I just mean that Pr(left wing|went to uni) > Pr(left wing|didn’t). No assumptions about the mechanism, just observing the regularity.

How did you reach the conclusion that they’re “heavily correlated”? From the studies you posted, I’m seeing effect sizes of r ≈ 0.2, which is usually considered a weak correlation. A change in one variable explains only about 4% of variance in the other.

An effect of this magnitude is, I suspect, consistent with left wing beliefs/ideology being transmitted at universities, whose population has already passed a selection filter on intelligence.

Euthanized by taxation can’t work. Even if you pull it off, the wealth simply leaves and reinvests in a less restrictive country. Capital flight. Race to the bottom.

Overcoming capital would mean the victims of capitalism—all of us—coordinating on the scale at which capital operates: the global scale. We can’t even agree at national scales.

Worse, capital owns the communications infrastructure and controls which messages get amplified and which dampened. They can actively manipulate our “common knowledge”, our sense of what everyone else takes for granted. They can, and do maneuver us into two mutually antagonistic factions, each convinced of their moral righteousness, their justified hatred of the other half of the population.

To actually defeat capital and institute a better, stable, fair system, we’d need to first reconcile with the arbitrary political faction we’ve been trained to hate. Then we’d have a shot at globally coordinating in a world where the five richest men in earth own media networks.

It’s a hard problem.

Nah, you guys have two years until he makes his dictator play. Democrat wins in November will just serve as a justification.

Nah, you’re thinking of Hansel. It’s actually an online community of people who can’t get laid despite really wanting to.

Can you point me in the direction of these failed attempts? I’m tempted to try something similar and would rather learn from others’ mistake first.

Could we have a fediverse dating app? What would it look like? How would we go about it?

I like: how many Germans does it take to screw in a light bulb?

One. They are very efficient, but not very funny.

Just curious, and I’ll admit it’s too my discredit that I’m even engaging, but why are you behaving this way?

What?

Government funded and administered health care systems being a form of risk pooling and insurance are not controversial ideas. These are standard definitions.

I’m not sure where you’re getting these ideas. Why would taxpayer paid services not be a form of risk pooling? There are hundreds of countries around the world with government run health systems, or government funded and privately run systems, or private-public partnerships in various forms. Pooling taxpayer money to fund health care for those individuals unlucky enough to need it absolutely does make it insurance.

I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on “universal health care” and “health insurance” if you’d like to start learning about these topics.

I’m an academic statistician who discusses risk and related concepts with experts every day…

I mean, I agree with the first part fully, but I think what you mean is that we shouldn’t have for-profit corporate run insurance.

Any socialised health care is a form of insurance—a way for us to pool the risk of large bad events, so that everyone (or a lot of people) pays a little so that a few people aren’t totally destroyed by the catastrophe. The alternative to having insurance is that we let people die when rare but really bad things happen. We absolutely should have insurance, but we should all share the cost equally, or the rich should pay more, rather than a few people massively profiting from running the enterprise.

But, however we run it, we’ll need to treat dental differently from medical because of what I said in my first comment

This makes perfect sense from the supply side. Very few (younger) people need expensive medical care, so we can pool the risk. Almost everyone needs some, regular dental care, so it’s more like a savings account than insurance. I’m not claiming that the insurance systems in any given country aren’t exploitative, just that medical and dental insurance should be different.

How fast can this ship go? Depending on how far in time you go, you’ll need to spend a long time traveling through space to get to where Earth was…

The Earth is traveling along an elliptical orbit around the sun, the sun is orbiting the Milky Way, the Milky Way is traveling along a curved trajectory. Why, if you kept your momentum, would you end up on Earth?

Lol.

I actually agree with most of your statement, except for “DIRECT”. That’s not part of my claim, and it shouldn’t be a goal of yours.

The terrain has been rigged so that all the direct, the locally advantageous, locally practical solutions lead back to the same toxic equilibrium. We are stuck in a historical basin of attraction and need to escape it.

The only long-term stable/viable solution, the only solution that honours our responsibility to future generations, is to avoid the immediate direct solutions, the ones that the manipulated incentive structures are set up to anticipate, and to do what you described. I’m not claiming it’s easy, or likely to happen, merely that it’s our only chance to save our species from itself.

Counterargument: it makes sense to support whatever system would create the best life for everyone, rather than just creating good experiences for you while others are forced to struggle and suffer, because you aren’t a selfish arsehole.

Another version: it makes sense to support whatever system creates the most good for everyone AND is most stable, because the countless future generations matter far more than you.

The scale at which we exert political control has been increasing consistently for, approximately, the last 10k years. The rate has been accelerating too. There’s no reason to believe that the current hodge podge of 300 or so regional factions (nations) is the natural or final solution, and every reason to expect that political/economic power will escalate to the global level, and soon.

We should be focused on ensuring that transition is peaceful and collaborative, that the solution we converge on is fair and sustainable. We should especially be concerned with preventing that transition from being a dominance play by the players currently holding the greatest defacto power (i.e., economic, transnational corporations, and military, the USA).

One major impediment to this is the idea that all we—the ordinary people all over the world—can do is fight amongst each other at a national level about relatively trivial social issues (i.e., by voting for the marginally less bad alternative in our national elections). We can, and should, organise and strive for a democratic, fair, well-designed global political system that keeps economic power in check.

Other major impediments are the lies that a) the only alternative to the current system is totalitarian communism, or other 19th century political models, and b) that we—you and I—need to have a perfect solution in hand already. We can demand, via our respective nations, that the world’s best minds come together and design the best system possible, and that was transition to that system peacefully and rationally.

We need a global solution. The scale of economic power is larger than the scale of our democratically controlled political power. Nationalism won’t save us.

You have me at a depressive phase, exhausted from my work week, so I fully agree with you. However, I know the more optimistic version of me would say:

But we overcame feudalism, we abolished slavery. These were also systems where the (incentives * power to change things) were strong and aligned to preserve the status quo. Still, our ancestors made the choices that made the world better for us, rather than for them. There must be a prosocial kernel in us, a drive we could appeal to if we could just broadcast a coordination signal loud and reliable enough.

I live in a remote town with a sizable population of city-raised, university-educated workers. I’m surrounded by people fully committed to both the liberal and conservative worldviews. Both groups have shitty individuals, exploiting the beliefs and biases of their faction for their personal advantage (the liberal ones tend to be smarter and more insidious, but all the worse for it; the conservatives dumber and more direct). But the majority of both groups are well-intentioned, caring people who would and do sacrifice for others. They’re just all convinced that fighting the mostly good people in the other faction is what’s right, rather than working together to change the game entirely. The challenge is to convince, to coordinate, not to defeat.

Thanks for the chat. It’s rare to have an intelligent dialogue on here, especially when politics is involved.

I feel that if you can perceive/understand a problem and it’s consequences, you become morally culpable for solving it, however hard that might be.

By “generation”, I mean all the people alive today, and in the last century or so, rather than those discrete named decadal generations. Collectively, especially in the face of climate change and the accelerating consumption of non-renewable resources, we know that our actions could doom countless future generations. It’s our responsibility to build a sustainable world. But instead we choose cheaper prices and immediate advantages for ourselves and our factions (nations, ethnic groups, political parties, cultural identity groups, etc).