H1B Visas

H1B visas allow immigrants for filling high tech jobs. They're getting attention currently from anti-immigration presidential candidates like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

Some right wing people like the idea of H1B visas, contrary to the Republican presidential candidates. H1B visas sound compatible with the free market. What's wrong with educated immigrants coming here to work? Isn't that part of free trade? Doesn't capitalism mean competing in a global marketplace?

A fired Disney employee gave emotional testimony about the H1B program recently. He said Disney workers were forced to train foreigners to replace them at their jobs with threats of withholding their severance pay if they didn't do it. And they were lied to about the availability of other Disney jobs to transfer to.

A lot of people are upset. Some libertarians don't care. They say, "Too bad, anyone should be able to be fired for no reason at any time".

I looked at how H1B visas work. To bring in foreign workers, you have to agree to pay them market wages and you aren't allowed to displace American workers from their jobs.

Disney brought in foreign labor as a cost cutting measure. They wanted to fire Americans and pay the new workers less money. This is a blatant abuse of the H1B program. Whatever you think immigration policy should be, it's bad when companies break the law.

The H1B visa program is only meant to bring in workers for tech jobs that a company couldn't find an American to do. The point is not to get cheaper labor, it's to get labor at all when there's a shortage. Disney is abusing the spirit of the program and violating the clearly written terms of how this law works.

None of this is ambiguous. Let me show you some of the conditions involved with bringing in H1B workers:

Labor Condition Application for Nonimmigrant Workers ETA Form 9035 & 9035E

Wages: Pay nonimmigrants at least the local prevailing wage or the employer’s actual wage, whichever is higher, and pay for non-productive time. Offer nonimmigrants benefits on the same basis as offered to U.S. workers.

Displacement: Non-displacement of the U.S. workers in the employer’s workforce

Secondary Displacement: Non-displacement of U.S. workers in another employer’s workforce

Recruitment and Hiring: Recruitment of U.S. workers and hiring of U.S. workers applicant(s) who are equally or better qualified

If you want more of the fine print, look here.

Finally, I want to explain, from a free market capitalist perspective, why the H1B visa program is crony capitalism, not free market competition.

Capitalists might think, "if the foreigners will work for lower wages, that's a good thing and they should be hired".

But, workers who come here with the H1B program can't really change jobs. They are stuck with the company sponsoring their H1B visa. So they don't get to freely compete on the market, and therefore they get underpaid.

US citizenship has value. The H1B program lets some government-favored companies hand out valuable US citizenships – which the company is given for free – and then pocket that value in lower wages paid to the immigrants. And that's in addition to the lower wages they can pay to people for the several years where firing them would mean they get deported.

American workers cannot compete on wages with workers who are underpaid because they can't change jobs, and who take lower pay in return for immigrating. That isn't an ideal of capitalism, it's government distorting market wages. And it's a way for companies with friends in the government to get ahead – crony capitalism.

Edit: My mistake: H1B is a temporary work permit. It can last for 3-10 years but they don't get citizenship. Consequently it's called a non-immigrant visa. Thanks Justin.

This doesn't substantially change any of my arguments. A permit for staying in the US has value, just as handing out a citizenship would. And with the H4 visa, they can bring in their wife and kids, who may be able to work or go to school in the US too, while the H1B visa lasts.

H1B workers still have less job mobility than domestic workers.

And people here on an H1B visa are allowed to seek a green card and try to stay permanently. It can be a step which helps them immigrate. Wikipedia says:

Even though the H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa, it is one of the few visa categories recognized as dual intent, meaning an H-1B holder can have legal immigration intent (apply for and obtain the green card) while still a holder of the visa. In the past the employment-based green card process used to take only a few years, less than the duration of the H-1B visa itself. However, in recent times the legal employment-based immigration process has backlogged and retrogressed to the extent that it now takes many years for guest-work visa holders from certain countries to obtain green cards. Since the duration of the H-1B visa hasn't changed, this has meant that many more H-1B visa holders must renew their visas in one or three-year increments for continued legal status while their green card application is in process.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (5)

Having Reasons

People on FI were discussing having reasons for things and saying it was justificationist and you should only worry about whether there is a negative problem with something, not a positive reason for something.

If someone asks why you're doing something, that isn't bad. It's good to have some concept of what you're doing, and why. What problem are you trying to solve and how will this solve it?

If you can't answer – if you can't say any reasons for what you're doing – prima facie there is a criticism there. Why don't you know in words what's going on? Why are you choosing to do it?

This is not unanswerable. But you should have an answer. If you can't say any reasons for what you're doing and you also don't have an answer to why you're doing it anyway (to address the kinda default well known criticism that knowing what problem you're trying to solve and how this will solve it is generally a pretty good idea), then that's bad. You should either have a reason you can say, or a reason to do it without a reason you can say.

If you can't say a reason to do it without a reason which you can say, what about a reason for doing it without that? Whatever you don't have, you could have a reason for doing it despite not having that.

The point is, you ought to be able to say something of some sort. If you can't, there is a criticism – that you have no idea what you're doing. (If you can argue against that – if you do have some idea what you're doing – then you could have said that info in the first place when questioned.)

I'm not convinced the quotes are substantively justificationist. And I'm really not convinced by like, "Don't ask reasons for doing stuff, only point out criticisms." Doing stuff for no reason is a criticism. In general people ought to do stuff to solve problems, and have some concept of how doing this will solve a problem they want to solve. If they aren't doing that, that isn't necessarily bad but they should have some idea of why it makes sense to do something else in this case.

You can't even criticize stuff in the usual way if you don't know what their goal is. You normally criticize stuff by whether it solves the problem it's aiming to. But if you don't know what they are aiming for, then you can't criticize in the normal way of pointing out a difference between the results you think they'll get and the results they are aiming for.

And if they can tell you a goal, or a problem they want to solve, then they do have a reason for doing it. They are doing it to accomplish that goal / solve that problem.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (4)

Automizing

Objectivism discusses automizing the use of your ideas. For example, you automized walking. You can walk without consciously thinking about it. Walking works automatically. Walking is actually pretty complex and involves moving multiple muscles and balancing, but you can do all that automatically. Pretty cool!

Some people think automizing sounds mindless and are wary of it. What if I automate how I handle a situation and then I keep doing the same actions over and over without thinking? How do you automatize anything without losing control over your life?

Let's step back. There's a simple concept here. You do some stuff and the first time it takes time, effort, attention, work. But if you do it often, you learn how to do it easier. This frees up effort for other stuff. Learning better ways to do things, that consume less resources, isn't bad. That isn't losing control over your life.

You need to make good choices about what to use when. If you have a method of doing something without thinking about it consciously, that's a good tool. You can still choose when to use this method, or not. If you know how to clean your house without thinking about it (letting you focus on listening to audiobooks), that doesn't make you clean your house. You still get to control your life and choose if and when to clean.

People's methods of doing something – automatic or not – can be used as building blocks. You use the walking method while doing cleaning. The cleaning method involves doing multiple simpler methods together. (If you're a programmer, think of these as functions. You can build a cleaning function out of a walking function, a looking around function, an identifying dirt from visual data function, and so on. You would not want to write a cleaning function only in terms of basic actions like moving individual muscles.)

People build up many layers of complexity. They automate things like a life schedule, and routine cleaning, and routine cooking and eating for mealtimes, and so on. Those automizations threaten their control over their life. They get so set in their ways, they have trouble choosing whether to keep doing that. The problem here isn't automization itself. It's having a bland repetitive life and basically habitually not thinking. That's a totally different sort of thing than creating building block methods – like walking, or cleaning – to use in your life or in other methods. And figuring out how to do them better, faster, easier.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (2)

Pragmatism

A lot of pragmatism is because people lose arguments but still disagree. They don't know how to deny the truth of an idea, but they still don't want to do it.

There is a gap between the knowledge they live by and the knowledge they use in debates. The knowledge applied to debates is what they call ivory tower abstractions, and the knowledge applied to life they call pragmatic.

This gap is a very very bad thing.

This separation results in lots of bad intellectual ideas that contradict reality. And lots of bad life choices that contradict principles and logic, e.g. by being superstitious.

Being able to speak intelligently about your life knowledge allows for getting advice and learning from criticism. Being able to apply abstract knowledge to life allows for using the scientific method, free trade, or successfully finding a book in a Dewey Decimal organized library.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (7)

Watching The World Burn

While watching men burn the world, sometimes i wonder why they do that and if there's some way to persuade them to change. I wrote a dialog about it:

curi: doesn't that hurt?
Mark: what?
curi: the fire
Mark: what fire?
curi: you're burning off your legs
Mark: no i'm not
curi: you can't walk anymore
Mark: sure i can
curi: then walk 10 feet, show me
Mark: later, i'm tired
curi: [astonished] you lie so much!
Mark: why are you so mean and critical and negative?
curi: such a better life is possible. you could walk and produce instead of putting all your effort into destroying yourself and your children
Mark: i'm happy, my life is pretty great, go bother someone else
curi: you burned off your legs!
Mark: so what? it's a sexy new look
curi: that's not a pretty great life. that's not happiness
Mark: i think i know more about my feelings than you do
curi: can i help? would you like some medicine?
Mark: no
curi: why not?
Mark: i have my own vision and goals. go live your own life and stop trying to control me. and what do you have against fire or pain anyway? my kids LOVE them, which proves how rational fire and pain are, since kids are born without all the hangups adults like you have.
curi: would you be willing to read a book and reconsider?
Mark: [doesn't reply]

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (5)

Ann Coulter's Bad Scholarship

Ann Coulter tweeted:

Professor whose statistical model predicted every election since 1912: Odds Of President Trump Range Btwn 97% & 99%-http://bit.ly/1p63RMW

After my previous positive reviews of her book scholarship, I wanted to highlight how atrocious this is. Let's look over the article:

Political Science Professor: Odds Of President Trump Range BETWEEN 97% AND 99%

The model has been correct for every election since 1912 except for the 1960 election

Ann said "every election". Did she even read the article? What a travesty.

Specifically, Norpoth predicts that Trump has a 97 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton and a 99 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders.

The predictions assume Trump will actually become the 2016 presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

So it doesn't predict either primary. It only predicts Trump is 97-99% to become president if you throw in the big assumption that he's literally 100% likely to win the Republican primary.

So that's two major factual errors in Ann's tweet.

Besides getting the basic facts wrong, twice, there's also the issue that the article and prediction model are utter crap.

“When I started out with this kind of display a few months ago, I thought it was sort of a joke,” the professor told the alumni audience

You know what would have been impressive? If the prediction model was published in 1911.

Instead it was worked out a few months ago and has never actually predicted anything? It's really easy to "predict" past data. It's called back-fitting and it's well known. Making a formula to fit past data is completely different than making successful predictions about the future.

(That it was back-fitting, not prediction, was predictable to me before I even clicked the article. Ann should have known better even if she literally didn't read a single word of the article.)

Norpoth, a 1974 University of Michigan Ph.D. recipient who specializes in electoral behavior alignment, said his crystal ball also shows a 61-percent chance that the Republican nominee — Trump or not — will win the 2016 presidential election.

Wait what? This is pretty incoherent. These numbers do not make sense. For this math to add up – around 98% chance for Trump to win if he's the nominee, and 61% chance for any Republican to win – requires Trump to have only around a 60% chance to be the nominee (if the other Republican candidates are somehow all around 0% likely to win the general election) or less.

I also checked out the Daily Caller's source:

Political science professor forecasts Trump as general election winner

“You think ‘This is crazy. How can anything come up with something like that?’ ” Norpoth said “But that’s exactly the kind of equation I used to predict Bill Clinton winning in ‘96, that I used to predict that George Bush would win in 2004, and, as you remember four years ago, that Obama would win in 2012.”

Note the wording, "the kind of equation". So he made up a new equation just now. He's made up other equations in the past. He keeps changing them each time, rather than re-using an equation that's ever predicted anything.

In contrast, Norpoth forecasted that a hypothetical presidential race with Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio on the Republican ticket would be a much closer race. The results showed Clinton with a 55 percent chance of winning the race against Cruz or Rubio with a 0.3 percent lead in the popular vote.

So Trump needs to have a very low chance to win the GOP primary for the math to work out. Meanwhile the prediction model saying he'll win the general election is based on him doing so well in the primaries! This is all a bunch of contradictory nonsense.

And Ann Coulter is promoting this utter nonsense on Twitter while making factual errors. This fits her recent pattern of saying anything – even stupid and dishonest things – that are on Trump's side. :(

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (2)

Popper and Brainstorming

I got a Critical Rationalism (CR, aka Popperian Epistemology) question today about how conjecturing/brainstorming/guessing works. I'd already given an initial answer that people already know how to brainstorm, so what's the problem? But there was further concern about a missing piece in CR.

I've seen questions like this before. They involve a misunderstanding of epistemology. People are looking for theory of epistemology to be a standalone complete framework, rather than a collection of useful knowledge.

CR takes human knowledge and adds and subtracts some things. It does not replace all existing knowledge from the ground up.

This is really important. I've seen a lot of questions about CR and *stuff people already know how to do*. And questions about CR not being totally complete instructions for every detail of how to do things.

It's not supposed to replace your life. It's supposed to augment your life.

CR doesn't teach you how to type. You already know how to type. But not perfectly. No one here is a perfect typist. And I'll bet some people here actually make frequent typing errors, press some keys with the wrong fingers, need to look at their keyboard sometimes while typing, etc

Nevertheless, CR leaves your typing skill alone. It doesn't offer a new and better way to type. Your typing may be imperfect, but CR isn't trying to help with it and make it better. (At least not in any direct way. Indirectly CR helps with everything.)

You already know English. Your grasp of English has various flaws. Nevertheless, CR largely leaves it alone. CR does not try to replace your knowledge of English with a better understanding.

CR builds on top of pre-existing flawed knowledge you have – like typing and English.

In the case of English, CR does give a few tips, changes, and improvements. E.g. CR offers some clarifications on the meanings of "science", "justified true belief", "positivism", "induction", "authority", "rational" and "knowledge".

With brainstorming or other guessing/conjecturing, it's a pre-existing skill you already had before you'd ever heard of CR. Like English and typing. (For most people).

CR does offer some tips, changes, and improvements for how to brainstorm. But CR does not offer a from-the-ground-up replacement. Why would it? Your ability to brainstorm ideas, while imperfect, does basically work. Yes people get stuck in some ways (and a lot of the tips, both from CR and other places are directed at that). But the big picture is you can think and don't need that to be replaced anymore than you need a replacement for your knowledge of English.

Take what you already have and improve it and solve problems with it. But just look for reforms, not a fully-formed complete replacement.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Abortion and Planned Parenthood

In US politics, pro-life people hate Planned Parenthood, and pro-choice people defend it.

Last night in the GOP primary debate, Donald Trump (who now claims to be pro-life, despite past statements that he's very pro-choice) got criticized for his support of Planned Parenthood. After calling Ted Cruz a liar, Trump bizarrely continued by saying that Planned Parenthood does wonderful things, thus freshly demonstrating that Cruz is right.

I've heard a lot of right-wing atheists, like many libertarians, complain about Republican opposition to abortion. It's a big sticking point that lures them leftward. What I don't hear them talk about as much is that Planned Parenthood should not receive taxpayer funding; that violates the proper role of government and taxes. But what I really don't see them saying is that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization.

Contrary to the typical dynamics, I'm pro-abortion and anti-Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood is not just a "neutral organization that provides abortions and other health services", as many people seem to imagine (without having done any research). It's a radical (and powerful) leftist institution which actively promotes evil agendas.

Planned Parenthood was founded by the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger. Why? Because she disliked human beings. She liked abortion because she wanted fewer black, poor and stupid people to exist. She wanted to control and limit the human population and get rid of the types of people she considered undesirable. She also advocated sterilizing people and contraceptives. Abortion was one more tactic designed to promote the agenda of population control and race purification.

(This stuff is not controversial or seriously disputed. Research it if you're curious.)

The "pro-choice" position is disgusting. The issue is: is abortion murder? To reply to that with "it's a woman's choice" is absolutely stunning. Everyone should find this shocking and appalling.

The only defensible pro-abortion answer could be, "No, abortion is not murder."

I don't want to debate all the details and get into exactly where the line should be, but I will now tell you why I favor abortions in the first trimester:

I don't believe in God or the soul. I consider that mysticism. I look at the issue scientifically.

For murder to take place, there must be a human being which is murdered. I don't think a sperm or egg is a human being. And nor do I think an embryo is a human being.

What would it take for me to believe there is a human being capable of being murdered? At minimum, it would have to have a brain which has some electrical activity. Without the physical existence of a brain, which is doing something, there cannot be a human mind. And without a mind, there's no person. No mind means no consciousness. No mind means no one there to have preferences, to think, to say "I", to want to live.

I've noticed a lot of Democrat politicians say they are "personally against abortion", but want it to be legal. They also say they'd like abortion to be "safe, legal and rare". My question is: why?

If abortion isn't murder, then why are you personally against it? If abortion isn't murder, why do you want it to be rare?

What claims are there about abortion being bad, other than the issue of murder? What anti-abortion ideas do these people believe? In what non-murder way is abortion bad? They never explain and this has never made any sense.

The exceptions that even many pro-life people make to allow abortion are weird. Suppose that human life begins at conception and abortion is murder:

If abortion is murder, why should being raped make murder acceptable? Why should incest justify murder? If that's a human being in the womb, it doesn't matter how it got there, and how unwanted it may be, it's absolutely not OK to murder it.

The life of the mother exception is the only one that makes any sense. If the mother's life is in danger, then you'd have a consideration (a human life) that could actually matter when discussing killing a human being in the womb.

Some pro-life people would ask me: "How confident are you in your science? Do you really want to risk it? What's so great about abortion to be worth the risk that it's murder? Why not just let this issue go?"

The answer is that abortion is important. Having a child is a huge change to the life of the mother and father. Parenting is a really big deal. It absolutely makes enough difference for the abortion issue to be worth exploring.

Not everyone wants to have a child. And people who do want one may want their child later. And that's good. People are right to decide if and when they should start a family. Making good decisions about that is a big deal. Parenthood should indeed be "planned"! It deserves thought, organization, and being with the right co-parent.

Abortion can enable choosing a different person to marry who you get along with better. It can enable finishing your education. It can enable having a savings and keeping your finances under control your whole life, rather than having a kid early and struggling with money for decades. These are a big deal.

Abortion helps prevent the unfortunate situation of a man paying child support and a stressed single mom trying to cope. That's not a good situation. It happens. Abortions let some people avoid that fate.

Abortions make a big positive difference in some people's lives.

You may ask: Why can't people just use contraceptives? Aren't the people getting abortions irresponsible?

Contraceptives are not 100% effective. But, yes, many people getting abortions are irresponsible. So what? If you want to work to teach people to think better, live more responsibly, etc, go right ahead. That'd be great. Not letting them get an abortion will not help them.

You may ask: Do some people use abortion as a backup plan to help enable a more promiscuous lifestyle? Does it contribute to cads and sluts having drunken parties, rather than doing something more worthwhile with their time?

Yes. But the potential misuse of a technology is no reason to ban it. Medical technology, like plaster casts to help heal broken bones, enable people to be more reckless in their lives, but it's still a good thing.

You may ask: Why can't they just be abstinent if they aren't prepared to be a parent?

It's a matter of freedom. Many people have different values than you. Some live sinfully. Some live pretty responsibly but do have pre-marital sex.

On the premise that abortion isn't murder, then: it's a technology which helps some people's lifestyles. Whether those lifestyles are good or bad, as long as it's non-violent, non-criminal, non-rights-violating, they deserve liberty and tolerance. If you've got some suggestions about how to live better, go ahead and persuade people, but do not use the government to ban technologies.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (11)

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