ebrso
9mo ago
I think a major problem is that there’s a lot of wiggle room for motte and Bailey around the issue. When people want sympathy they talk about a guy just down on his luck. When they want to remove them, they’re drug using street shitters.
I agree that people describe homeless populations (indeed, all populations) as more or less sympathetic depending on their own sympathies. But I hardly see how that (alone) has anything to do with mottes / baileys. Not every form of intellectual dishonesty should be shoehorned into a motte-and-bailey framework.
So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.
ebrso
9mo ago
[America has] 330 million people. A million [drug overdose] deaths in 10 years isn't even coming close to affecting the median.
Of course the median American didn't die from a drug overdose in the last decade. But if knowing a drug addict is to be affected, then I suspect the median American has indeed been affected by drug abuse.
ebrso
9mo ago
Once you're in the real world, it's all about results, and if you can't hang, you aren't going to go anywhere.
The claim that professional promotion requires concrete accomplishments in a role is wrong or vacuous.
Plenty of people get promoted for "bad" reasons. Often they're just in the right place at the right time. Or they market themselves and their mediocre achievements effectively. Sometimes they sequester special knowledge, which makes them seem useful, even if they're not useful in any kind of wins above replacement sense. Sometimes they get credit for others' achievements, either because they take credit unethically, or because they're just kinda near an achievement and it falls on them by osmosis. Sometimes they've been in a role for a long time, and they're butting-up against the top of the compensation window for that level, so it's easier to promote them than not. Sometimes the panel making the promotion decision is sympathetic to them for various reasons. And on and on.
ebrso
10mo ago
The money is meant to compensate [Black and Hispanic members of the class]. Why would white applicants have a claim on the money?
I never suggested White applicants should have a claim to anything, I only suggested that this outcome potentially invites an equal protection challenge. If a Black guy and a White guy sit for the same test, and both fail, but legal recourse is available to the Black guy alone, based exclusively on immutable racial characteristics, then it seems to me (a non-lawyer, but a member of the educated laity) that the White guy has clearly been denied equal protection of the laws.
"Four teachers in 1996 first filed a suit over the test. . . . The test was ruled discriminatory in 2012 by the third Manhattan federal judge to handle the case — which included a two-month nonjury trial and repeated trips to an appeals court."
That sounds like a vigorous defense to me.
I don't see what bearing the length of the process has on the vigor of the procedure.
The plaintiffs were not paid not to work. Presumably most of them worked at other jobs since 1996 (when the lawsuit was originally filed). They are being compensated for the damages incurred as a result of the ostensible discrimination. If I dropped a hammer on your head while working on a roof, and as a result you had to quit your job as an accountant and work retail, would you frame a lawsuit settlement as paying you not to work?
I don't stand by my characterization of the lawsuit as paying teachers "to not work," although incidentally, NYC has done just this before. But certainly the plaintiffs were paid in return for nothing. If the settlement is intended merely to compensate for damages (i.e., make the plaintiffs "whole," i.e., to leave them in a similar state to where they might have been had the injury never occurred), then why wouldn't class members be eligible solely for the difference between what they actually earned and what they would have earned as NYC teachers (with adjustments for factors like difficulty of position)? If a hammer falls on my head at the fault of my employer, and I go and take another paid job while continuing to receive a paycheck from my original employer, then it's even better for me than payment explicitly for not working!
Did you change the link?
I haven't edited the original post since publishing.
ebrso
10mo ago
A major discrimination settlement has been reached with NYC candidate teachers.
The NY Post is reporting that New York City has reached a $1.8B bias settlement with roughly 5200 Black and Hispanic teachers who failed a New York State teaching certification exam, which prevented them from serving as teachers in NYC public schools. At least 225 would-be teachers will receive payments exceeding $1M (not including ancillary benefits like lifetime pensions for jobs that were never performed).
I am not a lawyer, and I have no familiarity with this kind of litigation, but I was surprised at the settlement. It's possible that NYC got spooked by recent high-profile discrimination lawsuit outcomes (jury verdict against Equinox here, settlement with Fox News here), and it's possible the legal fees and likely result of a trial made settling prudent for NYC. But I wonder whether NYC politicians (or bureaucrats) failed to mount a vigorous legal defense out of ideological sympathy for the plaintiffs.
I also don't see how this kind of settlement - available only to failed candidates based on their race - can satisfy an Equal Protection standard. Won't failed white candidates have a discrimination claim?
Anyway, there's no shortage of culture war angles to this story. NYC famously pays $38,000 per public school student / year, with mediocre outcomes; once again the tax payer seems to get a raw deal. There are the perennial issues around disparate racial impact from ostensibly race-blind hiring practices. The NYT doesn't seem to have reported on this, which raises questions about media coverage. And so on.
I want to focus on a different question, though: to what extent (if at all) do such high-profile, lottery-style bonanzas undermine the case for honest, low-paid toil among the working class? I have a pet theory that the seeming arbitrariness of financial success in America (and perhaps other countries) is a major factor (not the only one!) among prime working age men exiting the labor market. Events like this feel deeply unfair - why work your whole life if you can get paid to not work? And nobody wants to participate in a system that's rigged against them.
ebrso
1yr ago
I agree that Ashton Kutcher's a strong actor. His capabilities are underestimated because he's so handsome (Brad Pitt, James Franco, and perhaps Leonardo Dicaprio have a similar "problem").
I don't doubt he made some good investments, mainly in tech (sane choices, at least with hindsight). But academic credentials? Wikipedia says he dropped out of the University of Iowa to pursue professional modeling - surely the best academic decision he could have made.
ebrso
1yr ago
No. In my hypothetical and in the real-life event, a drunk person chooses the word that seems most likely to offend the person they are confronting.
In the same way that kids telling their little brother that he's adopted don't hate orphans, they just like teasing their little brother.
I think this example supports my position. Yes, the older brother is trying to rile the younger brother. But there's also common knowledge across the participants that the older brother holds that it's undesirable to be adopted.
ebrso
1yr ago
"Characterizing X as detestable" is just far, far too much cognition to attribute to someone this drunk.
If I say that Martin Shkreli is an asshole, I'm probably not exercising too much cognition. I'm certainly not consciously/explicitly characterizing anuses as bad. Indeed, there's a reasonable case that assholes (anuses) are good - after all, what's the alternative? Still, in context, there's some clear background knowledge: assholes are detestable.
What bothers me is the idea of expelling students because they said a naughty word (yes, even if they said it 200 times). If the line between expulsion and not-expulsion is "did you say a racial slur," that violates my intuitions regarding the importance of freedom of speech, thought, and inquiry in institutions of higher education.
So you're suggesting that broad principles of free speech require public colleges to treat student speech in a content-neutral way, with no special treatment for the communication of ideas we find abhorrent, including racial slurs? That seems fine, although it's not the position most public American colleges seem to take (certainly not in practice). It's hard to imagine how this would even function if implemented literally. How could student work possibly be evaluated in this context?
ebrso
1yr ago
Imagine a student getting plastered and, noticing her RA's MAGA cap, calling the RA a "Nazi" two hundred times.
In your hypothetical, the student is characterizing being a Nazi as detestable. In the real-life event, the student is characterizing being Black as detestable.
I'm skeptical of widespread American anti-Black racism narratives, and I don't think this case supports them (except weakly at the margin). I think it's possible (although unlikely) that the White girl doesn't harbor meaningful animus towards Black people, and that she was just grasping clumsily for an epithet that carried a powerful valence. I also assume the White girl has some fairly serious emotional problems (as do many people, such as myself) which were exacerbated by alcohol use.
Nevertheless, the White girl's behavior was grotesque. I have no objections at all to expelling her from school.
ebrso
1yr ago
mandatory voting.
I have reservations about mandatory voting, but if implemented, I think it might have the effect of improving the quality of the national political conversation.
Basically, I get the sense that, at some point around the late '90s, national political campaigns came to understand that changing someone's vote from R to D (or vice versa!) is actually really hard, and it's more effective for the D campaign to encourage high D turnout. Driving D turnout requires impressing upon D voters that the upcoming election is crucially important, which means convincing D voters that an R victory will be a total catastrophe (the end of democracy).
Mandatory voting would change campaigns' incentives to reward actually changing voters' minds, which could help lower the temperature in the country.
ebrso
1yr ago
If you're going to be glued to the television/internet tomorrow evening, and want to know what races to watch as early indicators,
My plan is to turn off TV/devices in the early evening and review the results when I wake up on Wednesday morning. If experience is any guide, though, I'll be refreshing the standard real-time update feeds compulsively until 2 am.
ebrso
1yr ago
American midterm election predictions?
Does anyone wish to use this space to register predictions for outcomes in tomorrow's American midterm elections?
Personally, I take a kind of efficient markets approach to this stuff, so I'll defer to the betting consensus. But if you want your time-stamped judgment registered as part of the official Motte record, here's your chance!
Mods - please feel free to remove if you don't think this is a good fit for the space.
ebrso
1yr ago
(and you still continue to buy cocaine (avocados)!)
For those who don't know (I had to look it up myself), there are claims that violent cartels in Mexico have branched-out from traditional narcotics and human trafficking and into lucrative agricultural exports, such as avocados. This apparently takes the form of protection rackets, with the cartels taxing legitimate farmers.
ebrso
1yr ago
There has been plenty of progress on questions like differences in BMI, running ability and such. Scott even posted a link years ago to a study on genetic causes of BMI differences (which he used to vaguely hint on his beliefs about IQ differences). Genome wide association studies have been done and are being done on all these questions. To quote Joe Rogan, "You haven't been paying attention to the literature."
I think you're suggesting that there's a widespread academic consensus that, e.g., genetic factors significantly explain part of the observed population differences in high-level sports achievements. But I'm skeptical that such a consensus exists. Off my head, I can't think of any mainstream American academic who has endorsed something like this position publicly.
Maybe the consensus exists, but it's considered tasteless to discuss the question in polite company? In any case, are there prominent experts who argue that HBD (largely) explains differences in high-level athletics achievement, but doesn't explain differences in (e.g.) high-level math achievement? I would be interested in seeing how they thread this needle.
ebrso
1yr ago
Probably there is less attention about athletic differences because the stakes are lower
That is exactly why I think that it could make for more productive conversation.
Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality. Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the unachievability of equality and justification of inequality. There's some honest people on either side who have been swept up in the drama, but in terms of the direction of the energy which drives the whole debate, this is what lies underneath it.
I think HBD conversations would improve if focus were to shift from cognitive factors to athletic factors. For example, are the extraordinary accomplishments of recent-African-heritage sprinters in international track & field competitions attributable to genetic factors that are relevant at the population level? If we can't make progress on this question, then how can we hope to make progress on (far harder) questions about cognitive factors?
ebrso
1yr ago
I guess I want to speak up for the people who think that Fetterman really wasn’t that bad. For the most part, it was clear what he was trying to say, even though he didn’t express himself fluently and seemed like a nervous middle schooler giving a presentation.
What occurred to me watching the Fetterman debate is that ordinary, American political rhetoric is hard to distinguish from literal brain damage: question-evading, compulsive repetition of simple points, failure to substantially engage with alternative points of view, reliance on memorized/rehearsed lines, introduction of irrelevant themes/ideas, etc.
There were portions of Fetterman's performance where he clearly wasn't communicating like a normal person, but I (literally!) couldn't tell how much was attributable to the stroke-induced impairment vs. how much was just the standard-issue (moronic) political medium.
ebrso
1yr ago
Adults don’t use phonetics in the same way that Magnus Carlsen doesn’t calculate chess moves.
It's truly remarkable how many chess patterns are internalized by world-class chess players. Here's a video of a chess grandmaster solving simple chess puzzles in real time, as he narrates. What's amazing to me is how quickly the professional recognizes the solutions - often before I have any sense at all for the position. For him, it's like playing "Where's Waldo" if every non-Waldo character were dressed in all black - the correct result seems to just pop-out without any conscious processing.
So, I agree with the overall thrust of this comment. But it's also absolutely the case that top chess players often perform deep calculations, even in rapid games.
ebrso
1yr ago
Using suboptimal methods because it just feels good is perhaps the most common failure mode for everything in all of history.
I think this quip is question-begging, and just serves to muddy the waters by conflating several distinct phenomena:
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Conflict between a society's short-term and long-term preferences.
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Conflict between the preferences of distinct groups in a society.
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How individuals/groups establish preferences, and how they understand and express these preferences.
There are important questions of fact involved:
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Are whole-language approaches more effective for teaching students literacy?
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Should effectiveness in teaching students literacy be the unique factor determining instructional approach?
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Are teachers well-positioned to evaluate the effectiveness of various instructional approaches?
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Do teachers have insight into how they arrive at their own preferences?
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Do teachers misrepresent the justifications for their preferences? Do they do so knowingly?
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Are whole-language approaches easier/more fun for teachers?
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Do teachers prefer whole-language approaches because they're more pleasant for teachers?
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Do students have effective political advocates for their interests?
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Etc.
I was on one of these busses that was filled with migrants sometime around the beginning of the year. The bus was traveling from San Antonio to Dallas. It was a normal Greyhound bus, and I had purchased a ticket. When I got to the bus station, there was some kind of (possibly Christian) charity group distributing boxed lunches. Most passenger wore stickers on their chests listing their names and final destinations.
I talked a bit to the guy sitting next to me (I speak Spanish). I'll call him L. L was from Venezuela, but had been living the past few years in Ecuador. He had a wife and 2 kids remaining in South America. He'd crossed north through Central America and then Mexico through some combination of foot, car, and rail. Finally, he'd arrived at the US border a few days prior. He proceeded to cross-over around Laredo, TX, then surrendered himself to American immigration agents. L was detained for a few days in some kind of immigration facility, then discharged to the streets with an (online) court date for a year in the future. Someone told L he should proceed to some kind of homeless shelter, so that's what he did. He stayed there for a few days, and then someone came and offered him (and other migrants) a free, 1-way bus ticket to the American city of their choosing. L chose Indianapolis, because he had some relatives living there. Some days later, he was escorted into a shuttle with other migrants, transported by shuttle to the Laredo bus station, handed a stack of bus tickets (there's no direct route from Laredo to Indianapolis!), and encouraged to board the bus. His first stop was San Antonio. L told me he'd worked as an auto mechanic before, and that he hoped to find similar work in Indianapolis, but that he was willing to work at any kind of job.
A few points:
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