Lucas Spailier

I'm not sure how seriously I should take the narrative about the anti-free speech situation in EU/UK. Every time I try to dig into one of these stories, it seems to land into one of 4 categories :

• A one-sided story that doesn't seem trustworthy at all. The Greg Lukianoff article you link mention the 'most surreal case' of Elizabeth Kinney. After looking into it, frankly, I just don't believe it. There are too many improbable details, like that 11 policer officers were sent to her house and dragged her out of her bath - regardless of the free speech situatio

This theory mostly does not actually contradict OP's, except for the assumption that the problem of motivated reasoning would eventually be evolved away.

We can believe that motivated reasoning is caused by a short-term planning algorithm pressuring a long-term planning algorithm into getting what it wants ; and that getting rid of this mechanism would be very costly and so we shouldn't expect it to disappear any time soon, if at all. Both seem quite plausible to me, and do not preclude one another.

Morality overall, in many rather huge ways.

Moral consciousness has risen yes, but does that actually translate in improved morality ?
That is, if I can steal an expression from Patrick McKenzie, the optimal amount of immorality in a society is not zero, and I'm not sure which side of the optimal we're currently on.
It seems plausible (though hardly a slam dunk) that even as moral consciousness was lower in the 90s', the actual welfare we derive from our moral rules was higher, even for the supposed central beneficiaries of our current stricter rules.

This reminds me of what I thought was a Sun Tzu quote, but I cannot find it anymore. It went something like this :

A good general does not look for a path to Victory, but ensures that all paths lead to Victory.

In a chaotic battlefield (life), one way to make it so that 'all paths lead to Victory' is to improve your orient speed. But the nugget of wisdom I got from the apparently-not-a-Sun-Tzu-quote is that you need to have enough elbow room in your plans across all dimensions so that you're not going to lose everything you care about just because you fail t... (read more)

The feeling of losing is a sense of disorientation and confusion and constant reorienting as reality changes more quickly than you can orient to, combined with desperate attempts to somehow slow down the speed at which your adversaries are messing with you.

I just want to note that there doesn't need to be anything adversarial about that. I see this sentence as a very on-point articulation of what is going on in people's mind when they are angry about technological or societal changes.

In fact, the Catalan boy goes to study in Belgium, but he doesn’t make any local friends. They are speaking Flemish among themselves and he has no idea what they are talking about. [...]

Yet, the boy befriends other Erasmus students just as eager for company as he is. Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians. He falls in love with a Polish girl, marries her and they settle in Berlin together and speak English at home.

Most places have student organizations run by locals who help foreign student get situated, including socially. Generally this is a local chapter of the ... (read more)

While I agree at a basic level, this also seems like a motte-and-bailey.

There is clearly a vibe that all doomers have obviously always been wrong. The author is clearly trying to push back against that vibe. I too prefer arguing at 'motte' level, but vibes (baileys) matter, and pushing back against one should not require a long airtight argument that stands up to the stronger version of the claims being made. Even though I agree the stronger version would be better, that's true for both sides of any debate.

I'm surprised, in discussions related to veganism, to never see mentioned the point that having the people who care the most about animal suffering not buy meat at all shift economic incentives for producers in a bad way. I'm not involved in vegan culture, so maybe these discussions do happen and I'm just not aware, but it never popped up anywhere I saw it.

If the only people who care about animals do not buy meat at all, then factory farmers have no incentive whatsoever in producing ethical meat. In theory, we could imagine that the ethical-eaters would on... (read more)

There is :

• The thing that an organization claims it wants to achieve.
• The thing that an organization thinks to itself it aims to achieve, which can be different from the public claim in an adversarial context.
• The thing that different subunits of the organization think they ('they' the subunit, or 'they' the organization) aim to achieve.
• The thing than an organization is in practice optimizing for as a result of its internal and external pressures, which can be different from both publicly and privately stated goals because coordinating an organization in a ch

I'm never sure if people do not see the logical case for price control in a crisis, or if they see it but believe it doesn't apply.

In any case it's probably worth it to share what I think is the (rationalized, sanewashed) reasoning against price gouging. The central example to keep in mind while reading this is a peasant during a famine in 15th-century France.

1. Survival is at stake. There is not enough survival goods for everyone.
2. Rich and powerful people shouldn't have an excessively easier time surviving than others. Whether or not one thinks that makes sen

The problem is that it would reduce the incentive to develop property for large developers, since their tax bill would go up if they developed adjacent land.

I guess I'm arguing about the zero point. Your frame is that the current situation where large developers develop something, the surrounding land's value goes up, and this profits the developer is the default, and thus LVT brings us below the default, since it balances the uptick in land value with more taxes. My frame is that the default for everyone else is that one cannot benefit from the incr... (read more)

Another issue with the LVT is that it acts as an implicit tax on nearby land development.

Isn't this the whole point ? One of the main goals of LVT, as I understand it, is to prevent people from leeching off positive externalities generated by others without providing anything themselves, like a shitty apartment building that still charges high rents because of good nearby amenities/infrastructure.
The downside you mention is about how LVT would also prevent people from 'leeching off' their own positive externalities, like the Disney example. Assuming th... (read more)