MotteInTheEye
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User ID: 578
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
The whole "growth mindset" bundle of ideas trades a lot on this motte-and-bailey.
Motte: All else being equal, someone who believes that hard work matters and innate talent does not will perform better than someone who believes the opposite.
Bailey: It is actually the case that hard work matters and innate talent does not.
My understanding is that the studies focus on supporting the motte - to the extent that there is good science here, it supports the motte. (It's social science so of course that extent is very little.) But most of the discussion around growth mindset acts as if the bailey was proven, which the studies don't even attempt to prove.
It's interesting because it's hard to know how self-consciously this substitution is made. Is it done intentionally by people who believe the motte and therefore wish to convince people of the bailey for their own good? Is it simple confusion? Is it bad faith twisting of social science to support a politically desired conclusion (the blank slate hypothesis)?
I suspect that a large component is that believers in the motte want to resolve cognitive dissonance when it comes to acting on the motte. They are convinced that it will be good for others if they are persuaded of the bailey. But this holds whether the bailey is true or not! And trying to convince people of something that's not true for their own good is the kind of thing bad guys do, and they are not bad guys, so the bailey must be true.
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
Another way of putting is is that for more than a century, the Supreme Court has been the primary instrument of transforming the federal government and its sphere of influence following the progressive program. Conservatives only in our lifetimes wised up enough to set up the pipeline, as you put it, and it has only just borne any fruit in the form of walking back a bare handful of the most extreme points of that program.
We shouldn't be surprised that progressives would turn on it so quickly, because it has always been a question of what means would achieve the necessary end of transforming America and being on the right side of history. The Supreme Court was their darling because it was the most effective tool, not because of any underlying principles about the primacy of the judiciary over other branches of government.
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
I don't think this question is in good faith but just in case: it was a simple misdirect joke, making it seem like he was talking about the Pacific garbage patch that progressives are very concerned about and then revealing that he was speaking figuratively about a country. It would be like if a tsunami was in the news and I said, "I'm very concerned about this massive tidal wave about to hit our shores - but enough about the Democrats' immigration policy."
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Great post, but I think the pattern you briefly mentioned at the end bears a much deeper examination.
Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals.
This really understates the phenomenon. As a conservative from a blue tribe stronghold, my visits to red tribe strongholds like the deep south are extremely disillusioning. It's hard to overstate what a dramatic difference there is in the obesity levels everywhere you go. And this in turn leads to much higher consumption of public health resources.
It's hard to square these realities with common sense arguments which ring true to me, like the ones you made above. It doesn't seem debatable that self-sufficiency is more a red tribe value than a blue tribe value - so why are blue tribe individuals, as a class, more self-sufficient when it comes to diet and health?
There are a number of explanations you could hypothesize: maybe personal belief in the importance of self-sufficiency is irrelevant in a system that doesn't incentivize it. Maybe if you controlled for poverty / IQ the differences are explained or the sign of the correlation flips. Maybe it's a Simpsons paradox thing where within a given region, right-wing beliefs are correlated with fitness, but the correlation doesn't hold across the whole population. But it feels like it's crying out for some sort of explanation.
MotteInTheEye
7mo ago
With a little creativity you could discover an unbounded number of actions leading up to the phone call without which it could not have occurred. E.g., the guy who let you in in traffic so you would be there on time, the other guy who slammed on the brakes just in time to prevent a major accident which would have stopped you from arriving at the coffee shop, the gal who set her alarm so that she could open up the coffee shop that morning, the engineer who put the final touches on the cell phone communication standard your phone used to receive the call...
There's obviously no moral obligation on you to identify every single event without which your phone call couldn't have happened. You owe a normal debt of gratitude to someone who minorly inconvienced themselves to help a stranger. Of course a bigger gesture would be a nice act since this particular act of kindness looms large in your mind, but there's no coherent case that you owe anything more than you would if the call hadn't earned you any money.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Unfortunately it's inevitable even if every single voter fully intended to vote for quality, not agreement, simply because of the fact that you notice flaws in arguments that you disagree with much more easily than in those you agree with.
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
It's still a pretty big jump from "has read some posts by Scott" to "reads the Motte", right?
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
So all you would have to do is say "I regret my abortion" and you get a free payout? There's a rather obvious downside to this policy...
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
It's a great point that the conservative judicial pipeline is almost exclusively Catholic and that Roe v Wade had a huge role in motivating intellectual Catholics to rethink their progressive association.
MotteInTheEye
11mo ago
I think it was essentially a three step process for this and all other hobbies:
- The original Internet culture was generally left-libertarian.
- Internet forums ate the hobby: because they were such an efficient way to engage with other hobbyists, they outcompeted every alternative cultural center of the hobby.
- The left-libertarian founders and their successors largely became woke leftist, bringing the forums along with them.
The second and third steps happened in parallel during the aughts and early teens.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
There's no doubt that plenty on the right are going after Taylor Swift in cringey and conspiracy-minded ways. But I don't get Hanania's idea that she and her fans should be natural allies for the right. She's the icon of modern feminism.
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
This is a really strange take, since in Genesis the men of Sodom immediately try to rape the angels that are sent to Lot to warn him to get out. Genesis hardly leaves you wandering what could have been so bad about these people that they were condemned.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
It's really pathetic how little progress the tech industry has apparently made towards measuring and incentivizing actual productivity, that some of the foremost employers still feel like they need to chain people to a desk and hope that they'll get something done that way. This is despite having approximately the most naturally conscientious workforce in the world.
Remote work aside, there is so much on the table for the employer that's able to keep the 10x software engineers and fire everyone else that it's mind-boggling how few companies have even tried to pull it off. I'm not sure if it's ideological commitment to egalitarianism, principal / agent problems where middle management pursues empire building instead of efficiency, or just genuinely that difficult of a problem to solve.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Hlynka has been hanging out in this space and its predecessors getting banned and unbanned for the better part of a decade now. The discussion around "maybe just a 3 month or one year ban would correct the problem" misses the point - there is no question of changing the way he interacts here, there is just the mods' decision about whether the good outweighs the bad or not, given the way he will inevitably interact. I don't have a strong opinion on whether they got it right or wrong, but any criticism of their decision should be focused on that question, not hypothetical approaches to get him to clean up his act.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It seems like what you are really asking is "why are people acting like this is solely an ethnic Jewish/Arab conflict when Egypt is at least partially cooperating with Israel against Gaza." Because all of your questions are easy things answer if ethnicity isn't the only lens you use to look at the conflict. Egypt and Israel would both rather not have this impoverished and violent population incorporated into or freely mingling with their own people, and they act accordingly.
MotteInTheEye
2yr ago
Think of topics like "how AI algorithms discriminate against underrepresented minorities", "why do tech companies hire so few black people", "here's the latest outrageous thing Trump/Musk said on Twitter", "Amazon suppresses worker organization at its warehouses", "which tech giant has the greenest commitments and initiatives", "sexist gamers are review-bombing the latest AAA video game because the protagonist is a woman", etc etc.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I'm not convinced by OP's arguments either, mainly because as others have pointed out it's trivial for the community to define a bar that earns respect regardless of what settings the game allows. But this is going too far. It's reasonable and inevitable to seek a more objective lens on an achievement that feels substantial to you by comparing it to what others can do / have done. It's easy to say "measure yourself by yourself - if you sink 200 hours into beating easy mode because your thumbs just won't cooperate like a normal person's then you can be just as proud of that". But the failure mode there is that we are liable to deceive ourselves and let ourselves off the hook too easily if our only standard is subjective difficulty.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
That post, and especially OP's interactions in the comments, is setting off my troll alarm. I think there were plenty of bait-takers, but my hunch is that OP's goal was to a) see how ludicrous of a statement he could get the sub to agree with and b) possibly trick a few people into learning some undesirable facts in the gaps that his arguments led right up to.
MotteInTheEye
7mo ago
I'm fully on board with the death penalty proposal, but also, I don't understand why prison operators can't maintain a monopoly on violence even in its absence. Is it simply jurisprudence that has made corporal punishment and solitary confinement impossible or would it somehow be unaffordable to apply them as needed? A guy alone in a room with food coming through a slot can't rape or intimidate anyone, and I have a hard time believing that the extra number of toilets required wouldn't pay for itself by cutting down on all the violence that prison guards have to deal with, even leaving aside the benefits to cooperative prisoners.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
When my Dad was 16 or 17 (on the eve of the first OPEC embargo), he worked for summer and bought an old Cadillac. Today, not only is no job you do at 17 going to pay you enough to buy a decent car, a 'decent car' (that you buy with parental support, even) is going to be a 2000s Camry or equivalent highly functional, probably Japanese or Korean vehicle designed for middle class parents like your mom and dad.
I don't think I understand this part of your comment. I think you could buy either a very functional but uncool car like you describe, or a cooler car requiring maintenance along the lines of the old Cadillac, for $5k or so, which seems pretty achievable for a conscientious teenager to earn in three months at post-pandemic entry-level wages.
MotteInTheEye
3mo ago
If we are banning for AI posts can we also ban for "irregardless"? The latter is much more offensive to me!
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
I agree with your assessment that a repeat of Jan 6 is unlikely but I don't think it's because people are cowed, I think it's because the actions taken by the "rioters" didn't spark the admiration of their own side that progressive protests do. Begging someone else to do something about the problem, burning it all down because you don't like the hand you are dealt: conservatives, with their emphasis on personal responsibility and an internal locus of control, just don't resonate with these courses of action the same way progressives do.
For rank and file conservatives, the way Jan 6 was handled by the DoJ is a glaring injustice, but the rioters themselves are not heros. I think they are regarded as, at best, well-intentioned idiots and buffoons, and at worst, feds and their dupes working to supply the establishment with casus belli for extreme action to stamp out their political opponents.
MotteInTheEye
10mo ago
There might be a cultural dimension but a big part of it is that slowing to a stop and restarting is actually a significant inconvenience to a biker in a way that it's not to a driver since it requires a large expenditure of your personal physical energy.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
That's like saying "if you were going to let the Nazis occupy France, you may as well let them occupy England too". The fact that the death penalty takes decades to apply is the result of action by its opponents, defended against mostly unsuccessfully by its proponents.
There's no mystery to solve. The leftist instinct in America is always to sympathize with the poorer person whose life is in disarray. It's extremely clear which way this breaks in both cases (everyman subway rider / deranged lunatic and CEO / presumably indebted twenty-something).
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