More from @lymanstoneky

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Apr 23

factory farming is an ethical choice to prioritize the welfare of future humans (lower ghg emissions) over current day cows.

and i'm okay with that.

also i weight cow welfare at a precise zero in my welfare function anyways.
clear.ucdavis.edu/blog/its-time-…

if you wanted one mathematical construct that i think is most closely a proxy for a quantitative rule of moral behavior, it would be the discount rate. lower discount rates are almost always more moral than higher discount rates. patience is the basic virtue.

the article is a nice little read.

i also object to the burgers-or-planes comparison on another basis:

cost.

Read 18 tweets

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Apr 22

It was a good thing to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It would have been a good thing to nuke Berlin if it had been an option earlier in the war.

Sherman's March to the Sea was not just morally acceptable, it was a moral requirement.

Replies are turned off. Not sorry.

An actually just war:
1) Must be waged with a strategy calculated to minimize war duration, since war duration is by far the greatest cause of total civilian suffering
2) Must be waged with a strategy calculated to minimize odds of recurrence, for obvious reasons

If you're not trying to achieve a decisive, total, and swift victory, then IMHO every bullet is a war crime.

Read 11 tweets

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Apr 22

Why did so many hunter gatherer groups around the world nearly-simultaneously and in an unconnected way develop agriculture?

This has been a kinda problematic question in human prehistory.

It may have been solved... by an economist?

Studying the economics of... Earth's orbit?

Okay let's back up.

Earth's climate has a lot of moving parts. But a big factor, as every child knows, is that the sun is quite warm. But sometimes, a spot on earth is closer to the sun. And sometimes further. Because our planet is caterwampus, i.e. tilted on its axis.

However, that tilt isn't stable. It gets, in the formal scientific language, a bit wibbledy wobbledy from time to time. When earth gets a case of the wobbles, the seasons get a little bit funky.

Read 15 tweets

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Apr 22

Hugely important preprint for pronatal policy.

What happens when you exogenously 1) INCREASE WORK INCENTIVES by 2) boosting household returns to work but 3) you accidentally and randomly make it a gender-specific benefit?

Fertility both rises AND falls.

So first you need to understand the intervention.

The author calls it a basic income. But technically it was a back-to-work subsidy structured as an income floor for currently unemployed people in Finland. If you were poor, your current benefits were deducted from it.

The upshot is that it had little or no value if you had little or no income, but it became more valuable the more income you earned.

It did not have a negative effect for anybody. 100% of people in the treatment group faced a same-or-better return to work and income.

Read 17 tweets

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Apr 17

why christianity was victorious, funerary epigraphy edition

source: prism.ucalgary.ca/server/api/cor…

assuming pagans were actually 50/50 and that christian epigraphs under-represented females to a similar degree as pagans (plausible), that implies the Christian community was ~2/3 female.

Read 44 tweets