I don't think proximate causes are a good basis for societal decisions - for example many people blame poverty on bad decision making but that neglects previous generational disadvantages that could affect genetics (e.g. lead poisoning related to redlining) and it overlooks that people grow up in different environments. This seems like it's basically an excuse for people to not care about the bad effects of a system they're participating in by saying "don't worry this isn't your concern you can just blame those people".

I think a lot of this boils down to a free will argument. While that's still ultimately up in the air, if we're looking at necessary and sufficient conditions then it seems like there's more evidence that we don't have free will than that we do. I think the "necessary and sufficient" relationship for free will would be that free will exists if we could have made a different decision than one that we did, and we don't have any way to test for that.

In the absence of free will people are just a result of their starting point and environment afterwards, and thus don't have a reason to claim disproportionate ownership over the output of that larger system.

Don't want this to come off as combative - I'm super interested in debate on this! I'd love to be proven wrong but it seems like we don't have free will so I feel like it's generally a mistake to try to organize society as if we did. I wasn't really aiming for a counterfactual argument, but how was this a "bad" counterfactual? It was definitely hyperbolic but meant to show in an extreme that the principles would still hold true and that someone wouldn't be able to claim ownership over the output. I feel like we probably just disagree on the axiom of free will but feel free to correct me!

We also have plenty of equally verified accounts of virgin births from other religions going back even further than Jesus. So if we're believing any claims of virgin birth followed by claims of miracles, then the Christian god must surely be lying by saying they're the only god

This seems like a nice little summary of all the other similar claims: https://www.smh.com.au/national/there-s-nothing-new-about-vi...

> Claims of divine intervention aside, virgin births may have a more human explanation – a tragic demonstration of the extreme measures women have been forced to take to save themselves and their reputations.

God also murders tons of people in the bible without consulting them, which definitely cannot be done while also respecting their free will

> "You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus"

It's nice that she accepts it afterwards, but that's definitely not how consent works, and it doesn't seem like she was given any other option

Edit: I saw your other comment saying "there's other evidence of god respecting free will and he probably would have been fine with it if she didn't want to". The bible is full of contradictions so there may be evidence of a respect for free will somewhere else, but this specific story seems to contradict that

However you end up is a combination of genes and environment - neither of which you have any control over. I don't see why someone should have full rights over whatever their output is when they have no control over the input. If someone has a great idea that can double food production - they owe all the money and food to the society because they would not have had the idea or been able to implement it otherwise. The public could then decide they should get a larger share for some reason(we generally do this with tax policy), but I don't see how they could have any moral claim to it

Changing that in isolation would almost definitely have an effect where low income families can't afford college. I see that as a gap the govt should be filling either through public colleges or directly funding people to go to school, probably both. The core issue I see here is we're letting private companies make bad investments without liability, into something that probably shouldn't be profit-driven to start with

If I give you two loan options with bad terms and you have to choose one, then that is a fiscal policy thing and your choice is ultimately pretty inconsequential. You may be slightly better off than the person who made the other choice but the bad policy is affecting both of you.

Ultimately it's both a policy and a personal choice thing, but as with most society-wide issues the personal choice aspect falls away pretty quickly and we need to get realistic and figure out what a solution is instead of just blaming individuals.

It doesn't really matter what students "prefer", if a bank doesn't do their due diligence and a student isn't able to repay their loan, then the bank should be losing that money as a bad investment. They won't give a $1M mortgage loan to buy a 50k lot, and likewise won't give it to someone that doesn't seem like they could pay it back. I do think there's value in people getting degrees that don't pay well - but then you shouldn't be getting a loan to do so.

> students would be paying whatever Harvard or Stanford asked

I don't think this is true - people simply can't go to a school they can't afford and people don't have infinite money. We gave the banks the freedom to tell children that they will indeed be able to pay back loans that they often cannot, so it's the bad actions of one organization(banks) enabling another(school). Ivy league schools may be like Veblen goods where increased prices also increase demand - but that can't be true for all schools and we've seen tuition increases across the board.

The solution that seems best to me is to first fix the bankruptcy issue - if someone can't pay back a loan that is a risk the bank is accepting by giving the loan, just like any other loan. I think that alone would probably have enough of a chilling effect that way less people would be able to attend colleges at first and they would be forced to lower tuition rates. That would correct the market going forward, but it doesn't really help people that already fell victim to this system. That seems like it could be remedied by either making interest rates 0 or capping total interest to some amount relative to the principal (e.g. the total amount can never grow to more than 110% of the principal).

Similar to healthcare, I don't think education shouldn't be profitable in the short term - it's a long term investment a society has to make in itself so you can't really track it as an individual investment in any one person. If someone else becomes a doctor I'm still benefitting from that so it makes sense that I'd pay into some of the cost to educate that person. Unfortunately in the US at least we seem to be totally unable to do anything without a short-term and concrete path to profit regardless of the amount of good it would do.

I'm not prepared to defend this but that's the view - if you have a system of governance it isn't anarchy so if the argument is "all systems of governance are at least partially involuntary" then that may be true but doesn't say anything related to anarchy

I haven't actually seen the numbers before but this is pretty absurd:

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...

> Globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion (6.3 percent of global GDP) in 2015 and are projected at $5.2 trillion (6.5 percent of GDP) in 2017

> coal and petroleum together account for 85 percent of global subsidies

I think we're in agreement that a depressed person generally doesn't want to be cheered up and won't be receptive to it, so you can be positive as much as you want and it won't do much.

I've been on both sides of this, and as the depressed person it seems most helpful to remember that I need to put in the extra effort to try to be positive especially when I don't want to. And as the partner it's helpful to remember that you need to create some separation so you don't get too pulled in and then are unable to help in any way.

I'd also add that (again maybe just for me) it's a way more helpful way to view it. It helps me recognize when I need to just go through the motions of being positive until I can get back to doing it naturally. It usually feels a lot better in the moment to focus on the negatives but somewhere in my head I know that's not going to help me.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-the-myers-b... For background - the test was created by a mother-daughter team who were authors but with no background in psychology. They were inspired to create the test, but they couldn't convince any psychologists it was legitimate so they instead sold it to businesses as a way to assess employee strengths and weaknesses.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/myers-briggs-test

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/myers-briggs-personality-test... > As Emre explains, the test has become part of our neoliberal discourse about making yourself into a commodity, selling your personality, loving what you do > It seems their ideas about personality and gender made them blind to structural problems so that they saw gender inequality as an individual problem.

Kinda unrelated to this discussion, but there's also this darker side to all these personality tests where they encourage people to fit into a certain role because it benefits a company and not because it's who they really are.