curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now
This just isn't true. Most bush-era democrats or academic leftists, or any way you can interpret 'pushing DEI' back then are not now pushing the idea that blacks have lower average IQ and that this has significant policy implications. Where do you get these ideas?
curious_straight_ca
21d ago
That would be counterproductive
curious_straight_ca
30d ago
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
Very strongly disagree here. IQ is correlated with performance in all complex intellectual tasks. If you dropped everyone into an every-monkey-for-himself anarchic pre-industrial hellscape, the warlord of the gang that eventually won would be high IQ. The best traders in financial markets are high IQ. People who win in politics are high IQ, whether that's democratic politics or authoritarian elite politics.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters
Most black people in america live perfectly fine lives by any standard, and would continue to do so under the policies suggested below because they're neither career criminals nor people who benefit from upper-class affirmative action. Nobody's "fucked".
There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds
I think it's very likely you'd pass the IQ test / be able to buy your way in under a better immigration system. Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
To be more explicit, I do not think his voluntarily removing multiple fingers, or refusing to use those fingers and keeping them flexed pre-amputation, brought him any social status in our current culture. He'd just seem very strange. I don't see any reason for him to guess, even unconsciously, that his actions would bring him status. It makes much more sense for this to happen for other reasons.
That video has negative information content. Blinken is following a reasonable general policy of saying nothing of substance whatsoever, because sounding like a politician all the time is better for him than seeming reasonable and informative 95 out of 100 times and saying something that blows up on him occasionally. Paul takes advantage of Blinken's empty statements, using them as a canvas for an uncontested and vague picture of withholding critical information.
This doesn't imply there's secret information that'd settle the debate. This is exactly what would happen if government agencies were taking years to do simple procedural things (as happens constantly), and politicians wanted to make hay with it (as also happens constantly). Paul doesn't even have to be intentionally lying, just be someone who's willing to believe things that are both emotionally compelling and convenient, as most people are.
This person was not attempting to become weaker to gain status. They just have a rare psychological disorder, it's way more like someone with severe OCD than it is a transtrender. Read the article
“He hides his fingers, keeps them flexed, leading to impaired dexterity, localized pain, irritability and anger,” Dr. Nadia Nadeau, of the department of psychiatry at Université Laval wrote in the journal Clinical Case Reports. He grew more determined to find a way to get rid of fingers he considered “intrusive, foreign, unwanted.”
It's still important to get the details right even if you're correctly diagnosing a broader trend.
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
What is your theory here? Why do you think you'd be able to entirely stop trans stuff, but not be able to accomplish a half-measure of 'only adults can transition after a year of psych evals'? The former seems easier, unless you want to go full nrx
curious_straight_ca
8d ago
I agree that's a reasonable factor but it doesn't seem like a significant one. I'd be more amenable to an argument of the form "people can adapt to anything, and it's just not bad enough to override the confused desires that led them there", but they do not at all seem to be in the state of "would regret it but see as sunk cost", that feels very different.
curious_straight_ca
15d ago
Oh lol, I didn't even click it
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
FWIW I do hope you come back after the ban and keep posting here, even though we disagree you clearly have things to say.
On the particular topic of plurals: It's not even a new thing. There have been waves of multiple personality disorder diagnosis before the internet was a thing, and in the resulting controversy a consensus emerged that the diagnosis was actually helping to cause and perpetuate the supposed disorder. here's a very nice article about that.
MPD was an extremely popular diagnosis when hypnosis was in vogue 130 years ago; then emerged again 60 years ago when The Three Faces of Eve became a best-selling book and hit movie; was revived 40 years ago following the vogue of the movie Sybil, and its many imitators; and reached a peak 30 years ago when several people started conducting weekend workshops all over the country minting an army of poorly trained MPD therapists who suddenly diagnosed and treated it in all their patients.
Having seen hundreds of patients who claimed to house multiple personalities, I have concluded that the diagnosis is always (or at least almost always) a fake, even though the patients claiming it are usually (but not always) sincere.
In every single instance, I discovered that the alternate personalities had been born under the tutelage of an enthusiastic and naive therapist, or in imitation of a friend, or after seeing a movie, or upon joining a multiples' chat group—or some combination. It was most commonly a case of a suggestible and gullible therapist and a suggestible and gullible patient influencing each other in the creation of new personalities. None of the purported cases had had a spontaneous onset and none was the least bit convincing.
There's an interesting parallel here to claims I've seen here about how teachers "find" transgenderism in kids, it fits really nicely. However: I think in your discord explorations, most of the kids weren't diagnosed by a psychologist, but "discovered" it themselves on the internet. I think the same thing happens with the trans kids.
I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.
I don't think so! I'd read it.
curious_straight_ca
19d ago
I agree that the ideology was bankrupt, but the fact remains that it was a rival superpower and did last quite a while. It could've collapsed within three years, and it didn't!
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
One way to understand how I'm not trying to censor is that I invited OP to make a more detailed and direct defense of whatever the nazis were doing.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
I don't think this is a good comment. It just gestures at a bunch of vague right-wing ideas without providing any detail, evidence, or new information. An equivalent left-wing comment would be "America is occupied by the entrenched forces of conservatism and racism. They know what they are doing, they see our pain, yet they refuse to even let us speak. They hold all the levers of power and are not afraid to use them against us."
It probably violates the "speak plainly" rule too. Who are the occupiers? How are they keeping Germany in line with the new ideology? What would happen? Which german thinkers? Which direction? Yeah, obviously it's the nazis, but I'd be happy to read an open and evidenced defense of Nazi ideology or historical actions, but this isn't that.
curious_straight_ca
25d ago
The theory of evolution as the origin of life predicts that the number of differing random substitutions in DNA between two species is proportional to the length of time between now and their most recent common ancestor, as predicted by fossils or just inferring phylogeny from morphology. Or, in simpler words, if all species evolved from a common ancestor, and DNA mutates with time, species that split apart more recently will have fewer random DNA mutation differences than species that split apart farther in the past. This prediction was made and confirmed.
So it's not a tautology! It made a prediction and the prediction was correct.
Every theorem of mathematics is in some sense a ""tautology"" relative to the axioms, but they're still true and important. It's also not a mathematical tautology to claim that evolution caused the existence of all life on Earth, because your tautology-evolution could still be true with a creator, yet 'the theory of evolution' contains the first. Also, the theory of evolution is incredibly practically useful in biology and medicine.
curious_straight_ca
16d ago
I specifically mean claiming that existing adults who believe themselves to trans women, do so for multiple years, and most centrally are MtFs who genuinely feel terrible about not being women, shouldn't start taking hormones and socially transition. Within this argument the claim isn't that they're Becoming-Woman, the claim is that trying to mime the social roles and appearances of women and starting hormones appears to make them happier, more content, etc
It is incredibly weird to try to imagine though how so many people who are not, in fact, mentally women, could come to the conclusion that they are mentally women and start mimicking that social role and genuinely enjoy it. And as far as I can tell that is true! It really speaks to how complex and contingent human values and desires are, and how many potential configurations of human beliefs and societies there are.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
No! I'm happy that we allow Holocaust deniers or the (iirc) nazi pedophile from a while ago to post if they follow the rules. But that's the kind of comment I'd expect to see as a reply to iamyesyouareno on twitter, not one I want to see here.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
(warning: citing graphs without understanding deeply where the numbers come from, but all that matters for this argument is the order of magnitude)
McDonalds's profit margin, averaged over the past decade, is like 24%. They'd, you know, rather it be 100%, but competition doesn't let them do that.
Mcdonalds is actually a high outlier in that regard because of the value of the brand, other fast food companies are lower etc. Again, this is competition manifesting, people are willing to pay more for a mcdonalds burger than a generic burger.
I do think black people have a significantly lower average IQ than whites, that this has a genetic component, and this means that disparate impact civil rights law and affirmative action should not exist.
I don't think this comes from a believe in 'fuck everyone not like me' - I'm happy to work with smart Indians, Chinese, etc. And if I see a black person who's in fact contributing at the same level as a non-black person, I'm happy to work with that person too! (Clarence Thomas, for instance, doesn't seem to be any worse of a justice than the others).
I think most pro-HBD commenters here have beliefs like that?
I don't think most trans people are pedophiles though, or that they're transing our kids in the schools or w/e. I don't think transitioning is a good choice for anyone, but there's not really any concrete relationship between the way it's bad and pedophilia or schools.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
That isn't what that post is about. The title of that post is "Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)". (In anticipated experiences). HBD pays rent, depending on how you interpret it, in anticipated experiences by predicting a lot of anticipated experiences, such as future differences in behavior of various races, future test scores of various races, future successes of countries populated almost entirely by various races, how effective interventions in schooling or income vs interventions in genes will be to modify such outcomes, etc. Yudkowsky is definitely not claiming that if something isn't politically useful, it isn't worth knowing.
But you can also still have widespread knowledge of HBD and also colorblind meritocracy. That we've been moving away from that a bit doesn't actually make it too unstable to maintain, most aspects of social organization ebb and flow with time. To make a larger scale comparison, if you think free-market capitalism and democracy are inevitable - consider communism, fascism, and the significant appeal that the two had within many liberal democracies around a century ago. They ended up being stable because they weathered tough storms, not because the water was calm. Similarly, 'colorblind meritocracy' is having a bit of a tough few decades, but that itself is very weak evidence against the thing's ability to persist.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
In this specific case I really doubt it's a fetish based on the description
“He hides his fingers, keeps them flexed, leading to impaired dexterity, localized pain, irritability and anger,” Dr. Nadia Nadeau, of the department of psychiatry at Université Laval wrote in the journal Clinical Case Reports. He grew more determined to find a way to get rid of fingers he considered “intrusive, foreign, unwanted.”
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
DEI is just a fancy way of saying you're making an effort to comply with the law and make sure that there isn't any illegal discrimination in your company.
... So the result is that affirmative action plans tend to be a bit goofy. To the extent they take any real action, it usually focuses on training and recruitment rather than specific requirements
I feel like when I've seen DEI it's coincided with implicit but fairly obvious pushes to just hire more women and black people. It's claimed that implicit bias and structural racism and such are just being corrected for, but mechanically, what's happening is that on the margin 'racial and gender minorities' who have less experience or seem less skilled are hired instead of white people, because intentional antiblack discrimination is rare nowadays but achievement gaps persist. Novant crossed a line, but many other companies are doing the same thing and just being less obvious about it.
curious_straight_ca
15d ago
I think the weirdness factor and that it was self-imposed will heavily outweigh that tbh
If you're gonna reppost your substack piece here, please at least put in the effort to copy the whole contents of the post into your toplevel. If Ymeskhout can do it, you can too. And maybe less of "Remember to subscribe"?
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