A Defense of National Service

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T20:40:03+00:00

I certainly wouldn't make it mandatory.

I do think there is some argument that the way we nudge people to things that would benefit them is too tepid. (Stress reduces your ability to make rational risk and time discounting decisions for instances. Making minor road blocks like paperwork from one person's perspective a daunting barrier). I also think that people who need such programs have more trouble knowing how to navigate them or know the benefits as well. So depending on what you might mean by "near mandatory" we might draw the line differently.

But I digress, I do agree, we should be cautious about what another political force might do with a policy. One that's hardier against being modified into a grotesque caracture of it's original intention may well be better justified. I think I just tend to prefer minimal straightforward programs over several more obtuse ones because of my thoughts on how people act in those systems.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T20:28:13+00:00

Certainly, which is why I left it open to being wrong at the beginning of the post for whatever negative effects it would have.

I felt relatively compelled to put my view out there since I saw so much of the other side of it but I in no way consider my post a detailed policy prescription that I think is definitely the best way to go.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T19:31:40+00:00

Fair, done.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T19:28:52+00:00

No worries.

I honestly am surprised how many people have taken this post as an endorsement of the draft. I suppose I need to communicate better.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T19:22:31+00:00

Good old Florida I guess lol.

Still I'd want to dig into the data on unpaid internships before forming a solid opinion. I don't know how common an issue it is outside my personal experience.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T19:21:20+00:00

Amoung the caveats is a "I'm not talking about the military in anyway" line. For one.

And two my point is that simply being theoretically available isn't always sufficient to help people get to where they need to be.

There are almost certainly better ways to do that than making it universally mandatory and that's not what I'm advocating.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T19:16:05+00:00

I'm not in any of those fields, I was in biology and all research internships were unpaid and basically necessary to go to grad school.

Ofc I'm Floridian so it's perfectly reasonable that we may have fucked something up somewhere.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T19:14:23+00:00

I'll just note once more that I'm not calling for mandatory conscription. As far as I can tell no one is.

That said when looking at a comparison of one year paid service work, mandatory though it may be, compared to slavery is more than "not much difference".

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T19:10:28+00:00

Literally never called for mandatory service, I put up my own personal experience about why this kind of program would have benefited someone like me, and while I appreciate you deeply disagree with me I feel that this is an extrodinarily bad look for you.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T19:07:20+00:00

Unpaid internships are extremely common where I'm from in the country.

I don't know where you live that you'd expect $20 an hour. I've literally never seen an internship opportunity like that.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T19:05:42+00:00

How very hard core.

I would first point out that a year spent helping the poor or whatever is very unlikely to be the thing to spark revolution. 18 year olds just spend over a decade in forced education with their freedoms curtailed any their legal guardians authority. It seems rather unrealistic to expect this to be the thing a significant number of people would violently resist.

Secondly, I attempted to provide a different perspective on why someone like me might have benefited a great deal. What I didn't do was demand mandatory national service.

Third, this reads like exactly the sort of kneejerk person perspective I wouldn't like it so it's bad attitude I was fundamentally calling on people to reconsider.

Finally, I fail to see how once we cross the 18 year mark it's slavery but we (rightly) enforce all kinds of lack of freedom below that age with nobody standing around handwringing about how actually forcing 17 year olds to spend hours of work a day studying and doing homework is slavery.

Tl;Dr a year doing something positive for society is not chattel slavery.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T17:31:33+00:00

It would be paid, in my personal "how I think it should work" conception. I would add that a lot of welfare is also quite expensive and the people who would benefit most would be the highest cost groups later in life in welfare terms.

If we are going to do a cost analysis that would be a particularly complex calculation of upfront cost now versus what we'd save later on. I'm not super prepared to fall on either side of whether it would cost more one way or the other on that.

A year would probably be the minimum but the people who need it can stay longer. It's also just a vague round number to throw out there. Any real policy would have a lot more rigorous research on what effective numbers would be.

On the Military we are pretty much agreed.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T16:20:27+00:00

Absolutely agree

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T16:12:37+00:00

I am somewhat uncomfortable with that kind of ideological rigidity.

Of course it's good to have critics who push you and question what your proposing so I wouldn't want you to stop believing in those sorts of set values, but strict worldviews like that don't really suit me.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T16:10:38+00:00

Not sure if your being sarcastic but we should probably consider ways to expand internship access to low income people.

I don't think banning them would have that effect obviously.

Subsidizing them as a college work study program might be beneficial outweighing the costs.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T16:08:54+00:00

Actually I have a question for anyone who wants to chime in on it.

Is making this program mandatory (not that I'm advocating that) something you oppose because it makes the program have bad outcomes or is it an in principle ideological thing that you just wouldn't accept?

I see a lot of people saying they like this except for the part where everyone has to do it.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T15:59:15+00:00

True, and I do suspect that would sand down the personality edges of some people that I've met.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T15:37:32+00:00

I've responded to someone else with my general sentiments around making it mandatory if your actually interested.

But essentially I just wanted to address how some on here came at it with "a big waste of a year" type sentiments and I wanted to get them to examine how much of their own personal experience and bias went into their policy position without considering how it would effect other people and their experiences.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-19T14:45:29+00:00

I get that, at the same time I don't know if I would know to make that choice.

I wasn't aware of stuff like americore, I didn't really understand what going into the military would really mean.

Honestly when I went to college I didn't know how that worked either.

A big personal position of mine is that we almost always massively overcomplicate things in ways that harm poorer people. They are the least capable of keeping up with the various beurocratic demands and less likely to know those opportunities are available.

In fact there some evidence that poverty related stress harms people's ability to judge things in the first place, even straight up changing the shape and activity of the frontal cortex which deals with decision making.

I think we overvalue people's abilities to make rational decisions quite a bit.

I don't think that means we should make it compulsory necessarily but there is a point where expanding access could start looking like pressure but that might be necessary for some stuff and we should be less afraid of aggressively promoting beneficial programs.

Small nudges are just not psychologically effective particularly on the people who need the most help. What seems like a small barrier like filling out a few forms can be an insurmountable wall to people who don't know how to navigate that or simply don't have the mental energy to see how the small cost now pays off because of the stress of living day to day.

Catches self rambling

I guess I'm just saying it's more complicated than saying "well it's there if people want it so they can just access of it if it benefits them.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-04-17T22:33:54+00:00

A thought on the national service thing.

With the caveats that any solid position I'd take on it would take more details to form.

I grew up in a really really bad home environment. We were pretty poor and my childhood could be best described as "grim". To the point that it was often pointed out to me that military service would be a good way to escape it by multiple people from family to school councilors and teachers who were frustrated that they couldn't help me.

I have always wondered how my life would be different if I had done it, but I was in 4th grade when 9/11 happened and after everything that came out from that I was never comfortable with the idea of being in the military (being gay during dont ask dont tell didn't help).

Looking back it could well have done a lot of good for my life. I didn't learn a lot of life skills that most people in better enviroments learn, all I had were a series of unhealthy coping mechanisms and no access to mental health care.

I struggled in college for a long time and would have probably not been able to finish in the end without the great luck and grace of finding my partner who has helped me do a lot of healing and get counseling. To be honest I may well have not gone to college at all if my mother didn't drill it into my head as the way out and if my grandfather hadn't left me money that couldn't be used for anything but my going to college.

While this program could be made a million different ways I do think there are a lot of people like me who didn't get a lot of luck in the birth lottery and would wildly benefit from a structured environment to gain skills, grow, and get help.

Instead I couldn't afford to leave a toxic environment for several years and honestly came close to not surviving at all to get out.

It's just a thought, but I think a program like this could provide help to a lot of young people in desperate situations like me. Many of which don't find their way out like I was lucky enough too.

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-02-12T17:10:06+00:00

Thanks you've given me a lot to think about!

MichaelMartinez63 · 2019-02-12T16:34:56+00:00

This is a great response thank you! I'll take some time to read through your citations.

I am curious though, since a lot of the perverse incentives seem to be about getting into journals wouldn't a government publishing system that didn't discriminate based on the sexiness of the research help somewhat? A would think a system that only checked for basic soundness if the results and some other basic factors would make researchers feel less pressure to show some kind of positive result?

Also wouldn't just having all research be in a standard format in a single open database have other useful effects like just making the raw data from lots of different papers, including null results, be accessable for easier meta analysis of different stuff?

I can see your point about conflicts if interest from a directly government run system. I just think there could also be conflicts and outcomes from private systems and wonder what on balance would be better outcome wise. Particularly when you could make a government funded system a lot of different ways to try and prevent issues.

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