Prolithic Geologist

Why are the kids scoring poorly today? Uh, high ceilings. This study is making the news, but it is bad🧵

Never forget that the left tried to erase the word “mother”.

If by empathy you mean identifying that his life is a mess, congratulations everyone can see that. If empathy means “we need to do something about his situation” then we need to be careful here. The first risk is an expensive boondoggle that would only solve the unjust type of homelessness, that is the type of you were to suddenly become homeless. This is the most common type of public policy, it’s extremely expensive and highly ineffective because it doesn’t actually address any of the homeless’s actual root problems. There is also a secondary, but no less important factor. If you were to change the parameters of society so that someone who did act the way they did, who abused chemicals, constantly broke the law, ruined every relationship they’ve ever had so that these people did not face the negative consequences of those actions, would society be improved or worsened? What sort of incentives do we want to put into place?

This is the kind of slopulism that I hate. Institutional investors are a MICRO slice of home purchases. Actual affordable housing comes from letting developers build market demand, ending parking minimums, ending abuse of environmental laws via frivolous lawsuits, and more…

Indeed, I would agree that imagining hypotheticals is a core part of thinking. However this “Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance” is a specifically gamed hypothetical designed to lead to a certain dishonest conclusion. The idea of this exercise is to pretend your birth was a random event across the space of all current humans while superimposing the context of deciding a “fair” distribution of rights & privileges. The exercise makes a reader think: “Well, due to my culture, I expect a certain level of rights and privileges. So based on the veil of ignorance, I should want those rights and privileges for people in all countries!” This, naturally brings us to the leftist conclusion that we have an implicit morally duty to extend rights to all people. But this is not an honest examination, it’s a hat trick that the progressive uses to smuggle in his own morality. It’s easy to see how the trick works if you invert the question. Any serious examination of “right and privileges” understands these things as the equal and opposite counterparts to “moral obligations and duties”. But could we do the same”veil of ignorance” exercise for imposing societal obligations on people? For instance, as a Westerner, imagine that you were forced to live in a randomly selected society and follow its own moral strictures, rules, and cultural regulations. What kind of society would you be comfortable existing in, chosen from behind the veil of ignorance? Wouldn’t it only be Western style societies? So wow, we just developed a moral imperative to invade all nations and impose Western Societal norms on them based on Progressives favorite first principle! But No! We can’t do that! That would be imperialism! Well fine then. If there is no universal obligation to impose moral duties then there can be no universal moral obligation to distribute entitlements.

People don’t like to think about the thousands of different influences that have come together to make them. The history, the culture, the family, the experiences, each a collection of unique experiences that drastically alter how we see the world. It’s not wholly their fault, when we were being raised pretty much everyone believed some version of Fukushima that liberalism was the end goal of societies. That everyone more or less viewed the world, morality, and politics broadly the same. It built the habit in a lot of people to view others as more or less the same as you. The only problem is they’re not, they’re different. Empathy became a narcissistic reflection of our own emotions.

This whole argument reminds me of Obama when he used to go to companies and founders telling them “you didn’t build that” As a pretext for wealth confiscation. A large devoted effort of the equity projects is trying to convince people they don’t actually deserve any of the fruits of their labor.

This is what it sounds like living next to a data center. The video below was recorded at midnight, and the data center is situated next to 100s of residential homes.

When I empathize with, say, street criminals — like, really get in there and try to model their thoughts — I like them less, feel less sympathy for them, because I am not merely imagining me-but-does crimes; I’m thinking through how they must think and finding that my opinion of them gets worse!