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
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
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.
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
For myself, I will not be receiving future Covid vaccine doses. They have an unknown risk against a low risk from Covid itself.
Why do you believe covid's potential harm is more known or bounded than the vaccine? We have a little bit more long term data (about a year) for the virus but the vaccine's data is also of higher quality
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.
username
1yr ago
It seems to me this problem has only gotten worse since we started cracking down on paedophilia and grooming. Admittedly, paedophilia is much more reported than it was before, but it's not at all clear to me that cracking down on grooming behaviour is going to make it easier for youth to get mentorship, if anything I'd expect it less mentorship. Your strategy may optimize for least harm, but OP was looking for more mentorship.
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.
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
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.
username
1yr ago
I wish we had more tony starks and bruce wayne characters out there. Billionaires are portrayed terribly in recent movies.
Knives out has some fun twists. The plot is a bit unbelievable, but that's how murder mysteries are supposed to go, it's a chain of extremely unlikely events. It's a shame the characters felt so cheap, it made the the murderer rather predictable, other choices wouldn't have been as morally/politically satisfying.
username
1yr ago
If that actually happened, would it really be a plan of which the general populace disapproves? Seems to me that voting against someone you don't want elected is well within the spirit of democracy. I welcome republicans to do the same during democrat primaries.
Counterexample: It'd be a lot shadier if democrats purposefully won trump the nomination because they expected him to lose the general election. It's both risky and it feels more of a hack to vote for someone you don't actually want.
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
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
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
There are different kinds of meat alternatives,
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Actual lab-grown meat from animal cells, this could theoretically taste close to meat in texture but I suspect the taste will be off for a while. Worse than the taste, we're very far off from producing this at a wide scale.
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Growing animal proteins using yeast. This does not taste like meat but can be done cheaply. I believe milk proteins is actually cheaper than dairy farming. I'm excited to see this gain popularity.
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Impossible/beyond type of meat substitutes. These usually don't have the same nutrition profile, but they probably taste the closest to meat.
I'm hoping we can combine the yeast technology with the artistic skills from beyond/impossible for something that tastes and nourishes identically. On the other hand, there's something that feels wholesome about eating natural food, even if a ton of suffering goes into it. I do have minor concerns about the level of processing that goes into the beyond/impossible tier foods. Hopefully the lab-grown stuff will one day be economically viable and feel "paleo" enough.
username
1yr ago
Perhaps in reality none of the aforementioned actions are wrong. It's not wrong to spy on someone in the locker room, and so it's not wrong to use 'x-ray glasses' to see through their clothes, or use an AI to edit a picture to do functionally the same thing.
This matches my intuition. For someone to just generate deepfakes they just keep to themselves? I've got no problem with that. For someone to distribute those deepfakes around, possibly (but not necessarily) passing them off as real has the potential for harm.
In the case of spying, I think punishment is valid even if it isn't technically wrong because spying will usually lead to information being used in harmful ways, like revealing facts or blackmail. Even if spying is done without those intentions, sometimes secrets are just too good to keep, it's playing with fire. Deepfakes don't have that same problem.
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.
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.
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.
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