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Lumifer comments on Stupid Questions February 2015 - Less Wrong
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Comments (198)
Citation needed. There's going to be a problem with that, since there are no market prices for organs at the moment.
Actually, there are some exceptions. Women, for example, can effectively sell their eggs. And it seems there is a market where sellers don't look to be "starving at the moment".
Citation still needed. The high-end prostitute prices are sky-high, say $5,000 / session. Times 28 is $140,000 -- what were you saying about most people?
If this is true, then what I said would not apply to the selling of eggs.
I agree that those particular prostitutes would meet the requirement--they make so much money that most people would be willing to prostitute themselves for some multiple of that amount which is not too high (compared to similar multiples for janitors). So I won't have a problem with letting them operate.
But that would not extend to prostitutes in general. (I might decide that most prostitution is bad but allow it for practical reasons, but that's different.)
This is not Wikipedia. If you really believe that average people would not behave this way, say so. If not, asking for a citation is just filibustering.
You are making naked assertions and I'm asking for data, evidence that supports your claims.
It is only appropriate to ask for data for an assertion if you think the assertion has a significant chance of being false.
Sure. Your assertion was:
I think that assertion has a significant chance of being false.
Most arguments are meant to convince bystanders. I don't believe that bystanders will think that assertion has a significant chance of being false. If you disagree, then fine; we have different opinions on organ selling based on irreconcilable differences in opinion about how human beings behave.
You know, I'm not one to throw the word "privilege" around, but I'll make an exception here. This is a profoundly privileged perspective. You're taking the stigma attached to prostitution and using that to decree, without personal experience or any hard data that you've deigned to produce, that it couldn't possibly be a rational decision for anyone at any reasonable price.
These people aren't stupid. A few of them might be desperate -- though fewer, I imagine, than you're giving them credit for -- but I'd expect that to give them a keen appreciation of their options. Are you really prepared to say that they don't know their own needs?
(By the way, I lived near the Nevada state line when I was in high school, and locker-room word of mouth at the time placed an hour at one of the so-called "bunny ranches" across the border at about $200. Accounting for inflation, let's call it $300 now. 28 times that is $8400 -- enough to tempt me as I am, and definitely enough that it would tempt me if I wasn't already working a high-paying job. No starvation needed.)
In addition: sugar babies/daddies are very popular, looks like.
If by "stigmatize selling X" you mean "refusing to sell X except for a price that is very high compared to what it gets on the market", then of course--you're just restating what I'm saying.
If you mean something else, please clarify.
I already agreed that there are high priced prostitutes who are making rational decisions, although I would not apply this to typical prostitutes.
1) Do the prostitutes actually get $200 take home pay, not just $200 receipts (some of which has to go to overhead and paying the pimp)?
2) The question about most people is really about most people somewhat like them. In particular, is your gender the same as the prostitutes'?
3) Even if the answers to the first two questions don't make it moot, are you a typical person in this regard?
I said "social stigma", and I meant "social stigma": the attitudes that make other people think less of you, on average, for taking X as a job than Y. My presumption is that that you're basing your extremely low estimate of the job's attractiveness on that stigma (there's really nothing else to explain orders-of-magnitude levels of aversion); I, on the other hand, would expect it to have been priced into the market already, along with a number of other externalities like health and legal risk, and that the people considering the job are competent to evaluate it (which is really just another way of saying the same thing). These are the same factors that make unskilled labor in a steel mill command more money than unskilled labor in data entry, and sex isn't magic.
(Bans can distort markets in unpredictable ways, but that's why I used Nevada as an example.)
But that wasn't even the important part of my post. The important part is that they are not you, neither in personality nor circumstances, and even if you believe that most people would find their career choice very aversive, it's presumptuous in the extreme to declare it illegitimate (for example by assuming it must be the product of coercion) on that basis. And on that note...
...this is almost exactly the wrong question to be asking. Comparative advantage is a thing! If one person is willing and able to produce more value for money in a given role than another, that means nothing more or less than that they're better suited to that role, at least in economic terms. There is absolutely no reason that a given job has to be attractive to a "typical" person. Mine isn't.
You really think it's appropriate to object to somebody calling out your unsupported claims as unsupported when they are A) obviously disagreeing with you, to the point where there's absolutely no need to explicitly state it, and B) providing evidence in support of their own claims, with both reasonable arguments and supporting links? In that case, what would it take to convince you?
(Emphasis mine) Should I take it that this is then something you can't actually be convinced of by anything short of incontrovertible proof to the contrary?
Data set of one, but I find Lumifer's arguments far more convincing than yours. This is largely based on the fact that they are actually backed up by something more than the assumption that everybody begins with your personal model of how people make decisions.
A disagreement about priors is not nontrivially "can't be convinced by anything short of incontrovertible proof".
I'm in favor of legal prostitution and am not denying your claim generally, but the idea most people (or frankly any more than let's say doubleish the current real world rate of people) being willing to prostitute themselves for six figures does not agree with my intuition at all.
Do you have a source in mind or do we just have different intuitions?
Look beyond your own social circle.
Look e.g. at the numbers for the so-called sugar daddies/sugar babies sites. (here or here, etc.)
Oh I did, the figures for any social circle in which I am has a rate of 0% .
I may be misinterpreting, but wouldn't that fall within the "current real world rate" of prostitution I mentioned?
But I guess as to the question asked, of a data source for the prostitution rate change at six figure rates, that might be a hard (albeit perhaps quite fun for researchers) study to run, so I'll just take that add a no.
Again, total tangent. I agree with your base claim.