I'd argue both statements do make the same amount of sense. The wording of "owe" doesn't make as much sense for the big bang but my overall argument was that people shouldn't feel ownership over a causal chain they happened into and haven't had any true impact on.
I don't think proximate causes are a good basis for societal decisions - for example many people blame poverty on bad decision making but that neglects previous generational disadvantages that could affect genetics (e.g. lead poisoning related to redlining) and it overlooks that people grow up in different environments. This seems like it's basically an excuse for people to not care about the bad effects of a system they're participating in by saying "don't worry this isn't your concern you can just blame those people".
I think a lot of this boils down to a free will argument. While that's still ultimately up in the air, if we're looking at necessary and sufficient conditions then it seems like there's more evidence that we don't have free will than that we do. I think the "necessary and sufficient" relationship for free will would be that free will exists if we could have made a different decision than one that we did, and we don't have any way to test for that.
In the absence of free will people are just a result of their starting point and environment afterwards, and thus don't have a reason to claim disproportionate ownership over the output of that larger system.
Don't want this to come off as combative - I'm super interested in debate on this! I'd love to be proven wrong but it seems like we don't have free will so I feel like it's generally a mistake to try to organize society as if we did. I wasn't really aiming for a counterfactual argument, but how was this a "bad" counterfactual? It was definitely hyperbolic but meant to show in an extreme that the principles would still hold true and that someone wouldn't be able to claim ownership over the output. I feel like we probably just disagree on the axiom of free will but feel free to correct me!
One interesting case of "locks" getting less secure is for bank bags. On one of the recent LockPickingLawyer videos he talks about how these bags are easy to cut through but that's not usually an issue because they're mainly designed to be tamper-evident. Using a real lock is more of a risk so many banks are switching to an adhesive seal instead of a zipper-lock.
It was pretty commonplace to lie to avoid the social persecution of having a baby outside of marriage. This was still fairly common even recently - a young girl would go to a nunnery and them come back with a child "they adopted". There is also no evidence of any miracles aside from games of telephone played over centuries.
We also have plenty of equally verified accounts of virgin births from other religions going back even further than Jesus. So if we're believing any claims of virgin birth followed by claims of miracles, then the Christian god must surely be lying by saying they're the only god
> Claims of divine intervention aside, virgin births may have a more human explanation – a tragic demonstration of the extreme measures women have been forced to take to save themselves and their reputations.
I can agree with that, but as far as we see in the text it is a command - she's never told she has another option and we as the readers aren't given any indication that she thinks there is. I get that there's a charitable interpretation here if you look for it but I'm trying to just go based on what it says in the book
It seems like the angel tells her in Luke 1:31 that it's happening whether she wants it to or not
> "You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus"
It's nice that she accepts it afterwards, but that's definitely not how consent works, and it doesn't seem like she was given any other option
Edit: I saw your other comment saying "there's other evidence of god respecting free will and he probably would have been fine with it if she didn't want to". The bible is full of contradictions so there may be evidence of a respect for free will somewhere else, but this specific story seems to contradict that
I think this is overlooking the main argument - having someone waste time by getting their own food/shelter isn't really any better than having them waste time doing a job to get money for food/shelter. We would likely be better off not wasting people's time and just giving them food/shelter so they are free to figure out how to best use that time
I think you're sneaking in some assumptions here that people just develop these skills within themselves and have the same opportunity to do so as anyone else. If you start the clock with them already having those skills and other people not then it makes sense, but they ultimately owe all of that back to the society that gave them those skills.
However you end up is a combination of genes and environment - neither of which you have any control over. I don't see why someone should have full rights over whatever their output is when they have no control over the input. If someone has a great idea that can double food production - they owe all the money and food to the society because they would not have had the idea or been able to implement it otherwise. The public could then decide they should get a larger share for some reason(we generally do this with tax policy), but I don't see how they could have any moral claim to it
Maybe we're just getting philosophical about word meanings here but how can you have governance that isn't imposed/hierarchical/authoritative? If whoever is making the rules says you can't do something and someone wants to, then the governance is the process that stops them. If someone is prevented from doing something, that implies a hierarchy capable of preventing the action, and that capability would have to be imposed by an authority.
Yeah I think the initial motivation behind setting it up this way was good - "let's try to get as many people into college as possible". I'm narrowly making an argument against loans that are not dischargeable by bankruptcy or death.
Changing that in isolation would almost definitely have an effect where low income families can't afford college. I see that as a gap the govt should be filling either through public colleges or directly funding people to go to school, probably both. The core issue I see here is we're letting private companies make bad investments without liability, into something that probably shouldn't be profit-driven to start with
I'm not trying to make it black-and-white, there's certainly some degree of personal choice weighing in here - but it's not the core issue and it's probably a distraction. When we realized cigarettes were bad it was partially about informing people, but the main thing was to change marketing laws so you could make sure that wasn't undoing all the good info.
If I give you two loan options with bad terms and you have to choose one, then that is a fiscal policy thing and your choice is ultimately pretty inconsequential. You may be slightly better off than the person who made the other choice but the bad policy is affecting both of you.
Ultimately it's both a policy and a personal choice thing, but as with most society-wide issues the personal choice aspect falls away pretty quickly and we need to get realistic and figure out what a solution is instead of just blaming individuals.
This is an institutional problem and they should be blamed though.
It doesn't really matter what students "prefer", if a bank doesn't do their due diligence and a student isn't able to repay their loan, then the bank should be losing that money as a bad investment. They won't give a $1M mortgage loan to buy a 50k lot, and likewise won't give it to someone that doesn't seem like they could pay it back. I do think there's value in people getting degrees that don't pay well - but then you shouldn't be getting a loan to do so.
> students would be paying whatever Harvard or Stanford asked
I don't think this is true - people simply can't go to a school they can't afford and people don't have infinite money. We gave the banks the freedom to tell children that they will indeed be able to pay back loans that they often cannot, so it's the bad actions of one organization(banks) enabling another(school). Ivy league schools may be like Veblen goods where increased prices also increase demand - but that can't be true for all schools and we've seen tuition increases across the board.
The solution that seems best to me is to first fix the bankruptcy issue - if someone can't pay back a loan that is a risk the bank is accepting by giving the loan, just like any other loan. I think that alone would probably have enough of a chilling effect that way less people would be able to attend colleges at first and they would be forced to lower tuition rates. That would correct the market going forward, but it doesn't really help people that already fell victim to this system. That seems like it could be remedied by either making interest rates 0 or capping total interest to some amount relative to the principal (e.g. the total amount can never grow to more than 110% of the principal).
Similar to healthcare, I don't think education shouldn't be profitable in the short term - it's a long term investment a society has to make in itself so you can't really track it as an individual investment in any one person. If someone else becomes a doctor I'm still benefitting from that so it makes sense that I'd pay into some of the cost to educate that person. Unfortunately in the US at least we seem to be totally unable to do anything without a short-term and concrete path to profit regardless of the amount of good it would do.
Not an expert on the topic, but my understanding is that anarchy rejects governance in general - there wouldn't be any "elevated decision-making body". It's not as much "you can leave if you don't like it" as it's "if you're here then you can change things".
I'm not prepared to defend this but that's the view - if you have a system of governance it isn't anarchy so if the argument is "all systems of governance are at least partially involuntary" then that may be true but doesn't say anything related to anarchy
The best explanation of anarchy I've heard is by debunking the common view that people think anarchy is when a a disaster happens and a warlord takes over - but it's really when a disaster happens and neighbors start checking on each other to make sure everyone is alright and see if anyone needs help. If the community isn't voluntarily doing it then it isn't anarchy
Just want to add that I think these are useful to get general ideas of what different personality traits there are, but there's little to no science backing the Meyers-Briggs assessment. These type of tests can be nice framework for a starting point, but you should never rely on them to predict how someone will act in the future more than you would astrology.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-the-myers-b...
For background - the test was created by a mother-daughter team who were authors but with no background in psychology. They were inspired to create the test, but they couldn't convince any psychologists it was legitimate so they instead sold it to businesses as a way to assess employee strengths and weaknesses.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/myers-briggs-personality-test...
> As Emre explains, the test has become part of our neoliberal discourse about making yourself into a commodity, selling your personality, loving what you do
> It seems their ideas about personality and gender made them blind to structural problems so that they saw gender inequality as an individual problem.
Kinda unrelated to this discussion, but there's also this darker side to all these personality tests where they encourage people to fit into a certain role because it benefits a company and not because it's who they really are.
Can't give any great advice here, but my intuition is that it's going to depend a lot on the company.
I have friends that have worked retail jobs where they aren't going to care at all and will probably use it as an excuse to fire you.
I work at a company where a coworker was fired and afterwards told some of us that they were dealing with mental health stuff causing it, and I think my company would have been more helpful if they brought it up earlier by perhaps helping to find a therapist through the insurance or changing their roles for a while. For example if the frustrating part of coding is tough to get into, maybe switch to building out documentation so you have something you can see tangible progress on daily/hourly, and would still let them add the same amount of value if not more.
If this is your experience then I think it's important to recognize that those are just anecdotes, and if you have a lot of those anecdotes it's only going to make it harder to base your view on facts. There's tons of evidence that the typical views on masculinity have a lot of negative mental health impacts.
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/11/sexism-harmf...
> While overall, conforming to masculine norms was associated with negative mental health outcomes in subjects, the researchers found the association to be most consistent for these three norms — self-reliance, pursuit of playboy behavior and power over women
https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...
> models predicting depression generally showed that higher conformity to masculine norms was associated with an increased risk of current depressive symptoms, especially in the oldest age group
I did a search for "studies on masculinity and depression", there's plenty more if you want to read up on it.
That view also makes no sense for gay couples - if there's two women and one is depressed then does the other stay because their partner is a woman, or leave because they're a woman? Same issue for two men - do they leave because the partner is a man or stay because they are?
If you have any studies showing that for some reason men should be handling mental health differently then women I'd be interested to read them, because as far as I can tell the view that there should be a difference is itself a big contributing factor to negative mental health.
Agree with this reasoning - NFTs seem like they clearly have little to no real value and I think the people buying them understand that and are just doing speculation (and we know how that ends up). BTC/ETH are a little harder to gauge because they market themselves as alternative currencies rather than a product in-and-of-itself, but I still get the same fear that it's entirely based on sentiment and nothing in the real world. One article (or Elon tweet) could cause it all to drop overnight.
The USD might fall the same way, but it'd be slower and would require real-world change to happen instead of people just deciding not to use something anymore, and it's so tied up in the global currency exchange that we'd have way bigger problems to worry about than "my investment account lost all it's money". I'm pretty risk averse so I get that other people would want to play that game, I'm just not much of a gambler.
Ethereum seems slightly better than Bitcoin for the reasons you stated as well - ETH could drop to almost zero value and smart contracts would still be cool, but ultimately I'm into the tech. Feels a lot like having a lot of reddit karma to me - it's cool to the people that think it's cool, but doesn't mean much outside of that, unless you can convince someone that does think it's cool to take your fake assets and trade them for "real" assets.
I was raised with religion and then later realized it doesn't make sense, I went through a lot of the same feelings
You could still have subjective value even if there's no "sea level" from which to assign an absolute value. "Value" is a pretty abstract concept and something everyone probably has to define for themselves, but at least depending on your definition _everything_ could have value - maybe not to you, or maybe not right now, but in some sense it still "ultimately" does - and that's pretty cool too
I don't think proximate causes are a good basis for societal decisions - for example many people blame poverty on bad decision making but that neglects previous generational disadvantages that could affect genetics (e.g. lead poisoning related to redlining) and it overlooks that people grow up in different environments. This seems like it's basically an excuse for people to not care about the bad effects of a system they're participating in by saying "don't worry this isn't your concern you can just blame those people".
I think a lot of this boils down to a free will argument. While that's still ultimately up in the air, if we're looking at necessary and sufficient conditions then it seems like there's more evidence that we don't have free will than that we do. I think the "necessary and sufficient" relationship for free will would be that free will exists if we could have made a different decision than one that we did, and we don't have any way to test for that.
In the absence of free will people are just a result of their starting point and environment afterwards, and thus don't have a reason to claim disproportionate ownership over the output of that larger system.
Don't want this to come off as combative - I'm super interested in debate on this! I'd love to be proven wrong but it seems like we don't have free will so I feel like it's generally a mistake to try to organize society as if we did. I wasn't really aiming for a counterfactual argument, but how was this a "bad" counterfactual? It was definitely hyperbolic but meant to show in an extreme that the principles would still hold true and that someone wouldn't be able to claim ownership over the output. I feel like we probably just disagree on the axiom of free will but feel free to correct me!