Bistrofan

Karma: 248

Bistrofan 28 Jun 2026 2:48 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jmh’s comment on: Surprising facts about the slave trade
Ok yeah my bad, economic good is a term that already has a specific meaning and I meant it more as that C is a good thing for the overall economy lol. I mean it more like this:

A: Has a Pikachu card but wants a Charizard card.

B: Has a Charizard card but wants a Pikachu card.

Normally A and B would just trade each other, but what if they don’t know the other exists or can’t find each other? In comes our “matcher” C. Maybe A values the Charizard card as (Pikachu + $2) so he pays C a dollar to find a person willing to trade, they find B, a trade occurs and everyone’s life is better for it. It is a good thing that C did the job of matching A and B together.

Matchmakers, brokers, marketplaces, etc are examples of matchers. A grocery store has an actual economic purpose that creates value instead of extraction.

Bistrofan 27 Jun 2026 13:17 UTC
8 points
2
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: Surprising facts about the slave trade

I’m not sure “efficiency” is the right way to think about it. The realistic counterfactual was probably not the people who were slaves instead being immigrants with rights to their own person, but rather staying in Africa

Now perhaps it’s true that “not having the labor at all” is worse than “having the labor but in inefficient slavery”, but that doesn’t really mean much in terms of comparing it to modern day market systems, where we have the labor and (relatively more) free markets.

Or to go back to the middleman issue of slave owners.

It’s beneficial for A and B to engage in mutual trade of goods and services. If A and B would not have traded unless C was involved, and C takes a 20% cut yet A and B still want to trade despite that, then C is probably an economic good. Introducing buyers to sellers (and vice versa) is a whole job in modern economies after all.

However if A and B were already going to trade, then C coming in and parasitizing 20% by threatening violence against the two participants is not an economic good. Introducing a violent parasite into a free trade hurts the value generated in trade. This is not exclusive to thieves or slave owners, it happens even with normal taxes. Now perhaps the thief, slave owner or government uses the money in some other manner to promote something society cares about more than economic efficiency, but it is not in question that the violent middleman is a drag on the economy.

Violent middlemen are parasites. Would one a priori think that your trip to the grocery store would be cheaper if on the way a highwayman held you up and charged you a “toll”. No. They don’t provide any value themselves, they extract from you. The same thing with slave owners, what value they might create in the role of manager or buyer/selling matching is incidental to the main point of highwayman style parasitism, and is beaten out by proper managers and matchers.

And this isn’t even a modern idea. Adam Smith talked about the inefficiency of slavery himself.

Lest we forget, Smith openly condemned slavery on both moral and economic grounds. As an economist, he argued that slavery was inefficient and ineffective for society. He believed that when people are forced to work, and therefore cannot act upon their “own interest”, they have no incentive to innovate, improve or invest their skills and labour.

Bistrofan 26 Jun 2026 3:12 UTC
53 points
7
on: Surprising facts about the slave trade
Slavery being economically inefficient makes a lot more sense when we stop viewing it from the perspective of the owner, and instead from the perspective of the market. The slave owner is functionally a self inserted middleman central planner, who makes their living not by generating value but through violence. They are a parasite who feeds off labor in the same way that a common thief does, they extract wealth without creating any. Compare this to the modern role of the manager, which actually serves a value generating purpose. Successful management and leadership optimizes and increases productivity through directing and organizing the groups below them. Slave owners redistribute value to themselves, skillful managers and business leaders create more value. Of course some slave owners were smarter than others and did do a management role as well but it’s overall less efficient.

And the labor under them is inefficiently allocated too. The slave trade just does not distribute talent nearly as well as a labor market does. Slaves don’t move to jobs where their particular skills are needed, they don’t specialize nearly as much, and competing slave owners can not freely compete for skilled slaves at the same level as a free market. They also incentivize underinvestment in human capital, educating and training slaves too much increases the risk they can run away and get substantial work elsewhere. Not to mention that some amount of labor is “wasted” in the enforcement of slavery as well, labor that could have gone to actually doing something.

Bistrofan 28 May 2026 17:04 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
Two big lessons
1. The underlying logic might be correct overall (carrying capacity hasn’t been disproven) but the specific circumstances are important, sometimes even more important, and the environmental conditions can change/be changed.
2. Current trends are not set in stone and extrapolating them out as if they went on forever at the same rate can make for a scary story. Trying to correct for current trends can bite us in the ass if they later shift like China’s one child policy.

Bistrofan 21 May 2026 22:57 UTC
0 points
0
on: Women should be able to open things
Easiest trick I’ve learned is just to run it under some warm water for 30 seconds (sometimes more but often enough) and then it just slips right open without a struggle. Had problems with a weirdly tight ketchup bottle the other day (the brand has never caused me issues before or since) and it went from literally impossible to easier than lifting the bottle itself.

Bistrofan 13 May 2026 3:33 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: AllAmericanBreakfast’s Shortform
Important point towards low pandemic chance to me is that we saw it occur on a cruise ship. Those are tightly packed sure, but the chances that it originally started on the ship itself seems rather low. Assuming it is a new mutation, it either
1. Mutated in rodents that were already on the ship
2. Mutated in rodents on land that later slipped into the ship before sailing off.
3. Infected someone before they boarded.
4. Exceedingly unlikely but maybe it was planted there as a bioterrorism or something.
Both 2 and 3 pose the question of why the infection didn’t spread anywhere else. The infectee didn’t stay at a hotel the night before or spend time with anyone on land right before? The rodent didn’t happen to be near anyone on land and spread to them before it boarded? It’s not impossible, and maybe the incubation time was just long enough that it only started while on board the cruise, but that takes away from the likelyhood. Likewise it’s possible maybe some mouse or rat or whatever onboard just happened to be one that developed a new mutation but again, really unlikely.

That being said, we do have to face one issue. If Y is a possible (even if unlikely) cause of X, then observing X to be true means Y is way more possible than a non X world. We live in a world where hantavirus seems to have infected a significant amount on a cruise ship, thus while unlikely to be a major mutation that spreads human to human easily, it is something to be a bit concerned about.

Bistrofan 10 May 2026 3:17 UTC
10 points
3
on: Bad Problems Don’t Stop Being Bad Because Somebody’s Wrong About Fault Analysis
Now of course sometimes it does make sense to point out a different person or institution is at fault. For example, if Alice saw a bad headline and wrongly blames Carol, the innocent columnist, and plans to angrily email Carol about it, you can gently point out it’s not Carol’s fault but her editor Eddie. Alice can angrily email Eddie instead, problem solved! [1]

However, often these explanations are delivered in a way that doesn’t suggest a different person to blame, or that you’re wrong for wanting a solution to begin with, somehow?

In defense there, that’s often taken as implicit and or likely. It’s a common mistake to think that authors write their own headlines and for people with complaints about headlines to blame the author for it. Chiming in with “Authors don’t make their own headlines” doesn’t fix the issue of bad headlines, but it does correct the (likely) mistake that Alice has in her head about who or what to blame.

Although in that case I suppose you could get really annoying and go “erm actually, it’s the financial incentives that really determines how headlines turn out because good headline writers fail and stop writing headlines”. And understanding that allows us to look at the actual questions.
1. Is there an actual issue now that we understand the real cause.
2. Is there an actual fix?
If it’s “authors keep making bad headlines” that seems more fixable than “financial incentives reward bad headlines and good headlines literally die off”.

Bistrofan 28 Apr 2026 0:51 UTC
17 points
5
on: In defense of parents
Kids, especially little kids, still need guidance but I think you’re missing the point here. Children nowadays are very coddled compared to the past, and that seems to be genuinely stunting their emotional growth into maturity. My parents had tons of stories about them going out and playing in the woods only coming home for lunch and dinner. My mom would go biking miles away with her friends and explore the world around them, interacting with people all over and learning independence. Now half of parents apparently don’t even let their 9-11 year olds go to another aisle alone!. I’ve seen kids now still have babysitters at the age where my peers were the babysitters. Kids would be working the farms for their parents, carry buckets water and clean up the house, look after younger siblings. Benjamin Franklin was an apprentice printer at 12 years old. David Farragut was famously in charge of a captured British whaler at that same age during the war of 1812. Page apprenticeships in the medieval times started at 7 years old. Even today across the poor part of the world, child labor is the norm. I’m not expecting every kid to be a Ben Franklin or a Farragut, and I don’t think we should be pushing for much child labor anymore when our society can go without that and parents don’t want it for their kids, but when push comes to shove most children are way more capable than we give them credit for once you start actually expecting it from them. Modern wealth just allows us to coddle our kids in a way that the people of the past and the modern global poor don’t get, and we’ve forgotten just how independent the children really can be.

Heck in Japan, there’s a long running reality show about toddlers going to the local store and getting groceries. Now obviously I’m not saying toddlers should be expected to do everything perfectly, but contrast that with not even allowing an 11 year old into another aisle.

Bistrofan 25 Apr 2026 21:51 UTC
4 points
3
on: Bistrofan’s Shortform
I noticed something interesting with the recent button debate see here for context is that a lot of people seem to assume red 100% would be possible, and anyone who doesn’t do it is just dumb and therefore red has no downsides. But as some have pointed out, “people” likely includes young children who wouldn’t be able to understand it. Half of everyone under idk, let’s say 2 just dies. Depending on your thoughts about fetal personhood, this phenomenon might even apply to half of all pregnancies.

A red vote is not just “I live” without any consequences, tons of children, fetuses, and many loving parents (hoping to save their children or die with them if it fails) will die too. Not to mention young children aren’t the only group to essentially pick at random. The mentally disabled/the blind/people with dementia/etc are also at risk and so too are the people who love them, someone who pushes blue to try to save their blind spouse, or their disabled sibling. The world doesn’t just carry on as normal, it’s suddenly destabilized and society as we know it could collapse.

One interesting tweet I saw says

I would like us to run this once a week until everyone always votes red

This is humanity ending when you consider the young children are random, especially if you consider fetuses as voters there as well. What happens in a world where every week half of our babies and pregnancies just die? To his credit, he recognized this and accepts he was wrong but it’s a good example of the shortsighted belief that red doesn’t hold consequences.

Now maybe voting red is still worth it, that’s an interesting discussion to have. But it’s definitely not as simple as people are making it out, and most likely the only world where things don’t go to hell in some form is >50% blue.

Bistrofan 19 Apr 2026 17:43 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: Having OCD is like living in North Korea (Here’s how I escaped)

Then there is very confident assurance that you can’t stop having some feeling. Which is simply not true, according to my experience. You can. And even do it immediately.

One of the required secondary powers of OCD is this, a disordered ability to shut down your intrusive thoughts and feelings. If they could just make it go away intuitively, they would.

Maybe it’s possible for many to train their feelings away with enough sustained effort still, but it’s clearly far more difficult to stop the thoughts than most people face.

Bistrofan 23 Mar 2026 5:09 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: China Derangement Syndrome
I’m a supporter of helping protect Taiwan, but it’s useful to know the Chinese view is that Taiwan is a part of their country going back to the civil war, one they have never officially conceded as having ended and have never acknowledged Taiwan as anything but an internal issue to them.

Sure at some point it gets kinda silly to keep insisting “someday we’ll get them” instead of just giving up, but that does mean it’s not a good example of China being hostile towards foreign powers.

Bistrofan 28 Feb 2026 0:44 UTC
27 points
22
in reply to: yams’s comment on: yams’s Shortform
Not to be overly political (although how do you avoid it with a topic like this?) but I think it’s just another part of “MAGA maoism” as it’s been called. The idea of the Republican party as a small government free market pro liberty group died with Trump, who painted over that whole philosophy with his focus on culture war grievances, state control, and “owning the libs”.

Matt Yglesias had a good piece two years ago about how the tariff regime essentially makes a mini central planning department and we’ve seen Trump expressly use it as such, trying to bend the economy to attack companies and nations over personal grievances.

And Scott Lincicome of the CATO institute has covered this new brand of “state corporatism” as he calls it quite well IMO, about the nationalization of various companies and the various market distortions it creates.

“First they came” is a famous poem about the oppression of people, but it’s also a good general warning for all sorts of behavior. What someone will happily do to another is what they can happily do to you if you ever cross them. Whether that be the chick who cheated on her husband for you cheating on your new relationship, stuffing people into camps, or using the full force of government to smash your company into bits if you aren’t compliant.

There’s likely to be more of this behavior coming in the future. They’re trying to unlock themselves a new power, and what hammer doesn’t seek out a nail?

Bistrofan 27 Feb 2026 5:22 UTC
7 points
4
in reply to: RationalElf’s comment on: RationalElf’s Shortform
A substantial amount of the files are redacted, and there’s apparently a lot that hasn’t been released at all yet either. It’s hard to get a good idea of something if you can only see a small percentage of it, especially when that small percentage has been curated. Right now it feels kinda like going to North Korea, seeing a show village and declaring the country a rich and free democracy. The play looks great, and you’ll never know otherwise if you don’t get a look behind the curtains. And when the curtains do open, surprise there’s even more curtains!

And one of the big issues here is with trust. Maybe a redaction is personal information of a victim, or maybe it’s something else that needed to be covered up because it looked bad. The unknown is unknown after all. I’m not sure how much I can trust the Trump admin here at all when there’s already been multiple controversies with unwarranted redacting and the multiple u-turns that have already occured around the files, so “nothing to see behind the curtains” is not particularly convincing. At the very least the behavior has been very very suspicious.

There’s also some really interesting things to consider about the arguments around the files. One common claim was “if there was anything potentially damaging for Trump in them, why did the Biden admin not release it”. Now we know there is tons of stuff about Trump. Nothing that is definitive proof of criminal behavior, but things like the birthday book letter and accusations certainly seem like they could have been harmful for his campaign.

So now we’re stuck with “There is potentially damaging material about Trump in there, so why did the Biden admin not release it?”. Perhaps they’re more ethical than the argument makers thought and didn’t think it fair to leak those files. Or maybe there’s something that both admins don’t want revealed, whether it be a third party or a MAD scenario. I don’t know, but it again sure is weird!

Bistrofan 25 Feb 2026 18:24 UTC
2 points
0
on: Why American Politics is Different Now (for Richard Ngo)
For much of the twentieth century mass media was policed by The Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was a policy that required media outlets to cover controversial issues in a balanced manner that represented both sides of the argument.

The issue is that arguments often have more than just two views. Like let’s say someone goes on TV and argues for a 50% vice tax on alcohol, there’s a number of different possible responses here.
1. Keep the status quo
2. Vice tax but a lower amount
3. Vice tax but a higher amount
4. Prohibition again
5. Some other type of new limit on alcohol
6. Some other other type of new limit
7. Some other other other type of new limit (and so on for as many potential methods as exist)
8. Subsidies to encourage alcohol instead.
Who gets to demand a response here? And if the “I want more people to drink” guy gets a response, does it use up the opportunity from the prohibition one? Heck even “same side” responses could be difficult cause they still differ too. Does a “I prefer a 40% vice tax” response count the same as a 20% vice tax response? Does “I want drinking alcohol to require a drinking license” count the same as “I want alcohol consumption to be illegal if consumed over X limit?”

Maybe we try to solve some of this by only allowing “mainstream” views a response, but now we have to determine what is mainstream enough and what isn’t. And we still have the problem of determining how to separate out different views to begin with. Maybe we collapse the status quo people with the pro alcohol subsidies people because they both reject the tax, and then the guy who gets up on TV and actually gets to talk is the subsidies guy despite not actually being popular.

And I’m sure many can relate to seeing a person argue something on the internet you generally agree with, but then use bad arguments and behavior that you think are terrible. Maybe you believe in a 20% vice tax for X and Y reasons, but the guy who gets on stage to represent the view says “I support 20% because the voices in my head told me to.” Would you feel represented by that? I wouldn’t, and I would think it bullshit if the government tried to say that man gets to take the place of my well thought response.

The fairness doctrine just doesn’t seem very workable as a concept. To even do a somewhat decent job, government will have to get into and sort out the most niche debates on everything said on TV or radio, and there will still likely be tons of mistakes that happen. And I’m not even gonna get started on how much corruption/bribery/dealmaking/etc is going to be encouraged by this level of bureaucracy and decisionmaking.

Bistrofan 25 Feb 2026 2:26 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: Tom Smith’s comment on: Tom Smith’s Shortform
It might not be intended this way but the discussion being centered around domestic surveillance of Americans does have a possible implication that foreign communications are already being covered by Claude without protest from Anthropic. If that’s the case then attempts by the government to turn it domestic shouldn’t be much of a surprise to them IMO.

Bistrofan 25 Feb 2026 1:59 UTC
8 points
2
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
One of the big issues with IQ discussions is that you end up taking the public’s struggle with statistics which is already terrible even when they’re trying and then add on a whole bunch of bad faith intention and discourse on top.

Like this is just anecdotal but the amount of people I’ve seen in this and similar discussion seemingly unable to recognize that averages aren’t necessarily that meaningful to any individual experience is crazy. A group with an average of 95 IQ is still going to have lots of individuals within it that are over >100! If you take a random person from average 95 IQ group and a random person from average 100 IQ group, there’s a not that far from equal chance that the former person is higher than the latter! Less than the ⁵⁰⁄₅₀, but it’s close. “Less than a coin flip” is not equivalent to rare.

Bistrofan 11 Feb 2026 23:13 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: Bistrofan’s Shortform

A simple steelman is something like “if we’re very wrong about A[G/S]I, then birth rates are a big issue, so we better invest some resources into it, in case we’re wrong”.

This would be understandable if it weren’t for the timelines here. Let’s say AGI takes ~10x the amount of time (40 years instead of 4 years from the 2026 date) and the few billion people (which to note is just the population of the 1900s) happens in 100 years instead of 200, that would be 2066 vs 2126.

Despite being absurdly friendly on the timelines, it’s still not even close! That suggests to me a very rocky confidence level being held about AGI actually happening, unless one believes that the superintelligence smarter than all humans put together wouldn’t be able to help the birthrate.

Edit: Actually I’m messing up the math a little because I’m mixing up scenarios and hypotheticals. If the whole world had South Korea levels it would be much lower than a few billion in 100 years. But that’s already the unrealistic worst case scenario, the world overall right now still has a positive replacement rare and estimates put around 10 billion people by 2084 which is still two decades past our order of magnitude AGI predictions.

Bistrofan 11 Feb 2026 15:00 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Bistrofan’s Shortform
Yes and I have a major example, one of the leading CEOs in the AI industry. He believes that AI will be more intelligent than all humans currently alive by 2030 while also saying birthrates are a top priority for all countries.

But birth rates aren’t that bad that they’re ending civilization anytime soon. Even if every nation was at South Korea levels in 200 years we’d still have >2 billion people. If he believes AI will be more intelligent than all humans combined in less than a decade, then why worry about something centuries out with easy solutions presented by the thing coming in just four years?

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Bistrofan11 Feb 2026 4:35 UTC

2 points

17 comments1 min readLW link

Bistrofan 11 Feb 2026 4:35 UTC
10 points
6
on: Bistrofan’s Shortform
A lot of the rationalist discourse around birthrates don’t seem to square away with AGI predictions.

Like the most negative predictions of AGI destroying humanity in the next century or two leaves birthrates completely negligent as an issue. The positive predictions with AGI leave a high possibility of robotic child rearing and artificial wombs (when considering the amount of progress even us puny humans have already made) in the next century or two which also makes natural birthrates irrelevant because we could just make and raise more humans without the need of human parents to birth them.

And stuff like say, the concerns about old people consumption outnumbering youth worker production don’t work well if one also believes that the upcoming AIs are going to make most work and labor obsolete to begin with. If pretty much everything is done by robots, then the issue of not enough young labor pretty much ceases to exist.

I don’t know if this is just the result of hedging against the possibility that this sort of AGI doesn’t happen, or if people just haven’t thought it all through much.

Bistrofan

Bistro­fan’s Shortform

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