aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1mo ago
Except, of course, they don't need to convince you it's reasonable, they just have to have convinced EEOC bureaucrats, judges, DEI departments, and so on, and they'll force it on everybody whether you agree or not.
This is all technicality. We still live in a democracy, these people serve at our collective pleasure. All sorts of things have been the law carried out as written, been unjust and overthrown. Step one is to defeat the idea in the public arena, the rest follows.
aqouta
1mo ago
No worries about a ping, it's good to have another context to continue from.
I think @RandomRanger drawing some conclusions from HBD that make sense if you add some other values like that society's purpose is to do something like maximize capabilities that I don't really hold, or at least don't strongly hold. You'll see they don't even mention race, this is just the Idiocracy argument.
It does seem like our heavy investments in educational interventions could at least be better spent even going to improve the lives to those they're trying to uplift if we were a little more realistic and separated out the most gifted students with impoverished backgrounds for tracks and gave the less talents of all races something like a comfortable life. It doesn't strike me as particularly compassionate to spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to teach less gifted students subjects that they aren't capable of. In fact that seems quite humiliating, it makes the failing more personal if we assume that they're capable but some personal failing is causing them to fall short. Those resources could go towards making sure they have adequate housing and that their neighborhoods are safe. There is no reason our less gifted can't lead dignified lives. I suspect that because of HBD those living dignified but not demanding lives will differ in racial proportions to those living impactful lives. I think it will probably have different proportions of red heads and heights as well for much the same reason.
As for @Capital_Room's longer post, I find it pretty unconvincing. Yes, I know that those people are obsessed with disparate outcomes. No, I don't think that this is reasonable justification for racial discrimination. It's just the argument for Harrison Bergeron given without candor.
aqouta
1mo ago
With all the shitcoin pump schemes it really wouldn't be difficult to have some coin, dogeMoonDiamondCoinbirdDog2Coin or something created by the paying party. the recipient buys it on a decentralized exchange, the paying party fakes a bunch of trades back and forth at a higher price point, then the recipient sells their shares. Is it a little suspicious that you got lucky and picked the right moonshot coin? Sure. But people get lucky. Especially if you are smart enough to also have picked a bunch of duds as well.
aqouta
1mo ago
In case you think this problem is more intractable than it is. If you just block/mute these accounts when you see them after maybe 5 rounds the flood slows to a trickle. It's really not a lot of accounts doing it.
aqouta
1mo ago
I know you don't go for the rationalist memeplex but falsifiability of beliefs predates yud and should be an exception. Is there truly nothing I could do or say that would convince you otherwise?
aqouta
1mo ago
You know what angle I never see brought up in the "gamers are up in arms about X or Y" events? Most people who spend many many hours playing games aren't playing the traditional boxed story games that everyone talks about. The best selling game of the year might move 15 million copies and take up 80 hours of the average buyer's time. Meanwhile 151 million people will play a game of league of legends in the average month. Final fantasy 14(an mmo) and World of Warcraft have 2.5 million and 2.2 million active subscribers. Most hours played by games are not spent on these story games and yet it's all that is ever really discussed.
aqouta
1mo ago
I think it's possible, but to the extent that such people exist I do not believe that they are posting about HBD, or complaining about "blank slatists" on theMotte.
I'm not sure I've ever seen the "you don't actually exist" argument deployed before.
aqouta
1mo ago
I'm tempted to go point by point but am on mobile today so I'll be brief. There needs to be a way to describe the truth value of HBD without the baggage of the vile hateful racists and you describing the vile worldview with a portmanteau containing the word is not helpful. We cannot be this afraid of the truth. It's beneath us.
aqouta
1mo ago
Likewise, whether you're a race essentialist who believes in HBD or you're a race essentialist who believes in intersectionality makes little difference to someone who genuinely believes in a colorblind meritocracy because you're an enemy either way.
Do you think it's not possible to believe in HBD and not be a race essentialist? True or false HBD is an empirical observation. Race essentialism is a political orientation.
To bring in your Marxist example HBD isn't the belief in the proletariat siezing the means of production. It's the recognizition that compound interest causes capital to accumulate. A brute fact about the world recognized by anyone interested in the truth that can be put towards propaganda about the virtues of building businesses and endowments for your children or propaganda about how you need to kill the capitalists while you still can before they own everything.
You're like someone who has seen the Marxist propaganda and has decided to react by disbelieving in compound interest and refuse to differentiate between the Marxists and your allies on those grounds.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity
If you and @HlynkaCG want to talk about the white-identity right I beg you, just call them that. There is nothing inherently tied to HBD belief that implies the importance of racial identity. That you think I'm a white identarian is exhibit A that your understanding of the whole topic is deranged.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms. One is a belief about the cause of statistical outcomes and the other is ideological movement. If you assumed that HBD was true are you actually saying that you'd be committed to white identarianism? Surely not right? The only thing holding you back from pushing for ethno states isn't the really quite difficult to defend belief that there is no variance in average aptitudes between races? Can you actually say that? Say "If I were convinced that there was a statistical difference in outcomes between racial groups I think ethno states would be a good idea".
If you're not willing to say that please stop putting those words in my mouth.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
I have long argued for race blindness. HBD is simply true and its truth is useful in counter arguing against the belief that different outcomes are caused by racial discrimination. I know this cannot be the first time you're seeing this position, why do you keep ignoring it?
aqouta
1mo ago
While this is true their borders don't seem to reflect reality at all. The dominant strain on the left is absolutely not HBD believers who oppose a color blind meritocracy on the grounds of believing in HBD.
aqouta
1mo ago
If you ask me "We didn't actually get away with it, so you can't blame us for trying" isn't much of defense.
The NFL is not meaningfully "we" and I don't understand why you insist that it is. You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us. It's like you making a some point about culture and then I spend reams of text explaining how young earth creationists are wrong and thus your real motivations are some version of backwards theocracy.
aqouta
1mo ago
That sounds like the facts on the ground, but maybe the argumentation was particularly bad. If this was seriously a turning point moment for @hlynka I'd be interested in seeing the actual comments.
aqouta
1mo ago
how do the people that believe in pure determinism (or determinism plus stochastic randomness) react to a physical threat? If someone stands in front of them and says, "if you deny free will, I will punch you in the face", do they behave as though they believe that there is no free will to be exercised on the part of either party, that everything that follows is a mere consequence of the state of the universe with possibly a roll of the dice to determine the outcome? Many will affirm that they do, in fact, believe that, but pretty much no one would be willing to bite the bullet and say that neither individual has a choice in what follows.
Your scenario doesn't really seem to prove anything at all? I don't believe I'm writing this comment by some kind of libertarian free will, that is to say I my writing of this comment was always destined to happen from the very moment of the big bang down to the edits and spelling errors. Making it meta and putting the question of determinism into the scenario really just serves to confuse. I would react probably similarly to any other scenario where someone threatens to hit me if I don't lie with maybe some variation because it's a stranger than average lie to demand.
aqouta
1mo ago
The scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and a significant portion of users here defended it. To be clear, The NFL had been collecting Wonderlic score on players since the late 70s, and what they got caught doing was artificially adjusting the scores of high-performing black players downward to change the racial distribution of disability payouts. On a dime I saw users who had claimed to support standardized testing flip from "the data obviously supports our conclusion" to "we must correct manipulate the data to better reflect the truth
Can you link to this? I might have missed a subthread but this does not comport to my memory of this particular scandal.
aqouta
2mo ago
Probably needs to be sold as a kind of color blind absolutism without going too much into the goals beyond that. Claim that people are using race data to do nefarious things and ban it. Might need to make an example out of some of the racial hustlers. It is probably unrealistic but the other options aren't particular realistic either, what does maximal freedom of association look like and how could it be sold?
aqouta
2mo ago
There is no rule of the universe that says we need to pay attention to race. No reason something like "the black professional class" when referenced needs to elicit anything but confusion the way that the "blonde working class" might. Why do people like Greene never have to answer the reverse question? When we enter our two hundredth year of affirmative action and the gap still doesn't close are the African Americans not going to ask the same question of why? If blank slatism is still the only option on merit then what possible conclusion could they reach besides a conspiracy among the other races? Why would this be a more acceptable answer?
What actual mechanism causes some poor black kid in a bad area of town to have any idea whatsoever how many black people are accepted into Harvard? If not told by people intentionally trying to stoke up racial animus would they ever notice if zero black people were in Harvard even after a hundred years? The solution is easy. Stop taking the statistics, make it illegal, or at least highly suspect, to ask for race on a survey not specifically for the purpose of determining health differences. This is the obvious and only stable way forward, we will find our way to it or suffer disasters.
aqouta
2mo ago
I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground.
I acknowledge there exists a motte of social gender understanding that jettisons nearly the entirety of the movement's beliefs which is merely overly neurotically fixated on gender trappings. As you say though, it has practically no constituency because from that standing it really can't make any demands. The movement needs more than mere preference as motivation to justify demands for extraordinary treatment.
There is a clear and tangible need motivating treating adoptive parents like parents. They've taken on a real responsibility for the care of a child. If they just really liked PTA meetings and being seen pushing a stroller around we wouldn't humor them, or at least wouldn't tolerate any kind of top down demand to humor them.
If we reduce the question of trans down to "some people want to be treated s or they're the opposite sex". Then sure, it's coherent, and I'm even willing to humor it to a degree even though I think it'd be better liberalism to just say men can wear dresses and be treated like women while still being men if they want. This is of course all academic, we're talking about a reasonable version of trans activism that doesn't exist and won't ever be prominent.
aqouta
2mo ago
I mean they need a reasonable offramp and Trump isn't that. This is why the Democrats have, correctly, zeroed in on the strategy of just pointing out the wild stuff Trump does and not talking about much else. If the republicans want to be the party of normal they need to actually take up that mantel.
aqouta
2mo ago
Look, the problem isn't just that people who don't think gender essentialism is a coherent worldview think that we're sacrificing the wellbeing of many children and adults needlessly. That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics. It's deeply unsettling to have what seems like plain reality not just denied but the denial to have in many cases incredible force behind it. There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim. There does not appear to be any limiting principle.
aqouta
2mo ago
@The_Nybbler might be slightly too narrow on what it takes to be a libertarian but it really does seem quite strange to call yourself a libertarian and then endorse laws like seatbelt laws. I just call myself a normal liberal so I can go one way or the other but it's hard to take some who calls themselves a libertarian seriously when they take a case where all the relevant externalities are internalized, risk of injury due to not wearing a seat belt, and decide the state should have a say. It just feels like one of the most central cases of not being a libertarian.
Us talking. To be clear I don't think it's true that our democracy is a sham, but that's a very large subject and if it's the difference of our beliefs I don't currently have the time or interest to crack it open. For the most part it seems to me like the electorate gets what a large majority wants and is willing to loudly hinge their votes on. If the demand and anger was there to destroy the equal outcome status quo then it would fall.
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