There is no more evidence for that than there is for God. Indeed:
Indeed, belief in the legitimacy and wisdom of government seemed to require more blind faith than belief in God. - -
George H Smith, Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies
Amazingly, there really are domains in which socialism actually works. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. had privatized firefighting. It was horrible. After the American Civil War, firefighting was taken over by governments, and, astoundingly enough, things actually got better!
Simply responding with a Randian quote doesn’t show that government doesn’t work. Moreover, there are some things where government has worked well. At the most basic level, one needs governments to protect property rights, without which markets can’t function. Similarly, various forms of pooled goods are useful (you are welcome to try to have roads run by private industry and see how well that works) But even beyond that, government policies are helpful for dealing with negative externalities. In particular, some forms of harm are by nature spread out and not connected strongly to any single source. The classic example is pollution. Since pollution is spread out, the transaction cost is prohibitively high for any given individual to try to reduce pollution levels they are subject to. But a government, using regulation and careful taxation, can do this efficiently. In some situations, this can even be done in conjunction with market forces (such as cap and trade systems). In the US, this was very successful in efficiently handling levels of sulfur dioxide. See this paper. Governments are often slow and inefficient. But to claim that well-thought out policies never exist? That’s simply at odds with reality.
In particular, some forms of harm are by nature spread out and not connected strongly to any single source. The classic example is pollution. Since pollution is spread out, the transaction cost is prohibitively high for any given individual to try to reduce pollution levels they are subject to. But a government, using regulation and careful taxation, can do this efficiently. In some situations, this can even be done in conjunction with market forces (such as cap and trade systems). In the US, this was very successful in efficiently handling levels of sulfur dioxide.
Even from a libertarian point of view, pollution is something that causes harm, like murder or theft. The governments job is to enforce laws that mitigate sources of harm and, when possible, correct harms against individuals. A person or corporation who puts out some amount of pollution should be forced to pay for any clean up or harm that they make.
If you drive a car, you emmitted some fraction of the pollution that caused temperatures to go up, caused smog induced illness and some other miscellaneous harms that cost some amount of money. If that amount of money was 40 billion dollars, and you contributed 1 billionth towards the harm, you sshould pay 40 dollars.
This should be even less controversial than imprisoning murderers
This should be even less controversial than imprisoning murderers
Sadly it isn’t. I consider(ed) myself libertarian, and then found that most self-identified ones reject that reasoning entirely. Pity.
I was also unpleasantly suprised to find that there was a group of people griping about programs that would make it easier to identify cars that weren’t liability-insured or pollution-tested, and this was called a “libertarian” position.
ETA: And libertarian-leaning academics don’t seem to “get” why paying polluters to go away isn’t a solution, and don’t even understand what problem is supposed to be solved, even when hypothetically placed in such a situation! (See the exchange between me and Hanson in the link.)
It’s not so much that it doesn’t solve the problem as things just don’t work that way. For starters, current energy distribution methods are local monopolies, so they are strongly regulated on price because the competition mechanism doesn’t work as it should. The idea that a customers might “choose” cleaner energy doesn’t always work.
Second, some logging companies tried that. They had an outside company, come in, do an inspection, and certify the ecological viability of their practices. There were a fair number of people who actually were willing to pay a little more. The problem is, another set of companies came by, inspected and approved themselves (with a different label that they invented) , and customers weren’t able to tell the difference. That’s a problem.
It’s not so much that it doesn’t solve the problem as things just don’t work that way. For starters, current energy distribution methods are local monopolies, so they are strongly regulated on price because the competition mechanism doesn’t work as it should. The idea that a customers might “choose” cleaner energy doesn’t always work.
Also, to a great extent, electricity is fungible. Suppose you have both windmills and coal-fired plants connected to the same electrical grid, and they both generate equal amounts of power. Now suppose I tell the electric company that I only want to buy power from the windmills, so instead of getting half wind power and half coal power, I get 100% wind power (on paper). However, the electric company doesn’t actually have to change the way it produces electricity in order to do this. All they have to do slightly increase the percentage of coal power that they deliver to everyone else (on paper). So all that changes is numbers on paper, and there’s exactly as much coal power being generated as before.
Your noise pollution example is a potentially problematic one for libertarians but the obvious answer that occurs to me is the one I would expect many thoughtful libertarians to make. You are assuming a libertarian world with largely unchanged amounts of public space which is a problematic combination. The space outside your window has no reason to be public space. You would see a lot more ‘gated community’ type arrangements in a more libertarian society. People with low noise tolerance could choose to live in communities where the ‘public’ space was owned by a municipal service provider with strict rules about noise pollution. Anyone not adhering to these rules could be ejected from the property.
Many common problems with imagined libertarian societies dissolve when you allow for much greater private ownership of currently public land than currently exists.
It’s easier to move out? You are not born under a landlord. You do not swear fealty to the flag of the landlord. Nobody thinks the landlord should be able to draft you for civil service. The landlord cannot put you in jail for failing to pay rent. There’s a long, long list of other differences where the landlord as government analogy breaks down. I’m surprised anyone still brings it up.
EDIT: Ha. You changed it. In reality, not necessarily that much, although it’s nice to have extra governmental agency that you can choose to pay or not, and that is accountable to the government in a transparent way. Asking the government to regulate itself is almost as dumb as asking a logging company to regulate itself.
Well, If you expect a landlord to perform the functions of a government, by, say, regulating noise levels for the benefit of tenants, then doesn’t the analogy hold in this particular case? If regulation is bad, does it matter if it’s regulation by landlord or regulation by city council?
If a landlord tries to have you evicted, and you refuse to leave when a court rules that you must do so, local law enforcement is allowed to physically remove you from the property. That doesn’t sound non-violent to me.
This is a fair point. I would note, however, that eviction typically requires repeated notification, and opportunities for you modify your behavior before encountering violence.
Contrast with how your local sheriff can bust down your door in the middle of the night, shoot your dogs, destroy your property, and arrest you merely for suspecting you of possessing marijuana. And then be praised for it even if you are innocent.
Municipal services are generally provided by a local government but this is largely an artifact of the way modern democracies are organized. Private arrangements are fairly rare in the modern world but cruise ships, private resorts, corporate campuses and on a smaller scale large managed apartment buildings provide examples of decoupling the idea of provision of municipal services and government.
What if you had a dozen different companies that provided services like that. They would have a monopoly in different areas, however, the local governments would still be able to choose which one they wanted, and at any time they were displeased they could switch. Actually, this is a good idea!
You can probably go further than that. Municipal services can be unbundled and can operate without a geographical monopoly. This is already widely done for cable and telecoms in the US and UK and for electricity and gas in the UK. Some countries do it for water and sanitation services. There are examples worldwide of it being done for transportation, refuse collection, health and education. Arguments that such services are a ‘natural monopoly’ are usually promoted most strongly by those who wish to operate that monopoly with government protection.
If the “municipal service provider” has the power to enforce its edicts on noise level (because it has the power to exile those who violate them), then doesn’t that mean that it has exactly the same power over noise that a government would—and the same potential to misuse that power?
I tend to think that the right of exit is the ultimate and fundamental check on such abuses of power. This is why I favour decentralization / federalization / devolution as improvements to the status quo of increasing centralization of political power. I think that on more or less every level of government we would benefit from decentralization of power. City-wide bylaws on noise pollution are too coarse-grained for example. An entertainment district or an area popular with students should have different standards than a residential area with many working families. Zoning rules are an attempt to make such allowances but I think private solutions are likely to work better. I’d at least like to see them tried so we can start to see what works.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Moreover, there are some things where government has worked well.
Hitler was kind to animals. Even accepting your dubious claim it is not enough to show that government sometimes achieves positive outcomes (and don’t forget to ask what criteria are being used to determine ‘positive’). The relevant question is whether government intervention produces an overall net benefit. Generally it seems you can make the strongest case for this in small, relatively homogeneous countries. These results do not necessarily scale.
you are welcome to try to have roads run by private industry and see how well that works
There are an awful lot of hidden assumptions in this statement.
But a government, using regulation and careful taxation, can do this efficiently.
Can in theory and ever actually do in practice are worlds apart. Negative externalities are one of the stronger economic arguments for government intervention but actual examples of government regulation rarely approximate the theoretical regulatory framework proposed by economists. This is largely because the behaviour of governments is determined primarily by public choice theory and not by the benevolent, enlightened pursuit of economic rationality.
I agree with most of what you said. That’s one of the reasons I gave the historical example of SO2. The claim being made by the person I was responding to was not a remark about net gain but the claim that regarding “Good quality government policy” that “There is no more evidence for that than there is for God” and then backing it up with an argument from irrelevant authority. So giving examples to show that’s not the case accomplishes the basic goal.
There are an awful lot of hidden assumptions in this statement.
There’s a pretty good precedent for this happening in the form of the railway system in early America. I think I’d classify it as a market failure as private roads and railways have a way of becoming local monopolies and having an enormous advantage when it comes to rent-seeking behavior.
It’s not that it’s impossible, I just don’t think it’s a very good idea.
One of the hidden assumptions I was thinking of is the assumption that government built roads have been a net benefit for America. The highway system has been a large implicit subsidy for all kinds of business models and lifestyle choices that are not obviously optimal. America’s dependence on oil and outsize energy demands are in large part a function of the incentives created by huge government expenditure on highways. Suburban sprawl, McMansions, retail parks and long commutes are all unintended consequences of the implicit subsidies inherent in large scale government road construction.
American culture and society would probably look quite different without a history of government road construction. It’s not obvious to me that it would not look better by many measures.
Not necessarily. If you’ve ever been to Disney World, it’s not like that. And hell, government roads in the states and Japan often dissolve into a complex and inefficient series of toll roads, at least in some areas.
I’m much more worried about uncompetitive practices, like powerful local monopolies and rent seeking behavior.
Disney world owns the land, they can do whatever they want. But here in order to make efficient roads, we have to use eminent domain. A private company wouldn’t be able to do that. In order to have a governmentless society, you have to a) create a nearly impossible to maintain system of total anarchy like exists in parts of Afghanistan today or b) create a very corrupt and broken society ruled by private corporations, which is essentially a government anyways.
But here in order to make efficient roads, we have to use eminent domain.
The Kelo case allows government to use its eminent domain powers on the behalf of private companies. Why couldn’t a private road builder borrow this government power?
Why do you assume I support the Court’s decision? All I did was state that under current United States law, Houshalter’s objection was possible to overcome.
The government does use private contracters in many cases for different projects. It might work on roads, I’m not sure if they already use it, but its still alot differnet from asking a private corporation to decide when and where to build roads.
They do. And private corporations or councils already decide where to build the roads for some things, it’s just that all of those things only work if they’re already connected to other infrastructure, which, in the US, means public federal, state and locally built roads.
Well, I think you aren’t really imaginative enough in your view of anarchy, but… I’m not an anarchist and I’m not going to defend anarchy.
I disagree with the idea that efficient roads require imminent domain. It’s not even hard to prove. All I have to do is give one example of a business that was made without imminent domain. The railroad system, which I brought up before.
I still mostly think a nation of private roads is a bad idea, since it’s hard to imagine a way or scenario in which they wouldn’t be a local monopoly.
Which is part of the reason I think it’s a bad idea. The railroads constantly petitioned for those rights, that money and essentially leached off the American people. That’s what rent seeking means.
Are railroads that good an example? Some railroads and subways were built using eminent domain although I don’t know how much. And many of the large railroads built in the US in the second half of the 20th century went through land that did not have any private ownership but was given to the railroads by the government.
Railroads are a good example of a bad idea. The reason I picked them is that they were terrible, if I was going to pick innovative and creative real estate purchases by private industry, I’d be talking about McDonalds or Starbucks.
Railroads weren’t a terrible idea. The canal system was a terrible idea, not railroads. Railroads created lots of industry that wouldn’t have been possible without them. Many 19th century leaders thought of them as the best thing that ever happened to America.
The system of canals built in the early 19th century in the United States allowed the settlement of the old west and the development of industry in the north east (by allowing grain from western farms to reach the east). Why do you consider them a terrible idea? They were one of the centerpieces of the American System, which was largely successful.
Because they would dump the waste off the left side of the boat, and get drinking water from the right. The actual sides would switch depending on wich way they were going. I’ve been on those canal boats before, they are very, very slow. They had orphans walk on the side of the boat and guide the donkey (ass) that pulled it. They also took a long time to build, and didn’t last that long.
Because they would dump the waste off the left side of the boat, and get drinking water from the right.
This was a general problem more connected to cleanliness as a whole in 19th century America. Read a history of old New York, and realize that it took multiple plagues before they even started discussing not having livestock roaming the city.
I’ve been on those canal boats before, they are very, very slow.
Of course they were slow. They were an efficient method of moving a lot of cargo. Each boat moved slowly, but the total cargo moved was a lot more than they could often be moved by other means. Think of it as high latency and high bandwith.
They had orphans walk on the side of the boat and guide the donkey (ass) that pulled it.
In general 19th century attitudes towards child labor weren’t great. But what does this have to do with the canal system itself? Compared to many jobs they could have, this would have been a pretty good one. And this isn’t at all connected to using orphans; it isn’t like the canals were Powered by the souls of forsaken children. They were simply the form of cheap labor used during that time period for many purposes.
They also took a long time to build, and didn’t last that long.
The first point isn’t relevant unless you are trying to make a detailed economic estimate of whether they paid for themselves. The second is simply because they weren’t maintained after a few years once many of them were made obsolete by rail lines. If the rails had not come in, the canals would have lasted much longer.
So they’re a terrible idea because of bad sanitation and child labor? In that case, the entire history of economic ideas is bad up until 1920-ish. They unquestionably achieved their goal of providing better transportation. Am I to infer that you believe that government run highways are wrong because there is trash strewn on the sides of the road?
Maybe but thats not the point. They might have worked, maybe even made a profit, but I still say that they were inefficient which is why we don’t use them today (all thats left is a few large pieces of stone jutting out of rivers that passers by can’t explain.)
I think they might have been been better as wither a fully government venture or a private one. When they merge, a conflict of interest becomes immediately present.
That’s interesting. I wouldn’t expect there to be many examples of working privatized roads and their effects on a nationwide scale, but if there were, I’d love to see more about them, or even a good paper based on a hypothetical.
I think you’re stuck in the mindset of ‘if it wasn’t for our government provided roads where would we drive our cars?’. Such a world would probably have fewer private cars and be arranged in such a way that many ordinary people could get by perfectly well without a car, as is the case in many European and Japanese cities.
This article might help you understand some of the hidden assumptions many Americans operate under. Note: this guy has some rather wacky ideas but his articles on ‘traditional cities’ are pretty interesting.
I strongly agree with you that the US federal government has spent too much on road subsidies over the years and should decrease its current spending.
That said, not everywhere is Juneau, Alaska; not all sites connected to government roads are a “Suburban Hell,” and not all inhabitants of the suburbs would prefer to live in a “Traditional City.” Roads are useful for accommodating a highly mobile, atomistic society that exploits new resources and adopts new local trade routes every 20 years or so. Cars and parking lots are useful for separating people who have recently immigrated from all different places and who really don’t like each other and don’t want to have much to do with each other. Interstate highways were built for evacuation and civil defense as well as for actual transport. Finally, regardless of whether you prefer roads or trains, some level of government subsidy and/or coordination is probably needed to get the most efficient transportation system possible.
In any case, this thread started out as a discussion of Traditional vs. Bayesian rationality, did it not? Improving government policy was merely the example chosen to illustrate a point. It seems unsportsmanlike to shoot that point down on the grounds that virtually all government does more harm than good. Even if such a claim were true, one might still want to know how to generate government policies that do relatively less harm, given a set of political constraints that temporarily prevent enacting a strong version of (anarcho)libertarianism.
Even if such a claim were true, one might still want to know how to generate government policies that do relatively less harm
The failure of government is not a problem of not knowing which government policies would do relatively less harm. The primary problem of government is that there is little incentive to implement such policies. Trying to improve government by working to figure out better policies is like trying to avoid being eaten by a lion by making a sound logical argument for the ethics of vegetarianism. The lion has no more interest in the finer points of ethics than a politician does in the effects of policy on anything other than his own self-interest.
I mentioned elsewhere that governments of relatively small states with relatively homogeneous populations seem to do better than average. Scaling these relative successes up appears problematic.
If small homogeneous states do best, then campaigning for devolution to the best available approximation of such might be the best move.
Yes, that or seasteading. I’m also a firm believer in the ‘voting with your feet’ approach to campaigning. I have no desire to wait around until a democratic majority are convinced for improvements to happen locally. Migration is one of the few competitive pressures on governments today.
Your link provides very little evidence for your claim. At the national level, to say that a program costs $1 million per year is unimpressive. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the multiplier effect for mohair production is quite low, say, 0.5. I suspect that is it rather higher than that, since multiple people will go and card and weave and spin the damn fibers and then sell them to each other at art fairs, but let’s say it’s 0.5. That means you’re wasting $500,000 a year. In the context of a $5 trillion annual budget, you’re looking at 1 part per 10 million, or an 0.00001% increase in efficiency. Why should one of our 545 elected representatives, or even one of their 20,000 staffers, make this a priority to eliminate? The amazing thing is that the subsidy was eliminated at all, not that it crept back in. All systems have some degree of parasitism, ‘rent’, or waste. This is not exactly low-hanging fruit we’re talking about here.
More generally, I have worked for a few different politicians, and so far as I could tell, most of them mostly cared about figuring out better policies subject to maintaining a high probability of being re-elected. None of them appeared to have the slightest interest in directly profiting from their work as public servants, nor in exploiting their positions for fame, sex, etc. Those are just the cases that make the news. In my opinion, based on a moderate level of personal experience, the assumption that politicians are primarily motivated by self-interest at the margin in equilibrium is simply false.
Your link provides very little evidence for your claim.
What did you take my claim to be? The example in the link is intended to illustrate the fact that the problem of politics is not one of figuring out better policy. It is an example of a policy that is universally agreed to be bad and yet has persisted for over 60 years, despite a brief period in which it was temporarily stamped out. The magnitude of the subsidy in this case may be small but there are many thousands of such bad policies, some of much greater individual magnitude, and they add up. The example is intentionally a small and un-controversial example since it is intended to illustrate that if even minor bad policies like this are hard to kill then vastly larger ones are unlikely to be eliminated without structural reform.
None of them appeared to have the slightest interest in directly profiting from their work as public servants, nor in exploiting their positions for fame, sex, etc.
Giving this appearance is fairly important to succeeding as a politician so this is not indicative of much. I find it more relevant to judge by actual actions and results produced rather than by words or carefully cultivated appearances.
In my opinion, based on a moderate level of personal experience, the assumption that politicians are primarily motivated by self-interest at the margin in equilibrium is simply false.
As a well known politician once noted, you can fool some of the people all of the time.
As a well known politician once noted, you can fool some of the people all of the time.
Indeed you can! Be aware, though, that memes about government corruption and the people who peddle them may have just as much power to fool you as the ‘official’ authorities. Hollywood, for example, has a much larger propaganda budget than the US Congress. When’s the last time a Hollywood movie showcased virtuous politicians?
Also, beware of insulated arguments. If you assume that (a) politicians are amazingly good at disguising their motives, and (b) that politicians do in fact routinely disguise their motives, your assertions are empirically unfalsifiable. If you disagree, consider this: what could a politician do to convince you that he was honestly motivated by something like altruism?
When’s the last time a Hollywood movie showcased virtuous politicians?
An Inconvenient Truth? Seriously though, I don’t think Hollywood is particularly tough on politicians. It’s a major enabler for the cult of the presidency with heroic presidents saving the world from aliens,asteroids and terrorists. Evil corporations and businessmen get a far worse rap. The mainstream media is much too soft on politicians in the US in my opinion as well. Where’s the US Paxman?
If you disagree, consider this: what could a politician do to convince you that he was honestly motivated by something like altruism?
I think some politicians actually believe that they are acting for the ‘greater good’. Sometimes when they lobby for special interests they really convince themselves they are doing a good thing. It is sometimes easier to convince others when you believe your own spiel—this is well known in sales. They surely often think they are saving others from themselves by restricting their liberties and trampling on their rights. Ultimately what they really believe is somewhat irrelevant. I judge them by how they respond to incentives, whose interests they actually promote and what results they achieve.
I don’t think being motivated by altruism is desirable and I don’t think pure altruism exists to any significant degree.
I agree with you that Hollywood is soft on Presidents, and that the mainstream media is soft on just about everyone, with the possible exception of people who might be robbing a convenience store and/or selling marijuana in your neighborhood, details at eleven.
That still leaves legislators, bureaucrats, administrators, police chiefs, mayors, governors, and military officers as Rent-A-Villains (tm) for Hollywood action flicks and dramas.
Sometimes when they lobby for special interests they really convince themselves they are doing a good thing.
From my end, it still looks like you’re starting with the belief that government is wrong, and deducing that politicians must be doing harm. Your arguments are sophisticated enough that I’m assuming you’ve read most of the sequences already, but you might want to review The Bottom Line.
I’m not sure to what extent either of us has an open mind about our fundamental political assumptions. I’m also unsure as to whether the LW community has any interest in reading a sustained duel about abstract versions of anarcholibertarianism and representative democracy. Worse, I at least sympathize with some of your arguments; my main complaint is that you phrase them too strongly, too generally, and with too much certainty. For all those reasons, I’m not going to post on this particular thread in public for a few weeks. I will read and ponder one more public post on this thread by you, if any—I try to let opponents get in the last word whenever I move the previous question.
All that said, if you’d like to talk politics for a while, you’re more than welcome to private message me. You seem like a thoughtful person.
I’m not sure to what extent either of us has an open mind about our fundamental political assumptions.
I described myself as a socialist 10 years ago when I was at university. My parents are lifelong Labour) voters. I have changed my political views over time which gives me some confidence that I am open minded in my fundamental political assumptions. Caveats are that my big 5 personality factors are correlated with libertarian politics (suggesting I may be biologically hardwired to think that way) and from some perspectives I could be seen as following the cliched route of moving to the right in my political views as I get older.
my main complaint is that you phrase them too strongly, too generally, and with too much certainty.
This is partly a stylistic thing—I feel that padding comments with disclaimers tends to detract from readability and distracts from the main point. I try to avoid saying things like in my opinion (should be obvious given I’m writing it) or variations on the theme of the balance of evidence leads me to conclude (where else would conclusions derive from) or making comments merely to remind readers that 0 and 1 are not probabilities (here of all places I hope that this goes without saying). I used to make heavy use of such caveats but I think they tend to increase verbiage without adding much information. If it helps, imagine that I’ve added all these disclaimers to anything I say as a footnote.
All that said, if you’d like to talk politics for a while, you’re more than welcome to private message me. You seem like a thoughtful person.
I tend to subscribe to the idea that the best hope for improving politics is to change incentives, not minds but periodically I get drawn into political debates despite myself. I’ll try to leave the topic for a while.
tend to subscribe to the idea that the best hope for improving politics is to change incentives, not minds but periodically I get drawn into political debates despite myself. I’ll try to leave the topic for a while.
Incentives (or incentive structures, like markets [1]) are the result of human decisions.
Perhaps you mean changing the minds of the people who set the incentives.
[1] A market’s incentives aren’t set in detail, but permitting the market to operate in public or not is the result of a relatively small number of decisions.
Perhaps you mean changing the minds of the people who set the incentives.
Part of the thinking behind competitive government is that we are the people who set the incentives.
Seasteading is explicitly designed to create alternative social systems that operate somewhat outside the boundaries of existing states. An analogy is trying to introduce revolutionary technologies by convincing a democratic majority to vote for your idea vs. founding a startup and taking the ‘if you build it they will come’ route. The latter approach generally appears to have a better track record.
Charter cities were born out of a slightly different agenda but embody similar principles.
A simple step that individuals can take is to move to a jurisdiction in line with their values rather than trying to change their current jurisdiction through the political process. Competition works to improve products in ordinary markets because customers take their business to the companies that best satisfy their preferences. Migration is one of the few forces that applies some level of competitive pressure to governments.
Other potential approaches are to support secession or devolution movements, things like the free state project, supporting the sovereignty of tax havens, ‘starving the beast’ by structuring your affairs to minimize the amount of tax you pay, personal offshoring and other direct individual action that creates competitive pressure on jurisdictions.
I think he’s talking from a government perspective or a perspective of power.
Obviously, you can educate people yjat malaria is bad and beg people to solve the problem of malaria. It is, however, possible to know a lot about and not do anything about it.
Or you could pay people a lot of money if they would show work that might help the problem of malaria. I tend to think this method would be more effective, although there are other effective incentives than money.
I don’t think being motivated by altruism is desirable and I don’t think pure altruism exists to any significant degree.
The common form “I don’t believe in X, but X would be bad if it did exist” seems to me like a bad sign; of what, I’m not sure, perhaps motivated cognition.
It can be a bad pattern but there are cases where it is legitimate, for example “I don’t believe in the Christian god but if he did exist he would appear to be a major asshole.”
In my opinion, based on a moderate level of personal experience, the assumption that politicians are primarily motivated by self-interest at the margin in equilibrium is simply false.
As a well known politician once noted, you can fool some of the people all of the time.
It would either be polite or impolite to make explicit who the “some of the people” are that you refer to in this sentence, and what relevance this has to Mass_Driver’s remark. I am curious to hear which.
Mass_Driver appears to be one of the people who can be fooled all of the time since he judges politicians by what they say and how they present themselves rather than by what their actions say about their incentives and motivations. I did not intend to be ambiguous.
Thank you—I had suspected that might be your meaning, but I prefer not to pronounce negative judgments on people without clear cause, and I have read plenty of comments which appeared equally damning but were of an innocent nature upon elaboration. Carry on.
I appreciate your unusually deft grasp of the English language. Upvoted.
(I also appreciate the paucity of my education in the sociology of representative government, and must therefore bow out of the discussion. Please discount my opinion appropriately.)
Wow. That’s really very eye-opening. And as someone who has spent time in old cities outside the US and doesn’t even drive, I’m a bit shocked about how much of an assumption I seem to be operating with about what a city should look like.
Japanese cities still have massive infrastructure and public transportation subsidies. It’s not OMG how can we not have cars?; it’s OMG how can we actually have transportation in a non governmental way that actually operates in a healthy market?
City scale transportation infrastructure doesn’t require large amounts of governmental involvement. Traditional European cities evolved for much of their history with minimal government involvement. City level infrastructure would be well within the capabilities of private enterprise in a world with more private ownership of public space. Large privately constructed resorts (think Disneyland) illustrate the feasibility of the concept although they are not necessarily great adverts for its desirability.
That site you linked to has an article comparing Toledo, Ohio to Toledo, Spain. Its kind of unfair because Toledo Ohio is a relativley small city and is dying economically. I was kind of offended because I live really close to there, but he does make a point.
Huh. Well Toledo just seems like a craphole. Well once they get around to demolishing all of those old buildings it will look better. And I can’t explain how people live without cars. It boggles me. Sure we have big roads, but seriously, who wants to walk for 20 miles every day?
And I can’t explain how people live without cars. It boggles me. Sure we have big roads, but seriously, who wants to walk for 20 miles every day?
The point made in the discussion of traditional cities I linked is that living without a car can be a nightmare in places that were designed around cars but that many cities that were not designed around cars are very livable without them. I’ve lived in Vancouver for 7 years without a car quite happily and it’s not even particularly pedestrian friendly compared to many European cities (though it is by North American standards). I only walk about 3-4 miles a day.
I live in the middle of nowhere North west Ohio actually. I don’t exactly consider it “the country”, but it is compared to other places I’ve been. The roads make 1 mile grids and each has a dozen houses on it and a few fields and woods. Walking to town would take the better part of a day. Also, why are many modern cities built in the 18th century designed around cars if they only were invented in the later half of the century and became popular nearly half a century after that?
Ok. It looks like someone just did a driveby and downvoted every single entry in this subthread by 1 (I noticed because I saw my karma drop by 13 points with about 5 minute span since my last click on a LW page, and then glancing through saw that a lot of entries in this thread (including many that are not mine) had a lower karma than they had been when I last looked at the thread this morning, with many comments at 0 now at −1). Can the person who did this please explain their logic?
Request for explanation seconded—I have had four comments (one, two three four) downvoted in the same timespan, with several surrounding comments visibly downvoted.
When it comes to government policy I tend to grade on a curve. I actually agree with you that the quality of government policy is generally quite poor. But it’s not equally poor everywhere, and improving government’s function (which will in some cases meaning having it do less) can do a lot of good for a lot of people.
I should also point out that choosing to take no action is still a policy decision. To give you an example, a few years a go some crazy woman pulled a knife on a plane, leading to a bit of an incident. There was a review of airline security regulation for domestic flights (which usually have no searches or metal detectors in my country). Cabinet decided, on the basis of advice from officials, that existing regulation was sufficient, and the only thing that needed to be done was put a lockable door on the cabin, which was being phased in already. Would you regard this as a good policy decision?
I’d question the need to have government involved in the decision at all. Why not let the airlines decide their own security policies?
At least three reasons:
Because airlines have these large objects that can function as missiles and bring down buildings. So failing to secure them harms lots of other people.
As with other industries, individuals do not have the resources to make detailed judgments themselves about safety procedures. This is similar to the need for government inspection and regulation of drugs and food.
Violation of security procedures is (for a variety of good reasons) a criminal offense. In order for that to make any sense, you need the government to have some handle in what procedures do and do not make sense.
The first two reasons only justify requiring that airlines carry liability insurance policies against the external damage that can be caused by by their planes and injuries/deaths of passengers. Then, the insurer would specify what protocols airlines must follow before the insurer will offer an affordable policy. Passengers would not have to make such judgments in that case.
ETA: Actually, you know what? This has devolved into a political debate. Not cool. Can we wind this down? (To avoid the obvious accusation, anyone can feel free to reply to my arguments here and I won’t reply.)
Well, my general approach is to think that we should continue political discussions as long as they are not indicating mind-killing. For example, I find your point about liability insurance to be very interesting, and not one I had thought about before. It is certainly worth thinking about, but even then, that’s a different type of regulation, not a lack of regulation as a whole.
Well, my general approach is to think that we should continue political discussions as long as they are not indicating mind-killing.
If it’s not there in your judgment then, I’ll continue.
For example, I find your point about liability insurance to be very interesting, and not one I had thought about before. It is certainly worth thinking about, but even then, that’s a different type of regulation, not a lack of regulation as a whole.
Yes, but it certainly makes a difference in how many choices and alternatives regulation chokes off. Even if you believe in regulation as a necessary evil, you should favor the kind that accomplishes the same result with less intrusion. And there’s a big difference between “Follow this specific federal code for airline security”, versus “Do anything that convinces an insurer to underwrite you for a lot of potential damages.”
Similarly, when it comes to restricting carbon emissions, it makes much more sense to assign a price or scarcity to the emissions themselves, rather than try to regulate loose correlates, such as banning products that someone has deemed “inefficient”.
If you consider all that obvious, then you should understand my frustration when libertarians have to pull teeth to get people to agree to mere simplifications of regulation like I describe above.
Yeah, no disagreement with those points. (Although now thinking more about the use of insurance underwriting there may be a problem getting large enough insurance. For example, in some areas there have been home insurance companies that went bankrupt after major natural disasters and didn’t have enough money to pay everything out. One could see similar problems occurring when one has potential loss in the multi-billion dollar range.)
One of the oldest reinsurers originally had unlimited liability for members. I think that provides much more effective oversight of risk allocation than any regulation.
I think that provides much more effective oversight of risk allocation than any regulation.
No, it didn’t. Did you miss the part where Lloyds imploded, and the unlimited liability destroyed scores of lives (and caused multiple suicides)? The ‘reinsurance spiral’ certainly was not effective oversight. Even counting the Names’ net worth, Lloyds had less reserves and greater risk exposure than regular corporate insurance giants that it competed with, like Swiss Re and Munich Re.
EDIT: It occurs to me that the obvious rebuttal is that Lloyds was quite profitable for a century or two, and so we shouldn’t hold the asbestos disaster against it. But it seems to me that any fool can capably insure against risks that eventuate every month or year; high quality risk management is known from how well the extremely rare events are handled.
Their liability is still limited by the laws regarding personal bankruptcy. You can’t pay back money you don’t have. (In the old days, there was debtor’s prison, but that really doesn’t help anyone.)
Some libertarians oppose limited liability for shareholders of corporations because it distorts the incentives to reduce the risk of harm to third parties. I tend to lean in that direction although I can see the merit in some arguments in favour of limited liability.
Ah yes, the orthodox doctrine of the Church of Unlimited Government. I’m a heretic and don’t accept any of these as self evident. I find it interesting that it doesn’t even occur to most people to ask the question whether any given issue should even be considered as a legitimate concern of government. From the second link (emphasis mine):
Do you remember the flap recently about the airline that was going to charge for carry-on luggage? And then a Congressman said we need to pass a law saying that the airlines cannot do that? Now, the merits of the issue are debatable (as a passenger, I think I might actually prefer to fly on an airline that charges for carry-on luggage), but that is not the point. Even if we all felt really strongly that charging for carry-on luggage is evil, are we willing to say that government should stay out of the issue, on principle? The libertarian says that indeed the government should stay out of it. The member of the Church does not. Again, being ok with government staying out of it gets you libertarian points only if you care about the issue. If you are ambivalent about charging for carry-on luggage or you think it’s a really minor issue, then it’s not in the set of social problems that you feel are important.
I bring up the carry-on luggage example because to me it illustrates the relative strength of the forces for limited government and the forces for unlimited government. From my standpoint, the idea of regulating the pricing of carry-on luggage is nutty as a fruitcake. But it seemed perfectly normal to most people—certainly to most of our “thought leaders.” It seems to me that I belong to the Dissenting Church, and the established church is the Church of Unlimited Government.
I’m not at all sure what any of this has to do with anything. I agree with the quoted section that having the government step in to regulate how much carryon luggage people can have is an example of people making bad assumptions about government. Indeed, this one is particularly stupid because it is economically equivalent to charging a higher price and then offering a discount for people who don’t bring carryon luggage. And psych studies show that if anything people react more positively to things framed as a discount.
But I don’t see what this has to do with anything I listed. Can you explain for example how the fact that airplanes are effectively large missiles is not a good reason for the government to be concerned about their security? The use of airplanes as weapons is not fictional.
Similarly, regarding my second point are you claiming that people in general do have the time and resources to determine if any given drug is safe or is even what it is claimed to be? I’m curious how other than government regulation you intend to prevent people from diluting drugs for examples.
Edit: And having now read the essays you linked to I have to say that I’m a bit confused. The notion that the US of all countries has a religious belief in unlimited government is difficult for me to understand. The US often has far less regulation and government intervention than say most of Europe. So the claim that the US has a religion of “Unlimited Government” as a replacement for an established religion clashes with the simple fact that many countries which do have established or semi-established religions still have far more government intervention. Meanwhile, it seems that it is frequently politically helpful in the US to talk about “getting the government off of peoples’ backs” or something similar. So how the heck is this a religion in the US?
I’m not at all sure what any of this has to do with anything. I agree with the quoted section that having the government step in to regulate how much carryon luggage people can have is an example of people making bad assumptions about government.
This rather illustrates my point. You can see the lack of justification for a fairly extreme example like the carry on luggage but can’t see how that relates to the question of airline security. From my perspective the idea that government should even be discussing what to do about airline security in the original example is at least as ridiculous as the luggage example is from your perspective.
Can you explain for example how the fact that airplanes are effectively large missiles is not a good reason for the government to be concerned about their security? The use of airplanes as weapons is not fictional.
Airlines already have a strong economic incentive to take measures to avoid hijacking and terrorist attacks, both due to the high cost of losing a plane and to the reputational damage and possible liability claims resulting from passenger deaths and from the destruction of the target. I would expect them to do a better job of developing efficient security measures to mitigate these risks if government were not involved and also to do a better job of trading off increased security against increased inconvenience for travelers. There is absolutely no reason why a potentially dangerous activity necessitates government involvement to mitigate risks.
Similarly, regarding my second point are you claiming that people in general do have the time and resources to determine if any given drug is safe or is even what it is claimed to be? I’m curious how other than government regulation you intend to prevent people from diluting drugs for examples.
You can make the same argument with regard to many goods and services available in our complex modern world. It is equally flawed when applied to drugs as when applied to computers, cars or financial products. There is no reason why government has to play the role of gatekeeper, guardian and guarantor. In markets where government involvement is minimal other entities fill these roles quite effectively.
There is absolutely no reason why a potentially dangerous activity necessitates government involvement to mitigate risks.
Since the italics are yours, I’m going to focus on that term and ask what you mean by necessitate? Do you mean society will inevitably fall apart without it? Obviously no one is going to make that argument. Do you mean just that there are potentially ways to try to approach the problem other than the government? That’s a much weaker claim.
You can make the same argument with regard to many goods and services available in our complex modern world. It is equally flawed when applied to drugs as when applied to computers, cars or financial products. There is no reason why government has to play the role of gatekeeper, guardian and guarantor. In markets where government involvement is minimal other entities fill these roles quite effectively.
Really? Cars are extensively regulated. The failure of government regulation is seen by many as part of the current financial crisis. And computers don’t (generally) have the same fatality concerns. What sort of institution would you replace the FDA with ?
Since the italics are yours, I’m going to focus on that term and ask what you mean by necessitate?
I mean that recognizing the existence of a perceived problem does not need to lead automatically to considering ways that government can ‘fix’ it. Drug prohibition is a classic example here. Many people see that there are problems associated with drug use and jump straight to the conclusion that therefore there is a need for government to regulate drug use. Not every problem requires a government solution. The mindset that all perceived problems with the world necessitate government convening a commission and devising regulation is what I am criticizing.
What sort of institution would you replace the FDA with ?
I’d abolish the FDA but I wouldn’t replace it with anything. That’s kind of the point. People would still want independent assessments of the safety and efficacy of medical treatments and without the crowding out effects of a government supported monopoly there would be strong incentives for private institutions to satisfy that demand. The fact that the nature of these institutions would not be designed in advance by government but would evolve to meet the needs of the market is a feature, not a bug.
I can kind of see how a private company could test and recomend/approve drugs, but what about snake oil sales men. No, this system wouldn’t work at all. To many people would die or be seriously hurt for no reason.
True and they wouldn’t deserve it, but the truth is, there are a lot of really awesome effective drugs that either take forever to get approved, or don’t get approved it at all. This kills people, too.
And there are a lot of diseases, like bronchitis, that are easy for a person to diagnose in themselves, and know that they need an antibiotic, but it costs a hundred dollars to see a doctor to tell him what he already knows so he can get the medicine, and if that’s the difference between him paying the rent or not… and, hypothetically, he dies because it goes untreated.
It’s more a propblem of political viability rather than anything else.
And there are a lot of diseases, like bronchitis, that are easy for a person to diagnose in themselves, and know that they need an antibiotic,
And then they misdiagnose it, and antibiotic resistance increases, and then the antibiotic doesn’t work when they need it. Or they diagnose it but miss a warning sign for another disease that a doctor would have noticed and tested for. No thanks, I’d much rather have people who have gone to medical school for years make that decision.
No thanks, I’d much rather have people who have gone to medical school for years make that decision.
And I’d much rather the decision to trust doctors be made by the people to be affected, rather than politicians (who have not done any school / training in particular).
The “people to be affected” are the general public, who suffer when contagious diseases aren’t treated properly, and the general public makes these decisions through elected politicians. Also, these decisions are frequently based on recommendations by administrators with degrees in Public Health.
Some day I hope someone without an axe to grind does an in-depth study estimating how badly people would be harmed with drug regulation v. without drug regulation. I’ve seen the ‘yeah but regulation causes harms’ versus ‘yeah but non-regulation causes harms’ argument before, but I can’t remember seeing anyone try to rigorously and comprehensively quantify the respective pros and cons of both courses of action and compare them.
Have you looked at the academic studies on the topic? Are these the “axe-grinding” “arguments” that you dismiss? Simple comparisons of the US vs Europe during times when one was systematically more conservative seems to me to be a pretty reasonable methodology, but maybe you don’t consider it “rigorous” or “comprehensive.”
Maybe I’m overdoing the scare quotes, but those words were not helpful for me to identify what you have looked at, whether our disagreement is due to your ignorance or my lower standards.
Have you looked at the academic studies on the topic? Are these the “axe-grinding” “arguments” that you dismiss?
I have not, and my comment was not intended to slam whatever genuinely unbiased academic studies of the topic there are.
My comment’s referring to the times I’ve been a bystander for arguments about the utility of pharmaceutical drug regulation, both in real life and online; a pattern I noticed is the arguers failing to cite hard, quantitative evidence or make an argument based on the numbers. At best they might cite particular claims from think tanks or other writers/groups with a political agenda that would plausibly bias the analysis.
So when I say I’ve seen the argument before, I’m not thinking of the abstract debate over whether what the FDA does is a net good or not, or particular pieces of academic work; I’m thinking of concrete occasions where people have started arguing about it in my presence, and the failure of the people I’ve witnessed arguing about it to present detailed evidence.
I haven’t tried to research the topic in detail, so I don’t know precisely what ground the academic studies cover. At any rate, I didn’t mean to claim knowledge of the field and to imply that there aren’t any. I genuinely do just mean that I haven’t seen them, because laymen (including the parent posters in this subthread, at least so far) don’t mention them when they argue about the issue. As I wrote before, I added the ‘axe to grind’ warning not as a preemptive slam on academics, but because I suspect there have already been some overtly partisan analyses of the subject, and I want to discourage people from suggesting them to me.
Simple comparisons of the US vs Europe during times when one was systematically more conservative seems to me to be a pretty reasonable methodology, but maybe you don’t consider it “rigorous” or “comprehensive.”
In this context, what I mean by ‘rigorously and comprehensively’ is that the analysis should satisfy basic standards for causal inference—all important confounding variables should be accounted for, and so on. For example, it would not be ‘rigorous’ to just collect a list of countries and compare the lifespan of those with an FDA-like administration with those that don’t, because there are almost certainly confounding variables involved, and it’s not clear that lifespan is a suitably relevant overcome variable. We might pick a more suitable outcome variable and use a regression to try controlling for one or two confounders, but we still wouldn’t have a ‘comprehensive’ analysis without a list of all of the significant confounding variables, and a way to adjust for them or vitiate their effects.
One rigorous and comprehensive way to evaluate the question, although not a very realistic one, would be a global randomized trial. We might agree on a set of outcome variables, carefully measure them in every country in the world, randomly assign half the countries to having an FDA and the other half no FDA, and then come back after a pre-agreed number of years to re-measure the outcome variables and check for an effect in the countries with an FDA.
Now of course we don’t have that dataset, so if we want evidence we have to make do with what we have, perhaps by comparing the US and Europe as you mention. That could be a pretty good way to test for a positive/negative effect of drug regulation, or it could be a pretty bad way, but I’d need to hear more details about the precise method to say.
Maybe I’m overdoing the scare quotes, but those words were not helpful for me to identify what you have looked at, whether our disagreement is due to your ignorance or my lower standards.
I’m not sure what you believe we’re disagreeing about. I think you might have gotten the wrong impression of my intentions—I wasn’t trying to score points off RomanDavis or Houshalter or mattnewport or anyone else in this thread, or imply that drug regulation is obviously good/bad and only an axe grinder could think otherwise. At any rate, if you have citations for academic studies you think I’d find informative, I’d like them.
The disagreement was just that you seemed to say (by the phrasing “some day”) that there had not been any good work on the subject.
The only such paper I remember reading is Gieringer. That link is to a whole bibliography, compiled by people with a definite slant, so I can’t guarantee that there aren’t contradictory papers with equally good methodology.
I genuinely do just mean that I haven’t seen them, because laymen (including the parent posters in this subthread, at least so far) don’t mention them when they argue about the issue.
I’m reminded of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who gives the impression of having fabricated the papers assessing him, but they’re real.
Fair enough. Thanks for the Gieringer 1985 cite; it’s 25 pages long so I haven’t read it yet, but skimming through it I see a couple of quantitative tables, which is a good sign, and that it was published in the Cato Journal, which is not such a good sign. But it’s something!
I had noticed that you said that. I was originally not going to draw attention to the paper’s source, but it occurred to me that someone might then have asked me whether I was aware of the paper’s source, referring to my earlier claim that I wanted to discourage people from offering me overtly partisan analyses. So I decided to pre-empt that possible confusion/accusation by acknowledging the paper’s origin from a libertarian-leaning journal.
Yeah, I was thinking of bringing up examples myself, but because of the various axes involved, bringing one up might not be terrible effective.
Another person (I think it was cousin_it) brought up the idea that it should come down to a bet. If we bet ten dollars, and one of us kept arguing after the evidence was in and the bet was lost all it would come down to is, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
EDIT:Also someone went and down voted the crap out of me. Who’d I make mad and why?
Yeah, I was thinking of bringing up examples myself, but because of the various axes involved, bringing one up might not be terrible effective.
Yup. I thought of the ‘without an axe to grind’ proviso because I expect some politically-aligned think tanks out there have already published pamphlets or reports arguing one side or the other, but I wouldn’t be inclined to take their claims very seriously.
EDIT:Also someone went and down voted the crap out of me. Who’d I make mad and why?
Yes, it looks like almost all the comments related to the government policy issue got downvoted. This is annoying in that, I at least thought that it was a calm, rational discussion which was showing that political discussion isn’t necessarily mind-killing. I’m particularly perplexed by the downvoting of comments which consisted of either interesting non-standard ideas or of comments which included evidence of claims.
The downvote limit is 4 times your karma yes? So if the total downvote for the thread was around 60 points, the individual would only need to be around 15 karma.
Yes. It was originally equal to your karma but some of us had already spent that many downvotes and the point of the policy wasn’t to stop established users from being able to downvote.
I hope someone without an axe to grind does this; if there are axes involved, its much more likely to turn out supporting whatever the person thought before, i. e. not strongly correlated with how people are hurt or helped by regulation
The FDA doesn’t prevent snake oil salesmen: various kinds of alternative medicine escape regulation. It seems regulation primarily applies to treatments that might actually have a hope in hell of working.
Are you considering the other side of the ledger? The people deprived of potentially life saving new treatments because they have not yet been approved? The innovative new medical companies that never get started because of the barriers to entry formed by the regulatory agencies and the big pharmaceutical companies who know how to navigate their rules? The new treatments for rare diseases that are never developed because the market is too small to justify the costs of gaining regulatory approval? The effective anti-venoms already used successfully in other countries that are not available to treat rare snake bites in the US because FDA approval is too onerous?
The FDA doesn’t even have a perfect track record achieving its stated aims. As with any large government agency, private alternatives would be more cost effective and better at the job.
Alternative medicine used to be much more closely regulated. A lot of these products were more closely regulated until lobbying by the alternative medicine industry lead to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 which made it much harder for the FDA to regulate them.
So how do you feel about the government regulating what credit card issuers or insurers are allowed to offer? I see this as similar to the carry-on luggage issue. I don’t want credit card companies to be allowed to offer misleading rates or unfair policies like paying off the lowest interest rates first. I’m not sure about carry-on luggage, but what about charging for a bathroom? That seems clearly within the scope of legitimate concerns of government, given that air travel is already heavily regulated.
That seems clearly within the scope of legitimate concerns of government, given that air travel is already heavily regulated
This argument doesn’t work. Just because you already have heavy regulation, doesn’t justify having more regulation. Also, many libertarians would say that the solution should be to simply remove much of the heavy regulation of air travel.
This argument doesn’t work. Just because you already have heavy regulation, doesn’t justify having more regulation.
Well, it doesn’t by itself justify more regulation, but it makes additional regulation less burdensome. If trains were not regulated and planes were, it might be reasonable to add regulation of bathrooms to plane regulations, but not to introduce regulation to trains so we could regulate bathrooms.
Also, many libertarians would say that the solution should be to simply remove much of the heavy regulation of air travel.
I think there are some credit card practices that could be framed as fraud (You can change my interest rate without telling me? And without telling me you won’t tell me? Seriously? What the hell?) so the government would have to be involved even in a strict libertarian society, but I never like where this is going.
Libertarianism, as a political concept was an idea invented by David Nolan to suit his political theories. He had a chart, and a quarter of it is various types of libertarians.
If you like more social liberties than the American center, and more economic liberties, and are willing to forgo some amount (even a small amount) of government services and protections to achieve them, then you are some where on that quarter of the map. You don’t necessarily have to be way off in the corner with the anarchists or defend every idea they have.
So basically it all comes down to “Should the government worry about this or not?” Is there any good heuristics or principles for determining wether or not the government should regulate something? I’m not upset at the system for being wrong per se, but I am upset about it being so inconsistent and unreliable.
Have you read Taleb’s The Black Swan? He has a counterfactual story that is extremely similar (though it uses 9/11); basically there aren’t any (even negative) incentives for politicians to push such policies through until after some huge disaster happens.
I haven’t read Taleb, but I have heard a few interviews of him where he got the opportunity to outline his ideas.
I think politicians in general have a tendency to overreact to adverse events, and often by doing things that involve signals of reassurance (such as security theatre) rather than steps to fix the problem. I’m open to the possibility that they don’t do enough to prevent problems, but as a rule governments are very risk averse entities, usually preoccupied with things that might go wrong.
In what way is this a useful response to James_K? What do you believe James_K is doing that he shouldn’t be doing (or vice-versa), such that your comment is likely to lead him toward better action?
What if there is evidence for God? Why do you assume there isn’t?
Note that general Less Wrong consensus is that religion in almost all forms is very wrong. It is a safe operating assumption to work with on LW, in that you don’t need to go through the logic everytime to justify it. it probably isn’t as safe a starting point as say the wrongness of a flat-earth, or the wrongness of phlogiston, but it is pretty safe.
This is not a site that devotes a whole lot of space to debating religion. People aren’t getting mean so much as they’re using shorthand. It can save time, for atheists, not to explain why they’re atheists over and over. Hence the links. The sequences are a pretty good expression of why the majority around here is atheist. They’re the expansion of the shorthand. If you’re anything like me, reading them will probably move some of your mental furniture around; even if not, you’ll talk the lingo better.
Chill with the downvotes, guys. Houshalter’s new, looks to be participating well in other threads, and is just stating a belief for the first time.
Houshalter, this is a tangent to the current… tangent. It might be better to discuss theism in its own Open Thread comment or within a past discussion on the topic.
On a related note, have you looked through the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence yet? Not to throw a short book’s worth of stuff at you, but there’s a lot of stuff taken for granted around here when discussing theism, the supernatural, and evidence for such.
Chill with the downvotes, guys. Houshalter’s new, looks to be participating well in other threads, and is just stating a belief for the first time.
Uh… thanks?
Houshalter, this is a tangent to the current… tangent. It might be better to discuss theism in its own Open Thread comment or within a past discussion on the topic.
I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.
On a related note, have you looked through the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence yet? Not to throw a short book’s worth of stuff at you, but there’s a lot of stuff taken for granted around here when discussing theism, the supernatural, and evidence for such.
D: GAHHH!!! D: Hundreds of links to pages that contain hundreds of more links. D:
I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.
Don’t take the adversarial attitude: “taking a stand”, “against me”. This leads to a broken mode of thought. Just study the concepts that will allow you to cut through semantic stopsigns and decide for yourself. Taking advice on an efficient way to learn may help as well.
Chill with the downvotes, guys. Houshalter’s new, looks to be participating well in other threads, and is just stating a belief for the first time.
Uh… thanks?
Occasionally someone will show up here and try to flame-bait us, not really arguing (or not responding to counterarguments) but just trying to provoke people with contrary opinions. (This is, after all, the Internet.) It’s obvious from your other contributions that you’re not doing that, but someone who’d only seen your two comments above might have wrongly assumed otherwise. I was explaining why the downvotes should be taken back, as it appears they were.
By the way, the mainstream view among Less Wrong readers is that any evidence we’ve seen for theism is far too weak to overcome the prior improbability of such a sneakily complex hypothesis (and that much of the evidence that we might expect from such a hypothesis is absent); but there are a few generally respectedtheists around here. The community norm on theism has more to do with how people conduct themselves in disputes than with the fact of disagreement— but you should be prepared for a lot of us to talk amongst ourselves as if atheism is a settled question, and not be too offended by that. (Consider it a role reversal from an atheist’s social interactions with typical Americans.)
I’ve enjoyed my exchanges with you so far, and look forward to more!
It’s considered poor form to delete a post or comment on LW, since it makes it impossible to tell what the replies were talking about. (Also, it doesn’t restore the karma.)
What’s preferable, if one regrets a comment, is to edit it in a manner that keeps it clear what the original comment was, or to add a disclaimer. Here’s one example— note that if cousin_it had just deleted the post, it would be more difficult to understand the comments on it.
Or a fake example:
Oh yeah, well your MOM coherently extrapolated my volition last night
It might be better to just spend some time reading the sequences. A lot of people here like myself disagree with the LW consensus views on a fair number of issues, but we have a careful enough understanding of what those consensus views are to know when to be explicit about what assumptions and what methods of reasoning we are using.
I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.
Awwwww, I’m not against you. I just think you’re incorrect.
If you post on Less Wrong a lot, you’ll eventually say something several posters will disagree with, and some of them will say so. Try not to interpret it as a personal attack—taking it personally makes it harder to rationally evaluate new arguments and evidence.
I wouldn’t expect the karma system to be much of a problem, by the way. If I remember rightly, your karma can’t go below 0, so you can continue posting comments even if it falls to zero.
So it is. On the bright side, it looks like your karma loss is from getting downvoted on quite a lot of comments (about a dozen over the past 4 days, it looks like) rather than arguing about God as such. And I see you can still post. :-)
I downvoted several of Houshalter’s comments for containing multiple spelling and punctuation errors, though I’d upvote a well-written defense of theism.
I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.
You’re probably getting most downvotes because, as orthonormal said, you’re going off a tangent to the current tangent, and with a somewhat adverserial stance.
I think the essays most directly related to the rectitude of religion are “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable”, which CronoDAS linked, and “Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism”. That said, the real introduction to the sort of thinking that led most of us to reject religions are illuminated to an extent in the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism) sequences.
There is no more evidence for that than there is for God. Indeed:
Amazingly, there really are domains in which socialism actually works. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. had privatized firefighting. It was horrible. After the American Civil War, firefighting was taken over by governments, and, astoundingly enough, things actually got better!
Simply responding with a Randian quote doesn’t show that government doesn’t work. Moreover, there are some things where government has worked well. At the most basic level, one needs governments to protect property rights, without which markets can’t function. Similarly, various forms of pooled goods are useful (you are welcome to try to have roads run by private industry and see how well that works) But even beyond that, government policies are helpful for dealing with negative externalities. In particular, some forms of harm are by nature spread out and not connected strongly to any single source. The classic example is pollution. Since pollution is spread out, the transaction cost is prohibitively high for any given individual to try to reduce pollution levels they are subject to. But a government, using regulation and careful taxation, can do this efficiently. In some situations, this can even be done in conjunction with market forces (such as cap and trade systems). In the US, this was very successful in efficiently handling levels of sulfur dioxide. See this paper. Governments are often slow and inefficient. But to claim that well-thought out policies never exist? That’s simply at odds with reality.
Even from a libertarian point of view, pollution is something that causes harm, like murder or theft. The governments job is to enforce laws that mitigate sources of harm and, when possible, correct harms against individuals. A person or corporation who puts out some amount of pollution should be forced to pay for any clean up or harm that they make.
If you drive a car, you emmitted some fraction of the pollution that caused temperatures to go up, caused smog induced illness and some other miscellaneous harms that cost some amount of money. If that amount of money was 40 billion dollars, and you contributed 1 billionth towards the harm, you sshould pay 40 dollars.
This should be even less controversial than imprisoning murderers
Sadly it isn’t. I consider(ed) myself libertarian, and then found that most self-identified ones reject that reasoning entirely. Pity.
I was also unpleasantly suprised to find that there was a group of people griping about programs that would make it easier to identify cars that weren’t liability-insured or pollution-tested, and this was called a “libertarian” position.
ETA: And libertarian-leaning academics don’t seem to “get” why paying polluters to go away isn’t a solution, and don’t even understand what problem is supposed to be solved, even when hypothetically placed in such a situation! (See the exchange between me and Hanson in the link.)
ETA2: I edited an EDF graphic to make this cute picture about the pollution issue and Coasean reasoning. ETA3: Full blog post with original graphic
It’s not so much that it doesn’t solve the problem as things just don’t work that way. For starters, current energy distribution methods are local monopolies, so they are strongly regulated on price because the competition mechanism doesn’t work as it should. The idea that a customers might “choose” cleaner energy doesn’t always work.
Second, some logging companies tried that. They had an outside company, come in, do an inspection, and certify the ecological viability of their practices. There were a fair number of people who actually were willing to pay a little more. The problem is, another set of companies came by, inspected and approved themselves (with a different label that they invented) , and customers weren’t able to tell the difference. That’s a problem.
Also, to a great extent, electricity is fungible. Suppose you have both windmills and coal-fired plants connected to the same electrical grid, and they both generate equal amounts of power. Now suppose I tell the electric company that I only want to buy power from the windmills, so instead of getting half wind power and half coal power, I get 100% wind power (on paper). However, the electric company doesn’t actually have to change the way it produces electricity in order to do this. All they have to do slightly increase the percentage of coal power that they deliver to everyone else (on paper). So all that changes is numbers on paper, and there’s exactly as much coal power being generated as before.
Your noise pollution example is a potentially problematic one for libertarians but the obvious answer that occurs to me is the one I would expect many thoughtful libertarians to make. You are assuming a libertarian world with largely unchanged amounts of public space which is a problematic combination. The space outside your window has no reason to be public space. You would see a lot more ‘gated community’ type arrangements in a more libertarian society. People with low noise tolerance could choose to live in communities where the ‘public’ space was owned by a municipal service provider with strict rules about noise pollution. Anyone not adhering to these rules could be ejected from the property.
Many common problems with imagined libertarian societies dissolve when you allow for much greater private ownership of currently public land than currently exists.
What’s the difference between a government and a “municipal service provider”?
It’s easier to move out? You are not born under a landlord. You do not swear fealty to the flag of the landlord. Nobody thinks the landlord should be able to draft you for civil service. The landlord cannot put you in jail for failing to pay rent. There’s a long, long list of other differences where the landlord as government analogy breaks down. I’m surprised anyone still brings it up.
EDIT: Ha. You changed it. In reality, not necessarily that much, although it’s nice to have extra governmental agency that you can choose to pay or not, and that is accountable to the government in a transparent way. Asking the government to regulate itself is almost as dumb as asking a logging company to regulate itself.
Well, If you expect a landlord to perform the functions of a government, by, say, regulating noise levels for the benefit of tenants, then doesn’t the analogy hold in this particular case? If regulation is bad, does it matter if it’s regulation by landlord or regulation by city council?
It does matter if one has guns (or SWAT teams) and the other relies on non-violent persuasion.
::does some Googling::
If a landlord tries to have you evicted, and you refuse to leave when a court rules that you must do so, local law enforcement is allowed to physically remove you from the property. That doesn’t sound non-violent to me.
This is a fair point. I would note, however, that eviction typically requires repeated notification, and opportunities for you modify your behavior before encountering violence.
Contrast with how your local sheriff can bust down your door in the middle of the night, shoot your dogs, destroy your property, and arrest you merely for suspecting you of possessing marijuana. And then be praised for it even if you are innocent.
Municipal services are generally provided by a local government but this is largely an artifact of the way modern democracies are organized. Private arrangements are fairly rare in the modern world but cruise ships, private resorts, corporate campuses and on a smaller scale large managed apartment buildings provide examples of decoupling the idea of provision of municipal services and government.
What if you had a dozen different companies that provided services like that. They would have a monopoly in different areas, however, the local governments would still be able to choose which one they wanted, and at any time they were displeased they could switch. Actually, this is a good idea!
You can probably go further than that. Municipal services can be unbundled and can operate without a geographical monopoly. This is already widely done for cable and telecoms in the US and UK and for electricity and gas in the UK. Some countries do it for water and sanitation services. There are examples worldwide of it being done for transportation, refuse collection, health and education. Arguments that such services are a ‘natural monopoly’ are usually promoted most strongly by those who wish to operate that monopoly with government protection.
Allow me to rephrase.
If the “municipal service provider” has the power to enforce its edicts on noise level (because it has the power to exile those who violate them), then doesn’t that mean that it has exactly the same power over noise that a government would—and the same potential to misuse that power?
I tend to think that the right of exit is the ultimate and fundamental check on such abuses of power. This is why I favour decentralization / federalization / devolution as improvements to the status quo of increasing centralization of political power. I think that on more or less every level of government we would benefit from decentralization of power. City-wide bylaws on noise pollution are too coarse-grained for example. An entertainment district or an area popular with students should have different standards than a residential area with many working families. Zoning rules are an attempt to make such allowances but I think private solutions are likely to work better. I’d at least like to see them tried so we can start to see what works.
So the issue is that of scale, then?
And the right of exit is conditional on there being somewhere to go. Finding such a place can sometimes be difficult.
It worked out pretty well for the US.
It worked out pretty well for the US, but a distressingly high proportion of Americans don’t seem to know that.
Hitler was kind to animals. Even accepting your dubious claim it is not enough to show that government sometimes achieves positive outcomes (and don’t forget to ask what criteria are being used to determine ‘positive’). The relevant question is whether government intervention produces an overall net benefit. Generally it seems you can make the strongest case for this in small, relatively homogeneous countries. These results do not necessarily scale.
There are an awful lot of hidden assumptions in this statement.
Can in theory and ever actually do in practice are worlds apart. Negative externalities are one of the stronger economic arguments for government intervention but actual examples of government regulation rarely approximate the theoretical regulatory framework proposed by economists. This is largely because the behaviour of governments is determined primarily by public choice theory and not by the benevolent, enlightened pursuit of economic rationality.
I agree with most of what you said. That’s one of the reasons I gave the historical example of SO2. The claim being made by the person I was responding to was not a remark about net gain but the claim that regarding “Good quality government policy” that “There is no more evidence for that than there is for God” and then backing it up with an argument from irrelevant authority. So giving examples to show that’s not the case accomplishes the basic goal.
There’s a pretty good precedent for this happening in the form of the railway system in early America. I think I’d classify it as a market failure as private roads and railways have a way of becoming local monopolies and having an enormous advantage when it comes to rent-seeking behavior.
It’s not that it’s impossible, I just don’t think it’s a very good idea.
One of the hidden assumptions I was thinking of is the assumption that government built roads have been a net benefit for America. The highway system has been a large implicit subsidy for all kinds of business models and lifestyle choices that are not obviously optimal. America’s dependence on oil and outsize energy demands are in large part a function of the incentives created by huge government expenditure on highways. Suburban sprawl, McMansions, retail parks and long commutes are all unintended consequences of the implicit subsidies inherent in large scale government road construction.
American culture and society would probably look quite different without a history of government road construction. It’s not obvious to me that it would not look better by many measures.
Yes but you’d be stuck with complex and inefficent series of toll roads. It might work, but I doubt. Not efficiently anyways.
Not necessarily. If you’ve ever been to Disney World, it’s not like that. And hell, government roads in the states and Japan often dissolve into a complex and inefficient series of toll roads, at least in some areas.
I’m much more worried about uncompetitive practices, like powerful local monopolies and rent seeking behavior.
Disney world owns the land, they can do whatever they want. But here in order to make efficient roads, we have to use eminent domain. A private company wouldn’t be able to do that. In order to have a governmentless society, you have to a) create a nearly impossible to maintain system of total anarchy like exists in parts of Afghanistan today or b) create a very corrupt and broken society ruled by private corporations, which is essentially a government anyways.
The Kelo case allows government to use its eminent domain powers on the behalf of private companies. Why couldn’t a private road builder borrow this government power?
You actually support the Kelo case? To me that’s like a Glenn Beck conspiracy theory come to life.
Yup. Mind killed. I’m out, guys. Was fun while it lasted.
Why do you assume I support the Court’s decision? All I did was state that under current United States law, Houshalter’s objection was possible to overcome.
The government does use private contracters in many cases for different projects. It might work on roads, I’m not sure if they already use it, but its still alot differnet from asking a private corporation to decide when and where to build roads.
They do. And private corporations or councils already decide where to build the roads for some things, it’s just that all of those things only work if they’re already connected to other infrastructure, which, in the US, means public federal, state and locally built roads.
Well, I think you aren’t really imaginative enough in your view of anarchy, but… I’m not an anarchist and I’m not going to defend anarchy.
I disagree with the idea that efficient roads require imminent domain. It’s not even hard to prove. All I have to do is give one example of a business that was made without imminent domain. The railroad system, which I brought up before.
I still mostly think a nation of private roads is a bad idea, since it’s hard to imagine a way or scenario in which they wouldn’t be a local monopoly.
Actually, in the U.S. at least, railroads did get lots of land grants, right-of-way rights, and similar subsidies from the government. So yeah.
Which is part of the reason I think it’s a bad idea. The railroads constantly petitioned for those rights, that money and essentially leached off the American people. That’s what rent seeking means.
Are railroads that good an example? Some railroads and subways were built using eminent domain although I don’t know how much. And many of the large railroads built in the US in the second half of the 20th century went through land that did not have any private ownership but was given to the railroads by the government.
Railroads are a good example of a bad idea. The reason I picked them is that they were terrible, if I was going to pick innovative and creative real estate purchases by private industry, I’d be talking about McDonalds or Starbucks.
Railroads weren’t a terrible idea. The canal system was a terrible idea, not railroads. Railroads created lots of industry that wouldn’t have been possible without them. Many 19th century leaders thought of them as the best thing that ever happened to America.
The system of canals built in the early 19th century in the United States allowed the settlement of the old west and the development of industry in the north east (by allowing grain from western farms to reach the east). Why do you consider them a terrible idea? They were one of the centerpieces of the American System, which was largely successful.
Because they would dump the waste off the left side of the boat, and get drinking water from the right. The actual sides would switch depending on wich way they were going. I’ve been on those canal boats before, they are very, very slow. They had orphans walk on the side of the boat and guide the donkey (ass) that pulled it. They also took a long time to build, and didn’t last that long.
This was a general problem more connected to cleanliness as a whole in 19th century America. Read a history of old New York, and realize that it took multiple plagues before they even started discussing not having livestock roaming the city.
Of course they were slow. They were an efficient method of moving a lot of cargo. Each boat moved slowly, but the total cargo moved was a lot more than they could often be moved by other means. Think of it as high latency and high bandwith.
In general 19th century attitudes towards child labor weren’t great. But what does this have to do with the canal system itself? Compared to many jobs they could have, this would have been a pretty good one. And this isn’t at all connected to using orphans; it isn’t like the canals were Powered by the souls of forsaken children. They were simply the form of cheap labor used during that time period for many purposes.
The first point isn’t relevant unless you are trying to make a detailed economic estimate of whether they paid for themselves. The second is simply because they weren’t maintained after a few years once many of them were made obsolete by rail lines. If the rails had not come in, the canals would have lasted much longer.
So they’re a terrible idea because of bad sanitation and child labor? In that case, the entire history of economic ideas is bad up until 1920-ish. They unquestionably achieved their goal of providing better transportation. Am I to infer that you believe that government run highways are wrong because there is trash strewn on the sides of the road?
Maybe but thats not the point. They might have worked, maybe even made a profit, but I still say that they were inefficient which is why we don’t use them today (all thats left is a few large pieces of stone jutting out of rivers that passers by can’t explain.)
Were telegraphs a bad idea? Horse-drawn plows? Why does the fact a technology was superseded mean that it’s a terrible idea?
I think they might have been been better as wither a fully government venture or a private one. When they merge, a conflict of interest becomes immediately present.
That’s interesting. I wouldn’t expect there to be many examples of working privatized roads and their effects on a nationwide scale, but if there were, I’d love to see more about them, or even a good paper based on a hypothetical.
I think you’re stuck in the mindset of ‘if it wasn’t for our government provided roads where would we drive our cars?’. Such a world would probably have fewer private cars and be arranged in such a way that many ordinary people could get by perfectly well without a car, as is the case in many European and Japanese cities.
This article might help you understand some of the hidden assumptions many Americans operate under. Note: this guy has some rather wacky ideas but his articles on ‘traditional cities’ are pretty interesting.
I strongly agree with you that the US federal government has spent too much on road subsidies over the years and should decrease its current spending.
That said, not everywhere is Juneau, Alaska; not all sites connected to government roads are a “Suburban Hell,” and not all inhabitants of the suburbs would prefer to live in a “Traditional City.” Roads are useful for accommodating a highly mobile, atomistic society that exploits new resources and adopts new local trade routes every 20 years or so. Cars and parking lots are useful for separating people who have recently immigrated from all different places and who really don’t like each other and don’t want to have much to do with each other. Interstate highways were built for evacuation and civil defense as well as for actual transport. Finally, regardless of whether you prefer roads or trains, some level of government subsidy and/or coordination is probably needed to get the most efficient transportation system possible.
In any case, this thread started out as a discussion of Traditional vs. Bayesian rationality, did it not? Improving government policy was merely the example chosen to illustrate a point. It seems unsportsmanlike to shoot that point down on the grounds that virtually all government does more harm than good. Even if such a claim were true, one might still want to know how to generate government policies that do relatively less harm, given a set of political constraints that temporarily prevent enacting a strong version of (anarcho)libertarianism.
The failure of government is not a problem of not knowing which government policies would do relatively less harm. The primary problem of government is that there is little incentive to implement such policies. Trying to improve government by working to figure out better policies is like trying to avoid being eaten by a lion by making a sound logical argument for the ethics of vegetarianism. The lion has no more interest in the finer points of ethics than a politician does in the effects of policy on anything other than his own self-interest.
Some governments cause much less damage than others, so I think there’s something to study.
I mentioned elsewhere that governments of relatively small states with relatively homogeneous populations seem to do better than average. Scaling these relative successes up appears problematic.
Even among large heterogeneous states, some do better than others.
If small homogeneous states do best, then campaigning for devolution to the best available approximation of such might be the best move.
Yes, that or seasteading. I’m also a firm believer in the ‘voting with your feet’ approach to campaigning. I have no desire to wait around until a democratic majority are convinced for improvements to happen locally. Migration is one of the few competitive pressures on governments today.
That’s one of the principal aims of the states’ rights movement.
And possibly one of the reasons it’s disreputable—afaik the states involved aren’t all that homogeneous.
Your link provides very little evidence for your claim. At the national level, to say that a program costs $1 million per year is unimpressive. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the multiplier effect for mohair production is quite low, say, 0.5. I suspect that is it rather higher than that, since multiple people will go and card and weave and spin the damn fibers and then sell them to each other at art fairs, but let’s say it’s 0.5. That means you’re wasting $500,000 a year. In the context of a $5 trillion annual budget, you’re looking at 1 part per 10 million, or an 0.00001% increase in efficiency. Why should one of our 545 elected representatives, or even one of their 20,000 staffers, make this a priority to eliminate? The amazing thing is that the subsidy was eliminated at all, not that it crept back in. All systems have some degree of parasitism, ‘rent’, or waste. This is not exactly low-hanging fruit we’re talking about here.
More generally, I have worked for a few different politicians, and so far as I could tell, most of them mostly cared about figuring out better policies subject to maintaining a high probability of being re-elected. None of them appeared to have the slightest interest in directly profiting from their work as public servants, nor in exploiting their positions for fame, sex, etc. Those are just the cases that make the news. In my opinion, based on a moderate level of personal experience, the assumption that politicians are primarily motivated by self-interest at the margin in equilibrium is simply false.
What did you take my claim to be? The example in the link is intended to illustrate the fact that the problem of politics is not one of figuring out better policy. It is an example of a policy that is universally agreed to be bad and yet has persisted for over 60 years, despite a brief period in which it was temporarily stamped out. The magnitude of the subsidy in this case may be small but there are many thousands of such bad policies, some of much greater individual magnitude, and they add up. The example is intentionally a small and un-controversial example since it is intended to illustrate that if even minor bad policies like this are hard to kill then vastly larger ones are unlikely to be eliminated without structural reform.
Giving this appearance is fairly important to succeeding as a politician so this is not indicative of much. I find it more relevant to judge by actual actions and results produced rather than by words or carefully cultivated appearances.
As a well known politician once noted, you can fool some of the people all of the time.
Indeed you can! Be aware, though, that memes about government corruption and the people who peddle them may have just as much power to fool you as the ‘official’ authorities. Hollywood, for example, has a much larger propaganda budget than the US Congress. When’s the last time a Hollywood movie showcased virtuous politicians?
Also, beware of insulated arguments. If you assume that (a) politicians are amazingly good at disguising their motives, and (b) that politicians do in fact routinely disguise their motives, your assertions are empirically unfalsifiable. If you disagree, consider this: what could a politician do to convince you that he was honestly motivated by something like altruism?
An Inconvenient Truth? Seriously though, I don’t think Hollywood is particularly tough on politicians. It’s a major enabler for the cult of the presidency with heroic presidents saving the world from aliens, asteroids and terrorists. Evil corporations and businessmen get a far worse rap. The mainstream media is much too soft on politicians in the US in my opinion as well. Where’s the US Paxman?
I think some politicians actually believe that they are acting for the ‘greater good’. Sometimes when they lobby for special interests they really convince themselves they are doing a good thing. It is sometimes easier to convince others when you believe your own spiel—this is well known in sales. They surely often think they are saving others from themselves by restricting their liberties and trampling on their rights. Ultimately what they really believe is somewhat irrelevant. I judge them by how they respond to incentives, whose interests they actually promote and what results they achieve.
I don’t think being motivated by altruism is desirable and I don’t think pure altruism exists to any significant degree.
Good examples!
I agree with you that Hollywood is soft on Presidents, and that the mainstream media is soft on just about everyone, with the possible exception of people who might be robbing a convenience store and/or selling marijuana in your neighborhood, details at eleven.
That still leaves legislators, bureaucrats, administrators, police chiefs, mayors, governors, and military officers as Rent-A-Villains (tm) for Hollywood action flicks and dramas.
From my end, it still looks like you’re starting with the belief that government is wrong, and deducing that politicians must be doing harm. Your arguments are sophisticated enough that I’m assuming you’ve read most of the sequences already, but you might want to review The Bottom Line.
I’m not sure to what extent either of us has an open mind about our fundamental political assumptions. I’m also unsure as to whether the LW community has any interest in reading a sustained duel about abstract versions of anarcholibertarianism and representative democracy. Worse, I at least sympathize with some of your arguments; my main complaint is that you phrase them too strongly, too generally, and with too much certainty. For all those reasons, I’m not going to post on this particular thread in public for a few weeks. I will read and ponder one more public post on this thread by you, if any—I try to let opponents get in the last word whenever I move the previous question.
All that said, if you’d like to talk politics for a while, you’re more than welcome to private message me. You seem like a thoughtful person.
I described myself as a socialist 10 years ago when I was at university. My parents are lifelong Labour) voters. I have changed my political views over time which gives me some confidence that I am open minded in my fundamental political assumptions. Caveats are that my big 5 personality factors are correlated with libertarian politics (suggesting I may be biologically hardwired to think that way) and from some perspectives I could be seen as following the cliched route of moving to the right in my political views as I get older.
This is partly a stylistic thing—I feel that padding comments with disclaimers tends to detract from readability and distracts from the main point. I try to avoid saying things like in my opinion (should be obvious given I’m writing it) or variations on the theme of the balance of evidence leads me to conclude (where else would conclusions derive from) or making comments merely to remind readers that 0 and 1 are not probabilities (here of all places I hope that this goes without saying). I used to make heavy use of such caveats but I think they tend to increase verbiage without adding much information. If it helps, imagine that I’ve added all these disclaimers to anything I say as a footnote.
I tend to subscribe to the idea that the best hope for improving politics is to change incentives, not minds but periodically I get drawn into political debates despite myself. I’ll try to leave the topic for a while.
Incentives (or incentive structures, like markets [1]) are the result of human decisions.
Perhaps you mean changing the minds of the people who set the incentives.
[1] A market’s incentives aren’t set in detail, but permitting the market to operate in public or not is the result of a relatively small number of decisions.
Part of the thinking behind competitive government is that we are the people who set the incentives.
Seasteading is explicitly designed to create alternative social systems that operate somewhat outside the boundaries of existing states. An analogy is trying to introduce revolutionary technologies by convincing a democratic majority to vote for your idea vs. founding a startup and taking the ‘if you build it they will come’ route. The latter approach generally appears to have a better track record.
Charter cities were born out of a slightly different agenda but embody similar principles.
A simple step that individuals can take is to move to a jurisdiction in line with their values rather than trying to change their current jurisdiction through the political process. Competition works to improve products in ordinary markets because customers take their business to the companies that best satisfy their preferences. Migration is one of the few forces that applies some level of competitive pressure to governments.
Other potential approaches are to support secession or devolution movements, things like the free state project, supporting the sovereignty of tax havens, ‘starving the beast’ by structuring your affairs to minimize the amount of tax you pay, personal offshoring and other direct individual action that creates competitive pressure on jurisdictions.
I think he’s talking from a government perspective or a perspective of power.
Obviously, you can educate people yjat malaria is bad and beg people to solve the problem of malaria. It is, however, possible to know a lot about and not do anything about it.
Or you could pay people a lot of money if they would show work that might help the problem of malaria. I tend to think this method would be more effective, although there are other effective incentives than money.
Voted up. I think you should consider writing a top-level post summarizing some of the themes from Thousand Nations.
The common form “I don’t believe in X, but X would be bad if it did exist” seems to me like a bad sign; of what, I’m not sure, perhaps motivated cognition.
It can be a bad pattern but there are cases where it is legitimate, for example “I don’t believe in the Christian god but if he did exist he would appear to be a major asshole.”
It would either be polite or impolite to make explicit who the “some of the people” are that you refer to in this sentence, and what relevance this has to Mass_Driver’s remark. I am curious to hear which.
Mass_Driver appears to be one of the people who can be fooled all of the time since he judges politicians by what they say and how they present themselves rather than by what their actions say about their incentives and motivations. I did not intend to be ambiguous.
Thank you—I had suspected that might be your meaning, but I prefer not to pronounce negative judgments on people without clear cause, and I have read plenty of comments which appeared equally damning but were of an innocent nature upon elaboration. Carry on.
I appreciate the irony of your veiled criticism. Upvoted.
I appreciate your unusually deft grasp of the English language. Upvoted.
(I also appreciate the paucity of my education in the sociology of representative government, and must therefore bow out of the discussion. Please discount my opinion appropriately.)
Wow. That’s really very eye-opening. And as someone who has spent time in old cities outside the US and doesn’t even drive, I’m a bit shocked about how much of an assumption I seem to be operating with about what a city should look like.
Japanese cities still have massive infrastructure and public transportation subsidies. It’s not OMG how can we not have cars?; it’s OMG how can we actually have transportation in a non governmental way that actually operates in a healthy market?
City scale transportation infrastructure doesn’t require large amounts of governmental involvement. Traditional European cities evolved for much of their history with minimal government involvement. City level infrastructure would be well within the capabilities of private enterprise in a world with more private ownership of public space. Large privately constructed resorts (think Disneyland) illustrate the feasibility of the concept although they are not necessarily great adverts for its desirability.
That site you linked to has an article comparing Toledo, Ohio to Toledo, Spain. Its kind of unfair because Toledo Ohio is a relativley small city and is dying economically. I was kind of offended because I live really close to there, but he does make a point.
Toledo, Spain: Pop 80,810, Unemployment 10% (estimated from Wikipedia figures). Toledo, Ohio: Pop 316,851 (city), Unemployment 13%.
Huh. Well Toledo just seems like a craphole. Well once they get around to demolishing all of those old buildings it will look better. And I can’t explain how people live without cars. It boggles me. Sure we have big roads, but seriously, who wants to walk for 20 miles every day?
The point made in the discussion of traditional cities I linked is that living without a car can be a nightmare in places that were designed around cars but that many cities that were not designed around cars are very livable without them. I’ve lived in Vancouver for 7 years without a car quite happily and it’s not even particularly pedestrian friendly compared to many European cities (though it is by North American standards). I only walk about 3-4 miles a day.
I live in the middle of nowhere North west Ohio actually. I don’t exactly consider it “the country”, but it is compared to other places I’ve been. The roads make 1 mile grids and each has a dozen houses on it and a few fields and woods. Walking to town would take the better part of a day. Also, why are many modern cities built in the 18th century designed around cars if they only were invented in the later half of the century and became popular nearly half a century after that?
Because suburbs were built afterward, around the cities, like a tumor, and usually after World War II.
Ok. It looks like someone just did a driveby and downvoted every single entry in this subthread by 1 (I noticed because I saw my karma drop by 13 points with about 5 minute span since my last click on a LW page, and then glancing through saw that a lot of entries in this thread (including many that are not mine) had a lower karma than they had been when I last looked at the thread this morning, with many comments at 0 now at −1). Can the person who did this please explain their logic?
Request for explanation seconded—I have had four comments (one, two three four) downvoted in the same timespan, with several surrounding comments visibly downvoted.
When it comes to government policy I tend to grade on a curve. I actually agree with you that the quality of government policy is generally quite poor. But it’s not equally poor everywhere, and improving government’s function (which will in some cases meaning having it do less) can do a lot of good for a lot of people.
I should also point out that choosing to take no action is still a policy decision. To give you an example, a few years a go some crazy woman pulled a knife on a plane, leading to a bit of an incident. There was a review of airline security regulation for domestic flights (which usually have no searches or metal detectors in my country). Cabinet decided, on the basis of advice from officials, that existing regulation was sufficient, and the only thing that needed to be done was put a lockable door on the cabin, which was being phased in already. Would you regard this as a good policy decision?
I’d question the need to have government involved in the decision at all. Why not let the airlines decide their own security policies?
At least three reasons:
Because airlines have these large objects that can function as missiles and bring down buildings. So failing to secure them harms lots of other people.
As with other industries, individuals do not have the resources to make detailed judgments themselves about safety procedures. This is similar to the need for government inspection and regulation of drugs and food.
Violation of security procedures is (for a variety of good reasons) a criminal offense. In order for that to make any sense, you need the government to have some handle in what procedures do and do not make sense.
The first two reasons only justify requiring that airlines carry liability insurance policies against the external damage that can be caused by by their planes and injuries/deaths of passengers. Then, the insurer would specify what protocols airlines must follow before the insurer will offer an affordable policy. Passengers would not have to make such judgments in that case.
Remember to look for the third alternative!
I don’t understand the point you’re making in 3.
ETA: Actually, you know what? This has devolved into a political debate. Not cool. Can we wind this down? (To avoid the obvious accusation, anyone can feel free to reply to my arguments here and I won’t reply.)
Well, my general approach is to think that we should continue political discussions as long as they are not indicating mind-killing. For example, I find your point about liability insurance to be very interesting, and not one I had thought about before. It is certainly worth thinking about, but even then, that’s a different type of regulation, not a lack of regulation as a whole.
If it’s not there in your judgment then, I’ll continue.
Yes, but it certainly makes a difference in how many choices and alternatives regulation chokes off. Even if you believe in regulation as a necessary evil, you should favor the kind that accomplishes the same result with less intrusion. And there’s a big difference between “Follow this specific federal code for airline security”, versus “Do anything that convinces an insurer to underwrite you for a lot of potential damages.”
Similarly, when it comes to restricting carbon emissions, it makes much more sense to assign a price or scarcity to the emissions themselves, rather than try to regulate loose correlates, such as banning products that someone has deemed “inefficient”.
If you consider all that obvious, then you should understand my frustration when libertarians have to pull teeth to get people to agree to mere simplifications of regulation like I describe above.
Yeah, no disagreement with those points. (Although now thinking more about the use of insurance underwriting there may be a problem getting large enough insurance. For example, in some areas there have been home insurance companies that went bankrupt after major natural disasters and didn’t have enough money to pay everything out. One could see similar problems occurring when one has potential loss in the multi-billion dollar range.)
Reinsurance.
Good point, although again, would then push the regulation back one level to make sure that the insurance companies risk was appropriately allocated.
One of the oldest reinsurers originally had unlimited liability for members. I think that provides much more effective oversight of risk allocation than any regulation.
No, it didn’t. Did you miss the part where Lloyds imploded, and the unlimited liability destroyed scores of lives (and caused multiple suicides)? The ‘reinsurance spiral’ certainly was not effective oversight. Even counting the Names’ net worth, Lloyds had less reserves and greater risk exposure than regular corporate insurance giants that it competed with, like Swiss Re and Munich Re.
EDIT: It occurs to me that the obvious rebuttal is that Lloyds was quite profitable for a century or two, and so we shouldn’t hold the asbestos disaster against it. But it seems to me that any fool can capably insure against risks that eventuate every month or year; high quality risk management is known from how well the extremely rare events are handled.
Issue Status: Closed.
Reason: As Designed.
Their liability is still limited by the laws regarding personal bankruptcy. You can’t pay back money you don’t have. (In the old days, there was debtor’s prison, but that really doesn’t help anyone.)
Some libertarians oppose limited liability for shareholders of corporations because it distorts the incentives to reduce the risk of harm to third parties. I tend to lean in that direction although I can see the merit in some arguments in favour of limited liability.
Ah yes, the orthodox doctrine of the Church of Unlimited Government. I’m a heretic and don’t accept any of these as self evident. I find it interesting that it doesn’t even occur to most people to ask the question whether any given issue should even be considered as a legitimate concern of government. From the second link (emphasis mine):
I’m not at all sure what any of this has to do with anything. I agree with the quoted section that having the government step in to regulate how much carryon luggage people can have is an example of people making bad assumptions about government. Indeed, this one is particularly stupid because it is economically equivalent to charging a higher price and then offering a discount for people who don’t bring carryon luggage. And psych studies show that if anything people react more positively to things framed as a discount.
But I don’t see what this has to do with anything I listed. Can you explain for example how the fact that airplanes are effectively large missiles is not a good reason for the government to be concerned about their security? The use of airplanes as weapons is not fictional.
Similarly, regarding my second point are you claiming that people in general do have the time and resources to determine if any given drug is safe or is even what it is claimed to be? I’m curious how other than government regulation you intend to prevent people from diluting drugs for examples.
Edit: And having now read the essays you linked to I have to say that I’m a bit confused. The notion that the US of all countries has a religious belief in unlimited government is difficult for me to understand. The US often has far less regulation and government intervention than say most of Europe. So the claim that the US has a religion of “Unlimited Government” as a replacement for an established religion clashes with the simple fact that many countries which do have established or semi-established religions still have far more government intervention. Meanwhile, it seems that it is frequently politically helpful in the US to talk about “getting the government off of peoples’ backs” or something similar. So how the heck is this a religion in the US?
This rather illustrates my point. You can see the lack of justification for a fairly extreme example like the carry on luggage but can’t see how that relates to the question of airline security. From my perspective the idea that government should even be discussing what to do about airline security in the original example is at least as ridiculous as the luggage example is from your perspective.
Airlines already have a strong economic incentive to take measures to avoid hijacking and terrorist attacks, both due to the high cost of losing a plane and to the reputational damage and possible liability claims resulting from passenger deaths and from the destruction of the target. I would expect them to do a better job of developing efficient security measures to mitigate these risks if government were not involved and also to do a better job of trading off increased security against increased inconvenience for travelers. There is absolutely no reason why a potentially dangerous activity necessitates government involvement to mitigate risks.
You can make the same argument with regard to many goods and services available in our complex modern world. It is equally flawed when applied to drugs as when applied to computers, cars or financial products. There is no reason why government has to play the role of gatekeeper, guardian and guarantor. In markets where government involvement is minimal other entities fill these roles quite effectively.
Since the italics are yours, I’m going to focus on that term and ask what you mean by necessitate? Do you mean society will inevitably fall apart without it? Obviously no one is going to make that argument. Do you mean just that there are potentially ways to try to approach the problem other than the government? That’s a much weaker claim.
Really? Cars are extensively regulated. The failure of government regulation is seen by many as part of the current financial crisis. And computers don’t (generally) have the same fatality concerns. What sort of institution would you replace the FDA with ?
I mean that recognizing the existence of a perceived problem does not need to lead automatically to considering ways that government can ‘fix’ it. Drug prohibition is a classic example here. Many people see that there are problems associated with drug use and jump straight to the conclusion that therefore there is a need for government to regulate drug use. Not every problem requires a government solution. The mindset that all perceived problems with the world necessitate government convening a commission and devising regulation is what I am criticizing.
I’d abolish the FDA but I wouldn’t replace it with anything. That’s kind of the point. People would still want independent assessments of the safety and efficacy of medical treatments and without the crowding out effects of a government supported monopoly there would be strong incentives for private institutions to satisfy that demand. The fact that the nature of these institutions would not be designed in advance by government but would evolve to meet the needs of the market is a feature, not a bug.
I can kind of see how a private company could test and recomend/approve drugs, but what about snake oil sales men. No, this system wouldn’t work at all. To many people would die or be seriously hurt for no reason.
True and they wouldn’t deserve it, but the truth is, there are a lot of really awesome effective drugs that either take forever to get approved, or don’t get approved it at all. This kills people, too.
And there are a lot of diseases, like bronchitis, that are easy for a person to diagnose in themselves, and know that they need an antibiotic, but it costs a hundred dollars to see a doctor to tell him what he already knows so he can get the medicine, and if that’s the difference between him paying the rent or not… and, hypothetically, he dies because it goes untreated.
It’s more a propblem of political viability rather than anything else.
And then they misdiagnose it, and antibiotic resistance increases, and then the antibiotic doesn’t work when they need it. Or they diagnose it but miss a warning sign for another disease that a doctor would have noticed and tested for. No thanks, I’d much rather have people who have gone to medical school for years make that decision.
And I’d much rather the decision to trust doctors be made by the people to be affected, rather than politicians (who have not done any school / training in particular).
The “people to be affected” are the general public, who suffer when contagious diseases aren’t treated properly, and the general public makes these decisions through elected politicians. Also, these decisions are frequently based on recommendations by administrators with degrees in Public Health.
Some day I hope someone without an axe to grind does an in-depth study estimating how badly people would be harmed with drug regulation v. without drug regulation. I’ve seen the ‘yeah but regulation causes harms’ versus ‘yeah but non-regulation causes harms’ argument before, but I can’t remember seeing anyone try to rigorously and comprehensively quantify the respective pros and cons of both courses of action and compare them.
Have you looked at the academic studies on the topic? Are these the “axe-grinding” “arguments” that you dismiss? Simple comparisons of the US vs Europe during times when one was systematically more conservative seems to me to be a pretty reasonable methodology, but maybe you don’t consider it “rigorous” or “comprehensive.”
Maybe I’m overdoing the scare quotes, but those words were not helpful for me to identify what you have looked at, whether our disagreement is due to your ignorance or my lower standards.
I have not, and my comment was not intended to slam whatever genuinely unbiased academic studies of the topic there are.
My comment’s referring to the times I’ve been a bystander for arguments about the utility of pharmaceutical drug regulation, both in real life and online; a pattern I noticed is the arguers failing to cite hard, quantitative evidence or make an argument based on the numbers. At best they might cite particular claims from think tanks or other writers/groups with a political agenda that would plausibly bias the analysis.
So when I say I’ve seen the argument before, I’m not thinking of the abstract debate over whether what the FDA does is a net good or not, or particular pieces of academic work; I’m thinking of concrete occasions where people have started arguing about it in my presence, and the failure of the people I’ve witnessed arguing about it to present detailed evidence.
I haven’t tried to research the topic in detail, so I don’t know precisely what ground the academic studies cover. At any rate, I didn’t mean to claim knowledge of the field and to imply that there aren’t any. I genuinely do just mean that I haven’t seen them, because laymen (including the parent posters in this subthread, at least so far) don’t mention them when they argue about the issue. As I wrote before, I added the ‘axe to grind’ warning not as a preemptive slam on academics, but because I suspect there have already been some overtly partisan analyses of the subject, and I want to discourage people from suggesting them to me.
In this context, what I mean by ‘rigorously and comprehensively’ is that the analysis should satisfy basic standards for causal inference—all important confounding variables should be accounted for, and so on. For example, it would not be ‘rigorous’ to just collect a list of countries and compare the lifespan of those with an FDA-like administration with those that don’t, because there are almost certainly confounding variables involved, and it’s not clear that lifespan is a suitably relevant overcome variable. We might pick a more suitable outcome variable and use a regression to try controlling for one or two confounders, but we still wouldn’t have a ‘comprehensive’ analysis without a list of all of the significant confounding variables, and a way to adjust for them or vitiate their effects.
One rigorous and comprehensive way to evaluate the question, although not a very realistic one, would be a global randomized trial. We might agree on a set of outcome variables, carefully measure them in every country in the world, randomly assign half the countries to having an FDA and the other half no FDA, and then come back after a pre-agreed number of years to re-measure the outcome variables and check for an effect in the countries with an FDA.
Now of course we don’t have that dataset, so if we want evidence we have to make do with what we have, perhaps by comparing the US and Europe as you mention. That could be a pretty good way to test for a positive/negative effect of drug regulation, or it could be a pretty bad way, but I’d need to hear more details about the precise method to say.
I’m not sure what you believe we’re disagreeing about. I think you might have gotten the wrong impression of my intentions—I wasn’t trying to score points off RomanDavis or Houshalter or mattnewport or anyone else in this thread, or imply that drug regulation is obviously good/bad and only an axe grinder could think otherwise. At any rate, if you have citations for academic studies you think I’d find informative, I’d like them.
The disagreement was just that you seemed to say (by the phrasing “some day”) that there had not been any good work on the subject.
The only such paper I remember reading is Gieringer. That link is to a whole bibliography, compiled by people with a definite slant, so I can’t guarantee that there aren’t contradictory papers with equally good methodology.
I’m reminded of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who gives the impression of having fabricated the papers assessing him, but they’re real.
Fair enough. Thanks for the Gieringer 1985 cite; it’s 25 pages long so I haven’t read it yet, but skimming through it I see a couple of quantitative tables, which is a good sign, and that it was published in the Cato Journal, which is not such a good sign. But it’s something!
I said my standards were lower. My point was that your original comment could be taken for having read this and dismissed it.
I had noticed that you said that. I was originally not going to draw attention to the paper’s source, but it occurred to me that someone might then have asked me whether I was aware of the paper’s source, referring to my earlier claim that I wanted to discourage people from offering me overtly partisan analyses. So I decided to pre-empt that possible confusion/accusation by acknowledging the paper’s origin from a libertarian-leaning journal.
Yeah, I was thinking of bringing up examples myself, but because of the various axes involved, bringing one up might not be terrible effective.
Another person (I think it was cousin_it) brought up the idea that it should come down to a bet. If we bet ten dollars, and one of us kept arguing after the evidence was in and the bet was lost all it would come down to is, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
EDIT:Also someone went and down voted the crap out of me. Who’d I make mad and why?
Yup. I thought of the ‘without an axe to grind’ proviso because I expect some politically-aligned think tanks out there have already published pamphlets or reports arguing one side or the other, but I wouldn’t be inclined to take their claims very seriously.
Whoever did it, it’s not just you.
Me too. Around 30 points in around 10 minutes. I’m flattered.
My guess for all this is that someone found the whole conversation off-topic and mind-killing. Which seems to justify downvotes.
Did either of you perhaps post in any of the threads replying to billswift?
Yes. I think someone downvoted extra comments elsewhere for effect based on the magnitude and speed of the karma hit.
Yes, it looks like almost all the comments related to the government policy issue got downvoted. This is annoying in that, I at least thought that it was a calm, rational discussion which was showing that political discussion isn’t necessarily mind-killing. I’m particularly perplexed by the downvoting of comments which consisted of either interesting non-standard ideas or of comments which included evidence of claims.
It must be a relatively high karma user given the fact that downvotes are limited by total karma. Perhaps they’d care to explain themselves.
The downvote limit is 4 times your karma yes? So if the total downvote for the thread was around 60 points, the individual would only need to be around 15 karma.
Yes. It was originally equal to your karma but some of us had already spent that many downvotes and the point of the policy wasn’t to stop established users from being able to downvote.
I’m not sure. I’ve never actually run into it.
I hope someone without an axe to grind does this; if there are axes involved, its much more likely to turn out supporting whatever the person thought before, i. e. not strongly correlated with how people are hurt or helped by regulation
The FDA doesn’t prevent snake oil salesmen: various kinds of alternative medicine escape regulation. It seems regulation primarily applies to treatments that might actually have a hope in hell of working.
Are you considering the other side of the ledger? The people deprived of potentially life saving new treatments because they have not yet been approved? The innovative new medical companies that never get started because of the barriers to entry formed by the regulatory agencies and the big pharmaceutical companies who know how to navigate their rules? The new treatments for rare diseases that are never developed because the market is too small to justify the costs of gaining regulatory approval? The effective anti-venoms already used successfully in other countries that are not available to treat rare snake bites in the US because FDA approval is too onerous?
The FDA doesn’t even have a perfect track record achieving its stated aims. As with any large government agency, private alternatives would be more cost effective and better at the job.
Alternative medicine used to be much more closely regulated. A lot of these products were more closely regulated until lobbying by the alternative medicine industry lead to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 which made it much harder for the FDA to regulate them.
So how do you feel about the government regulating what credit card issuers or insurers are allowed to offer? I see this as similar to the carry-on luggage issue. I don’t want credit card companies to be allowed to offer misleading rates or unfair policies like paying off the lowest interest rates first. I’m not sure about carry-on luggage, but what about charging for a bathroom? That seems clearly within the scope of legitimate concerns of government, given that air travel is already heavily regulated.
This argument doesn’t work. Just because you already have heavy regulation, doesn’t justify having more regulation. Also, many libertarians would say that the solution should be to simply remove much of the heavy regulation of air travel.
Well, it doesn’t by itself justify more regulation, but it makes additional regulation less burdensome. If trains were not regulated and planes were, it might be reasonable to add regulation of bathrooms to plane regulations, but not to introduce regulation to trains so we could regulate bathrooms.
Fair enough.
I think there are some credit card practices that could be framed as fraud (You can change my interest rate without telling me? And without telling me you won’t tell me? Seriously? What the hell?) so the government would have to be involved even in a strict libertarian society, but I never like where this is going.
Libertarianism, as a political concept was an idea invented by David Nolan to suit his political theories. He had a chart, and a quarter of it is various types of libertarians.
If you like more social liberties than the American center, and more economic liberties, and are willing to forgo some amount (even a small amount) of government services and protections to achieve them, then you are some where on that quarter of the map. You don’t necessarily have to be way off in the corner with the anarchists or defend every idea they have.
So basically it all comes down to “Should the government worry about this or not?” Is there any good heuristics or principles for determining wether or not the government should regulate something? I’m not upset at the system for being wrong per se, but I am upset about it being so inconsistent and unreliable.
A good heuristic is “no it shouldn’t”. Whether there are any exceptions to this rule is an open question.
I guess I would say I don’t know.
Have you read Taleb’s The Black Swan? He has a counterfactual story that is extremely similar (though it uses 9/11); basically there aren’t any (even negative) incentives for politicians to push such policies through until after some huge disaster happens.
I haven’t read Taleb, but I have heard a few interviews of him where he got the opportunity to outline his ideas.
I think politicians in general have a tendency to overreact to adverse events, and often by doing things that involve signals of reassurance (such as security theatre) rather than steps to fix the problem. I’m open to the possibility that they don’t do enough to prevent problems, but as a rule governments are very risk averse entities, usually preoccupied with things that might go wrong.
In what way is this a useful response to James_K? What do you believe James_K is doing that he shouldn’t be doing (or vice-versa), such that your comment is likely to lead him toward better action?
What if there is evidence for God? Why do you assume there isn’t? Plus, quote mining is a fallacy which doesn’t prove anything. Make an argument.
Note that general Less Wrong consensus is that religion in almost all forms is very wrong. It is a safe operating assumption to work with on LW, in that you don’t need to go through the logic everytime to justify it. it probably isn’t as safe a starting point as say the wrongness of a flat-earth, or the wrongness of phlogiston, but it is pretty safe.
Maybe, but I am a Christian and I don’t agree that religion is “wrong”.
This is not a site that devotes a whole lot of space to debating religion. People aren’t getting mean so much as they’re using shorthand. It can save time, for atheists, not to explain why they’re atheists over and over. Hence the links. The sequences are a pretty good expression of why the majority around here is atheist. They’re the expansion of the shorthand. If you’re anything like me, reading them will probably move some of your mental furniture around; even if not, you’ll talk the lingo better.
Chill with the downvotes, guys. Houshalter’s new, looks to be participating well in other threads, and is just stating a belief for the first time.
Houshalter, this is a tangent to the current… tangent. It might be better to discuss theism in its own Open Thread comment or within a past discussion on the topic.
On a related note, have you looked through the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence yet? Not to throw a short book’s worth of stuff at you, but there’s a lot of stuff taken for granted around here when discussing theism, the supernatural, and evidence for such.
Uh… thanks?
I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.
D: GAHHH!!! D: Hundreds of links to pages that contain hundreds of more links. D:
Don’t take the adversarial attitude: “taking a stand”, “against me”. This leads to a broken mode of thought. Just study the concepts that will allow you to cut through semantic stopsigns and decide for yourself. Taking advice on an efficient way to learn may help as well.
Occasionally someone will show up here and try to flame-bait us, not really arguing (or not responding to counterarguments) but just trying to provoke people with contrary opinions. (This is, after all, the Internet.) It’s obvious from your other contributions that you’re not doing that, but someone who’d only seen your two comments above might have wrongly assumed otherwise. I was explaining why the downvotes should be taken back, as it appears they were.
By the way, the mainstream view among Less Wrong readers is that any evidence we’ve seen for theism is far too weak to overcome the prior improbability of such a sneakily complex hypothesis (and that much of the evidence that we might expect from such a hypothesis is absent); but there are a few generally respected theists around here. The community norm on theism has more to do with how people conduct themselves in disputes than with the fact of disagreement— but you should be prepared for a lot of us to talk amongst ourselves as if atheism is a settled question, and not be too offended by that. (Consider it a role reversal from an atheist’s social interactions with typical Americans.)
I’ve enjoyed my exchanges with you so far, and look forward to more!
I recently found out that you can’t downvote someone past zero, so that must be why they stopped :)
I might just delete the post anyways. Ah well.
It’s considered poor form to delete a post or comment on LW, since it makes it impossible to tell what the replies were talking about. (Also, it doesn’t restore the karma.)
What’s preferable, if one regrets a comment, is to edit it in a manner that keeps it clear what the original comment was, or to add a disclaimer. Here’s one example— note that if cousin_it had just deleted the post, it would be more difficult to understand the comments on it.
Or a fake example:
should probably be edited to
if the content is to be removed.
I enjoyed that example. I would hope it wouldn’t get deleted.
It might be better to just spend some time reading the sequences. A lot of people here like myself disagree with the LW consensus views on a fair number of issues, but we have a careful enough understanding of what those consensus views are to know when to be explicit about what assumptions and what methods of reasoning we are using.
Awwwww, I’m not against you. I just think you’re incorrect.
If you post on Less Wrong a lot, you’ll eventually say something several posters will disagree with, and some of them will say so. Try not to interpret it as a personal attack—taking it personally makes it harder to rationally evaluate new arguments and evidence.
I wouldn’t expect the karma system to be much of a problem, by the way. If I remember rightly, your karma can’t go below 0, so you can continue posting comments even if it falls to zero.
It was at 20 yesterday, now its at zero.
So it is. On the bright side, it looks like your karma loss is from getting downvoted on quite a lot of comments (about a dozen over the past 4 days, it looks like) rather than arguing about God as such. And I see you can still post. :-)
I downvoted several of Houshalter’s comments for containing multiple spelling and punctuation errors, though I’d upvote a well-written defense of theism.
Hm, had you not noticed the sequences yet? The “sequences” button is next to the “about” button. There’s quite a few more of them. :)
You’re probably getting most downvotes because, as orthonormal said, you’re going off a tangent to the current tangent, and with a somewhat adverserial stance.
I think the essays most directly related to the rectitude of religion are “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable”, which CronoDAS linked, and “Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism”. That said, the real introduction to the sort of thinking that led most of us to reject religions are illuminated to an extent in the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism) sequences.
/me beats dead horse