Let us assume HBD is correct.
That does not make it acceptable to enslave, discriminate, oppress, or demean a race of people - all people deserve a baseline of dignity and respect.
How do you measure oppression? On the face of it in terms of basic rights, this situation is solved. Universal suffrage and all that, the baseline of dignity achieved. Right? Except there is always more to that baseline and in that case the only measure of discrimination, oppression and the rest of it is outcomes. If outcomes are unequal, then oppression had to take place. For some times classical liberals talked about "equality of opportunity". Which is again an interesting concept - but how do you measure if access to opportunity is truly equal except of outcomes?
HBD means nuking tabula rasa, which is the basic dogma for most versions of humanist movements. Be happy with basic constitutional rights, everything else is free for all - so there will be various castes, classes and groups, some of them in hereditary worse situation when it comes to outcomes. This is a very, very hard pill to swallow in the current equality/equity obsessed society. Hence the vehement resistance to the whole concept of HBD.
georgioz
1d ago
Neither party has done either. I’ll accept we’re in some sort of emergency (crazy politicians, Gen Z apathy, climate change and TFR collapse). I’m not remotely convinced a leader of any major party can lead us out.
You just brushed with a specific concept that emerged from Davos crowd in 2016, the specific term is polycrisis and they are in love with it since then. Like you mentioned, we have demographic crisis, climate crisis, mental health crisis and everything in between and more. It is a feature, not a bug - some of these like climate crisis or demographic crisis are just new fact of life that will stay with us for our lifetimes.
Moreover there are micro panics, this week it is the wife that strangled her three kids, and it seems that 10% of the world knows about it. Next week it will be something else. It is just a constant barrage of various issues, sense of endless anxiety that triggers basic psychological programming.
georgioz
3d ago
Of course, this is the model that I also have. Just because you are a good manager does not mean that you are good at everything - from repairing stuff or soldiering through to philosophy or even things such as being a good father. In fact good managers are perfectly aware of this fact and they are good at matching various people with capital in order to get the best result - they would be the first to tell you they themselves are not best at repairing broken ship motor, while organizing everybody to either help or at least get out of the hair of somebody with such a skill needed for occasion.
georgioz
4d ago
So they ended up hiring a mentally ill con man who was good at not saying anything that would ruffle the wrong feathers.
I'd argue that they wanted a con man and ended up with a person with pseudologia fantastica. It is different from con man, as con men try to be rational and persuasive, they do not invent completely out-there story as their objective is to get some financial or other reward. So they keep their con believable. Pathological liars are completely opposite, they draw pleasure if somebody validates their fantasies and they will push the boundaries to get a new high.
Of course the whole Critical Justice/DEI framework is especially vulnerable to these pathological liars, as first the claims themselves are unhinged, where inventing new ways of how one was oppressed while sitting on a bench is matter of course - you know the genre of X is racist (knitting, hiking etc.). Second, the whole field uses standpoint epistemology, basically "believe X" where X is somebody oppressed. So it is not your place to disbelieve and especially criticize people of color, especially if you are white.
So yes, they made the bed that they are now sleeping in, and it is not easy to unmake. The vulnerability is deeply ingrained in the fields it affects.
I actually think that @Corvos has a point. Imagine that you are a modern self-employed digger without any boss. You probably utilize some sort of capital in form of excavator, that in turn utilizes labor of probably millions of people from iron ore processing to electronics. You are only good at operating this highly specific piece of machine, you would be nothing without it, you are "parasite" on labor of all those workers that produced the capital you now use. CEO like Elon Musk is just high-tier version of this digger. He is good not at operating a single machine, but at operation of huge gigafactories and software houses. That is his level of expertise, these companies are his capital and he is best in the world operating them.
Moreover, there is no world where position like that does not exist. You could be in Soviet Russia and you will have a local party boss managing the factory, who is subject to some planning committee that collectively represent Elon Musk on steroid as they produce 5 year plan for the whole economy.
What LLMs do specifically, is that they are just another vector of showing how intellectual property is nonsensical category. The solution is easy, the intellectual property belongs to the person who was first and fulfills any number of invented arbitrary rules for intellectual property (e.g. that it cannot be mathematical formula etc.). If it does not fulfill these criteria, then this app is freeware just as if you xittered some new mathematical formula. If it does fulfill these criteria then the app is his by virtue of being first and everybody else is plagiarizing his work. And it does not matter if it is an app or music or whatever.
British empire was historically surprisingly insular, especially when it comes to colonies. In 1841 there were only 0.25% of foreign bon people in UK, in 1901 it increased to 1.5% - and vast majority of those were French, German as well as Russian Jews etc. The total African/Indian population of UK could be of around 10,000 people. By the way the same goes the other way around. British ruled with a very small bureaucratic elite, the whole Indian Civil Service never exceeded much beyond 1,000 people. Pre rebellion in 1856 the whole white military in India was around 40,000 people for the population of over 200 million in Raj and even post-rebellion the numbers were never too outrageous it only doubled. Brits took the divide and conquer tactics very seriously, majority of military as well as administration was actually local population.
It was not until after WW2 and especially after de facto dissolution of the empire that the immigration really picked up pace. It is a very new phenomenon for Britain. I know it looks different with constant propaganda about black people in historical dramas, but it is just that - a new myth for new multicultural UK.
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