justmotteingaround
No bio...
User ID: 2002
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
I think he is correct. I find HBD plausible in principle, but it's terrible political tool in practice. For one, its radioactive and attracts a high proportion of radioactive supporters. Second, many better tools already exist (standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting). HBD is a worse substitute than existing policy frameworks. It purports to partially explain a wide variety of complex human behavior of ill defined groups. Interesting in principle; a bad policy tool for a nation that focuses so much on the individual (culturally and legally).
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
he believed those "results" weren't legitimate at all!
And that illustrates why the legal standard of "reckless disregard for the truth" exists. Such concepts put limiting principles on credulity. Without such limiting principles a future president could claim they believe they are legally Emperor for life, while amassing functionaries to carry out that goal. If if such an attempt were to fail, they could hide behind "well my lawyers were saying it was true, and I sincerely believed them, so I declared martial law." Elites have enough power, and I'm fine holding all rulers to something like a "reckless disregard for the truth" standard. At a minimum, they should end up in court.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
When the POTUS asks someone to overturn election results immediately after falsely notifying them that they are committing a serious crime if they don't, just chuck them in a jail cell for a decade to teach them about reckless disregard for the truth, and intimidating election officials.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
When the PODUS, or any higher ranking politician, calls someone to tell them "The ballots are corrupt and that's illegal... Its more illegal for you than it is for them. You know what they did and you're not reporting it, and that is a criminal offense. You can't let that happen. That's a big risk to you... And you're letting it happen. I'm notifying you that you are letting it happen. And all I want to do is find X votes" just put them in jail.
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
I think this is where HBD is misapplied as a heuristic if the goal is a colorblind meritocratic society. There are 40M blacks in the US. Plenty have merit for various jobs, things get weird at the tails, but there is a skew is already roughly reflected in broad achievement. From a quora post "what is the IQ of blacks"
"It’s about one standard deviation lower than whites or about 85. In practice, this means that individuals at the upper end of the curve are massively underrepresented. Look at two rather meritocratic statistics: 1) about 1% of NIH grants are awarded to black scientists 2) about 1% of CPAs in America are black. In either of these examples, there isn’t a big push to have candidates get external support or preferences (e.g. medical school or Ivy undergrad) so blacks are underrepresented by about 10 fold, which is what would be expected by a bell curve shifted to the left by one standard deviation.
Tally for black achievements (14% of U.S. Population):
1% NIH Grants awarded 1% of CPAs 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs (19 out of 1,800 recorded over history) 1% of American billionaires 1.8% of Law firm partners (virtually zero 0% at big NYC law firms) 2% of U.S. Air Force pilots 0% of Nobel prizes in Physics, medicine, chemistry ~1% of Nobel prizes in Economics (1 in history, note some years multiple recipients creating fuzzy math) 0% of Fields Medalists (considered the closest to Nobel for math) Another way to look at the issue of black intelligence is to pick an IQ required for a demanding job and see how many individuals fall in that category. Some researchers have suggested it takes an IQ of 130 to become a professor, senior executive, physician, tech entrepreneur. One could argue this is a floor, not an average. In the general population, about 2.5% of people would have an IQ this high. If the distribution curve is shifted to the left one SD, only 0.13% or about 1/17th as much (1/17th of 2.5%) of the population reaches this level. This suggests only one out of 770 American blacks would likely be capable of such professions.
This is all explicitly legal (a non-arbitrary business necessity must be demonstrated for disparate achievement to be perfectly legal. Standardized tests are fine). So you'd want to build merit based coalitions which doesn't lump ill defined groups together. HBD is less useful because its too broad. Coleman Hughes has collected wildly disparate outcomes at the group level within the squishy race categories, and HBD misses all of that. There are certainly edge cases of unqualified candidates being pushed forward to everyones detriment (such as the Barpod sadfunny ATC episode), but such instances have been challenged in the courts repeatedly, with ruling which work with HBD anyhow (ie demonstrating the necessity of disparate outcomes for organizational functioning).
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
This still seems like special pleading. Perhaps you can argue/explain to me how its not. As I see it, we can figure out chess, engineer billions of transistors per sq in, manipulate genomes, program LLMs with billions of tokens, perform a million-trillion operations every second. Therefore its not unreasonable to suspect that we can make good climate models.
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
It is a defense to disparate impact along protected class lines if it can be shown that the discriminatory factor is a business necessity. I'm less confident in how this plays out in practiced, how many bullshit claims of prevailed since the CRA, and how much bullshit claims have trailed off since.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
We should give climate science whatever veneration it earns. AFAIKT, it has produced results and useful predictions, but this is largely immaterial to what I'm talking about.
If there was Blah Science, researched for decades by tens of thousands of smart people who overwhelmingly agree that X is true, I'd bet on X being true.
My point: most people would bet on X being true in normal circumstances. People seem to make an exception for climate science. I'm curious why people make this exception.
I'm also curious if there are any other broad fields where this pattern holds. Things surrounding nutrition come to mind. Perhaps there are many, and what I'm calling special pleading is quite common.
justmotteingaround
9mo ago
This article is an semi-coherent jumble of truth mixed together with ludicrousness.
That's basically my take on everything I've read on amren. Extremely well written and inspiring, but the claims and leaps of logic that follow are indeed ludicrous. I understand the allure of the narrative, but trying to map it on to the world as I know it leaves be utterly bewildered.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
This could be said in response to innumerable scientific claims. Climate science is plausibly knowable enough to model well. But I'm not making any claims what climate science says. I'm asking what, at a general level, is unique to climate science that garners a special amount of skepticism?
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
Thanks. I am trying to ignore specifics and make an inductive argument about science in general to shed light on why climate science appears special (ie: most biologist claim that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, physicists say the universe has a speed limit, meteorologists say 80% chance it'll rain in 3 days etc). Normally, people just go "oh okay". AFAIKT, some 95% of climate scientists are saying "yep, the climate is projected to warm for x and y reasons" and yet many people are have been uniquely skeptical for ~50 years despite increasing consensus among people who have studied the science thousands of hours. I curious what the reason for this is.
Personally, I think the hypothesis is the expected one. Humans have added a trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere in 200 years, and its trivial to prove CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I'd expect something to happen, probably warming, although this need not be the case, and I don't really care either way. All I want to know is what makes climate science uniquely dubious from the highest vantage point, without specifics (mostly for practical reasons).
I haven't followed this much at all. I don't disagree with the points you made, but at a 5 minute glance it seems that the climate models are useful. Even if they weren't, skepticism in the face of an increasing consensus in a quantitative field over decades begs for an explanation.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
That is trying to understand a really complex system
This is practically a definition for 'science'.
Well, they have a vested interest in it, no?
This is largely true for most fields of science.
the system as such began a long long time ago and we don't know much about that period.
Similarly, this is also true for most of science.
I can't find anything that makes these arguments apply to climate science, but not biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, etc.
Eg. Do we really know bacteria cause disease? Researches have a vested interest in continued research, but the proposed mechanisms are beyond complex, based on biology that began over a billion years ago.
that they at least produce the predicted results
Apparently climate models have been, on average, predictive. But this is not the kind of inductive claim I'm searching for.
weather forecasting as I see it isn't much better than an old man and bad knees.
Apparently, these are accurate 75% of the time inside of 5 days. This would be easy to disprove. Again, not an inductive claim. As an aside, if interested I'd be willing to bet money that weather forecasts are about as accurate as 30 sec. of googling led me to believe they are.
that a myriad of special interest have their hands in all kinds of places
I'm extremely mindful of this regarding climate policy.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
Who thinks this represents either an improvements or degredation of cultural norms? Its pop art that served its utility at the time and might not work today, but it is an interesting cultural time capsul.
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Neutral. Maybe some people are asexual. I'll never care either way. If its caused by a medical issue, it sould be treated.
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Improvment. Probably best not to comment on hot kids at work. Calling someone passing and living as a gender the opposite is hugely unprofessional and a dick move.
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Improvement. Casual racism at work is a terrible idea.
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Improvement. Similar to above. Sexual innuendo is dubious in the workplace.
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Neutral. Euphemism treadmill. Tranny was acceptable enough at the time.
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Improvement. Dont mock peoples inherant differences, especially at work.
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Neutral. Its neither bad nor good that society is surprised by bisexuality.
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Improvement. Revenge porn and hacking are serious actions.
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Improvement. No need to overly bash the beliefs of most of society.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
Right, but this line of reasoning could be used to dismiss as inaccurate anything sufficiently complex and niche. The human body, the universe, and AI are complex, but people don't dismiss medicine, astrophysics, and LLM's because of complexity. What is special or unique about decades of climate science that gives people pause?
I don't want to put words in peoples mouths. If people think decades of climate science is uniquely dubious because they reckon its just too complex, that's fine. Special pleading is an informal fallacy anyhow. OP found climate science to be nonsense, and the idea of climate modeling to be outlandish, and didn't elaborate. But saying this isn't special pleading by pointing out complexity is a non-starter. It's rare that, for decades, 90+% of trained scientists agree on some domain specific thing in a heavily quantitative field, yet popular sentiment demurs without easily explaining why.
justmotteingaround
47m ago
This all sounds relatively banal and bog-standard for a protest, no? Its like the far left analogue of some right wing militias: masks, standing against gov't tyranny, large sense of importance, performative desire to get arrested (ie open carry audits), dubious legal and political theories (ie Bundy; The White horse Prophecy, etc), and, of course, their own flags! I think the militia folk go camping alot, and are probably way more fun to hang out with. But when either side actually goes to protest I can do little more than think "well okay, whatever floats your boat, but remember, your freedom ends where someone elses begins, have fun!"
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
I am optimistic, especially compared to what I gather is the median for themotte. I think institutional bias over fake racism claims is an issue, but Bayesian thinking leads me to think it cannot possibly be a primary concern (ie it cut the other direction for a long time so that is the initial given, and you update towards the current state with examples of it cutting the other direction. Sanity checking my guesswork seems to indicate that outcomes are in line with expectations, and have been for decades (given both the priors, and the explanatory assumptions of HBD). Each individual example of the current bias is infuriating, but I don't yet see dispassionate quantitative reasons to think it has large consequential effects (although I'm open to such reasons).
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
Would be a shame if we stopped using them because of incorrect beliefs about the root causes of group differences…
This is essentially what I am earnestly claiming, because I do see how we get back to equal protection without explicitly acknowledging point 1. The courts have been doing this since the 1970's, clarifying that disparate impacts are fine so long as a non-arbitrary business necessity can be demonstrated.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
One swallow doesn't make a summer. One paper (by a non expert) doesn't invalidate an entire field of experts.
we should restructure all of society based on these projections is yet another outlandish claim (with a side-helping of massive conflicts of interests)
I think looking at proposed answers to climate change is what turns evaluating the climate change hypothesis form a reasoning exercise into an emotional/political endeavour - and it cuts both ways. This is the only way I can explain all the special pleading for climate change as uniquely suspect for decades, despite being a bland, intuitive hypothesis. I think it's helpful set aside looking at proposed answers before thinking about the hypothesis.
I think Global Warming/Climate Change/etc... is nonsense
We should expect some kind of climate change a-priori. Anything else is nonsense. We've known CO2 is a greenhouse gas since 1859. Very basic. We've known the atmosphere:earth is roughly proportional to apple:apple-skin for a fair bit too. I'd be shocked if adding ~1 quintillion Kg's of CO2 to the atmosphere had precisely no effects. Measuring CO2 in ppm is trivial. Measuring temperature is trivial. Even if climate change isn't human caused, it'd still be worth investigating so we can engineer around it.
That we have the tools to model the Earth's climate at all is (imo) an outlandish claim
This is also a dubious line of thinking (its something like the appeal to ridicule). Chess computers, controlled flight, weather prediction, gene editing, nuclear fission, were all once claimed to be too outlandish to be possible. They still feel outlandish, but all can be done by hobbyists.
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
depend on either their outcomes being race-neutral
I may be wrong but I think this is explicitly untrue legally. AFAIK, if you can demonstrate a necessity of hiring in a way that causes a disparate impact, and your methods were not arbitrary (standardized tests are usually used as a defense), then it's perfectly legal.
Are there people making ignorant or bad faith cases about the arbitrariness of the standardized tests? Of course. But as far as I can tell, they lose in court.
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
Oh I totally agree with this assessment. This was true when Murray published The Bell Curve, which is milquetoast compared to HBD (ie it was explicitly agnostic to genetic factors). The radioactivity remains. HBD is the path of most resistance, justly or otherwise, so the realpolitik renders it almost useless in practice. Any substitute is already superior. Moreover, I would argue that HBD has plenty of epistemic problems, which get only magnified in individualistic societies.
justmotteingaround
2mo ago
No I mean using that a explanation as a sorting or policy heuristic. Suboptimal imo. Take the analogy of gender differences and firefighters. Biology explains the difference. All else equal, males will make better firefighters in many circumstances. Is biology the best policy tool are political talking point. I'd argue no. Are there females who could make the cut? Sure. And hiring differences in firefighters has successfully defended against disparate impact (people will argue the test doesn't demonstrate a necessity, but I digress). There is prob a better analogy using evolution (explanatory) to sort or guide something is less optimal than extant sorting or guiding policies. Hope I'm clear enough. But yes, HBD is not a heuristic, but the OP opened that analogy.
If you want to say "HBD not racism or culture explains much of the disparate outcomes", then yeah, fine. I agree. Nevertheless, I'd argue that taking about it in political or policy debates is usually suboptimal imo because the flack (just and unjust), better tools, the fact that society is often sorted that way anyhow. HBD could really illuminate understanding of reality.
justmotteingaround
3mo ago
The analogy doesn't fit the premise, so the conclusion is... not even wrong??
Germany is a board of landlords who - rightly or wrongly - signed various contracts (citizenship, residency, asylum). So tough titties to them. They have to live up to the responsibilities they signed up for. If someone can convince the majority of the board to void certain contracts and "evict" people, then they'd run afoul of their responsibilities to various human rights charters aimed at preventing exactly this kind of "eviction". They're free to do that too, as far as I'm concerned, but "landlords remorse" doesn't make comparisons to other dubious evictions unreasonable.
justmotteingaround
6mo ago
Counterpoint: history is largely a one-way conversation of destroying traditions in favor of such progress. Preserving tradition is a balancing act for the more necessary goal of maintaining the the systems and institutions which beget the traditions. Its 60% compromise.
I don't think the Catholic Church is at a point where blessing gay unions is necessary to optimize the institution, but it's clearly now in their Overton window.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
As an aside, I still think chess fits. I don't even think we know how many games of chess are possible. Humans recently approximated a Go engine - something people long claimed was too complex to ever be done, much like chess. Models + compute can beat humans at games of unimaginable complexity.
Regardless, even if chess is a bad analogy, admitting that doesn't gets me out special pleading that climate science is not only special in its complexity, but also special in that thousands of people with PhD's, from Montana to Mongolia, overwhelmingly agree that its possible to model climate usefully.
What reason do I have to disbelieve climate science that doesn't also apply to designing bleeding edge microchips, or medicine, or applied physics, or the improvements seen in weather forecasting? I'm trying to argue myself into climate science skepticism inductively and/or by way of inferences. A strong quantitative scientific consensus about cause and effect is usually a good bet. What makes climate science different?
The only thing I can come up with is that climate science is more akin to a year-long weather forecast (ie cannot be computed in P time because well understood chaotic conditions). But then why do such a large amount knowledgeable keep spending money on the practical applicability of climate models? I'm back at special pleading that science is a liar in this case in particular.
I'm okay with any politician being thrown in jail for a decade for merely doing what Trump did on his call with Raffensperger.
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