atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
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User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
I might be sounding a little too idealistic here, but grades are definitely not the main point when you're "in an academic context". Hopefully you're actually trying to learn something and having stronger, more focused peers to talk to makes this significantly easier.
and if you're taking performance-enhancing drugs to get As, that means someone else is closer to getting an F
This is very much not true! Grading is almost always against the difficulty of the material, not against your peers. I have never heard of a single colleague who ever made their class this insanely zero-sum. Any sort of curve is just a sanity check to make sure that estimates of difficulty are correct and always take into account impressions of how strong a given class is compared to past ones. If someone is closer to getting an A, they ask better questions in class, are a better resource to talk to outside of class, and in general make the class better.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
There's a standard argument about gun control in the US that you hear a lot in the liberal bubble. Obviously, this argument does not appear to be very compelling to the anti-gun control side. It's pretty hard to find the counterarguments while embedded in the bubble, so I'm asking here in the hopes someone might explain them.
The argument comes from making a comparison between cars and guns. Both create about the same magnitude of danger when in the wrong hands, but cars are significantly more important for being able to function in modern society. Therefore guns ownership and usage should be regulated at least as strongly as cars are. In particular, car ownership has a strict licensing requirement including a safety/competency test and also requires insurance in case of accidents. We should therefore pass additional gun regulations requiring the same.
I can imagine the counterargument being in almost any step of this chain of logic:
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For some reason, cars are actually far more dangerous than guns in the wrong hands, maybe when you appropriately consider the kind of car or kind of gun people most commonly have.
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Maybe it seems that cars are more important for modern living, but actually guns are more important, maybe as protection against low-probability really horrible things---tyrannical government, breakdown of society, etc. I guess this would require making some kind of expected value justification, that the horrible thing is likely enough and guns ownership would actually help enough.
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I can't really see anyone disagreeing with cars being regulated to the level the argument claims.
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We don't need to pass additional gun regulations like those for cars. Because of so and so reason, guns are actually already regulated more strictly than cars. Just look based on this and this example how much easier it is to get a car than a gun (though as long as it's not actually super misleading, the stereotypical Texas Walmart example makes this hard for me to see).
Which of these points can actually be expanded into counterarguments you guys find compelling? How do you do so? Is there something else I'm not considering?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
Thanks to everyone for the replies! I'm seeing three main thrusts in counterarguments:
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The risks that guns and cars produce are very different from each other so even making the comparison in the first place is a little silly (see here and here for example).
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Guns are actually regulated much more strictly than the people who usually make this argument are aware---even to the point where the argument comes off as frustratingly ignorant (see here)
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Yes, there are actually compelling reasons that widespread gun ownership significantly reduces the risk of the government becoming tyrannical (see here and here)
I hope I haven't misrepresented anything here.
I can't seem to find a discussion on this yet, and I'm very curious to hear this site's interpretation of events. Yesterday, judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that the FDA should rescind it's approval for a commonly-used pill for abortions, mifepristone. The narrative I'm reading in mainstream media frames this decision as so cartoonishly insane that I'm struggling to see how it can be accurate. However, I'm also struggling to see where exactly the narrative is misleading.
First, the civics-101 explanation of how an agency like the FDA or the Fed should work is that certain regulatory problems are too technical and change too quickly based on new science for lawmakers to deal with them directly. Therefore, Congress delegates its power to a group of skilled experts who can react to the cutting edge of research and make reasonably policy. Of course, this is the civics-101 explanation and reality is presumably much more complicated, but the point is that laypeople who don't really understand the subject matter, like judges or members of Congress, should not be the ones making the final decision on technical questions.
Kacsmaryk's decision is framed as exactly this happening---the FDA made a complicated judgement about the safety of mifepristone based on their expertise and a non-expert judge decided to invalidate it based on their personal disagreements with the technical science. Articles emphasize quotes from the judgement where he explicitly disagrees with the FDA's interpretation of studies: "“Here, F.D.A. acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns — in violation of its statutory duty — based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.", etc. Unfortunately, the actual decision (Edit: better link from ToaKraka) is very long with most of the pages being about legal details like establishing standing, making it hard to find the true reasoning behind it (though props to NYT for emphasizing the primary source so prominently, beat my expectations for news sources).
There has to be more going on here than a random judge deciding that they are more qualified to decide technical medical questions than actual experts; as a general rule, political opponents aren't ever this insane. What are the details I'm not understanding in the decision that make this more reasonable?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
Thanks for the links! It's surprisingly hard to find primary sources about current events these days since for whatever reason search engines decided five years ago to heavily prioritize low-quality news articles instead. I really hate this---you have to basically be in the field and know the name of the database/repository where things are held, otherwise you're doomed. That's why I'm so happy when the news articles actually provide the source, even though they also didn't give a link to the official court-decision repository that I'm sure exists somewhere.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
This is a case of a federal judge either being a batshit insane crank at the level of the people who mass email their own theories of "quantum consciousness" to physics departments or a federal judge being hopelessly corrupt in their drive to force their policy choices on others. My prior against this is very low---like accepting such a narrative deserves a lot of double checking. It's a pretty disappointing reflection on the world that the answers here seem to be "no, the situation is even worse than you thought".
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
Just to clarify this interpretation, do you think the judge would accept if a new non-expedited/properly-justified expedited approval process happened over the next few months that reapproved the drug (this isn't rhetorical)? There might be some important legal reason I don't understand for why if there was in fact incorrect procedure the first time around, the agency shouldn't be allowed to redo things in the proper way.
Also, under this interpretation, what was the point of all the language in the opinion specifically disagreeing with the underlying science and cost-benefit analysis? Was it not actually doing that?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
And the charming lady didn't deserve it
Queen Elizabeth was an direct inheritor of stolen wealth who personally claimed fame, importance, and power for the sole reason that her ancestors were some of the worst war criminals who ever lived. For the reason she didn't renounce it all as soon as she could, she definitely deserves every insult.
The point is that because of ofcom no one in UK can run a piece calling the Queen a cunt
This makes matters even worse. I think we have an obligation to insult world leaders this morally compromised who protect themselves from criticism through censorious laws and policies. In that spirit, Queen Elizabeth is a dead, inbred, nepo-baby under the delusion that her family's legacy of warcrimes was something to be proud of and (example below) Xi Jinping is an incompetent Winnie-the-Pooh look-alike running the world's second-largest economy into the ground. Don't be afraid to say so!
That's an unusual view. Might makes right is really not generally accepted as a good basis for morality. I guess it's best to link that instead of me badly summarizing a bunch of well-known arguments.
Edit: I think I understand better---you're saying that morality for countries/civilizations interacting is very different than that for people. I agree that this is probably true, but it would still be nice to justify why this particular difference exists. I think all the logic for might makes right being wrong for people transfers over? Most simply, it's better if societies could focus their energies on productive endeavors instead of zero-sum building of war-making potential so they can conquer and avoid being conquered.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
Yes, I know, and maybe about 50 others? Once you reach a certain level I'm not sure distinguishing who was absolutely worst is relevant and probably pretty impossible---how do you weight how many were affected, how brutal they were to each individual, how they were relative to others at the time, what they personally did vs. what others did on their orders, etc. This is why I said "some of the".
The British Empire was pretty exceptional in its scale and recency however.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
What's not compelling about the standard narrative of familiarity and education overcoming irrational, subconscious bias? (Though I apologize for wasting space if you were specifically trying to poll people who don't buy this narrative, just felt weird that no comments except the very bottom two seem to touch on it.) People have a very strong subconscious bias against the weird and unusual. People of a different race went from very obviously looking like nothing you've ever seen before to common familiarities in the street and on TV. Furthermore, education levels increased, giving more people the ability to overcome incorrect biases in their thinking. Once everyone realized that other races were 99.99% the same kind of humans, acceptance immediately followed.
I would even add another layer to this. In the past, following this same-race bias wasn't very costly. Excluding the one or two different-race/ethnicity/culture people you ever see from your group doesn't really matter. People used to be basically replaceable as far as skills and ability to contribute---one farmer or pre-modern or soldier isn't going to be dramatically different from any other. However, for whatever reason, this has completely changed in the modern day and some people have special skills that let them contribute an absurdly disproportionate amount. By the 20th century, excluding, for example, someone like von Neumann or Einstein because they're Jewish makes your civilization lose out and be destroyed.
The difference is even worse now---in all the most important fields that make a civilization powerful, the top performers contribute just so much more than the average performer. You really cannot exclude the 100x programmers/scientists/entrepreneurs because of their race---they are just too rare and too important. Non-acceptance of different races is just untenably for a society and any costs of cultural inhomogeneity pale in comparison. Literally, judge people by the content of their character (i.e. skills and abilities) instead of the color of their skin or be outcompeted and die.
Of course prevailing views always lag practical pressures by a bit, but it really should not be surprising that attitudes changed so much.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
As stated, it requires a heavy dose of blank slatism on top.
I don't think this is at all true. It requires a much weaker claim than blank-slatism: simply that non-whites are capable of being these 100x contributers. As long as the relative fraction isn't so extreme that like 80-90% of top-level talent is white even though whites are a much smaller percentage of the world population, then there are still serious costs for excluding non-whites. I've never seen HBD claims this strong---probably because they're patently ridiculous if you look at, for example, what the US IMO team looks like, the demographics of difficult STEM classes at elite universities or workers at tech companies, etc.
Of course, as asked by @aardvark3, this isn't the group that you guys are usually interested in discussing, though I note that the original post was only about the acceptance of any non-whites at all. Even in this case, saying something like there are almost no prominent black scientists is just false---this is the the strength of claim you would have to show for the argument not to apply. (Asking for von Neumann-tier is very unfair because there are only a few people of that tier a century---you can plausibly argue that he's literally the only example, so trivially no ethnic group except his own reaches that bar.) Whatever differences might appear between groups are dominated by differences within a group---I think even the strongest HBD positions accept this. Therefore and at the very least, the right specially selected subset of any racial group will always be very beneficial to accept.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
Sorry, maybe the example wasn't so clear. The Nazis were the ones who excluded von Neumann and Einstein and were destroyed for it.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
I don't think I can satisfy the exact requirements you want. David Blackwell did his work while the foundations of his field were being developed so it gets outsized use. There isn't really something as important as statistics where the foundational work was done late enough that the generation born after say civil rights could contribute. I think it's uncontroversial that there wasn't a level playing field before?
My list is also somewhat focused on younger people since it's a bit easier for me to judge their credentials and I'm more likely to have heard of them.
With that said, here's a list of prominent black scientists and mathematicians I can name off the top of my head. I think all of them are pretty respected within their field:
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Aaron Pollack (no wiki article but google Aaron Pollack math or Aaron Pollack UCSD)
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John McWorter (If you also want to count linguistics)
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Timnit Gebru (who did have a good research career before the political controversies, I understand if people here won't count her)
This isn't quite 10, some quick further research finds:
Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum matches the level of impact you're looking for, but sort of in a right-time-right-place technicality way. Also, Robert Ellis seems to match the older-figure pioneer pattern of David Blackwell.
You can judge for yourself how compelling this list is. It works better as support for the level-of-talent argument instead of the level-of-societal-contribution one, though the second is very hard for me to judge and sort of random.
On the other hand, opposition to skilled immigration seems super common amongst HBD people here. While not as egregious, that's pretty close, especially because the definition of "skilled" can easily include things like English ability or other markers of ability to assimilate.
This is the main reason I don't really trust the stated motivations of the average HBD person. Race is at the very best only a super loose proxy for the things that actually matter and you can always easily measure and filter on much better proxies instead. Not noticing this and asking to filter on race is super suspicious.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
If HBD/average human capital concerns are that important for you, there isn't really that much difference. Furthermore, shouldn't it be a much lower bar to let people in vs. kicking them out? Unless you're some kind of extreme Malthusian, there are far fewer bad moral side effects to increasing skilled immigration than to forced deportations---like this big difference makes opposition to skilled immigration even more bizarre.
Anyway, I hope you noticed the convenient demonstration of the extreme vitriol bringing up this argument always seems to produce in this community---it's like a pattern match to the storybook reaction to cognitive dissonance. It's also the one topic where the moderation team is ok with constant personal attacks being made instead of arguments.
Interactions here have made it quite hard not to conclude that a very large fraction of HBD-talk here is really motivated by exactly what @HlynkaCG was pointing out in his comment---it's simply a convenient argument for an ultimate goal of a world where people are judged by what they were assigned at birth instead of what they control.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
I've already said all I had to say about you years ago.
Do you mind explaining what the point of your comment is then? Are you expecting this to lead to some sort of productive conversation?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
Thanks! This is a much better answer.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
As more hopeful news on another topic that's also of great interest here, This NYT was published recently. The comments are even more hopeful. As an even crazier example that I realize will be very hard for people here to believe, I figured out sometime last month that a large majority of my department at a liberal university in a county that went for Biden almost 90-10 is very strongly oppposed to Harvard in the ongoing supreme court fight over affirmative action (just to qualify it's more "we're against affirmative action as Harvard is currently practicing" it instead of "we're against affirmative action period").
To get to the fight-y, culture war part, I've tried to argue over and over on the old site that certain of this places extreme, bogeyman views are usually straw-men used to tar the entire American left. These views get outsize attention because of all the standard media/clickbait reasons and were never really supported that much. If you just talk to normal people and don't raise suspicion that you're not on board with the egalitarian ideal that people's fates should be mostly decided by their choices instead of their birth, you'll probably also find this.
The standard kumbayah, everyone-should-band-together-against extremists model isn't really so bad: 80% of people on either side mostly agree with each other on values. Such normal people on different sides of the political divide nevertheless have serious factual disagreements that lead to very different policy preferences. The problem is that each side attracts a 20% of moral aliens with bizarre value systems that happen to make them want far more extreme versions of these policy preferences. To achieve their goals, the best thing the aliens can do is disguise themselves as normals to convince at least the normals on their side. As a nice bonus, this might also make the other side suspect that everyone supporting these preferences is an alien, giving them even more support out of solidarity against "unfair" accusations. For the left, this has hopelessly tarred any kind of diversity initiative, for the right, any kind of tough-on-crime thing.
The best way to fight this is to be really careful in distinguishing who you have factual disagreements with vs. who you have values disagreements with. Both sides need to police themselves and kick out the aliens with bad values even if these aliens might agree with them on object-level policy questions. Also, be much more cautious before concluding someone on the other side is an alien. On the other hand, be really careful to emphasize to the other side that your values aren't alien---this is really hard because there'll be a lot of enemy action from the aliens who want to keep their side extreme. I can't say I'm super successful at it here, but I try to emphasize that I care about egalitarianism at the bottom and that my disagreements with the majority of the American right are due to factual disagreements about what's necessary to actually achieve true egalitarianism.
Surely you're joking. That NYT headline reads "A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up." and you regard this as uplifting?
Check the comments and how unanimously against the rejection NYT readers are. The article is also very much not saying that these policies have already been installed in every hard science department, only that they are starting to be and facing huge amounts of pushback. There's a huge difference between these two so it's really important to be precise.
Whenever I get them to agree in arduous discussions that Lysenkoism cannot be correct, they greet me with a cheery "good thing we got rid of that bourgeois geneticism, eh comrade?" the next morning. And from this, all other injustices of progressivism flow.
I find this specific part very hard to believe. Can you give more details on the exact thing you got them to agree on that they immediately went back on? Given the imprecision in your previous paragraph, I'm suspicious that something subtly different might have happened. Which specific people in academia are you talking about? What kind of institution? Which departments?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
Ahah! You are capable of replying with mostly arguments instead of mostly personal attacks, maybe there is hope for a productive response here.
Well, almost:
especially of South Asian states, where our friend hails from, currently epitomized in Hindutva ideology but also obvious e.g. in loops foreigners jump through to be allowed to stay in Thailand. To my knowledge, he has never addressed the paradox of insisting that American nativism is so incomprehensibly evil and alien to his sensibilities.
This is a pretty huge non-sequitur. Whatever other people you happen to associate me with may or may not do is completely irrelevant to this discussion. There's absolutely no paradox here any more than me saying that you talking about morality at all is a paradox because there are tribes in New Guinea that used to practice slavery and cannibalism. I'll also mention here that I'm 100% a patriotic American culturally, in the eyes of the law, and yes, even by birth if that matters so much to you, but this shouldn't really be necessary for the quoted argument to be total nonsense.
people in different tribes do have legitimate object-level policy and deep value differences, which suffices for adversarial mechanics and strategic deceit even between non-extreme subgroups;
I think there's a failure to fully understand American society that's tripping you up here. It might be educational to listen to Kevin McCarthy's acceptance speech when he was elected Speaker of the House. As far as an official, recent statement of what the mainstream right in the US believes, I think it's hard to do better than this. I find that the values he's emphasizing and glorifying align very strongly with my own even though his policy preferences might dramatically differ. As long as we're reminiscing about what happened years ago, I think even Kevin McCarthy would very much endorse my originally summary of American values.
Reminder: the «people's» here...
Similarly, this particular translation, even while being more a specialization to a non-central example than a translation, is not quite the convincing knockout argument you think. Sure, "immigrant" is a hopelessly corrupted word for the right, rather like "meritocracy" for the left that immediately brings to mind bad feelings due to associations with certain non-central examples. If you talk about specific immigrants however---let's say the properly assimilated doctor contributing to society---most Americans would be pretty happy giving them their "patrimony" or whatever. Similarly, "inheritance" is a much more toxic concept than you imagine. People are embarrassed here for getting things from inheritance instead of hard work and hide this as much as possible.
Of course a more fair translation would be "people" to American of all races, "egalitarian ideal" to the whole content-of-character instead of color-of-skin thing, "object-level policy" to something like desegregation, and "aliens with bad values" to white identitarians.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
I will second this comment. Comparing my actual personal experiences in what was supposed to be the most extreme possible environment to what I read on the internet is what made me completely distrust the "wokeness is taking over everything" narrative in the first place.
We don't have so many examples, but on second thought maybe this is yet another example of academic experiences being dramatically different depending on which department you're in. Both you and the OP seem to mention experience with humanities departments, though I'm not sure where @Tomato is.
I'm in pure math and I've found that even with new people I can argue almost anything political as long as I tie it back to some common fundamental value and avoid saying certain poisoned words (the only annoying part is that "meritocracy" is both of these things at the same time). A lot of my stated policy preferences are extremely liberal, so maybe this gives me enough trust and legitimacy that people don't think I'm secretly hiding different values when I say something not in the consensus---I can argue that standardized tests are actually good for undergrad admissions and people do think I believe so for the "right" reasons. It helps a lot with the trust issue to point out examples where something exceptional is happening that changes your belief---I'll say I don't like the general GRE but undergrad admissions are different for this and this reason.
Now for some speculation on why there might be a difference between fields, I think it's pretty important that for mathematicians, their research area isn't really expected to give them any special insight into politics. If a liberal mathematician hears about a Trump supporting colleague, there's an easy out: "well, they're my friend so I know their heart is in the right place and I know they treat everyone in the department with equal respect, but they're just confused because of so and so biases. Anyways, none of us are really that good at thinking about politics anyways, remember the last time we talked to our friend in history/philosophy/etc.? Also, remember the Unabomber? That Serge Lang was an AIDS denialist? Trump-guy isn't really messing up so badly". For a humanist who's actually supposed to be an expert in people and culture, the out isn't so easy and the assumption might become that supporting Trump is a true implication of their values which therefore must be evil.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
So there are two actual justifications for affirmative action that people usually give. First, that complicated, subjective admissions systems are invariable going to be implicitly biased against certain groups so there needs to be some brute-force explicit bias to counteract this if the department is actually interested in selecting the most qualified candidates. The most popular affirmative action policies are therefore in line with something like, for example in graduate admissions: check outcomes at graduation/at prelims/at quals for these at-risk groups---women, the standard underrepresented racial minorities, etc. If these outcomes are better than average, modify the admissions policy to give those groups a leg up. Keep on calibrating the blunt modification until outcomes look about the same as an average student.
The second reason is that it's alienating to be one of very few people in a particular group in the department. Therefore, give enough of a leg up that there are at least, for example, 2 women in each graduate class. I guess this is effectively a quota by proxy, but it's never an explicit numerical target that needs to be reached, just if there were too few one year, increase the weight the next year. It's also such a low requirement that it shouldn't really ever come up unless the first point was horribly messed up.
Harvard's affirmative action on the other hand is seen as almost a complement to legacy admissions but with good publicity, at the most conspiratorial, way keep down an "uppity" new meritocratic class from competing with a hereditary elite. The whole "helping underrepresented minorities" thing, while they think is a good goal, in this case is just a Trojan horse for a true, nefarious goal.
I think this is a complicated topic that has had multiple serious research papers written about it. I'm not an economist, but this and citations seems to be a good place to start (the paper should also be free on scihub).
As far as I can tell, the summary here is that labor markets are just weird and free-market assumptions don't work out so well for various reasons. I hope an actual economist can correct me if not; until then your best answer will come from the paper itself.
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