Scott Alexander

> Japan did industrialize first, prior to WWII, and adopted some aspects of western culture afterwards.

Except for voting and human rights, Japan adopted all the things I listed before WWII. The Meiji era was full of westernization.

I don't think people realize just how insanely dysfunctional other cultures can be. Plenty of poor countries lack concepts we consider basic. Take Haiti, for example. I'll quote a couple paragraphs from a doctor who volunteered there after the earthquake[1]:

> It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable.

> Gail told the story of the time she asked a city office for some paperwork regarding Doctors Without Borders. The local official took out a drawer full of paperwork and looked through every single paper individually to see if it was the one she wanted. Then he started looking for the next drawer. After five hours, the official finally said that the paper wasn't in his office.

I…

I'm afraid that this risks sounding terribly terribly condescending and I don't want it to, but I truly intend the following to be helpful...

> that thinks too-logically about politics

There is a reason Justice Oliver Wendell Homes said "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Humans are complex and if you try to define a set of axioms (or special forms) and build up and understanding from that, it is all too easy to follow your line of thought past massively lethal flaws. In your case, there are very good reasons why we don't give the president all of the powers that are currently allocated to congress. It is very very tempting to lay out specific ones for you. Other commenters will surely do that. However, I think that would not help you learn a better way to approach thinking about human power structures and the ways that they can fail. You should start by reading (or listening to audiobooks of) more history. Read broadly, enough that you start to experience the phenomenon described here: http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html

If you want some easy-to-digest things to start with, this list of resources videos is pretty good, but has the flaw that it is all from one source:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yocja_N5s1I&list=PLBDA2E52FB1EF80C9
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E9WU9TGrec&index=1&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtMwmepBjTSG593eG7ObzO7s
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyzi9GNZFMU&index=1&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNjasccl-WajpONGX3zoY4M

For…

> If you are claiming these do not exist...

I'm not. ju-st is implying either that we don't know how to build power plant sized fission reactors, that we've never built and operated one successfully and safely for decades, or both.

All projects in the US have delays and cost overruns. I addressed this in my reply to his comment. That doesn't mean that the design and construction of the thing being constructed isn't a solved problem.

> Consider that the Fukushima plant life was extended beyond its ["advisable"] lifespan.

And yet:

> When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly. [0]

Nuclear power is less dangerous than even solar power, hydroelectric power, or wind power!

> Rooftop solar power has a per terawatt death rate ten times worse than nuclear power because of - I kid you not - people falling off roofs when installing the panel. Hydroelectric power has a worse fatality rate because of dams bursting and flooding people. Even wind power has a worse fatality per terawatt rate - seventy three people have died in windmill related accidents. [0]

[0] http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html

Ok thanks very much.

I guess one example of what I was talking about is your phrase: "your attempt to fudge the definition of "socialism"".

That's a rather inaccurate, poisonous misrepresentation of what I said and was doing, it seems to me. Yet you say it like it's the plainest fact, and maybe you believe it is. It's snarky. It's not assuming good faith. It's pure downvote material.

I was describing how it seems to me the word is used in the US nowadays. Or as I said, even more carefully, how it "seems nowadays to usually be used". I don't hear much news at all, less from the US, but a fair bit of that (before Trump anyway) has been hysteria about purported socialism, and e.g. any policy or intention Obama had that the far-right didn't like, described as such. It's laughable—at best, The Worst Argument In The World[0].

I likewise can't make any sense of how you thought I was trying to 'fudge the definition' of a word, if I understand what you meant by that. And I can't see which part of what I wrote was 'mocking', at all. The 'hahaha' at the beginning, if you were referring to that, was me laughing - I actually physically laughed like that, it was a record of that.

But I really appreciate the effort put into the rest of what you wrote, thanks.

[0]http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html

It is possible, but I wouldn't put too much confidence in conclusions I've arrived at through application of the Razor on the field I know little about.

An interesting concept to that effect is that of "epistemic learned helplessness"

http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html

Basically, if you're not an expert in some field, then for any given argument, arguments of either side can be made to sound equally convincing to you, so - unless you have time to become an expert in every domain you encounter - your best bet is to accept the general scientific consensus on the topic.

(If anything, Occam's Razor is very useful to determine who is arguing for the generic scientific consensus, and who is arguing out of political reasons, or fear driven by ignorance.)

If all you care about is the camaraderie of people who think like you, that is fine. But many people care about other things too.

For example if you believe that climate change is a conspiracy by the Chinese to weaken the American economy, then even if you can go to anti-climate change conferences and be popular among climate change denialists, you won't be very happy because you will believe that in the end the Chinese are still going to destroy your country.

You could gain some social power but lose all your structural power[1]. For the sort of people who care more about objective reality than about popularity contests, that is a bad deal.

[1] https://squid314.livejournal.com/354385.html