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Persuasion through status rather than argument

robkhenderson.com

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Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#121

Post by tsimionescu »

jacquesm wrote: post #109
tsimionescu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if this is true, the costs of digging are much higher than the costs of above-ground construction + the legal costs of acquiring the land. A hundred kilometer tunnel would be one of the longest tunnels ever built, and the longest train/track tunnel by quite some margin. And it would need copious safety features and auxiliary tunnels leading to the surface, even before the whole vacuum part gets added in. So it w…

> the costs of digging are much higher than the costs of above-ground construction Yes, easily 3 to 10x. > A hundred kilometer tunnel would be one of the longest tunnels ever built, and the longest train/track tunnel by quite some margin. And it would need copious safety features and auxiliary tunnels leading to the surface, even before the whole vacuum part gets added in. So it won't even completely avoid the need f…

I understand your point much better now, yes. These are all different from things like cold fusion.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#122

Post by fallingknife »

Tainnor wrote: post #85
fallingknife wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you are wrong. Inequality has not grown over the last 20 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA

Why are you only looking at income inequality, only in the United States and only in the last 20 years? Look at where that graph was in 1980, for example.

Because you said "over the last couple decades"

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#123

Post by lapcat »

M95D wrote: post #120
lapcat wrote: post #82

The author is trying to push a consistent narrative throughout the article, and unfortunately this results in the omission of alternative explanations for the phenomena discussed. For example: > Likewise, in a fascinating study on the collapse of the Soviet Union, researchers have found that university-educated people were two to three times more likely than high school graduates to say they supported the Communist P…

> researchers have found that university-educated people were two to three times more likely than high school graduates to say they supported the Communist Party Ignorant researchers. Those kind of people were required to be members of the Party or else they could not get jobs according to their education. Also they were the most actively monitored by state security. Phones tapped, spied by neighbors, required to spe…

> Ignorant researchers.

No, the surveys were conducted in 1998-2000, years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#124

Post by Geee »

Tainnor wrote: post #60
fallingknife wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't read any criticism of capitalism because there is basically none. 99% of it is just people claiming that some abstract bad thing in human society is due to "capitalism" without any sort of argument that would actually rise to the level of what I would call criticism.

In an unregulated market, capital very naturally tends to accumulate more capital - while, if you have nothing, it's very hard to build up capital in the first place. Which means that, if this continues indefinitely, more and more things belong to fewer and fewer people - which is exactly what we've been seeing over the last couple of decades.

This is a very good thing, and the reason why capitalism works. The idea of pure meritocratic capitalism is that capital is allowed to accumulate to those who use capital most efficiently. There are fewer of those, naturally. Increasing capital efficiency benefits everyone; it means less work and more production, i.e. there's more of everything and everything is cheaper.

The actual issues of our current world happen because this pure version of capitalism doesn't happen. There's all sorts of things which lead to non-efficient people / organizations accumulating a lot of capital.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#125

Post by kredd »

jacquesm wrote: post #102
kredd wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to discuss this back in university days! NA is extremely allergic to copy something that’s been done extremely well in the east (e.g., high speed rails) and instead tries to come up with some “cool better way” of doing things. After all, we are different, and copying something would be an extreme ego hit. This thought process applies to Hyperloop as well. I live in Canada, and it is really disappointing how w…

Canada has a massive infra problem. That is not strange when you consider that it has an enormous area to deal with a relatively low population and that most of that population lives along a relatively narrow strip of land, and long strips are very much sub-optimal compared to a circle (which is the ideal for infra). So both from a density perspective and a topology perspective there are serious challenges to overcom…

You’re absolutely correct. Highway was built around 1941 though, NA was still building itself up during that time. In an ideal world, we would be building up new cities, new rail lines, new infrastructure and etc., but I guess the momentum is lost. Now we’re stuck in “upgrade and spend a lot more for a km of subway line”. Maybe we’ll figure our way out of it eventually!

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#126

Post by jacquesm »

kredd wrote: post #125
jacquesm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada has a massive infra problem. That is not strange when you consider that it has an enormous area to deal with a relatively low population and that most of that population lives along a relatively narrow strip of land, and long strips are very much sub-optimal compared to a circle (which is the ideal for infra). So both from a density perspective and a topology perspective there are serious challenges to overcom…

You’re absolutely correct. Highway was built around 1941 though, NA was still building itself up during that time. In an ideal world, we would be building up new cities, new rail lines, new infrastructure and etc., but I guess the momentum is lost. Now we’re stuck in “upgrade and spend a lot more for a km of subway line”. Maybe we’ll figure our way out of it eventually!

I suspect that eventually immigration will solve it but it will take a very long time.

As it is it did not look sustainable to me while I was living there.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#127

Post by mindslight »

Tainnor wrote: post #80
gms wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it backwards. Regulation has gone up a lot over the last two decades which is why you're seeing what you're seeing. Historically in America or current day in developing countries, the rate of growth in living standards negatively correlates with the amount of regulation.

You haven't responded to my main point: do you believe that a completely unregulated market doesn't lead to wealth accumulation in the hands of few people? It is of course true that some (bad) regulation, like protectionism of various sorts, can also lead to the same outcome in a different way.

After pondering this question from time to time over a few decades now, I will say I still really don't know. Sure, it makes intuitive sense that wealth can be used to create setups that capture more wealth. But most examples we see of this (especially the galling zero-sum ones) are regulatory capture and regulatory escape, where wealth is used to affect government action/policy to further concentrate wealth. The most glaring of these, that facilitates many others, is the fountain of newly-created USD that the politically connected get the first cut of. That value doesn't come from nowhere - it's the central collection of technological and economic progress that would otherwise show up as distributed price deflation.

On the other hand, we have the diminishing marginal utility of money - rich people overspend all the time, often on frivolous stuff. Musk bought an entire publicly traded company and crashed it on the way home, the way an upper middle class person might a shiny red Dodge Viper. One might say the VC ecosystem is chiefly 'dumb' money sloshing around trying to not be left out of the next big thing, while having no clue what that might be.

Talking about "completely unregulated" markets is also somewhat specious. In a completely ancap context, we'd likely get structures similar to governments, funded by wealthy people cooperating rather than continuing to compete in less-productive ways (say through physical force). In fact some might even say that this is the character of the current US government in a few different regards.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#128

Post by gms »

Tainnor wrote: post #92
gms wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, completely unregulated would lead to that. We need laws to protect against coercion and adjudicate in the case of disagreements between parties. Warring tribes where physical force wins is not a good place to be.

I don't think you're seeing the whole picture if you think only about physical force. People who are well off have more opportunities to start other ventures that make them even more well-off, and if they're especially powerful, they can use that influence to further their benefit. I don't think that's particularly controversial.

It’s not easy to start successful ventures. Most new ventures fail. Even the best VCs only have a 30% success rate.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#129

Post by corporatenight »

motohagiography wrote: post #72

A lot of intelligent people aren't very smart, and a lot of smart people aren't very intelligent. The smart achive desirable outcomes, and usually that means not rocking the boat. The intelligent have a capacity for abstraction, which means it's easy to misunderstand why people are parroting absurdities. Where a good programmer is intelligent, a good product manager is smart. I was surprised he didn't include this Da…

[dead]

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#130

Post by Lammy »

motohagiography wrote: post #72

A lot of intelligent people aren't very smart, and a lot of smart people aren't very intelligent. The smart achive desirable outcomes, and usually that means not rocking the boat. The intelligent have a capacity for abstraction, which means it's easy to misunderstand why people are parroting absurdities. Where a good programmer is intelligent, a good product manager is smart. I was surprised he didn't include this Da…

Propaganda doesn’t necessarily mean lies. It’s anything that makes a recipient feel compelled to participate in the spread of that thing. Right in the name: propaganda, propagate.
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