Considering that animal suffering is the worst thing in the world in your view, is it better a meat eater not exist at all? I feel like this flips ethics on its head.
Looking into the numbers now: 80 billion land animals are killed for food each year. That means 10 per person. Yeah, the value of one human outweighs ten cows, pigs, and chickens in agony, so although we totally need to do something to help those animals (end factory farming), saving people remains good.
I suppose the utilitarian (which I am not) would answer that if causing a single carnivore to cease existing would end all animal suffering, that’s probably worth it. But in reality, the marginal suffering caused by a single carnivore is such that, though he should forego meat-eating as a matter of morality, his ceasing to exist would not be better overall. But I’m curious what BB would say to this.
A single carnivore causes a lot of suffering--probably more than they have pelasure in their life--but not enough to outweigh their other positive effects.
I wonder why Hanania seems so sceptical towards foreign aid to Africa (e.g. to prevent AIDS, one of the worst diseases in human history), very strange and surprising...............................
It’s just like the billions spent to end homelessness in San Francisco. The money is NOT just enriching NGOs and the insufferable people who work for them.
I was expressing frustration about a tangential topic which wasn't fair or productive. PEPFAR apparently converted 120 billion $USD and two decades of effort into ~25 million lives saved. If I assume this wasn't an over-determined outcome and put aside my doubts about this program sustaining its supposed historical performance - then PEPFAR is certainly an amazing effort. From this frame, PEPFAR is actually nothing like the tragedy carried out in the name of progress in San Francisco.
There's a remarkable exchange in this discussion where the host explains Richard might want to refer to all the smart people voting for Harris he knows. It's worthwhile to note that smart people do in fact exist in sectors outside of academia and software. Outside of those two sectors, I can think of really intelligent people in energy, mining, finance, business logistics, agriculture, manufacturing, etc who are voting for Trump and have at least a bachelor's degree.
This is probably why education polarization in exit polls keeps hitting at roughly 60-40; Democrats can pick up lots of educated millennials, but the oldest among them acquiring homes and marrying appear to be moving towards Republicans. The NYT pollster Nate Cohn's commentary and Pew Research Center's high quality mail survey offer some interesting pointers in that direction. Meanwhile, people older than millennials and those quietly working in other industries with advanced training or degrees are just not easily visible to you if you work in certain parts of academia or software. But they're quite smart, and you'll probably need to work with more people like them to confront problems like climate change or animal welfare. Many of them are obviously voting for Trump over Harris; as we'll see in the Catalist exit polls no matter who wins.
Richard said there's a reason the US is wealthier than Europe due to free market policies, which I'm partial towards. But I hear Keynesian economists suggest it has instead to do with America's ability to run up the deficit due to USD's status as the global reserve currency, which would suggest fiscally conservative policies like austerity have actually been what has held back Europe
The reason Democratic administrations tend to have higher gdp growth than Republicans is purely coincidence. Take recessions as an example. The dot com crash and the housing bubble popped under Bush who cannot reasonably be held accountable for that. Covid is another example as well. These are random historical incidents that lead the economy to perform worse, causing the party in power to lose in an election. In both cases, Republicans were blamed for the economy and lost to Democrats, which is contributing to the correlation.
In both incidents with Trump and Bush, they both got elected largely due to the electoral college. What is happening in reality is Republicans tend to be elected more often than Democrats due to the EC, which means that they are in power more of the time, so they recessions are more likely to happen under their administration. Then they lose to the Democratic party. It has nothing to do with the Democratic party being better on economics and is purely coincidence.
It might be coincidence or it might be their bad economic policies! Like, maybe the reason why the last 10 recessions have had 9 under Republicans has been because Republicans do more recession causing things.
What exactly should Eisenhower have done differently in 1958 and 1960? Nixon "learned" from the 1958 midterms and the 1960 election to employ more leverage on the Fed and go along with Democratic Congress price controls. Doesn't strike me as the right lesson! Do Republicans just perpetually apply all the wrong lessons on how to run the economy across the last half century? Or is there a simpler explanation here? Brian Riedl has explored this further[1], but I'll provide my shorter theory below.
The simpler explanation might be that Democrats do structurally better as a center-left populist party when there's a recent economic downturn. If we accept that our economy has a business cycle and Democrats are a center-left populist party while Republicans are a center-right business party, it requires far less assumptions to conclude the center-left will do better politically when a business downturn occurs.
But why are Republicans so often in charge during it? If we accept another premise, which is that it's very hard for a party to win the presidency three times in a row for thermostatic public reasons, this would explain the constant churn in party office. All it really takes is Democrats to sync up a victory with an economic downturn under a Republican once to plausibly get this pattern going. Now we face an inevitable party churn in the presidency that ended up overlapping with downturns losing the GOP the presidency (1960, 1976, 1992, 2008, 2020.) We've explained a helpful amount of what's going on here without even getting to party management of recessions by just applying anti-long incumbency knowledge and how recurring party themes can address voters during the downturn of business cycles.
This is basically right, I would also add that from my comment below, the Republican party enjoys an advantage in the EC as well as the fact that there are a large number of conservative voters in this country, which means that Republicans win more of the time. In any given election, you should basically think it's close to a tie with a slight Republican advantage.
Once you start going back to the last 10, the 10th is from the 50s. At some point you go so far back that it doesn't have as much bearing on politics today, which is why I focused on the 3 that have happened this century. They look random to me.
Recently it's just explained by the Electoral College, but historically what is happening is that there are just more conservative voters than liberal voters, which means that in a head to head matchup - Republicans tended to win. Richard brought it up in the conversation for a short moment, but excluding Bush Jr, Trump, Biden, and Obama, Republicans controlled the presidency most of the time going back to Eisenhower - with 28 years in power compared to Democrat's 20. So Republicans have had the presidency almost 60 percent of the time.
'being forced to live in Mexico is a rights violation'
Incredibly based.
No ones forcing them to live in Mexico. They came to Mexico from their home countries on their own
More of this kind of format! it’s so much easier for adhders to engage with 🙌🏻🙌🏻✨✨
This is really cool.
Considering that animal suffering is the worst thing in the world in your view, is it better a meat eater not exist at all? I feel like this flips ethics on its head.
This has been discussed a lot by EAs, and the general answer is that their existence is good. This is because:
1) People increase technological capacity which might allow us to get lab meat that eliminates factory farms.
2) People reduce wild animal suffering.
3) The welfare a person has over the course of their lives is maybe roughly commensurate with the pain they cause to animals.
4) People have kids who will likely have good lives in the future and not eat animals.
Do you agree with point three and think that the other points are sufficient to balance the factory farming?
I think probably most people cause more suffering through faactory farming than they get welfare, but maybe just by a factor of 1.5 or 2 or something.
That surprises me!
Looking into the numbers now: 80 billion land animals are killed for food each year. That means 10 per person. Yeah, the value of one human outweighs ten cows, pigs, and chickens in agony, so although we totally need to do something to help those animals (end factory farming), saving people remains good.
I suppose the utilitarian (which I am not) would answer that if causing a single carnivore to cease existing would end all animal suffering, that’s probably worth it. But in reality, the marginal suffering caused by a single carnivore is such that, though he should forego meat-eating as a matter of morality, his ceasing to exist would not be better overall. But I’m curious what BB would say to this.
A single carnivore causes a lot of suffering--probably more than they have pelasure in their life--but not enough to outweigh their other positive effects.
I wonder why Hanania seems so sceptical towards foreign aid to Africa (e.g. to prevent AIDS, one of the worst diseases in human history), very strange and surprising...............................
Have billions of dollars prevented aids from becoming endemic in Africa?
They have prevented it from becoming much more widespread than it otherwise would be.
It’s just like the billions spent to end homelessness in San Francisco. The money is NOT just enriching NGOs and the insufferable people who work for them.
Have you spent even one minute looking at the efficacy of PEPFAR specifically? I mean that seriously!
I was expressing frustration about a tangential topic which wasn't fair or productive. PEPFAR apparently converted 120 billion $USD and two decades of effort into ~25 million lives saved. If I assume this wasn't an over-determined outcome and put aside my doubts about this program sustaining its supposed historical performance - then PEPFAR is certainly an amazing effort. From this frame, PEPFAR is actually nothing like the tragedy carried out in the name of progress in San Francisco.
Wow, I just want to say, people on the internet almost never admit they were wrong, and I think it's admirable that you did!
If factory farming is the worst thing on earth, how much more effective would it be to transfer all African aids money towards ending factory farming?
Perhaps very effective, but if money weren't spent on PEPFAR, it wouldn't be spent on ending factory farming, obviously.
Most of it gets misspent by corrupt officials, although how much is certainly debatable
There's a remarkable exchange in this discussion where the host explains Richard might want to refer to all the smart people voting for Harris he knows. It's worthwhile to note that smart people do in fact exist in sectors outside of academia and software. Outside of those two sectors, I can think of really intelligent people in energy, mining, finance, business logistics, agriculture, manufacturing, etc who are voting for Trump and have at least a bachelor's degree.
This is probably why education polarization in exit polls keeps hitting at roughly 60-40; Democrats can pick up lots of educated millennials, but the oldest among them acquiring homes and marrying appear to be moving towards Republicans. The NYT pollster Nate Cohn's commentary and Pew Research Center's high quality mail survey offer some interesting pointers in that direction. Meanwhile, people older than millennials and those quietly working in other industries with advanced training or degrees are just not easily visible to you if you work in certain parts of academia or software. But they're quite smart, and you'll probably need to work with more people like them to confront problems like climate change or animal welfare. Many of them are obviously voting for Trump over Harris; as we'll see in the Catalist exit polls no matter who wins.
Richard said there's a reason the US is wealthier than Europe due to free market policies, which I'm partial towards. But I hear Keynesian economists suggest it has instead to do with America's ability to run up the deficit due to USD's status as the global reserve currency, which would suggest fiscally conservative policies like austerity have actually been what has held back Europe
The reason Democratic administrations tend to have higher gdp growth than Republicans is purely coincidence. Take recessions as an example. The dot com crash and the housing bubble popped under Bush who cannot reasonably be held accountable for that. Covid is another example as well. These are random historical incidents that lead the economy to perform worse, causing the party in power to lose in an election. In both cases, Republicans were blamed for the economy and lost to Democrats, which is contributing to the correlation.
In both incidents with Trump and Bush, they both got elected largely due to the electoral college. What is happening in reality is Republicans tend to be elected more often than Democrats due to the EC, which means that they are in power more of the time, so they recessions are more likely to happen under their administration. Then they lose to the Democratic party. It has nothing to do with the Democratic party being better on economics and is purely coincidence.
It might be coincidence or it might be their bad economic policies! Like, maybe the reason why the last 10 recessions have had 9 under Republicans has been because Republicans do more recession causing things.
This is correct, but gave me one of those funny instances where chatgpt refuses to admit it's wrong:
"No, it is not true that 9 out of the last 10 U.S. recessions happened under Republican presidents. Here's a brief overview of the last 10 recessions:
1. **2020 (COVID-19 recession)** - Trump (Republican)
2. **2007-2009 (Great Recession)** - Bush (Republican)
3. **2001 (Dot-com bubble burst)** - Bush (Republican)
4. **1990-1991** - Bush (Republican)
5. **1981-1982** - Reagan (Republican)
6. **1980** - Carter (Democrat)
7. **1973-1975** - Nixon/Ford (Republicans)
8. **1969-1970** - Nixon (Republican)
9. **1960-1961** - Eisenhower (Republican)
10. **1957-1958** - Eisenhower (Republican)
So, out of the last 10 recessions, 8 occurred under Republican presidents and 2 under a Democrat."
What exactly should Eisenhower have done differently in 1958 and 1960? Nixon "learned" from the 1958 midterms and the 1960 election to employ more leverage on the Fed and go along with Democratic Congress price controls. Doesn't strike me as the right lesson! Do Republicans just perpetually apply all the wrong lessons on how to run the economy across the last half century? Or is there a simpler explanation here? Brian Riedl has explored this further[1], but I'll provide my shorter theory below.
The simpler explanation might be that Democrats do structurally better as a center-left populist party when there's a recent economic downturn. If we accept that our economy has a business cycle and Democrats are a center-left populist party while Republicans are a center-right business party, it requires far less assumptions to conclude the center-left will do better politically when a business downturn occurs.
But why are Republicans so often in charge during it? If we accept another premise, which is that it's very hard for a party to win the presidency three times in a row for thermostatic public reasons, this would explain the constant churn in party office. All it really takes is Democrats to sync up a victory with an economic downturn under a Republican once to plausibly get this pattern going. Now we face an inevitable party churn in the presidency that ended up overlapping with downturns losing the GOP the presidency (1960, 1976, 1992, 2008, 2020.) We've explained a helpful amount of what's going on here without even getting to party management of recessions by just applying anti-long incumbency knowledge and how recurring party themes can address voters during the downturn of business cycles.
[1] https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/presidents-as-economic-managers
This is basically right, I would also add that from my comment below, the Republican party enjoys an advantage in the EC as well as the fact that there are a large number of conservative voters in this country, which means that Republicans win more of the time. In any given election, you should basically think it's close to a tie with a slight Republican advantage.
Once you start going back to the last 10, the 10th is from the 50s. At some point you go so far back that it doesn't have as much bearing on politics today, which is why I focused on the 3 that have happened this century. They look random to me.
Recently it's just explained by the Electoral College, but historically what is happening is that there are just more conservative voters than liberal voters, which means that in a head to head matchup - Republicans tended to win. Richard brought it up in the conversation for a short moment, but excluding Bush Jr, Trump, Biden, and Obama, Republicans controlled the presidency most of the time going back to Eisenhower - with 28 years in power compared to Democrat's 20. So Republicans have had the presidency almost 60 percent of the time.
These guys look like twins
Thanks for making this available --- I enjoyed it.
If I may look a gift horse in the mouth: could you make any future debates available in audio format (in addition to, not in exclusion of, video)?
Jeez, as soon as I posted this, I saw the "switch to audio" option. What an embarrassing clown I am.
Waiting for the transcript. :)
There is a transcript at the top if you view the website version
Could you link the Wayne Xiang(?) article you referenced?
Nvm, https://open.substack.com/pub/simpleheart/p/the-presidential-candidates-on-animal?r=1tkfn8