aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
2d ago
I agree with this point. If the goal of appointing these people is to enfranchise Black people whose opinions are marginalized in society then I don't see how putting someone who does not at all have the experience of those groups into power accomplishes this. It's like the recent immigrants taking the affirmative action spots in ivy leagues. The disconnect between the purported motivation and the outcome achieved along with the total lack of interest in aligning these things betrays that the motivation is not sincere.
aqouta
8d ago
Even in this scenario given a three minute chat and just observing behavior I think you could swamp race with other observations. But yes, if you're going to construct a scenario that amounts to "You need to select people knowing only the average stats of their group" (racial or otherwise - this same analysis applies to things like hair color of any other arbitrary grouping) then it would just follow that you should select the group with the highest expected competence.
I agree with the following implications and further think this implies some obligation of those who are more capable to help those who are less. Not on a group based level but just the mesh of all humanity.
I've probably commented on HBD threads on the motte several dozen times over the years and remember replying directly to you more than a couple times.
Edit: here I am about a month ago pushing back in the same topic.
Here I am clarifying that HBD need not be able racial supremacy
As far as no enemies on the left goes, I work at a mega bank and some groups of leftists have expressed to me a desire to have me take a place in front of a wall. I know you have a kind fo esoteric understanding of left VS right but I assure you that I recognize enemies to my left.
aqouta
8d ago
I've never had any trouble with it myself. For the most part people you're interacting with have been sorted such that I think assumptions wouldn't be interpersonally useful. I work with excellent black engineers. It's a lot like how I can recognize for various reason women tend not to enter engineering fields and yet I easily recognize one of the most talented engineers on my team is a woman.
aqouta
9d ago
HBDers like to claim individual and environmental factors largely don't matter and that everything can be boiled down to genetics. When I observe the world around me, I find that exceedingly hard to believe. My go-to example is that someone can have all the genetic potential in the world and still end up a flabby bastard if they don't eat well or work-out. Or in the case of the linked thread, all the genetic potential in the world isn't going to make a kid read well if nobody teaches them to read. From these simple observations I have arrived at the conclusion that the effect sizes of individual/environmental factors like having an engaged adult who teaches the kid to read, or getting off one's ass and going to the gym are far more predictive of outcome, and thus must have a greater effect size than genetics assuming such effects are measurable at all.
You do seem to just ignore those of us who are proponents of HBD and don't fall into this obvious trap. Yes, the environment also matters, no this does not actually disprove HBD and it is ridiculous to assume it does for the same reason a dump trunk being able to plow through a barricade does not prove barricades to have no efficacy. The world is more complicated than only one thing being able to contribute to an outcome. The HBD position is not that HBD has a greater effect size than environment, this is trivially proved by the ability to deprive babies of oxygen enough to leave them mentally handicapped. The HBD position is that genetics matter at all and vary between groups.
aqouta
9d ago
I just want to chime in as I do that as someone who believes HBD is very likely true that I have no real interest in the use of it in this way. The use of these characteristics to pre judge people is reprehensible. I am only interested in HBD as an alternative explanation for disparate outcomes.
aqouta
17d ago
This sort of demonstrates my point about 'being allergic to the discussion', whenever you talk about this stuff people assume the old battle lines are in effect and that those must be the 'sides' we're arguing for.
People assume this because you invoked capitalism for no gain whatsoever. As I've said elsewhere this discussion has happened before with no reference to fundamental economic systems.
Like I said, capitalism's solution to post-need goods is to impose artificial scarcity; IP laws are one of the ways that this artificial scarcity gets imposed. The fact that without that imposition, capitalism can't incentivize the creation of those goods and they stop existing, is very much a part of my point: that capitalism doesn't have a good solution to this situation.
It's not capitalism or markets that doesn't have a solution to this, it's a atomic property of this type of thing. There is no natural solution it's hacks and kludges all the way down.
In theory, the makers of a great game don't care whether they make $50M and a million people play their game, or they make $50M and billion people play their game.
Right, and somethings like price discrimination try to get at this but it's messy. The problem is the same mechanism we use to determine the value of the game is inherent to the scarcity. Something like a government buyout price could be interesting, a studio could opt to sell their languishing IPs straight to the state for some reasonable multiple of the cash earned to date but that's got it's own issues. Again, I'm really not opposed to tweaking the systems in play.
aqouta
17d ago
Pretty much, yeah, except with taxes instead of a subscription model so that every citizen can enjoy it no matter what.
Spotify being a voluntary interaction makes it far superior in my opinion.
I'm just saying that finding a universal solution that we can use for all post-scarcity goods (including things like medicines that cost billions to invent and pennies to produce) is really really important
My point I think is that no such universal solution exists and this search you ask for has been ongoing for as long as this class of high upfront cost low to no marginal cost goods have existed. Capitalism, combined with some regulation, offers a lot of flexibility to tailor specific solutions to specific problems. If you want to say "Hey, we should tweak or even heavily change the regulation component to better achieve our ends" that's a totally valid thing to propose. I myself have a lot of things I'd like to tweak about how IP works in the US. But nowhere in this discussion does some adherence or aversion to 'capitalism' enter the picture.
aqouta
17d ago
My point is that IP laws are a uniquely capitalist solution to the problem, because the whole point of IP laws is to let capitalist price-finding still work on post-scarcity goods.
Ok, but you have said we're probably better off keeping the rest of the capitalist(I do quite dislike this term as it implies a kind of rule by capital that I deeply disagree with so unless otherwise specified I'm substituting in 'Market based system with private property rights) system so unless you're proposing replacing that it does need to slot into a capitalist framework. You've proposed central planning with a distribution which has all the problems of the IP system, just as hare brained of schemes would instantly arise to maximize payouts and minimize costs, but lacks the things you get out of the box by going with a capital compatible system.
There would be no benefit to IP laws and artificial scarcity if you weren't trying to achieve that type of price-finding through markets, which is the heart of capitalism.
I agree IP couldn't work if there was nothing to be gained from ownership of the IP but that's just dumping a contextual system into an abyss that tells us practically nothing. What any system that encourages production which has high upfront costs and near zero marginal costs must have is a way to both compensate people who produce things that many people actually want and discourage the production of things that many people don't actually want. And it's a big bonus if it's not susceptible to waste based on signaling games, i.e. many people might say they want more educational programming but if in reality none of it is actually consumed that's a failure in planning.
aqouta
18d ago
But we can insert into IP laws anything we want. Invoking capitalism is purely going to muddy the waters. IP laws are not capitalism, they are an extra-market hack to incentivize the invention of goods that have little to no marginal production costs. @guesswho can propose any other hack they want, and in fact this conversation has happened on the motte without the invocation of capitalism at least once before. The fundamental problem that exists outside of any economic scheme is that some things have high upfront costs, some of which costs are in the form of risk, that needs to be born by someone while the fruits can be endlessly enjoyed by all. IP is actually a pretty elegant solution to balancing these incentives all things considered. I'm happy to listen to other suggestions but we're not going to be talking about capitalism.
aqouta
18d ago
Here is as example of a new system that almost certainly wouldn't work, but shows the types of ideas you could discuss... The government measures how much people spend on all digital entertainment products today, and creates a new tax in that amount. Anyone in the country can download and enjoy any digital entertainment they want, for free, at any time. The revenue from the tax gets split among all digital creators proportionally to how many times their product was downloaded, with some type of pro-rating for how long the experience is or how long it should take to produce or etc., details to be worked out by hypothetical domain-expert philosopher kings.
You're describing spotify.
aqouta
18d ago
It's not capitalism that prevents you from sharing the data project that you purchases for no marginal cost with others, it's intellectual property laws. Now if you get rid of those and let capitalism take it's course then you will almost certainly see less of these things invented but you're far from critiquing anything at the heart of capitalism.
aqouta
18d ago
For those wondering about why the install thing and not the revenue thing I think the only workable answer is that they're thinking about unusual business models and game studios that care more about install base for attracting funders. If some studio creates some mobile app or cheap steam game that makes barely any money but uses that to secure a ton of fundings for a much bigger title Unity wants a piece of that funding because they're getting nearly nothing from the current system.
Late to the party but responding before reading other replies.
An NPC is someone who doesn't meaningfully engage with thought on political topics and simply parrots what their peers believe in order to fit in. If tasked with writing anything on their political stance the entire corpus would consistent entirely of empty slogans. Despite having no real political thoughts they still might actively fight the culture war in a kind of zombie state where they're very sure of the correctness of their slogans because they've grasped their shallow message but cannot actually handle any pushback because of how trivial is it so inflict cognitive dissonance on them with just a handful of pointed questions.
They're probably not inherently bad people, they trust their peers are good people and the slogans they're given seem pro social enough that they must come to the conclusion that their opponents are simply evil but they're none the less destructive because it makes most of politics about herding thoughtless voters rather than hashing out substantive disagreements.
The NPC bit is the most fitting in describing the degree to which, once you've identified someone as an NPC, you can almost perfectly assume all of their positions on all topics. Just like NPCs in games these qualities can be abused easily and is the source of many time tested content formats like man of the street being tricked by content creator to make silly statements.
aqouta
29d ago
I found adding :
.comment-anchor {
padding-left:25px
}
To the custom CSS in setting to help a lot if the issue you're talking about is the same I ran into before. The text is so close to the left side of the comment box that you can easily click and drag from outside of the text field and grab the whole comment hierarchy.
aqouta
1mo ago
Women generally are more sensitive to disgust than guys are.
Huh, I have the opposite intuition. From what I can tell women are less sensitive to that kind of thing than men unless we're defining disgust very broadly. Partnering up with the highest status/propertied man with little regard to other factors has been a quite dominant female reproductive strategy for a long time.
aqouta
1mo ago
I take issue with the bad personal hygiene and trust fund status. The usual complaintants are usually well funded through their own personal earnings and frankly the hygiene thing never did at all in my experience, high functioning people who question they're success aren't low hamging fruit like bathing. Seriously, the idea that this is someone earning well enough to sponsor a family coming over while also not having figured out that inoffensive smells factored in is a venn diagram containing only the severely autistic. It's nearly disqualifying that you actually unironically reference it.
I do accept them being 450 lbs and repulsive, but I think there is still room to feel love there. But I think merely very obese would be more fair.
Mildly, somewhat, eh. There's a pretty substantial step when you cross from someone who is the sex you're orientated towards into an entirely different sex that I think breaks the comparison. It should be plenty to get the point across that it's a particularly repulsive woman. Even just on the child rearing element it matters that the kid(s) would be biologically both of ours and raising them together creates a bond.
I propose a compromise of a trans man who is fully reproductively intact. And I think I wouldn't actually be resentful of this transman if they also took the relationship seriously. Even this version is kind of lacking because I think our perspective savior is likely to be willing to change some things about themselves at the savee's request which kind of interferes with the repulsiveness of a transman to your average man because the transman would at least make an effort to be more feminine to the preference of the savee.
That said I do find the whole mail order bride thing intuitively distasteful in a way I can't articulate well. Something about the transactional nature. Perhaps Disney has just too thoroughly colonized my mind.
aqouta
1mo ago
But there was some rich gay dude who would save 'em if you married the guy.
Hold up, you're significantly changing the situation by making it a homosexual relationship. I can have children by marrying a very ugly woman, I cannot have children by marrying an unpleasant man.
aqouta
1mo ago
I mean they're able to dictate how sports programs are run and how interpersonal disputes are handled. Are you really going to say admissions criteria is beyond the pale?
aqouta
1mo ago
Scott's star has never shined brighter.
At what cost?
When was the last time he wrote anything people here bother quoting anymore? Besides "Scott wrote a thing which is a good opportunity for my more interesting post on the topic" type deals.
aqouta
1mo ago
I think that most of the binary polarization around public schools depends on whether you were a 'cool kid' in school, or not. I made a bit of a transition from cool to uncool during my high school years, and it was like being on a totally different planet.
I really wasn't anything like a particular cool kid, I had a couple social groups but frankly in retrospect a kind of an outsider complex that made me feel like a victim even though I probably wasn't. I was a bit of a geek, more into wasting time in video games than much socializing. albeit most of the time was playing those games with people I knew so socializing in a way.
I definitely had some social complaints but talking about the schooling itself? My teachers were professional and seemed happy and engaged in teaching the subjects, with one exception or my chemistry teacher that I think had to do with a last minute replacement for someone who quit. My fellow students mostly weren't disruptive and did what the teachers asked of them without much question. By highschool we were given quite a bit of freedom and had access to a wide range of elective options at either a community college or a career and technology center that many high schools shared(I took a couple CISCO certification classes, a video game design class and an mobile phone programming class).
People are talking about above and beyond improvements like better sleeping hours and even more accelerated options. These might be worth considering in their own right as an improvement on something that already works. But as far as doing all the basic stuff right I think I've personally seen it work given you have the right student population.
But yeah, the separate question of whether schooling itself is oppressive or the tyranny of teenaged social interactions ring somewhat true. Making young people going through puberty not be total assholes to each other constantly as they figure it all out just doesn't seem like it could reasonably be in scope in a discussion about improving schools in a country where, just to pull the first depressing stat I could find, 63% of high school seniors can't read at grade level.
If steel manning I think the motivation is something like that there is some value in young disenfranchised black kids seeing that their skin color is not alone an impenetrable barrier. Are their voices actually being heard because a rich lady who happens to be black gets a position? Maybe not. But it's not nothing to know that if they escape poverty they too can aspire to any position.
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