David Wright retweeted
Everyone is acting like this is the first time machines mogged mathematicians.
In 1976 they *lost their minds* over the first computer aided proof, quotes via new @PessimistsArc post newsletter.pessimistsarchive…
I hope the other arguments in their statement are better than the one they pull-quoted.
Scott Aaronson appears to have joined the mathematicians who have got spooked. I'm happy to grant that AI is (like cars, computers) a transformative technology that will change how we live. That it will change most jobs and eliminate some (maybe mathematician). But I do not give the crank Eliezer Yudkowsky one iota of credit for this insight.
scottaaronson.blog/?p=10062
David Wright retweeted
This is the per-pupil funding for the elementary school Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.
If you subscribe to the funding theory of education, how much would have been enough? It's already crossed the average per capita annual income threshold. Maybe $100k? $200k?
David Wright retweeted
If you want to make housing cheaper, stop using taxpayer dollars to enable deadbeats to extort landlords. It just raises costs for everyone else.
Actual email from a taxpayer funded lawyer at the Housing Justice Project straight up extorting us for $10,000.
David Wright retweeted
How to fix the student loan crisis:
1. Allow student loans to be discharged through bankruptcy
2. End federal guarantee/backing/issuing of new loans
Those in the worst situations with lower income and high loan balances can file for bankruptcy to get rid of the unpayable burden.
No handouts to higher income that would/could pay off anyway
Stops the problem in its tracks for the future because students are no income/asset/skill borrowers, so student loans will disappear entirely. The only reason they exist today is because the government guarantees them.
This created an incentive for universities to jack the price up knowing loans would cover, and lenders would lend because the government would pay.
This will save the government money over the long term because anything it loses from bankrupt borrowers it gains from no more future loans.
These two changes eliminate student loans from existence, frees up the most burdened borrowers, and lowers the cost of education because college prices will plummet once the government stops paying for loans.
Easy fix, pays for itself, boosts the economy with higher consumer spending, and lowers the cost of education for all.
David Wright retweeted
idk why but i find it so funny that the euro banknotes featured FICTIONAL bridges so as to not cause conflict between member states but then a dutch town decided to just build all of the bridges to claim them??!?
David Wright retweeted
Cultural liberals like Carl love to cite immigration's economic benefits. But ask them to optimize it even slightly for economic benefit, or exclude those predicted to be net costs, and they immediately blanch.
I am 100% the opposite of this. It seems blindingly obvious to me that we should incorporate an additional 1% of the population and I see almost no downsides except perhaps cost. What goes through this person’s head every time some gruesome crime occurs and the perpetrator always has dozens of previous arrests?
I’m not even super left wing on questions of prison abolition. I’m certainly willing to entertain all kinds of arrangements. But what I believe pretty strongly is that there are no intellectuals remaining on the right with respect to this stuff. I just literally don’t know how you can watch us speed run into having a carceral state and still have basically no introspection about the intersection of incarceration and politics beyond just, “crime bad.”
Like, never, even in your darkest moments, even when you’re alone on a desert island and no one can see you or hear you and there’s no risk of you getting in trouble, do you ever think critically about the consequences of mass incarceration? Do you literally have no critiques? Do you genuinely believe there are no downsides? Will you not allow yourself to have any ordinary thoughts at all?
(last one, I swear. probably)
The main bugaboo of those who wring their hands over “mass incarceration” seems to be racial disparities. Soft-on-crime policies motivated by racial equity have been an unmitigated disaster. Both blacks and whites would be so much better off if we would strongly signal that we will not tolerate public disorder from anyone and don’t give a damn who lands in prison more.
Years ago, @asymmetricinfo asked „what is maximum immigration you would allow.“ Then I thought „any amount if right people.“ Now I feel differently. I’ve lived abroad, enjoy contact with foreigners, but want my home to feel like mine. ~15% foreign-born population is max.
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David Wright retweeted
The payment of payroll taxes, and in particular Social Security taxes, opens individual claims to future benefits and hence cannot be pooled with income taxes without adjustment.
The net tax is the difference between the tax and the actuarial value of the claim it buys.
At the bottom of the distribution, internal rates of return on Social Security contributions are higher than market rates, which means that these contributions, rather than being net taxes, truly are net subsidies. This means that the 12.6% "tax", once adjusted, becomes a net subsidy.
As you move up in the distribution, internal rates of return get lower and lower, and Social Security essentially forces workers to buy annuities above market prices, thus hiding net taxation.
This makes Social Security, a redistributive retirement program and a legacy of the New Deal, a contributor to the progressivity of the fiscal system, not the opposite like Zucman's graphs suggest.
Contrary to what you claim, working-class people contribute significantly to funding American society today. Payroll taxes and consumption taxes absorb a high fraction of their income.
For the middle class, the income tax starts kicking in on top of these.
And for the rich, the corporate tax becomes significant.
Some mathematicians were also this histrionic about the computer-aided proof of the four-color theorem.
David Wright retweeted
Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.
