FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
@The_Nybbler too, for good measure.
I wasn't a mod at the time, yet I still remember this. What happened was that HBD was sucking up all the oxygen and the mods got sick of HBD dominating every single thread all the time, and the heat and lack of light it generated, so they put a temporary moratorium on it. To this day, you and a few others have carped "The mods banned HBD discussions because they were afraid of The Truth!" to death.
When you say "sucking up all the oxygen", I think people who were not there might be left with the impression that non-stop debates about whether or not Blacks had lower average IQ at the population level were cluttering up the thread. This would lend credence to the idea that The Truth Was Being Suppressed. The problem for me is that I was there as well, and my memory is that this would be a false impression.
What I recall is that HBD was increasingly being used as a fully-general explanation to any question pertaining to differing outcomes of any sort. The initial arguments over whether Blacks had lower IQ were left far, far behind in a spiral of increasingly absurd extrapolations. The picture that emerged, for me, was a belief that higher IQ was the determining variable in all outcomes, period, end of story. A lot of people appeared to believe IQ was the only variable that could ever conceivably matter, in any situation, ever. It became routine to see completely unsupported just-so stories about how some phenomenon obviously was caused by HBD, complete with speculations about the mechanism involved, without a shred of supporting evidence and to a level of granularity that was frankly absurd. Then there'd be a big debate, often between different "HBD" enthusiasts arguing different but equally ungrounded theories for the purported mechanism, without a shred of actual evidence or even logical rigor visible. And when people grumbled about how absurd this all was, the response was "you're suppressing the science!"
A concrete example from this thread might help: take this comment as an example of the form. The chain of logic seems to be that people who get enslaved have lower IQ, slaves who get sold abroad have lower IQ than slaves retained locally, and that any genetic contributions to ADOS from whites can be safely ignored. The first claim is plausible but unproven, with Greek slaves in Rome being an obvious counterexample. The second claim appears completely unsupported, and the third claim is implicit in the logic but likewise unsupported. None of this meshes at all with the frequently-cited statistics about native africans having sub-70(?) average IQs, to point out only one obvious complication.
Comments like that are neither rigorous, nor evidence based. The fact that American Blacks have lower IQ than American whites is, I think, well-established. The fact that Africans generally have lower IQ is a whole lot less well-established, since Africa hasn't had the thorough population-level scrutiny the US has, but I'd grant it as a reasonable hypothesis based on what evidence has been gathered, and partly on the continent's general dysfunction. "Slaves can be safely assumed to have lower IQ because they got enslaved" is not supported at all, and counter-examples spring readily to mind: the many Greek slaves taken by Rome, for example. "Slaves sold overseas can be safely assumed to have lower IQ" is likewise not supported at all. These are just-so stories.
My memory is that just-so stories like this used to be absolutely rampant, and that this rampancy was what the topic ban aimed to suppress. I think it worked reasonably well, though not without considerable cost. Maybe it have been better to just spot the pattern, trace its outlines, and then point it out whenever it showed; that's the pattern that eventually worked on a number of other emergent or engineered problems in the forum. I contend simply that it was a serious problem, and it deserved to be addressed because it was notably degrading the perceived quality of the forum for a lot of users.
Maybe my memory is wrong, and I'd be open to contrary evidence. I waffled on turning this into a top-level post next week, but eh.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Me, The_Nybbler, aqouta, fuckduck9000, curious_straight_ca and perhaps others who are pressed to identify as «HBDers» variously accuse you of or are questioning reasons behind you lot's (HlynkaCG, FCfromSSC, and you too) misrepresenting the distribution of opinion around these parts, in a way that amounts to slander. Denying that slander when directly asked, but then repeating it as a generality, is a very irritating pattern.
Speaking personally, neither you or any of the people you listed were who I've had in mind. I'll humbly decline to ping people at a third party's demand, but feel free to do so yourself if you find it warranted. I was referring to posts like this, this, or this. It seems to me comments like this are frequent, and having had them pointed out to me, I notice them quite a bit now. It also seems to me that they used to be a whole lot more frequent in the old days, and I consider the decline in frequency to be an unequivocally good thing and would like to maintain it.
If you like, I'll start collecting them when I come across them; it's entirely possible that their prominence is an example of whatever bias it is that makes you notice things you've previously noticed. On the other hand, there's also the bias where people pay more attention to things they disagree with strongly, and less attention to things they disagree with less strongly, which I've noticed cashes out here in the sharpest hunting for holes in arguments coming from people on the opposite side, and the laxest treatment coming from people, roughly speaking, on the same side.
In any case, this thread has convinced me that labeling the pattern of using HBD as a fully-general explanation for any and all behavior "HBD" is a bad idea, for what it's worth. It clearly rings up people I had no intention of ringing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
I'm not interested in banning or demonizing anything.
What's the proper way to refer to race-essentialist people who explicitly use HBD as a fully-general explanation for all behavior and outcomes? As an example, this post from a bit ago:
We know what the root cause is for classroom indiscipline, poor nutrition, bad (cultural?) traditions, bad (parental?) literacy, unstable home life and one-parent households.
If people are smart and capable, they won't find themselves in situations where they're having more children they can support with unhelpful partners, won't have a culture glorifying crime, won't be illiterate, won't disrupt classrooms, won't create or maintain food desserts or fail to provide nutritious food.
...So that's a claim of straight bio-determinism, isn't it? It seems to me that these sorts of posts are most of the HBD posts I see, mainly because the more rigorous conversations got mined out years ago. Now, maybe my impression is wrong, and I think that sort of post is more common than it actually is because it stands out to me in a way more rigorous HBD posts don't. But this low-quality and wrong posting is what I'm actually objecting to, and not the rigorous version that confines itself to the evidence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
It's whether "Modern HBDers" or "the HBD crowd" as a group are largely pseudoscientic race-war enthusiasts.
I literally can't remember the last time I saw you discussing HBD in any detail, but my subjective impression is that every time there's a discussion impinging on race, we have people (and almost always either non-regulars or the WN-adjacent regulars) dropping absurdly-reasoned biodeterminist hot-takes backed by a naïve appeal to the general HBD consensus. I think it's pretty clear that there's a cluster of people who are firmly persuaded of the HBD hypothesis by the overwhelming evidence, and then a quite distinctly separate cluster of people who are very excited about HBD because it gives them an excuse for what appears to be straightforward racism. I can see that painting the later as "the HBD crowd" confuses them with the former, but "the HBD crowd" seems like an obvious label for the people consistently driving a large majority of the discussion of HBD.
I'm open to the idea that my impression of the relative frequency of these groups is wrong or biased or whatever. I don't think the people using HBD evidence as a springboard into unsupported biodeterminist speculation discredits the evidence itself, but I do think using it as a springboard is wrong, there's a pattern of it, and I'd strongly prefer to see less of it. Assuming I'm not wrong about the frequency, wat do? Does using a different label solve the problem?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
The comparison to Rubber Duck debugging in the code sphere comes to mind.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
What you're describing is difference in methods. Do those check out to differences in objective outcomes? The stat I remember from years ago was that fully-licensed talk therapy showed no increased effectiveness over volunteers given a two-hour class on active listening. Would be interested in better stats if any are available.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
I would be surprised if it was no better than active listening as I'm not enough of a skeptic to think it adds nothing beyond active listening, which it also does.
I am enough of a skeptic to say that. The Dodo Bird Verdict is not a reasonable outcome; "all forms of therapy are equally effective" should strongy increase your prior that therapy does not work the way it claims to, and at that point one needs to start entertaining the idea that what therapy's most reliable effect is to give people positive emotions about therapy.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Welcome to arguing against Enlightenment Ideology. Its core claim is that it can guide us all to a brighter future, but actually doing that is quite hard, and "brighter" is always relative to the past. Consequently it's easier to lie about how bad the past was, then to actually improve on it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Just as a simple sanity check, all the arguments you're making comparing people in 1900 to people today, would apply just as much to people in 1800 to 1900, and 1700 to 1800, and 1600 to 1700, no? If life was so much worse a hundred years ago, shouldn't it be even worse than that the further back you go? At what point, shouldn't the misery become unsurvivable? And yet people clearly survived, and even thrived to the point of producing rich cultures of beauty that we enjoy to this day. Do you not see a contradiction here?
There was no mental health care to speak of a century ago.
Psychology mostly didn't exist a century ago, but given that Psychology is fake as fuck, it's unclear to me why that is supposed to be a problem. I see absolutely zero reason to believe that the "common factors" giving rise to the Dodo Bird Verdict should be supposed to have been a recent discovery, and not achievable through previous religious and spiritual traditions the world over.
We can't cure most serious mental illness now, and for all the criticisms of Bedlam, it is not obvious to me that our current method of allowing the mentally-ill to kill themselves on the streets with meth and heroin is in any way an improvement
The world back then was awful in a way that is hard to comprehend for a person in a developed country in the 21st century.
Based on your personal experience, presumably? I mean, we have writing and records from quite a ways back, stories, songs, plays, art, personal journals; why speculate, when we could look at their thoughts directly? None of these depict an unmitigated hellscape. On the contrary, most people seem to have been reasonably happy and healthy, even in times of considerable duress. Heck, why not compare suicide rates? That's an objective measure, right? Or maybe marriage rates, given the overwhelming correlation between long-term marriage and a whole host of positive outcomes? Or average numbers of close friends?
What you're doing here is comparing every bad thing you can imagine about the past against every good thing you can imagine about the present. Shockingly, this results in the present being the apparent best of all possible worlds. Your explanation ignores the concept of the hedonic treadmill, the way peoples psychology adjusts itself to both prosperity and hardship, such that the former does not simply satisfy, and the later does not simply crush. People are more complicated than that.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?
I would not, and the above quote strikes me as about as obvious a case of squid-ink as it's possible to have. Mulvaney's video ad was a video ad, bought and paid for as part of the new marketing strategy by AB. Why would it be relevant whether it was on TV or on social media? They chose to put this person's face on their merchandise as part of that marketing strategy. major marketing pushes are not "jokes".
They designed and implemented an edgy mass-market social media campaign. They don't get to do that, and then claim that people reacting poorly to their message is due to "the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplifying it". They are the ones who fed a specific message into the biggest amplifier there is, with the specific intent to get it seen as widely as possible. People aren't worried that they're going to get a beer-can with a picture of a trans person on it, they don't want to buy beer from a company that thought it a good idea to advertise by teaming up with what they perceive to be a weird sex cultist.
The WSJ is spinning like a tornado in service of its tribal interests, not engaging in honest analysis of the facts at hand. As for AB, talk is cheap. The only reason they're apologizing is because they've actually taken a significant hit. If consumers actually object to AB's behavior, the only way to demonstrate that objection that AB and its peers will understand is to make the error hurt as badly as possible. To the extent they do not do this, their preferences will be deliberately minimized and ignored. AB volunteered to be a cautionary example, and is getting their wish.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Was it major though?
A fair question, and I guess one must ask "compared to what?" AB's entire advertising budget for 2023? Do we have numbers? I doubt this pitch was more than a drop in the bucket, honestly, so it's easy to argue that this is an insignificant thing. Only, we have AB's VP of marketing bragging on the record about how they're trying to transform Bud Light's brand, attract a new, more youthful consumer base because their existing customer base is in decline. It doesn't seem arguable that the Mulvany ad was a straightforward part of this strategy. Large-scale brand strategies run by the VP of marketing are, in fact, a central example of a major marketing push, and this ad was a central example of that push's aim. It's not peripheral, it's not irrelevant, it's a perfect example of what they intentionally set out to do.
This isn't a case of bad execution of a good idea, but rather good execution of a bad idea. The problem isn't that they picked the wrong trans woman to be their face. The problem isn't that they wrote the script wrong, or posted the video at the wrong time or in the wrong place. The problem certainly isn't that Conservatives Pounced. You make an ad because you want people to see it; congratulations, people saw it. If it were a good ad, if this strategy were a good idea, the virality would be a massive windfall. It isn't, so it isn't. The problem is that the Trans issue is quite possibly the very hottest spot in our rapidly accelerating culture war, and they tried to use it for a brand-pivot that actively insulted their core customer base.
The reaction seems like the perfect storm of building resentment and an easy target for a boycott. Hard to predict.
Sure, that's true. I'm not going to pretend that I knew the boycott would be this effective. But I'm pretty sure I could have told you or in fact AB that ditching your core customers to chase a population that considers you a punchline, via inserting yourself into the most contentious topic in American politics, was likely to be more than a little risky.
We can say that we prefer it when gains from trade are divided as evenly as possible, but there is nothing morally wrong about selling something for a price that a customer is willing to freely pay.
I'm quite skeptical of this statement, at least at the margins. Trade is pretty clearly give-and-take negotiation, and it's not obvious to me why the economics which emerge from such interactions should set their roots all the way down to the level of fundamental moral axioms. If I'm dying of thirst in a desert, and someone offers to sell me a bottle of water for 90% of all my future earnings, and I have a handgun, I am going to get water and they are maybe going to get dead. They didn't care much for my life, after all, so why should I care much for theirs?
The fact that negotiated trade works well in low-pressure environments doesn't mean that it's infallible. It works because it's so much easier and better than the alternatives that there's not much contest, not because it's one of the basic building-blocks of the universe. Deform conditions to the point that it's not easier and better than the alternatives, and people will switch. Expecting otherwise is simply foolish.
All this is to say that trades can be imbalanced, and there are levels of imbalance that undermine confidence in the win-win nature of trading. This isn't much of an issue under normal conditions, but rampant AI isn't normal conditions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
At some point, it stops making sense to think of it as "your country".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
The VP of marketing said a fair bit about her plans for a new marketing campaign. How do you interpret her statements?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
...we're not actually anywhere near a trillion dollars, are we?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Convincing, sure. But what were you convinced ... of?
Strong emotions can be deceptive, but they aren't always. Sometimes they're being triggered for a good reason, and sometimes it's worth noting when and how the instinct and the truth align.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
hmm. can you elaborate? Is it something specifically about insects, or more generally about visceral imagery?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
How about "your average far right mottizen with more concepts than sense"?
That's a possible option.
What other puzzling questions can be easily answered with something like HBD when the lies are exposed and the censorship lifted?
...This is the problem, though. The comment I linked is a person saying "it's all genetics", in response to a situation that we know for a certainty is environmental. Teachers used technique A, got good, verified results, but switched to technique B that gives very bad results instead, because the teachers find technique B more personally fulfilling. HBD has no plausible role in this conversation, but here it is anyway, because people find it easy and fun to apply.
Then when our grumpy friend drops the hammer on this obviously bullshit argument, which he predicted would be made in advance, more reasonable HBD people appear to interpret it as an attack on reasonable, evidence-based science.
If HBD leads to the proliferation of irrational, obviously bullshit racial hot takes, I think that's a problem. I think the best solution is to push back against those hot-takes, and the core logic behind them, and "put HBD into everything" is definately part of that core logic.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
I have a problem with you saying things like ‘nothing good can come from [discussing HBD]’, not you taking apart flawed arguments.
...and part of the problem is that there's two different arguments getting conflated.
"Put HBD in everything" arguments are generally poorly argued, and often motivated reasoning. I don't like seeing arguments of this sort, because they're low-effort, unsupported and inflammatory, without actually providing anything of value.
"HBD is useful" is coming from the common assumption that HBD in the narrow sense is pretty clearly true, and then asking what we do about it. This seems like an entirely legitimate argument to me, but I hold that, practically speaking, there is nothing particularly useful you can do with HBD. Spreading it isn't going to resolve our racial problems, because they're already too far gone. I could be wrong about this, and it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to debate. Part of the problem, though, is that spreading "HBD is useful" seems to also spread "Put HBD in everything", both here and in the general population.
You'd immediately recognize your statements as indicating a wish to hide the truth if a progressive said it about one of your hobby horses.
I have a hard time imagining a symmetrical argument on my side that would fit the particulars, so this is hard to assess. I don't think it's true, though, because I don't see how anything I'm saying is properly understood as an argument to hide the truth.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Seems like a strong incentive for pivotal actions of one's own to prevent the World To Come from arriving. Is the presumption that such actions don't really exist?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Naw, Kulak's thing is sorta "You don't really want it if you aren't willing to kill everyone to get it". I'm just curious if he's that pessimistic about the idea of resistance of what he pretty clearly considers to be likely max-neg eternal victory. I'm not pessimistic about that option, and am always a bit bewildered by people who are.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Hmm. Maybe it has to do with how good one thinks central control already is, and how easy it is to establish a panopticon, versus how difficult to break that same panopticon? One's views on the general fragility or anti-fragility of social institutions? ...I guess this is a general request for an effort-post on "why things are likely going to go badly, in Dase's view". I'm pretty sure I agree with you that Yudkowski and his ilk are a greater threat than AI, but it seems to me that the threat is fairly manageable, while you seem to think it's all-but-inevitably going to get us. The_Nybbler has a similar take on wokeness generally, seeing it as practically invincible, rather than eminently defeatable; all I can conclude is that we have very, very different priors.
The go-to pivotal action to avoid torture, on the other hand, is obvious enough and reliable.
There's a shortage of extraordinarily well-put-together brains in the world, sir. T'would be a pity to ruin yours.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
I have no idea honestly, but my guess would be no. I think he possesses a level of sheer bloody-mindedness that precludes the deeper forms of despair. It's one of his more admirable qualities.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Not "we're sorry" not "no we don't support groomers" not "this was stupid and the person has been fired" not "no we dont' think you're all fratty out of touch people that we need to move past". Nothing.
Caving would get them absolutely slaughtered by Blues as well, and they fear that damage considerably more than the damage they're currently suffering.
Okay, just for calibration purposes, here is an example of an HBD comment from this thread. Do you think this is a good example of an argument well-founded on facts, solid evidence and intellectual rigor?
[EDIT] ...This thread turned into a bit of a free for all, but this comment and this one might be relevent.
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