= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Diabetics can't have the tablets with sugar
This is false.
In response to
Market Failure: Sugar-free Tums
Many diabetics think they can't. I've found their comments on the internet.
I would argue all those values are irrational.
Please do.
The expression "irrational values" sounds like a category mistake to me.
What you're really doing by saying "My utility function might value my self-perception as a person who votes for X" is phrasing virtue ethics as utilitarianism. That's a move which confuses rather than clarifies. If you value your self-perception as a person who votes for X, you aren't a consequentialist; you believe in virtue ethics.
Can you say it? Yes; you can in theory be a virtue utilitarian. But no real-life virtue ethicists are utilitarians. Hence, confusion.
Market Failure: Sugar-free Tums
In theory, the free market and democracy both work because suppliers are incentivized to provide products and services that people want. Economists consider it a perverse situation when the market does not provide what people want, and look for explanations such as government regulation.
The funny thing is that sometimes the market doesn't work, and I look and look for the reason why, and all I can come up with is, People are stupid.
I've written before about the market's apparent failure to provide cup holders in cars. I saw another example this week in the latest Wired magazine, a piece on page 42 about a start-up called Thinx to make re-usable women's underwear that absorbs menstrual fluid--all of it, so women don't have to slip out of the middle of meetings to change tampons. The piece's angle was that venture capitalists rejected the idea because they were mostly men and so didn't "get it".
I'd guess they "got it". It isn't a complicated idea. The thing is, there are already 3 giant companies battling for that market. The first thing a VC would say when you tell him you're going to make something better than a tampon is, "Why haven't Playtex, Kotex, or Tampax already done that?"
So, Thinx did a kickstarter and has now sold hundreds of thousands of thousands of absorbent underwear for about $30 each.
The failure in this case is not that VCs are sexist, but that Playtex, etc., never developed this product, although there evidently is a demand for it, and there is no evident reason it couldn't have been produced 20 years ago. The belief that the market doesn't fail then almost led to a further failure, the failure to develop the product at the present time, because the belief that the market doesn't fail implied the product could not be profitable.
I just now came across an even clearer case of market failure: Sugar-free Tums.
In response to
Revitalising Less Wrong is not a lost purpose
Why is nobody but CFAR staff posting articles anymore? The button is still there to submit to LessWrong rather than to Discussion.
Didn't there use to be a formatting stripping button?
Doh! I forgot about that. 'Coz it is indicated by an eraser icon.
When I use it, it looks like it isn't working--it resizes everything to a tiny font, and converts all quotes to indents. Inspecting the HTML, it looks like it's done the right thing. I'll have to test it some to decide whether I trust it.
Fixing that tool to not change what's displayed so much would be perfect.
In response to
Lesswrong Potential Changes
I really wish the LW editor would strip font specifications out of the HTML when I do a paste into its editor while creating a new post. It's a pain in the ass to have to go thru the raw HTML by hand and strip out all the font specifications. I have never yet wanted to copy the fonts from quotes and links that I've copy-pasted.
In response to
comment
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on
"3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism"
Have less big font quotes. Unless, like I sometimes do, you're intentionally trying to filter out people from your audience without the patience to search for meaning in discordant font sizes in order to maximise the quality of your responses.
In response to
comment
by
on
"3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism"
I don't see any big font quotes. You must have different fonts.
I really wish the LW editor would strip font specifications out of the HTML when I do a paste into its editor. It's a huge pain in the ass to remove them from the HTML by hand.
I used vim to remove the remaining font specifications just now.
I don't usually upvote top-level discussion posts but I'll lend you one upvote until you break even.
This is an important topic of discussion. I reckon your downvotes are because of your subpar formatting.
Based on my experiences as a marginalized person, being rational just means going easy on my oppressors.
shudders
In response to
comment
by
on
"3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism"
How else would you format it?
In response to
comment
by
on
"3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism"
Perhaps that connotation is because of the group in question? I dislike playing word games, the words we use should be interchangeable if they refer to the exact same thing. It's kind of like how we went from Negroes to Black to African Americans in an attempt to combat racism, but the racism was the problem, not bad words, and it only gets confusing when you word police. I was talking to some social justice types before the term was used in a derogatory way online and they described themselves that way, and the first place I saw it online was as a self-description of those groups. Words get loaded with bad affect because people have negative thoughts about the thing being referred to. I think any decision to use a new word that predates changing the thing to which we are referring is premature.
In response to
comment
by
on
"3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism"
Someone told me yesterday that airline stewards don't want to be called stewards anymore; they want to be called, I think, flight attendants. The funny thing is that "steward" used to mean a very high-ranking individual, the person who ran a great lord's estate. The airline industry used it for their stewardesses to artificially inflate their status. Over time, the role, at least in the opinion of flight attendants, degraded the word, until they didn't want it anymore.
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Kickstarter is part of the market so, from what you have described, Thinx is a market success story.
My point is that the existing companies failed to provide a product that consumers wanted, and VCs relied on the "fact" that the market is efficient to "prove" that Thinx could not succeed, since it did not bring anything to the table that the big companies couldn't have done themselves..