site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28495 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It has been a while since I've read John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, but I've been ruminating on his conception of property in that book. He says:

Though the earth, and all inferiour creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.

Basically, whenever you mix your labor with something out of nature, it becomes yours.

This conception was highly influential on the Founding Fathers of the United States, and it is easy to see the advantages of such a conception of private property for a brand new country. Sweeping aside the thorny issue of native Americans, if you have a vast wilderness of unclaimed territory, the idea of allowing citizens to go out, form a homestead somewhere and to recognize their claim on the land feels very intuitive and "fair."

Unfortunately, such an idealized conception of property ownership didn't actually exist in practice. Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow explores some of the things that happened in Appalachia over the history of the United States. Just within this microcosm, we see the way things often played out in practice, and it was far from the Lockean ideal.

It was not unusual for some rich landowner to lay claim to a bunch of land he had never even seen or set foot upon, and then to just sit on the claim without ever doing anything with it. Then squatters would move in, and make homes and farms on the land, before being discovered and kicked out.

It seems to me, if we take John Locke's account of property as our model, the squatters had a better moral claim to owning that land than the de jure owners in many cases. And yet again and again, we see governments recognizing the claims of absentee landlords over those of the people who had worked and improved the lands with their own two hands.

In many ways, property and its justification are core to establishing that society is "fair." So it is troubling to note a discrepancy this big between theory and practice so early in the country's history, at the very foundation of property ownership claims, poisoning everything downstream from them.

I think a toy example will help illustrate why this is such a big deal for the modern United States:

Imagine there's an island that has 10 heterosexual couples on it. This island is abundant in natural resources, and it has the following features:

  • If 20 people work the land, it can produce a luxurious lifestyle for all 20 people.
  • If 14 people work the land, it can produce a good (but not great) lifestyle for all 20 people.
  • If four people work together, it is possible to trap two people in a 10 foot by 10 foot area of the island effectively forever.

Now, as we come into the island, 9 of the couples have come together and formed a gang. They claim that because their gang was the first to walk the circumference of the island, they have the best claim to owning the island and they will enforce their property claim against the 10th couple. They do not want the last couple collecting resources on the part of the island that had informally been "theirs" up until a few days ago, in which they had spent years building shelters and tools to improve their hunting and gathering.

The gang is going to imprison the couple in a 10'x10' part of the island unless they agree to recognize their ownership claim. Furthermore, while they're prepared to enjoy a merely good lifestyle for the rest of their lives, they tell the unfortunate couple that after they agree to the gang's ownership claim the gang would be willing to rent "their" part of the island back to them, as long as that couple gives them all a tribute that will take them down to a meager lifestyle, and take the gang up to a decadent lifestyle.

Left with no other choice, the unfortunate couple agrees to recognize the gang's ownership claim, and starts paying tribute.

Is the society on the island described above fair or just? I think most people's intuitions would be that it is not.

Now, imagine that several generations have passed. The islanders have expanded out onto several other islands, but the extra resources from the first island have resulted in a very uneven society. The descendants of the original gang own everything, and the descendants of the original unfortunate couple have never owned anything. They rent wherever they go, despite barely enjoying the fruits of their labor.

Did the passage of time, and inheritance of property down through the generations somehow make the society more fair and just? Would the descendants of the original unfortunate couple be wrong to want to overthrow their society and redistribute the land and other resources of society more fairly and justly?

As I see it, there are three distinct phases when it comes to thinking about property rights:

  1. The initial distribution of property at the establishment of a country.
  2. The inheritance of property up towards the present.
  3. The free exchange of property among people of the present generation.

It seems to me like a lot of people are happy to start at step 3 and call it a day when it comes to how they conceptualize property, and its just distribution through society. A worker who is forced to sell their labor in order to make money to purchase the necessities of life is not being exploited no matter how little they're getting paid, and no matter what happened in steps 1 and 2 to get them to the place where they needed to sell their labor in the first place.

For people who defend the current conception of property in the industrialized world, and who think that we should accept the idea of starting at step 3 and not worrying about 1 and 2, what is the justification?

Locke was wrong.

Yarvin had a great quote: "Property is peace." Possession and the physical power to enforce possession are fundamental properties of reality. "Property rights" are a formalization of possession. "Property" is an agreement to write down and legitimize possession, and say that going forward property can only be transferred according to the rules (which in most cases means according to the consent of the existing owner) and not according to violence.

For someone to say, "these property rights are illegitimate" is fundamentally akin to the person saying, "I renounce the peaceful status quo; I choose war."

When formal property rights are entirely out-of-whack with the reality of possession (the case of an absentee landlord and squatters living on the land for years), that is a recipe for friction and conflict. There is no one way under natural law in which such conflicts must be resolved. Societies just have to muddle through, and usually they develop some sort of concept of adverse possession and statues of limitations.

Would the descendants of the original unfortunate couple be wrong to want to overthrow their society and redistribute the land and other resources of society more fairly and justly?

This would constitute choosing war against the existing legal regime. Can rebellion against authority ever be just? Yes, but only in dire situations. Is it in this case? I don't know, only the people involved have enough information to decide. Here is how one moral guide (the Catechism of the Catholic Church) discusses the criteria for violent opposition to existing political authority:

Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well–founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.

Pope John XXIII in an encyclical enumerated some of these fundamental rights:

"We must speak of man's rights. Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services. In consequence, he has the right to be looked after in the event of ill health; disability stemming from his work; widowhood; old age; enforced unemployment; or whenever through no fault of his own he is deprived of the means of livelihood."

So they might be justified in rebellion. However, the rebellion would be justified not because the property rights were originally illegitimate, but because the current political status quo was depriving them of the means necessary for the proper development of life.

EDIT: if this island example is supposed to be analogy for blacks in America, I would say rebellion in the current year clearly flunks all five of the above tests for legitimacy.

Coase theorem suggests that provided property rights are clear and transaction costs low enough property will ultimately be put to its highest and best use notwithstanding the initial distribution.

Over hundred+ years, transaction costs are low enough. I think the US bears this out.

The older I get the more I dislike this first principles thinking based on rights and so forth. I think ultimately there is only one social law in the world, the law of the jungle. Just as any other animal, you get to keep your property if you can physically keep it. You conveniently evaded the issue of natives in USA, but that was precisely the case. Natives could not keep their land so they did not. As easy as that.

Current social and economic arrangement exists because it has legitimacy. Legitimacy is ability to keep powerful individuals from exerting violence to take what they want. You can get legitimacy by naked power, by growing the spoils so there is easier way to get ahead than using violence as well as by creating social structures regulating violent behavior or any number of other means.

This will be a tangent, but I recently watched YouTube discussion of some people from Niger where they reacted to US news reports about recent coup in that country which was described as anti-democratic and authoritarian etc. And they laughed, Niger ranks 189th out of 191 countries in the world in UN Development index, it is as poor as it can get. It does not matter if god himself was ruling that country and he was just unlucky, the result is abject poverty and failure. The regime simply has no legitimacy, it does not work and no number of "first principles" talks about democracy and freedom make any sense in Niger. If society is in ruin and ruled by illegitimate regime, is anti-social behavior really antisocial?

For people who defend the current conception of property in the industrialized world, and who think that we should accept the idea of starting at step 3 and not worrying about 1 and 2, what is the justification?

It works. First World now is still arguably the best place and time to live in history of mankind, even now in 2023. The current system has build up some legitimacy, it was able to grow its population along its wealth for centuries now. There may be some reasons to play on the edges and adjust things here and there, but I do not think we are close to anything that should require drastic measures like in Niger.

For people who defend the current conception of property in the industrialized world

If your whole post is applicable anywhere, it is applicable to pre-industrial world, where the rich were rich because they inherited land from their ancestors who arrived with William the Bastard centuries ago.

It has no meaning in industrial civilization, and even less in post-industrial one. How many of today's rich are rich because of unbroken inheritance of land stolen from Indians or Saxons?

Even in country where some of old feudal customs, traditions and wealth still survive you can, at best, justify expropriation of property of Duke of Westminster while not touching the rest of billionaires.

There is a reason why equal distribution of land, most extremely extreme extremist rebel demand for millenia, was quietly dropped back in the 19th century.

Did the passage of time, and inheritance of property down through the generations somehow make the society more fair and just?

Yes, ideas of statute of limitations and adverse possession are universally considered fair and just, given that the alternative is state of eternal vendetta, eternal revenge for ancient slights that were revenge for even more ancient slights.

Land will never be without value as long as humans are entirely living on earth simply because we cannot make more of it. We only have one Earth and once all the land on earth belongs to someone else, you can’t simply get your own. How much wealth is generated by the mere fact that you own land would vary by era, but no scarce resource will ever be without value.

How much wealth is generated by the mere fact that you own land would vary by era, but no scarce resource will ever be without value.

Yes it varies, and in our era pure ownership of land brings less wealth than ever before.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardjchang/2023/04/09/the-path-to-billions-the-industries-with-the-most-billionaires-2023/

#7. Real Estate 193 billionaires | 7% of list Richest: Donald Bren ($17.4 billion), chairman of California-based real estate firm Irvine Co.

Only 7% of world's billionaires have real estate as source of their income (and most of it is from real estate development, not raw ownership of unimproved land).

All a statute of limitations does, conceptually, is move step 1 up to some more recent date, though. If we say that any claims older than, say, 100 years will not be recognized, then the new "foundation" of the current system of property ownership is just 100 years in the past. I think a statute of limitations can certainly be a procedurally just rule for a society to adopt, but that doesn't mean the outcomes that it produces will be substantially just.

Also, it's awfully convenient for a group in power to say, "Hey, we've gotta let bygones be bygones, alright? You wouldn't want endless vendettas and re-litigation of this whole thing every generation, would you? Good, good, I'm glad you're seeing reason, now go back to your hovel and eat your gruel."

Joe Studwell's How Asia Works makes a case that land reform (AKA "stealing" land from some people and giving it to others) was an important part of the transition to being a middle income country for many Asian countries. And we even have examples of land reform under the Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome, so the issue of land concentrating into a few hands and leading to issues in society is a well-trodden one. To avoid the kind of stagnation that tends to result from that, why shouldn't we adopt something like Georgism, which would weaken land-based property ownership within society but attempt to make it fair going forward?

To avoid the kind of stagnation that tends to result from that, why shouldn't we adopt something like Georgism, which would weaken land-based property ownership within society but attempt to make it fair going forward?

The US economy is simply not stagnating. We have the highest nominal GDP/capita worldwide among large countries, lead novel research and industries (most recently AI), and our #1 competitor is notorious for stealing our IP. The US's property economy is stagnating for all the usual YIMBY reasons and a lot more construction should be legal, but that's not at all analogous to your OP. Georgism, taken literally, means replacing all taxes with a tax on land, which I don't think is workable because a lot of important capital is entirely intangible in the form of human capital, IP, and organizations and a land tax totally misses that.

Joe Studwell's How Asia Works makes a case that land reform (AKA "stealing" land from some people and giving it to others) was an important part of the transition to being a middle income country for many Asian countries. Exactly. These were pre-industrial feudal countries completely unlike modern developed world.

Exactly. These were extremely poor pre-industrial countries completely unlike modern developed world.

Assuming you are in US. You waved your magic wand, expropriated all 1,3 billion acres of privately owned agricultural land and distributed it equally. Every US citizen now owns whole 3.9 acre of land.

Now what? How is poverty alleviated? How are people who "live in hovel and eat gruel" helped, what are they supposed to do with this land?

And we even have examples of land reform under the Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome, so the issue of land concentrating into a few hands and leading to issues in society is a well-trodden one. To avoid the kind of stagnation that tends to result from that, why shouldn't we adopt something like Georgism, which would weaken land-based property ownership within society but attempt to make it fair going forward?

All pre-industrial, pre-modern ancient civilizations.

Demonstrate that the stagnation we see now (assuming we have stagnation) is due to poor people lacking land of average value about 4000 dollars per acre.

The island collectively voted to transfer ten percent of the island's economic output to those who are less fortunate, funded by taxes on the more - and that doesn't include infrastructure, education, etc for the general benefit. And the original gang's descendants aren't in power anymore - they invited successive waves of immigrants, and, via free trade, transferred most of their property claims to the smartest and most industrious (or unscrupulous) of them. How many Jews, Asians, or Indians were on the island when the first nine people arrived, compared to how many are rich today?

Yeah, if we were still feudal or WASPs owned 90% of a rentier economy because they got here first, that'd be very unjust and inefficient. But that doesn't resemble the current state of America. A different argument against private ownership of the means of production - that it's exploitative or inefficient for those who come out on top of a fierce competition for profits to dictate much of the economy - at least accurately describes the thing it criticizes.

For people who defend the current conception of property in the industrialized world, and who think that we should accept the idea of starting at step 3 and not worrying about 1 and 2, what is the justification?

Because said free exchange has, several times over, redistributed all the capital from the original owners to those who won in a contest of merit (or underhandedness), and to whatever extent the original gang members hold more capital than some other groups, it's mostly because they have e.g. better genes or cultures - and, indeed, more recent arrivals with better genes/cultures have higher average income/wealth than the founding ethnicities.

I'd love some sort of study/analysis of whether you, in terms of current affluence in American society, are better off as the descendant of a member of the top fifth percentile in wealth of 1700's Colonial America or as a first/second-generation immigrant who is the descendant of somebody who was similarly affluent in their country of origin.

Dunno if this is Culture War or not, but I could really use some Instruction for the Bewildered on this.

So NFTs are a bubble that has finally burst, surprising nobody (or at least, nobody seems to be willing to admit publicly they believed the hype). They were the Tulip Mania of our day.

Or maybe they're not, at least if you have the right ones. Who knows, certainly not me, that's why I'm asking for explanations.

I couldn't understand just exactly what was meant to be so wonderful about them, and the common reason seemed to be "they're not fungible", which left me where it found me.

Was it just because of the magic worlds "crypto" and "blockchain"? What the hell was supposed to be going on here? You can buy a share of some (generally terrible) image, but you won't own it, the original creator will, and many others can also own a share of it, but because it's "blockchain" this somehow makes it vastly valuable?

At least Jack's magic beans really did grow into a giant vine where he eventually obtained treasure, but this sort of thing bewilders me as to what the hell is going on.

So NFTs are a bubble that has finally burst, surprising nobody (or at least, nobody seems to be willing to admit publicly they believed the hype). They were the Tulip Mania of our day.

This was very obvious even without hindsight . Good thing i stayed away from this stuff. it's valuable for the same reason some artwork is valuable. a market forms in which supply and demand determines the price. the community collectively subscribes to the belief that these jpgs are worth something, and hence they are.

I recommend Foldable Ideas video on NFTs. If you're familiar with (or don't care about) the history of crypto and tokens more generally you can probably skip to Section 4 (~39:00), though I recommend watching the whole thing.

On the buyer side, NFTs were an example of what finance calls greater fool theory. The basic idea is you can get people to pay irrational prices for something as long as they are convinced they will be able to sell that thing to someone else (the "greater fool") for a profit. People didn't buy NFTs because they (necessarily) believed in the value proposition of an NFT at some particular price point, but because it would be a profitable investment due to an appreciation in value. Wash trading, for example, is a way a particular seller might manufacture a history of an NFT increasing in value before selling it to someone else, who hopes to see a continued pattern of increase in value. The technical aspects of NFTs and blockchain function in a primarily obfuscatory capacity. To give people some tech jargon for why their investment will appreciate that they fundamentally do not understand. A demonstration that Eulering is alive and well.

I don't recommend Foldable Ideas videos on anything. NFTs are bullshit but that guy is a soy douche all around. I don't trust him not to misrepresent anything he lays his hands on.

Was it just because of the magic worlds "crypto" and "blockchain"? What the hell was supposed to be going on here?

In theory, it was supposed to be an authentication schema that avoided a lot of present authentication issues.

In certain circles, there's a major problem with digital art, in that it's very hard to prove that a specific piece is 'yours' or was 'commissioned by' you, in the way that possessing a physical piece of traditional art does. Not just in the sense that someone else could take a picture or save-to-hardrive and repost, but they could readily do so and pretend you were faking. You could post it onto a website, but not only does that invite someone to right-click-save, it's only useful so long as the website is active with your media on it, and only to the extent the timestamps there are more authoritative than those from a random self-host who could fake them. Having process files like version'd photoshop files or sketch layers largely just cycles back a level.

This isn't a hugely valuable things in terms of productivity or world-changing ramifications, but for people who care a lot about digital art, it can be really annoying. Even at casual levels, there are Problems -- a lot of bigger-name furries find themselves impersonated on sites like F-list by people who are just trying to leverage their art, which doesn't sound that bad until you stumble on a profile claiming to be you and into some stuff. At more professional spheres, art impersonation is a big deal.

By having some strongly delineated identifier showing ownership, with a good way to transfer it, which is authoritative but separate from an authority, could be useful.

In practice, it got dominated by grifters early on, as with a good many other crypto crap did -- just like a lot of 'decentralized' crypto DNS ended up running through a couple oracle servers, a lot of NFT implementations did that and validated the url (why?) instead of some meaningful identifier for the image, and that's when they weren't just a glorified pump-and-dump. I think there are some technical issues for part of that, but there was also just some inexplicably high dollar values going around very early on in the tech's development. There's some charitable explanations possible, like zero-index-rate behaviors or tech-dumb investors huffing farts, but I expect a lot of people saw rumors of conventional modern art as money-laundering and thought this would be the next thing in that field.

I couldn't understand just exactly what was meant to be so wonderful about them, and the common reason seemed to be "they're not fungible", which left me where it found me.

Buying outrageously ugly ape for outrageous price, and reselling it to bigger fool shrewder crypto investor for even more outrageous price? Everything is wonderful about this plan, when it works as intended.

Yeah, it needs to be emphasized that the apes (and the lions, etc, but particularly the apes) were really some of the ugliest, most offputting "artwork" that's been hocked specifically as a good investment i've seen in some time. It flabbergasts me that the sheer ugliness of those things didn't immediately give the people "yeah, that's not going to appreciate in value expect in very short timelines" reaction.

I think there is some element of some people liking that.
Ex: I've always been put off by shows like Spongebob and Regular Show due to the almost grotesque art style they often delve into, similar to various of the NFTs. Of course they're better cartoons, but it shows that some people like that general style.

Following up on /u/MaiqTheTrue's point:

  • A tin of shit sold for €275,000 in 2016.
  • Andres Serrano's "artworks" (many of which involve bodily fluids in some way—using, for example, blood (sometimes menstrual blood), semen or human breast milk) routinely fetch anywhere from five to six figures. This includes "Piss Christ", a "photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's own urine", which sold for a quarter-million in 1999 (half-million in today's money).
  • Damien Hirst's entire career.
  • "My Bed" (a "readymade installation, consisting of [artist Tracey Emin's] unmade dirty bed, in which she had spent several weeks drinking, smoking, eating, sleeping and having sexual intercourse while undergoing a period of severe emotional flux... The artwork featured used condoms and blood-stained underwear") fetched £2.5 million in 2014.

In modern art, artists making intentionally ugly, crass and disgusting work is no impediment to their making a pretty penny.

The difference here is that I can, if I wish, ignore all of that stuff and never see any of it apart from random glimpses of Piss Christ when someone chooses to have that debate again or perhaps one of Hirst's works (which are aesthetically generally more pleasing than the apes), whereas at the height of the NFT mania it was impossible to browse Twitter without seeing some ape avatar posting about whatever dumb shit.

True, although some of this stuff is more mainstream than you might think. Andres Serrano created the cover art for two Metallica albums, for example.

In defense of the apes, most modern art isn’t valuable because of its beauty, but rather because it’s made by someone famous in the art world. It’s not a new phenomenon. A guy can paint a canvas in a single color, and providing that he’s famous enough, people will spend thousands of dollars for a square canvas painted green.

Heck, add a stripe of a second colour and you're talking millions.

Was it just because of the magic worlds "crypto" and "blockchain"? What the hell was supposed to be going on here? You can buy a share of some (generally terrible) image, but you won't own it, the original creator will, and many others can also own a share of it, but because it's "blockchain" this somehow makes it vastly valuable?

Yes, this is exactly it. Like other highly-speculative assets, the "fair price" of an NFT can be approximated by [expected value of the asset conditional on the bull case being true] x [probability of the bull case being true]. In the case of NFTs, the bull case is, "the Ethereum blockchain becomes integrated into all aspects of life and is recognized as the authoritative ledger of monetary transactions, ownership, and recordkeeping." In such a scenario, ownership of the NFT would in fact correspond to legal ownership of the property represented by the NFT.

Of course, now that crypto has been exposed, it is pretty obvious that [probability of the bull case being true] is approximately zero, so the value of NFTs are approximately zero.

Sophisticated_Artist puts random squiggles on a page - artwork worth millions of dollars!

Crypto_bro puts random memes on a webpage, on a blockchain - why should that not be worth millions of dollars?

I maintain that there's literally nothing wrong with NFTs. I don't want them. Nor do I the rubbish that art galleries (especially modern art galleries) pay 'artists' for. I see no reason why the former are privileged and the latter despised. In fact, the latter are better since they aren't used to cheat charitable donation tax loopholes.

Honestly, I've been wanting to use NFTs to cheat those loopholes for a while. I'd do anything to get them closed, including break them so wide open that they have to be closed. Unfortunately this would probably just lead to the NFT-specific loophole being closed if it was ever open to begin with.

The idea would be, create Fake Art Collection, keep its valuation ridiculously high, allow people to commission new NFTs in the Collection but only if they donate them to NFT Art Museum. It would be a nice easy way to make the loophole exploitation process effortless and available to everyone, not just the rich and well-connected. Would love if anyone has any idea whether this could work from a legal standpoint--I could easily build the blockchain side of it.

NFTs were supposed to have a mechanism where you could verify ownership, track transfers, and maybe even compensate the original producer every time a work changed hands. Lots of drawing board schemes appeared on how you could pivot this platform into a fair system for paying creatives, and creatives would produce like never before, in some kind of decentralized way through common consensus.

Everyone got so excited about it that they took a leap of faith on the NFT part and... kinda forgot to actually build the rest of that stuff? The default way to even trade these things ended up being a central exchange (Opensea). Pretty far from the ideal.

Tulipmania ensued and then a crash happened.

In some ways, you could argue that the Bored Ape stuff was one of the more justifiable uses of NFTs, in that they were, ostensibly "club membership cards". Ie. they were tradable tickets that marked you as a member of the "Bored Ape Yacht Club". Which seems clearly not worth the price of admission, but rich people spending stupid money on irrelevant status markers, including clubs that are all about networking with other rich people by screening out those too poor to afford dues isn't really a new thing, so arguably this is no stupider than a lot of stuff.

However, a lot of the dislike for all this is that uses of NFTs are 99.9% scams - and even if not, are typically cases where the NFTness isn't providing any actual value. Ie. most clubs don't need NFTs to prove membership, just keeping a database of who's paid their dues and is considered a member.

NFTs promise to move that database outside the control of the club - making the database public such that trading tickets, proving membership etc is outside the control of the club. Which sounds like it might have some value, except that recognition of that NFT as denoting membership (ie. using the forums, perks etc of the club) is still under the control of the club: if they decide to refuse to recognise your NFT, there's still nothing you can do (except the same legal remedies you could seek without them). It probably wouldn't do that of course, but only for the same reasons it wouldn't do it without NFTs: it'd destroy the club's ability to attract funds). Which all means that being an NFT doesn't really add much, except perhaps provide tradability that the club doesn't have to be a party to - but that could still be done without needing the complexity of blockchain involvement.

And that's probably the core issue with pretty much all uses of NFTs. There are theoretical cases where such a trustless distributed database of ownership could have value, but for pretty much all actual uses, it's not providing any value whatsoever, and is just a vehicle for scams relying on obscuring that point.

NFTs are like MTG cards ,yet the latter proved to be a way better investment. MTG cards have the advantage of utility (in the context of playing them) and scarcity, whereas NFTs have no utility even if there is scarcity in terms of the mint run.

Funny enough, the most valuable MTG cards are never played with, to the extent where it's legal to use fakes (proxies). Unless I've misunderstood it and you have to own a Black Lotus to enter a tournament with a proxy of one.

You must own a Black Lotus to enter a sanctioned tournament with one. And it must be damaged during the tournament for the judge to issue a proxy for it. You can’t just make a proxy.

That said, casual game? No one cares.

They are illegal in sanctioned events, which is why sanctioned vintage events are extremely rare. The only real sanctioned vintage is in the online version where the cards are 2 orders of magnitude cheaper.

There are unsanctioned tournaments, but I hear they limit the amount of proxies allowed. No point in showing up with your deck worth more than the per capita GDP if you get smoked by some kid playing a bunch of lands with ancestral recall and black lotus written on them.

In MTG do you win other people’s cards if you beat them? I always thought TCGs operate best with that system, to add a little real risk.

That sounds like it would transform the game from "no one would play any card worth more than $1000" to "no one would play any card worth more than $1". Of course, for cards at that level market price depends on play viability in the first place, so...

Okay, MtG rules are my wheelhouse, including early ones as well as current ones. Hyperion is more correct than not, but not quite there.

Very early in the game's history there was an "ante" rule where each player was supposed to set aside the top card of their deck at the beginning of the game and the winner kept all the ante cards. As he mentions there were even a few cards that interacted with this, say by forcing the opponent to ante an additional card, or anteing one yourself as an extra cost for a very powerful effect.

It was dropped very early on, not so much due to "playground fights" as because it (a) was incredibly unpopular, and (b) raised concerns about gambling laws in some jurisdictions, or at least WotC was worried that it might. The latter was the main reason WotC cited for removing it. It is still in the rulebook but is very heavily deprecated, and the use of ante (and the cards that directly interact with it) is banned in all sanctioned tournaments and has been for something like 95-97% of the game's history at this point.

I don't think it was framed as optional in the earliest rulebooks, though in my experience it was treated that way in practice. It certainly is optional now, and the clear default is to not use it. Though it's redundant, the rulebook also bans it where prohibited by law.

Well, the idea is to even the playing field somewhat. If you have an expensive but powerful card, you can play it, but only if you are willing to risk the possibility of losing it.

Yeah but if I've got a deck of 60 cards and I'm against a fast burn deck and I've got GAMEWINNER9000 (RRP $10,000) which instantly wins me the game if drawn in my deck, I haven't actually got that big a % of actually pulling that card in context of a single game.

Richard Garfield, patrilineal descendant of James A. Garfield never expected anyone to buy more than a dozen packs of the cards. So, when they did they had to fix the rules. Magic as Richard Garfield intended, where you can draw 3 cards for one blue mana.

They originally had that as an optional rule in MTG but all the playground fights caused it to die out. There were even ante cards printed; but, they, along with the skill cards are banned even in Vintage.

It appears that an "ante" rule exists, but is not used in official events.

MTG did have a rule like that initially. It was called "ante", but didn't last very long. From a wiki:

The last card to mention ante was Timmerian Fiends, printed in the 1995 Homelands expansion. Ante is strictly forbidden in DCI-sanctioned play and is only allowed in unsanctioned games where not forbidden by law.

NFTs are stateless distributed and permissionless certificates of ownership.

That's what the hype is originally about, it's Bitcoin for assets. And some of the original NFTs are stuff like address space on Urbit that actually has a concrete use online.

A novel art market for digital images developped on top of this technology, with the usual pitfalls any art market has. From wash trading to counterfeits to money laundering to bubbles.

None of the dynamics are new. What is new is that these dynamics can exist for completely digital assets whereas true private property was previously impossible for such assets as they would require a centralized authentication.

Tie these certificates to actual assets and they'll have value, but outside of online institutions that can enforce the redeemability of such certificates through code, they are only as valuable as this tie.

If no tie exists, the value is purely based on speculation.

The best steelman logic would be the point at which the NFT, as a kind of certificate of authenticity, becomes so respected that it is shameful to display art that you don't own the NFT for. No one would ever display something they don't own the NFT for, because everyone would point and laugh at them.

Think of luxury applications. A company like Rolex faces constant problems with ever better fakes. In a hypothetical future where people really care about NFTs, the NFT becomes authenticity. You just wouldn't wear a watch you didn't own the NFT for.

I don't see any of that happening.

No one would ever display something they don't own the NFT for, because everyone would point and laugh at them.

But people do display reproductions of art pieces they like, but could never afford the original. Museums make a tidy sum off selling everything from key chains up that are plastered with popular art works - think how many times you've seen the Raphael angels on something.

I suppose people could club together and purchase a stake in a new valuable art piece, and get the right to display it with the NFT showing they own a piece of it, not like the people who can't afford to do so but can only afford prints or copies - the way syndicates that own racehorses do.

People wear fake brands now, and don't care about them being authentic. I could see fake NFTs for your fake Rolex becoming A Thing.

People wear fake brands now, and don't care about them being authentic.

Some people do, some people absolutely refuse to. Among some people the rep Rolex is acceptable, or even privileged, a sign of cleverness. Among others, wearing a Rep would be found shameful, even disgusting. And the thing is, group A's opinion does not matter to group B, and if group B is large enough the value of the "real" asset will rise. Telling a room full of rich people making fun of your rep that "other people wouldn't care about this" isn't going to help.

If you're going to try to understand the concept of NFTs, or of authentic fashion/art/branding/etc, without just pointing and laughing you have to start by realizing that social groups exist where ownership is status, and ownership of the real thing is status. Am I one of these people? No. But there's lots of them around. Frankly there are times I wish I was, that's a whole class of emotions that I don't get to experience.

Sure, but if I'm in a gathering of people wealthy enough to have real genuine Patek Phillipe watches, I'm not going to be wearing a fake (if I can only afford a fake, the only way I'm in that room is as a servant of some kind).

If I'm among people who buy and wear and use fake brands, I don't care and neither do they so long as the item is good enough for use.

The problem in both cases is the signalling: I am rich enough to afford the real thing. If you are too gauche and nouveau riche for group A, they will shun you for other reasons than "that's a fake"; even if it's genuine, the 'wrong' brand or 'he/she is plainly trying to show off' will be enough to have fun made of you. Think of mocking rappers for suddenly deciding to drink Hennessy, or how Burberry became a down-market brand by catering to chavs. Or the crassness of the 'purchase for investment, lock it away so it stays unseen' of the Saudi prince who bought the Salvator Mundi(and indeed the crassness of rushing to establish it as a genuine Leonardo so it could be sold off for $$$$$$).

For group B, it's the same shunning for showing off, except in this case it's "he/she thinks they're better than us".

There's a narrow band where "I'm rich enough now with my newly-minted wealth to afford the real thing" is appreciated and a source of emulation, and I think that's where the NFT art falls. I don't care about real or fake, except insofar as appreciating real craftsmanship or real artistic merit and beauty (I'm never going to be impressed by "see how rich I am? see? see?") and so the status games don't matter to me.

So I think both the authentic old money set and the 'can only afford fakes' set would both laugh at the "see my authentic NFT token proving my authentic ownership" set trying to boast of their money and status. Does anybody think the oil-rich princelings of the Gulf States are arbiters elegantiaes or rather tasteless playboy yahoos squandering fortunes on hookers and blow? 'Dude look at my 200 real genuine NFTs' 'yeah, your highness (what a maroon, does he really think splashing cash around equals taste?)'.

As someone who works in the blockchain full-time, they're all scams. I will write more on this topic if/when I find time, but in short there is a miniscule fig leaf of objective justification for their price (perhaps blockchain something something will make NFTs priceless) and a perfect storm of incentives leading folllowers to hype the NFTs up. Like how pyramid schemes do actually have real products, but are like 5% product and 95% pyramid, NFTs are 0.01% product and 99.99% self-sustaining (until it pops) bubble.

It's less about "NFTs" and more about the idea of "buying digital art". The 'right click, save' criticism was so apt because the 'value' of owning expensive art is in the prestige of possessing a rare piece with good provenance and being able to show it off (either in your home or by lending it to a museum). "Showing off" your NFT, on the other hand, is literally showing off a JPEG, it's not only "functionally identical" to it, it is identical, because the "NFT" is only a (hypothetical) loicense tracking system.

When you buy art, you own the art. When you buy an NFT, you own a cryptographic key that says you have some kind of partial, meaningless "right" to a JPEG (but not the JPEG itself).

At least Jack's magic beans really did grow into a giant vine where he eventually obtained treasure, but this sort of thing bewilders me as to what the hell is going on.

It's a scam. If a panel of Joe Biden, Abe Simpson, and Muhammad Ali can't understand how it makes money, it doesn't. The only way for it to be a worthwhile investment is to leave someone else holding the bag.

It's a scam. If a panel of Joe Biden, Abe Simpson, and Muhammad Ali can't understand how it makes money, it doesn't.

That's pretty good. Did you invent this?

It’s an expression I developed, yes. Originally it was ‘if Joe Biden can’t explain how it makes money, it’s a scam’, but it kept being mistaken for political commentary about the Biden economy so I switched to using Abe Simpson because ‘confused old man’ was the relevant part. Then it just developed from there.

I think at best, the hope was that they would be like digital versions of famous ticket stubs, autographs or similar collectables that have little to no intrinsic value.

We maintain the ability to delete and edit top level posts for people to correct honest mistakes. I don't know why you deleted your previous top level post, but do not abuse that feature. If it is already under discussion, consider it out of your control.

Also this is a discussion forum for the culture war. Although jewish issues are often culture war related, it doesn't mean all jewish issues belong being discussed here. The main thread is mostly for current culture war issues. Historical analysis can be brought up in their own separate topic. These aren't hard and fast rules. But they are unspoken community expectations, which you managed to heavily violate (which is the reason for the large number of downvotes). I'd suggest more lurking in the future.

"Tifo"?

It makes sense that an insular religious group which refused to do agriculture since ~400AD would own an outsize amount of property in 20th century Slovakia (acquired through moneylending and banking I imagine). It also makes sense the ethnic Slovak farmers would find this annoying and try to take action against that. How much more is there to discuss? There’s no moral quandary or political interest here, just two groups doing what is in their best interests.

They didn't refuse agriculture, they were banned from it in most places.

Of course, it was noted Jews were predominantly craftsmen and other non farm occupations cca year zero.

Pretty sure Jews in the pale of settlement farmed, no?

The Talmud has passages condemning agricultural work and encouraging learned / literate work. According to Solzhenitsyn, the Tsar tried to get Russian Jews to farm but failed. As far as I know there is no example of a Rabbi (the leaders of the Jewish micro-nation) ever asking for farming privileges in any of their negotiations with foreign powers.

The Talmud has passages condemning agricultural work

Can you give us a cite where? I think what quotes (passed through several hundred years chinese whispers game) you mean, but they do not say what you think they say.

and encouraging learned / literate work.

No surprise, who you think wrote the Talmud?

According to Solzhenitsyn, the Tsar tried to get Russian Jews to farm but failed.

People were not eager to become Russian peasants? What a surprise.

BTW, if true, it confirms that the tsars were idiots, lack of people in agriculture was the last of Russia problem.

It is not 14th century but 19th one, you are not playing Crusader Kings, but Victoria and your first task is to move peasants out of villages into cities and factories (if you want to win and not only goof around).

I am also reminded of King Anaxandridas II of Sparta, who was alleged to have told someone who asked why Spartans didn't till their fields but instead had their helots do it, that "It was not by taking care of the fields, but of ourselves, that we acquired those fields."

As you said, this is alleged apocryphal quote.

If you want to hear authentic Spartan voice from antiquity justifying their treatment of helots (that was seen as outrageous even by ancient standards), start here, this is the closest you can get.

This speech was written by Isocrates, one of most famous orators of the time in voice of Spartan king of the day. It summarizes arguments used by Spartans themselves and presents the best possible case for Spartan peculiar institutions.

So what he says:

1/God gave us this land and these people.

For we inhabit Lacedaemon because the sons of Heracles gave it to us, because Apollo directed us to do so, and because we fought and conquered those who held it; and Messene we received from the same people, in the same way, and by taking the advice of the same oracle.

2/It was ours for a long time. Its a tradition.

Then again you are doubtless well aware that possessions, whether private or public, when they have remained for a long time in the hands of their owner, are by all men acknowledged to be hereditary and incontestable. Now we took Messene before the Persians acquired their kingdom23 and became masters of the continent, in fact before a number of the Hellenic cities were even founded.

3/You are doing far worse, you have no right to judge us.

and although it was only the other day that they razed both Thespiae and Plataea to the ground

4/Both the greatest kingdom and the greatest democracy of the world were fine with it for a long time, why are you making into a big issue now?

But, although our treaties were concluded under circumstances in which it was impossible for us to seek any advantage, yet, while there were other matters about which differences arose, neither the Great King nor the city of Athens ever charged us with having acquired Messene unjustly.

See that despite the delusions of modern wannabe bronze age keyboard warriors, raw psychopathic "might makes right" attitude was not something believed in ancient times, even by Spartans.

3/You are doing far worse, you have no right to judge us.

and although it was only the other day that they razed both Thespiae and Plataea to the ground

The earliest example of "[And you are lynching Negroes](And you are lynching Negroes)" in history?

See that despite the delusions of modern wannabe bronze age keyboard warriors, raw psychopathic "might makes right" attitude was not something believed in ancient times, even by Spartans.

That literally is a raw psychopathic "might makes right" ideology. Invoking the will of the gods doesn't change anything. They thought the will of the gods was whatever happened. It's just "might makes right" with extra steps. They even add as an extra, "and because we fought and conquered those who held it."

I don't see how the invocation of jealous, petty, and partial gods changes anything. It just reinforces how insanely might makes right their ideology was back then.

Outstandingly informative post! I hope you aren't lumping me in with bronze age keyboard warriors though, because my basic philosophy can be summarised as being human means striving to exceed the limits of might makes right.

I also don't see what's wrong with preferring to avoid farming if possible and wanted to provide another ancient example of that mindset, which might not have been said by Anaxandridas II, but was clearly understood by Plutarch. This thread reads like mango worship to me.

If Jews don't farm, why do they have a major holiday for harvest season? Farming may not be the most popular career for Jews, but it appears there's still plenty of Jewish farmers, even before the Kibbutz movement.

I am also highly skeptical of people pulling quotes from the Talmud to try and make a point about the Jews. The Talmud is a large volume containing many contradictory opinions about many subjects from many historical scholars. It's meant to be studied and debated, not read as a literal book of laws. Can you cite the exact passage that you believe condemns agricultural work and why you believe the intent of that section is to order Jews not to perform it?

I have no idea what the relationship of Eastern European Jewish communities was to farming. Certainly they were strongly discriminated against and banned from it in many places. If they refused to try or ask, perhaps they knew they wouldn't get it, or were concerned that they wouldn't be allowed to keep them for long enough for a planting and harvest cycle, or wouldn't be allowed to learn how to do it well. Or maybe it's not very well documented exactly what they did or didn't try to do over the years.

In looking around the net about the subject, I did find this interesting and pretty neutral article about the subject making the case that the root cause of Jews tending away from farming in the pre-historical era was not hostile discrimination or refusal to do farm labor, but instead the religious requirement to be literate (in order to read the Torah) in an era when that was extremely difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. It seems likely that many people thought, if you've got to acquire a relatively rare and difficult skill, better to make some use of it rather than continue to farm.

Because Sukkot has its origins in Ancient Israel, and actually before that in ancient Canaan, which was agricultural. Talmudic Judaism came about around the first century, around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple. This is where what we call “Judaism” originates.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/20824/1/dp670.pdf

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/jewish-occupational-selection-education-restrictions-or-minorities/5B02E978ED1E2F71A331D87CA6DE71D9

These articles go over how the Talmud made those who were illiterate very low status, and those Jews eventually converted to other religions. But farmers were pretty much necessarily illiterate before the printing press. Additionally, scholars had a huge advantage in terms of marriage because of the general praise of scholars. “200 years together” talks about how rabbis took advantage of this. Specifically in the Talmud we read we read that agriculture is the lowest profession and that selling merchandise is better than working the land.

I interpret the posts you started this thread with as making the claim that Jews as a group categorically refuse to do agricultural work because the Talmud says they aren't allowed to. But the articles that you posted seem to basically agree with the one I posted - that Jews mostly moved away from agriculture because the religion did mandate that they become literate in an age where that was rare and difficult, and there were more lucrative jobs available for those who were (though usually not lucrative enough versus farming at the time to persuade people of other religions who did not have a religious mandate for literacy to take them up). So agreed on that I guess?

This is also evidence that the mandate for literacy is actually real and recognized as so and obeyed by the great majority of Jews throughout history. You seem to be attempting to claim there is a mandate to not do agricultural work, which I can't see any evidence of historical or near-modern Jews actually perceiving, recognizing, or obeying. It may not be super-popular, but there definitely are substantial movements around Jewish Farming, and I've never heard of any Rabbis or Talmudic scholars making a claim that those movements are wrong. And you'd think they'd get rid of Sukkot too if they really did hate farming.

(this probably deserves an effortpost of its own, but indeed literacy is rare and expensive in the pre-industrial age, which includes not only the printing press, but a power source for it, plus decent-quality long-lasting paper and ink in industrial quantities, plus a way to transport large quantities of all of those supplies and the resulting books around a country)

The Talmud is a pretty complex and obscure subject. You pretty much never hear any Jews who are not Talmudic scholars talking about it or basing their lives around it. Indeed, there are college degrees for reading and interpreting it. I am not at all a Talmudic scholar myself, but all of the commentary in the site you posted on the section you linked says it's mainly about marriage and relations between men and women. It seems nobody else thinks the bit that you say forbids agriculture work (or rather, quotes a "Rabbi Elazar" as claiming it's "low") actually does so. It's a book that's existed for thousands of years and had many tens of thousands of people spend years of their life reading and interpreting, if it's actually meant as a prohibition, surely there must be more people talking about that, but I can't seem to find any.

I interpret the posts you started this thread with as making the claim that Jews as a group categorically refuse to do agricultural work because the Talmud says they aren't allowed to.

Yes, this is the most surreal part of anti-Jewish discourse, remnant of premodern villager mind floating around in post-post-post modern cyberspace.

Medieval Jews indeed avoided peasant farm labor, just like medieval Christian nobility, clergy, merchants, craftsmen, town dwellers in general and everyone else who could.

If you ever did even a day of manual field work, you would understand why.

The Talmud is a pretty complex and obscure subject. You pretty much never hear any Jews who are not Talmudic scholars talking about it or basing their lives around it.

"The Talmud" is not a book, it is a library. The full edition in printed form weighs impressive 330 pounds.

Imagine, for example, treating 217 volumes of the Church Fathers as "one book."

Just like all traditional religious works, Talmud is full of stuff extremely unsavory for modern audiences.

If you listen to people who are not fond of Jews, they have idea that Talmud is some sort of encyclopedia of crime, grand manual how to cheat, rob, deceive and manipulate the goyim, they make Talmud much cooler that it is in reality (extremely dreary discussions about minutiae of religious laws).

As you said, only religious Jews are studying Talmud for real, even people who are really not fond of Jews are not interested in learning the "Jewish secrets" and are satisfied with copying and pasting of short list of mostly fabricated "Talmud quotes".

Specifically in the Talmud we read we read that agriculture is the lowest profession and that selling merchandise is better than working the land.

Which just sounds like the Hindu caste system, very broadly, where it's the literate priestly class putting their caste at the top of the pecking order and then those who till the land or engage in work around animals, waste, dead bodies, etc. are put at the very bottom of the social pyramid. This isn't a purely and solely Jewish notion.

In the ideal (as opposed to actual) social system in the Vedic era, the ranks are:

Brahmins: Vedic scholars, priests or teachers. Kshatriyas: Rulers, administrators or warriors. Vaishyas: Agriculturalists, farmers or merchants. Shudras: Artisans, laborers or servants.

Manusmriti assigns cattle rearing as Vaishya occupation but historical evidence shows that Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Shudras also owned and reared cattle and that cattle-wealth was mainstay of their households. Ramnarayan Rawat, a professor of History and specialising in social exclusion in the Indian subcontinent, states that 19th century British records show that Chamars, listed as untouchables, also owned land and cattle and were active agriculturalists. The emperors of Kosala and the prince of Kasi are other examples.

Cows being sacred, farming/dairy herdsmen as occupation would be higher-ranked in India. For the Jewish position, since there weren't sacred animals but were impure ones - and the question of who was raising pigs or keeping pigs at the time - then people who were probably herding non-kosher animals as well as kosher ones would naturally be an occupation giving rise to the attitude "it's better to be a trader than a farmer".

i agree, but we don’t see this kind of anti-agricultural ethic in Christianity. All Christians are of equal value who act Christlike, and the learned class was celibate. So it makes sense for eg Slovaks to rebel against a foreign upper class. And, of course, it also makes sense for Jews to want to make more money in lending and trade rather than farming. All of it makes sense, it’s just competing value schemes.

There might be another push. Since Jews were generally exiles for most of the existence of Talmudic Judaism, they might have been subject to expulsions and attacks. Farming is obviously bound to the land, and if you have to worry about neighbors with pitchforks and torches coming after you or governments getting grabby, Farming is probably a terrible profession. You cannot pack your field in a suitcase or put it in a cart, your fields and barns will be lost if you have to flee or are ordered to leave. Christians were generally dominant in their countries and rulers of those countries so any wealth tied to the land wouldn’t be at risk. If you bought a field, chances are that your kids would be passing it to their kids.

The other thing with literacy is that without literacy, there’s not really a way to preserve the religion. The temple is gone, the priests are gone, you’re surrounded by other peoples. If nobody can read, the religion gets lost or becomes so diluted that it’s lost entirely.

This is a troll post where you pretend to make an argument that 38% property ownership is not high enough to justify discrimination against Jews, while intending for the reader to ignore your argument and just react to the 38% figure as being too high.

They post and delete so many threads now, often you reply only for them to be deleted. They’re also a lot like a similar account that used to do this.

As a Slovak I have a suspicion it was more than 38%.

I know that in Hungary it was over 50% before WW2..

Not sure what's objectionable about this post. (His behavior aside).

Slovak state was antisemitic, they aryanised Jewish property, they didn't just hand over Jews of Slovakia but paid the Germans to take them.

2/3rds of the pre war Jewish population died, a lot of the remainder moved to Israel.

Still seems to be a lot of Jews around, but that's just my family - half of it are M.D.s and Jews are quite common in medicine.

I think interwar Hungary is widely acknowledged as the European society in which Jews were most disproportionately dominant in commerce (Scott even wrote about it on various occasions). I suspect it had something to do with political dynamics in the late Austro-Hungarian empire; even in Poland (which had a numerically and proportionally much larger Jewish population) you didn’t see the same level of involvement in leading businesses etc.

Weren't Poles more antisemitic / discriminatory?

The reason why OP's post is objectionable is because OP is doing a thing. He wants to post a quote about how Jews owned a large percentage of property in Slovakia. He considers the high percentage to be noteworthy and wants to share it with The Motte, and yet, he disguises his reason for sharing the quote by pretending to refute it. He pretends to make an argument that the large percentage is not noteworthy, while expecting the reader to reject his pretend argument and conclude that it is indeed noteworthy.

OP wants to make posts that speak truth to Jewish power but feigns to believe that the moderation team of The Motte will silence him if he does so in an open and forthright manner. He adopts the guise of an antisemitism skeptic who tries to refute hate facts and fails. I think as well that OP expects his disguise to be recognized. Which means his true intention is not even to deceive but simply to express resentment that his posts speaking truth to Jewish power are unwelcome on The Motte.

Let's consider forbidding this bad behavior. Whatever they're doing with this post and delete game, it isn't in good faith.

Yeah. It really puzzles me why NNs are allowed to post on this site. I understand that rationalists want to "discuss absolutely anything", but bad faith posting doesn't help anyone.

The point of this place is to practice the belief that we can discuss any subject rationally and honestly. So we strongly prefer to ban not any specific viewpoint, but poor argument tactics instead. If you want to say that Jews are bad, you can, but you have to actually say it and make a rational case for why, not make suspiciously weird and irrelevant posts whose real purpose seem to be to put a eyebrow-raising number into people's heads.

I think this is a good thing - the NN's most compelling argument is usually that they're so censored everywhere, they must have an actual point that the system doesn't want you to hear. We can refute that here - here's a wide open forum for you to post what you actually think, and if it's really dumb it will get shredded just like it deserves.

Why can people even delete threads? What purpose does it serve?

I've used it to delete dupes in the past, or comments I later saw were already made by somebody else in totality. You also should be able to delete posts you simply didn't intend to make.

Removing them after people have engaged I don't see the use of however, it just removes useful context.

Incidentally that's how it works in Slack: you can only remove posts nobody interacted with.

I think that would be a decent compromise. And you can message an admin to delete otherwise.

I wouldn't even think that 100% "Jewish" ownership meant that that "Jews" controlled the economy

This reads like something a fashy person would say through a sock puppet account that pretends to oppose antisemitism while making self-defeating arguments.

Also, how is it that your reply was made ten hours ago, but I am only able to see it now?

Also, how is it that your reply was made ten hours ago, but I am only able to see it now?

New user filter. Every comment they make has to be manually approved by mods. Also, you were right, I have been had.

Troll post or not(it is), the meta argument still stands. At a certain point you realize that people who ingroup jews never accept in any sense that there is any rhyme, reason or responsibility to be found when the subject of anti-semitism comes up. Which is why you get these inane arguments to begin with.

The framework for the discussion is of a victim and oppressor, not cause and effect. Which is at odds with the 'rationalist' disposition on most other topics.

Are Jews overrepresented? Of course. Is that a problem? I don’t think so. Could that cause jealously? Naturally.

I think it's very fair to say it's a problem, much like it is for any successful minority. Because it breeds resentment and cliquishness.

The way around is to have successful minorities adhere first to a common set of principles and fuse them into a larger group where tribal loyalties are discouraged.

But if you don't do that, you will get sectarian conflict. It's not optional.

This is a great example. Jews just exist in a form that is impossible to assign negative cause to. So the natural conclusion is that anyone who assigns them any negative cause is suffering from some ailment or pathology.

This is just such a transparent expression of ingroup bias. Like, it can't be that jews actually caused something negative to happen or are in any way instrumental in the proliferation of anything bad and that some people had a very natural and human reaction to it. I.e. not wanting to live with jews anymore. No, the Nazis were instead jealous of jews.

My point is that being successful is not a bad thing and therefore it’s weird to imply there is some moral failing by Jews being successful and thereby causing resentment.

Who implied that? I don't understand.

I just see your point being predicated on the idea that people can't take issue with what some jews were being successful at and/or how.

What issue is there to take with Jews being successful? Provided they weren’t stealing from people or doing something illicit it seems to me that anyone taking issue with Jews being successful is engaging in resentment.

No one is saying that jews being 'successful' is a reason to not like them except you.

Claiming that certain Jews did things that you dislike is of course not necessarily pathological. However, blaming Jews as a group for things is certainly and in all cases a form of irrational, shoddy thinking. Not because of moral issues, but simply because it is inaccurate. "Jews" did not cause things that you dislike to happen in Weimar Germany. Some specific Jews did.

Frankly this is just a form of special pleading that only ever functions to try and thwart discussions of large-scale problems by shrinking them down to a series of individual decisions. It's de rigeur to talk of pathological behavior among white people, white communities, "whiteness", etc., and most people who sniff about "canards" of Jewish influence and malign behavior will not think twice before agreeing that white people bear collective moral, cultural and (especially) financial responsibility for a litany of supposed historical grievances. In many cases this is actually the law! The nuance that you insist upon is something that's only ever applied to shield members of an ingroup from criticism of that ingroup as a collective, so that no one ever gets to ask questions about whether your ingroup really is a malign influence on society - now, regardless of how large the problem is, you get to insist that it's just hundreds or thousands or millions of individual bad apples, nothing more. Where, precisely, is the boundary between "it's all just individual Jews making individual decisions" and "white people need to spend their lives denouncing previous generations of white people"? At what point does it become fair to make systemic criticisms of your ingroup?

In order to blame someone they’d have to have the power to do it. White Americans did, for example, push Native American tribes onto reservations. White Southern Americans passed Jim Crow laws. If you want to blame Jews for the fall of Weimar, they not only have to be there when the gun goes off, but have to be holding the gun. But, quite often it was other people. Hyperinflation was caused by the Allies demanding draconian reparations.

Claiming that certain Jews did things that you dislike is of course not necessarily pathological.

Then why do I consistently get the response that it is? Regardless of anything else, my point stands. There is a very distinct and clear form of ingroup bias whenever the 'jews' are criticized. There's never a concession made or a 'rational' framework of cause and effect. In this very thread the act of killing a Nazi collaborator is framed as justified, not causal.

However, blaming Jews as a group for things is certainly and in all cases a form of irrational, shoddy thinking.

Is there anyone in the world who believes that every single jew in the world was doing the things the "specific" jews in Weimar Germany were doing?

What you are saying would have salience and some form of coherency if it wasn't for the fact that the entire modern world is based on the idea that there are nations of people. Like Germans. Who were paying, and are in some form still paying, for the actions of specific Germans during the war. Do we need to be able to trace the causal chain of how a specific German housewife helped the Nazi regime during the war, which justifies her and her offspring pay money to jews until the day they die and beyond? No. This nihilistic autism is only presented when someone makes even a vague generalization about jews having done something.

I mean, can we come up with some term that describes the specific jews that do anti-European, anti-civilizational, anti-society, anti-Christian stuff? You know, not the good ones but the "specific" ones and those that support them. Because I'm tired of people acting like they are explaining something to me when all they are doing is playing PR for their ingroup. As if I just can not fathom that the jew I played video games with isn't Magnus Hirschfeld.

What you are saying would have salience and some form of coherency if it wasn't for the fact that the entire modern world is based on the idea that there are nations of people. Like Germans.

There was a country of people, called Germany. It was this country that did various actions in WW2 that still partially (though, in truth, not as much as some people would like to claim) burden the successor country of that country. They do not, however, burden ethnic Germans who had, say, moved to the United States to form German communities there, many of which specifically fought against the country of Germany. People might claim Donald Trump to be a Nazi for various reasons, but it would be at the very least exceedingly rare to claim he is one because he's a German-American, or that his German heritage would make him directly liable for the actions of the Nazi government in the country of Germany.

During WW2, there was not a Jewish country. There is a Jewish country now, and the actions of that country burden the citizens of that country, making all Israelis in some ways liable for the actions of Israeli government vis-a-vis the Palestinian occupation and the human rights violations therein (at least the ones not explicitly resisting those actions). However, that still doesn't make all Jews everywhere liable for the actions of Israeli goverment.

German people were interned in the US following the US entry into the war. Plans were drawn up for more extensive internment of all German Americans but were scrapped since there were too many of them. Redefining things to be a 'country' is irrelevant. Getting down to brass tax it's about people. Everyone understands this when they are forced to act in reality.

However, that still doesn't make all Jews everywhere liable for the actions of Israeli goverment.

Yet, to this very day, many jews harbor resentment towards Germans. Some going as far as they can in upholding the old anti-German boycott.

Maybe I am being too hot tempered and uncharitable here but I really can't fathom what your point of bringing 'countries' into this would be other than to obfuscate things. Jews did not need to be a country to act as a people. They knew of themselves as the jewish people, they grouped up as the jewish people and they made declarations and took actions as a people prior to Israel ever being a thing. In fact, the only way Israel as a country could come to be in the first place was because of jewish people acting as a group.

So to turn your thing on its head a little bit, and to attempt to highlight my issue with it; are jews liable for the creation of the state of Israel?

More comments

Because I'm tired of people acting like they are explaining something to me when all they are doing is playing PR for their ingroup.

Then stop saying "Like, it can't be that jews actually caused something negative to happen or are in any way instrumental in the proliferation of anything bad and that some people had a very natural and human reaction to it. I.e. not wanting to live with jews anymore. " and say i.e. not wanting to live with the specific people who did X. We can only judge you by what you say, so if you cast a wide net (jews) with your words, that's all we can respond to. If you mean to only criticise a subset of people who did X or Y, then say that.

That's why one of the part of the rules is: Be as precise and charitable as you can.

Be precise about who you want to criticise. If you don't mean jews as a group then define who exactly you are talking about. If there is some anti-European position you want to criticise, define it and who said it. If you know it "isn't all jews" then make that clear. Otherwise it looks like you are simply indulging in Boo-outgroup rhetoric.

It will also skip the whole back and forth you are right in the middle of now, where someone rebuts with, "well actually,not all jews", and you have to sigh, "yes I know it's not all jews, I don't think the guy I play CoD with is involved. I'm not an idiot!"

Define exactly who you are talking about at step 1 and you can skip steps 1A through D going back and forth until you define who you mean. It removes a derailment opportunity. It hones your argument and removes extraneous pain points.

The fact Germans are paying for anything is because citizens do in fact inherit the financial responsibilities their government has agreed to. It doesn't mean morally Brunhilde is responsible for the Holocaust, any more than the fact her taxes go to pay interest on the national debt means she is responsible directly for the government building an autobahn 10 years before she was born and thus the deaths of anyone who crashes their well engineered automobile at 200kph should weigh on her soul. But yet still her taxes go to help pay it off. The German government can decide that a moral crime committed by the German government demands recompense. And all German citizens therefore inherit the financial responsibility, but they do not inherit the moral responsibility. That is the disconnect in your example. They are different things.

Brunhilde is not morally responsible for Hitler's actions just as Bob the jew is not morally responsible for Fred the jew's actions. So if it is Fred's anti-European actions you have a problem with then criticise Fred, not jews. If you mean Fred but say jews then people will understand you to mean jews not Fred. And if Bob and Fred are BOTH members of "Ja, we hate Europe" then specify it is the organization JwhE that you are criticizing.

In other words if you are not being specific in who you are calling out, why should people responding be specific in return?

That's why one of the part of the rules is: Be as precise and charitable as you can.

Maybe you could be charitable and understand that when someone says the Germans did something, they don't mean every single individual German. Maybe you can understand that when someone says jews have won a lot of Nobel prizes, they don't mean every single individual jew. I mean, of course you understand that. Everyone does. 'Jews have won a lot of nobel prizes' is not a statement anyone has ever taken issue with. It's just that when the implication is negative the ingroup bias of some gets activated and they start demanding special status for their ingroup.

I don't accept that jews are more special than others and I don't accept that I should use extreme and autistic verbal rigor when talking about the ingroup bias of some whilst freely ignoring it for others. I think people should be able to be charitable, see past their bias, and recognize what is being said without dragging everything through the mud of tactical individualism. Like I said in my prior comment, you don't need to prove how every single individual German helped the Third Reich when justifying they pay war reparations to jews. You don't need their tax returns to see just how much they were paying. You just draw a blanket group based judgement. They were German, they now have to pay. I'm making a similar judgement call. If one is jewish and one sees all of the negative stuff specific jews have done, why doesn't one have to own that? The Germans had to own all of their actions. They couldn't say that it wasn't them, but rather individual soldiers, politicians and the 30% or so that voted for the NSDAP in the 30's. Why should jews be allowed to not just disown all responsibility, but ultimately claim that these things aren't even jewish. It's like saying the NSDAP wasn't actually German.

The fact Germans are paying for anything is because citizens do in fact inherit the financial responsibilities their government has agreed to.

Why do they 'inherit' that whilst jews don't inherit that specific jews in powerful positions who identified themselves as jews and representatives of jews, who identified their organization as jewish and who declared economic war on Germans in the name of their explicitly jewish organizations due to actions taken by specific Germans against jews in Germany?

Seems like we've erected a very one sided standard. Individual Germans take responsibility for Germans as a group. Individual jews don't take responsibility for jews as a group. Even when jews are explicitly grouping up and expressing themselves as a group. It seems like, in a negative context, there are only individual jews and they can never reflect poorly on jews as a group. No matter how much ingroup bias jews display. Yet here I am pretending that this just doesn't exist. That jews don't have an ingroup bias that they routinely express every single time someone is critical of jews.

Here's a thought, if people don't see themselves as jewish, stop being jewish. Say you're Italian or Romanian. But no. Even on the internet, where no one knows you are a dog, jews and people who ingroup jews take time out of their day to reply to group generalizations in the context of negatives about jews but let actively rely on them in other contexts.

I'm not saying anything about all jews being X. I'm pointing out a double standard. Other individual people have to own their group and how other individual people of that group have made that group look, especially if those individuals did something bad to jews. I could understand how a fervent individualist would not want to participate in such a thing, but people who act on their group biases are obviously not that.

More comments

This is a nonsense argument. You may as well say that Nazis as a group don't share responsibility and that all evil done in the 3rd Reich was done by individual Nazis.

This outright denial of any collective responsibility is common among individualists, like myself, but it falls short on one condition: if people organize as a group, they are responsible as a group. Which is why we punish criminal conspiracies.

And if one concedes at least this, and they must, then the question becomes rather if Weimar had Jews organized and organized specifically as Jews. A question that is much less easy to answer in the negative than a clean reading of history would enjoy. Successful minorities are almost always so because they are organized.

Now of course this is where collective condemnation of an entire ethnic group falls short as guilt can only be shared in the confines of a specific organization (supposing of course it can first be established), but you can't defend this by claiming atoms acting independently, not seriously.

And if one concedes at least this, and they must, then the question becomes rather if Weimar had Jews organized and organized specifically as Jews.

The “Jewish communists” derided as revolutionaries in Weimar Germany (they failed at revolution, so can’t be responsible for those issues, but still) certainly didn’t organize specifically as Jews - they were part of areligious communist and anarchist organizations that all had a substantial number of gentile members.

I must say I was not here thinking of communists but of the very much capitalist german-jewish economic elite, a group much studied by sociology, and in particular as to how Jewish its success and internal ties were.

I believe the answer to that question remains debated, but they are a clearly identifiable group with class interests and a significant say and influence in the direction of German society at the time.

The national socialist ideological tie between these people and the communist Jews to form some international conspiracy I believe is clearly faulty and fictitious, but both groups existed and had aims and power. Often at odds with one another, but not necessarily with a character that can be removed from Jewish ethno-cultural interest.

Incidentally, I do not believe such dismissals about atheism matter when we are talking about an ethnos. To give a clear example, atheists Jews have long had tremendous influence over the American film industry and nobody can seriously deny that this influence has a Jewish cultural character even as they are atheists.

It proves that rationalists are disingenuous about caring for rationality which is what one would expect.

There has been a history of movements calling themselves rationalist in the last 200+ years and usually they are atheistic leftwing cults of reason where a very ideological, fanatical and close minded group proclaims their views to be rationality itself and also scientific. If you look even in the French revolution they were rationalists although of a more murderous sort.

It really hollows out any criticism of far right identity politics or woke non jewish identity politics from their substance, since those making such criticisms share the same pathologies and just find their own prejudice in favor of Jews to be uniquely fine. To be fair what is called far right identity politics often includes not just extremists but even moderates, so some of those people who are treated as far right extremists should not be criticized to begin with.

I do think someone who is a genuine moderate can make criticisms of extreme identity politics, albeit I don't oppose any form of identity politics for any group a priori. It is about the amount and whether it is motivated by a view of history that is "what is mine is mine and what is yours, is yours". I also oppose this even to the level of smaller groups and the individual.

Ideally in my view people should respect their own and try to better their lot (as individual, family or nation) while following the golden rule and respecting the same rights in others and not seeking to do better by trampling over others. And it is fine to be angry when others are unwilling to do so and are out to get you and mistreat you. And to indeed defend yourself from their bad behavior. It is also good to oppose and be disgusted at this behavior even when it doesn't directly lead to your specific tribe being mistreated which is how I feel.

If this norm is common enough in a society you got justice, and internationally you do end up having something closer to international justice.

But any form of justice requires a punishment mechanism and also disapproval of those who violate it. It is a trap in my view that a good thing (disapproval of leftist or Jewish racist bad behavior) should be memetically aligned with bad things like sharing the same levels of ethnic extremism which isn't necessary to share to oppose this. Moderate tribalism to support your group when mistreated is sufficient, if one doesn't misunderstand what moderation means to mean too little. Or even without direct tribalism which is fine in moderation (and bad if too little or too much), it is also moral and good to oppose this behavior on a more general universalist grounds for being utterly immoral and criminal.

Extreme forms of tribalism, like the form promoted by many who have captured institutions in favor of Jewish identity politics today (n addition to others of progressive stack), obviously is in the mentality that they own history both the past, present and future. Fully the mentality of what is yours is mine and what is mine is mine. Where their vilification of others is kosher, but where their wrongdoing is antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Not everything related to the enlightenment degenerated in extreme cults, so there is something to what I argue here related to the enlightenment even if this fanaticism and hypocritical tribalism is part of its historical trajectory as well. Hell the enlightenment even had key figures who were highly critical of the Jews from an internationalist perspective, condemning them as misanthropes. And these figures have also been branded dishonestly with the typical one sided racist manner of most of those who use that word who care zero for nuance as antisemites.

My thesis is that seeing all the evil and all of racism as historically existing just in the Jews is obviously false, others had and can have this extremism as well, but there has been and there is a genuine problem of racism against non Jews that both the Jewish community it self had and has (and the result are racist hate groups like the ADL), and even there are non Jews have become that by identifying with the Jewish ultranationalist vision of the world. And it is part of a general pattern of extreme tribalists. The general alliance of tribalism of progressive associated identities aka progressive stack today is of an extremist and ultranationalist sort.

Coming to terms with the fact that their shit also stinks and striving to genuinely promote a more evenhanded perspective on the moral evaluation of different identity groups would be a valid demonstration of not sharing this pathology.

That's not the argument.

Very obviously overepresentation does not justify such crimes but this discussion that you started and many people participated isn't about that.

There is a motte and bailey here going on. The issue is whether in interethnic conflict we adopt the perspective of Jews always oppressed by gentiles, or reject it. Nor about whether we can't find any point where Jews weren't unfairly mistreated.

The reality is that you are a hateful racist propagandist against non Jews whose rhetoric reflects many others here who are like you who also promote propaganda meant to potray Jews in a favorable light and hate on non Jews and negate any criticism to bad racist either Jewish behavior or jewish supremacist behavior of non Jews as well. It is your choise to do so, just like someone could have cherry picked a narrative focusing on Germans being killed by communists before WW2 and then after end of WW2 and even mentioned the Jewish names involved.

History as a weapon for certain groups is one thing, where their victimization is highlighted, maximized, chery picked, while any wrongdoing hidden, assumed to be conspiracy, made taboo, and other groups are shit upon. And history meant to illuminate in general without hiding wrongdoing of anyone, nor being milked in such a propagandistic manner is quite another.

I think the response on your faction's utterly malicious tactics has been rather idiotic. The only correct response that is proportionate is complete contempt at the immoral hypocritical racists trying to vilify and enforce high status for their ingroup and low status and demonziation for their outgroup who are also authoritarians to boot. You shouldn't be given the opportunity to impose your totaltiarian racist vision while censoring the truth.

Secondly, obviously the trick is to try to get people's reputations destroyed by trying to associate them with nazism, the same trick far leftists also did to justify their own extremism with fascism. The most antifascists in history were the mass murderous communists which gave the world the antifascist wall known as berlin wall.

The reality is that historically both nazism, communism, far leftism, and even being a Jewish supremacist have all been bad things and it is the fallacy of false dichotomy to pretend that to oppose one, someone must align wit the other. On a visceral and intellectual level believe me when I find a multipolarity in evil and there are more than one type of immoral extremists I find deplorable and disgusting. Extremists can oppose each other indeed. The funny thing is that Jewish supremacists share the pathologies they whine about the most of racism, prejudice, ultranationalism, hateful bias and throwing blood libel at others. Anyway, the only way to be ethical is to reject the framework of false dichotomy and not allow your type of extremists to get away with imposing your evil in the world, just cause you will lie and slander any opposition.

The best thing for a racist for Jews to do if they wants to reduce real antisemitism, would be to shut the fuck up. But their goal isn't to reduce prejudice against Jews but to impose a Jewish supremacist vision that Jews rule and non Jews drool and also to implement racist policies as well and limit freedom of their outgroup while allowing people like them to humiliate and hate them constantly. Especially some ethnic groups they have a grudge against. But like the historical German supremacists and other Jewish supremacists throughout history, this behavior causes backlash that can lead to their favorite group being even mistreated.

Also, very obviously outside of mistreatment, many here claim to oppose any negative rhetoric towards Jews but are very willing to dish it out towards others.

This lack of restraint is telling about where the priorities of Jewish supremacists lie. They are immoral cruel racists against non Jews but even for their own ingroup they are willing to provoke more hostility and negativity towards Jews to achieve not a moderate end but an end where Jews are high status and treated in a superior manner and their non Jewish outgroups are low status and treated as inferiors.

What point were you trying to make with this post? It seems to be a historical curio with no real relevance to modern culture war.

i dont claim to find this relevant to modern culture war but bear in mind not every country has a culture war about the same topics.

maybe he is slovakian, i dont know if it is relevant there but i dont just assume it isnt

I'm pretty sure this is just secure signals getting around his ban. OP hasn't responded to a single comment on his post, and the post bears the hallmarks of trying to smuggle in pro-holocaust messaging without explicit calls to action.

Seriously, who here cares that pre war Slovakian Jews were an economically dominant minority?

I disagree. The poster very likely went by Anything-something in the previous forum. There was a case of a far right figure killing minorities and this poster milked it very fanatically in line with their far left jewish supremacist ideology. They also posted like they posted now. He could be pushing a long con, but it seems more likely they are just a Jewish supremacist which isn't uncommon here. And in regards to that poster in particular I have seen different names with the same way of thinking posting for a long time.

Why can't you oppose what the OP promotes without coming with a theory that they must be the opposite of what they represent? Its like racists for Jews can do no wrong.

I genuinely think that if we censored but also treated with contempt as they deserve people promoting propaganda about how Jews/blacks/women/lgbt can do no wrong, milking their suffering in a cherry picked and promoting one sided history and shitting on their outgroup and we also don't promote milking history against Jews, we would have a far less pointless debate about these issues. So I am in favor of OP not be allowed to continue their behavior and they are in fact the same poster that was banned previously, but I don't buy that they are pulling a 5th dimensional chess move. I also think that the behavior of OP and Jewish supremacists does create a hostile racist environment and violates consistently rules on consensus, hating outgroup. Generally there are good reasons to limit their behavior to protect those they abuse, and such people always abuse their power.

We should also ideally be promoting people like Helen Andrews promoting nuance. There is also a nuance to be found in WW2 but one that still ends up with a very negative view of the nazi regime. Things like the mistreatment of Germans for example and Morgenthau plan are worth mentioning to move beyond the most fanatical black and white visions. Or the soviet mass deportations and genocides.

Jewish participation in communism is also important to note, not to promote a narrative that onesidedly shits on Jews, but to promote a narrative that spreads negativity and positivity around over a narrative that potrays one group in the most favorable light and other groups in the most negative one.

A good comparison is the Jewish overepresentation among slave owners in 19th century America. The point isn't that this justifies today mistreating Jews but to counter what John Steward called "blacks and Jews together getting whitey". Or the Jewish supremacist narrative of history. We should to the extend history allows be promoting narratives that are more evenhanded than onesided. At least in comparison to the typical approach we see today on such issues. Spreading the negativity around is part of that but also outright promoting the importance of not weaponizing history.

Its why Andrews articles arguing against the grave hoax in Canada, or against the thesis of American slavery as uniquely bad form of slavery are good. I also recommend her articles arguing against the dishonest propaganda of the Belgian Congo attrocity propaganda that also promoted exaggerations.

Where the facts don't allow it, we can still pathologize and be intolerant towards people cherry picking real events in the exclusion of any other to weaponize history against their ethnic outgroup.

It is completely true that there is an attempt to promote maximal grievances mixing truth and lies against western civilization. We should expose the lies and be intolerant to those cherry picking the truth to hate on western civilization in the broad sense and anyone affected by this movement. However we should tolerate people who don't weaponize history and just in proportion to what should be expected do care about past attrocities in a proportionate manner that doesn't result in shitting on the outgroup. It is also fine to care more about your own people's past suffering but again to a point. There is a point where trying to impose it as the most important thingever encroaches on the rights of others and is disrespectful and abusive.

Also, important to note that the brutal nazi occupation ended up in decent % of populations dying from various countries in eastern europe. They deserve a negative reputation, because the dislike and hatred against them didn't start in post ww2 propaganda, or existed only in the American shores, but among the people they abused historically. It isn't just about the Jews. The point here is we shouldn't allow people to use the nazis or confederates to shit on modern rightists, non far leftists, or european nations. This is compatible with holding a negative opinion of the nazis.

Not allowing bad actors to do that won't result in the nazis being liked. They are not going to be liked.

In fact the proud eastern european or certain south europeans should have an especially negative opinion both their previous oppressors and their modern haters who don themselves in antifascist colors. Indeed, as USSR was the most antifascist regime to ever exist, they have a good experience getting it good and hard from both the nazis and the antifascists.

Although, obviously people should focus much more on present problems and less on past defeated regimes.

I think the point of the Motte is that such opinions can be expressed within reason. If you think something needs to be addressed then why not do it yourself?

For the avoidance of doubt, the "Slovak Republic" in question was a puppet state set up following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Tifo was a Nazi collaborator and was quite properly hanged for treason by the short-lived democratic government that ruled post-war Czechoslovakia before the Soviets consolidated thei control.

Everything the "Slovak Aryanization agency" and suchlike did was more or less enthusiastic implementation of decisions taken in Berlin.

38% does not constitute majority ownership, which would mean that whatever perceived exploitation there was would have been mostly the product of native Slovaks. The Nazi's attempt at drawing a connection between "Weimar degeneracy" and Jews is similarly ridiculous because there were at least as many ethnic Germans involved.

I would favour "Is the demographic overrepresented?", over "Does the demographic represent over 50%?". The former doesn't breakdown at sufficiently small minorities who might exert power/commit crime at rates staggeringly higher than the largest demographic but less than 50%. The former isn't dependent on what fraction other demographics of the entire population represent thus allowing one to discover demographic partilucular peculiarities, even if they are only a small fraction of the whole.

In a population consisting solely of Greens and Purples, if Greens are ten times as likely to commit murder as Purples, but if Greens are less than 1/11th of the population, the latter metric would fail to detect a murderous characteristic, whatever the cause, of the Greens.

I think you have fallen for the bait; this is the objection which OP intended to be raised. I would have too had @omfalos not mentioned it.

Can we stipulate Wikipedia is not a Nazi-aligned source? And then put aside everything else, to look at this list of leaders from Wikipedia of the German Revolution that introduced the "Weimar degeneracy" -

Rosa Luxemburg

Karl Liebknecht

Kurt Eisner

Clara Zetkin

Paul Levi

Franz Mehring

Leo Jogiches

Wilhelm Pieck

Ernst Toller

Erich Mühsam

Richard Müller

Emil Barth

Gustav Landauer

Eugen Leviné

Max Levien

Rudolf Egelhofer

Karl Radek

Johann Knief

Emil Eichhorn

It did not have "at least as many" ethnic Germans involved. In reality only 1/3rd were gentiles.

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht died a few months after the German revolution when they led the weak and quickly crushed Spartacist uprising, so I'm not sure why anyone would think they contributed much to so-called Weimar "degeneracy".

I also find the notion of "Weimar degeneracy" to be pretty silly because people who use that term generally ignore the much worse degeneracy of the Kaiser's government, which allowed Germany to get pulled into the worst war in human history up to that point and then failed to win it, and many of the supporters of which then blamed others besides Germany's political-military ruling class for the catastrophe. Note that I am not blaming Germany for starting the war or claiming that the communists would have been better had they taken power in Germany, but I am claiming that the Kaiser's government were a bunch of incompetents who caused much worse things to happen to Germany than anything that Jews or leftists did to it during the Weimar periiod.

The specific notion of "Weimar degeneracy" already implies that the person who uses the term only cares about what certain groups of people did to Germany, but does not care about others. So, for example, to them all the leftist attempts to take power are automatically branded as bad things, but they will go and excuse the Kapp Putsch and Hitler's later takeover as being good things even though there is no good reason to believe so given that Kapp probably would have returned some version of an incompetent monarchist autocracy into power and we know that Hitler in fact made even stupider geopolitical decisions than the Kaiser's government had, and got Germany even more destroyed than the Kaiser's government had.

The German revolution didn’t “introduce Weimar degeneracy”; the ‘German revolution’ (actually several) that you’re referring to were a series of failed communist revolutionary attempts, all of which were quashed. The Weimar Republic stood in opposition to them, and was considered by the radical left to be the enemy since it largely preserved the economic system and structure of government (at lower levels) that had existed in Germany before the war, was more continuity than change. It certainly didn’t have very much to do with any cultural change, since its main problem was its utter sclerosis.

The cultural changes that happened in Weimar Germany happened across the West at the same time, and outside of a tiny subculture in Berlin (which even the Nazis didn’t really bother eradicating, since in many ways their attitude to gender wasn’t trad at all) the vast majority of Germany in the Weimar era largely retained its traditional cultural character.

This list has 9 Jews and 10 non-Jews. Going by Wikipedia descriptions, Luxemburg, Eisner, Levi, Jogiches, Toller, Mühsam, Landauer, Leviné and Radek are Jewish.

Since I am not that good with european jewish names - how did you figure that out? Aside from the Levi and Levines that are somewhat high profile.

Max Levien doesn't seem to have been Jewish. "Research has established that Levien was descended from Huguenot immigrants into Russia by the name of Lavigne."

Of course, several debates with online antisemites have demonstrated, to me, that he criteria for Jewishness among their objects of hatred are stretchy indeed - you can be Jewish by religion, Jewish by ethnicity, half Jewish, quarter Jewish, have any demonstrable Jewish heritage, just know how to speak Yiddish, have advocated against anti-Semitism, have a Jewish spouse, "look Jewish", have a "Jewish" last name (ie. often just a normal German or East European last name - that's why people frequently seem to assume Karl Liebknecht was Jewish, for example) etc. etc. to get in the Jew count.

It’s funny. I’m not Jewish by Jewish standards (father was Jewish but not mother). I’m married to a Jew. My kids are Jewish. So presumably the antisemites view me as Jewish while the Jews do not!

In a way that makes you Jewish. The true essence of being a jew is that whichever way the world turn you are always the one in the least favorable position. Sources - let's start with the old testament and then move to history books.

Orthodox Judaism wouldn’t, Reform Judaism would.

People who constantly milk past history of antisemitism or past anti black racism are promoting racism today and authoritarianism. I think it would be much better if people instead of doing this were silent instead and that such milking of past grievances in one sided manner was dealt with more intolerance and there was a taboo against it.

Like people realizing this fact and either outright censoring some of this when is overdone or be condemning and unpleasant to those doing it.

So no, it isn't legitimate and good to be talking about the so called antisemitism of Tito's Yugoslavia. I don't care about it but I do care about you and others like you bringing it up.

Although in different contexts among historical departments doing an even handed history that doesn't just soapbox about antisemitism but is willing to mention negaively say Jewish mistreatment of non Jews too, but also talk about Jews being mistreated, I don't see something wrong with that.

There is certainly a norm being promoted about being against bringing up Jewish participation in communism or any Jewish wrongdoing. Well if we shouldn't talk about Jews wronging others we should also talk less about others wronging Jews in the past. These milking of past grievances and promotion of victimhood ensures racism being kept alive. Especially in combo with the concept that some groups have always been victims and others always be victimizers.

The people who are extremely intolerant to any negativity towards Jews and call it conspiracy theory, while legitimize much greater negativity towards non Jews, are just racist extremists acting based on prejudice and trying to give it a fig leaf of legitimacy. The end point of what they promote is that indeed Jews are superior and should be treated better and others worse.

So my view is what we need is to not care that much about such events but to care about the faction that wants to talk about it and punish them for being malicious racists who are acting in bad faith and trying to use their one sided approach of history as a weapon.

Unironically one way to avoid conflict is to actually bring up the past less. Unless that is you bring it up to correct the onesided approach of those who are milking the past maliciously today which isn't antisemites today who milk the past against their outgroup in positions of influence.

To respect the sensitivity of people who want less focus on any supposed wrongdoing done by say Jews, we should also talk less about supposed past antisemitism.

Unless the goal is indeed to promote a narrative of oppressed groups that should be protected and we need to be racist in their favor and against groups like european christian men. Which it is. Hence making such malicious exploration of history taboo is what I recommend. Like fighting about the details, it is better to just not tolerate people who try to use history in such manner to begin with.

I certainly don't think we need the opposite milking of history either as the pervasive force but a detente where everyone understands that at least most groups, and certainly Jews included have a more complex history than pure victimizers nor victims and while we aknowledge complexities of history we don't abuse it in such manner would be a much a superior norm. A detente rather than one group of hateful grievance carriers dishing out as much as they want while demanding they don't get any of the same currency back. And throwing terms like nazi and antisemitism to cover up their own racism and to slander any dissent to their racist extremism.

I would recommend for the right and others who ought to oppose this to fire activists in positions of influence promoting this milking of the past to shit on the present outgroup and that it would be a good thing and a move towards a less racist and fanatical society if we were intolerant to those malicious actors of this mentality. Rules like boo outgroup or regulations against racism should not make exceptions for those promoting a jewish grievance against european societies either.

BTW, it does no good for the relationship between Jews and non Jews to constantly talk about ethnic conflict between Jews and non Jews. Moving past it and promoting that different groups must respect each other does far better than promoting to one the idea that they will always be victimized by the other, and to the other either the acceptance of this ideal and they deserve to be mistreated as "revenge" and because of their own bad nature, or to see Jews as a group that will always see them as oppressors and therefore might mistreat them.

Rules like boo outgroup or regulations against racism should not make exceptions for those promoting a jewish grievance against european societies either.

Should TheMotte add a rule against advancing any form of slave morality in general?

Calling it slave morality misdiagnoses the problem.

It is more racism for Jews by either Jewish supremacists who are Jewish racists, or non Jews who are racist supremacists for a foreign ethnic group. And same in general for the progressive stack.

These people with this mentality are not pushovers. Oikophobia relies on pushovers as well to take root, but the faction on the offense are more direct racists, rather than those who are impotent to oppose them. It is an alliance of different extreme tribalists than just a pathology of everyone being a pushover.

And such behavior of enforcing consensus that the Jewish outgroup is always at fault and Jews always have it worse and admitting no fault, and how any dissent is antisemitism which should be shut down is behavior that is utterly ridiculous and rule violating and inconsistent with any serious and respectable way of exploring history, or ethnic issues. Just onesided racist propaganda. So is more sneaky ways of doing this like just always talking about jewish victimhood.

This authoritarian racist propaganda should not be tolerated anywhere, including in universities, media, etc. by just enforcing what current rules ought to be or were, but not the hidden rules that are about the progressive stack and respecting the tribalism of Jewish supremacists. Is it possible to shut it down, but have some sensitivity to not censor the rare case that Jewish victimhood is brought up if there isn't an agenda to overly promote it? Yes it is possible indeed to do that and distinguish the weaponization of history, with the even handed exploration of it.

I have a problem with the slave morality concept since those who bring it up seem to use it to pathologize both being a pushover and moderation. I favor groups having self respect, and standing up for themselves against malicious racists. I don't want them to have a mentality that everything is ok and permitted and that they should abuse others.

There is a sweet spot between pushover, ultranationalist oppressor and it does involve a healthy level of intolerance towards foreign racist supremacists and the locals who align with them. That sweet spot is what I favor, of not tolerating this bullshit, but also not doing it to others neither.

The reality is that if western civilization and countries, when the Frankfurt school, ADL, weathermen underground and third world marxist nationalists were pushing their extremism decades ago, shut these groups down and didn't let them march in institutions, the world would be in a saner and more moderate place today. Same for other groups which shared this extremism and authoritarianism but were somewhat more sneaky about it like the neocons.

And make no mistake, these groups did shut down opposition.

Now things are in a worse spot, but you still got to not tolerate such viewpoint if you have any rules of conduct and standards. Its not that we don't have rules in institutions but its that evenhanded application of rules has been eroded over being at this point even overt supremacist in the progressive stack manner. And there are also those who are aligning with its agenda but aren't going to admit this even though it can be surmised by their behavior.

So do we have a general problem of quokas? Not exactly. Racist supremacists for progressive stack identities are racists who promote tolerance for their own racism and in bad faith promote that their outgroup should be pushovers and have no tribalism. These people are not really quokas but are authoritarians.

This isn't done in good faith against tribalism since they promote it for their ingroup and oppose any right wing criticism of excessive tribalism. Moreover, there is a direct connection between becoming a pushover and eventually becoming a racist supremacist for a foreign tribe and not just an enabler. Since the vacuum of your own lack of tribalism can be filled by identifying with the tribalism of another group where tribalism without limit is tolerated and where you can virtue signal.

A society that was dominated by "slave morality" promoted towards everyone would look quite different. I think a mutuality of restraint is part of international justice but again restraint does not mean tolerating everything. Restraint is different than concern trolling the victimized party to be pushovers or else they are dishonestly slandered by the actual racist supremacists as nazi antisemites, who just coincidentally never show the same intolerance both in terms of unpleasantness, hostility and also in terms of outright banning and restricting the most pervasive type of progressive supremacists who actually do pass hate speech laws and manage to get governments promote their narratives.

Of which Jewish supremacists are obviously part of promoting the same ideal of their group doing nothing wrong and western civilization oppressing them among others. If anything, they seem to be the most authoritarian racists and the issue where their supremacist ideology is enforced most viciously and ruthlessly.

Governments abandoning ridiculously one sided definitions of antisemitism and outright condemning the weaponization of history to portray Christians as permanent oppressors of Jews or anyone, would be a move forward. Same with the narrative of europeans as oppressors, or even of western civilization as oppressive. As well as condemning one sided depictions of the past and promoting in influence figures like Helen Andrews and more who have promoted truth and nuance and this as the official approach.

The lobbies which made these racist blood libel laws reality should not be allowed to continue to have influence and organizations can easily be banned. Indeed, like a police department raided ADL offices for a criminal investigation in the 1990s, banning political commissar state within a state powerful totalitarian racist supremacist organizations while investigating them for crimes like extortion, spying and more, is definitely feasible.

In Poland they criminalized blaming the Poles for the holocaust, which is part of the reason the Polish succeed in defending themselves from this to some extend. Prohibition which does not necessarily require outright criminalization on goverment level of this one sided promotion of guilt on continuous nations, religions, based on one sided propaganda ought to be the end point. People who are being racist pricks against groups today by weaponizing history promoting them as permanent past, present and future oppressors should be more afraid of engaging in that behavior, than their victims of resisting it.

As we can see you can incentivize and keep out ideologies without outright banning them. But it would be less extreme for countries to restrict the more dominant type of hate speech that shits on their people that laws in line of this ideology. Like this ideology rose in influence it can decline. And then I would have less supremacists to be complaining about since there will be less people holding that ideology once it is repressed instead of promoted. Which is fine my me.

It really is especially insulting to see people in other occasions be intolerant to this type of behavior but either engage in it themselves when it comes to the Jews, or tolerate it as uniquely defensible. It isn't and the way forward is to not tolerate it anywhere.

At the heart of the impotence and extremism lies the same fallacy about how we should defend this kind of extremism because the radical right oppose it, which could be used to justify, and has been used to justify all type of far left extremism. What is wrong about racist supremacists is in fact imposing on other groups a violation of their rights. Its not in fact extreme to oppose this being done to you.

So it is both disappointing and illuminating that we are dealing with people who we shouldn't take as credible just because they might have more correct takes on other issues, when they show this extremist prejudice in favor of the Jews and against Christians, Europeans and other non Jewish groups. It isn't really that complicated, don't tolerate this movement, which is good while behaving with standards of behavior that do in fact differ from the supremacists which you don't tolerate and criticize. Remember that being too much of a pushover towards them is not being sufficiently different and is letting them impose their evil on the world.

If I were to quantify it, I would say that enforcing an ultranationalist ideology with worldwide ambitions is evil. It makes sense for nations to have some bias in favor of themselves in their own borders. Focusing more on your own history is part of this. While focusing on your history is one thing, even there some restraint on how one sided you present history and the world is good. Some evenhandedness. But this should count 100 times over if you are trying to promote a vision of history to a different ethnic group. That we reached the point where ridiculous Jewish supremacist racist propaganda is being adopted by different non Jewish countries is both a tragedy and a farce.

38% does not constitute majority ownership, which would mean that whatever perceived exploitation there was would have been mostly the product of native Slovaks

38% of property doesn't equal 38% of businesses. If indeed the non-Jews owned basically all the land, then the Jews would have owned more than 38% of businesses (assuming, again, that one can trust the 38% number).

Well, really why bother? Maybe the CIA could or couldn't get rid of Maduro, but it seems to be of very little advantage to the United States. They don't need their oil, they're not in a relevant location, there are much bigger and more serious threats, and whatever comes after Maduro could be worse. Either way, the CIA gets the blame, so why not go home early on Fridays?

It decreases illegal immigration from increases legal immigration

Similarly, one can decrease rape by declaring it consensual.

Deleted by author

Hmm. Should posters be allowed to delete top level posts like this? It isn't great behavior.

[not a reply to you] Not sure why OP deleted their post, I thought it was good.

Could you summarize?

Idk about good but it certainly was eye-opening. Did you catch the username? I was confused about how cocaine comes from scorpions and wanted to follow up via PM.

Right, the segue into late-stage capitalism vs. hallucinogens was confusing though.

Good one! The username was jfnyqinr292m

You'd need a mod, it was a random string of characters like jfnyrgi or something. Not memorable.

Well now I wish I had gotten to read it!

Edit: meant to post as reply, not top level.

In what contexts are accurate prejudice/biases acceptable justification for discrimination?

I want to consider a broad range of groups including both involuntary/innate characteristics such as race, gender, and IQ, as well as more voluntary categories such as religion, political ideology, or even something like being in the fandom for a certain TV show, expressing a preference for a certain type of food, or having bad personal grooming. This is a variable that your answer might depend upon.

Let's suppose that we know with certainty that people in group X have a statistically higher rate of bad feature Y compared to the average population, whether that be criminality, laziness, low intelligence, or are just unpleasant to be around. I'm taking the fact that this is accurate as an axiom. The actual proportion of people in group X with feature Y is objectively (and known to you) higher than average, but is not universal. That is, Y is a mostly discrete feature, and we have 0 < p < q < 1 where p is the probability of a randomly sampled member of the public has Y, and q is the probability that a randomly sampled member of q has Y. Let's leave the causation as another variable here: maybe membership in X increases the probability of Y occurring, maybe Y increases the probability of joining X (in the case of voluntary membership), maybe some cofactor causes both. This may be important, as it determines whether discouraging people from being in group X (if voluntary) will actually decrease the prevalence of Y or whether it will just move some Ys into the "not X" category.

Another variable I'll leave general is how easy it is to determine Y directly. Maybe it's simple: if you're interacting with someone in person you can probably quickly tell they're a jerk without needing to know their membership in Super Jerk Club. Or maybe it's hard, like you're considering job applications and you only know a couple reported facts, which include X but not Y and you have no way to learn Y directly without hiring them first.

When is it okay to discriminate against people in group X? The far right position is probably "always" while the far left would be "never", but I suspect most people would fall somewhere in the middle. Few people would say that it would be okay to refuse to hire brown-haired people if it were discovered that they were 0.1% more likely to develop cancer and thus leave on disability. And few people would say that it's not okay to discriminate against hiring convicted child rapists as elementary school teachers on the basis that they're a higher risk than the average person. (if you are such a person though, feel free to speak up and explain your position).

So for the most part our variables are:

-Group membership voluntariness

-Feature Y's severity and relevance to the situation

-The situation itself (befriending, hiring, electing to office)

-Ease of determining feature Y without using X as a proxy

-Causality of X to Y

Personally, I'm somewhere between the classically liberal "it's okay to discriminate against voluntary group membership but not involuntary group membership" and the utilitarian "it's okay to discriminate iff the total net benefit of the sorting mechanism is higher than the total cost of the discrimination against group members, taking into account that such discrimination may be widespread", despite the latter being computationally intractable in practice and requiring a bunch of heuristics that allow bias into the mix. I don't think I'm satisfied with the classically liberal position alone because if there were some sufficiently strong counterexample, such as someone with a genetic strain that made them 100x more likely to be a pedophile, I think I'd be okay with refusing child care positions to all such people even if they had never shown any other risk factors. But if there were a similar strain that made them 10% more likely I don't think it would be fair to do this, because it's such a low base rate that 10% doesn't do much to offset the cost of the discrimination. Also the utilitarian position allows for stricter scrutiny applied for more serious things like job applications (which have a huge cost if systematically discriminating against X) versus personal friendships (if people refuse to befriend X because they don't like Y, those people can more easily go make different friends or befriend each other, so the systemic cost is lower)

But I'd love to hear more thoughts and perspectives, especially with reasoning for why different cases are and are not justified under your philosophical/moral framework.

I just want to chime in as I do that as someone who believes HBD is very likely true that I have no real interest in the use of it in this way. The use of these characteristics to pre judge people is reprehensible. I am only interested in HBD as an alternative explanation for disparate outcomes.

It's only reprehensible because we have better alternatives, right? Say (tortured hypothetical) it's the year 1500, and you're picking crewmembers for your voyage in a week. You need a bunch, so all you have to evaluate them is a three minute chat, and they're not particularly educated so there's not much shared knowledge to go on. It's your experience from past voyages that jewish crewmembers are the best and africans are the worst, and this is still informative even after adjusting for your first impression. (Also, a bad crewmember might mean 'your ship sinks'). I think making the race-based judgement here is fine. The only other alternative is picking randomly to an extent. And if you have a moral issue with some people being deprived because they're paid less - how is 'not being chosen because you're black' morally worse than 'not being chosen because you're low iq'? Both are unchosen.

This, of course, isn't really true in the modern day. You can just give someone an IQ test or an interview problem or something.

Even in this scenario given a three minute chat and just observing behavior I think you could swamp race with other observations. But yes, if you're going to construct a scenario that amounts to "You need to select people knowing only the average stats of their group" (racial or otherwise - this same analysis applies to things like hair color of any other arbitrary grouping) then it would just follow that you should select the group with the highest expected competence.

I agree with the following implications and further think this implies some obligation of those who are more capable to help those who are less. Not on a group based level but just the mesh of all humanity.

Is it even possible to not pre-judge though? I think this is what leftists fear about HBD going mainstream and being accepted as true by the average person. If its true that a group is many times more likely to commit violent crime, or some trait marker means someone is many times more likely to be a poor employee, is it reasonable or even possible to not act on that belief?

And if you are acting on behalf of someone else, hiring for a job in someone elses company or choosing a school district for your kids, is it moral to not make the best informed choice possible?

I've never had any trouble with it myself. For the most part people you're interacting with have been sorted such that I think assumptions wouldn't be interpersonally useful. I work with excellent black engineers. It's a lot like how I can recognize for various reason women tend not to enter engineering fields and yet I easily recognize one of the most talented engineers on my team is a woman.

I think this is what leftists fear about HBD going mainstream and being accepted as true by the average person. If its true that a group is many times more likely to commit violent crime, or some trait marker means someone is many times more likely to be a poor employee, is it reasonable or even possible to not act on that belief?

You don't need HBD for that. You just need to know the facts; HBD gives a reason for them, but even if HBD is false and there is some other reason for them, the same inferences may be drawn.

Except I'm not just coyly avoiding references to HBD but secretly referring to that alone, I'm deliberately including a broader range of groups like using someone's membership in the KKK to know you don't want to be friends with them, or using someone's presence on a sex offender registry to avoid hiring for daycare positions. This is also a form of using someone's group membership to pre judge them. Of course there are differences, I'm not trying to argue "these are the same therefore in order to be consistent you have to support or oppose both". My point is more "there are tons of differences between these things, which ones are the actually relevant distinctions and why?"

I think I’d have a high threshold for most common contexts, though as the task at hand got more critical to the mission of the company, the health and safety of the clients or employees, or the safety of the product, my threshold goes down by quite a lot.

I don’t care if my front desk people in a hotel are maximally competent. The role isn’t complicated, and above a certain threshold of competence (speaks English, functionally literate and numerate, understands social contexts) I don’t get that much more for being choosy in who I hire. Any minimally competent person can do the task.

When it comes to something more mission critical, for example a programmer for my software company, the threshold goes down rather quickly. I lose money when I have to waste 1000 man-hours because someone bungled the code, and delays might well cost me millions in salary or lost sales. This hurts everyone working for the company.

The most obvious case would be in dangerous roles, or roles where a mistake can cause injury or death to other people or themselves. A doctor who is too stupid to understand what he’s doing, or has ADHD badly enough that he’s likely to miss critical details is a danger to his patients. An engineer who is unable or distractible enough to not do accurate calculations is a danger to anyone who uses his designs. Even in some forms of factory work, missing a detail or failing to check for people around before servicing or starting equipment can cause serious injury.

So it’s sort of a sliding scale for me. The more critical the role and the more a mess up will harm employees, clients, or the company itself the more I’m at least OK with using any means necessary to get the best possible person for the role.

Any minimally competent person can do the task.

Here is where I sigh heavily and type out a reply more in sorrow than in anger.

I've worked a lot in those kinds of "all you need is a warm body" jobs. And then bosses wonder why the fuck their customers are annoyed and leaving shitty reviews.

Because even for "what the hell do I care who I hire, all I want is a trained monkey to take names and rattle off the prepared script" roles, you do actually need a teeny bit more than "can stand upright unassisted and speak English".

The other day at work I had to engage with the customer service hotline of the bank where we do business, and it soon became apparent that they'd outsourced from the natives here to someplace else. Presumably because it would be cheaper and "what the hell do we care who we hire for these minimal roles".

And it was not a happy experience, lemme tell you. Not the fault of the people on the other end of the line, who were doing their best but had plainly just been dumped with "yeah this is the script" and no support, but the attitude of the higher-ups responsible for the decisions on outsourcing, customer service, shaving off expenses for wages, etc.

It took three phone calls to get a minor issue sorted out, that ordinarily would have taken just one.

And that is why the saying "pay peanuts and get monkeys" came into being. If your attitude to public-facing/customer-facing jobs is "this isn't important, it's just something any minimally competent person can do", then that is what you will get: minimal competence. Which is not enough. If, on the other hand, you have people willing to go the extra step to solve a problem, help a customer, or fix something that is not working - well hey there, your customers have a better experience and don't go away planning to switch to your competitor!

And how do you get people willing to go the extra step? For a start, don't display that you think this is a step above not being employable at all, that you don't give a shit about the job or the people who do it, and that you consider it so minimal, you have no respect for the people doing it.

Whenever I encounter shitty public service, I usually joke after the fact "interest rates are too low".

I dont mean this literally of course, but it is a real problem that improved sorting of people into roles plus some percentage of the distribution of IQ and conscientiousness being too low for meaningful contribution to society, means some experiences in life are just going to be terrible. I often wonder how much of my own childhood experience with generally decent schoolteachers versus my children's teachers who are basically morons is my own changing perception, vs. the fact that smart women have better options now.

I've had similar thoughts about my own elementary school teachers vs my childrens. Smart women do have more options now. Classrooms are different now, the expectations of the experience are different. I think this encourages the moronic.

Datapoint of one(or some small number, whatever), but I remember my teachers as mostly moronic, sometimes motivated to teach and sometimes more concerned with making the kid fit into a box optimized for being easy to work with, and generally being quite lazy. So possibly changing perceptions.

Yeah, I easily can count the number of teachers I didn't think were stupid on one hand.

The amount you would have to pay more for the good for marginally better service is not worth hiring marginally more competent warm bodies.

The best receptionist in the world would be a really flirty Victorias Secret model with massive tits and 150 IQ who also volunteers at the animal shelter and the retirement home and has a warm smile. But she's not going to bring in enough marginal dollars to Dunder Mifflin Paper company to justify the salary on net.

You are leaving Economics completely out of the picture.

If, on the other hand, you have people willing to go the extra step to solve a problem, help a customer, or fix something that is not working - well hey there, your customers have a better experience and don't go away planning to switch to your competitor!

The issue is often that their competitors are not any better in this regard. Or, even when they are, any advantage from customer service is absolutely swamped by other considerations.

I travel a lot and have had a range of experiences with hotel front desks, but I can't say any of them would ever trump even a small difference in price or location. I think the only exceptions I could imagine would be those bordering on the actually criminal.

Especially in the era of travel aggregators, a lot of folks are looking at just the price tag and maybe a map.

Yeah, that's the problem. Because that approach does lead to the "not my job, not my problem" attitude with staff, where a small amount of extra effort could avoid something becoming a major problem later on, but eh why should I care, the boss doesn't, I'm just gonna do my hours and not a finger's worth of extra effort.

And so customers go "they're all equally shitty, which one is cheapest?" and for cost-cutting, employers go the "it's a minimal job for minimal staff" and the outcomes are what we've all experienced: hanging on the phone trying to get the options from the automated menu instead of talking to a real person; if you do get a real person, they're working off a script in an overseas call centre and can't help you even if they wanted to; they don't want to, because everyone knows call-centre work is shitty and this is only something they're doing until they can get something better; help lines aren't helpful, and the degradation in quality continues so long as people will put up with it because it's not worth shifting from service provider A to service provider B since they all use the same kind of cost-cutting measures.

But automation and AI will make it all better, so even the minimal people will be out of jobs to be replaced by the Helpful Friendly ChatBot! Except I don't expect AI to be exempt from the "it's a minimal job, cut expenses as much as possible, this may be crappy but it's good enough" attitude, either.

I've seen the jokes about the American DMV and I don't know what they are like in reality, but that's all part of the "minimal job for minimal people" attitude and how it corrodes any sense of wanting to do something to help people. I've had low-level public-facing public service jobs where it would have been easy to go "not my job, not my problem" and leave people hanging, versus putting in a bit more effort to try and help them solve their problem and tell them what to do and how to navigate the bureaucracy, even though that wasn't formally part of the job.

But if that is not wanted, and indeed punished, by "I don't care who I hire so long as they can turn up sober and speak English" attitudes to 'it's a job any minimally competent person can do and doesn't need good workers because if they're any good they're going to leave for something higher up and better paid' positions, then bored, indifferent and even actively aggressive clerks who shut the window just as your position in the queue moves up to it are what you're going to get. "Oh, I could have stayed open five more minutes beyond my official closing time and taken that form, but now you're going to have to wait another two hours in line? Not my job, not my problem".

I think you're on to something here and it is reminding me of a post on Pakistani vs Japanese manufacturing that I remember reading a month or two back but now can't seem to find. One of the take-aways was that the sort of "not my job not my problem" attitude often behaved in similar ways to a pathogen as what's the point of putting in effort if the next guy down the assembly line is just going to fuck it up.

Here.

That's the one, thank you.

I thought it was only a week or two back - I remember reading it very recently. I haven't had any luck finding it either though. I want to say @screye was involved?

@AsTheDominoesFall, found it. It was 3.5 weeks ago, where i was thinking 4 - 6. I couldn't remember the title and it didn't show up when I did a search for "manufacturing" and various other related terms.

Ah, the post I was thinking of must have been inspired by that one, it was a tangent in the main thread iirc - although I still can't find it, so maybe I don't.

naah, can't recall that one :/

Probably one of the other resident south-asians ?

But they were doing so before this. Most of the jobs I’m thinking of have been in a race to the bottom for decades. People want low prices and labor has a fairly high cost so most service roles are bare bones, purposely dumbed down so anyone off the street can do it, and quite often understafffed from even their own plans. People don’t actually care in most instances. They want cheap, and probably don’t even notice the service end unless it particularly bad. So there’s never really been a reason to worry about quality in low level workers. And as I said above, at the wages most of these jobs can afford to pay, you really don’t get to keep qualified people that long. That young go getter who’s really bright and helpful will probably be doing something else pretty quickly because the pay sucks and he’s got options. If you paid enough to keep him, the room rates go up and you have more empty rooms. The same would go for low level retail. If you paid enough to attract talent you’d have to raise your prices, and people generally don’t really put up with that when there are other cheaper options.

And every once in a while, someone does better customer service, word gets around, and people start actually going over to the better firm. Which then finds they can't scale the better customer service, returns to the crappy norm, and we're back where we started.

Hmm I'm starting to think we've gone over this before...

I don’t care if my front desk people in a hotel are maximally competent. The role isn’t complicated, and above a certain threshold of competence (speaks English, functionally literate and numerate, understands social contexts) I don’t get that much more for being choosy in who I hire. Any minimally competent person can do the task.

Sure, I’d add not a thief, friendly, and capable of prioritization. But you do actually get a value add from a better employee- particularly ability to train as a mgr/assistant mgr, which places like that are always short of.

Agreed in the abstract although I think in a lot of those industries you’ll find more issues with turnover than competence, anyone with a reasonable work ethic, a normal IQ and basic skills will probably do well at low level management anyway. The issue with too much competence in that kind of job is that they’re usually temporarily working that field whilst perusing higher skills to get a better job. Brandon Sanderson talks about working the night desk at a hotel before becoming a writer. He was and still is fairly competent and you could train him to be a good manager. Except for the rather obvious problem that he has no intention of staying in the hotel after he gets published. Or you might get a smart kid to work the desk while going to college and find that they leave after graduation. And again sure for a time you get someone good, but once he graduates he’s going on to his professional field leaving you to get someone else to fill the gap.

In what contexts are accurate prejudice/biases acceptable justification for discrimination?

Everything. Next question please.

To elaborate, whenever the expected utility from discrimination exceeds the costs. If there's a genetic test that correlated with a 0.05% increase in risk for colon cancer, no sensible insurance company would order it, nor should a sane employer hinge their employment decisions upon it, because that would just be a pain in the ass. There's no magic threshold where Bayesian reasoning and statistics becomes applicable, just that there's a time and a place where it's worth the effort over the default course of action.

For many properties relevant to us, it's just blindingly obvious, such as if a person is male or female for the purposes of how concerned you should be when seeing them jogging towards you in a deserted alley.

Few people would say that it would be okay to refuse to hire brown-haired people if it were discovered that they were 0.1% more likely to develop cancer and thus leave on disability

I would be perfectly OK with this, because even slightly rational employers wouldn't fire someone on that basis, and a world where that happens is one that looks nothing like ours. Should they end up fired, then they'll likely end up hired by someone else for 99.99% of their previous wages.

For example, I'm against employers being unable to discriminate on the basis of disability, despite having my own mental health issues, such as ADHD. I'm still functional, if it was so bad that I, say, forgot what medicines I'd prescribed my patient or wandered off in the midst of work, then I would have no expectations of further employment. I wouldn't want that person as an employee, colleague or even my own physician, yet that counts as a protected characteristic.

That's for when we're actually post-scarcity, at least in terms of deserving subsistence if not a job, and we're not there yet.

To elaborate, whenever the expected utility from discrimination exceeds the costs. If there's a genetic test that correlated with a 0.05% increase in risk for colon cancer, no sensible insurance company would order it, nor should a sane employer hinge their employment decisions upon it, because that would just be a pain in the ass.

I'm not sure I agree with this: there are lots of tests like BRCA1 that reveal something like 40% of women with the gene will develop breast cancer. Large employers often self-insure for employee health insurance (often with a known insurer providing the infrastructure and managing benefits), so health care costs actually come directly out of their bottom line. I can imagine that the math works out pretty easily that if, say, Starbucks knew of a positive test for the gene or a family history of certain diseases, it would actually be an actuarial loss to hire certain candidates and provide health insurance.

The US prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of genetic information, and I'm not sure I disagree with the idea that we should do so.

I'm not sure I agree with this: there are lots of tests like BRCA1 that reveal something like 40% of women with the gene will develop breast cancer.

That's not a vanishingly small likelihood is it? It makes perfect sense for insurers to cover it.

As for me, I'm fine with it, I consider attempts to shield important information away with a sceptical eye, leaving aside issues of poor incentives like the police breaking the law to acquire evidence which ought to be inadmissible and such. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and rare is the time when more information is bad for you.

Large employers often self-insure for employee health insurance (often with a known insurer providing the infrastructure and managing benefits), so health care costs actually come directly out of their bottom line.

Is this how it works?

I thought the whole point of health insurance was that it cost the company the same amount no matter how much of it you use.

I guess if they told the health insurance company they were genetically screening employees they could ask for a lower rate, but I sort of wouldn't expect the health insurance companies to go along with it, when they can refer to it being bad optics in order to not give a discount.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Is this how it works?

I thought the whole point of health insurance was that it cost the company the same amount no matter how much of it you use.

If you doubt it, you could literally just hit your favorite search engine up for an explanation of self-insuring companies.

I thought the whole point of health insurance was that it cost the company the same amount no matter how much of it you use.

No, the whole point of health insurance is to pool risk. Companies offer it as a perk, now, but the typical American association between employment and insurance is exceedingly contingent. Insurance companies collect premiums to finance the pool, as well as to finance the administration of the pool and also to distribute profits to shareholders and do all the other things companies do. Large insurance companies have larger pools, distributing risk more widely and collecting more money to the pool. If you're a large enough corporation, however, collecting the premiums yourself (and perhaps paying a small administrative fee to an insurance company) may save you and/or your employees a lot of money, for example if your employees tend to be some combination of young, healthy, unmarried, and/or childless.

Strictly speaking, you can self-insure as an individual, too. If you forgo insurance and simply put your "premiums" into a high yield savings account every month, then over the course of your lifetime you should on average actually come out ahead of people who buy insurance, since the whole point of insurance companies employing armies of actuaries is to be sure that they don't go bankrupt--that is, to insure that more money is coming into the pool, than going out of it. So if you believe the mathematicians, you should self-insure! Of course in reality it doesn't work out this way, even if you're relatively lucky; since insurance companies also have enormous negotiating power, even when self-insuring accurately duplicates the risk pool it doesn't duplicate stuff like "in network" discounts, negotiated rates, "maximum out-of-pocket," and other such perks. To say nothing of most peoples' inability to truly weather a large financial shock on the theory that they should, by the time they are ready to die, still technically come out financially ahead.

You have an inverse of Pascal's Wager going on as an individual. If MegaCorp runs its health insurance in house it at least in theory turns a profit from 99 mostly healthy employees paying for the 1 unlucky guy that gets into a terrible car accident or gets cancer. If it's Joe Schmoe trying to do that then he comes out ahead 99 percent of the time and gets fucking cleaned out 1 percent of the time. This isn't the same.

If it's Joe Schmoe trying to do that then he comes out ahead 99 percent of the time and gets fucking cleaned out 1 percent of the time. This isn't the same.

Right, that's why I said:

Of course in reality it doesn't work out this way, even if you're relatively lucky . . . To say nothing of most peoples' inability to truly weather a large financial shock on the theory that they should, by the time they are ready to die, still technically come out financially ahead.

For that matter, self-insurance sometimes goes very badly even for whole corporations--though, as with insurance companies, the larger they get the less this is likely to be a problem. Small and mid-size firms do self-insure sometimes, and sometimes this goes badly for them. Two or three million-dollar medical events in a single year would be terribly bad luck for a company of, say, 500 employees, but it's well within the realm of the possible. This is why a company that self-insures should typically also have some kind of stop-loss policy backing up its self-insurance pool (and indeed many insurance companies themselves have stop-loss coverage). This is a fascinating area of the law that unfortunately falls outside my expertise, but I find it fascinating even so. Insurance and, essentially, meta-insurance form the basis of all sorts of interesting economic gambits. But some of the greatest profits of all have been won by persuading whole nations that participation in such gambits is wise, or even obligatory.

Which is to say: while I acknowledge that the equilibrium I live in requires that I bet, pragmatically, against the actuaries who think they'll take more of my money than they'll have to give back, I remain suspicious that insurance is in fact a deeply parasitic economic entity, of a kind that should probably be much more regulated than it is (even though I am, in almost all cases, reflexively anti-regulation).

relatively lucky

Maybe I'm just being autistic here, but I was thinking that most of these self-insuring fools actually make it out OK or even come out ahead, a few break even, and some get hauled to the cleaners and back.

This is such a general problem that a even book would be insufficient to wholly deal with it.

Some other examples: Instead of directly determining a person under eighteen's ability to consent by whom they wish to governed, all are deemed incapable of it because of an involuntary characteristic (age). That this discrimination takes places has is probably related to the fact that the alternative, individual assesment of voters understanding of elections, has been determined to be outside the overton window. While the other alternative, barring no-one on the grounds of age, is infissable as infants are incapable to even use a pen to mark the ballot, let alone understand the meaning of this action.

During ww2 all Japanese-Americans were deemed a threat and interned, while Koreans Americans weren't affected and also showed no sympathy for their co-Asians. Meanwhile Soviet Union in 1937 declared Korean-Soviets were more loyal to Japan than SU, and deported them to mostly Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In Japan, Koreans distinguished themselves as brutal, particularly as guards of PoWs. Was it moral for FDR to allow Koreans to roam free, while Stalin deemed them a threat, and Japan viewed them as an asset? Or perhaps all internment and ethnic cleansing schemes schemes unjustified by their very nature?

Instead of directly determining a person under eighteen's ability to consent by whom they wish to governed, all are deemed incapable of it because of an involuntary characteristic (age).

When the person under eighteen is paying all the bills for this house and keeping it up and running and solving their own problems, then the person under eighteen can get a say in who runs the place, otherwise I'm your mom and this is my house, my rules.

(Sorry, couldn't resist).

There are limits. I think a child does have a right to e.g. being fed, and if the current parent isn't satisfying this then society probably should step in.

Taking that argument seriously leads to some pretty dark places when it comes to voting restrictions.

Only if you think anything but the most novel moral fads is "dark".

Universal franchise has been panned as a stupid idea for as long as Republics have existed, and under the name of "democracy" specifically denounced by all but the most depraved and bloody products of the Enlightenment.

In fact the only reason most people ever got the franchise was to justify feeding them into the meat grinders of the bloodiest wars to ever happen and taxing them at rates that would be deemed confiscatory by most of history. So I think this ancient skepticism was on point.

What dark places? That the franchise should be restricted to net taxpayers? It’s actually pretty trivial to figure that out without having to resort to ethnic or other discrimination.

I will charitably assume that you understand discrimination here quite broadly, and mainly as things on the quantitative side, like multidimensional demographic profiling in mortgage approvals, rather than a recipe for an explicit caste society. Most arguments against this line of thought are invalid (rejecting the premise) or non-consequentialist and «principled» to the point of absurdity (statistically reliable proxies in uncertainty are bad! Uncertain gut feelings/laughably gameable metrics are good!).

I think the main problem with the utilitarian approach is simply that the society we have cannot be trusted with the full power of Reverend Bayes. That's okay, in my view: it'll recalibrate under the pressure of truth and retain its good sides while reducing bad ones. But, as it stands, Nick Land said it best:

Consider John Derbyshire’s essay in infamy The Talk: Nonblack Version, focusing initially on its relentless obnoxiousness, and attentive to the negative correlation between sociability and objective reason. As Derbyshire notes elsewhere, people are generally incapable of differentiating themselves from group identities, or properly applying statistical generalizations about groups to individual cases, including their own. A rationally indefensible, but socially inevitable, reification of group profiles is psychologically normal – even ‘human’ – with the result that noisy, non-specific, statistical information is erroneously accepted as a contribution to self-understanding, even when specific information is available.

From the perspective of socially autistic, low-EQ, rational analysis, this is simply mistaken. If an individual has certain characteristics, the fact of belonging to a group that has similar or dissimilar average characteristics is of no relevance whatsoever. Direct and determinate information about the individual is not to any degree enriched by indirect and indeterminate (probabilistic) information about the groups to which the individual belongs. If an individual’s test results are known, for instance, no additional insight is provided by statistical inferences about the test results that might have been expected based on group profiling. An Ashkenazi Jewish moron is no less moronic because he is an Ashkenazi Jew. Elderly Chinese nuns are unlikely to be murderers, but a murderer who happens to be an elderly Chinese nun is neither more nor less murderous than one who is not. This is all extremely obvious, to obnoxious people.

To normal people, however, it is not obvious at all. In part this is because rational intelligence is scarce and abnormal among humans, and in part because social ‘intelligence’ works with what everyone else is thinking, which is to say, with irrational groupish sentiment, meager information, prejudices, stereotypes, and heuristics. Since (almost) everybody else is taking short-cuts, or ‘economizing’ on reason, it is only rational to react defensively to generalizations that are likely to be reified or inappropriately applied — over-riding or substituting for specific perceptions. Anybody who anticipates being pre-defined through a group identity has an expanded ego-investment in that group and the way it is perceived. A generic assessment, however objectively arrived at, will immediately become personal, under (even quite remotely) normal conditions.

Obnoxious reason can stubbornly insist that anything average cannot be about you, but the message will not be generally received. Human social ‘intelligence’ is not built that way. Even supposedly sophisticated commentators blunder repeatedly into the most jarring exhibitions of basic statistical incomprehension without the slightest embarrassment, because embarrassment was designed for something else (and for almost exactly the opposite). The failure to understand stereotypes in their scientific, or probabilistic application, is a functional prerequisite of sociability, since the sole alternative to idiocy in this respect is obnoxiousness.

As it stands, so it goes.

  1. Does this suggest that if such an obnoxious rational person does have the statistical sophistication to draw such distinctions and make decisions in secret, then it's okay? That is, stereotypes are bad in general if widespread because normies will abuse them, but the actual rational analysis is fine if used in an isolated and secret way that normies don't find out about?

  2. What defines "obnoxious" here? Is rationalism itself defined as obnoxious because it cares about pedantic details that normies don't? Or is it merely the social obliviousness of nerdy rationalists who oversimplify everything and miss the forest for the trees, such that a more sophisticated rational intelligence that understands and compensates for normies would not be obnoxious?

obnoxious race realist, colorized, 2019

I think this racist is better than the last, but the next racist will be the really good one. That will be our lucky racist. He will grant us three wishes.

There's another problem as well. Finding out specific information about someone is not free.

It may be that if a group has a 20% greater chance of committing a robbery in the future, it's cheaper to just exclude all of the group than to specifically examine each one. This is especially so when the undesirable trait is something like "will do X in the future"--it's pretty hard to measure that before it happens.

Thanks for pointing this out. Land here articulates very well something I've been trying to understand for quite a while.

A more simplified way to put it in my view, would be to say that statistical analysis and the scientific method more generally are best used as limited tools. Unfortunately these tools were so mind-bogglingly, world-shatteringly powerful our ancestors couldn't help but violently wrench the entirety of human society to serve the tools, and make them more effective. Now we can't even use the tools properly, because the masses of society don't understand that these methods aren't the exact same thing as divine messengers serving up Truth from the heavens.

And so the wheel turns. At least soon we'll have artificial intelligence to turn the wheel for us.

Personal life - always, Personal life as consumer - always as long as it is not in your face too much - aka it is ok to avoid purple owned businesses, it's not ok to explicitly demand to be serviced by the only green employee there. Professional - you can go like Cristal brand to tell that you are amused that this rap guys are buying so much Champaigne, they get offended, and you know that your real customers - can freely drink without being associated with the likes of Jay Z or 50 Cent

I am not a big fan of proxies when it comes to important matters. We should aim to get as close to the underlying variable as possible.

Got a black and white potential candidate for a job as a physics researcher? In my world whoever scores higher in the IQ test gets it.

Not hiring child molesters at a pre school is less about competence or safety and more about optics. Lets say you had a device that could read minds and is attached to ones wrist to deliver a deadly electrical shock before one is to sexually abuse a child. I would bet most parents would still rather this guy not be near his children with the device on even if it means his life depends on doing an excellent job.

Will we ever reach the perfect set of proxies? No. But if they are used the way Bayes intended, I am fine with them. In practice they are used as hard and dumb cutoffs.

Oh you have 5 years of experience Instead of the 5.1 we are asking for? Too bad.

The problem with this view, which is at the heart of the modern rational world, is that the energy expended to figure things out in totality isn't always worth expending.

Your brain doesn't need to understand the shape of the environment on the atomic level to manipulate it, you've developped the concept of objects, which are a useful, wrong, simplification of it.

Newtonian physics are falsified, yet we use them daily in engineering.

The truth is that ALL criterions are proxies. The true nature of the world is unknowable and all decisions are made using models based on experience.

And quality models are energy efficient for their uses.

This actually gets at how I personally define “IQ”, which is the physical level at of detail at which a being understands reality. In this sense, there is a theoretical — and arguably practical — upper bound on intelligence, where a being understands all of reality across all time — that is, the position of every atom in the universe across every temporal dimension.

I have no doubt in the near future we will have AIs which achieve a significant portion of this — the ability to perceive and manipulate reality at the atomic level across a substantial — say, galaxy sized — slice of the universe. In practice these would be indistinguishable from magic to someone alive today. You could just say “get me a beer” to the AI, it would instantly assemble atoms into a glass (ice cold with frost on it) filled with atoms assembled as freshly brewed beer.

Looks like you're mixing in so much perception, memory, reach and ability to manipulate into "intelligence" that your personal definition of "IQ" is going to massively differ from the colloquial.

This is like the gripe I have with the Yud-esque AI doomers who claim intelligence is when if more, then can do magic.

The issue with not using proxies is that really a lot of measures are nearly impossible to get any other way. I can’t give an intelligence test to potential hires — it’s illegal. So I have to use college graduation as a proxy. I can’t really ask whether you’re going to commit a crime, — the criminal isn’t going to admit it — but someone rocking up with face tattoos wearing a hoodie is a decent proxy for criminality.

I can’t give an intelligence test to potential hires — it’s illegal.

Where are you, and when was the last time you were in the position to hire someone? I only ask because while I've seen this argument made on numerous occasions throughout rationalist circles, I have never seen it born out in meat-space. In my experience, aptitude and skill tests are a bog-standard component of the hiring process, and have been throughout my professional life.

Having sat on both sides of that proverbial table I feel like something must be getting left out here.

Yeah, I’ve had to take aptitude and IQ-proxy(wonderlic etc) tests at most jobs I’ve applied for. If testing potential hires is illegal then it’s certainly not very well enforced.

I’ve had to take aptitude and IQ-proxy(wonderlic etc) tests at most jobs I’ve applied for.

Same here, furthermore just last week I was on the other side of the desk administering our internal test to a bunch of potential new hires. Given I work for a large US government contractor, and how up my ass Legal typically is about everything else involving budgets/hiring I find it hard to believe they would somehow miss that.

"The good news is you won the debate. The bad news is you will never gain entry to a selective college nor a prestiguous employer. I hope this was worth it to you, young Mr. Sailer".

I feel like the unexamined assumption in both this post and many of the replies is "WTF does it even mean to be <quote>accurate<\quote> in this context?"

And even if some autist were to attempt to codify it, the Engineer's Hymn strikes me as the only appropriate response.

The careful text-books measure
Let all who build beware
of the shock, the load, the pressure
a material can bear
So, when the buckled girder
lets down the grinding span
The blame of loss, or murder
is laid upon the man
Not on the Steel - the Man!
But, in our daily dealings
with stone and steel, we find
The Gods have no such feelings
of justice toward mankind
To no set gauge they make us
for no laid course prepare
In time they overtake us
with loads we cannot bear
The prudent text-books give it
in tables at the end
The stress that shears a rivet
or makes a tie-bar bend
What traffic wrecks macadam
what concrete should endure
But we poor Sons of Adam
Have no such literature

In short, If your goal is to come up with some sort of systematic means of judging group membership so you don't have to put the effort into judging individual merit, you're inevitably going to get a garbage result because garbage in is garbage out.

Even shorter, you're asking the wrong questions.

Edit:formatting

I don’t believe anyone operates this way in real life.

We all use models that are GIGO if said model provides a slightly better view of the world and it is very costly to acquire a better model. It’s called a heuristic.

So yes, I’m going to mind my P&Qs more when I see generic male black youths walking in my direction compared to generic Asian girl youths.

If I am approving someone for say a loan, then I have harder data and therefore the cost to acquire a better model is rather limited.

If the girls were all tatted-up and the guys were dressed like this would that change your calculus any?

A pet theory I've been playing around with is that the reason that the intellectually inclined introverts seem to gravitate towards intersectionality/HBD is that for whatever reason they never developed the ability to read any social signal more discrete than "looks like me = friend, looks like other = threat".

And all these pet theories you have are Bulverism, derived by working backwards from "The HBD believers are wrong, bad, and stupid, let's try to come up with a reason 'why' in a way that insults them". Which is fine if you're into insults but not a good way of determining anything about the world.

Are you also going to argue that Kepler's equations are wrong or not worth studying because he arrived at them by working backwards from a belief that the academic consensus of his day was incorrect?

Edit to add: Contra the popular consensus here, the measure of a theory's quality is not in it's intellectual or social merit, but a combination of how well it explains observed reality and how well it predicts future behavior.

I think I defined it fairly unambiguously:

Let's suppose that we know with certainty that people in group X have a statistically higher rate of bad feature Y compared to the average population, whether that be criminality, laziness, low intelligence, or are just unpleasant to be around. I'm taking the fact that this is accurate as an axiom. The actual proportion of people in group X with feature Y is objectively (and known to you) higher than average, but is not universal. That is, Y is a mostly discrete feature, and we have 0 < p < q < 1 where p is the probability of a randomly sampled member of the public has Y, and q is the probability that a randomly sampled member of q has Y.

It's "accurate" in that the literal proportion of people with trait Y in the general population and the group, in real life are p and q respectively, with p < q, and we also believe this to be true. As opposed to an inaccurate stereotype representing a false belief. In-so-far as Y actively impacts merit, then membership in X does provide a real signal correlated with merit.

Obviously actually measuring merit directly is superior to imperfect correlations, but if you are, for instance, hiring someone for a job, imperfect correlations are the only thing you have up until you actually hire someone and watch them perform the job. Literally everything you judge on is going to be an imperfect correlation of some form, so it's just a question of which ones you use and how much weight you put on each.

It's "accurate" in that the literal proportion of people with trait Y in the general population and the group, in real life are p and q respectively..."

The thing is that you haven't explained why that should matter.

Why are you trying to avoid measuring merit? Is it Laziness? or is it lack of ability/bandwidth?

In many cases it's where merit is difficult to measure up front. If you are looking at job applications, you can't literally perceive merit until you've already hired someone, and thus excluded the other candidates. If you're trying to avoid rapists, you can't perceive merit until they've literally attempted or succeeded at raping someone. If you're looking for romantic partners, a 1 minute analysis based on group membership is 120 times cheaper than going on a 2 hour date, and thus potentially worthwhile if the amount of information you can extract from it is 1% as much.

The optimal Bayesian thing to from a purely selfishly rational perspective seems to be using immediately identifiable group membership as a first screening pass (establishing the prior) and then update with more direct merit measures as/if they become available.

In many cases it's where merit is difficult to measure up front.

...And yet I don't think it's as hard as people make it out to be. To use the hiring example just last week I was in the position of vetting a bunch of potential new hires. Our organization uses the abbreviated (30 question) Wonderlic in conjunction with an internally generated field-specific aptitude/skill test. I feel like between the test scores and simply talking to each candidate individually for 15 - 20 minutes we were able to get a pretty good sense of each one's "vibe" and sort the ones we wanted to call back, from the ones we don't.

While I will grant that this method may not be practical for the sort of "all we need is a warm body" job that @FarNearEverywhere refers to I can't help but wonder how much of that is a product of the attitude that "all we need is a warm body". I recognize that I am fortunate to have a dozen applicants for 3 open slots. I can afford to be picky. At the same time there is price to be paid for not being picky. I'd rather be in the field myself with my guys collecting overtime because we're shorthanded than hire some shit-wit who's going to make a mess of things and potentially get someone killed.

Okay but you don't seem to be arguing against categorizing people, you're mostly just suggesting that accurate categories are superior to inaccurate categories. I'm not especially familiar with Wonderlic, but some quick Googling suggests it's an employment-specific intelligence test. Which means it's is not literally measuring merit at a job, it's categorizing people based on questions that it thinks are a proxy for job skill (unless the job literally consists of answering Wonderlic questions). People don't go around politically identifying with in discrete groups based on their intelligence, but screening out unintelligent people is still a form of grouping people up and discriminating based on something that isn't directly merit, but is strongly correlated with it.

Because measuring merit means hiring them for the job and seeing how well they do. By the time you've done this, if it turns out they have no merit, you've paid a big cost. The worst case is if "merit" doesn't just mean "will do the job well" but also includes things like "won't embezzle funds". It's hard to measure whether someone's going to embezzle funds other than by either using proxies, or waiting until they actually embezzle the funds and taking the hit.

All models are wrong, but some models are useful.

Less than you might think.

If so regarding modern cognitive models that undergird the HBD debate firms should be able to make a killing hiring math students from CSU-Monterrey and foregoing kids from Stanford, Cal Tech, and Berkeley and foregoing those poorly modeled higher salary demands.

I'm not sure what that has to do with HBD, but you can in fact do that. Except the "making a killing" part. Any major salary difference between similar employees with different educations will only last a year or two. And balanced against that are the increase search costs -- it may be you can hire randomly from Cal Tech and have a 95% chance of getting a good employee, but from CSU-Monterrey it's more like 5%. So you need to filter more, which costs you money up front. It also increases the chance of getting a dud, since your filters aren't perfect, and duds are expensive.

The 5% vs. 95% claim is self-rebutting. If the SAT is, indeed, crap, then CSU-Monterrey students are as good as Cal-Tech students AS A RULE. I didn't say you could make a killing by hiring CSU-Moneterrey grads that graduated at the top of their class and had full academic scholarships vs. random hiring at Cal Tech. I made an absolute statement that you could hire randomly from CSU-Mont and do just as well, while paying pennies on the dollar.

Funny you should mention that...

Some

I take the utilitarian position, however I feel like lots of people who think they are taking the utilitarian position nevertheless produce wildly different real-world conclusions about what types of discrimination are or aren't justified.

It's a hugely complex issue once you start considering things like the just world fallacy and how people will take any 'approved' discrimination as justification to dehumanize entire populations, or the way discrimination creates self-fulfilling prophecies, or etc.

I almost feel like this is one of those cases where people can't actually think usefully about the truth of the matter, and the utilitarian optimal thing is to pretend that you 100% believe and insist on the liberal version, while secretly using the utilitarian version on practice, because a society that believes in the liberal version will come closer to the utilitarian-optimal outcome than one that tries to explicitly do utilitarian math.

I'm not sure that's stable though, because it may inevitably slippery slope its way into progressivism. That is, this optimal state depends on universal but not-common knowledge: the utilitarian version has to actually be a secret. Because if you are publicly insisting on ignoring group memberships and everyone knows that person A is discriminating against group X in a not-secret way, then the public persona is forced to denounce them as a X-ist in order to maintain consistency. But if everyone using the utilitarian version in practice, then it's hard to keep that a secret from everyone else (who is doing the same thing). And if only the smart well-behaved rationalists who can be trusted to discriminate responsibly use the utilitarian version while everyone else uses the liberal version, then a higher fraction of smart well-behaved rationalists would be discovered and denounced as X-ist creating a stereotype against them.

Maybe it works if you restrict the secret utilitarian version to only cases where there's absolutely no conceivable way of being discovered.

And if only the smart well-behaved rationalists who can be trusted to discriminate responsibly use the utilitarian version while everyone else uses the liberal version, then a higher fraction of smart well-behaved rationalists would be discovered and denounced as X-ist creating a stereotype against them.

Right, I think that's the world we're actually in, and that it's probably worth the trade-off.

Rationalists should get better about hiding it, no one's ever caught me so far.

In general, I would have the state seek policies of colorblindness (even outside of the context of literal skin color). I can acknowledge that this may not always be the most efficient choice economically, but it seems desirable because it's a system I could accept being on the other end of. At the same time, I think we can and should guarantee a certain minimum of quality of outcome: even if you're at the bottom end of the system we should be able to make systems that give dignity, the basics (shelter, food, and such), and ideally purpose.

But I can also accept that there are times when deviating from this policy is expedient or even required: if there's a dangerous fugitive at large known to be tall, I wouldn't necessarily demand stopping and checking short people equally.

I do think we've discussed this topic to death, as has 'the discourse' generally. And ethics depends on context. Consequentialist or not, so long as your values look more like "economic productivity" or "more happy people" or "national greatness" than "racism bad", it makes sense to think about the ethics of discrimination based on how they impact those. And while in the far past, 'statistical discrimination' probably could cause significant harm, I think today it causes essentially no harm.

In most cases of potential discrimination with political relevance, modern science, technology, and political organization would allow a competent corporation or state to directly measure each individual's traits or capacities, bypassing the ethical dilemma. Intelligence / job skills? IQ tests. Criminality? Properly enforce even minor laws, and have a public database of offenses employers can consult. Various right-wingers lament the low IQ of immigrants, but no need to statistically discriminate here, just give potential applicants IQ tests. Not politically viable, but so are immigration restrictions on all colored people. This alone makes 'statistical discrimination' a mostly moot issue in practice, IMO, and any marginal statistical discrimination has no systemic impact as a result. This is the point at which critics of pervasive racism or sexism fall back to 'structural racism that disadvantages poor/nonwhite/nonmale people even by objective standards', although they never draw the conclusion that they should pay less attention to explicit discrimination.

The terms I'll use are statistical discrimination - most centrally, making a decision with goals unrelated to race/sex/the group in question, but using the group as a proxy for the goal - versus taste-based discrimination, making a decision that's not really rationally justified on any goal other than 'exclude group'. Which category you place something into depends on your values - a white nationalist probably thinks a white-only company is a rational choice to maximize productivity, and a committed anti-racist would in their heart consider any discrimination taste-based because black people aren't any less capable than white people. But there's a big difference between giving black people .3 percentage points higher interest rates than white people or not hiring a hispanic house-cleaner because the last one stole from you, and not hiring any female doctors in the entire medical system because you incorrectly think they're much less capable than men. Even if it was applied universally, statistical discrimination in modern life is just not that impactful. Even if the cars of black people are stopped 3x as much as those of white people, the cumulative harm this does to black non-criminals is just low, the rate of police physically harming innocent and cooperative people is low. If there was a latent supply of skilled black programmers somewhere, Big Tech would love to tap it no matter the average black IQ (alas, immigration laws). And to whatever extent statistical discrimination, by assumption justified excluding second-order effects, harms black people who are on the good end of the distribution in question (IQ, criminality), that harm is (by assumption) compensated for in aggregate by the higher skill, lower criminality, or whatever of the worker that replaced them. If it was absolutely morally necessary to alleviate this, itd still be better to do so so via e.g. taxes and transfers, a pareto improvement, than by banning statistical discrimination. And again, this should be moot because one can just measure individuals.

I don't think your voluntary vs involuntary group membership distinction is important. Being born with a low IQ is exactly as involuntary as being born with median IQ into a group with a high rate of having low IQ, but it's perfectly reasonable to give lower-paying jobs to people with lower IQ, so in low information environments (that aren't modern environments), I don't think giving lower-paying jobs to group members is different.

Then there's taste-based discrimination. Those committing it incorrectly (by assumption) believe it's statistical discrimination, and given how pervasive that mistake is it's worth considering. I think nobody can deny that this can be terrible in economic and moral senses. Take untouchables, a recurrent cultural phenomena, whether in india, europe, or elsewhere. These groups are prohibited, for absurd reasons, from engaging in most productive occupations and many social relations. (Although I'm curious if anyone has a defense of untouchable classes, the only study I found put dalit IQ at 5 points less than brahmin, which is low, but I don't think that estimate means much) It's a waste of surplus, and terrible for those affected. The categorical exclusion from many occupations of women and individuals of various races in the recent past seem similarly misguided, as confirmed by the low remaining wage gaps. But when people condemn taste-based discrimination today, the moral weight they put fits untouchables more than it does us. Most people in America are apolitical, centrist or progressive, and believe either in race-blind merit or explicit affirmative action, and hiring practices reflect this. And while nobody hiring women obviously depresses female wages, if even half of firms openly treat women equally, they'll suck up all the women and reduce the wage gap, adjusted for hours worked and skill, to a minimum. While taste-based discrimination is still dumb, and thus bad in the same way that firing someone for having brown hair is bad, in areas like hiring, interpersonal relationships, and criminal justice, it's not a significant moral issue in the US, in the same way that religious persecution was a massive issue 300 years ago but isn't anymore.

So to go into your example:

But if there were a similar strain that made them 10% more likely [to be a pedophile] I don't think it would be fair to [refuse them a childcare position], because it's such a low base rate that 10% doesn't do much to offset the cost of the discrimination

I think this is a misleading example - there are many people currently teaching who have demographic attributes that make them, statistically, more than 10% likely to be pedophiles than other groups of teachers. E.g. men vs women. But even taking it literally, I don't think it's an issue, because it's limited to the small percentage of occupations that involve childcare, so people with that strain can just get other jobs. It's equal in impact to the many other idiosyncratic and irrational preferences employers have.

One counterargument to meritocracy is that majority or minority populations don't like it when they're outperformed and seek redistribution or expropriation. From a naively utilitarian point of view, it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of meritocracy to achieve a bit more stability, or to find an equilibria somewhere you can get a good amount of both.

See Malaysia's temporary-cum-permanent introduction of affirmative action. For example, Malays get access to higher-paying government bonds, they can buy cheaper property in new developments, their companies are privileged for govt contracts, they can more easily get into universities... There's a similar system in India as self_made_human points out. In Australia, Indigenous people get their own special job pathways and a great deal of govt expenditure focused on their communities.

Personally, I think this is a bad idea that leads to long-run instability. Opening up and strengthening divisions in the population of the country is a bad idea. If you have meritocracy, then you will have groups of winners and angry losers. If you have affirmative action, then you have new, state-defined groups of winners and angry losers, a recipe for toxic politics. Better a nation-state without such dividing points. Or, if you can't have a nation-state then at least try to avoid huge divisions in ability between populations, if you have to import people then aim for similar levels of skill to the general population.

If you have affirmative action, then you have new, state-defined groups of winners and angry losers

When the state determines winners and losers among groups, the incentive to compete for state control matches the state's ability to differentiate group outcomes.

I feel like this accounting of winners vs losers in meritocracy is obscuring the fact that there is no 'natural' distributional outcome of meritocracy.

Meritocracy 'naturally' produces an ordinal relationship between people on whatever axis it measures, which does naturally create 'winners' and 'losers' (and those in between).

But one meritocratic system might end with the winners have 10% more resources than the losers, and another meritocratic system might end with the winners having 1,000,000X more resources than the losers. This having nothing to do with how much better the winners are than the losers, just with contingent factors about how the system itself functions.

The meritocratic ordering itself says nothing about which of those two distributional outcomes is 'correct' or 'natural' or 'right,' meritocracy measures something different from that and has nothing to say on the matter.

Which of those systems we should choose to live in, and which distributional outcomes we should want our meritocracy produces, is purely an arbitrary and political question.

If the losers demand that they get more than the winners, then that is trying to overturn meritocracy and take what is not theirs.

If the losers think that winners should get 10x as much as losers, and the winners think that winners should get 1000x as much as losers, then that's just a standard conflict of material interests between two different groups of citizens.

That's just politics.

(also, insert the standard affirmative action rant about 'recruit the kid who runs fast but has terrible form')

See Malaysia's temporary-cum-permanent introduction of affirmative action. For example, Malays get access to higher-paying government bonds, they can buy cheaper property in new developments, their companies are privileged for govt contracts, they can more easily get into universities... There's a similar system in India as self_made_human points out. In Australia, Indigenous people get their own special job pathways and a great deal of govt expenditure focused on their communities.

Malays get this so that they don’t riot against the Chinese minority who dominate the country’s economy, as they already have before. For the Chinese, bumiputra is a price they are willing to pay for the preservation of their economic power (and its associated privilege, as it’s not as if they’re less clannish than the Malays are), a fig leaf that minimizes racial hostility. The alternative might well be being kicked out of Malaysia entirely, and while that would be bad for the Malays, it would also be bad for the Chinese affected.

The alternative might well be being kicked out of Malaysia entirely

As I've heard it told, the founding story of independent Singapore involved the parliament of Malaysia voting unanimously (absent members from Singapore) in 1965 to expel Singapore from its state involuntarily. This seems related to the fact that the island was, unlike the mainland, a majority ethnic Chinese. The difference in outcomes of governance in otherwise-adjacent states is, um, certainly notable.

Malaysia isn’t that badly off- it’s certainly better off than Indonesia. Difference in government(and Lee Kwan Yew really was a once in a generation genius at government) and geography can explain the difference, probably better than HBD.

The difference in outcomes of governance in otherwise-adjacent states is, um, certainly notable.

Ditto the inverse. The standard HBDer take is that culture doesn't matter, and that by extension Lee Kuan Yew's efforts at economic and cultural integration were a waste of time/resources, and yet (as you yourself observe) the differences in outcome are notable.

I imagine that someone will be along in a bit to argue that if Singapore had massacred all the ethnic Malays on the Island rather than integrating them they would have been even more successful but I don't buy it. That's the kind of policy that causes "unrest"

The Malays would have won that riot because they dominated the military.

Which in turn suggests the existence of considerations with far greater effect sizes than simple genetics, supporting my point.

Well yeah, the state of modern Russia points to something beyond national average IQ scores being highly relevant for what happens in a country.

Agreed

More comments

The standard HBDer take is that culture doesn't matter

This is a laughable assertion. The standard HBD take acknowledges that culture and environment can cripple any person or set of persons, just that asserting those things apply to some situations is also laughable.

The problem is most HBDers that are willing to talk about it online are the type of folks who understand that HBD is somewhat real, and then they see absolutely everything through that lens. The people here on the Motte are actually quite reasonable about HBD in my view.

But in the wastes of the internet outside our walled garden... well, when you have a hammer as powerful and covered up as HBD, what isn't a nail?

I've rarely seen HBD ever deployed, even on the internet, in any context except for as a defense against unhinged allegations of racism.

Even here, my experience has been much closer to that of @TheDag's.

More comments

This is a laughable assertion.

No it is not.

Near as I can tell, the sort of view expressed by @Folamh3, @self_made_human, and others here that...

it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

...is not an extreme or hyperbolic take, it's the median.

Charitably you are engaging in a very blatant Motte and Baily where you try to play the "group differences in outcome" card right up until someone asks how exactly you determine group membership for the purposes of determining group differences. IE Is a dark-skinned man who votes Republican "black" or is he, as Joe Biden and the Hosts of the View assert, "white". (Edit: See Slate and the LA Times' treatment of Clarence Thomas and Larry Elder)

Less charitably you are simply lying.

  • -11

note: I think it'd be more productive for everyone if you directly responded to the (different) arguments we're all making, instead of picking on one individual example of hypocrisy.

Take the rare very smart black kid in 1800. He's a slave. His masters notice he's clever, and give him more complex work. He remains a slave.

Take the kid post-reconstruction. He's the son of a farm laborer. He grows up, goes to the city, and gets a job at a factory. He's paid less than similar white workers for explicitly segregationist reasons. He's still given more responsibility than his black coworkers though, maybe even more pay.

The kid grows up in 1980. He's sent to a bad public school. Fights break out every day, teachers don't understand half of the material in most classes. But the teachers still read from the book, the textbooks are still available, so the smart kid picks up a lot. And he does well on the standardized tests. He goes to a good college, helped in part by affirmative action, and gets a job as an engineer. Or maybe he finds school stifling, does well on some classes but neglects others, and gets sucked into a culture of drugs and violence, becomes a sad statistic. Both happened.

The kid grows up in 2020. Bad public school, but with 2x the funding. The kid spends half his time on his phone, but still does well on tests. Test scores -> decent college -> decent job. Or, he finds school stifling. But now, he's naturally attracted to online communities with people of similar intelligence, and imitates their interests. With this, he makes connections, learns the tacit parts of upper-middle-class culture, and builds a desire for the kinds of occupations successful people pursue. Via one of those, he gets a good job.

This is why culture and environment 'don't matter'. They do matter, in the absolute. But, first in cities, then via technology, modern life exposes people to every other type of person, allowing people to effectively sort themselves by ability. And this heavily smooths out any differences in outcomes attributable to differences in culture or circumstances. Some still remains, of course, but much less than in the past. Innate ability, by contrast, is as strong a differentiator as ever.

A question: Jewish kids, Black kids, Hispanic kids, White kids, and Asian kids all have access to computers and the internet. They all post on all the major platforms. Why are so many of the best writers or smartest anonymous posters, even via the constrained medium of twitter, jews? Why are so few black?

You might explain this via lack of access, or systemic racism. But the second question is: Why, at least to my eyes, are the racial gaps in ability as large, and often larger, (both in terms of jew/white, asian/white, and white/black) in the realm of self-driven achievement on anonymous internet platforms than they are in educational institutions or real-world occupations?

Just to be clear, you're asking me to imagine a lineage of people who were smart and capable but held back by cultural and policy issues like slavery and segregation...

...and the conclusion that you expect me to draw from this example is that cultural and policy issues don't matter?

I think you're going to need to unpack your reasoning for me.

More comments

Near as I can tell, the sort of view expressed by @Folamh3, @self_made_human, and others here that...

it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

It is probably true. Schools are like 2% of environment, probably less. In fact, some parents have taken to faking moving into "worse" schools to improve their kids chance of getting into top tier colleges. Its not extreme because its bland and true. If you took all the kids from Brooklyn Tech and put them in the worst school in NYC, and put all those kids into Tech, Tech would immediately become a "bottom 10" school and this rando bad school would become a "top 10" school. Environmental effects need to be much stronger than teachers to significantly affect outcomes.

Do you realize that he was paraphrasing DeBoer and you can look up what else the guy has written? Specifically, from the same link,

This perspective is both buttressed by a tremendous amount of evidence and yet considered impermissible in polite debate. And teachers and schools pay the price, as they are asked to control outcomes they have limited influence on. The abstract of this paper sums up the reality.

Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains.

[…]

Kids do learn at school. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen-year-olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past. Everyone has been getting smarter all the time for at least a hundred years or so. So how can I deny that education works?

The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. People don’t know something, or don’t know how to do something, and then they take lessons, and then they know it or can do it. From algebra to gymnastics to motorcycle maintenance to guitar, you can grow in your cognitive and practical abilities. The rate that you grow will differ from that of others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals; a seasoned piano teacher will tell you that anyone can learn some tunes, but also that most people have natural limits on their learning that prevent them from being as good as the masters. So too with academics: the fact that growth in absolute learning is common does not undermine the observation that some learners will always outperform others in relative terms. Everybody can learn. The trouble is that people think that they care most about this absolute learning when what they actually care about, and what the system cares about, is relative learning - performance in a spectrum or hierarchy of ability that shows skills in comparison to those of other people.

I do not see how you can object to anything in there. Genetics drives the differential ranking of humans; environment drives the absolute magnitude of what's possible for every given percentile; it seems to be the society-wide environment and not some school or teacher's ultra clever nudging or a bit of extra resources. The evidence really suggests that, as long as you don't hit the kids over the head with a lead pipe, don't starve them or force into pit fights, and provide merely reasonable learning conditions by the standards of modern pedagogic science – which are in many cases cheaper to achieve than some extravagant progressive practices – they basically reach up to their genotypic potential in the contemporary society. Which is unequal in predictable ways.

Sure, ruining education remains easier than getting it right, just like producing inedible slurry is easier than running a decent food stall. But the latter is still not rocket science. It's reasonable, arguably necessary, to enforce some standards of hygiene and ingredient quality; it is inane to assert that, say, differences in height of New Yorkers of different races are driven by distribution of ethnic food stalls in their neighborhoods. Likewise with education.

…But of course you understand all that, you [expletive deleted]. You were trolling @Folamh3 back then as well:

I must confess a certain amount amusment/schadenfreude reading this.
If ability to read really is, as you just so confidently asserted, "all genetic" why shouldn't teachers pick their methods based on what's fun for them?

etc. etc.

You just refuse to engage charitably on this matter, and in fact seem to take some pride in that.

Look man, you and I have been doing this for years. 10 years this October by my count. What do you think my "engaging charitably" would look even like in this context?

The way I see it I have been eminently charitable, and in the decade I've been participating in this specific community I've seen an HBD post that rose above tired "arguments as soldiers" or "look at me I'm so edgey" maybe a handful of times at the most.

What this look likes from my end you have staked out a position in the Motte, and because your position in the Motte may have some merit (emphasis on the may) I am expected to cede the Bailey as typified by the linked post without a fight in the name of "charity".

If that's what is expected of me then, yes. I will admit that I do take a certain amount of pride in refusing to "engage charitably".

More comments

In my follow-up comments to the comment you linked, I made it abundantly clear that when I said "it's all genetics" I was exaggerating for rhetorical effect, and I do not, in fact, believe that culture plays zero role in educational outcomes. My hyperbolic assertion that "it's all genetics" was intended to contrast with the attitudes of certain education researchers who do, apparently, believe that genetics plays no role in educational outcomes, and that educational outcomes are entirely determined by culture, upbringing and school quality.

I've made my actual position on this matter abundantly clear to you, and I think it's rather tiresome and dishonest of you to quote this off-the-cuff comment out of context. You seem convinced that this off-the-cuff comment I made in passing was some sort of "mask-off" moment for me, and all the follow-up comments I made expressing my actual position in more nuanced detail were simply lies. I don't know how you arrived at this position and I don't appreciate being misrepresented.

I would greatly appreciate it if you would knock it off and stop involving me every time you want to make a point about how evil and wretched HBDers are. And don't tell a story that you're only pinging me because I'm "one of the Motte's most prominent HBD proponents" or whatever: I barely discuss the issue at all, and the comment you linked is from seven months ago. In the interim, out of the dozens if not hundreds of comments I've posted here, I've discussed HBD in any capacity a grand total of three times, in one case because you were pinging me about it, in another case to explicitly refute the claim that HBD is the cause of disproportionate homicide rates between ethnic groups in the US. It's not a topic I know much about, claim any expertise in or discuss with any great frequency.

If you're so convinced that rabid, unqualified endorsement of HBD is the median position on this site, it shouldn't be remotely hard for you to find a better example to illustrate your point than me, a guy who has never claimed any expertise in the topic, doesn't find it particularly interesting and barely talks about it. Given that you know all of the foregoing, it's really obnoxious of you to repeatedly bring me up any time you're trying to score points in a HBD debate, especially now that you've been explicitly requested not to do so in future.

My read of that interaction is that you were trying to use arguments as soldiers and then got pissy when they got slaughtered to a man because you'd marched them into a killbox.

This is far from the first time that you and I have done this particular song and dance. You'll make some blanket claim about X-outcome is entirely explained by genetics and then someone usually myself or @FCfromSSC will point out that all the genetics in the world won't teach kids to read, or turn a flabby sack of dough into NFL athlete if they don't eat well and go to the gym, at which point you accuse your interlocutor of misunderstanding what you plainly said and/or quoting you out context. Rinse, wash, repeat, every 3 - 4 months.

Simply put, if you don't want to be used as an example of HBDer's poor behavior, stop providing such good examples.

Edit: See also my replies to @DaseindustriesLtd, and @hydroacetylene.

  • -12
More comments

it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

No Hlynka, as I've told you before, HBDers don't think genetics is the be all and end all.*

The reason that differences in outcome are minimal for a smart kid in a private versus public school is that they both surpass a minimum threshold of quality such that any further difference is down to genetics. Take the same kid and chuck them in the kind of rundown, underfunded schools you might find in the worst parts of India and you're going to see them suffer. If you wish to attribute all the disparities of the world to either genetics or "culture", then that's the latter because it has fuck all to do with genes.

You're so comfortable in your Western skin that you don't notice how almost everything around you is far better than it historically was, say a century ago, and is still better than the majority of this planet.

*Another example of your exasperating tendency to forget anything inconvenient to your narrative. Even my usual desire to adhere to the presumption of good faith and charity here on The Motte has long worn thin for you.

as I've told you before, HBDers don't think genetics is the be all and end all.

And yet HBDers keep arguing the contrary.

To be blunt, you either endorse the linked comment or you don't. Which is it?

More comments

My position would be somewhere along the lines of: "If there is no way to evaluate the factor being considered directly, then discrimination based on proxies is acceptable. Voluntary proxies (like dress) are preferable to innate proxies (like race)."

Say redheads have an unusually high chance to spontaneously combust, and I don't want to hire them in my explosives factory. If I can measure an individual's combustibility, then discrimination against redheads is pointless and nefarious. If I can't, then yeah, sorry redheads.

Given that we can measure Big-5 personality traits and IQ in mere hours at most, effectively all proxies (race, education, class, wealth etc) are unacceptable nowadays, though they were fine before.

Given that we can measure Big-5 personality traits and IQ in mere hours at most

Of these, only IQ, and people are often reluctant to be measured. If someone gets a high score on IQ test, they almost certainly have high IQ. If someone gets a high score on personality test, this also could mean they are high IQ liar and decided their intelligence to get result wanted by test presenter.

If I can measure an individual's combustibility, then discrimination against redheads is pointless and nefarious.

This is an example of the base rate fallacy. The only way priors could cease to matter is if you had perfectly accurate information, which is obviously unrealistic. To borrow an example from Neven Sesardić:

In order to facilitate the calculation of relevant probabilities we need to introduce the only part of the equation that is still missing, namely the information about specific evidence. For that purpose imagine there is a piece of evidence (E) which is much more often present among those who are guilty of murder or non-negligible homicide (M) than among others (∼M).

To be specific, suppose that, among both whites and blacks, the probability of E, given M, i.e. p(E|M), is 0.3, whereas the probability of E, given not M, i.e. p(E|∼M), is 0.0003. Now since E is much more frequent among Ms. than among ~Ms., the presence of E in a person will markedly increase the probability that the person has M. <…>

The probability p(M|E) is obtained by dividing the frequency of E&M by the frequency of all E, i.e. E&M + E&∼M. So the probability that a randomly selected black person with characteristic E is also M is 0.6. Figure 5 gives the same graph for whites.

The difference is striking. The probability of a person with suspicious characteristic E being a murderer is 0.6 if he is black, but 0.09 if he is white. And this difference is exclusively the result of different prior probabilities of M among blacks and whites.

My point isn't disagreeing with that at all. In that example you cannot 100% measure homicide-guilt, so proxies, as listed in the quote, are fine. Additionally, considering multiple proxies simultaneously is fine as well. A white person dressed trashy is less likely to be a criminal than a black person dressed trashy, yes, and so you can definitely factor in both the race and dress proxies simultaneously. If we ever had a perfect legal system that always caught every criminal (or even say, 99.99%), then the use of those proxies would immediately become pointless, as you could instead just check whether they've been convicted.

But for the qualities that are most important in official contexts we have plenty of measurements we can take instead. Between IQ, Big-5, a simple psych questionnaire, and a skills test, a bureaucrat/hiring-manager can know nearly all you'd need to know to make a decision about any given individual. It doesn't matter what the base-rate IQ of blacks is if Jerome sitting in front of you tested at 130. It doesn't matter that whites from Germany are known to be hardworking if Matteo tested at 10th percentile conscientiousness. With the accuracy we're capable of attaining in our postmodern era, the generalities frequently worsen predictions rather than improving them.

The problem we have now isn't that we overuse measurements, but that we ignore them because we don't like the conclusions and so weigh the scales to get outcomes that are deemed more acceptable. This is effectively using generalities backwards, which is definitely worse than using them forwards, but still worse than just looking at individuals and getting some stats.

If we ever had a perfect legal system that always caught every criminal (or even say, 99.99%), then the use of those proxies would immediately become pointless, as you could instead just check whether they've been convicted.

Perfect legal system with catches people for past crimes, but not future ones? Then proxies still remain useful.

In that example you cannot 100% measure homicide-guilt, so proxies, as listed in the quote, are fine.

Except there is no such thing as 100% accurate measurement. People cheat, people bribe their way up, people luck out. Any measurement you use will have a certain margin of error. Within that margin prior probabilities reign supreme. Put simply, most Africans with an IQ of 130 are less intelligent than Europeans with the same score. Because the percentage of the latter with scores ≥ 130 is much higher (2.28% vs. 0.13% for African-Americans, one of the smartest African populations), you are simply more likely to encounter a genuine one vs. a cheat or a one-off compared to the former. You must adjust high African scores down to increase their accuracy, and you must adjust low European scores up. Ditto for men and women etc. This is the only way to do justice to truth and fairness. This applies even more so to immigration policy — because intelligence is not 100% heritable, the genotypic intelligence of high-IQ individuals from low-IQ populations (resp. their descendants) is always going to be lower than the already adjusted scores.

Yet if most people caught you correcting scores in this way they’d be fuming with righteous indignation. This is the result of ideological indoctrination that does not aim for truth or fairness and declares Bayesian reasoning (or more precisely, certain priors) taboo. The idea of ‘not judging people by the color of their skin’ is simply a fallacy, part of deceitful activist propaganda.

You must adjust high African scores down to increase their accuracy, and you must adjust low European scores up.

I've no education in statistics, but isn't this double counting? The average score for Africans is calculated including the high-achievers and low-achievers. If Africans score an average of say 85, and you then apply a penalty to the high achievers, by doing so you move the average down below 85, in which case a stronger penalty must be applied to future tests and so on, right?. You would improve the average accuracy of any individual test, but you'd skew the whole. I guess it's probably resolvable by keeping nominal and adjusted scores separate.

But really, how much of a concern is the precise accuracy here anyway? An IQ test takes what, an hour? Make people take one every year, or every time they apply for a job, or whatever. If the collective accuracy of 10+ IQ tests isn't good enough for society, then God knows how we've made it this long.

if you are such a person though, feel free to speak up and explain your position

I believe you are strawmanning my position. It would be absolutely fine to always prefer non-brown-haired candidates, other things being equal. They might still win by virtue of other characteristics.

This kind of strawmanning seems necessary to me in order to demonize basic Bayesian reasoning. Otherwise everyone would see this as eminently rational behavior.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


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.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats