Bistrofan

Karma: 45

Bistrofan 19 Aug 2025 14:26 UTC
4 points
0
on: Underdog bias rules everything around me
One issue with underdog narratives nowadays is that they tend to be applied to large groups of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people. Even if there are general statistical truths, by their very nature those large groups still tend to be very diverse and dynamic at the individual level. And the most standout of those tend to be the rich and powerful elites, which the average Joe is comparing themselves to.

“My group” = all the normal hard working people in my personal life

“Their group” = the rich and powerful elites I see on Television or in the news

But of course the perspective is the exact same for the average Joe of the other group! Their group is all the normies in their life while your group is the elites of your side mentioned on TV and in the news. My left wing father would talk about the Koch Brothers and other right wing millionaires/billionaires/elites and some of the right wing adults in my life would mention people like George Soros and other left wing millionaires/billionaires/elites.

I don’t know if this is a big part of the explanation, but I do think it’s a meaningful part at least.

The hostile media effect is particularly striking because it arises in settings where there’s relatively little scope for bias. People watching media clips and sports are all seeing exactly the same videos. And sports in particular are played on very even terms, where fairness just means enforcing the rules impartially.

If your beliefs about the world = base reality then any straying away from your beliefs is inherently going to be interpreted as biased against (your) reality. We can all generally agree on the obvious stuff like when a tennis ball is clearly outside the lines but if it just skirted the paint and it’s hard to really tell then motivated reasoning starts to kick in, and your reality is whatever you want it to be.

And you don’t see “ok your tennis ball skirted the line but I think you got it in” as biased towards you, you just see it as them making the obvious correct acknowledgment of the world. Each ruling with you is a ruling that’s just going with obvious truth and each ruling against you is a biased denial of facts.

Bistrofan 18 Aug 2025 15:17 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: The Comprehensive Case Against Trump

The incident that supposedly taught Spider-Man that with great power comes great responsibility was him refusing to stop a criminal and the criminal killing Uncle Ben. But in that story, he could have stopped the criminal easily, with negligible loss to himself.

In the original Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-man declines to stop a burglar in a building earlier that day. A police officer is like “hey mister, all you had to do was trip them for me” and Spider-man is like “no, all of that is your problem, I’m through doing things for other it’s all about me.” He wanted to be a TV star.

Then later (days later), Peter arrives home one evening to find a police car stopped in front of his house. Uncle Ben was shot in a burglary and it was the same guy as he learns in the warehouse. (Interestingly enough, Ben at the time did not say his famous line, the text is there as commentary but Ben himself did not say it).

Uncle Ben would have lived if only he had stopped some particular criminal 20 miles away at 1 AM during the fourth month

So it’s actually a lot closer to this. His failure to stop the random burglar at the store led to Uncle Ben dying.

The lesson that Spider-Man took out of it—that he has to help people at great expense to himself—doesn’t match the actual event—where he should have helped someone at no expense to himself.

It’s not like the criminal was aiming at Uncle Ben and Spider-man just refused to save him, it was an incident multiple days (maybe even weeks) before where he refused to intervene! And Peter doesn’t want the pain he experienced to happen to others.

It’s very similar reasoning to Batman, he has no reason to take up the mantle and fight crime past his parents murderers but he does so anyway. They are empathetic and caring people. They are aspirational stories about the moral responsibility to do good for others, they’re pretty blatant about it and even Stan Lee literally says that is what makes a hero.

Are you a religious person? Do you believe we should run society according to the Bible? I am not, and I do not.

No I am not religious, but in a general point about American society America’s main religion is extremely relevant. The guiding moral philosophy of most Americans says helping out others is what God wants of them.

And the main problem with USAID, as others have pointed out, is that helping people was entangled up with promotion of left-wing politics. Saying that we are forced to keep promoting the left-wing politics because otherwise we wouldn’t be saving people is a hostage puppy.

That’s a perfectly fair argument if you think it’s not being done properly. Why exactly getting rid of the left wing parts requires the killing off programs like PEPFAR and other very useful and helpful programs that even major charities (like the Vatican which isn’t some incredible left wing propaganda group) say are helpful is beyond me, but if your argument is that it is necessary then fine.

I never said USAID is perfect, and there are potential reasons it needs to be dismantled even at the possible costs of millions of lives. Just that “We shouldn’t help others out” is a very niche view in the US to the point of basically being a weakman argument, even Republicans still seem to poll 5% of government funding going to foreign aid.

Bistrofan 18 Aug 2025 2:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: The Comprehensive Case Against Trump

Yes. And in the context of Spider-Man, it was about a situation where Spider-Man should have helped people when it had little cost to himself. It was, of course, used to explain why Spider-Man went out superheroing, but as such it didn’t actually make sense.

I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to say but Spider-Man goes out saving people because he has the power to save people. Like much of early superheroes, they’re aspirational. And Stan Lee was pretty blatant about this https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/13/superpower-luck-stan-lee-quotes-comic-characters

“Another definition of a hero is someone who is concerned about other people’s well-being, and will go out of his or her way to help them – even if there is no chance of a reward. That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero.”

A hero to Stan Lee is a person who helps because they feel it is right to help.

Not many people think that helping others is wrong. But “wrong” and “not an obligation” are very different things.

That’s true they are different, but helping others being inherently good is imbedded deep in American culture! Also not just media, the most believed in religious text of our country has plenty to say about helping those in need for the sake of it

And USAID was something that many religious charity groups worked with due to similar goals.

C.R.S. is governed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops with the mission to serve the poorest and most vulnerable overseas. In 2023, it worked in about 120 countries serving over 200 million people through 1,000 projects. It serves people on the basis of need, not creed. U.S.A.I.D. has provided funding and non-financial support to C.R.S. for decades, accounting for about 50 to 60 percent of its budget, or between $500 million and $700 million per year. C.R.S. works with and through 2,000 field partners, about half of which include local Catholic parishes and dioceses. U.S.A.I.D. has been a significant and longtime partner of the U.S. and global Catholic Church.

Bistrofan 17 Aug 2025 0:08 UTC
5 points
1
on: The Comprehensive Case Against Trump

A final defense: why spend money helping out people in other countries? A nation’s obligation is to its own! The people saved by foreign aid aren’t Americans, so why should we bother to help them? In response:

I think the big thing to me is American culture kinda says we should. Think of some of the most famous uniquely American cultural icons in modern history, the Superhero. People with power above almost every other person who protects and helps other just because they believe it’s the responsible thing to do with power. One of the most famous American media quotes ever is Uncle Ben’s “With great power comes great responsibility” line.

Or take Star Trek. Starfleet and the federation runs humanitarian programs all across the galaxy. From providing medical supplies to war torn areas to helping Bajor recover in DS9 (although that is helped by the discovery of the wormhole in the area). As the Star Trek wiki itself points out

One of Starfleet’s primary duties was to offer humanitarian aid whenever possible. (VOY: “Learning Curve”, “Counterpoint”)

In the TOS episode Whom God Destroys Kirk talks about the humanitarian dreams of these founders

They were humanitarians and statesmen, and they had a dream-- a dream that became a reality and spread throughout the stars, a dream that made Mr. Spock and me brothers.

So much of the positive optimistic American culture and media is dedicated to a similar idea, that it is good to help people just for the sake of it, especially when you’re powerful.

That doesn’t mean you should do everything everywhere all the time. For example the Federation officially maintains a non-interference rule for less advanced civilizations, and while it’s often breached in the goal of helping others, it is an acknowledgement that involvement isn’t always the correct option. And in Sanctuary the topic of helping refugees find a new homeworld clashing with the resource struggles of Bajor at the moment is treated with respect to both sides, though siding more towards aid as the correct solution there.

And in media like The Amazing Spider-man issues #31-33 and the movie Spider-Man 2 Peter’s struggle balancing his personal life with his superhero is a central part of the plot.

And reflecting this, the US has a strong history of bipartisan aid efforts. PEPFAR can only be cut because it existed to begin with, and USAID was made in the 60s surviving all the way till now! Heck even now the main arguments out of the admin aren’t that we shouldn’t help people, but instead that the programs are corrupt or counterproductive or hurting us too much in giving (like the Bajor refugee example). They say “America first”, not America Only.

Now I have my disagreements about these claims, and I think the way we went about it even if they were true about some parts is still irresponsible but even in rhetoric they can’t find themselves saying that helping others is wrong! I don’t know what they do and don’t personally believe, but it suggests something there.

And polling also seems to suggest that Americans are pretty pro help, they just don’t really have a grasp on the reality of foreign aid.

the November poll finds the median estimate of the percentage of the federal budget most Americans think is spent on foreign aid is 25%. When you ask Americans how much would be appropriate to spend on foreign assistance, the median response is 10%. In fact, only a little over 1% of the federal budget currently goes to foreign assistance.

Like yeah if I thought a quarter of my taxes (or even more for a pretty good portion of respondents) were going to foreign aid I would be in support of scaling that back too! I think a lot of other people advocating for programs like PEPFAR would feel the same way. But even with that Americans still name a pretty hefty amount of aid they want to provide. Now I don’t think we can take the exact number too seriously, the American public is bad with percentages and likely doesn’t realize just how big that is either but the direction is there towards helping people in need around the world.

In that sense your question of “The people saved by foreign aid aren’t Americans, so why should we bother to help them?” is practically a weakman, because it seems most Americans do believe we are obligated to help others and their opposition is mostly operating under the idea that we spend insanely large amounts of money to do it, that our country is in such a state of emergency that we need to focus everything on ourselves first (like the Bajor refugee example), or that it’s corrupt/fraud being used to smuggle in unrelated things like “leftist propaganda” (like Musk highlighting the spending he considered woke) rather than an actual opposition towards aid to those in need. The people saying we shouldn’t help anyone are small in number and not representative of the general population.

Edit: This last point I think is actually the case with a lot of these topics. For example Americans are still pretty favorable of immigration. Trump’s [previous] popularity on the topic might seem like it comes from a strong “we hate foreigners coming here” perspective, but polling + actual talks with people suggests it’s more like a foreign aid situation. They don’t want zero immigration, in fact they quite like accepting legal immigrants. They are just concerned about the ideas of criminals and bad actors sneaking in through loopholes or people being lazy and living off aid instead of working. The opposition to deporting those seen as hard workers here in the country is shown with Joe Rogan for example, one of America’s most popular podcasters who had endorsed Trump this very election! Likewise, I imagine the average person’s perception of immigration is off with reality but they don’t seem to be against immigration nearly as much as the admin is.

Edit2: And I live in a Trump+20 rural area! My talks with people seem to suggest that even quite a bit of supporters are still generally favorable of immigration as an idea. Many seem to be happy overall because they think Trump is removing lots of dangerous criminals, but they do seem to think the removal of workers is just unfortunate collateral to this. Maybe it’s a selection bias of what type of Trump supporters I interact with in my life, but they are still Trump supporters. Like the lady who runs the cleaning company I use, she was boldly in support of Trump and yet many of her workers are Mexicans and she speaks Spanish.

I think a lot of politicians and pundits see victory as support for going all out, but in reality a lot of people are only marginally favorable. They were scared of criminals and welfare thieves, not farm workers and house cleaners and landscapers.

Bistrofan 31 May 2025 22:31 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Letting Kids Be Kids

So, you do have a choice, and you’re choosing safety over freedom.

That may be the right choice, according to your values, or it may not. But you obviously do have the choice.

This sort of “we don’t have a choice” rhetoric is the source of a lot of the dynamics that the OP describes.

Yes I technically have a choice, I could tell my kids to suck it up and walk across multiple even busier roads, many of which don’t even have sidewalks for a good portion of them. But technically having a choice there doesn’t change anything about the complaint, after all I wouldn’t need to make this choice if I could live somewhere more walkable!

I’m making a far riskier choice than the parents in Tokyo do when they let their kids walk to school, in part because the parents in Tokyo don’t have their children walking down a sidewalkless street with cars going 40-50 right by them.

There’s roughly a ¹⁄₁₃₂ chance of a person being injured in a car accident each year in the US using some quick math off of injury rates and population, and walking is apparently 36x more dangerous than driving so it’s pretty heavily skewed towards them and I’m going to assume that’s skewed even more heavily towards “Kids who routinely walk alongside a road without a sidewalk near cars going 40-50 mph”. I wouldn’t know the exact amounts, but that seems pretty substantial to me.

Of course, I already make the choice of freedom vs safety by driving them to begin with (although similar, it’s skewed towards people who are drunk driving/using phone/speeding heavily/etc). So I know it’s a choice. But it doesn’t have to be one this awful!

Bistrofan 30 May 2025 19:07 UTC
13 points
3
on: Letting Kids Be Kids
I think there’s some important context to consider, the growing general crime paranoia of society. Personal-safety fear is apparently at a three-decade high https://news.gallup.com/poll/544415/personal-safety-fears-three-decade-high.aspx
People are as scared of the world now as they were during the 90s crime wave.
>WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Forty percent of Americans, the most in three decades, say they would be afraid to walk alone at night within a mile of their home. This indicator of crime fears last reached this level in 1993, when, during one of the worst crime waves in U.S. history, 43% said they would be afraid.
That doesn’t explain any difference by itself (after all fears were high in the 70s and 80s when children could free roam a lot more), but just from casual reasoning it seems like a more difficult task to lower fear over child safety without confronting general fear over personal safety because they stem from a similar source. Like my brother in law who would spend his time listening to crime podcasts and those videos of Ring camera package thieves and other spooky stuff https://youtu.be/r-ViIM4eZiI?si=YwpkoQyiGNKSS2eS (5.8 million views!) and things like that. The ones who see videos of the cities and basically think every street in Chicago or Los Angeles are packed to the brim with violent homeless.
>Because that’s what they are. People. Some people take this too far. Only treat kids as peers in situations where that makes sense for that situation and that kid, but large parts of our society have gone completely bonkers in the other direction. For example:
I absolutely agree, I get along well with the children in my life because I respect them as individualized people, including my own children, and my nieces/nephews/etc. They are kids at the end of the day, inexperienced and immature versions of their future self but time and time again I find high expectations of conduct/work ethic/etc to be more successful than coddling. That doesn’t mean no forgiveness (obviously I love my kids even if they don’t clean up their mess!), but it does mean I expect them to clean up after themselves.
Also Japanese two year olds!! https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/apr/07/old-enough-the-japanese-tv-show-that-abandons-toddlers-on-public-transport are going out on minor errands, and ok maybe Western society doesn’t need to be that permissive but certainly we can let young teens go out.
But ok, I think part of this isn’t just safetyism and overcoddling but also car infrastructure and lack of good public transit. One thing I’ve noticed is that you simply *don’t have a choice* here most of the time. I would sometimes have to walk 15-20 minutes home from high school and doing that required crossing a four lane road without a reliable crosswalk. Doable? Yeah, I obviously did it. But I’m not making any child of mine do something similar, it was terrifying and I always tried to get picked up/go with a friend/take the bus before I got my own car. And I have little choice now if they want to go to a friend’s house or a school event or whatever random things, I either drive them, they walk on the extremely loud (basically just auditory waterboarding if you have sensory issues like me) and dangerous roads that sometimes won’t even have sidewalks, or they take the public bus and spend like 2-3 hours getting to a place a 15 minute drive away (and filled with less savory people) that still requires walking the roads because bus stops are few and far between.
Even if I wanted to emulate Old Enough, I can’t. I have no choice in the matter, my main limiting feature here is not culture or law currently, it is city planning design. There are very few places where this isn’t true, and those are almost always very expensive because turns out there’s demand for the safe walkable neighborhoods even if we refuse to allow them.

Bistrofan 29 May 2025 18:21 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Meditations on Doge
That’s part of the PR topic! Musk seems to have done a fine job marketing himself to the right wing aligned people, but “people who are predisposed to support you” are rarely the ones you actually need to convince. The main opinions you see will be of your friends and it feels good for them to cheer you on, but good PR strategy knows you often need to ignore your friends. It’s the fence-sitting moderates and more friendly “enemy side” people who are willing to say “Well that man is ok at least” who while relatively small in number are the kingmakers in a divided topic.
The targeting of more respected spending like foreign aid such as PEPFAR, his obsession with giving ridiculously incorrect savings estimates, constant framing of everything within the culture war, and barely disguised idealogical arguments as you point out is a breeding ground for generating the hostility and pushback from people who might have otherwise been more friendly.

Bistrofan 26 May 2025 20:18 UTC
2 points
1
on: Meditations on Doge
>Not so today. The civil service in western countries clearly struggles to keep up with the ever more complex and dynamic world. (If you want to understand the nitty-gritty details of that struggle read the excellent Pahlka’s book on the topic.) It clearly needs a reform, but nobody knows what kind of reform would work. Unlike in post-Soviet states in 1990’s, there’s no one to copy, no one to get guidance from. We are in experimentation mode.
>So, short of disbanding institutions wholesale without a clear plan, merely hoping they’ll improve when rebuilt, what else can be done?
It’s not just a question of “where would we need reform?” or “what kind of reform would work” but “what kind of goal are we seeking to get out of reform to begin with?” which is where a lot of the contention comes from. Political discussions in general get very heated and we tend to assume that the “other side” reform ideas aren’t working towards the Better Goal but to the Evil Goal. Having a target like the West which was just clearly better in their eyes makes for a somewhat more agreeable point than some generic reform idea.
As for DOGE in this process, a lot of left leaning people do the thing where they think it’s working towards the Evil Goal. Part of that is generic partisanship, but I do think part of that is on Musk constantly wading into culture war shenanigans and overselling his work. I can’t read minds and I can not know their intentions if it’s towards a mutually agreed upon Better Goal, a Better Goal that I don’t agree with but makes sense or an Evil Goal most would agree to be bad like corruption, but it does no favors when he’s on TV making unkeepable promises (like claiming Social Security benefits will increase) or he’s constantly taking sides in heated cultural debates that generates more opposition and thus distrust from the opposition.
You can’t have perfect PR, there will always be people who are angry just to be angry but people who truly believe in a positive reform should understand that your belief isn’t enough. You have to sell it to people, not just the idea of reform itself but trust in you and your implementation, and having a clear explicit and workable goal to move towards helps with that a lot.

Bistrofan 23 Apr 2025 1:51 UTC
25 points
5
on: Accountability Sinks
Fantastic post, an overreliance on process can end up with an inflexible and stiff system. I’d like to add an example I’ve personally encountered in my own life, the “Zero Tolerance Policy” of schools back in the mid 2000s. I was often bullied in middle school and at one point in my life a kid was pulling on my coat while I had something in my hand. It slipped out and hit them, which caused them to beat me to the floor and punch me in the face repeatedly until the teachers stopped them. The school of course responded to their violence with a suspension (as is proper) but also tried to suspend me as well until my dad made it clear that he would not back down on the matter and demanded to see the tapes. The school folded and I was not suspended. If my father had not been such a fierce advocate, I would have been punished for the crime of being a victim. Human systems are not created with a perfect vision of the future being followed by robots, it simply can not predict every exception in every way and even if it could it would be too confusing to follow.
And yet I think this goes too hard on process and procedure in some ways. You acknowledge this with how society would collapse without rules and process, but I think it’s better to look at the problem as one of tradeoffs. The limits on human flexibility are often a negative, but time and time again we flock to them. Why is that? Because without clear rules and procedure, humans can be really stupid, emotional and egotistical.
Rules are accountability sinks in part because they’re the ones that create accountability to begin with. A society that follows its own rules is a society that builds up credibility overtime. As an example there are issues with the American legal system but I would much prefer to have the worst American judge looking over my case than the best North Korean one. The worst American judge is still at least somewhat accountable to the rules, and I can appeal and appeal upwards quite a bit. If I upset a political leader like a mayor, senator or president, it’s difficult for them to corrupt not just the worst American judge but all the judges throughout the appeals process. The best North Korean judge however has no such process. If Kim Jong Un tells him to give me the death penalty, then I die.
This exists because of rules and process. While America has not been literally perfect and will likely never be literally perfect, I can still generally trust in the system. I can generally trust that a prosecutor must bring more evidence to a trial than “I don’t like him and want him to be guilty”, I can generally trust that a judge won’t sentence me just because he doesn’t like my face. And I can generally trust that the rest of government will do the same, that my mayor will not lean over to his police buddies and have me thrown in jail without a shred of proof. And even if that does happen, I can generally trust that when the court says “Let them go”, I will be let out. I can do all of this because America has rules and process and obeys them the large majority of the time.
Ultimately rules are just words on paper, but our collective trust and faith in them creates a stable society where they do generally get enforced. Not perfectly, but better than most other nations both nowadays and in history. Sometimes rules get distorted, sometimes they get abused, sometimes they mandate things that shouldn’t happen but I can at least trust that they will *generally* be followed and violators will *generally* be punished when possible and thus I can feel safe and assured that if tomorrow I insult my mayor, my governor, my senator, my local police chief, or my president that their hand can not easily reach out and slay me with their power. We can and should work on seeking a better balance when possible, but it is precisely this inflexibility that keeps me safe, and that means we trade off that sometimes rules take a little bit too much away. Thhanks to rules, I can also generally expect my bully to be punished for punching me.
And at the very least, I can predict the actions of a rules and process addict even if they are bad rules. Even in a county where you get the death penalty for speaking out against the Dear Leader, as long as they follow process you can at least know the outcome before you speak out. Unlike in many of those old school monarchies where the rules were shifting and vague based off the current feelings of the monarch.