Jai

… And now I realise why people don't like SlateStarCodex. (I still like it.)

I'm no historian, but the stuff he wrote about Catholicism doesn't actually seem right. Argued better than I can in [0].

And some of the comments are not just atrocious, but are not argued against[1]:

> I think there are commonly-known models in all four quadrants. For example:

> a. Widely accepted and good fit for reality:
(Law of supply and demand)

• “Supply and demand” is a good first-order model for certain market dynamics, but it only explains… at a guess, ⅓ of the economics I personally interact with.

> b. Socially unacceptable and good fit for reality:
(IQ tests as a good proxy for mental ability)

• IQ tests are a reasonable proxy for certain, specific axes of mental ability within a subpopulation; the general “IQ tests are a good proxy for mental ability” claim is blatantly absurd.

> c. Widely accepted and bad fit for reality:
(Sexism as main cause of gender wage gap)

• “Sexism is not the main cause of the gender wage gap”… I'm less certain that this is wrong, but I have actually done quite a bit of research on it (including reading what Scott Alexander wrote on the topic!) and this is splitting hairs, to be charitable; I think labelling it “rhetoric” is more accurate. No, several of the systemic injustices aren't due to individual people going “aha! I know what I'm going to do today: not pay my female underlings!”, you're right! But everybody already knows this,[2] and that's not…

> ...the deeper explanation, still taboo, is the perception that the Obama administration’s handling of the 2008 crash was both corrupt and profoundly disillusioning.

Is this true? At least partially true? As in "also true".

My impression of today's average voter is a general purpose anger towards power and institutions. Are "low information" voters specifically blaming Obama, or Bush, or whomever?

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I haven't read Taibbi for a long time. It just becomes too much. Ditto Chris Hayes, Ralph Nader, Mike Malice, Mark Crispin Miller, Greg Palast, Bill Maher, and so many others.

Ya, ya, ya, we know everything's fscked.

Now please skip to the money shot: How do we fix things?

I'm fine with criticizing Obama, DC, Wall St, whomever. Power corrupts, establishment hierarchy sucks, humans are fallible.

But at some point, it'd be helpful to make suggestions, convert some of that outrage into (constructive) action.

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But two omissions continue to bug me with all these "enlightened centrist" criticisms.

First: you know, everyone else has agency too. Obama and the Clintons and the Democrats aren't operating in a vacuum.

Second: per the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, why blame the people who are trying to do some good more than the people who are actively making things worse? Few people go to work every day to do a bad job. Obama Admin made plenty of mistakes. But they also prevented a complete collapse. Overcoming a great deal of opposition to make it happen.

"The…

> As I understand it, the basic income idea is based on that realistically almost everyone at some point uses government aid or finances (directly or indirectly). basic income is just making sure that when you need to make use of that aid, you don't have to jump through hoops, requirements and paperwork.

That points at an alternative way to conceptualize a basic income: at the end of the day, it's the net transfer that matters. Ie all the money and welfare services you get from the government minus all the taxes you pay.

On average over all of society that net transfer has to be zero. (Modulo complications to do with souvereign wealth funds and government debt.)

Now, most people around the world want rich people to pay and poorer people to receive on net.

The usual way to achieve that is via means testing in both the welfare and the tax system.

Basic income can be seen as a way to simplify government bureaucracies by shifting all the means testing out of the welfare system and into the tax system.

> By giving everyone enough to live and not starve, you can do that. Without needing bureaucracy. It goes together with other great ideas like a minimum livable wage[0], pensions, public education and public healthcare.

These other things don't sound like good ideas to me. Especially outlawing poor people's jobs seems cruel and a bad case of 'Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics' to me. See https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

A related blog post calls this the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics (your ethical burden increases by interacting with the problem in any way, even positively): https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

There are also other analogies:

At work, if you touch something, you are now eternally responsible for maintaining it. Be it code or process or equipment. Changed the toner in the printer? Great, you can now do it all the time. "But you already know how to do it, it will just take a minute for you".
The best tactic at work is to be really competent in the main job and push all energy into furthering the skills and experience and recognition in that and dodging all the crap work by appearing badly suited to them. You want your colleagues to say "ah he's a good guy, really competent, but this type of work is really not his kind, he'd forget it, mess it up or something". Basically the goofy distracted professor meme. Great at focusing on his specialty we pay him for but cannot be tasked with these everyday mundane shit tasks.

On a larger scale, big tribal feuds are often among groups with small differences, like Christian denominations and wars over dogmatic debates on the details.

More people ought to read this: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/.

Google is already providing a free service to homeless people. It's not empathy to tell someone else to solve a problem that you care about. That's virtue signaling. If he cares, he should take matters into his own hands.

Is it too much to ask a single person to build a free email service for all homeless people? Perhaps, but the good news is that he doesn't have to. Google already allows you to disable 2FA [1]. He could have started a campaign to disable 2FA on homeless people's phones, but instead he uses this as an opportunity to shame Google to boost his own Twitter follower count.

I think that empathy is highly overrated. I doubt anyone notorious for flashing their big Johnson is particularly empathetic, yet LBJ expanded social services more than any other President. The problem isn't that people have too little empathy these days. It's that people are too easily impressed by broadcasting their intentions rather than actually trying to solve a problem.

[1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1064203

> This is maybe a radical argument, but I make it in good faith; if your business can only exist by paying workers at or below poverty wages, and/or enacting dehumanizing controls, it probably shouldn't exist.

The problem is that once you close the business and fire the underpaid employees, they don't disappear. Now they're unemployed and make $0/hour.

This blind spot fascinates me. The best explanation I've seen is "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics". It says that "when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it".

So in this scenario, once you've fired your employees, you are no longer connected to them, and their further destiny is not your fault.

I suspect this is a deep part of our moral instincts, and we have to be aware of it to get to a more rational approach.

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/