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A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

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Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#421

Post by wutbrodo »

OJFord wrote: post #243
wutbrodo wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the country with the highest GDP lacks anything other than the bare minimum social security and the article is very-USA centric. As with many similar topics, the US actually spends a much higher amount on social welfare than people realize, more than most developed countries. As always, it just does so uniquely inefficiently, for reasons that are complicated and possibly related to our sclerotic politics. https://w…

It would be oddly specific, IMO, to claim that a country doesn't spend enough on (for example) social security. What people actually talk about is outcomes. Interesting that a lot is spent on it, but not really much of a counterpoint since, as you say, it's done so 'uniquely inefficiently' that the outcome remains less.

> What people actually talk about is outcomes.

This is not my experience at all. I feel like the vast majority of conversation on the topic I've read is about differential _political will_ for social welfare and other redistribution, usually due to perceived cultural failings.

Eg, "the US doesn't want to take care of its most vulnerable because of muh freedom"

The notion that the US has lots of _political will_ for infra, redistribution, homeless care, etc but simply has an incompetent government is anathema to polite-company discourse, usually leading to handwavy rationalizations about how "starving the beast" has caused the government to be incompetent.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#422

Post by s1artibartfast »

yesenadam wrote: post #351
TeMPOraL wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less of an anthropic principle, and more the realization that it's the only stable equilibrium available once nuclear weapons become available.

Sorry, by "here" I didn't mean in the sentence I quoted, just in this field. I just don't buy the apparent absolute certainty it won't kill everyone. Then anything else would have been preferable to the "stable equilibrium" we were assured was necessary. But we won't be around to talk about it. That eternally living under MAD is 'the only way' seems to me more like a religious belief than a realization of a fact. A u…

>That eternally living under MAD is 'the only way' seems to me more like a religious belief than a realization of a fact.

It is the presumptive fact in the absence of viable alternatives. IF one is discovered, we can revisit the question.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#423

Post by wutbrodo »

tialaramex wrote: post #330
wutbrodo wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the country with the highest GDP lacks anything other than the bare minimum social security and the article is very-USA centric. As with many similar topics, the US actually spends a much higher amount on social welfare than people realize, more than most developed countries. As always, it just does so uniquely inefficiently, for reasons that are complicated and possibly related to our sclerotic politics. https://w…

> more than most developed countries Basically this article is about someone's exercise to persuade themselves a lie is true. Keep squinting, keep finding ways to tilt the numbers, until, like a word you've read over and over they become nonsense and then pronounce yourself satisfied that you've proved Up is Down and Black is White. Congratulations I guess, to Kirkegaard? A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M to…

> A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all.

Does this comment have a point, beyond lurid and ill-thought-out analogies? Notice that even your contrived example isn't self-consistent: the only way the steelworker's unemployment check "wouldn't count" is if 100% of it was taxed away in the course of spending it.

Even your fevered conspiracy theory doesn't make any sense! What motivation do you imagine the paper author has? The paper[1] spends a substantial amount of time focusing on poor US outcomes, and its point is that current US policy isn't actually saving us any money relative to the rest of the OECD, so our outcomes aren't even trading off against net economic benefit (at least first-order). Suboptimal distribution of our social spending (as in your ridiculous examples) falls squarely into this category, and as such is a potential target for the paper's criticism.

[1] https://www.piie.com/publications/pb/pb15-4.pdf

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#424

Post by dragonwriter »

DanBC wrote: post #413
dragonwriter wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are often used as equivalents No, they are often (though very, very far from most often) used in reverse because people forget which is which. Even in that case they have very distinct intended meanings, and are not equivalents. > Descriptivism is better than prescriptivism if you want to understand language as it's actually used. Sure, but descriptivism isn't “words lose all distinct meaning if occasionally s…

> No, they are often (though very, very far from most often) used in reverse because people forget which is which. Even in that case they have very distinct intended meanings, and are not equivalents. Isn't this just another way of saying they're equivalent as used? People don't know which is which, they often don't car,e and they pick one. Prescriptivist "what should eg mean in this sentence?" Descriptivist "what do…

> Isn't this just another way of saying they're equivalent as used?

No, it's not.

One is used a vast majority of the time to mean “that is” and occasionally, by different people, to mean “for example”.

One is used a vast majority of the time to mean “for example” and occasionally, by different people, to mean “that is”.

Neither group (not the one with the dominant understanding nor the one with the minority understanding) uses the terms interchangeably, they both use them with distinct meanings.

The existence of some confusion of meaning and minority usages resulting from that does not eliminate all distinction in meaning, even from a descriptivist standpoint.

It's true that “X means Y” is usually a simplification of a distribution to a modal value, but that's also widely recognized and, from a descriptivist standpoint, already incorporated into the meaning of the phrase.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#426

Post by XorNot »

chasd00 wrote: post #370
XorNot wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's generally known - everyone is aware of nukes and what nukes can do. The difference is they're considered much more of a known quantity these days: you can't use them, you don't use them, and you also can't fight a direct war with any country which has them. The idea of the "mad Russians" launching against the US has worn out, but watch what happens when you talk about Iran or North Korea having them. Wha…

the problem with MAD is it falls apart when you cross religious extremism with nuclear weapons. It's not rational to douse school girls in acid on their way to school but religious extremism turns it into reality.

The AD - Assured Destruction - part works just fine. Irrational actors don't assemble world ending arsenals (after all if you think you should rush to your death, why not launch when you have 1, given that you're most likely in a "use it or lose it" situation).

Even in your cited example - the people who do this sort of thing attack those who can't fight back. They are never in any danger of being immediately shot dead after.

While yes suicide bombers exist, this is more a question of arms proliferation and control then an indictment of the ineffectiveness of MAD or the general strategic reality of nuclear weapons. And the situations under which non-state actors have them are still a policing rather then political concern - North Korea or Iran leaking a bomb to another entity that then detonates it is the surest possible way that both those states will be dismantled by NATO, since MAD does apply there: proof that you represent an uncontrolled risk of nuclear attack invites conventional or nuclear annihilation, regardless of the mechanism. Civilian casualties go out the window when you have already suffered some.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#427

Post by darkerside »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #367
darkerside wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what you've said, I get the same impression. If you want to connect with somebody, don't talk. Listen. Even if you "know" you're right. As stubborn as you think those people are, they have a good case for arguing that you are just as stubborn if not more so.

Do you hang out with people who just talk all day without a prompt? How do you listen if you don't first ask?

I think I get your question now. Honestly, there is an art to it, and you can't always just come out and ask. It exposes that you care more about the information than you do about the person. Maybe bring it up gently the next time it comes up in context. Or, when it's just the two of you, ask if you can bring up a potentially sensitive question with no judgement involved, just to learn.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#428

Post by rolandog »

ballenf wrote: post #374
yesenadam wrote: post #216

> Has Tech Destroyed Society? I recently watched the documentary The Man Who Saved the World [0], about Stanislav Petrov, who one day in 1983 made the decision to ignore the early warning system computers telling him the USA had fired 5 missiles at the USSR.[1] It seems had he followed orders, a report to his superiors would have resulted in mass retaliation. The decision was in his hands. In the movie, as well as a…

> Petrov explains emotionally to the guard that the Russian people wanted peace, and thought the USA wanted to attack them. Good reason for us to personally think about (and investigate) whether our political/societal enemies really believe what we're told they believe about us. And I don't mean respond to a tweet, I mean have a real conversation. Kinda feels like we're in an arms race where Facebook/Twitter are the…

"continued hostilities" -> "offline engagement".

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#429

Post by ChrisArchitect »

sircastor wrote: post #119

I’m reminded of a long bet made a number of years ago between Joseph Romm and Greg Blencoe that 1% of car sales in the US would be Hydrogen Fuel cell vehicles by 2015. I’d done a report on this in college and completely forgot about it, probably because hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are near impossible to find on the consumer market. So Blencoe lost the bet and paid Romm the $1000 and wore a T-shirt. He posted a very s…

if something happened before the internet or since, but it's archived properly, did it really happen? :-P

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#430

Post by goatcode »

fabianhjr wrote: post #113

Regarding the first paragraphs where luddism is mentioned several times; Lord Byron, father to Ada Lovelace the first programmer, was one of the few on the House of Lords to defend the Luddites: > But the police, however useless, were by no means idle: several notorious delinquents had been detected; men liable to conviction, on the clearest evidence, of the capital crime of poverty; men, who had been nefariously gui…

Language changes.
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