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Notes -
I think that this would not work. (Or technically, it would work in that it would make a maximally persuasive argument, but "maximally" still isn't "very".)
This falls under a class of arguments which goes "everyone who is wrong says similar-sounding things to everyone who is right, so you can't say that the other people are wrong and you're right". To use an example I used elsewhere, you can say "all humans are capable of enormous evil, if you were in Hitler's situation, you'd probably do evil too". It sounds plausible--a lot of people who don't do evil might do evil if they could get away with it--and it's impossible for me to disprove by observing that you're wrong about me.
But on the other hand, I am not in a position to do evil like Hitler, but I am in a position to do evil like Cade Metz. And I haven't.
The claim that I'd be like X in X's position isn't based on actually analyzing my personality, it's based on carefully setting up the claim so that it's hard to falsify, based on the fact that everyone will deny the claim whether it's true or not, and then doing a leap from that to "well, surely your denial means nothing".
I don't think such an oracle would work on me, for the same reason I don't think I'd be like Hitler in Hitler's position--I know myself better than you, and "everyone would deny this, so you are indistinguishable from the other denials" isn't actually good reasoning.
If an oracle would make the maximally honest, persuasive, verifiable argument to me that is either for or against homeopathy, and it picked pro-homeopathy, its argument would fail to convince me--for reasons related to there not being any good arguments for homeopathy. You may say all you want "a homeopathy believer could say the EXACT SAME THING about the other side", but it doesn't make me and him similar.
Ah, sorry, underspecified the thought experiment. The goal for the 'almost half' is to show that some people aren't persuaded or reseated in their positions. In the case of the oracle being asked about homeopathy and picking a pro-homeopathy side, it would be genuinely limited to incredibly weak arguments because no stronger honest ones exist, and a petitioner would only be confronted with a slightly clearly idea of what 'water memory' is supposed to be, and at most a slight 'isn't it weird' evidence that didn't have medical ramifications.
Similarly, the oracle can't persuade a homeopathy advocate who commits by having himself deafened before asking the question.
But those are a bit of a waste of a question. At best, you'd now be able to tell yourself you can out-think the oracle, or have slightly better arguments for a position you reasonably believe is already extremely strong. In these cases, you have no benefit to asking the question.
The thought experiment is more for questions in the middle, where you might have some confidence, but there are plausible arguments on each side. I don't, personally, like gun control, but there are sane arguments in its favor. If I asked this thought experiment's oracle, it could blast me with the most persuasive form of every verifiable argument for or against the policy. I might plausibly not comply, because there are underlying values assessments. Not optimistic -- I've changed my mind on this topic before -- but I'll recognize it as a possibility for the sake of the thought experiment.
The question is whether I should ask. The oracle is only providing information, and it's even information I can verify, so from that perspective it's totally beneficial. But it's also incredibly biased information, provided by something built to be as persuasive with that biased information as possible, and it demonstratably does change the beliefs of many people who speak to it and get a counterargument, or reduce the ability to doubt for many who it reinforces.
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Homeopathy is a stupid example for two reasons:
It has no moral valence and so whether or not to believe in homeopathy is a purely empirical claim. Take something instead like abortion. Under what conditions we should allow abortions is much more of a claim about our underlying axiomatic systems. It seems quite obvious that exposure to different media/arguments can drastically change the typical person's views on abortion, and even for the particularly strong willed/thoughtful will nudge the person's opinion.
Up-to-lizardman-constant, no one believes in the "strong homeopathy hypothesis" that diluting chemicals with water makes them more powerful. But there are many "weaker homeopathy hypotheses" that I'll bet I can convince you of: Consider your typical hypocondriac that goes to a doctors office and always demands getting some sort of medication. This person will experience lots of negative side effects of medication. Their health will be meaningfully improved by becoming convinced that homeopathic medicine works and taking those "medications" instead of actual prescription medications. One type of maximally persuasive argument about homeopathy would argue for a weaker hypothesis like this, but you could just state that this isn't actually arguing for homeopathy, and so is axiomatically not the maximally persuasive argument.
Fine, change the example to young earth creationism. 37% of the US population believes in it. Yet I claim that a maximally persuasive argument about it would not convince me.
For that matter, it also counts as having a moral valence.
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This is correct so far as it goes, but I reject the implication that "isn't actually arguing for homeopathy" is some sort of minor quibble which doesn't affect the point.
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I'm kind of surprised that nobody mentioned Brooke Shields.
Yeah, there's a small array of that type of incident. While Shields's mother put her into sketchy stuff disturbingly far under the age range of Lords, by the time of the infamous 'nothing comes between me and my jeans' ad, she was 15 and... it seems like it was just social conservatives and some second wave feminists who even found it noteworthy? And that's only got press coverage because it could show up as a surprise in a magazine ad; far more explicit content was just getting commercial review as a product. She ended up in a lengthy court battle started when she was 16, trying to keep photos from six years before out of a Playboy Press publication. What the hell.
Which would be awkward enough if she were the only case, but nope.
There's a joke about the past being a foreign country, but it's weird to see how recently things can be so foreign. You hear about one-pants families in pre-1992 China (caveat: not sure I believe them, even as extreme outliers) or actually look at the Shakespeare-era Romeo and Juliet age ranges and shake them off as a distant. Then you look at this stuff and see 2003 in the United Kingdom or Brookes's 1980 filmography, and that's not so distant.
And then there's the broader Blue Is The Warmest Color problem, so we don't really object to the idea, so much as what's downstream of it. But then you start to see the reasons, and it's not exactly an arbitrary division.
I dunno. I don't really like thinking about this topic, so I really don't want to turn it into my 'beat'. But it's also probably important as to how we understand the world's norms, and about how new generations form romantic relationships, and there are recent court cases touching on its intersection with law and policy.
Can you please elaborate on these? I don't quite understand the references.
It does seem to me that no other group is even bringing up this bygone phenomenon anymore, and social conservatives do it to a much lesser extent than third/fourth-wave feminists whose attitude towards the Sexual Revolution and its consequences are mixed, to say the least, and are happy to dig up any example that counts in their worldview as the victimization of girls and young women by sleazebag older males in the name of sexual liberation and free love.
From a leftist point of view in general, on the other hand, the obvious problem with this issue is that the sexualization of both male and female children and adolescents that did take place after 1968 or so was only ever supported ideologically by liberal leftists, and it appears that their tribe eventually decid
For the UK: until 2003, the United Kingdom's of majority for the purpose of producing or featuring in pornography was 16, sometimes including topless sixteen-year-old girls being included in regular tabloid newspapers. It was only changed to 18 as a side component to a much larger bill. It's just weird to think that, well after Eternal September, this line wasn't some universal standard even just from the US to the UK.
Blue Is The Warmest Color is a French coming-of-age story, originally a comic and eventually turned into a well-recognized live-action film. It also features lesbian sex between an 'college student' and a 15-year-old. I haven't watched it, so I can't tell you what the protagonist's age is during the full-frontal six minute sex scene in the film version, but the story's pretty clear that they start hooking up while the protagonist is an early high school equivalent. It's mostly noteworthy because it received a pretty mainstream coverage and applause.
The general paradox applies more broadly: any coming of age story recognizing the initiation of sexual desire has to straddle the simultaneous recognition that most people start having it happen at teenage age ranges, and actually presenting it as happening at those age ranges can be a felony. Like, in reality, no, the law's never enforced that way, and probably can't be prosecuted in the United States. But also in practice, yes, because if you try to do it payment processors will treat it as illegal activity, most vendors won't accept it because it's illegal, and in most social environments it's worse than untreated leprosy. Unless they don't react that way, in which case it can be lauded by mainstream publications.
Shield's own The Blue Lagoon, 1980, is a heterosexual version. Even in written form, see the infamous underage orgy scene in Stephen King's It or various literary fiction, it's something we just accept. While not anywhere near as explicit, see Holden Caufield can hire a prostitute at the age of 16, the prostitute herself can be 16 and not new to the work, and it's assigned reading that most teachers just gloss over. Or for an extreme version, the various outstanding support of Harry Potter fanfic as a route for self-discovery that was extremely popular back before the author made her stance of transgender stuff public, and had (and has) an staggering amount of stuff that I hope you have good blocklists for.
You can avoid the paradox -- a lot of early furry fandom works handled it by having their characters wait until college to have their sexual awakening, leading to the establishment of the Off I Go To Gay Furry College genre; others by carefully not mentioning the age of their characters at all -- but this typically results or requires characters that have an unhealthy relationship with their sexuality at the start of the story, and kinda dodges the matter rather than resolving it.
I think that explains stuff like the Breendoggle being so heavily buried - even today, Marion Zimmer Bradley's stocked in stores that wouldn't consider keeping a monster like Orson Scott Card and be very cautious about Piers Anthony - but there's a pretty large faction of Red Tribers that do recognize 16-17 age sexuality as something that happens and is acceptable within their local cultural expectations. You just don't see many Borderer norms discussed as meaningful outside of their own environment.
Oh, so exactly like real life then.
So basically, the culture that takes a more complimentary posture towards men- in contrast to the one that's built upon
maximal exploitation"minimizing men's evil desires"- has a healthier and more constructive picture of how sexuality works.Perhaps moving in that direction is superior to moving in the opposite direction- but of course, any hint of that would mean more stuff for your blocklists. The amount of un-consensual and un-good in the world would increase.
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I'm not @gattsuru, but I assume the reference to the UK is the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which overhauled their consent structure. It kept the age of general consent at 16, but with penalties for authority figures having sexual contact with under-18s, and established strict liability for such contact with under-13s. But most of the news coverage seems to have been focused on the "equalizing" effect it had on heterosexual versus homosexual contact (previously, the "age of consent" was different in part based on sexuality).
This is presumably related to the movie Blue is the Warmest Color, which portrays a lesbian relationship beginning between a 15-year-old and a woman in her early 20s.
The cultural correlations between homosexual conduct and child abuse are sufficiently strong that even in the mid-20th century it was common to use the word "pederast" to describe a gay man as such. There are various reasons for the perceived correlations, and the "gay rights" movement has worked hard to disentangle the concepts in public perception, which is probably one reason why the Sexual Offences Act was seen as so important at the time. But at the same time, a lot of really popular LGBT media continues to positively portray a variety of statutorily problematic (i.e., ephebophile-not-pedophile) relationships.
As opposed to the 21st, where the cultural correlations between heterosexual conduct and child abuse are sufficiently strong that it's common to use the word "pedophile" to describe a straight man as such.
It's still that way. It's normal for all sexualities that are outside the sphere of concern for feminists (who worked very hard for the above swap), and infinite for the one inside of it. (On paper, the laws are the same; in practice, courts are functionally mandated to treat retroactive revocation of consent as legitimate and still hold men who are statutorily raped responsible for any resulting child, so we see it only ever privileges women.)
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Thank you for the AACQ, everyone!
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@Tanista “it doesn’t matter what immigrants think……various pro social things if they are forced to by the populace”
I feel like this is wrong. I guess you can somewhat force them to learn to say American values but it’s probably impossible for them to adopt American culture in the inner monologue.
Most here I think would accept an HBD argument that evolution doesn’t stop at the neck down. And things like ability to do algebra in your head have significant differences. But I also believe evolution doesn’t stop at your ability to be a human calculator in your head but have significant personality trait differences.
For example the Japanese seem to be very pro-social in a lot of ways. And they are largely smart so many would think they would be ideal immigrants. But the Japanese also seem to have a personality trait that is very conformists. When the leader says Japanese now do things “X” way the whole society seems to instantly become super “X”. It’s why they could be a closed society then within a generation open to the world and become a global power quickly. It’s in their long hour work culture. It’s why they could blow the biggest real estate bubble the world has ever seen. It’s why when they did deflation they did it very well after the big inflation bubble. It’s seems like when Japanese society decides to do a thing they do it extremely well.
Supposedly this has something to do with growing rice and rice growing versus European agriculture required a lot more conformity. Hence this personality trait is very strong in Asians. And why many Asian 20 something’s took to woke very quickly when it became the dominant societal power.
Americans are not this. We traditionally have a big contrarian and rebellious streak. Genetically I came across something called the Wanderlust gene and you can find it at high rates in Americans of European descent versus the population groups they came from in Europe. In the past going to America was a big trip. Crazy for true Heritage Americans and basically guaranteed to be a one way trip for the economic means of most of them. For the Ellis Island wave it was still a huge step. For modern immigrants it’s basically trivial and can be reversed with a 1k flight. There would still be some selection for this personality trait but far less.
If culture has a hereditary basis then cultural assimilation isn’t going to happen. I am assuming culture is a combination of innate personality + your art/constutition/great works etc.
The one conclusion I’ve had from this is that some of the early waves of Indians seem to have 100% assimilated and the filters we had on Indian immigration then were perfect. Nikki Haley’s kids are barely distinguishable from an old money Southern Boy. Indians are largely hated today as immigrants and I have no idea on them as the filters and ease to get in were relaxed.
Personality I believe has a genetic component. And if it’s genetic then assimilation isn’t just forcing people to learn your memes and words.
Do I believe that Japanese Americans and Somali Americans and Heritage American are going to become behaviorally identical or even broadly the same within America? No. Do I think a selective immigration system (it's more selective for some than others) can pick people who would be much closer to some tolerably American orientation? Yes.
In this particular case we're talking about a certain sort of ideological hostility towards the legacy population and culture and this is strongly encouraged by a certain faction within these countries. I can see a world where Somalis continue to underperform (as they do elsewhere) but someone like Ilhan Omar wouldn't dare go on TV and parrot the talking points she does cause the populace just wouldn't stand for it.
There are people who just hate the kaffir for sure, but a lot of people are essentially striving conformists who are taught that this is the appropriate stance to take towards America, that essentially all brown migrants should behave as if they have the same right to ambivalence about the national project as the Foundational Black Americans, as Tariq Nasheed calls them. Maybe certain people would be tribal in any context, but there is a world where even rational tribalistic impulses would suggest you shut the fuck up about the plan to dissolve the old status quo and beat your racial enemies and be more American than the Americans.
That is not some given. That is not a fact of life. It's a product of a national divorce between red and blue legacy Americans, with the children being told they can pick a side.
The degree to which stopping this makes people Americans in their hearts is debatable because I just don't know how to quantify that from your post (one could argue that many whites are not American in their desire for socialism and welfare). I think it would certainly be an improvement.
But why? What’s in it for me?
You are right red and blue tribe are not united enough to even try forced assimilation. I still think it would often fail due to personality differences.
Every time we do mass migration in the US we see massive outmigration of the native population from desirable locations. Many call this white flight. We now have zero urban environments in the US for middle class natives.
When the great migration occurred it eventually led to white flight thru out all of the rust belt cities. They left because the schools collapsed and their kids were being bullied in their communities. Crime rose. Which led to the birth of the suburbs and policy to keep land values expensive.
Recently LA and NYC have seen a new wave of white flight. Sure we can say this is due to blue tribe governance making housing and taxes unaffordable for the middle class. Regardless, immigration came to these cities and politically governance changed. I am personally a victim of the crime to white flight thing. It sucks. But not as much as staying and waking up to police marking bullets in the morning. Most of the people fleeing NY and Cali do not share my politics. They just left because the areas got worse and the financial mature sense to leave.
And you talk about the red tribe-blue tribe divorce. In reality with only the white vote we would have the power to do forced assimilation. I saw data that Trump would still win the election if only white females voted. But that’s not our electorate anymore. But I will emphasize I don’t believe forced assimilation would work due to genetic personality differences.
I understand why immigrants want to come here. I don’t hate them. It just makes my life worse.
So I will asks you what is in it for me?
You don't have to take migrants at all. I don't think there's anything immoral about being Japan. Maybe things would be a bit slower (though recent events in Canada and UK have proven problematic for the Max Immigration == Growth thesis so there're clearly diminishing returns) but that's a tradeoff a reasonable person can prefer. Practically, I don't think it's likely to happen but you can want that.
Even if you did close down the borders now though, something has to be done to digest the large numbers that have already been taken.
A lot of the pro-immigration people act like it is a moral thing so I respect that you don’t think it’s moral.
I guess I’m an urbanist. Which is sort of a blue tribe personality trait. Demographically and where I grew up I would be predicted to be very red tribe but my preferences are very blue tribe.-
I do think one of the strongest arguments against immigration is Americas inability to build middle class urban environments. Americas preference for building suburbs in my view is based on a strong preference not to live in diverse environments. I guess one could say blacks are special and prone to having unacceptable levels of violence and new immigrants are fine. That is kind of a justifiable view. But while we just had a huge immigration wave our biggest cities didn’t build more housing and make it work but instead had out migration of natives. So my opinion is if blue tribe wants me to accept mass migration then they need to show me they can run a multicultural city that doesn’t result in mass out migration of natives.
A lot of my anti-immigration views can boil down why doesn’t America have cities. Because I like living in cities.
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In theory, what's in it for you is that each immigrant that can support himself is producing at least as much as he takes, and therefore making you richer.
In practice, when a country gets dysfunctional enough (making it illegal to build new housing means that all productivity gains end up being stolen by landlords, lack of law and orders means the negative externalities of criminal immigrants can easily overwhelm the positive good created by law-abiding immigrants, the welfare state means that immigrants don't actually need to produce more than they take in order to support themselves, etc.) this doesn't hold.
Well, there are immigrants and then there are immigrants. Europe, which was almost completely white, and whose third-world immigration consists mostly of African and Middle Eastern Muslims, has seen its quality of life degrade significantly. America, which already had a ridiculously criminal ethnic underclass, and whose third-world immigration has consisted mostly of comparatively well-behaved Latinos, less so.
Never forget that white flight to the suburbs was the result of desegregation of the native black underclass, not Hispanic immigration from Latin America. If anything, Latinos help keep blacks in check, because we do not have an ounce of white guilt (see George Zimmerman).
I live in Miami, and I still remember how surreal it was when blacks attacked the Bayside Marketplace during the George Floyd riots. Some of my earliest memories of America are of shopping there with my father and sister.
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What am I missing here? Like, I disagree with a lot of your examples, but even if I accepted them at face value, what you’re saying doesn’t follow. If immigrants could assimilate at some point in the past, they can do it again. If they did it when American culture was less dominant and less accomplished, they can do it now.
Usually this expression goes the other way.
No argument here. Personality variance is crazy high even if you ignore societal effects.
Sure, I guess. What makes that genetic and not, well, social? I think society is usually the more mutable.
I think it’s also dumb to lump all Asians together. Look at this study on rice vs. wheat. It was conducted entirely between different regions of China!
Again: sure. Pioneer spirit, etc. etc. How do you know it’s not societal? How do you distinguish between selection on genes and on memes?
I can’t say I’m familiar with the literature, and what I could find was largely woo for globetrotters. Are you saying there’s a gene which provides this huge selection opportunity? And that it varied enough within ethnicities to dominate factors like poverty or religion?
But why not? You have all these examples of groups who supposedly had crazy-strong hereditary culture. They’ve all more or less assimilated. Doesn’t this suggest the exact opposite?
I’m sorry but what groups did I claim successfully assimilated into America? I see I claimed a few Indians became American. S Africans I’m claiming were Americans before they came to America - both culturally and genetically. And actually more American than post Ellis Island Americans. Their Englishmen who left England. Musks/Thiel are ethnically Anglos. They are both more Heritage American than my Ellis Island Wave Heritage.
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My working model is that this selection effect was in constant operation from the dispersal of the Proto-Indo-Europeans - that the more peaceable and agreeable people would stay put, while the restless and rebellious segment would press further west - all the way until the closing of the American frontier in the 19th century. And now we're all trapped in here with each other, and we don't know how to manage.
What’s the closest thing to the new west today? Texas?
I honestly rate S Africans as the most American and in many ways more American than the current native population as pure Anglos who also left. Thiel/Musks easily fit in. I don’t think I would want mass migration from Europe today as we’ve likely already selected out the quintessential American personalities from their population; whatever was left likely mostly died out in the World Wars.
It will be interesting if posts Berlin Wall coming down slavics ever show that characteristics. We have some big winners in the Google founders but they don’t seem to have that same personality as the two big S Africans Thiel/Musks.
I don't think Americans (in the immigration case) would tolerate the 19th/20th-century-style policy you'd need, which is this, so that would almost certainly be bad.
Musk fits into the American civil religion very well; he is the most financially successful African-American in history. One imagines opposition to the kind of power he has to be the fault of mere racism.
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They're Ashkenazim, like the Playrix
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I think this niche is filled nowadays not by any specific place, but by nomadic lifestyles in their various incarnations - perpetual tourism, van life, digital nomads, passport bros, etc. But by its very nature this can only be done by isolated individuals and never as a population-level movement. And so, I would surmise, the selection process that began 6,000 years ago has now come to an end.
All of those routes seem like opting-out. Haha. It leads to a cheaper lifestyle but limits you to basically making money online. I do think those routes have some of the same characteristics but their limitations are also why I proposed move to Texas as the new frontier which obviously has its own limitations but also can fulfill career ambition.
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Wow! I didn't expect to make it on the list. After lurking here so long, it's a delight to actually have gotten there. Glad my background could be of some use.
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There really is such a diversity of AAQCs. I suppose that is evidence that the actively engaged audience here is less ideologically siloed than I thought based on the upvote/downvote evidence. I used to think this was quite the hallowed award, as it is often used as clemency for more provocative posts receiving warnings not bans. But my repeated inclusion, first for a banal comment on the purpose of liberalism, and now for a rambling diary entry on jury duty is making me reconsider it status. Not as a icon on sanctity but more an appreciation of the functional cogs of the forum, in keeping with its purpose.
Detailed analysis from a nonstandard view providing information not available to someone without your experience is pretty much a central case for an AAQC.
That or barely (but tastefully) contained rage.
Artfully contained, even!
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I remain baffled by which of my own posts people consider to be "quality". So far the only consistent property that I can find between them is length. It's a little embarrassing for me, because that usually means I haven't taken the time to tighten up the prose.
I'm consistently surprised when a comment gets AAQC'd. No idea what unites them.
I think I'm up to six now and it's really only one of those - about the Islamic relationship to the Bible and critical scholarship - would I have thought of as offering something insightful to posters that they wouldn't have already run into regularly on this site (helps that there aren't a lot of Muslims) and even then I was a bit dissatisfied with it and how anemic the sources were.
But then, it was a comment in response to a post that was also good enough to crosspost to substack so maybe that's why I was feeling a bit inadequate.
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I think people appreciate experience and expertise in AAQCs. Things that show a new insight or perspective get nominated, in order the whole community can update on them. Also, even if there are only 5 liberals, if they all nominate each other's work, the mods will approve them. AAQC isn't a popularity contest so more diverse thoughts get through.
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My first ones was like 9 sentences which isn't that long, but I do see the pattern you do. I'm straight up just a bad writer. I have found that other people can express the same concept more eloquently, more fluidly, and more expressively than I have ever been able to. I sometimes read comments under my post and go "shit why couldn't I say it like that"
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I got an notification that said I was mentioned in this post but I wasn't. Is it because I deleted a post that got nominated or just a bug?
Yes, it was a post you deleted. I didn't notice until I was tagging your account for the AAQC. I edited the list afterward, but of course the initial notification remained.
Interesting. I left that post up for like <5 minutes.
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Thanks for the last minute nomination! Just beat the bell! Was proud of this one, and seemed like it generated some good discussion!
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