atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
Someone recently showed me some LSAT practice questions and I cannot get over how amazing of a test it is. If you're like I was and not familiar with the style, I encourage you to look some up---either some quick internet search or do some short test-prep site quiz like this.
I have never before seen something that I more wished the general population was better at. Can you imagine a world in where significantly more people had the reading comprehension and understanding of arguments to answer these accurately? It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc. Why is studying LSAT-style questions not part of the mandatory school curriculum? Wouldn't pushing for this be one of the best ways to "raise the sanity waterline"?
Now for the controversial point---I've also never been so tempted by the idea of a poll test. I know the two main reasons why disenfranchising a large group is bad: first, democracy isn't about making the best decision, but about making sure that every group feels heard by the system so that they don't violently rebel when it decides against them. Second, it's important to give the rulers of a country incentives to keep everyone happy so that institutions stay inclusive for all the standard Why Nations Fail reasons. However, I never thought I would see a test that so perfectly measures the skills needed to accurately judge political arguments! Maybe if we're in the world where practicing the questions is part of everyone's years of mandatory schooling and the LSAT-score threshold is low enough that almost anyone could cross it if they took that part of school seriously?
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
5mo ago
Second, we had a moderate disaster back in 2021
Wikipedia claims >$195 billion in property damage. As a comparison, Hurricane Harvey is listed as $125 billion and the 2011 Japan earthquake as $360 billion, though in 2011 dollars.
If these numbers are correct(?), this is closer to "one of the most expensive natural disasters in human history" than "a moderate disaster".
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak.
A key point you're ignoring here is that such racialized rioting doesn't happen nearly as frequently in the US. When it does happen it also never comes from any sort of immigrant group that failed to assimilate---it's not at all fair to try to fit summer 2020 in the US under the same framework and use it to make arguments about assimilation. Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.
There's an alternate framing of the narrative that actually supports the liberal point of view here (I think you're aware of this?). Yes, the French method of forcing assimilation is silly and doesn't work, but this doesn't mean that assimilation is doomed and will never happen. Rather, we already have a model of assimilation---race aware and everything---that works extremely well in the US. The French should copy this instead of sticking their heads in the sand about human nature and ignoring the necessity of actively combating the insidious power of irrational bias against people that look different.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".
Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate? I will keep repeating, it's at very best just a weak proxy for anything that actually matters. It's really not hard to construct a better proxy: just as literally the first thing that comes to my head, selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want (even if it's still not even close to perfect).
This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism. Such a crazy and bizarre logical jump happening this consistently is really, really suspicious.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale
I don't think this is generally accepted---certainly not to the point of "plainly". There's a very prevalent narrative that the rise of the alt right in Europe/US is exactly the widespread social instability you would see because of this---for example see here:
"One in three young men in Germany has never had a girlfriend. Are you one of them?" Krah asks and continues with advice: "Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident. And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft. Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots. That's the way to find a girlfriend!"
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
Like hell they have.
I'm sorry, this is complete and utter bullshit. Polling has consistently shown that Americans overwhelmingly support the diversity of their country---Here's a recent one (see page 5). MLK has an effective shrine in DC and judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin is like commandment 1 of the national religion. A majority of the country thinks immigration should be kept at current levels or increased and basically has since about 2005.
Seriously, I'm astounded how you can make this claim. Americans have been choosing this expanded, non-race dependent version of identity for decades. Like the taboo is so strong---when was the last time that being publicly outed as a white supremacist wouldn't ruin an American's life?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
I am simply extending the principle of family inheritance to societies and ethnic groups as a whole.
This is much bigger complaint than your second paragraph. Why is ethnicity the right way to group people and why don't you like extending the principle to groups that share the same values and culture instead? I normally see "patrimony" used here to poetically sneak in this connotation of hereditary descent when it's never justified.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
Arghhhh!!! The entire point is that it's not justified. If I needed to choose 1000000 workers I wouldn't arbitrarily straitjacket myself into needing all of then be from the same country/race---I would just pick the million best from everywhere the best way I can. There are so many other much more useful ways to distinguish people from each other. I am completely dumbfounded why this point is so hard for people to grasp.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr 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.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
There are a lot of cultural reasons to prefer the US to the UK
- The UK is much more aristocratic and hereditarian---there's a royal family, a House of Lords, everyone is judged by the accent they developed while growing up, most politicians didn't just go to the same few universities, but literally the exact same high school, etc.
- Social conversation in the UK sometimes feels like its 50% a competition about how cleverly you can insult the other person. This is really distracting if you ever want to talk about something substantive. Despite it being mostly in good humor, the constant negativity is really draining.
- The above two points also enforce quite a bit of social conformism. Having unusual hobbies or interests for your social class is much harder than in the US.
- Ambition and particularly hard work are looked upon much more favorably in the US.
You do have to select from pools of people. Where do you think immigration authorities are getting their data from? People are pooled together into races and countries by birth. If authorities choose to accept data from both pools they have to sift through the 90 IQ pool and the 100 IQ pool. If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.
I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Imagine you had a list of 1000 numbers and wanted to find the top 100. What you are proposing is randomly splitting the list into two halves with a very slight weighting so that larger numbers go into the first half, and then picking the top 100 from the first half. It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to give a very optimal outcome.
I don't insinuate that you suffering from some psychological ailment because you seemingly favor immigration from Africa.
(Edited) This topic more than any other seems to produce nonsensical logic like the above that I know people here (including you) would immediately catch talking about anything else. I don't know what else I'm supposed to conclude except agreeing with the progressive point that discussions about racial differences are always going to be ruined by the mother of all cognitive biases.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
Middle Eastern and African migrants making it to the US are incredibly filtered as opposed to the dregs who wash up on European shores. Oceans tend to be handy in that regard.
I never really bought this argument. The US has also had a pretty big inflow of unfiltered immigration from Mexico/Central America recently. Previously, the US had an even larger (proportionally) unfiltered flow from Ireland/Italy/Eastern Europe. These immigrant groups seem to be doing pretty fine---definitely much better than MENA immigrants in France.
The one group that causes the greatest uproar is arguably the segment of the US population that has been the least successful at integration (still better than the EU! At least Ebonics isn't an outright different language) are the ADOS.
This particular group had been actively kept in poverty in deprivation until the late 60's and is still effectively (though not forcefully) segregated away from the general population. Obviously this group isn't going to be assimilated very well---HBD/culture are not the only plausible explanations! Furthermore, this in fact doesn't really contradict my original point. Groups that are treated as the US treated voluntary immigrants do fine and assimilate great. Groups that aren't don't.
This was a very enlightening comment, thanks.
However, I think there's a very good reason people think of used-car salesman lying as reflecting much more poorly on character than lawyer lying. The used-car salesman style demonstrates sloppiness with and disregard of details---this is a huge red flag if you want your leaders to have any sort of ability to understand technical or scientific questions. Conversely, being able to pull off lawyer-style, technically-true lying is a great demonstration of being good with details.
Lawyer-style lying is never going to lead to travesties like sharpiegate, which actually harmed the ability of the National Hurricane Center to function as a scientific organization. This sort of thing is very dangerous if you want government policy to accurately reflect reality.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
You have to tear down old buildings and start building massive multi family units
This is putting way too high of a standard. Buildings are demolished and replaced all the time! If you don't allow this, you get nonsense like the "historic laundromat" in San Francisco. Putting all the cases like this together, there's a ridiculous amount of space in San Francisco itself for more housing when so much of the city looks like this.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
This is an extremely heterodox interpretation of history. You can argue that the entire field has been "captured by the left" and therefore shouldn't be trusted, but please be clear that this is the level of claim you're making.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
....an internationally acclaimed piece of contemporary German art (something I've previously claimed barely exists, to my chargin)
This depends on your idiosyncratic personal preferences about what counts as art, meaningful, or beautiful. As far as I'm concerned, Germany contains arguable the world's premier center for producing beauty and meaning. I personally think it's crazy to judge a country producing ideas like these as not producing internationally acclaimed contemporary art just on the basis of video games, paintings, or music (even this example is questionable since this German produces quite a bit of internationally acclaimed music).
This is the general problem with basing your morality too heavily aesthetic preferences. These vary too much from person to person, are really hard to reconcile, and therefore produce unresolvable differences in judging which places are successful/which policies work/etc. It just leads to an all-against-all war between 100,000,000 orthogonal value systems.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
No, it wouldn't because Western countries need all kinds of workers not just high skilled ones. And culture is intrinsically tied with race to a greater extent than even religion
This is not too hard to fix---just do the salary sorting independently for each position after you've decided how much of each you want. Furthermore, I don't think it's so hard to do some cursory test for cultural compatibility that again, would be much better than the weak proxy of race. Again, saying the first thing that comes to my head just to emphasize how close it comes and how easy the problem is, even just English proficiency might suffice. Knowing nothing else, would you prefer a natively English-proficient Christian Nigerians over random Muslim Indonesian? Seriously trying to come up with a filter would do dramatically better than just looking at race. Immigration officials have so much more information about prospectives and this completely overwhelms any evidence provided by race.
Saying this another way, filtering by race doesn't make sense unless you can somehow argue that race is actually a strong proxy for merit/cultural compatibility/whatever you want from immigrants. Even the most extreme HBD positions don't deny a huge overlap in distributions of whichever characteristic you care about, so such a position would seem ridiculous.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate, or at least be good citizens in Latin immigrants to the US versus the ones going to the EU. Latin America is still far more stable than Africa or the ME is at any rate.
Are you certain that this is an intrinsic quality of the populations? You can just as well argue that this is because the US is better at making immigrants want to be good citizens and assimilate because of the differences between the way it deals with race and the way France does. I also don't think it's that obvious that Mexico/Central America are more stable than the Middle East and North Africa. Murder rates are way higher for example. I'm not saying there isn't a difference in populations, but I've never really heard a convincing argument that there was. I have on the other hand seen many arguments and plausible theoretical justifications for why the US method of assimilation is better.
I struggle to see how it's even possible to falsify this
There's a sort of meta point here. This is sociology, not science and you can't really ask for rigorous things like falsifiability. Talking way outside my field here, but from whatever classes I took, it always seemed the best you can do is try to fit a bunch of examples into a narrative and just argue about which one is most compelling, maybe using whatever it is sociologists call "theory".
The "US is better at assimilating" narrative is consistent with all the examples (the claim I made above was that the ADOS example doesn't contradict it). It also has theoretical justifications---the whole thing about immigrants in the US actually being given a fair chance since the country isn't blind to unfair biases against them, for example. The "populations are different" narrative still needs some sort of justification why Mexican/Central American immigrant populations in the US are actually meaningfully, intrinsically different from MENA immigrant populations in Europe beyond just "I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate".
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2mo ago
A criterion like 3/4's of your life spent in the US if you're under 18 and 3/4's of your childhood in the US if you're over 18 would be much better. On the other side of it, there are people whose parents moved when they were infants, are fully connected to the US and have no memory of living outside, and don't get citizenship.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
There are entire books on how to study for the LSAT. I presume that would be a place to start, though it might be good to hear from someone who actually took the test.
The first issue is fascinating: there is a serious disagreement between the left and the right in the US about what freedom of religion actually means. I think the left qualifies it in a sort of paradox-of-tolerance way: you don't get to excuse intolerant views by claiming that they are part of your religion. Otherwise, religion just becomes a giant loophole in the rules that make the pluralistic society of the US actually work: believe whatever you want as long as it doesn't make you impose anything on other people. All the recent fights about LGBT rights vs. religious freedom are a pretty strong demonstration of this actual fundamental values difference.
Therefore, for a lot of the left, the actual answer here is bluntly that these parts of Christianity are actually bigoted---drop them or deal with the justified condemnation. Omar/Miller's particular fight is just an important reminder that the divide on how much deference to give religious beliefs doesn't cleanly split left/right. If you feel that this divide is important, maybe you should rethink whether certain politicians are actually on your side or not. I personally much preferred the political alignment from back in the day of internet atheism fights.
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