Why doesn't the U.S. government hire more tax auditors? If every hired auditor can either uncover or deter (threat of chance of audit) tax evasion, it would pay for itself, create jobs, increase revenue, punish those who cheat. Estimated cost of tax evasion per year to the Federal gov is 450B.
Incompetent government tropes include agencies that hire too many people and becoming inappropriate profit centers. It would seem that the IRS should have at the very least been accidentally competent in this regard.
Is there an effective way for a layman to get serious feedback on scientific theories?
I have a weird theory about physics. I know that my theory will most likely be wrong, but I expect that some of its ideas could be useful and it will be an interesting learning experience even in the worst case. Due to the prevalence of crackpots on the internet, nobody will spare it a glance on physics forums because it is assumed out of hand that I am one of the crazy people (to be fair, the theory does sound pretty unusual).
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists provides payed serious feedback as a service.
How do you deal with embarrassment of having to learn as an adult things that most people learn in their childhood? I'm talking about things that you can't learn alone in private, such as swimming, riding a bicycle and things like that.
So have you actually learned anything
Yes, though mostly indirectly. I've learned mostly from reading about neoreactionaries elsewhere. SSC, Moldbug, etc. I'm learning a lot. Very interesting. This discussion was the catalyst for my reading. So, thanks!
from these discussions
Yes, I've learned some directly from this discussion.
Mostly I've learned that people will get internet-hostile about certain topics. I was already aware of this, but my interaction in this discussion has re-cemented the fact in my mind. I've received a recent -37 karma lashing (t...
Is there a specific bias for thinking that everyone possesses the same knowledge as you? For example, after learning more about a certain subject, I have a tendency to think, "Oh, but everyone already knows this, don't they" even though they probably don't and I wouldn't have assumed that before learning about it myself.
I've been thinking about what seems to be the standard LW pitch on AI risk. It goes like this: "Consider an AI that is given a goal by humans. Since 'convert the planet into computronium' is a subgoal of most goals, it does this and kills humanity."
The problem, which various people have pointed out, is that this implies an intelligence capable of taking over the world, but not capable of working out that when a human says pursue a certain goal, they would not want this goal to be pursued in a way that leads to the destruction of the world.
Worse, ...
As Bastian Stern has pointed out to me, people often mix up pro tanto-considerations with all-things-considered-judgements - usually by interpreting what is merely intended to be a pro tanto-consideration as an all-things-considered judgement. Is there a name for this fallacy? It seems both dangerous and common so should have a name.
low IQ
How does low IQ directly cause crime?
properly police black neighborhoods
What does this entail?
A silly question. What kind of algebra deals with functions where the input and output are distributions? (Of a discrete variable.)
I'm looking for an SSC post.
Scott talks about how a friend says he always seems to know what's what, and Scott says "Not, really; I'm the first to admit my error bars are wide and that my theories are speculative, often no better than hand-waving."
They go back and forth, with Scott giving precise reasons why he's not always right, and then he says "...I'm doing it right now, aren't I?"
Something like that. Can anybody point me to it?
Not new, possibly not interesting to anyone beside me. A 2013 astrobiology paper that explores an odd corner of the Fermi Paradox. The paper explores the bizarre perspective that Earth life was seeded by extraterrestrial life (directed panspermia) as a form of information backup. Our biosphere's junk DNA, in this scenario, stores information valuable to the extraterrestrial system.
Our biosphere's junk DNA
Junk DNA generally doesn't survive that long in evolutionary timescales because there's nothing that prevents mutations. It seems a bad information storage system.
The reason for the higher crime rates isn't directly relevant to the discussion of police "racial bias".
It's not? How do you know?
Police bias seems likes it could be directly related to crime rates (since it's the cops who do the arresting).
How did this "racial bias" manifest itself? Them acting like they believed blacks were more likely to be criminals than whites.
Judgements based only on race.
Or even willingness to shoot a black who was running at him and grabing for his gun?
I'm not arguing every white cop who shoots a bl...
In particular did you know about the different rates of murder commited by blacks and whites before posting the OC?
I don't think I knew that particular stat was an empirical fact, though I wasn't surprised by it. My view, generally, was that blacks in America earned less, had higher incarceration rates, etc. The causes interest me.
Do you have any evidence for this belief? If so, why haven't you presented it anywhere in this thread?
I believe all three of my points are basically non-controversial, specifically #2 and #3. #1 is true in at least some c...
Interesting rhetorical sparring point taking place in the U.S. election that relates to rationality here at LW.
In the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton referenced bias when discussing the recent spate of police shootings of African Americans. Clinton said “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police,” and went on to say “I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other," and “I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, ‘why am I feeling this way?’”
In the VP debate...
The problem is that the statistics don't show the claimed bias. Normalized on a per-police-encounter basis, white cops (or cops-in-general) don't appear to shoot black suspects more often than they shoot white suspects. However, police interact with black people more frequently, so the absolute proportion of black shooting victims is elevated.
The fact that the incidence of police encounters with blacks is elevated would be the actual social problem worth addressing, but the reasons for the elevated incidence of police-black encounters do not make a nice soundbite.
None of this is important of course because, as is usual for politics, the whole mess degenerates into cheerleading for your team and condemning the other team, and sensitive analysis of the actual evidence would be giving aid and comfort to the hated enemy.
Psychology is most evidence-integrated proximal discipline for the plane a cognitivist should think in where possible.
You can dissolve the philosophy 'problem of other of other minds' as actually a problem of empathy and learned helplessness and external locus of control.
Once the problem of other minds is entirely enacted and person-centred, non-egocentric ethics becomes silly
:)
just looking for a rough sketch
Well, you can probably go about it in the following way. IQ is and was a controversial concept. One of the lines of attack against it was that it is meaningless, that the number coming out of the IQ test does not correspond to anything in real life. This is often expressed as "IQ measures the skill of taking IQ tests".
To deal with this objection people ran a number of studies. Typically you take a set of young people and either give them a proper IQ test or rely on another test which is a decent IQ proxy -- usually the SAT in the US or one of the tests that the military gives to all its drafted or enlisted men. After that you follow that set of people and collect their life outcomes, from income to criminal records. Once you've done that you can see whether the measured IQ actually correlates to life outcomes. And yes, it does.
I don't have links to actual studies handy, but you can easily google them up, and you can take a look at a not-fully-rigorous description of the various tiers of IQ and what do they mean in real-life terms.
Basically what these studies give you is the cost of an IQ point, cost in terms of a lot of things -- income, chance to end up in prison, longevity (high-IQ people are noticeably healthier), etc.
Given this, you can calculate the expected outcomes for the US black population. If their average IQ is 10-15 points lower, you can translate this into expected income (lower than the US mean), expected chance of a criminal conviction (higher than the US mean) and other things you're interested in. Once you've done that, you can compare your expected values with ones empirically observed. Any remaining gap will be due to something other than the IQ differential.
informs your politics
On a macro level it does not. There are smart people, there are stupid people, and the correlation to some outwardly visible feature like the colour of the skin doesn't matter much. I am not a white nationalist, I do not think the Europeans should re-colonise Africa for the natives' own good, etc.
On a micro level it does. For example, I find affirmative action counter-productive. For another example, I don't believe the claims that inner-city schools (read: black) lag behind suburban schools (read: not black) because of lack of funding or because of surrounding poverty. Throwing money at the problem will achieve nothing.
There are smart people, there are stupid people, and the correlation to some outwardly visible feature like the colour of the skin doesn't matter much.
How do you mean? You're saying you believe it to be true that, generally, people with black skin color are more likely to have a significantly lower IQ than people with white skin color... And you believe that IQ is correlated with life outcomes. How can this not matter much?
I find affirmative action counter-productive.
I also have the sense this may be true in many instances. The theory seems solid, ...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
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