You know that your vote doesn't matter in large-scale elections. Being a busy person, you don't go out of your way to vote. When discussing an election with a friend, you mention you didn't vote. Your friend and others in the group socially ostracize you. You don't understand why, but after a few times you just say that you voted. In all future elections, you leave work early and indicate to your friends that you voted. You know your vote doesn't matter, but you also know expressing that sentiment has no benefit. You secretly wonder if the pressure to vote is a social norm engineered by one side. After some time, you hear a new friend indicate they did not vote. You publicly scorn them, for the social benefits.
Plans you're not supposed to talk about
191–200 of 675 posts
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty crazy how every single vaccinated person I know has tested positive for Covid since. I guess I and they must be outliers. If there is some protection from spread, it's garbage protection.
That you anecdotally know vaccinated people who got Covid and that Covid vaccines lower the chance of being infected with Covid can both be true?
Yes, I knew I would get called out for an anecdote on this website. Thanks for not disappointing.
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to be clear, you are saying that you know what makes people happy better than people know themselves. And even if you are right, people's current behavior shows that they disagree with you on what is best. Therefore they won't voluntarily give up buying new shoes. You will have to force people to agree with you and this type of paternalistic "I know what is best for you better than you do" leadership is rather d…
I’m not talking about forcing anyone to do anything. I talked about carbon taxes to make people pay the true price of their consumption so the market forces can find the right equilibrium, which they can’t when the price doesn’t include all the information.
It seems like we are talking in circles. The original debate was that there were two options for dealing with climate change. One was expensive and painful and the other was cheap and easy.
The cheap and easy one is we just all decide to voluntarily reduce consumption. That isn't feasible for the reasons listed in previous comments.
The expensive and painful one is a combination of disincentivizing consumption, offsetting carbon emission, creating carbon capture technology, etc. As I said before, a carbon tax is part of the expensive option because it obviously makes consumption more expensive.
That isn't to say a carbon tax is a bad solution. I generally support one. It is simply a recognition that a carbon tax is not the cheap and easy solution of us all simply reducing consumption. If you want a cheap solution either people need to voluntarily give up consumption or they need to be forced to give up consumption.
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#194this is the best explanation I've even seen for a positive aspect to secrecy. yet I still distrust secretive practices on principle, because evil deeds require secrecy 99% of the time
> You consider telling everyone “OK, here are some promises that we’ve designed to maximize how embarrassing it would be for us to break up”, but decide it’s better not to make that explicit. I didn't understand this sentence. Anyone care to clarify please? (E.g., what would be an example of a promise that would be embarrassing?) Thanks.
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Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#195Who is the author? I read the About page but it offered few details, just links to some articles. It’s fair enough to say that the work should stand alone, but it’s also fair enough to apply Sturgeon’s Law when encountering a new blog.
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#196this is the best explanation I've even seen for a positive aspect to secrecy. yet I still distrust secretive practices on principle, because evil deeds require secrecy 99% of the time
transparency is a deflection and most of the implementation is based on lies many forms of good deeds also rely on secrecy
> transparency is a deflection and most of the implementation is based on lies
transparency(openness)-opacity(secrecy) are not the same as honesty-deceit.
all language-based 'explanations' can be argued to be lies by nitpicking with increasing precision.
For example, consider whether the circle constant PI is equal to 3?
well yes it is but in fact it's 3.1
well yes but it's actually 3.14159... and so on
in any case, this article is playing around the distinction between transparent and honest and opaque or secret and deceitful. the difference can be very blurry
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#197Even if G*d didn't exist, one probably can't prove either way. So, from a risk/reward payoff, it seems believing is a higher payoff than not. And from a purely emotionless approach, if you're a Western religion (Christian) you don't have a high bar to cross. Just believe, no deeds or acts are required. That is a high ROI trade either way. [Edit: I am not endorsing a specific Western Religion, I'm giving an example. I…
Not high bar ?
Financially there is significant amount of contribution expected to be made, in some countries like Germany the state even now would collect it on behalf of the church ( Catholic) ! I don't even know if it is possible to officially declare Catholic to the State and not pay the taxes.
Ethically joining a religion would also mean you are tacitly approving every horror that religion as an institution is committing now (like child molestation or coverups, corruption, treatment of native residents say in Canada, blatant discrimination ( is a black-gay-trans pope (or equivalent) possible ? ), or has in the past( genocides, conquests in the name of God, racism, witch hunting, anti science stances and so on).
More than half the wars in history have been in the name of religion, how would you without emotion accept all that baggage ? No rational person with a modicum of ethics can accept it, only indoctrinated faith from a early age can sustain this construct.
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#198Even if G*d didn't exist, one probably can't prove either way. So, from a risk/reward payoff, it seems believing is a higher payoff than not. And from a purely emotionless approach, if you're a Western religion (Christian) you don't have a high bar to cross. Just believe, no deeds or acts are required. That is a high ROI trade either way. [Edit: I am not endorsing a specific Western Religion, I'm giving an example. I…
What if threatening people causes suffering on earth?
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#199The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!" I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led societ…
This sentiment seems completely useless (actually incredibly dangerous) without at least some attempt at explaining how we might distinguish between aspects of society which seem terrible but are actually secretly good even though no one knows why, and aspects of society which seem terrible because they're terrible.
The GP said aspects of society you don't understand. You changed "don't understand" to "seems terrible". Those aren't the same thing. This doesn't require you to accept things that you find terrible.
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#200I was skimming through a translation of Seneca, and one of the dialogs starts out with an agreement amongst the participants, to the effect of: "Of course we believe in the stuff that the philosophers believe (about death, the afterlife, etc.), not the stuff that the people believe."