• 2 Posts
  • 44 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2023

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  • This guy has like a billion videos that are just some variation of “Here’s a tech bro startup making a gadgetbahn and here’s why it wouldn’t work and trains are a thousand times better”. Great that it exists, but since these startups never learn from others’ mistakes and thus keep making the same missteps over and over and over again, it makes the videos very samey after a while. Not sure what I would do in his position.



  • I left a comment that made a similar point with some data:

    4: Please stop sharing conspiracy theories

    5: Higher wages are useless if your country’s infrastructure and tax system is so piss poor that you need to spend more on basic necessities. We have economic metrics that account for some of this, such as the difference between income and discretionary income. Free-market propagandists always point to the US having high income, but the same can not be said for discretionary income. For example, if we compare the US to the Netherlands, we see that the US median disposable income is 41K while in the Netherlands it’s 36K. But let’s compare how much you have to spend in your day to day life and calculate the discretionary income based on that:

    ________________________US_______Netherlands

    income________________41k_______36k

    food___________________5.1k_______3.7k

    shelter_________________13.2k______13k

    clothing________________1.2k_______1.5k

    transport______________6.3k_______3.4k

    health__________________3.2k_______1.8k

    student debt___________2.1k_______0.8k

    discretionary income__9.9k_______11.8k

    As we see, the case the free-market capitalist makes falls apart once we look at discretionary income, which collectivist and social policies ensure is higher in the Netherlands.

    EDIT: Scott has edited the post to make 4 seem less like an endorsement and more an ironic share. This is better, but I still prefer it if these things aren’t spread at all.

    EDIT 2: Source for the 2021 US-Dutch disposable income vs discretionary income (as well as a lot of other comparisons between median US and Dutch expenditure): https://www.moneymacro.rocks/2021-07-02-dutch-vs-america-middle-class/





  • I actually don’t find this a bad post, but I do want to point out that it got way more karma than any of titotals more critical posts, even though I find many of them better. This once again points to how the EA Forum’s voting-power-by-popularity karma system creates groupthink; being critical nets you less voting power than being lauditory, and it disincentivizes calling out bullshit in general.

    When Ives Parr of “Effective Altruism is when you want to spend money on genetic engineering for race-and-IQ theories” fame, made a seperate post complaining that that post got downvoted despite nobody giving a good counterargument, I wanted to comment and call him out on his bullshit, but why bother with a karma system that allows him and his buddies to downvote it out of the frontpage while leaving you with less voting power? A lot of EA’s missteps are just one off blunders, but what makes the EA forum’s “”“epistocratic”“” voting system so much worse is that it’s systematic, every post and comment is now affected by this calculus of how much you can criticize the people with a lot of power on the forum without losing power of your own, making groupthink almost inevitable. Given the fact that people who are on the forum longer have on average more voting power than newer voices, I can’t help but wonder if this is by design.