I read Nickel and Dimed (2001) several years ago and I thought it was very good. A couple of things I remember that are relevant to the discussion.
Ehrenreich did not find a shortage of part-time work. My recollection is that the problem was the opposite: employers would only offer up to 30 hours of work a day, for regulatory reasons. So Ehrenreich often had to pick up two such jobs to attempt to earn enough money, which increased her costs. I agree that non-linear compensation is common at higher income levels, especially in knowledge work where there are increasing returns to marginal labor.
Ehrenreich discussed with her fellow employees how they were making ends meet. A common answer was that they lived with relatives, friends, or partners, allowing them to save money on housing, food, and transit, relative to Ehrenreich and also giving them a small safety net. From the perspective of Ehrenreich's co-workers, she was paying extra to live by herself. She failed to make ends meet largely for that reason.
I have a prediction market for this. There are papers in the description, which I review in the comments.
I think it's important to be able to make a narrow point about outer alignment without needing to defend a broader thesis about the entire alignment problem.
Indeed. For it is written:
A mind that ever wishes to learn anything complicated, must learn to cultivate an interest in which particular exact argument steps are valid, apart from whether you yet agree or disagree with the final conclusion, because only in this way can you sort through all the arguments and finally sum them.
For more on this topic see "Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization."
If I knew a charity had murdered ten people I would report the charity to the appropriate authorities. I wouldn't donate to the charity because that would make me an accessory to murder.
The medical profession supports medical treatments that save lives but very occasionally have lethal side effects. I defer to their judgement but it makes sense to me.
I've not read the paper but something like https://arxiv.org/html/2402.19167v1 seems like the appropriate experiment.
There is a trivial solution to resolving Pascal's mugging using classical decision theory (accept the objective definition of probability; once you do so, the probability of me carrying out my threat becomes zero and the problem disappears).
The value of the threat becomes zero times infinity, and so undefined. This definitely improves the situation, but I'm not sure it's a full solution.
Evidence from wartime rationing is that given a per-buyer cap, people are less angry about price rises. Or perhaps war creates more solidarity than natural disasters.
Maybe a compromise is possible where merchants are allowed to raise the price provided that they have a per-buyer cap and sell their stock quickly.
Typically, a salaried white collar worker can turn up to work and use the bathroom at the start of the day, and it is counted as working hours, whereas a blue collar worker will use the bathroom before starting work (for the reasons you give about KPIs) and so it is not counted as working hours. Similarly for lunch break and end of shift. As a result the white collar worker will have a larger proportion of bathroom time counted as "working hours", given the same time spent in the bathroom.
Maybe your point is that this is a difference of degree, not a difference in kind? True, but differences of degree matter for the working hour trends being discussed. If measured working hours stay the same but workers spend more of their bathroom hours during working hours then this is an effective increase in free time.