Thanks to everyone who commented on my last two posts, especially the many people who disagreed with me. Two things I will admit I got mostly wrong: 1. I was wrong to say there was “no case” for the tax bill. Aside from all of the minor provisions which can be good or bad, the case for slashing corporate rates is that they’re more distortionary and less efficient than other forms of taxation. Thanks to everyone who pointed this out to me. 2. Several people brought up problems with the article sa...
Dec 08, 2017•11 min
There was some good pushback on yesterday’s article on taxes. But sorry, I’m still right. Many people responded with generic low-tax anti-government positions. Fine. Let’s say the government is definitely bad and taxes are definitely too high. The current tax bill is still not the right way to do tax cuts. Budget director Mick Mulvaney claims that the richest 20% of people pay 95% of income tax; the Wall Street Journal ‘s numbers are a little lower, at 84%. Total income taxes are $1.8 trillion ,...
Dec 07, 2017•7 min•Ep. 21
Here is the cost of the current GOP tax bill placed in the context of other really expensive things. Although it’s not quite enough money to solve world hunger, it’s enough to end US homelessness four times over or fund nine simultaneous Apollo Programs. I’m writing this post sort of as penance. During the primaries, I wrote a post arguing that Sanders’ college plan was bad . And compared to any reasonable use of the money, I still think that’s true....
Dec 05, 2017•6 min•Ep. 20
About 30% of the victims of sexual harassment are men. About 20% of the perpetrators of sexual harassment are women. Don’t believe me? In a Quinnipiac poll , 60% of women and 20% of men said they’d been sexually harassed. Opinium , which sounds like a weird drug, reports 20% of women vs. 7% of men. YouGov poll in Germany finds 43% of women and 12% of men. The overall rates vary widely depending on how the pollsters frame the question, but the ratio is pretty consistent....
Dec 05, 2017•17 min•Ep. 19
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s catchily-titled Inadequate Equilibria is many things. It’s a look into whether there is any role for individual reason in a world where you can always just trust expert consensus. It’s an analysis of the efficient market hypothesis and how it relates to the idea of low-hanging fruit. It’s a self-conscious defense of the author’s own arrogance. But most of all, it’s a book of theodicy. If the world was created by the Invisible Hand, who is good, how did it come to contain so m...
Dec 01, 2017•1 hr•Ep. 18
Earlier this year, Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs wrote an article against school vouchers . He argued that private schools would be so focused on profit that they would sacrifice quality, and that competition wouldn’t be enough to keep them in line. I counterargued that yes it would , and cited among other things the success of food stamps (ie “food vouchers”). These give poor people access to the same dazzling variety of food choices as everyone else, usually at reasonable prices and low p...
Nov 22, 2017•37 min•Ep. 17
Question I’d never thought to ask before: are we sure it’s a good idea to let people know what the laws are? The Chinese legal system originated somewhat over 2000 years ago in the conflict between two views of law, legalist and Confucianist. The legalists, who believed in using the rational self-interest of those subject to law to make them behave in the way desired by those making the law, advocated harsh penalties to drive the equilibrium crime rate to near zero. They supported the ideas of a...
Nov 16, 2017•38 min
Medieval Icelandic crime victims would sell the right to pursue a perpetrator to the highest bidder. 18th century English justice replaced fines with criminals bribing prosecutors to drop cases. Somali judges compete on the free market; those who give bad verdicts get a reputation that drives away future customers. “Anarcho-capitalism” evokes a dystopian cyberpunk future. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe we’ve always been anarcho-capitalist. Maybe a state-run legal system isn’t a fact of nature, bu...
Nov 14, 2017•38 min•Ep. 15
The Alchemist asked if I wanted a drink. I did, but no amount of staring could make my eyes settle on the color of the liquid in the flask. And the gold the alchemists paid the taxmen smelled funny and made crackling noises. I declined. I took the summons and set it on the table between us. The King’s son was dying. The doctors, astrologers, witches, and other assorted wise people of the kingdom could not save him. The King had asked for an alchemist, and been given one. He, too, had failed. But...
Nov 09, 2017•24 min•Ep. 14
I turn 33 today. I can only hope that age brings wisdom. We’ve been talking recently about the high-level frames and heuristics that organize other concepts. They’re hard to transmit, and you have to rediscover them on your own, sometimes with the help of lots of different explanations and viewpoints (or one very good one). They’re not obviously apparent when you’re missing them ; if you’re not ready for them, they just sounds like platitudes and boring things you’ve already internalized. Wisdom...
Nov 08, 2017•10 min
When I wrote about my experiences doing psychotherapy with people, one commenter wondered if I might be schizoid: There are a lot of schizoid people in the rationalist community from what I can tell. The basis of schizoid is not all the big bad symptoms you might read about. There are high functioning people with personality disorders all the time who are complex, polite and philosophical. You will never see this description because mental health industries center entirely around people Failing ...
Nov 07, 2017•14 min
SSC’s review of postmodernism got very mixed reviews. Some of them made a good point: why should I be trying this at all? I’m not a postmodernist, I’m not a philosophy professor, surely someone much more qualified has already written a blog-post-length explanation of postmodernism. This is all true. My only excuse is that trying to figure out complicated concepts requires a different approach than trying to teach simple ones. Some knowledge is easy to transfer. “What is the thyroid?” Some expert...
Nov 03, 2017•15 min•Ep. 11
Some of the Seattleites put together a Postmodernism For Rationalists presentation that’s been sparking a lot of discussion . It’s not quite the way I would have explained things. I’m no expert in postmodernism, and can’t give anything more than a very simple introduction to one of many facets of the movement. But I am an expert in explaining things to rationalists. So it’s worth a try. Last week, I went over the evidence for and against a European Dark Age . Most people on both sides agreed on ...
Nov 02, 2017•17 min•Ep. 10
Rat Park is a famous study in which lab rats were kept in a really nice habitat that satisfied their every need. Contrary to the usual results with lab animals, scientists couldn’t get these happier rats addicted to drugs. Researchers concluded that drug addiction, far from being the simple biological story everyone assumed it was, was really a just coping mechanism for intolerable social situations. Rats stuck in terrible cages get addicted to drugs, as do humans in terrible slums. But give the...
Oct 26, 2017•20 min•Ep. 9
The Baffler publishes a long article against “idiot” New Atheists. It’s interesting only in the context of so many similar articles , and an inability to imagine the opposite opinion showing up in an equally fashionable publication. New Atheism has lost its battle for the cultural high ground. r/atheism will shamble on as some sort of undead abomination, chanting “BRAAAAAAIIINSSSS…are what fundies don’t have” as the living run away shrieking. But everyone else has long since passed them by. The ...
Oct 25, 2017•13 min•Ep. 8
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. — Paul Graham, What You Can’t Say I. Staying on the subject of Dark Age myths : what about all those scientists burned at the stake for their discoveries? Historical consensus declares this a myth invented by New Atheists. The Church was a great patron of science, no one believed in a flat earth, Galileo had it coming, et cetera. Unam Sanctam Ca...
Oct 24, 2017•26 min•Ep. 7
Thanks to everyone who made interesting comments on yesterday’s post about Dark Ages. Several people challenged the matching of the economic/population decline to the “fall of Rome”. For example, from David Friedman : On the graph you are citing, 36 million is the population in 200 A.D. The fall of the Western Empire is commonly dated to about 450 A.D. By 400 A.D., on the same graph, population is down to 31 million–say 30 million by 450....
Oct 17, 2017•19 min•Ep. 6
Cracked offers Five Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe About The Dark Ages ; number one is “The Dark Ages Were A Real Thing”: The Dark Ages were never a thing. The entire concept is complete and utter horseshit cobbled together by a deluded writer. The term “Dark Ages” was first used in the 14th century by Petrarch, an Italian poet with a penchant for Roman nostalgia. Petrarch used it to describe, well, every single thing that had happened since the fall of Rome. He didn’t rain dark judgment ...
Oct 16, 2017•35 min•Ep. 5
Pop science likes to dub dopamine “the reward chemical” and serotonin “the happiness chemical”. God only knows what norepinephrine is, but I’m sure it’s cutesy. In real life, all of this is much more complicated. Dopamine might be “the surprisal in a hierarchical predictive model chemical”, but even that can’t be more than a gross oversimplification. As for serotonin, people have studied it for seventy years and the best they can come up with is “uh, something to do with stress”. Serotonin and b...
Oct 11, 2017•13 min•Ep. 4
From Boston Review : Know Thy Futurist . It’s an attempt to classify and analyze various types of futurism, in much the same way that a Jack Chick tract could be described as “an attempt to classify and analyze various types of religion”. I have more disagreements with it than can fit in a blog post, but let’s stick with the top five. First , it purports to explain what we should think about the future, but never makes a real argument for it. It starts by suggesting there are two important axes ...
Oct 11, 2017•22 min•Ep. 3
Last post talked about individual differences in whether people found others basically friendly or hostile. The SSC survey included a sort of related question: “Are people basically trustworthy?” The exact phrasing asked respondents to rate other people from 1 (“basically trustworthy”) to 5 (“basically untrustworthy”). 4853 people answered. The average was 2.49 – so skewed a bit towards higher trust. The overall pattern looked like this:...
Oct 11, 2017•8 min•Ep. 2
A few years ago I had lunch with another psychiatrist-in-training and realized we had totally different experiences with psychotherapy. We both got the same types of cases. We were both practicing the same kinds of therapy. We were both in the same training program, studying under the same teachers. But our experiences were totally different. In particular, all her patients had dramatic emotional meltdowns, and all my patients gave calm and considered analyses of their problems, as if they were ...
Oct 11, 2017•17 min•Ep. 1
