username
1yr ago
I didn't say the french policy was racist, just that it led to worse outcomes. I probably won't convince you. You're not a canadian public servant and don't see what it's like. I'm not defending the no-white-male policy or anything. Apologies for the what-about-ism, I made an off-topic comment and now I'm just elaborating.
but employees can learn French if they want to get a promotion, and it actually represents a specific skill that can be of use in employment
Here's a situation I've seen a ton: An employee wants to become a manager, so they go on paid french training, putting their job on pause for weeks or months. When they come back, they inevitably don't use their french because francophones don't care and don't want to slow down important conversations by speaking to a french novice. Once their newly acquired french abilities atrophy, the training cycle repeats. I've seen this happen to a ton of really talented people with passion for their domain.
Also, learning french as an adult is pretty difficult, especially when the public service is not at all immersive. Even francophones usually prefer english because they'd prefer not to learn twice the terminology, check weird grammar rules or slow down communication.
This argument does not seem well considered at all
I see where you're coming from. However the outcomes I've experienced suggest the french-requirements are a worse policy.
Thinking probabilistically, I don't think trans acceptance, even encouragement, has a very big impact on your odds of having grandchildren.
Do you feel the same fears about your children being encouraged to be homosexual? Homosexuals can still reproduce (especially women), but they have much fewer children on average and homosexuality is much more prevalent than transexuality, certainly the sterilized kind.
username
1yr ago
That's correct, but if these women are birthing at least one child according to my scheme, that child would eventually have an IQ higher than the host nation average (because clients would be upper/middle class). Many of these women would get multiple contracts or contracts for twins, so I would think it would actually raise the mean IQ of the host nation.
username
1yr ago
Why do you think it would impact the host nation?
Do we have evidence to suggest the surrogate's IQ is important in determining the child's IQ? These surrogates would certainly be less conscious of detrimental factors like smoking and drinking, but that's what contracts are for. Even better if they're closely monitored by their clients.
username
1yr ago
I haven't spoken to many senior managers, mostly mid-level managers. My impression is that senior elites and execs in companies pay more attention to diversity so it would make sense for the public service to match that as well.
I'm very interested in cases where managers in the canadian public service had bonuses tied to diversity requirements. Do you have any examples you can link to?
username
1yr ago
It's not that simple. Tax cuts increase inflation without directly printing more money. Raises are a big component of inflation. If everyone got a 5% raise do you think prices would remain the same?
username
1yr ago
I think that does make sense, at least in a vacuum, but going to college will probably also make you more likely to "trust the experts" on a number of topics, including OP's examples of rejecting HBD and supporting outdoor masks
username
1yr ago
Ahh yes, performance agreements. My experience with these is that people don't commit to targets they can't already meet. After all, these objectives are mostly self-imposed, and the exercise is more of a formality. That said, I'm sure it's sometimes the case some execs have to work hard to meet their diversity targets. Thanks for sharing.
username
1yr ago
Thanks for explaining, that does makes sense and is pretty convincing. People who consume the barely legal type porn are definitely marginal ephebophiles, if not full-blown ones.
There's definitely variation among people's taste, though. In my view, someone could have a "youthful" fetish the same way they have a mature/milf or an asian fetish. I suppose whether these are "fetishes" or not is a terminological debate, but I certainly did not have your view pinned down until you explained it.
username
1yr ago
I work in the public service and agree that equity was probably not the (main) motivation for the strategy they picked. Most of what you hear about equity is signalling buzz. Most managers I've asked told me they face no pressure to hire for diversity. Seems like this team just found a hack (which I doubt is common) to shorten their screening process. Mostly likely they don't care who will be hired anyway. People here seem doubtful, but the public service and hiring processes are so heavily decentralized. It's totally plausible for a team to do this without being motivated by equity.
Of course, there is obvious bias because they could never get away doing the opposite strategy (e.g, filtering out equity groups). That said, there are policies which increase the proportion of white workers, like requiring citizenship and the ability to speak french.
username
1yr ago
OP was talking about democrats boosting non-trump candidates. Presumably, democrats are picking candidates they like better than trump. That's not sabotage, that's just expressing your preference.
If democrats were purposefully selecting weak candidates they don't prefer nor think can win an election, I would agree it's sabotage, that it leads to weaker nominees and that it's not good for the country.
username
1yr ago
I'm not woke, but I do think "Race is a social construct" has some merit. It's a terminological disagreement rather than a scientific one.
Someone who has one white parent and one black parent is often considered black, despite the genetic make-up being 50/50. National demographics on race also largely come from self-reported data in surveys, which have a famously growing list of races you can pick from.
As for intelligence differences between races, I think most people are simply ignorant rather than cognitively dissonant. It's not obvious to everyone that racial groups have different mean IQs, it's not something you learn from mainstream sources. Even once this fact is known, it's not crazy to think achievement disparities can be explained by culture and social institutions. We would all be a lot less economically productive if we moved to Haiti. Oppression isn't even a necessary factor.
I'm not sure why the center-right part is important, are you not interested in solutions that would also please the left?
Among many other schemes already mentioned, I would try and facilitate surrogacy tourism/immigration.
If foreign women sign a surrogacy/reproduction contract with a citizen, they are granted citizenship and subsidies. We could also cut red tape around live-in nannies to make it easier for these women to live with their clients. Presumably these women can also offer low-skill labour, and could become nannies or cheap child-care workers. Cutting the red-tape around these contracts would also be great, it would be nice if middle-class couples/individuals could just find a surrogate using a simple friction-less online-matching service.
I've shared this idea with people, it sickens leftists to think of the inequality these women experience. It sickens conservatives to think how strange the family changes around this new opportunity. Personally, in accordance with libertarian philosophy, I think giving people additional opportunities is generally a good thing. However I feel bad for the foreign men who can't immigrate because they don't have wombs. Also, I suppose womb-draining low-income countries would qualify as eugenics.
Yes, I mentioned that not doing lockdowns when everyone else is doing one would still result in many of the similar consequences.
That said, Swedes' private behaviour is also partially responsible for some of these consequences. Even without lockdowns, many Swedes stayed home, didn't go to restaurants, moved into a bigger house to comfortably WFH. The Swedish government also had distributed relief transfer payments. All of this contributes to inflation.
username
1yr ago
I'm probably misunderstanding georgism, but would it even help without YIMBY/zoning deregulation? If land value prices in zoning restrictions, then a plot of land that can only be used for single family housing won't be worth more than a single family can afford. If land value is independent of zoning restrictions, then it just makes a ton of people poor without letting them build improvements that house more people.
username
1yr ago
If by liberal you mean left, then the argument is essentially that people are biased against those looked over minorities, (e.g everything from overt racism to implicit bias). How do we know this bias actually exists? The best argument I've seen is Scott Alexander's Social justice for the highly demanding of rigor. It's a little bit outdated. For instance, more recent analyses of the blind orchestra data show it can also be used to support the hypothesis that blind orchestras lowered women's chances of getting in.
username
1yr ago
They probably want the ability to hit targets with higher confidence. Shooting multiple missiles is an easy way to do that.
Still, I wonder why China ramped up nukes more recently, decades after the soviets and USA have abandoned the same strategy. Also, why is it such a secret? Of course you'd want to keep the details secret, but wouldn't you at least want your enemies to know you have a large nuclear arsenal?
username
1yr ago
I believe racial groups have different mean IQs and that some of these differences could be partially explained by genetics. I guess that puts me in the HBD camp.
If HBD weren't real, I don't think I'd expect any major differences between countries. Asia and Africa would still be held back by poor institutions. The fact that the middle-IQ group dominated both the lower and higher IQ groups leads me to believe group IQ differences didn't have a high first-order impact on history. I think the biggest differences would be within countries. I'd expect to see more black and fewer jewish scientists, engineers, CEOs, etc. Racism would still exist on a similar scale. We'd worry less about economic disparities, but still worry about representational disparities. American "guilt" towards blacks would more closely resemble european guilt towards jews.
There's another aspect of HBD which proposes that, although men and women have the same mean IQs, men have higher variance than women. Whether that's true or not, I think the counterfactual would be of higher consequence.
username
1yr ago
Putting aside people who are bona-fide pedophile and are attracted to actual children, it sounds like in your model, (e?)phebophillia is a more of a fetish or a preference. I do think porn can exacerbate, and even create fetishes/preferences, at least temporarily. So it seems the marginal aspect is a valid concern.
On the other hand, I doubt people with porn-induced/enhanced phebophilia are that much more likely to engage in morally problematic behaviour with minors.
Lollicon probably appeals to an even wider audience who like anime and hentai. Because the visuals are so unrealistic I doubt it's harmful. I don't think anyone is developing a significant bestiality fetish from the wacky stuff often portrayed in hentai (cat-people, tentacles, etc.) and I don't see why lollicon would be any different with respect to pedophilia.
username
1yr ago
According to the law of large numbers, your payout will converge to the expected value if you repeat an exercise enough times. Since this experiment can't be repeated anymore once you lose all your earths, it doesn't apply here and expected value is a poor decision making tool in this scenario.
username
1yr ago
The truss case is a bit unusual: The inflation hit very quickly and her policies were a very apparent cause.
The average case is a lot muddier. Prices are sticky and it takes a while for inflation to get noticed. Most nations saw a steady inflation increase since 2020. Many of those nations, like the USA, have new leaders since the inflation started. It's probably the case that some leaders picked known inflationary policies before elections to get more votes (e.g. student forgiveness before the mid-terms), knowing the resulting inflation would be delayed and its cause nebulous.
username
1yr ago
I found a rationalist group in my area and they're fun to talk to. People are all over the political spectrum so people rarely strongly signal their controversial opinions, discussions are usually around less inflammatory topics like economics and philosophy. You can crawl old meetup posts on ACX and look for something local, or find communities on social media.
More generally, you can meet people organically in hobby space. If the hobby leans young or female, expect it to lean left. If it's more blue-collar and male, expect it to lean right. In both cases, people should generally be less extreme and more centrist than groups who met through explicit tribal filters.
username
1yr ago
I don't personally object to hunting, but because you said "I don't know what it is", I'll take a crack at it: Hunting isn't about the food, it's about the sport. It's not crazy to think there's something deontologically wrong with killing creatures for fun.
username
1yr ago
This isn't a novel claim in this space.
I'm not sure whether discrimination is the primary cause for differing outcomes between racial groups, but the question isn't as binary as it may seem. What if discrimination is responsible for the way that group's culture developed, or for selecting certain genes? It's been hypothesized that the type of discrimination jews faced for centuries placed a selective pressure for high intellectual achievement. If jews were pressured into professions requiring high IQ like doctors and banking (jews were the only ones allowed to charge interest in many places), then evolution would filter out the ones too dumb to practice medicine or banking. I'm inaccurately paraphrasing Scott Alexander's argument here but my point is that discrimination has downstream impacts that can last longer than the discrimination itself.
The point is, there are other policies which will impact demographics. I don't want to change the subject too much, but I actually think the french level requirements in the canadian public service lead to worse outcomes than white-male exclusion, even if it were scaled up 100x. It's currently impossible to manage employees or be in a sufficiently senior role unless you speak french, even when the vast majority of francophones opt to read,write and speak in english when working. When my team is hiring, I'd rather work with a "non white male" constraint than a "must speak french" constraint. The french requirements are often unnecessary and make it very difficult to hire talent. As a french speaker, I've leapfrogged colleagues of similar productivity because they were anglophones who couldn't even be considered for a number of promotions.
Still, though, I agree that on the surface one policy sounds a lot better than the other and that they're not analogous with respect to why they impact demographics.
More options
Context Copy link