TangoTrotFox

I think money in politics is certainly an issue, but there seems to be an increasing amount of evidence that this its influence seems to be diminishing, not increasing. One party's presidential candidate in 2016 achieved record breaking fund raising, and outspent their opponent by 2:1. In recent midterms one senatorial candidate raised $38 million in one quarter smashing all records and obviously outspending his opponent, also by about 2:1. Both candidates lost. According to WaPo [1] candidates from one party outspent the other party in 75% of 80 of the most competitive contests. But fewer than half of those candidates who outspent their opponent ended up winning their election.

This didn't used to be the case. Money spent used to be one of the most reliable methods of determining who'd win an election. Now voters seem to be voting in ways that are much less predictable.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/despite-record-spend...

The alternative is centralization of government which changes nothing except ensures that once corrupted its scale would affect what, at scale, could even be the entire world. It also gives bad actors a single target to focus all their energy (and influence) on. In my opinion the solution is to go in the opposite direction. I think the 'closer' to the people, both figuratively and literally, a government is, the more they tend to be held accountable. Romania's revolution against Ceausescu was a very clear, and quite literal, illustration of this.

As an aside, "nation state" is not a fancy way of saying country. It has a specific meaning denoting a mostly ethnically homogeneous nation. E.g. Belgium is most certainly not a nation state.

There's a funny thing about society. Do you know how you create wildly misinformed idiots? By assuming people who disagree with you on topics are wildly misinformed idiots. The National Academies put up a release in 2011 surveying all available information on the correlations between vaccines and a wide array of nasty stuff. It's available here [1]. It gives an extremely in depth overview of the evidence of the time, which has not radically changed since then. It's a 900 page report, but it's well organized. And you'll find that indeed there are quite a huge number of very real and very nasty correlations between vaccines and all sorts of things. By making the false statement (presumably based on the view that everybody who abides anti-vaccine views must be a wildly misinformed idiot) that 'almost all studies show correlations between nasty things and vaccines are exaggerated or outright lies', you do something really bad. You implicitly suggest that if the correlations were not 'exagerrated or outright lies', they would be meaningful. They are not.

Correlation does not equal causation.

There's an extremely strong correlation between US spending on science, space, and technology and suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation. The correlation is a 99.8% fit. But this means absolutely nothing whatsoever. There are some 30,000 various correlations available here [2]. You'll find many, such as the one I mentioned, are incredibly strong fits. But that's really the danger of data. Just because something fits, doesn't mean anything. The entire process of science is about discovering causation. Correlations mean nothing without clear causation. Even correlations that make sense mean nothing without causation. For instance, I'm sure you'd agree that US spending on science has pretty much nothing to do with suicides by hanging. So it's easy to see it's spurious. What if instead that correlation was e.g. an increase in enrollment in STEM degrees being pursued? Again, you should assume this correlation is spurious until you have a very compelling reason, certainly beyond bias confirmation, to do otherwise.

[1] - http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2011/Adverse-Ef...

[2] - http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Not against vaccines, but I think understanding the views of things you disagree with is important. And even more so on this issue because people believe things that even more absurd, but more socially acceptable - and so these ideas persist. The issue some have with vaccines is not generally an outright denial whether or not vaccines work. It's people weight the risk:reward of vaccines differently than others largely supplemented by a large number of correlations to all sorts of nasty things with vaccines.

The reason the opposition to vaccines is not a reasonable view is because these are correlations and correlation is not the same as causation. At the same time consider the innumerable number of social views that people hold, and that continue to be published about, that are based absolutely and completely on correlations relying on the absence of evidence against causality, as evidence of causality. But of course proving a negative is impossible -- the burden of proving causality is on the one suggesting such exists. Failing to recognize this is the exact logical fallacy that drives the opposition to vaccines.

If all correlations were held to the same standard as those that reflect negatively of vaccines, the world (and science itself) would be in much better shape.

One thing most people do not understand is that the former net neutrality rules did not prohibit throttling, in and of itself. Every rule and clause in the net neutrality bill has a little clause following "Though shall not [...] except for reasonable network management." What's "reasonable network management"? 400+ pages and it was not well defined. It's something that would be decided on a case-by-case basis. But ultimately if any carrier could create a compelling argument that some service was causing undue congestion on their network, they had complete freedom to throttle it.

As an aside you'll note that now, and then, when companies are found to be doing they'll immediately scream "reasonable network management." Search for sprint "reasonable network management" and you'll get years of results such as [1][2][3]. Give them a cut of the profits and suddenly that congestion would be considered much more reasonable - a la Netflix/Comcast.

[1] - https://www.sprint.com/en/legal/legal-regulatory-and-consume...

[2] - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/nonpr...

[3] - https://civsourceonline.com/2015/10/15/sprint-sued-by-non-pr...

Problems getting harder is not really a valid explanation for the current state of science, or any particular field. At any given glimpse of society, their current state of the art is the best they've managed with all they know. Further progress is always harder, even when we now think of it as something that should have been easy. For instance the basic concept that things happen for a reason is something everybody understands now, even only a completely intuitive level - yet it was one of the breakthroughs of the Greeks. And Newtonian mechanics is also something people tend to understand quite intuitively, yet following the Greeks it would take the better part of two thousand years for people to consider that e.g. objects in motion stay in motion unless acted on by something else. Artistotlean mechanics held that continued motion required continued force. Artistotle seemingly did not consider friction, air resistance, and so on that cause objects to slow. Or just consider the tens to hundreds of thousands of years to develop writing, or to enter into the iron age, and so on.

There's some argument to be said that in times past there were fewer "scientists" working on these topics, explaining the delays. But I don't think that's fair. The reason I put "scientist" in quotes is because many of these things have minimal prerequisites and the average home would have all that's needed to experimentally test and discover these concepts. And their immense value, far beyond the academic, meant their discovery likely would have been able to rapidly spread regardless of the origin - so that, at least to some degree, precludes authority as a necessity.

Many things that now constantly elude our ability to understand, perhaps dark matter is a great example, will likely one day be child's play.

There are some very practical problems with nuclear that people are hand-waving away. One of the most significant is simply longterm cost, because you have to consider what nuclear, at large scale, would entail. Because of the specifics here costs would likely go much higher, not decline - and it's already one of, and by some metrics, the most expensive methods of energy production. Right now nuclear accounts for 10-15% of the world's energy production, yet even at that level we only have known uranium reserves to run these for about 200 years. [1] Bump that up to where nuclear is a major player in energy production and we're suddenly running out imminently. This means we're going to need to turn to things like saltwater extraction and breeder reactors. But these technologies are going to send costs skyrocketing. And as well as scarcity becomes an issue, we can also expect to see the cost of uranium itself start to skyrocket.

And this is before getting into the other issues of nuclear at scale. Decommissioning is a lengthy, expensive, and complex process. Nuclear accidents are rare, but nowhere near as rare as they should be, on paper. There are currently about 450 plants operating worldwide. That's a disconcertingly low number given the number of accidents throughout the years. And breeder reactors would be absolutely required for longterm uranium perspectives, yet that technology not only greatly increases costs but also complexity and volatility. And another issue that becomes even more critical at scale is disposal. We already have some 90,000 tons [2] of nuclear waste (in the USA alone) the requires disposal. And this waste needs to be stored for thousands of years before it becomes remotely safe. And that also means we need to consider the waste that will pile up over centuries of nuclear usage.

And as the article mentions, we're likely to see major increases in global energy usage over the years to come which further exasperates these problems. These are very real practical problems that seem to have no clear solution. In my opinion solar is the most logical option for the future. The one and only downside there is the lack of production during the night, yet this can be resolved in a countless number of basic technical ways ranging from batteries to even just mundane things such as shifting objects (or liquids or whatever) to create potential energy that can be harvested during off times. If we take a utopic view of the future, it's even possible to envision worldwide high energy direct current lines transiting power worldwide. All of these things involve losses of energy of course, but as far as our needs are concerned solar can provide a practically infinite amount of energy and so optimal efficiency is not so relevant.

I also think that the decentralization of energy is also desirable. Even something as benign as rooftop solar will end up providing an immense amount of energy. Centralization of energy, let alone when it relies on a scarce resource is something I think we've learned a lot about for the past century. A bit of hindsight would be valuable here.

[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...

[2] - https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear...

What is the difference between today and 20,000 years ago? What's the difference between today and 20,000 years from now? There are of course social and political changes but the key thing that invariably is behind all progress and improvement in society is technology. For instance throughout our entire history as a species we not only had slavery but it often played a key role in day to day life. Then, as we hit the industrial revolution it suddenly began to be rapidly phased out of existence, world wide. By the time it was ended slavery had long since gone from a necessity to a luxury and was well on its way from a luxury to a burden. Technology obsoleted it and society followed. In areas where technology has not completely obsoleted slavery, it still exists to this day.

Amusingly even Socrates predicted as much thousands of years ago, "For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus.. If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." Technology is, practically by definition, exactly what solves humanity's problems.

Though to be fair, this headline is somewhat clickbaity. The article is not really suggesting that technology doesn't solve humanity's problems. But rather than Google, and to some degree the entirety of Silicon Valley, has entered its twilight phase. And as Google has surprisingly rapidly metamorphosized into the next e.g. Microsoft, it's not an unreasonable suggestion.

I agree, with one exception. In certain ultra-urban locations, excessive advertising begins to take on its own sort of aesthetic that can become paradoxically pleasant. Some streets in e.g. Hong Kong [1] look like something out of Bladerunner. It has this sort of peculiar, and difficult to explain, dystopic appeal. Dystopic appeal should be an oxymoron. What can I say? I like it. Blame William Gibson.

[1] - https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AA7W4X/long-exposure-neon-advertis...

The problem with non-falsifiability is that let's say we avoid 'overgeneralizing' from a categorization as you suggest. And instead we stick to whatever tightly constrained region of classification or prediction you'd consider acceptable. And so we take a Myers-Briggs test and it says this individual should exhibit this class of behavior. And it turns out they don't. Would this pose a problem to Myers-Briggs? Not in the least. Okay, what if it was a hundred? A thousand? A billion? There's no magic number where it's suddenly a problem.

I do agree with the person you're responding to that astrology would likely still be considered somewhat scientific if it didn't rely on things that we know to be false. For instance astrology mixes Mercury starting to go backwards as a key player in its predictions. The problem being there that Mercury doesn't go backwards. It was/is an optical illusion based on an inaccurate understanding of our solar system. But outside of getting some things fundamentally wrong astrology is the same as any other unfalsifiable model. Being wrong doesn't matter, and you can just constantly add onto it and claim you're 'refining' it.

Maybe even that geocentric model though is the same story. Part of the reason the geocentric model of our universe lasted so long was because, with the technology at the time, it wasn't completely falsifiable. Mercury needs to go backwards to make this model work? Other planets need to go into crazy floral sharped curvy patterns to make it work? Well okay then I Mercury goes backwards and planets go in floral shaped curvy patterns. If you wanted to suggest a different model, such as a heliocentric one, that'd involve throwing away literally centuries of work and entirely discrediting astrology (which was at one time a pursuit as scholarly as any other) as a science. People blame the church for the geocentric model, but there was much more to it than just that.

Something interesting is that numerous studies have shown that a number of psychotropics, including the monstrosity that's fluoxetine/prozac, perform at levels that is hardly better than placebo. In many cases the difference is not statistically significant. This [1] paper/article provides an overview of a variety of data. It also goes into how these sort of drugs manage to get approved in spite of negligible performance. The paper gives the example of vilazodone/viibryd. That drug went through 5 trials. They showed absolutely 0 effect. In some of the trials the placebo outperformed the drug. Undeterred, the company continued running trials. In the next two they managed to show a very small effect, probably similarly to how if you flip a fair coin enough eventually you'll get heads 10 times in a row 'proving' the coin isn't fair. Anyhow those two trials showing a minuscule effect were enough for the FDA which now states, "The efficacy of VIIBRYD was established in two 8-week, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials.".

I find this just completely fascinating. That prozac shows a negligible effect over placebo in blind studies is even more interesting to me because of the side effects. It has some really serious side effects - you'd know if you were getting the 'real' stuff, at least if you were allowed to communicate with the others who were. And the prozac brand alone was, at its peak, reaching profits of $2.6 billion a year. This creates a nasty incentive for pharmaceutical companies to target 'drugs' at conditions that can be treated by placebo. Because in these cases, you can always prove the drug works, without actually having to go through all that nasty work involved in creating a drug that actually works.

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/

Politics is extremely divisive and, even more importantly, is perhaps no longer a major vessel to enact meaningful longterm change. There is of course the issue of one decade's change being overwritten by the next decade's party. But there's something more fundamental. In times past government was able to enact huge changes, because government enacted and enforced policies that directly harmed society. Slavery is the most obvious one. Government worked as an enforcer for slavery and was equally able to end it with little more than a vote and stroke of a pen. But in today's era I think we've started to reach an era of sharply diminishing returns for governmental action because the issues are ones that are less systemic and, in any case, cannot be directly solved by government in any completely clear way.

For instance you mention education. If you poll most people on our state of education in the US the results would have little to nothing to do with reality. And that reality is that we already spend an immense amount on it - more than nearly anywhere in the world. This isn't a proxy for population size, I am referring to cost per student of course. And this also isn't just a proxy for ridiculous university costs. If you look at only education costs outside of university, we are the 5th biggest spender in the world. And similarly this isn't a proxy for private spending with wealthier folks sending their kids to private institutions. If you compare just our public spending on this same group of education, we end up 7th in the world - comparing just our public spending to everywhere else's public + private spending. And as an aside, those costs are all normalized to account for the fact that a dollar goes a lot further in many places than the US - meaning we are indeed comparing apples to apples, by multiplying other nations' nominal spending.

All numbers mentioned here from the OECD data [1]. They list the private/public spending in GDP relative ratios which does silly things like put South Africa and Costa Rica as the world leaders in education, but you can convert those figures into something useful. For instance in the US our GDP relative share of public spending on education outside of university is 3.207. Our GDP relative share of private spending on education outside of university is 0.307. Therefore of all our spending on non-university education, 3.207/(3.207+0.307) = 91.3% is public. You can now take this and apply it to our gross spend on non-university education ($12,424.3 dollars per student) to see that we publicly spend 12423.3 * .913 = $11,342 per student per year on education outside of university - which leads to our public spending being higher than every other nation's, excepting 6, public+private spending

The point of this is that most people think that we just need to spend more money on education and everything would be dandy. No, our problems are more fundamental and require solutions that are in no way obvious. Bill Gates, though I do not particularly agree with his direction, is working towards trying to create these very sort of solutions. And these solutions, should he be correct, are what actually have the possibility of enacting real longterm change.

[1] - https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm

IRV doesn't solve the right problem. The biggest benefit of IRV is that it helps to reduce the spoiler effect, but not much else. But I don't think when people talk about election change that they are talking about the spoiler effect. Rather I think the thing people see is this weird trend in society today. Fewer people than ever identify as republican or democrat, yet very nearly 100% of all seats in office at all levels of government are filled by republicans or democrats.

Let's imagine a state had 100 representatives (to keep the numbers nice). And in this state 35% of the population most strongly identified as republican. 34% most strongly identified as democrat. 16% most strongly identified as green, and 15% most strongly identified as libertarian. And this state had a really good geographic mix of people, so everybody was completely evenly distributed. As a nice aside there you don't even need to worry about things like gerrymandering - any sample of any area will have an identical mix of people as any other area. That's good... right?

What would be the most reasonable result for the makeup of their representatives? What would we actually get? I think most of everybody would say the same thing for the most reasonable result. 35 republicans, 34 democrats, 16 greens, and 15 libertarians. Few would correctly answer what we'd actually get - 100 republicans. And in a nutshell, this is the real problem. District based plurality elections, be it first past the post or IRV will trend towards domination of two major parties. The only solution is proportional representation. You get 10% of the votes and if there's at least 10 seats then you're guaranteed to get at least one.

Proportional stands next to no chance of being implemented since it would require the current political establishment to sign their own [political] death warrants, but if we're going to change the electoral system I think we should at least look at solutions that would actually solve the problem.

How do you propose I'd be caught? This isn't a rhetorical question. It's just not at all apparent to me. Nearly all detected 'voter fraud' is not actually fraud, but people making ostensibly honest mistakes - such as convicted felons or people on probation voting. And that's because that is basically leaving video footage and your business card at the scene of a crime.

For what it's worth, I agree that the risk:reward is pretty messed up. But we're not the metronome for politics in the US. People are doing all sorts of stupid things, and seemingly getting even more radical. I'm sure you'd agree that there are plenty of people that would think by adding a few votes they'd be doing their part to 'save the world.' I mean there are people assaulting each other over political differences. People are going literally crazy from politics.

A couple of problems with this view. The first is that voter fraud is not easy to detect. When I voted all I had to do was walk in, sign a sheet by my name, and go vote. There was no verification or validation of anything. I could have just as well signed by another individual's name. If I was smart I'd do it somewhere closer to the closing of poll times to help minimize the chances that they'd show up. I could then go from station to station doing similar things.

The second is that the past does not predict the future. Politics getting kind of absurd in the US. People are radicalizing to an extreme degree. When people are assaulting and trying to intimidate one another because of relatively minor differences of political opinion, it should be assumed that voter fraud is going to be an increasingly severe threat to election integrity.

Maybe most importantly of all. You don't want to wait until it's a severe issue to stop it. At that point you risk having already have lost the faith of the electorate and that's only going to lead to bad outcomes. You want to preempt bad actors.

You're straw manning. The point is you need to consider reality before trying to decide how to tackle problems. Your regulations are not only not going to levy any consequences to bad actors, it's going to directly reward their bad behavior. They're the ones that are going to be able to capably break the law, and work to minimize consequences in any case where they're caught. But the law will severely hamper good actors that try to abide it. I think you realize this which is why you're now resorting to 'Well, so we just them all get away with this without consequence!?' And the answer there that when doing 'something' is less effective than doing nothing, you don't have any choice. To do otherwise is simply cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Sure, but I think this starts getting into ideology. I think people should be taxed rates that, in a vacuum, can be considered fair. I pay 15% of what I can, you pay 15% of what you can is about as fair as you can get. The reason I'm not fond of going beyond this is because you start getting into very subjective territory.

For instance while I agree with all you've said, excepting your conclusion, I'm sure you'd also agree that lower income individuals would also be much more likely to end up as the direct beneficiaries of where lots of government money goes to such medicaid/medicare and various social programs. Since these lower income individuals are going to be disproportionately more likely to utilize the benefits of these government programs, would it then not make more sense for them to shoulder a greater percent of the costs to account for this? I absolutely do not agree with this conclusion, but at the same time I also don't see any clear logical flaw in it.

So you can do an ideological tug of war, one way or the other, to no end on these issues. One ideology might have the wealthy give nearly all of their income away to help the rest of the population. The other end of ideology might have people give none away and rely entirely on market dynamics. I think a fixed and fair sum is one of the more reasonable ways to step outside of ideology and try to create a system that nobody really loves, but also nobody can create rational arguments suggesting is, in and of itself, unreasonably biased towards one group or another.

I've also had similar thought experiments here. But take it a step further. It's probably safe to say that the current biggest divide in society is in political ideology. Let's just call this left/right, though that's far from precise. Imagine we placed all 'left' individuals in one US, and all 'right' individuals in another completely identical (in terms of physical resources, preexisting infrastructure, etc) US. And migration between these two nations was freely and instantly allowed, but only if you absolutely abided the initial ideological split. How long would it take before these two nations then had their own internal splits with people dividing themselves among some new subissue?

Of course you hit on this with #1, but I think the answer is that there is no limit to the number of partitions. In other words that division is itself inevitable. So rather than trying to ideologically homogenize ourselves, I think it's more important to for people to embrace diversity of views as opposed to attack everything that doesn't conform to, what to them, seems self evident. Because for 'the other side', their views are likely seen as identically self evident. When sides remain incapable of doing anything except working to antagonize the other, in the end the only way things would be resolved is by force of arms which is certainly something almost nobody wants.

I generally agree with you here, but as an aside there is one nuance you have to consider. And that's taxation vs disposable income. Imagine somebody earns $50k and spends $30k on their living expenses and pays a 30% tax rate. They have $20k left after their basic living expenses, but $15k of that is eaten up by taxes. Looking at their disposable income, they're paying a ridiculous tax rate of 75%.

I think it's more reasonable to compare taxation on disposable income. In my opinion a fair tax would only tax disposable income anyhow. Of course that creates an incentive to have $0 disposable income but it's no different than the problem of corporations aiming to report $0 profit.

Progressive tax schemes aim to achieve this, but in a completely broken and inconsistent fashion. For instance somebody earning $100k in San Francisco is going to be spending a rather different percent of their income on basic living expenses than somebody living in Bodunk earning the same, and so applying the same scheme to both does not make sense. It'd be much easier to just make everything that qualifies as a 'basic living expense' fully deductible, and then you pay e.g. 15% on the rest.

There's an even bigger problem. There was no validation at all. It was based on self reporting which, in turn, was based on asking [ideally] random homeless individuals, and then extrapolating that outward. There is an incentive for individuals to lie here if they believe that 'native' homeless might be subject to preferential treatment, or if reporting 'native' homeless increases could result in more favorable incentives for the homeless. And given how big of news homelessness and home price issues are in San Francisco, I think this motivation is a major concern.

I am curious about the baselines here for other areas though. Even given the incentive to lie, the reported numbers given still seem quite high to me. The most liberal metric is living in the city for at least 10 years, which applied to just below 50% of the homeless. Even if we take the most conservative metric of 'migratory' patterns, with 30% of individuals having moved to San Francisco after becoming homeless, that still seems very high. But I don't really have a baseline for comparison in other major cities and search is not turning up any particularly great sources.

I agree with you, but I don't see how this goes against what I'm saying? In 2008 Obama won California by 3 million. He won in the rest of the nation, excluding California, by 7 million. In 2016 Clinton won in California by 4 million. She lost in the rest of the country, excluding California, by a million. I completely agree that without excessive spending her margin of defeat, outside of California, would likely have been greater. But this also shows that the spending alone does not, in current times, map strongly to votes.

And I hope this will continue to be a thing. In my opinion, people are overestimating the significance of the centralized internet forces, such as Facebook, and discounting the significance of decentralized internet forces - such as discussions perhaps not dissimilar to the one you and I are sharing. There's no doubt that advertising has a significant effect, but I think it's perhaps less than ever before largely because people half way around the world from one another can chat and have far more relevant conversations than any sort of 'Hi, I'm Bob. My opponent's an asshole. Vote for me!' piece, or even the more refined. 'Hi, I'm Bob. My meta-analytics indicate that you like broccoli. Omg, I do too. My opponent doesn't. He hates broccoli and all it stands for. Also, he's an asshole, like anybody who wouldn't like broccoli amirite!? Vote for me!'

Even outside of the presidential consider things like Sanders. Yes at some point he was competitive in fund raising, but his success was not because of the fund raising. Rather his fund raising came as an effect, rather than a cause, of his success. And again that success was something that was driven by the decentralized and oft difficult to predict, let alone control, forces of internet communication.

I'd go the other direction. I think if you taught every single 16 year old a basic class in surface-level understanding of time dilation/length contraction, gravity as a facet of spacetime, the two slit experiment, the twin paradox, relativistic star ships, so forth and so on - you'd see the number of astronomers/physicists skyrocket. They likely would not be able to follow the math and reasons behind, but that's not necessarily the point. Just understanding how absurd our universe really is, is something that I think is really kind of encouraging. It gives perspective as to the wonder and discoveries that await outside of the everyday bickering that people are exposed to 24/7 since the internet became ubiquitous.

Even less exciting things like seeing how the doppler effect led almost directly to the concept of the big bang is something that seems critical. That it's not (or, hopefully was not) a normal part of curricula seems odd. Even things like the mind boggling implications of the various conservation laws are just incredible. That topic is at least covered in lower education, but rarely if ever in such a way as to really elucidate how incredible these rules are, and all that can be derived from them.

I think this sort of ideal is more likely to reward than punish bad actors. I'm certain you can think of a million and one ways companies/PACs/individuals/etc could influence others in ways that would be difficult, if not impossible, to trace back to them. The player that tries to play by the rules and ensures that all of their messaging on the up and up is simply going to get burnt.

The wisest form of regulation is to assume bad actors from step 1 and try to create systems where the bad actors are encouraged to abide the rules, not out of threats, but because it benefits them in some way. For instance, the EU are aiming to force Netflix (and similar operations) to have 30% of their catalogue sourced from local productions... or else. It's not tough to predict the result. They'll license the premium stuff (which they probably already have) and then just stuff the rest with filler to hit the minimum.

Imagine if instead that Netflix and other companies received a tax deduction which was proportional to the percent of time their customers spent consuming locally sourced material. Now suddenly there is a positive incentive for the good behavior, and Netflix would almost certainly be going out of their way to try to get you to watch locally sourced material. On the other hand people often want to have their cake, and eat it too.

One important factoid that goes against this view is that Clinton's margin of victory in California was substantially greater than her entire margin of victory in the popular vote. The reason I mention this is because you spend where you need to spend. California was never even remotely in contention and so it's safe to say that Clinton was not spending to try to win by millions in California. In other words, it's unlikely that her spending produced the votes she was trying to 'buy'.

I think the thing that enables Facebook is also the thing that obsoletes it. If we imagine Facebook 30 years ago when mass media was still a tightly constrained venture comprised of relatively little more than television, print, and radio, then I think your point would be extremely valid. Reaching an extremely micro-targeted demographic of immense scale, in real time, and for relatively low cost? I mean yeah, Facebook would be what would decides elections.

But we don't live 30 years ago. We live today. And billions of people are, in some form or another, doing exactly what you and I are doing right now. Discussing and debating ideas while influencing each other in various ways that are extremely difficult to quantify. We, in turn, are probably somewhat influenced by advertisements and the such still - but I think that people are starting to influence people more than any sort of advertising is.

The one thing that has typically predicted elections success in the US is money. Whoever spends more, wins. If they spend a lot more they tend to win by wide margins. In the most recent election, one candidate spent vastly more and were relatively highly praised by the media. The person that was greatly outspent and alternatively vilified or mocked by the media in a 24/7 loop for months leading up to the election, won.

For that matter even look at Bernie Sanders. A 73 year old man who refers to himself as a democratic socialist. That word polled somewhere south of cancer not that long ago. But times have changed as the internet can redefine the rules, zeitgeist, and overton window of society - in a flash. Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and full of some interesting quotes, defeated a deeply entrenched representative going on to his 10th term who was still serving as the chair of the house democratic caucus. These things are not happening because any of the cliches that have been blamed. They're happening because the internet has usurped control of dialogue away from any given behemoth. And now what happens is being decided by a collective of individuals that, if nothing else, have shown themselves to be rather less than predictable.

You're assuming direct causality. Think of the practically limitless number of major confounding variables here that are practically impossible to control for in a reasonable way. At the most fundamental think of the distinction between nations that legalize prostitution versus those that do not. There tends to be a very different system of ethos between these nations and this is going to trickle down to every single aspect of society.

So for instance I think it's extremely likely that you can show that legalizing certain drugs (such as marijuana) can be shown to 'cause' increases in sex trafficking. Of course it almost certainly does not but I'm making the educated assumption that nations that have legalized prostitution are going to have legalized drugs of various sorts more liberally than nations that still have criminalized prostitution. And so, lo and behold, we can show a correlation between legalizing drugs and sex trafficking if we assume that paper is correct that a link exists between sex trafficking and legalized prostitution.

Though indeed even the link itself should be called into question. For instance could the cause not be that legalization enables greater scrutiny over workers and thus the legalization itself helps to increase the detection efficiency of unlawful trafficking? Differences in what you're measuring mean nothing unless you are measuring things in the exact same way, with the exact same 'resolution'. Again you can try to control for things like this, but the controls are subject to just as many problems.

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Maybe the most important issue here is that this is an issue that is incredibly difficult to do right even when you are 100% impartial and objective analysis is your one and only purpose. In reality people are biased, and a negative result means you basically just wasted however many months researching this topic. And this is a topic where you could, even without malice or intent, show anything to be true if you wanted by just seeking out slightly different data, or controlling for confounding issues in slightly different ways.

It's easy to see the logical flaw here by considering a reduction to absurdity. Imagine a minimum wage of $200/hour. This would of course lead to mass unemployment and collapse the market, except for a very minuscule percent of the labor force in extremely high skill high value positions. Just because somebody would now be earning $200/hour most certainly would not mean they were not valued. Instead you'd have simply squeezed everybody out of the market except these most incredibly valuable employees.

But you can also see the same flaw by just considering a mathematical distribution of wages. That distribution would resemble a bell curve. There will be a small number of very low skill positions with very low wages. And on the other end there will be a small number of very high skill positions receiving very high wages. And in between you reach the fat of the market with average skill positions reaching average wages. The effect of the minimum wage is to create a clumping on the left side of this curve as the people earning wages for extremely low skill work are now earning exactly the same as the wages for those doing more skilled work. And those abnormally low skill jobs that cannot afford to be paid anymore simply disappear.

For instance gas stations used to regularly be full service - you park, pay, and an attendant would fill you up or take care of any routine maintenance you needed. Those jobs went away, in the US at least. And similarly we're currently in the process of gradually phasing out cashiers, which I imagine our grandchildren will look back on with similar quaintness as we might full service gas stations. The point there being that you're left with a higher and higher skill level as the baseline just to enter the job market. And just because somebody's being paid the new minimum, does not mean they're not substantially more valued than others.

I think most people simultaneously underestimate the cost of labor and overestimate the profit margins of companies, often by quite extreme margins. I think that's because many here view things like Apple as typical where they make something like $400k in profit per employee. Excessive profit margins aren't really a sign of a well run company so much as silly huge markups. Apple sells phones worth around $300 for $1000 in large part because of extremely effective marketing. This is not how a normal business works.

A company that offers competitive prices is often going to run on razor thin profit margins. For instance WalMart, opinions of the company/owners aside, certainly qualifies as well run. Yet their profit per employee is just $4,200. That just ends up being a whole lot of money due to scale. At the same time just $4,200 per employee means their entire profit margin is heavily dependent on labor costs. Give everybody a $2.50/hour raise and they've gone from an incredibly profitable company, to a company on the path to bankruptcy.

And in these two extremes WalMart is far closer to a typical business. While I do think we should do what we can to help ensure good jobs for qualified applicants, I also think we should not move towards a world where the survivors in business are obligated to move more and more towards Apple level markups just to cover their costs. And those increases in turn often doing a great job of then stripping away real gains in come.

It's sometimes peculiar how quick we are to aim to repeat history, blisteringly awful history, seemingly with no concern or regard for what we are doing. The Arab world was once near the top of the world in scholarship and academic pursuit. Algebra, for instance, being a reference to Ilm al-jabr wa'l-muḳābala, by Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Or there was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where scholars were consigned with the responsibility of translating cultural and scientific works from across the world into Arabic.

But then in a shockingly short period of time that same Arab world started to place their selected social values above that of the truth, in and of itself. Perhaps one of the major catalysts for this was Al-Ghazali, and his very well received ideology laid out in "The Incoherence of the Philosophers." [1] Formerly a philosopher himself, that work is where Al-Ghazali began to deny all science and reality and replace it with religion. He declared that there was no such thing as causality. When a leaf catches fire it is not because it was exposed to fire - rather god chose to transit the fire from the torch to the leaf at that very moment. And again when it deteriorates into ash - that is once again not a natural process, but rather the explicit and active will of god acting at that very moment.

The implication of this is that there is no truth to be sought, there is no connection in nature, there is nothing except for god. The reason for this is because it answered any sort of inconvenient questions for religion, by attacking the questions (and those that pose them) directly. And in a short period of time the Arabic world was set on the path that sent it away from academic pursuit and knowledge and onto the path that's brought it to where it is today. Imagine what a different place the world would be today had they instead remained focused on the truth, and the golden age of Islam persisted indefinitely.

Social values must never take precedent over truth, no matter how undesirable the truth may be to hear, or how undesirable the speakers of said truth may be.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...

I think AlphaGo vs AlphaZero is a strong argument against this. AlphaGo used the best knowledge of humanity to try to tune its play and mix human expertise, and centuries of master level play, with the strength of deep learning systems. It seems like this would be ideal, particularly as per your analogy. Google certainly believed this as this is the system they directed their resources towards developing and then very publicly demonstrating.

AlphaZero was likely a curious aside at one point. The idea with AlphaZero is to throw everything out the window. Even the game itself is just generalized into a generic position->transition->terminal state system where most 'simple' (in terms of rules) games can be relatively easy replaced. There was no human heuristics, no human games to go from instead relying entirely on self training, and so on. Of course it ended up that AlphaZero became vastly stronger vastly faster than AlphaGo ever managed to.