guesswho
2yr ago
The reason it’s $11 for a dozen eggs certainly isn’t that the dollar has been ‘devalued’, it’s at near historic highs relative to most other developed world currencies. The reason eggs cost $11 in the US while they cost $4 or less in most of Western Europe
They cost $4 or less in most of the US, Tucker is as usual just lying.
(by any reasonable definition of 'lying')
guesswho
2yr ago
They think that the deep state will ensure that the jury is made up of those who can be relied upon to reach the right answer.
In which case it doesn't matter what the makeup of DC is like, a sufficiently corrupt judge could craft a jury of 12 Democrats in Texas.
guesswho
2yr ago
Shouldn’t a hypothetical, nationally representative jury, nullify the charges?
Well, no, because a jury actually hears all the evidence and arguments, a process which most of the voting public will never bother with. They're supposed to come to the correct conclusions after getting all that evidence, not the nationally representative one, and it's no surprise if those two happen to diverge (or don't).
If the ballot box and the jury box fail (edit: I forgot, perhaps the most egregious of all, also denied the soapbox when democrats cheered when he was kicked off twitter), what box do they have left?
'They' Control the Supreme Court and the House and most state Senates where actual things that affect people's daily lives get passed. 'They' have had huge wins in the past decade across all kinds of political domains, including the abortion victory 'they' claimed to care so much about or decades.
And if they want to nominate a non-criminal, they have every chance of electing them President.
The ballot box has not 'failed' anyone, and most people are enough aware of this that they're not going to risk their lives and livelihoods over the rhetoric to the contrary (even if they repeat it themselves!).
I too am annoyed by loose threats of terrorism, such as ‘if you don’t give young men sex/poor people money/if you police black people/etc, they will rise up’,
Of these, only black people have actually done anything about it in recent memory, because the actual material conditions of their lives are bad enough that it's worth the risk. The expected value of rioting to disrupt the system and maybe loot a TV, against the risk of being killed or injured in the streets or arrested, was actually positive-EV for enough poor black people in some urban areas to get them out of their houses.
That's just not true in this case, the average Trump voter will not be materially hurt by another 4 years of Biden in a way where risking violence in the streets is positive-EV for their individual life, and very few people will ever do it just for ideology.
guesswho
2yr ago
Not only did you conveniently put your bottom line as it's own line at the bottom of the argument, you even drew a line above it as in the standard notation for a deductive proof of this kind.
It's so on-the-nose it makes me wonder if it's an intentional parable on the topic, but probably not.
Anyway, genuinely sorry for your family's pain in that situation, I'm glad it seems to have worked out ok. But rampant safetyism and trying to avoid legal liability really just isn't qualitatively similar top mass criminality and corruption of the type you speculate. If all politicians were the criminals you model, I would expect you to have to bribe one of them to get in to see your mother, not have one of them compassionately bend the rules to help you.
guesswho
2yr ago
DC is an overwhelmingly democratic voting jurisdiction, but you would need to be cynical indeed to think there is no chance that even one Democrat juror would refuse to imprison a political opponent on obviously baseless charges.
Much more importantly, trials are not a vote of everyone in the demographic area. Lawyers can reject jurors who they believe can't judge the case fairly; it's entirely possible to craft a jury of 12 Republicans in 99% Democratic region, if that's crucial to your case being judged fairly (or more likely, craft a jury of 12 people who consider themselves independent/undecided and are not very politically engaged in general).
And, if you don't trust that process because you think teh judge is a shill, then it also doesn't matter what the makeup of DC is because the judge could craft a jury of 12 Democrats in a 99% Republican area. If the judge is a shill then the rest doesn't matter, that's all you need to say.
It's all part of the gish gallop, make a million separate claims instead of proving any one of them.
But, anyway: no, the economy is good and people are comfortable, there won't be major violence.
guesswho
2yr ago
How familiar with the field of neuroscience are you? We can make a lot of repeatable predictions, at various levels of examination, and pretty high reliability.
We can't make arbitrarily detailed predictions with arbitrarily high accuracy, but few sciences can.
The predictions you make and explanations you give with a materialist account of the mind are a lot better than the ones you get with a non-materialist account, though. Since we can never directly access the 'truth' of the 'ultimate explanation of causes', the 'truth' that humans have access to is just accepting whichever available model does best, for now.
guesswho
2yr ago
Part of it is just 'never underestimate the stupidity and laziness of criminals'.
People smart and disciplined enough to plan and carry out something like that can find higher-paying jobs that don't put their lives and freedom at constant risk.
guesswho
2yr ago
He does regularly link to the SSC subreddit, which (I think?) has some of the same moderators as this site. Don't know if there's an obvious pipeline from that sub to here.
guesswho
2yr ago
As opposed to the group "Asians and Pacific Islanders",
A grouping made up by census-takers, which the people inside of it strenuously object to.
or the group of all black people worldwide, including Pygmies and Kanye West?
Also not an actual political movement of any size.
guesswho
2yr ago
See the rest of my previous comment after that sentence for my reply. That's what the whole thing was about.
My point was, if you are against any attempts to account for and correct for institutional discrimination, then you are in effect behaving as though you believe it doesn't exist and all outcome gaps are only caused by innate differences.
That may not be your explicitly endorsed belief about the world, but it's implicit in your policy preferences; they don't make sense in a world where that's not true.
And I do think it's mostly the hbd side which falls into that category.
guesswho
2yr ago
You need women writing it, is the thing.
Like, there's plenty of great media about female submission that women love, it's mostly written by women and explores the internality of the women characters and represents their emotional journey in dignified and relatable way.
When men write it, the woman is ussually just a sexy lamp that falls in love with the male lead as a reward for him completing his character arc or w/e. That's not the same thing.
guesswho
2yr ago
'we must have a female Doctor' (why?)
Well...
Looks like a 13% increase in overall viewership plus major capture of a new demographic, opening the door to new advertisers and new types of merchandising.
'Never attribute to ideology that which is adequately explained by capitalism.'
guesswho
2yr ago
I mean if there were 20 different individual 'Tomb Raiders' across a series spanning 60 years of production, I don't think it would be crazy to have one of those 20 be 'Lars Croft' for one game. Could be fun.
guesswho
2yr ago
Well, as you'd say I'd still push back on gender representation in those time, but yeah I'm generally fine with all of that. I wasn't actually trying to attack the past for their practices here.
My point was, people complain about ubiquitous diversity in everything as one of the annoying consequences of SJWs getting their hands on the rudder of popular culture. So if the question is 'what would it look like to defeat the SJW movement', and the current levels of diversity in media are a hated consequence of the SJW movement, then what's the alternative? What would 'defeating' that look like?
As you say, having media be 'representative' today would involve a ton more diversity than we had with 'representative media of the past. I cited to someone else a study showing that even today, minorities are still underrepresented in most media sectors compared to the actual population average.
So if 'defeating SJW's absurd push for diversity' means just moving to representative proportions instead, and representative proportions would actually be more diverse than what we have now, then what are we actually asking for?
A few people narrowed the complaint down to, paraphrasing, 'race-swapping, implausible world-building, and bad writing' which, sure, that's a lot more reasonable and is a definition we could discuss.
I kind of think that winning on those types of corner-cases would still leave you with a media landscape that looks a lot less changed from the current one than I feel like some people are asking for, giving the volume of complaints, is the thing.
But they aren't such examples.
In what way are they not?
70 years ago, the wage gap for women and minorities was much larger than it is today and they were widely considered to be mentally inferior (or 'different' in ways that excluded them from full economic participation), women and minorities were much less represented in media than they are today, and the modern category of 'trans people' didn't exist as a social construct.
Are you saying there's some non-strawman path back to that reality that I should have hypothesized instead of the way I described things? I'd like to hear it.
Or are you just saying that I should have interpreted 'defeat the SJWs' to mean something other than moving society backwards on those 3 things, even though the modern trends surrounding those 3 things are pretty much the main topics that people here complain about in relation to the SJ movement?
Because if that's what you mean, that's why I phrased it as a question, and then offered the alternative of just defeating cancel culture and loud annoying woke scolds and etc. (the 4th thing that gets complained about) while keeping most of the actual material advances. I offered that as an interpretation of what OP meant, and asked if that was what they meant, and continued to address that point along the assumption that they probably meant that. That was the actual point of the comment, which you (like many) are not bothering to engage with.
Again, this is the whole 'take a sentence and respond to it in-line instead of responding to the entire comment' thing.
The overall comment was 'When you say "defeat the movement," do you mean materially or rhetorically? Defeating them materially would actually be pretty nuts and hard to do and you probably don't actually endorse it, so probably you mean defeat them rhetorically? In which case, sure, that could happen, it just wouldn't mean very much if the material advances of the movement mostly remained in place. People have muddled thinking in general about what it means to 'defeat' a movement, and movements that are remembered as absurd or evil often accomplished many of their goals in reality; that's probably important for you to think about as you consider your question'.
But you don't read the whole comment, see the shape of it, and respond to the intent. You grab a few sentences, apply an uncharitable new context to them that doesn't match how they were being used rhetorically, and want to debate those instead.
It's tiring.
Sure, and we live in a world where society hasn't decided that we want to submit to trans people. Some people in society have, others haven't, and it's under discussion now.
Yeah, and my point is, saying that treating trans people with respect is 'submitting' to them, like you're a dog rolling over to show your belly and whining so they won't hurt you, is just as uncharitable a phrasing of the progressive position as any of my phrasings in this comment.
Which is to say: it's a phrasing I'm totally fine with! I understand why it might feel like that to someone who's not on-board with the project, and while I think that phrasing misses really important nuance and misrepresents people's intentions, it still more-or-less points at the same empirical reality as the charitable phrasing I'd use, so whatever. I can be a good sport about it, and continue the discussion in good faith despite having my position uncharitably framed that way.
And if you think that these are different, that my phrasing of your side is a straw man but your phrasing of my side is totally fair, then you're the one who is too far into your own side's rhetoric to recognize where you're failing to understand your opponents.
It's also you just playing another transparently bad faith shell game of claiming that sports and shelters "spontaneously chose to include trans people." Whether or not they chose to include trans people is not in contention; if you combined the people who believed transwomen should compete/shelter with females and those who believed transwomen should compete/shelter with males, that would cover basically everyone. It's not a question of "including" them, it's a question of how you include them.
Sorry, I can't even parse this. Are you implying that I was offering a hypothetical 'excluded' world where trans people aren't allowed on teams/in shelters for either gender and are thus 'excluded' at a societal level, assigning a preference for that world to my opponents, and saying that's bad?
Because, no, that's nuts, if that's how you're reading my argument then I really really wish you would take like 30 seconds to try to think of a more charitable interpretation whenever you get mad at something I write.
My point is that individual teams/shelters can choose to include or exclude trans people in their individual organization. And if any individual organization ever chooses to include them, that leads to the state of affairs that people like Rowling et al. are objecting to, with battered women sleeping next to what they would call men, with girls competing against what they would call boys.
You can't actually allow those organizations to freely choose their own policies on this topic without creating the situation that those people are mad about and want to abolish (or you'd have to change everyone's opinions so that those organizations never used that freedom to make a choice they'd disagree with). To get what they actually want, they would need everyone else to 'submit' to their preferences.
That was my point.
No, it doesn't require that everyone else submit to my agenda. It requires me convincing enough people that freedom speech is worth protecting
What are you talking about.
Like, literally, what are you talking about?
I already stipulated in the hypothetical I was advancing that we repeal any laws that would restrict your ability to speak however you'd like on these topics. That's already something I granted here.
So when you say 'It requires me convincing enough people that freedom speech is worth protecting', are you talking about repealing laws restricting speech in this area, and you just missed where I already granted that?
Or are you saying that people getting mad at you for saying things that they consider to be incredibly rude and dehumanizing is a violation of free speech?
Are you saying that if more people just agreed with your passion for free speech they'd be perfectly happy with hiring you so you can misgender and deadname their trans coworkers 20 times a day, and tell them how you're sorry that they fell for a social contagion and mutilated their genitals around the water cooler?
Again: outside of whatever laws in this area might exist, which I already granted you, it comes down to the fact that people have values and norms and preferences and social mores and rules of etiquette that you're violating, and they react the way people always react when someone does that. There's not a way around that without people either changes those preferences and etiquettes to match what you want, or changing to care about 'free speech' so much that they stops reacting to those violations in the normal way humans throughout history have always done.
Which I already said in my last comment, and you didn't address in your response, preferring to just insult me instead of addressing the argument. Again, tiring.
I'd also like to ask directly, have you ever gone by a username "darwin2500" or something similar on Reddit or the SlateStarCodex website?
Yes, obviously.
You were more interested in attacking my character than responding to my points there, too.
guesswho
2yr ago
No. These are not the same statement. They say vey different things. If I were to say that black people are more stupid than white people I would be denying the important fact that there are indeed black people smarter than myself and white people dumber than nearly all black people. It's very important, and I am careful always to be very specific about this fact.
See, this is what I'm talking about. You're letting affective valence drive your interpretation, and being maximally uncharitable towards anyone not treating your views with careful aesthetic kid gloves, in order to justify to yourself that actually they don't understand you or else they'd be forced to agree with you, or at least be respectful towards you.
You're acting like I don't understand you, when I'm the one that just wrote the summary of your position that you're currently agreeing with!
Because the thing is, no, that is not what 'x is dumber than y' means. No one would interpret it to mean that if they weren't doing a motivated reading to shore up their own position. If that's what 'x is dumber than y' meant, then it would literally never be a sensible thing to say; you couldn't say 'People with Down Syndrome are dumber than Phd graduates,' because one Phd grad somewhere in the world overdosed and fried their brain and is near-catatonic and thus now dumber than one Down syndrome person somewhere.
What you need to understand is that no one is impressed by you carefully parsing your language in this way. They're not failing to understand your nuanced and balanced and fair-minded take on racial superiority; they know that 'there is a population difference in IQ levels with lots of overlap' and 'black people are dumber than white people ' mean the same thing, and that the people who say them are both pointing us to similar worlds that they don't believe in and don't want to move towards.
People aren't failing to understand you, they disagree with you, and the insistence on politely-intellectual aesthetics isn't persuading them.
uninterested vs incapable just very trivially mean different things... Less suited for is closer to a incapable but then again I'm unsure why I'm defending words you conjured.
And again, proves my point. Yes, the 'uninterested' part is the meaningless window dressing your side uses to make it sound like no one is being hurt by this (as if poor people living under capitalism are uninterested in making more money!), and the 'less suited' (incapable) part is what is doing the real work. 'If women were just as good at the jobs they're underrepresented in, why wouldn't CEOs hire them,' right?
Because women are saying they'd actually like to work those jobs and make that money and have that power, and those are intuitive desires to everyone in the audience, so it's real hard to convince everyone of the 'uninterested' thing. And if they were good at the jobs but just didn't like the corporate office culture, well, rational CEOs would just change that culture to get more talented workers and increase profits! So the only alternative to institutional misogyny that holds water is the 'less suited' (incapable) part, that's what is actually doing the work in explaining what the world is like.
And note that you happily spend a long paragraph arguing about the aesthetic 'preferences' part, but once you get to the actual meaningful part, you just throw up your hands and imply it's beneath your dignity to answer. Which, again, is a tactic we recognize.
What a thing to say! What an absurd thing to assume would happen if we used race blind hiring.
What is race-blind hiring, and when were you advocating it?
Do you mean like the cello players who get interviewed behind a screen so that no one knows their gender before they get hired, and then way more women end up getting hired? It was people here who told me that was a myth.
Do you mean that you want more regulations so that job applicants cannot be interviewed in person or by phone and cannot give any information on their applications that would reveal their race or gender, including things like their address and which college they went to? And no one is allowed to ever hire someone they already know? So that all hiring is truly blind to race and gender?
Or do you just mean that you want hiring to work pretty much like it is now, except we get rid of any types of incentives or pressures or rhetoric around diversity, and go back to the way things were in the past?
Because there were times in the past where, yes, women and black people had extreme difficulty getting any work above subsistence wages. Not in our lifetime, earlier, but: people from the times when that was true wouldn't tell you they were racist, they would also tell you that it was just because of innate differences that make those people unsuited or uninterested in higher paying jobs.
The point is, if you don't acknowledge systemic bias, then you don't have any reason to look at any specific outcome gap and say 'that's too big to be natural'; without systemic explanations, whatever the gap is must be natural.
And if you know that systemic bias does exist while also spending all your time attacking and rolling your eyes at anyone who tries to address it, then people are going to infer your motives based on that, and it doesn't matter what aesthetics you try to use to fancy it up.
What you need to understand is that reality is nuanced, but directional public policy is not. Either we're to one side of the 'natural' wage gap and should be pushing for more diversity and opportunity initiatives to shrink the gap until it reaches the natural level, or we're to the other side of the 'natural' wage gap and should be pushing to stop those programs and eschew action on the matter until the wage gap grows to reach it's natural level.
You can spend a million pages writing about how it's a complex topic with many factors and no one thing explains the entire phenomenon and so forth, and there's a role for actual scientists and policy-matter experts to do that in a systematic way so that we can learn more. But for average people the thing that matters to them is policy direction because that's what they use to cast their vote.
And if you are on the 'increase the wage gap' side of the policy dispute, it doesn't matter to those people what your reasoning for it is (including when you say it's uncharitable to call your side the 'increase teh wage gap side', yes you are against policies aimed at shrinking the wage gap and that means your policies being implemented would probably see it increase but that's not your terminal value or anything so it's a strawman to call you that), you're still the person trying to fuck their life and drive the country what they see as backwards.
You and the person who says 'I do have a terminal value of increasing teh wage gap, I love inequity!' have the same effect on their life when you go to the ballot box. In fact you're probably worse because your focus on aesthetics and polite rhetoric actually is persuasive to enough people to be dangerous.
See discussion here.
But also, this is actually an interesting opportunity for a discussion of aesthetics vs. empirical meaning.
We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?
The aesthetics of this statement are pretty crude and confrontational. But also, AFAIK HBD relating to black people being on average less intelligent and women being on average less suited for/interested in high-paying jobs is a median position around here. People have defended the Damore memo to me without pushback from the rest of the community, which definitely talks about capabilities in addition to preferences. So lets make some purely aesthetic changes to that sentence and see how it matches up to people's actual beliefs-as-they'd-frame-them here:
We all agree that actually black people have lower average IQ and women are less suited for and less interested in high-stress, thing-oriented positions , and not be surprised or try to change anything when we find that they have* jobs that are less prestigious or have lower average pay?
Is that a fair summary of at least a common worldview around here?
Because my contention is that the two worlds that these two sentences describe are empirically identical to each other.
'Lower average IQ' is aesthetically nicer than 'more stupid', 'less suited for or interested in' is aesthetically nicer than 'more incapable than', and the passive voice of 'not be surprised to find' gives an aesthetic sense of impartiality that the active voice 'stop giving them' does not.
But they describe the same beliefs about people's mental attributes, and predict/endorse the same empirical state of the world with regards to employment and wages.
Basically, I don't see the value in letting people hide behind aesthetics. Your empirical beliefs/preferences about the state of the world are your empirical beliefs/preferences about the state of the world, no matter what words you use to describe them.
If you agree with one description of World State A presented with nice aesthetics and are offended by another description of World State A presented with mean aesthetics, that's probably a sign that your beliefs are motivated by aesthetics more than they should be.
(which certainly happens to me and people on my side, I assume! People describe my side's beliefs like this all the time, and I try to respond to them fairly, see here re 'submitting' to individual trans persons vs being a member of a society with certain beliefs and preferences)
All 3 were ad absurdum examples demonstrating the crazy steps you would have to take to make the future look like the past, in the 'roll back the clock' or 'return to glory days' way that I think people imagine.
My point is, if you don't take those absurd steps, then I think the future continues to look mostly like a continuation of the present in all the major particular, because the changes to society and culture and the zeitgeist and the Overton Window have already happened. They're not being sustained by an ongoing SJW effort that can be 'defeated' and return everything to 'normal', they are 'normal' now (aside from the most toxoplasmic excesses).
Going back to the old 'normal' would take as much effort and revolution as it took to get to the current 'normal', and I think that's unlikely to happen, is my point.
But, to discuss your points:
They just don't believe that "trans" is the kind of thing that places obligations on other people to submit to the person who believes themselves as "trans" in terms of things like pronoun usage, prison assignments, shelters, sports, etc.
Well maybe we should explore what it means to 'submit' in a cultural context.
Assuming I don't want to, is it 'submitting' to the church if I'm quiet and respectful during sermons, instead of heckling the priest and playing loud music on my phone?
Assuming I don't want to, is it 'submitting' to a restaurant if I wear a shirt and shoes when I eat there, in accordance with their posted rules?
Assuming I don't want to, is it 'submitting' to a parent with a loud child on a plane when I don't scream at them to shut their stupid brat up?
Shelters and sports teams can have whatever rules they like about who they admit, and you can associate with them or not. You can call people you meet any names or titles you want, and if other people think you're being rude they're allowed to yell at you or stop associating with you.
The obligation you talk about is not placed on you by the person who considers themselves trans. The obligation is placed on you by the society that believes and wants to respect that fact. The obligation is placed on you by your own desire to be a part of that society and interact with it nicely despite disagreeing with it on this point.
I don't think JK and the people she retweets would actually be happy if we just repealed whatever law Peterson was talking about that approximately zero people have ever been prosecuted under, and any other legal requirements on private citizens (which is different from government policies about government functions), and everything else remained exactly how it is today. She would have faced exactly the same backlash and been outraged by 99.8% of the same events in that world.
In order to have a world where sports and shelters don't spontaneously choose to include trans people, you would have to change their opinions about trans people to something different than they are today. In order to live in a world where there's no social consequence to misgendering trans people, you'd have to change everyone's opinion about how rude that is or isn't.
I don't see how you imagine a social structure in which you are not required to 'submit' to this agenda, without requiring that everyone else submit to your agenda by changing their opinions and preferences to match yours.
When you preferences and beliefs are far enough away from the rest of society's, then society does a lot of things you disprefer, and society is likely to yell at you if you follow your preferences in ways that impact other people. 'Submission' doesn't really enter into it, it's just a straight-up conflict, a zero-sum relationship in which one side getting more of what it wants means the other side getting less.
guesswho
2yr ago
There is also the possibility that they're selling another product, like drugs or weapons or so on. But this doesn't make a lot of sense either- why wouldn't they make the sales using the dark net or offline?
Never underestimate the stupidity or laziness of criminals.
Besides, even if the criminal knows how to set that stuff up, they can only go for clients who also know that stuff. I could definitely believe there's a black market with customers who are too stupid/lazy to use anything more complicated than Ebay or Etsy, especially if we're talking drug addicts.
Anyway - I assume what we actually want here is referrer tracking, to see where the people buying those things are getting linked from? i don't know enough about it to know how possible that it, though.
guesswho
2yr ago
I think it is also true that quite a lot of people on that level, and a LOT of people lower down in the PMC are communists. I knew a lot of communists at university, half the politics PhDs were doing their thesis on Marx or Marxist thinkers.
Well, I guess we are probably going to disagree about what 'being communist' is here.
A lot of people study heterodox things in college and maybe even post about them on social media later in life, but if they produce like a capitalist, consume like a capitalist, vote for neoliberal politicians and invest their retirement fund in capitalist organizations, what do we actually call them?
And yeah, certain liberal arts colleges have a lot more of those people than the general population, and then they go on to teach at other liberal arts schools, and that's a thing. Not many of them write their dissertations praising Marx and then go on to hole serious political or economic power, though, and the vast majority of the populace still disagrees with them strongly (or rather, has blind contempt for them without understanding their ideas in teh first place).
I would say that people's hostility to communism comes from the increasing awareness of what went on in the USSR, and in particular from its very public collapse. (Other communist countries like NK or Cuba don't exactly offer appealing prospects either). It has very little to do with McCarthyism
Sure, but I would say that growing trans acceptance comes from increasing awareness and understanding of trans people and the trans experience, and has very little to do with social contagion and SJWs getting people banned fro social media.
I think it's pretty normal when a movement succeeds for the parts of it that look inconvenient in hindsight to get disavowed or forgotten. That doesn't mean that they're not all part of the same movement at the time.
(If they were, I could just 'no true scotsman' any SJW that does something annoying and insist that the movement itself is never wrong)
If McCarthyism had won, communist philosophy would not be taught, it would be difficult to buy or publish related books, and any trace of communism in someone's past would get them fired.
That's a pretty stiff standard for victory. I'm not sure we've beaten anyone except literal Nazis and slaveowners that badly in US history.
guesswho
2yr ago
Alright, this is the point in the conversation where you have to explain what you mean by 'explaining' for us to make any progress.
Because yeah, the ultimate riddle is always 'why is there something instead of nothing', and no observer within the universe can ever possibly give any explanation for that. All 'explanations' are just descriptions of how lower-level observable properties of the world lead to higher-level observable properties of the world, and there will always be a bottom level which defies further reduction into observable causes and can only be described as 'magic'.
But the magic layer for materialism is pushed orders of magnitude further down the causal chain than the magic layer for any other explanation, and materialism correctly explains far more things above its magic layer than any other framework.
That's pretty much what we mean when we say we 'have a good explanation' or 'a good model' of something, that the magic layer is pretty far down and we can use it to predict a lot of things above it.
guesswho
2yr ago
???
Can you explain what you mean?
If X causes Y, and you observe Y, that's Bayesian evidence for X. What's your objection specifically?
guesswho
2yr ago
This is true. But it's also true that it's bayesian evidence of genetic aptitude differences.
Absolutely!
The problem is people who confidently proclaim it's only one or the other. Not only is that a priori unlikely, we definitely definitely don't have clean enough data to make such a claim (in either direction) at teh moment.
Instead we live in a world where anyone who even suggests the second is a possibility is shamed and all of our policies treat it like an impossibility
Well, that's the thing - what 'policies' are recommended by the HBD hypothesis?
Like (ad absurdum here), we could stop bothering to educate women and black people at all, or funnel them into home ec/trade schools, but that seems clearly discriminatory and not really how you should react to small differences in population averages where the distributions have tons of overlap.
Would the policy just be 'stop trying to push diversity at all, because any differences are probably genetic and ok'? But that's assuming all differences are genetic, which is the opposite of carefully considering both possibilities, and makes no sense in the most-likely world where both factors contribute to outcomes.
The thing is, if discrimination exists the correct policy is probably to take steps to fight it, and if genetic differences exist the correct policy is probably to just do nothing and let the market sort itself out.
So if you think that some discrimination and some genetic difference both exist, then the correct policy is probably to take steps to fight discrimination, and that's it!
(or, fight discrimination but less strongly than we would in the world with zero genetic differences. But we don't have a measure of 'how strongly to fight discrimination in a hypothetical world', we just have directional policies that fight discrimination or don't, so we can't really distinguish policy agendas between those two worlds)
Anyone pushing for something other than that seems like they are making assumptions about discrimination not existing, or the genetic differences being way stronger and more universal than we have any evidence for.
Which is where the shaming comes in.
guesswho
2yr ago
I mean, sure, but isn't that sort of like me saying 'you're confusing cancel culture with progressivism, all bad things proceed from the former and all good things proceed from the latter'?
I'm ok with movements disavowing their idiot extremists, or being held accountable for them, as long as that standard is applied consistently.
You also say "some textbooks." Don't you think that "almost all" would be more accurate?
I meant 'some' as in 'a small overall amount' rather than 'a small percent of the total'. My point is that we don't talk about him much in day to day life, compared to how much we praise capitalism and vilify communism.
That said, I literally haven't read a history textbook since highschool, so... sure, I would guess it's at least most, but I honestly have no idea. I occasionally read claims about red-state textbooks being different but I have no idea how true that is, haven't investigated it.
Are you in favor of making it illegal to hire someone you already know previous to getting the application? Are you in favor of making it illegal to promote people within a company where their boss already knows them? Are you against putting college names on applications, since some of them are historically black or women-only?
I assume not, that would be silly, which demonstrates how you can't really have race/gender blind hiring/promotion at any scale.
Which is why advocating for that as our primary way to fight discrimination, again, pattern-matches to only caring about hbd: 'I suggest we fight discrimination using this policy, which is nearly impossible to achieve in principle, and I don't intend to even try passing the extreme measures that would be needed to achieve it,' means the same thing as 'I propose we don't fight discrimination'.
It also ignores the ways in which test scores and other parts of the resume can be affected by things other than ability (real easy to get a stellar resume when your parents network do-nothing internships for you at their yacht club), which again is a major part of the systemic discrimination that people chalk up most of the problem to, that you're ignoring in your policy.
And the thing about that it is, you can't actually send government agents into yacht clubs as surrogate parents to underprivileged youths in order to network for them. The real world is too complicated for you to actually correct those differences in opportunity and experience at the source like that.
The only policies to address that type of thing which can actually be implemented are ones that assume a bias exists, and explicitly corrects for it at a single specific layer, such as hiring. I agree that this approach is distasteful, the utopian dream where we can intervene at other places until test scores are perfect metrics of ability would be a nicer world to live in, it's just not the world we actually live in.
People who believe that part of the gap is still from discrimination of various types (again, not just explicit individual bigotry, we did mostly correct that already) and want to actually do something about, end up having to bite that bullet.
People who won't bite that bullet are revealing either their priorities (the problem is real but not worth solving at that cost) or their beliefs (there's no problem because the gap is 'natural'), and the outcome for policy and for people is the same regardless of which it is.
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