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Which, of course, is another strike against the defunders

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deletedJul 19, 2022·edited Jul 19, 2022
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Always nice when the One Weird Tricks work for someone. In previous open threads this year, it's been B12 or magnesium for depression. "Everyone's a Little Bit Deficient" - wouldn't it be great if there was a standardized nutritional battery test included with every yearly check-up or psych eval? I'm sure we'd catch many more such cases. Optimally Balanced Diets are rarer than I think anyone acknowledges.

I am always leery of giving out Medical Advice, cause I'm Not A Doctor(tm), but it feels like "have you tried more B vitamins" is an easy low-hanging fruit to pick first. Not just cause of water solubility, but because the effective ULs are either really high or nonexistent. Always worry if I tell someone they could use more <other_nutrient> they'll run off and consume 5000% DV and get something worse than carotenemia. The whole precursor/binding for bioavailability thing is a bit too complex to fit into bite-sized recommendations. (Like I only belatedy realized that I'm probably making a mistake taking vitD supplements while also regularly not getting much calcium...and that's a connection I already knew about! Scott's harped on it for years!)

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Ah yeah, the classic Big Ol' Dartboard O' Supplements approach. My current score is:

*1000mcg B12 1/wk (cause the pills are stupidly tiny and effectively un-cuttable, not cause I love extremely high dosages). I'm too poor to regularly eat animal products, dislike fermented plant products, and don't often encounter fortified foods. One of the paradoxical side effects of avoiding much pre-cooked/processed instant American foods...

*125mcg VitD every other day. Love mushrooms and fish, too poor to stuff my face with them at every meal. I work underground, get no direct sunlight in my house, and rarely leave it. Known medication side effect of osteoporosis.

*500mg calcium/250mg magnesium/7.5mg zinc every other day. To go with the VitD, and I've given up trying to punish myself by drinking milk or fortified OJ. (Why can't tap water have more nutrients in it? I love tap water!) Love me some shellfish, but ahistorically expensive. Known medication side effect of osteoporosis.

*Brotein powder with >100% B1, B2, B5, B6, mixed with daily coffee daily. (Chocolate flavouring makes it a "muscle mocha". Surprisingly good, much more palatable than "bullet coffee".) Perfect route to take water-soluble stuff, cause coffee always means an incipient bathroom trip anyway.

Nothing else has seemed worth the cost/benefit ratio, given the things I do regularly eat, and/or how hard it is to truly reach medically-significant deficiency. I sometimes wish I didn't have lactose intolerance and/or actually liked dairy products; those are some extremely convenient nutritional profiles at low cost. (Thanks, government subsidy!) Same thing with vegetables, legumes, seeds, and nuts; I know there's a lot of incredible efficiency there, but blah, I just can't make myself eat such things often enough to matter. "The best diet is the one you'll actually stick to"

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o/ B12 person here, checking in. Supplements changed my life (although I have figured out the underlying cause by now and no longer take them).

There's a specific set of symptoms that makes me recommend people just give it a shot (stuff like light/sound sensitivity, increasing troubles with memory, issues sleeping, possibly constipation), since it's over the counter pretty much everywhere AFAIK, and doesn't really have side-effects when 'overdosed'.

Other vitamins I've been more leery of recommending. Vitamin D is a great example of something that can cause an astonishing amount of misery, at least so says my experience with kidney stones (unfortunately-effectively-high-protein low-carb diets and vitamin D supplements are tricky to balance even if you drink A LOT of water, it turns out).

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Oh hey, I remember you from a previous Open Thread but couldn't remember exact username. It was, indeed, your posts that inspired me to consider B12 at all, so thanks! I have no idea if it's doing anything particularly meaningful for me (VitD had immediate effects, I really am living the vampire lifestyle), but it's been nice to hear from intelligent folks I trust that, no, actually, Consumer Reports isn't always right about The Vast Dangers Of Big Supplement (You Won't Believe #37!). Loved that magazine growing up, but, wow, I sure absorbed a lot of thoughtless memes.

I'm luckily too poor to afford significant amounts of protein, so carbs are a major component of the gustatory budget. Gonna suck a lot whenever I get that diabetes diagnosis, probably. One of my prescription meds is a diuretic as a side effect, so it's sorta hard for me to not drink lots of water all the time, which I guess is handy too. If really annoying on the disposal end.

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The underlying cause of my issues ended up being SIBO ("small-intestine bacterial overgrowth"), which basically means I avoid carbs as much as possible. Some carbs are actually okay, but blanket-avoiding them has just proven to be safest for me; I admittedly don't really have the patience to figure out which kinds of what I can eat. From a time when I was testing around, I know Japanese rice is okay! On the other hand, Basmati rice is terrible. SIBO literature suggests I should be able to eat Jasmine rice, but that's a nope.

Avoiding carbs has really calmed my irritable bowel syndrome from "stomach ache every day" to "no problems unless I break the rule too much". Desserts are fine (in part because plain sugar is easy to digest, so ironically not that much of an issue). I sure love desserts. The dietary change made the far too excitable bacteria in my gut calm down and stop eating all of my B12 before I can absorb it.

I'm also living the vampire lifestyle, and I really should take the occasional D supplement, but right now my bones feel healthy and the 0.0 vitamin D in my blood seems to never have caused me any psychological issues, so I'm just not taking any. Every once and a while I pop one in, but summer isn't when I'll be doing that. I *am* ghostly pale, so I expect even the occasional stray ray of sunshine will probably produce enough vitamin D (that is immediately used by the processes that needs it) for me to survive until winter, at least.

I'm super happy to hear vitamin D helped you! And, honestly, if you don't have issues with carbs, you should eat them. The slow-to-digest types of carbs that are toxic for me are actually better for most people, and unlikely to give you any trouble (especially re: diabetes). :) You're much kinder to your liver with carbs, too. There are some general downsides to carbs that get worse the older you get, but as long as you listen to your body, I can only endorse eating them.

Sorry to hear finances are the bottleneck to flexibility, though (and, if I gather from the rest of this thread, lactose intolerance). It's never nice to not have some options that might be important later down the line. I hope that, should it ever be relevant, you find a way to navigate your troubles.

Until then, enjoy the carbs! I do miss them. :)

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On Sunday, at the nearby mall, by one of the main entrances. It had Pepsi products. Before that was a week or two ago when I was on the road for a few hours and saw them at rest areas.

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What causes them to go outside? Are they allowed to?

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I don't know if you're making a "refrigerator running" type of joke or not, but I'll answer seriously in case you aren't.

In the case of the rest areas, I only saw vending machines outside at the smaller ones that only had bathrooms. If the place had a McDonalds or similar, the vending machines were indoors. I'm guessing it was an issue of space. Here's an example of one of the ones I saw: https://goo.gl/maps/smSbcxKQxm78AB8Y8

For the mall, I don't know for a fact that it was allowed *but* I know the same machine has been there for several years. I guess being outside allows them to refill the machines outside of the mall's operating hours without needing keys to the building. Come to think of it, I don't know of any vending machines *inside* that particular mall except a single one in the food court.

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The mall near me has vending machines inside only. I figure it's because people spend a lot more time inside than outside.

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Yesterday, at the public safety training center I was at.

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I think it might depend on climate. When I lived in the desert Southwest, I'd see them outside of apartments, gas stations, highway rest stops, etc. all the time. Now I live in a much wetter, more humid climate with much colder winters (the Midatlantic) and I think maybe I saw one outdoors at a gas station the last time I drove to West Virginia a few months ago.

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Two weeks ago, at long wharf in Boston.

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Today. At San Diego State University. I stopped to look at one vending machine dedicated to rapid covid tests but there were many others for bottled water and drinks and snacks.

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Interesting selection bias on this one: I can only comment if I remember the last time I saw a vending machine outdoors; the more recently it was the more likely I remember.

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deletedJul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022
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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

If you don't want to flip through a whole PDF, the cartoon is also available here, on Imgur:

https://i.imgur.com/VTlwdE6.jpeg

NOTE: This is still just as NSFW as it was above.

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I don’t think brilliant people are insecure about their smarts. I have never met one who knew his/her IQ or had any interest in it.

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Agreed. I think obsessing over IQ is for those who feel that they have something to prove.

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What did the deleted comment say?

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Or, you know, those who want to defend against victim oppression narratives that assume inequality must be the product of discrimination etc.

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founding

That defense is highly unlikely to be effective in practice, and may be negatively effective.

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Jul 25, 2022·edited Jul 25, 2022

Sure, in the same way that literally every other defense is going to be ineffective against dataphobes who cling to narratives. If it isn't genetic, what is it? "Culture"? You think that's convincing to anyone?

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I don't know what the deleted comment said, but let's just make it clear that this does not imply that IQ isn't crucially important.

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Is it important if you're hanging sheet rock?

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No, it's important for explaining inequality in society and the political consequences of said inequality.

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The downtown area of Lancaster, although not that large, is very different from the rural, Amish area around it. Industrial and some colleges. Plus, a not insignificant portion of the rioters traveled to the unrest from outside Lancaster. The mini-riot ended quick after a judge slapped a million dollar bail on one of the riot instigators.

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I also think there is an underestimation of how racially diverse a lot of rural areas are.

But I agree the article does present problems for Scott's (and partially my, I tended to agree with him) thesis.

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> it had Black Lives Matter-related rioting

What made the event a "riot" versus a protest?

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

Lancaster is a pretty effete college town fully of specialty boutiques and an outlet strip with Ralph Lauren and Nautica shops. It's not exactly a central example of what the original comment was getting at. It's like calling Asheville, NC or Burlington, VT "rural."

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I wondered about this too when reading Scott's question. I live in an area where putting D on your ballot is a reliable way to lose, and we still had several protests and a lot of community anger with attempts to codify BLM messages into public policy.

There's also the possibility of spillover effects of very strong nationwide anti-police rhetoric, that demoralized the police even in areas where they are generally supported. I think this is possible, but I'm skeptical, especially as a lasting effect.

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This makes a lot of sense to me because I think given how few criminals get caught the lack of crime is more about social pressure than actual cost benefit analysis of the behavior.

I remember in college the campus police were basically like stolen money/items/laptops are basically never ever found unless the person is caught in the act, or the item turns up while the criminal commits another crime.

Once someone has gone and taken a bottle from a liquor store or whatever, and nothing happened, and their mom didn't disown them, there is kind of permeant change in what they see as the accept range of personal action.

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This sounds correct to me. I recall in college a small convenience store that was located right next to campus. Every Thursday night there was a huge crowd of students there late into the night, and nothing on the shelves. Nighttime theft was huge, to the point the harried employees couldn't do anything to stop it. So they hired a security guard to stand by the door and suddenly all the shelves were full again. Having a security guard in a store with maybe 2 employees otherwise is a massive increase in cost, so it was certainly not optimal. Because it became a requirement, the store paid much higher costs to stay in business.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

Utilitarian leads to stranger results, see "repugnant conclusion"

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Well, for me repugnant conclusion is a fatal flaw of that model.

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I do not really have one, but mostly virtue ethics (heavily influenced by Christianity), with consequentialism for tactics.

Utilitarianism seemed interesting but all formulation lead to some absurd conclusions.

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In that case, I'd guess that you would have essentially the same objections to birth control as to abortion. The math is the same. "Sum" utilitarianism (as opposed to "average") only sets a limit on population growth when it reduces average quality of life so far that the total number of utils starts to drop.

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Many Thanks!

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But if that's the case and you take the contraception away, what do you do with the people who stop having sex in the first place? Do you “embrace the repugnant conclusion” of forcing them to have children too?

If this AALY metric really is the be-all end all, then hey, a woman cannot bear children from age 0-10, and again from age 45(ish)-death, so that’s only an average of 35 years of fertility. Even if “constant forced child-bearing” during those fertile years reduces their utility value to the point that she’d rather be dead than alive, you’d be offsetting that pain and suffering with whatever utility she gets out of her non-fertile years, plus the 35 x 79AALY lifespans of the kids she was forced to bear.

I hate to be dramatic, but this line of thinking seems to be trending towards a hypothetical society in which rape is a moral duty rather than a crime. Which is why the main lesson of this thread seems to me to be less about the abortion debate and more about the shortcomings of utilitarianism as a moral system.

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The repugnant conclusion is that, all else equal, higher fertility rate leading to more lives is better, even if each individual life is slightly worse off. I feel like this could be true. That is very different from “change our government into a totalitarian tyranny that forces people to reproduce against their will, and re-wire societal norms such that this type of oppression becomes stable.”

I agree with you that utilitarianism is problematic. Not inherently so, maybe, but just because no one can have enough information to take into account the societal implications. We say “In a vacuum X outcome would be good. Government, go make X happen” without being able to include into the calculations the part about the government going and doing.

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>what do you do with the people who stop having sex in the first place

Are there so many of them that they matter in the grand utilitarian calculus? Populations who have not embraced birth control methods seem grow quite fast because a large number of people will, ahem, engage in procreative activities. "Doing something" with the ones won't necessarily boost the population size growth rates very much.

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Did you think somebody who thinks deep and hard about utilitarianism hasn't heard of that before?

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No, but I expect that some people who read this have not thought deep and hard about utilitarianism.

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Ding ding ding.

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Why is a 50% discount extreme?

I mean, taken to it's logical conclusion, this would lead to women have as many children as they can without financial ruin but I don't think most people would point to families of 10+ as maximizing utility. There's clear some level at which children encounter something like decreasing marginal utility.

The median person's intuitive utility estimate, I think, hovers around 2-3 children being optimal. And, presuming they have those 2-3 optimal children, any abortions don't matter and don't really have a marginal impact.

Or, in human terms, if Sarah has 3 kids, that's fine, and if Mary has 5 kids, that's kinda a lot. If Sarah had 6 abortions and Mary had 2, who cares? The overwhelmingly important factor is the number of actual kids.

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I mean, it's hard to imagine stable systems with significantly larger families. Just to ballpark this, the median household income in the US is ~63k. Presuming an uninterrupted career of 43 years (22-65) that gives us a lifetime earning of ~$2.7 million. USDA gives the ballpark cost of raising a kid at $230k/kid. Keeping this in constant dollars, that means the family is spending 25% of it's lifetime earnings on the kids. Not including taxes, food and shelter for the parents, retirement, or even associated expenses like college funds, just raising the kids.

TBH, raising three kids on $60k a year with both parents working sounds, not brutal, but reasonably tough. Raising even 5 kids on that same budget starts to look really rough and as the number of kids increases and their access to economic resources decreases, the odds of them having bad life outcomes increases and that affects the QALY stats (for both them and society) significantly.

So, one on level, the 2-3 kid standard seems like a Chesterton's Fence of what is affordable for middle income and lower-middle income families, who (at least when this was the norm) set the social standard. You could theoretically bump this up to 5-6 kids but that sounds really rough with two working parents and $60k/yr. And even then, the core issue isn't abortion. Just as we wouldn't care whether a woman with 3 kids had 0 abortions or 5 abortions, we wouldn't care whether a woman with 6 kids had 0 abortions or 5 abortions. The total number of children in the world is not constrained by abortion, it's upper limited by fairly sensible economic realities and currently set by whatever weird cultural force has cratered global birth rates.

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"The total number of children in the world is not constrained by abortion, it's upper limited by fairly sensible economic realities and currently set by whatever weird cultural force has cratered global birth rates."

If the limit on children is economic, then abortion policy would not be expected to change the number of children.

However, the limit on children is not economic, as you note in your reference to "cultural force". Modern Americans are extremely rich by historical standards and can afford large families if they choose to have them.

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"Modern Americans are extremely rich by historical standards and can afford large families if they choose to have them."

Yeah, yeah they can and Parrhesia is welcome to make a utilitarian maximally-natalist argument if he wants but its not going to have much to do with abortion.

Like, if the formula is "more babies=more people=more total happiness" then at the very least we'll be discussing things like childcare and contraception long before we touch abortion.

Unless the argument is that changing abortion laws will lead to culture change which will lead to a more pro-natalist culture. Which, I dunno, maybe Parrhesia does want to make that argument.

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Poor people have more kids, not fewer. This is true when comparing countries, when comparing people within a country, and when comparing the same country at different stages of economic development. Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, has a fertility rate of 7 children per woman. Also, fertility rates are dropping precipitously across the world, including to well below replacement in developed countries, even as the world becomes richer. So clearly there's something very wrong with the economic argument.

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IDK most people I know from large families seem happier than those from small families. Should large families be mandated if this is true?

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Changing the government into one that could plausibly make and enforce such a mandate would have its own (very negative) utility calculation. Much better would be for intellectuals and social influencers to start sharing and promoting the benefits and joys of large families, rather than doing the opposite like what happens right now.

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Shouldn't natural selection take care of this in any case? Laissez faire seems like the way to go here.

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founding

This argument only works under total utilitarianism. Total utilitarianism has failure modes which align fairly poorly with most people's intuitive expectations of "good outcomes". Other forms of utilitarianism also have failure modes, but, IMO, fewer and less degenerate.

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founding

Ethical theories are made for man, not man for ethical theories. There is no objective referrent, external/independent of people's actual preferences over world-states, that points to a specific theory of ethics (i.e. "total utilitarianism"), and says, "That's the one!" If an ethical theory gives you results that you don't like, that does not mean that the problem is with you(r preferences).

To be sure, people have incoherent and inconsistent preferences. This makes formalizing ethics, even at an individual level, a tricky endeavour. It still does not mean that any given formal theory is therefore correct, in a situation where a human displays preferences which seem locally incoherent or inconsistent.

People do make predictable mistakes. Scope insensitivity sure is a cognitive bias! That does not mean that, reflectively, once that wrinkle is ironed out, people will necessarily endorse total utilitarianism.

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I’d go even further and argue that strong commitments to abstract ethical theories are a major source of concretely unethical behavior.

It’s especially true when the system of ethics is divine command, following God’s will, etc, but also comes up elsewhere.

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Chesterton's Fence. If a conclusion seems counter-intuitive, it might be because of something actually wrong with it that you can't yet put your finger on. It might even be hard to identify after mulling it over for a while; some fences separate large, unfamiliar fields.

(It might just be that the counter-intuitive conclusion is truly the better one, and will become intuitive once you happen upon some key insight, but it's risky to just assume that's the case right off.)

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> How do you know if a form of utilitarianism "fails"?

For me? When ethical theory recommends actions which I consider as evil/bad. And after careful thinking I do not consider changing my mind on the idea as a good thing.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

By that logic, anyone who is capable of having kids with little risk to their own life and isn’t actively doing so is similarly bad from a utilitarian standpoint. Why not further mandate that everyone must be regularly attempting to conceive unless they can show a doctor’s note to get out of it?

I’m pro-natalist, but I generally support incentives to promote desired behavior (eg paid maternity leave) over punishments to discourage undesired behavior (eg prison). I don’t bother justifying my preference on utilitarian grounds, (edit to add: but if I were to do so, it would probably focus on putting high value on the utility of personal freedom.)

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

I edited in my attempt to add in a possible utilitarian justification. Basically: value personal freedom highly enough to justify the desired outcome. I’m not sure if it actually works though.

Your original reasoning is similar to how I find myself pro-natalist, so it generally makes sense to me. I find a bit of utilitarianism useful, but strict adherence not so useful, especially as it tends to end up with ideal states being authoritarian states ruled over by benevolent dictators that tend to have predictably bad real-world failures.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

Like I said, I’m not sure if the framing works.

Spending the rest of your life with an unwanted child can severely reduce the life quality of yourself and of the child. I guess try to find a way to quantify that? If you grow up with an abusive/neglectful mother (which wouldn’t be 100% of forced births, but still), I’d say your growing up years are less than half as worthwhile as otherwise, maybe 25%? It gets better after that, but coping mechanisms learned under abuse/neglect can have long lasting negative effects.

You could also look at things like increased suicidality from even wanted births (see https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/rounds/suicide-risk-during-pregnancy-after-childbirth-on-rise) and imagine that might be a low bound on if someone were forced to carry an unwanted fetus to term. Of course some people might end up killing themselves and the unborn child if abortion isn’t available, but I’d guess that effect is small (I couldn’t find any stats on a quick Google search).

Those are my best bets I guess; I’d be interested to know if you can find a way to incorporate them into your utilitarian framing.

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deletedJul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022
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In general, zero - I would start from a strong assumption that lives aren't interchangeable, and it's not appropriate to coerce someone to sacrifice part of their life for the benefit for another unless they themselves want to.

If I have a month left to live, and you kill me to grant someone else 100 QALYs, that's still murder and an unacceptable violation of my rights, the ends don't justify the means.

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Half of those people you're bringing into existence will have no personal freedom. This feels an awful lot like turning humans into paper clip factories. You're making more of something just to make more of something.

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This whole discussion is missing any insight into the disutility of pregnancy with the exception of the account by Marginalia. Pregnancy and childbirth are high cost. They are extreme, jarring, terrible experiences for many, whether or not the child is wanted, but frank admissions of this are taboo so the menfolk remain oblivious. If you are looking to quantify disutility to the mother, you have a lot of research to do.

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Taking into account the toll of pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood, I would call it 25 years per child. If you want to get fancy, you could say 35 years for the first child and 20 years for each subsequent child per child. Of course none of this captures the opportunity cost of losing women to being continuously pregnant over doing things like innovating the most effective system for widespread adoption of mosquito net use.

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Isn't it normal for utilitarianism to say we should be increasing utility and we're falling short whenever we fail to do so (which is to say, all the time)?

https://betonit.substack.com/p/you-dont-have-to-be-a-moral-saint

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"By that logic, anyone who is capable of having kids with little risk to their own life and isn’t actively doing so is similarly bad from a utilitarian standpoint. Why not further mandate that everyone must be regularly attempting to conceive unless they can show a doctor’s note to get out of it?"

That may be true (that capable, but unwilling parents are bad), but it would not justify mandates. Since those people having children would propagate anti-natalist preferences into the future. Being anti-natalist lowers reproductive fitness and loses out against pro-natalist preferences in the long run. Or do you assume that this trait is a very mutable by coercion? Forcing people not be "bad"? I'm skeptical.

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From this do you conclude that abortion should be banned, or that quantitative utilitarianism using totally made-up numbers isn't the optimal ethical system?

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Even being vaguely utilitarianist myself, i totally agree with this comment.

Utility may very well be quantifiable in principle, but not without modeling second and third etc. order effects on society in the present and in the future and etc. It's difficult.

And also, utility just cannot be an additive quantity. I don't really believe we have today a valid model that let us compute utility.

Just by inventing numbers one can justify any ethical position. I am afraid that utilitarianism is often invoked just to add a veneer of math to make the argument look more formal and rationalist.

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As I understand, you care about the total number of people born. The fact that abortion ends one life before it begins does not mean that the total number of born children is reduced. If a woman has abortion, she chooses to not have a child right now, and It think it needs more evidence, that choosing an abortion right now reduces the total number of births, as the woman has the chance to have a child later in life.

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I've heard that the average abortion reduces fertility by 1/3 of a birth.

But that's only relevant to the decision to have a particular abortion. That isn't the question you asked. You asked about state policy. The effect of state policy is very difficult to measure. For example, when Spain legalized abortion in 2010, it had no effect on the number of abortions, thus presumably no effect on fertility. But the number of abortions in Spain had skyrocketed over the preceding decade. In truth, it had been legalized incrementally and surreptitiously. One problem with restricting liberty is that people will just lie to you about what the laws are.

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How good is the data on things that were generally dark secrets?

Before safe (much less legal) abortion we had A LOT more infanticide. Also a lot of abortions and deaths among women that were never acknowledged or disguised. Ask whether the data indicates a rise in abortions, or a switch from back alley abortions and women drinking abortifacient tea to anything documented.

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Here is one data point, linked to at Marginal Revolution yesterday: https://www.nber.org/papers/w30248#fromrss

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Poland, where abortion is mostly banned, notably does not have higher birthrate than neighboring, culturally similar countries, where abortion is mostly allowed. But I guess OP would argue that contraception should be also banned under his interpretation of utilitarianism.

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This is a good point. If you assume that a woman will only have (for example) two children in her lifetime, then abortion allows her to choose when the children will be born. She can thus ensure they are born at a point that maximises her utility, while also maximising the utility of the child (she has sufficient time and resources to raise them, and desire to do so).

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I'm also curious about this. I'm guessing that making abortion illegal leads to more illegal abortions, and probably slightly more children? Though as a counterexample, if abortion were illegal where I live, I would get sterilized ASAP instead of waiting to see if I change my mind about wanting kids.

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That sounds strange. I live in a place where abortion is illegal, and I never hear about people getting sterilized in order to avoid the inconvenience of having to order abortion pills online instead of from a local health provider.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

This is by far the best response to the original comment and it's a little annoying he hasn't responded (while continuing responses to other, far weaker critiques). As far as I am aware, there is _very_ little to no evidence that, on average, abortions reduce the number of humans born. They mostly shift timing of birth by some amount.

In other words the entire premise of the question seems to be fundamentally flawed.

If anything, birth control has a _far_ greater impact on the number of humans born.

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This is a good argument against abortion IF you are a sort of an utilitarian who accepts repugnant conclusion. But many self-identified utililitarians/consequentionalists don't.

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I don't think that moral rules could be "disproven" in any meaningful sense. I just have sort of a pedantic issue with your vocabulary.

There are, with massive oversimplification, two kinds of utilitarians, those who want to maximalize total utility vs those who want to maximalize average utility. In practice, I am pretty confident that most self-identified consequentionalists are the latter, while RC and your argument only applies to the former.

If you would argue that from the standpoint of "total utilitarianism", abortion is indefensible, I would agree.

Btw. if you are curious why I am waffling between using the word consequentionalism vs utilitarianism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an elegant explanation of the difference: "Persistent opponents posed plenty of problems for classic utilitarianism. Each objection led some utilitarians to give up some of the original claims of classic utilitarianism. By dropping one or more of those claims, descendants of utilitarianism can construct a wide variety of moral theories. Advocates of these theories often call them consequentialism rather than utilitarianism so that their theories will not be subject to refutation by association with the classic utilitarian theory." (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/)

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Interesting. Perhaps average utilitarians mostly call themselves consequentionalists, while total utilitarians mostly call themselves utilitarians without adjectives?

In any case total utilitarianism feels weird AF, imho in itself sort of an evidence that it is not exactly popular position.

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deletedJul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022
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According to the same logic, why shouldn't we just treat women as baby factories, and ensure they have as many children as possible? The result is one life lost (that of the woman) against several (ten plus) new lives created. Under the same logic that is a net gain, even though it is clearly abhorrent to treat a woman in this way.

In the end this comes down, as others say, to the repugnant conclusion. If you accept it is better to have a lot of miserable people rather than a few happy people, then why would there be any argument in favour of abortion? If you do not accept it, then it is quite easy to find a pro-choice stance.

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I think it is wrong because the question is too narrow. For example, you ignore the possibility that the women gets an abortion but later has another baby. If she doesn't get the abortion, then that later baby is never born. Which baby provides greater utility? The one that is born at a bad time for the mother, and therefore doesn't get proper care; or the one born when the mother has sufficient resources and desire to raise it properly?

As for the repugnant conclusion (which follows from the logical extreme of your argument), it is wrong simply because most people consider it to be wrong (hence the name). Morality is subjective, we have no way to measure it objectively (even measuring utility is challenging and probably impossible in reality). Moral frameworks are designed to produce an objective way to guide decisions and societies, but if they lead to outcomes that are widely considered wrong then its worth questioning the axioms and steps that lead to those outcomes. In that they are no different to any other theory of nature.

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> Morality is subjective, we have no way to measure it objectively

I was with you until this point. We do have a way to evaluate principles objectively, with "reason". This isn't the kind of measurement we have in physics, but it's the reason why we can confidently conclude that slavery is wrong, for instance.

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Let’s say we had a runaway poorly aligned AI which aimed to maximize human utility. To do so it systematically breeds humans like factory farmed chickens, building giant robotic prison-like facilities which are just enough to keep their inmates alive and able to interact with each other, but require no more resources per person than this. Humans are engineered not to age, to remove the disutility of death and maximize the time spent in the facilities. Those with genetic abnormalities are bred out of the population to reduce the disutility of disease.

To prevent the possibility of human rebels overthrowing this system, everyone is closely monitored and all military technology is operated by the AI.

Is this a good outcome? If ethics is identical with maximizing total utility, seems like the answer has to be yes.

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The RC is reasonable on its own terms. But it is misleading because people usually make two mistakes when thinking about it: 1) Taking for granted that the built-in assumption of a linear trade-off between number of children and average utility is true in reality, and 2) conflating the two ideas “imaginary Society X would be better than what we have today” and “it would better if the government assumed vast power over people’s lives in an attempt to bring to pass Society X.”

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I don't see why one would single out abortion specifically when the far, far more common cause of humans not existing is people choosing to not have sex with random strangers.

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“Repugnant conclusions for thee, but not for me”, is it?

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This sounds like a build up to the world's worst chat up line.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

Even if we accept your utilitarian moral framework (which I don't), don't you need to consider the fraction of people who (a) get an abortion, but then (b) go on to have their preferred nonzero number of kids at a later time which is more suitable to them? Then weigh the tradeoff between having (e.g.) one child born in a few months, vs a different child born in a few years, but to a parent who (e.g.) has more money saved up and a stable long-term relationship with the coparent.

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You might also want to consider specifically cases where a woman is at the tail end of child-bearing age and wouldn't be able to have her preferred number of children at a later date. There could be a strong utilitarian case to be made for forcing her to carry the fetus to term.

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Two things

1. First, fetuses are basically fungible (to a first order). While we know they aren't literally blank slates, _we_ have no information about them, and with nothing learned nothing's lost. And they don't have any way to conceive of or experience the loss themselves.

Women who do want children will end up having very nearly the amount of children they want to have, the question is which children and when.

When mother's want to abort, they typically have a good reason to, that will basically cash out the child being unwanted (horrific to experience for a child) or being disfigured.

Therefore, abortion let's women choose which babies they are going to have, selecting from the larger group, maximizing their own and their children's happiness.

2. On the repugnant conclusion. This has always confused me. The logic chain seems to hinge entirely on this step where you accept that 4X as many people who are 0.5X as happy as better. It's couched in small numbers than that to make it sneak by, but it's expected that simply accept this as obviously true and ive not seen why this must be so. To me it seems obviously _untrue_. Average utility matters, and experience of disutility also matters.

Aesthetically I would prefer a world 2 perfectly happy people to 1 perfectly happy person, but I certainly wouldn't damage perfection to add another person.

I'm typically pro-natalist, because I expect more humans to make _everyone_ happier (on average) at the margin.

The way we make a society of very happy people is by trying to maximize the happiness of each new person. Maximizing the number of people is just an obvious Malthus trap. You're not biting the bullet by "accepting the repugnant conclusion", youre just committing yourself to a bizarre way of counting.

Think of yourself as a consequentialist first - do the things with the best outcomes. Use utilitarianism as a good thought tool to remind yourself that cost-benefit-analysis must be done and let it guide the hard choices, but the point isn't to literally implement a specific accounting scheme.

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> Women who do want children will end up having very nearly the amount of children they want to have, the question is which children and when.

This is true, up until a woman has the N children they want. After that, though, an abortion would prevent them from having more children.

If we really want to increase the number of folks having children, abortion is the wrong point of the "pipeline" to be looking. People are choosing not to have children for good reasons, and we won't see more children until we fix them.

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>When mother's want to abort, they typically have a good reason to

That depends on what you define to be a "good reason". If it is

> the child being unwanted (horrific to experience for a child) or being disfigured

Then that consistently turns out to be in the 3-5% percent range of all abortions in the US. The vast majority of abortions is convenience.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

This is what happens when you try to reduce moral arguments to a single metric. Someone else could just as easily counter that if you approach the question with a moral framework in which you only consider personal liberty and no other factors, it becomes difficult to conceive of a pro-life argument.

Hard utilitarians, deontological NAP libertarian types, and fundamentalists may prefer it otherwise, but ethical questions are just too complex to be reduced to black-letter law. If they could be, we’d already be living in a centuries-old golden age of simple, universally-understood morality.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

I can see that if you’re getting a lot of argument from utilitarians you want to address, but it seems weird. There are so few hard utilitarians in the world that it really mutes the relevance of the hypothetical for the abortion conversation at large. Kind of like writing a “case against abortion for fundamentalist Zoroastrians” – no harm in doing it I suppose, but it seems like a lot of buck very for little bang if it’s really cordoned off to only the audience that would find it relevant to their belief system.

I guess, within that circle, it boils down to how you’re measuring happiness. There seems to be an implicit assumption in your argument that happiness stacks in a very simple arithmetic way. Every year of human life is a happiness block, so wherever you have more humans living more years, by definition you have more happiness.

I guess if I were to challenge the argument on pure utilitarian grounds that’s where I’d start. What makes you think happiness works that way? If one island has 2000 happy people, and another has 1000 happy people, why would we describe the first island as “twice as happy” as the second? Seems incredibly reductive. But then, I guess you have to do something like that, because if you open things up and allow for utility to be subjective (which it invariably is) then you get all your classic utilitarian bugbears – “what if I get 100x more utility from punching you than you get disutility from being punched?”

In the end it becomes hard for me to have the conversation – it just keeps coming back to being about how utilitarianism is busted as an exclusive mode of analysis, rather than being about abortion. Like we’re both just digging with a broken spade but trying to pretend it's not broken.

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Utilitarianism may be rare in the world but it is common in the rationalsphere.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pohTfSGsNQZYbGpCy/criticism-of-ea-criticism-contest?commentId=EygGXPgxCBhrdFT99

'I feel that, while you went a level of meta up, this article really encapsulates why I am so hesitant about EA. I have several concerns about VNM utilitarianism applied to a global monolithic scope. My experience discussing them in the EA space is people looking at me funny and something along the lines of “How can you be against it though?”'

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

In an individual case maximizing (QA)LYs makes sense to me (most of the time). But it breaks down (for me) when we talk about a population.

When we calculate/estimate for all lifeforms how much QALYs they can experience per year I doubt the most optimal lifeform in QALY per $ are humans.

Then the pareto optimum would be a mix of maximizing the total lifetime of the optimal lifeform and scientists.

If you don't want to go all the way you can restrict lifeforms to humans. There are humans who have much better odds of living QALYs than others. Thus - under that model - we should maximize those: Aborting humans with bad odds and breeding those with the best odds on an industrial scale.

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Imagine you are walking down the street when an old stranger accosts you and greets you by name, and tells you this story: "One day, many years ago, I was protesting at an abortion clinic. A young woman entered, weeping. She had got pregnant by accident and thought her life was ruined. She said she couldn't afford a kid right now. She said the father wasn't the guy she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, but she was terrified of trying to raise a kid alone. She had career aspirations and thought a kid would just get in the way, earning her eternal resentment. I told her to consider adoption, but she knew that once she saw her baby's face she'd never let it go, despite all the misery it would cause both her and the child. She was determined to get this abortion. Having exhausted the avenues of rational appeal, I drew my trusty sidearm and leveled it at the doctor. I made it clear that I would use deadly force as a last resort to coerce this doctor, and any other she visited, not to abort this fetus. She ended up having that baby, and naming it ${your_name_here}. That baby grew up to be you."

How do you feel towards the old stranger? Are you feeling the most intense feeling of gratitude ever, for their selfless actions that saved your very existence? (I'm not.)

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(I should've added: I think reciprocity makes a better moral foundation than utilitarianism.)

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Sorry for not spelling out why I think this is relevant. I'm basically offering another reason why utility maximization might not be the best approach. I thought perhaps someone who'd already accepted "The Repugnant Conclusion" might find in this hypothetical another Conclusion too Repugnant to accept. E.g. ... {content warning: rape} ... what if instead the man says he brutally raped your mother when she was twelve, and he is your father? Do you still feel the utmost gratitude for him causing your existence?

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If you're not grateful you must really hate your own life.

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Your deduction does not match my lived/imagined experience. You might want to revisit some of your assumptions.

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When you say you hate your life on this forum that's just one data point of evidence whether you hate your life or not. You've also said that you wouldn't feel any gratitude towards someone who saved you from never existing. That's another data point. One or both of those could be a lie.

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I love my life, but I don't look at this fact pattern and think "gratitude." Honestly my response when trying to imagine myself in the situation described was a complex ambivalence, as I imagine most people's would be.

A guy threatened my mom's doctor with death to prevent her from receiving a medical treatment she wanted. Even if that threat ultimately yielded significant benefit for me personally, things aren't so black and white that I'm just going to have unequivocally good feelings about the whole thing.

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>medical treatment she wanted

Killing you. I mean, you really shouldn't adhere to a value system where you call the act of someone ensuring that you never exist a "medical treatment." The old stranger stopped your mom from churning up fetus you and ensured your existence. If I learned that my mom had attempted to kill me before I was born and was only stopped when a person threatened her with a gun. I'm not sure exactly how I would feel with regards to my mom but I would surely appreciate that stranger allowing me to live.

I really think if you don't feel deep gratitude towards the old stranger you haven't thought deeply about the whole 'never getting to exist' thing. Or you've let your mind become so affected by real politik that you've come to think of non-existence as better than disagreeing with the party line.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

I didn't say gratitude wasn't part of it, only that it wasn't the *totality* of my feelings.

If you see someone else observe that questions around abortion are morally & emotionally complex, and that their response to learning that they "might have been aborted" is multi-layered, but your response is to think that they haven’t thought about the issue and accuse them of letting their minds be overly affected by politics, I’d gently offer that maybe you’re the one indulging in partisan thinking, to the over-simplification of a complex issue.

I used to think I had this all figured out and had a simple, air-tight pro-life argument that solved everything. Thinking more deeply about it is precisely why I’m not that self-assured about my conclusions anymore.

To offer a parallel example - I find out that a mob boss kidnapped and drugged someone and had one of their kidneys cut out. On the other hand... I'm the guy who got the kidney. I'm certainly glad to have the kidney, but I don't think it'd be strange to say that my feelings on the subject are mixed. Nor do I think that acknowledging that my feelings are complex betrays some kind of shallow or partisan thinking on my part.

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Not getting into discussion of complexity. Your analogy fails because you could get the kidneys another way, and because as presented the donator has no relationship with you. The proper analogy is donator is your father, no one else in the world can give you the kidney but your father, and within 9 months following the surgery your father will most likely grow his kidney back. Oh and also your father is consciously making the choice not to give you the kidney.

I would love the shit out of that mob boss because he's literally saving my life. And also fuck my dad why isn't he giving me the kidney willingly? It would be inconvenient for him?

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One might want to consider the eugenic effects of abortion. But it is not entirely trivial to correctly calculate e.g. the effects of decreased selection against intelligence and diligence on the probability of human extinction. And this might lead to a pro-abortion conclusion rather than a pro-choice one.

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Yes, it's not difficult to imagine that the average would-be human is a net burden at all. Just look up the demographics of who gets most abortions.

Existential risks can't even be intelligently discussed among the general population because of low average IQs. To make an extreme example, a world with 1 million people with very high average IQs would probably have higher total utility in the long-term than 8 billion people with current IQs.

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"To make an extreme example, a world with 1 million people with very high average IQs would probably have higher total utility in the long-term than 8 billion people with current IQs"

I see your point, but I think that your case is a bit too extreme. 1 million people, even if there were all geniuses, is probably too few to keep a technological civilization going.

I've read estimates that the Earth can sustainably support 1-2 billion people at 1st world levels. Very very roughly speaking, I suspect that that is around "the sweet spot". 1-2 billion people were enough for a thriving civilization in the 19th century. The periodic table, Maxwell's equations, and evolution were all discovered with that population.

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'scuse the delay. It turns out that the estimate I'm using is traceable to a rather crappy paper (albeit it was an old one: Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies

Volume 15, Number 6, July 1994 - Optimum Human Population Size Gretchen C. Daily, Anne H. Ehrlich and Paul R. Ehrlich https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/BF02211719). They _do_ use energy as the bounding factor in their calculation. In fairness, this is from nearly 30 years ago, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to anticipate the drop in photovoltaic prices over the decades since then.

Wikipedia has a range of more recent estimates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population: "Estimates vary widely, with estimates based on different figures ranging from 0.65 billion people to 98 billion, with 8 billion people being a typical estimate.". Of course, this is going to be highly dependent on what assumptions are made about technology. If we had atomically precise manufacturing (aka Drexler/Merkle nanotechnology, https://www.amazon.com/Nanosystems-P-K-Eric-Drexler/dp/0471575186 maintaining a large population at 1st world levels becomes vastly easier. In the other direction, with current technology, strictly speaking _no_ level is truly sustainable, because some of the elements we rely on are being extracted from finite deposits and we do not currently have the technology to retrieve them from our wastes.

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You're implying there's some key industries that simply can't function economically without larger economies of scale I take it? I don't know enough to dispute or confirm that, so I'll stay agnostic.

The latter two discoveries you cite were discovered in a country with quite a small population though.

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"You're implying there's some key industries that simply can't function economically without larger economies of scale I take it? I don't know enough to dispute or confirm that, so I'll stay agnostic."

Yes, that is a reasonable way to look at it.

Just to pick an old technology, consider blast furnaces

https://questionanswer.io/how-many-blast-furnaces-are-there-in-the-world/

This doesn't quite directly answer the question, but it says China has ~250, and makes about half the steel in the world, so it looks like there are around 500 worldwide. Since those supply iron to ~8 billion of us, it looks like one blast furnace needs a market of about 16 million people to be economical. Yes, there are other ways to make iron, but they have a worse tradeoff of quality/uniformity/cost. In the blast furnace case, there is a surface/volume consideration. One can more efficiently keep a large object hot than a smaller one.

To pick another one: There is a minimum size for a nuclear reactor, set by the critical mass.

"Today there are about 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries plus Taiwan, with a combined capacity of about 390 GWe. In 2020 these provided 2553 TWh, about 10% of the world's electricity." so again we need about 16 million people to make one reactor worthwhile.

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Yeah, it's a reasonable argument. On the other hand, a society of geniuses figuring out smaller designs that are also efficient doesn't sound insurmountable. The reason those things are expensive to build is because they're complex, but to 160 IQ people they might be no more complex than a regular house is to a 100 IQ person.

Also, with a small population there would be an abundance of fossil fuels and other resources, so efficiency would be less important.

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[note: Stating, not endorsing. Not debating.]

sibling-pool-growth-resource-displacement argument:

You implicitly assume that the average outcome of an abortion is -1 human being alive. Consider the hypothetical woman, that wants to have 3 children. But she does not want to start right now. The unwanted/inconvenient baby, if born, would be taking up scarce resources. This might lead to her only having 2 children in total. Is this a common scenario? I do not know. Empircal + speculative question. If you consider this implausible, consider a stronger version. The fetus is diagnosed in-utero with Down-syndrome. This kind of child definitely takes up a lot more resources and a dramatically lifechanging amount of attention and care compared to a healthy child. [Singer made an argument along those lines, I believe]

societal/family-capability argument:

A child, that a mother would kill rather than bring to term (given the option) is probably more unloved than the average child. Those relatively unloved children will on average be worse off than the children, that those of mothers did not consider killing (thru no fault of their own, but life ain't fair). So the average happyness/well-adjustedness of children will sink. Society (or its microcosms like the classroom or the sibling group within a family) thrive, if the average quality of people is higher, rather than lower. You are the average of the 5 people around you/peer effects and all that.

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The new biography of Jacob Taubes by Jerry Muller is very good! Made me wonder if theology can ever be avoided. Maybe all modern controversies simply rehash ancient religious debates.

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Thanks. Probably going to read that based on reviews.

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You can't compliment Cass like that, Scott. I spend like ten hours a day telling him terrible things about himself and it's barely keeping him in check. Saying nice things about him is like feeding a mogwai after midnight - you are courting a full Gremlins 2 situation.

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Might be my fault. I brought some decent scotch to one of the meetups, and he might have been running on that for months.

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Listen, I think we can all agree Cass is history's greatest monster. But if you think I'm going to sit here and listen to you besmirch good scotch, you've got another thing coming.

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Think.

And hey, I won't disparage good scotch. I'm just saying, it's like a powerful tool. In the wrong hands...

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Seems plausible.

But as we say in this house, "Everything I know about alcohol I learned from Dwarf Fortress."

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Keep an eye on the cats.

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Ahh, yes, cats. I understand some forts have not ahem, -cough- solved that problem. Or, ahem, used that, ahem, RESOURCE to solve some other problem...

Really, I'm not automatically too worried about the cats. I'm just glad one need not fear the OP carp so much anymore!

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I don't know--having someone compliment a person publicly like this shifts the dynamic... different people re-align things.

Basically, by now I've gotten enough training on the DSL-adj Discord in insulting people that my mind is beginning to be capable of generating insults of people. (It's like... this new-ish cognitive pattern; I'm straining at it.) But anyway, this might result in ME dishing more insults his way!

Oh, also, he said something about Quanticle being some kind of significant player in a triumvirate in the founding of DSL... it was probably some Ancient-Roman-Times reference so I didn't follow it. Or get around to Googling it! (Now that I think about it, that might be useful to find out whether it was a compliment or insult... or a backhanded compliment... backhanded insult.. etc.)

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Quanticle was one of the founding global mods, but he retired about 6 months in. (Johan Larson retired ~18 months in).

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The WSJ article is paywalled, but there are some more specifics here: https://www.wsj.com/story/murder-rates-soar-in-rural-america-bb431022

I suppose it's possible that the standard explanations (economy, isolation, etc) explain rural homicide, while protests and the knock-on effects on policing, explain urban homicide, but it would certainly be a strange coincidence if mostly unrelated causes increased murder by almost the same amount at the same time in urban and rural places. It would be nice if there were a graph showing the increase in rural homicide, so we could see if it's tightly connected to the same time period or more spread out. My link, as well as what I can read of the paywalled link, seem to indicate that it is more spread out (2 vignettes mention March and April of 2020, while the top paragraph of the full text mentions murders continuing until December).

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Here's one way to bypass the paywall:

https://archive.is/www.wsj.com/articles/violent-crime-rural-america-homicides-pandemic-increase-11654864251

This works for some, but not all, paywalls -- type in "archive.is/" after "https://".

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Works.

White county Arkansas is mentioned. Seems pretty white

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_County,_Arkansas

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There's a town called Alabaster, Alabama. May win the whiteness award.

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And another paywall bypasser. https://12ft.io/

Very elegant.

"The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.

All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page."

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Rural crime blm? Probably not. Seems like the Procrustean bed with this subject. Here's a link looking at the wsj story

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/10/blame-rural-crime-wave/

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Jul 19, 2022·edited Jul 19, 2022

Funny enough, here's the WSJ talking about soaring rural crime in 2018:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nothing-but-you-and-the-cows-and-the-sirens-crime-tests-small-town-sheriffs-1526122800

My quick search can't seem to find a graph, but if someone had stats at the ready, I'd be curious what this really looks like.

My sense is that large sections of rural America are descending into ever greater decay and social breakdown, as parts of the white working class that used to be able to form families and work mostly-steady jobs have now fallen into a basically underclass existence. This has been a 50-year+ trend, exacerbated by things like the opioid crisis, but the crisis is as much an effect of the decay as the cause. Covid might also have accelerated the decay by a few years, caused some mentally unsteady people to break sooner rather than later, but there hasn't been any real change in direction. It's easy to imagine that the rural/white-working-class decline would have continued unabated whether or not Covid or Wokeness ever became a thing.

The decline of cities, by contrast, is much more recent -- they had been improving until Obama's second term, which makes the change in their direction much more curious and easier to pin on BLM/Wokeness.

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founding

4: Hm, I think Spencer's grants round is still open until July 22nd? https://programs.clearerthinking.org/FTX_regranting_2022_application.html

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author

Sorry, I'm not sure how I made that mistake, I've fixed it above.

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Black people make up about 8 percent of rural population, compared to 13 percent of the urban population.

https://ruralhome.org/wp-content/uploads/storage/research_notes/rrn-race-and-ethnicity-web.pdf

According to WSJ, the spike in rural areas has been 80% of the spike in urban areas. Percentage wise, there are 62% as many blacks in rural as urban areas. If you see this effect as “police afraid to interfere with black people committing crime,” it’s not surprising you’d see a spike in rural areas too.

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The proper test must be to look at the violent crime by state or county, and estimate the effect of Black% on the increase in recent years. The BLM/summery of Floyd model predicts that this coefficient will be positive.

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Seems a pretty straightforward analysis.

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Here is the data, source is Wikipedia - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRuJVmAoL7U7dqL8RvBJArcvs1wNPJxcZ-WT-NqrQIBIuuyIm7fVQjIVnIfCaQS9slr90dnx-0RtcQU/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true

Also of note to the original statement regarding rural crime is that methamphetamine overdose deaths (and presumably use) increased 35% in 2020, according to DEA - https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2021/01/14/dea-2020-year-review-combatting-serious-drug-related-threats-during

Meth is the only illicit drug significantly favored in non-metro vs large metro areas according to https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/substance-use In SD, which saw the largest increase in homicides in 2020, more people died from meth than opioids, whereas nationally opioid deaths outnumber meth more than 2 to 1.

Meth use significantly increases the likelihood of involvement in violent crime https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774467/#:~:text=Among%20violent%20offenders%20only%2C%20sedatives,opposed%20to%20non%2Dfatal%20violence.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32916517/

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States are too crude for this.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

Rural homicide by state would be fine as an indicator (if it's near-uniform then it's not BLM; if it's concentrated in the South then it potentially is).

Does anyone compile homicide stats by type of police jurisdiction (eg. city police departments vs sheriffs)?

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Doubtful you'd find anything more specific than counties, and even that would need a script to sort through. The breakdown for SD alone is 204 pages https://atg.sd.gov/docs/CrimeInSD2020.pdf

Runner up for increase MT is a little easier to navigate but is nothing I know how to import data from https://dataportal.mt.gov/t/MBCC/views/CIM-ViolentCrime/Dash_ViolentCrime_StatsbyCounty?iframeSizedToWindow=true&%3Aembed=y&%3AshowAppBanner=false&%3Adisplay_count=n&%3AshowVizHome=n&%3Aorigin=viz_share_link

Ravalli and Missoula jump out as large increases, both are less than 1% black.

Some correlation with the homicide graph peaks and valleys and this one, for drug testing - https://www.millenniumhealth.com/news/signals-report-vol-4/

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So in 2019, the correlation between black% and murder rates was 0.62

In 2020 it was 0.72

And yet the *change* in murder rate between 2019 and 2020 was barely correlated with black%(-0.02)

Not sure how if that makes sense?

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I guess if you look at change as the absolute increase in murder rates rather than relative change, then the correlation with black% is 0.50

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Good way of putting it. It's easy to get a big percentage change when you only need a handful of extra murders to do it, but that wasn't the subject of the wsj article so I omitted commentary.

Fwiw I absolutely agree with the police pullback causing the murder spike. Traveling all over the northeast constantly for the last 2 years (and many before) there was definitely a shift in what everyone thought/realized they could get away with, whether it was open-air drug dealing in Manhattan or traffic laws turning into traffic suggestions on the highways. Everyone seemed to know the cops were demoralized and dgaf, whether they lived in a city or not. But that's anecdotal.

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This would also be explained by black people tending to live in higher-density areas though, right? If murder rates increased uniformly, then higher-population counties would have a greater absolute increase.

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This is states, not counties, and the rates are also population-adjusted. When I talk about an "absolute increase in rates", I mean an increase of say 1 murder per 100,000 people, rather than an increase of 25% from the previous year.

Urban population% by state is not strongly correlated with the absolute increase(0.03) or relative increase(-0.06) from 2019 to 2020.

Urban population% is weakly correlated with murder rates in both years though(about 0.18).

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Having nearly finished my Masters, I'm wanting to plan out my PhD, and AI Alignment is an area (among others) that I'm thinking about transitioning into. I'd like to talk to someone doing Real Research in the area (who might potentially be a PhD supervisor). I don't have a lot of contacts at top tier universities yet, so I thought I'd ask here first before trying connections-of-connections.

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I've heard Berkeley is the center of that kind of thing. You might try entering one of the open competitions and writing something to see if it's an area you like dealing with.

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Academia is dragging its feet a lot when it comes to AI alignment, so the number of specifically AI-alignment PhD positions at universities is very small (though not zero). If you can't secure one of them (but still want to do a PhD), then a more general-purpose PhD might be your best bet. I'd say either pure math or some kind of AI/ML topic, though make sure to not advance AI capabilities during your PhD because that would be very counterproductive to AI alignment (because it would shorten timelines).

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Jul 21, 2022·edited Jul 21, 2022

>general-purpose PhD

There are economists who say that an economics PhD is a license to study (with quantifiable experiments and/or mathematical theory) approximately anything and everything that isn't already a hard science of its own, like physics or chemistry. Afterwards, one can pursue many different paths in both academia, business, or independent study, and there is a chance to find something where ones PhD studies are useful instead of functioning as a piece paper that signals "I am smart".

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There is a field tangent to AI Alignment which is formal verification of AI/ML systems. You should look into that as well.

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Do you have any recommendations on where to start?

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I haven't seen a good book. I did find: https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/

The two main areas are formal verification (e.g. dafny etc) and state-based provers (verifying the system state space) e.g. for all inputs, the ventilator never turns off, and never enters an unsafe state.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

Scott, any chance you could write an article about therapeutic uses of hypnosis?

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Is there any evidence that hypnosis even works?

BTW, Scott wrote some articles that all methods of therapy work with surprisingly similar effectiveness.

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Do you have particular clinical endpoints in mind when you say "works," or is this just sort of a vague, snarky question?

If the former, David Spiegel's research at Stanford might be a place to start:

https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/david-spiegel#publications

BTW, I have no strong opinions about hypnosis. I just prefer precision to snark.

I also agree with the "Dodo bird"/"common factors" hypothesis regarding psychotherapy. I just don't think it particularly tells against hypnosis.

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

> Do you have particular clinical endpoints in mind when you say "works," or is this just sort of a vague, snarky question?

I associate hypnosis with charlatans and scammers and its fictional representation where it is shown as super-powerful mind control.

Overall the question reads to me like question about therapeutic uses of unicorn horn.

But maybe I am wrong and there is a good evidence that hypnosis works, as in "it can have some effects"

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Hypnotherapy is ultimately just another school of therapy. It's established enough that they've done scientific studies on it's effectiveness and, off-hand, it was no worse than the more mainstream alternatives and can be significantly faster under some circumstances. It operates with techniques that are more focused on dealing with the unconscious mind rather than the conscious, and these can seem a little stilly in isolation, but in aggregate are pretty effective.

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Yes?

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No. It’s all in the mind.

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When an ailment lies in the mind, where else would it's treatment lie?

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Exactly.

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The mind is still physical, so physical changes can change the mind. Analogously, you could change a computer's behaviour by changing the software, but you could also change the hardware.

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I was joking. Of course it’s all in the mind but that’s all that’s being claimed.

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A bit off topic but sometimes I wonder if there really is a bright line here.. "code is data" and all that

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Apologies, not quite to the point of therapy, however I was hypnotised by a stage hypnotist many years ago. It was a very strange experience. I was slightly conscious throughout, and knew I was doing weird things but couldn't (wouldn't?) stop myself. I sang pretty well, so other people said, and a big piece of concrete was smashed on my stomach while I was suspended between 2 chairs. It is a life experience I've never fully understood. Later on I used auto-suggestion (self-hypnosis?) to stop smoking cigarettes - I made myself believe the awful taste of a cigarette when one had a bad cold, was the taste I would experience whenever I smoked a cigarette. Still working 40 years later.

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Very occasionally I can via a huge effort of will wake myself from an intolerable dream. Is the dream a hypnosis like thing?

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40 years later, without hypnosis i still can get a delicious urge to light up. My personal philosophy emphasizes being in a position to say no including to oneself. Sort of tying oneself to the mast.

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I was stage hypnotized once, and have attended a couple of them at various events where it was the only entertainment.

Really it just seemed to be getting you relaxed and suggestable, and then relying on a combination of peer pressure, people liking attention, and the permission to do odd things.

I pretended to have sex with a chair for 5 seconds in front of a bunch of extended family including my grandma in the crowd of a couple hundred. But this was at the end of a long string of much less transgressive things I didn't really mind doing. I never really felt hypnotized at all, just relaxed and "playing along", and constantly calculating whether I would actually go through with X. And then when they finally got to that I was like "well I have gone this far, I might as well go along with this before derailing the show".

Probably the most incongruous thing I saw was my first cousin French kiss his own mom (he was probably 19?). But I would note, they, and more generally all the people I have seen who were hypnotized are exactly the type of people who love to be the center of attention and do things for attention, real class clown types.

And to the extent in the shows I have been to I have known the volunteers from the crowd, all of the ones who did the most radical things on stage were these "look at me" class clown types. Not a lot of wallflowers it "works on".

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This illustrates why participating in stage hypnosis may not be a great idea. For the susceptible proportion of the population, hypnosis can be potent, and using it for random entertainment purposes may not be ... life-enhancing.

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This is the Dodo Bird Verdict; it's accurate, but it's mostly about depression in particular. Depression is often pretty closely related to loneliness, so just having someone to talk to is quite helpful, even if the other guy is mostly trying to talk about how you're secretly attracted to your mother. But if you look at e.g. phobias, those respond pretty much only to cognitive-behavioral therapy.

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Gun sales increased in both rural and urban areas, increasing homicide

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Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022

He's already explained why gun sales don't explain it. Gun sales over the past 20 years do not track the homicide rate.

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I think Scott was too quick to dismiss gun proliferation when thinking about the murder rate issue; absolutely there are other factors such as economic hardship and general societal angst, but we really are in uncharted territory after multiple years of record gun sales.

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founding

Actually, we're in fairly well charted territory. After multiple years of record gun sales, we now have a country where 42% of American households keep guns and thus ~42% of Americans have ready access to guns. Over the past half century, that value has fluctuated between 37% and 47%, and eyeballing the chart we've been above 42% for most of that period.

We've got a map of this territory, and it doesn't show a strong more guns -> more homicide causal link.

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founding

Not only is the American territory well charted here, we have international data (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_guns_by_country) about which countries have the highest percent of households with guns

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42% of households having guns isn't the same are 42% of people having access to guns. Now that think about it, some of the people in those household are small children, too young to figure out how to get at a secured gun. Probably a lot more people don't want the gun, though I suppose that's not relevant-- gun restrictions don't have an effect on those people.

This might push the percentage of people with access to guns lower, and on the other hand, if that 42% is households with legally owned guns, then the % of people with access to guns could be a lot higher.

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I mean, sure, that's a valid critique of the claim. But unless there's some reason to expect these factors to have radically and suddenly changed in 2020, the overarching point remains; gun availability in mid-2020 was not exceptional or outside historical norms.

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founding

Fair point, By "~42% of Americans" I meant "~42% of American adults". There will be occasional cases where an adult in a gun-owning household doesn't have de facto access to even a single gun, but I expect these will be roughly balanced by people in non-gun-owning households who have easy access through a nearby family member.

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I assume you're citing Pew 2017 since that shows 42% by household (is there a newer reliable study?), which being self-reported ownership would not include many (or any?) illegally owned guns - unfortunately, I'm not sure there's any good measure of the rate of illegal gun ownership, but illegal guns are more likely to be used in crimes and so would be a very important puzzle piece.

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founding

But not a piece of the puzzle that is invoked by the "massive spike in gun sales!" during the pandemic/Biden/#BLM era, because that was a count of *legal* gun sales. I haven't seen any evidence of an increase in the number of illegally-owned guns, so "maybe there's lots more illegal guns and maybe that's why there's lots more killing" is doubly speculative.

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Maybe I'm jumping too far to a conclusion, but wouldn't the number of illegal guns in circulation be predicted by legal gun sales? In the US (as opposed to i.e. Australia) there isn't much cross-border trafficking or manufacture of illegal guns (modulo the fact that it is legal to manufacture one's own gun... hmm.) Perhaps it'd trail by more than a year or two, though... Not sure.

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One place this might break down is if the people who bought guns since Mar 2020 were unusually inclined to use them in crimes relative to the previous run of people who owned guns.

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Jul 19, 2022·edited Jul 19, 2022

Do we have any reliable way to figure out who is buying guns, and when? If an entirely different set of people bought guns in March-May of 2020, then gun sales could be causative or at least related. My impression is that gun sale spikes are generally the same people who normally buy guns, but I'm certainly open to the idea that 2020 was different in that regard.

ETA - Thinking a bit more, even gun sales spiking isn't really a "cause" as a result or something else. Why a different group of people are suddenly buying guns and then using them to murder sounds like a very important question. Probably a good bit more important than whether guns are being purchased by new types of people.

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I have not been very impressed with the quality of data on gun ownership/possession. We know when legal sales rise (by number of ATF background checks), but with poor granularity and no context.

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Which is intentional, based on how gun registries have been used in the past. There was a well known instance in NYC where a list of gun owners, with home address, was leaked/published and it led to a wave of break-ins - people trying to steal guns from those that registered the guns. The perception is that any detailed list of gun sales is intended to be used for later confiscation efforts, or to harass gun owners (like leaking the list to potential thieves).

There's no trust in the debate that a registry would only be used for neutral/good purposes.

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founding

We haven't even established *if* a different group of people are suddenly buying guns and then using them to murder. The extra murders could be coming from the same group that had been doing murders all along, or a different group that has had guns all along but wasn't murdering people until recently.

You're jumping to a conclusion well ahead of the data, for reasons I can only guess at.

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I think you responded to me, and it sounds like you disagree, but your post and my post appear to be saying the same thing. We don't know *if* new people are buying guns, and that seems critical to the question of whether guns are related to the question. I went on to add that even if new people are buying guns *and* using the new guns to commit murder (which I agree we don't know), it appears to be a step in a chain of events, which is not the prime cause we are looking for. There would have to be some reason people are buying guns to commit murder, which is what we are really trying to determine here.

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Re: DSL, every time I stop by I'm surprised by how conservative it is. Does anyone know why? Is it a founder effect thing, or that actually everyone is super conservative and it mostly doesn't come out in these threads, or what? In the days that the SSC subreddit hosted the culture war thread its posters were fairly conservative leaning on average, but not to this extent, in my recollection; I haven't stopped by The Motte to see how it's doing these days.

(Just to pick an example at random, the thread for the Dobbs SCOTUS decision: