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non_radical_centrist 29d ago

I read the Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania a couple weeks ago. I was going to write a more in depth review covering more sections, but got bored after writing my thought process about how employers aren't allowed to use discriminatory tests and never got around to writing more, so I'll post what I did write.

Let’s all people have a factor that you can represent numerically how good they will be at a job. Let’s call it the m, for mystery, because exactly what will make someone good at a job- e.g knowledge, skill, conscientiousness, etc. can be very difficult to measure, and knowing how important proportionally each sub-factor is to the final m factor or even what every sub-factor maybe is also very difficult. But, we can still try to estimate someone’s m. If you have a job that largely involves lifting heavy boxes and moving them around, you can get a decent estimate by having a candidate try to lift a heavy box- if they fall, they almost certainly have low m for that job, and if they succeed with ease, they’ll likely have a high m for that job. If you have a CEO position for a large multinational corporation, you can like at a candidate’s previous job experience- if they’ve previously been in charge of a corporation that hit records profits during their tenure, they’ll likely have high m. If while previously in charge of a corporation, it went from high profits to bankruptcy, or they’ve only ever held a job as a janitor, you can guess that they’d have low m for the position.

We can say with confidence that on average, black people have lower m than white people for most jobs. Whether this is because of genetics, culture, discrimination, or something else isn’t relevant to this discussion, because this discussion isn’t about increasing their m, just about what are fair hiring practices. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed, both Congress and the general population of America overwhelmingly wanted two things: For black people to not be actively discriminated against, but also for people to be able to still select the best employees for a job, even if all the best employees were white. But what is “discrimination”? That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer.

Let’s say an employer has 1000 job candidates, and needs to select 100 to fill a newly created job. The employer wants to get the 100 employees with the highest m- he is unlikely to succeed perfectly, but he still wants to get as close as he can. If the employer asked all potential job candidates to fill out a brief questionnaire as the first stage of the application process, and one of the questions was “Are you black?”, and then the employer threw out every single application where someone answered “Yes”, the average m in the remaining pool would likely be higher, although he also would’ve likely tossed some candidates who did belong in the final pool. Whether it’s a good idea from the employer’s perspective may vary- maybe the employer really has no good ideas on how to figure out which candidates have higher m, and his next step will just be to randomly select 100 candidates from the remaining pool, in which case he’ll have done better in terms of average m score than if he didn’t purge black candidates.

But, I think almost everyone would agree that purging black applications like that is discrimination, in the letter of the ACR, in the spirit of what Congress intended it, and that the majority of Americans don’t want to see that sort of candidate selection happen, not from government employers and not from private employers either. The government would tell any employer that tried to do that something like, “Stop that, rework your hiring practices so that you’re actually more directly testing for m, and not just discriminating against blacks”.

So the employer goes back to the drawing board, and comes up with another test. He will take a pencil, and slide it into the hair of a candidate. After releasing, if the pencil falls out of the hair, the candidate proceeds to the next stage, if it stays in, the candidate is removed from selection. That’s the Apartheid South African Pencil test, and in practice that’d basically be the same as the previous test, although it’s hypothetically possible some black people would pass and some white people would fail. Or maybe the employer tries to be slightly less blatant, and instead does a swimming test(black have worse buoyancy than white people). Unless the job actually involves swimming in some way, I think most people would still agree that such a test is discriminatory, not actually measuring m in any way, at least not more than a generic fitness test does, and would only have predictive power in job performance because it’s managing to exclude blacks.

The employer now comes up with a fourth test. It will be a straightforward algebra exam, the sort you’d see in a 10th grade math course. If the job does not involve algebra in any way, like it’s a job moving boxes around, or maybe it’s a cashier job at a retailer, or even a more high class job like a lawyer that doesn’t really involve math, then this test will also disproportionately fail black candidates, who tend to be worse at algebra. But, is it actually discriminatory? Where the previous tests only would have any predictive power for job performance in so far as they measured whether or not someone’s black, and black people on average did worse at the job, the algebra test might have real predictive power, because it’s not just measuring algebra skill, it’s also measuring general intelligence, and general intelligence would be a major component of m for almost any job.

Whether the test is actually discriminatory now comes down to whether “general intelligence” is real, and also that if it is real, can it be measured by an algebra test? I don’t think that question, in the absence of formal studies, has an obvious answer. I think reasonable people could very easily come to believe that algebra skill is divorced from other intellectual tasks like public speaking, literacy, chess skill, etc. My understanding of the literature is that that is not true- that there is a general intelligence, and skill at all intellectual tasks are relatively closely correlated. And that that general intelligence is also closely correlated with job performance in pretty much every job. But, reasonable judges who aren’t good at parsing scientific studies themselves can be convinced that general intelligence does not work like that.

Richard Hanania, in The Origin’s of Woke, writes that judges and bureaucrats expanding the definition of discrimination to also include tests that really measure future job performance is one of the key origins of wokeness. I wouldn’t disagree. Where I do disagree with him is that I don’t think it’s easily possible to permit real skill tests but ban actually discriminatory test, because they can look very similar. Ultimately I don’t disagree with his conclusion that the laws should be altered to allow for discrimination though, because I think where in the 60’s the Civil Rights Act may have been needed to prevent employers doing discrimination along the lines of a Pencil Test for employees like how the American people wanted, today the vast majority of Americans are no longer anti-black racist, despite what many on the left think. I think you could remove a lot of anti-discrimination protections, and unlike in the 60’s, a combination of few people today being actually racist and non-governmental social pressure to keep the real racists in line will prevent the sort of racism Americans hate.

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self_made_human Kai su, teknon? 29d ago

Oh dear. I am really not an endocrinologist or paediatrician.

This is incredibly far outside what I can reasonably consider my expertise, and you have asked a complex question to boot.

Growth plate fusion is very important, and given your age, you'd need an xray to very carefully examine your growth plates to figure out how safe it is.

To put the difficulty of your question in perspective, I'd be barely more at ease if asked by someone if they needed open heart surgery.

I could ask you to elaborate and provide reports and so on, but I'm still not remotely comfortable with the topic, especially at that age, it would entail me cracking open textbooks and research papers and feverishly reading, and it's not laziness that makes me wish to avoid it, it's the fact that I still wouldn't be sure if my advice was sound in your case, especially with the risk of acromegaly.

You absolutely need a different kind of doctor, not a psych trainee, this is genuinely above my paygrade and I would have to be crazy to comment without significantly more experience in the subject, which seems rather unlikely to come about.

My apologies, while I'm not one to gatekeep medical advice, this isn't something I feel qualified to speak about, especially with so many confounding factors. My innate reaction is "probably not a good idea, if the plates are almost fused" but even that isn't a statement from confidence.

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HalloweenSnarry 29d ago

Besides, they're patient and rich enough to not genocide people as you can tell by what's going on in Xinyang.

...Is this sarcasm?

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gattsuru 29d ago

Maybe. There's a lot of people who came away from Loper v. Raimondo thinking that SCOTUS was pretty willing to toss the Chevron under the bus, but then Cargil had a place where the regulatory agency claims to have read the law wrong for twenty-plus years, disclaims Chevron, and most tea-leaf-readers are thinking it'll come out okay. It's just too useful to leave the actual law to the regulatory agencies.

But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

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Gaashk 29d ago

There may be something to the accusation that some jobs have been set up in a way to favor people who are very good at showing up with to the minute timing, writing emails and reports, and other things that are convenient for managers but not exactly about the work being done, such that it's more convenient to manage a small white woman moving a few boxes than a strong black man moving many larger, heavier boxes, because her m in general office skills and agreeableness are higher. This seems to happen a fair bit in government positions, where there might be several support white women writing grants for some minority local agricultural program or something. I've seen it in politics, with full time non-minority positions devoted to "centering minority voices" in marketing materials.

I'm most familiar with education, and do sometimes see this happen. People often talk about the degree barrier, and schools being organized like mid-century factories. Recently, I saw a situation where a minority community is required to hire an art teacher. The specific community is rich in professional artisans, that and views of nature is all they're known for. But they have to hire someone with a college degree, additional education classes for certification, who can run classes that are cleaned up and ready to leave exactly when the bell rings, do a moderate amount of accurate paperwork, and write some reports. So they get an outsider. They are not allowed to exchange this position for a business or finance teacher, which they might be more in need of. This is a bit silly and wasteful. The skills for m, training the next generation of artisans is not the same as m fitting into a tightly scheduled, interlocking education system that's stressed about specials teachers providing "preps" for the homeroom teachers, and the bureaucratic money goes towards the latter.

That isn't to say that I generally agree with the woke take that surely if you removed barriers we could achieve "equity," especially in high education and prestige positions. But the structure of at least some jobs (probably the kinds of jobs the average woke activist is most familiar with) are not very tightly linked to their ostensible goal.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 29d ago · Edited 29d ago

I used to argue with white nationalists a lot many years ago on /r/anarcho_capitalism and what I found very frustrating is they refused to properly defend their point of view, particularly on the point of who counted as white.

Not sure I count as white nationalist, but my definition would be basically "supermajority ethnically descended from the Ecumene", with the cutoffs of the Ecumene being the Sahara in the south, the Urals in the northeast, and somewhere around Persia in the southeast. This seems like the most sensical definition in terms of genetics (Persia, of course, was the most porous boundary there, hence the lack of clarity).

I completely agree that it makes more sense to select immigrants by the traits that whites are claimed to possess. Selecting them based on race is extremely crude.

The usual argument here is regression to the mean. Genes and environment both have effects on phenotype, and it's tricky to separate them. If one accepts arguendo that white people are genetically predisposed to WEIRDness, then when filtering for phenotypic WEIRDness you're filtering more strongly on nonwhites, which means they will on average have greater environmental contribution, which means compared to similarly-WEIRD-phenotyped whites they would have less genetic tendency toward WEIRDness. Thus, their children would be predictably less WEIRD; they would regress toward the mean.

(NB: I am actually agnostic about the main object-level claim here; HBD is not my forte, and particularly among humans who aren't either sub-Saharan African or *nesian - i.e. Eurasians, North Africans and Native Americans - I'm sceptical of claims of large differences given the short timescales involved and similar subspecies heritage. I'm merely pointing out the logical consequences of that claim if one does accept it.)

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2D3D 29d ago

Consider all the swamp creatures he appointed.

This line highlights the specific reason Trump was able to demolish the Republican establishment in a way no others have succeeded in: Trump does not actually wish to live life as a politician. The glad handing, the genuflecting, the influence peddling... all of that escapes Trumps attention, largely because he's too stupid to realize thats what being a politician is about. The calculating politicians do not want to really do work, they want the recognition and the lifestyle accorded to a politician. Trump has partially upended the dynamic since the swamp toadies make the pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago, but none of these mutants (including Trump) are invited to the junkets and receptions that characterize the real social calendar that a politician cares about.

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Gaashk 29d ago

I just looked this up, since I had never really noticed or thought about height all that much before. Turns out I've been spending time with all the tall ethnicities by accident. I didn't know the Balkans and Southern Slavic people were noticeably tall before, TIL.

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2D3D 29d ago

Batley and Spen: teacher is in hiding after local muslims threaten to kill him for teaching about the Charlie Hedbo massacre, which involved showing the offending picture.

https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/year-prophet-muhammad-batley-school-23493076

West Yorkshire Quran incident: Autistic Boy, maybe on the egging of his muslim friends, is filmed stomping in his own copy of a Quran. Death threats against the boy cause his mother to be filmed issuing a grovelling apology while wearing a hijab, while the police sagely advise that there isn't really a problem because death threats aren't to be taken seriously. https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/police-statement-wakefield-schoolboy-who-26379609

There are plenty more incidents that straddle the line of Noticing. The manchester arena bomber was not stopped because of concerns about being racist, the home invader Mizzy said people only injected to his 'pranks' because he is black (not quite the Islam surrender, but maps closely) the liverpool bombing was memory holed after the bomber was revealed to be a refugee, then unearthed when he turned out to have converted to Christianity and reholed when investigators found he had reverted to Islam, the Leicester riots saw police blame the Hindus for oppressing the local muslim minority...

The list of examples is quite extensive and even a non Britisher would be able to casually recount simple news articles that reached local escape velocity. Local lads in all these towns know far more about whats going on, and the passivity of the UK establishment in the face of unrepentant and actively exploitative muslim contingent who sees the weakness not as charity to be reciprocated but stupidity to be taken advantage of.

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2D3D 29d ago

whether stealth actually works (unclear. You can detect stealth aircraft using bounces to places other than the radar, so called 'multilateration.

I am certain no one here has ever actually used a fucking FCR or even a operated a boat with a commercial nav radar. All this 'stealth doesn't work' smugposting to portend the sheer stupidity of NATO in developing a white elephant fails to consider the corpus of historical evidence for low observable UCAVs in penetrating contested environments, not to mention literally every Red Flag exercise seeing F35s curbstomp 4.5G unless things are stacked specifically against the F35. Stealth aircraft are incredibly difficult to detect much less differentiate from atmospheric pickup, and not even 2010s tech is able to do variable gain adjustment and track reacquisition. Every nation is either looking to buy or indigenously develop 5G+ stealth planes because right off the bat stealth strangles your opponents aerial inventory and capability. No CAP, CAS or ISR if you can never confirm if even your own airspace is clear and if you lose automatically lose any contest. Ground Based Air Defense spam is cope when GBAD all requires a first track to be established by a radar station and thus is itself subject to the 'contested' matrix outlined above.

This doesnt change (much) the points raised about drones and artillery spam, but that might require a seperate effortpost. Suffice to say, artillery now has to include a wider variety of counter battery threat vectors and drones... well let me just say I am really excited for sci fi lasers to finally manifest in reality.

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aardvark2 29d ago

I submitted data to SA survey using google forms (without saving a copy locally). How to get I so I can show it to other person (or vice versa)

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 29d ago

Go into the .xlsx file of public results, search by the most identifiable answers you gave (I used diagnoses) to work out which row is you, read off that row.

I don't know another way, or how to get the private answers (other than straight-up asking Scott to email you the row that includes your email address).

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2D3D 29d ago

But, reasonable judges who aren’t good at parsing scientific studies themselves can be convinced that general intelligence does not work like that.

Many brain cells are expensed trying to justify WHY some groups must ve 'actively discriminated' against when the intuitive value of the above statement is obvious to anyone who has interacted with other people. If everyone was equal in ability and some groups were being discriminated against for no reason, I would hire them since they cost less money/are more desperate and I would crush the competition with my superior offerings. Korean bulge bracket banks are filled with Korean girls because they work hard and don't cause trouble all while being cheaper. Silicon Valley is filled with the obvious Asian (East and South) surplus because of their acretive value. Neither circumstance emerged because of a concerted antidiscriminatory lobby, but because market forces brought them to the fore. Capability tests are discriminatory solely because they are barriers to the value capture efforts of activists. Goldman Korea hires girls because these girls generate more value than their cost, but activists hire minorities because their tribe can parasite the value off the host.

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aardvark2 29d ago

I thought google forms has its own way to do so

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 29d ago

Maybe it does, but if so I don't know it.

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Belisarius . 29d ago · Edited 29d ago

I actually consider the viewpoint of:

another piece of evidence of the artificiality of this meme is that it reverses the scariness of those two possibilities. To me, a world where people come to harm because of impersonal arbitrary forces, of an inherent chaos which can be mitigated or ignored according to your risk tolerance, is a comforting world.

inherently scary and threatening. There is plenty of doublethink and celebration paralax going on.

It is a very implausible claim on the face of it.

Things happen for a reason, and in the world there are various groups with different agendas that they coordinate for their goals at expense of others, is simply an unshakeable fact.

J. Edgar Hoover saying the mafia doesn't exist is scary, because the mafia obviously exists and he is covering up for it. There isn't a reading where it is productive to focus upon the comfort of the mafia not existing, just cause Hoover says it doesn't exist. It isn't a realistic scenario. Nor of course can you blame everything that happens on you, on the mafia being behind it, but it is nonsense to come with an understanding of reality that disminishes the mafia.

When people claimed that there was no communist conspiracy, and like people here who do it with the contemporary version of this, promoted weakmen kooky scenarios of communists putting fluoride in water supply, and comedies pushed the meme "Communists are out to get our bodily fluids", and were hating on those who opposed it as right wing extremist lunatics, that was scary. We had communist sympathizers who opposed valid opposition to communists, and painted reasonable vigilance as inherently ridiculous. That is dangerous and a society with no defenses should be afraid of how things are going to degenerate towards.

A reasonable precautionary attitude and suspicion is protective. And I find a society that has a pragmatic, intellectually wise attitude towards precaution and recognizes the things it must focuses upon, to be a more comforting one. Basically, the people who are dismissive are not actually promoting a more comforting vision, but their very action of dismissing valid problems is threatening, and often a result of them sympathizing if not outright belonging in particular factions that are accused of coordinating to screw over people. The meme of a very tiny cabal is unfortunately false, because influential aspiring factions try to recruit others and do have supporters.

There isn't' a scenario where the CIA, or George Soros, or ADL and others like them representing actual factions aren't t doing plenty of nefarious things, or groups like Epstein's don't exist. Or that things like biological weapon programs of CIA, or that it is possible that covid itself might be the result of such research, are inherently ridiculous claims. The scenario we are dealing with is the one where people are covering up for them and worse vilifying those who do oppose and care as lunatics, or as extremists.

To further give my take, and don't misunderstand my tone here as implying you think otherwise, because I am more explaining my understanding than disagreeing with you:

Now, this isn't to say that any kooky claim is legitimate. Criminal conspiracies are real, and nefarious factions that might or might not fit within the definition of criminality, definitely exist without a shadow of a doubt and we know this. This doesn't mean moon landing is fake, or aliens are here. Just as we know this, we also know flat earth is nonsense. There are simply plausible claims, and implausible. Just like people who promote flat earth theory are promoting something which is nonsense, it is also credulous to be dismissive of opposition to genuine factions and pretend it is ridiculous.

In fact it is a strategy, infamously promoted by Cass R. Sunstein to flood the field with kooky conspiracy theories, to disminish suspicions on 9/11 and other issues. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585. So they both promote both implausible takes, but also to try to create weakman scenarios with real factions, like George Soros, or like the communists I mentioned. And then people are going to focus on the more sensationalist, kooky, weakman at best scenarios as a strategy of supporting the actions of genuine factions like the CIA, people like George Soros, groups like AIPAC and ADL, or even factions like cultural far leftists, or cliques of influential billionaires like Bill Ackman, etc. Or try to spin legitimate opposition as ridiculous.

Nobody is in charge is just an excuse to cover for the people with power and their actions. There are always people with influence doing things because they decided to do them. Even inaction is a decision, and someone must be held accountable for the direction things are going. It is also a promotion of lack of standards and servile attitude towards elites, and decision makers in general (which can include a decent share of the public on some issues) and even for mediocrity. Good governance requires accountability and holding people up to a standard.

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DradisPing 29d ago

I think the way the press reported him was never really accurate. His hero was always Octavian and has been sporting a roman haircut for like 15 years now. He was known to take new hires on long hikes and was always somewhat outdoorsy.

He's the sort of guy who would decide that learning some hand to hand combat training is important.

But if you're a white guy doing a VC funded bay area tech company there are certain cultural expectations you need to conform to.

After 2016 he was personally blamed for Trumps election by many. In 2020 he spent 400 million of his own money in a scheme to oppose Trump that put him in some significant personal legal jeopardy.

It didn't get him back in good graces so I think his attitude now is "I don't need those people anyways".

It's common for famous people in California to play down personality traits that don't conform to the ruling consensus. A good example is someone like Stephen Spielberg who's definitely a loyal democrat, but he's a former eagle scout who loves guns. People tend to assume he was a pot smoking theatre kid when he was young.

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MaiqTheTrue Zensunni Wanderer 29d ago

I tend to agree with the idea that the meme itself is artificial, and I think the aim is to give the public a meme that simply dismisses the idea of conspiracy out of hand. I don’t believe in any particular conspiracy personally, but I find the meme obnoxious simply because dismissing a claim out of hand is a dangerous thing simply because it means not even bothering with the evidence. I think the proper and critical thinking response to a conspiracy claim isn’t dismissing it out of hand, but demanding proof. If the earth is actually round, it will still be round even if I question it. And provided that the evidence is available, truth will eventually win.

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epohon 29d ago

"Scarcity doesn't exist" is certainly a position, but I usually see it from the people far to the left of the leftmost motte poster. Because you sound like a techno-optimist, let's assume there's a Dyson sphere around the sun. Where to from there? That's it, that the ceiling. Would you rather share the energy with a hundred billion others, or a hundred thousand?

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Silverdawn I wake up 🔄 There's another psyop 29d ago

He is also the biggest driving force behind open source AI right now. His latest model is nearly at the level of the closed-source alternatives. Requires hella hardware to run but still. That is the polar opposite of what I heard about Zuckerberg over the last 10 years: monitoring, stealing and selling personal information, etc.

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2rafa 29d ago · Edited 29d ago

If you attended an American high school, did you read the n-word aloud in English class? I’m curious. We did in like 2012 in NYC, I’m wondering if that was the cutoff point.

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2rafa 29d ago

Rich Indian guys always seem to wear at least a moderate amount of jewelry tbh.

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2rafa 29d ago

Sure, but he was always politically a libertarian. He lobbied against banning Holocaust denial on Facebook until it became politically untenable for example because he believes in freedom of speech. I don’t think he’s very political, that means both that he’s not a lib and that he’s not going to sacrifice huge money for conservative causes like Elon. Plus he’s a Jewish guy with half-Asian kids so that likely sets an upper bound on how rightist he might go.

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2rafa 29d ago

He’s always been politically libertarian.

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SerialStateLineXer 29d ago

People often talk about the degree barrier

Fun, counterintuitive fact: Degree requirements actually favor black applicants, because in the US, black people are educational overachievers.

That is, for any given test score level, black Americans have, on average, higher educational attainment than non-Hispanic white Americans. If you look here, in 2021, 26% of black and 45% of NHW Americans age 25-29 had at least a bachelor's degree.

If we look here, we see that the 74th percentile for black SAT takers is between 1000 and 1100, let's say 1050. This is an upper bound for the average SAT score of black four-year graduates; it's likely a bit lower due to the imperfect correlation between test scores and educational attainment. The 55th percentile for whites is around 1150, half a standard deviation higher. If we do a similar exercise for masters or higher, again we find roughly a half-sigma difference.

I don't think this is primarily attributable to affirmative action, since most four-year universities do not have competitive admissions. Probably the fact that black students tend to have wealthier and more educated parents than white students with the same test scores plays a role. Athletics may be a factor as well.

Anyway, since black people tend to be more credentialed than white people (and Hispanics) with the same cognitive and academic skills, degree requirements actually give them an edge. I expect that the DEI industry will quickly lose interest in skills-first hiring when they realize that the main beneficiaries are white and Hispanic men.

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