Posts by BenWilson
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Nice viz. Could be interesting to break the top 10% down even further. It would be most curious to see how the top 10% is itself distributed. I bet the median is very different from the mean.
As for the fairness, you have to buy the idea that everyone should get similar proportional increases at all to even dream of calling it unfair when the top 10% get a slightly higher rise. If you look at that fact that the income of the bottom 7 deciles put together is about the same as the top one, then it starts not to look that onerous that they might have to pay more tax proportionally. Even just in the top 2 deciles, two thirds of the income goes to the top one. I bet there’s a similar tale even within the top decile, and the mean is dragged up quite a lot by the final few percentiles.
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Hard News: The problems inherent in the system, in reply to Russell Brown,
Ben, I’ll be raising your points with Maia tomorrow.
Excellent!
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Hard News: The problems inherent in the system, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’m puzzled by the way you’ve dismissed harm reduction, when it largely seems responsible for positive change.
Fair enough. I'm not being clear enough. I don't oppose harm reduction, per se. I just think it's only half of the picture, and that when you work on the wrong function, you get wrong results, with mechanical efficiency. To that end, I see harm reduction as a policy as minimize(harm). Whereas I think the function should really be minimize(harm-good). Or maximize(good-harm), which is exactly the same thing. And the thing about minimizing for the wrong function is that you don't get a solution that is useful, a partial result for the other function. You get something can be a very long way from the other result. If good is not a part of your objective function, you can end up minimizing it. That is, after all, the solution path that takes the biggest bites out of harm - to take huge bites out of anything that people think is good, but carries some harm (and is thus popular). You can forge a very long way against good just for very minor harm reductions.
Which all seemed rather theoretical, until a huge step was taken just recently in exactly this way. We reduced all harm from drugs by taking away all potential for enjoying them. The enjoyment was utterly irrelevant, and in fact, it indicated the very best path for the maximum harm reduction. Because a whole lot of people liked their nasty synthetic cannabis that was legal, of course that was the perfect thing to immediately completely irradicate. Its very popularity, the very thing that made people want to have it, was what caused it to be targeted for termination. The process decided its fate in a microsecond - it was always there in the solution path for anyone who cared to look. This was why I didn't jump for joy when the PSA was passed in the first place, immediately cramming the synthetics market into a corner, killing most of the utility someone like me might have got out of it. It seemed pretty clear it was a first step on the path to eradicating all psychoactives.
I'll give that the definition of harm can include harms to people arising from prohibition. In that, it could contra-indicate prohibition, maybe, eventually, with enough data. But it can only do so very weakly. The prohibition harm has to be quite substantial to outweigh the harm of the substance abuse that it's addressing. Unless the definition of harm can actually include harms to liberty, harms arising from the lost opportunity of enjoyment, in other words it becomes (harm-good) then goodness will always be irrelevant and the machine can kill it with ruthless efficiency.
This is only the first of my objections to incrementalism+harm minimization. It's the most important one, though. If the objective function is wrong, then it's not possible for the system to produce the right answers. It actually disputes what the right answer is - it's simply been told something wrong is right, and it seeks it. The most basic part of engineering is to define what the hell you want and get that right first. I won't even go into the other ones yet. The efficiency of the gun is really quite secondary to the basic question about which direction it's pointed.
In this analogy, the algorithm is society seeking solutions to drug policy. It's particularly about society using science to seek solutions to drug policy, via gradual iterative improvement, through an impartial and patient bureaucratic process, and the gradual pressure of concerned groups. To say that this system has no place even considering average-joe-six-pack's right to a high only confirms what I'm saying. If the system has no mechanism to take that into account, what on earth does? What's to stop it? I can only hope to raise consciousness to this logic. WE can stop it, if only we can see that there is something to stop. And we don't have to stop harm minimization. We just have to make it work on the whole objective.
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Hard News: The problems inherent in the system, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Because they’re not a public policy or public health issue.
The bulk of the population are not a public policy issue? Aside from them not being an “issue” at all, but people, they certainly are a very primary concern of public policy, and they damned well should be. If it was up to the public, cannabis would probably be decriminalized already.
But surely you can see that your very point presumes the unimportance of an entire half of the the purpose of even having a government, which is to preserve our chances of happiness? It’s not just about protecting us, and it’s certainly not just about protecting us from ourselves. Or is your point simply that you’re not interested in my point? If so, fair enough. That’s certainly a fair comeback to my saying I’m over hearing about how awesomely progressive we can be via the slow incremental accumulation of reasons not to take drugs, culminating in the hardly surprising decision to ban the whole lot of them.
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Hard News: The problems inherent in the system, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I don’t see how most on here can. How many users actually will admit to it and explain what is good about it
And how can they do it in a way that stacks up against cold facts and statistics about addiction, madness, self-destruction and death? We don't count good times. We don't keep statistics on how much people enjoyed themselves, especially not about things they can't easily admit to enjoying.
Addict suggests sick. User works for me as it has no prejudice.
It's a tricky issue. I don't think the word "addict" is without useful meaning.
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Hard News: The problems inherent in the system, in reply to Russell Brown,
Portugese are not “free to enjoy themselves on drugs”.
They are considerably freer than I am.
You’re barking up the wrong tree if you expect public health agencies to do that part for you. The Ministry of Health doesn’t make table wine recommendations either.
That's exactly the opposite of what I expect. They're entirely dedicated to harm reduction, that's what they do. Which is why I wouldn't expect any particular help to come from them on the half of the issue I'm talking about.
But no one’s preventing you from having that discussion
No, they're not. And I'm having it, aren't I? Do you want me to stop? It seemed like just the place to be talking about this, but your call.
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Hard News: The problems inherent in the system, in reply to Russell Brown,
Okay, let’s take your analogy and look at what actually happened, rather than the scenario you’re conjuring for the sake of argument.
I'm not conjuring the prohibition of homosexuality. That really happened. And it was almost always justified on the grounds of harm, at least at the end when it became less tenable to do it just on the grounds of pure mean-ness.
Obviously, I'm not in the least bit against taking practical measures to reduce harm, like improving delivery methods and disposal units and hygiene, and different rules for children. That's ridiculous. But the context of this discussion is "the problems inherent in the system". I think there's a good reason why it's such a struggle to take steps like the brilliant move Portugal made, and that is because the entire debate is focused on the harm angle. You're even doing it in making your point about what's good about what happened in Portugal. You talk about the harms that reduced. You don't or can't (and not through any fault of your own) point out that one of the biggest goods of that is that Portuguese drug takers are freed to enjoy themselves on drugs. You're even couching the discussion of freedom in terms of harm. It's not that freedom is good, it's that taking away freedom is bad. That leaves open the whole line that if you can't prove it's bad, then there's no reason not to take away the freedom. That is the default position left open. To me, the freedom is a good in itself. And it far outweighs, in the context of the cannabis debate, almost anything that comes up in the harm angle. It does this because it applies to far, far more people than get harmed by drugs. Orders of magnitude more people in the case of drugs like cannabis.
They might not be pursuing the pure laissez-faire you want, but they’re sure as hell not the enemy.
I do not want laissez-faire. I want the good from drugs to be at least a part of the discussion. There are very dangerous drugs, and there is every reason to put in all sorts of consumer protections, and to initiate programs that help these people. It's just quite astonishing how every discussion about what should be done about drugs does almost nothing to look at just how much enjoyment people get out of them. The idea that there could be government initiatives to actually make drug taking easier is completely unthinkable, where for something like sport (which also harms untold people), we have departments dedicated to promoting it. The drug taker is framed as at best someone hurting themself a little bit, at worst a junkie. That's just bullshit. It's not like that. A small fraction end up junkies. Most people just have a good time. I don't see why we have to dedicate all of the discussion to the junkies.
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Hard News: The problems inherent in the system, in reply to Russell Brown,
No, there are lots of other answers to that.
“Try to avoid or minimise use of cannabis until at least the age of 18, thereby hugely reducing the risk of future psychosis,” is one.
“Use a bong or a vapouriser,” is another.
Yup, but they're small change compared to not using it at all. Which is the money shot of minimization, to actually get to zero.
And really, I just tire of even speaking about the harm aspect of it. So what if it harms people? It also makes them feel good, and they like it. In their millions. Hundreds of millions, in fact. That's worth way, way way more than that people get a sore throat from it. Or even that some of them even die. It really is worth human life, for humans to get to live their lives how they want. For me to even want to engage with a harm minimization it has to be about a serious harm, and cannabis just isn't that. It's tiny potatoes.
And let's not kid ourselves that harm even is the motivation behind it being banned. It's just not. It's about exerting that power over others to take something away from them that they like because people like to do that to other people. It's got puritanical bullshit written all over it, and it's steeped in the hypocrisy of all those people tut-tutting it who have done plenty of it themselves, and who have sunk massive quantities of piss in their lives, wrecking their livers, ruining families, etc. Because they like it. Because both of those things make them feel good - the booze gets them drunk, and the small joy of taking away someone else's little pleasure is a naughty little joy they can all safely feel, so long as the hypocrisy of it continues to be bought wholesale. Shit on the stoners. Why not, there's not enough of them to make a difference? Have a laugh about how silly they are when they're stoned.
Just like homophobia. Laugh at the queens. It's the exact same thing at work here. We could be having this argument about the dangers of anal sex, and AIDs, and how some kids might get turned into queers if it's legal. Which all might even BE real dangers. But so what? What on earth gives us the right to concentrate on anal tearing when the very sexual identity of a segment of humanity is at stake?
I'm just not going to get dragged into being a concern troll over something like this any more. I think stoners should be out and proud and if they die of it, that's their bloody choice.
And for the record, Russell, I know you are sympathetic. I'm not addressing this as a personal criticism of you. I'm speaking to the internet here. I'm speaking to anyone who has got caught up in this game of how we can do so much to reduce this harm that is really so tiny, and so not even our business. I'm really fucking angry that we just got blanket prohibition in this country, and I think people who can't see it came about because of a basic failure of defending simple morality need to hear this. That approach will NOT get through to the people who matter. It did not get through. The reverse happened. They intensified the war on drugs, they sought the natural position of harm minimization - zero.
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But let’s not pretend there are no harms from cannabis. The question is how they can be minimised.
Nah. That's the question whose only answer is "by making cannabis use as infrequent as possible". I think it's the totally wrong question and I'm not going to go into why any more. Anyone who hasn't got it now, will never get it.
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Certainly I don't need to hear anything about a cure for my boy's troubles. The cause of most of them is clear. It's a crying shame, though, that he gets tremendous support just because what happened was an accident, when all the therapies that have done him such good are not available without huge cost to families with spectrum children just because the cause is not really known. God knows from many of the parents I've met, they need it a lot more. Not because it will "cure" their child. But because it helps them cope, and to get on and gives them tools and support and networks to deal with what will be a lifelong problem in many cases.
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