We don't burn witches anymore
but the group psychology endures
Moral distance, cognitive discipline seem to be the cure
The first two Spider Man movies weren't good either

Both are true:

"About twice as many economists believe a voucher system would improve education as believe that it wouldn’t"

"only a third of economists support vouchers"

Scott Alexander on Cost Disease

Here is Scott Alexander on Cost Disease.

"In 1983, the first mobile phone cost $4,000 – about $10,000 in today’s dollars. It was also a gigantic piece of crap. Today you can get a much better phone for $100. This is the right and proper way of the universe. It’s why we fund scientists, and pay businesspeople the big bucks.
But things like college and health care have still had their prices dectuple. Patients can now schedule their appointments online; doctors can send prescriptions through the fax, pharmacies can keep track of medication histories on centralized computer systems that interface with the cloud, nurses get automatic reminders when they’re giving two drugs with a potential interaction, insurance companies accept payment through credit cards – and all of this costs ten times as much as it did in the days of punch cards and secretaries who did calculations by hand."

He talks about average wages, but he doesn't talk about growth in employment in these sectors. Since 1970 employment in these sectors went from 6% of the workforce to 15%. That's very expensive. I'm surprised Slatestar didn't mention this.

Hanson says that healthcare is primarily about signalling care, not health. Caplan says that school is primarily about signalling good work, not education. If either or both of them are right, then the amount we spend and the number of people we employ in these industries seems like one of the worst things in the developed world.

Life is

"My life seemed like a glass tunnel,through which I was moving faster every year,and at the end of which there was darkness..."-Derek Parfit

Why anything?

Why anything?

Here is another analogy. Suppose first that, of a thousand people facing death, only one can be rescued. If there is a lottery to pick this one survivor, and I win, I would be very lucky. But there might be nothing here that needed to be explained. Someone had to win, and why not me? Consider next another lottery. Unless my gaoler picks the longest of a thousand straws, I shall be shot. If my gaoler picks that straw, there would be something to be explained. It would not be enough to say, ‘This result was as likely as any other.’ In the first lottery, nothing special happened: whatever the result, someone’s life would be saved. In this second lottery, the result was special, since, of the thousand possible results, only one would save a life. Why was this special result also what happened? Though this might be a coincidence, the chance of that is only one in a thousand. I could be almost certain that, like Dostoevsky’s mock execution, this lottery was rigged.

Is Pornography Really about “Making Hate to Women”?

Do porn users hold more gender egalitarian attitudes?

Intellectuals for Trump

Intellectuals for Trump

"But when the host asked whether Trump might be “more sensitive and self-restrained” than Obama in the use of executive power, the room erupted in laughter."