Negatory
2yr ago
While it’s possible for an influx of new labor to drive down wages for a short time or in a particular field without much of a barrier to entry, you’re just wrong, theoretically and empirically.
Think about babies. They start off small and helpless. All they do is consume for close to two decades, which isn’t helped by child labor laws.
But eventually, they will join the workforce, driving down the cost of labor. Right?
Except, workers are also consumers. So they work to earn money and then spend that money, which creates a demand for other people to have jobs.
A country with a high population growth rate from fertility has a very similar labor economics situation with one having the same from immigration.
Wages go up, on average, from increased productivity. Not restraining labor supply, which is ultimately self-defeating in a modern economy.
People get pissy over immigrants and over outsourcing, but ultimately it’s mostly just hating the necessary dynamism and creative destruction that makes the American economy so much better than any peer.
Negatory
2yr ago
It’s not a categorical error to:
- Point out the claimed miracle is n=1 from decades ago.
- Being up the lack of miracle healing of lost limbs, because it’s telling. BS tends to hide where ambiguity gives it natural cover. There’s lots of ambiguity in health outcomes, but lost limbs are a clear cut (pun intended) situation, so nobody can play games there.
The null hypothesis is that lots of health outcomes happen for reasons we don’t understand the murky details of, because the human body is simultaneously wondrous and a dumpster fire, and there’s no reason to go claiming miracles from god when a positive outcome happens. That’s just picking hits and ignoring misses.
If faith healing happened commonly, as many claim it does, then there ought to be a way to show that systematically. Not one offs.
Negatory
2yr ago
Education issues were a big issue for a Republican winning the governor so that dynamic already exists there.
Negatory
2yr ago
I can blame you for being economically illiterate such that you think those high tech salaries from valuable companies would exist without having imported a lot of people with relevant abilities.
You wouldn’t make more if all the immigrant tech talent vanished because they aren’t what’s preventing you from having the relevant skills to have those jobs.
Zero-sum thinking is just factually incorrect here.
Negatory
2yr ago
Once again, how do you explain height differences?
How much difference would you accept as reasonable based on genetics? Clearly, one standard deviation is too much. A half maybe?
You’re right about the overall limits of variance we are going to see among human populations.
However.
In the grand scheme of things, 85, 100, and 115 IQs are not a huge amount of variation for our species anymore than 5’5”, 5’10”, and 6’3” heights are.
At some point we will have exhausted plausible environmental explanations for the achievement gap.
In fact, we already have, as evidenced by arguments serving as excuses that it would take centuries to get past the effects of misfortune (an order of magnitude more than what the Supreme Court thought), and that ever-present “systemic racism” is behind any disparity, with no need to show actual evidence of racism.
The tide of the evidence is being pulled in one direction along multiple fronts, and so people want to pretend we have the same understanding of genetics as 50+ years ago when it was less clear and explicit oppression was far worse and more recent.
To my friends, everything; to my enemies, epistemic humility.
Negatory
2yr ago
Avoiding making mistakes is typically a perfectionist issue, and can lead to risk avoidance.
And anxieties about money are very common.
The standard response that I would recommend in your case is figure out what your investment timeline and risk tolerance ought to be in terms of stocks/bonds/REITs, then start investing in low-cost index funds.
And just don’t look at the numbers.
Automate that shit and avoid being triggered. A financial advisor might be called for, but you have to be careful because boy are incentives misaligned there by default. If you want to get to the point where you can make investment decisions in a car-by-case basis it sounds like you might have to invest in formal therapy.
A tale of caution:
I had an older coworker who was very conservatively invested even though his house was paid off, he and his wife still had a decade of career left, and their kids were doing well with college paid for.
So I explained that standard advice would be he should adjust his portfolio, and he agreed it made sense to shift his allocation towards stocks.
This was in late 2019.
So, naturally, the anxiety that had led him to avoid optimal exposure to stock over the years caused him to sell when the market plunged. He listened to me give standard advice once, but didn’t talk to me when he got nervous. Emotionally, now it’s even worse because COVID did not destroy stock values forever and so obviously my “buy and hold” advice was right because it always is, short of a level of catastrophe the US has never experienced.
So he lost a painful chunk of his portfolio and, I imagine, hasn’t tried to reallocate back towards stock. So he locked in losses and now has a low-growth portfolio. He’ll be fine overall with his decent pension and responsible living for decades (a Jew married to a Korean, so relevant stereotypes apply), even if his investments were zeroed out. (That’s why I thought he would do well with accepting more variance in his portfolio… but actually risk aversion was the driving force.)
I’d feel bad about it but for the fact that level of emotional incompetence can’t be helped in someone old enough to have lived through the dotcom and 2008 crashes as an adult.
Negatory
2yr ago
We’ve know since Stephen Jay Gould that evolution didn’t apply above the neck.
I’ve never had anyone who knows much about biology (and doesn’t try the very dumb trick of denying IQ) explain how height (obvious and uncontroversial) differs from intelligence genetically.
Both are polygenetic and can be severely affected by environment (particularly malnutrition, historically), and can differ across races, but we simply can’t deny the height achievement gap.
Negatory
2yr ago
Men don’t win points for having a disadvantage labeled.
Neurodiversity is all the rage these days, but there a giant penis-sized asymmetry for how such labels work out for women vs. men in being perceived.
“What a loser” vs. “oh you poor thing” is the default response, because biology is real and our instincts have us value men differently for showing weakness, even when it’s not fair.
Negatory
2yr ago
I think this is correct.
Though at this point, some Utah Mormons have gone full Red Tribe and there are internal divisions in the Utah GOP along “Mike Lee vs. Mitt Romney” lines.
Also the LDS church is fairly pro-immigration and pro-vaccination, which caused issues for some of the faithful.
Negatory
2yr ago
I agree it’s possible since the current equilibrium is not stable, but if I adjust to that level of optimism myself, I also become more optimistic about point 1 being commonly if quietly accepted in elite circles (in the same way that even a lot of people that dislike markets don’t outright deny supply and demand when push comes to shove).
If the sanity waterline rises then I expect the two to be positively correlated, in other words.
Negatory
2yr ago
Hard evidence and the freedom to tweet are already changing the online discussion of it.
It’s the same issue with gender preferences.
I don’t think the current mainstream position can hold indefinitely.
Negatory
2yr ago
You’re thinking about this the wrong way.
The battle over gay marriage was won so fast both legally and popularly that progressives think they can repeat that with say trans issues.
I don’t think conservatives think they have a chance of ever reversing gay marriage. Best they can do is fight to have the freedom to not bake cakes for it.
Negatory
2yr ago
I’ve heard that theory but I’ve also seen pictures of the math grad students at Harvard and the US math Olympiad team.
Negatory
2yr ago
Re: “European” tech and institutions:
Negatory
2yr ago
Luck matters.
History is full of strange contingencies and many books have been written trying to explain why the scientific and industrial revolutions took place in Western Europe and not somewhere else. Britain having easily accessible coal was pretty important, for example. Lots of people believe Christianity had important cultural effects that led to intellectual and economic freedom and the resulting innovation.
The correlation in modern times between national IQ and wealth is a modern correlation. Inborn ability can be constrained from reaching its potential by the environment. China is still hobbled by bad policy and underperforms its potential, as is North Korea.
Negatory
2yr ago
Blacks make up over half the NFL so they’re still overrepresented by a factor of four.
Culture doesn’t cut it there either as an explanation because both whites and blacks have very strong cultural motivations for those two sports.
Where culture does tend to explain things is when blacks aren’t overrepresented because it’s a sport where black kids are less likely to have a shot or interest. Famously, the Winter Olympics don’t have a lot of Africans on the podium. The NHL is very white and that almost certainly is explained by culture and not by skating genes. Similarly, baseball has a different cultural situation.
Negatory
2yr ago
I don’t know what you mean by “demonstrate that the natural can be proven under a naturalist framework” when I’m asking for evidence of the mere existence of some claimed phenomenon. “Supernatural vs. natural” is a red herring because the claim is that there is an effect on the material world. Calling “can I see evidence of it” a “naturalist framework” is not even wrong. It’s just common sense to not merely take someone’s word for it.
We have used science to discover tiny things and invisible forces by extending our powers of observation. We’ve had theories make predictions that we can later observe to be true as technology improved. We may not have a full understanding of say quantum physics, but we have experiments that allow us to observe the effects.
If the supernatural touches the natural, we should be able to observe evidence of the interaction. Holy books are full of accounts of such interactions. People today often claim such interactions happen.
And yet, we just can’t quite seem to get good evidence such things happen.
I’m not sure if I’m parsing the meaning of your last paragraph correctly, but if it’s something along the lines of “people don’t form their beliefs logically” then, logically, I can’t change your mind. Obviously, humans are not consistently rational in their epistemology. Religious beliefs are sacred/anchor beliefs married to trapped priors and most people are immune to contradictory evidence. But not all.
Negatory
2yr ago
Don’t leave out the part where the Founding Fathers were made up of both Roundheads and Cavaliers (were any prominent ones Borderers?) and the constitution was designed as a truce on the culture war of the time, while allowing states to have the bulk of the power to define how life would go.
The culture war of the time was of course Protestants vs. Catholics/insufficiently Puritan Protestants, and the Founding Fathers probably all had recent ancestors directly affected by those civil wars in the UK.
The modern day culture war is more about Borderers vs. Roundheads (now puritan progressives), whereas the Cavaliers strike me as more of the business wing of the GOP.
Of course, this is very loose. The Bushes are New England WASPs, as is say Mitt Romney’s ancestry.
Negatory
2yr ago
Can’t you do pretty even split in the US over just liberty vs. equality/equity? Aka limited government vs. social democracy, with a corresponding “rural vs. urban” fight over culture and lifestyle options.
As soon as the shift from “equal under the law” to “equality of outcomes ensured by government intervention” became dominant on the left, that fight was going to happen, and most other fights align around it.
I don’t think the civilizational/hierarchical one works, given how much the Blue Tribe wants to use state power to ensure equity. The Classic Conservatives/Theocrats aren’t the main force on the right in the US.
Negatory
2yr ago
The Holocaust happened both because people didn’t like the Jews and believed them to be inferior.
If you have strong racial animus it’s probably not the case that a proper understanding of genetics will help. But, historically, neither has the opposite.
You’re not going to get the “just stop noticing systemic racism” genie back in the bottle because we already blew past the compromise of colorblind liberal individualism, and now that’s racist.
Only way out is through because you have to get enough of the elites and activist class to be willing to go back to the compromise. You don’t get concessions by having a quietist tradition that concedes defeat in the cancel culture war.
If by “stars” you mean “skill positions” like QB, well…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_issues_faced_by_black_quarterbacks#:~:text=Due%20to%20%22racial%20stacking%22%20in,considered%20a%20%22thinking%22%20position.
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