TavIrish Minister for DefenceRegistered Userregular
there is one dude in my company who i'm sure is very angry right now and i hope he's having a terrible day
+1
amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
It's kinda funny to think about twitter and facebook and zoom and how many mid and high level people are going to get fired based on their negative reactions to the verdict today.
It's really fascinating seeing something like this through the eyes of an adult vs when I was in fifth or sixth grade when they read the OJ verdict
are YOU on the beer list?
+5
TavIrish Minister for DefenceRegistered Userregular
Surely this isn't true? We can establish standards to evaluate quality of life, we can assess the relative quality of decision-making, we can see and recognize cases where people make decisions that are against their best interests, even repeatedly, even when it causes severe harm. People engage in indulgent activities that they do not enjoy and end up feeling shame and self-loathing. These are all common, normal experiences. Does procrastination improve quality of life?.
As a matter of descriptive fact, the best measures of quality of life that we have for policy purposes are based off either choices people actually make or the choices that they report that they would make (QALY and DALY measures work this way).
...what?
I either don't understand what this line means, or it's saying something deeply misleading. I choose to assume the former. What do you mean by this? Can you elaborate?
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
+1
amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
What bothers me about this guy is that he's 50 and he's a little bootstrappy but he's english second language. He grew up in South America and came here with his family. Like he's not actually a shitty person, he just doesn't understand the world around us in this country because it isn't his and his families culture.
We've had talk about it, from him being nervous and wanting to buy his first firearm to shitty stuff trump has done. He's one of those people that will read Fox and CNN and not know which side to believe.
I really want to help him, offer advice, but shit he makes it tough when I also have to help him out with actual work too.
Like, my career at this point is helping this person be better at being a person.
are YOU on the beer list?
0
TavIrish Minister for DefenceRegistered Userregular
Heroin is so screwed up that I don't think it should ever be freely available. I could see a case for a guidance protocol for those addicted to keep a relatively good life while staying addicted, though methadone fills that role fairly well.
Same goes for many opiods really. They're just too good at what they do.
I think the basic idea of judging narcotics on personal impact and societal impact is a pretty solid foundation. For instance XTC users do take limited personal health risk every time they partake, but nobody ever becomes violent or a problem. Alcohol actual scores pretty bad on both scales, because it is weird in that most people do ok with alcohol (Not that it's particularly great, but 90% don't have a big impact), 5-10% of people go on a disastrous lifepath. Some become dangerous to themselves, some to others.
Yeah, meth too.
A really far gone meth or heroin addict is just like, a walking addiction. It feels like there's barely even a person in there, it's really unsettling and sad.
I don’t have studies handy, but it’s been my understanding that it doesn’t take long for the debilitating neurological changes brought on by meth to become permanent with regular use, around six months to a year. From then on, you’ve got permanent schizophrenia and there’s no coming back; compare this to my heroin patients, of whom I’ve seen many get clean and go back to normal lives.
I agree that chemical addiction, regardless of substance, tends to rob the afflicted of their former selves. Thankfully drugs like opiates and alcohol can be recovered from, with great effort; methamphetamines, not so much.
+3
MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Surely this isn't true? We can establish standards to evaluate quality of life, we can assess the relative quality of decision-making, we can see and recognize cases where people make decisions that are against their best interests, even repeatedly, even when it causes severe harm. People engage in indulgent activities that they do not enjoy and end up feeling shame and self-loathing. These are all common, normal experiences. Does procrastination improve quality of life?.
As a matter of descriptive fact, the best measures of quality of life that we have for policy purposes are based off either choices people actually make or the choices that they report that they would make (QALY and DALY measures work this way). And sure, you can try to "correct" the results of those preference-based measures with the wisdom of the sages. For instance, Martha Nussbaum seems to think that instead of asking people what they want for their life, we should ask her what they should want for their life, and she knows the answer because she's fluent in ancient greek, well-read, and crackerjack at dinner parties. Mostly, though, she and her followers have still not been able to come up with a measure good enough to guide many resource allocation decisions, even if we were to simply take their word for it when it comes to what people are supposed to want (this is extremely hard to do systematically).
I do agree that compulsions present a complication when reading people's preferences off their behavior, but would note that we do not see those indicators when it comes to most people's drinking. Many people may have cut back periodically for health reasons, and that does point toward something, but it is rare to "end up feeling shame and self-loathing" after drinking in moderation and enjoying it. I find it surprising to be pressed to argue that moderate drinking is fun and frequently "worth it!"
The specific claim is not that moderate drinking isn't worth it
It's that, it the cost of eliminating all problem drinking were simply also eliminating moderate drinking, it would be worth it—that the consequences of problem drinking substantially outweigh the benefits of moderate drinking
I also (largely without data) claim that "moderate" drinking is less common than we'd like to believe, or rather that problem drinking is much more common than we'd like to believe
If moderate drinking is worth it, then whether that counterbalances problem drinking depends on how worth it it is, how bad problem drinking is, and how many people do each.
So, to make the comparison well, we would have both quantitative estimates of the quality of life associated with moderate drinking, teetotaling, and problem drinking, and then population breakdowns of how large the moderate and problem drinking segments are.
It's plausible to me that this ends up positive, though neither of us is running these numbers.
0
MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Surely this isn't true? We can establish standards to evaluate quality of life, we can assess the relative quality of decision-making, we can see and recognize cases where people make decisions that are against their best interests, even repeatedly, even when it causes severe harm. People engage in indulgent activities that they do not enjoy and end up feeling shame and self-loathing. These are all common, normal experiences. Does procrastination improve quality of life?.
As a matter of descriptive fact, the best measures of quality of life that we have for policy purposes are based off either choices people actually make or the choices that they report that they would make (QALY and DALY measures work this way).
...what?
I either don't understand what this line means, or it's saying something deeply misleading. I choose to assume the former. What do you mean by this? Can you elaborate?
As I understand it, QALY and DALY measures assign quality levels to health states primarily by surveying respondents and asking them how they would trade off being in that health state against other possibilities (e.g. chances of death, full recovery) and then inferring a quality weighting from that.
I find the idea that people tend to make choices that maximize their quality of life to be unconvincing? It seems to be the opposite of reality. My impression is that most people do not eat healthy, exercise regularly, maintain good posture, moderate their indulgences and vices effectively, avoid procrastination, sleep a full 8 hours every night as best they can, save their money, etc.; instead, they strongly tend to make choices that produce short-term benefits or pleasure at the cost of long-term unhappiness or even harm, even when they say they would rather do those good, wise things, even when they know they would be happier tomorrow having done them.
i couldn't come up with a dumb joke so instead i will say that "choices that produce short-term benefits or pleasure at the cost of long-term unhappiness or even harm" has basically been my life under depression. hurray for maladaptive coping strategies :toot:
P10 on
Shameful pursuits and utterly stupid opinions
0
AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I think meth is on the rise again in gay circles. It's sad. V sad.
Seems to be on the rise everywhere
It’s cheap and crazy addictive
Virtually every homeless person I see at work, regardless of age, race, or gender, is on meth and most of their addictions are too far gone to be treatable
Atomika on
0
SurfpossumA nonentitytrying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered Userregular
Speaking of making good life choices, I've been playing a bit of Apex again recently and boy howdy that game sure is fun still.
Simply moving from point a to point b is a delight.
I find the idea that people tend to make choices that maximize their quality of life to be unconvincing? It seems to be the opposite of reality. My impression is that most people do not eat healthy, exercise regularly, maintain good posture, moderate their indulgences and vices effectively, avoid procrastination, sleep a full 8 hours every night as best they can, save their money, etc.; instead, they strongly tend to make choices that produce short-term benefits or pleasure at the cost of long-term unhappiness or even harm, even when they say they would rather do those good, wise things, even when they know they would be happier tomorrow having done them.
Technically, what I said was that the best evidence we have for what's good for people is what they tend to choose, particularly under conditions of full information and with time to reflect. That is consistent with our best evidence sometimes being kind of bad.
There's obviously a lot to say here, including regarding exactly what you're taking to reveal people's preferences (your examples could be resolved by asking people what they think is good for them rather than looking at what they actually do; but this introduces its own problems in other cases). Nonetheless, in broad strokes, is there some other, better source of evidence about what's good for people that doesn't involve consulting them in some way? I am unimpressed by theorists like Martha Nussbaum who have read a lot of great literature and claim that this qualifies them to understand the human condition and thereby to be systematically better at saying what's good for people better than the people themselves are.
Surely this isn't true? We can establish standards to evaluate quality of life, we can assess the relative quality of decision-making, we can see and recognize cases where people make decisions that are against their best interests, even repeatedly, even when it causes severe harm. People engage in indulgent activities that they do not enjoy and end up feeling shame and self-loathing. These are all common, normal experiences. Does procrastination improve quality of life?.
As a matter of descriptive fact, the best measures of quality of life that we have for policy purposes are based off either choices people actually make or the choices that they report that they would make (QALY and DALY measures work this way). And sure, you can try to "correct" the results of those preference-based measures with the wisdom of the sages. For instance, Martha Nussbaum seems to think that instead of asking people what they want for their life, we should ask her what they should want for their life, and she knows the answer because she's fluent in ancient greek, well-read, and crackerjack at dinner parties. Mostly, though, she and her followers have still not been able to come up with a measure good enough to guide many resource allocation decisions, even if we were to simply take their word for it when it comes to what people are supposed to want (this is extremely hard to do systematically).
I do agree that compulsions present a complication when reading people's preferences off their behavior, but would note that we do not see those indicators when it comes to most people's drinking. Many people may have cut back periodically for health reasons, and that does point toward something, but it is rare to "end up feeling shame and self-loathing" after drinking in moderation and enjoying it. I find it surprising to be pressed to argue that moderate drinking is fun and frequently "worth it!"
The specific claim is not that moderate drinking isn't worth it
It's that, it the cost of eliminating all problem drinking were simply also eliminating moderate drinking, it would be worth it—that the consequences of problem drinking substantially outweigh the benefits of moderate drinking
I also (largely without data) claim that "moderate" drinking is less common than we'd like to believe, or rather that problem drinking is much more common than we'd like to believe
If moderate drinking is worth it, then whether that counterbalances problem drinking depends on how worth it it is, how bad problem drinking is, and how many people do each.
So, to make the comparison well, we would have both quantitative estimates of the quality of life associated with moderate drinking, teetotaling, and problem drinking, and then population breakdowns of how large the moderate and problem drinking segments are.
It's plausible to me that this ends up positive, though neither of us is running these numbers.
So this was my original question: how do you produce a quantitative estimate of the quality of life benefits of moderate drinking, especially compared to the more easily quantifiable aspect of problem drinking, e.g. person years lost, health costs, drunk driving numbers
I don't know, it seems flatly obvious to me that the benefits indulging a gustatory pleasure can't match the weight of the consequences. This immediately reminds me of arguing that the pleasure we get from eating meat can outweigh the moral value of animal lives, if the pleasure is significant enough. Sure, the feeling that these are equivalent can motivate individual decisions, but that doesn't mean that the decision is sound; it just explains it. The benefits of alcohol seem to fall into an entirely different category of impact, one profoundly more trivial than the negative consequences of problem drinking.
Even if everyone surveyed "strongly agrees (5)" that moderate drinking greatly improves their quality of life, it doesn't square the comparison, and it sure seems like processing this complex comparison through the brutal machinery of quantitative analysis will produce unsatisfying results
Surely this isn't true? We can establish standards to evaluate quality of life, we can assess the relative quality of decision-making, we can see and recognize cases where people make decisions that are against their best interests, even repeatedly, even when it causes severe harm. People engage in indulgent activities that they do not enjoy and end up feeling shame and self-loathing. These are all common, normal experiences. Does procrastination improve quality of life?.
As a matter of descriptive fact, the best measures of quality of life that we have for policy purposes are based off either choices people actually make or the choices that they report that they would make (QALY and DALY measures work this way).
...what?
I either don't understand what this line means, or it's saying something deeply misleading. I choose to assume the former. What do you mean by this? Can you elaborate?
As I understand it, QALY and DALY measures assign quality levels to health states primarily by surveying respondents and asking them how they would trade off being in that health state against other possibilities (e.g. chances of death, full recovery) and then inferring a quality weighting from that.
Gotcha. I'm glad you clarified, because I definitely didn't understand what you were saying.
Now that I do, I still don't think it quite works. The surveys you're talking about are social preference surveys - they assess (in less blunt ways) whether I'd prefer to be, say, blind vs paraplegic. And it's true that I'm making a "choice" in the sense that I'm choosing between two options on a piece of paper, but I think that's a bit of equivocation on the word 'choice.' If you ask me to mark on a piece of paper which is healthier, being vegetarian or eating meat, I will mark vegetarian every time. Yet I'm not a vegetarian. Choices that require effortful, real world behavior are categorically different from choices between abstract hypotheticals.
That difference between preference and behavior that I think renders your response and EM's objection askew of each other. Just because somebody reports a preference for an outcome doesn't mean they make the behavioral choices necessary to achieve that outcome, and I don't think that these are merely edge cases like addiction. Rather, I think it's fundamental to the human condition that we all make choices that lead to outcomes we didn't necessarily prefer, which is why we have millennia of legal and moral and philosophical and religious writings imploring us to overcome our baser instincts.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Surely this isn't true? We can establish standards to evaluate quality of life, we can assess the relative quality of decision-making, we can see and recognize cases where people make decisions that are against their best interests, even repeatedly, even when it causes severe harm. People engage in indulgent activities that they do not enjoy and end up feeling shame and self-loathing. These are all common, normal experiences. Does procrastination improve quality of life?.
As a matter of descriptive fact, the best measures of quality of life that we have for policy purposes are based off either choices people actually make or the choices that they report that they would make (QALY and DALY measures work this way).
...what?
I either don't understand what this line means, or it's saying something deeply misleading. I choose to assume the former. What do you mean by this? Can you elaborate?
As I understand it, QALY and DALY measures assign quality levels to health states primarily by surveying respondents and asking them how they would trade off being in that health state against other possibilities (e.g. chances of death, full recovery) and then inferring a quality weighting from that.
Gotcha. I'm glad you clarified, because I definitely didn't understand what you were saying.
Now that I do, I still don't think it quite works. The surveys you're talking about are social preference surveys - they assess (in less blunt ways) whether I'd prefer to be, say, blind vs paraplegic. And it's true that I'm making a "choice" in the sense that I'm choosing between two options on a piece of paper, but I think that's a bit of equivocation on the word 'choice.' If you ask me to mark on a piece of paper which is healthier, being vegetarian or eating meat, I will mark vegetarian every time. Yet I'm not a vegetarian. Choices that require effortful, real world behavior are categorically different from choices between abstract hypotheticals.
That difference between preference and behavior that I think renders your response and EM's objection askew of each other. Just because somebody reports a preference for an outcome doesn't mean they make the behavioral choices necessary to achieve that outcome, and I don't think that these are merely edge cases like addiction. Rather, I think it's fundamental to the human condition that we all make choices that lead to outcomes we didn't necessarily prefer, which is why we have millennia of legal and moral and philosophical and religious writings imploring us to overcome our baser instincts.
Yeah, I have not been careful in distinguishing between preferences revealed in actual choice situations versus hypotheticals, though they're different methodologies. My reason for not distinguishing them is that I believe that both would associate moderate drinking with positive quality of life, given both that people actually choose to drink moderately, and that the dominant cultural attitude to doing so is positive. My expectation is that people would both actually choose to have a drink at the pub with friends, and would also say that they'd like to have a drink at the pub with friends if asked hypothetically about it.
Instead, the contrast I've had in mind to both revealed preference and hypothetical choice methodologies is expert choice, where we ask someone (Nussbaum, as I've been harping on), who's supposed to be an expert, and they simply assign quality weights on the basis of their great wisdom regardless of what the plebs either do or say. That was the only way that I could see to getting to "moderate drinking is bad, actually, even for the people who think they're enjoying it and who continue to say so even when informed of all relevant health info."
I find the idea that people tend to make choices that maximize their quality of life to be unconvincing? It seems to be the opposite of reality. My impression is that most people do not eat healthy, exercise regularly, maintain good posture, moderate their indulgences and vices effectively, avoid procrastination, sleep a full 8 hours every night as best they can, save their money, etc.; instead, they strongly tend to make choices that produce short-term benefits or pleasure at the cost of long-term unhappiness or even harm, even when they say they would rather do those good, wise things, even when they know they would be happier tomorrow having done them.
The people I do know who eat healthy, exercise regularly, devote themselves to long-term goals instead of playing videogames, and in all ways optimize for a wise lifestyle are anxious and miserable
I don't think you can take for granted that the things we think of as 'healthy' choices lead to happiness
credeiki on
Steam, LoL: credeiki
+8
MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Surely this isn't true? We can establish standards to evaluate quality of life, we can assess the relative quality of decision-making, we can see and recognize cases where people make decisions that are against their best interests, even repeatedly, even when it causes severe harm. People engage in indulgent activities that they do not enjoy and end up feeling shame and self-loathing. These are all common, normal experiences. Does procrastination improve quality of life?.
As a matter of descriptive fact, the best measures of quality of life that we have for policy purposes are based off either choices people actually make or the choices that they report that they would make (QALY and DALY measures work this way). And sure, you can try to "correct" the results of those preference-based measures with the wisdom of the sages. For instance, Martha Nussbaum seems to think that instead of asking people what they want for their life, we should ask her what they should want for their life, and she knows the answer because she's fluent in ancient greek, well-read, and crackerjack at dinner parties. Mostly, though, she and her followers have still not been able to come up with a measure good enough to guide many resource allocation decisions, even if we were to simply take their word for it when it comes to what people are supposed to want (this is extremely hard to do systematically).
I do agree that compulsions present a complication when reading people's preferences off their behavior, but would note that we do not see those indicators when it comes to most people's drinking. Many people may have cut back periodically for health reasons, and that does point toward something, but it is rare to "end up feeling shame and self-loathing" after drinking in moderation and enjoying it. I find it surprising to be pressed to argue that moderate drinking is fun and frequently "worth it!"
The specific claim is not that moderate drinking isn't worth it
It's that, it the cost of eliminating all problem drinking were simply also eliminating moderate drinking, it would be worth it—that the consequences of problem drinking substantially outweigh the benefits of moderate drinking
I also (largely without data) claim that "moderate" drinking is less common than we'd like to believe, or rather that problem drinking is much more common than we'd like to believe
If moderate drinking is worth it, then whether that counterbalances problem drinking depends on how worth it it is, how bad problem drinking is, and how many people do each.
So, to make the comparison well, we would have both quantitative estimates of the quality of life associated with moderate drinking, teetotaling, and problem drinking, and then population breakdowns of how large the moderate and problem drinking segments are.
It's plausible to me that this ends up positive, though neither of us is running these numbers.
So this was my original question: how do you produce a quantitative estimate of the quality of life benefits of moderate drinking, especially compared to the more easily quantifiable aspect of problem drinking, e.g. person years lost, health costs, drunk driving numbers
I don't know, it seems flatly obvious to me that the benefits indulging a gustatory pleasure can't match the weight of the consequences. This immediately reminds me of arguing that the pleasure we get from eating meat can outweigh the moral value of animal lives, if the pleasure is significant enough. Sure, the feeling that these are equivalent can motivate individual decisions, but that doesn't mean that the decision is sound; it just explains it. The benefits of alcohol seem to fall into an entirely different category of impact, one profoundly more trivial than the negative consequences of problem drinking.
Even if everyone surveyed "strongly agrees (5)" that moderate drinking greatly improves their quality of life, it doesn't square the comparison, and it sure seems like processing this complex comparison through the brutal machinery of quantitative analysis will produce unsatisfying results
I agree that if it were anything like 50-50 on becoming an alcoholic, then drinking would be insane. But my understanding is that it is not anywhere near that. So even though being an alcoholic is much worse than moderate drinking is good, we need to account for the the fact that many more people are able to drink moderately without becoming alcoholics (this is the opposite of the meat eating comparison, where more chickens are killed for food every year than there exist people on the planet).
I also think that there's no alternative to approaching these questions than using quantitative analysis. Well, there is an alternative--we can just make stuff up--but it's not very good.
0
SurfpossumA nonentitytrying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered Userregular
Here is the dilemma: on the one hand you have quantitative analysis, and on the other you have what my mother thinks is good for people.
I find the idea that people tend to make choices that maximize their quality of life to be unconvincing? It seems to be the opposite of reality. My impression is that most people do not eat healthy, exercise regularly, maintain good posture, moderate their indulgences and vices effectively, avoid procrastination, sleep a full 8 hours every night as best they can, save their money, etc.; instead, they strongly tend to make choices that produce short-term benefits or pleasure at the cost of long-term unhappiness or even harm, even when they say they would rather do those good, wise things, even when they know they would be happier tomorrow having done them.
What other measure are you proposing? Who are you to decide that the long-term costs out-weight the short-term benefits for the people in question?
0
MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Also, this is not related, but: I've complained a few times in chat about Spotify tryin to hit me up with indie sadgirl covers, which are a tired genre.
And now they hit me with... a twee indie... folk-guy?... cover of.... A Little Bit Alexis!?!?!?!
I find the idea that people tend to make choices that maximize their quality of life to be unconvincing? It seems to be the opposite of reality. My impression is that most people do not eat healthy, exercise regularly, maintain good posture, moderate their indulgences and vices effectively, avoid procrastination, sleep a full 8 hours every night as best they can, save their money, etc.; instead, they strongly tend to make choices that produce short-term benefits or pleasure at the cost of long-term unhappiness or even harm, even when they say they would rather do those good, wise things, even when they know they would be happier tomorrow having done them.
The people I do know who eat healthy, exercise regularly, devote themselves to long-term goals instead of playing videogames, and in all ways optimize for a wise lifestyle are anxious and miserable
I don't think you can take for granted that the things we think of as 'healthy' choices lead to happiness
That's super interesting. There's a huge positive correlation between those choices and happiness in my circles!
I find the idea that people tend to make choices that maximize their quality of life to be unconvincing? It seems to be the opposite of reality. My impression is that most people do not eat healthy, exercise regularly, maintain good posture, moderate their indulgences and vices effectively, avoid procrastination, sleep a full 8 hours every night as best they can, save their money, etc.; instead, they strongly tend to make choices that produce short-term benefits or pleasure at the cost of long-term unhappiness or even harm, even when they say they would rather do those good, wise things, even when they know they would be happier tomorrow having done them.
What other measure are you proposing? Who are you to decide that the long-term costs out-weight the short-term benefits for the people in question?
Saying "this way of drawing a conclusion sucks" carries no burden to present a defense for the opposite conclusion, unless you're inside a trolley problem.
Also, this is not related, but: I've complained a few times in chat about Spotify tryin to hit me up with indie sadgirl covers, which are a tired genre.
And now they hit me with... a twee indie... folk-guy?... cover of.... A Little Bit Alexis!?!?!?!
This is after they already tried to ply me with the original A Little Bit Alexis; didn't stick, so they were like I know--
This was hilarious. And it also led me to another video of Noah Reid (who plays Patrick on the show) playing "A Little Bit Alexis" in a folk country style at a convention, with Annie Murphy (Alexis) doing her bit, and it was also hilarious (there is one specific part that made me spit-take, and I think it will be obvious when you see/hear it): https://youtu.be/T2i9_5fruf4
Hahnsoo1 on
+1
Donkey KongPutting Nintendo out of business with AI nipsRegistered Userregular
Oh shit discord's deal with microsoft fell through because Discord rejected the 12 billion dollar offer. That is... breathtaking. Imagine saying no to an overvaluation that large.
Thousands of hot, local singles are waiting to play at bubbulon.com.
+20
SurfpossumA nonentitytrying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered Userregular
I don't actually know if I want to put quantitative analysis in that dilemma as opposed to something like, "letting people decide what's good for them even if you disagree," but I wanted to use the big words everyone was using.
I find the idea that people tend to make choices that maximize their quality of life to be unconvincing? It seems to be the opposite of reality. My impression is that most people do not eat healthy, exercise regularly, maintain good posture, moderate their indulgences and vices effectively, avoid procrastination, sleep a full 8 hours every night as best they can, save their money, etc.; instead, they strongly tend to make choices that produce short-term benefits or pleasure at the cost of long-term unhappiness or even harm, even when they say they would rather do those good, wise things, even when they know they would be happier tomorrow having done them.
What other measure are you proposing? Who are you to decide that the long-term costs out-weight the short-term benefits for the people in question?
Saying "this way of drawing a conclusion sucks" carries no burden to present a defense for the opposite conclusion, unless you're inside a trolley problem.
I don't get where you are going with this or how it connects to what I'm saying.
My point is that EM's entire argument is making an inherent assumption about what quality of life is based on their own, largely unstated but still obviously there, criteria. But why should we view that criteria as superior to the one people chose for themselves?
I find the idea that people tend to make choices that maximize their quality of life to be unconvincing? It seems to be the opposite of reality. My impression is that most people do not eat healthy, exercise regularly, maintain good posture, moderate their indulgences and vices effectively, avoid procrastination, sleep a full 8 hours every night as best they can, save their money, etc.; instead, they strongly tend to make choices that produce short-term benefits or pleasure at the cost of long-term unhappiness or even harm, even when they say they would rather do those good, wise things, even when they know they would be happier tomorrow having done them.
The people I do know who eat healthy, exercise regularly, devote themselves to long-term goals instead of playing videogames, and in all ways optimize for a wise lifestyle are anxious and miserable
I don't think you can take for granted that the things we think of as 'healthy' choices lead to happiness
I mean, I have a bunch of people in my circle who make healthy choices in terms of diet and exercise, and their happiness/sadness are not especially correlated with those choices, but it's the frickin' Bay Area. You can't toss a string of organic healing crystals without hitting at least one health junkie out here. But it's not especially correlated with day drinkers and boozehounds, either. I think the benefits/consequences of those choices are pretty much distant and invisible, which makes them hard to see for most people. I am most certainly paying for my excesses of my youth, and while I was never a big drinker (LOL Asian low alcohol tolerance), certainly my diet has led to my current chronic health problems (which I'm managing nicely, and don't impact my happiness that much currently).
Oh shit discord's deal with microsoft fell through because Discord rejected the 12 billion dollar offer. That is... breathtaking. Imagine saying no to an overvaluation that large.
I kinda hope the rejection notice is just a single line:
I'm kinda in a music rabbit hole currently, as I just watched Adam Neely's recent screed about Celine Dion and the perfect pop modulation and Two Set Violin (two classical violinist NERDS) react to Montero (Call Me By Your Name) and make some surprisingly deep observations about some of the music theory behind it while also making jokes that only classical musicians would understand.
0
SixCaches Tweets in the mainframe cyberhexRegistered Userregular
edited April 2021
I hope you’re all drunk on whatever gets you high.
Oh shit discord's deal with microsoft fell through because Discord rejected the 12 billion dollar offer. That is... breathtaking. Imagine saying no to an overvaluation that large.
I kinda hope the rejection notice is just a single line:
"No, we saw what you did to Skype."
12 billion means who gives a shit?
+1
SummaryJudgmentGrab the hottest iron you can find, stride in the Tower’s front doorRegistered Userregular
Oh shit discord's deal with microsoft fell through because Discord rejected the 12 billion dollar offer. That is... breathtaking. Imagine saying no to an overvaluation that large.
Wow, I just got the spins hearing that
What the hell
Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
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It's really fascinating seeing something like this through the eyes of an adult vs when I was in fifth or sixth grade when they read the OJ verdict
this doesn't even make sense!! The shoes would be 100% off!! At least have your shitty meme be accurate
...what?
I either don't understand what this line means, or it's saying something deeply misleading. I choose to assume the former. What do you mean by this? Can you elaborate?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm sorry I didn't pay that much attention to it. It did say 100%
We've had talk about it, from him being nervous and wanting to buy his first firearm to shitty stuff trump has done. He's one of those people that will read Fox and CNN and not know which side to believe.
I really want to help him, offer advice, but shit he makes it tough when I also have to help him out with actual work too.
Like, my career at this point is helping this person be better at being a person.
yeah they knew what they were doing
I don’t have studies handy, but it’s been my understanding that it doesn’t take long for the debilitating neurological changes brought on by meth to become permanent with regular use, around six months to a year. From then on, you’ve got permanent schizophrenia and there’s no coming back; compare this to my heroin patients, of whom I’ve seen many get clean and go back to normal lives.
I agree that chemical addiction, regardless of substance, tends to rob the afflicted of their former selves. Thankfully drugs like opiates and alcohol can be recovered from, with great effort; methamphetamines, not so much.
If moderate drinking is worth it, then whether that counterbalances problem drinking depends on how worth it it is, how bad problem drinking is, and how many people do each.
So, to make the comparison well, we would have both quantitative estimates of the quality of life associated with moderate drinking, teetotaling, and problem drinking, and then population breakdowns of how large the moderate and problem drinking segments are.
It's plausible to me that this ends up positive, though neither of us is running these numbers.
As I understand it, QALY and DALY measures assign quality levels to health states primarily by surveying respondents and asking them how they would trade off being in that health state against other possibilities (e.g. chances of death, full recovery) and then inferring a quality weighting from that.
Seems to be on the rise everywhere
It’s cheap and crazy addictive
Virtually every homeless person I see at work, regardless of age, race, or gender, is on meth and most of their addictions are too far gone to be treatable
Simply moving from point a to point b is a delight.
Technically, what I said was that the best evidence we have for what's good for people is what they tend to choose, particularly under conditions of full information and with time to reflect. That is consistent with our best evidence sometimes being kind of bad.
There's obviously a lot to say here, including regarding exactly what you're taking to reveal people's preferences (your examples could be resolved by asking people what they think is good for them rather than looking at what they actually do; but this introduces its own problems in other cases). Nonetheless, in broad strokes, is there some other, better source of evidence about what's good for people that doesn't involve consulting them in some way? I am unimpressed by theorists like Martha Nussbaum who have read a lot of great literature and claim that this qualifies them to understand the human condition and thereby to be systematically better at saying what's good for people better than the people themselves are.
So this was my original question: how do you produce a quantitative estimate of the quality of life benefits of moderate drinking, especially compared to the more easily quantifiable aspect of problem drinking, e.g. person years lost, health costs, drunk driving numbers
I don't know, it seems flatly obvious to me that the benefits indulging a gustatory pleasure can't match the weight of the consequences. This immediately reminds me of arguing that the pleasure we get from eating meat can outweigh the moral value of animal lives, if the pleasure is significant enough. Sure, the feeling that these are equivalent can motivate individual decisions, but that doesn't mean that the decision is sound; it just explains it. The benefits of alcohol seem to fall into an entirely different category of impact, one profoundly more trivial than the negative consequences of problem drinking.
Even if everyone surveyed "strongly agrees (5)" that moderate drinking greatly improves their quality of life, it doesn't square the comparison, and it sure seems like processing this complex comparison through the brutal machinery of quantitative analysis will produce unsatisfying results
Gotcha. I'm glad you clarified, because I definitely didn't understand what you were saying.
Now that I do, I still don't think it quite works. The surveys you're talking about are social preference surveys - they assess (in less blunt ways) whether I'd prefer to be, say, blind vs paraplegic. And it's true that I'm making a "choice" in the sense that I'm choosing between two options on a piece of paper, but I think that's a bit of equivocation on the word 'choice.' If you ask me to mark on a piece of paper which is healthier, being vegetarian or eating meat, I will mark vegetarian every time. Yet I'm not a vegetarian. Choices that require effortful, real world behavior are categorically different from choices between abstract hypotheticals.
That difference between preference and behavior that I think renders your response and EM's objection askew of each other. Just because somebody reports a preference for an outcome doesn't mean they make the behavioral choices necessary to achieve that outcome, and I don't think that these are merely edge cases like addiction. Rather, I think it's fundamental to the human condition that we all make choices that lead to outcomes we didn't necessarily prefer, which is why we have millennia of legal and moral and philosophical and religious writings imploring us to overcome our baser instincts.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
But it loses its thread
Yeah, I have not been careful in distinguishing between preferences revealed in actual choice situations versus hypotheticals, though they're different methodologies. My reason for not distinguishing them is that I believe that both would associate moderate drinking with positive quality of life, given both that people actually choose to drink moderately, and that the dominant cultural attitude to doing so is positive. My expectation is that people would both actually choose to have a drink at the pub with friends, and would also say that they'd like to have a drink at the pub with friends if asked hypothetically about it.
Instead, the contrast I've had in mind to both revealed preference and hypothetical choice methodologies is expert choice, where we ask someone (Nussbaum, as I've been harping on), who's supposed to be an expert, and they simply assign quality weights on the basis of their great wisdom regardless of what the plebs either do or say. That was the only way that I could see to getting to "moderate drinking is bad, actually, even for the people who think they're enjoying it and who continue to say so even when informed of all relevant health info."
The people I do know who eat healthy, exercise regularly, devote themselves to long-term goals instead of playing videogames, and in all ways optimize for a wise lifestyle are anxious and miserable
I don't think you can take for granted that the things we think of as 'healthy' choices lead to happiness
I agree that if it were anything like 50-50 on becoming an alcoholic, then drinking would be insane. But my understanding is that it is not anywhere near that. So even though being an alcoholic is much worse than moderate drinking is good, we need to account for the the fact that many more people are able to drink moderately without becoming alcoholics (this is the opposite of the meat eating comparison, where more chickens are killed for food every year than there exist people on the planet).
I also think that there's no alternative to approaching these questions than using quantitative analysis. Well, there is an alternative--we can just make stuff up--but it's not very good.
Spoiler: you will not agree.
What other measure are you proposing? Who are you to decide that the long-term costs out-weight the short-term benefits for the people in question?
And now they hit me with... a twee indie... folk-guy?... cover of.... A Little Bit Alexis!?!?!?!
This is after they already tried to ply me with the original A Little Bit Alexis; didn't stick, so they were like I know--
That's super interesting. There's a huge positive correlation between those choices and happiness in my circles!
Saying "this way of drawing a conclusion sucks" carries no burden to present a defense for the opposite conclusion, unless you're inside a trolley problem.
This was hilarious. And it also led me to another video of Noah Reid (who plays Patrick on the show) playing "A Little Bit Alexis" in a folk country style at a convention, with Annie Murphy (Alexis) doing her bit, and it was also hilarious (there is one specific part that made me spit-take, and I think it will be obvious when you see/hear it):
https://youtu.be/T2i9_5fruf4
I don't get where you are going with this or how it connects to what I'm saying.
My point is that EM's entire argument is making an inherent assumption about what quality of life is based on their own, largely unstated but still obviously there, criteria. But why should we view that criteria as superior to the one people chose for themselves?
I kinda hope the rejection notice is just a single line:
"No, we saw what you did to Skype."
12 billion means who gives a shit?
Wow, I just got the spins hearing that
What the hell