GBRK
5mo ago
I'm curious to see if organized Christianity adopts a more hardline position on immigration
Regarding america, I'm pretty sure the only organized christians worth talking about are the mormons and the catholics. Sure, there are plenty of random protestant churches, but they can hardly be called organized. Now, I can't speak for the mormons, but it will be really, really weird if the catholic church takes a more hardline position. The most consequential modern group of immigrants is latin americans, who the church loves because they're already disproportionately catholic. It might come around to some sort of de-facto restrictions on muslim and hindu immigrants-- like a christian-flavored acculturation in compromise with the protestants. But the international nature of the church causes it to trend away from strictly cultural or ethnic xenophobia.
GBRK
5mo ago
There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position
I think it's worth at least considering the possibility that we are backed directly by God :P
GBRK
5mo ago
As other people point out, it's unlikely that an african war will cause a truly large migration surge to the US. Afrigan wars are bloody, but relatively small scale. For them to become larger-scale would require african states to experience chinese-warring-states-esque darwinian evolution in state capacity, that would ironically make them better at retaining and mobilizing their populations.
No, african famine is likely to cause migration surges... but given the global climatic conditions that will be causing it, it's unlikely that anyone will be particularly sympathetic since the entire planet would end up being worse off.
GBRK
5mo ago
For the 99% of American veterans and their families using the VA, the gender column is a redundant sex column. Its deletion changes very little
Again, nothing was actually deleted, it was a straight rename. If data HAD been deleted, then conversely the liberals would be entirely right to worry-- both at the object level (because it would make it harder to track the health outcomes of people whose sex differs from their stated gender identity), and at the meta level (because it would prove that the VA was staffed by people perfectly happy to delete inconvenient data to serve their political masters.) It's important to mantain all the current data, and to have it clearly placed in a well-defined structure. Storage is much cheaper than compute, and just "having something in the chart" is way less convenient for medical researchers looking to make conclusions about aggregate data than a checkbox. Actually, if you'll let me climb up onto an even taller soapbox-- I privately suspect that a massive fraction of healthcare inefficiency is ultimately caused by incompatible and difficult-to-parse data standards that waste the time of providers and make it difficult to provide care. I don't have ANY of my childhood medical records, for example, because they're stored in hard copy in another state in my childhood doctor's medical office. And unfortunately, the process of taking old bad records and unifying them into a smooth, unified system is beyond nightmarish-- so any attempt to obstruct that where it's happening is literally costing lives.
https://www.psypost.org/secret-changes-to-major-u-s-health-datasets-raise-alarms/
I had to do a double take when I saw this article because I was on the exact team at the VA that did (part of) this. The reddit discussion is being hysterical about data loss but as the article reflects, the changes were purely to column headers and data element names-- or at least, that was what I heard during meetings. (I didn't actually make any of the changes, it was very much "not my job".) The bigger issue is that it sounds like the VA failed to advertise what happened to outside stakeholders. In case any of them are listening... the data tracks and has always tracked the sex at birth, and has never included the gender identity. The columns were called "gender" for the historical reason that the medical field didn't always view gender as being separate from sex.
In effect the whole change was just CYA thing-- the big bosses were making a stink about culture war stuff, and they spat out the easiest possible fix. So far as I know this had no actual impact on any healthcare measures. I can't rule out the existence of eCQM that include gender identity, and there's a (now-deprecated) FHIR extension for gender identity. but frankly I doubt we ever used it. Our data source didn't even keep track of ethnicity, which gets used as a supplement for basically every QDM measure.
Basically a waste of time, and therefore money. Being optimistic, maybe it'll be less confusing for measure developers, but it's hilarious to me that the conservative administration was basically ceding the point here by differentiating at the schema level that "sex" is different than "gender".
GBRK
5mo ago
For me to believe the hypothesis that "intra-racial IQ differences are primarily mediated by genetic differences" I would need to see the following data:
- genes causative of IQ differences (this data exists. It's fuzzier than I want, but I'm willing to accept it.)
- iq-modifying gene frequency by race (this data doesn't.)
Without both those data points, all you can do is try and prove "intra-racial IQ differences look like this" and "IQ differences are primarily mediated by genetic differences" separately. But while that's necessary, it's not sufficient-- to prove the full hypothesis. At least, not without larger effect sizes and better mathematical techniques. Especially because even if you prove that, say, the IQ differences between whites and amerindians and asians is due to genes, that's dramatically insufficient to prove that the IQ differences between those groups and subsaharan africans are due to genes. Nutrition, parasite load, education infrastructure, epigenetics. Look upon my works ye mighty, and despair.
The vast timespan that selection effects have had to act are exactly why I'm so suspicious of modern data. Every human born in the last two hundred years lives a live completely unlike the lives we lived in the last five thousand. And the majority of humans born in the last five thousand years have lived lives completely unlike the lives lived in the last five hundred thousand. And yet, any attempt to argue for the impact of selection pressures on intelligence must explain all three of those periods simultaneously. It has to be true across every subpopulation, and every chronopopulation. It has to explain the differences between the dutch and italians, and the italians and the romans, as well as it explains the differences between the hausa and yoruba.
And also...
Look, I have a bit of a pet theory. A literal pet theory. Because: we know that wolves are smarter than dogs. They do better on problem solving tasks, and of course they're superior at surviving in the wild. But a dog will sit when you tell it to sit, and fetch when you tell it to fetch. And the vast majority of tests we put canids up to aren't "surviving in the wild," they're "doing what we tell you to." So if racial IQ differences are provably genetic... even then, I'll be a little suspicious about the true allocation of racial intelligence. It's worth remembering that while IQ tests try to be as unbiased as they can along as many metrics as possible... they can unbias themselves along the axis of being a test. And tests favor trainability. I'm not going to say that obviously dumb people are just actually "street smart", but I do wonder if IQ tests at the population level are really just measuring which cultural-genetic backgrounds can sit still the longest while wagging their tails. This theory is unfalsifiable, of course, so I won't ask you to falsify it... but it would be fascinating to see what would happen if we rounded up people at random, gave them IQ tests, dropped them off somewhere remote, and then watched to see how long they survived.
You're arguing against a strawman. I agree that blank slatism is false. But the specific conclusions drawn by HBD about racial intelligence have dramatically insufficient evidence. You've flipped a coin three times, seen HHH, and assumed the coin is biased toward heads. Sure, that's technically more accurate than the people claiming the coin is exactly, perfectly balanced, but not more accurate than the viewpoint that we have insufficient coin-flipping data to figure out its true bias.
GBRK
5mo ago
Okay, so why don't studios make movies for less?
They do. But mostly those cheaper movies end up going straight to streaming, because nothing short of a blockbuster puts butts in theater seats.
GBRK
5mo ago
Fast crud, not fast blockbusters. Even committees can take artistic risks when movies are cheap. The 1959 Ben Hur only cost about 150 million dollars in today's money. Back that, that was an absurd amount of money. Today, any given marvel movie will hit that figure.
GBRK
5mo ago
Specific to this topic, the US even has a strategic cheese reserve hidden inside a network of caves, to guard against the eventuality of having to pacify a wisconsinite rebellion or something.
GBRK
5mo ago
There are two broad models for film production: the auteur model, where a genius director is granted full control; and the committee model, where a variety of people belonging negotiate for their own interests.
Well, that's a lie. There's a whole spectrum of production models, including genius-director-plus-meddling-executive-directors and committee-headed-by-strong-mayor and collaborators-work-to their strengths. But it's useful to think about every movie as falling (relative to some imaginary baseline) into either camp. Auteur films lie and die on whether their director is actually a genius-- and a genius not just at directing, but at every layer of personnel selection and delegation. That makes them risky, because a director's genius is often relative to the nature of the specific project they're working on. Pretty much every "great" film has been an auteur film, but a disproportionate number of terrible films are auteur films too. In the meantime, committee films pretty invariably fall into a "mediocre but enjoyable" middle zone. When entertainment companies fund a movie, they can afford to take risks on auteurs if the movies being funded are relatively cheap. If 9 of your 10 million dollar movies flop but the last one makes 200 million you're in the black. But blockbusters have to make a return. Netflix Originals can afford to vary in quality, but Marvel movies have to put butts in seats every single time.
Now, all of the above is probably just review-- I'm sure you've heard arguments to that effect before. And it might seem a bit misaimed with your criticism is with writing specifically. Why not just hire a known-genius director, and force them to work with a known-genius writer, and otherwise keep your hands off? The problem is is that the auteur-versus committee problem is fractal. We can say that a genius director should have all the power relative to their production committee, but what about relative to a genius actor, or a genius writer? Compared to novels, scripts are filtered through three extra layers of interpretation: first, the collaborative interpretation between the actor and their director. Then, the interpretation of the camera operator, then the interpetation of the editor. Each layer subtracts some of what the writer's initial intention was, and adds a little of what all the other collaborators are thinking of. That means every layer of production needs to be careful about not spoiling the soup. If they add too much of their own personal flavor, it'll clash with what everyone else is doing. If they add too little, they're create the movie equivalent of that one meme about the horse drawing. So you can't just add a top-tier writer to a project and let them have free reign, because that brings the whole thing out of whack. You can't just lock a bunch of geniuses together in a film studio with an unlimited supply of cocaine, you need genuine collaboration, the entire way up and down the chain. If movies routinely used the exact same crew working together they could be consistently good, but as-is there's no way a production committee can just hope for the best. Thus, executive meddling. Thus, poorly written blockbusters.
GBRK
5mo ago
The established correlation between SES and IQ is not proven to be causal.
And the correlation between genetics and IQ has? Nobody's running randomized control trails with polygenically screened embryos. We're at least as confident that SES affects intelligence as we are that any particular gene marker of intelligence does. Sure, SES effects genetics too, but it's not like causality is required to be unidirectional.
Blacks mature faster than whites, run faster, have better color vision and immune systems
Even if these claims are true, and true because of specifically genetic factors, It's not clear to me at all that these things should result in tradeoffs. Faster maturation seems like it would select for greater learning speed; color vision for visual pattern analysis; faster running for spatial intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong-- but either way, it's an empirical question that the current data can't resolve. That's ultimately my big problem with modern race-based intelligence research: that the data is too fuzzy, and that there are too many empirical questions left unanswered. At this point I simply can't reject the null hypothesis and accept that the HBD racial intelligence rankings accurately reflect reality.
GBRK
5mo ago
Are you seriously blind to the idea that paying people makes them more loyal to you? I guess i shouldn't have brought up the "roman" thing because everyone wants to focus on the specifics of that example instead of looking for broader commonalities throughout history. Like-- do you seriously think the democratic expansion of the administrative state wasn't buying the loyalty of the permanent bureaucracy? This is the exact same thing, except ICE is a literal army instead of a figurative one.
I know a little bit about medical billing and data standards since I work in the industry. More and more, I'm pulled toward the idea that healthcare is so irreducibly complex the only way to cut the red knot is either with completely privatized and unregulated healthcare mixed with trustbusting to break local emergency room monopolies, or by creating a single payer system empowered to ruthlessly negotiate for its own interests. Trying to have a system where a government pays for only the statistically sickest individuals (the poor and old) is just the worst of all possible worlds. (My preference is for single payer, but I have a certain sympathy for the idea of completely obliterating the pharmaceutical patent system, making EVERYTHING legal OTC, and letting God sort it out.)
GBRK
5mo ago
I think less precision is better because more precision would just be unecessary detail. The exact ideology of my in and near groups doesn't matter when the core fact I an trying to convey is that there are people who I emotionally care for that the OBBB negatively affects. Trying to frame that in ideological terms would just ovscure the truth.
The most telling aspect of AI art is what I call "extraneous detail." As a reaction, I've been making a deliberate effort to avoid that in my own writing.
GBRK
5mo ago
Haha fair enough. I used to have a tv with a ui language set to french and never got around to changing it because i thought it was funny.
- ICE is not personally loyal to Trump
Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.
GBRK
5mo ago
Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed? I was genuinely surprised to see that no one was posting about it at all in this thread.
I'm broadly against the bill but don't have much of an opinion of the specific provisions. I understand that it's meant to neuter the political power of my ingroup and neargroup and it seems like it's going to be effective at that, so I know I'm going to dislike it regardless of whether it has any actual non-partisan merit. I guess if I had to single out few things in particular, I'm selfishly in favor of renewing the R&D tax writeoffs, but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces. There are... historical parallels. I'm (among other things) brazilian, and I can't help but remember the first republic's antipathy towards and neglect of the navy due to their royalist tendencies.
GBRK
5mo ago
I have a private theory that reorgs are the company-level analogue to how human bodies evolved to raise their temperature as an immune response. When you can cleanly identify and resolve a dysfunction you do that, but when you can't... when all you have is a lingering sense of dread... you can stagnate, and let your corporate DNA die out, or you can generate a lot of "heat" and hope any entrenched dysfunctions eventually die off. No individual corporate T-cell knows what they're doing-- they're just thinking about advancing their careers and how shitty the coffee is. But the behavior gets reinforced by so many selection pressures that they conform to it anyway, as part of a larger system that they can interact with but never fully comprehend.
(This feeds into my whole conspiracy theory about how the stockmarket is already a meaninfully superhuman artificial intelligence but that's another discussion.)
GBRK
5mo ago
cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.
Surveying my vegan friends, what's been most interesting to discover is that they're mostly not utilitarians. I routinely pose the question of, "how many weeks of veganism would I have to endure to convince you to eat a single burger." One dude was provisionally willing to eat a burger if it turned me vegan permanently (and agreed in general that there was some finite number of weeks he would trade for a burger) but the rest turned out to be avowed kantians on the subject. Apparently they didn't care about saving animal lives on net as much as they cared about not violating their personal morality about not contributing to the suffering of animals. That was a particularly interesting result for me because these same vegans are also involved in the local EA movement (which is how I met them.) Going in, I was under the impression that EA was a pretty explicitly utilitarian movement, in the sense that it prioritized QALYs and net pleasure-minus suffering, but that wasn't the angle they approached it from.
GBRK
5mo ago
Sidebar but what's up with the random é's I occasionally see randomly inserted in your text? Are you just using a non-american keyboard or is it like an "embolden the e" thing?
GBRK
5mo ago
I'm writing a book where the main character wants to turn herself into a cannibalism-powered surveillance state, her best friend belongs to a tribe of matriarchal-eugenicist-fascists that can reasonably described as feminazis, the "good guys" are the IEEE if it was also simultaneously the illuminati, and the "bad guys" are a mix of UN blue helmets and the Knights Templar. I am balls deep in moral dissonance dissonance and nobody is going to stop me.
GBRK
5mo ago
No I haven't.
You explicitly said that the right to citizenship is a quality issued by a state. That excludes it from being a quality intrinsic to any individual.
I think that the citizen body should reflect the nation
There are self-consistent worldviews that include this statement and the idea that citizenship is wholly the province of the state to administer, but you can't then also imply "citizen children have a right to citizenship" without introducing new ideas that break self-consistently. For example, you said "and they need to have citizenship somewhere" but this is only true in the practical sense-- we've signed international agreements that in effect guarantee this, but if we're talking about changing how things are done in the first place, why not re-examine all the assumptions? If we don't have to extend citizenship to the children of noncitizens, we don't have to extend citizenship to the children of citizens. In the vast majority of cases we would, obviously but why take that for granted? With respect to your position about "reflecting the nation", we-- we are in effect deciding what the nation should look like. Why not decide that it shouldn't include this "indigenous underclass?"
and do what the rest of the world does.
The rest of the world is obviously terrible though. This should be self-evident from the fact that they're not america. Why would anyone want to make america less like america and more like... saudi arabia???
"Undue" relative to what? Again, I'm not arguing that intelligence isn't mediated by genetics, I'm just arguing that we laack sufficient evidence about specifically race-based genetics. And as per your other comment, while larger sample sized would be nice the problem remain the potential for confounders. At the root of the problem is the fact that races are essentialy pre-confounded; we know for a fact that people of different races lead different lifestyles of consistent but largely non-genetic reasons; any of those things will interfere with any attempt to say a particular trait is caused by genetics. Hell, take skin tone for example. We know unambiguously that genes mediate skin tone, but we also know for a fact that any attempt to survey ethnicities by skin tone and attempt to precisely predict the genetic effect would be confounded by the effect of distribution over latitude and likelyhood to tan.
If you actually believe this, you should be more skeptical of hbd, not less. if there's one perfect brain, and iq is just about how close you are to it, the only selection pressures that would matter would be demerits for isolated populations with tight social structures that allow people with genetic defects to survive and breed. That looks like the exact opposite of the smart-jews HBD hypothesis.
I'm not on the motte because I'm interested in being politically correct.
That we should be testing groups is well taken, but the "similar iq" part i disagree with. Even most nuclear families have significant IQ variation. In particular, I think that when resources (food, parental investment, status) are scarce, groups end up adopting tactics that concentrate iq gains in a few individuals (like by feeding the chief's firstborn son better food and working hard to educate him) while the rest are allowed to be dumber. Also, the "smartest" genes are probably relative to body dimensions... Maybe a gene that causes you to grow more neurons on average is best when combined with genes that predispose you to have a big skull, but actually gives you iq reducing mental illness if poor nutrition or being born female gives you a small head.
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