Now that we have a new thread, 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 complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On November 10 2022 20:50 KwarK wrote: I really don’t see why any of you guys take the time replying to him. None of his posts so far have merited the time it would take to write a response.
I just felt I need to say something about this sort of nonsense, if only for the sake of my own sanity.
On November 10 2022 20:50 KwarK wrote: I really don’t see why any of you guys take the time replying to him. None of his posts so far have merited the time it would take to write a response.
I just felt I need to say something about this sort of nonsense, if only for the sake of my own sanity.
Yeah, that is a core problem in online discourse. If no one bothers to reply to utter nonsense because it is stupid and exhausting, it looks as if everyone agrees with the nonsense.
On November 09 2022 15:39 ChristianS wrote: [quote] Yeah, it’s past my bedtime too.
Book banning? Don’t Say Gay? Blatantly unconstitutional social media bill? Weird culture war against Disney? Fuck, chartering a plane to send migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard? I mean Jesus Christ, he’s practically been licking camera lenses he’s been so eager for attention. I get it, he’s effective at selling what you’d like people to buy, but come on, don’t try to tell me the guy paying Christina Pushaw is some “common sense” moderate who “doesn’t needlessly antagonize people.” He’s maybe the single most influential figure in deciding Republicans were gonna run on CRT and trans panic this cycle.
I didn't say moderate He's a Tea Party type alright. Just again, I guess the word "needlessly" is doing some heavy lifting. but at at the end of tonight's consideration, we ought to think about how he managed to win by so much. Florida is becoming more red, but he did like 15 points better than Trump in 2020. he's convincing someone, or lots of someones.
It’s a little early to be narrative-setting, but if we’re picking where to look for answers after this election: how did Republicans not clean house? You’ve repeatedly pointed out inflation, and gas prices, and Biden’s approval rating, and the longstanding historical trend for out-party gains in midterms. Funny you bring up the Tea Party, because last time you guys were here was 2010. How’s tonight looking by comparison?
My point isn’t to gloat, you’ll still probably get both houses. My point is that guys like DeSantis got to decide what your party was gonna run on this cycle, and what did they pick? CRT. Trans panic. Culture war, all day every day. Republicans brought that message all over the country, with just about every conceivable wind at their back, and it flopped. Don’t get me wrong, Florida has clearly become Mecca for Christian nationalism, and we should absolutely look at how that happened, but most places that shit doesn’t sell.
Fwiw, trans panic is dumb. The obvious ideal optimum for that is everybody shrugs and says "oh your trans. Okay" and pays about as much attention as we would to the sun rising the morning or as we would if you said "hey I'm a girl$
The (local) protected and elevated status in certain groups isn't ideal, but given the overall awful treatment that trans people experience, I don't think it's bad. You're mostly going to get treated way worse as trans (especially FtM), which is rather regrettable.
CRT, on the other hand is very problematic
Like the actual CRT that is a university option? Or the CRT desantis rails against, which is basically a boogy man of anything ultra right people fear?
I think this is a good explanation of the controversy surrounding critical race theory.
In essence the Democrats and Republicans are talking past each other. The Republicans fundamentally oppose the beliefs that underpin critical race theory. The Democrats support those beliefs. Critical race theory in the school teaching context is ultimately a convenient namesake for what could be more accurately called racial equity.
As with many things, the Democrats are supporting the expert studied opinion. They’re not supporting it because it’s a vote winner, they’re supporting it because it is historical fact and facts don’t care about your feelings.
I was recently unfortunate enough to catch some Fox News in the gym and the talking blob of lard was ranting about how convenient it is that all of the so called experts all happen to support the Democrat point of view. Surely it’s not a coincidence, he raved. Surely they’re all in on it. He suggested we follow the money.
It just never occurs to them that the experts came first and that the Democrats listened. Not on CRT, not on police reform, not on homelessness, drug control, trans medical care, public health, or anything else. It’s always a conspiracy to push an agenda. That blind spot in conservative media is amusing to me because it’s a confession, they believe truth is something to be generated in order to support their ideals and they can’t imagine anyone listening first and then generating policy.
And, it doesn't occur to you that the experts came first and did very poor (dishonest) science. After all, science is never systematically wrong about something. And certainly there are never incentives to do things like create further bad incentives and obfuscate reality (read: 50 years of nutritional science).
Luckily, your feelings and intuitions about science don't decide anything.
Falsification via adversarial competition does.
In the case of CRT, it's false as all problems are race problems, because all race problems are class problems: genetic distributions.
It really isn't that complicated. Your incentives need to do two things
1) maximize responsibility, agency, and reciprocity -> maximize cooperation -> maximize rate of adaptation to nature.
2) minimize the rate of expansion in the underclass
And the beauty of #1 is that it completely takes care of any of the crazy unhinged stuff that weird people want to do to individuals when they recognize there are significant differences across groups and across the genders at the distribution level.
Any chance of rewording some of that? I’m unclear what you mean
CRT views race as a social construct, that society advances whites at the expense of other races, and that the US "neutral" laws are actively racist.
Classes (e.g. lower, middle, upper) are nothing more than distributions. Higher cognitive ability, greater impulse control, greater intuition for reciprocity, greater conscientiousness, etc. Better genetics. Classes are classes because we've already sorted (distribution level) by ability. This is why if you look overall, class mobility looks like garbage. But, if you look at first gen immigrants there is excellent class mobility still. It's not that it's impossible or broken, it's that we are already sorted by our genetic ability (minus, of course, outliers).
So, race problems are class problems because the races are also already sorted by class, and the underlying cause is the genetic distributions across the population.
Thanks for the expansion.
I’d largely profoundly disagree, I think there’s a fair amount of evidence that race as we consider it is socially constructed.
Genetic tests of various populations show close similarities between populations that look very different phenotypically, and conversely big divergence in groups that look very similar.
Which would strongly indicate that not just that racial categorisation was very arbitrary at the time, but also that those categories were not right for the wrong reasons.
It’s one thing to go ‘hey these people have dark skin, they belong to the same race’, and genetic analysis to prove you right after the fact, but that’s not even the case.
On November 10 2022 20:50 KwarK wrote: I really don’t see why any of you guys take the time replying to him. None of his posts so far have merited the time it would take to write a response.
It's been a while since I visited this thread but isn't he parroting the same biological deterministic crap some other guy who got banned years ago was?
On November 10 2022 20:50 KwarK wrote: I really don’t see why any of you guys take the time replying to him. None of his posts so far have merited the time it would take to write a response.
The long form word salad, unsubstantiated “name of the enemy” drops, and retro pseudo-scientific essentialism reminded me of what some folks used to post here ten years ago, so there’s that at least.
I'd have to use the search function, and gourd knows I'm not gonna do that lol, but GH compared his arguments to phrenology, and that was better than any words I had for it.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes. It's not worth continuing to engage with as far as I'm concerned.
On November 10 2022 20:50 KwarK wrote: I really don’t see why any of you guys take the time replying to him. None of his posts so far have merited the time it would take to write a response.
The long form word salad, unsubstantiated “name of the enemy” drops, and retro pseudo-scientific essentialism reminded me of what some folks used to post here ten years ago, so there’s that at least.
I'd have to use the search function, and gourd knows I'm not gonna do that lol, but GH compared his arguments to phrenology, and that was better than any words I had for it.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes. It's not worth continuing to engage with as far as I'm concerned.
This is approximately what I expected given the general climate of the thread. Largely, emotional dismissal of the form "I don't like this, it can't be true"
Very little in the way of any discussion of factual information.
Lots of attempts to dismiss arguments by saying
"This sounds like bad thing X" or "This sounds like bad thing Y". Very little trying to understand what is being said.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes.
It's not odd.
Who in their right mind, with any understanding of ethics, would advocate for hatred towards other humans? That's....awful.
It's like "Oh yea, these people got dealt a really bad hand already, so we should totally also treat them like garbage too."
Like......what??
The rest is wrong. People aren't being fit into boxes. Even if you buy single word I just said with religious fervor, one still cannot make accurate predications about individuals because the variations between individuals as absurdly massive. The broad structure of civilization and of groups are being fit into (very approximate) boxes. There is nothing neat about it. It's extraordinarily messy.
Classes (e.g. lower, middle, upper) are nothing more than distributions. Higher cognitive ability, greater impulse control, greater intuition for reciprocity, greater conscientiousness, etc. Better genetics. Classes are classes because we've already sorted (distribution level) by ability. This is why if you look overall, class mobility looks like garbage. But, if you look at first gen immigrants there is excellent class mobility still. It's not that it's impossible or broken, it's that we are already sorted by our genetic ability (minus, of course, outliers).
Is this some misguided social darwinism? Are you really arguing that poor people are poor because they are genetically inferior to the rich? While ignoring all the socioeconomic and historical factors that lead to and continue to maintain and deepen current class inequalities?
By and large (minus the 3-5x higher rate of psychopathy) the rich and ultra rich are outright better. Healthier, smarter, more energetic, intelligent, and generally more moral in most cases.
They are all those things (minus "more moral", because fucking LOL) becuase they are rich, not because they are somehow the modern ubermensch. It's easy to be healthy and educated when you're rich. You're mistaking effects of being rich for causes.
Furthermore, most of the rich, and especially the ultrarich have either inherited their wealth, or were born into already wealthy and/or connected families that provided them with seed capital and/or networking necessary to start a successful business (e.g. Musk, Bezos, Gates). They also usually had the luck of being in the right place at the right time for their business to grow. For every success story like that there are thousands of failure stories that we never hear about. This whole "the upper class is genetically superior" talk is nonsense.
Yes, PoulsenB has some chilling logic. It is often underesteimated how much luck is a factor for being rich. Others are also good at exploiting without getting caught. I don't mind that people are rich, but it does not imply that they are smarter or "better".
Unfortunately, social factors are equally important in the other end of the spectrum. Heavy baggage is also passed on to children, and even in social democratic countries, there is no easy way to solve this.
Things like free education mainly benefit the middle class.
It's not that chilling, because everything he said was pretty damn accurate.
Itt's true that the uber rich usually had extreme luck, that they were often born into wealth, that there are thousands of failure stories for each one success, etc. That's a metric shitload of starting luck.
That in no way contradicts what I said.
He replied as if I said:
"Anybody that has high IQ, high ability to cooperate, high conscientiousness, and good people skills will become rich"
And it's like....no. They won't. (but they will usually lead at least a moderately successful life). Broadly, that's the entire point of talking about distributions, because distributions account for exceptions, of which there are often a great many.
On November 10 2022 20:50 KwarK wrote: I really don’t see why any of you guys take the time replying to him. None of his posts so far have merited the time it would take to write a response.
The long form word salad, unsubstantiated “name of the enemy” drops, and retro pseudo-scientific essentialism reminded me of what some folks used to post here ten years ago, so there’s that at least.
I'd have to use the search function, and gourd knows I'm not gonna do that lol, but GH compared his arguments to phrenology, and that was better than any words I had for it.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes. It's not worth continuing to engage with as far as I'm concerned.
This is approximately what I expected given the general climate of the thread. Largely, emotional dismissal of the form "I don't like this, it can't be true"
Very little in the way of any discussion of factual information.
Lots of attempts to dismiss arguments by saying
"This sounds like bad thing X" or "This sounds like bad thing Y". Very little trying to understand what is being said.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes.
It's not odd.
Who in their right mind, with any understanding of ethics, would advocate for hatred towards other humans? That's....awful.
It's like "Oh yea, these people got dealt a really bad hand already, so we should totally also treat them like garbage too."
Like......what??
The rest is wrong. People aren't being fit into boxes. Even if you buy single word I just said with religious fervor, one still cannot make accurate predications about individuals because the variations between individuals as absurdly massive. The broad structure of civilization and of groups are being fit into (very approximate) boxes. There is nothing neat about it. It's extraordinarily messy.
Where are the facts and studies you have provided?
Only one claim would fit into that category (of needing facts), and it's the claim about genetics being a prime driver of differences in success, productivity, and cooperativity across classes.
Everything else is mathematics style logic, if X, then Y.
With respect to that, a few pages ago I mentioned a whole host of data that supports the argument and the studies/branches from which this is coming from.
I'm not sure how such a discussion would go beyond that. I would go grab 15-20 papers, people would generally skim 2 or 3, then they would go and grab some papers saying the opposite. I'm not sure how that argument could progress meaningfully from there, especially given I don't expect everyone to be a technical expert in study design and statistical analysis and inferences to really discuss papers individually one by one.
I have a feeling we would spend.....10 hours? At least, and get approximately nothing out of it, discarding the things the other person said.
But that does raise the most important point, what *WOULD* cause me to change my mind?
- Probably a mixture of long conversations that convinced me that much of the early science was just wrong systematically without relying on "they were all racists"
- Why the general success of civilizations over time maps well with cognitive ability
- A powerful argument against the swedish IVF study at a mininimum
- And most importantly, a compelling argument for why intelligence and personality *wouldn't* be genetically controlled, despite it having known physical characteristics (increased pruning, increased transmission speed, etc.) that are genetically controlled, strong evolutionary logic to expect it to be genetically controlled, and a general explanation why other physical traits (height, athleticism, etc.) are significantly genetically influenced, but this for some reason passes over intelligence
- Why no efforts to improve intelligence (outside of malnourishment) have been even marginally successful, e.g. education doesn't help, better parenting doesn't help, etc.
to me, these more int = more success mathematical logic stories boil down to whether you think we are living in a deterministic world or not.
and are in my experience an attempt at denigrating a large subset of the population. not saying this is what you're trying to do here as this is utterly boring of a topic with little meaning to me and I dont really wanna engage in boring stuff.
On November 10 2022 20:50 KwarK wrote: I really don’t see why any of you guys take the time replying to him. None of his posts so far have merited the time it would take to write a response.
The long form word salad, unsubstantiated “name of the enemy” drops, and retro pseudo-scientific essentialism reminded me of what some folks used to post here ten years ago, so there’s that at least.
I'd have to use the search function, and gourd knows I'm not gonna do that lol, but GH compared his arguments to phrenology, and that was better than any words I had for it.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes. It's not worth continuing to engage with as far as I'm concerned.
This is approximately what I expected given the general climate of the thread. Largely, emotional dismissal of the form "I don't like this, it can't be true"
Very little in the way of any discussion of factual information.
Lots of attempts to dismiss arguments by saying
"This sounds like bad thing X" or "This sounds like bad thing Y". Very little trying to understand what is being said.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes.
It's not odd.
Who in their right mind, with any understanding of ethics, would advocate for hatred towards other humans? That's....awful.
It's like "Oh yea, these people got dealt a really bad hand already, so we should totally also treat them like garbage too."
Like......what??
The rest is wrong. People aren't being fit into boxes. Even if you buy single word I just said with religious fervor, one still cannot make accurate predications about individuals because the variations between individuals as absurdly massive. The broad structure of civilization and of groups are being fit into (very approximate) boxes. There is nothing neat about it. It's extraordinarily messy.
You talk about people being "dealt a bad hand", in reference to genetics, you talk about how wealthy people are just flat out better than poor people, you talk about the exact personality traits that are predicted by people's politics, but what you're not doing is trying to put people into boxes.
Okay. I'm just laying that out there. If you're an academic, take this opportunity to examine the assumptions you've made about your research. Shit stinks to high heaven.
I think it's great if you believe that disadvantaged people shouldn't be further treated like garbage. The issue I take is that you do nothing to acknowledge that their disadvantages are systemically created by a society that still sees them differently. Instead you insist that it's all in their blood. You're gonna continue to have problems with folks here as long as that's your logical bedrock.
On November 10 2022 20:50 KwarK wrote: I really don’t see why any of you guys take the time replying to him. None of his posts so far have merited the time it would take to write a response.
The long form word salad, unsubstantiated “name of the enemy” drops, and retro pseudo-scientific essentialism reminded me of what some folks used to post here ten years ago, so there’s that at least.
I'd have to use the search function, and gourd knows I'm not gonna do that lol, but GH compared his arguments to phrenology, and that was better than any words I had for it.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes. It's not worth continuing to engage with as far as I'm concerned.
This is approximately what I expected given the general climate of the thread. Largely, emotional dismissal of the form "I don't like this, it can't be true"
Very little in the way of any discussion of factual information.
Lots of attempts to dismiss arguments by saying
"This sounds like bad thing X" or "This sounds like bad thing Y". Very little trying to understand what is being said.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes.
It's not odd.
Who in their right mind, with any understanding of ethics, would advocate for hatred towards other humans? That's....awful.
It's like "Oh yea, these people got dealt a really bad hand already, so we should totally also treat them like garbage too."
Like......what??
The rest is wrong. People aren't being fit into boxes. Even if you buy single word I just said with religious fervor, one still cannot make accurate predications about individuals because the variations between individuals as absurdly massive. The broad structure of civilization and of groups are being fit into (very approximate) boxes. There is nothing neat about it. It's extraordinarily messy.
Where are the facts and studies you have provided?
Only one claim would fit into that category (of needing facts), and it's the claim about genetics being a prime driver of differences in success, productivity, and cooperativity across classes.
Everything else is mathematics style logic, if X, then Y.
With respect to that, a few pages ago I mentioned a whole host of data that supports the argument and the studies/branches from which this is coming from.
I'm not sure how such a discussion would go beyond that. I would go grab 15-20 papers, people would generally skim 2 or 3, then they would go and grab some papers saying the opposite. I'm not sure how that argument could progress meaningfully from there, especially given I don't expect everyone to be a technical expert in study design and statistical analysis and inferences to really discuss papers individually one by one.
I have a feeling we would spend.....10 hours? At least, and get approximately nothing out of it, discarding the things the other person said.
But that does raise the most important point, what *WOULD* cause me to change my mind?
- Probably a mixture of long conversations that convinced me that much of the early science was just wrong systematically without relying on "they were all racists"
- Why the general success of civilizations over time maps well with cognitive ability
- A powerful argument against the swedish IVF study at a mininimum
- And most importantly, a compelling argument for why intelligence and personality *wouldn't* be genetically controlled, despite it having known physical characteristics (increased pruning, increased transmission speed, etc.) that are genetically controlled, strong evolutionary logic to expect it to be genetically controlled, and a general explanation why other physical traits (height, athleticism, etc.) are significantly genetically influenced, but this for some reason passes over intelligence
- Why no efforts to improve intelligence (outside of malnourishment) have been even marginally successful, e.g. education doesn't help, better parenting doesn't help, etc.
So you are not sharing facts you are sharing your assumptions. Do not ask others to do what you can not provide. Basically you think you are so smart that your assumptions are factual but others need to provide proof of theirs. Sounds like Narcissism.
Clearly a lot of your assumptions are wrong, an easy one is that the rich are "more moral" you can easily fight hundreds of study's showing the link between narcacism and wealth along with sociopathy and wealth.
A smart person can demonstrate their intelligence, people will draw their own conclusions from my reasoning, and the way I discuss matters.
I offered to share a variety of studies if people were interested. But, usually people don't actually want to read them. Reading 20 papers, effectively, is something that takes a minimum of 40 hours, but realistically something like 80-100+ hours if you want to do quality analysis.
You made it sound like I wouldn't, when it's really "I will, but only if someone is saying 'Yes, I genuinely want to comb through a bunch of studies'". Otherwise, I spend an hour or two aggregating studies that nobody reads.
Others don't need to prove to me. One of the more important tenants of rational thinking is that your "beliefs must pay rent". They must accurately predict the world, and (outside of logical, formal proof) they must be probabilistic. If you're 100% certain (inconvincible) then you don't have a reasonable belief. You have faith. Religion.
So, it's important to answer the question: "What would convince me that I am wrong", and a fundamental first step to let people know what arguments might be convincing to you.
On November 10 2022 20:50 KwarK wrote: I really don’t see why any of you guys take the time replying to him. None of his posts so far have merited the time it would take to write a response.
The long form word salad, unsubstantiated “name of the enemy” drops, and retro pseudo-scientific essentialism reminded me of what some folks used to post here ten years ago, so there’s that at least.
I'd have to use the search function, and gourd knows I'm not gonna do that lol, but GH compared his arguments to phrenology, and that was better than any words I had for it.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes. It's not worth continuing to engage with as far as I'm concerned.
This is approximately what I expected given the general climate of the thread. Largely, emotional dismissal of the form "I don't like this, it can't be true"
Very little in the way of any discussion of factual information.
Lots of attempts to dismiss arguments by saying
"This sounds like bad thing X" or "This sounds like bad thing Y". Very little trying to understand what is being said.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes.
It's not odd.
Who in their right mind, with any understanding of ethics, would advocate for hatred towards other humans? That's....awful.
It's like "Oh yea, these people got dealt a really bad hand already, so we should totally also treat them like garbage too."
Like......what??
The rest is wrong. People aren't being fit into boxes. Even if you buy single word I just said with religious fervor, one still cannot make accurate predications about individuals because the variations between individuals as absurdly massive. The broad structure of civilization and of groups are being fit into (very approximate) boxes. There is nothing neat about it. It's extraordinarily messy.
You talk about people being "dealt a bad hand", in reference to genetics, you talk about how wealthy people are just flat out better than poor people, you talk about the exact personality traits that are predicted by people's politics, but what you're not doing is trying to put people into boxes.
Okay. I'm just laying that out there. If you're an academic, take this opportunity to examine the assumptions you've made about your research. Shit stinks to high heaven.
You talk about people being "dealt a bad hand", in reference to genetics, you talk about how wealthy people are just flat out better than poor people, you talk about the exact personality traits that are predicted by people's politics, but what you're not doing is trying to put people into boxes.
I also talked about how a substantial fraction of wealthy people (3-5x base rate) are psychopaths', about higher rates of narcissim and especially machiavellianism, etc.
I don't put people in boxes because individuals vary dramatically, like hugely. I would be horrifically wrong, in ways that matter substantially to the individuals, if I rounded off individuals to their distribution.
I've met absolutely brilliant individuals from my time in poverty. I've met repulsive, greedy rich people. On rare occasions, I've met unintelligent rich people.
Individual variation is tremendous, if you systematically "round off" people to their distribution, it's my opinion you're committing a massive error and will systematically mistreat people in ways that have noticeable impact.
The short way to say is: individuals vary tremendously and are wildly unpredictable, large groups behave in predictable ways
On November 10 2022 20:50 KwarK wrote: I really don’t see why any of you guys take the time replying to him. None of his posts so far have merited the time it would take to write a response.
The long form word salad, unsubstantiated “name of the enemy” drops, and retro pseudo-scientific essentialism reminded me of what some folks used to post here ten years ago, so there’s that at least.
I'd have to use the search function, and gourd knows I'm not gonna do that lol, but GH compared his arguments to phrenology, and that was better than any words I had for it.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes. It's not worth continuing to engage with as far as I'm concerned.
This is approximately what I expected given the general climate of the thread. Largely, emotional dismissal of the form "I don't like this, it can't be true"
Very little in the way of any discussion of factual information.
Lots of attempts to dismiss arguments by saying
"This sounds like bad thing X" or "This sounds like bad thing Y". Very little trying to understand what is being said.
It is very odd, in general, to see argumentation that clearly casts racism and fascism as being bad, and then turns to theories of personality that stand eerily close to eugenics, in an overreaching attempt to fit people into neat little boxes.
It's not odd.
Who in their right mind, with any understanding of ethics, would advocate for hatred towards other humans? That's....awful.
It's like "Oh yea, these people got dealt a really bad hand already, so we should totally also treat them like garbage too."
Like......what??
The rest is wrong. People aren't being fit into boxes. Even if you buy single word I just said with religious fervor, one still cannot make accurate predications about individuals because the variations between individuals as absurdly massive. The broad structure of civilization and of groups are being fit into (very approximate) boxes. There is nothing neat about it. It's extraordinarily messy.
You talk about people being "dealt a bad hand", in reference to genetics, you talk about how wealthy people are just flat out better than poor people, you talk about the exact personality traits that are predicted by people's politics, but what you're not doing is trying to put people into boxes.
Okay. I'm just laying that out there. If you're an academic, take this opportunity to examine the assumptions you've made about your research. Shit stinks to high heaven.
I also talked about how a substantial fraction of wealthy people (3-5x base rate) are psychopaths', about higher rates of narcissim and especially machiavellianism, etc.
I don't put people in boxes because individuals vary dramatically, like hugely. I would be horrifically wrong, in ways that matter substantially to the individuals, if I rounded off individuals to their distribution.
I've met absolutely brilliant individuals from my time in poverty. I've met repulsive, greedy rich people. On rare occasions, I've met unintelligent rich people.
Individual variation is tremendous, if you systematically "round off" people to their distribution, it's my opinion you're committing a massive error and will systematically mistreat people in ways that have noticeable impact.
I appreciate you saying this much. Your posting earlier in the discussion very much was saying the opposite. I take immense issue with the idea that someone's genes will dictate their politics, their fortunes, and their freedoms. There's always the debate over nature vs. nurture in the formation of someone's identity, but as long as I've been around, I've noticed that all the major forces that taint our society, the racism, the classism, the fascism, the discrimination on all levels of a society that seeks to prop up the privileges of the few, those things are taught and learned. Hatred is not a natural feeling, we are taught that we should hate some other that exists out there. We are taught that we should act like "we" are better than "them".
People have agency, and can make their choices, without trying to fit them to a curve.
On November 11 2022 00:18 L_Master wrote: A smart person can demonstrate their intelligence, people will draw their own conclusions from my reasoning, and the way I discuss matters.
L_Master, you really don't have to cite us a whole gish gallop of studies to showcase your point.
One peer reviewed article with its credibility intact (so yes, no Herrnstein/Murray) confidently stating that 'observed differences in IQ between ethnic groups are caused by biological differences' would go a long way. I don't really care about this topic so I'm not promising that I'm going to bother engaging (rather, to the contrary, I'm indicating that I probably won't), but the notion that your efforts are bound to be fruitless so you're not going to bother coupled with a 'trust me, I know about this stuff' attitude really isn't particularly convincing, and I'm just trying to help you out here.
You're clearly a smart dude, I'm sure you have some degree of understanding of which particular statements you're making people are most in disagreement with (for example, nobody is disputing that rich people are healthier - although they might disagree on cause and effect) - if these ideas are becoming mainstream (as per the 'When I'm seeing previous moderate liberals that I know to be reasonable people starting to have these conversations' quote), and with you claiming that you are used to writing academically (I assume that means you work in academia?) it shouldn't be hard to find some quick, peer reviewed sources to back up the ideas that get most immediate opposition.
On November 11 2022 01:08 Liquid`Drone wrote: L_Master, you really don't have to cite us a whole gish gallop of studies to showcase your point.
One peer reviewed article with its credibility intact (so yes, no Herrnstein/Murray) confidently stating that 'observed differences in IQ between ethnic groups are caused by biological differences' would go a long way. I don't really care about this topic so I'm not promising that I'm going to bother engaging (rather, to the contrary, I'm indicating that I probably won't), but the notion that your efforts are bound to be fruitless so you're not going to bother coupled with a 'trust me, I know about this stuff' attitude really isn't particularly convincing, and I'm just trying to help you out here.
You're clearly a smart dude, I'm sure you have some degree of understanding of which particular statements you're making people are most in disagreement with (for example, nobody is disputing that rich people are healthier - although they might disagree on cause and effect) - if these ideas are becoming mainstream (as per the 'When I'm seeing previous moderate liberals that I know to be reasonable people starting to have these conversations' quote), and with you claiming that you are used to writing academically (I assume that means you work in academia?) it shouldn't be hard to find some quick, peer reviewed sources to back up the ideas that get most immediate opposition.
Alright, I'll make a point a point to do that sometime today.
In general though, I find the tendency is for people to skim, find a few things they don't like, say that makes the study invalid/less valuable, and then cite some counter studies (which, most subjects have)
Which is sorta why I made the points I did about what might convince me. The studies are valuable, but so are discussions of causality, and models of "If Theory A is true, what does it predict. And, equally important, what does it NOT predict"
On November 11 2022 00:18 L_Master wrote: A smart person can demonstrate their intelligence, people will draw their own conclusions from my reasoning, and the way I discuss matters.