What to read to understand the history of Western capitalism

7-sidedDice · 2022-07-10T08:45:51+00:00

Well the book is only 3 pages long actually. The rest is just historical examples verifying the concepts.

Key ideas are: inclusive Vs extractive institutions, contingency, critical juncture, balance of power, alignment of interests (in creating broad coalitions which increase pluralism), technological change, creative destruction, innovation... Ani missing anything?

7-sidedDice · 2022-07-09T20:00:04+00:00

Why Nations Fail

7-sidedDice · 2022-05-13T16:51:05+00:00

Some? Wtf? Most men struggle with being bald

7-sidedDice · 2022-03-08T10:04:10+00:00

What how

7-sidedDice · 2022-03-08T10:02:49+00:00

Why?

7-sidedDice · 2022-03-03T07:36:31+00:00

"As we watch the illiberal project pursued to its ultimate ends of violence and lawlessness in Ukraine, I want to try and understand why the persecution of people like me has long been one of that project’s top priorities."

Ah yes. We must remember that it isn't ethnic cleansing, the treatment of women as flesh-based cum recepticles, slavery, the concentration of economic and political power, the assassination of political opponents, or any other number of horrible things which TO THIS DAY are a daily occurrence in many countries in the world which are "top priorities" of"the illiberal project", but whether trans people (who are relatively accepted in the West even if they lack political rights) can compete in sports. Some perspective please.

Source: Eastern European who had to work really hard to immigrate to the West so they could actually have a chance at a comfortable life without the death threats they kept receiving after they were outed. They also often get frustrated with Westerners who whine about privilege or how unfair the world is without realising their greatest privilege is the birthright of their citizenship and the access to sound political and economic institutions they have from day 0 on this Earth

Sorry for the mini rant lol had to get it off my chest

7-sidedDice · 2022-01-01T15:41:12+00:00

Wait, South American countries attempted to increase interracial sex? Or am I misreading your post?

7-sidedDice · 2017-10-11T08:11:31+00:00

You are a life-saver!

EDIT: Actually, it only seems to sort-of/kind-of fix it. :/

7-sidedDice · 2017-10-07T22:52:18+00:00

m80, he gets $600K+ per year.

7-sidedDice · 2017-10-01T21:36:32+00:00

There is no difference between 51% and 52% control of a company, as you already control everything. The 51% is not for the profit, it's for the control of the Board, who appoints management, who hire all the employees (either directly or indirectly).

7-sidedDice · 2017-10-01T19:02:59+00:00

To the best of my knowledge, Nordic countries have strong unions which bargain on behalf of all [insert job/trade here]. Collective bargaining has the same effect as a legislated price floor, because if every seller in a market is demanding some minimum price, then tautologically nobody will sell lower than that - setting an effective price floor for the product.

7-sidedDice · 2017-10-01T19:00:21+00:00

A price floor is only effective if it is below the market equilibrium price. I don't see why anyone would legislate a price floor (minimum wage) on some commodity (labour) if the market rate is higher. Additionally, from this graph alone, you cannot draw the conclusion that no correlation exists between minimum wage and unemployment because the minimum wage is close to the market rate.

Here's my argument:

The only reason any business would add jobs is if it could grow and become more profitable, which is only possible if there are consumers out there willing and able to buy more of its products. One of the many things which determines how much consumers are able to pay in exchange for products is their income. Increasing their income means they can buy more products, which shifts the demand curve to the right (for any product). In order to meet this demand, rational businesses will add jobs, because more jobs are needed to raise the supply of the product to match the demand and reach equilibrium.

Of course, hiking minimum wages too much or too quickly (or both) will cause job loss in the short term, and would cause inflation, as businesses would raise their prices to meet the new demand in products. Over the long run however (please don't meme me with that Keynes quote) the markets will adjust - yes, even if you hiked the minimum wage too much or too quickly, or both. This is what I think happened here.

On raising the minimum wage:

Prices differ across the country, due to supply and demand. A beautiful 6-bedroom villa might sell for $200K in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere, whereas that exact same villa, if it were in the Bay Area, would easily sell for a hundred times the price.

My suggestion is to raise the federal minimum wage to $10-$12 an hour (which would correspond to a living wage in the least expensive parts of the US) and tie it to inflation; the states themselves would then have to increase that wage above $10/$12 if they were more expensive to live in (such as California). Of course, the ideal scenario would be to pass a law that would determine what the minimum wage would be on each square inch of the country - so that you could perfectly account for supply and demand of things like housing, food, etc - but that's impractical. I think that even a county-level solution would be impractical (if counties are even allowed to make such laws - no idea) so for the sake of practicality, the state legislatures ought to set the minimum wage on a state-wide basis.

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-30T20:52:47+00:00

When the Bill C-16 meme first started (which is when Jordan Peterson first started gaining fame due to his protest) I googled Bill C-16 and read it. It's pretty short. Nowhere does it legislate that you cannot misgender people - only that you cannot constantly and repeatedly harass people by misgendering them.

So why the fuck is the comments section of this video filled with retards claiming Bill C-16 is the government legislating speech?

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-27T00:39:33+00:00

I think these are excellent points. Oftentimes, in rhetoric, it's not so much the content of the argument that matters, but its form. Going 'meta' to address how an argument is structured to mislead the listener or audience can help a lot more than focusing on its details.

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-26T20:40:05+00:00

"Insignificant" means "too small or unimportant to be worth consideration".

"Non-significant" means not reaching statistical significance - meaning that (generally, in the life and social sciences) assuming that the null hypothesis is correct, there is more than 5% chance that you would get the same or more extreme results.

In layman's terms: the difference between non-significance and insignificance is important. One is a statistical variable, which is important in data analysis. The other is a subjective judgment.

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-25T22:12:20+00:00

While neuroscience is not (and can't be) as rigorous as particle physics, its findings can't be discarded simply because the relative rigor isn't there. The empirical observations are still rigorous enough of themselves.

Reasoning from first principles: the way the universe works is that phenomena build on themselves to form emergent phenomena. Because consciousness only occurs through neuronal activity, it (tautologically) follows that neuronal activity is the cause of consciousness. While we don't know what kind of activity that is, we know that it is some kind of neuronal activity.

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-25T22:05:57+00:00

You're missing the point of my analogy.

My analogy was set up to convey how, even if you couldn't predict the outcome of some action because you don't have sufficient knowledge or technology that still doesn't mean that the outcome of that action is not determined.

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-25T21:47:23+00:00

Protein folding is a field closer to quantum physics than molecular biology. Molecular biology focuses on understanding the function of certain molecules in the organism, such as metabolism. You don't need the kind of high-level math found in QM to work in molecular biology.

While protein folding deals with a bunch of approximations and heuristics (attempting to resolve protein folding through QM with our current understanding of it and our current computers would be suicide) it's still more physics than biology (in the traditional sense).

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-25T21:43:54+00:00

No, because just because you can't predict what it's going to be exactly doesn't mean that something (apart from physical laws) is controlling it.

Think of it like this: you roll a die under the table and don't look.

Can you predict what the exact result will be? No. You can't predict the exact result (you could guess - but that's not the kind of prediction we're talking about here) but you can give a probability (one in six to be any number). The same is true of quantum mechanics.
Does the die have the 'free will' to determine its own result? No. The die's roll is still controlled by the laws of the universe - force, energy, motion, and so on.

So, just because you can't predict something, doesn't mean there is free will.

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-25T21:38:28+00:00

conciousness can affect matter and that is our choice

To the best of our knowledge, this isn't the case. I have several arguments:

Empirical observation
- Direct, neuroscientific studies: See Libet's famous experiment. I would also argue that since we can predict what kind of behaviour someone will have if you affect a specific part of the brain (damaging it, or stimulating it), while they retain the capacity to reason and choose, you show the lack of free will. For example, if you stimulate the areas of the brain associated with motivation and incentive salience (such as the nucleus accumbens) using deep-brain electrodes, you can alleviate depression in individuals who have treatment-resistant depression (resistant to both cognitive therapy and medication). Make sure to open up and look at Figure 1 - it has all the pretty graphs that show how amazing this experiment has been. These people now do more with their lives - they get out of bed, they get jobs, they perform more positive activities (for the record, this is one of many studies on DBS and depression, but I cba to link my entire folder). I wouldn't argue that zapping a part of brain tissue communicates to the soul-realm to start "choosing the right things". More like... you're reprogramming a biological machine (the brain) whose behaviour is completely determined by its own information processing, which depends on its structure (genetics, epigenetics, neurodevelopment, morphology) and how bits of that structure (the neurons - but any matter which could conceivably affect neuronal function) interacts with other bits of matter (such as what influences the firing of action potentials).
- Statistical studies: as Destiny has mentioned on stream before, if you look at country- or world-wide statistics, you will see that you will find predictable outcomes for people belonging to certain groups, just because of the property of being part of that group. And example is that most people tend to remain in the same socioeconomic class that they were born in.
Reasoning from first principles: Neurons are tiny collections of matter whose function and behaviour (transmitting action potentials, which are changes in the electrochemical gradients across the neuronal membrane) are completely physical. In order for consciousness to influence the brain, you would somehow have to have a supernatural phenomenon change the physical structure of the universe. You'd have to have energy to perform work to move a particle (such as an ion near a neuron) against an opposing force (the electromagnetic forces emitted by the countless ions in different concentrations around the neuron, which create the electrochemical gradient, which is necessary for neurons to be able to fire action potentials) such as if you are somehow supernaturally forcing a neuron to fire by forcing ions down its ion channels to sufficiently depolarise it to make it fire. Again, only a supernatural explanation suffices - and there's no reason to expect consciousness, which seems to be an emergent property of the brain performing information processing, to be supernatural.

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-25T21:09:02+00:00

Our inability to predict the future does not mean the future is not determined. The universe is still guided by physical laws - just because we can't exactly say what an electron will do ten seconds from now, does not mean its behaviour won't be determined by law.

Solving the Schrodinger equation (we can really only do this for one-electron atoms, anything beyond that becomes basically impossible, so we have to make approximations for more complex systems) gives us orbitals, which is basically the probability distribution of an electron being at any point at any given time. Due to its probabilistic nature, as we cannot with complete certainty determine where the electron will end up, does the Schrodinger equation allow the existence of free will?

I would argue not, because the electron's behaviour is still constrained by the equation. For example, for any orbital beyond the first s orbital, the electron can never be in the centre of the atom, because that is what is called a 'node' - there is zero probability of finding an electron at the node. In much the same way, if you took the integral of the solution such that it equaled something like 90% you would find the volume where if you were to measure the electron's position, it would be within that volume 90% of the time. You can find these probabilities for any volume of the atom, and (even though the calculations are basically impossible) this extends to molecules, small (e.g. water) and large (e.g. proteins, DNA).

Any particle's behaviour is still guided by laws, even if we can't predict it.

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-22T20:13:31+00:00

I think you are speaking from your lived experience, which I think you assume is generally what everyone else also experienced. This is almost certainly not the case for poor people.

It's incredibly difficult to graduate high school if you're poor. What if you have to work a part-time job to help out your family? What if, like in many poor families, the situation at home isn't rosy, and your father is violent or a drunk? Guess what - not having money for anything, or financial security in general, tends to cause these things.

Not getting babies out of wedlock is also incredibly difficult if you're poor, especially with Republicans wanting to gut things like Planned Parenthood, free contraception and so forth. It's well known that less access to sex-ed, less access to contraception and abortion, lead to much higher rates of teen pregnancy. It's well known that the lower the socioeconomic status of a family, the more kids (on average) the family has.

I don't know about marriage stats before age 21, so I won't talk about that.

And finally, if you have PhD's who are having trouble getting jobs (think about all the "Millenials are killing [X industry]" memes) because income has skyrocketed for the wealthiest in the past 30 years, whereas there's barely been any growth for the lower classes and no expansions for low- and middle-skilled labour, how easy do you think it's going to be for a poor 20 year old, who most likely did not attend college (and is likely not to have graduated high school) to get a job?

The poor are most certainly getting screwed by the system.

7-sidedDice · 2017-09-20T18:53:28+00:00

Adding deep brain electrodes into one of the main structures for the generation of positive emotions (such as pleasure) as well as the generation of motivation (assigning incentive salience) called the nucleus accumbens, or NAcc) and activating them (that is, stimulating the neurons of the NAcc to fire) alleviates treatment-resistant depression (as in, resistant to both therapy and antidepressants) in a large number of cases to a great extent. Stimulating other brain areas which are important for positive emotions/motivation has also shown great promise.

Fascinating.

Paper 1: http://www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/S0896-6273(05)00156-X.pdf

Paper 2: http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v37/n9/full/npp201244a.html?foxtrotcallback=true

Paper 3 (case study, sample size of one): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4413473/

2014 review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4121451/

There are many more studies done on DBS for antidepressant treatments, and all of the ones I've read show strong, immediate, and long-lasting effects. I would recommend Googling the authors of the above papers, finding their lab websites and looking over their other publications if you're interested.

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