Politics Discussion Thread September 2012

Multiheaded

The last thread didn't fare too badly, I think; let's make it a monthly tradition. (Me, I'm more interested in thinking about real-world policies or philosophies, actual and possible, rather than AI design or physics, and I suspect that many fine, non-mind-killed folks reading LW also are - but might be ashamed to admit it!)

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

in a competitive framework the former will triumph

In what kind of a competitive framework? If, say, all the trade unions within a nation insist upon a 30-hour week, it would indeed maybe reduce the industry's output a little - but wouldn't the best and brightest/most conscious workers from the other nations either move there, giving the employer superior human resources, or have a strike at home and enable the same kind of thing for themselves?

The question is, who tells, or broadly hints, the workers what to ask for? (and here the buck is certainly away from the Left - c'mon, look at how useless it has been, nowdays it can't tell the workers to stand up for anything!)

25 percent less output seems like more than a little to me

4[anonymous]14y

The incentives are higher for the best and brightest workers to move to where they are allowed to work more. Remember their opportunity cost for not working is much higher than that of the average or below average worker. If you are good at what you do and get paid more for it than others, let alone if you are competing for prestige within your field, you have an incentive to move to the more work heavy culture. Perhaps we even see this in the real world with migration of top talent from say Europe to the US. The typical mind fallacy is an important error to watch out for when considering policy. Many people feel they would prefer to work 30 hours instead of 40 hours or that they wouldn't respond to certain perverse incentives, so they assume no one else will.

5Kindly14y

The workers don't ask for anything. If all the trade unions insisted on a 30-hour week, it would probably happen, but there's no real incentive for anyone to try.