A Health Care Plan So Simple, Even A Republican Can Understand! is Ann Coulter's new article advocating the free market regarding healthcare. It's good. I have a point to add:

INSURANCE COMPANY: That will be $700 a month, the deductible is $35,000, no decent hospital will take it, and you have to pay for doctor's visits yourself. But your plan covers shrinks, infertility treatments, sex change operations, autism spectrum disorder treatment, drug rehab and 67 other things you will never need.

Unfortunately, having coverage of things you will never need isn't merely wasted money (or, essentially, hidden taxes to pay for other people). In some cases it's actively harmful. Rather than paying for zero value, it's paying for negative value.

The main issue is involuntary psychiatry. It's harder to subject people to unwanted "treatments" when you have to find someone to pay for it. The victim doesn't want to pay, the people who don't like the victim usually don't want to pay, and the mental prison won't pay. So who pays? Sometimes the government steps in to pay, but not always. You know what makes it easier to victimize someone? When the victim's insurance company pays. You can have a psychiatric "treatment" you don't want -- such as being imprisoned without a trial -- paid for by your own insurance company, against your will. Sometimes this makes the difference and gets you imprisoned when you wouldn't have been otherwise due to lack of funding.

Unfortunately, millions of Americans are harmed by psychiatrists every year, so this kind of issue is not as rare as one might wish. I provide some details on this in the next section, below.

There's also a milder scenario, which is you're pressured to see a psychiatrist. Or you're pressured to make your kid see a psychiatrist. Pressure can come from a teacher, friend, spouse or boss. Sometimes the pressure is tiny, and sometimes it's heavy pressure. And if you don't have insurance, you can use price as an excuse not to go or not to send your child. But if your insurance (or employer, school, or government) will pay, then you'll have to come up with some other reason to resist the pressure. Losing a particularly convenient, socially-acceptable excuse to say "no" will result in some unwanted trips to psychiatrists for some people.

So it's worth cash not to have psychiatric coverage. It'd be worth paying a higher monthly premium for it to exclude psychiatry coverage, if that were allowed (it's not). How much it's worth to get rid of psychiatric coverage is difficult to judge, but it's something.

It's the same with drug rehab. Suppose I took drugs for some reason, and then my friends were all pushing me to go to rehab but I wanted to quit on my own at home. The price of rehab – which my friends wouldn't want to pay – would be a good excuse that would help me resist their pressure and stay home.

I also wouldn't want coverage for any kind of "help" from social workers.

An interesting case is marital counseling. That can have value to people who go voluntarily, but it can also hurt people who are pressured into it. Even surgery depends. It's possible for a sports player to be pressured into a risky, expensive surgery that wouldn't have happened without an insurance company to pay for it.

The big picture is it's actively bad for you to have money readily available to pay for things you don't want. It's easier to avoid harm when finding money to pay for it is an extra obstacle in the way of it happening.

Also: read Thomas Szasz's short article, The Myth Of Health Insurance.

Psychiatric Harm

Just in California, there are over 300,000 involuntary psychiatric imprisonment orders per year. Many are converted to "voluntary" status because they will be locked up longer if they don't. Sucking up to one's captors is the standard path to freedom, rather than standing up for yourself. Many people are released quickly if they confess they were in the wrong and take a drug which causes brain damage.

Any time during a 72 hour hold, the doctor may arbitrarily place the victim on a 14 day hold if he wants to. At the end of the 14 day hold, the doctor may add another 30 days if he wants to. Meanwhile, family members are discouraged from showing up at all if a probable cause hearing takes place. And the probable cause "hearings" do not involve standard legal protections like excluding hearsay from counting as evidence. Victims commonly don't even get to wear normal clothes, they are forced to wear a hospital gown which is prejudicial.

In Florida, 194,354 involuntary (Baker Act) examinations were done in one year, and the number has been increasing significantly over time. This count intentionally ignores up to another 5,952 instances where the examiner forgot to write the date on the form. These involuntary examinations can last over 72 hours. This number includes children who were 22% of the victims. Roughly half of time time this is initiated by "mental health professionals", and half the time by law enforcement. Children are more likely to be victimized on school days. 22.7% more men are victimized than women, which the sexist report downplays as "slightly more" men.

The Florida numbers are substantial underestimates about psychiatry's reach. How many people say "no" to an authority when told they can agree to be examined now, and if they hesitate, are told their alternative is a legal order that they be examined anyway by a now-hostile examiner and lose their rights for 72 hours? That's common and documented.

The California Hospital Association says 4.1% of American adults are labelled seriously mentally ill per year and 58.7% of them receive some form of "treatment". After a little math, that means 6 million American adults per year are labelled seriously mentally ill and then have something done to them by psychiatry.

This is scary stuff. And there's a lot more info like it, and plenty that's worse. E.g. look up the present day use of electroshock "therapy" (torture) and lobotomy in the US. The FDA actually came out in favor of electroshock last year.

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My quick thoughts on Trump's missile attack on the Syrian airbase which Assad launched a despicable chemical weapons attack from:

Trump's attack was a pretty moderate, normal, mainstream thing to do.

It was OK, not great.

It's not what Trump said he'd do. E.g. in 2013 Trump wrote a bunch of tweets about staying out of Syria.

I'd prefer if Trump focused on his campaign promises more – destroy ISIS, get out of the Iran deal, build the wall, repeal Obamacare, and move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. None of those issues are going very well so far.

There's a selective attention issue. Why is this the right conflict to intervene in instead of a different one?

Trump and others haven't explained the self-interest of the attack in a clear, convincing way. What are the big-picture goals we're hoping to achieve by intervening? Spending $75,000,000 to help a few foreigners in the short term is bad policy which is contrary to the purpose of the US government and the purpose of our taxes.

Most people believe military actions should be proportional. That's wrong. They should involve whatever force is necessary for effective defense and resolving the problem.

It's bad to get drawn into back-and-forth tit-for-tat conflicts with only minor escalations. Ongoing fighting is awful. Instead, take little or no action until you're ready to go all-out and win. Trump's strike isn't anything like a last warning or second-to-last warning. It was just a response and Trump has threatened to do more small responses if Assad behaves badly again. That's a bad approach. (But note also that it's a moderate, mainstream approach. I'm the one who is out of the mainstream in my views here.)

If you're going to get involved in military conflict at all, there should be a plan to win in a fast, brutal, one-sided, non-proportional manner which is either pursued immediately or else threatened and ready. If you're just bluffing and have no plan for winning, stay out of it.

People are often nervous, defensive and stressed out about flaws they have.

For example: they are short, they have a small dick, their breasts are too small, they weigh too much, they have a blemish...

If everything else goes well, many of these issues frequently wouldn't matter to their date. But people bring up their own flaws and then act weird about them. The social awkwardness of saying, "I know I'm too fat but please don't be a bigot against me" is a much bigger problem than an extra 10 pounds. Saying, "I'm going to warn you in advance that I have a small dick, but I'll be really try-hard to make up for it." is even worse. (They don't say "try-hard" in those words, but they say stuff which has this meaning and is unattractive for this reason.)

It's ironic because people create their own disasters by awkwardly drawing attention to their own flaws. Then they take that as evidence their flaws are a big deal, deal breakers even, and so they're even more worried the next time.

If you don't bring up a flaw, a lot of times it will never be brought up. Relax and focus on stuff that matters, not "flaws" that aren't even a big deal you're just worried the other person will care about. If you don't want someone to care about something, don't start talking about it!

The same issue comes up in other contexts. Don't have a lot of work experience when applying for a job? Or maybe you haven't already done work exactly identical to what this job involves. Or you had a 2 month break between jobs. Or you got a B in a relevant university class. Or you and your previous boss didn't get along. In general, don't mention it. Don't start objecting to yourself and telling them reasons not to hire you. Address it briefly if they bring it up, but often they won't.

People go on vacations and enjoy them. But they routinely mix up several different benefits, some of which are unrelated to traveling and staying at a hotel somewhere.

Traveling to a place with something good about it (sunny beaches, museums you want to visit, etc) is one benefit of vacations.

Not working for a while is another benefit. People have more free time while on vacation. You'd still get this benefit if you took the same time off work but stayed home.

Another reason people like vacations is they spend more money. Not just on travel and the hotel, but also on food, spas, massages, entertainment and conveniences (to save time or hassle at the cost of money). They are less frugal about buying luxuries while on vacation. It's a common mistake to attribute some of the fun of this additional purchasing to travel. They could stay home but go to nice restaurants for a week and buy some other stuff they want, like they would on vacation, but without also buying a plane flight and hotel room.

I consider vacations (and travel) overrated. There are some good things about them, but try not to mentally bundle everything together. Recognize that you could do some of the stuff you do on vacation (take time off work, spend more money on your happiness for a week) without traveling, and save a lot of money, and it'd be better and more convenient in some ways. (Your home is nicer to stay in than a hotel room unless it's really expensive, and even then your home has all your stuff. And you have your car if you stay home.)

Alan Forrester wrote in a discussion of multiple universe quantum physics and David Deutsch's books:

The stuff [in the multiverse] doesn’t come from anywhere. There is a continuous infinity of fungible frogs, like the real number line. That continuous infinity of fungible frogs differentiates over time. The number of instances of frogs doesn’t increase or decrease as a result of the differentiation. You’re just taking the set that already exists and dividing it up. The same amount of stuff exists before and after a division.

And Justin Mallone asked:

I've found stuff involving infinity really difficult to wrap my brain around in a way I felt like I could understand and explain and apply. This post reminded me of that fact.

And I don't have trouble understanding complex concepts generally, so I assume I have some systematic mistake or set of mistakes I'm making in my thinking about infinity in particular, but I don't know what it is.

I can easily conceive of some actual set number of universes differentiating many times. Like you have 1024 universes, and they differentiate in some way where something happens in half the universes and something doesn't happen in half the universes (lets call the thing Event A or something). And then you look at the 512 Event A universes and something happens in 3/4 of them (Event B) and so you have 384 Event A + B Universes, 128 Event A Only Universes, and 512 No Event Universes. And on and on.

But the endless differentiation of infinities of universes seems weird to me. I guess cuz one of the things about the sort of differentiation I was just describing is that you can easily assess the ratios of stuff happening in them. You can think of stuff in terms of probability of happening across the set of universes you're considering -- like above you could say it's equally likely that neither Event occurs and that at least 1 Event occurs.

But doing that with infinity seems harder. If you differentiate an infinite set of universes in some way, you still have an infinity after the differentiation, although both are smaller (?!) than the infinity that you had before the differentiation. What??? 樂

To compare sizes of sets you need ways to measure the sets.

For finite sets a standard measure is the integer number of elements.

It's not the only measure people care about. Another thing you can do is weight the elements of the set and then measure the total weights of the sets and compare that. This kind of comparison can be more useful. E.g. you could look at the total weight of the set if you were looking at carrying sets of tools in a backpack. In that case, volume would be an issue too. And you could come up with measures of the utility of each tool and add up the total utility of each set.

Real scenarios are often more complicated than easy-to-calculate measures. Just because your tools have X total volume, and your backpack has X+1 total volume doesn't mean they will fit. One could be too long, or there could be no way to pack them together without empty space in gaps between some tools. And the utility of a set of tools isn't just the sum of the utilities of the individual tools. If a screwdriver is 4 utility, that doesn't mean 2 of that screwdriver is 8 utility. And nails have more utility if you also have a hammer.

The utility of a set of tools is too complex an issue for people to define a measurement function that's very accurate, so they do critical thinking instead (which may involve some utility measures as loose approximations). The weight and volume issues are both simple enough someone could do a good job defining it and inputting their measurement function into a computer which would accurately calculate it. This isn't trivial but it's doable today and people could get good, useful results with it. Companies like FedEx have computer programs that worry about packing objects into spaces and considering weight and volume. FedEx cares especially about putting boxes into cargo holds of trucks and planes. And there are mathematicians who like to calculate how to tightly pack spheres and other shapes into spaces with the least wasted volume, and they know some stuff about how to do that.

So some facts:

• You can define dozens (or trillions) of different measures on one set. You can measure the same set multiple ways.

• Some measures are more useful to human concerns than others. Some are harder to measure than others.

• There is no canonical single measure for sets provided by the universe's instruction manual. There isn't like the one objective measure. There are often a variety of worthwhile measures for a set, and also many, many more arbitrary and dumb measures.

• Some measures help address many different human problems, as well as more important problems. Their reach is a sign of their objective value.

• Inches and meters are measures created by humans to help solve human problems. They are relatively useful and objectively valuable compared to many other measures.

• Quantity is a more complex measure than people take for granted, and it's not really a singular measure across all types of sets. In order to measure quantity of iPhones you need a definition of what sets of molecules constitute one iPhone. Then if you want to measure quantity of hammers, you need a totally different definition of what is one hammer. Quantity is only measurable with a supplemental function defining what is "one" of something, and that supplemental function varies for different objects. This complexity is something humans take for granted as common sense

OK now let's talk about numbers.

Different infinite sets can be measured and get different results.

You can look at infinite sets and measure them as "Is it finite or infinite?" and come to the conclusion "infinite" for all of them, and think they're the same.

But there are other measures. The set of all real numbers has more stuff in it than the set of all integers, even though they're both infinite. This fact is then actually used for measuring other infinite sets -- is it the same size as all integers, or all reals, or something else?

The way to compare infinite sets is to consider whether there is a mapping that puts the sets in one-to-one correspondence.

I will show you a mapping from the set of all integers to the set of all odd integers. This shows they are the same size! (Same size according to the normal, useful way mathematicians measure infinite sets.)

The mapping function is: n*2-1

You take an integer, n, and you double it and subtract 1. Now you have an odd number, m.

This is a one-to-one correspondence. No m repeats and no m is left out. You can pick any odd number m and find that there is exactly one integer n which corresponds to it via this mapping function.

The function is also reversible and the reverse gets you a one-to-one complete correspondence from odd integers to integers. You just take an odd integer, add 1 and halve it and boom you've got an integer. And you can get any integer by doing this.

BTW you only need to find one mapping function to make your point. There are other mapping functions which work just as well. Such as n*2-27. That also maps integers to odd integers with complete one-to-one correspondence.

This set mapping stuff is counter-intuitive because people initially feel like there are twice as many integers as odd integers, so the measure should say it's twice as big. But this measure says they are the same size! Yet this is the measure that's actually useful, has reach, has lots of objective value, is used in math a bunch. You could define some measures which assign an integer size to infinite sets and assigns twice as large an integer to the integers as the odds, but that's either not useful or sufficiently obscure/niche that I'm not familiar with it.

And people feel like you would run out of odd integers when trying to have one odd integer for every integer. And you would with finite sets. There are twice as many integers from 1-100 as odd integers in that range. And the same goes for 1 to a trillion.

But you don't run out of numbers with infinite sets. That you're mapping 101 to 50 and 10001 to 5000 is not a problem. You can just keep going up and never run out of odd integers to map to all the integers. I think the best way to look at this is just that you can pick any integer and clearly see there is exactly one odd integer it corresponds to with our mapping.

A complete one-to-one correspondence means sets are the same size in some meaningful sense. It's like putting one set on the left, one on the right, and drawing a line between every element on the left to every element on the right. And every single element in each set has exactly one line connecting it to the other set. Just like if I have 4 goats and you have 4 cows and we drew 4 lines and saw our sets of animals were the same size. But if you had 5 cows then we couldn't draw lines in this way, you'd have an extra cow with no line touching it, or else i'd have a goat with 2 lines touching it.

There is no one-to-one correspondence from the integers to the reals, which is why the reals are considered a bigger set. That thing you can do to correspond odds to integers is not possible with integers to reals. That makes reals a bigger set than integers in a way which integers aren't bigger than odds. And this particular way of measuring set size turns out to be valuable, useful, helpful -- it's a good way to think about things for many purposes.

You're having trouble because you're using your intuitions about quantity measures of finite sets, including I presume that there's only one way to measure a set.

Physicists have a measure of infinite sets of universes. The results are fractions like 0.2 or 0.01. And it means what you would expect: e.g. you measure the universes where event A happens, get 0.5, and that means it happened in 50% of universes.

You could measure as a fraction of the whole multiverse but you normally don't want to. You can also measure as a fraction of a region of the multiverse, like the ones where you exist and are doing this experiment at this time and everything else is the same too. Then of those initially identical universes, you end up with 3 sets of universes and one has a measure of .5 and one has a measure of .375 and one has .125 (these are the numbers from Justin's example quoted above for No Event, A Event Only and A+B Events.)

How can an infinite set get a finite measure? Well it's just like if there were hypothetically infinite points in an inch, it could still be measured as one inch. And another distance could be two inches, and they both have infinite points but there's still this useful measure in which one is twice as long as the other. Current physics doesn't say an inch of space is infinitely divisible into infinite points, but that is a familiar classical physics scenario which people's intuitions don't struggle with so much.

Anyway this stuff is really confusing without the right background knowledge: having some general understanding of sets, measures, mappings, infinite sets, etc. So this should help give you some leads to think about and lead to some followup questions.

BTW I don't even know where this stuff is taught or good books explain it. I learned most of this from David Deutsch personally.

PS I am not an expert on math or physics terminology and may have used a technical term a little bit wrong or omitted a technical term that is normally used. I've tried to focus on clearly and understandably presenting useful, important concepts.

Most people don't like being told "no".

It's common that people ignore a request instead of refusing. They say nothing instead of "no". Especially online. In person sometimes it's hard to say nothing so they change the topic, or some something unclaer, or say "maybe" (then don't do it), rather than clearly saying "no".

In Overwatch, people commonly ask you to switch to a different hero. If you reply, "no" you're giving them useful information. You aren't going to change, so maybe someone else should consider changing. Knowing what you're going to do lets people synergize with it better. But people get angry if you say "no" and take it better if you silently ignore them. If you refuse them they feel challenged and confronted and try to fight with you. But if you're silent then you haven't challenged their right to order you around, and haven't confronted them socially, and they don't have anything to fight over. You appear the coward. And what happened is ambiguous. Maybe you're having problems with your headphones and didn't even hear them.

I prefer the type of people who say "no" instead of being silent. But most people are the silent coward types, and most people dislike it if you say "no" as if you have a right to say it and it's a valid, reasonable decision. People want conflict to be hidden in general. If I say "no" it's obvious we disagree, you want me to do X and I refuse. Silence hides the conflict better.

Passivity is immoral but normal. Asserting yourself stands out more. Communicating provides useful information, and silence is ambiguous – but people don't care much about that, they care about social status and interaction.

People are frequently silent because it's easier. Why go to the trouble of saying "no" – even if it's useful information – when people will hassle you for it? This is unfortunate. It'd be better if people communicated more honestly and weren't punished for it.