RichardGibbons

Yeah, I feel as if it's a bit like the "brain in a vat" scenario. It's plausible that you are just a brain in a vat, with electrical inputs supplied to brain to make you think that you actually have a body and exist in this world. There's no reason to be completely confident that you aren't just a brain in a vat being fed stimuli. But, on a practical level, you're likely to have better outcomes (i.e. a happier brain) if you use the heuristic that you aren't just a brain in a vat, but rather act as if you were a brain in a body roaming about on a giant spinning sphere. Similarly, I think you're likely to have better results investing if you have some concept of "intrinsic value", even if you know that the word "intrinsic" doesn't actually exist with the 100% confidence that seems to be implicit in the word "intrinsic".

And by induction, anything created by commodities is also a commodity and therefore speculative. And any business that relies on selling something speculative is also speculative because it could disappear in an instant if the speculative value of its output falls to zero. Therefore everything in the human universe is speculative and nothing in existence has intrinsic value. Including bitcoin. And the USD dollar. There, ValueArb. To help you out, I've proven exactly what you've been stretching toward. The key, I think, is to start with the premise that commodities that people use and are willing to expend both resources and human effort to acquire don't have intrinsic value.

This is actually quite a pragmatic response. So at least we know ErnieBot is pragmatic, even if Xi isn't....

That makes me wonder if the best thing for the world would be the Ukrainian war lasting for a decade. Horrible for Ukraine, but if nations began to believe that any war is likely to last many years, consuming many lives and resources, I think there would be fewer wars.

Wow, thanks Viking!

Do you happen to have a source for this? (Not because I doubt it, but rather because I'm curious about the underlying math.)

I agree that equality is awful. Much, much worse than the situation we have now. It's very clear and obvious that you have to maintain incentives or everything breaks. a) I think reducing immigration is sensible, but stopping immigration completely is not good. I think immigrants are self-selecting to be much more likely to be hard-working, ambitious, and entrepreneurial than the average citizen. So, I think it makes sense to let in the immigrants with needed high-value skills, and block the others. Then you don't have the immigrants competing with the poor for resources and jobs, and but still get people that add more value than the average American. (Though this would likely be mildly inflationary.) b) Works for me. c) I agree with your analysis of the current situation, but if you do this, I'm not sure how you ensure that the economic bottom 50% have the ability to get a higher education. Education is highly correlated with income mobility. But I don't have a better solution than yours, either. d) This is interesting, because I didn't think it was possible to do this without blowing up the national debt, but I think it is. I'd guess that you'd lose only about $200B in federal tax revenue doing that. Neat idea. e) Very reasonable, though I'm not a fan of your second item because I think it would increase prices in Canada to the same as the USA, rather than the reverse. And I'm a Canadian, so that would suck. LOL. f) If that's the actual math, then that makes sense. It's critical not to break incentives. g) Yep. Thanks for the response. I'm certainly going to adopt some of these as reasonable strategies I'll argue.

My baseline outcome is Bernie and AOC wailing and gnashing their teeth that billionaires have too much money, billionaires wailing and gnashing their teeth and spending resources to try to avoid the tax. I think it wouldn't negatively impact small entrepreneurship much, because I don't think young people will decide not to get rich because their kids won't have the chance to be billionaires. I'm not sure the extent to which it will effect big entrepreneurs like Musk and Bezos, but it doesn't seem to me that Musk and Bezo's motivation is to make their kids rich. I suspect it will largely impact the decisions of people who are older than 50 with children, but I think those decisions aren't that important for innovation and can be counter-productive (like monopolies leveraging their position), and it's a toss-up for me whether their reaction will be a net positive or net negative for society. In broader society, I think there will be an increase in social cohesion which is the key to the good outcomes in societies. I think there will be efforts to get the well-educated kids of rich parents to start their own business while they can lean on parents for help. I think people will become more tolerant of billionaires. I think monopolies will be harder to sustain. I think there will likely be more tax revenue. I think there will likely be more focus on innovation and more entrepreneurialism as youth will have more resources to mess around with. a) Can't know for sure, but I think maybe not. But it's super hard to predict these things, so I wouldn't bet any amount of money on it. Second- and third-order effects in taxation are hard. Does Elon stop innovating after PayPal because he's worried that his 15 kids won't get an inheritance? I think not, but I could easily be wrong. b) Yeah, people can totally do this as long as they pay the exit tax at a marginal rate of 99% on amounts over $30M. You have to move when extreme wealth is fairly certain, but you haven't achieved it yet. c) Well, I think most successful people don't get off on willful destruction because not doing that is a significant part of why they're successful. I'd be pretty surprised if Buffett destroyed Berkshire in a fit of pique. (And if he did, it would be neat to see which companies would rise up in its place, and what the people you paid $170M would build with that capital.) Just out of curiosity, what's solution do you have to combat growing wealth inequality? I'd be happy to adopt your solution if it seems more sensible than mine. I think it's quite a hard problem to solve without breaking capitalism, so I'd sincerely love to hear of something better than my proposed strategy. (If your solution is, "do nothing", I think that's an awful solution in a country with human rights and the second amendment. If wealth gets too skewed, I think life for everyone, including the rich, becomes not much fun.)

The problem is that this stuff doesn't actually do what you want it to because it assumes a static world. The world isn't static, and in a non-static world capitalism wins (for everyone, not just the rich) because incentives matter. Suppose that a country is getting 4% annual growth from a capitalist society, but the bottom 90% is only getting 40% of the output. If you put in your socialist changes and the bottom 90% now get 60%, but it costs you 2% of your growth, then in the year you do it, the bottom 90% have a 50% higher standard of living. But in 17 years, they have the same standard of living. And in 30 years, the bottom 90% in the capitalist society have a 50% higher standard of living than those in the socialist system. So you have to be careful not to break capitalist incentives, and studies show that higher capital gains taxes, wealth taxes, and high-income taxes do that. China is a pretty good example, because you saw the CCP destroy their country for socialism, adopt capitalism in the 1990s to dramatically boost their standard of living, and now you'll see them destroy their country once more by breaking capitalist incentives. The two Koreas are similar. Or, a less extreme example is the difference in Canadian and American economic paths. I think the actual solution is massive inheritance taxes (like, 99% on amounts over $30M) combined with taxes and jail time on people attempting to subvert those inheritance taxes. Allow the brilliant risk-taking entrepreneurs to allocate capital and do their thing for their lifetime to improve everyone's standard of living. But nobody gets to be a billionaire except through their own efforts.

No big deal, I didn't take it the wrong way. I think the big problem with North American politics now is that countries prosper when there is high social cohesion--when everyone shares a common broad vision and everyone tries to act in good faith to achieve that vision. Politicians and media, however, seem to believe that destroying social cohesion is good for their careers. They seem to want wedge issues, polarization, and villainization of their political enemies because it leads to engagement. The problem is, I suspect if you destroy social cohesion, you also destroy democracy.

Yeah. But, the corruption and abuse on the Chinese side is at least an order of magnitude (and maybe two) worse that the that in the "free" world. You might want to "both sides" it, but the CCP is obviously much more evil, just like the Nazis, Khymer Rouge, and Soviets were evil. The kid who shoplifted the chocolate bar from the store was a criminal, and so was Jeffrey Dahmer. Really, both of those two were criminal. Just like poverty in the US and running people over with tanks are basically the same thing.

I don't scoff at it at all. I think it's atrocious. The government has effectively said, "Because you publicly disagree with our policies, we're going to take away your ability to feed your family." This is a huge overreach by the government. So, I think my opinion matches yours on that issue (or maybe I'm actually more extreme than you on the Emergency Act invocation. I'm against it to an extreme degree.) On the vaccine mandates, I'm on the fence. I think there shouldn't be mandates outside healthcare, but I'm on the fence whether a healthcare worker should have the option of not using proven prophylactic measures. (Like, should they have the option of not washing their hands or not wearing masks during a surgery?) I think I probably settle on exactly how proven the "proven" measures are. I believe in liberal values, but there's no doubt that the Trudeau government is authoritarian and very far away from liberal values. I think there's a reasonable chance that because of this government, I'll never again vote for the Liberal Party of Canada. (I really didn't like Harper because of his anti-science stance. But now I wish I could vote for him today.)

Do you view the CCP committing genocide against the Uyghurs and grinding peaceful protesters to a pulp beneath the treads of tanks as harmful to societal development? I suspect not, because the CCP said this was a good idea, right?

I agree 100% that we should both team up to pound that straw man into the ground. For instance, I haven't enslaved or genocided anyone this year, though human historical practices indicate it's a good idea. And I think that's the right decision (for me, at least. Don't want to judge....)

Yes and yes.

LOL, yeah, science--correlation is not causation, and it's interesting to speculate about underlying causes when you have a strong correlation. Spanking kids was pretty standard in my lifetime, though it's abuse now.

I just had another discussion with my wife about this, and she actually remembered more than she did when we chatted earlier. To ease the transition, what we did was put our mattress on the floor, and the kid's mattress immediately adjacent (after the kid had graduated from the crib.) Then, when the kid fussed at night, the parent could easily move into the bed until the kid chilled, then return their own bed. Initially, it was harder for the parent (because you have to roll off your bed onto their mattress, which is more annoying than just falling asleep right away.) But she remembers that it didn't take long before the kid realized which bed was theirs to sleep in and that having their own bed didn't mean that their parent was abandoning them for the night. And then there was just a transition to another room.

Odd decision, citing bird parenting as the model to follow rather than human parenting. Human parents have co-slept throughout history. But if one is too frustrated, it's fine to ignore science. Lots of people ignore evidence and correlation is not causation. It could be that the co-slept kids are better adjusted and happier not because of the co-sleeping, but because their parents are more loving and kind. Maybe their parents are less authoritarian, when the non-co-sleepers care much more about control. Maybe co-sleepers simply care more for their kids or pay more attention to their kids than non-co-sleepers, and that's what causes the difference in outcomes. Heck, once one starts saying, "it's ok if I mess up my kid by not co-sleeping. No big deal", one could imagine similarly saying, "No big deal if I yell at my kid." Then "No big deal if I hurt my kid because I'm angry", or whatever. Maybe not co-sleeping is an indicator of which parents are willing to justify trading their kids' health for their own short-term happiness. Because correlation isn't causation, and all the co-sleeping studies seem to be correlational. (My poorly-educated bet would be it comes down to attachment parenting vs authoritarian parenting styles.)

Yep. We basically removed one side of the crib and attached it to our bed so that essentially the crib became an extension of the bed. Neither my wife nor I remember how long it lasted, but I'm thinking until about the age of three. The fact that neither of us really remembers the transition very well is indicative to me that at that point, our kids were easily sleeping through the night, weren't large enough to be annoying in bed, and that the transition period wasn't painful at all.

To not lose your mind with a baby who wants to co-sleep, I think the strategy is to remember the goal. In my opinion, the goal isn't to figure out a way to make the baby sleep. It's to raise a well-adjusted, robust kid. One thing that makes kids cry is anxiety. Essentially, the kid is telling you that they are worried, and are unable to regulate their emotions on their own. If you go with "cry it out" strategies, I think you're effectively communicating to your kid that you aren't a reliable caregiver. You're communicating that you can't be depended on for protection and support when they need it. And they're learning that at a deep level. On the other hand, if you do provide support when they tell you they need it, you are teaching them how to regulate their emotions and that you can be trusted to be there when they need you. They will be more comfortable exploring the world independently, because they know in their soul that if they run into something scary, you'll be there to help them. The outcomes of this strategy tend to be kids and adults with higher self esteem, resilience, affection, and life satisfaction. So, I'd suggest focusing on the outcome. Kids need attachment to parents, and, though it's quite annoying, by giving your child the attachment they need, you're increasing the odds they'll be happier in life. You'd likely take a bullet for your kid, so you should take solace that, to help them get better outcomes, you just need to suffer for a few more months. (Yeah, I know--taking a bullet is easier because it's over quickly, while lack of sleep is an ongoing grind that seems never ending. But I think it's worth it. And it will end.)

The really goofy thing about this speech is that Xi doesn't recognize that he's basically breaking "practical cooperation". The magic of capitalism and free markets is that it is the most efficient form of cooperation ever discovered. To create and manufacture, say, a computer, millions of people are cooperating, from the chip designers in Silicon Valley to the copper miners in Chile to the Nigerian oil producers. It doesn't matter at all that these people have never met each other--they are still working together as efficiently as possible to create a computer. And you know that that cooperation is ultimately practical, creating what's desired by people, because price signals show that's what people want. And if those resources are better spent producing a car--because people now want cars, more than computers--those resources will efficiently get rerouted to producing vehicles instead of computers.. And so when Xi says, "practical cooperation", to me, it basically seems the same as saying, "we're going to build crap that people don't want or need and destroy our efficiency because I'm the Man and I say so." That said, I understand why people buy into the idea, despite the strong, practical historic evidence of what works. Most people don't understand the magic of free markets and trade and delightful consequences like consumer surpluses. And, if one believes one can improve one's life by 20% at the small cost of hurting a million strangers by 1%, many people will take that deal.

I think it's pretty clear what side of the line Luca is on. He sprouts poetic about China's glorious achievements, and his only concession to the other side of the coin is that genocidal camps imprisoning a million people are "absurd". Rather than, say, "horrific", "atrocious", or "horrendous". There's no doubt whatsoever what side of the line he's on. That said, there's lots of people who support the horrendous, and it's convenient for us that Luca is so transparent about his passion.

At this point, it's extremely clear what's happening. 1. Stahleyp asserts that there's no morality without God. 2. Someone shows that there actually can be a morality without God. 3. Stahleyp doesn't address #2, but rather retreats to the position that morality is, by definition, only derived from God. 4. Stahleyp advances to #1 again, pretending the refutation in #2 doesn't exist and #3 implies that therefore morality cannot exist except as dictated by a deity. So really, it isn't an interesting discussion any more, because pretty well everyone involved in the discussion understands that their position is irrefutable.

Nope, that isn't my premise and isn't at all close to what my premise is, though I think it's what you would like my premise to be, since you keep returning to that. You seem to really want my premise to be that people are inventing arbitrary rules. My best guess at this point is that you want an argument that you can "beat" rather than actually understand the argument that the other people are making. But I feel like that's uncharacteristic of you, so maybe you just forgot the argument. If you want to it be expressed as 'rules', my premise remains, "there are natural rules that exist that if your society repeatedly violates those those rules in major ways, your society will be eliminated or transformed until it once again abides by those rules." Those rules become what's known as morality. Take a bowl full of plastic balls, marbles, and steel balls. Shake the bowl for a bit, and you'll find the steel balls shift to the bottom, below the glass, which is below the plastic. Your argument is that the balls could only stack in layers like this because God's hand placed them there. My argument is that you just need different masses, gravity, and randomness imparted by the shaking, and the steel balls must fall to the bottom of the bowl and the plastic must rise to the top.

Well, truthfully, I assessed the situation on its own merit and concluded that appeasement was a terrible strategy. (IMO, the optimal strategy is for the world, or a benevolent group of nations, to make expansionist wars so incredibly costly to the instigator that there is a massive incentive not to instigate expansionist wars.) With respect to Chamberlain, the most relevant example in history had a similar expansionistic dictator using similar rhetoric, with modernish weapons, similar technology, in the Europe. And that example completely refutes your point of view. So, I understand why your position is that the most relevant situation in history ought to be excluded because it's over-used. It's very hard to justify your position if someone actually points out how your strategy worked in the past. And, I used it because when someone is saying something that doesn't make sense, it seems reasonable to bring up the counterexample that everyone knows, rather than bringing in much more obscure and less relevant examples from 2000 years ago. Plus, the picture is concise, and I didn't really want to have a big discussion. Failed at that.... And that's the problem with throwing about Godwin's Law. In order to avoid the evil, we have to understand how it came about. If you start passing laws so that blacks can't own businesses... well, you can't compare that to Nazism because it's just Godwin's law. Start passing laws to allow blacks to be arbitrarily arrested or beat up--well, Godwin's law says you can't compare that to Nazism because nobody's being gassed. Don't want to minimize the evil of the Nazis. But you know, I think that the Nazis only got to the stage of putting Jews in gas chambers because they were first allowed to exclude Jews from owning businesses, and could arbitrarily arrest and beat up Jews. And that's the problem with Godwin's law. It poo-poos the idea that smaller evils can--and did--lead to a huge evil, and in fact that the smaller evils are required to make it to the point of the huge evil. Or, said another way, here's part of the discussion on the rise of Nazism from They Thought They Were Free: