As a foster-only parent in Massachusetts, I think I have much more interaction with DCF than most parents, albeit from a rather different angle.
In general, the parents’ concern here seems overblown to me — my perception is that DCF case workers will pretty much always start by talking to parents about their concerns if at all possible, and that they’re wildly unlikely to take any punitive action if a conversation about DCF’s expectations is enough to correct (from their perspective) the family’s behavior. If nothing else, the institutional incentives are ...
It’s not clear to me that putting effort into enforcing existing regulations is more feasible for many of the folks advocating assault rifle bans, nor is it clear to me that it’s a significantly higher impact approach.
Re: feasibility — Your examples of folks advocating additional legislation are federal and state politicians, while my impression is that most handgun enforcement actions in the U.S. traditionally rely on law enforcement agencies at more local levels. Thus, it’s not clear that the folks pushing such policies are in as good a position to...
Okay, so you‘re defining the problem as groups transmitting too little information? Then I think a natural first step when thinking about the problem is to determine an upper bound on how much information can be effectively transmitted. My intuition is that the realistic answer for many recipients would turn out to be “not a lot more than is already being transmitted”. If I’m right about that (which is a big “if”), then we might not need much thinking beyond that point to rule out this particular framing of the problem as intractable.
For that distinction to be relevant, individuals need to be able to distinguish whether a particular conclusion of the group is groupthink or whether it’s principled.
If the information being propagated in both cases is primarily the judgment, how does the individual group member determine which judgments are based on real reasons vs not? If the premise is that this very communication style is the problem, then how does one fix that without re-creating much of the original burden on the individual that our group-level coordination was trying to avoid?...
Do you disagree that “some degree of group-level weeding out of unworthy organizations seems like a transparently necessary step given the sheer number of organizations that exist”? If not, how does that dynamic differ from “shun[ning] orgs based on groupthink rather than based on real reasons”?
I don’t have a clear opinion on the original proposal… but is it really possible to completely avoid groupthink that decides an org is bad? (I assume that “bad” in this context means something like “not worth supporting”.)
I would say that some degree of group-level weeding out of unworthy organizations seems like a transparently necessary step given the sheer number of organizations that exist. I would also agree with you that delegating all evaluation to the group level has obvious downsides.
If we accept both of those points, I think the quest...
Maybe this is because of my vantage point (as your friend and someone who has deliberately distanced themself somewhat from EA as a whole), but I tend to think of you and Julia as relatively central figures in EA. Like, I’m not sure if you’re among the very most centrally-connected circles of that community, but I’d also guess that you’re not really more than about one rung out from there. In that case, I’m unsure how much you as an author would contribute to “de-centralizing” author representation?
That said, I do think that EA would absolutely...
For example, say you're wanting to take the next right turn, and the lane becomes a combined bus lane + right turn lane not very far ahead of you. If you don't see a bus and you pull into the lane a bit early you have an extremely good chance of making it to the combined section before a bus comes.
This type of scenario potentially pairs badly with only enforcing the last car in the queue when the bus arrives. As soon as the car at the end of the line switches to the bus lane, everyone in the queue ahead of them is suddenly incentivized to abruptly jump...
I didn’t say anything about ever requiring anyone to wear a mask, and yet that’s the only topic that you addressed in your reply.
I think there are a lot more options than a simplistic binary between collectively forcing people to wear masks and individually forcing people to accept all responsibility for their own infection outcomes. Those two positions aren’t even really points on a single dimension, because not all responsibility is enforced responsibility. Indeed, the OP spends a fair number of words trying to discern their current unenforce...
Hmm. If we’re in a world of completely individualized responsibility for avoiding illness by masking (or not, and dealing with the consequences), then it’s completely unacceptable for society at large to ever force an individual to mask or not (e.g. TSA checkpoints are an obviously relevant sticking point for flying). Can’t have it both ways.
I dunno about the e-mail/web hosting analogy, at least for the purposes of thinking about possible anti-spam approaches. As I understand it, the current state of Mastodon hosting is much more like the WordPress hosting example than the e-mail hosting example, in that each customer gets their own isolated instance of the software for their domain. I think a lot of the ability to achieve larger scale spam filters and etc on email hosts comes from the fact that the actual infrastructure is shared. E.g. my impression has generally been that s...
Thanks for continuing to write about this. That said, I feel like a lot of the links in reasoning are left implicit here, and I’d rather not be making assumptions about your rationale. What, specifically, do you think changed to make the situation more similar to typical flu season? How much of that change is rooted in factors that affect society at large, versus being rooted in your own house’s success at reducing your risks for particularly severe outcomes (less immunocompromised; newborn is now older), versus being rooted in your incre...
I’m curious to see if this actually does reduce opposition to construction in practice, or if folks are simply opposed to density (in which case they’ll find another excuse to object). I’ve seen some folks get noisy about how building denser projects with more units and less parking would effectively take away their street parking in Porter Square — but most of those folks were probably rationalizing the idea that density is bad, since suggesting this no-street-parking policy prompted several folks to quickly object that allowing such projects would be unfair to those people who do need a car.
Also, all of these numbers are presenting efficacy in preventing the particular strains that were circulating in the times and places of the corresponding studies. I’d personally discount transmission prevention a bit further due to uncertainty about whether these numbers fully reflect the virus strains that are circulating in my local community — our only data for when new strains spread to more communities are lagging indicators, and the effectiveness numbers for some newer strains are lower or less certain than the numbers we’re using in this discussion. (But then I’m also quite far to the cautious end of the spectrum.)
This is interesting, because people whose jobs revolve around meeting participation (e.g. corporate executives) would probably still want some sort of scheduling conventions to help them maximize their time available for meetings. If event organizers in different locations were still inclined to choose standard-length meetings, and you still have people who where to maximize the number of meetings in their day, then you have pressure for some sort of non-local scheduling alignment standard (but not necessarily timezones).
As it happens, I was on a call Sunday morning with 3 folks who work in different local (Boston-area) hospitals. All three said that, while not all institutions were behaving the same way, their particular institutions were already abandoning standard protocols in order to deeply conserve their stock of equipment like masks. One said, verbatim, “we’re acting as if we won’t get any more supply” of masks and gowns until a vaccine is developed.
That said, I think your two week threshold is not unreasonable. These folks are not goi...
Jeff touched on this, but I want to underline the point more strongly: How do the sharing platforms themselves (Reddit / YouTube / etc) exist without ads? To be clear, I’m no fan of the audience-distorting incentives of ads… but the infrastructure for free content isn’t exactly free, either, and we need to pay for that somehow or else that otherwise-funded content doesn’t get distributed (and then the lack of distribution inherently prevents donation / patronage models from working). I’m having trouble seeing another realistic way for tha... (read more)