non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
non_radical_centrist
9hr ago
I've heard that in the original days of Israel, just after the Arab war, the ultra-orthodox who spent all day just studying the Talmud were an extreme rarity because they almost all died in the Holocaust. So Israel gave them funding as a sort of living museum piece/out of pity for an almost lost culture. But then they kept growing since they had such a sweet deal, and what was reasonable when they were a few hundred people was not reasonable when they are a few hundred thousand.
non_radical_centrist
9hr ago
Hanania is a very political guy, who's willing to make certain sacrifices to achieve ends he thinks is good. He'd want discrimination laws rolled back in general, but as long as they aren't, is happy to see them used against the Left.
non_radical_centrist
1d ago
I didn't realize there was an update, thanks for letting me know
non_radical_centrist
1d ago
You can't be all those things in the US census system. You can only choose one. It's only Hispanic that's a both ethnicity instead of a race.
That's why Hanania is calling it obviously artificial.
Edit: as /u/toakraka said, that's old news and they've updated the system to reflect less artificial categories. It's still somewhat arbitrary though.
non_radical_centrist
1d ago
Part of what makes it obviously artificial is that hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, in the US census. So someone can be both hispanic and white, or hispanic and black, or even hispanic and Asian American Pacific Islander! And it was chosen like that because black activists didn't want to lose any influence from black spanish speakers choosing to identify as hispanic over black.
non_radical_centrist
1d ago
I think wokism as culture and wokism as law and wokism as anything else are all a positive feedback loop. There isn't a single definitive cause that, if you cut that out, all wokism is gone forever. But the book convinced me pretty well that certain executive orders and judicial decisions and bureaucratic policies played a major role in expanding wokeness.
non_radical_centrist
3d ago
Sure, but I don't think we're going to ever get to that point anytime soon, because some questions are real hard to forecast. I don't think anyone today knows when say the Israel-Palestine conflict will next have a ceasefire, but that's something a lot of people would like to know. If we get to a point where we can forecast so well everyone agrees on when it's most likely to end, then that's mission accomplished.
non_radical_centrist
3d ago
If it gets really good and really common then how would one extract any value from it?
If there's one answer that everyone agrees on and no one betting against each other, all the value would come from whomever posted the question and sponsored it so that anyone who guesses correctly gets proceeds. If people disagree on the answer, then people who're right also get value from whomever's wrong losing their money to the people who are right.
non_radical_centrist
4d ago
I don't have anything to say directly on the content, but writers like Zizek who seem to try to make their writing as difficult to parse as possible in order to show off their vocabulary have always annoyed me. There are times when a big, unusual word captures something that a shorter word doesn't, or is more convenient than using a string of shorter common words to represent the same concept. But when you're having to take a second to understand a phrase, time after time, it's irritating.
non_radical_centrist
7d ago
Sure, but anyone who's getting a sentence of a year is unlikely to be deterred by a single physical punishment.
There are two types of crimes really. Crimes made impulsively, and crimes that are planned. We can use corporal punishment to deter planned crimes, especially planned crimes that are so minor that sentencing someone to even a day of prison would be overkill but hitting them once with a cane is appropriate, like shoplifting. For crimes made impulsively, like a person having their mother insulted then committing assault against the insulter, we use prison to keep them off the streets because we just can't have them as part of society.
non_radical_centrist
11d ago
I have no experience being a professional developer, I just do side projects, but Youtube's a great resource for learning. I find you already need some familiarity with the topic before official documentation is understandable, and a youtube tutorial shows you every step, including ones that are just implied in written tutorials, e.g installations.
non_radical_centrist
11d ago
In Canada, 2016 one student had to say it out loud when we were reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I remember how all the white kids were really awkward about it but the black kids didn't care and were laughing a bit.
non_radical_centrist
11d ago
That post-secondary isn't going to work out for you, and to enlist in the military.
non_radical_centrist
12d ago
If everyone was equal in ability and some groups were being discriminated against for no reason, I would hire them since they cost less money/are more desperate and I would crush the competition with my superior offerings.
There was a problem with racism in the Jim Crow era where, if you were to be colour blind with your hiring practices and what customers you let in in the South, you could get racists making a lot of trouble for you. I think we're well past that era, but that there was a time when things really were nastily racist needs to be kept in mind.
non_radical_centrist
12d ago
I read the Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania a couple weeks ago. I was going to write a more in depth review covering more sections, but got bored after writing my thought process about how employers aren't allowed to use discriminatory tests and never got around to writing more, so I'll post what I did write.
Let’s all people have a factor that you can represent numerically how good they will be at a job. Let’s call it the m, for mystery, because exactly what will make someone good at a job- e.g knowledge, skill, conscientiousness, etc. can be very difficult to measure, and knowing how important proportionally each sub-factor is to the final m factor or even what every sub-factor maybe is also very difficult. But, we can still try to estimate someone’s m. If you have a job that largely involves lifting heavy boxes and moving them around, you can get a decent estimate by having a candidate try to lift a heavy box- if they fall, they almost certainly have low m for that job, and if they succeed with ease, they’ll likely have a high m for that job. If you have a CEO position for a large multinational corporation, you can like at a candidate’s previous job experience- if they’ve previously been in charge of a corporation that hit records profits during their tenure, they’ll likely have high m. If while previously in charge of a corporation, it went from high profits to bankruptcy, or they’ve only ever held a job as a janitor, you can guess that they’d have low m for the position.
We can say with confidence that on average, black people have lower m than white people for most jobs. Whether this is because of genetics, culture, discrimination, or something else isn’t relevant to this discussion, because this discussion isn’t about increasing their m, just about what are fair hiring practices. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed, both Congress and the general population of America overwhelmingly wanted two things: For black people to not be actively discriminated against, but also for people to be able to still select the best employees for a job, even if all the best employees were white. But what is “discrimination”? That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer.
Let’s say an employer has 1000 job candidates, and needs to select 100 to fill a newly created job. The employer wants to get the 100 employees with the highest m- he is unlikely to succeed perfectly, but he still wants to get as close as he can. If the employer asked all potential job candidates to fill out a brief questionnaire as the first stage of the application process, and one of the questions was “Are you black?”, and then the employer threw out every single application where someone answered “Yes”, the average m in the remaining pool would likely be higher, although he also would’ve likely tossed some candidates who did belong in the final pool. Whether it’s a good idea from the employer’s perspective may vary- maybe the employer really has no good ideas on how to figure out which candidates have higher m, and his next step will just be to randomly select 100 candidates from the remaining pool, in which case he’ll have done better in terms of average m score than if he didn’t purge black candidates.
But, I think almost everyone would agree that purging black applications like that is discrimination, in the letter of the ACR, in the spirit of what Congress intended it, and that the majority of Americans don’t want to see that sort of candidate selection happen, not from government employers and not from private employers either. The government would tell any employer that tried to do that something like, “Stop that, rework your hiring practices so that you’re actually more directly testing for m, and not just discriminating against blacks”.
So the employer goes back to the drawing board, and comes up with another test. He will take a pencil, and slide it into the hair of a candidate. After releasing, if the pencil falls out of the hair, the candidate proceeds to the next stage, if it stays in, the candidate is removed from selection. That’s the Apartheid South African Pencil test, and in practice that’d basically be the same as the previous test, although it’s hypothetically possible some black people would pass and some white people would fail. Or maybe the employer tries to be slightly less blatant, and instead does a swimming test(black have worse buoyancy than white people). Unless the job actually involves swimming in some way, I think most people would still agree that such a test is discriminatory, not actually measuring m in any way, at least not more than a generic fitness test does, and would only have predictive power in job performance because it’s managing to exclude blacks.
The employer now comes up with a fourth test. It will be a straightforward algebra exam, the sort you’d see in a 10th grade math course. If the job does not involve algebra in any way, like it’s a job moving boxes around, or maybe it’s a cashier job at a retailer, or even a more high class job like a lawyer that doesn’t really involve math, then this test will also disproportionately fail black candidates, who tend to be worse at algebra. But, is it actually discriminatory? Where the previous tests only would have any predictive power for job performance in so far as they measured whether or not someone’s black, and black people on average did worse at the job, the algebra test might have real predictive power, because it’s not just measuring algebra skill, it’s also measuring general intelligence, and general intelligence would be a major component of m for almost any job.
Whether the test is actually discriminatory now comes down to whether “general intelligence” is real, and also that if it is real, can it be measured by an algebra test? I don’t think that question, in the absence of formal studies, has an obvious answer. I think reasonable people could very easily come to believe that algebra skill is divorced from other intellectual tasks like public speaking, literacy, chess skill, etc. My understanding of the literature is that that is not true- that there is a general intelligence, and skill at all intellectual tasks are relatively closely correlated. And that that general intelligence is also closely correlated with job performance in pretty much every job. But, reasonable judges who aren’t good at parsing scientific studies themselves can be convinced that general intelligence does not work like that.
Richard Hanania, in The Origin’s of Woke, writes that judges and bureaucrats expanding the definition of discrimination to also include tests that really measure future job performance is one of the key origins of wokeness. I wouldn’t disagree. Where I do disagree with him is that I don’t think it’s easily possible to permit real skill tests but ban actually discriminatory test, because they can look very similar. Ultimately I don’t disagree with his conclusion that the laws should be altered to allow for discrimination though, because I think where in the 60’s the Civil Rights Act may have been needed to prevent employers doing discrimination along the lines of a Pencil Test for employees like how the American people wanted, today the vast majority of Americans are no longer anti-black racist, despite what many on the left think. I think you could remove a lot of anti-discrimination protections, and unlike in the 60’s, a combination of few people today being actually racist and non-governmental social pressure to keep the real racists in line will prevent the sort of racism Americans hate.
non_radical_centrist
19d ago
Neoliberals were strip mining the economy and the labor market
Neoliberals embraced deregulation and austerity because Keynesian economics and large amounts of the economy being state owned or heavily regulated lead to the stagflation of the 70s.
non_radical_centrist
19d ago
I much prefer it that way than the other way around.
non_radical_centrist
21d ago
It's annoying how expensive substacks are. I wish there are some sort of bulk deal where I could buy all the ones I'm interested in at a significant discount, because as much as I love the writing of the writers I follow, I can't drop a hundred bucks a year on each of them.
non_radical_centrist
22d ago
I'd be more worried about the conflict dragging in Pakistan/India/China who are borderline undeveloped themselves and already have nukes
non_radical_centrist
24d ago
My overall opinion on third world development remains that the 1st world countries need to collectively agree to legalize conquest between third world nations, abolish any international recognition of existing borders, and give it 30 years to sort itself out.
I'd agree something needs to be worked out regarding the 3rd world that probably wouldn't be politically correct, but I doubt that would work pretty well. Even if you're willing to callously sacrifice potentially billions of lives over those 30 years in order to get a better future over the up coming centuries, and you don't think there's any risk of those wars spilling over into the first world or using nukes, I don't think it'd actually result in disfunction ending. I think you'd get a lot of the dominant conquering countries not completely wiping out the populations of their conquered territories, whether out of pity, apathy, or to use the populations as poorly compensated labour. And those sorts of minority populations would just be another perpetual source of human misery.
I don't really know what would be the best solution to 3rd world disfunction, but fortunately I think genetic editing + AI will solve most problems in the long term.
non_radical_centrist
24d ago
I don't read much of Kulak's stuff, I find most of his writing to be wrong in some way. I would call this piece he had pretty racist too, since it implicitly dismisses any possible environmental cause for India's woes. The amount of extreme government disfunction, poor nutrition and poor healthcare many, many Indians receive I think are very plausible candidates for low human capital there, which he doesn't address at all.
non_radical_centrist
24d ago
I just read a good chunk of The Mystery of the Kibbutz. I'm not reading more because it got to be an awfully repetitive book, but the first few chapters were pretty interesting about how Jewish communes were relatively successful despite how one might expect a society without free markets to fail.
non_radical_centrist
24d ago
I recommend Khan Academy as an intro. They have video lessons, and built in problems for their website. And being able to actually solve some problems is necessary to really understand economics, stuff like macroeconomics can be pretty unintuitive to think about.
non_radical_centrist
24d ago
I still find it somewhat useful as a quick link to the people whose profiles I can check for new comments.
I would expect being alone would massively increase the risk rate. How many people would steal a stack of bills if they were left out in the open but there are people all around who knows they don't belong to the thief, vs how many would steal the stack of bills if they had total anonymity?
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