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Quality in dentistry has been going down. The custom work of crowns, quality of fillings, and etc, have been going by the wayside for cheaper options that the consumer doesn't grok the downstream expenses of. Generally the chain dentists don't even present options. I found this out recently after getting some miracle filling that just seems so easy and cheap as "technology has improved" but I would have happily paid for gold or amalgam and a more professional job. Hadn't had one in about 28 years, so I took their sales pitch as fact. I also understand that Crowns are similar, and vary in expected lifetime, quality, etc. I made a contact in the industry who actually runs a shop making them, but she informs me the industry is running the other way, towards cheap and will need replacements down the road.
But on the business side, the "Blue Oceans" Strategy (see the book) of removing options, cutting cost, removing details, and making off with a ton of cash like Yellowtail Winery is an easy sell. It's just that with eyes, teeth, my body, etc, I would prefer a different model. It's hard to be educated enough for all to be caveat emptor and up to recently I at least trusted a dentist when I walk in. Now I don't even know how to buy quality or who to trust.
Interesting case. Are there other cases where VC-run businesses have similar issues, perhaps in other industries? I would like to see and understand a pattern if possible.
>UBI may reasonably give people at the bottom of the market sufficient money to become participants.
The incentive is still going to drive a businessperson to come up with a way to take that money from those people (as it is now). So the rent seeking could expand to include something like slum-lording trailer parks in areas which are even further from possible employment, potentially locking those residents into a radius where no one around does anything but pot and video games.
Meanwhile, since there is more money available to the middle classes, can't I just sell/rent them a house with more bells and whistles? Maybe they're discerning customers with an extra thousand dollars, so we build the house on 16" centers again instead of 20" and sell them their new, wonderful, higher-quality lifestyle. Or maybe we just put a thousand dollar countertop on the same crummy house.
Or is something more fundamentally changed by UBI in the basic system underlying rent-seeking and inflation (in essence, the dynamics of capitalism)? To me, rent-seeking is only a specific incarnation of that greater dynamic of exploiting whatever source of income you can by whatever advantage you have within the system to take money from whoever can and will give it to you, and not as distinct as people make it out to be. The only thing UBI fundamentally changes in this equation is who can render funds, and how much they can render.
This is probably true in an internal sense, where one needs to be self-honest. It might be very difficult to understand when any conscious person other than you was doing this, and it might be dicey to judge even in yourself. Especially given the finiteness of human attention.
In my personal life, I have spent recent months studying. Did I emotionally turn away from some things in the middle of this, so that to an outside observer I might have looked like I was burying my head or averting my eyes? Sure. Was I doing that or was I setting boundaries? I guess even if you lived in my head at that time, it could be hard to know. Maybe my obsessive studying itself is an avoidance. In the end, I know what I intended, but that's about it. That's often all we get, even from the inside.
So while I agree with you, I'm not sure exactly when we should cease to be agnostic about parsing that difference. Maybe it's something we can only hold it as an ideal, complimentary to striving for Truth, basically?
It's also possible that an opposing effect happens where your shouting into the void about dragons connects in some vague way with my belief in the Ilithids, which I then end up coopting your dragon evidence into my own agenda. Especially if you find anything close to material evidence. Heck, your material evidence for dragons now gives all kinds of creedance to Ilithids, beholders, gnomes, and all sorts. So the gnome people and everyone else is now coming out of the woodwork to amplify your work on dragons. And I think this would be regardless of the specific nuances your attribute to dragons. I would expect those nuances to get smooshed in the fray to cite your once-and-for-all-proving-dragons strategy.
I mean, if Pons and Fleischmann was true, for example, I bet it would get trotted out with all kinds of half-baked theories on free energy, along with Tesla's name. And the reason I'm making this bet is because these already do get trotted out into such discussions.
(Not that I would ever read those reports or have done any such research into repressed Pons and Fleischmann evidence or Ilithid conspiracies)
If I am a lending shark, I will lend more predatorily to people under a UBI regime, even if that income is protected. It changes the risk management calculations towards "they now have more ways to figure out a way to pay before going bankrupt" and "after bankruptcy pool of money I can extract is higher." Again, maybe you've technically protected UBI, but I can surely garnish wages in either case, pressuring them to give me as much as they can. People can miraculously make money appear when you squeeze them, and now I know there's more there to squeeze them for in every case.
People with protected savings often raid that. I will count on the "raid the IRA" effect, but with people for whom that money wasn't earned, and they don't culturally have the tendency to want to protect it. And anyway, you can only file bankruptcy once in seven years, and I can get more blood in the interim. In essence, I'll redo all my risk management calculations on how far I press this because now you have two choices, you're either going to be dirt poor -- nothing but UBI and quit your job and live in the gutter, or else you're going to "magically make some money happen" to get me off your back.
My guess is this dynamic screws over people just above the poorest, and deep into the middle.
Look, I personally find all that distasteful. I won't even buy Altria stock. But I expect a flourishing of those businesses in a UBI regime, and they will prey upon many who UBI is trying to help. That and the increased inflation, I think the middle poor and the lower middle classes will get really screwed by the whole thing in the end. Basically the people who work and struggle, whom UBI most wishes to help.
Kind of adjacent: Add in investment scams targeting the undereducated, and lots of toys to decorate trailers. I would expect Sony, Nintendo, etc stock to go up (GME, LOL), and Altria as well due to the additional pot sales. The "Video games and drugs" class will expand fast, because UBI will not likely be enough to do anything actually interesting.
I think it's a step that has to happen and will happen. The writing is probably on the wall that we're going to enter a very redistributive regime in the USA. But I am not optimistic about it until we're at near Star Trek levels of Universal Wealth.
I don't think higher income people are spending as much %% of their money on goods and services, so everyday goods and services may not be protected as much from the "printing money" effect. Much of the shift in those prices comes from the increased spending power on the bottom margin, as the rich already have all the food and such they want anyway.
If you're already using that money to invest in stocks, then UBI probably inflates basic good prices (as it gives the lower income brackets more money and additionally reduces the labor supply to make them, as we saw in 2020 it might not take much to shake that out of balance). So it's inflationary on labor. It seems inflationary on markets as the mid-end will buy stocks (again, see 2020), so we get higher interest rates, which again prices the lower end consumers out of the market for houses, cars, and such. My guess is this further destroys anyone in the middle.
In addition to what you have said here, you cannot save up your time. It's questionable if you can save up your pats on the back (which you might just as well give away very liberally, and your reward could be as simple as the meaning or help it created for someone else). Perhaps you can save your attention, but usually that is going to be between you and your work and internet/media habits more than human interaction habits.
There could be some extreme cases where someone is hogging an undue level of time and attention (and at that point, you need to set boundaries as the issue likely lies within you as much as your friend). Which segues into, I think the whole point OP is missing, "It takes two to tango." There's something complex in the interaction between two people. If it was "worthwhile" or "you got something out of it" it is often due to the influence of your own actions, words, reality field as much as anything they willfully "did" or "did not do." And if it seemed like a waste of time, well, at least 50% of that interaction was you!
Your statement "The things that are given in a friendship are things that when you give them, you still have them. This is unlike buying a loaf of bread, where I am little concerned to support the baker, nor he me." is correct. To reach a little further into it, likely looking at things transactionally will skew human interactions in a specific direction, self-selecting for other people and interactions of a certain type. Strangely, for the person who believes in transactional human interactions, I suspect due to that skewing, looking back it will appear that their perspective was "correct." Transactionalism being a kind of self-reinforcing or even self-feeding pattern.
I think this might be akin to the conversational results that would be achieved in social interactions between a habit of steelmanning vs strawmanning. In steelmanning, you would understand things better, but also in my experience you can draw out the best of the other person's thinking, intentions, etc. The entire interaction typically changes. Especially if you are talking to someone from an otherwise embattled group. Often they drop the whole thing after awhile and you're talking to another human with about the same needs, wants, and motives as any other decent person, and there's something to connect to.
As you said, paying of attention and pats on the back in a transactional way seems dysfunctional. But it's also selective for partners who themselves are either very transactive or very giving. It's likely someone could leave ten years of doing it that way thinking they were "right." And if all you care about is one level of tangible results, it might be "an effective strategy." It's only a partial analogy, but just like the ideologue who goes around looking for every hole and inconsistency in dissenting views (the highbrow version of strawmanning) will have been "right" about all those idiots out there.
Does this vary on market at large scale as it does for medium scale? USA vs Asia, for example was 2-3x difference in price in concrete 10 years ago.
Wouldn't it be easier to use a platform anchored in the ocean somewhere? If there's some law that it technically needs to have "land" you could dredge some sand like the Chinese did in their reclamation projects. Have a carrier-sized piece of land (and turn that into your central park) and build everything else on elevated platforms.
Yes you have to spend a lot to maintain that structure and surface, but I am still not convinced the ice structures require any less work to maintain.
Getting land somewhere else is still probably easier and cheaper. Have you looked into Svalbard? Are there any places that have notoriously sleepy governments and you could just make a compound there and do your experimental society? This ice structure thing seems pretty capital intensive, which makes me think buying land is still a better bang-for-the-buck.
"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.
"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...
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
"[I]s a traditional education sequence the best way to prepare myself for [...?]"
This is hard to answer because in some ways the foundation of a broad education in all subjects is absolutely necessary. And some of them (math, for example), are a lot harder to patch in later if you are bad at them at say, 28.
However, the other side of this is once some foundation is laid and someone has some breadth and depth, the answer to the above question, with regards to nearly anything, is often (perhaps usually) "Absolutely Not."
So, for a 17 year old, Yes. For a 25 year old, you should be skipping as many pre-reqs and hoops as possible to do precisely what you want. You should not spend too much time on the traditional pedagogical steps as once you know enough, a lot can be learned along the way and bootstrapped to what you need while working on harder or more cutting-edge projects or coursework. To do this type of learning, you have to be "all in" and it feels exceedingly hard, but you get to high level. Also, you should not spend too much time on books and curricula that are not very good.
Somewhere in the middle of these two points though, are things that are just being done badly (math, for example, in the USA).
"I drew a bunch of sketches after coming round to see how it affected my ability to draw."
What was the result?
The comment being referenced may be of a very rare type. I have never been on Lesswrong, and rushed down to the comments section to type something, and found someone else having said it more eloquently than I wanted to. Normally we have a lot of entropy in the group thinking (which I love). This may just be a rare type of case.
I am perfectly happy that the patriarchal roles are no longer shackling women. I would not like to roll back time, personally, on these matters. I hope my question doesn't come across this way -- it is just that I am confused about expectations.
There is something I have been exploring, being back into the dating market in the USA after more than a decade of blessed expatriatism, and am currently seeing people and exploring all this.
Culturally, what are women supposed to do for men? No stative verbs (am/is/are/was/were/be/being/been), no nouns, no adjectives, but like what are the top 5 action verbs that women should be doing for a man and if she isn't, there should be a good reason or maybe he's going to leave? Or even 5 or 6 important ones or even mundane-but-expected ones? I can think of a list with regard to men, some of which are simple like hold the door or bring flowers, some of which are complex (like the thing above about flowing well with money)... but what verbs are like totally important and expected for women to do?
I think it's a disservice to women to not have some explicit expectations or even setting bars. But the answers could also just be in my own blindspot. I'm curious and I hope the question is appropriate here.
Are you familiar at all with the works of Christopher Alexander? He spent about 50 years exploring the objectivity of aesthetics in Architecture (and was highly influential across several fields, including software design). His book "The Timeless Way of Building" is available as an Audiobook and is approachable. It is also the closest thing I have ever read to the teachings of my Tantric Teachers in India.
Basically, the book is about a "Pattern Language" by which beautiful things happen. The hard part though is getting people to be honest about their feelings rather than lost in the intellectual games of taste. Alexander did weird experiments like asking people "Between these two buildings, which one makes you more whole?" People, being sophisticated and not woo, would typically say it's a stupid question. So he would agree with them and say, "Okay, but if you had to pick one on that term, which would it be?" He would get about 90% agreement on what is aesthetically right and what isn't. Whereas if you get into matters of taste, you'll maybe get 10% agreement, because people need to be sophisticated and express interesting opinions about modern art, modular walls, other such things.
At the very least, he's striving to find ways to test these rather hard things, and separate points that seem impossible to tease out otherwise, such as actual feeling rather than intellectualizing. And he was highly influential on the development of software patterns. Most people who read the books seem to find them impactful and useful. The downside is the thing he is finger-pointing-at-the-moon at for you is definitely "nameless" or perhaps even ineffable, yet also extremely obvious.
The book dances closely to the "Obviousness" in true creativity that the author of Impro talks about. Another very recommendable book on both aesthetics and human dynamics in general.
Edit: All this is related to human factors engineering, where self-reporting of perceptions is considered secondary information. Testing perceptions more directly can be elusive, and is thus the whole art in much of that human subject research.
It is also possible that the scope of evangelists would need to be sufficient to convince people who matter. Some people who can make decisions might listen to someone with an Exotic-Sounding PhD from Berkeley. Others who matter might not. Just as an example, I think some politicians and wealthy powerful types may be more willing to listen to engineers than mathematicians or pure theoreticians. And a normal engineer might also carry more clout than someone from such exotica as silicon valley communities where people are into open relationships and go to burning man.
By analogy, some of this is kind of along the lines where sometimes people trust a nurse practitioner more deeply than a doctor. There may be good/bad reasoning behind that, but for some people it just is what it is. The rest probably comes down to tribal shibboleths. But these get important when you want people to hear you. Remember how little it mattered to many people when "1500 people with PhDs all signed this thing saying climate change is real." I bet one blue-collar Civil Engineer with the education in hydrology to know exactly what he was talking about, would have been more convincing than 1500 PhDs to that whole tribe. And there could have been (still could be) a campaign to let that voice be heard rather than dismissing vast swaths of people, including those categories you mentioned above, who would have listened to him.
Politicians in general are typically uninformed about and have difficulty with highly-technical matters, even so far as what we all might consider "basic" frequentist statistics, let alone holes in those models. Let alone "The model has exfiltrated its own network weights!"
So in some sense, if you want the full weight of government involved, we need people who speak common languages with each of those different types you mentioned: Politicians, Military, Wealthy powerful, the public.
To that end, maybe we should be assembling like minded and smart people to talk about this using different languages and different expertise. Yes, the people from the think tanks. But also, people who others can really hear. Maybe we should develop a structure and culture here on LW to evangelize a *broader pool of types of evangelists.*
I think now you're talking more about desired qualities of a system than teachers, which might also be interesting in the other cases. In some technical sense probably it applies to the farmer, but human use of food is so constant and cyclical, it feels misapplied there. The doctor may be similar to a farmer in that regard, making money off the nature of humans to occasionally be ill.
However, the lawyer is most like what you are describing above, fully dependent on the system of conflicts for its sustenance, as the Dao De Jing states, "The more laws and ordinances are promulgated, The more thieves and robbers there are." Hence, perhaps, the general easy animosity towards lawyers.
I wonder if there is a social proportion to a school system having more of factor X and it getting more social animosity. I suspect it would be the same factor that creates droves of disaffected, burnt-out teachers. Of course, there is also the illness-industrial-complex system, which most people react badly to, compared to doctors themselves. What is that factor though?
"Comes from external stumuli" in this case, or more accurately incorporates external information =/= brainwashing into slavery. To some extent what you're saying is built of correct sentences, but you're keeping things vague enough and unconnected enough to defend. Above you said, "subset of this scenario is a nightmarish one where humans are brainwashed by their mindless but articulate creations and serve them, kind of like the ancients served the rock idols they created. Enslaved by an LLM, what an irony."
Yes, I have changed my mind based on things I have read and watched. One should do this based on new information. As for "happens consistently and feels like your own volition" I think you would need to unpack it a bit. "Consistently," I don't know. I'm 44 and an engineer and kind of a jackass, so maybe I don't change my mind as often as I should. My new partner has a PhD in Nutrition though, so I have changed my mind partly based on studies she has presented (including some of her own research) and input regarding diet in the last several months.
That it "Feels like" "my" "volition" is even more complicated. I don't know from whence will and volition arise, and they seem stochastic. I'm not entirely sure what """I""" am or where consciousness is, if the continuity of it is an illusion, or etc. These questions get really quickly out of what anyone knows for sure. But having been presented with both the papers and the food, eaten a lot, and noticed improved mood and energy levels, I'm pretty well sold on her approach being sound and the diet being great.
But you jump to service and enslavement? This is a bit more like someone needs to headbag me and then dump me in the back of their truck and drag me to a hidden site and inject me with LSD for six months or something. You are jumping scales drastically without discussing concrete anything, really. It might have emotional salience, but that hardly seems fit for a rationalist board.
Though I welcome discussion of concrete scenarios/possibilities of how you think this might go down. If those are realistic, this might be more interesting.
"Cause Panic."
Outside of the typical drudgereport level "AI admits it wants to kill and eat people" type of headline, what do you expect?
My prediction, with medium confidence, is there won't be meaningful panic until people see it directly connected with job loss. There will be handwringing about deepfakes and politics, but unfortunately that is almost a lost cause since I can already make deepfakes on my own expensive GPU computer from 3 years ago with open source GANs. Anthropic and others will probably make statements about it (I hear the word "safe" so much said by every tech company in this space, it makes me nervous, like saying "Our boys will be home by Christmas" or something). But as far as meaningful action? A large number of people will need to first lose economic security/power.
"Brainwashing" is pretty vague and likely difficult. Hypnosis and LSD usually will not get you there, if I'm to believe what is declassified. It would need to have some way to set up incentives to get people to act, no? Or at least completely control my environment (and have the ability to administer the LSD and hypnosis?)
>There is no way for such a collective pretence to get started. (This is the refutation of p-zombies.)
It could have originally had coordination utility for the units, and thus been transmitted in the manner of culture and language.
One test might then be if feral children or dirt digger tribesman asserted their own individual consciousness (though I wonder if a language with "I" built into it could force one to backfill something in the space during on the spot instance that patterns involving the word "I" are used, which also could be happening with the LLMs).
They are most definitely two different things, though it is popular to conflate them. Innocence of Evil does not require naivete, only that you are pure of doing the evil.
And the purity distinction is important. Otherwise we will fall prey to the delusion that it was our goodness itself which betrayed us or that in order to be pure, we must be fools regarding some part of the Truth. Though it is popular to think, as you have pointed out in the sexual distinction above, that awareness of consequence necessarily begets heaviness or loss of innocence (as if we cannot now take wiser action and secure our freedom, whereas prior to accurate knowledge, it was only through dumb luck something had not already gone wrong).
As for some psychical scarring occurring due to knowledge of the potential of humans to do harm, yes this is unpleasant, and the knowledge of it may cause some discomfort -- as you have said "cognitohazard." The question then is what is the nature of this discomfort? The bulk of it boils down to self-pity that the world is not as one wishes it to be, or that the world contains people who are damaged. The remainder, what you called "psychic scarring," is usually an accretion of previous unhealed trauma getting triggered (PTSD), or one's self-pity wishing to perpetuate naivete.
We could say that innocence is supreme sobriety, sober enough and seeing enough truth to be absent of evil in the situation, and naivete is drunkenness -- if anything, whatever good it manages is just one's having stumbled blindly into it. As a simple thought experiment, if sobriety and awareness of truth does not lead to good will and good actions, then our understanding of good will and good actions must be updated; if it is otherwise, then virtue does not exist in any form, and the "effective altruism" aspect of this community is wrongheaded and impossible (naive).
Otherwise, lets get back to the business of being "Innocent as a Dove and as Shrewd as the Serpent."
You are mostly describing Naivete.
Innocence is closest to purity, as it describes absence of evil. It is compatible with guile, to be "As innocent as a dove, and as shrewd as the serpent." To do so would describe cleverness, even craftiness in service of definite intentions, without any evil in your heart. A clear example might be deceiving someone doing human trafficking in order to save those being trafficked. Sometimes a razor's edge to walk, no doubt, but one that broaches not an epsilon of naivete (which could get someone killed in the above example of trafficking).
Can you tease apart those two traits, naivete and innocence?
I believe the leverage advice is very good, and people may not know how good it is or how broadly it really applies. Real-estate with 20% down amounts to a 5x leveraged investment (and one which is expensive to maintain). For about half a century it was a home-run for most people who did it, despite caveats. Since 2011, the volatility is higher than before, and I am not even confident in that as a hill to die on much more than NVDA.
Accelerated progress also means increased volatility / wider confidence bands, probably on everything.
We are also overloading the word "Child" here, which we may need to disambiguate at this point.
What you are saying applies broadly to a 7 year old, and less to a 16 year old. For the 16 year old, there's no longer 2 possible outcomes "succeed as a Salafi" or "fail as a Salafi." There is often the very real option to "Make your way towards something else." And the seeds of that could easily start (probably did!) in the 13 or 14 year old.
It's also neat that humans are kind of wired where the great questioning/rebellion tends to happen more in the 13-to-16-year-old than the 7-year-old. Thus the common phenomenon where the person graduates high school and church at the same time, or leaves the cult, emigrates, etc.
I think that you are correct, policies that "everyone knows" aren't "real" tend to reduce the degree to which everyone takes other policies seriously. But I think a lot of the "unreal" policies are in place for reasons of liability, risk management, or other communication tool. Also, seldom are any policy actually absolute or meant to be absolute. Just ask your lawyer, nearly everything in life is negotiable.
What's more, speed limit policy is geared towards a complex set of goals, politically decided upon in a risk-managed, engineered way. Then voted on by a board of people who might somewhat understand the problem.
You know what is almost never discussed explicitly in politics. "What are our goals here?" and "What tradeoffs do we suspect these different decisions entail?" Making this explicit, and letting people vote on politicians based on all this lucidity would be great, but reading, say, Thomas Schelling, I think it is also utterly impossible.
So we bluff speed limits (and nearly everything), and negotiate about it later.
"The best way to get out of a local maximum that I've found is to incorporate elements of a different, but clearly functional, intellectual tradition."
I agree wholeheartedly with this being a good way (Not sure about "best"). The crux is "clearly functional" and "maxima" -- and as an adult, I can make pretty good judgments about this. I'm also likely to bake in some biases about this that could be wrong. And depending on what society you find yourself within, you might do the same.
If I understand you, you are basically asking to jump from one maxima to another, assuming that in doing this search algorithm, you will eventually find a maxima that's better than the one you're in, or get enough information to go back to the previous one. And we limit our search on "functional."
But what if you have little information or priors available as to what would be functional or not, or even what constitutes a maxima? There's no information telling a child not to go join a fringe religious group, for example (and I think they often do their recruiting among the very young, for this reason).
Moreover, if someone (1) without clear criteria for what constitutes a "maxima" or "functional," or (2) who may even wish to explore other models of "functional" because they suspect their current model may be self-limiting, then we get to questioning.
And I think in (2) above, I am defining the positive side of post-modernism, which also exists and contributes to our society. The most salient criticism of post-modernism is usually that it is anti-heirarchical, yet insisting it is a better approach than those before it, constitutes a performative contradiction. Also, I think they are sometimes guilty of taking a "noble savage" approach to other cultures or ways of thinking (failure to judge what is functional).
However, if we combine the "questioning" (broad search, willing to approach with depth where it seems useful), with some level of judgement about "functional" (assuming our judgement is sound), then I think it's still a useful approach.
Because what you have presented offers no method I can see for a child without existing priors, or someone educated in a Shalafi school or similar (where judgement of "functional" is artificially curtailed), to find better ways to think.
"There are large bodies of highly reliable knowledge in the world,[...]"
The purpose of the questioning is to find out which objects are in that bucket, and which objects are in some other bucket.
If the child accepts what she is told about (A)There are large bodies of highly reliable knowledge in the world, and (B) This is one of them, then you might get many types of crazy.
TH;DT: The idea of firmly established ideas is unfortunately culturally and sub-culturally bound, at least to an extent. Which "firmly established truths" are currently being taught in Shalafi schools? I think the "flat-earthers, Qanon, etc...," could easily destroy the nonsense of their beliefs if they could employ a bit of the questioning.
Maybe what you and I are saying is a strong case of reversible advice?
Related: I got two masters degrees, at midlife, after doing other stuff. I also moved back to the USA during that time and found it useful to learn a lot of little things I never needed to think about in Taiwan, like how to fix a car. So, having learned a handful of new skills in the past eight years or so, from car repairs to calculus, as a general heuristic I find doing something independently from beginning to end and fixing the problems along the way the first time teaches about 50% of the knowledge. 2-3 times gets to 75%. 3-5 times gets to 90%. Past the 90% mark, you spend the rest of your life making small improvements in the last 10% of the knowledge.
Basically, you don't need to do that many Taylor series to see the pattern and grok what's going on (and have improved your understanding of polynomial representations of calculus, and start getting intuitions when other approaches are used). You don't need to switch the motor mounts on that many cars to basically get it (and to have learned frankly a lot about similar types of car work). Etc.
That first time, maybe the second in some cases, is the biggest lift and the biggest learning.
I think OP is painting with a broad brush. However, he probably has a point that social attitudes end up shaping the experience itself. Similar to the above poster talking about age gaps or miscarriages.
A problem in your objection, as well as any rebuttal to it, is how would we separate social contagion from the data? It seems that if OP is right, we wouldn't have the data to say he's right or wrong. If he's wrong, the data wouldn't really show that or not either. Embedded social attitudes are a matter of the fish not knowing the water in which it swims.
If indeed, that water is so think that OP (as well as several others who have responded) feels it is even taboo to admit their own experience was not traumatizing, then such a deep social fact is also likely to permeate all the data.
Now, in defense of the taboo (like all taboos), sexual molestation is basically such a bad thing in some sense that we don't want to allow any talk that would make this bad thing potentially happen more. The taboo is like a field around a Schelling fence that is trying to innoculate everyone against walking even within 200m of that fence. For whatever reason, the taboo also has some utility that should not be dismissed until it is also understood carefully.
In other words, it is taboo specifically because his talking about it risks pushing us deep into nuances that are risky. In fact, even assuming OPs position in a broad and hard form is fully correct, then it wouldn't undo the damage that people felt from being molested, and talking about it could hurt more. So, the entire topic is likely to be an infohazard, actually regardless of the truth value of OP's comment.
As I think more about this, the LLM as a collaborator alone might have a major impact. Just off the top of my head, a kind of Rube Goldberg attack might be <redacted for info hazard>. Thinking about it in one's isolated mind, someone might never consider carrying something like that out. Again, I am trying to model the type of person who carries out a real attack, and I don't estimate that person having above-average levels of self confidence. I suspect the default is to doubt themselves enough to avoid acting in the same way most people do about their entreprenurial ideas.
However, if they either presented it to an LLM for refinement, or if the LLM suggested it, there could be just enough psychological boost of validity to push them over the edge to trying it. And after a few successes on the news of either "dumb" or "bizarre" or "innovative" attacks being successful due to "AI telling these people how to do it" then the effect might get even stronger.
To my knowledge, one could have bought an AR-15 since the mid to late 1970s. My cousin has a Colt from 1981 he bought when he was 19. Yet people weren't mass shooting each other, even during times when the overall crime/murder rate was higher than it is now. Some confluence of factors has driven the surge, one of them probably being a strong meme, "Oh, this actually tends to '''work.''" Basically, a type of social proofing of efficacy.
And I am willing to bet $100 that the media will report big on the first few cases of "Weird Attacks Designed by AI."
It seems obvious to me that the biggest problems in alignment are going to be the humans, both long before the robots, and probably long after.
Solving for "A viable attack, maximum impact" given an exhaustive list of resources and constraints seems like precisely the sort of thing GPT-4-level AI can solve with aplomb when working hand in hand with a human operator. As the example of shooting a substation, humans could probably solve this in a workshop-style discussion with some Operations Research principles applied, but I assume the type of people wanting to do those things probably don't operate in such functional and organized ways. When they do, it seems to get very bad.
The LLM can easily supply cross-domain knowledge and think within constraints. With a bit of prompting and brainstorming, one could probably come up with a dozen viable attacks in a few hours. So the lone bad actor doesn't have to assemble a group of five or six people who are intelligent, perhaps educated, and also want to do an attack. I suspect the only reason people already aren't prompting for such methods and then setting up automation of them is the existence of guardrails. When truly opensource LLMs get to GPT-4.5 capability and good interfaces to the internet and other software tools (such as phones), we may see a lot of trouble. Fewer people would have the drive and intellect needed (at least early on) to carry out such an attack, but those few could cause very outsized trouble.
TL;DR: The "Fun" starts waaaaaaay before we get to AGI.
So is the hypothetical Puce just otherwise Blue tribers who tolerate or welcome some amount of forbidden talk, media, ideas?
What would you call an educated leftist who has no objection at all to Alt-right or anti-vaxxers speaking freely on twitter? What about one who is actively bothered when those people get deplatformed or legally interfered with, even if it is something truly repugnant such as neonazis? I have read a few corners of leftist media that express these ideas. Is this Puce, Grey, or something else?
In MBTI terms, you may have an Se blindspot. Se, or "External Sensation" is just what is right in front of you, what you see. People with high Se tend to be pretty good at status symbols, both reading them and communicating in them (and they also often fall pray to "what you see is all there is" illusions/delusions, as well as "X resembles y enough that x=y, and I'm done with any need for further information.").
Se Blindspot can make people basically fail to grok social status cues at all, and "Your strongpoint is your weakpoint" applies here.