Trump cares a lot about personal power. He does not (to put it lightly) seem to have much respect for tradition or the rule of law. He has 'joked' about a third term before. Many of the traditional safeguards are disappearing: Trump has fired many army officers, senior FBI leaders,...
The statement “taxation is theft” feels, in the literal sense, at least sort of true. If you do not pay your taxes, after a few strongly worded letters, the IRS (or equivalent government agency) will send armed men to take your money by force and maybe put you in jail...
[Epistemic status: Probably true, but very incomplete. I’m just some guy who spent a few days reading studies and literature reviews on this subject. This is just a short look at some of the technical (i.e. non-fundamental; could be solved with better techniques) issues that are encountered in the process...
This seems great, but as I understand it, air purifiers & ventilators also have the benefit of removing air pollution & mold, which as far as I can tell, far-UVC can't? It seems like a relevant thing to mention.
Trump cares a lot about personal power. He does not (to put it lightly) seem to have much respect for tradition or the rule of law. He has 'joked' about a third term before.
Many of the traditional safeguards are disappearing: Trump has fired many army officers, senior FBI leaders, and inspectors general, replacing them with loyalists. Many Republican senators seem to be either personally or instrumentally loyal to Trump.
On the other hand, he is very old; he stands to gain little from remaining in power after 86. He also is not much of an ideologue, so he may not care whether his allies remain in power after his death. The risk-reward calculation... (read more)
Out of interest: what brand of peanut butter did you eat?
Is there any reason we should trust Omega to be telling the truth in the XOR-trolley problem?
I intended the karmic argument to be implicit in the negative space of the argument on ignoble origins of wealth :) To me it's a matter of course that if you fairly trade with someone, you have moral claim to the wealth thereby earned!
Also, funny: I'm a compatibilist non-moral-realist as well (and inspired by the Hogfather quote, too)! Morality is a social construct, and so is desert, I just find it important to think about the interplay of the two.
Thank you for the kind words :)
I'll give a real-world example for a world ontologically prior to redistributive taxation (and, in fact, most taxation): the US, pre-1900. Minimal taxes were collected (90% of federal government was funded by taxes on tobacco, beer, and liquor) and pretty much none of it went to redistribution. To me, it seems that there was an ideological change somewhere in the early 1900s, driven by the Progressive movement, such that Americans started to approve of redistributive taxation as a concept.
So basically what I'm saying is that the difference I outlined in my post between public-goods and redistributive taxation is real and that there are moral arguments for... (read more)
The statement “taxation is theft” feels, in the literal sense, at least sort of true. If you do not pay your taxes, after a few strongly worded letters, the IRS (or equivalent government agency) will send armed men to take your money by force and maybe put you in jail for good measure. Nevertheless, it is generally held by most people that taxation is a legitimate object of government; revolts and rebellions over taxation occur not on general principle, but against excessive taxation or taxation without representation. So why do we accept taxation?
This post will not, to be clear, be a general argument against taxation. I am no anarchist; I’m not even... (read 2931 more words →)
I believe it because physicists-as-a-whole seem quite sure about it, and I've never seen (modern) physicists be wrong about something they're this sure about, and frankly I know fuck-all about physics beyond what I learned in high school. 98-ish % confidence that it's as correct as any model of the universe reasonably can be.
ACX also links to this paper analyzing federal cancer research, which claims it is so effective it only costs $326 in federal investment cost per life saved.
They claim $326 per life-year (specifically, DALY), not per life. Huge difference!
I agree with what you're saying; the reason I used trillions was exactly because it's an amount nobody has. Any being which can produce a trillion dollars on the spot is likely (more than 50%, is my guess) powerful enough to produce two trillion dollars, while the same cannot be said for billions.
As for expected utility vs expected payoff, I agree that under conditions of diminishing marginal utility the offer is almost never worth taking. I am perhaps a bit too used to the more absurd versions of Pascal's Mugging, where the mugger promises to grant you utility directly, or disutility in the form of a quadrillion years of torture.
Probably the intuition against accepting the money offer does indeed lie in diminishing marginal utility, but I find it interesting that I'm not tempted to take the offer even if it's stated in terms of things with constant marginal utility to me, like lives saved or years of torture prevented.
[Epistemic status: Probably true, but very incomplete. I’m just some guy who spent a few days reading studies and literature reviews on this subject. This is just a short look at some of the technical (i.e. non-fundamental; could be solved with better techniques) issues that are encountered in the process of measuring happiness.]
The tradition in scientific literature about happiness seems to be to start by mentioning how much we humans care about happiness. Far be it from me to break tradition, so: obviously, we care a lot about happiness. It’s the thing most people spend most of their lives trying to attain (either for themselves or for others).
Um …... (read 4095 more words →)
Exactly the sort of thing I browse LessWrong for! Good work.