking into consideration modern plant designs which are safer than Chernobyl + the possibility of building them in the desert with nobody nearby.

Your point is that there is a long tail risk which exists which might not show up in the historical data. I think this is wrong because Chernobyl is that tail risk and it is already inside the data, and moreover the odds of that tail risk happening again have declined and so it's exaggerated.

A better analogy is the stock market, where the GFC and the great depression are tail risks that are already inside the data. Or data on pedestrian fatalities across an entire country, where tail risks are represented due to law of large numbers across many people.

If you think building modern reactor designs away from cities presents a bigger tail risk than Chernobyl, you're going to have to outline how that is a plausible situation rather than going for analogies.