Category: Epistemic Status: 2/4 – Speculative

A post containing opinions, views or concepts that I have not necessarily honed to a great degree. More careful consideration may yet ensue.
The Political Compass – More than Just a Meme

The Political Compass – More than Just a Meme

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

Despite its designers’ hopes that it might beckon in a new era of more nuanced political discourse, the political compass has largely been reduced to meme-fodder.

This popularised version of the political compass has now been around for over 20 years, and by that metric, this post is a bit late to the party, however the concept of expressing political alignment using 2 dimensions is far older than this.

The American libertarian David Nolan came up with his “Nolan Chart” way back in 1969. It is very US-centric, and was created specifically with the goal of converting people to libertarianism, however I can’t help but feel that despite this, it is just more elegant than the political compass.

The more popular incarnation, that is the subject of so many political memes, has plenty of its own limitations and biases, but it also completely fails to be memorable too (“Authoritarian-Left” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue). Thankfully John Nerst at EverythingStudies wrote a pair of posts back in 2019 that reformulate the whole idea, addressing many of the limitations, and it is his “tilted political compass” that I want to build on…

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Voting Systems IV – Procedural Voting

Voting Systems IV – Procedural Voting

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

This post is part of a series of posts on Voting Systems.

As well as the general public voting for politicians or directly for policies, voting is also used by politicians themselves to decide on issues and pass laws.

Rather than being a “once every few years” phenomenon, this voting is part of the day-to-day workings of government. The standard operating procedure for many politicians.

This means that whilst some sort of formal procedure is needed, even the previously mentioned voting systems of Approval Voting, Score Voting, Evaluative Voting and SPAV are still far to rigid to permit the kind of nuance that is necessary in navigating the complex issues of the day. Rather like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, too simplistic an approach leads to a broken system. Legislators and governments tend to eventually find ways around a procedure if it is too restrictive, but these loopholes are accidental and therefore do not necessarily yield the best outcomes…

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Dedomic Utilitarianism

Dedomic Utilitarianism

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

This post loosely follows on from Resolving Moral Dilemmas using Uncertainty and Insanity.

Utilitarianism – A Brief Background

My aim here is not to provide yet another response to all of the common challenges to Utilitarianism.  A fairly good background of the challenges Utilitarianism has been faced with over the years can be found by reading through its Wikipedia article.  Alternatively for an even deeper dive, this article gives a very thorough summary of such things.  The issue is, that having fended off these initial criticisms, the philosophy of Utilitarianism has encountered a few problems which are not so easily dispatched.  Of the different types of Utilitarianism, some resolve certain problems, and others resolve other problems, but all reveal their own cracks in turn. It is on these deeper issues that I intend to focus…

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Relentless Positivity

Relentless Positivity

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

The Pursuit of Happiness

The pursuit of happiness is something of a universal human endeavour. As such, one could consider it odd that we are so divided about how to achieve happiness – after all, it is something we have been trying to reach as a society since time immemorial.  Unfortunately this view neglects the fact that the pursuit of happiness is such a significant motivator for people, that there are an enormous number of people and organisations out there trying to convince people that their method is the one, in order to gain influence, profit or status.  In this environment, it is difficult to filter the noise and disinformation from the genuine signal of how to live a happy life…

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Resolving Moral Dilemmas using Uncertainty and Insanity

Resolving Moral Dilemmas using Uncertainty and Insanity

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

One of the main criticisms of Consequentialism is that it leads to a state where anything not forbidden is mandatory.  In order to optimise future consequences, no choice has absolutely zero effect either way, which is what would be required for it to be merely permissible.  The seemingly innocuous question of “should I eat a sandwich for lunch?” becomes something with a morally absolute right and wrong answer. Even if the extent of forbiddenness or mandatoriness is variable by the severity of the consequences, we are left with a system in which any expression of free will is fundamentally negative.  An automaton that always picked the morally mandatory option would be a better person than anyone that ever chose differently. This outlook neglects uncertainty however – in an uncertain world, there is necessarily a grey area between things with obvious positive consequences and obvious negative consequences. In these situations, it is reasonable to consider the grey area to be permissible choices, as there is no way to determine which choice is better…

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Comments on UBI posts

Comments on UBI posts

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

This post relates to the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

This makes the fourteenth post in a row on UBI. For a blog that isn’t explicitly about Universal Basic Income, some might consider this excessive! I shall be moving on to other topics shortly, but a round-up of comments and further thoughts on this sequence of posts seems appropriate.

Firstly – I have created a dedicated page collating all of the posts (except the appendix) into a single article so that it can be read and linked to more easily.

Secondly – thank you to all those that read the posts, and to those that commented (either here, or in places that I posted links). I have had several interesting discussions about various aspects of UBI, some of which helped me to consider the policy from even more angles, and others that pointed me towards useful data that I had not previously encountered.

A summary of various questions, criticisms and discussions is given below…

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Arguments for a UBI – Appendix

Arguments for a UBI – Appendix

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

The United States

Having seen the complexities of the existing UK tax code and devised a much simpler way of doing a very similar thing, it is tempting to try to do the same with the US, however there are a couple of additional complexities to note before we can get started in earnest.

Firstly, the states can levy their own income taxes in addition to the federal income tax.  We will ignore state taxes, and look simply at the federal tax code.  Secondly, there are a huge number of special cases, loopholes and adjustments that apply when calculating US income tax, meaning that the effective rate people end up paying is often lower than the one that can be easily calculated using the headline rates.  This is unavoidable without considerable analysis, but the easily calculated rates should suffice at least for an initial comparison with the hypothetical Universal Basic Income based regime…

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Two Letter Words

Two Letter Words

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

Personally, I enjoy playing Scrabble – it is an excellent game. There is a slight problem with it though – it manages to straddle the gulf between language, which is highly flexible, ever changing and more than a little subjective, and competition, which leads people to seek to optimise heavily, bending into unrecognisability any rules that are not laid down in cast iron.

This split personality leads to conflicts, the most obvious one being which dictionary to use. This particular conflict has been neatly resolved in the English language by everyone agreeing to use “Collins Scrabble Words” (CSW, previously known as SOWPODS). Oh wait, that isn’t the case at all – the US, Canada and Thailand use the “Tournament Word List (TWL, derived from Merriam-Webster). Be that as it may, I am going to talk about CSW/SOWPODS here, because I am in the UK…

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Rethinking Education

Rethinking Education

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

The Blind Leading the Blind

The sizes of classes in schools has been a hot topic for years. Clearly 40 children in a class together don’t get enough instruction time from the teacher, giving rise to calls to invest more heavily in education so that class sizes can be reduced. I am inclined to think that this does not go far enough – it is a sticking plaster over a much deeper problem with the entire system of education which we rely on.

Class sizes even as low as 15-20 still leave the teachers in either a lecturing role, or spending less than half an hour per day with each student one to one.  This results in the vast majority of interactions at schools being between children and other children. Every year, school takes up around 20% of all the waking hours of children (1140/5840 hours), but add to this after school clubs, extra curricular activities and going out to play with friends, it is easy to see that children can spend a majority of their interaction time interacting with other children, rather than adults. This results in children developing their own independent cultures and norms, further distancing themselves from adults and adult interaction (not to mention exacerbating the perception by adults of children as silly and immature)…

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Combining Rationality and Antifragility

Combining Rationality and Antifragility

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

Bridging the gap between Traditionalism and Modernism

Traditionalism is manifest in a confidence that the way we have always done things is the best.  Modernism by contrast is a term used to describe the almost monomaniacal application of “scientific principles” to optimise every aspect of life.  Whilst in many ways the opposite of traditionalism, this confidence in the correctness of the approach is something that both modernism and traditionalism very much have in common.  The planned, orderly approach to things that modernism advocated, resulted in both huge advances and huge catastrophes in the ‘50s and ‘60s – huge rockets that could reach the moon, monoculture farming turning large areas of the planet into arid dust bowls, glittering skyscrapers providing homes and office space for thousands of people, sterile grid-based cities devoid of culture or community.  Clearly modernism was not all bad, but the negative consequences were remarkably far-reaching – if we view traditionalism and modernism as opposite ends of a spectrum, can we find a middle, and will this middle allow us to reap the benefits given by both approaches, avoiding the drawbacks of either…

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Maturity – Sophistication vs. Stultification

Maturity – Sophistication vs. Stultification

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Epistemic Status: 2/4 - Speculative

Maturity shouldn’t mean being boring. Instead it should be an awareness of when it is appropriate to goof off. Often maturity is seen as the ability to remain sombre and unexcitable – this is a great shame. Whilst the ability to remain calm and unflustered is very valuable, being older and more mature should not prevent people from having fun, enjoying life and being spontaneous. The misconception that being mature means that you can’t have any fun is borne out of an over-application of the idea that there are situations where sombreness is appropriate. If you are unable to determine in which situations it is acceptable to be silly, you learn to err on the side of caution, applying a sombre attitude even when it is not warranted…

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