4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
So he's... learning that he doesn't want to be a free speech absolutist? Because as I see it (as something close to a free speech absolutist), free speech can be extended to groups that want to abolish free speech and destroy me just fine. Free speech can't be abolished, and I can't be destroyed, by ways of speech alone. What you are saying, on the other hand, seems to be pretty close to the "speech is literally violence" view that I otherwise hear from progressives, despite you being seemingly anti-progressive (insofar as you wantonly suspecting OP of discriminating against non-leftists seemingly solely on the basis of getting leftist vibes from an anti-Musk account is an indication).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Yeah, I think the way I've seen this play out has mostly just been a fascinating illustration of many ways in which public discourse is toxic. I'm about the furthest possible from being a fan of the German Green party or climate change activism, but, well, Mueller is right. Protest generally entails disruption, and disruption means that at the margins, sometimes, somewhere, something like this will happen. That German society is now treating this as a totally unprecedented and horrifying situation that either nobody could have seen coming or nobody realised the protesters implicitly acquiesced to as an acceptable risk seems disingenuous at best, like if a year into the COVID-era BLM priotests the NYT suddenly carried an article like "Random downtown coffeeshop got smashed up. Did BLM go too far after all?". As far as disruption goes, a ten-minute delay suffered by rescue services does not even seem that unusual in terms of impacts of societal tradeoff. Should we also have big societal reckonings over labour rights next time an ambulance is too late on a Monday because of road construction, when construction could have been completed if the workers didn't get the day off on the day before? Seoul just saw 140-something dead because people decided to have a large halloween street party, and I don't see them debating (someone correct me if I'm wrong about this) whether mass gatherings for entertainment should be made a thing of the past, even though protest (yes, even that of people I consider to be performative idiots) surely is more important to society than parties.
How would China behave in this scenario? I can't imagine them sitting still and letting the US-led block alone transcend the constraints of MAD, but at the same time it doesn't seem to me like their R&D capabilities are quite on the level to keep up and join the newly forming circle of "have nukes, but can't be nuked" powers. Perhaps the right play for a US that has decided that the destruction of Russia is an overwhelming priority would then be to offer China unlimited participation in any interception technology it develops and deploys in return for its acquiescence, but I don't know if there is political appetite for such a bold trade.
On that matter, we really shouldn't forget that game theory demands precommitting to nuke your opponent before he makes himself unnukable. I'm increasingly finding myself wishing that we could just get one nuke each on DC and Moscow followed by a miraculous detente, to skim off some of the hubristic cream on top and make people on both sides realise how much they have postured themselves into feeling compelled to wager for skubUkraine.
The random mention of "goyslop" makes what would otherwise be a reasonable article to reference elsewhere impossible to use in "polite company". Why did you find it necessary?
To begin with, why would the Jewish/non-Jewish dimension even be relevant here? There may have been some case the JQ-posters could have made in the case of TV where I believe the term was originally coined, but Genshin Impact may be the biggest extreme spoonfeeding quest marker open world game out there at the moment, and it almost certainly has a higher fraction of Jewish players than Jewish developers.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
8mo ago
we've had it hammered into us that conversion therapy doesn't work, is a fraud, is torture, and should be illegal, then are we supposed to believe "it doesn't work at all except in this one instance of a new sexual orientation"
I think this understanding fails to model low-decouplers properly. A high-decoupler might indeed see the $currentyear belief system and think that there's a glaring unprincipled special case ("conversion therapy doesn't work... except for pedos") at work that is only waiting to be regularised. Meanwhile, I think, for the low-decoupler, the principle has never changed: things are either simultaneously evil, in violation of principles, wasteful, ineffective and fraudulent - or simultaneously good, in line with all principles, efficient, effective and honest. You could consider this an instance of the just-world fallacy, or simply affect-loading as the main and only way to make pronouncements about the real world. "$orientation conversion therapy doesn't work" was never intended to be the scientific statement, orthogonal to questions of morality, that you imagine it to be: it simply means that $orientation belongs in the good-effective-honest cluster and interfering with $orientation belongs in the bad-ineffective-fraudulent cluster. Any social debates being had, and any shift of public opinion, is not about eggheaded technical arguments regarding techniques but only about where the line between good and bad is drawn, and there I don't see any significant qualitative shift having happened in previous years. The last big Chesterton Fence that broke down in the western theater of the good-bad assignment battlefield was the loss of Christian authority, and I don't think we're getting back to that anytime soon; if you are serious about stopping pederasts, you probably should be more concerned with fortifying a new line. (I think that the liberal principle of bodily non-compulsion - which seems to have stood strong enough that the push for "you must sleep with trans women" fell completely flat - and some reinforcement of the idea that unrelated adults are by default sexually exploitative towards children and so children can't consent would be sufficient.)
Look at trans rights movement - for whatever genuine people are out there, isn't it strange how all of a sudden male-identifying violent rapists suddenly found their true inner womanhood when it was a question of going to jail and which prison they'd be put in?
I reckon this to be a sideshow entirely driven by the circumstance that approximately nobody actually has the slightest stake in what happens in women's prisons, and so the whole issue is a convenient side-stage to fight proxy wars for the conflict that actually matters (similar to how so many people with an opinion on Trump appear to have a strong opinion on Orbán, without necessarily even being able to point out Hungary on a map). I don't think the pederasty case has the same potential: many more people actually have a stake (by virtue of having children), and at the same time it doesn't have the shape of any live CW battle that it could serve as a substitute for (since all "can A have sex with B?" battles are currently cleanly resolved in favour of yes or no). (During the brief heyday of NAMBLA, the latter condition was not yet met, which is why the pedo question managed to get some air.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I still think that it's actually more of a memetic superweapon in the class of bingo boards than an astute observation. Show me one example where someone actually says something that it is fair to gloss by this abbreviation, as part of one utterance, because as far as I can tell, all examples including the present one actually fall into one of the following patterns:
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One person says "X will never happen". Another person says something that may be interpreted as "When X happens, you bigots will deserve it." This means nothing, unless you fall to the old temptation of treating the statements of all outgroup members as being coordinated.
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One person says "X will never happen". Later, under different circumstances, the same person says something that may be interpreted as (...). This is only objectionable insofar as the person revised their former prediction without publicly conceding that they were wrong/miscalibrated/overdramatic before. The culture war is replete with people on all sides being wrong, miscalibrated and overdramatic and making no admission thereof, no doubt fueled by an overwhelming desire to imagine oneself the underdog ("the ingroup will NEVER win this much, since our enemies are too strong"), so I'm not particularly convinced that your outgroup is uniquely guilty of this.
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One person actually says something like "X will never happen, but if X were to happen, you bigots would deserve it". I don't see anything inconsistent about this viewpoint, and I'm sure your ingroup believes lots of things that have this shape as well. If X does later happen, then the miscalibration thing above applies, but that's about it.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
In terms of generalists intelligently discussing general topics, I think there's a visible quality gap between the discourse here and the ACX commentary section, and, since in my three or so attempts to comment on the blog many years ago I never got anyone to respond to me whereas baiting some people into engagement on the Motte is trivial, that gap has probably been around for a while. I'm not aware of anything significantly above that on the internet for general discourse, but if you simply want raw displays of computational power and well-trained neural nets no matter the topic, it is hard to compete with Math Overflow comment sections (or, if you find the leveraging of domain knowledge to be "cheating", the same demographic could be found in a more immature stage over at AoPS back in the days; no idea how it looks nowadays).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1mo ago
This forum isn't rDrama and I would hope that it doesn't turn into it.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
These sorts of international agreements seem to be in a different class from basic rules-of-warfare/human-rights conventions, and anyhow once you go there (as the subthread below yours aptly demonstrates) you just get stuck in a very deep hole of both sides having equal and opposite stories of treaty violations by the other, and why their own violations as alleged by the other side don't actually count. Meanwhile, even in WWII, at least on the Western front both sides (and especially the morally and militarily victorious one!) upheld a pretense of respecting the rights of PoWs, and neither the Ameribrits nor the Soviets followed a principle of "our goal should be to maximise the number of dead Germans". Are you saying they should have?
Back on the object level of the issue at hand, for all it's worth, reports of Russians abusing or executing PoWs so far - especially after the chaos of the first few days - are very thin on the ground, despite what I assume must have been a very large number of people looking very hard for evidence. It stands to reason that they are certainly not killing and torturing as many PoWs as they could. The person quoted by OP seems to suggest that Ukrainians should kill and torture as many Russian PoWs as they could. If they did this, why would Russians not do the same to their Ukrainian PoWs? I can see why the intermediate state where Ukrainians go wild but Russians haven't yet would appeal to him, but at the inevitable new equilibrium where both of them do it, would his side actually be better off than before?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
So when/where were songs about straightforward love for a man from a woman's perspective actually common? The "early music" examples I can think of of unironic love songs (belle qui tiens ma vie..., Walther von der Vogelweide...) all seem to be m->f; in fact the only f->m one I can think of off the top of my head is Lana Del Rey's reasonably recent Young and Beautiful.
Because... they were client states where a pro-Russian government was removed by a Western-backed revolution with subsequent repression of the remaining pro-Russian elements? Because they were hosting strategically important Russian military bases and threatening to seize/expel them? Because they were about to ramp up their integration with US military structures and an intervention may yet preempt that? None of these justifications are applicable.
The only relevant ones could be blockade of already Russian-held territories (water supply to Crimea was a factor in the 2022 escalation, and a blockade of Kaliningrad would be more stark since there are fewer alternative routes to supply it), disenfrachisement of Russian speakers (arguably that ship has already sailed, they haven't been particularly enfranchised in the Baltics in a long time) and interference with transit of goods/resources as with the Ukrainian gas siphoning story (which is less relevant because the Western Europeans are probably not going to resume buying gas for a long time, and unlike Ukraine the Baltics are not so lawless that widespread stealing is likely). The Kaliningrad case would probably be a sufficient motivation, but there the ball is entirely in the Baltic court. The Russian coethnics story was always a pretext for public consumption that didn't actually figure much into the decision whether to go to war (they're getting squeezed plenty in Central Asia too, and yet Kazakhstan remains uninvaded), and as I mentioned the transit story seems to be largely moot now.
As a Motte-goer, I assume you shake your head over pronouncements of the form "Trump will enact a coup and become dictator", which are generally based on a sort of understanding that it's disloyal to the in-group to have any sort of nuanced understanding of why or how the outgroup does things. (Though maybe not, given how much air analysis of similar depth gets when it is red-against-blue?) Do you not see that "Putin will invade the Baltics" is the same sort of "of course the outgroup will do the maximally evil thing, they are motivated by evil after all" reasoning?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
I haven't encountered an authentic version of the "I don't want children because they will have to suffer through the warming apocalypse" sentiment in the wild, but then for myself a certain general feeling that I can't imagine a life on earth 50 years hence that will be worth living (though my blackpill of choice is more about AI and/or technologically fueled turbo-authoritarianism) certainly has been tipping the scales further against having children, so perhaps the general sentiment is not so rare. I think that the most pervasive cause is still that none of us have any mental conception of a (capital-g,l?) good life that features children. A parental generation that was never shy to resort to guilt-tripping over all the sacrifices they made to raise us certainly isn't helping there, but the understanding that millennials value experiences (which children get in the way of) over things (which children don't get in the way of as much) has been around for a while too.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
8mo ago
The razing of Mosul alone seems to have a median estimate of around 10k civilian deaths, with the entire Iraq war estimated at around 300k in 10 years - and let's not get started on Vietnam. Wikipedia stats on Afghanistan seem to amount to 3k in three months of American bombing, up to some guessing 20k in a year, which is a very close rate to the 18k in 1.5 years being bandied around for Ukraine.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Disagree Russia had any strategic fear of NATO.
What is the basis for this belief? Doesn't the current war prove that they would have been right to have a strategic fear of NATO proximity, considering that right now NATO is using its proximity to successfully stop Russia from attaining its interests in a third country?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
In modern society, short men are like the Cagots of the Middle Ages, who were hated and considered unclean for no other reason than an accident of their birth.
Surely this is an extremely hyperbolic comparison. Per Wikipedia, Cagots were legally "typically required to live in separate quarters", "not allowed to enter taverns or use public fountains", "buried in cemeteries separate from non-Cagots, with reports of riots occurring if bishops tried to have the bodies moved to non-Cagot cemeteries", "allowed to enter a church only by a special door", "compelled to wear a distinctive dress to which, in some places, was attached the foot of a goose", "prohibited from selling food or wine, touching food in the market, working with livestock, or entering mills", and so on, and so on, and so on.
On the other hand, short men in the modern day... have difficulties getting dates and are made fun of in pop culture?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Just a test: If it were a young man rather than a young woman, would you also be this strongly revolted?
(Matter of fact, I had a sort of similar case in my circle of acquaintances, with no legal euthanasia. He wound up successfully self-terminating after two failed attempts, and the social circle consensus seemed to be that it was sad how hard psychiatry had failed him but the act was ultimately utility-maximising. But then, he had actually befriended a female mirror image of the same age during one of his involuntary commitments, and people were very reluctant to inform her about his success lest it encourage her to do the same.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
If it's any solace to you, I'm a leftist of yesteryear and I don't feel like I'm winning either. Any accusation that I'm just unhappy because this is "too much of the same thing I advocated for" rings hollow - where exactly is the conservation of direction here? I fought against squares and religious nuts trying to ban me from reading and writing the things I wanted to read and write, and briefly things seemed to go uphill, but now I am once again fighting against people wanting to ban me from reading and writing the things I want to read and write. Same for reality-based policymaking, avoiding war, et cetera, all of which used to be considered leftist causes, and I can assure you I wanted them for themselves rather than because this was just what lay in the direction "left" happened to be pointing in at the time. Surely the people who you see as winning nowadays will "lose" eventually too, whether this will be in a way that you would recognise as "their thing going too far" (transracialism?) or something that looking forward from the present era will be as utterly unrecognisable as "left" as the push for joining the Ukraine war or bad-word censorship in every home would have been 50 years ago. Chances are whatever wins at the time will still be considered "left", but should this have any impact on how we feel about it? Do you feel differently about Chinese battles from the Warring States period if you learn that the winning army was called "left" (for entirely unrelated reasons to our modern terminology)?
It turns out that the past and future are usually not just some foreign country, but more akin to the actual Aztec Empire. Greater people than us have tried to do something about it to no avail. You know that meme prayer that ends with asking for serenity to accept the things you can't change?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I have a file in my notetaking program that I've named "mottepost ideas", with things ranging from bullet points to semi-complete drafts of posts to try and finish when I'm in a writing mood and not too frustrated with this place. The problem is that I've also been toying with the idea of trying my hand at real-name blogging for a while - both because I think some of those ideas would be interesting to write up for people I know in real life, and because the idea of attracting more real-life friends with similar interests by public writing is appealing in the abstract - and posting the idea on the Motte first would burn it for using there unless I'm willing to risk self-doxing.
Two entries in that file that I'm pretty okay with burning (because they're low-quality anyway):
critical theory vs. critical thinking
- Alison Bailey [2017] surprisingly clear about this
- logic = language of nature, power dialectic = language of humans
- speak good logic to extract resources from nature, speak good dialectic to extract resources from other humans
- are your problems better solved by extracting more from nature (chop wood, make fire) or from other people (capture warm house)?
- "dialectic can not extract a warming fire from winter's frozen wood, nor quenching drink from scorching desert air"
- dialecticians only can profitably wrangle people because someone has done the work of wrangling nature before them. Had nature not been wrangled, they would be sitting in caves wondering why their children died of tetanus, not sitting in shoddy flats wondering why they can't afford an iPhone
Weirdmaxing
Modern architecture sucks because of runaway elite competition, but what about good-looking traditional schools of architecture? Did those not arise from runaway elite competition? Even people in cultures that build nice buildings (say, 19thct UK) generally have no idea how you could build nice buildings in Japanese or Indian style. Seems like an "unknown unknowns" problem; is it optimal to not have one elite that gets to do runaway loopy optimisation with an evolving value function, but multiple, and then you get to pick out the best one from them? Is this generally a good approach to unknown unknowns?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
So is that the only thing that you want to punish with medieval torture, or is there anything else? I'm thinking of tobacco executives as an immediate candidate for someone who under any principled law you are proposing should go right after the lab leak overseers into the torture pit. Considering the tribal valence of it, how are you planning to argue against the other tribe enacting medieval torture on you or your champions, once they are in power?
More pragmatically, you probably aren't going to be successful at capturing scientists who oversaw a lab leak wherever they were in the world. If your country is the one that passes the law you want, all scientists who could imagine themselves committing an accident of this magnitude - which may be everyone who is good in this field - will move to Russia, China, or whatever other pick of adversary does not share in your bloodthirst and will not extradite, and then you can act surprised when COVID 2.0 turns out to have a mysterious affinity for people from your country. (I'm not a biochemist, but I don't know if, were I one, I would feel particular moral trepidations about doing horrible things to people who approve of subjecting me to a lifetime of medieval torture for an honest mistake, however dire the consequences.)
I've been thinking for a while that the issue with society's response to Holocaust revisionism/denial is that we are seeing a very well-crafted piece of societal engineering (one of the instances that I actually think of as good evidence in favour of @DaseindustriesLtd's "political von Neumanns", whose influence I'm otherwise skeptical of, existing), whose effectivity in part depends on a lack of widespread understanding of its purpose among everyone including most Jews, doing its job against intended targets, as well as a handful of people (chiefly "sees a fishy orthodoxy and pathologically can't resist" autistic contrarians, but also excessive pattern-matchers with a beef against elites, in the Kanye class) getting caught as collateral damage.
WWII was, by all accounts, pretty catastrophic for humanity across all strata, destroyed untold amounts of value and industrial potential, and uncharacteristically created pain even for those social strata that normally are very good at keeping themselves shielded from any calamities short of disease and death, and for whom the social contract so far had been "we don't interfere with you living your life where and how you want close to the optimum the current tech level has to offer, in return you take token care of the plebs and advance our common intellectual and spiritual life when you feel like it". If you had to prevent "something like it" - where "it" is basically a modern, industrious, intelligent nation suddenly conquestmaxing with only a handful of years' warning - from happening again, what would you do? Simple global disarmament won't fly, because Moloch, likewise for wars of aggression, and even restricting nationalism in general won't fly, because Moloch and without nationalism you will lose against any defector that is willing to use that social tech to make its soldiers fight harder. So what's a specific, necessary and sufficient, prerequisite for any country to pull what Germany did then?
The answer on which the current architecture is based is "topple the Jews", as the Jews are a natural tripwire population for exactly that sort of thing. By virtue of aptitude and connections they float to top positions in every mostly-free country earlier or later, and by virtue of the strong ethnic identity they always have solidarity/altruism for their fellow Jews everywhere. If you want to unleash a rain of steel and fire over Europe, but you haven't removed the Jews from the top rungs of your society, then you'll find that your plans will fail, because they will be represented in every organisation that is involved in your country functioning and at least a good subset of them will be more incentivised to save their fellow Jews in the countries you seek to trample from your plans than by whatever you could offer them for cooperating with you. Now, of course, you might naively be tempted to just make this argument explicit; but then I would reckon that absent extra memes, for any leadership that has already convinced its population of the necessity of conquest-maxing, completing the inference chain by "and therefore we need to make the Jews stand aside, so we can go forward with what we must do" would be a formality. It is only by maintaining the perception that going against the Jews qua Jews is an ethical singularity that this last step becomes hard. This maintenance, however, has always seemed like a fragile affair (with threats constantly emerging left and right, from displeasure with Israel to displeasure with capitalism to most recently displeasure with white people), with the Holocaust narrative in its current form being the most reliable support of the edifice. Challenge the sacredness of it, and you might just find that you lost the last thing that pinned the singularity to minus infinity in human moral space; and if people can start bargaining about an exact finite price to put on removing the Jews, then it's only a matter of time until the next conquest-maxer successfully makes the argument to their population that it is a price worth paying for their cause. Therefore, we get the system in which Holocaust revisionism seeking a specific adjustment and even general attempts to profane the topic by dispassionate historical review are quashed, but everyone has to act coy about why this is, further triggering the pattern-matchers and /r/atheists to dig themselves into a social hole.
(How many people, either on the mainstream side or on the Holocaust revisionist side, actually think of it primarily in these terms? I should clarify that I'm actually in the pro-mainstream camp because I think the tripwire system has done great things for us, but I can imagine that many nationalists would in fact be motivated by at least a diffuse understanding that Holocaust figures in a roundabout way underpin the enduring emasculation of their country as an absolute ceiling on how far it could go in pursuing its own interest on the world stage.)
(A funny consequence, I think, is the disconnect that we're now seeing over the Ukraine narrative. The Soviet Union never was brought into this tripwire architecture, and though to some extent "one in our midst might go military FOOM" was never even a concern they shared, to the extent to which they've set up Nazi-detection heuristics at all, it's just "wants to threaten Russia". Therefore to Westerners Zelenskiy's Jewishness makes the "Ukronazis" narrative look comically incoherent, whereas to Russians it's just a curiosum that has little bearing on the perceived plausibility of it)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I don't know. Concretely against your points, I don't see how ratioing, which I would've thought of as a downvote substitute for forums that only have upvote equivalents, is relevant in our setting, and vote-based dogpiling in the CW thread would also require people to explicitly have a thought process like "this comment is already very low, I want to make it lower", which would surprise me especially in our contrarian setting.
Concretely, for me, I just scrolled through the thread a bit and found that the hiding of vote counts changed my interaction for the worse. I've been concerned by the optics and implicit consensus building by [outgroup I perceive as being overwhelmingly represented]'s propensity to use downvotes as a disagree button, resulting in posts that are perfectly fine contributions to the discussion but insult their sensibilities or aesthetic preferences sitting in the negative numbers, for a while now. To correct what seemed to me as a misvaluation of posts, I'd upvote posts that were _under_valued and downvote posts that were _over_valued for what in many cases would just be the actions of [outgroup]; if a post were already sitting at its proper score, I'd do nothing. (I often enough do actually withdraw my vote if I come back to a part of the thread later and see that the tides have turned and a post I upvoted is now overvalued.) Now that I have to vote blind, all I can do is instead guess if this is the sort of post that made [outgroup] seethe or rejoice resulting in votes over- or undervaluing it; the urge then is to vote based on this guess, which for all means and purposes would just turn me into [outgroup]'s toxoplasmotic mirror image. (Whenever they feel strongly about a topic, they vote based on agreement; whenever I expect they feel strongly about a topic, I vote based on my expectation of their disagreement.)
Bounded rationality is a real field of study, describing optimal behaviour for agents who can't actually reason and obtain information infinitely for free.
Even Yudkowsky concedes that rationality is about winning. It seems pretty straightforward to see that someone who is still busy calculating probabilities to see if some skub paper checks out while the police remove him from the premises as the debt collector wants to foreclose his home is not winning. As a corollary, if the gut feeling strategy consistently gets better outcomes than the "reason and logic" one, it's more rational.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1mo ago
The telegrams are now showing footage that purports to be questioning one of the guys they caught. The core claim seems to be that he was recruited on Telegram after following some preacher, was offered about $5k with half transferred as an advance, and the weapons were provided by the recruiter.
Considering the timing and the guy's demeanor, I think the "legitimate ISIS" story should be losing a lot of probability mass, unless you postulate this is not really one of the shooters - leaving the Ukrainian intelligence and Russian intelligence strategy-of-tension explanations as the two most likely. The speed with which the Americans committed to the ISIS story speaks in favour of Ukrainian involvement a bit. The option that they were larpers can't be quite dismissed yet either - in that scenario I guess the guy being interviewed was previously beaten and/or bribed into giving this story off screen.
I think like this question has been answered multiple times, and you never seem to as much as acknowledge the answer: the value that it adds is that it counters the argument that differences in average outcomes between ethnic groups are evidence of discrimination, perpetrated by either members of better-performing groups or anyone who is casuallycausally involved in the outcome or its measurement.
This argument is currently ubiquitous, which is not surprising because if HBD is false, it's compelling. It's also being used to justify a wide range of measures that I believe to be materially disadvantageous for most humans, morally repugnant and often also concretely detrimental to myself (since as a working academic I have encountered the gamut of measures from finding myself on the wrong side of quotas to being hit with pressure from above and busywork due to vocal individual students who underperformed while belonging to a putatively disadvantaged group). Do you disagree with the point that if HBD is false and yet we observe the outcomes that we do, measures such as quotas, embedding of political officers in institutions that produce excessive discrepancies, loyalty/attitude tests for workers in outcome-assessment jobs and mandatory reeducation are at least justifiable?
You offer up "colourblind meritocracy" as an alternative to HBD as if in the world where the consensus belief is not-HBD plus we must have a colourblind meritocracy, people would look at the differences in outcomes and just go like "shucks, guess we must try at the colourblind meritocracy thing harder". This strikes me as very far-fetched. Certainly, if I had an axiomatic belief in non-HBD, I would think the state of reality is horrifying enough to warrant most of what is being done, only more and better.
I don't think this result quite disproves "poverty => crime" except for a very naive version of that theory. Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo, any more than a 30something lifelong incel would become a well-adjusted normie with normie attitudes towards women if given plastic surgery and a flask of post-singularity AGI-designed pheromones to make him irresistible.
(The naive version would be something like "I have no money, so I calculate that going to steal some is the highest-EV action for me to take now". I doubt that real-life decisions to do crime are usually taken in this fashion; more likely that it's similar to those culturally evolved cassava processing rules, which would also linger for a while even if you supplied tribes with non-toxic GMO cassava. Presumably pro-crime poor communities outcompete anti-crime ones.)
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