nomenym
24d ago
There are logically possible universes where natural selection is false. At minimum, it posits some kind of continuity of structures, time and place, inheritance of traits, and so forth. Another way of putting it is that evolution by natural selection is not an inherent part of all possible simulations. If Lamarck was correct, then Darwin is wrong.
It's not just a language, because it purports to describe a thing that is actually, or has, happened. It purports to explain the seen by the unseen, which is fundamentally what all truth-seeking explanatory hypotheses purport to do. There are certain core metaphysical assumptions, such as there is with all scientific investigation, or investigation of any kind.
We had many Darwinian concepts before Darwin, but Darwin synthesized them into a more powerful framework, theorized about the mechanism of inheritance, and began exploring the logical consequences of that theoretical system. His insight about evolution by natural selection gave him the tools needed to bring together previously disparate phenomena into a unifying scheme. Evolution by natural selection, when applied to the world we live in with its particular physical laws, allows us to reverse engineer nature, and to read history from its present. This framework has produced many testable hypotheses that have proven amazingly successful.
I think you fundamentally don't understand this subject or what you're even trying to do here.
nomenym
25d ago
Technically, evolution by natural selection, in its most abstracted form, is something like a metaphysical research programme. It is not a tautology; it can be false. However, it cannot be tested empirically. It is not falsifiable. It also doesn't itself explain very much at all. But that's kind of missing the point, because what it does is provide a framework for generating theories that can be tested. A lot of details, facts, history needs to be plugged into the framework for it to generate testable explanatory hypotheses, but those resulting falsifiable hypotheses have proven very interesting, predictive, and they now form the backbone of our understanding of the life sciences. Usually, when we talk about the theory of evolution, we mean to include all kinds of other general background facts about the universe and how life functions in it. We are rarely, if ever, just talking about the pure logic of evolution as it might apply to any logically possible universe, but yes that highly abstract version of evolution by natural selection is unfalsifiable metaphysics, but also highly fruitful, fecund, and insightful metaphysics.
nomenym
30d ago
This seems connected to the more recent idea that competency isn't real, and that all jobs are rewards/punishments that grant privilege/status and nothing more. The idea is that we can just redistribute status by just giving members of oppressed groups prestigious jobs to do, and that will work out fine because nobody is more competent than anyone else at anything. It's not even believing that people might have equal capacity for competence when brought up with equal privilege, but that they actually do have equal competence regardless of their life history. There is no need to improve or work hard to earn something; we just need privileged people to get out of the way.
nomenym
1mo ago
Dr. Louise King, an OB-GYN and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, agrees. "It's really important to dig down into this," she says. "Maternal deaths may be related to poor health coming into pregnancy, but that's still on us."
This is my favorite part. She says "that's still on us". So it's on OB-GYNs that people of pregnancy don't arrive at the hospital obese and diabetic? How do you stop that? How is that your responsibility? Where are the limits of your authority here? Imagine if your plumber decided if fixing your pipes wasn't enough, but rather he had to get to the root causes of why you allowed your pipes to burst in the first place, and why you neglected to do proper maintainance or care, and so it was necessary for him to infiltrate and influence your life in all kinds of indirect ways so as to bring about a circumstance where you were statistically less likely to have broken pipes.
nomenym
1mo ago
It's just a few crazy kids on college campuses. In a few years, when they're out on the real world, you'll see, then they'll have to stop with all these shenanigans. Nothing to worry about.
nomenym
2mo ago
It's usually an active rejection rather than neglect. "Expanding the audience" is just what they say to the moneymen. In practice, it's always about rejecting an audience who don't deserve to have nice things. I used to be more charitable about this, but fool me once and twice and all that.
nomenym
2mo ago
If you had the choice between a method that was very messy and unpleasant for the executioner but quick and painless for the executionee, versus another that was clean and easy for the executioner but more distressing and painful to the executionee, what would you choose? Frankly, I'm on the executioner's side on this one. I just wish people were more honest about their motivations--"yeah, I don't care much if he suffers for a minute; I just don't want to have to clean his brain up off the walls".
nomenym
3mo ago
"A few minutes" was a careless choice of words. I forget the details now, but there was some guy who made it his business to try and see if he could communicate with the severed heads, and he reported indications of consciousness.
I don't intend this as a criticism of anything. I'd be fine with reintroducing the guillotine.
nomenym
3mo ago
There are some interesting stories about severed heads looking around for a few minutes before going completely inert.
The kinds of people on death row usually deserve a fate worse than death. I don't think they should be tortured, but not because they don't deserve it. I am not especially concerned with minimizing their suffering beyond a point. When I hear about a botched execution where the executed has a couple of minutes extra pain and suffering, I just don't give a shit. They're the kind of people who make me hope hell actually exists (a common sentiment among both the faithful and faithless). Why should I care about them suffering for 60 seconds before death when I'd sleep soundly knowing they are suffering for an eternity in hell? Articles like this are largely just culture war.
On the other hand I disagree with that. Liberals do still have those values in there, and can express them just as strongly if not stronger than Conservatives. They just need an unusual nudge to do so. Covid was one of those moments where Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity values dominated Liberal moral decisionmaking.
I'm inclined to agree with this. I actually see a lot of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity in progressive politics, but it tends to come out in strange and indirect ways. These moral foundations often manifest like Freudian neuroses; they are seemingly repressed but then force their way through in ways that are often unconscious, perverted and vicarious.
I think Haidt is onto something, but his error is that modern progressives are psychologically more like old conservatives, except they have been raised in a tradition of progressivism. Older progressives were a self-selecting group of outliers, but modern progressives are just normies who grew up with that stuff. In any case, the upshot is that old fashioned expressions of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity have been tabooed. Essentially, the tenets of the progressive faith are all couched in the principles of Care and Fairness, and so when the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations bubble up to the surface, they do so dressed up in a guise of Care and Fairness. This is why modern progressivism seems to be taking on more a religious flavor, and it's often reinventing old customs but using new language to legitimize them.
nomenym
3mo ago
I contend that the biggest problem right now is simply that concern about GOF research has become right-coded.
nomenym
3mo ago
That's a lot of "ifs". In the meantime, I'd also sacrifice a few goats to the gods just to be sure all your bases are covered.
nomenym
3mo ago
I'm working on native habitat preservation/restoration on our property. It's a twenty year project, and it's going to be something special when I'm done (and it kind of already is). Bought a rifle recently--too many deer, and the meat would be nice. Controlled burns are fun.
nomenym
3mo ago
Sure, it's not fair in the cosmic sense of all that might have been but for the random vicissitudes of life. A "fair fight" does not need to satisfy that standard to achieve its intended purpose.
nomenym
3mo ago
Always was, but less so. It's all on the margin, as the economists say. It's not like men were always honorable, but they could at least sometimes be held to that code of honor. It sometimes worked, and that was usually enough. Now it's mostly gone.
The competency of men vs. women is a complicated issue; female social norms don't scale as well but work better in some contexts than others. Science loses much when the "fair fight" model is rejected in order to be more "welcoming" to people who shouldn't be there. Women also tend to bring down the status of professions, because a large part of what makes a profession high status is that it makes men desirable to women, but the reverse is rarely true. It's one of the reasons why high status seems so frustratingly elusive for many women; they do the same things as the men but don't enjoy the same results.
Status is a thing, but once a challenge has been accepted the rules are fair. You're equals at least temporarily. The idea is to suppress the role of status in the conflict.
So the Motte struggles to productively engage with ideas that are usually held and advocated by the types of people who are a poor fit for the culture here, is that right? Sure, I can believe that.
In general, the Motte is a very male social group that is structured around creating conditions for a masculine "fair fight". The rules are all about structuring an environment where people openly challenge each other, state their position and opposition plainly, and have a battle of wits, skill, and knowledge. The roles of popularity, status, and broader coalitional politics of the people involved are supposed to be temporarily suspended. Some kind of analogous form of this kind of competition occurs throughout the animal kingdom, but almost entirely between competing males, and it's more common as intra-group competition. The outgroup may be regarded more like dangerous animals that need to be eliminated by any means necessary.
Feminized social spaces don't tend to have much time even for the concept of a "fair fight". In fact, for women (or feminine males), the very notion of a fair fight is foolishness. Female social competition is much more about misdirection, subtefuge, and ambush. You should never challenge an enemy openly and square off against them; there should be no declaring a time and place or choosing your weapons. The goal is to wait until your opponents' back is turned and strike, or even better get someone else to strike for you. The roles of popularity, status, and coalitional politics are front and center, and even the very means by which the battle is waged.
This is essentially why too many women in academia is ruining science and related fields. Once there are enough relatively ordinary women, they shift the culture away from the "fair fight" model of science, and so science is now more about popularity, status, and coalitional politics and the battle of ideas is engaged by way of back channels. I recall recently listening to an interview with a philosopher lamenting the terrible influence that critical theory has had on the philosophy profession, and how it has all but taken over without seeming to have won any arguments. Infamously, such people do not engage in debates, i.e. "fair fights", but rather they use indirect, institutional, and social power to defeat their enemies often without even giving them a chance to defend themselves.
In my experience, advocates of veganism (as opposed to all vegans) tend to disproportionately belong to the latter group, and so they aren't going to feel comfortable and competent at interacting with the Motte. Sometimes people like these will actually stumble upon good ideas, and those ideas will perhaps not get a fair hearing on a forum like The Motte because their advocates usually don't fight fair. This could undoubtedly cause a blind spot. There is no solution. White nationalist types tend to be rather masculine in their disposition, and so they usually intuitively and more comfortably engage with the fair-fight culture.
nomenym
3mo ago
Yes, and it also incentivizes them to indulge in short-term mate selection. That was also my original point.
Yes, frequently. I live embedded in a very poor region of the deep south. In fact, by the standards of most people here, I am a poor lower class blue collar guy.
nomenym
4mo ago
There are low status and low income men who aren't especially criminally inclined and are relatively more stable and dependable. There may be relatively fewer of them than historically, but they still exist. Welfare makes them less desirable, and on the margin incentivizes more short-term mating preferences and competition from everyone.
The welfare state can never give people status, but it can reduce the status of low skill men who are more inclined to be providers and caregivers. Without the welfare state, lower class women have to make a trade-off between sexy bad boys and dependable good guys. With the welfare state, they don't.
Of course, it doesn't disprove anything. It just adds another wrinkle to the defense, but wrinkles accumulate until an idea starts to look old and haggard. Each wrinkle reduces the explanatory power of the hypothesis, since there are more and more exceptions, caveats, outliers, and improbabilities piling up around the thing meant to be explained. In the extreme, you reach a point where the argument is essentially that of Descartes' demon--P is true despite appearing for all intents and purposes to be false. That is, P has no functional role in explaining anything happens, but it is nonetheless asserted to be the true hidden cause of everything. That is, it ceases to be an explanatory hypothesis.
I would say this is approximately where feminists are with patriarchy, or where racism-mongers are with white supremacy, and so on. Unfortunately, the wrinkles don't seem to have much diminished their power and influence. The explanatory power of hypotheses seems to bear little relation to their political power, at least so long as societies are wealthy enough to offset their costs. In fact, it seems as though the political power of a hypothesis is actually diminished by too much explanatory power, since the latter makes it specific and inflexible and disallows easy picking and choosing of its application.
Sometimes I fear that successful rational criticism of popular political ideas can be counterproductive, since it often has the effect of merely reducing their explanatory power while actually increasing their political utility. It kind of refines and purifies them, alerting them to potential soft spots and weaknesses that need to be patched over. The end result is an idea that means less and has more to say, an idea that can account for everything and demand anything. In other words, and ideal ideology for political action. Science sure as shit doesn't keep this in check, but the economic costs and dead bodies do tend to pile up eventually.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but I think I may be accidentally arguing against the entire purpose of this forum.
X is being restricted from conducting political assassinations?
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