thinking about the @Chris_arnade story about front row and back row Americans, which really came to mind here
and also that greentext about the cognitive abilities of prisoners
and also about something currently happening adjacent to out liveshttps://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1411009581229084672 …
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she should not have gotten pregnant. she is not married. she does not have consistent employment. there are multiple potential fathers. she nevertheless deliberately got pregnant because she was envious of another woman who had a baby
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all right. so what is to be done considering this fait accompli well, one might suggest that her extended family pitch in to help her. or perhaps social organisations or government.
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unfortunately her dysfunctional extended family is working against her. one of her relatives is envious of *her* having a baby and decided that the appropriate response is to fabricate CPS reports to attempt to have the baby put in foster care
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this is a credible threat as much of her extended family has a history of making such reports against people who piss them off the risk of such entanglements also discourage her more functional network from engaging with her
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the ability of the dysfunctional extended family to interfere in this counterproductive manner, as you can see here, is being enabled entirely by government programs that are supposed to be helpful
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there's really not any good solution here. the sort of thick society that would have used somewhat coercive pressures to discourage her from getting pregnant doesnt exist anymore. government programs are worse than useless
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more competent people who could plausibly help her structure her life are fairly systematically discouraged from doing so could i help? maybe on the margins. is it worth the risk of multiple lawsuits and fights against fabricated CPS reports putting my daughter at risk? uhhhhh
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ultimately what this woman needed was not a government program but a society that would encourage or pressure her to make the good choices that she basically is not competent to make on her own
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I hate this conclusion because my fondest desire is for everyone to fuck off and leave other people alone but a very large number of people are not up to the task of making good decisions for themselves and the consequences of those bad decisions affect many other people
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a parent cannot credibly commit to not caring for a grandchild that their kid has when their kid is not capable of raising their own child, for example and if they or people like them /don't/ do something then that grandchild will suffer greatly
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government programs are really not helpful in a situation like this. her fundamental problem is not a lack of monetary resources but a lack of cognitive resources and there exist no functional means of transferring those.
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this is not an original point but it really drives home the extent to which making a set of broadly-good life choices the default for most people in society was important, and their destruction by cognitively well-endowed people who could skate by without them a disaster
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i had not expected to end up a social conservative on consequentialist grounds but here we are
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there are many complaints about this thread. here I will comment on some solutions that have been discussed and others that have been tried or might be triedhttps://twitter.com/DistractedAnna/status/1411064196964495364?s=19 …
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first Anna's comment. I do not expect that anything will make people "smart" in the general sense but I also expect there are probably gains from establishing better default choice sets, ie presenting good options to dumb people rather than leaving them to flounder
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second is the option of the status quo, which mostly leads to capable people simply isolating themselves in functional enclaves and leaving everyone else to suffer
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this is a stable choice in that it requires no energy inputs. it also has the obvious downside of lots of people leading awful lives. it might be optimal in the sense that theres nothing to be done anyway, cant deny that
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one criticism levered was that older societies were also not particularly good at dealing with this problem and pointed to things like Magdalene laundries and such its a real problem! i guess am not proposing this as a solutionhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland …
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later Progressives were fond of and really even defined by their advocacy for eugenics eg, see Buck v Bell (1927), regarding forced sterilization. it has never been overturned incidentally I do not favor thishttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell …
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more what actually seems to work is what the Mormons have done in Utah. see
@asymmetricinfo's nice piece on thishttps://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=5111151&itype=CMSID …Show this thread -
regrettably I would hate living in this kind of social environment but as I age I see the appeal on the current margin
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End of conversation
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