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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
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On August 18 2017 00:32 ticklishmusic wrote:
honestly, i'm kind of okay with it. 1 TB is a pretty generous amount of data- i mean, that much would be downloading the equivalent of my full hard drive every month. like 99%+ of people don't go that high.
though i guess it would be fair if you went over one month, then the extra bit you paid rolled over to the following months.
It's not unreasonable to go near or over that.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0URLasT.png)
In my household we have 6 people, three of which regularly stream video/entertainment, music etc. With HD video being the norm, and watching 60FPS streams for league, and other events on twitch/youtube, it's pretty easy to go over if there's a major event.
I'm in Canada, and my provider meters, but doesn't charge for overages as long as it's within "reasonable limits".
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Are we taking over/under on when we'll get a response from the WH? Or any politician for that matter?
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On August 18 2017 00:55 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 00:32 ticklishmusic wrote:
honestly, i'm kind of okay with it. 1 TB is a pretty generous amount of data- i mean, that much would be downloading the equivalent of my full hard drive every month. like 99%+ of people don't go that high.
though i guess it would be fair if you went over one month, then the extra bit you paid rolled over to the following months. Yeah, 12 TB per year. But that doesn't account for things like increase in video quality, increase in resolution, big data, etc. Compare total data usage today to 5 years ago. Enormous increase. Think about how many technologies and services were only possible once computing and internet speeds were high enough. There isn't really a point of "this is good enough" when it comes to technology. We shouldn't be comfortable putting up boundary conditions around technological advancement. Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 00:52 m4ini wrote:
Lets see Trumps reaction to the newest terror attack, how long it takes to condemn it, et cetera. Guesses? What? Source? What happened?
Right, I would expect those limits to increase as well as video quality, etc. increased as well. Also I hadn't thought about Lmui's point about having lots of people running off internet and how that rubs against his ISP's soft cap, but I'd argue that it's reasonable that a guy living alone or with one or two roommates shouldn't necessarily have to pay the same as 6 people.
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It's possible Trump will comment on it but I think he's retreated pretty far into his shell. Strategy-wise there's really no reason to comment on foreign events at the moment before it's crystal clear what's going on. This obviously isn't like that "gunman" in a theater in Germany or wherever that had blanks and the like and was just a mentally ill person (and not even in the sense of "wants to hurt people but is being called mentally ill" but genuinely not functioning properly), but if it's anything but Islamic terrorists and he says it's Islamic terrorists this will only get worse for him.
That said, he does love to deflect when terror attacks occur outside the U.S. (as long as they aren't targeting Muslim mosques in Canada) so it's possible.
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On August 17 2017 12:24 xDaunt wrote:So let me start by addressing why Vox Day's 14th Point ("The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children.") is not about white supremacy. And let me preface this by saying now that some of you are going to feel really retarded by the time that I'm done, because everything that I'm about to say is right in the 16 Points. Point 15 is the first big hint: Show nested quote +The Alt Right does not believe in the general supremacy of any race, nation, people, or sub-species. Every race, nation, people, and human sub-species has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, and possesses the sovereign right to dwell unmolested in the native culture it prefers. Just in case there's any ambiguity here, let's look at Points 10 and 16, respectively: Show nested quote +The Alt Right is opposed to the rule or domination of any native ethnic group by another, particularly in the sovereign homelands of the dominated peoples. The Alt Right is opposed to any non-native ethnic group obtaining excessive influence in any society through nepotism, tribalism, or any other means.
The Alt Right is a philosophy that values peace among the various nations of the world and opposes wars to impose the values of one nation upon another as well as efforts to exterminate individual nations through war, genocide, immigration, or genetic assimilation. Here, Vox Day is clearly advocating for peaceful coexistence among peoples and advocating directly against the supremacy/imperialism of one people over another. Not exactly the typical skinhead dribble, right? So now let's talk about his reasoning for ethnostates. We see it stated right in Point 11: Now, unlike the previous points, I am willing to cut people a little bit of slack for not fully understanding the significance of what Vox Day is communicating here given the terseness of the statement and the fact that most probably have not had the opportunity to read or hear Vox Day elaborate on this point. But his argument is basically as follows: history shows that conflict -- often violent conflict -- occurs when different cultures either a) exist in close proximity to each other, or b) find themselves in a situation whether they otherwise have to compete with each other over the same resources. Stated another way, multiculturalism breeds strife that is not easily repressed and eliminated until there is some degree of convergence between the cultures because people tend to be assholes to "the other." It's just who we are and what we do. Vox Day's solution to this human condition is to keep everyone separated and allow each people the right to national self-determination. This is stated in Point 5: Show nested quote +The Alt Right is openly and avowedly nationalist. It supports all nationalisms and the right of all nations to exist, homogeneous and unadulterated by foreign invasion and immigration. Accordingly, securing the future of white people is merely the logical extension of this principle. The goal, is the preservation of Western Culture, of which Vox Day writes in Point 4: Show nested quote +The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy. For the numerous posters who struggle with reading, let me make the following abundantly clear: All of what I have said so far is what Vox Day thinks. Not necessarily what I think.Like I have said many times before, my primary disagreement with the Alt Right lies in its preoccupation with race. And this is where I deviate from Vox Day as well. Here is what he writes in the summary section of his 16 Points: Show nested quote +TL;DR: The Alt Right is a Western ideology that believes in science, history, reality, and the right of a genetic nation to exist and govern itself in its own interests.
The patron saint of conservatives, Russell Kirk, wrote: "The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal."
This is no longer true, assuming it ever was. The great line of demarcation in modern politics is now a division between men and women who believe that they are ultimately defined by their momentary opinions and those who believe they are ultimately defined by their genetic heritage. The Alt Right understands that the former will always lose to the latter in the end, because the former is subject to change. While I am willing to entertain the idea that there is some genetic variation between races, I do not accept the idea that this variation is significant enough to affect the ability of members of a given race to be able to embrace, or assimilate into, a certain culture, particularly if we are to assume tabula rasa immersion into that culture (ie taking a baby from one race/culture and raising it in another race/culture). Stated another way, Vox Day thinks that race and culture are largely inseparable. I don't. Now, for practical purposes, I can see why race might be a useful proxy for culture given that every culture is the product of predominantly one race, but it doesn't change the basic point that a member of any race can, in theory, adopt any culture. So let's turn to IgnE's post: Show nested quote +On August 17 2017 08:52 IgnE wrote:
you mentioned "pluralism" as one of the pillars of western civilization so im just hoping that one of your major disagreements with the alt right is this fixation on "homeland" and "ethnic" homogeneity. unless you meant pluralism in the strictly narrow sense of division of governmental powers.
cultural homogeneity seems more like the xdaunt brand of fascism. properly oedipal but enlightened enough to not worry about the fiction of race First, I mentioned that "political pluralism" is a pillar of western civilization, referring mostly to the idea that we value truly democratic and representative rule, as opposed to some form of autocratic or even single party rule. As for cultural pluralism, it really boils down to a matter of degree. While I reject outright multiculturalism, I do think that there is some room for variation within a culture. Or using IgnE's terminology, the xDaunt brand of fascism does require a certain level of cultural homogeneity within the nation. I'll just say right now that I don't know exactly where the line is as it pertains to the US. However, and per my previous posts addressing this matter, I do think it critical that everyone within the US, at a minimum, accept and embrace the most important traditions of Western culture: individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, rationalism, and the rule of law. And I will be first to say that we have not done a good job of imprinting these values upon our own people (as is amply evidenced by some of the posters around here), thus this isn't even strictly an issue of insider vs outsider. We can see a nice little microcosm as to why cultural homogeneity matters just by looking at what has been going on over at Google. How was the internal reaction to Damore's memo any different than a cultural conflict? As with cultural conflicts between nations or peoples, conflicting values were the issue. And as we with so many cultural conflicts, one side is clearly working to eliminate the other. As Vox Day says, diversity + proximity = war.
As a black guy that has been on the internet for a long time and has participated on websites like the StormFront.org where i think i still have an account i can say that all that drivel about not wanting to subjugate other races and wanting to have their own states and send all the africans back to Africa has no excuse and entertaining such ideas is giving them the audience they don't deserve.
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On August 18 2017 01:20 ticklishmusic wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 00:55 Mohdoo wrote:On August 18 2017 00:32 ticklishmusic wrote:
honestly, i'm kind of okay with it. 1 TB is a pretty generous amount of data- i mean, that much would be downloading the equivalent of my full hard drive every month. like 99%+ of people don't go that high.
though i guess it would be fair if you went over one month, then the extra bit you paid rolled over to the following months. Yeah, 12 TB per year. But that doesn't account for things like increase in video quality, increase in resolution, big data, etc. Compare total data usage today to 5 years ago. Enormous increase. Think about how many technologies and services were only possible once computing and internet speeds were high enough. There isn't really a point of "this is good enough" when it comes to technology. We shouldn't be comfortable putting up boundary conditions around technological advancement. On August 18 2017 00:52 m4ini wrote:
Lets see Trumps reaction to the newest terror attack, how long it takes to condemn it, et cetera. Guesses? What? Source? What happened? Right, I would expect those limits to increase as well as video quality, etc. increased as well. Also I hadn't thought about Lmui's point about having lots of people running off internet and how that rubs against his ISP's soft cap, but I'd argue that it's reasonable that a guy living alone or with one or two roommates shouldn't necessarily have to pay the same as 6 people.
My household of two adults and three children uses internet for all media consumption (ie we don't bother with regular TV anymore), and our monthly consumption is roughly 300-500 gigs per month. It takes quite a bit to get to 1 TB per month.
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On August 17 2017 23:55 Plansix wrote:
Intent to be racist does not matter when determining if something is racist. If an action/policy disproportionally impacts a specific race in a negative matter, it is racist. Impact matters, not intent. Intent matters when determining if the person did it on purpose, like the NC voter ID law. People are to hyper focused on intent in an effort to absolve themselves of potential racism. But in reality, it is easy to apologize. Accepting that it isn’t relevant to determining the impact and an incitement of you really helps move the discussion forward.
I'm not sure about that. Here is the definition from a Google search for "racism":
1. Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.
2. The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races
Of course, Google definitions are imperfect (like any dictionary definition), but both of those definition revolve around some sort of "belief." "Belief" isn't the same as intent, sure, but it's certainly a characteristic that is requires knowledge of what's going on in somebody's head.
Furthermore, I don't see how saying "if an action/policy disproportionally impacts a specific race in a negative matter, it is racist" is consistent with support for affirmative action. Surely university admissions policies disproportionately negatively affect Asians? But whenever someone brings up "reverse racism", social progressives tend to laugh them out of the room. So that can't be the part of the definition either, if the definition is to be consistent.
The second Google definition, as far as I can tell, basically matches up with the definition I've been working under for this debate (i.e. having an irrationally strong prior and not effectively conditioning in the face of new data). There's a nuanced difference in terms of absoluteness, but they're the same in spirit.
The first definition is totally uncontroversial. Nobody reasonable these days believes that skin color is causal for any sort of difference in personality or cognitive ability.
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^Well I mean, technically, racism is nothing else than an ideology (-ism) that's based on race (rac-). Thus, yes, a "racist policy" should be a policy that's made according to an ideology based on race. Which includes race-based affirmative action in racist policies, since you first have to believe that there are different races to implement them.
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On August 18 2017 00:28 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +Cox is now charging its customers $50 extra each month for unlimited data.
Cox also introduced a $30-per-month charge that adds 500GB to the standard 1TB data plan. Cox customers who go over the 1TB cap without having purchased extra or unlimited data pay a $10 charge for each additional 50GB. Naturally, "unused data does not roll over," Cox says.
DSLReports reported Monday that the new $50 and $30 fees would be rolled out this week, and Cox confirmed it with details on its website. There's also an FAQ. "Our additional data plans are flexible to meet our customers' changing needs—you can add or remove an additional data plan as needed and will see a prorated charge on your bill," Cox said.
Cox's data cap charges mostly follow the model of Comcast, which also charges $10 overage fees and $50 extra per month for unlimited data. Comcast does not offer the $30-for-500GB option, however.
Cox, the third-largest cable company in the US after Comcast and Charter, has about 6 million residential and business customers in 18 states. It has rolled the data caps out on a city-by-city basis, so not all Cox customers face the caps yet.
Last month, we noted that Cox brought the overage fees to Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Cox was already enforcing data caps and overage fees in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio. SourceSo if they get rid of net neutrality, where does that lead ISPs and services? Especially the smaller ISPs? This reminds me of the Verizon v Sprint v T-Mo vs ATT commercials. Show nested quote +The Food and Drug Administration sent a sharp letter this month to a Canadian-based homeopathic pharmaceutical manufacturer named Homeolab USA. The letter warned of “significant violations” the agency found during a recent inspection and poor quality control of the company’s infant teething products that contain the deadly poison belladonna, aka deadly nightshade.
The letter, dated August 2 and posted on the agency’s website Wednesday, includes a lengthy list of quality and manufacturing process failures that render Homeolab’s products “adulterated,” the agency concluded. These include failing to test the quality of ingredients or ensuring consistent levels of belladonna in the products. SourceThis is why we need the FDA.
That isn't getting rid of net neutrality. That's just your shitty ISPs being shitty. They aren't saying "we charge extra for youtube or netflix data". They're just capping your internet at a shitty bound and making you pay if you want more data. It sucks, but has nothing to do with net neutrality.
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Yeah, Euro politics ----> that way.
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If the discussion is going to relying the google definition of racism, my comment need not be applied. The discussions of intent and systematic racism require a less simplistic definition that does not revolve an expressed belief of racial superiority.
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On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? Show nested quote +I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario).
or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc.
luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational).
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On August 18 2017 01:35 OtherWorld wrote:
^Well I mean, technically, racism is nothing else than an ideology (-ism) that's based on race (rac-). Thus, yes, a "racist policy" should be a policy that's made according to an ideology based on race. Which includes race-based affirmative action in racist policies, since you first have to believe that there are different races to implement them.
Don't you need stereotypes (i.e. empirical distributions or priors) to decide that "racist" affirmative actions result in the greatest utility for society though? Supporters of affirmative action are implicitly acknowledging that there exists a tradeoff between employing stereotypes (which they contradictorily deem universally bad) and maximizing utility.
On August 18 2017 01:45 Plansix wrote:
If the discussion is going to relying the google definition of racism, my comment need not be applied. The discussions of intent and systematic racism require a less simplistic definition that does not revolve an expressed belief of racial superiority.
This goes back to what I said earlier:
mozoku wrote
One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice.
Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist.
If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term?
If you're going to refuse to define racism and use it liberally to defend political policies by people who support diversity in principle but disagree on the merits of current policies advancing it, then the term is going to become diluted.
What the term "dilution" really comes down to in this context is the false positive rate. Increased radicalism on the right, and increased polarization in general, has led to more liberal use of the term "racist" This, in turn, increases the false positive rate. Therefore, the term has lost some of the meaning it used to have. The solution is to be more deliberate and thoughtful before using the term. Ironically, the defense I usually hear from people being accused of jumping to "racist" more quickly is that "well the other guy stated some other alt-right beliefs as well." In other words, they're using stereotypes to defend themselves.
Anecdotally, I used to be offended when I was called racist/sexist. Now, I expect it for making arguments like I just did, even though I consider myself someone who supports the goals of diversity in general.
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On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational).
Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism?
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On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism?
quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore.
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When compared to the right's definition:
"We solved, it move on,"
It can only expand.
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On August 18 2017 01:58 Plansix wrote:
When compared to the right's definition:
"We solved, it move on,"
It can only expand.
Actually even that would be progress. Currently it is at "only white people can suffer from racism"
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The performative fight over the meaning of controversial words and the ideas they refer to is an ongoing battle that practically anyone can take part in given the unprecedentedly pervasive nature of social interaction via digital media platforms. Thus, part of our education in the language arts must prepare folks for the reality that the world is full of people who will use words in an effort to destabilize their meaning, ostracize those who use them, or otherwise cause disruption and, most importantly, these people have pulpit access the likes of which Walter Lippmann could never have fathomed.
With that in mind, these reductive "racism doesn't actually mean anything anymore" arguments boil down into a sort of linguistic nihilism that many find distasteful out of hand, I included. Yes, the man who claims that the system is racist must contend with the fact that many people who also use the word racism do so in a manner that does not gel with his, but the listener is in no way vindicated by throwing his or her hands up while claiming that this topic has become too quicksand-like for their discursive tastes.
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On August 18 2017 01:45 Plansix wrote:
If the discussion is going to relying the google definition of racism, my comment need not be applied. The discussions of intent and systematic racism require a less simplistic definition that does not revolve an expressed belief of racial superiority.
Belief of racial separation (ie, identifying finite groups of humans like "Blacks", "Asians", "Whites", etc, while science shows that such groups do not exist) =/= belief of racial superiority
On August 18 2017 01:47 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 01:35 OtherWorld wrote:
^Well I mean, technically, racism is nothing else than an ideology (-ism) that's based on race (rac-). Thus, yes, a "racist policy" should be a policy that's made according to an ideology based on race. Which includes race-based affirmative action in racist policies, since you first have to believe that there are different races to implement them. Don't you need stereotypes (i.e. empirical distributions or priors) to decide that "racist" affirmative actions result in the greatest utility for society though? Supporters of affirmative action are implicitly acknowledging that there exists a tradeoff between employing stereotypes (which they contradictorily deem universally bad) and maximizing utility.
That's very true, but then that falls in the "the end justify the means" type of action, since you're using a mean (racism/racial discrimination) that's opposite to the values you defend (no racism/racial equality) in order to attain your goal. And I think a quick glance at history is enough to know that "the end justify the means" is very rarely a good way to do things.
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EPT
