I liked this post.
lc
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Falling birthrates is the climate change of the right:
Vaguely tribally valenced for no really good reason
Predicted outcomes range from “total economic collapse, failed states” to “slightly lower economic growth”
People use it as an excuse to push radical social and political changes when the real solutions are probably a lot simpler if you’re even slightly creative
Yeah that is also possible.
I guess I should make explicit that I’m a pussy who would almost certainly avoid the arena, because life involves other joys which together outweigh any interest in combat. But arenas should be allowed to exist as regulated venues.
Also, one of the benefits of duels is that they’re not entire career choices; you can duel someone and then run for office later or whatever, whereas fighting for Ukraine is kind of a long term commitment.
Was this post shared somewhere? Why is it getting a bunch of attention now?
Two things:
Sometimes semaglutide doesn’t work
There’s less information about it. I’ve heard lots of anecdotal reports of semaglutide inducing tolerance and losing its effects over time. If this means spending 2k/month forever to maintain the same weight then that’s pretty bad.
With billion dollars you can probably hire better lawyers
This isn’t the source of the trend; the sentencing guidelines for fraud are actually literally, explicitly logarithmic. The government recommends directly that sentences follow a curve of 2x price --> 2 more years.
Do other crimes, for example murder, follow a similar pattern? Like, at some moment they might execute you, but what are they going to do if you kill 10 times more people?
There seems to be a MAX_PUNISHMENT in the justice system (we don’t devolve into torture, etc.), which is reasonable. But with things like armed robbery you would get convicted for each individual count, not on a log scale.
In which case, a group of rationalist criminals should precommit that if they get caught, they will randomly choose one of them, who will accept the blame for everything.
This is (I suspect) a very common strategy among even regular criminals. You can think of it like a trade between law enforcement and gangs; the government gets their clearances and avoids the potential embarassment of a partially-solved case, and the serial killers send only the John Wayne Gacy to jail.
Well there has to be some compromise here. Can the berserkers get some wild west region where pubs aren’t policed as heavily?
I don’t agree with the take about net worth. The fine should just be whatever makes the state ambivalent about the externalities of speeding. If Bill Gates wants to pay enormous taxes to speed aggressively then that would work too.
This source here suggests complication rates between 15 and 5 percent, readmission rates between 6 and 3 percent, and reoperation between 3.5 and 1.5 percent of the time, depending on the skill of the surgeon. Empirically, broad overall health outcomes improve, so while it’d be good to do a deeper dive on accidents, my prediction is that it will not change the calculus (except perhaps how much hard to look for good doctors).
Bariatric surgery seems like a no-brainer for most morbidly obese people
Most justice systems seem to punish theft on a log scale. I’m not big on capital punishment, but it is actually bizarre that you can misplace a billion dollars of client funds and escape the reaper in a state where that’s done fairly regularly. The law seems to be saying: “don’t steal, but if you do, think bigger.”
I sometimes read someone on here who disagrees fiercely with Eliezer, or has some kind of beef with standard LessWrong/doomer ideology, and instinctively imagine than they’re different from the median LW user in other ways, like not being caricaturishly nerdy. But it turns out we’re all caricaturishly nerdy.
I think this is putting the cart before the horse. Why concerts as the original venue for that? Probably because concert people tend to be more gay.
Sure, investing pre-slow-takeoff is a challenge. But if your model says something crazy like 100% YoY GDP growth by 2030, then NASDAQ futures (which does include OpenAI, by virtue of Microsoft’s 50% stake) seem like a pretty obvious choice.
Yeah that’s a better one
Dictators who start by claiming impending QoL and economic growth and then switch focus to their nation’s “culture” are like the political equivalent of hedge funds that start out doing quant stuff and then eventually switch to news trading on Elon Musk crypto tweets when that turns out to get really hard.
That sounds less like “the men crave warfare” and more like “the men like their homes, their wives, their children, and will fight to defend them if someone tries to destroy them”.
Yes, there is certainly a kind of altruistic motivation too, but it doesn’t really explain why individuals seem to be eager to defend their country. A particular Ukrainian soldier’s contribution to the battle is not going to turn the tide to or from victory and defend their particular family. It also doesn’t really explain anecdotes like the following, where people in these circumstances seem distraught to the point of depression if an authority figure tells them they get to sit the conflict out. This certainly doesn’t apply to all men, not even most men (you can see a direct followup with another person where it’s very much the opposite) but it does apply for some of them.
I’d bet if you asked the Ukrainian soldiers, most of them will say that they’d rather this war didn’t happen.
Well of course they’re going to say that; I’m absolutely not saying otherwise either. War itself is almost entirely collateral damage. Modern warfare in particular is also so completely unrewarding for the combatants that it removes most of any kind of potential for glory. Getting shelled randomly by artillery so that someone else doesn’t is not the kind of thing people imagine when they imagine fighting.
But your claim is stronger, that there is some pressure so large that there would be a literal need for coliseums and gladiator fights to fulfil it. And I’m saying that that can’t be the case because if it was there would not be enough gyms for all the MMA fighters around.
You realize over a million people in the U.S. practice competitive MMA, right? Say ~0.25% of those people are interested in mortal combat. There’s your arena, at least for the largest cities like Los Angeles or New York.
You cannot just take what TED talker say about politics for granted. People in the media, academia, etc. talk about civil war because it’s exciting and they want to believe they live in an era of history where such things are still possible, not because they actually think insurrections are likely.