I think he calls them ”Mediocristan” and “Extremistan” respectively
greylag
being a “good person” requires having properties X, Y, and Z. Well, it turns out that no one, or nearly no one, has properties X&Y&Z, and also couldn’t achieve them quickly even with effort. Therefore, no one is a “good person” by that definition.
Some examples of varying flavour, to see if I’ve understood:
Being a good person means not being racist, *but* being racist involves unconscious components (which Susan has limited control over because they are below conscious awareness) and structural components (which Susan has limited control over because she is not a world dictator). Therefore Susan is racist, therefore not good.
Being a good person means not exploiting other people abusively, *but* large parts of the world economy rely on exploiting people, and Bob, so long as he lives and breathes, cannot help passively exploiting people, so he cannot be good.
Alice likes to think of herself as a good person, but according to Robin Hanson, most of what she is doing turns out to be signalling. Alice is dismayed that she is a much shallower and more egotistical person than she had previously imagined.
A town in Norway did it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170314-the-town-that-built-a-mirror-to-catch-the-sun
I am confused. None of these are particularly social-status-improving, or, for that matter, social-status-worsening, because none of them are conspicuous. If you buy a tailored suit or an expensive car or an expensive house, people can see that you own it, and the extravagance signals wealth (or can be interpreted as materialism or lack of prudence); none of the things on the list seem to qualify. What am I missing?
cultural norm shift → … meeting Paris Agreement target
I don’t think this chain of causes and effect can be ruled out a priori.
Before the Copenhagen agreement banned CFCs, there were activists boycotting aerosol cans! Tesla (and, before them, Toyota, makers of the Prius) benefitted greatly from buyers’ guilty consciences! (And that’s a good thing!) Wind energy was expensive and countercultural in the 70s; hippies did early R&D!
GDP is more of a measure of economic activity than value
Upvoting for this insight.
Whether or not this case has merit, the systematic censorship thing seems real to me… when the antivaxxers have a point, the mainstream isn’t allowed to admit it
”Social media trying to tackle disinformation with blunt instruments and causing collateral damage” seems to me very much true. Censorship of information about side-effects…? Well, it seems like “the covid vaccine makes you feel terrible 24-48 hours afterwards for some people” seems like common knowledge; I’m sure I’ve been advised after the flu vaccine to stay still & nearby for ten minutes to check I don’t react badly to it. More pointedly, the low-but-detectable-risk-of-blood-clots problems with the adenovirus vaccines resulted in rollout of those vaccines being paused/delayed by some countries for certain demographic groups, and while there was controversy about what was justified (pause vaccine rollout? Only give those vaccines to older people at less risk of blood clots?), “systematic censorship” is not an accurate description of what was happening.
It’s possible that autonomy changes everything, but things somewhat like this have existed or been talked about:
“Modular cars” have been attempted
There have been various attempts at swapping the *battery* of an electric vehicle, including by Tesla. (As I understand it, obstacles include: the design advantages of making the battery a structural part of the car chassis; sophisticated battery management that involves “plumbing” the battery into the car’s HVAC system). Swapping the battery seems a major move in this direction because the battery is a large amount of the *value* of an electric vehicle. (Conversely: while the vehicle is parked, connect the battery to the electrical grid, and the battery can earn money by arbitraging Watt-hours over time)
Obviously, such things as RVs and Winnebagos and caravans exist
Cargo containers (and truck/tractors/semitrailers) are something a bit like this, but for cargo
In my view, one big disadvantage of a privately-owned car is that that car’s shape has to work for journeys in town, long road trips, vacations, etc, where actually you might prefer something small or shared in town (like a microcar, bicycle, or transit bus) and something roomier for a long journey (or bigger still if you’re travelling with friends & family).
(Epistemic status: earworm)
No-one will have the endurance to claim on his insurance / Lloyd’s of London will be loaded when they go! - Tom Lehrer, “We will all go together when we go”
Guess: people are craving normalcy, and aren’t doing the math.
Thank you for the comprehensive answer!
What you want, as someone taking action against climate change, is … to be applying pressure somewhere it will have an effect. I want to say “leverage”, but I’m not sure that’s the right concept—let me give an example: funding renewable energy sources that are on a steep segment of their learning curve. The fact that I did this makes the next person who does this’s action more effective.
I think this article mostly implies, rather than flat out states, that there is a coordination problem here, which means, in approximate order: a) political action b) if you’re taking personal action (what you buy, who you work for, …) you want to be pushing down a steep and oiled learning curve for maximum effect
I think a lot of activist discourse about climate avoids talking about coordination simply because of the likelihood that the reader feels powerless and becomes apathetic. (“Don’t go over there, you’ll fall into the despair event horizon!”)
About 80% of Americans think “political correctness is a problem”; and even when you restrict to self-identified liberals, Democrats, or people of color, large majorities agree with the statement.
This is interesting to me because it’s surprising: I’d expect a sharper ideological divide on whether PC is a problem or not. I don’t think “PC is a problem” reliably means “I have a high tolerance for verbal conflict”; “PC is a problem” can be read as “people trying to enforce political correctness are picking fights for no good reason and escalating verbal conflict”.
Americans have become more tolerant of allowing people with controversial views to speak in public
This is an old-fashioned “Who should be allowed to speak in a town hall meeting in favour of outrageous opinion X?” sort of question. Frankly, this is a pattern-matched answer: “Yes, we believe in freedom of speech”. I’m not sure the answer would be the same if the question were “Social media is full of (highly persuasive) advocacy for outrageous opinion X—is this acceptable?”.
moderate liberals… against free speech
Hm. Why? Some explanations plucked out of thin air:
(a) To oppose free speech, you have to have enough people on “your side” that you might *succeed*, or that your training/experience has been in a situation where opposing free speech might succeed. (Large concentrations of moderate-left-liberals on a campus)
(b) Groups who have decided that “too much free speech is a problem” come from some particular community incompatible with being on the radical left. You’re not going to find many hard-left-wingers in the RAND corporation thinking about counterinsurgency strategy; a SJW memeplex sweeping across college freshmen is going to do better if the freshmen don’t have to already be Marxist believers to partake.
I think I’m suggesting that there might be *confounders* on the political-spectrum/free-speech-advocacy graph: “being a campus liberal causes free-speech-opposition and causes moderate-left beliefs” seems much more plausible to me than “there’s a spontaneous peak in censorship advocacy at this point in the political spectrum”.
The most passionate opponents of chaos are likely to be powerful, since change can only knock them off their pedestals
Opponents of chaos will be people with something to lose or something to protect. The ultra-rich 0.01% have the endurance to ride out most consequences this side of Armageddon, and the more excitable ones might see the chaos as an opportunity, or as a necessary evil.
Early Heinlein, because my parents didn’t want me reading the later books.
This seems like exceptionally good judgement.
Fantasy isn’t reality. I’ll happily watch Hugh Laurie playing House, M.D, but I’d like my actual doctor to be a better human (or at least to convincingly pretend to be one)
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
Plan to uplift Royal Corgi may cause constitutional crisis
Well, here are some ways robotaxis *could* contribute to solving urban mobility:
One limiting factor of cars? Congestion. Robot cars, communicating with each other, don’t need the safe headways for slow human reaction times, and can—potentially—co-ordinate themselves around gridlock.
Trying to travel around on a bicycle? Dumb meatbag drivers may run into you; will robots be better at that? We certainly *hope* so. Same for walking. Also...
Parking space! Robotaxis don’t have to park right next to the destination—so robotaxis are at least somewhat compatible with high density development, more so than private cars
If single-occupant cars aren’t providing adequate density, there’s nothing to stop the use of adequate-sized buses—something between the size of a minibus and a transit bus—at least out of downtown to “railheads” (the “last mile” concept alluded to).
How feasible is any of this? Hard to tell, too many hypotheticals. The “radical urbanist” article is only interested in scenarios in which robotaxis are completely ineffective (don’t work, too expensive) or completely disastrous (cause ultimate gridlock, which no government is capable of doing anything about).
There is a lot of commonality between this post and the idea of churnalism, which was coined by a journalist, and appears well substantiated. There may be a difference in emphasis or intent—churnalism isn’t about deliberately manipulating the reader, but PR is, and churnalism enables this.
(Epistemic status: guess, gut reaction) Most of what makes this article good does not come from specificity.
(Epistemic status: lame pun)
It was called “disco” in the 70s