Lucas Spailier

Karma: 74

Lucas Spailier 22 Dec 2025 15:05 UTC
3 points
0
on: When Were Things The Best?
Morality overall, in many rather huge ways.
Moral consciousness has risen yes, but does that actually translate in improved morality ?
That is, if I can steal an expression from Patrick McKenzie, the optimal amount of immorality in a society is not zero, and I’m not sure which side of the optimal we’re currently on.
It seems plausible (though hardly a slam dunk) that even as moral consciousness was lower in the 90s’, the actual welfare we derive from our moral rules was higher, even for the supposed central beneficiaries of our current stricter rules.

Lucas Spailier 14 Nov 2025 14:03 UTC
3 points
0
on: Orient Speed in the 21st Century
This reminds me of what I thought was a Sun Tzu quote, but I cannot find it anymore. It went something like this :
A good general does not look for a path to Victory, but ensures that all paths lead to Victory.
In a chaotic battlefield (life), one way to make it so that ‘all paths lead to Victory’ is to improve your orient speed. But the nugget of wisdom I got from the apparently-not-a-Sun-Tzu-quote is that you need to have enough elbow room in your plans across all dimensions so that you’re not going to lose everything you care about just because you fail to orient fast enough. Or in other words : you need to cultivate Slack.
If you are slow to orient when needed, that means you need to give yourself an enormous amount of slack to avoid a loss condition. But if you are too quick to orient when there is a perceived need, put too much emphasis or take too much pride in your ability to pivot, then you risk being too ‘trigger happy’ with your pivots, and becoming incapable of doubling down when that’s what the situation calls for. This post made me think of the latter failure mode.
Conversely, if you’ve got too much slack, this will erode your orient speed, as the need decrease—which manifests as akrasia, institutional inertia, etc.

Lucas Spailier 13 Nov 2025 16:06 UTC
11 points
3
on: Paranoia: A Beginner’s Guide
The feeling of losing is a sense of disorientation and confusion and constant reorienting as reality changes more quickly than you can orient to, combined with desperate attempts to somehow slow down the speed at which your adversaries are messing with you.
I just want to note that there doesn’t need to be anything adversarial about that. I see this sentence as a very on-point articulation of what is going on in people’s mind when they are angry about technological or societal changes.

Lucas Spailier 4 Nov 2025 10:54 UTC
4 points
0
on: Erasmus: Social Engineering at Scale
In fact, the Catalan boy goes to study in Belgium, but he doesn’t make any local friends. They are speaking Flemish among themselves and he has no idea what they are talking about. [...]
Yet, the boy befriends other Erasmus students just as eager for company as he is. Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians. He falls in love with a Polish girl, marries her and they settle in Berlin together and speak English at home.
Most places have student organizations run by locals who help foreign student get situated, including socially. Generally this is a local chapter of the ESN.
My understanding is that the helpfulness of these organizations vary wildly from place to place, but those in Belgium seemed pretty popular among both locals and foreigners, not least of which because this was known to be a great dating scene.
Also, many students choose to study in a country with which they already share a language. In French-speaking Belgium, some classes are made entirely or almost entirely of French students, or at least that was the case 10 years ago.
Not-unrelatedly, my wife is French, and out of the 7 couples I’m closest to from back in our university days, 4 include one ‘foreigner’ - though they hardly feel like that : one other French, one Portuguese, one Czech, one German.

Lucas Spailier 23 Oct 2025 15:53 UTC
36 points
18
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: The Doomers Were Right
While I agree at a basic level, this also seems like a motte-and-bailey.
There is clearly a vibe that all doomers have obviously always been wrong. The author is clearly trying to push back against that vibe. I too prefer arguing at ‘motte’ level, but vibes (baileys) matter, and pushing back against one should not require a long airtight argument that stands up to the stronger version of the claims being made. Even though I agree the stronger version would be better, that’s true for both sides of any debate.

Lucas Spailier 26 Sep 2025 9:15 UTC
9 points
−1
on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate factory farming
I’m surprised, in discussions related to veganism, to never see mentioned the point that having the people who care the most about animal suffering not buy meat at all shift economic incentives for producers in a bad way. I’m not involved in vegan culture, so maybe these discussions do happen and I’m just not aware, but it never popped up anywhere I saw it.
If the only people who care about animals do not buy meat at all, then factory farmers have no incentive whatsoever in producing ethical meat. In theory, we could imagine that the ethical-eaters would only add a few ethical-producers on top of all the usual horrible factory farming. In practice, everything is more interconnected than that, and I expect a large market for very ethical meat to also shift a significant portion of the unethical meat market in at least a moderately-ethical meat direction.
Asking Claude gives me the same three counter arguments that I thought most likely a priori :
- There are already some would be ethical eaters, so this already happen in practice—and I suppose vegans do not think the addition of their own ethical consumption would shift incentives in a significant way.
- Vegans prefer a revolution, based on plant-based alternatives or lab-grown meat, not a gradual improvement in farming conditions, and they think incentivizing these alternatives has more of an impact than incentivizing more ethical animal-based production.
- Some people simply do not want to cause animal suffering, out of their own personal feelings on the matter rather than out of more ‘logical’ moral reasoning.
All of these are relevant and probably true, but I note that they are more anti-anti-vegan arguments than pro-vegan arguments. They don’t suggest any moral imperative to be vegan rather than an ethical eaters.

Lucas Spailier 28 Jul 2025 15:18 UTC
6 points
0
on: The Purpose of a System is what it Rewards
There is :
- The thing that an organization claims it wants to achieve.
- The thing that an organization thinks to itself it aims to achieve, which can be different from the public claim in an adversarial context.
- The thing that different subunits of the organization think they (‘they’ the subunit, or ‘they’ the organization) aim to achieve.
- The thing than an organization is in practice optimizing for as a result of its internal and external pressures, which can be different from both publicly and privately stated goals because coordinating an organization in a chaotic world is hard.
Going through your examples, Meta is an organization whose public claim is different from its real goals because its real goals are unpopular. Hospitals are organization whose purpose is what they says it is, but some of their people have to optimize so hard for some instrumental goals (e.g. collecting money) that these instrumental goals get a life of their own. Political parties started like hospitals but ended more like Meta : the instrumental goals (e.g. power-seeking) took so much importance than now there are only power-seekers left in the leadership, and thus the stated goals of the parties have become different from their private goal.

Lucas Spailier 20 Jan 2025 12:53 UTC
6 points
2
on: Tax Price Gouging?
I’m never sure if people do not see the logical case for price control in a crisis, or if they see it but believe it doesn’t apply.
In any case it’s probably worth it to share what I think is the (rationalized, sanewashed) reasoning against price gouging. The central example to keep in mind while reading this is a peasant during a famine in 15th-century France.
1. Survival is at stake. There is not enough survival goods for everyone.
2. Rich and powerful people shouldn’t have an excessively easier time surviving than others. Whether or not one thinks that makes sense at society level, it would not be accepted by the poorer majority during the crisis.
3. Depending on the amount of stuff available and the level of wealth inequality, survival goods might be bid up entirely out of poorer people’s ability to pay. There is no inherent reason why you couldn’t end up with rich people eating their full while a poorer majority starve.
4. Goods coming from outside the disaster area might or might not help. If the price required to incentivize bringing these goods is higher than the already inflated price of local goods, it won’t help at all. If the price is lower, it will help lower prices, but then it will act as a lower floor on the price of survival goods. There might not be enough outside goods coming in to reach this lower floor, and there is no inherent reason why this lower floor could not be too high for a majority to pay anyway.
5. Violence is the historical tool to incentivize richer people to accept some hardship they could pay their way out of, in order to let others survive : reduced comfort is less dangerous than the threat of an angry mob.
6. While the threat of violence makes it less worthwhile (because more risky) to bring relief from outside the disaster area, without it this relief might not benefit the poorer majority at all, so they have no reason to care.
7. Laws against price gouging, and other form of market interference by the state in a crisis, are deemed less disruptive than riots, so they are used as substitute when possible.
I think the above reasoning mostly holds for the central example it’s meant for. It seems obvious that all the differences between 15th century France and 21st century America push in the direction of making it less likely to be correct. But it’s not obvious (to me) that these differences are enough to invalidate the argument entirely—I haven’t really try to model it properly, so I don’t have a strong opinion one way or another.
But I’m not sure it matters politically, since it’s not like this is what price control enthusiasts think when they argue against price gouging, the logic has been baked into cultural expectations of ‘fairness’.
Back to your proposition, I think if anything it would make things worse. From the point of view of someone on the streets during a disaster, the state would just be another rich and powerful actor driving up the cost of basic goods.

Lucas Spailier 2 Jan 2025 10:12 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: Some arguments against a land value tax
The problem is that it would reduce the incentive to develop property for large developers, since their tax bill would go up if they developed adjacent land.
I guess I’m arguing about the zero point. Your frame is that the current situation where large developers develop something, the surrounding land’s value goes up, and this profits the developer is the default, and thus LVT brings us below the default, since it balances the uptick in land value with more taxes. My frame is that the default for everyone else is that one cannot benefit from the increase in surrounding land’s value from one’s own actions, the current way we manage land ownership enables large landowners and companies to do it but that’s not the norm, and LVT just brings large landowners and companies back to the same default as everyone else.

I agree that on purely consequentialist grounds the result is the same, that this will be a pressure towards fewer buildings (or it gets rid of a pressure towards more buildings), but I think the frame matters for what our default reaction will be, especially in the absence a of good comprehensive model of what would happen to land use under LVT.

Also on purely consequentialist grounds, a situation where large landowners have an advantage to develop their land over everyone else seems like it risks all land belonging to a few large landowners in the very long term, which doesn’t seem desirable.
But if the LVT slows down land development even more than our current rate of development, and the only upside is that rich landowners have their wealth redistributed, then this doesn’t seem that great to me.
Note that the idea is that LVT would incentivize more development, and this is only an argument that it wouldn’t in one situation (for large landowners). If the LVT’s advocates argument holds for small landowners, the overall effect on land use could still be positive. Overall I agree that we can’t just assume the effect of LVT on land development would be positive without a better model to justify it, though I don’t think we should assume it to be negative either.

Lucas Spailier 30 Dec 2024 20:07 UTC
2 points
1
on: Some arguments against a land value tax

Another issue with the LVT is that it acts as an implicit tax on nearby land development.

Isn’t this the whole point ? One of the main goals of LVT, as I understand it, is to prevent people from leeching off positive externalities generated by others without providing anything themselves, like a shitty apartment building that still charges high rents because of good nearby amenities/infrastructure.
The downside you mention is about how LVT would also prevent people from ‘leeching off’ their own positive externalities, like the Disney example. Assuming that’s true, I’m not sure why that’s a problem ? It seems to be the default case for everyone. A restaurant doesn’t capture the full externalities from the neighborhood having a restaurant nearby, not unless it’s the only restaurant around and generally not even then. A friendly neighbor doesn’t capture the externality from the neighborhood having exactly one additional nice person in it. Neither of these things are realistically feasible, so why should we care that LVT would also make it unfeasible for Disney to get the full externalities from building Disney World ?