naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Please don't post like this. If you think something is ban-worthy, you can report it. We don't need to clutter threads with "you should be banned*," "no, you should be banned!"
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
The 'elites' in Europe are so braindead and so feckless
Please post about specific rather than general groups to the extent possible. Please provide effortful argument and evidence in proportion with how partisan or inflammatory your claims might be.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
The US constitution was replaced by the Civil Rights Act
Like hell it was.
@No_one's claim on this count needed more effort, or at least greater exploration of why the evidence provided should be interpreted as pointing in this direction. But it would be helpful if you did not meet a low-effort claim with an even lower-effort, higher-heat claim; that's one sure road to quick degradation of the conversation.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
This looks a little like a dodge. I don't understand how "reason" can be a final authority on anything, since reason requires premises?
You can read about Scanlon's "reasons fundamentalism" in his book Being Realistic About Reasons.
The question is, who gets to use the lake, how, and why? The answer, it would seem to me, requires moral judgments.
That seems right, but how you analyze the hypothetical will depend in large measure on whether you're writing a Hobbesian "state of nature" story, or whether there are further background details that can be discussed. As written, the hypo doesn't seem like a hard question at all; the old man needs fish to live. If he truly has no other alternatives, then he has an extremely weighty objection to a principle allowing the brewer to kill all the fish. You didn't specify that the brewer actually needs the lake to live, presumably the fact that he has a family means he's already got other resources, so he does not appear to have an equally weighty counterclaim. Now, if you're precommitted to some view preferring the "highest" or "best" use of something (utilitarians, for example), then sure, the question might seem hard. But it's not really hard at all, as you've written it: the old man needs the lake to live, the brewer doesn't.
We could easily go back and forth for a long time, modifying the hypothetical to pump intuitions in one direction or another, but the reason we could do this is precisely because morality is reasons-responsive, and adding or changing the relevant reasons can (and should!) change the moral judgments we reach on the matter. This is a very human process, but it is only one that even arises when we are committed to coexistence, at least in the abstract. Otherwise we would just shrug our shoulders and say "guess whoever kills the other one first gets to use the lake."
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I saw this when Scott Alexander responded to it, and read the follow-up comments with interest.
It has probably been 20 years since I last "updated" my sense of "nerd versus geek," and I have to say--I was until this week thoroughly under the impression that "nerd" referred to the academically inclined (narrow and idiosyncratic, but challenging, interests) and "geek" mostly meant pop-culture inclined (narrow and idiosyncratic, but unchallenging, or at least more artistic, interests). People could be either; people could be neither; people could be both. A Shakespeare geek loves Shakespeare; a Shakespeare nerd writes academic journal articles about how Ophelia was a proto-feminist. A science geek "Fucking Loves Science," but a science nerd actually knows things like Maxwell's equations and how to apply them. A sports geek collects memorabilia, but a sports nerd can quote you statistics, obscure rules, and probably kick your ass at fantasy football. In other words, it was never about what was "good"--you could be a geek or a nerd about things other people valued, or not. It was just about the level and quality of your interest in narrow and idiosyncratic things.
I cannot overemphasize just how much I really thought this was something my linguistic community (i.e. the Anglophone internet) had pretty well settled no later than, say, 2010.
Of course, in the 1970s and 1980s, these were both mostly words with a pejorative connotation; between "Revenge of the Nerds" (1984) and Bill Gates becoming a billionaire (1987) by the 1990s "nerd" had been pretty well rehabilitated, and by "The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001) "geek" had mostly come to cover pop culture afficionados, perhaps as part of the rise of the "geek girl." A lot of this kind of tapers off post-Awokening (circa 2014), possibly because the most relevant pop culture properties prior to 2014 was clearly dominated by "problematic" (i.e. white, male) creators and fans.
So the idea of nerds as people who like things that aren't good is just totally alien to me. This article talks about some interesting phenomena, but I think it butchers several otherwise-useful words to get there.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
For the reason she didn't renounce it all as soon as she could, she definitely deserves every insult. . . . I think we have an obligation to insult world leaders this morally compromised who protect themselves from criticism through censorious laws and policies.
It is permissible to argue this here.
In that spirit, Queen Elizabeth is...
What is not permissible here is actually delivering the invective. It's the epitome of pure heat, no light. You can argue that it should be permitted; it is not permitted here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
More effort than this, please.
("I refute it thus" is an interesting and perhaps even directly relevant sort of argument in this case, but you still need to put more effort into it.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
This is borderline consensus building, and well over the line of needing to bring evidence in proportion to the inflammatoriness of your claim. Don't post like this, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
The Great Awokening as a Global Phenomenon (PDF warning!)
I'm never entirely sure what to make of linguistic analysis--partly because it is very much outside my expertise. But it seems worth noticing when quantitative research is conducted on issues many of us take for granted. For one thing, there have been a couple of highly publicized "you can't even define woke!" takes injected into popular discourse recently, but the author of this study doesn't seem to have encountered any serious difficulty with the definition (though presumably not everyone will agree with the definition on offer, it strikes me as at least plausible).
For another, the timing and differences across cultures is interesting to me. I have always kind of assumed that the Great Awokening was something that happened in the U.S. and then caught on elsewhere, to varying degrees, but while that may in fact be true, it doesn't seem to show up strongly in this data. I guess one question might be whether this just shows that the Internet has really flattened the world in surprisingly strong ways.
Relatedly, the author's questions re: causation also seem important, though I have no idea where to even begin answering that. I do regard the Great Awokening as mostly just a re-re-rebranding of Marxism, focused on social relations instead of economic status, in much the way that so-called "cultural Marxism" did in the late 20th century. But then, why has it caught on now? If it's because of the long march through the institutions, shouldn't we see less of an effect in non-Anglophone nations with dramatically different political histories? Or is this again just the Internet working its dark magic?
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I also take issue in including Israel in the "anti-semitism" chart, and Arabic countries in the "Islamophobia" chart. This isn't wokeness, this is just pushing for your own interest.
I wondered about that, too, but then--how is that any different from feminist reporters writing about sexism? Is Ibram Kendi "woke," or is he just pushing for his own interest?
It's maybe a bit weird for a genuinely sharia-dominated nation to worry about "islamophobia" internally, but to my mind what makes a view "woke" is not the noticing or even the opposing of prejudice, but the totalizing way that prejudice is perceived. If you notice that your friend Bob never takes women seriously, maybe you think he's sexist, but that's not woke. If you see sexism lurking in every interaction between men and women, that's woke. To whatever extent that is a mistaken view (personally, I think it's a great extent, but even if I'm wrong about that), it fits the contemporary standard of a conspiracy theory, or maybe a prospiracy theory.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I'm not sure you could draw the implication you did about outside resources, but let me be explicit, there are no other resources in the universe.
Then how the fuck was this guy feeding his family before he "came along?" For that matter, where's the rest of the "mythical land" you specified?
My goal is not to fight your hypothetical; I'm happy to do my best to constrain myself to only the impossibly limited range of facts that you happen to find persuasive for whatever reason. But you keep losing the thread; whatever else these hypothetical characters are, they are not recognizably human, in the world you've described.
you seem to have a presupposition regarding the primacy of human life
What makes you say that? Because it's wrong. I'm not assigning metaphysical primacy to anything. And I sure as hell haven't suggested that we're engaged in "pure reason." Go back and re-read the thread; you will find no mention of "pure reason" anywhere in it.
All I've done is stake a claim on morality as we understand it being a human activity undertaken by humans through reasoning processes, that is, through the activity of justifying ourselves to one another. You keep trying to challenge or argue against that for some reason (despite haven taken no clear or coherent position yourself), but your objections are complete misses; you don't even seem to understand enough to meaningfully doubt. Which would be fine if I felt like you were trying to improve your own understanding, but you strike me as far too busy being blindly contrarian to ever glean any insight, either into any particular moral theory or into the more specific things I have claimed.
Are we becoming a circle jerk?
...becoming? I like your optimism!
Three years ago, @TracingWoodgrains took a demographics poll that was delightful to read despite containing no surprises. The modal mottizen then was
a 29-year-old, right-handed straight white man with a Bachelor's degree, a US citizen who lives in California. He has finished his formal education and now earns around $65000 a year, though his net worth remains under $10000. He is single with no kids for now, but he plans on having 2 kids eventually. He is not affiliated with any political party. He was raised Catholic, but now considers himself an atheistic humanist. He considers himself a capitalist, a libertarian, and a classical liberal. He got 800s in both SAT-math and SAT-verbal, but despite this scored only a 1500 overall. He scored a 33 on his ACT. Per the MBTI, he's on the border between INTJ and INTP, which breaks out more clearly in the OCEAN model with very high openness to experience, average agreeableness and conscientiousness, slightly below average extraversion, and low negative emotionality.
He's worn glasses since childhood, had a hundred books or so in his childhood home, and mostly read for pleasure as a kid, though he also enjoyed video games, TV, and playing outside. He went to public school, but didn't like it. Now, he spends 8-12 hours in front of a screen daily, reads hours of longform text each day, and generally also watches videos and plays games. He sleeps about seven and a half hours nightly, and has not had the pleasure of a lucid dream. He lives in a city, but hasn't yet been convinced of the joys of living in a cyberpunk dystopia and prefers outdoor activities to city ones.
Now, this is of course aggregated data. There are women who post here, multiple people with doctoral degrees, many from outside the United States; we have posters who are older and younger, richer and poorer, and so on and so forth. But compared to the world, compared to any given nation, compared to a city, compared to a university... there is definitely a degree of homogeneity in our userbase. At minimum, basically everyone here is open to discussing culture war topics, and sufficiently comfortable in our own views and positions to do so. At that level of self-selection, it would be hard to make an extremely convincing argument that this place is not a "circle jerk," as you've defined it.
Sure enough--if you look at the Quality Contributions Reports over the last few months, you'll see a lot of discussion on transsexuality and transhumanism and artificial intelligence and other recurrent themes. Of course, by the definition you've offered, every Internet community everywhere will inescapably be a "circle jerk," certainly if the community lasts more than five minutes. Even reddit, taken as a whole, is basically a circle jerk, unless you limit yourself to certain subreddits which are themselves circle jerks. (So it turns out most people prefer circle jerks to lonely masturbation...? Perhaps the metaphor is unwieldy...)
This is not an excuse; most of those places are explicitly circle jerks that will ban you on sight for interrupting everyone's fun. Since we aspire to be "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases," we do want to limit the, uh, circlejerkness! But we only have so many tools in our toolbox--though, as you observe, @ZorbaTHut is actively developing more.
But all of that said--I have almost never posted something here that did not meet with some disagreement. One of the upshots of the relative homogeneity we've got going here, is that a lot of us are pretty contrarian! And we have a lot of actually extremely rare arguments, here. After all--
He dislikes Black Lives Matter, the trans rights movement, gender-critical feminism, gun control, the pro-life movement, the furry fandom, and open borders. He can't stand intersectional feminism, white identitarianism, antinatalism, or social justice. He is ambivalent about animal rights and ambivalent leaning towards positive about the gay rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the pro-choice movement. He kind of likes the religious freedom movement and likes gun rights. He strongly supports Effective Altruism and would march in Hong Kong with the protesters there if he could.
Many of these topics are just outright banned elsewhere. If nothing else, our openness to discussions of this nature makes us much less of a circle jerk than, well, basically everywhere else on the internet, and certainly everywhere else with comparable civility standards.
So while "are we a circle jerk" need not be entirely a rhetorical question, and is certainly worth reflecting on from time to time, my inclination is ultimately to answer it with my own question:
Compared to what?
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Interestingly, I think organized Christianity in general (and maybe all historic faiths) are in a bit of a bind on matters like this. There are definitely people who separate themselves from their church as a result of, essentially, absorbing political views that are incompatible with received dogma. In an attempt to staunch the outflow, many churches have jettisoned millennia-old commitments... but this has led to further outflow, now from the committed faithful who see their churches placing retention (and, presumably, associated tithes...) ahead of doctrinal consistency, tradition, historical group identity, etc.
I don't know what the endgame is. I am certainly numbered among those who regard Wokism as, essentially, a neo-religion, a secular and distributed form of ideology that erroneously holds that because it doesn't do "supernatural," it must be immune from criticism along the lines of faith or metaphysics. But whether it will ultimately subsume Christianity (as Christianity subsumed so many faiths that came before it), or generate a successfully reactionary response along other lines, I cannot guess. Just by the numbers, Chinese statism, Indian Hinduism, and (to a slightly lesser extent) global Islam seem to be the relevant faiths of the future, anyhow. It would be interesting to know how Christianity and/or Wokism come through that development, but I will be long dead before that game is done, I expect.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I have no clue how you manage to moderate and participate in this groundhog week of yours.
In much the way that teachers continue to teach the same material, year after year. You change it up here and there, but you can't really depart from the core; while historians sometimes "innovate" on history, especially at introductory levels you have to start fresh with each new batch of students, cover the basics, refresh the fundamentals. The amount of maintenance that goes in to just keeping civilization running, well aside from actually improving the human condition, is mind-boggling. Unsurprisingly, Scott Alexander has explored this in a very interesting way at least once.
The CW thread is extremely responsive to "CurrentHappening," as you say. I've always read it as a sort of news aggregator. Discussion quality varies a lot--but when something momentous does happen, there are often a number of useful takes generated rapidly and from diverse perspectives. When those things aren't happening, then yes, the topics are a bit more "bingo board." But that's the "maintenance" cycle, I think, keeping the community rolling at a slight intellectual idle, occasionally spinning out a new or interesting take on a well-worn topic. Clearly, it's not for everyone! But that's okay--the other threads are there for a reason, and if the non-CW portions of this site were to grow substantially, that would be an interesting and worthwhile development, too.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I genuinely have no idea what you expected to demonstrate with that.
Really?
I mean, any modal read literally cannot do anything but describe a circlejerk.
You seem to actually have a pretty good idea what I expected to demonstrate with that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
If we retcon the shit out of history, we can't learn much from it.
I spent this whole thread writing primarily as someone who was an insurance-premium-paying adult and licensed attorney throughout Obama's presidency. I was giving you my first-hand testimony about how these things were being discussed at the time by the bulk of the informed people I knew. I don't remember having seen the Stephanopoulos interview at that time. Of course, there are always a lot of people talking about things, and not everything gets recorded. Memories are fickle, but "the record" has its own shortcomings, too. The interview you shared does seem to back me up, though--Obama himself was saying "not a tax," his administration argued "not a tax... unless..." and his opponents argued "not a tax." To say that, because an insignificant number of people were saying "yes it is a tax," it was a tax all along--that's the retcon.
Maybe I should get checked or something. Is there a test?
Oddly enough, I was just talking with some people about this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
The hypo is meant to be a highly distilled, but if it disturbs you, you're obviously under no obligation to answer.
It doesn't disturb me, and I did answer. You're the one who was complaining about how I answered.
What about other beings whose reasoning may be equal or greater to that of humans, but not necessarily the same? Does one or the other groups owe anything to the other? How are we to discern that such a group might be in our midst?
The answers to these questions will depend, inescapably, on the nature of these beings and their compatibility with human existence, especially in terms of the ability to give and receive acceptable justifications for actions. The desire and ability to coexist lead quite naturally to reasons for action. Without that desire and ability, it's all pretty moot.
Another question that I haven't been able to understand from our repartee or the entries you linked, is who gets to decide what a reasonable objection is?
We do, through the process of reasoning together.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
This means poor people benefit greatly from price discrimination: they get goods or services they want at a price they are willing to pay when otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford it.
No, the entire point is that they don't. They benefit a tiny tiny bit from price discrimination.
If I may--I think the disconnect here is one the difference between poor people benefiting from specific cases of price discrimination, and poor people benefiting from the overall existence of price discrimination.
A producer who is willing to let a good go for as little as $10, assuming a single transaction ever, is different than a producer who is willing to let a good go for as little as $10, conditional upon someone else paying $20 for the same good, or for some other good. My understanding is that airline pricing often functions in approximately this way. If you have a ten-seat airplane, and a flight costs you $10,000 to run, then your break-even point is $1,000 per seat. But if there are five people willing to pay up to $2,000 per ticket, and five people willing to pay up to $200 per ticket, and no other possible customers, then your ability to price discriminate means you get to make a $1,000 profit beyond your break-even, and five people get to fly who would not have gotten to fly at a flat, evenly-distributed price. The "poor people" in this scenario got a benefit, even though the airline could arguably have accepted $100, or $10, for those other five seats.
I don't think every case of price discrimination looks like this; I'm not even sure most cases look like this. But it does seem to me that "willing to accept an $X transaction conditional upon other transactions" is an important part of how to think about price discrimination.
Look, at this point you're either being deliberately obtuse, in which case we're done, or you have a genuinely serious lack of reading comprehension, in which case I cannot help you. I'm increasingly persuaded that you're just trolling. Here:
As far as I can see, you only answered a form of the hypo which included your modifications
Let's look. I said:
As written, the hypo doesn't seem like a hard question at all; the old man needs fish to live. If he truly has no other alternatives, then he has an extremely weighty objection to a principle allowing the [yeast-grower] to kill all the fish. You didn't specify that the [yeast-grower] actually needs the lake to live...
No modifications: just responding to what you actually wrote. Your "clarification" afterward was worse than useless (and seized on an irrelevancy); if anything, it made what was already a poor hypothetical to begin with into complete nonsense. What is morality like in a universe that consists of nothing but a fisherman, a yeast-grower, and a lake? Fuck if I know, there's no such universe, and I've repeatedly told you that morality as I understand it is a human endeavor undertaken by humans living in human conditions. I can't tell you what morality is like for space creatures or hypothetical beings who appear ex nihilo to lay claim to fishing ponds. We can use counterfactuals to imagine possibilities, but this requires us not to be assholes to our interlocutors, and be open to having hypothetical questions clarified for purposes of useful development without whinging about people fighting the hypo. You give every impression of trying to (clumsily) thumb the scales toward an anti-realist conclusion, and no impression at all of actually trying to understand what you're being told. Don't tell me I "didn't answer it" just because you don't like the answer.
Does that mean that if we are unable to ascertain any justifications offered by them, we are morally free to eliminate them? Or vice versa?
Your question is underspecified and cannot be answered in this form. You need to be at least somewhat concrete in your questions. As noted--we're not doing "pure reason" here.
If we are unable to agree on a mutual course of action through reasoning process, what moral obligations and rights to we owe/retain?
Contractualism is not about mutual courses of action. It is about finding principles for the governance of behavior that cannot be reasonably rejected. It is possible that in some cases two beings will simply lack any possible common reasons on which to ground such principles, but I've never seen any evidence that any human beings occupy that position with regard to one another.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
The concept of heritability and how it relates or doesn't relate to genetic causes of individual or group differences. I am aware of the "books at home" example. Is that all there is to it?
As a term of art--that is, aside from its colloquial sense--heritability is "the proportion of phenotypic variation (VP) that is due to variation in genetic values (VG)." This is a mathematical concept established on population-level statistics. I am not aware of the "books at home" example or what you take from it, so I'm afraid I am unable to tell you whether that is "all there is to it." But that link to Nature is a pretty short read, if you want to know more about how heritability factors into our understanding of highly heritable traits (like IQ).
What precisely g is?
G is also a mathematical concept that turns up in statistical analysis. Researchers who assign what are believed to be diverse cognitive tasks nonetheless observe high correlation in the ability to perform well on these tasks. G is the variable assigned to track that correlation. The fact that the correlation exists tends to undermine competing theories e.g. of "multiple intelligence."
Maybe to make it more of an ELI5, it's common in American culture to think of oneself as a "math person" or a "language person," or maybe even more particularly as a "history geek" or a "physics nerd." In all kinds of standardized testing we find it's actually quite unusual to be noticeably bad at, say, linguistic analogies, while being exceptional at, say, calculus. Even things like self-regulation tend to correlate with g--in a study of prison inmates, for example, populations with higher IQs were less prone to violence (PDF warning). While there are cases of extreme divergence (sometimes so extreme we call them "idiot savants"), statistically speaking high apparent cognitive ability is multi-domain.
Note that IQ is not the same as g, but is an attempt to measure g. Note that I also say "apparent" cognitive ability: you might argue that, for example, the ways in which we parse out "separate" cognitive tasks might not actually be separate, or something. It is important, in discussing intelligence science, to recognize just how much of a "black box" our brains still are to us. We can measure inputs and outputs, and we can even get some limited sense of what is happening internally, but beyond that most of our best guesses are inescapably statistical and of limited (but probably not zero) value at the level of individual humans. But in those analyses we find strong correlations of success across task domains (defined to the best of our understanding), which is extremely difficult to explain in the absence of something like g.
Steelman(!) Turkheimer's position. No, I don't want to hear about his politics.
I know you've posed this as a "small scale question" but what position?
Roughly summarise the position of Kirkegaard et al.
Again, you're going to have to be more specific.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
In a lot of HBD discussions I come across people who will claim that heritability is not identical to genetic causation. I do not understand on what basis this claim is made.
Consider the phenotypical trait "has two arms." Across a population of sufficient n, how "heritable" is "has two arms?" The answer is "not very heritable." Why? Because while there are probably some number of one-armed or no-armed individuals due to genetic mutation, most people who lack two arms have clearly-established environmental reasons for that (e.g. thalidomide, industrial accidents, etc.). So variation in armedness of the population is not predominantly explained by genetics. And yet it is surely true that you have two arms by virtue of your inherited genetic makeup!
On the other side, how "heritable" is "wealth?" The answer depends on your population sample, but often it is "very heritable!" Why? Well, in most places around the world, wealth is inherited (indeed, the word "inherit" originally referred to certain rights, long before we understood genetics) by operation of law. If wealth is concentrated in a few families (which is true in many human populations), then you would actually see a very tight correlation between the variation in genes and the possession of wealth, giving wealth a high heritability coefficient. Now it may well be that "making money" is something downstream of some genetically-affected trait, but still it seems unlikely that creating a clone of Donald Trump would guarantee you a being destined to inherit millions of dollars.
Examples like these have led to some fairly famous arguments that "heritability" ought to be jettisoned. But I find it difficult to take such arguments seriously, as they are in essence asserting that because observed correlations between phenotypical and genotypical variance do not definitively establish causation, we should stop caring about the correlations. This is the kind of attack that can always be raised against statistics--"oh, your correlations are spurious"--but I have yet to see any such attack that did not amount to an isolated demand for rigor. In cases like armedness or wealth, we can be pretty confident in our ability to see the spuriousness of the comparison. With something like intelligence, it's much more challenging, which is why we spend so much time crafting experiments intended to isolate relevant variables.
So g is essentially a latent contruct that is not directly measurable and IQ is our attempt to come as close as possible?
I don't know what it means to be a "latent construct" in this context. Probably g is not any one thing; cognition appears to be polygenic, so g is not only a function of having the right pieces, but also a function of how well those pieces work in concert. But yeah, IQ is one approach we've taken to, essentially, benchmarking g.
Turkheimer seems to be the poster child of the position that in-between group differences, especially as related to IQ, are not biological in nature.
Yeah, I guess the steelman of his position, as I understand it, would be it's very difficult to compare populations, in part because the very process of population selection involves a choice. It's not that "everything is heritable" (armedness isn't!) but more like "a lot of high-heritability stuff is clearly not genetic, a lot of low-heritability stuff is clearly genetically determined, and your methods for selecting populations for analysis already have a variety of biases built in to them, so all you're really doing is laundering those biases through complex math." Whether you buy that argument is probably going to depend a lot on your own priors re: how much intelligence seems genetic, in the same way that armedness seems genetic. It's an oversimplification to be sure, but if you think "Bobby is smart" is more likely the result of the processes that make Bobby wealthy, or the result of the processes that make Bobby have two arms, you will very likely draw different conclusions about whether the heritability of intelligence (which is, undisputedly, quite high!) says something about the genetics of intelligence.
Likewise, Kirkegaard seems to be Turkheimer's main opponent. I tried making sense of some of his blog posts, but they are all way over my head.
As someone who does not do a lot of statistical analysis, I often find this to be true of these arguments. I am more familiar with the philosophical problems (especially, the problem of induction) and I find even those quite perplexing! So I'm probably of limited help here. But it does seem to me that people like Turkheimer seem to be more interested in muddying the waters than in understanding and explaining observable correlations; this has a way of shifting extremely heavy burdens of proof over to the people who are actually looking at these correlations and trying, however imperfectly, to explain them. It's much easier to doubt an explanation, than to construct one. For me, as someone who is mostly an outsider to these arguments, the fact that any studies continue to suggest a genetic component to intelligence--never mind many studies!--seems significant, given the overwhelming amount of social and political pressure there is for people to adopt blank-slatism with regard to human cognition.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
If they can interpret "do not kill" to mean "actually, you can kill sometimes", then why wouldn't they be able to interpret the much more ambiguous condemnations of homosexuality in the New Testament to mean that homosexuality is not prohibited in general, but only in certain circumstances?
My understanding is that the New Testament prohibition on homosexuality is just part of the broader prohibition on sexuality. At least in the Pauline epistles (specifically, 1 Corinthians 7) the New Testament pretty unequivocally suggests that it's better to just be celibate, but if you can't be celibate, then monogamous marriage of the heterosexual variety, with a husband and a wife, is an acceptable alternative. So "do not have sex" immediately becomes "actually, you can have sex sometimes, if you must, but only under the circumstances of a monogamous heterosexual marriage."
I don't want to speak for other people's faith traditions; I don't want to tell Christians what they must really believe, when I find the whole institution broadly unbelievable. But it really does seem to me that anyone who thinks Biblical Christianity is even ambiguously compatible with a homosexual lifestyle must be engaged in some motivated reasoning somewhere.
If you have been even peripherally involved in higher education in the United States, then you've heard of Title IX. But if you haven't, here's the U.S. government's blurb:
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) enforces, among other statutes, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Title IX protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. Title IX states:
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Title IX is most famous for requiring equal athletic opportunities for men and women, without regard for whether this makes (among other things) any financial sense at all. But Title IX also imposes a variety of reporting requirements on college and university faculty and staff, such that essentially every campus has a Title IX Coordinator (or similar), and many campuses maintain entire offices of Title IX administrative staff. Do they do real, important work? I would argue virtually never--these are bullshit jobs par excellence--with one enormous caveat: they serve as a lightning rod for both civil liability and federal intervention.
(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.)
The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights fields several thousand sex discrimination complaints every year. Less than 10,000, but close--the DoE's OCR fielded a record 9,498 complaints last year. But that's not the headline.
Here's the headline:
1 Person Lodged 7,339 Sex Discrimination Complaints With Ed Dept. Last Year
You probably read that right.* More than 77% of all sex discrimination complaints filed with the OCR are filed by a single person, at a rate of about 20 complaints per day--and this same individual was responsible for a similar number and percentage of complaints in 2016, and possibly other years as well. Of this person, the office says:
“This individual has been filing complaints for a very long time with OCR and they are sometimes founded ... It doesn’t have to be about their own experience [but] ... There’s not a lot I can tell you about the person.”
* I reserve the right to rapidly backtrack my commentary if it turns out that this "single person" being reported in their system is named "Anonymous" or "No Name Given" or something equally stupid. I am proceeding on the assumption that Catherine Lhamon is neither that stupid, nor being deliberately misleading, and that she did in fact say the things she is quoted here as saying. But I'm including this caveat because I still find it hard to believe that what is being reported is even possible. Part of me still thinks there must be some mistake.
On one hand, like... I'm kind of impressed? There's someone who has decided to make their mark on the world, clearly. That's some tenacity. On the other hand, what the fuck? Surely in any sane world someone would tell this person, "you are abusing the process, and we are going to change the rules to rate-limit your nonsense."
That is... well, not the plan, apparently:
The surge in complaints comes at a time when the agency faces significant challenges: It shrank from nearly 1,100 full-time equivalent staff in FY 1981 to 546 last year and is dealing with a host of issues that reflect the strain placed on schools and students by the pandemic.
Biden, in his March budget address, sought a 27% increase in funding — to $178 million — for the civil rights office to meet its goals. Lhamon, whose 2021 confirmation Senate Republicans tried to block, said she’s grateful for the president’s support and hopes Congress approves the increase.
In FY 1981 the office was still dealing with the fallout of the American government forcibly engineering feminist aims into higher education. At a current budget of $140 million (an average of $250,000 per employee), with very nearly half of its complaints (across all topics, not just sex discrimination) coming from a single individual, what is that additional $38 million supposed to accomplish?
It seems like no matter how dim my view of the federal government gets, there's always some new piece of information out there waiting to assure me that I've yet to grasp the depth of the graft, ineptitude, and corruption of Washington, D.C. I am skeptical that Title IX has accomplished anything of value that would not have been independently accomplished by market forces and social trends. But even if that's wrong, and the early days of Title IX were an important government intervention, I cannot imagine how this particular situation could possibly exist within a sane regulatory framework.
It's final authority rests on reason. But yes, in the sense that "what we owe to each other" logically depends on the existence of a "we," contractualism doesn't have anything to say about what morality might look like if there were not a "we."
You'll have to be more specific. I think you might be asking questions about externalities, but first of all contractualism is a moral theory, not an economic theory. That said, my guess is that it would resolve the problem in the same way it resolves all problems, by conducting an analysis of the weights of interests and the objections individuals can raise on their own behalf to various principles for action.
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