71–80 of 453 posts
Life is hard, it's harder if you're stupid. - John Wayne
I actually often see the opposite less intelligent people are often carefree and more happy.
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And many of our problems are collective action problems: where it makes sense for individuals to defect on their own, and they can only raise the standard for the group if they act together. At different scales this means unionization and professional organizations, government regulation, and international regulation, to prevent whole countries from defecting - this is in large part what the EU is about, and a signif…
"Collective action has its own problem: power structures encourage corruption and misuse of the pooled power." Exactly. I tend to be wary of concentrating power. The larger the group the more likely that there are conflicts of interest within the group. Perhaps more importantly, large groups just don't make sense in a lot of cases. If I make a union of milk drinkers, we can buy in huge bulk and get a discount. But th…
The broad correlation (and correlation isn't necessarily causation) is that as union power decreased, so did real wage growth.
This is probably the greatest argument for big government. If we were to eliminate the supervision of the establishment over the safety and security of everyday life, it would be very time consuming to handle every single aspect of it. There is always the issue of an overreaching government, and that's where the left/right party split comes in. Each party either creates more regulation and protection or take some awa…
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I seem to recall running into a claim that the original idea of the republicans was that the government would be a check against coercion, be it physical, emotional, economic, or otherwise.
Seems the current Republican establishment is the exact opposite of that ideal.
Libertarians = Arch Linux (lean, mean, minimal)
Everybody else = Windows or Mac (i.e. huge operating system that tries to protect users from everything under the sun)
This is probably the greatest argument for big government. If we were to eliminate the supervision of the establishment over the safety and security of everyday life, it would be very time consuming to handle every single aspect of it. There is always the issue of an overreaching government, and that's where the left/right party split comes in. Each party either creates more regulation and protection or take some awa…
Politicians and civil servants are subject to behavioral concerns too. Who will watch the watchmen?
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He is asking an infant who is incapable of speech whether he understands legal rights. That’s an insult to the concept of justice.
Agreed. Unfortunately our justice system has been turned into a legal system. Legalities are more important than justice and it's sickening.
If behavioural economists are so good at predicting human behaviour, why aren’t they popular among consumer facing companies? Why don’t such companies have a special position for behaviourial evonomists? Why none of the behaviourial Economists have ever tried starting up?
To be honest, this is kind of my hope for a future job. I've wanted to practice behavior economics meets technological innovation for a long time now - but you're right, there doesn't seem to be a demand for this.
You mean outside the entire advertising industry? Now you might argue that advertising companies are more focused on selling ads to clients than optimizing the ad experience for victims, but it's an entire sector of the economy focused on exploiting the poor decision-making abilities of humans.
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The gene is the unit of selection.
No, the collection of genes is. There are exactly zero individual genes roaming around replicating in isolation.
The gene is the unit of selection is perfectly right. It's missing a finer point in that groups of genes are unities of selection too, but it's correct.
Some good ones: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1R2jH4PQEo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI
Some people have strong opinions about Alan Kay's CS / programming work and I'd really encourage them to put them aside and deeply understand his points + context. The programming parts aren't ever the point, he's deeply interested in how as humans we improve our ability to collaboratively manage systems.