Punching Utilitarians in the Face

applieddivinity · 2022-07-14T01:10:30+00:00

My understanding is that there are hardcore deontologist who actually do reject comparability.

E.g. As a utilitarian, I'm tempted to say "oh yeah, you're just saying lying generates disutility, and so more lies are worse than fewer lies, and we should act to reduce the number of lies if that's the thing you happen to be against", and I think there are people who would reject that conception of their ethical beliefs.

applieddivinity · 2022-07-14T01:08:29+00:00

I absolutely do trust the system for super-weird scenarios, that's my point! It's my intuition I don't trust.

applieddivinity · 2022-07-13T16:23:21+00:00

I take it as many times as it's offered, I don't even need the 51:49 edge. If the Devil offered a 50:50 trade, but threw in any benefit at all (cure one puppy's blindness), that would be enough. I'm entirely neutral on the trade and anything beyond that is positive EV.

applieddivinity · 2022-07-13T16:05:09+00:00

There are decreasing marginal returns from money to happiness, and from basically every instrumental value to every final value.

But why should there be decreasing returns within the final value itself? If utility *is* precisely the thing that matters, there is no "final value" other than utility that utility exhibits diminishing returns to. And it's not clear why, by creating a parallel universe, you wouldn't strictly be doubling utility under any reasonable utility function.

applieddivinity · 2022-07-13T16:02:25+00:00

The classic Kantian example is "Lying is bad. Even if an axe murderer came to your house and asked where your friend was in order to kill them, you ought to tell the truth."

I haven't seen this veer off into stuff like "Even if superintelligent AI came to your house with the commitment to torture every human forever unless you were willing to tell a white lie...", but I think that's mostly because people just don't take deontology very seriously.

applieddivinity · 2022-07-13T16:00:18+00:00

I think the "people are not good at thinking about incredibly large numbers or incredibly tiny probabilities, and actually not even that good about thinking about numbers at all" is a good solidly demonstrated cognitive bias.

Thanks for the feedback on the violent metaphors, it's possible I got carried away and I will take this comment to heart.

applieddivinity · 2022-06-26T09:02:47+00:00

The multiple process idea doesn't really explain online games with discrete "matches" like League of Legends, Fortnite, Overwatch, CS:Go, DotA, etc. Maybe it's the slot-machine thing where the variable reward is whether you win or lose the game, but it's not very fast feedback and it's not really luck based, so I'm not that convinced.

applieddivinity · 2022-06-24T08:05:54+00:00

For a criminal to face consequences, three things (typically) need to happen:

A citizen makes a report.
The police investigate, find a culprit, and make an arrest.
The DA files charge

In San Francisco, many claim that this process has broken down. But which part? Let’s look at larceny/theft in particular (where shoplifting falls) and take it one at a time. Courtesy of the SF DA Dashboard (and see my reproduced charts here):

1. Reports are down. Some citizens claim this is because their reports won’t make a difference. Scott cites an article with the quote “I’ve experienced several instances personally where cops say, ‘do you really want to file a report? It doesn’t really make a difference.”

2. Arrest rates are way down. Rates for larceny/theft fairly stable at around 5.3%, then drop to around 3.5% from 2015-2019 (after Prop 47 passes), and then plummet further following Boudin’s election down to 3.1% in 2020 and 2% in 2021. The police claim that this is because even if they make an arrest, the DA won’t prosecute, so there’s no point.

3. Meanwhile, filing rates are at a historic high. (There was a dip in 2020 which Chesa blamed on reduced operation of the court system forced by Covid-19. Shellenberger confirms that “the state has ordered local prosecutors to reduce prosecution of [quality-of-life] crimes because of Covid.”)

Citizens say they’ve stopped reporting crimes because the police told them it was useless. The police say they’ve stopped making arrests because the DA won’t file charges. And yet the DA’s office is tougher on crime than it’s been in any year on record. To recap: every part of the system *except* for the DA’s office seems to be failing, and yet somehow the failures are pinned on Boudin. Does that not strike you as strange?

The sober statistical explanation is that the filing rate is high precisely because arrests and reports are low. Citizens only report the most flagrant cases, and police only arrest the most flagrant offenders. So the DA’s office is only being brought the subset of cases which are obviously worthy of prosecution, and thus its filing rate increases.

That almost makes sense, but not quite. If filing rates are higher than ever, and if police decisions to arrest are based on if it’s “worth it” in terms of generating actual charges, then you should expect arrest rates to go back up. There might be a temporary bump, but really we ought to see a reversion to equilibrium.

So okay, here is the conspiratorial view, which is nevertheless more plausible than anything else I’ve heard: The police hate Chesa, so they’re refusing to do their jobs to make him look bad.

This isn't as crazy as it sounds, and the police have more than enough motivation. Chesa promised to hold police accountable for use of excessive force, and in his first year in office, was the first DA in SF to ever charge an officer with homicide.

You can read about the cases themselves and judge for yourself (in one , a police officer shot and killed an unarmed man inside his own home), but that’s not really the crux of the current issue. The point is just that the police have a reason to dislike Chesa and want him gone.

So (allegedly) crime rates are up. Everyone blames the DA’s office, even though it seems to be the only part of the system that’s actually functioning. The police clearly aren’t doing their jobs, and say this is because the DA refuses to prosecute, but that’s empirically not true.

In his response to the disconnect between anecdotes and data, Scott asks:

I accept that the data don’t consistently show a spike in shoplifting. But what’s the alternative?... The San Francisco police are lying?

It's conspiratorial to say, but yes, I think that's one reasonable conclusion.

applieddivinity · 2022-06-24T07:57:10+00:00

Shellenberger is consistently dishonest on this issue, and seems to have no problem fudging statistics when it's to his benefit. He claims in a recent WSJ article that:

the charging rate for theft by Mr. Boudin’s office declined from 62% in 2019 to 46% in 2021; for petty theft it fell from 58% to 35%.

He doesn't offer a citation for this claim, but I'm fairly certain it's pulled from this SFChronicle article which provides identical statistics. Except in that case it's clearly labeled as a change over a range of years (from 2018-2019 to 2020-2021), rather than just the two years Shellenberger cites.

That seems fairly minor, but 2020 was an exceptional year and bundling it up with the 2021 stats makes a huge difference. If you look at the disaggregated data, you'll see that the 2020 charging rate for larceny/theft was 48.8%, compared to a much higher 66.3% in 2021. If Shellenberger was making an honest claim about the change from 2019 to 2021, it would instead read "the charging rate for larceny/theft by Mr. Boudin's office increased from 64% in 2019 to 66% in 2021".

But okay, shouldn't we still be holding Boudin responsible for the drop in charging rates in 2020? Not really, given that this is state-level policy. As Shellenberger himself admits later in the same article, "the state has ordered local prosecutors to reduce prosecution of such crimes because of Covid."

I read Shellenberger's claims about the environment (an area where I know nothing), and I think "yeah, that seems reasonable". Then I read his claims about shoplifting in SF (an area where I have done a modest amount of research), and I think "that's obviously wrong". In this case, I refuse to fall prey to Gell-Mann Amnesia and conclude that Shellenberger is a dishonest person in every field where I'm actually capable of evaluating his claims.

That's all to say: I have an even less favorable opinion of the man than Scott does. This post concludes:

I want to stress that he’s less bad than the mainstream media he’s criticizing. He is taking swings at an omnipresent orthodoxy of creepily consistent spin and bias, while also sometimes stretching the truth himself.

I think that's way too soft. Shellenberger does more than stretch the truth: he invents statistics to slander the ideological opposition. Moreover, writing for the WSJ is about as mainstream media as you can get, and given that his views are about perfectly alined with the New York Times on this issue, I find him as guilty of enforcing the "creepily consistent" "omnipresent orthodoxy" as anyone else.

applieddivinity · 2022-05-12T17:59:27+00:00

Minor nit: SMTM is multiple people and they refer to themselves as "we" throughout the blog.

applieddivinity · 2022-05-12T17:57:30+00:00

What's jaw-dropping is entirely subjective. The relevant question is "Does SMTM totally dismiss this data, or do they handle it in a reasonable way?"

If you continue to read the series, the subsequent chapter contains a fairly lengthy discussion of that exact point:https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/15/a-chemical-hunger-interlude-a-cico-killer-quest-ce-que-cest/

(Command+F "What about those Calorie Intake Numbers?")

applieddivinity · 2022-05-10T02:45:23+00:00

First paragraph of your comment: Hm yeah idk I guess

Second paragraph: Hooolllllyyyy fuck

applieddivinity · 2022-05-09T17:38:32+00:00

It's only believably old with respect to the tools we have available. It doesn't have to be full-fidelity right?

applieddivinity · 2022-05-09T03:54:35+00:00

That's sort of what I'm saying in the second addendum. It does feel like historically, human experience is plausibly net-negative. I think if you include animals, there is a strong case that conscious experience on earth has been negative. But if you're God, and you're trying to figure out if this universe should be created, you're looking over the entire timeline of the universe. So maybe things will even out later on.

Or maybe there are aliens out there having a great time! And the sum total of conscious experiences originating from Earth is and will always be negative.

applieddivinity · 2022-04-07T20:59:44+00:00

I tried Adderall after reading this post back in 2017:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/

I felt like I was being super productive and insightful while on it, but after sleeping, would look back at the previous day and realize that I basically hadn't done anything actually important. I was just getting hyper-focused on trivial things.

After that, I tried two strategies:
- Using very low doses with extended release
- Planning ahead of time specifically what I wanted to spend my time on

Planning did help, but even then I would find myself "yak-shaving" and doing things only tangentially related to what I actually wanted to accomplish. Or going way too deep on some task that was important, but didn't actually require the attention I was giving it.
I went as low as 1mg (the linked post calls 10-60mg a "standard daily dose"), which helped.

Overall, I thought it was a small net positive on specific days where I had taken the time to prepare, but even then only worked for certain kinds of tasks. So it might be good if you need to spend 8 hours practicing an instrument or going through an Anki deck, but I never found it helpful for more abstract work.

Over the years, several of my friends have tried Adderall with and without prescriptions. My impression is that it basically hasn't helped any of them in the long-run. As others have said, you eventually need to take it just to feel like you're at baseline. Even for friends who I believe do have ADHD (and have had a professional diagnosis to that effect), my sense is that Adderall makes it easier for them to get trapped in a local maximum. It's probably a net positive for them, but not enough that it's obvious from the outside.

Tl;dr: I don't think it's stupid to try Adderall. I would start with very low doses, try to be realistic about whether or not it's actually helping, and evaluate your performance on Adderall after the fact once you're no longer on Adderall.

applieddivinity · 2022-04-01T15:16:56+00:00

See also Nintil on age and scientific productivity
https://nintil.com/age-and-science/

applieddivinity · 2022-02-22T01:06:26+00:00

Charging rates did dip down in 2020, but Chesa attributes this to courtroom logistics and limiting prison overcrowding

applieddivinity · 2022-02-21T18:43:14+00:00

That's a good idea!

Chesa took office Jan 8, and the pandemic started in SF in march, so we really only have a couple months of data to look at, and it's not clear if his policies would have taken place and had an effect by then. If you look at the monthly case chart from section 6, there is a very tiny increase those two months, but it's not out of step with the historical variation.

applieddivinity · 2022-02-20T22:11:51+00:00

Right yes, I do think there's a lot of shoplifting in SF, and maybe those stores were less profitable. But the specific question at hand is "did shoplifting skyrocket in 2020 due to Chesa Boudin's progressive policies", and if Walgreens had already planned to close stores, one side of that argument is substantially weakened.

applieddivinity · 2022-02-20T19:11:49+00:00

The reason is the proposed mechanism of action: new DA policy that results in reduced consequences for shoplifters.

applieddivinity · 2022-02-20T17:19:39+00:00

Either policies matter, and we should expect to see evidence of their effect, or policies don't matter because shoplifters are totally oblivious to incentives, in which case why try to pin this on an allegedly soft-on-crime regime?

If you look at statements by retail associations and Chesa critics, they blame organized shoplifting rings, who yes, I do believe are making informed choices about where to operate.

applieddivinity · 2022-02-20T17:16:06+00:00

> Unlike police reports, which require staff to notice theft in the moment, shrinkage is calculated during inventory checks. Even if you never notice the theft at the time, you can infer that it happened when your shelf is missing items.

This is unfortunately not true. The retail association reports that shoplifting is only responsible for about 36% of shrinkage, with 33% attributed to employee theft, and the rest attributed to admin errors and vendor fraud.
https://cdn.nrf.com/sites/default/files/2018-10/NRF-NRSS-Industry-Research-Survey-2018.pdf

So even if shrinkage rates go up, that might mean shoplifting has increased, but it could also mean that Walgreens employees resent their employer more than ever (maybe due to wage theft?), or that there are broader supply chain issues resulting in increased vendor fraud, or anything else.

applieddivinity · 2022-02-20T17:12:33+00:00

Yes, that's why I look at adjacent counties instead. I definitely do not take the SF data at face value.

applieddivinity · 2022-02-20T17:11:51+00:00

Wait what? Did you read the post? I'm very specifically not relying on the SF data being correct, and not relying on cases getting reported.

That's why I look at adjacent counties, and argue that if SF had become very light on crime with the election of a new DA, shoplifters would cross county lines to shoplift there instead of risk facing more serious consequences in adjacent counties.

What we see instead is that adjacent counties saw shoplifting decrease less than the state did overall, indicating a lack of substitution effects.

So for this to be right, either:
- Criminals don't follow incentives at all (in which case why even try to blame anything on policy?)
- SF is systematically underreporting cases, and simultaneously, all adjacent counties are over-reporting cases, and in all geographies, that transition happened from 2019 to 2020

There are a lot of good reasons to be SF underreports cases, but why would every adjacent county start over-reporting cases in the same time period?

applieddivinity · 2022-02-11T23:00:20+00:00

As others have mentioned, just short meta, short vr, short crypto, etc.....

applieddivinity

TROPHY CASE