> Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants.
The EA guys aren't the final word on ethics or a fulfilling life.
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that one might, rather than seeking to always better one's life, instead seek to share the burden others are holding.
Making a bunch of money to turn around and spend on mosquito nets might seem to be making the world better, but on the other hand it also normalizes and enshrines the systems of oppression and injustice that created a world where someone can make 300,000$ a year typing "that didn't work, try again" into claude while someone else watches another family member die of malaria because they couldn't afford meds.
Impact only has meaning per a chosen framework to measure within. For example, if I apply my ethical system to measure the impact of an EA, they have essentially no impact, since all they do is perpetuate a system that is the root of the problems they're trying to solve.
To be frank that anti-system logic sounds a lot like. "Why are you taking a shower when there are people dying of thirst in a desert logic? Plumbing is an inherently unjust system for giving more water to those who already have enough!".
Yes there are flaws in the system, but smugly opting out of it and declaring yourself morally superior isn't helpful. Instead you need to actually do the work of understanding the system, its virtues and flaws before you can propose changes that would actually improve things.
The issues I had (granted this was probably a decade ago), was that Gmail uses tags and IMAP uses folders. The translation there always felt messy and cumbersome. To me, this is why I felt Gmail wasn’t good in generic mail clients and really needed one built for Gmail.
Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.
I can confirm that basically all third-party apps have to handle this "Gmail weirdness" and come up with an abstraction layer to make Gmail IMAP accounts play nicely with "regular" IMAP accounts.
It seems the job selects for those types. I suppose people interested in law enforcement / justice that aren't that way either end up as lawyers or working for the FBI or something.
If you don't have any kind of marketable skills yet want to make a decent living with plenty of benefits, becoming a LEO is the easiest choice for most people.
Or if you don't have any marketable skills yet have a spouse that has a job with health benefits, you can become a real estate agent.
Those two career paths seem to be the most chosen for almost all of the 'not so bright' folks I grew up with.
It's a use it or lose it skill. When you carry a badge and gun around and can bark orders at people all day and they have to comply or face the infinite violence you can summon with your radio your skin will grow thin over time.
Power corrupts, or some half baked version of that.
It seems to me that the market will select for urban sprawl though which is a negative for society but has the highest margin. E.g. Houston suburbs, miles and miles of cheap to fab single family homes that turn it into a suburban hell scape where you have to drive everywhere.
I don't think the free market is giving the promises you say it is - supply isn't elastic for real estate if nobody's building because there's no margins. Demand can be anywhere really.
I like to look to Tokyo for an example. Small lots, extremely predictable regulations (that are still strict enough to ensure a safe living situation), fast approvals, mean it's much faster and easier to throw up an 8-10 story apartment than say downtown Austin, and so even today they keep doing it despite land in Tokyo being very expensive. And, no sprawl.
They can throw up 8-10 story apartments in Tokyo despite land being very expensive because they tear them down and rebuild them after 20-30 years. Also, Tokyo outside of a few areas isn't that tall, it is definitely dense, but 3-4 story tall building dense (those homes are also torn down and built anew ever 20-30 years, so construction buzzes in Tokyo).
It would be better if you considered new actual living capacity in Tokyo rather than just new constructions.
I believe the market in the US selects for urban sprawl because it's usually subsidized by the dense urban core. Suburban areas often don't generate enough tax revenue to support their own infrastructure and services.
I've lived in Tokyo and Houston. Tokyo is infinitely more livable and the housing is still relatively affordable. In Houston even if you can get a new place it'll be clapboard garbage that's a one and a half hour drive from work.
Average home price in Tokyo is 1.5x that of Houston. Average wage in Houston is 1.5x that of Tokyo. So the data doesn't support your post unless you really really love sushi and arcades.
Maybe other real estate savvy people can help me understand this plus two other things I'm confused about in the housing crisis:
1. Houses are unaffordable for many Americans. To get houses to prices where they'd be affordable again would require a housing prices drop that would likely be, market-wide, significantly low enough to put a ton of people underwater on their mortgages. What is society/the government meant to do about that? Is it an insurmountable floor on how low we can get housing prices? That floor feels very close if so.
2. We've been promising the last five generations (or more) of Americans that a house is an Investment, capital I, an excellent place to keep your money. How do we overcome the political pressure to turn a house into a depreciating investment for the length of time required to get housing to be affordable again? What kind of politician would put their neck on the line to piss off every boomer and 75% of gen X and 30% of millennials, or whatever the house ownership distribution is?
There's a big difference between land prices and the building prices. When costs rise 5% per year for a house that's untouched, that's almost entirely the land price going up.
You can make housing cheaper by putting more houses on the same amount of land. In high cost areas, the price of land dominates the cost of housing.
Political pressure to change the investment nature of housing can come from various directions, for example establishing a land value tax, which eliminates the financial incentive to speculate on rising land prices by keeping people out of your area, redistributes all those unearned land rents to the population equally, as is only fair, and also results in a lot of people selling land to be redeveloped taht are otherwise hoarding it when the rest of society would be using it a lot better. Of course, in societies with high levels of land ownership, the voting public usually tries to vote away such extremely fair taxes.
Politically, we must stop prioritizing the views of homeowners at the local level. They already got their reward, massive unearned capital gains on their residence, there's no need to give them priority on land use over the general needs of society.
> Politically, we must stop prioritizing the views of homeowners at the local level. They already got their reward, massive unearned capital gains on their residence, there's no need to give them priority on land use over the general needs of society.
They are the majority of people in most areas, so it does make sense that they would be given priority in some ways.
The rest of your post is unsubstantiated vitriol, which isn't exactly convincing.
You quoted my vitriol to the homeowners, the rest is not vitriol, it's basic land economics.
> They are the majority of people in most areas, so it does make sense that they would be given priority in some ways.
In some ways sure. But in the ways that they are? Absolutely not, it's basic unfairness. The entire tax system is tilted in favor of home owners. We don't need to do that, we could make it more equal so that people with less wealth are not penalized.
It's not "basic land economics", it's your personal opinion about how things should be and whether you think current policies are fair.
The tax code does favor home ownership, because people want to support it. Less people will be able to afford their own home without that support, which seems to be the opposite of what you want.
High levels of home ownership combined with "local control" and "democracy" enables the "haves" who already own homes to weaponize government to keep supply low and home values high. Zoning restrictions, building codes, taxes, and other government tools are brought to bear to support this. The "have nots" don't have a chance.
Austin seems to be a counter-example when they "instituted an array of policy reforms" in 2015 that showed great results. Sadly the key may be appealing to the greed of existing homeowners. Changing zoning to allow tall apartment buildings where single family dwellings once stood lets existing home owners make even more money by selling than they'd make by continuing to restrict supply. While it's sad if that's the only path to success, we'll have to take small successes where we can find them.
I'd also rethink these questions under the assumption that incomes rise over time as the dollar reduces in purchasing power. The original premise was that due to inflation the cost you paid for a home would reduce your economic burden for housing. The slow and steady rise of inflation along with income would guarantee your loan to income ratio would improve.
The last few years have distorted this promise and I think some people have taken a more extreme view of the time window in the name of increased short-term profits.
All said the price you pay today being less of a burden over time was never meant to be a short-term profit motive in the discussion of homes as a economic safe haven.
From what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would be slightly behind ours. Take a look at "wild children" for the very few examples we can find of modern humans developed without culture. Seems like above everything, our culture, society, and thus education is what makes us smart. And our incredibly high calorie food, of course.
That is exactly what civilization is about - for new generations to start not from scratch, but from some baseline their parents achieved (accumulated knowledge and culture). This allows new generations to push forward instead of retreading the same path.
it's impossible to prove the counterfactual (I guess, as I imagine we don't have enough gene information that far back). But I'd imagine that the high calorie food you can get starting with the advent of agriculture is exactly what could drive evolution in a certain direction that helps brains grow. We've had ~1000 generations since then, that should be enough for some change to happen. Our brains use up 20% of the body's energy. Do we know that this was already the case during the stone age?
The advent of agriculture did not provide better food, it was just the only solution to avoid extinction due to the lack of food.
The archaeological evidence shows that for many generations the first neolithic farmers had serious health problems in comparison with their ancestors. Therefore it is quite certain that they did not transition to agriculture willingly, but to avoid starvation.
Later, when the agriculturalists have displaced everywhere the hunter-gatherers, they did not succeed to do this because they were individually better fed or stronger or smarter, but only because there were much more of them.
The hunter-gatherers required very large territories from which to obtain enough food. For a given territory size, practicing agriculture could sustain a many times greater population, and this was its advantage.
The maximum human brain size had been reached hundreds of thousands years before the development of agriculture, and it regressed a little after that.
There is a theory, which I consider plausible, that the great increase in size of the human brain has been enabled by the fact that humans were able to extract bone marrow from bones, which provided both the high amount of calories and the long-chain fatty acids that are required for a big brain.
I've seen the bone marrow hypothesis also, which is very interesting. Afaik. evidence shows at least that there was enough specialization during neolithic era to have bone marrow cooks where the hunters delivered their bones. Something you wouldn't expect based on just school knowledge (at least back in 90s/2000s).
I see your point about agriculture at first degrading quality of food. Are you aware of evidence of brain size degrading even? Is it visible in the temple bones?
200k years just isn't much time for significant evolutionary changes considering the human population "reset" a couple times to very very small numbers.
Reich's lab actually found evidence of meaningful genetic changes that improved intelligence over the past 10,000 years, but not so much prior to that:
Converted to dollars, the value is far greater than the cost of a single bomb dropped on strangers that aren't a threat to me, so I don't need to justify it until someone can justify to me the bombs, the oil and gas subsidies, the bailouts, the...
My point is I don't want bombs dropped on strangers, so, in terms of things the government spends money on, there's nothing of less value to me that a single bomb on a stranger. Of all things the government spends its money on, I'd rather any one of those things to take 100% of the budget, than even a penny to go to dropping a bomb on a stranger, even if that significantly decreases my quality of life.
I just really don't like my government killing people far away that pose no threat to me.
The EA guys aren't the final word on ethics or a fulfilling life.
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that one might, rather than seeking to always better one's life, instead seek to share the burden others are holding.
Making a bunch of money to turn around and spend on mosquito nets might seem to be making the world better, but on the other hand it also normalizes and enshrines the systems of oppression and injustice that created a world where someone can make 300,000$ a year typing "that didn't work, try again" into claude while someone else watches another family member die of malaria because they couldn't afford meds.
reply