Honestly, the fact that there isn’t 100% support for universal
healthcare among rationalists is instant proof that they’re full of
shit. Like, what’s the bayesian odds that universal healthcare works and
is cheaper in every single other developed country, but somehow
won’t work in the US?
Ahahahahah you sweet summer child. I once remember having a discussion with Big Yud about min wage. Showing the plethora of empirical evidence of how the effects on employment are minimal, and it almost surely translates in higher lifelong earnings even for the least skilled workers. His answers were on the line of "given that economic theory says that min wage is bad, then my priors are super high for it being bad. Thus you will need stronger evidence to shift my posterior". Needless to say, min wage is one of the most studied topics in economics, so it's practically impossible to give evidence stronger than what we already have.
That conversation revealed to me the secret sauce of rationalism: if you set your priors high enough because \*first principles\*, then your ideas can resist any amount of empirical evidence (or at least the amount of empirical evidence that our society is able to produce, which is pretty much the same thing). It's just praxeology with extra steps
Also, since his grift is dependent on rich benefactors, towing their ideological line is critical. If Peter Thiel hates minimum wage, then Yud can’t either.
dont want to be that guy but this is an interesting one: its "toe the line."
theres a line drawn on the floor in the lower house of the UK parliament that youre not allowed to cross, lest the two sides start physically fighting. you have to keep your toes behind the line. the lore is that it ensures MPs are kept at least two sword-lengths apart.
"The gentlemen will toe the line!" or some variation was presumably bellowed at some point by the speaker of the house at members who crossed into the middle of the room. Over time, it became a metaphor for party discipline generally.
> the lore is that it ensures MPs are kept at least two sword-lengths apart.
I would simply unlock that most ancient of weapons from the vaults of history, the pool-noodle.
I think it's interesting how the eggcorn "tow the line" picks up an additional sense of actively pulling a shared burden. I can picture "toe the line" as people standing behind a line and "tow the line" as people pulling a rope of, like, a boat or something.
I don't want to be that person but, while it IS "toe the line", it has nothing to do with Parliament. Its origin is somewhat unclear but it's considered most likely to be derived from early modern military discipline. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe\_the\_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line) (Wikipedia specifically calls out the Parliament thing as fiction)
some old guy told me that story during a guided tour of parliament when I was like 10. once again the halls of power are revealed as yawning caverns of deception
> given that economic theory says that min wage is bad
So Elder Yud thinks people should die for the crime of being poor, despite believing death is literally the worst possible thing?
...but that isn't even true! In econ 101, sure, but there are totally standard models of how market power produces inefficiencies that a minimum wage can correct. Basic economic theory points out *one kind* of market structure in which implementing minimum wage would be bad, but you actually have to go and check how the real market behaves to figure out whether that analysis applies. There is no overarching sense in which minimum wage is always bad policy.
Yeah, honestly I think the culprit is our education system, where a "world of the welfare theorems assumptions" is the first to be introduced. So after spending some time on that (and often only on that: most people taking econ 101 courses are not *majoring* in economics), the average Joe thinks that such framework is more "natural" and anything else feels overtly complicated, so must be justified much more strongly, or is perceived just as outright sophistry. That is obviously turning the reality on its head: anybody thinking about his daily economic interactions should realize that it is the idea of agents being price takers to be counterintuitive, and the one that should be required to defend its usefulness. But still, I see a lot with students and sometimes even PhDs treating that set of assumptions as "how generally things work" and everything else as "looking for the exception", subconsciously if not consciously
Probably this fact is not due to any malign conspiracy to make everybody subconsciously freemarketer, it is just the fact that econ professors insist to make everything mathy from day 1, so logically you take the only model that you can operate in with univariate calculus as the first one, and obviously historical reasons. Still, it would be nicer if it was stressed more that competitive equilibrium is just a model among many, that the market is fundamentally an institution and what they are analyzing is only a particular form (and not a particularly relevant one) of that institution, and so on. Swindlers would be much less able to depict their half backed "common sense" arguments as the obvious and sound result of theory to educated (but not specifically in economics) people
> if you set your priors high enough because *first principles*, then your ideas can resist any amount of empirical evidence
Well this is why we sneer, isn't it?
You just update your *priors*. Not computing the posterior, updating the prior.
If Yudkowsky actually studied math he'd be chuckling each time he or anyone else mentions "updating their priors". He really missed out.
Universal healthcare only works because the one chosen country doesnt have it and uses its lack of it to create superiour healthcare products that the rest of the world enjoys and consumes. Having people not able to afford healthcare or die in massive depth is just the price of progress. Only the free market (please dont look at research grants) can provide the incentives that create new medicine. Praise markets!
(Iirc this was, with less sarcasm, scotts stance on it)
Sadly they are mostly correct about this. For many poor populations around the world working in horrible conditions providing products/services to rich countries is the only opportunity to improve their life.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume they make a big show about how big and spread out the country is, even though urbanization has never been higher, and so it would be expensive (and wasting money on those frivolous outer denizens) so it shouldn't be done.
All things aside Aduhelm is an insanely controversial drug. AFAIK it
seems to have been approved mainly because it clears amyloid, the actual
efficacy is so flimsy that it’s probably nonexistent, and Biogen didn’t
even do a confirmatory trial yet. The FDA expert panel advised against
approving it. It’s going to get marketed as the first ‘curative’
Alzheimer’s drug, while in reality it’s going to be an expensive version
of infomercial memory supplements. + having an approved Alzheimer’s drug
that targets amyloid is probably going to stall research into
non-amyloid AD drug targets, some of which seem promising
Oh, I know! More than any country in the world per capita. But that’s just the price of domestic innovation.
Wait, no, that can’t be it. Because the same would be true if it was developed by a German company.
There might be hope for this one.
Honestly, the fact that there isn’t 100% support for universal healthcare among rationalists is instant proof that they’re full of shit. Like, what’s the bayesian odds that universal healthcare works and is cheaper in every single other developed country, but somehow won’t work in the US?
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Is the inclusion of the model at the bottom just doing Bayesian fetish?
All things aside Aduhelm is an insanely controversial drug. AFAIK it seems to have been approved mainly because it clears amyloid, the actual efficacy is so flimsy that it’s probably nonexistent, and Biogen didn’t even do a confirmatory trial yet. The FDA expert panel advised against approving it. It’s going to get marketed as the first ‘curative’ Alzheimer’s drug, while in reality it’s going to be an expensive version of infomercial memory supplements. + having an approved Alzheimer’s drug that targets amyloid is probably going to stall research into non-amyloid AD drug targets, some of which seem promising