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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33042 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Was there a unique contribution that Jewish women made to feminism

Is "being a post-industrial society in pre-industrial times" not enough?

Post-industrial peoples tend womanist because there's no longer any biological advantage to being a man, and considering Jews tended to make (or be made) people who worked in occupations that we would recognize as the dominant components of post-industrial (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) economies.

So it would make sense that this sub-culture would have felt this influence early thus been a vanguard of it as the rest of the Western world "caught up". Interestingly, this also (to a degree) will erode their position simply because "success in a post-industrial environment" is no longer limited to Jews, though they still have 200 generations that selection pressure relative to the general population so it's probably going to take a while for their overrepresentation to end.

I would expect their contribution to be high, because jews are wealthy, disproportionately represented in the media industry and live in places where voices are heard (LA, NYC).

Antler estimates that two-thirds to three-quarters of the women in these collectives were Jewish.

It could be as high as 40% (while being 7% of the population) and I wouldn't bat an eye. But, at 66% there certainly was something about being Jewish that led to the numbers being so high.

If Jewish conspiracy theorists would quiet down for a bit, it would be really interesting to do good faith studies into why urban WASPs and secular Jews behave so differently. But I don't think there is any world in which such a modest proposal gets interpreted as anything but anti-semitic.

Was there a unique contribution that Jewish women made to feminism

Seems probable.

and if so, how would women's rights look today had there been minimal Jewish involvement?

Approximately identical.

When you’re done figuring that one out, let us know where themotte would be today without the involvement of jewish men. Presumably there would be even more of these boring questions hinting at nefarious jewish influence, but how is that even possible.

If there is anyone in the world that has the right to complain about Jewish women, it is Jewish men. For most of the world's masculines they are a folk tale told to scare impressionable youths but they (the Jews) have to live with and marry them. The closest thing in our reality to an actual monstergirl.

When I think of Eden Polani, Gal Gadot, and Bar Rafaeli, I don't think "monstergirl". Israeli girls are hot.

I think "monster girl" also usually has the connotation of "hot," so I don't know what crushedoranges is implying.

This is not intended as a dig against any of the named women but there is is nothing about being a monster that says one can't be hot. The black widow and femme fatale are tropes for a reason.

I don't know if this was a failed attempt at tongue-in-cheek humor or what, but if so, it failed abysmally.

"Jewish women are the worst" is about as low effort as a "boo outgroup" post gets.

Banned for a day. Don't post like this.

Most western intellectual movements have been disproportionately jewish, including fascism at one point.

The most parsimonious explanation is that they are a small enough group that any significant representation is over-representation, combined with (in the Ashkenazi wing of judaism) higher average IQ and disproportionate representation in intellectual pursuits. New political movements come out of a very specific demographic, upper-middle-class intellectuals who view their lack of power and authority as an indictment of society, hence the drive for change. Jews in the west are highly overrepresented in this class, and thus in most political movements.

They are also over-represented among conservative intellectuals, anarchy theorists, communists, anti-communists, dadaists, SocJus inquisitors, etc. Pretty much any intellectual fad popular with that demographic is going to be "disproportionately jewish".

What is the evidence that Jews were over-represented in the development of fascism?

That’s pretty interesting. However, I don’t think it proves that fascism at one point was disproportionately Jewish, as a majority of the leading intellectuals and writers of fascism were not Jewish in Italy. Unless you mean, “Jews were more likely to be interested in the fascist movement”, but if the topic is “leading figures/influencers”, I don’t think that is evidenced. Fascism as a movement was, going by writers and major thought leaders, almost exclusively non-Jewish.

Given that Jews make up a very small portion of the Italian population, they can be overrepresented without constituting a majority of the leading intellectuals and writers.

There another’s explanation, which is that Jews by the mere fact of always being a minority within a larger culture are often forced into seeing the wider culture in an outsider’s viewpoint. If you travel around, especially if you spend appreciable amounts of time immersed in another culture, you can kind of get a similar viewpoint. You can help but notice all the weird stuff those other people do that you don’t. Or weird things other people think that your people don’t. They aren’t raised to think of race the same way as whites do. Or women. Or poverty. So seeing a different perspective and perhaps not being attached to the dominant one let’s them poke holes in theories that others wouldn’t see.

I really think that the motte-and-bailey of many (often bad faith) questions like this is that "Jewish" is both a faith and several ethnicities.

Imagine if worship of Greek gods had survived to the present day--a religion of, say, 20 million, with half living in Greece but the other half in various diasporas around the world. In that hypothetical world, who is plausibly "Greek?"

Only the people who live in Greece? But, despite the ethnic cleansing of Turkey, presumably many Turkish people are ethnically Greek even today, at least arguably--it was only in the early 20th century that the purest of the Greeks were expelled. Besides, surely the Greek god worshippers would say "we're Greek too!" And what about people whose great-great-great-grandparents were Greek, and who still like to make pitas for lunch? Are they Greek, too? What if they insist that they are Greek? Also Greece has a long and storied intellectual tradition. The whole edifice of Western academia is literally named after an Athenian hero, because Plato's Academy was the Academy. Is academia "disproportionately Greek?"

In a way, the present day status of Greek versus Jewish (both ancient traditions and peoples!) is an interesting illustration of the costs and benefits of being cosmopolitan and culturally promiscuous, versus being insular and protectionist. Greece and Israel have similar populations today, both ethnicities have been subject to (differently executed, but nevertheless) centuries of subjugation, exile, and ethnic cleansing. Greek philosophy has arguably conquered the world; they literally invented formal logic, which no other culture ever independently accomplished, and laid the foundations of all modern sciences, including social sciences like politics and psychology.

(Indeed, Ashkenazi Jews--the Jewish ethnicity most often associated in popular perception with disproportionate intellectual prowess--are the Jews whose ancestry comes predominantly from southern Europe!)

And yet there are no grand conspiracy theories concerning Greek influence (though I admit I have never been to Turkey, maybe they have such things there?). Greek people in America are just treated as "white" people--even if they, as southern Europeans with noticeable genetic overlap across the Mediterranean, are suspicious about that classification! Meanwhile Jews of plainly and overwhelmingly European descent are often given a pass for claiming to not be white. That insularity and ethnic conservatism comes with a price (in particular, the kooks who allow Jews to live rent-free in their heads) but also with clear benefits.

(This same pattern can be observed about American culture in the era of mass media. Cultural differences, including linguistic accents, do continue to exist in the U.S., but American culture has become surprisingly homogeneous, historically speaking, given the size and population of our country--and much of the world has been caught in that phenomenon through mass media, as evidenced by e.g. people in the U.K. and (especially) Ireland participating in bizarre "Black Lives Matter" protests. Cultural "assimilation" or "integration" are interesting topics to me, I guess is what I'm saying here.)

Anyway, my main point is just that "disproportionately Jewish" is an easy target to hit in part because "Jewish" sounds to most people like a group with clear boundaries, but in fact it definitely isn't. It's a historical accident that they get any attention at all; Christianity started as a sect of Judaism, too, so arguably Jewish ideas have also conquered much of the world. But it's not at all clear to me how a question like "what would feminism look like without Christian (or Greek) influence" helpfully informs us about, well, anything.

A while back, in response to the so frequent it's hardly noteworthy claim that Jews dominate banking, I did a survey of the executive teams of the largest banks in the US and found that, while there was overrepresentation, it wasn't anywhere close to enough to suggest that there was any disproportionate control. A certain category of poster on here attacked my methodology; since I normally can't just look up someone's ethnicity or religion, I had to use names as the basis of my analysis, and I was assured that a lot of Jews have names that aren't immediately obvious (and I admitted myself that married women complicated things). Yeah, I know. But that wasn't really the point—if you're making a claim that a certain group dominates a certain industry that I'd expect, on the low end, plausible evidence that at least 40% of the people involved are members of that group. I thought I used liberal criteria, but even if I missed half of the Jews in the banking industry it would still be a long way from 40%.

I noticed something similar on whatever TheDonald is calling itself now during the height of the FTX debacle where there seemed to be agreement that Caroline Ellison was definitely Jewish. Ellison is not a Jewish name, and she was raised Catholic. But... someone noticed that her mother's maiden name is Fisher, and Fisher is a "typical Jewish name", and Judaism is matrilineal. Well, sort of. While I don't doubt that there are Jews named Fisher (or, more probably, Fischer), it's hardly dispositive. I've known several people named Fisher or Fischer and, to my knowledge, none of them were Jewish. I've also known people named Diamond, Gross, Stein, and Schwartz who definitely weren't Jewish. If you're going to claim that some industry is dominated by a particular group, the onus is on you to provide real evidence that that is in fact the case. And that's before we even start talking about what that's supposed to mean.

For anti-semites, Jews are a symbol. It doesn't matter if it's "a long way from 40 %"; they'll just say you missed the crypto-Jews. For those with more consistent concerns in the objective sphere, like fascists, it's just a stepping stone to saying that the majority can decide what proportion is too much.

as evidenced by e.g. people in the U.K. and (especially) Ireland participating in bizarre "Black Lives Matter" protests

While I agree that 'Black Lives Matter' makes little sense in a domestic context, protesting about American racial politics something the Irish left were doing decades ago, and it's no further from home than tagging along with the 'Free Palestine' (still a staple of Irish protests), 'Free Tibet' or 'End Apartheid' movements.

What's new is that while Israel, South Africa and Tibet are clearly foreign countries, Black Lives Matter has developed a cottage industry of finding racial injustic within Ireland. Their high points have been getting statues of Egyptian princesses removed a hotel because they mistakenly thought they were slave girls (the council later returned these statues to their plinths), protesting the shooting of a knife-wielding black man by police as if it were evidence of pervasive racism (given how scarce police shootings are this might be the first black man ever shot dead by police here), and calling for an end to the 'Direct Provision' system of processing refugees as the movement's Achilles heel is there not being many black people here in the first place.

It's a strange thing to look at. All of the infrastructure for making race an issue is ready to fire, the NGOs, the university professors and the street protesters, but with Ireland's immigrant population mostly consisting of Slavs (who don't really care about Irish politics and dream of going home) and well-paid Western Europeans whose only complaints are rent and petty crime, there is a severe shortage of discontented minorities. Give it a few years I guess.

They can’t just declare the travelers oppressed? Hispanics broadly not cooperating with left-wing socjus posturing doesn’t stop it over here, and it can’t exactly get dumber than posturing over the plight of mostly non extant black people in Ireland.

They can’t just declare the travelers oppressed?

You mean traveller gypsies? They have done that, but travellers are a very unsympathetic people and there's no European or American scale media/activism working in their favour to overcome that issue.

The spectacle of various European countries desperately trying to import enough disgruntled minorities to give them analogous race problems to the US so they can participate in the collective guilt has truly been incredible to watch.

The right sees it as a plan to import voters who will be reliably left, but I think it's even dumber than that. I think they literally have dysfunction-envy, and so desperately want to ape the US that they need a minority to oppress so they can hate themselves as much Americans do. How's a good self-hating Swede leftist supposed to denounce "socialist" Sweden as a right-wing racist hellhole if they don't have any other races there?

I live among Nordic leftists, and I can tell you with certainty that they legitimately don't believe that mass immigration comes with problems.

Also, Sweden does have a historically-oppressed minority group, the Sami.

How's a good self-hating Swede leftist supposed to denounce "socialist" Sweden as a right-wing racist hellhole if they don't have any other races there?

By reference to Sweden's past in supporting ("white-on-white") eugenics and WW2 era cooperation with Nazi Germany, as is traditional.

I've been active in left-wing politics for a long time, I know (at least at some level) people very high up locally, and there's no "plan to import voters" or "desperately ape the US" or anything like that. For most local leftists, the whole immigration issue is quite low on the list of concerns, and insofar there's a concern it's mostly about maintaining a certain immigration policy to comply with international human rights treaties (of course there's a lot of variation on how those are interpreted). If that immigration policy leads to many immigrants, so it goes; if it doesn't, so it goes, as well. The most important thing is not the number, it's the human rights treaty compliance.

Sounds like a cop-out to me, bypassing the argument entirely. The 'it's the law' defense. Is policy X or Y preferrable? Well, X is the law, I guess that settles it forever. Progressives turn into paragons of legalism all of a sudden.

That reminds of a discussion we're having in germany right now, about the closing of the last nuclear plants. The greens harp on about burocratic hurdles as a reason not to keep them open. Oh no, the plants would have to renew their license! The paperwork, the paperwork! Guess our hands are tied then. Let's just keep that terrible burden in mind when they ask for a policy change.

This isn't supposed to describe an "argument" or a "defense", it's obvious that it's not that good an argument against someone who doesn't share the underpinning ideological assumptions. It's supposed to describe the genuine reason why whatever immigration-related policies are advanced.

And it's not just that it's the law; it's the human rights treaty framework, something greater and larger than law, kind of a global constitution that underpins the entire global liberal world-system. The linchpin of civilization, if we were talking about people who think in terms like "civilization".

I'm not sure rightists completely understand just how large a role the global human rights treaty framework plays in modern European left-wing consciousness.

A text is not a genuine reason, though it may contain a reason. They used to point to the bible, now they have this. If they won’t give the true reason found in or around the text, but instead merely refer to its authority, they are avoiding debate. If I want a genuine justification for ‘murder is wrong’, a reply pointing to the law, the bible, or human rights misses the mark.

I'm not sure rightists completely understand just how large a role the global human rights treaty framework plays in modern European left-wing consciousness.

Perhaps, but if so, that is a failure of pedagogy and debate on the part of the left, of the kind described above. There are plenty of liberals on the right, including, believe it or not, people who like civilization.

I wish such disagreements were settled more often with ‘you have a more restrictive understanding of the right to asylum than I do’ instead of ‘you reject human rights’, but we’d need to actually discuss human rights, not use it as an applause/boo-light.

A heads-up: Yudkowsky will be talking AI with YouTube long-timer Ross Scott on the 3rd. This comes after Ross's last videochat with fans [warning: long, use the timestamps in one of the comments to skip around], where AI and Big Yud came up.

I expect that Ross will be able to wring some sort of explanation about AI risk out of Yudkowsky that will be palatable to the everyman. Ross has talked about things like Peak Oil before (here's an old, old video on the subject), so I think it will be interesting to see. I'll have to see if I can find out Ross's position on AI risk so far.

Yud should stop trying to convince the everyman. I’m not saying that no one should do that, just that Yud specifically should not bother with it. It’s not good for his mental health or morale to be dealing with people this dumb. It clearly disturbs him on an emotional level.

I recommend Ross' old Deus Ex review/retrospective where he discussed various conspiracy theories in detail.

Ross is well suited to these kinds of discussions. He's the best.

To be fair it is sort of cheating when you have a time machine.

Now this is a weird crossover I didn't expect. What's next, Angry Joe interviewing Nick Land?

...Holy shit, I kinda want that. I mean, I never cared for Angry Joe all that much, but still.

I admit this is surprising. I would've predicted the Butlerian Jihad movement deprioritizing Yud as a crank who may blurt out some risky political take, but he establishes himself more and more as the Rightful Caliph. Have Yuddites discovered a stash of SBF's lunch money to buy a bunch of podcasters, including some crypto has-beens looking for a new grift? Or is this simply a snowball effect, where Yud is becoming more credible and attractive the more he goes to podcasts?

On the other hand, this is all show for the plebs anyway; Policy people never lack for experts to cite. And «rationalists» can straight up lie to their audiences even about words of those experts.

I should accelerate my work on a dunk on Yudkowsky's whole paradigm, even though it honestly feels hopeless and pointless. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.

I admit this is surprising. I would've predicted the Butlerian Jihad movement deprioritizing Yud as a crank who may blurt out some risky political take, but he establishes himself more and more as the Rightful Caliph. Have Yuddites discovered a stash of SBF's lunch money to buy a bunch of podcasters, including some crypto has-beens looking for a new grift? Or is this simply a snowball effect, where Yud is becoming more credible and attractive the more he goes to podcasts?

Yud was right, Kulak was wrong. Way to get things done is from above, through influencing elites and aspiring elites, not through impressing normies with handsome looks and smart fashion, not through doomed direct action.

This is only the beginning. The Katechon pact is coming, hide your laptop.

Yud's message is aligned with the powers that be, so his voice will be magically amplified by the algorithm. The state is scrambling to ramp up their AI capabilities. They need the boot on any ambitious small companies in the form of a "six month pause". Yud thinks he's advocating for a less dangerous arms race, in reality he's just helping the most dangerous people catch up.

This makes sense if you consider that Yud takes Roko's Basilisk seriously. He's clearly realized this is his best contribution to its existence.

This makes sense if you consider that Yud takes Roko's Basilisk seriously. He's clearly realized this is his best contribution to its existence.

Well, how Big Yud reacted back then when Roko posted his idea on Less Wrong?

Called it wrong?

No, Yud went into full loud screaming mode.

https://basilisk.neocities.org/

I don't usually talk like this, but I'm going to make an exception for this case.

Listen to me very closely, you idiot.

YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.

and then put total ban on any further basilisk discussions on LW.

Not a reaction of someone who is not even slightly worried.

If big Y dissmissed this thing or just stayed silent, the whole idea would be forgotten in few days like other LW thought experiments. Streissand effect bites hard even if you are super genius.

Not a reaction of someone who is not even slightly worried.

Sure it is. Yudkowsky is exactly the sort of person who would be outraged at the idea of someone sharing what that person claims is a basilisk, regardless of whether he thinks the specific argument makes any sense. He is also exactly the sort of person who would approach internet moderation with hyper-abstract ideas like "anything which claims to be a basilisk should be censored like one" rather than in terms of PR.

Speaking or writing in a way where it's difficult to use your statements to smear you even after combing through decades of remarks is hard. It's why politicians use every question as a jumping off point to launch into prepared talking-points. Part of Yudkowsky's appeal is that he's a very talented writer who doesn't tend to do that, instead you get the weirdness of his actual thought-processes. When presented with Roko's dumb argument his thoughts were about "correct procedure to handle things claiming to be basilisks", rather than "since the argument claims it should be censored, censoring it could be used to argue I believe it, so I should focus on presenting minimum attack-surface against someone trying to smear me that way".

https://archive.is/nM0yJ

Again, I deleted that post not because I had decided that this thing probably presented a real hazard, but because I was afraid some unknown variant of it might, and because it seemed to me like the obvious General Procedure For Handling Things That Might Be Infohazards said you shouldn't post them to the Internet. If you look at the original SF story where the term "basilisk" was coined, it's about a mind-erasing image and the.... trolls, I guess, though the story predates modern trolling, who go around spraypainting the Basilisk on walls, using computer guidance so they don't know themselves what the Basilisk looks like, in hopes the Basilisk will erase some innocent mind, for the lulz. These people are the villains of the story. The good guys, of course, try to erase the Basilisk from the walls. Painting Basilisks on walls is a crap thing to do. Since there was no upside to being exposed to Roko's Basilisk, its probability of being true was irrelevant. And Roko himself had thought this was a thing that might actually work. So I yelled at Roko for violating basic sanity about infohazards for stupid reasons, and then deleted the post. He, by his own lights, had violated the obvious code for the ethical handling of infohazards, conditional on such things existing, and I was indignant about this.

Yud is a useful idiot. Not in the sense that he's stupid or even that his arguments are wrong: their truth or well-reasoned-ness is entirely besides the point. AI is clearly important, and people (including people with political power) are worried about it and the threat it poses to them. Amplifying a weird, neurotic extremist yelling on the sidelines about paperclips provides useful cover for more "restrained" control over AI: on one side is Yud, on the other is careless AI libertarians hellbent on either destroying civilization or making revenge porn of their exes, and in the middle are helpful folks like the FTC, EEOC, and CFPB who offer careful, educated policies to expand their power to protect the people from unlawful bias and other harmful outcomes.

Yud is a useful idiot.

What makes useful idiots useful is that they are not dumb, just clueless or naive. So probably good description of the non grifter portion of AI concerned people.

I don't think Yud is either, he is just optimised for maintaining his grift. I'm not even sure if he is aware what is happening, people usually aren't. In fact the more intelligent people are the more susceptible they seem to be to their own arguments.

People subconsciously drink their own coolaid and move goalposts around and use arguments as soldiers so they don't have to change. Its hilarious how someone so into "rationalism" could be such an antithesis of his stated goal.

Maybe it's just because I'm not in on the game enough, or that I'm getting bored, or that I'm a little too honest about being stupid, but I'm starting to get the same kind of vibes from these interviews as I get from listening to one too many interviews with 'science popularizers' and physicists talking about black holes and solar systems or whatever. At some point the endless stream of analogies, abstractions and hypothetical arguments just starts sounding like a 2 hour poem about math that I don't understand.

You can assure me it makes sense. You can explain to me how this new and exciting theory of the universe, that hinges entirely on mathematical assumptions, is like dumping a gallon of milk into a box of cereal before pouring it into the bowl, and I can maybe relate to that analogy because I know milk and cereal. But, again, at the end of the day I will never be able to relate that analogy to what is actually being talked about because all that's really there is theoretical math I don't understand.

These conversations seem to follow a similar but slightly different path of, there's no actual math, just assumptions being made about the future. The AI man says we are doomed if we continue. Here's a powerful analogy. Here's technobabble about code... Like, dude, you got me, OK? This appeals to my vanity for coffee table philosophical arguments and you are a credentialed person who sounds confident in your convictions. I guess we are doomed. Now, who is the next guest on Joe Rogan? Oh, science man is going to tell me about a super massive black hole that can eat the sun. Bro, did you know that a volcanic eruption in Yellowstone park could decimate the entire planet? This doctor was talking about anti-biotics and...

I don't want to come across as too belligerent, but all this stuff just seems to occupy the same slot of 'it feels important/novel to care'. I'm not going to pretend to understand or care any more than I would care about Yellowstone. I'll accept all the passionate believers telling me that they told me so when the inevitable mega-earthquakes happen.

But until then I'll just continue enjoying the memes that predate our inevitable apocalypse with the same urgency that the people worrying over AI show when enjoying yet another 4 hour interview, followed by days of more rigorous debate, over the ever encroaching extinction level threat that is AI.

1/2

You can explain to me how this new and exciting theory of the universe, that hinges entirely on mathematical assumptions, is like dumping a gallon of milk into a box of cereal before pouring it into the bowl, and I can maybe relate to that analogy because I know milk and cereal. But, again, at the end of the day I will never be able to relate that analogy to what is actually being talked about because all that's really there is theoretical math I don't understand.

Your broad impression is correct with one massive caveat: there's no there, there. It is about milk and cereal, and the pretense that the analogy simplifies some profound idea is a pose, it serves to belittle and bully you into meek acceptance of the conclusion which is not founded on some solid model applying to the bowl and the universe alike. Yud's opinions do not follow from math, he arrived at them before stumbling on convenient math, most other doomers don't even understand involved math, and none of this math says much of anything about AI we are likely to build.

It's important to realize, I think, that Yud's education is 75% Science Fiction from his dad's library and 25% Jewish lore in cheder he flunked out of. That's all he learned systematically in his life, I'm afraid; other than that he just skimmed Kahnemahn, Cialdini and so on, assorted pop-sci, and some math and physics and comp sci because he is, after all, pretty smart and inclined to play around with cute abstractions. But that's it. He never had to meet deadlines, he never worked empirically, he never applied any of the math he learned in a way that was regularized against some real-world benchmark, KPI or a mean professor. Bluntly, he's a fraud, a simulacrum, an impostor.

More charitably, he's a 43-year-old professional wunderkind whose self-perception hinges on continuing to play the part. He's similar to Yevgeny «Genius» «Maestro» Ponasenkov, a weird fat guy who LARPs as a pre-Revolutionary noble and a maverick historian (based). Colloquially these people are known as freaks and crackpots, and their best defense for the last two millenia is that Socrates was probably the same but he became Great; except he did not LARP as anyone else.

I know this dirty observation is not polite to make among Rationalists. I've talked to really smart and accomplished people who roll their eyes when I say this about Yud, who object «come on now, you're clowning yourself, the guy's some savant – hell, I've got a Ph.D in particle physics and won at the All-Russian Math Olympiad, and he's nobody but talks jargon like he understands it better than my peers» and I want to scream «you dumb defenseless quokka, do you realize that while you were grinding for that Olympiad he was grinding to give off signals of an epic awesome Sci-Fi character?! That for every bit of knowledge, he gets a hundredfold more credit than you, because he arranges it into a mask while you add to the pearl of your inner understanding? That the way Yud comes across is not a glimpse of his formidability but the whole of it? Can you not learn that we wordcels are born with dark magic at the tips of our tongues, magic you do not possess, magic that cannot remake nature but enslaves minds?»

Ahem.

Let's talk about one such analogy, actually the core analogy he uses: it's about human evolution and inclusive genetic fitness. AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities, 5th Jun '22:

Section B:

So why not train a giant stack of transformer layers on a dataset of agents doing nice things and not bad things, throw in the word 'corrigibility' somewhere, crank up that computing power, and get out an aligned AGI?

Section B.2:  Central difficulties of outer and inner alignment.

16.  Even if you train really hard on an exact loss function, that doesn't thereby create an explicit internal representation of the loss function inside an AI that then continues to pursue that exact loss function in distribution-shifted environments.  Humans don't explicitly pursue inclusive genetic fitness; outer optimization even on a very exact, very simple loss function doesn't produce inner optimization in that direction.  This happens in practice in real life, it is what happened in the only case we know about, and it seems to me that there are deep theoretical reasons to expect it to happen again: the first semi-outer-aligned solutions found, in the search ordering of a real-world bounded optimization process, are not inner-aligned solutions.  This is sufficient on its own, even ignoring many other items on this list, to trash entire categories of naive alignment proposals which assume that if you optimize a bunch on a loss function calculated using some simple concept, you get perfect inner alignment on that concept.

Point 16, Misalignment In The Only Precedent We Know About, is a big deal. There are 46 points in total, but it's a bit of a sham: many about AGI being smart, politics of «preventing other people from building an unaligned AGI», handwringing in 39-43, «multiple unaligned AGIs still bad», other padding. Pretty much every moving part depends on the core argument for AI being very likely to «learn wrong» i.e. acquire traits that unfold as hazardous out of (training) distribution, and the 16th corroborates all of such distributional reasoning in B.1 (10-15). 17-19, arguably more, expound on 16.

Accordingly, Yudkowsky cites it a lot and in slightly varied forms, e.g. on Bankless, 20th Feb 23:

we do not know how to get goals into a system. We can cause them to do a thing inside a distribution they were optimized over using gradient descent. But if you shift them outside of that distribution, I expect other weird things start happening. … GPT-7, there's probably a bunch of stuff in there too that desires to accurately model things like humans under a wide range of circumstances, but it's not exactly humans because ice cream didn't exist in the natural environment, the ancestral environment, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. There was nothing with that much sugar, salt, fat combined together as ice cream. We are not built to want ice cream. We were built to want strawberries, honey, a gazelle that you killed and cooked … but then ice cream comes along and it fits those taste buds better than anything that existed in the environment that we were optimized over.

On Fridman, 20th March '23:

You can nonetheless imagine that there is this hill climbing process, not like gradient descent, because gradient descent uses calculus, this is just using like, where are you? But still, hill climbing in both cases makes things something better and better over time, in steps, and natural selection was optimizing exclusively for this very simple, pure criterion of inclusive genetic fitness in a very complicated environment. We're doing a very wide range of things and solving a wide range of problems led to having more kids, and this got you humans which had no internal notion of inclusive genetic fitness until thousands of years later, when they were actually figuring out what had even happened, and no desire to, no explicit desire to increase inclusive genetic fitness. So from this important case study, we may infer the important fact that if you do a whole bunch of hill climbing on a very simple loss function, at the point where the system's capabilities start to generalize very widely, when it is in an intuitive sense becoming very capable and generalizing far outside the training distribution, we know that there is no general law saying that the system even internally represents, let alone tries to optimize the very simple loss function you are training it on.

(Distinguishing SGD from an evolutionary algorithm with the mention of «calculus» is a bit odd).

And on Twitter, April 24th 2023 :

…for example, hominid evolution falsifies any purported general law along the lines of "hill-climbing optimization for a loss function, to the point where that produces general intelligence, produces robust generalization of the intuitive 'meaning' of the loss function even as the system optimized becomes more intelligent". Humans were optimized purely for inclusive genetic fitness, and we ended up with no built-in internal psychological concept of what that is. When we got smarter, smart enough that condoms were a new option that didn't exist in the ancestral environment / training distribution, we started using condoms. Gradient descent isn't natural selection, but…

It's not just Yudkowsky these days but e.g. Evan Hubinger, AI safety research scientist at Anthropic, the premier alignment-concerned lab, in 2020.

And Yud's Youtube evangelist Rob Miles, Apr 21, 2023:

@ESYudkowsky I propose this as a clearer example to support "Humans are not trying to maximise inclusive genetic fitness even a little bit"

It definitely is the ultimate cause of our motivations, emotions, and values, my point is just that this fact is not sufficient for us to explicitly try to get it

2/2

Note that this evo-talk is nothing new. In 2007, Eliezer wrote Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers:

No human being with the deliberate goal of maximizing their alleles' inclusive genetic fitness, would ever eat a cookie unless they were starving. But individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers.

…This consequence is directly opposite the key regularity in the long chain of ancestral successes which caused the taste bud's shape. But, since overeating has only recently become a problem, no significant evolution (compressed regularity of ancestry) has further influenced the taste bud's shape.

…Smushing several of the concepts together, you could sort-of-say, "Modern humans do today what would have propagated our genes in a hunter-gatherer society, whether or not it helps our genes in a modern society."

The framing (and snack choice) has subtly changed: back then it was trivial that the «blind idiot god» (New Atheism was still fresh, too) does not optimize for anything and successfully aligns nothing. Back then, Eliezer pooh-poohed gradient descent as well. Now that it's at the heart of AI-as-practiced, evolution is a fellow hill-climbing algorithm that tries very hard to optimize on a loss function yet fails to induce generalized alignment.

I could go on but hopefully we can see that this is a major intuition pump.

It's a bad pump and Evolution is a bad analogy for AGI: inner alignment. Enter Quintin Pope, 13th Aug 2022.

One way people motivate extreme levels of concern about inner misalignment is to reference the fact that evolution failed to align humans to the objective of maximizing inclusive genetic fitness. … Evolution didn't directly optimize over our values. It optimized over our learning process and reward circuitry.

The relationship we want to make inferences about is: - "a particular AI's learning process + reward function + training environment -> the AI's learned values"

I think that "AI learning -> AI values" is much more similar to "human learning -> human values" than it is to "evolution -> human values". Steve Byrnes makes this case in much more detail in his post on the matter [23rd Mar 2021].

Evolution is a bi-level optimization process, with evolution optimizing over genes, and the genes specifying the human learning process, which then optimizes over human cognition. … SGD directly optimizes over an AI’s cognition, just as human within-lifetime learning directly optimizes over human cognition.

Or putting this in the «sharp left turn» frame:

within-lifetime learning happens much, much faster than evolution. Even if we conservatively say that brains do two updates per second, and that a generation is just 20 years long, that means a single person’s brain will perform ~1.2 billion updates per generation. … We don't train AIs via an outer optimizer over possible inner learning processes, where each inner learning process is initialized from scratch, then takes billions of inner learning steps before the outer optimization process takes one step, and then is deleted after the outer optimizer's single step. Such a bi-level training process would necessarily experience a sharp left turn once each inner learner became capable of building off the progress made by the previous inner learner. … However, this sharp left turn does not occur because the inner learning processes suddenly become much better / more foomy / more general in a handful of outer optimization steps.… In my frame, we've already figured out and applied the sharp left turn to our AI systems, in that we don't waste our compute on massive amounts of incredibly inefficient neural architecture search, hyperparameter tuning, or meta optimization.

Put another way: it is crucial that SGD optimizes policies themselves, and with smooth, high-density feedback from their performance on the objective function, while evolution random-walks over architectures and inductive biases of policies. An individual model is vastly more analogous to an individual human than to an evolving species, no matter on how many podcasts Yud says «hill climbing». Evolution in principle cannot be trusted to create policies that work robustly out of distribution: it can only search for local basins of optimality that are conditional on the distribution, outside of which adaptive behavior predicated on stupid evolved inductive biases does not get learned. This consideration makes the analogy based on both algorithms being «hill-climbing» deceptive, and regularized SGD inherently a stronger paradigm for OOD alignment.

But Yud keeps making it. When Quintin wrote a damning list of objections to Yud's position (using Bankless episode as a starting point), a month ago, he brought it up in more detail:

This is an argument [Yud] makes quite often, here and elsewhere, and I think it's completely wrong. I think that analogies to evolution tell us roughly nothing about the difficulty of alignment in machine learning.

… Moreover, robust alignment to IGF requires that you even have a concept of IGF in the first place. Ancestral humans never developed such a concept, so it was never useful for evolution to select for reward circuitry that would cause humans to form values around the IGF concept.

[Gradient descent] is different in that it directly optimizes over values / cognition, and that AIs will presumably have a conception of human values during training.

[Ice cream example] also illustrates the importance of thinking mechanistically, and not allegorically.

the reason humans like ice cream is because evolution created a learning process with hard-coded circuitry that assigns high rewards for eating foods like ice cream.

What does this mean for alignment? How do we prevent AIs from behaving badly as a result of a similar "misgeneralization"? What alignment insights does the fleshed-out mechanistic story of humans coming to like ice cream provide?

As far as I can tell, the answer is: don't reward your AIs for taking bad actions.

That's all it would take, because the mechanistic story above requires a specific step where the human eats ice cream and activates their reward circuits.

Compare, Yud'07: «Cognitive causes are ontologically distinct from evolutionary causes. They are made out of a different kind of stuff. Cognitive causes are made of neurons. Evolutionary causes are made of ancestors.» And «DNA constructs protein brains with reward signals that have a long-distance correlation to reproductive fitness, but a short-distance correlation to organism behavior… We, the handiwork of evolution, are as alien to evolution as our Maker is alien to us.»

So how did Yud'23 respond?

This is kinda long.  If I had time to engage with one part of this as a sample of whether it holds up to a counterresponse, what would be the strongest foot you could put forward?

Then he was pitched the evolution problem, and curtly answered the most trivial issue he could instead. «And that's it, I guess».

So the distinction of (what we in this DL era can understand as) learning policies and evolving inductive biases was recognized by Yud as early as in 2007; the concrete published-on-Lesswrong explanation why evolution is a bad analogy for AI training dates to 2021 at the latest; Quintin's analysis is 8+ months old; this hasn't had much effect on Yud's rhetoric about evolution being an important precedent supporting his pessimism, nor on the conviction of believers that his reasoning is sound.

It seems he's just anchored to the point, and strongly feels these issues are all nitpicks, and the argument should still work, one way or another, at least it proves that something-kinda-like-that is likely and therefore doom is still inevitable – even if evolution «does not use calculus», even if the category of «hill-climbing algorithms» is not informative. He barely glanced at what gradient descent does, and concluded that it's an optimization process, thus he's totally right.

People who try sniffing "nobody in alignment understands real AI engineering"... must have never worked in real AI engineering, to have no idea how few of the details matter to the macro arguments. … Or, of course, if they're real AI engineers themselves and do know all those technical details that are obviously not relevant - why, they must be lying, or self-deceiving so strongly that it amounts to other-deception, when they try that particular gambit for bullying and authority-assertion.

His arguments, on the level of pointing at something particular, are purely verbal, not even verbal math. When he uses specific technical terms, they don't necessarily correspond to the discussed issue, and often sound like buzzwords he vaguely associated with it. Sometimes he's demonstrably ignorant about their meaning. The Big Picture conclusion never changes.

Maybe it can't.

This is a sample from dunk on Yud that I drafted over 24 hours of pathological irritation recently. Overall it's pretty mean and unhinged and I'm planning to write something better soon.

Hope this helps.

Bad take, except that MAML also found no purchase, similar to other Levine's ideas.

He directly and accurately describes evolution and its difference from current approaches, but he's aware of a wide range or implementations of meta-learning. In the objections list he literally links to MAML::

I'm a lot more bullish on the current paradigm. People have tried lots and lots of approaches to getting good performance out of computers, including lots of "scary seeming" approaches such as:

1 Meta-learning over training processes. I.e., using gradient descent over learning curves, directly optimizing neural networks to learn more quickly.

2 Teaching neural networks to directly modify themselves by giving them edit access to their own weights.

3 Training learned optimizers - neural networks that learn to optimize other neural networks - and having those learned optimizers optimize themselves.

4 Using program search to find more efficient optimizers.

5 Using simulated evolution to find more efficient architectures.

6 Using efficient second-order corrections to gradient descent's approximate optimization process.

7 Tried applying biologically plausible optimization algorithms inspired by biological neurons to training neural networks.

8 Adding learned internal optimizers (different from the ones hypothesized in Risks from Learned Optimization) as neural network layers.

9 Having language models rewrite their own training data, and improve the quality of that training data, to make themselves better at a given task.

10 Having language models devise their own programming curriculum, and learn to program better with self-driven practice.

11 Mixing reinforcement learning with model-driven, recursive re-writing of future training data.

Mostly, these don't work very well. The current capabilities paradigm is state of the art because it gives the best results of anything we've tried so far, despite lots of effort to find better paradigms.

And the next paragraph on sharp left turn:

In my frame, we've already figured out and applied the sharp left turn to our AI systems, in that we don't waste our compute on massive amounts of incredibly inefficient neural architecture search, hyperparameter tuning, or meta optimization. For a given compute budget, the best (known) way to buy capabilities is to train a single big model in accordance with empirical scaling laws

Yuddites, on the other hand, mostly aren't aware of any of that. I am not sure they even read press releases.

Given the modern distinction between sex and gender, would it be appropriate to label a cis male/female individual, who engages in a feminine/masculine gender role, as a ""woman"/"man" even if they personally do not identify as such?

So take for example, a cis female with a career as a military soldier who is tall/strong and has a personality that is assertive, aggressive, and "thing-oriented". Let's say there is even a consensus among their peers that they are very masculine. Should they be referred to as a "man" according to modern sex/gender language norms? (Note: if you disagree with my sample masculine gender role description, just insert your own as you understand it to answer the question.)

Obviously, I suspect the answer is no, but then it seems like self identification is all that matters and all the discussion around gender roles is just window dressing.

Also, please do not take offense, my intention is not to troll here, I am just trying to better understand the modern gender theory perspective.

Would it be reasonable? IMO, yes. It's funny to imagine a world where bodybuilders are free to call overweight males women, and mothers are free to call old-maid females men. (See also this recent comment regarding the past use of the masculine grammatical gender for powerful women in the French language.)

Would it be appropriate? At the moment, I doubt it.

The modern distinction between sex and gender was invented by a pervert "doctor" named John Money. Look up what he did to David Reimer and Reimer's brother and tell me it's not child sexual abuse; it astounds me how much has been built upon Money's ideas.

Modern gender theory is nonsense.

Men are men, women are women, don’t make it complicated.

Modern gender theory is nonsense.

As opposed to traditional gender theory?

Men are men, women are women, don’t make it complicated.

Sure. What's a man? What's a woman?

What’s a man?

A miserable little pile of secrets.

What’s a woman?

The same, with the addition of an extra syllable.

So… men and women are the same?

Entire worlds can be contained in a syllable.

No, because men are disposable, and women are not.

Don't make me call Richter on your ass, Dracula.

Your words are as empty as your soul. Mankind ill needs a saviour such as you!

Sure. What's a man? What's a woman?

One knows them when one sees them.

How can I know when I see them if I don't have a definition?

Same way I do!

And how is that?

I look at them, and classify according to the millions of years of evolutionary biology that enabled me to draw that distinction.

What are you looking at when you classify them? Their pores?

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As opposed to traditional gender theory?

"Modern" was superfluous but not inaccurate.

Sure. What's a man? What's a woman?

Adult human male/female. What's your definition?

This neuters the entire concept.

You can't start with "A man is an Adult human Male and a woman is an adult human Female"

And derive the conclusion

"Adult human Males should be pressured not to wear dresses, take HRT, move to California and become FAANG programmers."

You have taken what was a sacred set of associations and shredded it until all that is left is a dictionary blurb.

And if you try to add all those sacred associations back in as a second premise-

Well, now you have a problem, because the thing most gender theory is actually attacking, isn't the definition of man and woman, its actually attacking the premise that this set of sacred associations holds in the tail end, and the premise that it should be maintained in general.

And once you start fighting those, I suspect you're going to find at the end of the line, that your final crux is aesthetic.

I mean, if every pragmatic issue were resolved with artificial wombs, better transition, etc, would you really concede that HRT is fine and as dumb to mock as getting a tattoo? Or that splitting sports by gender is dumb because what really matters is position in the bimodal distribution?

You can't start with "A man is an Adult human Male and a woman is an adult human Female"

And derive the conclusion

"Adult human Males should be pressured not to wear dresses, take HRT, move to California and become FAANG programmers."

But that's not what I'm doing. From "A man is an Adult human Male and a woman is an adult human Female" I am only deriving "You cannot force people to use opposite-sex or neopronouns, you cannot force single sex spaces to accept opposite-sex trans people, and you cannot make them chant 'Trans women are women!'". My other positions regarding trans issues are derived from other principles.

You're not even doing that much. Your definition says nothing about the correct use of pronouns. Your definition actually helps the argument that gendered spaces are unethical. Because gender doesn't mean anything important anymore (unless you're trying to have a baby and have no artificial womb on hand). You have to use other arguments for that now. And many of the arguments really only work for splitting people along the bimodal, not along single dimensions of the bimodal like your narrow definition of gender.

Your definition says nothing about the correct use of pronouns

Sure it does. I, and most people, use them to refer to someone's sex.

Because gender doesn't mean anything important anymore.

I don't accept that premise, so your argument doesn't follow. The establishment does seem to be trying to push that idea on people, but in fact even the most vehement egalitarian acts as though sex does make a difference in many contexts.

And many of the arguments really only work for splitting people along the bimodal, not along single dimensions of the bimodal like your narrow definition of gender.

I don't understand what you mean by that, can you elaborate?

Sure it does. I, and most people, use them to refer to someone's sex.

And plenty of people use them to refer to boats. You can bite the bullet on that if you want. But there are plenty of us who are willing to use feminine pronouns on anything with a feminine vibe.

I don't accept that premise, so your argument doesn't follow. The establishment does seem to be trying to push that idea on people, but in fact even the most vehement egalitarian acts as though sex does make a difference in many contexts.

See... This is it. You said:

"A man is an Adult human Male and a woman is an adult human Female"

but you expected the listener to put 1 and 1 together to create a normative framework.

This is a form of Motte and Bailey argument. That is what annoys me.

Both sides are quibbling over the definition of Man and Women because they know there's a cultural normative framework of what Men and Women are expected to do that most people intuit by vibe and don't question.

But here on theMotte we should be aspiring to be better than that.

That's why SJW definitions of Man and Women as a whole are incoherent by the way, they're trying to incorporate cultural normative vibe into the definition, and no two thinkers have precisely the same cultural vibe on the matter, and cultural normative vibe is subject to change. So naturally no singular definition emerges. It's also why Trans Women are Women has become a rallying cry. What they're really fighting for is "Trans women shouldn't be held to the masculine cultural normative framework." This is also a Motte and Baily argument.

Here on theMotte we should be aspiring to be better than that.

I don't understand what you mean by that, can you elaborate?

Certainly. take the argument "It is dangerous to permit Men in Woman's restrooms." This only holds for the subset of men that it is actually dangerous to permit in womens' restrooms. Is it dangerous to permit a passing castrated dickless Man with boobs in the Women's restroom? No, for the purposes of restroom safety, that person might as well be a woman.

Should Men be permitted in woman's sports? No. Because the average man will outcompete the average women. And we want to have a place where these people can compete and not get curb stomped every game (sounds like affirmative action to me but-).

Well. This only applies to the subset of Men that actually have advantages in woman's sports. Un-transitioned Men? Sure excluded. Transitioned men who went through a male puberty first? Probably excluded. They do have advantages due to that puberty. Men who never went through male puberty? Well. You're going to have to find some advantage they have. Otherwise- why not.

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Same as yours. I just don't like when people try this dismissive approach to the question. It's has, to me, the same vibe as "I don't need to educate you". We shouldn't forgo opportunities to explain ourselves or teach.

I say this as someone who probably agrees with you: This site is for a deeper analysis than "the opposing side is wrong". Tell us why modern gender theory is nonsense in a way that has even the thinnest sliver of a chance of persuading someone.

More effort than this, please.

("I refute it thus" is an interesting and perhaps even directly relevant sort of argument in this case, but you still need to put more effort into it.)

Well, we used to call girls who behaved in a masculine manner "tomboys" and men who behaved in a feminine manner "women" as a form of mockery, though in the former case the term was eventually reclaimed as one of endearment, so it seems to me like you have just gone in a loop back to old-fashioned gender roles. If that is the inevitable consequence of trans ideology then I certainly can't fault anyone for being a TERF.

Given the modern distinction between sex and gender, would it be appropriate to label a cis male/female individual, who engages in a feminine/masculine gender role, as a ""woman"/"man" even if they personally do not identify as such?

"Appropriate" is a two-place word. It does not make sense to talk about whether some action is "appropriate" in some universal global sense, only whether it is appropriate in context.

If you are working with trans person and you're trying to accomplish something in the real world that is not related to their gender identity? It would be "appropriate" in that situation to go with however they identify themselves so you can get on with doing the actual thing you care about, unless that's something you're not philosophically capable of doing (but in that case, why even ask?)

If you are a judge deciding the sentencing for a sexual assault case, and the defendant suddenly decided they were trans after it became clear that the verdict was not going to be in their favor and now they are arguing that they should go to a women's prison, "what is the more appropriate place to send them" is in fact the relevant question to ask.

If you're talking to a modern-day gender theorist, I have to ask what you're hoping to get out of the conversation, because that will inform the answer.

The thing thing to note about gender identity theory is that it is actually a mish-mash of different ideas that are inconsistent with each other. There's the traditional transexual 'born in the wrong body' narrative (really conceived as a Cartesian soul), but increasingly layers of queer theory where sex/gender is a performance which you can transgress, in which people can create or choose their gender. This has seamlessly merged into the modern liberal idea of 'lifestyle option', where you can explore your gender, try out being another gender.

When you unpack all this you realise it's actually an incoherent mess. It's actually one of the biggest signs that this is a social contagion.

Obviously, I suspect the answer is no, but then it seems like self identification is all that matters and all the discussion around gender roles is just window dressing

You hit the nail on the head here. As noted downthread, the point of gender ideology isn’t to better understand gender, and we know this because its proponents have a strong revealed preference for not understanding gender. Witness the fit thrown over the question ‘what is a woman?’

Instead the point of gender theory is to not ever have to tell a trans person they’re wrong. This is itself kind of a feat because, well, transgenderism by definition leads to ridiculous and wrongheaded ideas like ‘men can get pregnant’, and so if accommodating ridiculous and self-serving narratives about gender because you don’t have a coherent theory is the price to pay for it, well, they bit that bullet when they decided transwomen needed menstrual products.

I think the underlying problem with taking ideas and playing with them like this is that you are not focusing on the purpose behind the idea or the reality it inhabits.

To give an example from an area that can and has been greatly damaged by people losing sight of the ball, so to speak: if we are using currency printed by the Federal Reserve, why don't we just print more of it? It's free money, right? Well, everyone can see that this is not a good idea since it would lead to 'bad outcome'. You can play with the idea of money all you want, but to anyone keeping an eye on the ball the games you are playing are obviously pointless.

The goal of trans or gender anything isn't to create a novel and sophisticated categorization mechanism that functionally encompasses the human condition. For transpeople the goal is to be able to be whatever they want to be. Trans rights are a physical thing. If they want to go into the womens bathroom then that's what 'gender ideology' will have to facilitate. If they want to be a woman by setting up a webcam and masturbate their dicks into their own mouths then so be it.

If you want to take 'gender ideology' and play with it where it will lead to 'bad outcome' then you don't understand 'gender ideology' just like a person who thinks printing infinite money is a fun idea doesn't understand 'economics'. Worse than that, you are not even engaging with the true absurdity of it.

We can have a lot of people with a lot of bird ideas about what gender is or what trans is or whatever else, just like we can have a lot of people with a lot of bird ideas about what the economy is or how much money we should be printing. But it doesn't matter. What matters is what those with power want or what the ruling ideology says. And whilst you could argue that there is no obvious 'Federal Reserve' type body behind 'gender ideology', there is an obvious goal behind it. Just like there is a goal behind the Federal Reserve or whatever else. In short: more trans rights = good. Less trans rights = bad. Making fun or light of the means by which we get more trans rights can therefor only be at best childishly silly and at worst cynically transphobic.

The only way to escape this is by going full heterodox. Becoming a libertarian/nazi that believes central banking is a scheme cooked up by the Rothschilds/jews to enslave the taxpayer/goyim or by becoming a transphobic dissident right winger/nazi. For everything else you're just a bird in a cage.

No, because that obscures more than it reveals. Using a description of "a masculine woman" provides a more useful and accurate description than "man", especially if "man" also now includes masculine women.

Modern gender theory is inconsistent, contradictory and circular. Trying to reason with it is pointless. It by turns enforces then conflates distinctions between sex and gender and within sex and gender to suit its ends. Under this theory your question of whether it's appropriate to label a person a man can only be answered by whether that person wants to be labelled a man or not, which ignores that by advancing this theory the label has become an empty signifier that reduces to "is this person a person with person-like qualities". There is no there there.

I think the point about 'useful and accurate' is underappreciated- there's just less information in a broad label and no one should insist on someone ceding their valid empirical view of reality.

Empirical reality is cool but the point is that putting it to one side and taking modern/woke/trans gender theory on its own merits can demonstrate that either their logic fails by its own standard or their logic doesn't have any standards to fail by.

Either there will always be some asymptotic essence of otherness that upholds the delineation between man and woman with their respective qualities and qualifiers and renders the idea of switching from one to the other impossible, or there's no difference to functionally separate the two meaning there's no other to contrast against and so no position to move away from or towards. At that point the only thing left is a subjectivity of aesthetics, which amounts to the label-claiming we observe where we might see a woman who feels like the kind of woman who has a penis and wants to have sex with women but doesn't feel like the kind of woman who might get pregnant by having sex with a man (pronouns: yak/sax).

This is without touching on the unwelcome and unintended implications of these theories, such as how they would account for people who over-identify with their gender (boob jobs and steroids, trans rights are cis rights), male/female neurotypology that would necessarily disqualify otherwise typical men and women from belonging to their pre-existing category, and the plain old basic feminist argument that women are capable of more than housekeeping and looking pretty.

Taking it seriously leads to the conclusion that it's unserious, and by extension that it shouldn't be taken seriously. The regressive absurdity of it would be tragic if it wasn't so funny [reverse according to personal taste].

So what do we call a masculine woman? Call her a masculine woman. There's nothing to be gained by doing otherwise, and much to be lost. Whether we redefine reality or redefine words it necessitates the loss of the prior definition.

I think I agree with you but I'm not entirely following your thread and would like to. I agree something entirely subjective can't provide a stable social category and will lead to contradictions- I view this as gender ideology necessarily being dependent on sex to obtain meaning but also undermining sex at the same time. (Ie a parasitic relationship)

Is this the equivalent to what you're pointing to?

I think so.

In short: Assuming I subscribe to this variety of gender theory, what am I looking at when I see a pregnant person decorating a cupcake?

Yes, I think I see, thanks.

related thread about generational differences between immigrants: https://twitter.com/meghaverma_art/status/1651152395248836610

Upper class woman complaining about lower class members of her own country coming over to the west and shitting stuff up. Back home it's significantly easier to maintain distance between the high and the low but in the west its harder so you're more exposed to the negative effects. Plus complaints about being seen as a low class person because the other people with the same skin colour as you are mostly now low class people (the struggle is real, but if you're adept at exploiting opportunities this can be a huge boon for you too, as you get to feast freely on all the "gibs" provided by the white natives to assuage their internal guilt).

I’d just read it: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1651152395248836610.html

My elderly grandparents are American anti-racists. My grandfather is a veteran and the military circa the Korean War taught him antiracism. It stuck and he raised his kids that way.

Could you clarify a bit in particular on the term antiracism? It's a term currently used to describe a number of similar-but-very-different mindsets.

That's a good point. I don't mean Ta-Nehisi Coates' "antiracism". I mean some midcentury "whites and blacks should work and learn together, don't openly discriminate against black people" type of sentiment.

Public attitudes are downstream of power. What changed was legislation and court rulings establishing a new ideological regime, and endowing it with the power to enforce its preferences and inflict penalties on violators. The long arm of the law will reach right into your brain, and you won't even know it's there.

Legislation in a democracy is somewhat downstream of public opinion as well. How did the majority that enacted the civil rights act get elected?

Elections in a democracy are downstream of whatever is on TV.

That doesn't explain why Roe v Wade didn't result in a similar widespread change in attitudes towards abortion.

Wasn't it illegal in every state before Roe vs Wade? Seems like there's been a pretty massive shift in opinion since even though there are still people who oppose abortion.

Roe v. Wade p. 118 n. 2 lists only thirty states that at the time had laws prohibiting abortion. See also Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health slip op. pp. 23–24 ("By the end of the 1950s, according to [a source cited in Roe v. Wade], statutes in all but four States and the District of Columbia prohibited abortion 'however and whenever performed, unless done to save or preserve the life of the mother'.").

Wikipedia so grain of salt etc, but legal in 4, illegal with exceptions for rape, incest, mother's health or nonviable fetus in 13, illegal with exceptions for risk to mother's health in 2, illegal with exception for rape in 1, illegal with exception for risk to mother's life in 29, illegal no exceptions in 1.

I'm not aware of any pre-Roe public polling on abortion, but the earliest polling data came just two years after Roe. Since then, there's been no significant change. So unless public opinion on this important moral question massively changed in two years and held steady since then, I think it's more reasonable to assume that Roe changed nothing about people's public opinion.

By point of comparison, public opinion on interracial marriage gradually changed from before and after anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the court in 1967 in Loving v Virginia.

Wasn't it illegal in every state before Roe vs Wade?

No. Only Pennsylvania prohibited abortion in all circumstances.

Twenty nine states (Arizona, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming) only permitted abortion in the case of danger to the mother's life.

One state (Mississippi) only permitted abortion in cases of rape.

Two states (Alabama and Massachusetts) permitted abortion in the case of danger to the mother's health, which especially in the case of MA resulted in essentially abortion at will because mental distress was classified a danger to the mother's health.

Thirteen states (Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, North Carolina, New Mexico, Oregon, and South Carolina) permitted abortion in cases of rape, incest, likely damage to the fetus, or danger to the mother's health.

Four states (Alaska, Hawaii, New York, and Washington) permitted abortion at a physician's discretion.

Thanks, I had no idea. I tried to google it but kept coming up with news articles about how women had to have illegal abortions. But it sounds like it would have been pretty accessible if you were willing to take a road trip?

IIRC the abortion bans were informally enforced with a wink wink nudge nudge in lots of states, too- california seems to have been particularly known for that.

Worth noting that out of the 4 legal states, Hawaii, Washington and Alaska also had a requirement of at least 30 days residency in state first. Only New York would have been a "road trip" option (though I suppose Hawaii was already ruled out of that regardless of the law).

Because Roe v. Wade wasn't similar. There was no unified post-Roe regime; different states had different abortion standards, and the federal government never threw its weight around on the issue as it did with so many other issues. Governors weren't sending the National Guard to carry women into abortion clinics, the FBI wasn't starting anti-abortion task forces to infiltrate and destroy pro-life groups, or any of the other measures the state used to enforce the racial regime of the Civil Rights Act.

What's not compelling about the standard narrative of familiarity and education overcoming irrational, subconscious bias? (Though I apologize for wasting space if you were specifically trying to poll people who don't buy this narrative, just felt weird that no comments except the very bottom two seem to touch on it.) People have a very strong subconscious bias against the weird and unusual. People of a different race went from very obviously looking like nothing you've ever seen before to common familiarities in the street and on TV. Furthermore, education levels increased, giving more people the ability to overcome incorrect biases in their thinking. Once everyone realized that other races were 99.99% the same kind of humans, acceptance immediately followed.

I would even add another layer to this. In the past, following this same-race bias wasn't very costly. Excluding the one or two different-race/ethnicity/culture people you ever see from your group doesn't really matter. People used to be basically replaceable as far as skills and ability to contribute---one farmer or pre-modern or soldier isn't going to be dramatically different from any other. However, for whatever reason, this has completely changed in the modern day and some people have special skills that let them contribute an absurdly disproportionate amount. By the 20th century, excluding, for example, someone like von Neumann or Einstein because they're Jewish makes your civilization lose out and be destroyed.

The difference is even worse now---in all the most important fields that make a civilization powerful, the top performers contribute just so much more than the average performer. You really cannot exclude the 100x programmers/scientists/entrepreneurs because of their race---they are just too rare and too important. Non-acceptance of different races is just untenably for a society and any costs of cultural inhomogeneity pale in comparison. Literally, judge people by the content of their character (i.e. skills and abilities) instead of the color of their skin or be outcompeted and die.

Of course prevailing views always lag practical pressures by a bit, but it really should not be surprising that attitudes changed so much.

for example, someone like von Neumann or Einstein because they're Jewish makes your civilization lose out and be destroyed.

Jews weren't excluded in American society, including there were no laws banning marriage between Jews and non-Jews.

What about the other group which produces zero of Neumann tier scientists yet produces violent criminals at 10x rate?

Sorry, maybe the example wasn't so clear. The Nazis were the ones who excluded von Neumann and Einstein and were destroyed for it.

That’s an argument for not discriminating against groups that have a reasonable chance of producing 100x people. As stated, it requires a heavy dose of blank slatism on top.

As stated, it requires a heavy dose of blank slatism on top.

I don't think this is at all true. It requires a much weaker claim than blank-slatism: simply that non-whites are capable of being these 100x contributers. As long as the relative fraction isn't so extreme that like 80-90% of top-level talent is white even though whites are a much smaller percentage of the world population, then there are still serious costs for excluding non-whites. I've never seen HBD claims this strong---probably because they're patently ridiculous if you look at, for example, what the US IMO team looks like, the demographics of difficult STEM classes at elite universities or workers at tech companies, etc.

Of course, as asked by @aardvark3, this isn't the group that you guys are usually interested in discussing, though I note that the original post was only about the acceptance of any non-whites at all. Even in this case, saying something like there are almost no prominent black scientists is just false---this is the the strength of claim you would have to show for the argument not to apply. (Asking for von Neumann-tier is very unfair because there are only a few people of that tier a century---you can plausibly argue that he's literally the only example, so trivially no ethnic group except his own reaches that bar.) Whatever differences might appear between groups are dominated by differences within a group---I think even the strongest HBD positions accept this. Therefore and at the very least, the right specially selected subset of any racial group will always be very beneficial to accept.

Asking for von Neumann-tier is very unfair because there are only a few people of that tier a century

You literally introduced "someone like von Neumann or Einstein" into the conversation.

Whatever differences might appear between groups are dominated by differences within a group

No. Esitimates for Ashkenazi Jews: average IQ = 110 and SD=15. African Americans IQ = 85 and SD =15. And that's not even taking pygmies or Australian Aborigines, who have even lower IQs.

Can you name ten black scientists whose discoveries are used with some frequency? Say roughly at the level of David Blackwell or higher.

This is not a gotcha. I’m open to learning something.

I don't think I can satisfy the exact requirements you want. David Blackwell did his work while the foundations of his field were being developed so it gets outsized use. There isn't really something as important as statistics where the foundational work was done late enough that the generation born after say civil rights could contribute. I think it's uncontroversial that there wasn't a level playing field before?

My list is also somewhat focused on younger people since it's a bit easier for me to judge their credentials and I'm more likely to have heard of them.

With that said, here's a list of prominent black scientists and mathematicians I can name off the top of my head. I think all of them are pretty respected within their field:

This isn't quite 10, some quick further research finds:

Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum matches the level of impact you're looking for, but sort of in a right-time-right-place technicality way. Also, Robert Ellis seems to match the older-figure pioneer pattern of David Blackwell.

You can judge for yourself how compelling this list is. It works better as support for the level-of-talent argument instead of the level-of-societal-contribution one, though the second is very hard for me to judge and sort of random.

I’d discount Fryer (economics is not really a science in my book) and maybe McWhorter. For the others, I will need to spend some time on mathsci.net and arxiv to be sure. Let’s take a few days’ pause on the discussion if you don’t mind.

I found this an interesting exercise, so here's who I was able to come up with:

  1. Norbert Rillieux, inventor of the multiple effect-evaporator used in industrial sugar production.

  2. Percy Julian, pioneer of chemical synthesis of steroids and hormonal drugs.

  3. John Hodge, who determined the mechanism of the Maillard reaction in cooking.

  4. John Dabiri, developer of advanced wind turbines and some weird jellyfish-inspired soft robots

  5. George Carruthers, inventor of the ultraviolet camera deployed on the Moon by Apollo 16

  6. Arlie Petters, developer of the mathematical theory of gravitational lensing

  7. Alexander Anim-Mensah, whose contributions to membrane engineering are quite opaque to me, but seem to be quite significant in the areas of water filtration and improvement of washing machines

  8. Mark Dean, who holds an impressive number of patents in computer hardware and processor design

  9. Charles Drew, who achievements in blood plasma storage enabled the development of the first large-scale blood banks during WWII

  10. Kristala Prather, one of the major figures in the infant field of synthetic biology

I tried to limit this list as much as I could to the harder sciences and to leave out anyone whose contributions or lack thereof are at the center of a major controversy, which narrowed it down considerably. You are free to point out that this list includes mostly highly selected African immigrants or people with so little black ancestry that no one but an American would label them as such.

Thanks! This is a much better answer.

Well generally if the year was 1923 rather than 2023 I'd be hard pressed to ever see a black person in much of the US, so the great migration and mass media played a role for sure.

I always saw it as a way to maximize soft power gains after the allied victory in ww2. It wasn't enough that their victory was a sign that the allies were stronger, it had to become a symbol of how virtuous they are/were. The nazis practiced eugenics and were race obsessed, the nazis were evil. The allies are post-racial and blank slatist, the allies are good. That sort of thing.

It was probably important given the rise of the USSR as well. The US and other western countries iirc Britain needed to put distance between themselves and their own eugenics programs to maximize soft power gains after the war. Didn't the nazis even argue that western countries had similar programs to try and get off the hook for crimes? I don't remember tbh.

I think the other posters are right about other trends, industrialization, nation states etc. already at work, but when it comes to the bump after ww2 specifically this makes more sense to me. Might makes right was a hard sell after a war as ugly as ww2 so to continue with the aggressive expansion and feed the military-industrial devil they'd made a pact with in the west they needed to paint themselves as the good guys righting the world's wrongs.

It being mostly virtue signalling also fits with the large gaps in stated and revealed preferences when it comes to interracial marriage, school and neighborhood choice etc.

Didn't the nazis even argue that western countries had similar programs to try and get off the hook for crimes?

Supposedly the Nazis were inspired by the "success" of California's eugenics program.

And the reservations for American Indians.

It's a common left wing historian talking point that government support for civil rights wasn't pure benevolence but part of a propaganda war to win over African and Asian countries during the cold war. America became the global hegemon but its allies in Europe have all these colonial empires. Instead of strong arming Europe into giving up their colonies we'll just advance an ideology of racially egalitarian national determination where the emerging third world should be free to partake in a rules based international trade system that conveniently enough, we get to make the rules for.

If you read a left wing historian like Judith Stein her account of American deindustrialization is that foreign policy elites fucked over the American working class in order to build up allied economies so that they could resist communism. We let Japan and Korea dump steel in the American market while having massive tariff barriers so that they could build their own economies to ward off China. The seminal 'The Deindustrialization of America' by Bluestone and Harrison is full of examples of how tax and trade policy encouraged American companies to build factories in Europe rather than build them in America and export to Europe.

It's not just virtue signaling it was part of a broader strategy to win the cold war.

Some of this may be confounded by the fact that blacks marry at much lower rates than other races. If, on top of that, interracial couples are less likely to marry than intraracial couples (true in my anecdotal experience), the true interracial coupling rate could be quite a bit higher than the marriage rates you quoted would indicate.

But then you’re doubling down on any self-segregation. It’s the same with black-on-black violence: targets are rarely chosen from the general population, but from those close to the perpetrator.

Plus, there’s a difference between accepting other interracial marriages and feeling such attraction yourself.

the rot set in

I gladly accept the "rot" of not having Catholic moralists imprisoning people for distributing condoms. We should be very hesitant to use the police powers of the state to enforce rules at the point of a gun.

The counterpoint is that without a unified set of rules, you cannot build the high trust society that creates high civilization. If I believe that prostitution is just fine, and you don’t, this is a place where I cannot build a bridge. If we can’t agree on the basic shape of our moral life, what we build is not a unified national identity but a series of squabbling tribes each trying to take for itself the benefits available while denying them to everyone else.

Okay. I'll accept Brazil levels of low trust and social cohesion if it keeps the Pope from deciding where my penis goes and if I may put a condom on it. If moral busybodies and hard rejection of live-and-let-live were the glue holding society together, then we'll have to pay that ugly price to keep the government out of my bedroom.

The pope is not the only authority on the subject.

In the long run, the choice is between Sharia law and white Sharia.

While Brazil is coming to North-America, it was always over there if that's what you wanted.

It's not that ugly of a price, at worst few thousands dollars to move to your ideal society.

I think his point was that you don’t really have that choice- you have the choice between the pope telling you where you can stick your penis, and woke moralists doing the same thing.

It does seem like the woke have replaced the religious right as America's disapproving schoolmarms. I oppose them both and will maintain a consistent civil libertarian stance.

Though I rather doubt that opposing religious moral busybodies necessarily leads to progressive moral busybodies.

And I very much doubt that woke moralists will ever legally compel me to put my penis in someone I don't like. I'm married and monogamous. Noone can make me have sex with transwomen, etc.

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Fifty years? My brother in Christ, we’re talking about the whole Enlightenment.

Back in the good ol’ days, moral outrage was less likely to decide your fate than plague or starvation. As state capacity grew and the world shrank, maybe that became less true. By the time of the European Wars of Religion, a little intolerance was able to deal a lot more damage.

It turns out enshrining some sort of tolerance frees up surplus. Common cause to deal with the real enemy, perhaps, or simply peace for those weary of war. The philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries went to great lengths to justify cooperation instead of defection. Sometimes they even succeeded, for a while, until the incentives to defect piled up.

By the American Revolution, states professed a morality of high-minded ideals. These dominated because they gave a real, material advantage over states with low tolerance. America’s North was willing to tolerate both the moral evil and the political threat of the South, because most people involved saw the sanctity of the Union as more valuable. When war came, millions bled.

The next century saw America rise to power as a (relatively) unified bloc. The more dire an outside threat, the more benefit could be gained from tolerating those close to you. Other comments note how WWII made major strides in American race relations, since an African American was still no Kraut. Across the globe, this was the century of ideological alliances, a first, second and third world. And the first world, the one preaching Enlightenment ideals, was the victor.

Pope Francis said that a man’s gayness was less important than whether “he searches for the Lord and has good will.” That framing of tolerance has always been one of the great advantages of Christianity.

I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.

1 Corinthians 3:5.

On the other hand, actual discrimination has taken a steep nosedive even if most people still harbor some racial prejudices and attitudes, so clearly something changed.

From the stories my grandparents have told, quite a lot changed in terms of day to day discrimination.

I don't think Emett Till's murder is comparable to contemporary murder by a jealous husband. Roy Bryant did not make an attempt to conceal his identity when he abducted Hill, and the people Till was staying with did not resist his abduction. My guess is that they did not believe that Till would be killed, that he would be abducted and whipped but let live. That is what J.W. Milam would tell a journalist their intentions were afterwards in his published confession in Look Magazine (though the FBI doesn't think the timeline he laid out there works given the distances he would have had to travel) It is also what the lawyer for the prosecution in Till's trial would say was the appropriate punishment for his transgression. Bryant and Milam were not even indicted for kidnapping even though they had confessed to it before the trial.

This suggests that there was a social convention that white men could abduct and non-lethally punish black men and boys. If they had just kidnapped and whipped him they would likely not even have been charged. Murder crossed a line such that they were tried, but an all white jury would still acquit them.

They were arrested for kidnapping but they weren't charged with it.

You've brought up two examples where arguments escalated into impulsive shootings where the people were caught immediately and plead guilty. That's not indicative of a belief that you have a socially agreed upon right to do this violence without punishment. Your third example is a drive by with no details of how the shooter was caught. A drive by may be a poor attempt to conceal identity but it's still an attempt.

Bryant and Milam acted days after Till's alleged whistling and in a premeditated fashion and still took no action to conceal their identities from Mose Wright when they knocked on his door (except for threatening him) and asked him to identify Till. Till's family did not resist except to offer a bribe, because they knew resisting would bring greater punishment and because they expected Till to be whipped but not killed, as the prosecutor suggested was the appropriate punishment for Till.

Yes men across different cultures do violence to restore honor. The difference is that this was a caste system where there was a socially understood right for white men to restore their honor with violence against a black child without resistance from that child's family and go unpunished by the state or society. That's nothing like two guys shooting each other in the club over a girl and then pleading guilty and being sentenced to 25 years.

I know that you want to believe this, but the evidence seems to suggest the opposite. They were immediately arrested, suggesting that kidnapping was not acceptable.

They were acquitted by an all white Jury suggesting they correctly predicted that they did not need to hide their identities because it was acceptable to the people who would be in the jury. They were not punished.

In the case of the Fire Chief they dropped charges because he claims to have used pepper spray in self defense on the man who beat him, but there's video of someone who looks like him using bear spray on a sleeping homeless person. The fire chief also won't testify in court, so the local prosecutor thinks they'll lose since the homeless person will claim self defence after being pepper sprayed on a public sidewalk. Both he and the transient appear white in the video. I'd like to see the local prosecutor be more aggressive but this doesn't seem like much of a case of a racial caste system.

There was a manhunt for the black man who fired at the white child grazing her cheek and police obtained warrants for counts of attempted murder first degree. He is in custody now. The white guy who shot the black teen and sent him to the hospital was allowed to go free on bail and has been charged with first degree assault. The legal system seems to have acted appropriately. Biden commented on the controversial case where someone was seriously injured and not on the uncontroversial case where someone was grazed.

The Alameda County DA issued a blanket memo (not benefiting any particular race) saying that prosecutors should not use sentence enhancements and seek the lowest available prison term, with an exception for sex crimes against children and murder. Jasper Wu's killers all have been charged with murder, shooting at an occupied vehicle, possession of a firearm and two of them with conspiracy to commit a crime and "criminal street gang conspiracy". Google says the penalty for murder in CA is 25 years to life, so not exactly non-carceral.

The second paragraph of your 'mutual conflict' story says three charges were brought on one of the individuals involved and the State's Attorney says that the didn't invoke mutual conflict and CPD mischaracterized them. I'm don't know much about how self defense rights work in the case of large gun battles but it seems complicated to resolve who is the aggressor and who is legally defending themselves without video footage.

These are generic soft on crime stuff and not evidence of a contemporary racial caste system.

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On the other hand, actual discrimination has taken a steep nosedive even if most people still harbor some racial prejudices and attitudes, so clearly something changed.

I take issue with the notion that actual discrimination has taken a steep nosedive.

I've lost contracts, both public and private, due to my race and my sex ("sorry, you've been fantastic, but we have a big push to switch to all woman-owned vendors"). And while I didn't choose to go to university, my children may as well not even apply to many elite institutions for the penalties held against them due to their skin color, their academic merit notwithstanding.

My town was hit hard by its own self-imposed lockdown, so they decided to subsidize new businesses in the downtown area by paying for much of the first year's rent, renovation costs, etc. Except, whoops, only for women and 'minorities' (which incidentally whites are in my state of California, but I guess that doesn't count). I've seen scarce medical care withheld from whites in favor of prioritizing members of 'marginalized communities'.

I've seen white men lie about being Chinese women to get their writing published. I've seen others agree that persons of their race should stop making creative content because "we've had our time and it's their turn now." I've seen major media producers explicitly announce that it is now against policy to make shows and movies about white families and communities for not being 'representative' enough.

I've seen white women express that it would be wrong for them to reproduce, and instead wax lyrical about adopting 'brown babies'. I've seen judges decide that Christians shouldn't be allowed to adopt children for their failure to conform to modern gender ideology.

I've seen schoolchildren emotionally destroyed over the guilt and hatred heaped upon them due to what 'their' ancestors purportedly did. I've seen gifted kids lose access to advanced education because the demographics of those who qualified weren't equitable enough and this might disadvantage the children who really matter. I've seen teachers penalized or forced into resignation for disciplining too many of the wrong type of children. I've seen whole fields of study at every level of education, some quite venerable and august; some, I would say, absolutely vital to our society; neutered or destroyed because they are too thoroughly associated with the wrong kind of ethnicity.

I've seen the media lynch white (and, actually, Asian) people for self-defense because the presumption of guilt can only run one way. I've seen police officers crucified for defending themselves and others against armed, dangerous, and aggressive blacks who sometimes were in the literal act of attempting to murder others. I've seen whites refuse to report crimes, even those which did them great damage, because they've been so brainwashed into thinking that it is somehow morally correct for them to do so by the education system, the media, and the state. I've seen communities burned, laid to waste, and seen this called justice because it was done in the name of the 'oppressed'.

I've seen governments refuse to hamper heinous criminal activity, from property crime to mass organized rape of children, because the perpetrators have what our old friend Autistic Thinker might have called 'Tropical privilege'.

I could keep going on, for quite some time, and we all know it.

Discrimination is pervasive, overt, systemic, and often explicitly codified.

Perhaps I should rephrase: actual discrimination against nonwhites has taken a nosedive. Given that that was the topic of the thread, I assumed I didn’t need to specify.

instead of nosediving it looks more like the polarity was just inverted.

No. No, it really hasn’t.

You had entire regions of the country with double sets of amenities just so whites could avoid contact with “colored people.” If you know of somewhere with Black-only bathrooms or streetcars, please let me know so I can narc on them to the ACLU.

What about safe spaces, does that count?, and then we have Affirmative action, segregated graduation ceremonies.

If you know of somewhere with Black-only bathrooms or streetcars, please let me know

Here

so I can narc on them to the ACLU.

Please let me know how that goes.

Jesus Christ. Is this legal because it's...consensual? Surely someone has challenged it, because especially for public schools, it has to be a violation...

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If we want to understand the mechanism behind the massive decrease in discrimination against non-Whites, we would do well to notice that it has coincided with a massive increase in discrimination against Whites.

Seems to me that most of the people I hear pointing this out at all immediately blame 'the Jews'. But I think this is a poor proxy for whatever is actually going on. Just wish I knew what it was.

How about the idea that it never was about discrimination or civil rights or anything high minded at all. Just "who will defeat or dominate whom?", like most conflicts.

Why would a nation do this to itself?

IMO the leading factor was an enhanced sphere of sympathy (among Whites) due to media trends: television, books, newspapers, music. Maybe this is begging the question, because why did this media begin to show sympathy stories for non-Whites? That I believe was caused by people with a certain philosophical bent who felt that it was their moral duty to increase sympathy for non-Whites, due to universalism or socialism or a belief that race does not affect personality.

What changed in Western societies during the last century that lead to wide scale acceptance of non-white people?

It was imposed by law. You haven't seen photos of 101st Airborne escorting blacks into a white school ?

The US constitution was replaced by the Civil Rights Act, and over the next fifty years, activists were busily using state power to browbeat anyone opposed into compliance.

The government decided people can't segregate themselves by law, so they're now doing it financially. Federal government is disappointed, and has now resorted to mandating better loan conditions for people with worse credit scores.

I think these changes have been very positive on the whole

You think these changes have been very positive.

Ask whites in London or Paris how happy they're about these 'changes'.

The 'elites' in Europe are so braindead and so feckless in face of 'human rights activists' the continent is no doubt going to be taking in expected Bantu immigration waves by tens of millions, and within thirty years, the benefits of black bodies is going to be felt in every city from Madrid to Moscow.

The 'elites' in Europe are so braindead and so feckless

Please post about specific rather than general groups to the extent possible. Please provide effortful argument and evidence in proportion with how partisan or inflammatory your claims might be.

They believe humans are a fungible, interchangeable mass, and as policy are supporting 'replacement migration' to improve the age profile of European Union.

https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asylum/legal-migration-and-integration_en

On 27 April 2022, the Commission presented a Communication setting out an approach towards a new and sustainable EU legal migration policy, attracting the skills and talent that the EU needs to address labour shortages and reply to the demographic change in Europe. On the same day, the Commission also presented a proposals to modernise the Long-term residents Directive and the Single Permit Directive. The main objectives of these recasts are to:

This is completely absurd because as we know, people aren't interchangeable, and analysis in for example Denmark found that migrants are not beneficial to public finances at all, and are making states worse off at fiscally.

Which other states are generally too pussy to even consider doing.

Moreover, European Union has a cargo-cult mentality related to education.

These people truly seem to believe sending everyone to university is a worthwhile goal that's somehow going to lead to a more qualified workforce.

The US constitution was replaced by the Civil Rights Act

Like hell it was.

The US constitution was replaced by the Civil Rights Act

Like hell it was.

@No_one's claim on this count needed more effort, or at least greater exploration of why the evidence provided should be interpreted as pointing in this direction. But it would be helpful if you did not meet a low-effort claim with an even lower-effort, higher-heat claim; that's one sure road to quick degradation of the conversation.

Take it up with Christopher Caldwell's book.

Although it'd be more accurate to say that Wilson & FDR killed off a lot of the old one.

I believe he is referencing this thread from Kulak.

https://twitter.com/FromKulak/status/1623859736629198848

The 'elites' in Europe are so braindead and so feckless in face of 'human rights activists' the continent is no doubt going to be taking in expected Bantu immigration waves by tens of millions, and within thirty years, the benefits of black bodies is going to be felt in every city from Madrid to Moscow

Am I the only one who notes that there’s some pretty substantial natural barriers between Bantus and Europe, and that there’s also a lot of countries that care much less about human rights in between?

Crossing a hard desert bigger than the continental United States which is also an active war zone and has no roads to arrive in an Islamic dictatorship which has typical Arab attitudes towards blacks before somehow crossing an ocean to get to the white countries which are getting steadily less friendly to immigration is a very different feat from taking out a loan to pay human smugglers to drive you to a border located in a productive agricultural region.

Then how to explain the existing migration of sub-Saharan Africans into Europe?

As wealth has increased in Africa, immigration to Europe/USA has increased as well. A koisan tribesman has no way to immigrate to Europe. But a person living in Lagos might be able to scrape together enough money to be smuggled in.

We can see the massive growth in immigration from Africa in the last 2 decades and conclude that the Sahara is not the barrier it once was.

As long as there's money to be made ferrying them across, and there's media and elite support for the migration, these barriers are not very meaningful.

which is also an active war zone

In a few small parts, there is low level conflict. It's not like trying to cross the front in Ukraine, where attempting to sneak through at nights means you get blown up in complete darkness by someone far away.

steadily less friendly to immigration

The public may be, but the public doesn't matter much.

No one in Western Europe ever voted in a government with a mandate of 'increasing immigration', yet Paris and London look how they look.

The public may be, but the public doesn't matter much.

I recognize that this is a standard woke/alt-right talking point but I don't buy it.

I recognize that this is a standard woke/alt-right talking point but I don't buy it.

Then why is London, Paris full of nonwhites. It was never wanted by the public.

Have you read the Populist Delusion?

Because nonwhites wanted it, and they’re part of the public.

Nonwhites were present in numbers too small to matter.

Weren't rich either.

No, it wasn't the non-whites.

I believe it was the white left which got fed up with the working class not being interested in what they have to sell, and decided that minorities are a better base for future power.

So they embarked on a decades long project of increasing immigration, and largely succeeded.

There is already a thriving trade in human smuggling from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, and they're not crossing an ocean, they're just crossing the Mediterranean to Italy or France. The Arab countries will probably wave them through just to avoid them sticking around in their countries - let them be Europe's problem instead. The real deterrent is the willingness of European governments to ignore NGOs shrieking at them for policing the sea, and so far this deterrent is yet to appear.

It was imposed by law. You haven't seen photos of 101st Airborne escorting blacks into a white school ?

That's not quite fair, they also escorted white students.

Is that really a picture of soldiers threatening a school child with bayonets? It's almost unbelievable that it's not staged or faked. Can't believe I've never seen this before.

Yeah. There’s also a bunch from the preceding days with the state National Guard blocking out black children. And a few of boring, unarmed segregationists following them around and booing.

These were the tactical moves in a broader state-vs-federal, south-vs-everyone-else power struggle. Maneuvering for photo ops was the name of the game, especially once the armed forces were involved.

It was "staged" in the sense that the pro segregation crowd went in with the full knowledge of the army's orders and were probably hoping to get this picture or something very similar plastered across the front page of every newspaper but that doesn't make it "fake".

Went in and did what?

Try to start a fight or make a scene

I guess to protest and make a scene, apparently with the knowledge of the optics of being held back at gunpoint by the Screaming Eagles(?).

As it turns out, nobody cared -- even back then -- if you fix bayonets and aim your rifles at an unarmed white kid. Optics is what the media says it is.

The Civil Rights Act was passed by democratically elected legislature, the 101st was deployed by a democratically elected president. People have had fifty years to organize a majority to overturn the civil rights act and it remains broadly popular. It was legally imposed by the majority of the country on the South for sure, but why did the rest of the country support it?

It's interesting we've switched from 'politics is downstream of culture' to 'culture is downstream of politics' and politics is just whatever elites decide.

That's the same thing as I've said.

It was imposed by force, by the government, with elite support.

The public did not understand what was going on and what was going to happen to them, as one can expect.

For example, it was overwhelmingly supported by Northern democrats. And then, when put into practice in the North, caused things such as The Boston Busing crisis..

That your government uses 'democratic election', where an older government simply would say it's the "divine right" of kings doesn't matter much.

'Our Democracy' is a mechanism for obtaining legitimacy, not a mechanism for having voters have a say in policy.

Half of your electorate understands this perfectly and doesn't bother to vote.

See: "Manufacture of Consent" and "Political formulas".

EDIT: forgot a couple of words.

I don't think the constitutionality has much to do with what I'm arguing. If you're saying that this change in public opinion was imposed top down then you have to explain how, in a democratic society, people holding those views got to the top in order to impose them in the first place. The Supreme Court you can play the 'activist judges' card but legislation and presidential actions are harder to explain that way.

I'm totally fine with the old fashioned arguments that this is a sort of tyranny of the majority unconstitutionally trampling regional peculiarities and freedom of assembly. That's well trod ground. I just think it's shit social history to explain massive changes in social attitudes as top down action of a mysterious elite.

It's interesting we've switched from 'politics is downstream of culture' to 'culture is downstream of politics' and politics is just whatever elites decide.

Maybe, but from my perspective this is little more than the logical outcome of letting the Left-wing/Rousseauean mindset run unchecked. If your whole model of society is predicated on the idea that all social conventions and contracts are "imposed" upon an unwilling populace by "the elite" how could you arrive at another conclusion?

I think the causality flows the other way, when you're losing the idea that the whole game is rigged is really attractive. People see their values/aesthetic preferences losing popularity and their group losing status and want to find reasons to declare this illegitimate. The elite conspiracy position then becomes appealing. Fixation on elite-imposed values and manufactured consent as proof the game is rigged and there's no point in playing it is naturally the domain of the fringes who need to rationalize not moderating to gain popularity.

I think it's mistaken to conflate the broad idea of an external locus of control with elite control. There are lots of external forces that you can point to that influence individual or group behavior that aren't completely subject to elite control, market forces, and technological progress for example. You're setting up an internal vs. external locus of control axis, but there's also a separate tendency (cough cough The Paranoid Tendency) to view this external influence as the highly coordinated outcome of decisions made by a small set of human agents rather than as an uncoordinated cross-product of technological, environmental, and economic forces with some human agency acting at pivot points where path dependency is influential.

I have to disagree. external loci of control really is a hell of a drug, and it makes the notion of elite control obviously correct.

But it also falls apart the moment you introduce a potential alternative. After all what is "elite"?

As uncharitable as it may seem the old "NPC" meme has a certain amount of merit because the sort of Londoner or New Yorker who goes on about the BBC or NYT being "arbiters of credibility" genuinely seems to lack ability to not believe what they read in the newspaper. As 0 HP Lovecraft observes, the possibility that they may be lied to (or that they might not immediately detect an obvious lie) just doesn't occur to the average rationalist.

People have had fifty years to organize a majority to overturn the civil rights act and it remains broadly popular.

People, including a lot of people in the south, genuinely wanted it to work and expended a great deal of effort to make that happen. It's a shame it failed so absolutely, by the objective standards and definitions of its proponents. The social cohesion that made such an effort possible was burned in the process, and such efforts have little chance of being repeated. Instead you get metastasizing cynicism, withdrawal, polarization and extremism... But hey, how'd one of the old-timers here put it recently: Blues don't get held accountable for being wrong, or for the harm their bullshit causes. Fifty years later, they've written all the histories, so few remember what actually happened. It's a brilliant strategy that works marvelously right up until it abruptly doesn't.

How is "failure" being defined here?

Put very simply and rather reductively, Black people wanted better outcomes and an end to discrimination and racism, and white people wanted an end to black dysfunction and rioting.

Black outcomes are measured relative to white outcomes, and by that standard, their outcomes have not improved much if at all. They still have much worse educational outcomes, economic outcomes, marriage outcomes, vastly higher crime rates, vastly higher rates of single-parenthood, and on and on.

We've engaged in heroic levels of social engineering to try to eliminate discrimination and racism. To the extent that such elimination is actually possible, I'd say we've done it. Approval of interracial marriage is probably a good proxy here, and we've gone from supermajority disapproval to lizardman-constant disapproval. It doesn't seem to have mattered; black outcomes didn't improve, and blacks and their allies don't appear to perceive a substantive improvement, don't perceive that their demands have been satisfied. Usually in discussions like this one, people focus on the changes made, and ignore the deeper outcomes those changes were attempting to secure.

Black dysfunction and racial conflict remain intractable problems. All plausible methods of improving the situation have long since been exhausted, with no evidence of any significant effect. People are now pushing highly implausible methods like explicitly racial systems of government. Bad outcomes for the black community are used to argue for the continued existence of racism, but by this standard, one is forced to conclude that there is no detectable racism gradient anywhere within our very large and quite heterogenous society. By the consensus standards we've adopted to measure it, racism appears to be just about exactly as bad in California and Seattle as it is in Mississippi or Atlanta. This means that the fifty years of intense social engineering has worked exactly as well in the most stereotypically progressive places as it has in the most stereotypically racist and reactionary areas. The simplest explanation for how this could be so is that the engineering hasn't actually worked, even a little bit.

And of course the riots are still happening, and for the same reasons.

More importantly, what else should the federal government have done in the face of de jure segregation in the south? Should the US have waited around for several more decades until the south decided to get its act together?

What does "the south getting its act together" even mean? Again, there is no objectively measurable racism gradient between the south and anywhere else. Ending Segregation didn't fix any of the bedrock problems it was supposed to fix. It didn't even fix Segregation itself, since people simply found workarounds to ensure that they didn't have to share space with underclass blacks, who remain awful to live among.

There's a story where the Civil Rights era was a crusade against intolerance that struck down the legal and social discriminations that had oppressed blacks for hundreds of years, giving us hope for a brighter future. There's another story where nothing fundamental has changed, black people are still oppressed, our society is still defined by systemic racism and oppression, and radical change is needed. These stories, due to the particulars of their narrative, can't both be true. You have to pick one or the other, and blacks and the progressives who speak for them have picked the later.

I think that, given the state of the evidence, honesty compels us to concede the point. Blacks are still doing about as badly as they were before the Civil Rights movement, relative to whites, and none of the consensus methods of changing this have worked. We either have to accept the current state of affairs, or try something radically different than the path we've followed to-date.

black outcomes didn't improve

I don’t think this is true. I’m pretty sure that black educational and economic outcomes may not have caught up to whites(and may not ever), but that they’re a lot better than in the fifties.

A lot of this is due to declining standards to help them 'do better'. Everyone else pays that price.

I don’t think this is true. I’m pretty sure that black educational and economic outcomes may not have caught up to whites(and may not ever), but that they’re a lot better than in the fifties.

They are not appreciably better relative to white outcomes, which is the standard the champions of the Civil Rights era applied then and the standards their descendants apply now when they declare our outcomes to be unacceptable. I would happily agree with you that this is not the standard we should be using, if there were a way to consistently enforce some other standard in consensus discussions. There isn't one.

There's a lot of reasons but I'll focus on a crude materialist explanation; Industrialized societies are are less zero sum than agricultural societies. Agricultural societies under malthusian conditions are very zero sum. Any land that your group isn't farming is a limit on the population of your group. If you look at the Free Soil Party in the United States, the concern of Midwestern whites about slavery is not that it is unjust oppression. It's that white plantation owners are going to use black labor to take land in the west that could go to white yeomen farmers (it's not just that but that is part of it).

Some of the earliest anti-discrimination measures(Executive Order 8802 and the Fair Employment Practices Committee) come out of world War II and the need to utilize black labor in the American defense industry. When the pressures to be efficient get turned up you can't afford a luxury belief like segregation. Don't confuse discussions of the costs of wokeness' and affirmative action with the idea that total segregation is somehow more productive.

There are some places where there is really intense zero sum competition in industrialized societies. Unions had a complicated history with segregation I don't have time to get into here. But overall in an industrial society there's a lot of mutual benefit in economic growth and moving people from picking cotton in a feudal system to making steel in some of the world's most efficient factories is a good way to increase growth.

South Africa is the one society that kept segregation intact through industrialization and whites there are obviously in a different position from other anglo colonies in being the minority of the population.

Don't confuse discussions of the costs of wokeness' and affirmative action with the idea that total segregation is somehow more productive.

This seems to presuppose that segregation is always a net negative, which doesn't seem warranted to me.

Contingent on some hypothetical populations themselves being a net negative, doesn't it seem likely that integration could itself carry enormous costs?

As I say, I don't think ending segregation was per se the problem.

Well, terminating segregation in the US seems to have been more a symptom than a cause of the disease which is now killing us, so I don't think that it'd have made much of a difference. Perhaps, as a step on the road, it would have been better to delay it longer? But it was already inevitable by that point. And who knows, maybe keeping it around longer would actually have antagonized the leninists into going even farther even faster.

But if I lived in one of the communities destroyed by integration, I think a pro-segregation position would be obvious. If I'd lost social cohesion, property, and possibly even loved ones. I don't live in such a community, because I'm blessed to be able to live in a community with almost none of that sort of problem. It's expensive, but hey, segregation is. Revealed preferences would seem to indicate that everyone who can afford it finds the price tag worthwhile.

I suppose there are hypothetical populations of uniformly idiotic demon spawn where that would be the case. In really existing America early desegregation of industry took place to increase defense production not because of widespread adoption of egalitarian views. In general reallocating labor from agriculture to industry was a winning strategy in the 20th century and segregation was an impediment to this reallocation of labor.

If you think that markets are generally better at allocating labor than governments then you might predict that de jure segregation would generally have high costs.

If you think that markets are generally better at allocating labor than governments then you might predict that de jure segregation would generally have high costs.

Finally, I'd like to point out that it's the existence of a genetic/cultural subclass which has high costs. Those costs can either be borne in common (as in segregation, border enforcement, etc.) or externalized to the individual. When de jure segregation ended the cost of it didn't go down -- it was simply transferred to the families who found that suddenly the wife needed a full-time job so they could afford a house in 'a good neighborhood with good schools'.

Modern Americans pay through the nose for segregation! Only it's much messier and more expensive because instead of coordinating to make it cost-effective, we're if anything coordinating to fight it. This serves the wealthy who can display status and power by being unconcerned about the rising cost of segregation. Good luck to everyone else, I guess.

If you think that markets are generally better at allocating labor than governments then you might predict that de jure segregation would generally have high costs.

You have a point here -- my distrust of integration lies rather in that I don't expect the market to be allowed to sort things out.

EDIT: To be clear, integration plus forced (at gunpoint) 'equity' is just directionally toward Harrison Bergeron and I think we can agree there are major costs there.

Yes, I'd like (actual) equality under the law and the market and individuals and communities to be allowed to find their own level, and for those who sink to not be massively subsidized by those who swim. Compassion, I think, does not extend to perpetuating dysfunction.

I suppose there are hypothetical populations of uniformly idiotic demon spawn where that would be the case.

Also, I think it's dishonest to stipulate that they have to be uniform. You telling me that a population of 99% idiotic demon spawn and 1% normal people wouldn't be worth keeping at a distance? Where's the line? Isn't there a debate to be had here?

Besides which the question starts to come down to why we have nations, or borders, or militaries, or law enforcement, or locks to begin with.

The Central Asian steppe nomads didn't have to be 100% idiotic demon spawn for it to still be very much worthwhile for China to build a giant wall.

Given any polity, there are groups which would probably be net-negative to have integrate on equal terms. There are many layers of defense against this happening. What to do when they're already next door, already citizens? Shrug and give up? Watch your communities unravel, your institutions collapse, your cities decay?

The only reason we can even pretend (for peacocking status reasons) that this might be acceptable is that fossil fuels have given us this staggering amount of wealth. Wish we wouldn't have squandered it, but especially I wish we weren't squandering it on this in particular.

I think this is it. According to my elderly grandpa the military taught him antiracism in the 1950s. Rather than officially discriminating against black people they were put to something like equal training and combat work as whites.

I think this AstralCodexTen can help give some insight:https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way

The basis is, today, who uses the word "negro"? Two types of people: Extremely clueless old people, and vile racists*. So if you use it, and you don't look like you're at least 95 years old, everyone will assume you're a vile racist. Now think about who used the word "negro" 30 years ago. The answer is a lot more old people, not all of whom are clueless, some just don't want to change the word they always used, and vile racists. But fewer and fewer respectable people used it, because it was associated with vile racists, and there's no reason to use it when "black" worked just as well. So it became more and more associated with vile racists. And so on until the 50s-60s when it was actually just another word, the polite way to refer to a black person that government forms and black people themselves used.

I think there is a similar effect with political positions of being against coloured immigration. In 1910, it was perfectly respectable to want your community to be all white. You didn't have to be a vile racist to want to avoid black people in your community, you could just want to have your own separate culture in your neighborhood and have no personal enmity to black people. Although the hateful racists certainly did exist and did push, probably the hardest, against desegregation then too. Then over time, more and more people wanted to strongly signal they weren't hateful racists, and loudly declared they supported immigration. And then eventually being against multiculturalism was position only held by hateful racists. World War 2 accelerated this effect greatly as well, since Hitler was the loudest and most hateful of all racists, and he of course was also a great enemy of the Allies, so people had to try extra hard to make clear they were not a hateful racist like Hitler.

*I'm not exaggerating for effect. Even HBD types or other reactionaries who hold no hate in their heart but just want ethnostates don't use the word 'negro' today. It's only the vile people who want to be purposefully offensive and who hold a lot of hate and cruelty in their hearts who use it.

The word "negro" is chiefly used by vile racists...and extremely clueless old people. The two types of people who use the word "negro" are vile racists, extremely clueless old people...and those who want to finance college for black students. The three types of people who use the word "negro" are vile racists, extremely clueless old people, those who want to finance college for black students...and parodists with an almost fanatical devotion to irony.

...and people alluding to the era when it was the preferred nomenclature.

This is all true, except ...

there's no reason to use it when "black" worked just as well

Did it? Even today, when we look up "black" in the dictionary, we see: "dirty, soiled"; "thoroughly sinister or evil"; "indicative of condemnation or discredit"; "connected with or invoking the supernatural and especially the devil"; "very sad, gloomy, or calamitous"; "marked by the occurrence of disaster"; "characterized by hostility or angry discontent"; "characterized by grim, distorted, or grotesque satire". Two of those are annotated "old fashioned + literary", but e.g. The Lord of the Rings is full of them, and it's sold another 50M+ copies since the Peter Jackson films' release.

Occasionally you see some modern "anti-racist" shit that looks like it really came from a white supremacist and/or 4chan troll, but at least it often gets walked back, not popularized to fixation. Whose idea was it to replace an exonym whose primary association became "remember how evilly America treated African-Americans?" with another that instead indirectly associates its target with eight different types of badness?!

Right now the euphemism treadmill means there's no going back, thanks to the mechanisms you've described, but how did the switch get justified in the first place? Was there just no alternative? We wanted some new word, and too many people got caught looking like idiots by calling a British person "African-American", and nobody came up with any better option?

(There's also the fact that most "black" people are dark brown, not black, but that's somewhat of an issue with using a Latin-derived word for "black" too. For that matter, calling pinkish-beige people "white" is a misstatement of similar proportions and unnecessary connotations...)

That's a good point, especially since in my perspective, it was changed at the behest of black people.

Actually, my just so story for how it changed is that the places where the term African American was used most frequently were in East Coast Urban areas frequented by the middle and upper middle class. But the black people who populate those areas are not all ADOS, many of them are African and Carribean immigrant professionals. They didn't like being called African American because it is both inaccurate and didn't appear to confer any advantages at the time (not that I'm implying they'd pretend to be ADOS for status, just that you don't put as much effort into correcting someone when their label doesn't negatively affect you) and Black, despite the negative associations, is also indisputably the coolest colour.

Black, despite the negative associations, is also indisputably the coolest colour.

Except on sunny days, when it is the hottest.

I want to problematize the idea that there was a pre-WWII White Unity, that then disappeared all at once post-WWII. To post up off of @RenOS 's excellent response, desegregation doesn't start with Black people, it starts with "trusting people from the next village" and then moves through the French Revolutionary levee en masse to "trusting people from other regions within one nation." For immigrant and mixed nations like the United States, there was a long process to achieve linguistic and religious unity within the category of "White." The ancient Greeks drew such strong distinctions between so many different races and city states within a region that is roughly the size of modern Florida.

We can argue about what the degree of discrimination between groups existed pre-WWII, but it was common for a variety of reasons for white-ethnics to marry purely among their own community. Italians married Italians, Austrians and Germans married each other, Irish Catholics married Irish Catholics, WASPs looked down on intermarrying with Catholics. My Hungarian Great Grandmother had a framed photo of JFK and Jackie in her kitchen, because she had taken so much shit for being a Catholic when she came to America, JFK's election was for her similar to the way Black people felt about Barack Obama.

Post WWII, while I still have some Long Island Eye-Talian friends whose parents want them to marry another Eye-Tie, most people are subsumed under the category white. Theological differences between Papists and Prots have been erased or narrowed, to the point that very few people are sufficiently devout to care one way or the other, often a religious Catholic would sooner their daughter marry a devout protestant than an agnostic nominal Catholic.

Viewed in this way desegregation is part of a longer gradient. The amalgamation of disparate identies, from regions into nations, then of nationalities and religious groups into racial categories on the census, to a further integration between census categories of Race.

The amalgamation of disparate identies, from regions into nations, then of nationalities and religious groups into racial categories on the census, to a further integration between census categories of Race.

Nationalism was more often about fragmentation than unification though. The Austro-Hungarian empire split up at the end of WW1 because nobody wanted to share a country with a different ethnic group, and then Yugoslavia split up into even smaller parts later on. Ireland split from the UK. The Basques tried to split from Spain but didn't have enough guns. I don't think the narrative of a long, overarching process towards unification is accurate since it's a process that goes in both direction.

I think it's more of a top down movement going back to the roots of liberalism, which was an elite movement from the beginning. If you start with the premise that everyone is exactly equal and that all differences are from upbringing and circumstances then of course integration makes sense. People who have to live with the consequences more directly might not agree, but that's what the 101st Airborne Division is for.

Nationalism lead to the fracturing of empires that didn't unify hard enough. France brutally suppressed Gascon, Basque, Norman, Provencal, Breton identities, subsumed them under Paris. They eliminated local variation in languages, forcibly required that everything be written in proper standard French.

If the Austrians had the state capacity and the will to forcibly replace local languages with German, the Habsburgs would still be enthroned in Vienna.

There is a big difference between pushing a certain dialect and changing the entire language. Hungarian isn’t even an Indo-European language.

Basque is not Indo-European, either; Breton is, but as a Celtic language it's more closely related to Irish and Gaelic than to French. Occitan/Provencal is much closer to French, but you could say the same about, say, Catalan; I believe even Occitan is generally recognized as its own language (of course, the difference between a dialect and a separate language is often arbitrary).

EDIT: the beginning of the Lord's Prayer as a sample, taken from Wikipedia:

French: Notre Père, qui es aux cieux, que ton nom soit sanctifié, que ton règne vienne, que ta volonté soit faite sur la terre comme au ciel.

Occitan: Le nostre Paire que es els cèls, sanctificatz sia lo teus nom, avenga lo teus regnes, e sia faita la tua voluntatz sicò el cèl et e la tèrra.

Breton: Hon Tad, c'hwi hag a zo en Neñv, ra vo santelaet hoc'h anv. Ra zeuio ho Rouantelezh. Ra vo graet ho youl war an douar evel en neñv.

Basque: Gure Aita, Zeruetan zaudena, santu izan bedi zure izena. Etor bedi zure erreinua. Egin bedi zure nahia zeruan bezala lurrean ere.

Come on - Basque is a language isolate!

Basque and Breton are very definitely not French- one is more closely related to welsh and the other is thought related to other languages only by schizos. And I am a speaker of a ‘French’ dialect descended from 18th century Norman, it is barely mutually intelligible with standard french at all. And I think several of the other ‘dialects’ are now recognized as full fledged languages.

My understanding of the Habsburgs was that they were quite consciously a multicultural empire in the old sense, as opposed to a nation-state. You could go on being a Slovene, Hungarian, or Croat as long as you paid your taxes and homage to the power center in Vienna (in the form of the royal family, not the German or Austrian people), rather than being forcibly assimilated.

In the aftermath of WWI many of the older generation lamented what they saw as a rising tide of intolerance that led to the disintegration of the old monarchical order where everyone got along just fine to one where people clung instead to their parochial ethnic and linguistic identities and were all made weaker for it.

It’s worth noting that Austria thought a ‘many nations, one empire’ plan wherein the various subjects would be United by religion and the monarchy was a better bet than nationalism, and that the proximal cause of this plan failing was losing a major war(which was due to a combination of terrible foreign policy decisions, nepotism, and geographic disadvantages rather than internal instability), not revolts among the subjects, and nationalist sentiment opposed to membership in the empire was mostly an import- Princep was a Serbian(from outside the empire) wanting to incorporate a subject people into being forcibly required to be good Serbians, and not a local activist, after all.

I'm not interested in resegregation in any way, but I think people are really bad at understanding the historical perspective. For the great majority of history and places, the average person would see almost nobody except a very small set of fixed local ethnicities, often only a single one. The few situations where they would, it was either very strongly controlled like large-distance-trading (and even that was still often changing hands exactly at the lines where ethnicities changed) or in a very negative context like an invasion, vagabonds or large scale population movements (where the moving people might not necessarily be ill-intended, but the difficulties involving the movement still meant that it rarely worked out well).

It absolutely makes sense that historically, people would by default simply distrust anyone who wasn't of an ethnicity they knew; But in fact it was worse than this: People were xenophobic in a much more general sense in that they simply distrusted anyone, full stop, that wasn't already well-known in their local environment. And this made a lot of sense! Moving around into unknown communities back then was expensive and dangerous, something that was only done if you had no other option. And when would someone have no other option? Usually because they did something sufficiently bad somewhere that they had to flee. Not to mention that someone who has nothing to lose is inherently dangerous in an environment where everyone is still fighting for their survival. On average, even a single stranger arriving - not to mention a group of them - was a very net-negative thing for a community for most of history.

But even back then, there absolutely were ways around these problems; Letters of recommendation, bringing resources with you and immediately sharing them as a proof of goodwill, being part of a generally accepted institution like a monastery or long-distance-trading, let's call this whole category credentials. So the capacity to trust strangers has always been there. But credentials were entirely inaccessible for something like 99% of the population. Guilds were possibly the first larger scale credential that made the concept accessible for something like an extra 10% of the population I guess? I admittedly don't know the exact numbers here. There is some argument that christianity and religions in general can fulfil a similar role as a low level credential.

Now comes pre-modernity, or the colonialism period or however you want to call it. As rapidly improving technology allows people to move much further than they could before, suddenly the equations changed; The baseline for "my situation is bad enough that it's worth trying my luck elsewhere" increased and increased, and hence the average quality of the stranger (again, stranger meaning not just personally unknown but someone without credentials) increased from "probably literally a multiple murderer" to just "regular poor person" . Furthermore, our general situation improved enough that (violent) criminality in general was worth less, and violent mental illness also has diminished. But as it always goes, social technology tends to lag behind regular technology, and hence both people's instincts were slow to change and modern-style credentialism hasn't established itself yet (or just partially through the aforementioned guilds).

I think people underestimate how much of pre-modernity style racism is mostly just the combination of this instinctive, historically rational distrust of strangers and the poor experiences that predictably happen when groups with very different norms clash. And unlike a teutonic moving into a roman village, who might cause some issues but who can show his goodwill, adopt local norms and become increasingly indistinguishable, the obvious differences between very different ethnicities makes fitting in much more difficult and hence slows everything down. Racism is not in any way this special kind of evil that is entirely irrational, it's just our instinctive distrust of strangers that used to be very adaptive.

As we near modernity, people increasingly start to trust strangers more in a fully general sense, and modern-style credentialism gets established so that almost anybody can travel from one place to another where they literally know nobody and still show proof of who they are, what they are capable of, that they're not a threat to anyone, etc. And this process happened almost simultaneously as racism toned down, and I don't think that is an accident. It's fundamentally the same process in my opinion. In medieval times, a black guy turning up somewhere complaining that nobody trusts him falls on deaf ears; they're trusting no strangers, and they are struggling to survive already. Today, if anybody turns up somewhere and is treated with distance and distrust, you need a specific reason and "racism" as a concept starts to even make sense at all. Early this century was just the weird inter-period when our society hadn't fully caught up with the changes. Or more precisely, societies, since I think other ethnicities actively westernising has been a large part of the process as well.

Btw, none of this is incompatible with the sort of "light" HBD that expects some average differences between groups (but which is unfortunately still taboo in the modern western consensus position). I guess this post also ended up slightly off-target in that it is not describing how the switch actually happened in detail, and more on the why it was the way it used to be and why it has changed. but I hope it's still interesting enough for some people.

but I hope it's still interesting enough for some people.

It is! Thanks for writing it up, it's something to noodle on a bit.


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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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