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Adel posted:How do you deal with the "you're just being too sensitive" argument? I'd associate this argument with one of two subtexts. One is something like, "there is a lot of evil in the world, we need to have some filter to keep ourselves sane. And that the evil you're describing isn't bad enough to merit much emotional reaction." The other is something like, "The thing you're describing is, in fact, a notable Bad Thing. But it's weird that you care." I suspect that this is what you're seeing. In the second case, the key thing I'd keep in mind is that the person has shifted the topic. Instead of discussing the external world, they're now talking about your personal feelings and mental states. You're right that this is a difficult shift to address. And it's useful to your opponent because it lets them move out of the realm of facts and into baseless conjecture. Conjecture is way easier than being informed about a topic. My experience is that these armchair-psychology conversations never go anywhere interesting. So, I tend to just pretend that I didn't notice the attempt at changing the topic. You could also call people on their dodge explicitly (other posters are better at snark than I am, so borrow their lines). Or, you could go the complete opposite direction by making up some personal reason for why you care. Bonus points if you can tie it to a thing that they care about, as well. ("My brother is in the infantry. The idea of him being tortured makes me sick. Why do you hate our troops so much that you'd be ok with them being waterboarded?") If you're in the first case, then you have two fundamental options. Either, "No, you're wrong, this shouldn't be below your threshold for caring" or "Yes, you're right, this is typically below your threshold for caring, but I care because ____".
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Nov 17, 2011 05:13
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Zeitgueist posted:Again, I can cite any number of threads where you've been outright insulting of people that you disagree with, often calling them names. You need to spend some time practicing what you preach if you want to be more credible on this. I'll bite; I don't post snarky one-liners so I should be reasonably credible. One liners don't work outside of a pretty narrow context. They're dismissive. And, "you're so wrong that I don't want to talk to you," really only works when there's a difference in credibility. People could get that credibility by being an authority. Or they could get that credibility by numbers. Even then, the tactic seems to have divergent results. Some people get cowed into not-talking or pretending to agree. Others double down and get an emotional payoff from seeing themselves 'speak truth to power'. Neither seems hugely effective at actually convincing anyone to change their long-term position. And, "You're a monster" is going to be singularly useless when defending progressive causes offline. Progressive causes (almost by definition) won't have the massive numbers or credibility advantage that would be needed for "Stop disagreeing or I'll think badly of you!" to be a big threat. Making it worse is that I see various progressives use variations on "The future of the world hinges on THIS VERY ISSUE and your disagreement could DESTROY EVERYTHING" that I pretty much tune out the "gently caress you, you monster"-type attacks. My initial reaction to someone being overly emotional about an issue is that, either they've got some personal stake in the matter, or they're just starting to become informed about the world and so the few problems they're aware of seem disproportionately important.
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Nov 18, 2011 01:29
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I'm working on some essays about "Raising corporate income taxes really won't reduce employment". Does anyone have quotes/links to people expressing the opposite stance? I like addressing what other people are saying as it makes writing my essays easier, and lets me respond to the arguments that actually exist.
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Nov 23, 2011 03:59
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FISHMANPET posted:Why is it a bad idea for the Democrats to "negotiate" with the Republicanss? I had an argument with a coworker and his point was that they're all politicians they should figure it out and he wouldn't accept any reasoning that it's the Republicans that need to figure their poo poo out, nor could he understand why "negotiating" on whether or not the government should run and pay it's bills wasn't negotiating at all. The answer is that the Democrats did negotiate with the Republicans. The two got together, negotiated, and passed a list of laws like "The president can tax $X and must spend $Y on project Z." Now the republicans are trying to cheat their way out of their deal. They'll get to keep their tax-reductions, but won't pay for the projects that they already agreed to fund. Worse, the Republicans say that default is bad. So, their whole position amounts to, "Let us break our deal, or we'll intentionally hurt the country." The only way this threat gives them leverage is if they honestly believe that the Democrats care more about the country than the Republicans do.
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Oct 10, 2013 02:16
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shrike82 posted:Is anyone ITT familiar with Christian apologetics? I haven't read Miracles, specifically, but I've read other Lewis and lots of Apologetics in general. From what I remember, Lewis' big trick is using anecdotes to ignore hard parts of his opponent's arguments. Like, he addresses the problem of evil in Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. But his 'evils' are all the kinds of minor inconveniences that you'd find in a Leave it To Beaver episode. And, "Why is Beaver allowed to scrape his knee?" is way easier to answer than "Why do thousands of infants die in slow agony as infections cause fatal dehydration via diarrhea?" A similar thing comes up with his Trilemma. He imagines a guy saying all the stuff attributed to Jesus (specifically, the Jesus of Lewis' preferred interpretation/cannon). Then he sets of 'Liar'/'Lunatic'/'Lord'. That scenario is way easier to argue than then 'Legend' possibility of "What if the literary-character Jesus is a legend that was built from some core of actual people, plus a number of existing literary and oral traditions?"
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Dec 23, 2013 16:26
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E-Tank posted:So I recently got into an argument with my mother regarding freedom of speech and how I have my right to call someone a loving moron. She then told me that if I don't 'be an example' that nobody will listen to me, and that if I shout at someone for doing something stupid they're likely to try and hurt me. The problem isn't really that she's discussing tone, exactly. It's that she's changing the topic. So her argument is unrelated to yours. You took a position on your legal rights. You have the right to call people out, or you don't. Then she gave you some rhetoric and crime prevention tips. There's no real connection. If the debate's about we should go about convincing people, then it's totally legitimate to debate tone. If the argument is about something else, then a tone argument amounts to, "Oh yeah? Well your pants are ugly and your breath smells!"
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Dec 25, 2013 03:14
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Accretionist posted:To what degree can income inequality been ascribed to increasing automation? It's my understanding that the degree to which automation shifted income distributions represented a break from the post-war norm but I can't remember where I got that idea at all. Wild speculation here but: Technology doesn't seem to have an obvious effect in one direction. It looks like equality increased from 1920 on, peaked somewhere in the 1970s, and then started to fall. We'd have seen more and more mechanization during that whole range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2008_Top1percentUSA.png My hunch is that the really key question is, "how quickly can an employer train a replacement employee?" This is a sort of automation. It's just driven by Human Resources instead of mechanical engineering. The idea is that workers at McDonalds have very little bargaining power because McDonalds has its processes so well designed. Since McD can hire new people cheaply, they can recruit from a basically unlimited labor supply. Mechanization can help in as much as it simplifies training. If manufacturing goes from a skilled craft to 'push button', wages will drop. But a similar effect could happen if some Amish furniture maker developed some really clever furniture-building guides. So, I think your intuition is essentially right, but watch out for caveats like, "What about skilled CNC workers?"
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Dec 25, 2013 22:18
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darthbob88 posted:Is there a good general-purpose response to the "If we screw over the rich, they'll screw us over harder" meme? I know of specific responses; raising the minimum wage wouldn't raise prices that much, and the cost of unpaid OT is currently paid by workers, which might work if you generalize it out to other externalized costs, but I don't know of a good one for "if we raise their taxes, they'll raise their prices". Possibly noting that only the 1% can get away with that kind of thing, which is unacceptable. I can't tell my boss that since he's paying me less, I'm going to work less. "Why weren't they doing it already?" That's even the formal-econ answer to why businesses won't change prices in response to a (lump-sum/profit) tax. They like money. If raising prices would get them more money, they'd have done it years ago.
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Apr 2, 2014 13:51
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wateroverfire posted:That's not strictly true, though. A business might raise prices to protect its cash flow in response to a tax increase even if that decreases its total revenue. Which it might not, because if every business in a market faces a similar cost increase there's less to be gained by taking the hit in the margins to gain market share and so less likelyhood that you'll lose business to competition by passing the cost along. It could be that your customers don't have the money to buy what they were buying and/or won't stand for it, but maybe they do/will. It depends on your market. Can you walk me through this? I'm not sure I'm following. Are you sure you're looking at a tax on net-income rather than gross-receipts? As I'd see it, I could ask my accountant (or staff economist) to make me a spreadsheet of expected net-income for various prices. It seems like I'd just pick the price that gets me the best pre-tax revenue. Even if my take-home only ends up being 45% of that, I want to make sure I'm getting 45% of the biggest number possible.
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Apr 2, 2014 21:44
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:A friend of mine is studying intro economics and for the factors of production, entrepreneurship is listed. I suspect it's different kinds of economists talking. Schumpeter talked quite a lot about business cycles and influenced a ton of people. He was very into entrepreneurship figuring into production. Since, he's answering the closer-to-micro question, "how does all this 'capital' actually get arranged into something productive?" Macro models can get a bit more extract. A lot of traditional models just represent everything using a CES production function. Entrepreneurship would get lumped into something like a technology term. But those models are looking at a different part of the problem. Dr. Arbitrary posted:I figured. Do some economists actually try to perform quantitative analysis on entrepreneurship? Sounds like a mess. falcon2424 fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Apr 26, 2014 |
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Apr 26, 2014 15:30
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VitalSigns posted:The counter-argument is that mandatory voting makes it harder to put up institutional barriers to voting like closing polling places in poor neighborhoods, cancelling bus service, not giving employees time off, etc. The right likes to cast voting as a privilege so they can disenfranchise people and then blame it on them for "not trying hard enough" and not "making voting important enough". How does it do this? People without IDs are disenfranchised now. After the change, they could still be disenfranchised. Also, they'd be out of $50, or whatever.
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May 16, 2014 22:15
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Zeitgueist posted:I'm trying to find a quote that someone posted like 6mos or longer ago, it was like 100 years old and it was a wealthier person complaining that the poor wasted their money on luxurious food, just like happens every time someone tries to tell a poor person how to budget. If it's about people complaining that miners spent too much on strong tea and white bread, I think it might be The Road To Wiggan Pier by Orwell. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200391.txt
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Jun 17, 2014 20:05
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vegetables posted:I don't get Marx's concept of socially necessary labour time at all. Can someone explain it in terms a dur-dur stupidhead would understand? You, and a bunch of other people, are stuck on a deserted island somewhere. You get elected chief, and are in charge of planning how to allocate people's work. The first thing you realize is that you have to make tradeoffs. And it makes sense to talk about them in terms of time, rather than money. Do you spend an extra-person day on 'Fish' or 'Shelter'? Next, you'd realize that, in the long term, you've got to make your own tools. And these tools wear out. So, you should 'price' projects in terms of the time they take + the time it takes to build the tools. So, getting a pit dug might cost "2 person-days (digging)" + "1 person-day (making shovels)" for a total of 3 person-days. The term 'Socially Necessary' comes in when someone notices that one pit took 3 person-days (because people had the foresight to build shovels), and another took 6 person-days (because people dug with their bare hands). Should you give the pits the same "value"? The idea is that "Socially Necessary Labor" = The amount of labor, on average, that you need to spend to get a thing, given that you're using the most efficient technology available.
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Jan 5, 2016 18:29
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vegetables posted:This is a good explanation; thanks. The only thing I'm still not sure about is if it includes labour that turns out to be useless to society. You're the Island Chief: Do you build a giant coconut statue of yourself? On one hand, you can "price" the statue. It would take 10-person-days to build, including tool-replacement. On the other hand, you're assumed to be benevolent. So you're not actually going to commission the project. In the long term the answer is something like, "Yes: that's what the socially-necessary labor would be, if we built those statues. But we're not going to. So there shouldn't be any statues around to soak up value." To generalize that a bit, you'd realize that there's obviously a second 'kind' of value that makes you decide that "10-person-days of Food" is better than "10-person-days of Giant Coconut Statue". Since you're benevolent, you'd give an order like, "Work on whatever produces the most goodness-value per unit of time-value." People will leave over-staffed projects to work on ones that are better for society. The result is that, in equilibrium, the "Goodness-Value / Hour" should be about the same across all of the projects that actually get worked on.
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Jan 5, 2016 19:28
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Zodium posted:wait, that doesn't seem very consistent with anything we know about people's abilities to accurately estimate things. how does this account for heuristic bias? wouldn't we actually expect people to systematically ham up the estimates all the time just like they would in hypothetical free markets? No, it isn't very consistent with those things. In particular, it won't deal well with private information or coordination costs. My best defense of the idea is that there are some situations where these biases matter less. Scale helps. One person fishing for an hour might catch something. Or they might not. You can't know. And you certainly can't assume the person was slacking just because they came in with 0 fish. But if you have data from 1,000 people fishing over a few years, then you can make a much better guess about average results. (Though, scale has its own challenges. Suppose the fishermen crowd each other. The first fish are easy to get. Then people have to start working more. You quickly end up in a world where "extra fish per extra person" is very, very different from the average fish per person) A stable equilibrium helps, too. Otherwise you get a lot of complexity as "socially necessary" changes with the available technology and infrastructure. And, it's useful if you have a reason why people feel solidarity with each other. Especially if the reason can push back against the temptation for people to think that their industry is particularly harder than another person's industry.
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Jan 5, 2016 20:12
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