what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
here is Science insisting that trans women don’t even have an advantage.
This includes the line:
No, Vilain says. The lab studies of athletes’ hemoglobin and muscle mass say nothing about whether trans women can run faster, jump higher, or throw farther. “You have to demonstrate that before excluding” transgender athletes, he says.
I'm probably preaching to the choir, but this is utterly backwards. The default is that men can't compete in women's sports. If you want to assert that some set of procedures the man undergoes makes it fair for them to compete, that is what has to be demonstrated. One study with n = 8 doesn't cut it. I'm sure that a wokeist would screech in rage that obviously transwomen are women, but such claims are just definitional assertions that are not-even-wrong and convey no information.
That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!
This is true, and we could have many additional splits when it comes to sports. In fact, we do have other splits. An obvious one is by age (minimum or maximum), but we also have teams composed of only students from one school or university, we have weight classes in combat sports, etc. The goal is to make competitions that are relatively fair and competitive, although of course some people have massive natural advantages over others like being tall in basketball, and AFAIK there isn't really a "average height basketball league." It all seems somewhat arbitrary to me, to be honest, but I think the solution is something like a trans division (probably not enough population to make it competitive though).
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
It seems odd to me to talk about immigration in America without talking about, you know, immigration in America. "A nation of immigrants" is a cliche but America's current population pretty much all arrived in the past 400 years from other places. And in that time it went from being a handful of starving colonies to the most powerful nation in world history (as well as one of the richest). At times the Italians, Irish, and other Catholic nationalities were considered to be a mean, mongrel group who could never be trusted. Now a white nativist probably couldn't tell them apart from any other American. The Chinese were also once believed to be uncivilized barbarians; now they along with other Asian-Americans are literally too successful to avoid being discriminated against by college admissions. (Yes, recent immigrants are not a contiguous group with most of the ones who migrated in the 1800s to work in California--but neither genetics nor culture is going to change that much in 150 years. Modern immigrants are richer, but almost all the European immigrants were poor too. If they had been allowed to, the Chinese immigrants of the 1800s could have assimilated trivially easily).
All through these times recent immigrants and their families often provided large amounts of cheap labor, settled new frontiers, and gradually improved their lot--the American dream. When they arrived, they often formed immigrant enclaves, but gradually assimilated over a few generations--other commenters seem to sneer at this possibility, but as far as I can tell it's literally exactly what has been happening for many years. The first generation that moves as adults is mostly the old culture, their kids are a mix, and the grandkids are just like other Americans. Sometimes it happens faster than this, but even if it does take this long it doesn't seem to matter.
In light of all of this history, most of the fears proposed by modern anti-immigration activists seem to ring hollow.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
I've used Feeld and this is such a bizarre description. I did not recognize it at all from the article until they named it. AFAICT the app is aimed at people who are interested in kink and/or polyamory. Most of the profiles that have any information at all include one or both of those things. This group is not necessarily more mature than anyone else, the age range seems pretty similar to other apps (maybe slightly more late 20s than early), and it's not any more hookup-focused than the average non-relationship-type-specific app. Lots of people on it are looking for serious, longer-term relationships. It's probably more progressive than average, but few people explicitly put anything like that on their profiles--again, not much more than any other app if you're in a big city. They would probably rate higher on the Big 5's openness to experiences measure, and are more likely to be upfront about what they want out of a relationship, but that's about it.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Seems to me like locals might not want to live in an environment you consider "interesting" or "unique." The US was full of dangerous, dirty cities and poor farms in 1900. Then after WW2 everyone who could afford to moved to the clean and safe (ish) but absolutely boring, sterile, repetitive suburbs that no tourist would ever want to visit. Partly this was due to top-down changes that other places have the capability to avoid, but people would like to be rich, and with that comes convenience, safety, etc. (Both because those things cost money, and because your time is more valuable and dying is worse when you're reach).
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
A twitter thread about a paper on policing: https://twitter.com/jnixy/status/1559568512485470209
The paper itself: https://t.co/sy6LHNMpph
Key points
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The US doesn't have that many police officers given its level of serious crime (homicide), but it does have a lot of prisoners.
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The US is unusually punitive for suspects who are arrested, but also unusually bad at arresting anyone.
Their main recommendation is to trade off more certainty of punishment against less severity. This is an idea with a good deal of support in criminology (e.g. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf claims this, and it is consistent with what I learned when I studied the subject; https://www.jstor.org/stable/41638882 claims the opposite, but agrees this is contradictory to most of the literature). In particular, we could spend less money on incarceration and more on police officers. Interestingly, despite the suggestion to hire a lot more police, the paper takes a progressive stance ("The burdens of the status quo... fall more disproportionately on Black people and the poor, and especially the Black poor, than do the benefits.")
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I would guess Kulak is angry, at least in part, because of cases like these: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/02/statutory-rape-victim-child-support/14953965/
California issued a similar state court ruling a few years later in the case of a 15-year-old boy who had sex with a 34-year-old neighbor. In that case, the woman had been convicted of statutory rape.
In both cases, it was the state social-services agency that pursued the case after the mother sought public assistance.
"The Kansas court determined that the rape was irrelevant and that the child support was not owed to the rapist but rather to the child," said Mel Feit, director of the New York-based advocacy group the National Center for Men.
Of course, the money is in practice going to said rapist, because custody is irrelevant and there's 0 oversight to make sure the money is actually being spent for the benefit of the child. And speaking of custody, no one seems to care about the child rapists raising children.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?
Maybe not super popular here, but NIMBYism. IMO, the level of entitlement of certain suburbanites rivals that of woke college students. You don't have the right to arbitrarily control land you don't own. You don't have a right to consistent and large increases in property value. You had kids and now people need somewhere to live. Your neighborhood is not "full" it has fewer people than it did 50 years ago. Your car creates tremendous costs on other people that you don't even acknowledge, and your way of life is incredibly subsidized. You don't want the gas tax to go up, even though that was originally how the federal government was supposed to pay for those highways you need. You do everything possible to reduce traffic in your own neighborhood while driving to everywhere else and objecting to anyone else who doesn't want you to drive in their neighborhood.
Environmental review gets used as a bludgeon to stop anything that might help the environment, or is applied wildly inconsistently. Half the land area of downtowns, the most valuable space in the country, is devoted to highways and parking lots. We can find money and space to make 6 lines of roads for only cars, but bikes get to stay in an 18-inch space between stripes of paint which oh by the way regularly crosses over turn lanes or is next to the line of cars whose drivers will door you without a second thought. Our engineers design infrastructure that is simultaneously something cars are expected to hit, and pedestrians are supposed to stand next to.
Why we ever let this sort of thing become normalized is beyond me.
Also, opposition to nuclear. We might never have heard the phrase "global warming" if "environmentalists" hadn't thrown a fit in the 70s.
what_a_maroon
8mo ago
Libraries are a lot more than just a warehouse for books. They provide a lot of services, including research help, internet and computer access, rooms that can be booked (hah!) for various purposes, and often a variety of other programs (tax help, kids programming, etc.). Also, just because some books are cheap doesn't mean that borrowing books as no purpose. Some people are still poor, or just have limited space, so "books are cheap" isn't that strong of an argument.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Travel blogger Jake Nomada affectionately refers to the “lack of common sense found in many areas throughout the region” as “the Latin Hammer.” Some examples he lists include getting stuck in traffic for hours because road workers were on a siesta break, getting scammed by landlords, and bribing narcos.
Is there anything in this section (other than time-period specific technology) that would have been out of place in the US 100 or 200 years ago? For example, the behavior of early Mormons makes it seem like skepticism and common sense literally hadn't been invented yet:
Unlike the story I've [the author] been taught in Sunday School, Priesthood, General Conferences, Seminary, EF Y, Ensigns, Church history tour, Missionary Training Center, and BYU... Joseph Smith used a rock in a hat for translating 2 the Book of Mormon. In other words, Joseph used the same magic device or “Ouija Board” that he used during his treasure hunting 3 days. He put a rock – called a “peep stone” – in his hat and put his face in the hat to tell his customers the location of buried treasure on their property. He also used this same method for translating the Book of Mormon, while the gold plates were covered, placed in another room, or even buried in the woods. The gold plates were not used for the Book of Mormon we have today.
One of the key witnesses is described as:
The following are some accounts of the superstitious side of Martin Harris: “Once while reading scripture, he reportedly mistook a candle’s sputtering as a sign that the devil desired him to stop. Another time he excitedly awoke from his sleep believing that a creature as large as a dog had been upon his chest, though a nearby associate could find nothing to confirm his fears. Several hostile and perhaps unreliable accounts told of visionary experiences with Satan and Christ, Harris once reporting that Christ had been poised on a roof beam.”
Among other fantastic claims. There's a lot of crazy stuff in that link. And this wasn't the Borderers in Appalachia--Joseph Smith's ancestors were definitely Puritan and Mormonism began in upstate New York.
Safety is expensive. Car seats, climbing harnesses, etc. If something has to be done, and you're poor, then you'll just have to do it in the unsafe way. How many Darwin Awards went to hillbillies using guns for things they shouldn't have?
Overall I don't see a good reason to believe that these are problems inherent to a particular ethnicity of people rather than contingent on education, wealth, and possibly culture.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
What if the reverse is true, and covid has so-far unknown long-term effects, but boosters greatly diminish them, so that the unvaxxed are 25% more likely to do? Purely hypothetically, of course. What would the public's response be, and what would be the just punishment for people who said vaccines didn't work and COVID is a nothingburger?
Secure Signals is applying the standards of a modern criminal investigation rather than of history. In particular, the level of evidence that is required to convict someone. A person who goes missing under suspicious circumstances is sufficient to consider the possibility of homicide, and if you do have a body, you can absolutely say that a murder likely took place even if you can't prove the specific sequence of events leading to it to the standard that a court would require in order to convict a suspect.
In contrast, in the study of history, we often are required to use slim evidence in order to conclude anything at all, and the further you go back, the less evidence. For example, I've read that Hannibal is not referenced by any primary source, nor by any known source at all until at least several decades after he died. (This is sometimes given as a contrast to Jesus, for whom we have several different records within a few decades of death, by people who allegedly knew him personally, which is fairly unheard of for a regular person from 2000 years ago, and so by historical standards, it is considered quite likely that a historical Jesus did exist. You can object to this standard--but then you should probably be rejecting everything we allegedly know about history prior to the year 2000 or so, rather than quibbling over the details of one particular event).
For example, they write:
The Holocaust is the only controversy where you can just list a name, Date of Birth, "some sort of police document" and then claim that she was murdered without any factual basis.
This is probably more evidence than we have for the existence of victims of most historical atrocities, including the Holodomor, Rwandan Armenian Genocide (not sure how I made that mistake), Rape of Nanking, the Belgian Congo, deaths of slaves in the Western Hemisphere, murder and invasion of Native Americans, Gengis Khan's pillaging, etc. Maybe they think we shouldn't believe any of those happened either, but it certainly is not the case that the Holocaust is being held to unusual standards.
I think this is a great instance where Bayesian reasoning is helpful: If the Holocaust happened pretty much as claimed by most historians, then what evidence would you expect to still exist and have been found? Would you expect lots of detailed records to have ever existed for most people in that time period? Would you expect them to survive the war? On the flip side, if it didn't happen, would you expect any of the evidence that faul_sname points out in his comments? Standards for scientific journals or criminal trials exist for a reason, but that doesn't mean that those standards have to apply to every question.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
There is definitely a legal difference in actively provoking a fight. And if there isn't, there should be. Counter-protesting is protected speech. Speech isn't really protected if doing so negates your basic rights.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Intelligence is helpful, it just isn't sufficient. African kingdoms have been prosperous before (at least in a similar way to other old civilizations, which is to say, they had rich rulers and impressive art, even if the average person's life sucked). But building truly prosperous societies, in the sense of benefiting a large portion of the people, is incredibly difficult. What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace--is probably closer to many ancient societies that we now glorify as being important steps on the road to civilization, than the latter are to what we have today.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
What is the solution to all this? Disapproving of homosexuality doesn't seem to work. Disapproving of all sex doesn't seem to work. The kinds of protections that need to be put in place to keep kids from ever being in positions of risk undermine youth mentorship, they force kids to lean purely on increasingly disjointed and "mixed" family lives when they have no male leadership outside the family. I grew up with older male role models all around me, from Scoutmasters and Priests to coworkers and bosses, in addition to my father. How would I have grown up if I had been isolated from those men by barriers of propriety, and if like so many boys I grew up without a father?
I went through training for this when I worked for the Scouts. If you even had the opportunity to commit abuse, you had already broken most of the rules we learned, which for the most part seemed pretty reasonable to me and I don't think would prevent any mentorship if followed.
Does any organized group avoid child sex scandals over the long term?
No, because as your list of examples indicates, the group itself has basically nothing to do with it, except around some details. I won't pretend to be a mind reader and say why people sexually abuse children, except that, as the saying goes, "power corrupts." (Some) people will do whatever they feel like if they think they'll get away with it. Spend all your free time thinking of a justification to yourself, and you'll find one. Tell yourself enough times "how bad can it be?" and you'll start to believe it. Ideology is irrelevant, just like communist leaders often direct much consumption to themselves.
Also don't forget that caring about power, and about your own position, will always be an advantage over people who are actually selfless when it comes to taking power. Narcissists, sociopaths, and the generally power-hungry are willing and able to lie, to pretend, to work themselves into positions of trust and authority. People are willing to cover for their friends, or to maintain their own power, or for many other reasons. Again, ideology is irrelevant; in some sense, this is just one particular instantiation of "who watches the watchers?" You could also ask why some CEOs steal from their company, or why some politicians take bribes to favor one group over another, or why police abuse their authority and then cover for each other. Has anyone solved this problem?
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
My understanding is that Robber's Cave involved a lot of manipulation by the experimenters to get the boys to behave one way, and that by changing the circumstances they were able to get them all to work together again. "Fake" is an exaggeration, but the standard interpretation of the results may not be correct. E.g. https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html mentions this.
I'm less familiar with the Milligan experiment, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity indicates that the reported data may be inaccurate or missing key information. The section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replications_and_variations indicates that the results could be highly dependent on situation.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
On one hand, this is a nothingburger. On the other, I might be sheltered but it does surprise me when people in positions of seniority, especially Europeans, reveal such base, zoological prejudice, grounded more in axiomatic disgust than in any moral outrage about population replacement, decay of trust, death of the national Logos or whatever.
I suspect this is actually how pretty much all cases of xenophobia throughout the world, and throughout history, operate(d). It never actually mattered who the outgroup was, or what their real behavior was, or even if they had personal spaceships while you lived in a cave. That just means they were crass materialists while you were in touch with the spirits of the world. It's this meme, but unironically, because the meme was always an accurate depiction of reality. It's only relatively recently, and only in some parts of the world, that things like empirical evidence and logical argument started to be considered as valuable, or that beliefs should flow from them rather than the other way around. And so people need to at least come up with a plausible-sounding explanation, grounded in some sort of logic rather than pure visceral tribalism, as to why the other actually is a civilizational threat this time.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
The best explanation I've seen for non-lawyers is probably from Massad Ayoob: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-j4PS_8R5IE&ab_channel=MrMuscleBilly
This video is long but quite thorough. The specifics of when deadly force is justified start around 27:00. He's being relatively conservative to try to cover as many legal jurisdictions as possible, but given that this is NY it's probably the most legally relevant anyway.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
How often do the working poor ever organize politically, and when they try, is it ever effective? It wasn't effective at stopping the destruction of many poor neighborhoods to build roads through American cities back in the 60s (when the upper class, with more money and political capital, organized, they were able to stop it in their neighborhoods).
Political movements are almost always drawn largely from the middle class, often being more educated than average. As far as I'm aware, this is true of groups from Occupy Wall Street to Islamist terrorists to the Bolsheviks to the far more milquetoast political parties of modern developed countries. You could probably make a political organization called "more stuff for poor people now" and it would be 90% college-educated middle-class or richer (99% in leadership).
what_a_maroon
8mo ago
It looks to me like nara is explicitly saying that you can make those claims, you just have to A) provide evidence, and B) frame it in a way that is less antagonistic, dismissive, and strawmanny.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
The moment you no longer have free trade with the entire US (and its trading partners) you find that what you thought was your strong economy was actually one cog in a giant machine that no longer has a reason to exist. The UT system? No longer attracting talent from around the world or students from other states. Those big tech offices that have been popping up all over Austin? They're all out. The energy industry in Houston? Some presence will remain but they know they're not hiring Americans from other states if it requires them moving to a new country. All those farmers and ranchers in the Western and Northern parts of the state? Now might have to pay extra to ship their goods to Colorado, New Mexico, etc.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
I would support getting rid of private profiles. It doesn't stop someone from keeping their own list of comments from users they might find convenient to bring up in a later argument, or just remembering. It does make it more difficult to track down comments that might be interesting or helpful.
Making alts to avoid bans seems like a no-brainer immediate long ban to me. Replying to yourself on alts also serves no purpose except to mislead other others; I would modhat and ban aggressively if you know for a fact this is happening.
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
There's a rule on the sidebar, "proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." (emphasis mine). I think this rule is a great idea, as it supersedes meandering arguments about burden of proof that would otherwise consist of "no you" back and forth. It also encourages users to, well, do as it says, and provide evidence for things! But, that's only if the rule is enforced. This might be the rule with the highest ratio of violators to modhat comments, in my opinion. Sometimes it feels like I must be crazy, and have to scroll down the sidebar to make sure it still exists, because it feels like no one else knows it's there. Either that, or my idea of what is proportional here is entirely out of calibration with everyone else. I think it would improve the forum greatly, and help cut down on low-effort vagueposting, to more vigorously enforce this rule.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
I have to agree with @Soriek, that "let each religious group live on its own" fits much more with my idea of the Enlightenment than "crush all religions." Also, free-market capitalism is way more of Enlightenment economics than the mish-mash of top down policies imposed during the French Revolution.
Also, was literacy really 70% over the whole continent? I was under the impression it was pretty high in Puritan and Quaker areas, and very low elsewhere.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Yes, at which point their language and culture were brutally suppressed, and they were forcibly assimilated into the WASP culture of whiteness.
But what problems did this actually cause prior to 1914?
No need to wait, just look around you.
Ok, what am I looking at? Is it that the children of those immigrants from the 80s and earlier have started using American names and speaking English? Is it that these 3rd generation immigrants are more likely to describe themselves as American (also more data on language)? What? Or do you not actually have a justification for anything you've written, and are expecting me to just agree because something seems obvious to you?
still carry with them a dagger with which to plunge into the back of the nation that welcomes them
That's a completely wild sort of accusation to make. Do you have any evidence for such a strong claim?
what_a_maroon
8mo ago
Modern American meritocracy is bad because I see no reason why the child of two Brahmins deserves vastly more wealth and power than the child of two average Mayflower descendants just because the former is “more intelligent”.
You are making the same error that leftists do when they complain that not enough minorities are doctors or CEOs, qualifications be damned. It's not a question of "deserving power." It's a question of, "who is best for the job?" because whether important jobs are done well matters. As Scott once wrote:
The intuition behind meritocracy is this: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.
The Federal Reserve making good versus bad decisions can be the difference between an economic boom or a recession, and ten million workers getting raises or getting laid off. When you’ve got that much riding on a decision, you want the best decision-maker possible – that is, you want to choose the head of the Federal Reserve based on merit.
This has nothing to do with fairness, deserts, or anything else. If some rich parents pay for their unborn kid to have experimental gene therapy that makes him a superhumanly-brilliant economist, and it works, and through no credit of his own he becomes a superhumanly-brilliant economist – then I want that kid in charge of the Federal Reserve. And if you care about saving ten million people’s jobs, you do too.
Now, obviously, IQ is not the only factor that determines if someone is going to be good at such a job. And I would greatly like to separate/reduce power over other people from as many positions as possible, even if what they do is important, because the existence of the "ruling class" is the problem, not the details of who is in it. This is relatively easy for surgeons; less so for the chairman of the Fed. But the only way for the Fed not to have power is not to have a centralized monetary system, and similarly the only way for a politician not to have power is to have as small and weak a government as possible. And favoring "Mayflower descendants" over 1st generation immigrants accomplishes, in my view, pretty much nothing on either front. What if we flip your example; do Mayflower descendants deserve more wealth and power just because their ancestors from 400 years ago fled England?
In my mind, in support of this claim: https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/yjbefg/oc_how_harvard_admissions_rates_asian_american/
When looking at alumni interviews, which actually meet the applicant, Asian applicants do better overall and pretty much identical on "likability, courage, kindness." Asians only do worse when ranked by the committee that doesn't meet the applicant.
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