Re #2: you’re conflating the First Amendment and free speech. The First Amendment is one particular legal instantation of the idea of free speech, applicable in limited circumstances in one country. Establishing that there is no First Amendment problem does not establish that there is no free speech problem. And although I agree that there are important differences between government censorship and censorship by private actors, the classical liberal argument for free speech supplies reasons why even private censorship is harmful. You need to engage with these pro-free-speech arguments and explain why they don’t apply here.
remizidae
Author’s partial conclusions to save you a click:
Somewhere between many and most dog breeds should only be owned in ideal settings – farms, ranches, wilderness, etc. Owning the dogs outside of these circumstances is likely cruel.
Most dog owners should buy small-to-mid sized breeds with a long genetic history of high sociability and little-to-no history of work. Such dogs are the most well-suited to modern ownership. Cockapoos are actually a really good choice by these standards.
Unless you have a really good reason to get a thoroughbred, you should probably rescue a mutt from a dog shelter instead. Mutts are healthier, don’t contribute to the continued genetic deformity of purebreds, and can be rescued from misery and/or death in shelters.
Unless you have the resources to pay for a doggy-day-care where the dog spends all days with other dogs, you probably shouldn’t own a dog if you have a full time job.
This is a case of “are you asking the right question” for me. If the question is “are you giving your dog its best life,” most dog owners will have to say no. If the question is “are you giving your dog a better life than it would have if you did not acquire the dog,” most people who get dogs from shelters can honestly say yes. Living in a shelter or being euthanized seems clearly worse than a penned-in, neutered life as a coddled pet.
I don’t agree that a one-off or “drive-by” comment is a bad thing. Yes, it might be nice sometimes to have a lengthy discussion, but, you know, this is just a website, commenting is not my job, and people have other shit to do. I’d rather get a single good comment than get nothing at all from a person who has time to write one comment but not time to be on LW every day checking to see if their comment got a response.
Part of the reason why money buys happiness is that money buys *absence of financial stress.* That means that strategies that involve increasing stress in order to get more money are not necessarily going to increase your happiness. This consideration weighs in favor of:
1) More traditional, low-risk, low-effort investment strategies, like your bog-standard automatic investment into index funds. They’re more likely to get 7% than your theoretical 18-24%, but they require very little effort. Strategies like flipping houses, building a real estate empire, or startups *might* get you a higher return, but they also take significant time and effort and come with a high risk of loss or bankruptcy. (I personally have met a number of people who tried real estate and wound up bankrupt.) Maybe risk-loving people like Trump can sail through bankruptcy with no stress, but I sure couldn’t!
2) Considering financial stress also weighs in favor of reducing expenses, especially fixed costs that are hard to alter, such as debt payments, mortgages, and car loans. The person with a $5000/month income and $1000 rent is safer and feels richer than the person with a $7000/month income and $3000 rent.
I also think you leap a little too fast from “$75k income associated with happiness” to “therefore, you need $75k income.” The person with 75k income isn’t spending 75k, they’re likely paying ~20% in tax and saving some amount too.
Looks like no one has brought up yet the tension between Mustachianism and EA. They both advise frugality, but the theoretical Mustachian works the minimum time necessary to become financially independent and then retires to do less or no work for pay, because their priority is freedom. The theoretical EA person would work all their life because their priority is maximizing the good done/money donated.
I find arguments for both of these philosophies compelling, but they can’t be reconciled: either you choose to focus your energy towards helping yourself, a (probably) upper-middle-class American, or you’re altruistic and focus your energy towards helping the most needy. Yes, even altruists spend some money on themselves, and even Mustachians typically give some money to others, but there’s a basic difference in what your main goal is.
A secondary criticism is that Mustachians tend to denigrate the role of work in people’s lives (oh isn’t it terrible that I have to put on uncomfortable clothes and drive far away to work with people I don’t like), BUT, if you look at retired Mustachians or people who are rich enough not to work, typically they just find another line of work. Having some sort of work is crucial for most people’s self-esteem, self-efficacy, social lives, and even physical health.
The Mustachian riposte to this is that, even if you want to work, isn’t it better if you don’t have to? I agree, but I think the honest description of their movement is that it’s not about retiring early, which is only a true goal for very few of us—it’s just about getting rich.
What I was expecting from the first paragraph was a discussion of whether therapy works. I think people should know that when it’s been studied, there’s little evidence that talk therapy works better than getting support from a friend, family member, or other trusted person. A person with a credential, some insight, and an empathetic manner is not clearly better to talk to than a person with some insight, an empathetic manner, and no credential. And it’s important to remember that therapy comes with significant costs in money and risk. Anyone who gets involved with the psychiatric system should be aware of the substantial risk of overmedication and medication side effects, as well as smaller but still real risks of involuntary medication and institutionalization.
To address some common objections:
1) But therapy worked for me!
Response: Maybe. But anytime a person invests substantial time and money into a given strategy, there is a risk that their assessment of the results of that strategy will be affected by confirmation bias, sunk cost bias, and cognitive dissonance.
Also the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: I was depressed, then I went to therapy for six months, now I’m not depressed. Great, but most cases of depression resolve after six months, with or without treatment. How do you know what would have happened if you had tried some other strategy, or nothing at all, for six months?
2) But I don’t want to/can’t get a friend to listen to my problems for an hour+ a week, and a therapist will.
Response: Are you sure you need to talk about your problems for that long that often? Or is that just what the psychiatric establishment has taught us is standard?
Experiment for yourself, by all means, but my experience has been that a very brief conversation, coming at the right moment, can be incredibly therapeutic. Or an in-depth conversation every few months. Or support from a friend along with all the other self-help strategies that commonly work for mental/emotional problems.
3) If you tried therapy, you would see how great it is. Therefore, you must not have tried it, so I will dismiss your opinion.
Response: This is a dumb ad hominem, but it seems to come up every time I make this point, so I will address it. I’ve done a LOT of therapy, with a lot of different people, for a range of different problems, and it never worked. Put very little weight on this, of course, it’s very possible that it didn’t work for me but will work for you. I only bring up myself to foreclose the ad hominem.
Conclusion: if you’re considering therapy, be aware of the costs and benefits. And know that it’s not your only option, and it is one of the more costly options out there.
I’ve got to ask, what is the most locked-down person you know doing? It’s hard to imagine being more locked down than you are!
Couple other thoughts (cause this is fascinating, thanks!)
--The activity of grocery store shopping could be usefully expanded to shopping in any indoor store. Seems like all stores would be about the same level of riskiness if you control for number of people nearby (unless there are grocery-store-specific concerns?)
--The bar/restaurant distinction, and specifically rating bars as much higher risk than restaurants, is not convincing. I’ve heard people make this claim before but without explaining why. They might be thinking that going to a bar involves 1) more crowds, 2) more likely sitting at the bar, or 3) heavy drinking that clouds judgment. But while all of those things *sometimes* occur in bars, they don’t always, and they very often occur in restaurants too. (Plausibly people drink on average more in bars, but that’s not enough to warrant a dramatic increase in risk.) I suspect some of this is coming from people who either are unfamiliar with bars or have a certain Puritanical prejudice against drinking, leading them to think of bar-going as “more optional” than restaurant dining and therefore more condemnable. Obviously, both activities are optional, and there’s no reason to judge the bar-goer more harshly than the diner.
Anyway, your numbers should be revised to reflect the reality that the key risk factors for a dining establishment are indoor vs. outdoor, and crowded vs. spaced. The type of liquor license the place has doesn’t matter.
--This one is less feedback for the developers and more thinking out loud. A few people, like OP, are still on very high voluntary lockdown levels even now that almost every place has reopened. A few people, on the other hand, never really changed their habits that much because of COVID, or only did so when forced. The vast majority I expect are people who made significant sacrifices during the first month or two or three, but started to move back in the direction of a normal life when it became obvious that this pandemic was going to last a while. I wonder about the psychological effects it will have for the hardcore few to see groups 2 and 3 doing all sorts of things that the hardcore won’t let themselves do. Just sitting at home and watching quasi-normal life going on around them, while they shut themselves out and self-flagellate about every grocery store trip. I’m not criticizing—but, guys, be careful of your mental health. If it makes you happy to track the risk metrics this closely, do it, but if it’s making you anxious and amplifying tendencies towards scrupulosity, you don’t have to do it!
No, that’s not what social proof means. I’m saying a throwaway comment by a non-expert has very little probative value. Now, I’d give it more weight if Scott were actually to write a post about this topic concluding that we should all stop wearing sunscreen, because knowing him there probably would be some serious thought and research put into that. But the post you linked to basically says “it’s more complicated than you might think, but the consensus is still wear sunscreen.”
How much of your stress do you think was the result of living in a group house, and thus feeling that you had to get roommates’ consent to very normal things like going on a date or a walk? I know some people seem to like the group house thing, but damn, I like making my own decisions.
I’d like to see survey data on rationalists’ responses to the pandemic. Does this exist (should i make it exist?) I suspect the incredibly super-cautious are more vocal, thus distorting our perception of what others are doing.
Personally, I’m avoiding indoor restaurants/bars and indoor socializing and I wear masks when required. But I have no problem with outdoor socializing, going to restaurants and stores, and I’ve gone on several pandemic vacations.
I tried a hard lockdown in March-June with no friends, no restaurants, no travel, limited shopping, and it certainly was not a “trivial” loss. Our lifestyle and our sanity matters. I could feasibly lock down for a month or two, but I have no faith in my ability to accurately assess when that month would matter.
Where I’m coming out here is that it is not going to be feasible for most people to either lock down hard or intentionally get COVID. It’s not a comfortable conclusion, because we as humans like to pretend we are in control, but aside from the extreme I-will-never-leave-my-apartment outliers, who are never going to be more than a small minority of the population, we are not in control of whether or when we get Covid.
Secondhand smoke is mostly not harmful.
Food is satisficing too. I found it liberating to realize I don’t need to come up with a new meal every day. Food doesn’t have to be exciting or novel or an amazing taste sensation most of the time.
Minor point of disagreement: unless you are actively working to build muscle, you don’t have to worry about protein. The vast majority of people in Western societies already get more than enough protein. Perhaps this is different for vegans, but I’ll let them weigh in if they choose.
I strongly disagree with this idea that only a few vaccine experts should be debating the topic. Aside from a few basic technical concepts, the basic question here is ethical. Everyone can judge ethical questions. And if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that medical ethics questions are too important to be left to the experts.
Thanks OP! I love your posts. However, I was not convinced by this point: “the default state of the world is that your life lacks Slack.” The post explains why OP’s mindset drives him away from Slack, but it doesn’t really explain why this would be true for most people, and it does not ring true for me. I don’t really have evidence for this, but I would assume that most people have the capacity to have an unproductive day or week, take time off work, or waste money. When you think about how many hours the average person spends each day on TV or aimless interneting, it doesn’t really seem consistent with imagining most people’s lives as full of nonstop stressed productivity.
You make two very different points here, and I think the point about marriage might have better been its own post.
That said, I’m in violent agreement that entrepreneurial types tend to overestimate the extent to which other people are enterpreneurial. Or assume that non-entrepreneurs are just stupid or conformist. Being an entrepreneur requires a very high tolerance for risk and unpredictability, and not everyone has that. Personally I’m very happy knowing exactly what my next paycheck will be and knowing it is very unlikely I will lose my job. I take the limited downside risk, even though it does mean my upside is limited, e.g., I am unlikely ever to be a billionaire.
There is a possibility that SOME people who are currently held back by poverty might become entrepreneurships if given an extra $1000/month. That’s not convincing as the sole argument for UBI, but then I’ve never seen that framed as the sole argument for UBI.
Are you a manager or are you just speculating? I imagine different fields are different, but it has been my experience that people I manage are able to get things done without a lot of handholding, and while they probably have some “ugh fields” as I do too, they don’t let that stop them from getting the job done. Reassigning things constantly would have a big cost to the organization.
Would probably reassign something due to psychological aversion as a one-time thing, if a trusted senior person asked me to, but not for a new person. My advice to employees would be to be very hesitant about coming to management with a complaint that you can’t/don’t want to do a core part of your job.
It seems like you’re making a lot of assumptions about this community.
—They want to live in group houses—They don’t want to drive or own a car
—They don’t want to live in places with cold weather
—They don’t want to live in places with Confederate flags or lenient gun laws
You probably know this community a lot better than I do, but to what extent are these known facts vs. assumptions? Would it be worth doing some surveying to verify them?
It’s possible that some of what you observe, e.g. people living in group houses and not driving, is a function of circumstance and cost of living rather than people’s true preferences.
Have you quantified the risk that deworming medication might not work?
>You cannot discover new knowledge for humanity by reading a book written by a human.
But you can discover new knowledge for yourself. Unless you think you’ve already read enough that you know all human knowledge. This is why rationalists so often get accused of reinventing the wheel—because if you aren’t well-read, you can’t tell the difference between a genuinely new idea or insight and an old one. And you may come up with a good idea but be unaware of all the downsides that other people have pointed out in books.
Maybe some people need this advice. But most people read dramatically too few books, and in particular too few books from before the 21st century.