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Jul 16, 2022Liked by Michael Huemer

A good tell about whether or not someone is trying to help society primarily or enjoys being seen as a good person might be how well persuasive they attempt to be. This isn't to take a side in a debate, but I'm reminded of the recent Roe v. Wade decision and the rhetoric around abortion. I see some arguments that seem more like "owns" and appear terribly unpersuasive. I just googled Roe v. Wade signs and I see one that says "mind your own business." I'm not sure how helpful that sort of thing is because the obvious pro-life response would be that protecting unborn life is everybody's business.

I contrast this with an experience I remember having in college. There were some Christians that travelled around and tried to talk to college students about abortion. I doubt they were purely motivated by goodness, but I got the feeling that they strategized how to have persuasive conversations calmly and nicely. I think they really probably wanted to persuade pro-choice college graduates because they thought they could save some lives. I wonder how effective actually protesting is.

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Jul 16, 2022Liked by Michael Huemer

I think status quo bias is strong for existing government programs. Education is one of the more frustrating cases because it is so incredibly wasteful in terms of money and human life. A lot of people are being forced to do things which are nearly or actually useless. I think the burden is on the people who want to continue compulsory education.

1. Effects of interventions on cognitive ability, aside from something drastic like transnational adoption, fadeout and do not have a lasting impact. [1]

2. It appears there is no such thing as far transfer with regard to cognitive skills. Learning poetry doesn't make the average person a better thinker. "Despite the importance of transfer of learning, research findings over the past nine decades clearly show that as individuals, and as educational institutions, we have failed to achieve transfer of learning on any significant level" [2]

3. People who have used spaced repetition software, quickly sees that memory decays rapidly and non-linearly. [3] Student's forget a great deal of what they learn [4].

4. Many students don't enjoy being in school and would rather do other things

We take such a huge portion of people's lives, it's a shame that people don't come up with some criteria of what passes a cost-benefit anaylsis for education and then apply it.

[1] http://www.johnprotzko.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Protzko-2015.-The-Fadeout-Effect.pdf

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Transfer-Learning-Instruction-Educational-Psychology/dp/0123305950

[3] https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

[4] see: The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan

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This post reminds me of the book, The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hansen. Signaling theory explains much behavior in terms of competition for in-group status, rather than its direct effects.

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I don't doubt that many activists have self-interested motives, but what about activists who throw themselves in harm's way for the sake of the cause, such as protestors in the American civil rights movement or in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong? I would think that an activist risking life and limb is evidence that they're altruistically motivated, since such actions (obviously) run counter to self-interest.

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Jul 28, 2022·edited Jul 28, 2022

Does this apply to your activism regarding veganism or political libertarianism?

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