I would have shit in that alley, too
post by Declan Molony (declan-molony) · 2024-06-18T04:41:06.545Z · LW · GW · 134 commentsContents
I receive more compliments from homeless people compared to the women I go on dates with Is that guy dead? Who’s giving Brazilian waxes to the homeless? Crazy people talk to themselves because no one else will None 136 comments
After living in a suburb for most of my life, when I moved to a major U.S. city the first thing I noticed was the feces. At first I assumed it was dog poop, but my naivety didn’t last long.
One day I saw a homeless man waddling towards me at a fast speed while holding his ass cheeks. He turned into an alley and took a shit. As I passed him, there was a moment where our eyes met. He sheepishly averted his gaze.
The next day I walked to the same place. There are a number of businesses on both sides of the street that probably all have bathrooms. I walked into each of them to investigate.
In a coffee shop, I saw a homeless woman ask the barista if she could use the bathroom. “Sorry, that bathroom is for customers only.” I waited five minutes and then inquired from the barista if I could use the bathroom (even though I hadn’t ordered anything). “Sure! The bathroom code is 0528.”
The other businesses I entered also had policies for ‘customers only’. Nearly all of them allowed me to use the bathroom despite not purchasing anything.
If I was that homeless guy, I would have shit in that alley, too.
I receive more compliments from homeless people compared to the women I go on dates with
There’s this one homeless guy—a big fella who looks intimidating—I sometimes pass on my walk to the gym. The first time I saw him, he put on a big smile and said in a booming voice, “Hey there! I hope you’re having a blessed day!” Without making eye contact (because I didn’t want him to ask me for money), I mumbled “thanks” and quickly walked away.
I saw him again a few weeks later. With another beaming smile he exclaimed, “You must be going to the gym—you’re looking fit, my man!” I blushed and replied, “I appreciate it, have a good day.” He then added, “God bless you, sir!” Being non-religious, that made me a little uncomfortable.
With our next encounter, I found myself smiling as I approached him. This time I greeted him first, “Good afternoon!” His face lit up with glee. “Sir, that’s very kind of you. I appreciate that. God bless you!” Without hesitation I responded, “God bless you, too!” I’m not sure the last time I’ve uttered those words; I don’t even say ‘bless you’ after people sneeze.
We say hi to each other regularly now. His name is George.
Is that guy dead?
Coming home one day, I saw a disheveled man lying facedown on the sidewalk.
He’s not moving. I crouched to hear if he’s breathing. Nothing.
I looked up and saw a lady in a car next to me stopped at a red light. We made eye contact and I gestured towards the guy as if to say what the fuck do we do? Her answer was to grip the steering wheel and aggressively stare in front of her until the light turned green and she sped off.
Not knowing if I needed to call an ambulance, I asked him, “Hey buddy, you okay?” I heard back a muffled, “AYE KENT GEEUP!”
Well, at least he’s not dead.
“Uhh, what was that? You doing okay?” This time a more articulate, “I CAN’T GET UP,” escaped from him. Despite his clothes being somewhat dirty and not wanting to touch him, I helped him to his feet.
With one look on his face I could tell that he wasn’t all there. I asked him if he knew where he was or if he needed help, but he could only reply with gibberish. It could have been drugs; it could have been mental illness. With confirmation that he wasn’t dead and was able to walk around, I went home.
Who’s giving Brazilian waxes to the homeless?
I was walking behind a homeless man the other day. He was wearing an extra long flannel and sagging his pants low.
Suddenly, he noticed his (one and only) shoe was untied and fixed it promptly by executing a full standing pike. I wasn’t expecting him to have the flexibility of a gymnast.
In doing so, his flannel lifted up to reveal his dick and balls. The strangest thing? Fully shaved. Who’s going around giving pro bono Brazilian waxes to the homeless?
Crazy people talk to themselves because no one else will
Walking to the library one day, I noticed a homeless woman muttering to herself. There was an aura of urine about her. She was missing several teeth.
When she spotted me, she asked for twenty dollars. My father taught me to never give homeless people money because “they’ll just use it for drugs and alcohol.” I wasn’t busy, so I sat down next to her on the sidewalk and asked, “how’s your day going?”
She launched into a tirade about why her life sucks—it was mostly incoherent and I assumed she was crazy. After about ten minutes, she paused. She skittishly made eye contact with me and said “sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing?”
“Well, sometimes I ramble. But that’s because I have no one to talk to.”
“It’s probably lonely living on the streets.”
“Yeah.”
Once she realized I wasn’t going to abruptly leave, she asked me about myself and a conversation ensued. Over the next thirty minutes I learned that in the course of her life:
- She used to be a groupie for famous rock bands in San Francisco during the 1960s.
- Living the groupie lifestyle, she experimented with different drugs until she became a meth addict (hence the missing teeth).
- Broke and addicted to meth at forty years old, she moved back in with her parents.
- While living at home during this time, her brother began to rape her regularly. He told her that if she spoke up he would tell the police about her meth stash.
- She spoke up. Nobody in her family believed her that her brother was raping her. Her brother stayed true to his word and reported her to the authorities. She served multiple years in prison for possession of meth.
- When she was released, she had nowhere to go since her family had disowned her. She’s been homeless ever since. Sometimes she’s woken up by strangers raping her.
At the end of our conversation, she wished me well and said, “enjoy the library!”
“Have you forgotten how our conversation began?”
“...yes.”
“You were asking me for twenty dollars.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“What did you need the money for?”
“My bike’s inner tube is punctured and I’d like to buy a new one.”
I gave her twenty dollars. She shook my hand and said, “God bless you.”
Her name is Teresa.
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comment by Jiao Bu (jiao-bu) · 2024-06-19T18:10:57.342Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Taiwan has the second lowest violent crime on Earth, right after Japan. I am an Engineer, I have two masters degrees, and have made decent money in both Taiwan and the USA. I spent a summer and most of an autumn unhoused in Taiwan. In Taipei, I often slept on benches near Hell Valley, and woke up and went to the hotspring in the morning with the older folks who liked to go at that time. Other times I slept around Banciao or other side of the river. Several nice nights, I would wake up to drunk college kids hanging out around me, occasionally falling asleep or passing out for a couple of hours in the same parks I liked.
I got a scooter for about $200 and went further South. Initially I slept in the little gazebos, and later I slept anywhere, and got a hammock with a bugnet to hang up in the trees. I slept on the toy trains in the town South of Sun Moon lake. I slept by the old tree on the Pacific side of Hehuan (and liked camping at various heights on mount Hehuan in the summer, as I could effectively pick the temperature at night). Could swim by waterfalls or snorkel in the ocean near Hualien, then motor to a comfortable altitude, eat a little snack, and sleep. The milky way was generally visible to me. There are also untold beauty in potential cross-island passes above and South of WuJie, but I never made it through that way. I slept in part of the old hotspring near the temples on the Pacific side of Hehuan. Woke up in a warm bath and cops shining flashlights down into the canyon to see me. I slept under the stars. I slept on concrete under gazebos through torrential rains.
There are a lot of very clean public restrooms. I cleaned in the public restrooms or in rivers. Also, I got used to always having napkins in my cargo pants. Keeping clean was the biggest thing I discovered in a few months of this. Also bug spray, though the mosquitos there don't carry diseases for the most part, so it's nothing other than a nuisance. A windy spot does better than bug spray and doesn't smell weird.
I had enough money for all the food and gas I could have used in years. I had public healthcare and permanent residency. I was 35 and no children. Without the threat of crime, and in a mild climate, really, what need would I have for a house?
In the latter part, I was employed managing an English school through an ownership change. A local person found out I was sleeping in a hammock in a Gazebo halfway up Tiger Head Mountain (near Zhong Xin Bei). She was religious (Yi Guan Dao, I think) and all but insisted I rent from her. She made kind of a fuss with the owners and rented me a room really cheap in a large building with many college students. Thus ended my generally very nice experience of safe homelessness.
Since returning to the USA, I sometimes feel I am in danger when I have to stop and get gas for my car. I cannot imagine being unhoused here.
↑ comment by Jiro · 2024-06-23T22:09:28.165Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I am inclined to think "this is polluting the commons". All the things you used to survive are meant to be used by people who have homes and only occasionally need those things (and often pay indirectly, such as by making purchases in a store where they use the bathroom). The fact that they are free is a price structure that is only possible because people who use them are occasional users who rarely need them. Deliberately going without a home in the knowledge that you can survive using the free services is using much more than your fair share of the commons and if many people behaved like you, the free services would disappear.
Of course, you can argue "if they didn't want homeless people using them, they shouldn't provide them for free to homeless people". The consequence of this attitude, at large, is why we can't have nice things.
Replies from: jiao-bu, Benquo, army1987↑ comment by Jiao Bu (jiao-bu) · 2024-06-24T15:54:57.214Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This is an interesting point, and I like the perspective. The main ingredients needed for my adventures were (1) lack of crime and (2) spaces, such as clean restrooms, forests, and some of the gazebos such as along the road in He Huan Mountain. The hot springs at Hell Valley, I paid for, and of course I paid for food and gas and such.
I think (1) is common to most of Asia, and I have had several friends who did similar things in China, which is a bit poorer than Taiwan. China is interesting in that almost every American female who is there for awhile will eventually comment, "This is amazing, I can walk around at 3AM in a big city and know I won't be assaulted." Used to be that way in South India, to a lesser extent, where I did a version of this for about six months, actually eating for free in many cases (such as the Ashram's giveaway food in Thiruvannamalai) and people have been doing for centuries. I would not recommend it now, but that's due to politics. And some people do have guns in India. There are stray dogs, too. And the wealth distribution wasn't so good there. Just after I left, the "eve teasing" thing started, then a lot more issues showed up.
India is not nearly as safe as Taiwan (but still was far safer than the USA, where I booked a motel six just last weekend and had to simply vacate due to horribly unsafe conditions, a lock not functioning correctly. It was the kind of hotel with graffitti on the inside walls and young males everywhere outside late drinking and yelling (central Savannah Motel 6, should not be available to rent online, frankly). America is pretty special awful in that regard. But I haven't been to India since 2015, and my friends on the ground say not to go now.
(2) is less clear and you could be right. One point is that I don't think I left the public tourism bathrooms worse than I found them. In that case, what is the cost to society?
(3) There is the public healthcare system. However, I did work there on and off and paid taxes, ran a business. Additionally, even if unemployed, I had to pay a premium to use the public healthcare system ($70 a month at that time). Prior to ever having public health insurance, I once fell off a bike and had to go to the ER. Had cat scan, stitches, medicine, etc. About $200. So, I could just pay out of pocket there and I think pay less than in the USA with insurance in many cases. And I am guessing healthcare costs are probably higher for non-homeless drinkers and drug users than unhoused abstainers spending long days snorkeling in Hualien? Maybe this is a gray area.
A question is, am I damaging the commons in ways beyond these kinds of points? Can you be specific? I am trying to think through this and figure out what I would need to do to mitigate damage to the commons as I will be returning to Taiwan to extend my permanent residency, likely for most of next year.
↑ comment by Benquo · 2024-06-25T11:46:23.417Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Possessing a home also imposes costs on everyone else - it costs scarce materials and labor to build, equip, and electrify/warm/cool/water a home, and it uses up scarce space in a way that excludes others. It’s not obvious that a homeless person who works & is taxed, and is thus contributing to collective capacity to build and maintain the amenities they take advantage of, is a free rider; you’d need to actually do the math to demonstrate that.
Replies from: Jiro↑ comment by Jiro · 2024-06-25T15:27:38.765Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Society is set up to function under the assumption that most people have homes and are imposing those "costs". It is not set up to function under the assumption that a lot of people are homeless and use public restrooms, sleep in public places, etc. Those things can only exist because they are used by a small number of people under a rare set of circumstances.
You can describe homes as using "scarce space" but there's enough "scarce" space that most people can have homes and use some of it. The public restrooms in existence couldn't handle a situation where even 10% of the population was homeless, never mind most of the population.
Replies from: jiao-bu↑ comment by Jiao Bu (jiao-bu) · 2024-06-26T13:55:30.602Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If society evolved to 10% unhoused but working, healthy, and non criminal, I strongly suspect systems could be adapted. Non-destitute tent cities could likely be supported as easily as a large fairgrounds.
It’s possible then that the balance of outliers such as me are because most people just want to be housed? So the balance of light amenities for the unhoused in Taiwan is at equilibrium (and needs more amenities in the USA, probably). NB that surely I am not the first or only person in TW to do this. The countryside night-market culture seems possibly to involve healthy non criminal transient merchants for example. At any rate, implicitly the system is designed for the number of people doing this. No?
Back to my question above, what actual drain did I pose on society? If I could know what those are, I could mitigate them. I will likely be back in Taiwan to continue my permanent residency visa in 2025. I will be bringing in outside money and again probably living out of a bike or a motorcycle. Other than keeping things clean and obeying laws, what should I do to make sure I haven’t done harm?
Replies from: Jiro↑ comment by Jiro · 2024-06-26T16:05:03.179Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
At any rate, implicitly the system is designed for the number of people doing this. No?
No. That's like saying that stores' budgets are designed to allow for a certain amount of shoplifting (which is true), so it's okay to shoplift. The fact that the system is designed to survive some amount of cheating, and that it doesn't spend as much effort to catch cheaters as it could, doesn't make cheating okay.
Back to my question above, what actual drain did I pose on society?
That depends on your definition of drain. If by "drain" you mean "used far more than your fair share" everything you did that wouldn't be done so often by someone with a home was a drain. Your post mentions using public restrooms, using public places for sleeping, and being protected from crime even though you lived in the streets (and presumably was more vulnerable to crime than you would be in a home).
Other than keeping things clean and obeying laws, what should I do to make sure I haven’t done harm?
Get a home?
(And if your answer is "that means I have to pay for my restroom and sleeping space, and that would cost me money", that's pretty much the point.)
Replies from: jiao-bu↑ comment by Jiao Bu (jiao-bu) · 2024-06-29T18:35:16.081Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thank you for the ongoing conversation. I do appreciate this.
"If by "drain" you mean "used far more than your fair share" everything you did that wouldn't be done so often by someone with a home was a drain."
Why should we assume "cost" by default when not conforming to systemic expectations? And why should we assume others doing it should have a bad result?
I think that would only be a drain if someone else's use was diminished afterwards. You never mention, for example, my days spent snorkeling in Hualien. Hours and hours and hours for several weeks with my head in the water, looking at starfish and such. This was arguably "more than my fair share" but I did not diminish the resource for anyone else who wants to use it. And this is also something that might not be done by someone who is paying for a home. I think it's not instinctively mentioned in the conversation because we both know I could do this essentially infinitely and not diminish anyone else's use of that commons.
Likewise, if I leave everything in the condition I found it, am not breaking laws, and paying for food, gas, taxes, and whatever else I need or want, then what is our definition of "drain?" or even "fair share?" Fair share is a more complicated term because some who have houses got them free, perhaps through inheritance, along with money, or even regular middle class people might be using more of the countryside in a destructive way in their time off than I am (such as the trashed up barbeque sites you see along many rivers in Taiwan).
To delve into this a bit more, you may be effectively saying that we should look at any existing system, and regardless of our views on it, we owe it an attempt to conform to what we assume it assumes. It seems that could fail on multiple vectors, no?
We need something clearer than just "I think this society expects x, and so I assume that doing other than x is destroying the commons."
To think of it another way, if a culture of (lawful and clean) vagabonds were to evolve in Taiwan, for all we know it might create a new culture of innovation, versus the "lie flat" culture that some of Asia is falling prey to. Taiwanese youths with newfound time and freedom, at least some of them, might become a creative force. It could birth a silicon valley, or at the very least create a hopefulness of some systemic slack that many find lacking, which has serious social costs in that country right now. Or, given a feeling of less pressure to take and spend money, might have more children, helping the country's coming demographic collapse. Or, maybe a lot of biking/camping tourists will go to the Island and bring in money that way through use of the 70% which is mountainous and undeveloped land. Any of these are possible, so why should we assume bad outcomes?
↑ comment by Jiro · 2024-06-30T01:09:35.462Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You never mention, for example, my days spent snorkeling in Hualien.
I never mention it because you are not overusing it compared to someone in a home.
even regular middle class people might be using more of the countryside in a destructive way in their time off than I am
"People who are not causing the particular harm I am causing, may be causing different sorts of harm" doesn't really justify it.
To think of it another way, if a culture of (lawful and clean) vagabonds were to evolve in Taiwan, for all we know it might create a new culture of innovation, versus the “lie flat” culture that some of Asia is falling pray to.
This is a rationalization. It's like saying "if a culture of shoplifters arose, for all we know it could create a culture of innovation, where stores benefit from the publicity caused by shoplifting, customers consider stores with frequent shoplifters to have high quality goods so shoplifting attracts customers, tourists shoplift occasionally but spend more money in the areas where they shoplift, etc." You can always invent hypothetical scenarios where your harm doesn't really cause harm. The clause after the "for all we know" is wishful thinking and supported by nothing whatsoever.
Seriously, being homeless might create a Silicon Valley?
Replies from: jiao-bu↑ comment by Jiao Bu (jiao-bu) · 2024-06-30T13:35:11.996Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You still aren't telling me why I should assume I am contributing to bad outcomes instead of good ones or neutral ones without actual any actual crime or damage being done. I'm not building anything resembling a shoplifting ring here.
Let me try to think some of this through that you might be getting at. One of the things you mention is my depending on the lower crime rates. This is the single thing that keeps me from doing the exact same thing in the USA. In fact I/other people do the same thing in the USA sometimes, such as camping on national parklands, or even sleeping at a rest stop, even frequenting the same stop multiple times when it seems clearly safe.
So then the first question is, "Did I personally contribute to an increased crime rate or decreased safety on the island?" I think the answer is obviously no, but I would be interested to hear if I am overlooking something.
The second question would be, "What mass of people, if doing the same thing, would increase the crime rate?" This is harder to get into, and requires some speculation.
First of all, Taiwan does not allow any private handgun ownership, and very little private gun ownership in any form. Secondly, I think East Asian culture is less prone to interpersonal violence. The Chinese cities, even where there is increased poverty, don't pose the same kind of threat as most urban areas in the USA. In Taiwan, a random mugging or victimization is rare. In Japan it's close to non-existant. There is still Domestic violence, but nothing that a vagabond who isn't partnered to a violent person need worry about. I think the lack of crime is largely baked into the culture, and non-destitute, non-criminal unhoused are highly unlikely to really move any needles on this.
But let's say that a bunch of people decided to do what I did. I think one group might be the sort of miscreants who generally stay up using alcohol and stimulants and playing video games in internet bars. A few have made international news for dying playing video games (and no one noticed).
So, you take that demographic, and create a culture of groups on scooters riding around and camping in the mountains and sometimes in the cities. I could see that you would basically have a lot of kids sitting around drinking, surely trashing up the places where they camped. Probably communities would ask police to crack down on them. That might legitimately trash the commons. But isn't the problem there that they are drinking, maybe causing trouble, and littering? If you removed those issues, would there be any problem with it?
Regarding "Silicon Valley," yes, I think if a group of non-criminal, non-littering youth were to emerge that decided to be localized digital nomads instead of "lying flat" it could be a major force, creating a lot of new outputs. Not "silicon valley" on the scale of USA, (which required a time, place, and etc) but yes, potentially a highly innovative and important culture that could have a major impact. In order to create an innovative culture, at scale or even personally, a primary requirement is systemic slack. Inflation, housing costs, and red queen races of education are eating slack everywhere. Maybe spreading just the idea that people don't have to work all the time would have a positive impact on the culture. People need to breathe to create. It evidently needs to be easier to breathe than it is in most places.
Remember, we are talking about a country and an area that is headed rapidly to demographic collapse, where the young are already opting out in dysfunctional ways because the existing society is systemically failing them (as in the culture of just hanging out all the time in internet cafes, sometimes literally unto death). The "Lying flat" culture started in Japan and China and has spread to Taiwan as well (and the USA, for that matter). Camping out by hot springs and oceans and working while living in a hammock in the hills above one's town hardly seems like a dangerous abuse of the commons, given the actual contexts of the world.
But perhaps you believe we should not opt out of what we assume the system assumes. I could see a sort of "Schelling Fence" argument for that, but there should also be some limitation. If I am sure I am doing nothing criminal nor damaging to the environment, nor apparently reducing the commons of the land anymore than I did of the sea, then is there still a good reason I should not cross the fence?
I can also see some point where a critical mass of unhoused might cause social problems. On the other hand, normally a critical mass of unhoused is also destitute, which causes its own set of problems. I would not know how to unwind those two factors. I still think a tent city for the non-destitute would be great, but perhaps this would strain the social system of rents and employment by eliminating legibility and dependence on employers and landlords? Some might think that is a good thing, but on the other hand, let's just say it contributes to "market volatility," so even if the change might be net good, managing the interim could be hard.
But I am reaching here, circling back and forth on what I already thought about the matter. I feel like there must be something specific in your mind or intuition that led you to think I was trashing the commons, and I think making it lucid should be very valuable. Even if I indeed go back to Taiwan and camp (urban and non) again, it might help me ameliorate any actual degrading of the commons, which I am motivated to do as I love my second country there.
↑ comment by Jiro · 2024-06-30T16:31:19.453Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
So then the first question is, “Did I personally contribute to an increased crime rate or decreased safety on the island?” I think the answer is obviously no, but I would be interested to hear if I am overlooking something.
You didn't commit extra crimes, but it requires more resources to protect you from crimes. (And again, since you are a single person, the extra resources get lost in the noise. But if many people did this, there would be more crime.)
You still aren’t giving any reason why I should assume I am contributing to bad outcomes instead of good ones or neutral ones.
I could say the same thing about the shoplifter. There are scenarios where shoplifting might, in theory, be a benefit to the stores. It would not be possible to prove that these scenarios are false. Maybe it really is true that tourists like being able to occasionally shoplift and otherwise spend enough money to make up for the loss. You can invent an infinite number of such scenarios.
What I can observe, however, is that stores don't gather together to promote an area of town as the shoplifting district, and nobody's trying to legalize shoplifting. The people who would best know about the consequences seem to think the bad outcomes are the realistic scenario. Likewise, Taiwan doesn't take out ads saying "come to Taiwan and experience being homeless" or even have designated homeless encampment areas, shopping malls don't compete on how good their homeless person amenities are, and I really doubt that being homeless gives you high status among your colleagues at work, if you even told them.
Replies from: jiao-bu↑ comment by Jiao Bu (jiao-bu) · 2024-07-01T00:45:15.197Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"You didn't commit extra crimes, but it requires more resources to protect you from crimes. (And again, since you are a single person, the extra resources get lost in the noise. But if many people did this, there would be more crime.)"
Is me creating an opportunity for someone to commit a crime constitute my doing something bad to the commons or is it on the actual criminals? It seems you are quite literally blaming (potential) victims for their drag on society. Doesn't 100% of the responsibility for that, and whatever costs are incurred lie with those who would do the crimes?
The rest of it, about shoplifting, seems hard to connect, as no one is advocating doing something illegal. I think what I said above about creating slack is less speculative than you are making it out to be (especially given many of the real conditions, as I pointed out above).
To try and do justice to the rest of your post... are you saying that people would just see someone riding around the island, camping outside as a public nuisance, basically, and dislike it, so therefore it shouldn't be done?
(A) What would balance the "dislike" concern? I give you credit that you do not believe we should infinitely defer to the possibility that society would find a set of actions distasteful. I guess it is correct that a few frowns if someone found out I was sleeping in a Hammock in the woods might matter, though we don't also know who would think it was cool. FWIW, old people walking on the mountain trails some mornings who saw me camping out usually smiled and said "Oh, ni li hai!" ("You are very capable" which is normally a compliment). So how much deference do we owe to what amounts to speculations of distaste?
(B) A lot of the objection also seems to revolve around speculation that "if more people did this, a cascade of bad outcomes would happen." I think this is resolvable to (1) apparently there is systemic equilibrium in that most other people empirically do not choose to do this (and those who have no choice are a separate problem where everything we are saying is basically moot, the discussion would be a completely different one) and (2) your speculations that outcomes should be bad still seems to have at most equal footing to my speculations that it should be good or neutral.
So what level of deference do we owe to speculations of bad outcomes in the contra-factual case if my behavior somehow caught on with more people and they did what I am doing?
(C) Normal cases of destroying the commons usually require that the equilibrium of people choosing to do something tends towards overwhelming the common resource. In the USA, you see signs and ordinances trying to stop people from sleeping outside, so that equilibrium is currently out of balance (and most of those people do not have a choice). Without evidence, is there even any reason for me not to assume the system in Taiwan is currently in a functional and fine equilibrium at whatever number of people do what I was doing?
(TL;DR: D) I still think there may be something inside what you are saying that "Systems are designed on a set of assumptions, and this constitutes the social contract. Violating those assumptions always produces an unexpected systemic draw." As a systems engineer, I find this line of thinking intriguing. What I would guess is actually happening is there are many different forms of such draws. Most look different to mine, and look different to each other, but indeed, each stepping out of bounds of systemic assumptions and legibility does create a draw on the system. I am not quite sure how to address this, as it is extremely difficult to know if and what damage is being done, as it all amounts to noise.
It seems like there is some argument to be made that we should try to operate within all established social systems. However, I don't think it's infinitely true. The question then, like all my other points above, how much? If I guess I am contributing more than I am taking by my level of noise then is this okay? Moreover, am I even being accurate in understanding my own level of systemic draining noise? How much can I actually go around knowing if a particular action is producing a drain at all (I'm still not convinced being voluntarily unhoused did that in Taiwan)? Should I run it like GARP accounting standards where I always rule against myself, and if there is any question I am creating noise which increases systemic burdens, I should not do the action?
Honestly, maybe as a default that is okay. However, at some point, if I did it all the time, then the lack of slack may create enough drains on the user that their reduced mental health or capacity ends up creating a bigger drain. In other words, I am willing to take that position and I think you are correct about it if that's the crux of your argument -- but I think that would need to be held very loosely, otherwise we would do more damage handcuffing ourselves than the system noise of our lives.
↑ comment by Jiro · 2024-07-01T01:47:55.589Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Is me creating an opportunity for someone to commit a crime constitute my doing something bad to the commons or is it on the actual criminals?
It's on both.
The rest of it, about shoplifting, seems hard to connect, as no one is advocating doing something illegal.
The shoplifting comparison has nothing to do with whether shoplifting is illegal. The point of the comparison is that you can endlessly speculate that something really has a positive effect by imagining some scenario where it does. I am able to imagine such a positive effect for shoplifting, but it would not convince you that shoplifting is positive. I'm not going to be convinced that homelessness is positive by you imagining some scenario where it is.
If I guess I am contributing more than I am taking by my level of noise then is this okay?
My answer to this is the same as for the similar question about shoplifting: I would expect that if homelessness or shoplifting had a positive effect, stores and governments would act as though it does. You personally cannot become "okay" on your own--you don't get to decide that your shoplifting is actually contributing more to tourist publicity than it harms the stores, and you don't get to decide that your homelessness creates a positive contribution.
Replies from: TourmalineCupcakes↑ comment by DiamondSolstice (TourmalineCupcakes) · 2024-07-25T14:00:53.733Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"Is me creating an opportunity for someone to commit a crime constitute my doing something bad to the commons or is it on the actual criminals?"
"It's on both"
These situations seem to be very extreme, but I have this less dark example: Say I go swimming in a place where the lifeguard can't see me. Is it my fault I drowned or the lifeguards? The lifeguard is supposed to watch everyone... but I put myself in that situation in the first place. (After typing this out I realized it's still pretty dark, oh well)
"Of course, you can argue "if they didn't want homeless people using them, they shouldn't provide them for free to homeless people". The consequence of this attitude, at large, is why we can't have nice things."
- (This was in the second-from-the-top comment in this chain)
Another extreme situation. Here's a similar but softer one which seems positive...
Airplane tickets to Las Vegas are often much cheaper than tickets to literally anywhere else. That's because Las Vegas bets that people will be attracted to the cheap tickets and go to Las Vegas, then proceed to spend tons of money at the casinos. My family doesn't go to these casinos, we just travel to Vegas because we have friends nearby. We're benefiting but not contributing.
My point is that I noticed that some of the situations Jiao Bu's been in can be rewritten to get the other person to react differently. Maybe that's just me, though.
Replies from: Jiro↑ comment by Jiro · 2024-07-26T16:00:58.198Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Say I go swimming in a place where the lifeguard can’t see me. Is it my fault I drowned or the lifeguards?
The issue is not whose fault it is for the crime, but whose fault it is for the using up the extra resources to prevent the crime, which is not an issue in the lifeguard example. And that itself is a specific case of "how much more than average do you have to use the commons before you can be blamed for overusing the commons". Which is partly a matter of degree and depends on things like how much you use it, what people's expectations are, what reasonable expectations are, and what the intentions are of the people providing the resources.
My family doesn’t go to these casinos, we just travel to Vegas because we have friends nearby. We’re benefiting but not contributing.
I've done that myself (for busses to Atlantic City). Since the owner can change the price freely, and can change it incrementally or for specific customers, I'd generally not consider it to be overusing the commons if there is a price. In the case of loss-leader trips, it's also very hard to overuse the trips anyway, as opposed to just using them more than average--you probably couldn't use more than one trip every couple of days.
If stores in Taiwan charged for use of bathrooms, and the government rented out spaces for homeless on the ground, and charged a "homeless stay tax" which covers the costs of police and such, I would agree that it would be okay to go homeless and use them at the given prices. (If there is a two tier price where the homeless are charged more, the homeless tourist would have to pay the homeless tier price, and not cheat even if it isn't enforced well.)
↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2024-07-06T09:28:55.222Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Would you apply that to other examples of loss leaders too? When I buy a Ryanair ticket with no priority boarding, a randomly assigned seat and no luggage and don't buy anything on the plane, should I feel guilty because if everybody paid as little as me the flight wouldn't be net profitable for Ryanair? If not, what's the difference?
Replies from: Jiro↑ comment by Jiro · 2024-07-08T20:06:49.106Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'd ask you to estimate the distribution of the loss leader among customers and compare your usage of it to the average rate, and maybe the high end rate. I necessarily have to make up numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of airline seats were cheap seats. It would then be impossible for you to use cheap seats at more than twice the rate of the average person. I'd also expect that even without you, there would be a substantial number of customers who use cheap seats all the time. If a substantial number use them all the time, you being a person that uses them all the time is not greatly far from what is expected. And I'd expect that the rate at which you take trips doesn't differ greatly from the rate at which those other people take trips.
It's true that if everyone only bought cheap seats, the price structure would be unsustainable. But there's a big difference between something that would be unsustainable if everyone did it and something that would be unsustainable if done by even a relatively small number of people. If 5% of the population used public restrooms as often as a homeless person, public restrooms would become unsustainable, never mind "everyone".
Also, some of the amenities in question are run by the government. The government doesn't do loss leaders; it doesn't let you camp out in public parks because it wants to attract more paying customers who incidentally might want to sleep there. It's a government, it runs on taxes.
Replies from: Ericf↑ comment by romeostevensit · 2024-06-21T06:04:56.425Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thank you for sharing your experience. There is a balance in societies between tolerance for crime and tolerance for imperfect enforcement of law in ways that might rob the accused of some rights. I don't know much about Taiwan, but by all accounts the Japanese penal system accepts a substantially higher rate of false positives in punishing the accused. This trade-off point might make a lot of sense in a society with a lower overall disposition towards violent crime.
Replies from: jiao-bu, harold-1, cousin_it↑ comment by Jiao Bu (jiao-bu) · 2024-06-21T16:03:26.024Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Lower wealth disparity also results in lower crime, particularly lower violent crimes. Taiwan generally has a fairly "sleepy" government and penal system. And for many types of crimes, you can buy your sentence off for the equivalent of about $30 a day (1000 NTD). Not a lot of private gun ownership (non-zero, as aboriginals can hunt, and there are (very very few) skeet ranges, but even the president's secret service got into trouble for having a handgun in an unauthorized way). I've found very stressed and deformed rimfire cartridges out in the woods, apparently from homemade hunting rifles. That's about it.
The wealth distribution in Taiwan has been great though. Of course, Forumosa Plastics (Wang family), TSMC, Asus, and a few other giants have made bank, but what you find is a vast quantity of people got their "fair share" there. Education rates are high (According to Farid Zakharia, in our Legislative Yuan, nearly everyone has Masters or PhD degrees, highest education in any legislative body on the planet. I'll also point to a decent gender split, not quite 50%). First Asian country to legalize gay marriage, and Taipei has been having a lot of any-gender restrooms since 10 years or more ago.
So, it's basically a liberal society, educated to within an inch of their lives, with good wealth distribution and zero whatsoever personal handgun ownership (outside of mobsters, probably). If you get arrested for something like Pot, you can probably spend a few thousand bucks and not serve time, though if you're a foreigner, you might need to leave the country. Enforcement of laws out in the country is.... like Mayberry. The cops will chat with you and explain they don't want to clean your brain off the sidewalk if you're doing something stupid while drunk. Drunk driving is penalized very very heavily, however, as it should be.
On the bad side, people do get away with domestic violence as the law is such (according to a social worker friend of mine), that the police nearly have to witness the crime themselves for you to get into trouble. If you get into a fight with someone, that's kind of on you and them and the police may not want to be involved in any way (some of my drunken foreigner buddies have been in this situation -- it's good, bad. The legislative Yuan full of smart people also paradoxically sometimes comes to fistfights). If someone hits you with a car (happened to me), probably you won't get much, if any compensation. Some situations people drive very recklessly. Be careful crossing the street in Taichung or driving on Hehuan mountain road. People need to show off that they "know the road" by passing on a blind mountain curve, likely while chewing binland and drinking Whisbey (sic, it's an energy drink). Insurance payouts are very low. But then again, so are medical costs, even if you pay out of pocket without the social health system.
People also do all kinds of shady things with food, engine repairs, and other stuff. There's a lot of "old Asia" mentality in there or Cha bu duo jiou hao le, which translates to "Don't bother doing more than an approximate job with this." You can get something like a shady brake job on a motorcycle if you're not careful. And food quality violations are exposed all the time. People also abuse their Philippine or Southeast Asian household helpers, au pairs, and day laborers. Animal rights are nearly non-existent except for specific cases.
Like every place, there are contradictions. This is Earth and we have humans here. But in some ways, it is the balanced Libertarian Socialist Paradise we always dreamed America could be. Taxes 6% or 20%, and one of the best Healthcare systems on the planet (at about half the GDP rate of USA). Before implementing their socialized medicine system, they did an extensive 5+ year study on impact, usage patterns, etc, and just implemented a good program (which a legislature full of graduate-educated people passed after analysis, probably without fistfights).
Almost every Taiwanese will point out that cities in the USA are far more boring than cities in Taiwan (IMO, the negative comparison is due largely to the USA not at all doing well with 3rd spaces, and also USA sucks if you do not want to drive and cannot afford to just piss away money anytime you want recreation -- maybe you just Netflix and chill, which is a lot less fun than using an award-winning public transportation system to visit a beach all day and a famous nightmarket, then home on a Saturday and you may have spent $5-$20).
Of course, with degrees in Sociology and Systems engineering, I would quickly point out it's a lot more than an order of magnitude easier to administrate a landmass the size of Virginia with < 10% the population of the USA. Especially after a 30 year economic boom where most people got some piece of the pie.
Epistemic Status: I've left the safety of narrative reporting and its attendant subjective accuracy, and gotten into a lot of mixed editorial opinions and experiences. Take it all for what it's worth. I could be factually wrong about almost any of this, due to bad memory, bad information, or things having changed. If you'd prefer to focus on a topic and dig, I am in. If you want to see and experience Taiwan, have some sort of adventure in the lands of snakes and butterflies and mountain rivers and secret shrines, and you're the kind of person I would enjoy hanging out with, I might even be in.
↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-24T17:27:07.691Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Lower wealth disparity also results in lower crime, particularly lower violent crimes.
Is your claim that reducing wealth disparity causes violent crime reduction, or just that smaller wealth disparity is correlated with lower violent crime rates? If the former, then I'm quite interested in reading your epistemic justification for it.
Replies from: jiao-bu↑ comment by Jiao Bu (jiao-bu) · 2024-06-30T14:11:12.796Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"Violent crimes of desperation increase because of greater wealth disparity" seems sensible. The greater wealth disparity being the cause of the desperation that instigates the crimes. The OP here is about vast wealth disparity causing social deviance, in some sense.
However, "In a situation where wealth is more equitably distributed, there are fewer crimes of desperation" seems like they could both be coming from the same font of "Our society is good and cares about its people and takes good care of them." The OP of this thread is also about this.
"Violent crime is causing greater wealth disparity" makes sense only in places where warlords, drug kingpins, or oligarchic criminals are building empires.
I think East Asian islands have a combination of 1 and 2. In Taiwan, the 30-40 year boom saw most people getting a piece of the pie. Few are desperate enough to resort to violent crimes. Does this seem reasonable? Perhaps especially compared to places like the USA or increasingly Europe where you have a sizable portion of people who do not get their fair share of the pie in exchange for their life's time, with resulting despair, desperation, and etc...
↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-30T22:56:12.168Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think East Asian islands have a combination of 1 and 2. In Taiwan, the 30-40 year boom saw most people getting a piece of the pie. Few are desperate enough to resort to violent crimes. Does this seem reasonable?
It looks to me like here you are saying "Reducing the number of impoverished people causes a reduction in violent crime." I believe this proposition is at least plausible. But isn't it a quite different claim from "Reducing the amount of wealth disparity causes a reduction in violent crime."?
Specifically, the number of impoverished people and the amount of wealth disparity are not the same thing (although empirically they may have some common relationship in the contemporary world). Consider two possible societies of 100 people:
- (A) Each person has a net worth of $500.
- (B) Half the people have a net worth of $75,000 and the other half have a net worth of $3,000,000.
Notice, (B) has more wealth disparity than (A), but it also has fewer impoverished people than (A). And I would expect (B) to have less violent crime than (A).
Does this seem correct to you?
↑ comment by Harold (harold-1) · 2024-06-28T08:29:28.327Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm a lawyer (NY licensed) working in Tokyo, and this account of the Japanese penal system is incorrect. Prosecutors in Japan are extremely, extremely hesitant to bring a criminal case into the penal system, and so when cases are brought they are far beyond "a reasonable doubt". As a slightly misleading short summary, this, rather than lack of concern for false positives, is the reason for the notorious 99% conviction rate of criminal cases in Japan.
I've also been unhoused in a few different countries for short periods of time.
I'm certain that my affinity for Japan has its roots in needing this peaceful cultural of public safety.
comment by Sam Marks (samuel-marks) · 2024-06-18T14:48:16.551Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This was awesome. Here are some more stories in the same style.
Homeless person or professor?
It can be hard to tell in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That's partly because some professors—mostly the MIT ones—can look very disheveled. But partly it's because some homeless people can be surprisingly intellectual, e.g. it's not uncommon to find homeless people crouched in the shade reading a book.
My favorite example is a homeless man in Harvard Square. His name in my head is "Black Santa" because he's a old man with a full belly and white beard, and he's always surrounded by trash-bag-sacks not of toys, but of his possessions. He's always in the same spot, a stretch of Harvard Square that lots of homeless people hang out in. But while the other, mostly young, homeless in the area typically spend their time begging or zonked out, I only ever see Black Santa writing in a small notebook.
What's he writing all the time? As best I can tell from peeping over his shoulder as I pass by, he's writing poetry. Sometimes I spot him reciting it out loud before he goes back to scribbling.
Some day I hope to muster the courage to strike up a conversation out of the blue with him and learn more.
Remember that time I broke all my limbs at once...?
Most of my chats with homeless people happened when I had a fractured leg and was moving around in crutches. I think for the local homeless people—many of whom have disabilities, and essentially all of whom have friends with disabilities—the crutches made me seem more familiar. Or maybe it was just that I was spending more time sitting at bus stops with nothing to do but talk.
The most interesting, and the saddest, conversation I had was with a man who recognized my knee brace: "oh yeah I had one of those once too. Two of them actually."
"Did you break your leg twice? I'm sorry."
"Well, two of them at the same time I mean—both my legs were broken. Both my arms too. I got hit by a car and it broke both my arms and legs."
"Oh god, that's horrible."
"Yeah the medical bill was rough, no way I could pay it. I heard an ad on the radio for one of those lawyers that sues people for stuff like this. So I hired them and sued the person who hit me."
"Did you win?"
"Yeah, but the person who hit me didn't have any money, so I didn't actually get anything out of it..."
If something like this had happened to me, I think it would be the most traumatic event of my life, one that hurt to remember. On the other hand, the man telling the story told it casually, as if he kept remembering more things he did over the weekend that he wanted to chat about.
Would you like some cheese?
There's a kindly alcoholic that I sometimes see at the bus stop outside my apartment. He often smiles at me and says hello when I go by.
The first time I saw him, he was sitting there with a huge plastic-wrapped wedge of Jarlsberg cheese. With a giddy grin, he held it out to me in offering. I do like Jarlsberg, but declined.
An hour later I left my apartment and the man was gone. In his place was the unwrapped wedge of cheese on the ground with a single bite taken out of it.
I should have accepted the cheese!
Replies from: shankar-sivarajan, declan-molony↑ comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) · 2024-06-18T18:37:21.906Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Homeless person or professor?
↑ comment by Declan Molony (declan-molony) · 2024-06-18T17:05:18.668Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Your homeless person or professor story made me think of my uncle. He lives in his car, by choice.
He has a computer science degree and worked for a lot of top technology companies in the 80s and 90s. Eventually his disdain for the employee lifestyle inspired him to try his hand at the entrepreneurial route. Turns out he's neither a good employee, nor a good entrepreneur. After a couple bad start-ups, he went broke.
On two separate occasions during my childhood he stayed with my family in our home (with the precondition that he maintains employment somewhere). It lasted...for a while. But he grew bored. He prefers to live in his car and read books in the library than work "for the man".
I see him once a year on Thanksgiving now. Last year we talked about particle physics and blackholes.
Replies from: jmhcomment by yanni kyriacos (yanni) · 2024-06-20T00:16:37.037Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
When I was ~ 5 I saw a homeless person on the street. I asked my dad where his home was. My dad said "he doesn't have a home". I burst into tears.
I'm 35 now and reading this post makes me want to burst into tears again. I appreciate you writing it though.
comment by dr_s · 2024-06-19T06:10:06.922Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The bathroom thing sucks in general. We honestly just need more public bathrooms, or subsidies paid to venues to keep their bathrooms fully public. I understand most businesses won't risk having to deal with the potential mess of having anyone use their bathroom, but it's ridiculous even for those who do have the money that you're supposed to buy a coffee or something to take a leak (and then in practice you can often sneak by anyway).
Replies from: notfnofn, eye96458, keltan↑ comment by notfnofn · 2024-06-19T11:35:53.529Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I assume that it's harder to have public bathrooms when you have a substantial homeless population. There's a fear that they'll do drugs in there or desecrate the place.
I was briefly part of an organization that tried to solve this problem by having a portable station for homeless people to use the bathroom, take a shower, brush, and change (they were also given inexpensive undergarments + cleaning equipment). While doing that, I never experienced any of the above issues but there was also an establishment of trust because the homeless people and the volunteers would interact regularly. I wonder if this can extrapolate.
In places without a homeless problem, I've never had an issue finding a place to use the bathroom without buying anything. I usually buy something after as a courtesy, but I never promise the storeowner or anything.
ETA: in upscale areas in the East Coast, I often can find public bathrooms, and they're in good shape. I don't travel too much, so I don't have a whole lot of data points.
↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-20T15:28:46.912Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
We honestly just need more public bathrooms, or subsidies paid to venues to keep their bathrooms fully public.
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I'm skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I'd expect the market to produce them.
but it's ridiculous even for those who do have the money that you're supposed to buy a coffee or something to take a leak (and then in practice you can often sneak by anyway).
Why is it ridiculous?
edit: There are some [LW(p) · GW(p)] problems [LW(p) · GW(p)] with this comment.
Replies from: None, gilch↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-20T20:56:47.530Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I'm skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I'd expect the market to produce them.
The fact that the market demonstrably hasn't provided this good is little (in fact, practically no) evidence regarding its desirability because the topic of discussion is public bathrooms, meaning precisely the types of goods/services that are created, funded, and taken care of by the government as opposed to private entities.
In particular, these are built on public land (where private developers do not have property rights) for public use (with no excludability) and with little-to-no rivalry, at least across mid-to-long-term timeframes (past the point where another person is physically occupying the bathroom or dirtying it). As such, they fit the frame of public goods to a reasonable extent.
Why is it ridiculous?
I suspect the argument that it is ridiculous comes from an intuition that the need to go to the bathroom is such a human universal that we are all accustomed to, and the knowledge that having to hold in your urine is seriously unpleasant is so universal, that it becomes a matter of basic consideration for your fellow human beings to provide them with the ability to access the bathroom in an establishment when they clearly need to.
There is probably some connection to be drawn here with the debates and intuitions people have over/regarding price gouging, since the person needing to go to the bathroom is in a position of such a temporarily increased demand that it becomes massively unpleasant for them to even make it to other establishments, putting the current establishment owner in a position of power (benefitting from a restricted supply, from the perspective of the customer) that they are "abusing" by compelling the customer to buy something they did not care about in order to gain access to the toilet.
Replies from: gwern, jmh, dr_s, eye96458↑ comment by gwern · 2024-06-25T00:38:14.295Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
In particular, these are built on public land (where private developers do not have property rights) for public use (with no excludability) and with little-to-no rivalry, at least across mid-to-long-term timeframes (past the point where another person is physically occupying the bathroom or dirtying it). As such, they fit the frame of public goods to a reasonable extent.
'Public bathrooms' are definitely not 'public goods', not even close. A mere coincidence of the adjective 'public' meaning 'government run' and 'society-wide' doesn't make them so. The market doesn't provide it because it is outlawed; where it is not outlawed, it is provided; and where outlawed, it is often provided by the market in a different form anyway, like being excluded to only paying patrons of a store or restaurant. They are ordinary excludable private goods; often a club good, where load is low. That is enough disproof of it being a 'public good', but in any case:
-
government-owned land has property rights, and these are allocated, leased, rented, or sold all the time to private parties all the time, and often building and management of facilities in things like parks are outsourced.
This also applies to wanting government-run bathrooms on non-government land - you immediately see the problem. You don't need permission from a skyscraper owner to defend them from North Korea launching nukes at them, which is part of what makes it a public good; you do to install a free bathroom at its base for anyone and everyone to use. Building a bathroom 100 miles away does the people there no good. If it did, then it just might be a public good; but it doesn't, so...
-
they are extremely excludable: "Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it."
Obviously, a bathroom (whoever owns or runs it) can be locked, and often is (as are associated buildings like cafes which might give access to said bathroom). If anyone can walk into a government-run - or Starbucks or McDonalds - bathroom without a permit or paying etc, it's because whoever is in charge of that particular bathroom wants that, same as a privately-owned one.
-
they are by definition rivalrous ("the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service"), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn't matter to this point. ("I need to go now!" "Well, don't worry, in the mid-to-long-term it's empty, and we'll all be dead and not need a bathroom ever again, so really, the problem solves itself.") Again, the inherent nature of a bathroom is to have limited space and capacity. Just ask a woman about that.
They are also rivalrous in especially nasty ways - you handwave away 'dirtying it', but I'm not sure you appreciate how dirty is dirty. speaking as someone who has had jobs cleaning government-run bathrooms, specifically, I can attest that cleaning them up can be a shitty job, and whoever was responsible for smearing feces all over the stall and driving people out of that bathroom entirely when they saw it and were understandably repulsed, certainly was a 'rival' to whomever came later and might've wanted to use it. (Regrettably, I'm not even referring to a single incident here. Also, this was even in government facilities which charged for admission BTW, thereby excluding members of the public. The problem is, almost all people will treat the bathroom well, but the ones who do not self-select into using the bathroom...) Even when that isn't the case, users of bathrooms have a remarkable propensity to render them too distasteful to use. (I will never understand just how toilets can become so clogged with feces and toilet paper and urine so often unless the patrons were doing it deliberately. This goes for female bathrooms too.)
Bathrooms do not fit public goods at all, and that is part of why government is so bad at providing government-run bathrooms; there's nothing about them which makes the government better at providing them than any other ordinary private or club good.
Replies from: philh↑ comment by philh · 2024-07-09T12:08:30.052Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
they are by definition rivalrous ("the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service"), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn't matter to this point.
Why does timeframe not matter? If there's a pay-and-display parking lot, with enough spaces for everyone, but only one ticket machine, would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?
Bathrooms aren't zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me. (There are some people for whom bathroom use is more urgent, making bathrooms more rivalrous, e.g. pregnant people and those with certain disabilities. My understanding is these people sometimes get access to extra bathrooms that the rest of us don't.)
(As for dirtiness, all I can say is that the public bathrooms I've used tend to be somewhere between "just fine" and "unpleasant but bearable". I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it's literally once in my life I've encountered that. Obviously people will have very different experiences here.)
they are extremely excludable: "Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it."
Depends on details. London has some street urinals that afaict pop up at night, they have no locks or even walls, they're nonexcludable. Some are "open to everyone the attendant decides to let in", and some are "open to everyone with a credit card", and these seem just straightforwardly excludable. Other bathrooms can be locked but have no attendant and no means of accepting payment, so they're either "open to everyone" or "closed to everyone", and calling that "excludable" feels like a stretch to me. I suppose you could say that you could install a pay gate so it's "excludable but currently choosing not to exclude people", but then it depends how easy it is to install one of them.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2024-08-21T01:59:48.318Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?
Yes. Obviously. The capacity of the parking lot is not the size of the lot, it is the net total of everything that goes into it, including the bottlenecks.
Just as the speed of your computer is not the theoretical peak speed of the fastest component in it, but of the system as a whole; or a movie theater's theoretical capacity can be limited by how many customers the ticket window or concession stand can process, and not by the physical number of seats in a bay. (To give a concrete example: a year or two ago, I walked out of a movie theater which was so understaffed that they had combined tickets & concessions and so, despite arriving 10 minutes before, while waiting in line, I estimated that I was going to miss the first & best 20-30 minutes of the opera broadcast and decided not to bother and left. This was a pity, but the theater in question had apparently decided that given its constraints in things like hiring, this was their profit-maximizing move.)
Bathrooms aren't zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me
I wouldn't even say that: bathrooms are highly rivalrous and this is why they need to be so overbuilt in terms of capacity. While working at a cinema, did you never notice the lines for the womens' bathroom vs the mens' bathroom once a big movie let out? And that like 99% of the time the bathrooms were completely empty?
I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it's literally once in my life I've encountered that.
Did not the 'consumption' of that 'good or service' (by smearing shit all over it after using it) by the first toilet user 'diminish the ability' of the next would-be toilet user to 'consume the same good or service' (the toilet)? How many times, exactly, do you need to encounter a shit-caked toilet stall to prove the point that yes, toilet stalls are, in fact, 'rivalrous'? I submit to you that 'once' is enough to make the point.
Depends on details.
None of your examples are a counterexample. All of them are excludable, and you explain how and that the operators choose not to.
Replies from: philh↑ comment by philh · 2024-08-22T17:34:06.220Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Idk, I think my reaction here is that you're defining terms far more broadly than is actually going to be helpful in practice. Like, excludability and rivalry are spectrums in multiple dimensions, and if we're going to treat them as binaries then sure, we could say anything with a hint of them counts in the "yes" bin, but... I think for most purposes,
- "occasionally, someone else arrives at the parking lot at the same time as me, and then I have to spend a minute or so waiting for the pay-and-display meter"
is closer to
- "other people using the parking lot doesn't affect me"
than it is to
- "when I get to the parking lot there are often no spaces at all"
I wouldn't even say that: bathrooms are highly rivalrous and this is why they need to be so overbuilt in terms of capacity. While working at a cinema, did you never notice the lines for the womens' bathroom vs the mens' bathroom once a big movie let out? And that like 99% of the time the bathrooms were completely empty?
My memory is we didn't often have that problem, but it was over ten years ago so dunno.
I'd say part of why they're (generally in my experience) low-rivalrous is because they're overbuilt. They (generally in my experience) have enough capacity that people typically don't have to wait, and when they do have to wait they don't have to wait long. There are exceptions (during the interval at a theatre), but it still seems to me that most bathrooms (as they actually exist, and not hypothetical other bathrooms that had been built with less capacity) are low-rivalrous.
None of your examples are a counterexample. All of them are excludable, and you explain how and that the operators choose not to.
I'm willing to concede on the ones that could be pay gated but aren't, though I still think "how easy is it to install a pay gate" matters.
But did you miss my example of the pop-up urinals? I did not explain how those are excludable, and I maintain that they're not.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2024-08-22T18:51:22.821Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
but... I think for most purposes,
No they're not interchangeable. They are all designed with each other in mind, along the spectrum, to maximize profits under constraints, and the reality of rivalrousness is one reason to not simply try to run at 100% capacity every instant.
My memory is we didn't often have that problem, but it was over ten years ago so dunno.
"Didn't often have that problem" sounds a lot like saying "had that problem sometimes". Like shit-caked walls, how often do you need to have that problem to illustrate why the bathrooms are so overbuilt due to the extreme rivalrousness of their use?
I'd say part of why they're (generally in my experience) low-rivalrous is because they're overbuilt.
As I just said, yes. Bathroom stalls/toilets/urinals are extremely rivalrous and so you have to overbuild massively instead of, say, building exactly 1 unisex toilet for a whole theater. (Which would often be adequate raw capacity, on average; but the statistician drowned crossing the river which was 2 feet deep on average...) Then the rivalry is fine, and the worst-case lines are tamed.
But did you miss my example of the pop-up urinals? I did not explain how those are excludable, and I maintain that they're not.
Of course you did. You explained they popped up from the ground. Those are just about the most excludable toilets in existence! (I was impressed when I visited London and saw those. Although I didn't actually get to use them, unlike the self-cleaning Parisian ones, so I had to more admire them in the abstract idea of them than the reality: "Wow. That'll keep people out, alright. No half-measures there.") They are the Fort Knox of toilets - every example I've given of toilets being excludable by things like locked doors is way less excludable than your example of fortified telescopic toilets stored in the ground and protected by 10 feet and tons of concrete, rebar, and dirt. If you want to take a leak in a telescopic toilet you are excluded from by being down, you'd better bring either a backhoe or a computer hacker. And you maintain they are not excludable...?
Replies from: philh↑ comment by philh · 2024-08-28T12:18:10.219Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
No they’re not interchangeable. They are all designed with each other in mind, along the spectrum, to maximize profits under constraints, and the reality of rivalrousness is one reason to not simply try to run at 100% capacity every instant.
I can't tell what this paragraph is responding to. What are "they"?
You explained they popped up from the ground. Those are just about the most excludable toilets in existence!
Okay I do feel a bit silly for missing this... but I also still maintain that "allows everyone or no one to use" is a stretch when it comes to excludability. (Like, if the reason we're talking about it is "can the free market provide this service at a profit", then we care about "can the provider limit access to people who are paying for it". If they can't do that, do we care that they can turn the service off during the day and on at night?)
Overall it still seems like you want to use words in a way that I think is unhelpful.
↑ comment by jmh · 2024-06-23T04:49:00.505Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think there are some disconnects here.
I do agree that the mere fact "markets" are not providing some quantity of publicly accessable bathrooms is hardly an argument that we have a good equalibrium quantity -- or even a good nominal/social want quantity.
However, my experience in the USA is that the overwhelming (like on the order of 80%) of the bathrooms I've used in public were in fact on private property and privately provided -- be they gas stations, shopping malls/stores, restaurants/cafes and the like. Sometimes I will use ones in a (mostly public?) place such as state tourist stops on interstates or highway reststops or in airports and some subway systems. (Many of those as actually private but clearly a contract out solution with government specifying what the services will be). I also note that in a sizable number of cases the more public solutions are pretty poor, unsanitary and often even dangerous.
I do have some agreement with the eye96458 in that it seems a very localized problem for some urban centers and not really a general issue for the USA in general.
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-23T22:05:19.657Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I do agree that the mere fact "markets" are not providing some quantity of publicly accessable bathrooms is hardly an argument that we have a good equalibrium quantity -- or even a good nominal/social want quantity.
Would you provide your reasoning for this? I'm interested in understanding it.
Replies from: jmh↑ comment by jmh · 2024-06-24T02:50:45.810Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
[This will not be well detailed but hope provides a sense of why I made the claim.]
The most obvious one, and perhaps directly revelant here, is the concept of effective demand - in a market setting those without the money to buy goods or services lack any effective demand. I would concede that alone is not sufficient (or necessary) to reject the claim. But it does point to a way markets do fail to allocate resources to arguably valuable ends. But effective demand failures often produce social and governmental incentives to provide the effective demand for those without resources to pay themselves.
I think one can see two lines of though pointing towards under provision when considering social/government responses to the presense of ineffective demand. The standard economic market failure of under provision of public goods. The other is the issue of narrow and broad insterest in how government/public funds get spent. It's not clear to me how strong any narrow interest for increasing public toilets are in terms of driving that spending.
I don't think the public good -> under provision (outside some expected range of what a proper market equalibrium should produce) is something one just assumes. Would have to look into things more closely. But the same holds for the "we have markets so it's all good" type argument too. As is generally the case, the devil is in the details and not the general propositions.
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-25T00:47:35.054Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I want to clarify a few things before trying to respond substantively.
The most obvious one, and perhaps directly revelant here, is the concept of effective demand - in a market setting those without the money to buy goods or services lack any effective demand. I would concede that alone is not sufficient (or necessary) to reject the claim. But it does point to a way markets do fail to allocate resources to arguably valuable ends. But effective demand failures often produce social and governmental incentives to provide the effective demand for those without resources to pay themselves.
I don't have a well-developed understanding of economics and I'm confused about what meaning the term "effective demand" has in this context.
Are you using it the same way that Keynes uses it in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money?
Or, are you using the term as it is used in this Wikipedia article?
Or, maybe instead, can you tell me what is the difference between demand and effective demand?
I suspect that you are trying to highlight that destitute people still have preferences even though they do not have any resources to aid in realizing those preferences, but I'm not sure.
I think one can see two lines of though pointing towards under provision when considering social/government responses to the presense of ineffective demand. The standard economic market failure of under provision of public goods.
After doing a bit of reading, it appears to me that one of the required criteria for something to be a public good is for it to be non-excludable. But aren't bathrooms very excludable? Just put a lock on the door that will only open after swiping a credit card.
The other is the issue of narrow and broad insterest in how government/public funds get spent. It's not clear to me how strong any narrow interest for increasing public toilets are in terms of driving that spending.
Are you pointing out that the homeless have a narrow interest (in the technical economic sense) in the government operating free to use bathrooms?
Replies from: jmh↑ comment by jmh · 2024-06-26T02:16:37.828Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
While I think you can get to my point with either of the links, a lot more is going on in those links that will confuse and complicate the path. The simple point is that without available resources (typically money) to bid for additionaly output one simply has no way to bid resouces away from other production/uses and increase output of X (here public toilets) in a market.
In a pure sense public goods only exist in theory. But there are good that seem to behave a lot like the theoretical good. Looking at a situation through the lens of public goods then provides some useful insights. In this case, the idea of public bathrooms is all about making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one. In other words it really is not about specific bathroom/toilets but toilet services where one will be available to anyone needing it rather than them needing to use the alley or pay for access.
So if some are shitting in the alleys, and they are not doing so even when they could have used a toilet, then seems the view that current market equalibrium might be off. The two points above just point to reasons why it might be off. Note, that doesn't mean it is, it's generally understood that the social equalibrium is not expected to be a 0 (be it polution, or people shitting on the street) solution. We should not assume what is is what should be.
Homeless people may have narrow interests but they have no direct political infulence generally; they cannot do lobbying well and don't represent a concentrated voting block (probably cannot vote at all lacking a home address). The general public is not a narrow, well organized group that wants to eliminate shitting in the alley by providing increased levels of toilet services. So in some way the poltical eonomy equalibrium is some shitting in the alley, and the (to me at least) kind of obvious under provision of some public good (which might be public toilets, cleaner streets and healthier envionments)
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-26T04:36:05.744Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Taking a step back, let me just grant that people shitting in the streets is good evidence that the current price of using a bathroom is too high for some people who would, all else equal, rather use a bathroom than shit in the streets (So, insofar that my original comment suggested that the cost of using the bathroom was cheap enough that anyone who wanted to shit could afford to use a bathroom, I am retracting it.).
And if one's goal is to reduce the amount of shitting in the streets, then reducing the cost of using the bathroom is a good strategy. And it is possible that the best way to reduce the cost of using the bathroom is to fund bathrooms with tax money.
Then I suspect we are just having a straightforward disagreement over:
- Should the government make using the bathroom cheaper?
- If so, how?
While I think you can get to my point with either of the links, a lot more is going on in those links that will confuse and complicate the path. The simple point is that without available resources (typically money) to bid for additionaly output one simply has no way to bid resouces away from other production/uses and increase output of X (here public toilets) in a market.
I agree that destitute people are unable to bid resources away from other uses. And that this is relevant in the case of any good a destitute person may desire (food, bathroom access, XBox games, airline tickets, etc). I suspect that you believe toilets are a special case where the government should intervene because destitute people will pollute public spaces if they are unable to access toilets. Is that right?
In a pure sense public goods only exist in theory. But there are good that seem to behave a lot like the theoretical good. Looking at a situation through the lens of public goods then provides some useful insights. In this case, the idea of public bathrooms is all about making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one. In other words it really is not about specific bathroom/toilets but toilet services where one will be available to anyone needing it rather than them needing to use the alley or pay for access.
I agree that "making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one" is a genuine policy objective. But the policy objective and the related service, toilet access, are not the same thing. And there is no question of whether or not the policy objective is a pubic good, as that's just a category error. And toilets are distinctly excludable, so they are not even quasi-public goods.
But maybe I'm still misunderstanding you regarding the public goods issue.
Replies from: jmh↑ comment by jmh · 2024-06-28T01:49:02.120Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If the lens of public goods is not helpful then perhaps look at positive externalities. The two are fairly closely related with regard to the question you're asking about. Tyler Cowan's blurb (scroll down a littel) on Public Goods and Externalities notes how markets will under produce goods with positive external effects.
Again, this is a general point. One can bring in additional details to support the claim that the existing outcome is optimal or to support the claim that it is not optimal. But that was the point of my comment. We cannot just start with market outcome and claim success.
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-28T04:20:55.029Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Again, this is a general point. One can bring in additional details to support the claim that the existing outcome is optimal or to support the claim that it is not optimal. But that was the point of my comment. We cannot just start with market outcome and claim success.
You've convinced me that my initial comment was mistaken in another way. Specifically, if I haven't specified an objective (eg, less than 150 incidents of people shitting in San Francisco streets each year, or, every point in San Francisco is within .25 miles of at least 4 free to use bathrooms), then it is meaningless to suggest that it is currently being satisfied. So, insofar that I suggested that an objective involving bathrooms was likely being satisfied (specifically I suggested that we don't need more bathrooms, but relative to what objective?) without actually specifying that objective, my comment was meaningless.
(Maybe I made this mistake because in my thinking I failed to distinguish between the market equilibrium and objectives.)
If the lens of public goods is not helpful then perhaps look at positive externalities. The two are fairly closely related with regard to the question you're asking about. Tyler Cowan's blurb (scroll down a littel) on Public Goods and Externalities notes how markets will under produce goods with positive external effects.
Thanks for the link. Is it the case that people not shitting in the street is a positive externality?
And when you say "under produce" do you mean relative to the market equilibrium for bathrooms or some objective involving bathrooms?
↑ comment by dr_s · 2024-06-21T04:14:22.554Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I suspect the argument that it is ridiculous comes from an intuition that the need to go to the bathroom is such a human universal that we are all accustomed to, and the knowledge that having to hold in your urine is seriously unpleasant is so universal, that it becomes a matter of basic consideration for your fellow human beings to provide them with the ability to access the bathroom in an establishment when they clearly need to.
This, and how completely unrelated specifically the "buy a coffee" thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B. The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they're not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don't work out to it being a good use of capital or land.
Replies from: dmitriy, eye96458↑ comment by Dmitriy (dmitriy) · 2024-06-21T06:32:27.435Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
At least in California, pay-for-use toilets are uncommon in part because they're illegal
↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-21T15:59:43.443Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This, and how completely unrelated specifically the "buy a coffee" thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.
Why is it better to pay an explicit bathroom providing business, then to pay a cafe (in the form of buying a cup of coffee)? It strikes me as a distinction without real difference, but maybe I'm confused.
The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they're not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don't work out to it being a good use of capital or land.
Maybe bathroom services are just one of a cafe's offerings, but for whatever reason aren't explicitly put on the menu. Similarly, bars sell access to people interested in hooking up, but it's not explicitly on their menu of products.
Replies from: gwern, dr_s↑ comment by gwern · 2024-06-21T23:58:45.308Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why is it better to pay an explicit bathroom providing business, then to pay a cafe (in the form of buying a cup of coffee)? It strikes me as a distinction without real difference, but maybe I'm confused.
Most obviously, so someone can provide just a bathroom, rather than wrapping an entire cafe around it as a pretext to avoid being illegal - a cafe which almost certainly operates only part of the time rather than 24/7/365, one might note, as merely among the many benefits of severing the two. As for another example of the benefits, recall Starbucks's experiences with bathrooms...
'A bathroom' is quite a different thing from 'an entire cafe plus a bathroom'. 'A bathroom' prefab fits into many more places than 'a successful cafe so big it has an attached bathroom for patrons'. Which is probably why there were apparently >50,000 pay bathrooms in the USA before some activists got them outlawed, and you see pay toilets commonly in other countries. (I remember being quite fascinated by a pay toilet in Paris, which had a built-in cleaning cycle, and considering it well worth the euro coin.)
Replies from: dr_s, eye96458↑ comment by dr_s · 2024-06-23T13:36:49.758Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Which is probably why there were apparently >50,000 pay bathrooms in the USA before some activists got them outlawed
Oh, I didn't know this story. Seems like a prime example of "be careful what economic incentives you're setting up". All that banning paid toilets has done is... less toilets, not more free toilets.
Though wonder if now you could run a public toilet merely by plastering it with ads.
↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-22T18:12:51.489Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Most obviously, so someone can provide just a bathroom, rather than wrapping an entire cafe around it as a pretext to avoid being illegal - a cafe which almost certainly operates only part of the time rather than 24/7/365, one might note, as merely among the many benefits of severing the two. As for another example of the benefits, recall Starbucks's experiences with bathrooms...
First, I want to note some points of agreement. I agree that there are differences between a just bathrooms business and a cafe with bathrooms. And I agree that having longer hours is a potential benefit of just bathroom businesses. And I prefer (as I infer that you do as well) that just bathroom businesses not be illegal.
Second, in my previous post I was trying to ask about whether or not there were any genuine differences as a user when paying $X for a cup of coffee to a cafe in order to use the bathroom versus paying $X to a just bathroom business to use the bathroom. (I was responding to @dr_s [LW · GW] saying this: "This, and how completely unrelated specifically the "buy a coffee" thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.")
And in an effort to avoid being a weasel, let me clearly state that insofar that just bathroom businesses would remain open 24/7, or have very clean bathrooms, or be cheap, then they would offer benefits to people which are unavailable from cafes.
'A bathroom' is quite a different thing from 'an entire cafe plus a bathroom'. 'A bathroom' prefab fits into many more places than 'a successful cafe so big it has an attached bathroom for patrons'.
Yes, you are right.
Which is probably why there were apparently >50,000 pay bathrooms in the USA before some activists got them outlawed, and you see pay toilets commonly in other countries.
Thanks for the relevant historical information.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2024-06-22T21:57:15.214Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Second, in my previous post I was trying to ask about whether or not there were any genuine differences as a user when paying $X for a cup of coffee to a cafe in order to use the bathroom versus paying $X to a just bathroom business to use the bathroom. (I was responding to @dr_s saying this: "This, and how completely unrelated specifically the "buy a coffee" thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.")
Even bracketing out all other concerns, I think there is. You don't know what the setup is at any given cafe so you might go to the wrong one or do it wrong, social interactions are awkward, you have to decide what to buy, there is deadweight loss from the $5 of coffee you didn't want (and might not even drink and just throw away), the pay bathroom probably wouldn't've cost $5 (when I paid for that toilet in Paris, it cost a lot less than just about anything I could've bought from a walk-in cafe with a bathroom), you may have to wait in a line for who knows how long (and if you have to go, you have to go!) to wait for your order to be called instead of plunking in a coin and going right in, you might have to ask for the key in many places (which is always a bit humiliating, to make it a stranger's business that you have to go wee or potty), and return the key too... The cafe version of the interaction is many times worse than such a simple trivial task like 'use a restroom' has to be.
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-25T01:45:27.710Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Okay, I think you've convinced me that there are important ways in which pay toilets might offer a better service than cafe bathrooms.
(I suspect that I was getting myself confused by sort of insisting/thinking "But if everything is exactly the same (, except one of the buildings also sells coffee), then everything is exactly the same!" Which is maybe nearby to some true-ish statements, but gets in the way of thinking about the differences between using a pay toilet and a cafe bathroom.)
(Also, I [LW(p) · GW(p)] share [LW(p) · GW(p)] your view that bathrooms are excludable and therefore not public goods. And I'm curious as to why @sunwillrise [LW · GW] and @jmh [LW · GW] believe that they are in fact public goods.)
↑ comment by dr_s · 2024-06-23T13:33:28.025Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why is it better to pay an explicit bathroom providing business, then to pay a cafe (in the form of buying a cup of coffee)? It strikes me as a distinction without real difference, but maybe I'm confused.
Economically speaking, if to acquire good A (which I need) I also have to acquire good B (which I don't need and is more expensive), thus paying more than I would pay for good A alone, using up resources and labor I didn't need and that were surely better employed elsewhere, that seems to me like a huge market inefficiency.
Imagine this happening with anything else. "I want a USB cable." "Oh we don't sell USB cables on their own, that would be ridiculous. But we do include them as part of the chargers in smartphones, so if you want a USB cable, you can buy a smartphone." Would that make sense?
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-23T20:29:00.417Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Economically speaking, if to acquire good A (which I need) I also have to acquire good B (which I don't need and is more expensive), thus paying more than I would pay for good A alone, using up resources and labor I didn't need and that were surely better employed elsewhere, that seems to me like a huge market inefficiency.
I had not thought of this until you and gwern [LW(p) · GW(p)] pointed it out, so thanks.
I agree that this is a good candidate for a way in which buying-a-cup-of-coffee-that-one-doesn't-want-in-order-to-use-the-bathroom as a common activity within a society causes harm (via resource misallocation) to most members of that society.
But I do insist that this isn't a way in which the particular act of giving $X to a cafe for a cup of coffee in order to use their bathroom is worse for the particular consumer than giving $X to a just-bathrooms business. (I'm not sure what the appropriate words are for distinguishing these two different types of concerns, maybe, "on-going & systematic" and "one shot".)
(Have you considered just tipping the barista half the amount of the cup of coffee instead of buying the coffee? This would at least save you some $ and you wouldn't be contributing to the resource misallocation problem. And I realize that just you and I tipping instead of buying is entirely insufficient for solving the resource misallocation problem.)
Replies from: dr_s↑ comment by dr_s · 2024-06-23T20:58:48.824Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Tipping the barista is not really sticking to the rules of the business, though. It's bribing the watchman to close an eye, and the watchman must take the bribe (and deem it worthy its risks).
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-23T21:38:52.457Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I agree that such a tip is roughly a bribe. But why is that a problem? Maybe you believe it is a problem because many people are inclined not to accept bribes, and so such a move would frequently not work.
Replies from: dr_s↑ comment by dr_s · 2024-06-23T21:45:27.591Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
We're discussing whether this is a systemic problem, not whether there are possible individual solutions. We can come up with solutions just fine, in fact most of the times you can just waltz in, go to the bathroom, and no one will notice. But "everyone pays bribes to the barista to go to the bathroom" absolutely makes no sense as a universal rule over "we finally acknowledge this is an issue and thus incorporate it squarely in our ordinary services instead of making up weird and unnecessary work-arounds".
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-23T22:02:00.184Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I tried to stipulate that I was not proposing barista tips as a solution to the "on-going and systematic" problem, specifically I said, "And I realize that just you and I tipping instead of buying is entirely insufficient for solving the resource misallocation problem." [LW(p) · GW(p)]
warning meta: I am genuinely curious (as I don't get much feedback in day to day life), have you found my comments to be unclear and/or disorganized in this thread? I'd love to improve my writing so would appreciate any critique, thanks.
Replies from: dr_s↑ comment by dr_s · 2024-06-23T22:14:45.298Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
No, sorry, it's not that I didn't find it clear, but I thought it was kind of an irrelevant aside - it's obviously true (though IMO going to a barista and passing a bill while whispering "you didn't see anything" might not necessarily work that well either), but my original comment was about the absurdity of the lack of systemic solutions, so saying there are individual ones doesn't really address the main claim.
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-23T22:30:00.755Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
By "original comment" are you referring to "This, and how completely unrelated specifically the "buy a coffee" thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B." [LW(p) · GW(p)]? I actually took that as to be about the individual problem, so that may explain some of our failure to get on the same page. But, looking at the comment again now, the rest of it does seem to me to be more about the systematic problem, "The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they're not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don't work out to it being a good use of capital or land.".
This comment of yours [LW(p) · GW(p)] on the other hand struck me as being more about the systematic problem.
Sorry for any misinterpretation of your comments.
↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-21T15:46:50.460Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I'm skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I'd expect the market to produce them.
The fact that the market demonstrably hasn't provided this good is little (in fact, practically no) evidence regarding its desirability because the topic of discussion is public bathrooms, meaning precisely the types of goods/services that are created, funded, and taken care of by the government as opposed to private entities.
I disagree. My reasoning is as follows. I believe that (P1) there is a high correlation between demand for additional bathrooms owned-operated by private businesses (ie, private bathrooms) and demand for additional bathrooms owned-operated by a government (ie, public bathrooms), and that (P2) there is little demand for additional private bathrooms. So, I infer that (C1) there is little demand for additional public bathrooms.
Do you then object to (P1), (P2) or my inference?
In particular, these are built on public land (where private developers do not have property rights) for public use (with no excludability) and with little-to-no rivalry, at least across mid-to-long-term timeframes (past the point where another person is physically occupying the bathroom or dirtying it). As such, they fit the frame of public goods to a reasonable extent.
I'm not sure why you are arguing that bathrooms are public goods (or are you arguing that just public bathrooms are public goods?). Is it because you are implicitly making this argument?
- P3: Free markets do not do a good job of supplying public goods.
- P4: Bathrooms are public goods.
- C2: So, free markets do not do a good job of supplying bathrooms.
(Sorry for my awkward usage of the term "good job", my economic knowledge is weak.)
I suspect the argument that it is ridiculous comes from an intuition that the need to go to the bathroom is such a human universal that we are all accustomed to, and the knowledge that having to hold in your urine is seriously unpleasant is so universal, that it becomes a matter of basic consideration for your fellow human beings to provide them with the ability to access the bathroom in an establishment when they clearly need to.
Are you describing a heuristic here? Specifically that, if some need is (i) universal among humans, (ii) widely understood and (iii) unpleasant, then often one should immediately act to accommodate anyone who reports that they currently have that need.
And taking a step back, I suspect that I made a mistake and should have initially asked "What do you mean by the term 'ridiculous' here?" As I'm not sure if @dr_s [LW · GW] is just reporting that he doesn't like the current situation, or that it makes him laugh, or that it causes harm, or that it could be easily improved, or something else entirely.
But thanks for trying to explain the reasoning to me.
There is probably some connection to be drawn here with the debates and intuitions people have over/regarding price gouging, since the person needing to go to the bathroom is in a position of such a temporarily increased demand that it becomes massively unpleasant for them to even make it to other establishments, putting the current establishment owner in a position of power (benefitting from a restricted supply, from the perspective of the customer) that they are "abusing" by compelling the customer to buy something they did not care about in order to gain access to the toilet.
Interesting. I do not share the intuition that price gouging ought to be made illegal, so maybe you are on to something.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-22T16:21:31.614Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Do you then object to (P1), (P2) or my inference?
I completely disagree with (P1).
I think (P2) has a somewhat strange framing, particularly given the fact that 'private bathrooms' can refer to either bathrooms in the homes/dwellings of people, which does not really have much to do with the conversation here, or to auxiliary goods in private establishments, in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their 'demand' for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms).
In any case, going from (P1) and (P2) to (C1) does seem locally valid [LW · GW] to a reasonable extent.
Are you describing a heuristic here? Specifically that, if some need is (i) universal among humans, (ii) widely understood and (iii) unpleasant, then often one should immediately act to accommodate anyone who reports that they currently have that need.
Yes, that is the general heuristic I am describing, perhaps with the following added requirement: (iv) the person reporting they need it appears genuine and doesn't appear to try to exploit you in a bad-faith manner.
As I'm not sure if @dr_s [LW · GW] is just reporting that he doesn't like the current situation, or that it makes him laugh, or that it causes harm, or that it could be easily improved, or something else entirely.
I would suspect it means he thinks it is bad in such a clear and manifest manner that it is an instance and a signal of general civilizational inadequacy and insanity [LW · GW].
Interesting. I do not share the intuition that price gouging ought to be made illegal, so maybe you are on to something.
Neither do I, although I suppose I implicitly did back before I studied enough economics to change my view on it.
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-22T23:55:39.382Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I completely disagree with (P1).
Why do you disagree with (P1)? Do you explain it here: "in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their 'demand' for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms)."?
And I completely grant that I might be mistaken about (P1). I haven't spent many cycles investigating this topic.
I think (P2) has a somewhat strange framing, particularly given the fact that 'private bathrooms' can refer to either bathrooms in the homes/dwellings of people, which does not really have much to do with the conversation here, or to auxiliary goods in private establishments
I tried to give a definition of "private bathrooms" in my previous comment, specifically, "... bathrooms owned-operated by private businesses (ie, private bathrooms)...". But to be more explicit, by "private bathrooms" I mean the auxiliary goods in private business establishments (eg, cafes) and the primary goods offered by just-bathroom businesses.
Does that clear up the strangeness?
in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their 'demand' for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms).
Why is the demand of the people only interested in using the bathroom not being satisfied? I expect them to buy the cheapest thing and then use the bathroom. But maybe I'm confused.
And why is their demand not causally impacting the creation of such bathrooms?
In any case, going from (P1) and (P2) to (C1) does seem locally valid [LW · GW] to a reasonable extent.
So given that you find the inference to be of good-ish quality and assuming that we can clear up the strangeness with (P2), then does it follow that you would accept (C1) if you became convinced that (P1) was likely true?
Are you describing a heuristic here? Specifically that, if some need is (i) universal among humans, (ii) widely understood and (iii) unpleasant, then often one should immediately act to accommodate anyone who reports that they currently have that need.
Yes, that is the general heuristic I am describing, perhaps with the following added requirement: (iv) the person reporting they need it appears genuine and doesn't appear to try to exploit you in a bad-faith manner.
Okay. AFAICT I try to avoid using heuristics that call for me to drop whatever I'm doing and act to assist someone else. I also roughly prefer that other people avoid using such heuristics. But I do understand that if someone were using that heuristic, then they might be outraged or upset that people are being turned away from bathrooms.
(I'm also open to the possibility that there are some good heuristics of this type.)
I would suspect it means he thinks it is bad in such a clear and manifest manner that it is an instance and a signal of general civilizational inadequacy and insanity [LW · GW].
Yes, I suspect this is a good guess as to what @dr_s [LW · GW] meant. And thanks for the interesting-to-me link.
Are you done discussing the matter of bathrooms as public goods? I'm not sure if that line of discussion is worth continuing or not.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-23T21:25:29.537Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why do you disagree with (P1)? Do you explain it here: "in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their 'demand' for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms)."?
Yes. I believe there is significant (and currently unmet) demand for publicly-accessible bathrooms that do not require the users to purchase some other good or service (such as coffee) that they are not interested in (which a private establishment could, and in many cases does, require).
Why is the demand of the people only interested in using the bathroom not being satisfied? I expect them to buy the cheapest thing and then use the bathroom. But maybe I'm confused.
For the reasons mentioned in my paragraph above, I model these as two different types of goods for our discussion. It seems to carve reality at the joints [LW · GW] in a meaningful way.
I also roughly prefer that other people avoid using such heuristics.
This preference, valid as it may be, cannot be met in practice, at least at a large scale (in terms of number of people).
While individualized assessments contain benefits (such as the use of discretion to take into account specific situations that are not taken care of well by rigid and context-independent rules and heuristics), they also impose significant costs on those who engage in them, namely the increased expenditures of time and mental energy needed to analyze situations on their individual merits (as compared to placing them in one of many mental "boxes" that you had already conceptualized and that you know how to dispose of quickly). Humans have a limited amount of fucks to give, so to say, and (en masse) they won't spend them on topics like these, which are less important from a subjective perspective than stuff like familial relationships, boss-to-underling interactions etc.
Are you done discussing the matter of bathrooms as public goods? I'm not sure if that line of discussion is worth continuing or not.
Well, public bathrooms are approximately public goods, for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning [LW(p) · GW(p)] (I said only 'approximately' because there is a small level of short-term rivalry involved due to the fact that someone occupying a bathroom stall physically prevents you from going in during the time they are inside and because such users can temporarily damage the structures there in such a way as to prevent future users from accessing the facilities, until the damages are fixed).
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-23T21:55:19.926Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why do you disagree with (P1)? Do you explain it here: ...
Yes. I believe there is significant (and currently unmet) demand for publicly-accessible bathrooms that do not require the users to purchase some other good or service (such as coffee) that they are not interested in (which a private establishment could, and in many cases does, require).
Okay. I don't understand your reasoning. Are you specifically suggesting that there are people who would pay some $X to use the bathroom, but the cheapest item on the cafe menu is $Y where X < Y, and so those people are unable to access a bathroom? Otherwise I'm not sure why someone who needed to use the bathroom would be unwilling to spend $ on some unrelated good in order to use the bathroom.
Why is the demand of the people only interested in using the bathroom not being satisfied? I expect them to buy the cheapest thing and then use the bathroom. But maybe I'm confused.
For the reasons mentioned in my paragraph above, I model these as two different types of goods for our discussion. It seems to carve reality at the joints [LW · GW] in a meaningful way.
Okay, you may be right to do so, but from my perspective your reasoning is still opaque.
I also roughly prefer that other people avoid using such heuristics.
This preference, valid as it may be, cannot be met in practice, at least at a large scale (in terms of number of people).
While individualized assessments contain benefits, they also impose significant costs on those who engage in them, namely the increased expenditures of time and mental energy needed to analyze situations on their individual merits.
I want to be clear that I am specifically opposing the use of heuristics that call for one to immediately render aid to someone else. I am not opposing the use of all heuristics. I agree that it would be a mistake for someone to never use heuristics, because as you say, humans have limited time and mental energy.
Are we talking past one another here?
Are you done discussing the matter of bathrooms as public goods? I'm not sure if that line of discussion is worth continuing or not.
Well, public bathrooms are approximately public goods, for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning [LW(p) · GW(p)]
That seems plausible to me, but I still don't understand why you are pointing out that bathrooms are approximately public goods. (I speculated as to why in my initial response [LW(p) · GW(p)] to you.)
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-23T22:04:29.725Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Are you specifically suggesting that there are people who would pay some $X to use the bathroom, but the cheapest item on the cafe menu is $Y where X < Y, and so those people are unable to access a bathroom?
This is part of the dynamic, yes. But it is not the only relevant consideration: often times, people do not reason on the basis of stand-alone monetary considerations, but also in terms of other, more ineffable concepts, such as principles or values. In this specific case, I believe there are a lot of people that would hate the idea of having to pay for something they don't care about (again, like coffee) in order to access the bathroom, independently (and in addition to) the fact that they must part with some of their cash. It would be more of a principled, i.e. deontological, objection of sorts, and would increase their desire to be able to access public bathrooms.
Are we talking past one another here?
Well, I don't see what evidence or reasoning we have to single out [LW · GW] "heuristics that call for one to immediately render aid to someone else" as worthy of specialized treatment as compared to just "heuristics" more broadly.
That seems plausible to me, but I still don't understand why you are pointing out that bathrooms are approximately public goods
Public goods are (broadly speaking) better served through intervention by a central authority such as a government. As such, correctly identifying something as a public good helps explain why the (private) market has not provided a socially optimal quantity of that good.
Replies from: eye96458, eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-25T00:50:57.136Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm following up here after doing some reading about public goods.
Public goods are (broadly speaking) better served through intervention by a central authority such as a government. As such, correctly identifying something as a public good helps explain why the (private) market has not provided a socially optimal quantity of that good.
I'm inclined to believe that bathrooms are excludable (because, for example, an entrepreneur can just put a lock on the bathroom that will only open after a credit card swipe/payment) and so are not public goods. Am I getting this wrong?
↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-23T22:48:07.477Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
But it is not the only relevant consideration: often times, people do not reason on the basis of stand-alone monetary considerations, but also in terms of other, more ineffable concepts, such as principles or values.
I roughly agree. (Although, values are always involved in decision making, right? Or maybe you believe that value, as in, don't steal, and value, as in, I'd rather spend money on XBox games than a jet ski, are different sorts of things and you just mean the first sort here.)
In this specific case, I believe there are a lot of people that would hate the idea of having to pay for something they don't care about (again, like coffee) in order to access the bathroom, independently (and in addition to) the fact that they must part with some of their cash.
You might be right about this, I'm not sure. That isn't how I think about the situation so I might be committing a typical mind fallacy. I'm interested in why you believe that to be the case, but I recognize that it might be quite a bit of work for you to try to nail down an explanation.
I don't see what evidence or reasoning we have to single out [LW · GW] "heuristics that call for one to immediately render aid to someone else" as worthy of specialized treatment as compared to just "heuristics" more broadly.
My intuition is that it's usually neutral to pretty bad to rush off and offer someone else assistance without thinking it over carefully. I believe this because (i) most people do a bad job of modeling other people, and, (ii) people are generally quite good at helping themselves, (iii) it sometimes triggers a wasteful arms race of people competing to appear to be the most caring, (iv) people straightforwardly pursuing their own interests is a good recipe for improving the world.
Public goods are (broadly speaking) better served through intervention by a central authority such as a government. As such, correctly identifying something as a public good helps explain why the (private) market has not provided a socially optimal quantity of that good.
Okay, I now understand your reasoning, but I will have to think about it more before offering a substantive response.
↑ comment by gilch · 2024-06-22T23:26:20.009Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I'm skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I'd expect the market to produce them.
I wouldn't expect so, why would you think that? Markets have a problem handling unpriced externalities without regulation. (Tragedy of the commons.) Pollution is a notable example of market failure, and the bathrooms issue is a special case of exactly this. Why pay extra to dispose of your waste properly if you can get away with dumping it elsewhere? As a matter of public health, it's better for everyone if this type of waste goes in the sewers and not in the alley, even if the perpetrators can't afford a coffee. How would you propose we stop the pollution? Fining them wouldn't help, even if we could catch them reliably, which would be expensive, because they don't have any money to take. Jailing them would probably cost taxpayers more than maintaining bathrooms would. Taxpayers are already paying for the sewer system (a highly appropriate use of taxation). This is just an expansion of the same.
Replies from: eye96458, eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-23T21:36:10.455Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
From your response it seems to me that I've understood your question and position [LW(p) · GW(p)], so I'm responding to it here.
epistemic status: I am a public policy and economics amateur. I do not have extreme cognitive ability and I thought about the question for < 1 hour.
I'm going to suggest some other possible ways to stop homeless people from shitting in the streets and then I will nominate my current preferred solution.
- Remove legal restrictions [LW(p) · GW(p)] to running just-bathroom businesses.
- Reduce the number of homeless people (by, for example, giving them homes and/or letting developers build more homes).
- Start a charity that operates bathrooms for the homeless.
My current preference is a mix of (a) punishing people who shit in the streets with jail time, (b) reducing the number of homeless by facilitating more housing development, (c) and removing legal restrictions on running just-bathroom businesses.
AFAICT I prefer my solution to yours because I am wary of the San Francisco Division of Public Bathrooms turning into a permanent boondoggle (I'm generally suspicious of government activity, although I do accept that, for example, the Apollo Program and Manhattan Project are very impressive, and IMO most American police departments do an okay job.) and because I suspect the situation is being heavily influenced by anti-housing-development policies and anti-just-bathroom-businesses policies.
If you have a good critique of my solution, please offer it. As I said, I'm a public policy noob.
Replies from: edge_retainer↑ comment by edge_retainer · 2024-08-02T14:45:52.305Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
its a public externality, you don't need a government division to run bathrooms, you just need to do 1. + provide a subsidy
↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-23T00:07:39.832Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I wouldn't expect so, why would you think that?
I explained my reasoning here [LW(p) · GW(p)]. Also note that most people who have demand for using the bathroom are not penniless homeless people.
Why pay extra to dispose of your waste properly if you can get away with dumping it elsewhere?
I agree. A self-interested rational agent would just shit in the streets if they could get away with it.
As a matter of public health, it's better for everyone if this type of waste goes in the sewers and not in the alley, even if the perpetrators can't afford a coffee.
I agree.
How would you propose we stop the pollution? Fining them wouldn't help, even if we could catch them reliably, which would be expensive. Besides, they don't have any money to take. Jailing them would probably cost taxpayers more than maintaining bathrooms would. Taxpayers are already paying for the sewer system (a highly appropriate use of taxation). This is just an expansion of the same.
I understand you to be raising the question, "What is the best way to stop homeless people from shitting in the streets?". And then you've suggested four possible solutions:
- Government operates more free to use bathrooms.
- Government pays private businesses to make their bathrooms available to everyone.
- Government fines people who shit in the streets.
- Governments jails people who shit in the streets.
And you claim that (1) and (2) are the best options.
Do I understand you correctly?
Replies from: dr_s↑ comment by dr_s · 2024-06-23T06:54:45.991Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I explained my reasoning here. Also note that most people who have demand for using the bathroom are not penniless homeless people.
Here is my reasoning. On one hand, obviously going to the bathroom, sometimes in random circumstances, is an obvious universal necessity. It is all the more pressing for people with certain conditions that make it harder for them to control themselves for long. So it's important that bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, and distributed reasonably well everywhere. I would also argue it's important that they have no barrier to access because sometimes time is critical when using it. In certain train stations I've seen bathrooms that can only be used by paying a small price, which often meant you needed to have and find precise amounts of change to go. Absolutely impractical stuff for bathrooms.
On the other, obviously maintaining bathrooms is expensive as it requires labour. You don't want your bathrooms to be completely fouled on the regular, or worse, damaged, and if they happen to be, you need money to fix them. So bathrooms aren't literally "free".
Now one possible solution would be to have "public bathroom" as a business. Nowadays you could allow entrance with a credit card (note that this doesn't solve the homeless thing, but it addresses most people's need). But IMO this isn't a particularly high value business, and on its own certainly not a good use of valuable city centre land, which goes directly against the fact that you need bathrooms to be the most where the most people are. So this never really happens.
Another solution is to have bathrooms as part of private businesses doing other stuff (serving food/drinks) and have them charge for their use. Which is how it works now. The inadequacy lies into how for some reason these businesses charge you indirectly by asking you to buy something. This is inefficient in a number of ways: it forces you to buy something you don't really want, paying more than you would otherwise, and the provider probably still doesn't get as much as they could if they just asked a bathroom fee since they also need the labour and ingredients to make the coffee or whatever. So why are things like this? I'm not sure - I think part of it may be that they don't just want money, they want a filter that will discourage people from using the bathroom too much to avoid having too many bathroom goers. If that's the case, that's bad, because it means some needs will remain unfulfilled (and some people might forgo going out for too long entirely rather than risking being left without options). Part of it may be that they just identify their business as cafes and would find it deleterious to their image to explicitly provide a bathroom service. But that's a silly hangup and one we should overcome, if it causes this much trouble. Consider also that the way things are now, it's pretty hard of the cafes to enforce their rules anyway, and lots of people will just use the bathroom without asking or buying anything anyway. Everyone loses.
Or you could simply build and maintain public bathrooms with tax money. There are solutions to the land value problem (e.g. build them as provisionary structures on the sidewalk) and this removes all issues and quite a lot of unpleasantness. You could probably use even just some of the sales tax and house taxes income from the neighbourhood and the payers would in practice see returns out of this. Alternatively, you could publicly subsidize private businesses offering their bathrooms for free. Though I reckon that real public bathrooms would be better for the homeless issue since businesses probably don't want those in their august establishments.
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-24T15:54:29.900Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks for providing this detailed account of your reasoning. I understand most of what you are saying, but I'm a little confused about the first two paragraphs.
On one hand, obviously going to the bathroom, sometimes in random circumstances, is an obvious universal necessity. It is all the more pressing for people with certain conditions that make it harder for them to control themselves for long. So it's important that bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, and distributed reasonably well everywhere. I would also argue it's important that they have no barrier to access because sometimes time is critical when using it. In certain train stations I've seen bathrooms that can only be used by paying a small price, which often meant you needed to have and find precise amounts of change to go. Absolutely impractical stuff for bathrooms.
On the other, obviously maintaining bathrooms is expensive as it requires labour. You don't want your bathrooms to be completely fouled on the regular, or worse, damaged, and if they happen to be, you need money to fix them. So bathrooms aren't literally "free".
Here I take you to be laying out the problem/goal that the rest of your comment addresses with various candidate solutions. But what exactly is the goal?
- Bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, well distributed and with no barrier to access (while taking into account the fact that bathrooms are expensive to maintain).
- Literally every potential visitor to a given geographical region (regardless of the person's medical, biological or economic idiosyncrasies) has unencumbered access to clean and functioning bathroom facilities.
- <something else>
My confusion is being prompted by the suspicion that different neighborhoods have different optimal bathroom regimes (unless the goal is trying to make every neighborhood accommodate the same set of people (eg, all people, or all Americans, or middle class residents of the city, etc)). For example:
- Neighborhood A is mostly a bunch of expensive boutique clothiers and almost all of their customers are wealthy women. It turns out (and I might be totally wrong about this specific case) that nearly all wealthy American women do not suffer from conditions that would require them to ever need short notice immediate access to a bathroom (eg, IBS). But this is not true of the wider American population. How many bathrooms should be in neighborhood A?
- Then suppose that over time neighborhood A shifts from being mostly boutique clothiers to restaurants frequented by middle class tourists. Now how many bathrooms should be in neighborhood A?
So, I'm just looking for clarification on precisely what problem/goal the comment is addressing.
Or you could simply build and maintain public bathrooms with tax money. There are solutions to the land value problem (e.g. build them as provisionary structures on the sidewalk) and this removes all issues and quite a lot of unpleasantness.
And so that my comment isn't just harassing you for clarification, I like the idea of building bathrooms in places that would not crowd out other businesses, but what about re-zoning (maybe "re-zoning" isn't the right term) parts of the sidewalk so that entrepreneurs could setup bathroom businesses on it?
Replies from: dr_s↑ comment by dr_s · 2024-06-24T20:40:39.719Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think in general it's mostly 1); obviously "infinite perfect bathroom availability everywhere" isn't a realistic goal, so this is about striking a compromise that is however more practical than the current situation. For things like these honestly I am disinclined to trust private enterprise too much - especially if left completely unregulated - but am willing to concede that it's not my main value. Obviously I wouldn't want the sidewalk to be entirely crowded out by competing paid chemical toilets though, that solves one problem but creates another.
Since the discussion here started around homelessness, and homeless people obviously wouldn't be able to pay for private bathrooms (especially if these did the obvious thing for convenience and forgo coins in exchange for some kind of subscription service, payment via app, or such), I think the best solution would be free public bathrooms, and I think they would "pay themselves" in terms of gains in comfort and cleanliness for the people living in the neighborhood. They should be funded locally of course. Absent that though, sure, I think removing some barriers to private suppliers of paid for bathroom services would still be better than this.
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-24T21:41:54.898Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think in general it's mostly 1); obviously "infinite perfect bathroom availability everywhere" isn't a realistic goal, so this is about striking a compromise that is however more practical than the current situation.
Then I believe that I understand your previous comment, so I'm going to respond to your proposed solutions.
Now one possible solution would be to have "public bathroom" as a business. Nowadays you could allow entrance with a credit card (note that this doesn't solve the homeless thing, but it addresses most people's need). But IMO this isn't a particularly high value business, and on its own certainly not a good use of valuable city centre land, which goes directly against the fact that you need bathrooms to be the most where the most people are. So this never really happens.
I'm not sure where you live, but as others have pointed out (and as you are aware of), some cities and states (including California according to Wikipedia) ban pay toilets. If this ban was lifted, then would you expect the public bathroom situation to meaningfully improve?
(And I grant that this doesn't address your concerns about people who cannot afford to use paid toilets.)
Another solution is to have bathrooms as part of private businesses doing other stuff (serving food/drinks) and have them charge for their use. Which is how it works now. The inadequacy lies into how for some reason these businesses charge you indirectly by asking you to buy something. This is inefficient in a number of ways: it forces you to buy something you don't really want, paying more than you would otherwise, and the provider probably still doesn't get as much as they could if they just asked a bathroom fee since they also need the labour and ingredients to make the coffee or whatever. So why are things like this?
I agree that these are important questions (also, is it illegal for a cafe to charge someone just to use the bathroom? and, have any cafes tried to offer this service?). Before anyone takes any public policy action I would want them to get to the bottom of these matters.
I'm not sure - I think part of it may be that they don't just want money, they want a filter that will discourage people from using the bathroom too much to avoid having too many bathroom goers. If that's the case, that's bad, because it means some needs will remain unfulfilled (and some people might forgo going out for too long entirely rather than risking being left without options). Part of it may be that they just identify their business as cafes and would find it deleterious to their image to explicitly provide a bathroom service. But that's a silly hangup and one we should overcome, if it causes this much trouble. Consider also that the way things are now, it's pretty hard of the cafes to enforce their rules anyway, and lots of people will just use the bathroom without asking or buying anything anyway. Everyone loses.
These seem to be plausible hypotheses to me. Also, cafe entrepreneurs may just not have had the idea to offer a 'Use Bathroom' service. And insofar that they are interested in making money, that may overcome a desire to not do something weird.
Or you could simply build and maintain public bathrooms with tax money. There are solutions to the land value problem (e.g. build them as provisionary structures on the sidewalk) and this removes all issues and quite a lot of unpleasantness. You could probably use even just some of the sales tax and house taxes income from the neighbourhood and the payers would in practice see returns out of this. Alternatively, you could publicly subsidize private businesses offering their bathrooms for free. Though I reckon that real public bathrooms would be better for the homeless issue since businesses probably don't want those in their august establishments.
I agree that this might be the best solution. I'm generally skeptical of government services (although many municipalities do IMO an okay-ish job of delivering police, fire and water services) because they are not enmeshed in the market pricing mechanism (ie, they aren't threatened by bankruptcy and they aren't trying to make profit). But other [LW(p) · GW(p)] commenters [LW(p) · GW(p)]have [LW(p) · GW(p)] argued that bathrooms are public goods and that free markets don't do public goods well, so maybe I'm mistaken. I still haven't thought about their argument.
Since the discussion here started around homelessness, and homeless people obviously wouldn't be able to pay for private bathrooms (especially if these did the obvious thing for convenience and forgo coins in exchange for some kind of subscription service, payment via app, or such)
Why can homeless people obviously not pay for private bathrooms? I've seen homeless people use phones, but maybe most of them don't have phones. And I've seen homeless people have money (eg, panhandling then buying food), but maybe they don't have enough, or maybe they don't have credit or debit cards.
But maybe I'm missing the point and the real question is just, what about the people (regardless of what percentage of the homeless they are) who cannot afford to use private bathrooms? If the number is tiny, then just putting them in jail for shitting in the streets seems good enough to me. If it's larger, then maybe more public bathrooms are necessary, or maybe the destitute should be (de facto) banned from certain areas of cities, or maybe something else, I'm not sure.
↑ comment by keltan · 2024-06-21T23:47:04.476Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Just returned to Aus from US. One of the most annoying things while travelling was lack of public bathrooms. I could believe that some restaurants just didn’t have a bathroom. I was surprised at how few bathrooms lighthaven seemed to have. Though didn’t go into any of the sleeping areas. Even a place like Disneyland, or a mall. Here is AUS, if I go to a mall I expect to have bathrooms every ~hundred meters. I expect them to be clearly marked, easy to navigate towards and extremely rarely out of order. I can’t imagine needed to pay to use something like a bathroom. Though I did see cafes charging for cups of water. Charging for that type of thing in public places feels like a mistake to me.
Replies from: Raemon↑ comment by Raemon · 2024-06-22T05:06:27.187Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
FYI Lighthaven isn't super representative – most of the bathrooms are in private rooms because it was a hotel designed for people being in private rooms, and it's expensive to build more (both because it costs money, and because each bathroom is one fewer breakout room, which we also wanted in many contexts).
comment by WalterL · 2024-07-02T02:53:36.452Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
There's a saying in Chess, that if you have one weakness, you can probably defend it, but if you have two, you are probably fucked. I dunno, it's phrased better, but that's the gist.
Most homeless people are only temporarily homeless. They are the 'one weakness' crowd. Something has gone wrong, they are on the ropes, but they are straightening it out. There are times and places I can point to in my life where I could have become a 'one weakness' homeless.
A one weakness homeless has fucked up in a royal way (drugs, hit his girl...), and fallen through the cracks, but in a world where Thanos snapped them into a suburban home, they'd be fine. They are a homeowner/taxpayer sort, who just temporarily slipped out of the socket. Pick em up, turn em over twice and put em back in the USB slot, and all is well.
This is most homeless! Most people who are homeless are not homeless long. The majority, the vast majority, are on the come up. Never forget it.
The long term homeless tend to be 'all weakness' homeless. These are the protagonists of all of the frustrating stories of people trying to help someone out and suffering for it. The lifers. The people that the stereotype grew from.
Fundamentally, Mr. All Weakness cannot trust himself. He can't get a job, even the most menial and basic, because the version of him that exists tomorrow doesn't regard itself as bound by the promises made today. Call this mental illness, maybe it is an addiction to some substance, or simply loose temporal coupling...it doesn't matter. The point is that, without a future, they live for the present, and such people will be homeless.
Lots of people have trouble sticking to a diet, yeah? We've all been there. It's gonna start tomorrow we think, daily, for years. The second type of homeless are like this with everything.
The basic problem of helping the homeless is that the ones you can help can help themselves. A hand up is useful, sure, but you are accelerating a process already begun. The ones you cannot help, cannot BE helped.
All of the anecdotes, all of the stories people remember, will be about the second type. The people they successfully help will vanish from the streets, just as they were always going to. The ones that take the offered hand and bite it with piss stained teeth stick in the memory, and they are going to be the face of your project.
When OP imagines being homeless, it is a type 1 homelessness. The clerks would suffer nothing from giving up the bathroom code to a homeless version of OP, or, indeed, most homeless. But one experience with an all weakness homeless will teach caution, and if you are in a clerk in a neighborhood with homeless people you will have that experience sooner than later.
I spent two and a half hours (unfucking paid!!) cleaning a gas station bathroom at the end of a double because I was careless with the key. I never made that mistake again.
Replies from: Dirichlet-to-Neumann, eye96458↑ comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann · 2024-07-07T15:20:53.022Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I've often heard say, among charities people who work with homeless people, that you need as long to get out of the street than you spent living in the street.
↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-07-02T04:02:38.753Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This is most homeless! Most people who are homeless are not homeless long. The majority, the vast majority, are on the come up. Never forget it.
I hadn't realized that was the case. Do you have any good data on this?
Replies from: WalterL↑ comment by WalterL · 2024-07-02T14:56:18.652Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's mostly anecdotal from my experience, I'm afraid. That is, my conviction went the 'wrong way'. When I was poor, that's what I saw, then later articles mostly seemed to agree, rather than the data making me believe something and then experience confirming.
I looked up noahpinion's 'everything you know about homelessness is wrong' article, which I remember as basically getting stuff right. There is a citation link for 'the vast majority of homelessness is temporary and the vast majority of homeless people just need housing', but it is broken. womp womp.
The first link on searching 'homelessness is temporary' on google goes to What Are the Four Types of Homelessness? | Comic Relief US , where they don't give a hard number beyond saying that most homelessness is temporary. We can get it in reverse, though, in that 'chronic homelessness' is described as 17%, which would make non chronic homelessness 83%.
Homing in on 'chronic homelessness' seems worthwhile, if that's the terminology we might find more useful stuff that way.
State of Homelessness: 2023 Edition - endhomelessness.org has the hopeful link 'homelessness statistics'. They cite 421,392 'homeless people' and 127,768 'chronic homeless'.
Endhomelessness.org gives us: Chronically Homeless - National Alliance to End Homelessness where they describe chronic homelessness as about 22% of the homeless population.
Addressing Chronic Homelessness | The Homeless Hub gives us 2-4% of the homeless being chronically homeless in canada, vs 10% in the US.
I tried to google the opposite 'homelessness is permanent', 'homelessness is not temporary', etc, but the verbiage doesn't work that way. I couldn't find any results for most homeless being forever homeless, but even in a reality where that was true, I'm not sure I would.
comment by cousin_it · 2024-06-19T12:36:09.619Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Here's a question I don't know the answer to. If there was a program offering a basic income to homeless people, enough to pay for housing+food+clothes+etc in a cheaper area of the US without having to find work, but to receive the money you have to actually move there and get housed - would most homeless people accept the offer and move? I ask because it seems like such a program could be pretty cheap. Or would most of them prefer to stay in cities even at the cost of being homeless? If so, what would be the main reasons?
Replies from: westward, gilch, ann-brown↑ comment by westward · 2024-06-19T18:53:28.394Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
My understanding is that most homeless people are 'local' to the area. That is, the majority were already residents of a city before becoming homeless and for a variety of common sense reasons would not want to leave. They know the physical and social geography of their area. They have family or other deep ties. They know which shelters are open at which times, which areas to avoid, where to get dinner on a Thursday. Where it's relatively safe to sleep outside, etc.
Promising a person that if they move they'll be provided for means they lose whatever social network they have and requires trust that such a promise will be fulfilled and they won't be stranded in a worse situation.
That understanding is based on a handful of evenings volunteering at a local homeless shelter, conversations with a friend who is heavily involved in the non-profit world of homelessness, and a layman's interest in housing policy.
Replies from: cousin_it, gilch↑ comment by gilch · 2024-06-23T05:08:00.145Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
There's some UC San Francisco research to back up this view. California has the nation's biggest homeless population mainly due to unaffordable housing, not migration from elsewhere for a nicer climate.
↑ comment by gilch · 2024-06-22T23:41:40.878Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Relatively healthy people do occasionally become homeless due to misfortune, but they usually don't stay homeless. It could be someone from the lower class living paycheck to paycheck who has a surprise expense they're not insured for and can't make rent. It could be a battered woman and her children escaping domestic abuse. They get services, they get back on their feet, they get housed. Ideally, the social safety nets would work faster and better than they do in practice, but the system basically works out for them.
The persistently homeless are a different story. They're often mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs. They don't have the will or capacity to take advantage of the available services. In the past, such people were often institutionalized. These institutions often didn't act in their best interests, but it at least kept them off the streets so they couldn't harass the rest of us. Your proposal probably wouldn't help for them.
↑ comment by Ann (ann-brown) · 2024-06-19T13:31:30.678Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Probably depends on the specifics. Access to employment and services is a fair one; if you have a job and significant medical needs (and being homeless tends to give you significant medical needs), then moving to somewhere that doesn't provide them is unhelpful. Similarly, just because you have the money, there needs to be a certain degree of work for a community to support something like a grocery store to spend it at. Moving to Alaska for example is likely to sharply increase what food actually costs if you aren't up to homesteading.
And a lot of the 'cheaper parts of the US' (like Alaska) have climate-related challenges to maintaining a safe home, food, etc. Additionally, they might not be on the grid. Their water may be poisoned due to local pollution. Old mines might make the ground unsafe to inhabit. City land may actually be cheaper to establish affordable housing on when you add up all the costs of trying to provide good power, water, sanitation, and ensure the house doesn't just fall into a sinkhole at some point. Not everywhere is inhabitable without work that you might not be able to do.
That said, there's people it'd be great for, and 'just give people houses' is a very solid approach. If you think you can pull it off, I'd certainly go for it. Even if it didn't work for everyone, imagine how much help it would be if it worked for even 10% of people, and you're only paying for the ones it does help.
comment by Oli Beatson (oli-beatson) · 2024-08-22T20:56:58.412Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I've always felt a mix of fear, compassion and guilt when it comes to homeless people. In the UK, both London and suburbia (where I'm from) have seen the issue visibly intensify over the last decade or two.
Here as anywhere, it's a number issue. After discovering the YIMBY movement maybe half a decade ago, I began to realize, the next big social justice movement, has go to be whatever reframing of <this whole thing> -- housing and urban policy -- is required to ensure society never again returns to this kind of supply shortage and general climate of stagnation and political innumeracy with regard to permitting. Even down to our journalism, the tables are stacked in an incredibly conservative, and just generally anti-progress, anti-growth, direction.
I think it fails to collect political traction because most people are just completely unable (and maybe emotionally incapable) of fully grokking and computing the scale, even, of each component of the problem, whether it be
- people who struggle with aspects of living in a society, or
- the resources (land, building supplies, "sky", "views", transit access, etc) that are each considered bottlenecks to "solving" the "problem"
The swathes of people who would benefit from partially supervised living conditions, either for their safety, health or broader social fulfilment. The number of people nihilistically satisfied to burn through their bodies on drugs like candles. The number of people trapped in relationships of convenience to save on housing costs. The number of people unable to move to an area more suitable to their career or lifestyle, especially the effect this has on artistic and intellectual scenes. Each of these "deaths by a thousand cuts" to the fabric of human happiness and productivity.
I was briefly excited by Keir Starmer's seeming embrace of the YIMBY movement in this country, and might feel optimistic about the tide changing in the USA too. I lost interest in the tech career I'd previously been pursuing as I noticed that, a little weed and this and that was doing things to my creativity that allowed me to see the edges of "reframings" - the kind of Tone you would need in a film, or a song, or a tiktok even, that would reposition the average view on homelessness a bit towards "oh, THAT'S how big the problem is??". I am semi-seriously writing a musical premeptively entitled "TENT" that might hope to at least be farcically fresh on these subjects, inspired by essentially defecting from the responsibilties of living with my mum and instead going out to Brighton to regularly meet and hear the various stories of people who've been through or orbitted this situation, which is a large cohort of my generation. I am also allowing myself to develop a rapper alter ego that may be able to tackle this in a way that is culturally and aesthetically appealing. I do constantly kinda hope someone has a better plan, tho.
I am unconvinced it will take much less than a wholesale reorientation of the current way we see planning as a state responsibility, and housing as a general commodity, to not just adequately sate the shortage but allow enough slack in the market for places devoid of life or industry to become lively again. But it's an inherently partisan and charged subject and I'm wary the level of delusion that can creep into any viewpoint in such a complex domain.
comment by Z(oe) · 2024-07-18T00:50:58.520Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I read this like three weeks ago, and it felt really familiar, though I couldn't remember why. But today, I figured it out! I found this assignment from when I was 16, and it seemed like a fitting addition.
It is five o’clock on a Wednesday. It’s drizzling, a rain soft enough to seem comforting had it been warmer. But, it isn’t, and in the dingy winter cold, it stings. This does not matter to the people in the café, insulated from the outside world by their expensive coffee. A low hum of hip-hop and typing fills the place. Old friends reunite, their crammed tables filled with laughter. Three small children pet a tourist’s dog. “Don’t worry,” she says. “He doesn’t bite.”
A man in a suit sits alone in the corner. He is working intently, three coffee-stained mugs piled at the edge of his table.
The bell on the door rings and a homeless woman walks in, her back hunched, hair wet from the rain. Café-goers actively avoid her gaze. She stops in the doorway, then shuffles over to the man’s table.
She says hello as he scooches back his chair.
“May I have a favor? Please?” She speaks very slowly.
He is confused.
“What do you need?”
She pauses.
“Ah.. Could you give me a hug?”
His eyes widen, as if he is just now seeing her clearly. “I’m sorry, but no.”
“Ok. Well, have a nice evening.”
By now, everyone has dropped the pretense of ignoring her, conversations stilled. She turns away, head lowering as she walks out the door.
“Seattle, huh,” he chuckles, smile strained, and an anxious laugh echoes from nearby tables.
I laugh, and wish I hadn’t.
comment by Nemoto · 2024-07-24T14:09:39.100Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
We say hi to each other regularly now. His name is George.
Isn't it extraordinary to know the name of a homeless person? Unusual enough to make it the concluding point of a section of writing on LessWrong. After all, they are almost a separate species, with their own culture, way of life, habits, and an aura which causes a nostril-wrinkling response in any decent clean-living human. Why should upright citizens have to fund the needs of this feckless lot of wasters?
Except his name is George. He has a personality. He once had parents, maybe a school, maybe hopes and dreams. He is not detritus, but a person. Something terrible has gone wrong in his life, and we are of the opinion that it was his own fault. Karma. Just desserts. Because our opinion of him has been formed entirely by our own experiences, and they differ from his.
I live in Cornwall in the UK, an area that predominantly relies on tourism for its economy. We also have a significant homeless population. People pooping in the sand dunes has become something of a public health issue, because government cuts mean that some beaches have no public toilets at all. Not even in a cafe, because there isn't a cafe. It is illegal to walk dogs on some beaches during the tourist season, yet unlike humans, dog walkers generally clean up after their dog, a legal requirement here.
I believe there must be solutions to this issue.
- Some resorts have upgraded their public toilets to have turnstiles for entry, which are operated only by card payment. The charge is less than the cost of a cup of coffee, and in return the facilities are kept clean and there are decent handwashing facilities. Vandalism is minimised, because people don't want to pay to smash stuff up, and there is no cash on the premises to steal. If the local authority were to issue some kind of pass card which would allow the homeless to use these facilities, would this be inviting anti-social behaviour? The only way to find out would be to try it and see.
- Both tourists and homeless people have been forced to suffer the indignity of public urination and defecation due to the closure of most of the public toilets. It seems shocking that visitors to our county, who pay a high price for accommodation here, poop in the sand. But why should this be more shocking when it is done by tourists than homeless people? Because tourists are above having such a basic human need? Because only homeless people can be driven to such acts of desperation? Because we can't face the thought that we might one day be forced onto such an act? Because we remember some past toilet-related moment of deep embarrassment? Who doesn't? Can you feel how this man felt:
As I passed him, there was a moment where our eyes met. He sheepishly averted his gaze.
- Some locals seem to think that everyone who visits a scenic wild beach should magically be capable of non-excretion, like God.[1] There are usually rubbish bins in these remote areas, and sometimes even bins specifically for dog waste. Maybe a solution worth trying is the installation of signs to encourage people to clean up after themselves in the same way they would for a dog? Various agencies feed homeless people; perhaps they could also distribute poop bags to them.
Now, If I can suggest two possible solutions, just because I have a little spare time on a wet Wednesday afternoon, consider what a truly determined body of intelligent humans could come up with! Or maybe Claude could help us with some even better ideas. Those who are in charge of big cities might find it more pleasant there if they devoted a few hours and a fraction of their budget to making provision for the welfare and dignity of George and those others in his dismal circumstances.
- ^
Robert Anton Wilson has successfully debunked the fallacy that this entity has a willy: The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, Volume 3, Nature's God, page 84. Therefore it is unlikely to be capable of excretion in the same manner as mammals.
↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-07-24T19:48:15.188Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Except his name is George. He has a personality. He once had parents, maybe a school, maybe hopes and dreams. He is not detritus, but a person. Something terrible has gone wrong in his life, and we are of the opinion that it was his own fault. Karma. Just desserts.
I’m fascinated by the bolded claim. Are you asserting that there was a part of his life that was terrible AND that it, the terrible part, has gone wrong? Please clarify.
comment by metachirality · 2024-06-18T06:09:54.370Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I remember going to a city and seeing someone on the subway loudly threatening nonexistent people. I wasn't scared, I just felt bad that in all likelihood, the world had failed this person through no fault of their own.
comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2024-06-21T21:23:52.344Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I believe the past tense is actually "shat". Much more expressive.
comment by Review Bot · 2024-06-19T22:41:05.659Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
comment by milanrosko · 2024-06-19T04:52:52.492Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I have no idea what this is about but it seems to me that you are making confidential conversation about Teresa <redacted> public, possibly without her consent. Maybe because she is homeless. Can someone explain to me like I am five why this on lesswrong?
Replies from: habryka4, declan-molony, lahwran, ben-millwood, LosPolloFowler↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-06-19T04:57:26.256Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
(I see no indication in this story that the conversation was confidential)
Replies from: Davidmanheim↑ comment by Davidmanheim · 2024-06-19T06:04:12.162Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Ideally, statements should be at least two of true, necessary/useful, and kind. I agree that this didn't breach confidentiality of some sort, and yet I think that people should generally follow a policy where we don't publicize random non-notable people's names without explicit permission when discussing them in a negative light - and the story might attempt to be sympathetic, but it certainly isn't complementary.
Replies from: SaidAchmiz↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2024-06-20T03:06:05.044Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Ideally, statements should be at least two of true, necessary/useful, and kind.
Why is that ideal?
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-20T21:46:07.085Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Said, I suspect you have had many discussions here on this and related topics in the past, mostly along the lines of @Zack_M_Davis [LW · GW]'s "Lack of Social Grace is an Epistemic Virtue" [LW · GW]. As such, I doubt what I am writing here will be novel to you, but I shall present it anyway. [1]
As I see it, there are four main (and mostly independent) reasons why "statements should be at least two of true, necessary/useful, and kind" [2] is a good norm to enforce in a community: [3]
- By requiring that statements are either necessary or kind in addition to merely being true, leaders/moderators of a community can increase the overall level of kindness in the discussions that take place, which helps move the conversations away from a certain adversarial frame common on the Internet (in which users mostly try to one-up one another by signaling how intelligent they are) and towards a more cooperative stance which scales better, allows for a more robust process of (actual, real-world) community building [4], and improves user retention and satisfaction.
- Since different users have differing levels of tolerance for unkind statements or attempts (written by fellow users) to other-optimize [LW · GW] their lives, the types of people most likely to be upset by and eventually leave the community are those who were most sensitive to such statements. This generates a process of group evaporative cooling [LW · GW] that manifests itself through a positive feedback loop of the average kindness level of comments going down and the users least tolerant of unkindness/off-topic or other-optimizing comments leaving. Over the mid-to-long term, the only people left in the community would be a small minority of users with really thick skins who care about the truth above all else, along with a sizeable majority of people who enjoy intentionally insulting and lambasting others under the guise of "I'm only calling it as I see it." That would not be a fun place to participate, from the perspective of the vast majority of potential users that would otherwise be willing to contribute. [5]
- Robust norms against optimizing solely for truth at the expense of other relevant details (such as, for example, the likely impact of one's statement on the intended readers) provide a powerful deterrent to users who often teeter on the edge of the provocative/acceptable boundary. This is important because human rationality is bounded and the individual ascertainments of users that their comments are true and positive-value are not always reliable. As such, the community, on the whole, ends up erring on the side of caution. While this might not maximize the expectation of the aggregate value created (by incorrectly-in-retrospect prohibiting valuable comments from being posted), it could nonetheless be the optimal choice because it significantly lowers the likelihood and prevalence of overly harmful content (which, if disvalued strongly enough, becomes a more important consideration than maximizing the utility of the average state). [6]
- Even if we were to stipulate that users could always (and in a cost-free manner) correctly determine that their comments are true before posting them, the communication of true facts to other people is not always a good idea and sometimes serves to create harm or confusion. These ideas were expanded upon clearly and concretely in Phil Goetz's classic post on "Reason as memetic immune disorder" [LW · GW], which ably explains how "the landscape of rationality is not smooth; there is no guarantee that removing one false belief will improve your reasoning instead of degrading it." [7] The norms we are talking about attempt to counteract these problems by requiring that users think about the impact, helpfulness, and necessity of their comments (as they relate to other people) before posting them.
Of course, this is only one side of the equation, namely "why require that comments are necessary/helpful or kind in addition to being true?" There is also the reverse question, regarding "why is it okay for a statement to be helpful and kind, if it in fact is not true?" [8] This deals mostly with white lies or other good-faith actions and comments by users to help others, and it is generally seen as bad to punish thoughtful attempts to be kind (as that predictably reduces the overall level of kindness in the interactions community members have, which is bad as per the discussion above).
- ^
Since it is both true and necessary/useful, meaning it meets the criteria. (It doesn't seem particularly kind or unkind)
- ^
Thinking about it in more detail, it feels like a type/category error to lump "true" and "necessary/useful" (which are qualities having to do with the underlying territory [LW · GW] that a statement refers to) in with "kind" (which deals with the particular stance the user writing the statement takes towards intended readers). Since no human has direct API access to undeniable truths and everything we think about must instead be mediated by our imperfect and biased minds, the best we can do is say what we think is true while hoping that it is in fact correct. The strongest argument for nonetheless stating the norm as having to do with "truth" is that it likely invites fewer debates over the intent and the content of the minds of others than something like "honesty" would (and, from the perspective of a moderator of an internet community, norms against mind-reading and ascribing bad attitudes to strangers are crucial for the sustained thriving of the community).
- ^
Given your stated opposition to guideline 5 [LW · GW] of Duncan Sabien's "Basics of Rationalist Discourse," I can already expect a certain subset of these arguments not to be persuasive to you.
- ^
I am aware of your historical (and likely also current?) opposition to the development of the rationalist "community," but your view did not win out.
- ^
Somewhat related quote by Scott Alexander: "The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
- ^
See, generally, Type I vs II errors and the difference between the utility of the expectation and the expectation of the utility.
- ^
See also the valley of bad rationality [? · GW] more generally.
- ^
↑ comment by Zack_M_Davis · 2024-06-21T00:28:58.388Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
white lies or other good-faith actions
What do you think "good faith" means? I would say that white lies are a prototypical instance of bad faith, defined by Wikipedia as "entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another."
↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2024-06-21T00:25:26.972Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
There is also the reverse question, regarding “why is it okay for a statement to be helpful and kind, if it in fact is not true?” … I suspect you would likely say this is not okay, for reasons of Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies [LW · GW] and because of a general feeling that telling the truth is simply more dignified [LW · GW] than optimizing for anything else.
Knowingly saying things that are not true is bad, yes. (It might be good sometimes… when communicating with enemies. There’s a reason why the classic thought experiment asks whether you would lie to the Gestapo!) I don’t see any even somewhat plausible justification for doing such things in a discussion on Less Wrong. There is no need to reach for things like “dignity” here… are we really having the “is posting lies on Less Wrong bad, actually? what if it’s good?” discussion?
This deals mostly with white lies or other good-faith actions and comments by users to help others, and it is generally seen as bad to punish thoughtful attempts to be kind (as that predictably reduces the overall level of kindness in the interactions community members have, which is bad as per the discussion above).
Seen by whom? I certainly hope that nobody here on LW thinks that it’s bad to punish “thoughtful attempts to be kind” that involve lying. Do you think that?!
In any case, I can’t help but notice that you spend a lot of time discussing the “kind” criterion, approximately one paragraph (and a rather baffling one, at that) on the “true” criterion, but you say almost nothing about the “necessary” criterion. And when you do mention it, you actually shift, unremarked, between several different versions of it:
necessary/useful
Right away we’ve got confusion. What’s the criterion—“necessary”, or “useful”? Or either? Or both? These are two very different concepts!
necessary/helpful
Now we’ve added “helpful” to the mix. This again is different from both “necessary” and “useful”.
And what do any of these things mean, anyhow? What is “necessary”? What is “useful”? Who decides, and how? (Ditto for “kind”, although that one is at least more obviously vague and prone to subjectivity of interpretation, and enough has been said about that already.)
In any case, I’ve written about this problem before. Nothing’s changed since then. “Don’t post falsehoods” is a good rule (with common-sense elaborations like “if it’s demonstrated that something you thought was true is actually false, post a correction”, etc.). This stuff about “kind”, on the other hand, much less “necessary” (or “useful” or any such thing)… Well, let me put it this way: when anyone can give anything like a coherent, consistent, practically applicable definition of any of these things, then I’ll consider whether it might possibly be a good idea to take them as ideals. (To say nothing of elevating them to rule status—which, at least, Less Wrong has not done. Thankfully.)
Replies from: habryka4, None↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-06-21T00:53:14.114Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
FWIW, I think of it as a useful mnemonic and more something like "here are three principal components on which I would score a comment before posting to evaluate whether posting it is a good idea". I think the three hypothesized principal components are decent at capturing important aspects of reality, but not perfect.
I think on LW the "is it true"/"logically valid"/"written with truth-seeking orientation" principal component is more important than on other forums.
I also think de-facto we have settled on the "is it kind"/"written with caring"/"avoiding causing emotional hurt" direction being less important on LW, though this is a topic of great long-standing disagreement between people on the site. To the substantial but still ultimately limited degree I can set norms on the site, I think the answer to this should probably roughly be "yes, I think it makes sense for it to be less important around here, but on the margin I think I would like there to be more kindness, but like, not enormously more".
I feel like LW has varied a surprising amount on how much it values something like the "useful"/"relevant"/"important"/"weightiness"/"seriousness" principal component. LW is not a humor site, and there isn't a ton of frivolous posting, but we do have a lot of culture and people do have fun a bunch. My current take is that LW does care about this dimension more than most other internet forums, but a lot less than basically all professional forums or scientific journals or anything in that reference class.
Not sure whether this helps this discussion. I found it helpful to think through this, and figured I would share more of the principal-component framing of this, which is closer to how I think about it. Also, maybe you don't see how these three things might meaningfully be considered three principal components of comment quality, or don't see how they carve reality at its joints, which IDK, I am not like enamored with this frame, but I found that it pays decent rent in my ability to predict the consequences of posting a comment.
Replies from: SaidAchmiz↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2024-06-21T01:06:49.682Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I feel like LW has varied a surprising amount on how much it values something like the “useful”/”relevant”/”important”/”weightiness”/”seriousness” principal component. LW is not a humor site, and there isn’t a ton of frivolous posting, but we do have a lot of culture and people do have fun a bunch. My current take is that LW does care about this dimension more than most other internet forums, but a lot less than basically all professional forums or scientific journals or anything in that reference class.
Part of the problem (not the entirety of it by any means, but a substantial part) is that the claim that these things (‘“useful”/”relevant”/”important”/”weightiness”/”seriousness”’) are somehow one thing is… extremely non-obvious. To me they seem like several different things. I don’t even really know what you mean by any of them (I can make some very general guesses, but who knows if my guesses are even close to what you’ve got in mind?), and I definitely don’t have the first clue how to interpret them as some kind of single thing.
(Really there are so many problems with this whole “kind/true/necessary, pick 2” thing that it seems like if I start listing them, we’ll be here all day. Maybe a big part of the problem is that I’ve never seen it persuasively—or even seriously—defended, and yet it’s routinely cited as if it’s just an uncontroversially good framework. It seems like one of those things that has so much intuitive appeal that most people simply refuse to give it any real thought, no matter how many and how serious are the problems that it is demonstrated to have, because they so strongly don’t want to abandon it. I do not include you among that number, to be clear.)
Replies from: habryka4↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-06-21T01:09:58.522Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
To me they seem like several different things. I don’t even really know what you mean by any of them (I can make some very general guesses, but who knows if my guesses are even close to what you’ve got in mind?), and I definitely don’t have the first clue how to interpret them as some kind of single thing.
My guess is I could communicate the concept extensionally by just pointing to lots of examples, but IDK, I don't super feel like putting in the effort right now. I broadly agree with you that this feels like a framework that is often given too much weight, but I also get decent mileage out of the version I described in my comment.
Replies from: SaidAchmiz↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2024-06-21T01:36:28.469Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
To be clear, it wasn’t my intention to suggest that I expected you to clarify, right here in this comment thread, this concept (or concepts) that you’re using. I don’t expect that would be a good use of your time (and it seems like you agree).
My point, rather, was that it’s really not clear (to me, and I expect—based on many concrete instances of experience!—to many others, also) what these words are being used to mean, whether this is a single concept or multiple concepts, what exactly those concepts are, etc. Quite apart from the concrete question “what does that mean”, the fact that I don’t have even any good guesses about the answer (much less anything resembling certainty) makes the concept in question a poor basis for any evaluation with practical consequences!
I broadly agree with you that this feels like a framework that is often given too much weight, but I also get decent mileage out of the version I described in my comment.
I don’t doubt that, but I do want to point out that a set of criteria applied to oneself, and the same set of criteria applied to others, will have very different consequences.
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-21T01:56:40.473Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Knowingly saying things that are not true is bad, yes. (It might be good sometimes… when communicating with enemies. There’s a reason why the classic thought experiment asks whether you would lie to the Gestapo!)
The thought experiment is fine as a stand-alone dilemma for those who have some particularly powerful deontological commitment to truthtelling, I suppose. Since I do not number myself among them, deciding to lie in that case is straightforwardly the choice I would make. And, of course, lying to enemies is indeed often useful (perhaps even the default option to choose).
But I definitely do not agree with the (implied) notion that it is only when dealing with enemies that knowingly saying things that are not true is the correct option. There have, of course, been a great deal of words spilled on this matter [LW · GW] here on LW that ultimately, in my view, veered very far away from the rather straightforward conclusion that when we analyze the expected consequences (which factor into my decisions at least to some extent, and have in any case been part of the ethos of LessWrong for more than 16 years [LW · GW]) of our words to others and we realize that the optimal choice is not the one that maximizes our estimation of truth value (or even minimizes it), that is the action we select. Since we are imperfect beings running on corrupted hardware [LW · GW], we can (and likely should) make affordances for the fact that we are likely worse at modeling the world than we would intuitively expect to be, perhaps by going 75% of the way to consequentialism instead of committing ourselves to it fully?
But that merely means adjusting the ultimate computation to take such considerations into account, and definitely does not even come close to meaning you write down your bottom line [LW · GW] as "never knowingly say things that are not true to friends or strangers" before actually analyzing the situation in front of you on its own merits.
I don’t see any even somewhat plausible justification for doing such things in a discussion on Less Wrong. There is no need to reach for things like “dignity” here… are we really having the “is posting lies on Less Wrong bad, actually? what if it’s good?” discussion?
First as a more meta note, incredulity is an argumentative superweapon and thus makes for a powerful rhetorical tool. I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with using it, of course, but in this particular case I also do not think it is bad to point this out so readers are aware, and adjust their beliefs accordingly.
Now on to the object level, LessWrong is indeed founded on a set of principles that center around truthtelling to such an extent that posting lies is indeed bad here. But the justification for that is not a context-free Fully General Counterargument [LW · GW] in favor of maximal truth-seeking, but rather a basic observation that violating the rules of the site will predictably and correctly lead to negative outcomes for everyone involved (from yourself getting banned, to the other users you are responding being rightfully upset about the violation of norms of expected behavior [LW(p) · GW(p)], to the moderators having to waste time getting rid of you, and to second-order consequences for the community in terms of weaking the effect of the norms on constraining other users, which would make future interactions between them more chaotic and overall worse off).
But zooming out for a second, the section of your comment that I quoted is mostly out of scope of my own comment, which explained the general reasons why the particular norms at issue are good for communities. You have focused in on a specific application of those norms which would be unreasonable (and is in any case merely the final paragraph of my comment, which I spent much less time on since it is by far the least applicable to the case of LessWrong). There is no contradiction here: as in many other areas (including law), the specific controls the general, and particular considerations often force general principles to give way. It is yet another illustration of why those principles are built to be flexible in the first place, which accords with my analysis above.
Seen by whom?
Seen by the users of the site, at a general level, and in particular the overwhelming majority of lurkers that form a crucial part of the base (and influence the content on the site through their votes) at any given time, in no small part because of their potential to become more productive generators of value in the future (of course, that potential only becomes actualized if those users are not driven out beforehand by an aggregate lack of adherence to norms akin to the ones discussed here, as per my explanation in parts 1 and 2 above [LW(p) · GW(p)]).
There is a tremendous selection bias involved in only taking into account the opinions of those that comment; while these people may be more useful for the community (and many of them may have been here for a longer time and thus feel that it is their garden too [LW(p) · GW(p)]), the incredulity you offer up at the possible existence of disagreement on this matter does not seem to have come to terms with the community's aggregate opinions on these topics when they came up 1-1.5 years ago (I'd rather not relitigate those matters, as to respect the general community consensus that they are in the past, but I should give at least one illustrative example [LW · GW] that forms the prototype for what I was talking about).
I'll take the rest of your comment slightly out of order, so as to better facilitate the explanation of what's involved.
you say almost nothing about the “necessary” criterion
This is incorrect as a factual matter. There are 3 crucial moments where the "necessary" criterion came into play in my explanation of the benefits of these norms:
- by discouraging other-optimizing [LW · GW] (this is mentioned in point 2 [LW(p) · GW(p)] above) and other related behaviors as being neither necessary nor useful, even in situations where the user might honestly (and correctly) believe that they are merely "telling it as it is."
- by focusing at least in small part on the impact that the statement has on the readers as opposed to the mere question of how closely it approximates the territory and constrains it [LW · GW] (this is the primary focus of point 3 [LW(p) · GW(p)] above).
- virtually the entirety of point 4 [LW(p) · GW(p)].
approximately one paragraph (and a rather baffling one, at that) on the “true” criterion
I would wager that LessWrong understands the concept of "truth" to a far greater extent than virtually any other place on the internet. I did not expand upon this because I had nothing necessary or useful to say that has not already been enshrined as part of the core of the site.
By contrast, what I explain in one of my footnotes is that "true" and "kind," on their face, do not belong in the same category [LW · GW]because they essentially have different conceptual types. Yet, as I wrote above, there is an important reason why the norms are typically stated in the form Davidmanheim chose rather than through the replacement of "honestly" for "true" (which concedingly would make the conceptual types the same).
And when you do mention it, you actually shift, unremarked, between several different versions of it
There does not seem to be a natural boundary that carves reality at the joints [LW · GW] in a manner that leaves the different formulations in different boxes, given the particular context at play here (namely, user interactions in an online community). From a literal perspective, it is virtually never "necessary" for a random internet person to tell you anything, unless for some reason you desperately need emergency help and they are the only ones that can supply you with the requisite information for you.
As such, "necessary" and "useful" play virtually the same role in this context. "Helpful" does as well, although it blends in part of (but not the entirety) of the "kindness" rubric that we've already gone over.
These are two very different concepts!
As mentioned above, in the case of comment sections on LessWrong? They are not very different at all.
And what do any of these things mean, anyhow? What is “necessary”? What is “useful”? Who decides, and how? (Ditto for “kind”, although that one is at least more obviously vague and prone to subjectivity of interpretation, and enough has been said about that already.)
In any case, I’ve written about this problem before. Nothing’s changed since then.
Quite to the contrary: the actual important problem at hand has indeed been written about before [LW · GW], about 9 years earlier than all of the links you just gave (except for possibly the last one, where "The topic or board you are looking for appears to be either missing or off limits to you"). The type of conceptual analysis your questions require will not output a short encoding [LW · GW] of the relevant category in thingspace [LW · GW] in the form of a nice, clean definition because the concepts themselves did not flow out of such a (necessary & sufficient conditions-type) definition to begin with. That would be precisely the same type of type error as the one I have already identified earlier in this comment. They are the result of a changing and flowing communal understanding of ideas that happens organically instead of in a guided or designed manner.
The people who decide are the moderators (not just in terms of having control of the ban-hammer, but also by setting soft rules or general expectations for what is and isn't acceptable, commendable, upvote-worthy through their communications of what LessWrong is about [LW · GW]). And they decide how to set those rules, norms, and expectations based on their own experiences and judgment, while taking into account the continuous feedback that the community members give regarding the quality of content on the site (as per my earlier explaination above in this comment).
Well, let me put it this way: when anyone can give anything like a coherent, consistent, practically applicable definition of any of these things, then I’ll consider whether it might possibly be a good idea to take them as ideals.
Putting aside my previous two paragraphs, it is, of course, good for systems of norms, just like most incentive systems overall, to be clear and legible enough that users end up understanding them and become free to optimize [LW · GW]within their framework. But Internet moderation cannot function with the same level of consistency and ease of application (and, consequently, lack of discretion) as something like, say, a legal system, let alone the degree of coherence that you seem to demand in order to even consider whether these norms could possibly be a good idea.
As Habryka explained less than 3 months ago [LW(p) · GW(p)]:
Replies from: Zack_M_Davis, SaidAchmizIt is valuable and a precious public good to make it easy to know which actions you take will cause you to end up being removed from a space. However, that legibility also comes at great cost, especially in social contexts. Every clear and bright-line rule you outline will have people budding right up against it, and de-facto, in my experience, moderation of social spaces like LessWrong is not the kind of thing you can do while being legible in the way that for example modern courts aim to be legible.
As such, we don't have laws. If anything we have something like case-law which gets established as individual moderation disputes arise, which we then use as guidelines for future decisions, but also a huge fraction of our moderation decisions are downstream of complicated models we formed about what kind of conversations and interactions work on LessWrong, and what role we want LessWrong to play in the broader world, and those shift and change as new evidence comes in and the world changes.
I do ultimately still try pretty hard to give people guidelines and to draw lines that help people feel secure in their relationship to LessWrong, and I care a lot about this, but at the end of the day I will still make many from-the-outside-arbitrary-seeming-decisions in order to keep LessWrong the precious walled garden that it is.
↑ comment by Zack_M_Davis · 2024-06-21T04:26:18.990Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I definitely do not agree with the (implied) notion that it is only when dealing with enemies that knowingly saying things that are not true is the correct option
There's a philosophically deep rationale for this, though: to a rational agent, the value of information is nonnegative. (Knowing more shouldn't make your decisions worse.) It follows that if you're trying to misinform someone, it must either the case that you want them to make worse decisions (i.e., they're your enemy), or you think they aren't rational.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-21T04:28:58.055Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
To clarify, I straightforwardly do not believe any human being I have ever come into contact with is rational enough for information-theoretic considerations like that to imply that something other than telling the truth will necessarily lead to them making worse decisions.
Replies from: Zack_M_Davis, SaidAchmiz↑ comment by Zack_M_Davis · 2024-06-21T04:37:01.412Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The philosophical ideal can still exert normative force even if no humans are spherical Bayesian reasoners on a frictionless plane. The disjunction ("it must either the case that") is significant: it suggests that if you're considering lying to someone, you may want to clarify to yourself whether and to what extent that's because they're an enemy or because you don't respect them as an epistemic peer. Even if you end up choosing to lie, it's with a different rationale and mindset than someone who's never heard of the normative ideal and just thinks that white lies can be good sometimes.
Replies from: None, kave↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-21T04:43:35.406Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yes, this seems correct. With the added clarification that "respecting [someone] as an epistemic peer" is situational rather than a characteristic of the individual in question. It is not that there are people more epistemically advanced than me which I believe I should only ever tell the full truth to, and then people less epistemically advanced than me that I should lie to with absolute impunity whenever I start feeling like it. It depends on a particularized assessment of the moment at hand.
I would suspect that most regular people who tell white lies (for pro-social reasons, at least in their minds) generally do so in cases where they (mostly implicitly and subconsciously) determine that the other person would not react well to the truth, even if they don't spell out the question in the terms you chose.
↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2024-06-21T04:41:37.175Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Over what is “necessarily” quantified, here? Do you mean:
“… to imply that something other than telling the truth will necessarily lead to them making worse decisions, in every case where they make any decision”?
or:
“… to imply that something other than telling the truth will necessarily lead to them making worse decisions, in every case where I tell them something other than the truth”?
or:
“… to imply that it is necessarily the case that a policy other than telling them the truth will, in expectation, lead to them making worse decisions on average”?
or something else?
I ask because under the first two interpretations, for example, the claim is true even when dealing with perfectly rational agents. But the third claim seems highly questionable if applied to literally all people whom you have met.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-21T04:52:47.381Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I believe that , where and T = "in every single situation where someone can either tell them the truth or can instead tell them something false or not fully optimized for truth, they make better decisions when given the truth."
This is compatible with , where and T' = "in the vast majority of situations where someone can either tell them the truth or can instead tell them something false or not fully optimized for truth, they make better decisions when given the truth." In fact, I believe S' to be a very large set.
It is also compatible with , where and T'' = "a general policy of always telling them the truth will, on average (or in expectation over single events), result in them making better decisions than a general policy of never telling them the truth." Indeed, I believe S'' to be a very large set as well.
Replies from: SaidAchmiz↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2024-06-21T05:04:49.586Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Right, so, that first one is also true of perfectly rational agents, so tells us nothing interesting. (Unless you quantify “they make better decisions when given the truth” as “in expectation” or “on average”, rather than “as events actually turn out”—but in that case I once again doubt the claim as it applies to people you’ve met.)
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-21T05:13:51.482Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yes, in expectation over how the events can turn out given the (very rough and approximate) probability distributions they have in their minds at the time of/right after receiving the information. For every single person I know, I believe there are some situations where, were I to give them the truth, I would predict (at the time of giving them the information, not post hoc) that they will perform worse than if I had told them something other than the truth.
This is why I said "make better decisions" instead of merely "obtain better outcomes," since the latter would lend itself more naturally to the interpretation of "as things actually turn out," while the decision is evaluated on the basis of what was known at the time and not through what happened to occur.
↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2024-06-21T03:01:50.123Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
To all that stuff about “consequentialism” and “writing down your bottom line”, I will say only that consequentialism is meaningless without values and preferences. I value honesty. I prefer that others with whom I interact do likewise.
Seen by whom?
Seen by the users of the site, at a general level, and in particular the overwhelming majority of lurkers
Now, how could you possibly know that?
you say almost nothing about the “necessary” criterion
This is incorrect as a factual matter. There are 3 crucial moments where the “necessary” criterion came into play in my explanation of the benefits of these norms:
Given that you didn’t actually make clear that any of those things were about the “necessary” condition (indeed you didn’t even mention the word in any of points #2, #3, or #4 in the grandparent—I did check), I think it’s hardly reasonable to call what I said “incorrect as a factual matter”. But never mind that; you’ve clarified your meaning now, I suppose…
Taking your clarification into account, I will say that I find all three of those points to be some combination of incomprehensible, baffling, and profoundly misguided. (I will elaborate if you like, though the details of these disagreements seem to me to be mostly a tangent.)
And when you do mention it, you actually shift, unremarked, between several different versions of it
There does not seem to be a natural boundary that carves reality at the joints [LW · GW] in a manner that leaves the different formulations in different boxes, *given the particular context at play here (namely, user interactions in an online community). *From a literal perspective, it is virtually never “necessary” for a random internet person to tell you anything, unless for some reason you desperately need emergency help and they are the only ones that can supply you with the requisite information for you.
Yep. That certain is the problem. And therefore, the conclusion is that this concept is hopelessly confused and not possible to usefully apply in practice—right?
As such, “necessary” and “useful” play virtually the same role in this context. “Helpful” does as well, although it blends in part of (but not the entirety) of the “kindness” rubric that we’ve already gone over.
… I guess not.
Look, you certainly can say “I declare that what I mean by ‘necessary’ is ‘helpful’ and/or ‘useful’”. (Of course then you might find yourself having to field the question of whether “helpful” and “useful” are actually the same thing—but never mind that.) The question is, does everyone involved understand this term “necessary” in the same way?
Empirically: no.
except for possibly the last one, where “The topic or board you are looking for appears to be either missing or off limits to you”
Ah, sorry, that’s indeed a restricted forum. Here’s the post, with appropriate redactions:
https://wiki.obormot.net/Temp/QuotedDSLForumPost
They are the result of a changing and flowing communal understanding of ideas that happens organically instead of in a guided or designed manner.
Precisely the problem (well, one of the several problems, anyhow) is that there is not, in fact, a “communal understanding” of these concepts, but rather a whole bunch of different understandings—and given the words and concepts we’re talking about here, there’s no hope of it ever being otherwise.
Internet moderation
This discussion started out [LW(p) · GW(p)] with a question about what is ideal, not what is allowed by the rules, or any such thing, so legibility of rules and consistency of moderation—important as those things might be—are not the point here.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-21T04:01:58.783Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
To all that stuff about “consequentialism” and “writing down your bottom line”, I will say only that consequentialism is meaningless without values and preferences. I value honesty. I prefer that others with whom I interact do likewise.
As I mentioned, this fits in as a "particularly powerful commitment to truthtelling," even as in your case it does not seem to be entirely deontological. Certainly a valid preference (in so much as preferences can even be described as "valid"), but orthogonal [? · GW] to the subset of empirical claims relating to how community interactions would likely play out under/without the norms under discussion.
Now, how could you possibly know that?
This is one of the rare occasions in which arguing by definition actually works (minus the general issues with modal logics [LW · GW]). The lurkers are the members of the community that are active in terms of viewing (and even engaging with in terms of upvoting/downvoting) the content but who do not make their presence known through comments or posts. As per statistics I have seen on the site a few times (admittedly, most of them refer back to the period around ~2017 or so, but the phenomenon being discussed here has only been further accentuated with the more recent influx of users [LW · GW]), LW is just like other Internet communities in terms of the vast majority of the userbase being made up of lurkers, most of whom have newer accounts and have engaged with the particularities of the subculture of longer-lasting members to a lesser extent. Instead, they come from different places on the Internet, with different background assumptions that are much more in line with the emphasis on kindness and usefulness (as LessWrong is more of an outlier among such communities in how much it cares about truth per se).
Yep. That certain is the problem. And therefore, the conclusion is that this concept is hopelessly confused and not possible to usefully apply in practice—right?
You seem to have confused the point about the fact that one literal meaning of "necessary" is that it refers only to cases of genuine (mostly medical) emergencies. It is not that this word is confused, but rather that, as with many parts of imperfect human languages that are built up on the fly instead of being designed purposefully from the beginning, it has different meanings in different contexts. It is overloaded, so the particular meaning at play depends on context clues (which are, by their nature, mostly implicit rather than explicitly pointed out) such as what the tone of the communication has been thus far, what forum it is taking place in, whether it is a formal or informal setting, whether it deals with topics in a mathematical or engineering or philosophical way, etc (this goes beyond mere Internet discussions and in fact applies to all aspects of human-to-human communication). This doesn't mean the word is "bad", as it may be (and often is) still the best option available in our speech to express the ideas we are getting across.
Whether it is "necessary" for someone to point out that some other person is making a particular error (say, for example, claiming that a particular piece of legislation was passed in 1883 instead of the correct answer of 1882) depends on that particular context: if it is a casual conversation between friends in which one is merely explaining to the other that there have been some concrete examples of government-sponsored anti-Chinese legislation, then butting in to correct that is not so "necessary"; by contrast, if this is a PhD student writing their dissertation on this topic, and you are their advisor, it becomes much more "necessary" to point out their error early on.
The question is, does everyone involved understand this term “necessary” in the same way?
Certainly not! It would be quite amazing (and frankly rather suspicious) if this were to happen; consider just how many different users there are. The likelihood of every single one of them having the same internal conception of the term is so low as to be negligible. But, of course, it is not necessary to reach this point, nor is it productive to do so, as it requires wasting valuable time and resources to attempt to pin down concepts through short sentences in a manner that simply cannot work out [LW · GW]. What matters is whether sufficiently many users understand the ideas well enough to behave according to them in practice; small disagreements of opinion may remain, but those can be ironed out on a case-by-case basis through the reasoning and discretion of community leaders (often moderators).
Empirically: no.
Yes, you are right to say this, as it seems you do not believe you have the same internal representation of these words as you think other people do (I fully believe that you are genuine in this). But, as mentioned above, the mere existence of a counterexample is not close to sufficient to bring the edifice down, and empirically, your confusions are more revealing about yourself and the way your mind works than they are a signal of underlying problems with the general community understanding of these matters; this would be an instance of improperly Generalizing From One Example [LW · GW].
Ah, sorry, that’s indeed a restricted forum. Here’s the post, with appropriate redactions:
Yeah, this works.
Precisely the problem (well, one of the several problems, anyhow) is that there is not, in fact, a “communal understanding” of these concepts, but rather a whole bunch of different understandings—and given the words and concepts we’re talking about here, there’s no hope of it ever being otherwise.
For the reasons mentioned above, I do not believe this do be correct at an empirical level, just as I agree with the assessments that many of the previous confusions you have previously professed are not about concepts confusing to the vast majority of other people [LW(p) · GW(p)] (and, in particular, other users of LW).
This discussion started out [LW(p) · GW(p)] with a question about what is ideal, not what is allowed by the rules, or any such thing, so legibility of rules and consistency of moderation—important as those things might be—are not the point here.
"What is allowed by the rules"? What rules? There seems to be a different confusion going on in your paragraph here. What are being discussed are the rules and norms in the community; it's not that these are allowed or prohibited by something else, but rather they are the principles that allow or prohibit other behaviors by users in the future. The legibility of rules and consistency of moderation are absolutely part of the point because they weigh (to a heavy but not overwhelming extent) on whether such rules and norms are desirable, and as a natural corollary, whether a particular system of such norms is ideal. This is because they impact the empirical outcomes of enacting them, such as whether users will understand them, adhere to them, promote them etc. Ignoring the consequences of that is making the same type of error that has been discussed in this thread in depth.
Replies from: SaidAchmiz↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2024-06-21T04:16:55.390Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Now, how could you possibly know that?
This is one of the rare occasions in which arguing by definition actually works
You then followed this with several empirical claims (one of which was based not on any concrete evidence but just on speculation based on claimed general patterns). No, sorry, arguing by definition does not work here.
It is not that this word is confused … It is overloaded
Well, words can’t really be confused, can they? But yes, the word “necessary” is overloaded, and some or possibly most or maybe even all of its common usages are also vague enough that people who think they’re talking about the same thing can come up with entirely different operationalizations for it, as I have empirically demonstrated, multiple times.
Whether it is “necessary” for someone to point out that some other person is making a particular error … depends on that particular context
That is not the problem. The problem (or rather—again—one of multiple problems) is that even given a fixed context, people easily can, and do, disagree not only on what “necessary” means in that context, but also on whether any given utterance fits that criterion (on which they disagree), and even on the purpose of having the criterion in the first place. This, again, is given some context.
What matters is whether sufficiently many users understand the ideas well enough to behave according to them in practice
It’s pretty clear that they don’t. I mean, we’ve had how many years of SSC, and now ACX (and, to a lesser extent, also DSL and Less Wrong) to demonstrate this?
But, as mentioned above, the mere existence of a counterexample is not close to sufficient to bring the edifice down, and empirically, your confusions are more revealing about yourself and the way your mind works than they are a signal of underlying problems with the general community understanding of these matters; this would be an instance of improperly Generalizing From One Example [LW · GW].
Sorry, no, this doesn’t work. I linked multiple examples of other people disagreeing on what “necessary” means in any given context, including Scott Alexander, who came up with this criterion in the first place, disagreeing with himself about it, in the course of the original post that laid out the concept of moderating according to this criterion!
This discussion started out [LW(p) · GW(p)] with a question about what is ideal, not what is allowed by the rules, or any such thing, so legibility of rules and consistency of moderation—important as those things might be—are not the point here.
“What is allowed by the rules”? What rules? There seems to be a different confusion going on in your paragraph here.
Uh… I think you should maybe reread what I’m responding to, there.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-06-21T04:36:44.852Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
people who think they’re talking about the same thing can come up with entirely different operationalizations for it, as I have empirically demonstrated, multiple times
Yes, people end up with different representations of the same kinds of ideas when you force them to spell out how they conceptualize a certain word when that word does not have a simple representation in natural language [LW · GW]. It is the same phenomenon that prompted Critch to label "consciousness" as a conflationary alliance [LW · GW] (and Paradiddle accurately identified the underlying issue [LW(p) · GW(p)] that caused this seeming disparity in understanding).
In any case, as I have mentioned above, differences in opinion are not only inevitable, but also perfectly fine as long as they do not grow too large or too common. From my comment above [LW(p) · GW(p)]: "small disagreements of opinion may remain, but those can be ironed out on a case-by-case basis through the reasoning and discretion of community leaders (often moderators)."
It’s pretty clear that they don’t. I mean, we’ve had how many years of SSC, and now ACX (and, to a lesser extent, also DSL and Less Wrong) to demonstrate this?
LessWrong and SSC (while it was running) have maintained arguably the highest aggregate qualities of commentary on the Internet, at least among relatively large communities that I know about. I do not see what is being demonstrated, other than precisely the opposite of the notion that norms sketched out in natural language cannot be followed en masse or cannot generate the type of culture that promotes such norms to new users (or users just transitioning from being lurkers to generating content of their own).
Uh… I think you should maybe reread what I’m responding to, there.
I think I'm going to tap out now. Unfortunately, I believe we have exhausted the vast majority of useful avenues of discourse on this matter.
Replies from: SaidAchmiz↑ comment by Said Achmiz (SaidAchmiz) · 2024-06-21T04:46:50.752Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
From my comment above [LW(p) · GW(p)]: “small disagreements of opinion may remain, but those can be ironed out on a case-by-case basis through the reasoning and discretion of community leaders (often moderators).”
But these aren’t small disagreements. They’re big disagreements.
I do not see what is being demonstrated, other than precisely the opposite of the notion that norms sketched out in natural language cannot be followed *en masse *or cannot generate the type of culture that promotes such norms to new users (or users just transitioning from being lurkers to generating content of their own).
The SSC case demonstrates precisely that these particular norms, at least, which were sketched out in natural language, cannot be followed en masse or, really, at all, and that (a) trying to enforce them leads to endless arguments (usually started by someone responding to someone else’s comment by demanding to know whether it was kind or necessary—note that the “true” criterion never led to such acrimony!), and (b) the actual result is a steady degradation of comment (and commenter) quality.
The Less Wrong case demonstrates that the whole criterion is unnecessary. (Discussions like this one also demonstrate some other things, but those are secondary.)
↑ comment by Declan Molony (declan-molony) · 2024-06-19T15:00:18.542Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I see the point all of you are making, thank you. I agree that a last name muddies things--I deleted it from the post.
↑ comment by the gears to ascension (lahwran) · 2024-06-19T05:06:16.831Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think you have somewhat of a point, but. Like. On one hand, it was in public, there's no indication it was meant to be confidential at the time. None of this is anything anyone could use to track her down. It's a humanizing, empathetic story about people having a bad time towards an end of building empathy. But the part where I maybe agree a bit is like, she may or may not have agreed to people sharing her story. My guess is she probably would; but we can't trivially ask her. It might not be too terribly hard for Declan to find her again and get her consent to share it, and my guess is she'd give it eagerly; if it's achievable for him to do that I'd suggest he should. But if he can't, I'd default to share. Maybe not with her full name though.
↑ comment by Ben Millwood (ben-millwood) · 2024-06-19T11:46:47.309Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I suggest you redact the name from this comment, and then OP redacts the name from the post too, keeping everything else. I think there's some rhetorical value in presenting the information like this, but I think the potential downsides outweigh the upsides here.
↑ comment by Stephen Fowler (LosPolloFowler) · 2024-06-19T13:28:29.851Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I agree that it is certainly morally wrong to post this if that is the persons real full name.
It is less bad, but still dubious, to post someones traumatic life story on the internet even under a pseudonym.
Replies from: eye96458↑ comment by eye96458 · 2024-06-20T15:31:16.068Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I agree that it is certainly morally wrong to post this if that is the persons real full name.
Because you expect that doing so would cause the person harm?
It is less bad, but still dubious, to post someones traumatic life story on the internet even under a pseudonym.
Why is it dubious? Do you expect that it will cause harm to the person?