Thread by @notkavi

1 like = 1 hot take.

I feel like I do this every time I 2x in followers lol, and I haven't been cancelled yet

1. The online left seems to have gotten too wedded to the idea of using intuitive morality as a bludgeon. Actually thinking about why you believe what you believe is important

2. The only reasonable medium term solution to the housing crisis is to legalize housing construction

3. Charitable deductions should be eliminated

4. The 71% of emissions are emitted by just 100 companies meme is the worst thing to ever touch lefty spaces

5. The correct solution to the pandemic was a total lockdown in the early days for a couple weeks, or failing that a total lockdown later for a month or two. trying to balance economic concerns *at all* was a complete disaster

6. Small businesses are often much worse than big businesses

7. The special deferential status afforded to religion over other things (religious beliefs > normal beliefs, religious practice > hobbies) is really bad and needs to go away

8. Most media in our society is incredibly oversaturated with relationships and the expectation that people always need to be in relationships

9. The CA water crisis is only important insofar as it affects the environment (causing fires etc). CA uses most of it's water for frivolous stuff that we wouldn't miss if it disappeared (lawns & cash crops)

10. Basically nothing politicians do can speed up or slow educational polarization. It's a broader cultural phenomenon

11. Vaccines were always going to be politically polarized. But masks didn't have to be

12. Lazy conspiracism does occur on the left, and it's bad when it happens

13. Pseudoscience often has long term negative effects and should be combated before you start seeing the negative effects

14. If we fix climate changes worst effects and end up with like a median scenario, oil and gas will be a net positive for humanity in the long run

15. Work is fulfilling to some people and not to others. Trying to enforce a dignity of work is bad

16. Banning inheritance is one of the easiest meritocracy and justice wins that can be done

17. Private colleges should expand their capacity by 10x or more

18. All people should learn the basics of programming (at least excel level) in high school

19. Integral calculus should not be taught beyond the basics (cut trig substitution, integration by parts, etc). These days we basically use tabular for everything

20. Nobody ever uses long division, we shouldn't teach it

21. Educational, racial, and rural/urban polarization are big, but the South is also more conservative than the north on top of all of that

22. Justice and revenge are basically just the more and less respectable way to refer to the same concept

23. Empathy is a terrible foundation for a moral system. Moral intuitions can in general be very bad

24. There is never a reason to vote for a candidate you expect to get 3rd place or lower in any fptp election

25. Younger people being more pro socialist has nothing to do with them being young and everything to do with them being born post cold war, so they'll stay that way as they age

26. Leftists and liberals overemphasize historical correlates and reasoning for modern inequity, to the point where like modern anti asian racism is viewed as a direct extension of pre 1965 anti asian racism, when in practice the connection isn't super strong

27. The "working class" has like 7 definitions, and if you take the union of all of them, you end up with 99% of the country. The term is useless at this point and you should just say the specific definition you mean

28. "People who sign the check on the front" vs "People who sign the check on the back" remains a far better way to define class than most definitions out there

29. Educational polarization is neither secretly class polarization nor is it "smart = lib". It's a complex and multifaceted situation that is too often caricatured

30. Racial depolarization is probably good for the country, even if it hurts the democrats short term chances

31. Property tax exemptions should not exist. Schools, colleges, hospitals, etc should just be funded directly, and churches and nonprofits should just have to pay.

32. Eminent domain is good actually

33. AI risk is basically entirely fictitious. The real issues with AI are not existential threats at all

34. Leftists and more radical liberals need to develop the ability to see good policies on the merits that are not explicitly phrased in terms of equity

35. Moderates and moderate liberals need to look past the boilerplate about equity that's used to win over leftists and radlibs to see if they actually like a policy on the merits

36. The US needs to stop doing nonsense like getting Lula thrown out in Brazil. In general, the outcome is a disaster

37. Both Jeremy Corbyn and Kier Starmer are bad for the same reason: they refuse to differentiate Labor from the Tories on the issues of greatest salience to voters

38. The recall process is not actually too easy to trigger in California. the cost isn't actually that high. You all actually like having an election and are just lying

39. Vaccine challenge trials are a no brainer and should be done

40. Political polarization has both positive and negative effects, but people focus almost exclusively on the negatives due to status quo bias

41. Pears are bad that's it that's the take

42. Salted chocolate is an elaborate gaslighting scheme I refuse to believe anyone actually enjoys it

43. Process is way overemphasized over outcome in a lot of settings. Outcomes are what actually matters, so when possible we should measure and regulate outcomes, not processes

44. There will be a reinansance in automated/interactive theorem proving over the next couple decades driven by the integration of machine learning into the proof pipeline

45. Tradition is bad. Even worse than pears

46. 100% of "social media bad" takes are complete nonsense. Yes, even the one you're thinking of as the exception

47. Maps that attempt to show a statistical trend but do not normalize by population should be banned. I support a change to the first amendment to allow this

48. Logarithmic scales should never be used in public communication

49. Norcal/socal as a divide really only applies to the Coast. California has 4 regions, norcal (bay area + north central coast), socal (SB/greater LA/SD/inyo), central valley, and northeast CA (rest)

50. An ideal electoral system for executives is an RCV primary selecting like 6 candidates, then an RCV where people pick the candidates they least like to eliminate them

51. Murkowski is going to get squeezed out of the top 2 in AL-Sen 2022

52. Even if prosecutors don't think they can convict trump, they should at least drag him into court a bunch. It will really ruin the next couple years of his life if he has to constantly be in court on trial

53. The US should admit Puerto Rico, DC, Guam, and Canada as states

54. The people who are really mad about mask mandates going on a bit too long are overreacting because they want to do an bothsides equivalence. Thats my only explanation because I cannot imagine someone actually being that mad at a mask

55. Covid probably had in aggregate no effect on the 2020 election

56. There is no rationally consistent way to be anti abortion (yes even pro choice/anti abortion) and not vegan

57. A humanities education does not make you better at thinking than a stem education. The fact that many of the big pandemic cranks were humanities folks should be a wakeupcall to this.

58. There's no strong evidence that internal polls are actually more reliable or provide a ceiling on a candidates performance. everyone on this site takes them far too seriously

59. 99% of real analysis is just useless pedantry. It's *fun* useless pedantry and can build mathematical intuition, but the folks who say it's somehow crucial for probability are completely wrong

60. Status quo bias is really bad and we all need to combat it. A lot of people make excuses for it like "oh well people are used to X etc". It's fine from like a strategic standpoint, but when devising your own views, try to correct for it

61. Borrego Springs is a top 5 place to visit in California

62. Straw bans are dumb, and should be undone

63. Carbon taxes should be given back in direct dividends to ensure that they're not regressive and to ensure that they do not appear regressive

64. There's no fundamental difference between giving someone a handout and allowing someone to do a job whose societal externalities are negative

65. Theft should be treated as a crime which should only be pursued to the breakeven point, and even then not all the way (transfers are less bad than burning resources)

66. Most of the problem with debate is actually just about the medium. Text based correspondence debates are great and often v illuminating

67. Cryptocurrency should be entirely banned. It is a speculative instrument with negative social value

68. Most anti anti theism consists of arguments substantially worse than the average anti theist argument

69. Urbanization will begin to reverse sometime in the next few decades as wfh becomes more common

70. Social engineering is good actually, there's no reason to think the "natural" state of society is optimal or even particularly safe