what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
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.
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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
9mo 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
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
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
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
10mo 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
10mo 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
11mo ago
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
what_a_maroon
9mo 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?
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
It should matter, though. As @Rov_Scam pointed out in a previous thread on this topic, you really do not want to encourage people to be very loose with their standards when it comes to applying violence to another person. It certainly can be difficult to summon lots of sympathy for the average person making a disturbance on the train, but that's missing the point. The kind of person who will aggressively (aggressively as the opposite of "conservatively" here, not in the sense of being the aggressor necessarily) use deadly physical force will likely not limit themselves to people that you personally find distasteful. Offend them on the road by cutting them off? They might take it on themselves to play cop and run you off the road. Take part in a protest they disagree with? Maybe they'll start a fight. Get into an argument at a bar? They might leave to retrieve a weapon, or wait for you outside.
To be clear, I'm not accusing Penny of being this type of person. I have no basis on which to make that particular determination. He might have just made an error in judgement (or he could even have acted in the right--I think this is unlikely, given the witness statements I've read, which don't seem to actually include any actions that Neely took that would constitute a serious threat to human life, but they could be incomplete or wrong). But the use of violence by civilians against other civilians has to be based on high and objective standards, rather than how we feel about the people involved.
what_a_maroon
8mo ago
"This other hypothesis is wrong" and "my hypothesis is correct" are not the same thing. Many different hypotheses are plausible.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Since I was asked to elaborate: Just about every part of this comment is extremely low quality.
restraining
Excuse me? A 15 minute chokehold resulting in a dead person is "restraining"?
violent
This is not in evidence. Unless you mean his prior assault arrests, which were not known to anyone on the train and thus irrelevant.
drug-addled mentally-ill
Neither of these remotely justifies death.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Honestly, "trying to mislead foreign countries about what capabilities the US has" doesn't seem like a terrible explanation. It's certainly within the capability of the CIA to take whatever our most advanced technology is and recruit a few pilots and former spooks to exaggerate what they saw in front of Congress (or just lie). Maybe some of the Congresscritters are even in on it.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
That would be my guess as well. In addition, these likely reflect reports rather than any sort of confirmed illness (edit: I would guess coming from https://vaers.hhs.gov/). In attempting to make its point seem stronger, in my opinion, it actually makes it weaker: how could a single vaccine (not even a new idea, just a different way of making them) causes eye injuries (something the article itself admits is unusual for a vaccine), vascular disorders, skin and tissue, ears, respiratory, breast or reproductive... the list goes on. It also is clearly doing the thing of "Big! Numbers!" by pointing to the number of different categories, even though looking at the list a "category" may be extremely specific, such as differentiating "vaccination site pain" "...swelling" "...discomfort" and then repeating them all for "vaccination site joint X".
Oh yeah, and the author is also advertising their book, which looks like a very reasonable and dispassionate review of scientific evidence.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
In the US, each side pays their own legal bills. Pretty much every other developed country defaults to the loser paying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fees)
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Every society had such people and was confronted with such problems. Some of them were ruled by such people and it lead to their collapse. Great Britain exiled a bunch of them to Australia and Appalachia, or just executed them. Notably its crime rate remained pretty high by modern standards, because crime is more complicated than "just kill the bad people."
But we have to ask ourselves: how likely is such a nightmare scenario to become reality?
I can't put a number on that with any confidence, just like you can't put a number on your nightmare scenario. I can at least say for sure that multiple powerful countries have turned into that society in the past 100 years, they've committed (and continue to commit) terrible atrocities. I can also say that worries about overbearing government aren't totally one-sided: There's plenty of right-coded worry about tyrannical and controlling governments (just look at of the discourse around covid, masks, and vaccines, or more recently 15 minute cities).
“how many arrests does it take before we declare somebody scum and he loses his basically civil rights” has some answer that you would consider reasonable?
No number of arrests means that someone should lose all their civil rights. For one, as soon as you establish such a number, I think you immediately try to argue it down to be "1" or to "well they did something that isn't actually violent but is vaguely antisocial" because that's what is actually required for you to be satisfied. But also, why is one person being arrested 4,000 times? If it's because there's not actually any evidence they've committed a crime, then that sounds like the police are either incompetent or harassing the guy. If it's because he is convicted and then gets released, then that shouldn't be the case, but putting a convicted criminal in prison for longer does not require revoking civil rights.
Obviously it sucks to be victimized on the street with nothing you can do about it. It also sucks to be tackled and arrested by a power-mad cop with nothing you can do about it, or attacked on the street by a vigilante who got you confused for someone else. I's not like your (honestly, insane) idea of "execute them all" is a solution anyway, because if you could implement it you could more easily implement actually reasonable reforms.
This includes the line:
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.
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).
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