I appreciate that you took the time to re-evaluate my original post. I did have prosocial intention, and perhaps you're right that I should have explained my intentions better.
My opinion is that the author is engaged in damaging self-deception. My goals with my response were to 1) surface this self-deception and 2) demonstrate its absurdity. In so doing, I hoped the author and people with similar inclinations wouldn't self harm in this particular way.
My interpretation is that we don't quite agree what the author is doing wrong. In addition to the issue you identified as moral self-centeredness ("how I want the world to be is how it ought to be") I understand the author to also be acting in accordance with this view ("I should act as though I live in the world that ought to exist").
I'll adapt your analogy a little to try and make my point. A hiker warns the author that there is a branch on the ground ahead blocking the trail. This branch is too heavy for any one person to move, but is easy to walk around. The author, believing that the government should remove branches from trails, resolves not to walk around the branch, falls over it, and injures themselves. They then go home and write a long editorial claiming their injury to be the government's fault, since they should have removed the branch.
The most important takeaway, I think, is that the proximate cause of the injury is the author's actions even if it is the government's responsibility to remove branches. If walking around the branch is "unnecessary suffering," surely intentionally walking into the branch is at least doubly unnecessary. I am not at all convinced blaming the system in this situation is engaging in a cooperative game, it simultaneously minimizes the author's agency and overstates harms caused by the system.
I should note that if the author had walked around the branch then complained about it afterwards none of this criticism would stand.
Reading your replies, it's clear you are sympathetic to the criticisms the author has of the education system/meritocracy. That's fine, but it seems to me that you're accepting the premise that their suffering is the school's fault. I'm not telling the author to "shut up and climb over the log," I'm telling the author to take responsibility for their own actions and stop blaming others. The fact that the author finds the situation intolerable doesn't change proximal fault at all.
In a vacuum, sure, I do think many of these systems are imperfect. The distinction between a kid who has yet to go to MIT and a kid who has gone to MIT is minor, and failure to interview the former implies an inefficiency somewhere. The difference between you and the author is that you accepted your own agency and took responsibility for the consequences of your actions.
Not super relevant, but I haven't really revealed my own position. Simply, I think it is the job of the individual to act in their own best interest, and the job of government to align incentives such that the individual's best interest is also the best interest of the collective. In my personal life I'm the type of person who moves branches out of the way, but it's not something I expect of others; I'm a moral anti-realist, which I understand is not a very common position.
I didn't miss the second narrative, rather:
My failure to engage with the criticisms of the system was entirely intentional.
I had three reasons for ignoring the criticisms:
- The critique is a fairly standard leftist/Marxist criticism of meritocracy. It’s well-trodden ground, and neither I nor (in my opinion) the author has much new to add here.
- The critique is doing a lot of rhetorical work to assert the moral righteousness of the author not taking the test. Engaging it at all felt (to me, subjectively) like indulging their superiority fantasy.
- The author’s argument that the university doesn’t function how it “claims” to function is weak; the university’s supposed “claim” is largely the author’s interpretation of what “special” means and what they personally think university should be for.
I grant that one can agree with their criticisms, I simply found them to be of secondary importance.
This essay was incredibly sad to read. It reads as a self-deception, a self-sabotage, an attempt to justify a continued refusal to pay the prices required to experience their desired outcomes.
The question I thought should obviously be consuming the author, namely, how to successfully navigate the system that actually exists, was only briefly considered before it was rejected as intolerable. Instead, the topic of the essay was how incorrect the system was for not granting the author something they appear to feel owed. Emergent systems like society are not necessarily just, fair, or even logical. They rarely do everything we want them to, as well as we want them to, or grant us the objects of our desire. We live in the world that exists, not the world we wish existed.
The thing I found most galling in this essay is that the author never seriously engages with the possibility that their application did not merit admission, and presents no data for the reader to use to evaluate merit for themselves. While we know the author spent lots of time on their essay, we don't know how good the essay was. They have no grades or achievements to tell us of. Instead, I assume, we are supposed to take on faith that if the author had suffered the indignity of taking a test everyone else takes they would have gotten in and all would be well.
In fact, were I on the admissions committee, this essay alone would disqualify the candidate. In a scholarly institution it is frequently necessary for a teacher to hand a student work and for them to do it. It is rarely desirable for the student to respond not with completed work, but with a screed on how homework is a tool the elites use to keep the lower classes down, arguing that the assignment is illegitimate and should be replaced with a different evaluation method both because it is unfair and because they don't really like doing it.
It could not be more normal for a human to find themselves unanointed by elite institutions. The majority of those so afflicted are able to live fulfilling lives, though admittedly not necessarily in the exact manner of their choosing. No tests need to be taken to start a business. The joy of having a family is not reserved for those with diplomas.
My failure to engage with the criticisms of the system was entirely intentional. If you want benefit in life, you must frequently pay the stated price. If you refuse to pay the price, you cannot demand the benefit.
I think you've made a motte-and-bailey argument:
- Motte: The payoff structure of the cosmic flip/St. Petersburg Paradox applied to the real world is actually much better than double-or-nothing, and therefore you should play the game.
- Bailey: SBF was correct in saying you should play the double-or-nothing St. Petersburg Paradox game.
Your motte is definitely defensible. Obviously, you can alter the payoff structure of the game to a point where you should play it.
That does not mean "there's no real paradox" , it just means you are no longer talking about the paradox. SBF literally said he would take the game in the specific case where the game was double-or-nothing. Totally different!
This ends my issue with your argument, but I'll also share my favorite anti-St. Petersburg Paradox argument since you didn't really touch on any of the issues it connects to. In short: the definition of expected value as the mean outcome is inappropriate in this scenario and we should instead use the median outcome.
This paper makes the argument better than I can if you're curious, but here's my concise summary:
- Mean values are perhaps appropriate if we play the game many (or infinity) times. In these situations, through the law of large numbers, the mean outcome of the games played will approach the mean interpretation of expected value.
- For a single play-through (as in the thought experiment) the mean is not appropriate, as the law of large numbers does not apply. Instead, we should value the game by its median outcome: the outcome one should reasonably expect.
- Indeed, if you have people actually play this game, their betting behavior is more consistent with an intuition of median expected value (this is tested in the paper).
- There's an argument Median EV is the better interpretation even when playing multiple times. In these situations you can think of the game as "playing the game multiple times, once." This resolves the paradox in all but the infinite cases.
- If you use the median interpretation of EV for finite trials of the game, there is no paradox.
A personal gripe: I find it more than a little stupid that the "expected value" is a value you don't actually "expect" to observe very frequently when sampling highly skewed distributions.
Mathematicians and Economists have taken issue with the mean definition of EV basically as long as it has existed. Regardless of whether or not you agree with it, it seems pretty obvious to me that it is inappropriate to use the mean to value single trial outcomes.
So maybe in the real world we should play the game, but I firmly believe we should value the game using medians and not means. Do we get to play the world outcome optimization game multiple/infinite times? Obviously not.
I made an omission mistake in just saying "sampling from noisy posteriors," note I didn't say they were performing unbiased sampling.
To extend the Psychology example: a study could be considered a sampling technique of the noisy posterior. You appear to be arguing that the extent to which this is a biased sample is a "skill issue."
I'm arguing that it is often very difficult to perform unbiased sampling in some fields; the issue might be a property of the posterior and not that the researcher has a weak prefrontal cortex. In this framing it would totally make sense if two researchers studying the same/correlated posterior(s) are biased in the same direction–its the same posterior!
1Eh. feels wrong to me. Specifically, this argument feels over-complicated.
As best I can tell, the predominant mode of science in replication-crisis affected fields is that they do causal inference by sampling from noisy posteriors.
The predominant mode of science in non-replication-crisis affected fields is that they don't do this or do this less.
Most of the time it seems like science is conducted like that in those fields because they have to. Can you come up with a better way of doing Psychology research? Science in hard fields is hard is definitely a less sexy hypothesis, but it seems obviously true?
2I really, really, really did not like this post. I found it to be riddled with bad assumptions, questionable unsupported claims, and critical omissions. I don't think any of the core arguments survive close scrutiny.
Moreover, I took serious issue with the tone throughout. The first half hand-waves some seriously questionable claims into existence with strong confidence, while the second half opines that everyone who ever thought otherwise is some combination of sycophantic, incurious, brainwashed, or an idiot. I would have appreciated more intellectual humility.
***
My read is that this post totally whiffed on the entire subject of die casting cost savings.
The chassis of cars is a relatively small fraction of their cost. The cost of aluminum die casting and stamped steel is, on Tesla's scale, similar. Yet, there were so many articles saying gigacasting was a major advantage of Tesla over other companies.
To be clear: the cost savings argument for die casting is little to do with the cost of the chassis itself, it's mostly an argument about the cost of body assembly.
In an automotive assembly line one of the most labor-intensive, challenging, and expensive steps is the "body shop," where a car's structural components are assembled into a "body in white." Die casting saves time and money by reducing the number of welds, bolts, etc. required to go from components to body. It also cuts down on total weight, waste material from manufacturing a larger number of components, and the number of steps one can introduce tolerance errors.
Here is an example from the Model 3. Switching from traditional assembly to die casting cuts out 169 separate metal parts and 1600 welds. Those costs add up! Look at the difference in estimated variable costs.
in short, your claim: "The cost of aluminum die casting and stamped steel is, on Tesla's scale, similar" both seems to miss the entire point and run against literally everything I have seen written about this. You need citations for this claim, I am not going to take your word for it.
***
The price thing alone seems like a post invalidating miss, but I was pretty alarmed by the sheer number of other strong assertions made with weak or no supporting evidence. Some of these seemed obviously wrong.
Tesla has been widely criticized for stuff not fitting together properly on the car body. My understanding is that the biggest reason for that is their large aluminum castings being slightly warped.
Tesla's panel gap issues predate the giga press by like a decade and has always been attributed to wide tolerances for all parts and lazy QA (de-prioritized in favor of R&D). I have absolutely no idea how you got to this "understanding." Citation please?
As for voids, they can create weak points; I think they were the reason the cybertruck hitch broke off in this test.
Or the geometry of the frame was insufficiently optimized for vertical shear. I do not understand how you reached this conclusion.
BYD is still welding stamped steel sheets together, and that's why it can't compete on price with Tesla. Hold on, it seems...BYD prices are actually lower than Tesla's? Much lower?
Price alone doesn't really say anything about the giga press. Perhaps BYD's efficiency could be explained by some of the other few thousand things that go into making a car? What about all the other stamped steel chassis companies BYD is way more efficient than?
Also, production costs are the actual thing that matter for this argument, not price. Tesla has 6x the profit per car of BYD which obviously factors into the higher prices.
Oh, and Tesla is no longer planning single unitary castings for future vehicles?
This is a bit misleading. Tesla doesn't currently do unitary castings, so this is a suspension of future R&D not changing what they currently do. Importantly, this means they will keep giga casting their chassis for the foreseeable future.
Money is a factor, of course; PR agencies drive a lot of the articles in media. I assume Tesla pays some PR firms and people there presumably decided to push the Giga Press.
You should stop assuming! Tesla spent essentially nothing on marketing until 2023, well after this assumed PR would be taking place. By nothing I mean that the estimate for their marketing spend in 2022 (literally all marketing to include PR if there was any at all) was $175k.
Actually, my read of the data is that the mountain west is not more environmentally conscious than the rest of the US.
The mountain west poll does not include national numbers, so I have no idea where your national comparisons are coming from. If I did, I'd check for same year/same question, but because I don't know where they're from I can't.
Take a look at this cool visualization of different state partisan splits from 2018: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/partisan-maps-2018/
The mountain west appears neither significantly more nor significantly less partisan on any of the climate change related questions than the rest of the US.
My main point, which I don't think you've contradicted (even if I accept that the mountain west is unique), is that you're making an argument about "environmentalism" partisanship by using primarily "climate change" polling data. The charts from the 2013 paper you've posted sort of confirm this take–climate change is obviously a uniquely partisan issue.
The intro to your sequence states the following:
The partisanship we see today is unusual, compared to other issues, other countries, or even the US in the 1980s.
Basically, I have not seen evidence that this is true for issues beyond climate change (or other countries!), and I think your sequence would benefit by explicitly comparing
- the partisan split of non-climate-change environmental issues (e.g. rain forest protection) to
- the partisan split of non-environmental issues (e.g. taxation)
My initial reaction, admittedly light on evidence, is that the numbers you present are at least partially due to selection bias. You've picked a set of issues, like climate change, that are not representative of the entire scope of "environmentalism." It shouldn't surprise anybody that "worry about global warming" is a blue issue, but the much more conservative-y "land use," "protection of fish and wildlife" and "conservation," issues for whatever reason are often not measured. In short, it feels a little to me that your actual argument is that liberal-coded environmental issues are partisan.
More than half of state wildlife conservation funding comes from hunting licenses and firearms taxes. I assure you, these fees mostly come from republicans in republican states. Here is some polling done in the west on environmental issues. It shouldn't be a surprise that republican voters in Wyoming and rural Colorado care a lot about the environment, but one shouldn't expect them to think about the issues in the same way as latte drinking knowledge workers in coastal cities.
It also might interest some to read how Nixon talked about the environment. This message to congress about founding the EPA in 1972 has some interesting passage, including the following:
PROTECTING OUR NATURAL HERITAGE
Wild places and wild things constitute a treasure to be cherished and protected for all time. The pleasure and refreshment which they give man confirm their value to society. More importantly perhaps, the wonder, beauty, and elemental force in which the least of them share suggest a higher right to exist--not granted them by man and not his to take away. In environmental policy as anywhere else we cannot deal in absolutes. Yet we can at least give considerations like these more relative weight in the seventies, and become a more civilized people in a healthier land because of it.
I've paid attention to politics for a long time, but I've never heard a democrat talk like this about the environment. Just this one paragraph contains three progressive blasphemies, nearly one per sentence:
- The idea that the environment belongs in any way shape or form to a nation or a people (is our heritage)
- The idea that the environment derives its value from the "pleasure and refreshment" they "give man"
- A higher right to exist not granted by man?????!
I suspect there are a few genres of late. Most people have the Sudden Realization variety; I suffer from Lucid Coma tardiness. This horrific disease means I'm fully aware of the right time to leave and how it reflects on me, I just... don't. Psychoanalysis might reveal some sort of ego conflict or latent aggression towards the world for imposing a schedule on me, but all of this is to say I think this model needs to add another dimension for agency.
Perhaps we can make a 2x2: calibration x execution reliability.