1,261 karma · joined March 15, 2018
There’s something incredibly irresponsible and pathetic about acknowledging a course of action that seems bad/inevitable, and then declaring that it will happen.
The future is not inevitable. If you declare failure to reach a positive future as inevitable, you are actively working towards failure, not success.
Libertarianism does not imply atomization. There’s nothing preventing people from creating larger groups of people that facilitate cooperation. It just has to be voluntarily entered into.
Discussions about when to grant authority to enforce things not specified in an explicit agreed to contract is where the debate about the problems with libertarianism belongs, imo.
Take the word “regulation”. According to wiktionary, it comes from “regō”, which means “to keep straight, direct, govern, rule”.
Direction requires a desired destination. We would like to steer the environment away from highly adulterated/dangerous drugs, away from harmful drug use generally, away from territorial violence, and away from drugs being sold to children.
Those that advocate for “deregulation” as well as decriminalization are really advocating for emergent peer to peer regulation instead of regulation by fiat. They generally think the best way to keep systems accountable and moving in the desired societal direction is for individuals to have as much freedom and direct feedback as possible about the consequences of their actions, which they argue leads to better individual decision making due to that better feedback.
Those that advocate for government regulation generally think it’s easier to keep systems accountable if you concentrate the most competent and responsible people into an explicit, transparent enforcement organization, which they argue leads to better decision making due to that better guidance and enforcement.
The former worry most about ineffective or bad actors in government enforcement systems distant from feedback/information. The latter worry most about ineffective or bad actors in the populace that are allowed to grow without coordinated enforcement/ability to organize.
I don’t think a lot of the arguing over different solutions to drug problems are really arguing about incompatible approaches, they’re just focused on different parts of the problem.
In my personal view, I think the BIGGEST problem from all camps is a lack of desire to really confront the core issues/invest the time and effort needed to actually solve these problems, which is a lot more about sitting down with people in very unpleasant situations/doing a lot of very difficult therapeutic communication, dealing with personal anger at irresponsible people, dealing with our disgust, not liking what we see reflected about ourselves, not liking to admit how much we actually DON’T control, not liking to acknowledge our own hypocrisies/how we contribute to the problem, not liking to acknowledge vast experiential differences and how important close connections are, not liking to admit how many people don’t prioritize themselves or others and are ungrateful/resentful, etc. We’d like to simply “get someone else to deal with it”, whether that be the government, the immediate family/individuals themselves, an app, a magic pill, some kind of secret drug problem destroying machine, etc.
Most online content is. I think most of what the author is complaining about can be attributed to this inability to distinguish between genuine human conversation with real people and automated attempts to get you to engage, not the internet itself.
Again, that doesn’t really count as a “proof” by modern standards, but it’s how the ancient greeks thought (they used more than just visual intuition/they also used more rigorous and formal propositions than that water thing, but they were visual and didn’t involve finite sets)
Whether or not a visual demonstration like that is actually a “proof” is a separate question. It definitely wouldn’t satisfy Hilbert, and doesn’t meet this definition:
> A proof of a statement S is a finite sequence of assertions S(1), S(2), … S(n) such that S(n) = S and each S(i) is either an axiom or else follows from one or more of the preceding statements S(1), …, S(i-1) by a direct application of a valid rule of inference.
I also don’t know of any visual “proof” like that which can’t be explained much more rigorously and powerfully with a formal set of assertions. But pulling threads like this and really asking what makes a proof a “proof” are some of the deepest questions I think a person can ask. It’s worth doing if only to appreciate what an incredible accomplishment all of the formal set theory work is in unifying and attempting to define meta concepts like “proof” itself.
Ultimately the more I read the more I recognize my own ignorance about a lot of this stuff and think the more most people are more ignorant than they realize. That’s why I tend to gravitate towards systems that maximize freedom at the national/international level, as I think any restrictions that need to exist tend to be emergent locally if allowed.
That’s susceptible to all kinds of excuse making and allegations of sabotage and cruelty and messy edge cases and would be extremely difficult to pull off in a way that satisfies zealots, but it’d have the massive benefit of actually comparing systems outside of any given framework for reasonable people.
My own personal theory is that any given economic system’s benefit is related to the collective psychology of the populace and that there are different local maximums and systems that work better in certain situations than in others.
That does not mean you’re wrong, I simply don’t trust your hand wavy dismissive argument about it being cheaper.
If I see a report that looks at the long term maintenance cost of an actually deployed modern solar farm, not hypothetical ones, and compares it to an actually deployed modern nuclear reactor, I’ll take that one.
I have an affinity for whatever actually works, the main reason I think nuclear looks good is I trust basic physics and understand how much astronomically higher the energy density of nuclear power is in comparison to like everything else.
This claim that 10 million acres of solar panels is cheaper to build and maintain and actually put into use and store power from vs extremely high energy output nuclear plants with tiny footprints that can produce continuously reeks of extremely biased accounting.
Worse according to who? Climate activists? Or people who are going to freeze to death because those “worse” options weren’t kept online?
That argument is not a straw man. I know very few want to go back to the stone age (some radicals do), that’s not my argument. A lot of people vastly overestimate the ease of transitioning and are making laws and goals and plans that are wildly optimistic and out of touch that will in effect lead to unstable grids and more people without power. No one sane wants that, but that’s already happening because a lot of places that have been aggressive about transitioning have done it poorly and without proper backup power generation options.
If COVID hasn’t convinced you rushed and panicked centralized interventions make things worse, and you’re willing to engage in even more of the kind of massive disruptions that we’ve only begun to see the full effects of because of a heatwave, you’re likely to kill more people with rushed intervention: https://nypost.com/2017/07/10/heat-death-hysteria-the-wrong-...
I meet a lot of people that are dogmatic about wind and solar and think it’ll work by itself and that the whole world needs to transition to that alone right now. In combination with other sources, in the US and rich countries we can afford to build all the clean energy we need, if all options are actually on the table. But doing that globally and doing it too fast will kill people.
Agriculture is already working, or was until its been starting to be shut down and curtailed due to alleged environmental issues like in the Netherlands. You can manage much larger chunks of land with plows and combines and other vehicles because of how you interact with the land when farming.
You can’t plant solar panels and have them just grow out of the ground and repair themselves and reproduce largely independently. It’s a totally different type of land use. Managing solar farms is magnitudes more effort to build and maintain than agriculture.
From what I understand it seems reasonable to get rid of coal in the US over a reasonable time frame with appropriate replacements. I’m not arguing in favor of coal. I’m arguing in favor of going with cheap reliable energy and whatever the best and actually practical solutions are for a given area.
The fact that coal has fallen by half in 20 years doesn’t mean the other half is just as easy, either. You need a certain amount of supplemental power at night, during bad weather, during usage spikes, etc. The remaining percentage of coal use is going to be more and more concentrated in the supply areas that are harder to replace. That doesn’t mean it can’t all be replaced or that we shouldn’t pursue replacing all of it, all I’m advocating is for a sane transition that takes practical constraints like that into account and doesn’t get perfectionistic about solutions. Frankly I don’t often see considerations like that being made, I see a lot of hysterics and dogmatic assertions about how everything needs to be solar panels and wind turbines yesterday and everyone who wants moderation or other green solutions and more gradual phase in is a greedy oil shill.
In most western countries we can afford to transition to other solutions, and it is far healthier for both the people around it and the environment, but I don’t think most of the people on this site really understand the ramifications of not having cheap reliable power. There’s a reason people left the farms and flocked to dirty hellish cities during the industrial revolution and still flock to cities and build coal plants today. It’s less hellish than living without reliable modern amenities.
Southern California and the Midwest aren’t going to become uninhabitable even if we continue pumping out as much CO2 as we are currently. I know of no reasonable projections that predict anywhere near the human cost of just shutting off power completely if it’s not clean like people seem to want to do.
That does NOT mean we can’t reduce CO2 emissions while meeting increasing energy demands. But we should be striving to do both. And given a choice between living next to a coal plant and having reliable lighting, heating, air conditioning and food refrigeration or living next to a clean but unaffordable and unreliable plant, most people would choose the coal plant. We’ve been running that experiment globally since the industrial revolution, the answer is clear. Even when taking the health effects and climate change projections into account, that choice would be reasonable. Dying of cold, dying of disease due to unrefrigerated food, dying due to inability to call for help… these are all things very distant from the minds of most people fortunate enough to be on this site. They are very real ramifications of not having reliable power. And those severe ones I just mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg.
Lets just please, please, please finish the new stuff before turning the old stuff off. Build as many solar farms and wind turbines and nuclear and hydro and battery parks and hydro batteries and natural gas lines as we need, and only turn the old stuff off when we’re actually ready. If we turn off everything not clean preemptively we’re going to kill way more people than climate change. If we were reasonable and sought to actually solve emissions problems as fast as possible there is no reason not to aggressively pursue wind AND solar AND hydro AND nuclear fission AND natural gas.
It’s sad I can make this prediction about your opinion, but I’m assuming you are probably not an advocate of fracking or nuclear power or hydro. Please correct me if I’m wrong. A lot of people apocalyptic about climate change are quite picky and refuse to pursue solutions that don’t conform to a perfect vision of a star trek like future where everything looks like the apple campus. It’s delusional.
It speaks to the privilege of those advocating green energy “at all costs” (which is not actually at all costs and maximally translates to “at the cost of the poor” due to the aforementioned pickiness) and reflects a severe lack of appreciation for the ramifications of less reliable and more expensive power on the poor.
The fact that most people on this site are surrounded by opulence and excess is creating a severe disconnect with the reality of the wider world. That default reality is that the only reason the climate isn’t killing way more people in the here and now is cheap power.
That’s 10 million acres of wires, maintenance, habitat and all kinds of mischievous creatures, not least of which are humans. And it only works when the weather is good. And not all countries have the grid or engineering and maintenance capacity of the United States.
It’s not a realistic solution.
By all means, lets put solar panels everywhere we already have buildings and roofs and power hookups and make a dent. Maybe at some point it’ll be possible to use solar alone, and we can keep up the maintenance.
Going all in on solar right now would be suicide. It’d be worse than the effects of anthropogenic warming. People are going to freeze to death this winter in Germany because they bought into the promise of renewables before it delivered and didn’t diversify their energy supply.
You should only phase something out when you can meet demands without it. Nuclear is a way to do that. Natural gas is a way to do that. Renewables are a way to do that. But you have to actually exceed demand and have a solid diversified base before you panic switch because of climate change. Otherwise you kill and impoverish more people than climate change.
It’s a job, not a caste. When you apply to work somewhere as a janitor you expect to work as a janitor. Don’t pity people doing a job that pays less, you have no idea what their story is or why they’re doing what they’re doing.
And if you think you aren’t adding to collective wealth and making salaries go further and further than they have before by growing the pie, maybe you should switch jobs and find one that keeps that pie growing.
I know there are lots of TV shows and movies about this, so it’s not a novel idea or anything, and I understand the potential for it to backfire, but I can’t overstate the cooperative benefits of gratitude if you really understand and appreciate what it is everyone is contributing.
I’m increasingly convinced shared narrative direction is deeper than material and organizational constraints in the direction society moves.
Obviously narrative needs to be compatible with material and organizational constraints, but given the overwhelming importance of religion throughout human history in motivating people, I think there’s a lot of compelling evidence that the stories we tell are pretty important.
You can’t force positive visions of the future, but I think we can be a lot more open to them than we are currently.
I’m highly skeptical of US intelligence agencies and think they are and have been corrupt, but I also understand the realities involved in maintaining a relatively peaceful global trade network in a world with billions of people, a collapsed soviet empire, and nuclear weapons. I also think it’s worth remembering what the KGB and soviet intelligence and surveillance state was like.
Maybe Brin and Page were secretly evil lizard people that wanted to turn the globe into North Korea, but I think the more likely explanation was that they were like most high level academic researchers: obsessively interested in seeing how far they could take their ideas, and overly optimistic about their positive impact and view of the military/intelligence as the good guys. Another fantastic example of that starry eyed optimism paired with dangerous government involvement was Project Orion. What was originally envisioned by its creators as a nuclear propelled rocket to propel humanity to the stars was corrupted by the cold war push for military dominance that funded it. In that case the potential for misuse was so great (one potential design was a battleship that was basically like a real life death star) that they scrapped it, but the scientists involved weren’t interested in building a death star. They were interested in building a nuclear space ship more powerful and with a greater launch capacity than anything we’ve ever designed before or since, and getting funding for it.
I personally believe everything possible should be done to make centralized surveillance impossible, because we’d need to repeal the fourth amendment to allow it if we’re serious about true and not “approximate” rule of law, and the dangers are too great, but I recognize that there was an argument to be made to justify involvement with intelligence agencies, and that a researcher salivating for funding and propelling their idea into the positive future the envision would think it’d be controllable and worth the risk.
I don’t think this level of cynicism is helpful or particularly true.
Knowing that power corrupts and actually preventing yourself from being corrupted by power are two totally different things. If you really, really want to solve a problem effectively, and know you’ll accumulate a ton of power if you succeed, its extremely easy to overestimate your ability to get the genie to do good once it’s out of the bottle.
Having to deal with the entire world pressuring you and trying to claw into your organization and inject their own interests is extremely difficult, and it changes people.
I explicitly remember looking at the colored letters of the alphabet in my first grade classroom that kind of wrapped around the top of the room and thinking some of them were wrong. There was another set of colored letters in kindergarten near the chalk board that I can’t remember explicitly, but I think it was “right”, or at least more right.
Many of the lower digits for me are shades of red, but are kind of comparative.
2 is red. 9 is a dark red. 5 is a lighter red in comparison to 9.
A lot of the higher numbers just kind of turn to black/I separate by digits. And all of the digits can still be black, the colors I associate just kind of get overlayed.
Some, like 6, are kind of confusing. It’s dark purple, but most shades of purple don’t feel right.
Some, like 1, is black or blue. Its definitely black when a digit of a higher number. It’s blue when I think of ordinals/first place.
3 is definitely yellow as a digit, pretty much always, but it gets dirtier sometimes. It can also be red/redish.
4 is like a dark aqua blue I associate heavily with water, but it can also be green, like when I think of the letter D, which I associate because they have the same order.
Would be interested to hear if you also have any associations that are “fuzzy” or context dependent like this. My associations in a given context are very very consistent/have had these same associations as long as I can remember, and I imagine the digits being colored in the way I described, but I’m also not sure if whatever I’m doing is really the same thing as people who actually experience the color quite vividly and automatically. I found a cool article a while back that talked about different subtypes, but I can’t remember if I’ve run across others describing this “fuzziness” aspect. It’s made me doubt whether I really have it, although it seems pretty definite that I do given the consistency with other explanations, but it also seems like it might be more kind of like a labelling/categorization thing for me than like a forced experience thing I hear some other people describe.
EDIT: missed that rendall describes something that sounds the same as the “fuzziness” thing I’m trying to articulate here -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32675007
It only takes one person in an apartment building to infect the whole building if the ventilation is poor.