> But why does that feel like anything?

Anthropic principle: because it does. If it didn't feel like anything, it wouldn't. But it does, so it does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

> But it does, so it does.

Explain the first part of this sentence.

More of "because you are a continuous chemical reaction that started 4 billion years ago". A bunch of legacy crap gets left around from the time before higher order thought when the brain - muscle interactivity was just based on feelings.

If we had all those animals, especially those around the time of the cambrian explosion to experiment on as they developed it would probably make more sense in the 'but it does' department. This is also why your math teacher wants you to show your work.

I have a feeling the response would be “read the latter”

Per American jurisprudence, this is false. Incitement / true threats are very narrow.

Homelessness and world hunger are not bottlenecked by money. There's a stronger case for healthcare, but that's also substantially a political issue.

There's a stronger case for world hunger being bottlenecked than healthcare. World hunger is a logistics problem now, but no amount of money lets you print doctors.

You can't just throw money at the world hunger problem, it will end up in some warlord's coffers. Hunger still exists because it is politically useful to keep people hungry.

With a little bit of lag time (school) we could have a metric fuckton of doctors. We have a metric fuckton of shitty lawyers. Doctors are artificially gated in the US

What’s the joke? “What do you call the person who graduated last in their class from med school? A doctor.”

Sure, I think that helps my point. You can't create "good" doctors out of thin air with money, just "more" doctors, and it takes forever.

Do we really need "good" doctors all of the time? I think the industry is overregulated to restrict the supply of healthcare.

Isn't that gap being filled nowadays with roles like nurse practitioners?

The optimal amount of bad doctors is not zero. But there is a point of "ChatGPT does a better job than this man does, and we're talking GPT-4o, not GPT-5 Pro". In which case we have a problem.

When a simple easy to make mistake will kill me, I'm pretty sure I want to have a good doctor all the time.

It’s funny how some people think shitty lawyers are good and some people think good lawyers are shitty, huh?

Actually funding education via wealth distribution is a great way of ”printing doctors”.

I don't know what wealth distribution means in this context, or why it's relevant at all, but food grows fast and doctors take like 20 years to grow no matter how much money you throw at it or where you get the money. And the context above was more specifically "fully pay health care costs" which is a comical fantasy the moment you try to actually define what that means, because the limit is not the price.

Changing the entire paradigm of medical care would be possible with enough money. There's no logical reason it takes 20 years to become a doctor. The fact that it does severely hampers both the quantity and quality of doctors. Becoming a doctor is much less about knowledge and intelligence than it is about attrition resistance. Loads of capable students disregard medical careers each year for more rapidly attainable positions. In many cases these are the MOST capable students because they recognize the problems with pursuing medical degrees.

Certainly the most skilled and advanced in the medical field will need significant schooling but there needs to be a major reform in healthcare training. One that produces more knowledgeable and skilled professionals and not a glut of questionably competent nurse practitioners.

simply, we have a scarcity of healthcare because we don’t invest the wealth we collectively produce in healthcare.

Or most people, really. We are letting it accrete around more of itself and don't clean up and redistribute.

A logistics problem is just a money problem, throw enough cash at it and you can get anything moved to anywhere

this is a bit hackneyed but it's true: time in the market > timing the market

now obviously, if you do time the market perfectly, that's the best. but it is far far more likely to shoot yourself in the foot by trying

The school system needs an Official™ medical justification to grant your kid extra accommodations for whatever his behavioral issues are. They are less interested in whether he "actually" has autism than in a rubber stamp that gives them more options for managing him. Which might indeed be a good thing for your son! It's hard to say without being closer to the situation.

Thanks. That indeed was one of the questions I had in my mind--"what changes once a diagnosis or label has been affixed?"

Stocks are narrative-driven, and sometimes this aspect swamps the "fundamentals." Keynesian beauty contests all the way down.

No they are not equivalent. This came up with James Damore too.

Let's say there's a pool of 20 candidates, 10 male and 10 female. Since more men than women have an abiding interest in engineering, let us posit that 40% of the men are top prospects for the job, and 20% of the women are equally high-quality workers. The company is trying to fill 6 roles and has an internal mandate to hire 50% women. To serve that mandate, 1 unqualified woman will be hired, at the expense of 1 of the qualified men.

You can apply the exact same logic w/r/t race. Yes, there are legacy-of-slavery reasons why fewer blacks than whites are qualified for any given technical credential, but those are upstream of hiring decisions, and are not the job of e.g. airlines to solve, especially not at the expense of lowering standards for a crucial position like pilot.

This response is very confused. Lack of interest in the field would result in fewer female applicants, but you're describing equal numbers of applicants. This situation where women are half as likely as men to be qualified is just sexism.

The idea that airlines are passing on qualified white candidates to hire unqualified black candidates to fill a diversity quota, because there aren't enough qualified black candidates to fill it honestly, is a white supremacist conspiracy theory. Real life DEI programs don't let them do that. To a white supremacist, any number of black pilots is "just a few too many" to have hired honestly, and so there must be some hypothetical white people being "stolen" from. See GP.

> Lack of interest in the field would result in fewer female applicants

Anyone in a hiring position would tell you, lack of intrinsic interest, or expertise, does not stop people from applying to an open position.

It is bizarre to me that you relate this experience like it's fun and whimsical trivia. Maybe that's because I'm a woman and identify more with the victims...

~No one pushes back on abuses of power by their own side.

(Not literally no one, but few enough people that they effectively don't matter.)

Dairy farming is pretty brutal to the cows, as is all industrial-scale animal husbandry.

(I'm not vegan, I eat dairy. It is what it is.)