Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Plans you're not supposed to talk about

dynomight.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 675 posts

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#321

Post by jollybean »

antiterra wrote: post #136
jollybean wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

--- "That's not how triage works." Triage: "the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties." Seems exactly like triage. --- "What is this mysterious cure?" Monoclonal Antibodies are a very effective treatment that we would use almost ubiquitously were it not for the cost. If they were $1 and easily administered, they are in some…

Public health is hard . How important is the truth if you know lying will save millions and millions of lives? Of course you can’t lie too much, or people will ignore you even when you tell the truth. What if your research on the disease model of alcoholism shows it to both be effective and a fantastical fabrication? Is it noble to publish this? Is it elitist to selectively distribute this knowledge? As for masks— wh…

Totally agree. It's very hard.

To your point, even with marginal data on mask usage, to the extent it doesn't interfere with Health System usage, then we probably want to get people using them even with 'limited data'.

And then how do you 'mask mandate'?

Very hard.

Aside from the people who will just 'do it because the doctors said' you need large swaths of people who are 'community minded' and who will do it out of their civic orientation, a recognition that they need to 'play along' because on the whole, it's in the interest of Public Good.

The later part is tough in an individualist society.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#322

Post by paulryanrogers »

type-r wrote: post #305

> Force everyone to solve the problem entirely by reducing CO2 emissions. I know it's not the point of the post but that's not the only other option. We can also keep CO2 emissions high, or even increase them. We just need to recapture them later. This is already being worked on, supported mostly by companies like Stripe and Microsoft. If we just invested more into this, we wouldn't have such a rough choice.

Recycling was once proposed not because it was a viable mitigation but because companies knew it would be an effective distraction. [0]

I'm not saying recycling or carbon capture is all bad. But they should be last resorts. That's why it's reduce, then reuse yourself, then recycle if there's no alternative.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#323

Post by phailhaus »

The author is not making these arguments. Look:

> This might be a bad plan [...] But I emphasize that I know nothing and I’m just parroting the opinions of others.

If you're posting about how these plans aren't accurate, you've missed the point. The author is making a broader observation, that you can conceive of plans that actually benefit from secrecy, and lead to all sorts of interesting human behavior. The particulars are irrelevant, it's about how the parts fit together.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#324

Post by vkou »

chii wrote: post #315
pdonis wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your rosy view of the historical consequences of the French Revolution is, to say the least, questionable. I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths), while rosy language about "liberation" and "democracy" kept people fr…

All revolution does is put a different group of people in charge than previously. The outcome could be good bad or ugly. Look at the iranian revolution. It has not resulted in a better outcome at all. In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry.

> In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry.

'Most' revolutions of the modern age were anti-colonial revolutions, in places like India and Africa, in the aftermath of WWII.

Life under colonial rule in those places was, as a rule of thumb, not great.

We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s[1]. Would you also describe those as a 'worse outcome for the citizenry'?

[1] Which could also be described, if not as de-colonization, as an end to Soviet imperialism.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#325

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #309
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the Oxygen Catastrophe, 2.3 billion years ago. I do, wonder, given that all the extinctions happened before humans existed, what possible alternative to 'natural' could there be, aliens?

> possible alternatives Asteroids, vulcanism are the usual culprits. There also could be cosmic ray bursts from exploding stars. > the Oxygen Catastrophe There seem to be many hypotheses about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event and it isn't clear to me there was a collapse, but a gradual replacement.

P.S. Evolution is not a stable system, and free markets aren't stable, either. Socialism promises stability, but history shows it's even less stable, as it is unresponsive to market changes.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#326

Post by ClumsyPilot »

WalterBright wrote: post #307
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The government money printing press is not free market." Oh no, not again this 'No True Scottman'-'Free market' myth. Let's go down this path - what does 'free market' theory say, how much money should be in the economy? How should it be created or destroyed? There is no natural process for it, whoever has lisense to print money can rule the world or collapse the economy. 'Free market theory' provides no answer, jus…

> how much money should be in the economy? How should it be created or destroyed? Great questions. Money is created when money is loaned out against collateral. Money is destroyed when the loan is repaid and the collateral returned. It's a natural process. The pressure on it is to have the supply of money match the value in the collateral. > whoever has lisense to print money Under a free banking system, anyone can p…

"Money is created when money is loaned out against collateral. Money is destroyed when the loan is repaid and the collateral returned. It's a natural process."

But there is nothing natural about it - the limit on money supply is how easy it is to get a loan. Bank could give out mortgages with 0% deposit, they could give out loans equal to 120% of the house value, and they indeed have done so.

What regulates the money supply is not 'natural process' but the rules set by the regylator on minimum reguirements. Is having no rules free market? But then it will be creating 2008 style event every tuesday.

Furthermore, this whole thing only creates money in our current floating-money system, right?

If you have medieval-style economy where you count literal gold coins, you can not create money, you would just be loaning out other people's deposits. The amount of money in the system would stay fixed, right?

So then the only 'natural' money supply is your ability to mine gold?

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#327

Post by chii »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #294
danblick wrote: post #83

The 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…

I don't know if its related, but I think of taxes. It may be rational for one person to not pay taxes, but if everyone was "rational" it would be disastrous for society. > (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) Why do you say that? What does it mean? I think of the internet, but not a person, I always thought of him as a free market economist. When I think of individual and socie…

> may be rational for one person to not pay taxes

it's rational to pay the lowest tax you can legally get away with, but not to evade taxes illegally especially if the chance of getting caught is high (as would be in a digital world where records of transactions are stored and analyzed). Much easier in a cash based society - case in point the Greek economy has a lot of tax evasion, and thus their gov't revenue shortfalls consistently.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#328

Post by akiselev »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #283
BurningFrog wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ask a difficult and important question. The two relevant ideas I know are: 1. Chesterton's Fence: "I don't understand why this exists, so let's tear it down" is an big and tempting error. Wait until you understand. 2. Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable, which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy. The sane approach is to change society incrementally, see what happens, and adjust and lea…

Perhaps I'm being too US-centric but I feel like you at-best mean conservatism with a lower-case 'c'. Even then the very definition of conservatism explicitly avoids any change: > commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing.

Even in the US that's a very uncharitable interpretation of conservatism that sounds like something I'd say in the heat of a Thanksgiving dinner argument.

The more charitable one is called "progressive conservatism". Progressive conservatives believe, among other things, that "instant change is not always the best and can sometimes be damaging to society, therefore cautious change that fits in with the nation's social and political traditions is necessary." [1] Progressive conservatives were the driving force behind abolition in Britain as well as natural conservation and the national park system in the United States, for example, so it's hardly a philosophy that resists all change.

A few presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower have called themselves progressive conservatives but in reality, the philosophy underpins the entire US Constitution and system of government going back to the founding fathers. It's the checks and balances that keep our (ostensible) democracy functioning. It's the court systems that can delay or outright kill hasty legislation. The conservatives want to let the progressives leap into the future while they focus on conserving the good things about the present so that they don't become casualties to progress.

To be clear the GOP is neither conservative, nor progressive, nor progressive conservative. They're just the elephant in the room.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_conservatism

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#329

Post by chii »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #291
WalterBright wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 6 all-natural mass extinction events Are you sure about that? Or have people just not discovered the cause yet? Pick one, let's explore it.

Sure, the Oxygen Catastrophe, 2.3 billion years ago. I do, wonder, given that all the extinctions happened before humans existed, what possible alternative to 'natural' could there be, aliens?

so it only happening 6 times over the 2.3 billion years is not a bad record. Human designed systems have barely over 5000-10000 years of history, and most only last a couple hundred.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#330

Post by ClumsyPilot »

WalterBright wrote: post #309
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the Oxygen Catastrophe, 2.3 billion years ago. I do, wonder, given that all the extinctions happened before humans existed, what possible alternative to 'natural' could there be, aliens?

> possible alternatives Asteroids, vulcanism are the usual culprits. There also could be cosmic ray bursts from exploding stars. > the Oxygen Catastrophe There seem to be many hypotheses about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event and it isn't clear to me there was a collapse, but a gradual replacement.

"Asteroid and vulcanism are the usual culprits"

That is nature, thats my point - it is brutal and murderous.

If you don't want to die from them you don't rely on Darwinism and if you don't want economic collapse and famine every time a new strain of flue evolves you dont wait for 'muh free market' to save you.

Post reply on HN