Eccentric Opinion

"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric." - Bertrand Russell

[hatredismymuse-blog]

Why I Don't Thank Members of the Military for Their "Service"

(This is coming completely off the top of my head, and is thus largely unstructured, and might be a little jumbled. I am essentially thinking out loud about a subject that’s become increasingly important to me in the past couple of years. Bear with me.)

I do not thank members of the military for their “service”. I do not consider employment in the military to carry with it a sense of “honor”. I do not, in the sense that is generally meant, “support the troops”.

Let me clarify.

I do consider the current American military occupations, at their core, immoral. I do see acceptance of collateral damage as completely unjustifiable. I do see the moral exemption given by most people to agents of the State as non-existent. Therefore, I do consider complicity in the current operations of the U.S. military as morally wrong. This does not mean, however, that I see soldiers as monsters devoid of any humanity. Nor does it mean that my primary reason for not participating in the almost universal rituals of reverence for the military comes from resentment. Many people’s prima facie similar outlook towards the military is simplistically antagonistic for its own sake, so I can understand why my perspective can appear that way, but I can not stress enough that this is not the case.

My vocal criticism of enlistment in the military and refusal to give support for “service” is instead an attempt to prevent others from falling into the trap, and to oppose the process that allows the “War, what isn’t it good for?” mindset to continue. What is it that gets people to decide upon a career in the military? For a lot of them, it’s the simple promise of things like a college education and a way out of poverty. But is that enough to convince someone to kill, or to be a part of an organization that kills? Not for everyone, and certainly not for the number of people who join the military for that reason. What allows them to bypass this moral block is cultural reversal of the killing (or complicity therein)’s status. Even in times of general cultural disapproval of the war at hand, the same surrounding culture will egg them on, telling them that it’s a great honor to serve in the armed forces. This doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense when analyzed critically (how can taking part in an unjustified action be honorable?), but the sheer strength of public opinion is enough to carry it across the bridge of cognitive dissonance for almost everyone.

Is it really virtuous to take part in unjustified military action? I do believe that there exist hypothetical cases (though extraordinarily unlikely ones) in which war could potentially be Just, which implies the potential justification of a hypothetical military. Most people do. The problem, though, is that they extend that hypothetical justification to reality, despite the fact that the reality does not line up with the situations that would be necessary (I don’t have time here to go into detail about my thoughts on Just war theory, but for now, just know that nothing since 1776 probably qualifies for the United States) for that hypothetical justification. The hypothetical justification of legitimate defense of liberty is used to defend the reality of senseless slaughter and creation of more and more hostility to the United States. This is essentially what Rand calls an “anti-concept”: a vague idea that uses the valid and sound propositions of one claim to justify the invalid or unsound propositions of another. American lives are not being saved by enraging the populations we occupy. Foreign nations are not being helped by having their cities wrecked and people accidentally killed in collateral damage. This is insanity, but those who name it and explicitly state the necessary conclusion that employment in the United States military is actually a disservice, both to the American citizenry and to those we claim to be making democracy safe for, are called insane.

People who join the military are not making the same conscious decision that they would be making if they robbed a bank to pay for college. They are acting with ignorance of the moral blindfold put over their eyes by every person who thanks soldiers for their “service”, and goes on and on about the supposed intrinsic honor of the occupation, or puts a yellow ribbon on the back of their car. When a soldier steps on a landmine, they were pushed onto it by those who claimed to respect them most.

I don’t want to cause further hardship to people who have seen the Hell of war. I just don’t want to spit on those hardships by telling them that it meant something, when it didn’t, and the blame goes to those who said it did. I want to make sure that the reality is clear to an impressionable youth confronted by amoral military recruiters willing to tell them anything to use their mind and body for the destruction of themselves and others. Furthermore, this is a gravely personal issue to me. I know what’s being dealt with. There are four people I’ve known that have at one time or another been very close and dear to me that went on to join the military. One wants nothing more than to escape the ordeal. Another has been deeply psychologically traumatized. Someone else, that I once considered my best friend, has been so fundamentally and profoundly reshaped as a person that neither I nor various others who knew him have any actual connection to him now, being nothing more than the same body housing an entirely different person. And the fourth is now buried in a military cemetery.

My attitude is not one of hatred, but of fear for those I love.

To summarize, this quote from the 1964 film, The Americanization of Emily, displays the proper attitude towards “gratitude” for military “service”:

“I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades… we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We… perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices…

My brother died at Anzio - an everyday soldier’s death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud… [N]ow my other brother can’t wait to reach enlistment age. That’ll be in September. May be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution. What has my mother got for pretending bravery was admirable? She’s under constant sedation and terrified she may wake up one morning and find her last son has run off to be brave.”

[eccentric-opinion]

Single-family houses are great, single-family zoning is not

We need a world of choices

You are allowed to build an apartment building that has a "no pets" rule and you are allowed to build a gated community that's only for childless old people. And both of those things exist. In a world without exclusionary zoning, it will still be possible for private developers to build subdivisions that have specific internal governance rules.

But just as we don't in general let people veto their neighbors' decisions about pets and kids, we shouldn't in general let people veto their neighbors' decisions about what kind of structures can be built on their land…

A reform agenda says it's fine for you to dislike new multifamily housing in your neighborhood just like I am allowed to be sad that a neighborhood coffee place I liked closed and was replaced by a vape shop. What I am not allowed to do is prevent the vape shop from opening or prevent the coffee place from closing. I think everyone in the neighborhood misses the coffee shop. The problem is we didn't miss it enough to buy enough coffee to keep them in business, especially since we have other good coffee shops.

- Matt Yglesias

[eccentric-opinion]

I have a preliminary theory of population ethics that seems to work reasonably well: total utilitarianism, with the constraint that the addition of a new person must improve the total utility of the world by more than the utility of the additional person.

For example, suppose you have a trillion rat brains on heroin that are experiencing an extremely positive level of utility. You could create a trillion-first brain, which would experience slightly less utility and also reduce the utility of the other brains, because there’d be less heroin to go around - but the new brain’s utility would still be high enough to make up for the decrease, so total utility would be greater if you created it. But total utility would increase by less than the utility of the new brain, so by this theory, you shouldn’t create it.

So this theory avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without committing to a view with other problems, like average utilitarianism.

[parrhesiablog]

Why make this modification to utilitarianism rather than accepting the repugnant conclusion?

[eccentric-opinion]

Why accept the repugnant conclusion? Creating a world with lives barely worth living seems pretty bad. And creating new people at the expense of those who already exist doesn’t seem like it’s actually making the world better, even if it increases total utility, which suggests that a simple maximization of total utility isn’t quite the right approach.

[parrhesiablog]

You’re taking an ethical intuitionist approach to this because you are recognizing that creating lives barely worth living “seems” pretty bad and modifying your ethical theory to be more in alignment with your intuitions. But from a utilitarian perspective worse or better is only defined by increased or decreased total utility. The point of utilitarianism is that the only thing that matters is suffering.

You modified utilitarian theory includes two principles: 1. maximize utility and 2. avoid RC. For utilitarians #1 > all other considerations. But for you #2 > #1 > all other considerations. But what is the justification for this other consideration #2 being more important than #1 other than it “seems” pretty bad?

I think lying seems bad. So in many instances lying > maximize utility in terms of moral significance for me. Am I wrong to do that? I don’t think so. I feel it’s similar to what you have done. This is why I’m an intuitionist and not a utilitarian. Maybe you could consider a lot of other intuitions as well.

[eccentric-opinion]

Utilitarianism is about maximizing global well-being, and there are ambiguities about what that means when the size of the population isn't fixed, and how to aggregate new and potential lives into the calculus. Total utilitarianism says to just add their utility to the total, but the repugnance of the repugnant conclusion suggests that kind of aggregation doesn't capture what we want from a theory for maximizing global well-being. It's not about avoiding the RC vs maximizing utility, but that the RC helps us revise what we're looking for in a theory about maximizing utility.

Creating a world with a lot of lives barely worth living seems bad from a broadly utilitarian perspective, because it seems to do poorly in terms of well-being. And if a world where utility is successfully maximized doesn't seem that great, then we need a better specification for what it means to maximize utility.

[eccentric-opinion]

What's wrong with average utilitarianism?

It implies that if everyone had lives of horrible torture, it would be an improvement to add a person whose life would be marginally less horrible torture, since that would increase average utility.

It also implies that whether it's right or wrong for us to create new lives could depend on aliens from Alpha Centauri who never interact with us. If these aliens live lives of extreme bliss, then every new life on Earth decreases world average utility, and we should all go extinct; and if their lives are extreme suffering, then it's okay to create horrible lives here, because that still increases the average.

And, like total utilitarianism, it holds that we can improve the world by creating new people at the net expense of those who already exist.

[eccentric-opinion]

I have a preliminary theory of population ethics that seems to work reasonably well: total utilitarianism, with the constraint that the addition of a new person must improve the total utility of the world by more than the utility of the additional person.

For example, suppose you have a trillion rat brains on heroin that are experiencing an extremely positive level of utility. You could create a trillion-first brain, which would experience slightly less utility and also reduce the utility of the other brains, because there’d be less heroin to go around - but the new brain’s utility would still be high enough to make up for the decrease, so total utility would be greater if you created it. But total utility would increase by less than the utility of the new brain, so by this theory, you shouldn’t create it.

So this theory avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without committing to a view with other problems, like average utilitarianism.

[parrhesiablog]

Why make this modification to utilitarianism rather than accepting the repugnant conclusion?

[eccentric-opinion]

Why accept the repugnant conclusion? Creating a world with lives barely worth living seems pretty bad. And creating new people at the expense of those who already exist doesn't seem like it's actually making the world better, even if it increases total utility, which suggests that a simple maximization of total utility isn't quite the right approach.

[eccentric-opinion]

I have a preliminary theory of population ethics that seems to work reasonably well: total utilitarianism, with the constraint that the addition of a new person must improve the total utility of the world by more than the utility of the additional person.

For example, suppose you have a trillion rat brains on heroin that are experiencing an extremely positive level of utility. You could create a trillion-first brain, which would experience slightly less utility and also reduce the utility of the other brains, because there'd be less heroin to go around - but the new brain's utility would still be high enough to make up for the decrease, so total utility would be greater if you created it. But total utility would increase by less than the utility of the new brain, so by this theory, you shouldn't create it.

So this theory avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without committing to a view with other problems, like average utilitarianism.

[eccentric-opinion]

Whether you are shipping 100 boxes of cellulose insulation or 100 boxes of computer chips, transportation from place A to place B costs about the same. As a percentage of what the product is worth, the transportation cost is vastly different…

Manufacturing for industries like computer chips happens in a few enormous factories. Manufacturing for low value per weight products like building materials happens in hundreds or thousands of small factories close to building sites to reduce transportation costs.

High volume, centralized manufacturing is one of the fastest ways to reduce costs. Think of the products that crash in price: CPUs, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, flat-panel TVs. The most talented people run a few giant factories and can afford to invest in almost every conceivable process improvement. Manufacturing things like cement, insulation, or 2x4s means you have the assistant branch manager and a few hourly workers toiling in a glorified warehouse. At small factories, improvements often do not make sense. Even if they do, they are challenging to implement at all facilities…

Post-WWII suburbs may be the best example of mass-produced housing, Levittown being the most famous example. The demand for houses was incredible. Builders turned subdivisions into factories that produced thousands of homes. Each house was virtually identical, allowing clear divisions of labor and investment in things like sawmills to precut lumber. Each worker had a specific job, like “White Paint Man”. A site might turn out dozens of houses per day. Builders built houses in under 90 days. The cost was reduced 20-30% to comparable models, with savings partially offset by capital costs for things like the sawmills. These methods never made up a majority of new home construction. They fell out of favor as consumers demanded more variation in housing, causing the economies of scale to disappear.

- Austin Vernon

[eccentric-opinion]

There's no reason renewable technologies have to be labor-intensive. That will only drive up costs and turn off consumers.

Let’s say America’s energy supply was composed primarily of solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear power, mostly automated with a few workers for oversight and a dog to guard the factory gate.

That would be close to ideal, even if it involved fewer jobs on net than the current energy infrastructure. Ideally, we should be striving for an energy network that hardly provides any jobs at all. That would be a sign that we truly have produced affordable and indeed very cheap alternatives to energy produced by fossil fuels.

The biggest obstacle to green energy is not that American voters love pollution and carbon emissions, but rather people do not wish to pay more for their gasoline and their home heating bills. If we insist that green energy create a lot of good jobs, in essence we are insisting that it have high labor costs, and thus we are producing a version of it that will meet consumer and also voter resistance.

- Tyler Cowen

[eccentric-opinion]

In general, I think blame avoidance/deflection is an important social and institutional dynamic that’s not talked about enough. If a bad outcome would get you blamed, you want to avoid it much more than an equivalent one that would be passed over in silence. So you shrug and say “No one could have foreseen that” even though you did foresee it, but the individual incentives were against you preventing it.

[eccentric-opinion]

Also, if publicly predicting a bad outcome means you personally have to do more work, you're incentivized to keep your predictions to yourself.

For example, imagine you think some possible event will make your employer's business go poorly, which might be preventable, but only with a lot of work. Others think the business will continue to be fine. If you keep talking, someone will eventually say "Well, why don’t you do something about it?", and you don't want to be the one guy doing something about it because if you're wrong, you'd do a lot of work for nothing, and if you're right, you get a pat on the back, which isn't worth all the effort. So you keep quiet, and when the event happens, you shrug, knowing that the incentives were structured against accurate prediction. Why be accurate if you don't get the benefits of accuracy?

On the other hand, if you don't push the work on the predictor, you incentivize frivolous predictions. If preventing a forecasted disaster is someone else's problem, there'll be more false alarms. Why be accurate if you don't pay the costs of inaccuracy?

[eccentric-opinion]

Defending the non-central fallacy

What might the steelmanned version of the fallacy look like? Here's one possibility:

While often mistaken for being outside of morally relevant category Y, X in fact belongs to Y upon reflection. Therefore, we ought to treat X more similarly to other more typical members of Y.

Imagine the following argument.

Person A: "I think eating meat is wrong."

Person B: "Why?"

Person A: "Because animal farming is cruelty. By eating meat, you are contributing to this cruelty, and that's wrong."

Person B: "That's ridiculous. The archetypal examples of cruelty are things like torture and child abuse. Animal farming just means raising animals for food. You, my friend, are guilty of the non-central fallacy."

As much as I sympathize with Person B, I must say that Person A appears to have the better point. It kind of just looks like Person B is deflecting. Let's examine how Person A might reply.

Person A: "I'm not saying that animal farming merely fits the dictionary definition of cruelty, and therefore we ought to treat it exactly like every other case that matches that definition.

Look, why do we think that torture and child abuse are wrong in the first place? For me, it's because those things involve involuntary suffering, and I think involuntary suffering is bad, no matter who experiences it. When I said that animal farming is cruelty, I was merely using that word as short-hand to convey my stance on involuntary suffering."

[eccentric-opinion]

Summary and commentary on The Cult Of Smart by Fredrik DeBoer

The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you're a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else...

A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.

This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

- Scott Alexander

[eccentric-opinion]

Consider the following argument:

Constructing new buildings will bring new retail amenities to the neighborhood.

New amenities will make the neighborhood a more attractive place to live.

Because the neighborhood is now more attractive, prices will rise.

Rising prices will displace some existing residents.

Therefore we shouldn't allow new buildings to be constructed.

In place of (1) you could put all kinds of things:

Constructing a new park

Reducing the crime rate

Renovating the local high school

Improving bus service to downtown

Fixing the potholes

In other words, you could imagine this kind of logic becoming an infinite cycle of bad urban policy. Defund police will lead to more murders? Well, that's good for housing affordability...

We simply cannot accept "make sure the neighborhood sucks" as our affordable housing strategy.

- Matt Yglesias

[eccentric-opinion]

Convenience has a massive effect on your behavior. You rarely shop in your favorite store, eat in your favorite restaurant, or visit your favorite place. Why not? Because doing so is typically inconvenient.

When governments mandate extra privacy or safety or consumer protection, crowds cheer and pundits sing. From now on, you’ll be clicking a few extra boxes a day. From now on, you'll have to stand ten feet away from the next person at the pharmacy. From now on, you'll have to sign your name and initials twenty times on a mortgage contract. Privately, almost everyone thinks each of these is a pain in the neck. Yet almost no one goes on TV and self-righteously objects, "These high-minded ideals are going to be awfully inconvenient."...

Why doesn't a rival politician gain power by promising to make convenience great again? Because "convenience" sounds petty and ignoble. People love convenience. They happily sacrifice other values for convenience. But they don't want to acknowledge this fact - or affiliate with those who do...

Yes, we long for a convenient world. A little inconvenience can ruin your entire day. No one, however, will ever go to the barricades for convenience. In fact, we're ashamed to admit how much convenience matters for our quality of life. The market mercifully sells us the convenience we want without judging us. Government, in contrast, takes us at our word - and robs us of precious convenience bit by bit, day by day.

- Bryan Caplan

[eccentric-opinion]

Josh Hawley is wrong, and Walmart deserves a defense

Antitrust is about competition. If Nike tried to buy Reebok there would be a serious antitrust question about monopolization of the sneaker market. The issue isn't that the combined Nike/Reebok entity would be "too big" (there are lots of bigger companies than the two of them combined); it’s a specific concern that we want companies to compete with each other rather than merge and raise prices. In theory you could have an anti-competitive cartel between three very mid-sized companies, if they happened to jointly control a market in something obscure like a particular kind of gasket or what have you...

The main demand from anti-bigness advocates is actually for less competition, not more. They're upset that chain stores drive mom & pop out of business. And now perhaps they’re concerned that Amazon is driving chain stores out of business. But that's competition - mom & pop are asking for protection so they can maintain their geographically segmented local monopolies.

- Matt Yglesias

[argumate]

so much religious belief seems to stem from a basic confusion over what emotions mean, and the fact that they provide feedback on what’s happening inside your head, not out there in the world.

so many conversion stories involve someone visiting a cathedral and feeling an emotion and concluding on that basis that the Christian god is real and miracles described in the bible really happened and people go to heaven when they die, when those conclusions don’t follow from the premise at all!

and it’s not a simple oversight, a lot of apologetics even rely on it, like half of C. S. Lewis’ guff is him saying he feels a sense of dissatisfaction sometimes and this is obviously evidence that the Christian god is real and miracles described in the bible really happened blah blah blah and like dude is there no other possible reason why you might feel this emotion, or why this emotion might exist in the first place?

I can get tingly sometimes when I listen to the right music in the right frame of mind but that doesn’t constitute proof that there’s a god of nightcore dubstep remixes out there rearranging the cosmos for my personal benefit, as cool as that would be.

[fatpinocchio]

When urban public transit construction projects employ union labor, that’s typically seen as a good thing - it’s providing decently-paying jobs to working-class people. But that increases costs, which makes those projects less attractive. Assuming that poor people are disproportionate users of public transit, they’re disproportionately affected by its absence or inconvenience. If it’s too expensive to build a station a few blocks away, they’re the ones who’ll have to walk a long way. (The same goes for running those systems. Cheap efficient services are better than jobs programs.)

The same goes for making public transit clean and safe. It’s true that enforcing civilized behavior on trains and in stations will sometimes require police enforcement, occasionally there’ll be scenes of police brutality when a cop goes too far, and the targets will be disproportionately poor. But the beneficiaries will be disproportionately poor too! If you just want to get to your low-paying job, you want to sit down on the train and relax, not worry that you’re sitting in filth or that you’ll be harassed by thugs.

[eccentric-opinion]

Facebook is being sued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 48 US states for its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram in 2014 and 2012, respectively (as well as over restrictions about third-party API access to Facebook’s platform, which I will not try to cover here).

[T]he lawsuits have a contradictory logic about what market Facebook is supposed to be monopolising, and what companies it is constrained by. The lawsuits' logic is that Facebook does not just compete with sites with very similar News Feed-type functionality like MySpace or Bebo, it competes with other social media sites too. Instagram is a bit like Facebook, but it's no more similar than, say, Twitter or TikTok, with which Facebook has other things in common. If Instagram can be considered a competitor to Facebook, so too must Twitter and TikTok - and perhaps Slack, Discord, Twitch, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit and many of today’s other popular social-networking services as well.

This is also true for WhatsApp, which faces competition from iMessage (45% of Americans use iPhones) and SMS text-messaging, as well as the messaging options offered by other social media sites.

So the lawsuits face a conundrum: if Facebook's market is narrow, and it is a monopolist in that market, then it is unproblematic for it to buy services in other markets since they wouldn't ever compete with it anyway. But if Facebook is in the same market as Instagram, then Facebook is not a monopolist, since lots of other healthy competitors exist in that broad market too. If Instagram and WhatsApp were competitors of Facebook’s when Facebook bought them, they must face lots of competition from other, similar products now.

- Sam Bowman