Did you know: JRR Tolkien’s great granddaughter, Ruth Tolkien, is the only blind person in the UK to be a competitive fencer. She is currently ranked the #186th best fencer in the country.
Alpha – an ambiguously-AI-automated alliterative account about abiogenesis. As an annotator already announced, “absolutely an amazing achievement”.
In response to my Silicon Valley reality check, Noah Smith looks for good critiques of Silicon Valley.
Sarah C is interested in a potential sepsis cure and pleads for you to consider helping a hospital fund a study. Outside my area of expertise, except to say that sepsis is really bad and curing it would be pretty great, plus I trust Sarah.
Neerav Kingsland: Ignoring Educational Productivity Is Immoral: “studies consistently find urban charter schools outperform traditional public schools while spending around 20% less per-pupil…what, as a society, could we do with this 20% extra funding that urban charter schools could save us?” I would love to see a debate between Neerav Kingsland and Freddie deBoer – I can host or otherwise try to make it happen if they agree.
Related – Wanted: A Charter High School That Starts Class At A Reasonable Hour
New front on the battle to prove that zero-calorie sodas must be bad in some way: does CO2 in carbonated beverages induce ghrelin release and increase food consumption?
According to Muslim legend, the Jews will try to hide behind trees to escape the Last Judgment, but the trees will shout “There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!” – except for the Gharqad tree, which is apparently pro-Jew. This has led to all sorts of amazing conspiracy theories, like that Israel is planting a bunch of Gharqad trees to ensure hiding places for its citizens. And here’s a book about Hamas terrorists with an interesting passage on the Gharqad tree legend.
A paper claims that housing restrictions have “lowered aggregate US growth by more than 50% from 1964 to 2009″.
Explaining The Gender Gap In Crime: The Role Of Heart Rate. “A low resting heart rate is widely regarded as the best-replicated biological correlate of antisocial and criminal behavior” Apparently it might have to do with something general level of autonomic arousal being lower in (to be blunt about it) emotionless sociopaths?
The best Internet responses to Trump touching a glowing orb in Saudi Arabia.
I don’t have a source for this, but it looks right, and it’s a really cool way of presenting the data:
The mathematics of Girih tiles, a beautiful form of Islamic art which applied principles of Penrose tilings five hundred years before it was discovered in the West.
Vox tries its hand at an explainer about the Sam Harris / Charles Murray interview. Some criticism from Gene Expression, The Misrepresentation Of Genetic Science In The Vox Piece On Race And IQ. From Elan, The Cherry-Picked Science In Vox’s Charles Murray Article. From Sam Harris, an accusation that the article just blatantly lies about the contents of the publicly available podcast (one of the authors later apologizes for this, but Vox hasn’t changed the article). From Professor Emeritus Richard Haier, who called it a “junk science piece” and tried to write a counterpiece for Vox (they refused to publish it, but it’s now up on Quillette). And even from other Vox reporters who thought it was journalistically shoddy. As for me, I think the article was as good as it could be under the circumstances – while it does get some things wrong and is personally unfair to Murray, from a scientific point of view I’m just really glad that the piece admits that IQ is real, meaningful, and mostly hereditary. This was the main flashpoint of the original debate twenty-five years ago, it’s more important than the stuff on the achievement gap, and the piece gets it entirely right. I think this sort of shift from debating the very existence of intelligence to debating the details is important, very productive, and worth praising even when the details are kind of dubious. This should be read in the context of similar recent articles like NYMag’s Yes, There Is A Genetic Component To Intelligence and Nature’s Intelligence Research Should Not Be Held Back By Its Past.
AskHistorians: Did Roman legionnaires get PTSD? “For the Romans, people experiencing intrusive memories were said to be haunted by ghosts…those haunted by ghosts are constantly depicted showing many symptoms which would be familiar to the modern PTSD sufferer.”
Somehow I went through medical school without ever learning that going in hot tubs while pregnant can be a risk factor for birth defects.
Like a food blog, except it’s RPG rations for dwarves, elves, orcs, et cetera.
Highly educated people are more likely to get brain tumors. The article mentions the boring hypothesis that they just have better access to medical care (but then how come most other cancers are higher in the uneducated?), but also proposes the much more interesting hypothesis that “having more brain cells or greater brain activity somehow increases a person’s risk”.
Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford is looking for a research assistant for Toby Ord (founder of effective altruism, currently working on a book on existential risks). If you’re interested, check out the job details and contact info.
According to the Guinness Book Of World Records, the most fraudulent election in history was the 1927 Liberian presidential contest, in which incumbent Charles King received 234,000 votes despite there being only 15,000 registered voters.
The “moderate drinking increases lifespan” vs. “that’s obviously just a confounder based on only healthy people drinking” wars continue, with the latest volley being that fruit flies and chickens exposed to alcohol vapor live longer. I was previously on the “obviously just a confounder” side of the debate, but the animal studies sound pretty convincing.
Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton, and A. A. Milne all played on the same amateur cricket team. The team called themselves the Allahakbarries “[under] the mistaken belief that Allahu akbar meant ‘Heaven help us’ in Arabic.”
Heredity watch: Elon Musk’s maternal grandparents were well-known pilots and explorers, and Musk’s mother spent part of her childhood on various family expeditions in search of a lost city in the Kalahari Desert.
The best new blog I’ve come across recently is Sam[]zdat, which among other things has been reviewing various great books. Their Seeing Like A State review is admittedly better than mine, but I most appreciated The Meridian Of Her Greatness, based on a review of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Go for the really incisive look at important ideas and social trends, stay for the writing style.
What lesson should we draw about Democrats’ prospects from the Republicans’ 7 point win in the Montana special election? (point, counterpoint).
The Less Wrong Wiki hosts a List of Rationalist Podcasts.
Behavioral Individuality In Clonal Fish Arises Despite Near-Identical Rearing Conditions. Worth interpreting in the context of my post Non-Shared Environment Doesn’t Just Mean Schools And Peers – even fish raised in exactly the same environments will show “non-shared environment” effects, probably because of something like embryogenetic randomness.
An easier way to read the Less Wrong Sequences online at readthesequences.com.
Mark Zuckerberg Calls For Universal Basic Income In His Harvard Commencement Speech. Sure, Silicon Valley people call for lots of things, but this seems especially important insofar as Zuckerberg seems like he’s positioning himself to run for President at some point.
An analysis showing Donald Trump’s speech patterns getting less fluent and more bizarre over the past few years – might he be suffering from mild age-related cognitive impairment? Also, given that this can be pretty subtle (cue joke about Trump) and affect emotional stability in complicated ways, should we be more worried about electing seventy-plus year old people to the presidency?
A sobering statistic on the difficulty of dialing back mass incarceration (incompletely sourced, but seems to check out): “if America only jailed murderers and rapists, it would still have more prisoners per capita than Western Europe”.
Measures Of Dogs’ Inhibitory Abilities Do Not Correlate Across Tasks. A lot of good cognition studies are being done on dogs these days; this one suggests that we don’t yet have a good general concept of “inhibition” that we can use to say that some animals (people?) have better self-control in general than others.
Big systematic review and meta-analysis: what actually helps lower-income students succeed? Read the paper or the Freddie deBoer blog post, which summarizes the results as “human beings”.
A more recent study on the evolutionary history of Ashkenazi genetic diseases (paper, popular article) claims that Tay-Sachs is probably the result of evolutionary selection, but that others (eg Gaucher, torsion dystonia, Fanconi anaemia, etc) aren’t, which would be a partial blow for Cochran et al’s selection theory. My guess is they just don’t have enough power to detect the effects – if this was all random drift, it would be vanishingly unlikely that so many of these diseases end up in the same pathways (eg lysosomal storage). [EDIT: I may be misunderstanding this; it may just mean there’s no net selection even though they’re diseases]
Related: a reader points out this paper on “The Social Construction Of Hungarian Genius”.
PNAS has a good (albeit kind of silly) article on claims that scientific progress has slowed.
This month in insane Twitter drama, for people who have previously made the good choice not to follow insane Twitter drama but want to walk back on it for some reason: will Sam Kriss publicly denounce Zionism? (1, 2, 3). What happens when Jeet Heer tweets “Bernie would have won”? Is Joan Walsh un-woke on Palestine? And apparently there is some kind of Joan Walsh/Katie Halper feud. I realize this sort of stuff seems petty, but it was really helpful in getting me to understand why everyone hates each other, and helped convince me that a lot of things I thought were silly arguments against straw men are actually important arguments against a large contingent of (depressingly) real people.
Parcel sorting facilities in China.
Noah Smith: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure.
That story about how Gavrilio Princip failed to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand, then went to get a sandwich, then ran into the Archduke just outside the sandwich shop and assassinated him anyway? The Smithsonian says it’s probably false.
Did you know: the ancient Egyptian language of hieroglyphs and Pharaohs survived into modern times as the Coptic language and is still the liturgical language of Coptic churches today. Also, English words derived from Egyptian include “adobe” and “oasis”.
New study finds that growth mindset is not associated with scholastic aptitude in a large sample of university applicants. Particularly excited about this one because an author said that my blog posts about growth mindset inspired the study. I’m honored to have been able to help the progress of science!
Rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun wrote a 1952 sci-fi story about the colonization of Mars, in which the Martian government was led by a President called “the Elon”.
Internet payment processors and payment regulations are terrible and destroying the nootropics industry and probably a bunch of other industries I know less about, part 459401.
ABC News reported that a meat company’s product was disgusting low-quality “pink slime”, and people stopped buying from that meat company. Now the company is suing ABC for $5.7 billion in a lawsuit with the potential to have chilling effects on journalism in general.
I think the Byzantine Empire had the coolest-sounding titles of any civilization, including Grand Logothete and Megaduke.
A deadly fire in an apartment building in London gains an extra layer of horror in the context of this blog post by apartment residents predicting that there is definitely going to be a deadly fire there soon due to apartment management and local government incompetence.
Contra recent thinkpieces about how polls don’t work and psephology is a pseudoscience, on an aggregate level the probabilities from prediction markets have been impressively accurate.
Phone companies were ready to deploy cellular phones since the 1940s – the reason we didn’t get them until the ’80s was government regulators refusing to give them the spectrum space for political reasons.
There’s wide state-by-state variation on the legality of shooting Bigfoot, with Washington calling it a felony and Texas calling it acceptable given that it’s technically “an invasive species”. (h/t Tumblr)
A swarm of 20,000 bees recently descended upon Vox Media’s Manhattan offices, leading to articles like The Swarm Of Bees Outside Vox Media, Explained.
“Neerav Kingsland: Ignoring Educational Productivity Is Immoral: “studies consistently find urban charter schools outperform traditional public schools while spending around 20% less per-pupil…what, as a society, could we do with this 20% extra funding that urban charter schools could save us?” I would love to see a debate between Neerav Kingsland and Freddie deBoer – I can host or otherwise try to make it happen if they agree.”
studies don’t consistently find that urban charter schools outperform traditional public schools.
they pay teachers less so they do spend 20% less per-pupil but I am OK with paying teachers.
My impression is that the public schools don’t have a long line of applicants for teaching positions. If charter schools can get teachers for lower salaries, that suggests that teaching at a charter school is enough more attractive than teaching at a public school that the charter schools can compete with lower salaries, in which case your assumption that they are saving money by making teachers worse off is mistaken.
Depends on what kind of teacher and where. If you want a job as a first grade teacher in Scarsdale, you’d better be related to someone on the school board. A high school mathematics teacher in the South Bronx is a different story.
Charters (and new schools in general) get younger teachers who are cheaper and are not as concerned about the good pensions and healthcare benefits that have been traditionally a big part of teacher compensation.
Also, unions are good for workers and a big part of the “school reform” movement is to smash the teachers unions.
Maybe I’m getting it confused with Teach For America in my head, but don’t charters also lack the teacher licensing/certification requirements that public schools have? I know private schools have virtually no requirements.
Update on Sepsis: Donations Probably Unnecessary
Can someone explain to me what exactly is the profound significance of IQ and why people believe that it has independent effects or meaning w.r.t. intelligence? If you really think about it, it’s existence is not really that surprising.
Stating that a group of tests that were mostly designed to be similar to each other have correlated results seems to be a given to me. Adding that those tests are also correlated with levels of educational achievement in a system where those tests are mandatory prerequisites to being allowed into school is not remotely mindblowing or even interesting.
What WOULD be interesting is if there was NO correlation, since that would mean that either the entire field of psychometry or education was totally worthless and we could save a couple million dollars by kicking the freeloaders out on their asses.
The issue of heritability is also one of misunderstood science. It’s a population level statistic that depends entirely on the specific population in which it is measured. Mixing it with IQ is not likely to give meaningful results. What these theories are based on is a relative measure (heritability) of a relative measure (IQ, which is normalized to the population and therefore not absolute) of a relative concept (intelligence is just a specific basket of human behaviour).
I also think that geneticists’ chafing under the idea that the liberal left doesn’t like these ideas requires a fair amount of ignorance about the history of certain strains of “science” and their relation to minority and marginalized populations. Are you really surprised that the left is accusing people like Murray of using esoteric science to make controversial assertions when that is exactly what he has admitted to doing?
I think the issue here is; Science is hard. That’s why most people don’t do it and resign themselves to copy pasting graphs from papers that they don’t really understand to fit their preformed ideological base. Actual scientists like Murray can still get themselves into trouble by being overly excited and political over relatively mundane results so what hope does the layman have? Unless you have a robust background in research, it’s probably better to assume that most of your conclusions are not really going to take in the majority of the research and it’s limitations and to leave the bickering to the people who were actually willing to get PhD’s in the topic.
Oh, this is bound to end well.
Indeed, it would be. The interesting thing is that rather different tests also correlate, and that tests intended to measure different aspects of intelligence also correlate.
As far as I can tell this paragraph is merely white noise.
Surprised? Not at all. But “esoteric” is not a word which disparages science. Quantum physics and general relativity are “esoteric” as well. They even made controversial assertions, though most had the happy quality of only being controversial to those who understand the subject.
As for the last paragraph, I’m not really interested in a view of science as priesthood
What “different” tests are we talking about. My reading of the literature suggests that most of these correlations are based on applying principles of abstract logic in some form or fashion. More fringe experiments like correlating criminality and other anti-social behaviour all have serious limitations and don’t seem to suggest that this is due to IQ in isolation.
(Although I recall articles that stated that reaction time was correlated with IQ which is pretty compelling.) To give an example, I would not be surprised if 400 meter dash times were correlated with something seemingly unrelated as free throw percentage, especially when you take into account the general population. It doesn’t necessarily mean this correlation is particularly more useful than any other.
What I’m trying to get at is: why is IQ or g the lynchpin on which we base cognition if it is just a broad correlation between a group of tests? Why are psychometrics attempting to reduce the granularity of measurements rather than specify how certain metrics interact with each other to produce functional differences.
Do you mind explaining why so I can clarify? I was trying to get at the fact that there is a lot more to be said about how these concepts relate to the real world than population level statistics.
I wouldn’t put you in my target audience then. That point was generally directed at people who seem to accuse people of being too blinded by ‘liberal bias’ or ‘political correctness’ to just accept the ‘facts.’ That seems to be a viewpoint that handwaves away both the limitations of this specific research and the history of scientific institutions but if you generally accept that people are going to find this kind of data problematic then I definitely agree that the science is what it is.
Science should not so much be considered a priesthood but you should try to take into account science as it is actually practiced which is something that people rigorously trained in the discipline tend to be a little better about. It’s one thing to understand genetic research, another thing to be a geneticist and understand the limitation of your tools. It’s good to talk about research, even if someone is a layman, but its extremely unlikely to match the rigor of individuals in the field.
I say all this to say, the layman discussion of most of this seems to be mostly back and forths with cherry-picked evidence to support certain external conclusions without much thought to the fact that the answer might literally be nobody really knows and we’re squabbling over unseen error bars. Most scientists would be totally fine saying: “it’s inconclusive, lets keep looking for more information.”
I agree and endorse your two posts.
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“Do you mind explaining why so I can clarify?”
I think he was trying to diss you, but it seems to me, he’s the one who’s confused.
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My (admittedly Bulverist) take on HBD is:
These guys don’t really understand genetics, or the brain, or factor analysis very deeply. Science is a priesthood, though, and getting a priest to bless how you want to feel anyways is a great thing!
I agree with and endorse your two posts. Especially this:
“The issue of heritability is also one of misunderstood science. It’s a population level statistic that depends entirely on the specific population in which it is measured. Mixing it with IQ is not likely to give meaningful results. What these theories are based on is a relative measure (heritability) of a relative measure (IQ, which is normalized to the population and therefore not absolute) of a relative concept (intelligence is just a specific basket of human behaviour).”
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“As far as I can tell this paragraph is merely white noise.”
My take on folks who, shall we say, are overly concerned with the brain and genetics, is they understand neither (nor factor analysis for that matter). But, despite protestations to the contrary, they want some sort of priestly respectability for how they wish to feel anyways.
This is, admittedly, a bulverist hot take.
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I guess my view is: either do this type of science seriously or find a better hobby and leave this to the professionals.
@grrath
Because it also correlates very strongly with a broad number of outcomes that we care about and therefor is highly predictive.
So you don’t care about the truth, but instead you prefer to have ‘safe science.’
The problem there is that “these ideas requires a fair amount of ignorance about the history of certain strains of “science”.” After all, Stalin did what you are demanding and the outcomes were not very safe.
More correlation =! better. If anything, we lose specific information about performances in certain contexts in exchange for an easier, more digestible concept. I think how the brain performs verbal reasoning vs. nonverbal reasoning is much more important and informative than their correlation between each other. That’s not to say IQ isn’t a good concept but it just seems too broad to be useful and certainly no different than any other measurement.
My reading of Stalin w.r.t. to science is the exact opposite. His relationship with Lysenkoism and the vast overstatement of the results of Lysenko’s theories and concepts pretty much destroyed Russian science and agriculture. That was entirely based on manipulating data to fit ideology and necessity and people who disagreed with him were shunned for their politics rather than their science. Scientists urged people to take into account a variety of factors when developing these theories and were shunned for just being biased. Sound familiar?
I’m not suggesting we ban any talk of IQ but rather we should take criticisms seriously especially considering the stakes. People aren’t raising these issues because they’re anti-science or anti-data. They’re doing exactly what scientists should be doing which is being skeptical, especially considering the history of these kind of ideas.
@grrath
The problem is that you’re taking as the null hypothesis that every either person or ethnic/racial/haplo group is identical, with no justification for this. All of human history, no one has ever thought everyone is the same and nowhere else in the world do people think everyone is the same. Go ask a group of Japanese geneticists if Japanese people and Australian aborigines have the same intellectual capacity. Go ask Africans if they’re the same as whites or Jews. They’ll tell you no. How did you figure everyone is the same? Who told you this?
It seems obvious on the face of it just from the different levels of development of different civilizations throughout history that people are different. If you want people to believe otherwise, I think the burden of proof should be on you to prove that people are the same either individually or have identical group distributions, or whatever the claim is you’re making.
But when the only people in the entire world making this equivalence claim are western liberals, while proposing no research to back it up, and using the unfounded conclusion as the basis for political policy, I can only conclude their motivation is political, not scientific.
If people really are the same, and it’s just environment that determines outcome, then prove it. Do the science and cram it down the throat of every racist for all time. It seems like this research should be the Holy Grail of leftism, but they don’t even want to discuss it, much less go looking for it.
“It seems obvious on the face of it just from the different levels of development of different civilizations throughout history that people are different.”
Sure, people are different. That much is obvious. The trouble starts when you want to make it precise. If you want to quantify human differences _carefully_, rather than toss meaningless numbers around, you need to know a whole lot of stuff about lots of areas.
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If you want to propose a serious quantification strategy, the burden is on you to show it is sensible. Especially if you want to start going around making causal claims, or (even worse) making policy recommendations.
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Re: null hypotheses: the default presumption is most effects are not there, for any specific concrete effect you want to test. This is actually a fairly sensible presumption in practice.
Re: “development level” have you played CIV? Bad starts matter a lot.
For example, Polynesians had no good access to iron. Still, they managed to find every habitable scrap of land in the Pacific in a migration wave that apparently lasted a reasonably short amount of time, and was finished a long time ago (deep BC), and build a working society in an environment that was effectively interstellar for them.
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But again, none of this is going to be convincing. You want to feel how you want to feel. This stuff is not composed of “updatable beliefs” for you.
Uncalled for.
@grrath
Yes, Larry Summers was shunned by just asking for people to not automatically assume that men and women have equal capabilities in all domains (right kind of equality between the sexes may not be questioned).
Murray Straus experienced how overwhelming evidence kept being denied, using various manipulations, because it is not politically acceptable that men are not more prone to engage in domestic violence than women (wrong kind of equality between the sexes may not be argued for).
The issue is that nowadays this happens mostly by scientists/academics with your apparent bias, but due to the culture war, people are pretending that only their ideological enemies are doing this.
If you look at Murray, the main thing he is asking for is for the possibility of racial IQ differences to be taken seriously. He is opposed by people who don’t want the possibility to examined at all. This makes the rest of your post quite disingenuous:
You seem to be living in an alternate reality where Murray is not regularly no-platformed and smeared with slurs, but instead, all his critics have actually read his book and are offering reasonable criticisms.
@Conrad Honcho
I never said this. I actually completely agree with you. I don’t think everyone is the same or even have the same intellectual capacity. Broad grouping of people are likely to have different intellectual skills (although I don’t think something as broad or socially defined as race is a meaningful way of measuring this). I don’t know how you got that from what I wrote but I’ll just assume I wasn’t really clear.
My actual null hypothesis is this:
Regardless of correlations, without a well-defined causal mechanism linking IQ to intelligence as it occurs in the real world, IQ is totally useless to everyone but psychometrists.
A weaker form would be:
Regardless of correlations, without a well-defined causal mechanism linking IQ to intelligence as it occurs in the real world, IQ may be useful, but not anymore useful than literally any other metric for measuring societal advancement.
For example:
A high school teacher who wants to get her students into college knows (or should know) that she needs to increase their SAT scores, their in school grades, their extracurricular activities etc. and if she reads Murray their IQ scores. Considering the fact that most research suggests that IQ is the least manipulable, the least understood and the least direct of all her options and the options of the policy makers above her, what has she actually gained from this knowledge? Why would she try to use IQ rather than making her students do SAT prep until their eyes bleed and getting her metrics up? She could technically get more vacation time by not worrying about getting her low IQ students up to speed but she could probably do that already just by looking at their grades.
@aapje
I don’t agree with any of the things that happened to Murray and Friends. * Controversial opinions definitely shouldn’t be shunned, especially by academics. My original post did talk about both sides not taking this seriously. My only point was that “you only think race and IQ are connected because you’re a racist” and “you only think they aren’t because you’re a leftist/SJW/commie” are both ridiculous arguments and reading this thread and most laymen threads about this issue a lot of arguments fall into these two camps. W.r.t. to the real world, universities skew heavily liberal so we really shouldn’t be surprised that we see what we see.
Again, this is not about censorship. This about actually trying to understand what people are trying to say.
*Larry Summers said that shit at a diversity meeting while President of a major university. If you’re on the faculty of the sociology department and you go to a sociology conference and say something like “Maybe you guys can’t get funding because your IQ scores are lower than all the other scientists.” don’t be surprised if you get your pink slip. The statement did contain facts and the idea is plausible but part of being intelligent is reading and understanding your job description.
@grrath
Currently, the assumption that there are no meaningful biological racial differences in IQ and no meaningful biological gender differences in aptitude/preferences/etc is used to jump to the conclusion that differences in outcomes must be due to environmental causes. Then people often jump to other conclusions: that these environmental causes always hurt one group and benefit the other, that the environmental cause is human behavior (discrimination), etc.
Then a fairly large group of people use these conclusions to advocate for/implement explicitly discriminatory policies that they claim offset the level of discrimination that they claim exists.
My interest in this is to get people to stop doing this, for various reasons. Those reasons include: it doesn’t appear to work. People are ignoring that because they believe it can’t not work, as they don’t see that their conclusions are based on unproven assumptions. Unfortunately, many people refuse to doubt unproven assumptions that sound plausible to them, so you actually have to prove them wrong, rather than merely demand that they prove they are right.
Your example of the teacher teaching to IQ rather than SAT is not something that I advocate and it’s a false dichotomy anyway, since the SAT is very much an IQ test.
You appear to keep implying that the real geneticists share your opinion but my experience is the opposite.
I am a bioinformatician. I process genetic data looking for mutations correlated with various diseases.
Straightforward, true, not-controversial things are gradually being turned into “that which must not be named” because of people making a lot of noise about being offended.
In my own institution I was given a heads up by a co-worker that a lecturer giving a lecture on genetics had recently got in trouble for mentioning to a class that “excessive consanguinity” in a population tends to cause bad things like more children with genetic diseases.( example: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/18/1-5-child-deaths-london-borough-caused-parents-related/ ) Unfortunately marrying close family members is a “cultural practice” in some societies making that now an unacceptable statement akin to “scientific racism” that led to complaints from The Sort Of People Who Make Complaints Like That.
The topic came up because my co-worker was at the time re-making some of his slides for a lecture on the topic so as to dance around the issue avoiding making any direct statements about the practical real effects of having kids with close family members when your parents did the same thing and their parents did the same thing and their parents did the same thing.
The Overton window on my whole field is gradually closing and shifting into the realm of simple self-deception. Genetics seems to be inherently inimical to their philosophy. They’re gaining political power steadily and I really would prefer to not see a modern replay of the politically-driven Lysenkoism farce.
And you appear to be part of the crowd driving that farce.
your “white noise” paragraph really is white noise, it’s the kind of fluffy meaningless statement that can be thrown at any hard statistics.
Pretty much every criticism you make of IQ could also be made about height or any number of complex polygenic traits yet while it’s uncontroversial to say that basketball players tend to be tall and that tall people tend to have a strong advantage in basketball and that height is an advantage in many sports and unusually tall people tend to have tall children it’s suddenly crazy controversial talk if we say that physics professors tend to be smart, smart people tend to have an advantage getting jobs as professors and that smart people tend to birth smart children and that how generally mentally capable you are at a wide selection of tasks is reasonably quantifiable.
Nobody complains about how someones height can vary slightly over the course of a day but IQ tests giving slightly different results depending on how someone’s feeling that day is pumped up to try to make it look like a big deal.
because in the latter case it’s all [fluffy generic statements to imply that stats don’t really count.]
(at a tangent to the point of your comment)
I’ve wondered about this. In the short term, having kids with a close relative makes it more likely that you will combine adverse recessives, producing an adverse result. But that should mean that adverse recessives, especially lethal ones, are being filtered out faster than they would be with more outcrosses. In the long run, is the result more adverse outcomes or fewer?
Without doing any serious analysis, my guess would be that if no new adverse recessives are being produced via mutation, the long run result would be to reduce adverse outcomes, whereas if most adverse recessives are due to fairly recent mutations, it would increase them. Is that right? Do you know?
At a further tangent, there are two different reasons why inbreeding would be related to ethnicity, religion, and the like. One is that if you have a small population and mating is mostly within it, you get inbreeding whether or not you want to–that’s the Amish pattern, with a small founding population making it worse. The other is that a culture might favor inbreeding–that’s the Arab Muslim pattern, where first cousin marriages are considered particularly desirable.
Height is in fact a one-dimensional parameter. Intelligence is not. A better analogy for intelligence in the context of basketball would be “basketball ability” (however you measure that). Some fairly famous basketball players are of the “small and fast” variety.
In fact, sports ability is a great example here. How do you think moneyball types would react if you proposed a one-dimensional parameter “b” you invented via factor analysis that you say correlates with everything good in a basketball player, and that can be used to predict player performance?
What institution do you work in (if you want to reveal that)?
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If you want to push back on folks who make it impossible to say that inbreeding is bad for you, all the power to you — all sensible people everywhere are behind you 100%.
@ David Friedman
I think I understand your question, and meaning so here goes.
Take an unrelated mother and father with uncorrelated negative recessive genes, and a related mother an father with correlated negative genes.
In the unrelated there is a 50% chance of a child getting his mother’s recessive, and a 50% chance of his fathers and an X% chance that they overlap causing a problem (we will return to that later). ~25% of children will get both genes, ~50% will get one, and ~25% get neither.
The related couple its the same basic math with 25% getting both genes, 50% one, and 25% neither.
Now the question is how damaging is this mutation to fitness? If it is Tay-Sachs were fitness falls to zero, in the inbreeding family you get
25% of kids no longer carry the gene, 50% of kids carry one copy and 25% have the fatal combination, which means the reproducing generation has 33% of people no longer carring the gene and 67% carry one copy. This generation inbreeds randomly.
You end up with ~11% of the next generation with the fatal combo (0.67^2*0.25) and ~44.5 of the next generation carries and 44.5% has zero copies.
The reduction will continue every generation, BUT it will always be a slower reduction than if there was intentional outgroup mating.
@Ilya Shpitser
yes, height is a 1 dimensional parameter>
And yet if you want to be in the NBA and you’re under 6 foot tall there’s 5 NBA players in that band and most of the US population. If you’re 5’5 and dream of being an NBA player you literally have better odds of winning the lottery.
If you’re over 7 foot tall and you don’t have some horrible health condition then you can basically walk right in. 17% of seven-foot-tall young men in America are in the NBA. If you’re over 7 foot you basically have to apply and you’re in.
A single 1 dimensional parameter and yet if you walk a reasonably healthy 7 foot tall guy in the door and a reasonably healthy 5’5 tall guy in the door and you know they both had a dream of being in the NBA that single 1 dimensional parameter tells you which one has less than a 1 in a million chance of being in the NBA and which one has a near certainty.
further that single 1 dimensional parameter is pretty much entirely genetically determined as far as we can tell (absent starvation or severe abuse or poisoning).
There have been a tiny number of merely average height players in the NBA. That single parameter doesn’t cover literally everything. But if you dream of raising a kid to one day play in the NBA the most significant step you can take towards increasing the probability of achieving that goal is to find to tallest person you can who’s willing to be the other parent.
And the NBA isn’t taking tall people for the sake of being tall, they want to win games, they’re using height as a proxy but it’s apparently a spectacularly good proxy.
I prefer not to name my employer online since the net contains too many people who are keen to hunt down peoples employers and try to get them fired whenever they’re pissed about anything.
@DavidFriedman
I remember an argument along those lines from an old Heinlein book.
Ok, simplifying a bit for easier number crunching, lets look at SNPs, pretty much the most common form of mutation, a single base being flipped.
Every generation there’s about 112-160 novel mutations: ie, your kids carry about that many mutations that neither you nor your partner carry(though a fraction of the tissues in your testicles may carry a larger fraction of them).
Most of those mutations will hit locations that don’t matter, I wrote a longer bit here but I cut it out in favor of simply saying : novel mutations are fairly common but mostly don’t matter if you’re not having kids with your close relatives.
The other problem is that such intentional selection exerts it’s price in dead children. You’d need to do it for so long and throw so many infants on the sacrificial alter that I’m not sure you’d gain anything overall.
Also we’re in modern times: Genetic counselling is a much better option or even filtering embryos to avoid ones carrying horrible diseases and doesn’t take a price in suffering children.
Yea and if he had inexplicably followed that up with a slide showing that Jewish people had the highest rate of Tay-Sachs, you would probably have some questions about his motives.
Political correctness is dumb. Period. Whoever runs your school is definitely part of the problem.
That being said, there’s a long history of people in authority saying that other people aren’t as good as them using technically plausible information. This has, whether you like it or not, shifted the burden of evidence a lot higher than even the most robust of statistics. What are the neuroscientists saying? We don’t even know how A brain converts sensory information to logical thoughts, let alone the functional difference between lower and higher IQ individuals. What are psychologists saying? Have they observed higher-IQ individuals having more pro-social or complex thoughts?
Science is a big field. Graphs don’t tell you the whole story. There’s a lot more information to be gathered before creating grand, ideology supporting theories. Being challenged on that is just part of the process and the people doing it aren’t doing it because they’re just too sensitive for the “truth.”
Yea, because nobody can readily ascertain what ‘smart’ even is. I don’t need a scientist to tell me that a person is tall. I can look with my eyes and readily agree. I can’t randomly test a person and score and IQ test for myself to know whether or not someone is actually smarter or dumber than everyone else. There’s going to be disagreement on the robustness of your test because a lot of people are going to have different value systems for intelligence and what tasks are important.
If, on top of not being an easily understood, mechnically validated measure, your argument sounds kinda sorta what white supremacists or bigots in general are also saying, then don’t try to suggest that people who disagree with you are being “anti-science”. If you want to be taken more seriously, get more serious evidence.
@grrath
Again the same old meaningless bullshit anti-science waffle.
It never changes, it never improves, it’s just the same droning content-free bullshit again and again.
“Oh it’s all so complex how dare anyone try because it makes me feel bad and offend me! hey, look, there’s some spaces we still don’t fully understand! that’s where everything supporting my position, my god or my magic lives! Also lets finish up with a vague threat that if anyone disagrees then they’re probably heretics/racists/sexists.”
hundreds of years and it never changes. The same worthless bullshit repeated by the same kind of people again and again and again.
I think you shifted to attacking the person now.
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I saw this a lot in this thread. As soon as grrath tried to discuss what understanding intelligence, as embodied in the brain, would _actually entail_ people started to attack him right away, and his stuff as “meaningless,” or “white noise.” Why is that?
It’s not meaningless at all.
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Since you love science so much, here is what the scientific process actually looks like in empirical fields. First you find an effect. Then you switch to follow up questions. What’s the mechanism for the effect, does this effect hold up in different populations, etc. Ultimately you try to learn enough to start having the types of precise mechanism discussions grrath was trying to have.
You know what you don’t start doing? You don’t start immediately being a culture warrior, and leave follow up questions for later. If you think you see something, and rather than wait for confirmation/replication/expansion/usual science stuff that follows you shift to demagoguery about how you are JUST LIKE GALILEO, this is a good indication you weren’t really in it for the science at all. You were looking for a club.
What grrath is trying to do is not suppression of science, but usual peer review.
because grrath isn’t actually talking about “understanding intelligence, as embodied in the brain”.
When someone starts with the the “that’s a position I disagree with, it would be a pity if someone were to brand you a nazi, oh by the way,where do you happen to work” shit I stop bothering to pretend they’re acting in good faith.
because they’re not.
understanding intelligence, as embodied in the brain is itself an interesting subject that could make for an interesting debate with lots of potentially interesting talk about the cutting edge in neurology.
What grrath is actually doing is balling all that up, throwing it over his shoulder and instead using it as white noise.
like a child sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming “LALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!, EVERYTHING IS SO COMPLEX THERE’S NO WAY ANY MEASUREMENT CAN COUNT LALALALA”
It’s being used as white noise.
You get the same thing when you argue with anti-vaxers, you point to solid numbers, you point to statistics and the stick their fingers in their ears and start declaring that biology is so complex that we can’t personally possible understand the full and complete effects of every single additive and every single metabolite! HENCE YOU CAN’T SAY THEY’RE SAFE!!!
It’s the same bullshit. Different day. Appeal to complexity and appeal to ignorance.
You can vainly try to interject with “But statistically there’s extremely strong correlations with..”
And they’ll just spew back more worthless white noise because they’re not interested in things being true nor finding more-true positions.
grrath is engaging in a pretty much textbook example of “How to discredit a report (without having to read it)”
http://www.venchar.com/2004/02/how_to_discredi.html
@murphy.
Jeez I can’t imagine how you’ll feel when you put a paper up for peer review. Criticism of data is the most scientific you can possibly be. If that offends you, then you and sjws have more in common than you think.
@aapje
You can’t fight unproven assumptions with unproven assumptions. There are very good arguments for and against discriminatory policies. I personally am against them but I don’t think the people who think they are a good idea are totally misguided. I also do not see how IQ is a useful concept to support my argument since there are far too many questions remaining. Most models still leave a fair amount of room for environmental conditions and policy makers are always going to try and maximise their effects.
It’s not nice to be called a racist, and liberals are wrong for doing that without evidence. It’s not nice to be called antiscience and IQ supporters are wrong for doing that. We need a middle ground.
@ilya
You’ve pretty much nailed all I was trying to say. Glad to know someone understood me.
Murphy, you think I was asking where you work as a threat? You mentioned crappy things at your institution, and I was curious. I work at Johns Hopkins, btw, and always sign my real name.
I get vitriol from anonymous tough guys sometimes, but that’s the game.
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You sound pretty worked up.
@murphy
The entire anti-vaxx movement was started when a trained scientists used plausible correlations and mechanisms to suggest vaccines caused autism. The lack of critical thought and the belief that because a scientist did some “science” and discovered something interesting is a sign that something must be done is the first step to people making the wrong decisions.
I don’t even understand what you’re arguing against. I’m not suggesting that IQ is total bullshit. I’m trying to qualify what we actually know
Who do you mean? I thought that the anti-vax movement was started when a trained researcher fabricated 12 examples. Plausible mechanism, yes, but I don’t think the paper made much use of correlations. Unless you mean secular increase?
@grrath & others
Imagine a door. Bob argues that the door is red. I look at the door and it seems green to me. I tell Bob. Then Bob argues that although he also sees green, the door is actually red, so we both must be color blind. So I devise a test and determine that neither of us is colorblind. Then Bob argues that there must be a color filter between us and the door. So then I devise a test to show that there is no color filter. Then Bob argues that God is manipulating our senses and instruments, so the door is actually red, but we can’t tell. When I accept that we can never disprove this possibility, Bob declares victory: ‘you can’t prove with absolute certainty that the door is green, so it must be red.’
This is the typical way in which science deniers/people who are emotionally wedded to a claim, act. They don’t weigh the evidence objectively and adopt a conclusion that is most consistent with the data, but reject their opponents’ conclusion because it has gaps, while ignoring that their own conclusion has way bigger gaps (or has evidence that disproves it).
As all scientific claims will have gaps in the evidence, you can reject any scientific theory this way and instead prefer a theory with much worse evidence, predictive power, etc.
So I wish to warn you and others (also those of the right-wing persuasion) that you have to be careful to not simply demand that the other side keeps plugging the gaps. Intellectual honesty also demands that if you are not agnostic, but make a claim yourself, that you make a positive case that the evidence for your claim is actually better than the evidence for the other claims.
@grrath
We know that IQ is extremely predictive for many things we care about a great deal (like doing well in school, earning a better income, living longer/healthier, etc, etc).
We know that races/ethnic groups differ genetically in ways that matter. For example, we can predict that Asians tend to be lactose intolerant far more often than Caucasians. This knowledge resulted in multinationals investing more money into dairy and dairy-like products that lactose intolerant people can digest. So this benefits Asians. Similarly, the knowledge that sub-Saharan black people tend to suffer from sickle cell disease far more often allows doctors to make better diagnoses, benefiting black people.
We know that IQ is highly hereditary (0.7-0.8 for adults).
We know that different races/ethnic groups have large group differences in IQ. We know that IQ is about equally extremely predictive for outcomes for all racial groups, so the tests don’t seem to have a racial bias.
We know that the environment can depress IQ and that certain races that have a lower average IQ also have a worse average environment. So part of the gap might be environmental.
We know that IQ’s can go up rather rapidly across generations (Flynn effect), again suggesting environment can play a role.
However, we also have evidence that black people do worse even if they are adopted by white parents and other evidence that suggests that the environment doesn’t explain very much of the gap.
With new genetic databanks, we may soon be able to correlate IQ to certain genes and determine if those genes more often present in certain races/ethnic groups. If so, that is very strong evidence of racial IQ differences.
We see that a certain ideological group opposes research into this area, resulting in funding problems for this kind of research, scientists self-censoring, etc.
We know that China is doing this research, so the cat is out of the bag anyway. With CRISPR, it might then be very easy to start engineering smarter babies and we know that countries like China have less moral objections to this kind of thing.
By neutering our scientists and preferring ‘ought’ over ‘is’ in our research, we might end up a backwater when it comes to human genetics, where rich, mostly white Westerners end up going to China to get their superbabies, while poor Americans (disproportionately black) fall back even further.
Is this a happy future for most progressives/lefties? Isn’t it better not to stick our head in the sand, but make choices based on reality, rather than choosing the ‘facts’ that we find morally preferable?
PS. Note that the objections to racial IQ differences are frequently at the level where the scientific evidence is overwhelming, like the predictive power of IQ. This is why the charge of science-denialism is frequently leveled.
So, you agree with me? This is all that I was trying to say. I am agnostic about race and IQ. Somehow I got lumped in with people who deny it’s very existence but that isn’t my position at all. It didn’t help that people thought my description of what it is was white noise because… I still don’t know why.
It’s obvious that people who don’t think they’re ideological are being very ideological because they’ve put a fair amount of words in my mouth.
My position is that, considering the evidence and the fact that I’m agnostic, I don’t think IQ is useful for the layman and should not drive or affect policy. It should also not be thought of as an absolute authority on intelligence because it was not designed to be one. If Murray wants to talk about this evidence he should be free to do so, and others are free to not listen and argue against it because it goes against their own observations and ideas about intellect.
Can you point out to me where you don’t agree? Or what I’ve said that makes you believe that I’m trying to push for one side?
If anything, I’m trying to get people to come into the middle and understand what it is they’re talking about. Science is not about absolutely right vs. absolutely wrong and evidence (no matter how statistically robust or weak) has to be weighed fairly against everything else.
My use of meaningful might have been too strong. I was only referring to it being relatively low-yield for non-psychometrics because there isn’t much they can do differently.
@grrath
Beliefs about IQ or if you prefer, ability, is already driving policy. This, despite the available (yet incomplete) evidence showing the opposite of what is argued to push through policies that would be unjust and counterproductive if they are wrong (and can even argued to be counterproductive even if they are right).
You seem to think that Murray is evidence that the questions are being asked, but he actually did his research for a private research institution. It’s quite telling that there are no examples of researchers in general academia who are openly researching the same things. There is evidence that academia are increasingly politically monocultures, where dissidents are discriminated against when it comes to jobs & grants, feel silenced, etc.
The logical result is that some research will not be done and the research that is done will frequently be performed in an ideologically motivated way, where certain explanations of the data are anathema, where the deck is stacked in advance to generate the ‘right’ outcome, where unpleasant outcomes are shelved, etc, etc.
I find this worrisome and find it especially worrisome that the majority of the left seems to worry greatly about how their ideological opponents refuse to accept some scientific consensus (and call this anti-science); whilst I see very little concern for science itself being politicized, which is a far greater threat, IMO.
If science is done well and lots of people reject it, at least those who are (somewhat) immune to the polarization can still find out the truth. If science itself is corrupted, then science has become useless for even the least partisan.
Why it is real is an important topic. Whether any particular conclusion is surprising or “profound” is much less important than its truth. Many people say that you just can’t measure intelligence. They should consider it profound.
From your other comments, you seem to believe that intelligence is multifaceted. If it turns out to be dominated by a single factor, should your surprise count as profound? If the people who create intelligence tests were trying to produce a single number, it is not surprising that they produced a single number. They claim that they were trying to produce many numbers. Why don’t you believe them? I think that it is much more plausible that their failure to produce many numbers was due to incompetence than malice.
But let us take IQ as a black box. Maybe better IQ researchers would produce a better box, with more numbers, rather than the 1-3 numbers we do get. Maybe that is a reason to become an IQ researcher, but short of that, what we have is IQ and the question is whether it is real and useful, not whether it is profound or the best battery of tests.
Sure, the current number is utterly unsurprising. When IQ tests first debuted, it was an interesting question of whether college was based on intelligence, education, or class. How do IQ tests compare to old by-hand approaches of identifying intelligent children? In any event, they’re a lot cheaper. The SAT was specifically created to find smart, less educated people and send them to college. It worked, and that’s probably a good thing. There are people who claim that college attendance today is wholly due to class. The correlation is the start of a rebuttal to them. But the important question is whether the SAT is a test of class.
And we should be nervous about whether the correlation between IQ and income and other positive outcomes is mediated by education. But people do measure whether IQ predicts productivity.
You might as well say that correlation is a population level statistic. (Narrow sense) heritability is merely the correlation of the trait with genes. There are certainly problems with correlation, but would you describe it as “misunderstood science”? Would you say that it is not likely to “give meaningful results”?
What’s wrong with relative measures? What’s wrong with normalization? Sometimes people make mistakes about IQ because of bad normalization, and maybe it would be better to use an absolute IQ scale. But so what?
“But so what?”
I would like to suggest a custom called “honest bookkeeping”: whenever you make a statement based on analysis of data, please list somewhere all assumptions that went into that analysis.
The last place in the long chain from paper to consumption by an internet reader (via university PR department, popular science article, etc.) this is often done is the scientific paper itself (and sometimes not even then). The point is, keeping the long list of assumptions around reminds us how contingent all statistical analysis is.
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People here seem to think there are isolated demands of rigor happening when it comes to IQ research. But really, I personally promise to lay off, if you just keep carrying the list around with every data-based claim. The list will speak for itself without me having to say anything.
It looks like an isolated demand for rigor in that you don’t seem to make this demand of the many other data-based claim on this blog. Why not make that demand of half of the links on this links post? I do think it would usually be better if Scott linked to the original research, instead, but usually the problem is not weak analysis, but that the statement has been completely mangled.
If you (like Cosma Shalizi) think that IQ matters and all these other topics don’t matter, it is perfectly reasonable to have different standards of engagement (not rigor), but if so, admit that. (But surely the questions of whether charter schools are equally effective and 20% cheaper does matter.) But if your goal is to communicate general points about analysis that happen to apply to IQ, perhaps it would be better to communicate them on a less charged topic.
Anyhow, that doesn’t answer my question. Grrath seems to make a specific complaint, that the heritability of a normalized measure is “not likely to give meaningful results.” If it is a legitimate complaint, I’d like to know why. What good does it do me for you to stop making a legitimate complaint?
Those particular points, that heritability is a correlation, a population statistic; and that IQ is normalized; those disclaimers are part of the definitions, written down in any reference work, eg, wikipedia. Does that count as “listing”?
Cosma called g a statistical myth (http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html). Did you mean he thinks that people being confused about g is important?
Btw, I totally agree with Cosma’s conclusion and reasoning on g. Since I know a little bit of causal inference, all of this is, as Cosma says, “old news” to me.
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In my field it’s all about writing down assumptions carefully. I think statisticians should do this more in general, independently of “sensitive topics” like IQ and genetics.
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“Does that count as “listing”?”
No. Listing is a psychological trick to try to exploit something like ?the availability heuristic? to get folks to treat statistical analysis at what I think is the appropriate level of tentativeness. People who understand this stuff don’t need this list. They already know.
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Re: your specific question, I think I should let grrath answer. I will say for myself you can talk about heritability of IQ all you want, as long as you put a list of assumptions you made (which will include normalizing IQ, and all the other things grrath worries about) at the end of your paper or blog post. With this list, people can decide for themselves how much to believe you.
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Narrow technical point, you said:
“(Narrow sense) heritability is merely the correlation of the trait with genes.”
That’s not what heritability means. Did you mean something else than heritability? What did you mean?
This whole thread is about how you never spell out your complaints, and then it turns into a Socratic dialogue?
Hey, you said Cosma thinks IQ matters. Cosma actually thinks IQ is made up. You said heritability is one thing, but actually heritability is something completely different. I am fairly sure I am going to see Cosma in about 2-3 weeks, if you want I can ask him.
I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt and ask for clarification, but if you insist on being uncharitable, how about I just say that it seems to me you don’t know what you are talking about?
Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. If you think I’m too stupid or too deluded to understand any of this, then by all means give up on me. But if you think that listing the things grrath worries about will make people worry about them, it sure didn’t make me worry about them. Maybe that’s because I don’t know what I’m talking about, and you don’t care about getting through to me, but that should have been pretty clear, pretty early in the conversation.
Added: that was somewhat mangled. Presumably there are some people who don’t know what they’re talking about that you do want to get through to. That’s the whole point of asking what you mean, what you’re concerned about.
My view on intelligence and genetics: intelligence is very complicated and high dimensional. It’s also multi-factor when it comes to genetics (lots of little causes rather than a few big ones). It’s pretty clear intelligence is heavily influenced by genetics, since we are much smarter than chimps.
These generalities seem pretty uncontroversial to me. If you want to do science or statistical modeling to try to make them precise, that’s absolutely fine with me — but just do it carefully, and list assumptions. Listing assumptions is honest — why wouldn’t you do it? I always ask this when I do peer review. And maybe actually do science/modeling rather than culture warrior posturing?
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Also maybe actually know what factor analysis does / how heritability is actually defined / etc. Whenever I see people stumble on actual technical details it really doesn’t give me a lot of faith in their project.
They have produced other numbers, that’s my point. The subtests of IQ can themselves be used to determine certain aspects of intellectual capability. Not to mention the tests created by educators to ascertain the extent of an individual’s knowledge and understanding. Correlating all these tests together is pretty cool but it’s an invented statistical concept that doesn’t do much more than condense a large set of data.
I don’t understand this part. Are you suggesting that critically analyzing the data is meaningless? You can’t use tools properly if you don’t understand their limitations and IQ has limitations that people are glossing over. You listed most of them in your comment but I don’t know why you don’t think that they’re important considerations.
Critically analyze the data, and I’ll get back to you.
Is this a “critical analysis”? All I’m saying is that I have no idea what you mean by it. So I’m asking you: What does it mean?
Perhaps you are just saying that small problems compound? Sure, but do they actually add up to a big problem?
I suppose I could challenge every article on here but that’s a bit unfair. If you want to substitute IQ with every other statistical link, you can, but it doesn’t change my point.
A big problem for what? For IQ to be a measure, not particularly. For IQ to be claimed to be important for policy, then those are serious problems. I can’t literally calculate for you how much it affects validity but based on something like the Bradford Hill criteria
to asses epidemiological causal references, theres not enough there.
If you want to talk about causality, we can talk about causality, but that sure sounds like a different subject. Originally you said that the heritability of IQ was not meaningful. That sure doesn’t sound like a complaint that needs reference to causality.
You keep changing the subject. Why won’t you say what you mean? Why did you put together two complaints in the same sentence? Do they interact? Or are you just saying that the problems added up?
If I didn’t understand your original point, why introduce new topics? If I’m not worth your time, oh well, but why barrage me with new points?
In lieu of finding a good place in the comments to talk about the Hugos, I’m starting fresh. I’m coming from the anti-puppy side pretty much.
From my point of view, they had people, including some of their most notable members, who were willing to wreck the Hugos. They weren’t just trying to make room for themselves, they (eventually?) wanted all the prizes. And they wanted the Hugo to lose all of its prestige for everyone as it had lost prestige for them.
Also, while setting up nominating ballots is within the rules, I see it as contrary to the spirit of the Hugos, which are about individual preferences. To whatever extent puppyish fiction was excluded, at least the un-puppy nominees were still mostly a matter of individual taste.
As a general point about Correia, he wasn’t entitled to a Hugo just because his books sold well and a good many people like them. Many excellent writers never get a Hugo, or don’t get one for decades.
I believe a lot of the problem on the puppy side was that they didn’t have excellent fiction to compete with. I’ve been reading sf since the 60s, including a lot of earlier golden age sf, and I’ve loved a lot of it. From what I could see of the puppies, they just didn’t have anything distinguished to offer.
When I say distinguished, I don’t mean pretty good, I mean strikingly better than most of the field.
You don’t think responding to them by a coordinated campaign to vote down everything nominated, which I gather was what happened–I’m getting all of this second and third hand from comments by both sides–qualifies as being willing to wreck?
We need to get ESR into this thread–I’m pretty sure he was involved with strong views.
The No Award campaign was a defensive effort rather than an effort to wreck the Hugos. Having fewer Hugo awards for a year or two wouldn’t do as much damage to the award as would the award going to bad works, though I grant that if the awards mostly hadn’t been given for five or ten years it might have done a good bit of damage.
As I recall, there were people on the puppy side who said they wanted to wreck the Hugos.
The No Award campaign was directed at Beale’s nominations, as I recall, so it wasn’t against everything on the ballot, but it was pretty close.
I grant (and I should remember) that the puppies were surprised that they got as many nominations as they did.
I was interested at the time to see that counter-ballots were strongly discouraged by the anti-puppies, and I think that turned out to be the right move.
How are the Dragon awards doing?
Having fewer Hugo awards for a year or two wouldn’t do as much damage to the award as would the award going to bad works
Nancy, I do respect your views, but tell me with a straight face that the 2014 short story winner was the best of its kind? The most I can say for it is (a) it would make a decent SF story if edited with a chainsaw and an old-school editor who would make the writer explain just what the heck is going on with the magic water and forget about settling childhood scores by presenting the narrator’s sister as a thundering bitch (b) thanks be to Klono it prevented “If I Weren’t Such A Drippy Wet Haddock’s Bathing Suit” – I mean “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” – from winning.
There’s a couple things on the entire 2014 list I’d throw my eye over but there’s an awful lot that would have me going “Nah, think I’ll look up some of those dirt-cheap reprint anthologies of 50s skiffy on Amazon instead”.
Deiseach, I agree that “The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere” wasn’t worthy of a Hugo, but it was only one short story.
I can’t say it was worse than Wright’s or Beale’s nominees (some of them in other years).
John Schilling, I should check more carefully.
The reason I weighed in on the puppy/anti-puppy issue was that it gets to me that it was portrayed as a situation where the puppies had reasonable complaints, but horrible people were insisting on ignoring them.
Admittedly, there is no such thing as scientifically measuring how insulting an insult is, but there was plenty of nastiness coming from the rabids, and I think to some extent from the sads.
In roughly the sense that an honor killing is an attempt to defend rather than wreck a family, yes. But this…
This is simply false. “A Single Samurai”, Steve Diamond, was on the Sad Puppies list for 2016, but not on Beale’s Rabid Puppies list. It got a nomination, and was soundly No-Awarded.
You cannot have recalled this “only against Beale” version of No-Award actually happening, because it provably didn’t. You may recall someone saying that “No Award” was selective, and you may not them have had reason to distrust them, but that person was a damn liar or a damn fool acting as proxy for a damn liar. “No Award” was pure scorched Earth directed against anything associated with any brand of puppy.
If that’s the sort of defense these self-appointed guardians of the Hugo consider appropriate, then let the scorching continue until all of Worldcon is consumed by it.
“No Award” was an attempt by insiders to demonstrate exactly what Correia claimed: That the Hugos were by and for insiders. It succeeded (Correia’s response was, predictabley, “I told you so”). It also wrecked the Hugos (or exposed them definitively as a wreck). The only real winner was Vox Day.
What did Vox Day win?
His heart’s desire to Watch the World(con) Burn, I would guess. For sufficiently puny definitions of “burn”; no incarnation of the Joker would have been satisfied with such meager results.
A pile of skulls. Or at least asterisks. The Hugos were wrecked, partially as a result of his efforts (but mostly as a result of the puppy-kicker antics); that’s what he wanted.
What he got was making Chuck Tingle into a star, which is probably not what he had in mind.
What he got was making Chuck Tingle into a star, which is probably not what he had in mind
Probably the best thing that came out of it, absolutely hilarious, and Mr Tingle is still a more traditional-style SF writer* than much of the stuff being nominated on the anti-Puppy side 🙂
*Seriously; the first page of Space Raptor Butt Invasion – I hasten to make clear this is as far as I’ve read! – is much more traditionally skiffy in set-up, tone, and characters than, say, The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere or that other dinosaur-themed story that I won’t name anymore
Speaking of space dinosaurs, there was a sci-fi novel I read, oh maybe 15 years ago that for the life of me I cannot remember the name of, and perhaps one of you knows.
The premise was one day multi-kilometer high rocket engines emerge from the Earth’s surface, obviously wrecking lots of things. In the exploration of ancient alien engineering the protagonists discover that dinosaurs in fact survived the extinction event, had developed an advanced civilization and taken refuge on one of the moons of Mars where they still exist today. After the heroes collect the dinosaurs, the planetary engines ignite and the entire planet earth is moved to another star system which is how the aliens foster galactic civilization.
So basically the plot of Rendezvous with Rama but the aliens move the whole planet instead of just scooping up some passengers, and there’s space dinosaurs. One of the craziest books I’ve ever read that was actually published as a real novel and I have never been able to remember the name of it.
@Conrad Honcho
Cusp?
If we’re going to talk about what “the Puppies” want, it’s important to note that there were at least two and probably three distinct groups of them.
The original Larry Correia implementation of Sad Puppies, in 2013-2014, was per Correia mostly an attempt to investigate various hypotheses up to and including “The SJW contingent is rigging the vote count” by having fans from his blog insert a known number of votes for works that would otherwise get very few and see what happened. I don’t think he’d have turned down a win, but I also strongly doubt that he expected one. It was in any event a very small-scale activity that could not greatly disrupt the Hugos. And I believe he did properly report back that the votes counted by the Hugos matched the votes pledged by his fans closely enough to refute the fraud hypothesis. The echo chamber hypothesis remains credible.
Note that for this purpose, it is appropriate to nominate a non-Hugo-worthy book, to avoid signal contamination.
Post-Correia Sad Puppies were an attempt to counter the perceived echo chamber by a smaller but more focused effort to nominate works of the sort desired by the fans who felt themselves locked out. I do not believe that this group ever wanted “all the prizes” in any serious sense. The mechanics of the Hugos at that time meant that simple nomination slates could, if sufficiently popular, entirely lock out the opposition. When this happened to multiple categories in 2015, the Sad Puppies changed the mechanics of their slate to prevent it happening in 2016.
The Rabid Puppies were a parallel effort by Vox Day to explicitly destroy the credibility of the Hugos by filling as much of the ballot as possible with works that only a Rabid (or very Sad) Puppy could love, and by provoking the SJW contingent to visible overreaction. Day tried to do this from within the Sad Puppy team when Correia left, and was told to take a hike. When the overlapping Sad/Rabid Puppy slates locked out multiple categories in 2015, he tried to do the exact same thing in 2016 – and failed because it was just the Rabid Puppies doing that.
I am differently sympathetic to all three groups and goals, but they are three different things. Claiming that “the Puppies” did X or want Y is probably at least half wrong unless X and Y are very broadly defined – and I don’t think any broadly accurate categorization is going to be a terribly objectionable one.
I’m somewhat skeptical of the extent to which the later claimed goals of stat analysis were -primary- (rather than an added bonus claimed to be primary after the fact in a bit of sour grapes reasoning), and I was following the thing on both sides from the start, but aside from that I think John’s summation is entirely accurate.
And Nancy, ChaosHorizon has done and continues to do a lot of very solid and transparent number crunching on various SFF awards (I recommend their blog in its entirety), and their analysis was that the “No Award” discipline and coordination was actually much tighter than the “sad puppies” bloc.
I didn’t say “No Award” wasn’t coordinated, I said it wasn’t an effort to wreck the Hugos.
That explanation only holds water if the people voting no award sincerely believed that there were no works in the category that year that merited an award. Notably suggested by GRRM as his preferred criteria.
However, he was making that point precisely because the dominant view at the time (and the trend displayed in the actual voting) was “No Award Any Work That Recieved Positive Mention By The Other Side Regardless Of Quality”, with quite a few prominent writers and editors stating things like
“Gee, sure is too Bad Author X was nominated by the Puppies. Their book is awesome, and in another year I quite possibly would have voted for them. However, in order to suitably demonstrate that the Puppies MUST not be allowed to influence this process, we must vote No Award over ANY work they could support!”
And I didn’t say that “No Award” wasn’t political or in some cases unfair. I especially think Burnside’s “The Hot Equations” deserved a Hugo, and I voted for it, though I generally went with “No Award”.
What I said was that “No Award” wasn’t an effort to wreck the Hugos.
@Nancy- ‘What I said was that “No Award” wasn’t an attempt to wreck the Hugos.’
When I see Hugo Award Winner on a book printed in the last thirty years, I expect writing at the level of a Star Trek novelization, but, wait, D party talking points! Woo!
Some few exceptions. Few. I don’t care if Vox Day wrecks today’s Hugos. They’ve burned that brand.
Thirty years is way too long. Cyteen, Hyperion, A Fire Upon the Deep, Doomsday Book, The Diamond Age, all really good books, and that’s only the first ten years. I was comparatively less impressed with Speaker for the Dead, but it’s hardly a liberal mouthpiece. (Also less impressed with Green Mars, which kinda was. Haven’t read the other four.)
Looking through the list of Hugos, I don’t start seeing nominations for books I’ve avoided for likely being too preachy until 2012.
What definition of “wreck the Hugos” does not properly include this behavior? Are you relying on the fact that they only wrecked it for that year (and presumably committed to wrecking any future year until the puppies gave up)?
They didn’t say they wanted to wreck the Hugos.
They came up with a method which would allow some representation for ballots without letting ballots swamp the Hugos.
I guess what I’m saying is that from my perspective, and I’ll admit that it may BE a matter of opinion, that behavior was in fact, if not in intention, damaging to the Hugos and to convention-going fandom in general.
I can only speak for my personal reaction, of course, but as a right/libertarian-ish leaning fan of long standing who felt that the Sad Puppies were mucking up but had some valid points, I came away from 2015 with the message that My Kind were very much Persona Non Grata in the long-term and established circles of capital-F Fandom, and I altered my participation in social circles and plans to attend various conventions accordingly.
I regret that fandom has become less fun for you, and I hope I haven’t made matters worse.
Is there anything you recommend? I’m looking forward to the third Torchship novel by Karl Gallegher. The series strikes me as capable of appealing to both puppies and anti-puppies.
No, you haven’t made things worse, you have always conducted yourself well here and while I don’t entirely share your view of the whole affair that’s probably to be expected, and I’m capable of disagreeing with someone without feeling like they’re a threat ;). It’s more the “people like this have no place in the community we are building” rhetoric, which you have not engaged in.
My tastes in SF are relatively broad, and I can tolerate a fair amount of little digs and asides that I think are transparent to some readers.
So, what are your tastes?
In space opera, my go-to recent/still publishing authors I don’t think enough people have read are Alastair Reynolds and Neal Asher.
For what I’d term “Hugo Bait” (the sort of grand big idea fiction with very solid technical chops that -I- would nominate), after being pretty disappointed by Ada Palmer’s follow-up to Too Like The Lightning I am less willing to recommend that, but I’ll still recommend Peter Watts’ Blindsight, Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief and sequels, and Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit (I think this is actually in the running for 2017).
And I’m out of time and have to run to work, but if you can elaborate on your tastes I’ll try and think up some more for when I get home.
OK, no point in beating around the bush on this. I believe that the Hugo awards since 2010 have been characterized by actual bigotry, to an intolerable degree. And by “since 2010” I mean a clear break which coincides almost exactly with the timing of Racefail.
In late 2015, approximately Peak Puppy, I tried to quantify the various claims regarding bias in the Hugos by picking twelve largely objective criteria by which any SF novel could be readily evaluated and which I suspected would correspond with a work’s “SJW appeal”. I do not consider this to be a perfect measure by any means, but it is one to which I could precommit without the possibility of cherrypicking and with little room for evaluation bias. Call the result a “Social Justice Index”, where the (purely theoretical) minimum score of -12 is Manly White Guy STEM Nerd Adventures in Space and +12 is a travelogue of the Feminist Socialist Womyn of Color Utopia. A sampling of race-neutral, gender-neutral, politically neutral science fiction with equal weighting on the science and the fiction should average to zero.
I never had time to do a full and proper statistical analysis on this measurement, and that’s probably not going to change soon. I’m still greatly disturbed by what I did find.
Counting every Hugo best novel nominee from 1959 to 2009, there’s a broad scatter at the individual level but also a steady trend from an average of -2.4 in the early years to -0.7 by the end. Linear fit, with standard deviation +/- 2.3. And the winners are evenly spread across this range, with the same trend. Nerdy white guy bias, because duh, but weak and getting better.
2010, the first post-Racefail year, that goes to +1.7, and from then to present (but excluding the various Puppy nominees) a steady rise to +2.4. That’s a statistically significant one-year jump greater than the previous fifty years combined, and it’s not a fluke. And the winners, rather than being uniformly distributed, are in the top half of the distribution with a mean score of +3.3. Digging deeper, the three dominant factors contributing to the shift are the race and gender of the author, the explicitly stated political views (if any) of the author, and the race and gender of the protagonists. There are weaker content indicators that I will summarize as “no nerds allowed”.
The past three years, the non-Puppy best-novel nominees consist of nine by women, one by a transgender person, and two by a nonwhite male. That’s it. That wasn’t acceptable when it was reversed in 1959-1962, and it shouldn’t be acceptable now. Looking at the detailed nomination statistics, it looks like without any Puppy influence Sad or Rabid we probably would have gotten either Kim Stanley Robinson or Neal Stephenson in 2016. One token white guy is still not acceptable.
I believe that there is an echo chamber at work in the subset of fandom that sets the standard for Worldcon and the Hugos, that this echo chamber is properly characterized as a bunch of actual bigots, and that the result is a community that is more hostile to Nerdy White Guys now than it was to everybody else fifty years ago. I believe that it unlikely that novels I would like will ever again win the Hugo except by way of their authors passing a de facto race/gender/politics litmus test along the way. As a Nerdy White Guy, my decision to absent myself from fandom in 2008 is looking pretty good right now, and absent a credible plan to salvage Worldcon or the Hugos I see no reason to tolerate their current owners trading on a reputation they do not deserve.
There’s more to say, but I think you’re mistaken about what maximum SJW sf looks like. However, making the changes I suggest will probably just make the effect on the Hugos look more extreme.
“and +12 is a travelogue of the Feminist Socialist Womyn of Color Utopia”
SJW doesn’t deal in utopias, or at least give me some examples if I’ve missed something. To my mind, one of the more tiresome things about SJW sf is the background assumption that oppression is roughly the same in all times and places.
I’ve hit something of a limit on sf about misogyny– I don’t feel a strong need to read about people like me being hated. This may well have something to do with my having run into much less misogyny than a lot of women have, but still there it is.
The other thing is that SJW sf has a strong tendency to be magical realism. Admittedly, this is a hard thing to define, but I think of it as fantasy with little worldbuilding.
I’d expect it to look like “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” only with PoC women and more preaching, but it probably doesn’t exist; hard to push a grievance philosophy with no grievances, and it’s tough to write utopia without being exceptionally boring.
Ah, sorry if I was unclear. +12 would be the theoretical limit of my scoring system, which might be achieved by the hypothetical FSWoCU story but which has never been seen in nature. The record for actual Hugo winners is +5, for Le Guin’s “The Disposessed”, which is not any sort of utopia. At the other extreme, the record is -6 for “Starship Troopers”, “Ringworld”, and “Deepness in the Sky”. Include losing nominees and the range goes from -10 to +6. To hit -12, I’m not sure even the novel-within-a-novel from “Iron Dream” would qualify.
I did score stories equally which had race/gender conflict as a major plot element and stories which had an explicit means of preventing race/gender conflict as a major part of the worldbuilding – either seemed a priori like the sort of thing social justice would favor in its fiction; if you and I would rather not have the heavy dose of misogyny but Team SJ would rather not have a comfortable utopia, that shouldn’t affect the evaluation either way.
Magical realism isn’t something I thought of including, but I did include STEM background for either the author or protagonist, and technological development as a major plot element, all of which would correlate by their absence with magical realism. But also with traditional fantasy. Those indicators are in any event weaker contributors to the observed shift, but not negligible.
“The Iron Dream” was basically an Animal Farm-style pastiche of the Nazi Party’s early history done as an Edgar Rice Burroughs plot, so I doubt it’d break -6 no matter how the details of your scale work. Too many concessions either to genre or to history.
“Watch on the Rhine” might, though.
-9, but there are a couple of points that come from the story’s setting/worldbuilding and default to zero for contemporary Earth. Hmm, Michael Z. Williamson’s “The Weapon” might make -12, but I really don’t want to go back and revisit that one. Pournelle’s “The Mercenary”, ditto but slightly more rereadable.
Maybe I need to go re-read Starship Troopers again, but, that whole section early on talking about the government brainwashing the troops with images of aliens raping earth women with massive purple members … doesn’t seem maximally anti-SJW to me. I mostly got a “war is hell” vibe out of the whole book (long ago, admittedly).
Perhaps I read from a post-Vietnam viewpoint, and Wikipedia’s summary seems to disagree with me, but Heinlein himself says it glorified the infantry (and presumably by that disparages the officer corps, as is long tradition).
That would be why Starship Troopers only scores a -6 on a scale where “maximally anti-SJW” would be a -12. If the maximally anti-SJW book has ever been written (paging Vox Day…), it was never successfully nominated for a Hugo.
@ HeelBearCub
I reread it a couple years back (admittedly after getting into an argument about how misogynistic/racist it was) and would describe it’s general vibe as “If war is hell why do people seem to enjoy it so much?”. Heinlein being Heinlein* tries to answer this question. This gets interpreted as “advocating Fascism/Militarism” which, to be fair, it sort of is, but if that’s all that someone takes away from the book I’d say it’s clear they weren’t paying attention.
*The sort of man for whom the whys and what fors of how different social structures develop and spread are a personal hobby-horse.
That was from The Forever War.
@John Schilling – “If the maximally anti-SJW book has ever been written (paging Vox Day…), it was never successfully nominated for a Hugo.”
Never read any of Vox Day’s stuff, but I have read some Ringo. If there’s a book out there that could hit a -12, I’d bet on Ringo for the author.
Nah, Kratman by a mile. Even at his most offensive to that particular sector of values, Ringo is tame by comparison.
Kratman self-identifies as an old fashioned American conservative, but my assessment of him is that he’s the only writer I’ve read to which the term “Fascist” could -actually- be fairly applied, based on the way he seems to feel about the ideas in the Legion Del Cid books.
I would say that the major reason ST isn’t maximally anti-SJW is Johnny’s modest level of achievement. The happy ending is that he becomes a lieutenant, (This is from memory.)
He doesn’t achieve high rank or political power. He doesn’t defeat the Bugs.
Also, pilots are women, and there’s at least some effort at portraying a society which isn’t culturally biased.
“Perhaps I read from a post-Vietnam viewpoint, and Wikipedia’s summary seems to disagree with me, but Heinlein himself says it glorified the infantry (and presumably by that disparages the officer corps, as is long tradition).”
No, if it’s military porn, it’s because it’s about a military where everyone is basically decent and competent.
Since I’m not a military person myself, I’m might be missing some subtleties, but the tone is that the MI (Mobile Infantry) is great, but there’s not a lot of focus on anything else being inferior.
The main thing I took away about the infantry is that no one else can hold territory, and my impression that this is correct.
Fine distinctions in which branch or level of military service is being glorified are inherently subjective, so my scoring gives a flat -1 if the protagonist is a member of the armed forces during wartime for most of the story and the story isn’t a dystopia or parody.
Where ST “fails” as a maximal anti-social-justice tract, by my preestablished rules:
1. Johnny Rico is technically a Person of Color. I’d feel guilty counting that given how well Heinlein palms the card for most of the story, but then he’s also got women serving as combat pilots in 1960, so the technicality stays.
2. He doesn’t express any political views of his own beyond (eventually) generic service-ethic patriotism, and the politics of the society he’s serving are already part of the score
3. Most of the story is set on a generic Earth, rather than on the High Frontier, nor are any scientific or technological frontiers explored in a significant way.
4. Published by the boringly generic G.P. Putnam’s rather than e.g. Analog, Baen, or any other publishing house with a reputation for White STEM Nerd Adventure Fiction.
5. Another technicality, but Robert Heinlein never actually won the Robert Heinlein award, nor the Prometheus Award, both also strongly correlated with White STEM Nerd Adventure Fiction.
It’s probably not possible to write a -12 or a +12 by design, because several of the points depend on (weighted) luck. Still, there’s lots of things Heinlein could have done to offend the cause or proponents of Social Justice and conspicuously didn’t.
One point nobody has mentioned … . The ability of a clique to control a genre partly depends on a small number of gate keepers, most of which can be controlled by the clique. The rise of self-publishing as a viable option means that that is decreasingly the case.
I think there’s two problems and I don’t see how they’re going to be reconciled (not with the battle lines drawn up as currently):
(a) Representation matters. I have managed to get this through my thick skull and broadly I agree that yes, if you’re a young black girl reading SF/F and seeing nobody like you between the covers of the book, it’s hard to feel included in the great embrace of fandom. So I do see why there are attempts to move it more towards “let’s have more women writers, POC writers, non-mainstream writers and characters and societies that are not 50s America in space”. Novels like this do not have to be bad or unappealing; I love Samuel Delany’s Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, for instance, though I probably disagree with Delany on nearly (not quite all, but nearly) everything politically, the cause and course of sexual liberation, and so forth. But Delany can write damn well.
Ursula LeGuin, too, is a good writer, though I was disappointed with the way she ended the last of the Earthsea books and the direction they took. Ah well, that’s what fanfiction is for! And she had the sense of humour and guts to write the Feminist Womyn Socialist Utopia story where it’s very definitely not one, in The New Atlantis. Again, I probably disagree with her about everything politically, but she’s an honest opponent and a good writer. And for nothing else, I have to be grateful to her for standing up for genre fiction (unlike the likes of Margaret Atwood, who much prefer to be classed on the literary fiction side of the matter and want to eat their cake and have it).
(b) Trouble is, when pushing the non-mainstream representation, they’ve kind of gone to the opposite extreme where box-checking: non-white? yes! non-Western? even better! non-straight? oh we’re hitting the jackpot here! non-male? ah darn just as it was going so well but maybe we can let this one squeak through on the first three points? is more important than the actual content or form of the story.
(I will die on the hill that “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” is a disgrace to the art of writing in general and not just SF/F, and all the people gushing about it being so poetic and so forth and so on had me shaking my head in disbelief about “did we read the same bit of damp blotting paper?”)
SJW doesn’t deal in utopias, or at least give me some examples if I’ve missed something.
I absolutely have to agree with Nancy Lebovitz there; China Miéville is probably a half-way decent writer but I find him unreadable because there’s just too much grimdark for the sake of it and wallowing in the misery (until the Socialist Utopia arrives and even there he’ll make it sound more like Orwell’s 1984).
Mieville varies a lot– he’s written some books I can’t get into, and some (notably Perdido Street Station) that I can’t believe I liked, but Railsea is a ridiculous funhouse ride with no respect for the cube-square law and some intellectual bits and Un Lun Dun is full of puns and surrealism and as I recall has a tbbq tbireazrag happy ending.
Miéville is one of the most imaginative guys I’ve ever read and I really like his early stuff, though it is very heavy on the grimdark. The intrusive politics mar what would otherwise be first-rate fantasy — I can almost hear him snarling “fucking pigs” over his keyboard anytime the militia shows up in the Bas-Lag books — but I still think he’s an excellent writer.
His later stuff is technically better, subtler about the politics if not really less political, and usually better on the high-concept front, but for some reason it lacks the lightning-in-a-bottle quality that Bas-Lag had for me.
As somebody right-aligned, but not at all involved in that community, this reminds me of Scott’s “free speech as commons” post.
Moderate-left: “What you’re doing will destroy the commons!”
Right: “The commons was destroyed when you let them lock the commoners out of it.”
I dont understand why I’m not allowed to defend myself.
I never crit Dr Hsu on cognitive genomics or AI– he’s absolutely peerless.
Only on conservative tendency.
I think Very Interesting is a sock puppet of someone else, and only made this login to attack me.
Not fair.
bintchaos, you appear to have two principal poles to your thought.
(1) Science is the answer, especially when it comes to understanding the workings of the brain and from that human consciousness and group psychology. If we understand this, we can devise methods to come up with solutions to social problems and overcome racism, greed, the whole mess of human imperfection. God(s) need not apply, we don’t need anything more than the physical and material explanations of empirical science.
(2) Islam is the most memetically fit competitor in the world today; Muslim populations will make up a quarter of the world population and this percentage will only increase. Governments in those nations will not be secular democracies but some form of Islamic government. The West is going to be out-competed by this and will succumb, as its systems (secular democracy) are too weak and unappealing to the minds formed by the Qu’ran, which cannot be edited into a Western- and secularism-friendly version. Hence there will not be an “Islamic Reformation” and the future belongs to the religious – as long as that religion is Islam.
Given these two principles, what is your solution? Do you see a clash between Faith and Science, except this time round Islam will not give in as easily as Christianity did? You criticise people with prominence in the public eye for not educating their base on climate change, healthcare and creationism, but why will someone in Indonesia, Southern Nigeria, or Turkey care about being educated on creationism, given that they believe in a strong version of this anyway? If the future is Muslim, what place does your complexity science and socio-physics have in a world where government is “rule by Allah”?
You have a lot of sneering on your blog about the dumb red brains, but you have nothing except “liberal democracy is dead” on the other side. So what is going to be the result, in your opinion? Great, America gets a liberal supermajority in 2050 and that lasts forever, but by then there is a Muslim nation supermajority in the world as well and secular liberal democracy is dead in the water in those nations; the white West is now toothless and powerless and the brown peoples will take over.
So what happens your world of science and educated liberal thought then?
I often hear conservatives claiming that liberal thought is on board with science, skepticism, et al. unless and until it says something bad about Islam, but this is probably the first time I’ve actually seen it in the wild with this kind of clarity. It’s just too perfect a stereotype, like someone claiming that God gave us guns to shoot them commie [racial slur redacted] would be on the other side.
It’s one of the things that made me think troll at first, though I’m not so sure about that now. But, Poe’s law.
I would have said “unless it implies the possibility of racial or gender differences that matter.” That’s surely a more central issue.
More central to the real Left, but not necessarily the imaginary Left that lives inside conservatives’ heads.
I’ve heard both versions, though.
I genuinely want an answer off bintchaos, because if I take their blog seriously, they anticipate the collapse of democracy in even a pretended form in the Near and Middle East (including Turkey) while the USA will eventually with the help of science and education achieve a liberal majority of good blue-brain people (and so help me God, they really are banging on about red and blue brains).
But this happy land of liberalism will be no damn good because it can’t stand up to Islam, which is going to be the dominant ideology of a significant and growing chunk of the global population. It can’t liberalise and democratise the Muslim countries and it can only get weaker by comparison.
So what is the point, then? Or is there a point? They appear to be avoiding the inevitable conclusion to their theory of the future (which is in broad agreement with Kevin C.’s view of the decline of his people and their culture, but more pessimistic in that the victorious Left itself will then collapse and be overtaken by a resurgent and dominant Islam) and instead diverting themself with a project of cognitive science (I can’t even say “putting their eggs in the basket” of this new social engineering project because they don’t seem to think it will work on Islam).
Though I am deriving some faint shreds of amusement from bintchaos’ determination that Real Science involves maths (but not, apparently, spelling and grammar and not littering every sentence with the academic equivalent of business buzzword acronyms) and things like biology and genetics are only Applied Science. Well, a common attitude, sez you.
Ah, but bintchaos includes sociology – or at least, their version of it entitled “socio-physics” – as Real Hard Science because (I imagine) it includes statistics. Whereas geneticists have to preferentially select for polydactyly if they want to count past ten, I suppose? They have either invented or are attending some kind of course calling itself “socio-physics”; I wonder what real physicists’ opinion of this new field is? 🙂
I know I’m only a poor ignorant former lab tech with an applied biology background and not a Real Scientist like someone doing sociology, but one word of advice: if you’re going to refer to Homo sapiens sapiens in the short form, it’s H. sapiens sapiens, not h. sapiens sapiens. The convention is to capitalise the initial of the genus part of the name, as in C. botulinum and S. aureus
Well Lord God, and I thought I was being sarcastic when I thought to myself “so does socio-physics or social physics consider human interactions to be the people version of Brownian motion?”
Looked up bintchaos’ textbook for the course they say they are taking (written by the founding father of the field!) and this is the start of the blurb:
Remind me again, folks, of all the guys who are sure, sure they have a beat-the-market system because they’re Real Scientists who understand how systems work, and the stock market is only a system? 🙂
(So if this is a textbook for a university course, binti is studying either at the University of Warsaw or Brigham Young University, from what I can make out with a quick Google).
By the bye, the guy who wrote this book and is the founding father of the field, Serge Galam, apparently predicted Marine Le Pen would win the election.
And they’re charging $209 for the ebook? binti, demand your money back!
They’re also being a little bit naughty claiming Professor Galam is the founding father who invented sociophysics thirty years ago; according to this, it was a term coined in the 50s by an astrophysicist and engineer named Stewart at Princeton, building on work in the field of “social physics” which originated in the 19th century.
I’m disappointed that it’s not being called “psychohistory”, but maybe that doesn’t sound mathy enough. (And it probably doesn’t work, but that’s a given.)
$209 is, unfortunately, pretty typical for textbooks, e- or otherwise. I remember being charged about that much once for a literal three-ring binder containing about four dozen photocopied pages; I wasn’t happy.
You mean these guys?
As amusing as that pair of images is, and as easy as bintchaos is making that brand of amusement, it’s also rather close to doxxing and probably oughtn’t be followed any further.
A brief look at the blog left me wondering whether they were imagining that red tribe and blue tribe were separate breeding populations, and had been for many generations.
@Nornagest
I had a professor apologize to us for the price of his own book (it had just come out and he didn’t know yet how high it would be priced, when he made it a requirement for the course). He suggested we make photocopies ourselves.
Does anyone else think what Deiseach is doing here is inappropriate?
@HBC
Which part? I agree with John regarding the localization/doxxing comment given Bintchaos’ previous statements, so Deiseach I’d suggest laying off the stuff that would contribute to localizing them.
That said, I don’t think it’s inappropriate to raise the basic questions about the underlying science/research ideas, though the tone is starting to cross the line into mean-spirited, IMO.
@HeelBearCub
Only with regards to the mentioning of the universities. That comes too close to doxxing, which I believe may be a mortal sin, but I’d have to check my catechism. Besides that bintchaos asked why he, a person self-professed to have extreme difficulty with empathy, when posting on a blog whose mission statement is intellectual charity, is getting negative reactions to his sweeping statements of the righteousness of his tribe and utter depravity of the opposing tribe. Deiseach is answering bint’s question.
I’m disappointed that it’s not being called “psychohistory”
It absolutely should be, but I wonder if there is a faint suspicion someone might recognise the term? 🙂
Agreed that I shouldn’t have added in the universities, but I was trying to figure out if this was a real academic course or one of those online “buy my series and become a genius” type things. Since the history of the field mentioned Princeton and Harvard, I was trying to see if they still ran courses on a subject named “socio physics” whether using the textbook or not. BYU and Warsaw were the only two that came up as currently running such courses, but I wasn’t trying to track down bintchaos as such. Apologies for that.
I am trying to grapple with bintchaos’ thought rather than stick to making sarcastic and mocking comments. As far as I can make out, their views are broadly (1) conservatism as an ideology is a dead duck in the 21st century. Education makes you liberal, and a university degree is the only hope for everyone hoping to get a job in the automated future. Besides which, they are going full-on for some phenotypical “conservatives have big fear centres while liberals have big taking in new information centres in their brains, so there’s a genotypic and phenotypic difference between red and blue” theory – in sum, liberalism is going to win due to a confluence of various factors, including but not limited to red brains being dumber – yes, they quote an IQ 90 figure for ‘typically’ red occupations like the army and police (2) Islam is a strong memetic competitor that is going to wipe the floor with secular democracy. The global future is Muslim. Western conservatism can’t stand up to it, but neither can Western liberalism; the best they can achieve is that the rich Saudi playboys like the “whiskey! sexy!” part of “democracy! whiskey! sexy!” but have no truck with or need for the “democracy!” part. So two cultures are going to clash in the near to mid term, and clash hard, and Islam may well win. Ergo, we’re all buggered.
Unless SCIENCE!!!, which they do not adequately explain as to how it’s going to overcome or liberalise Muslim nations with Islamic governments – it really is the “and then profit!” step in their argument, which isn’t even an argument, merely a collection of “hay guyz check dis out!” posts
I am groping towards a vague synthesis of the hodge-podge of posts on their blog, which seems to lead to a hope that
psychohistorysocio-physics will save us all, as the theory of mind and mass social dynamics worked out there can be applied to nudge the dominant Islamic governments in places like Turkey onto a more liberal path (perhaps looking backwards to the glory days of the tolerant – or so it is presented as being – Abbasid Caliphate? In which case it’s back to the future with a vengeance, and in a fashion that makes conservative idylls of the Golden Ages past look mealy-mouthed by contrast!)@Conrad Honcho
That is not what happened. Deiseach looked stupid on The Incoherence of the Philosophers and Ghazali, and she couldn’t attack Qays so she attacked me. And I’m a girl, and I dont know why you would want to spin that unless you are doing your own version of Fearless Girl with Deiseach in the starring role of bravely facing down the big bad bull(y) of liberal academia and scientific research.
That aside, I am afraid. I have never seen that quantity or quality of raw unmitigated hatred on the internet or IRL. I take her implied threat of raising a lynch mob to doxx me very seriously. And the act would totally be rationalized into “she brought it on herself”, just like the HUGO awards deserved the Puppies trying to wreck the awards. The Ann Coulter defense. Interestingly Ann Coulter also said that muslims should evolve into christians or something like that.
The whole “Ghazali would be a christian” spew was utterly irrational and quite nuts.
So no, I dont want to be a SSC commenter anymore.
‘k thanx bye.
@Deiseach
One last thing…
You obviously have read neither al-Ghazali or Isaac Azimov.
Psychohistory is Hari Seldon, a scifi character.
Social physics (an entirely different thing) is Dr. Alex Pentland, MIT media lab.
Sociophysics is the application of mathematical rigor and properties of physics to large scale complex adaptive social systems.
@ HeelBearCub
FWIW add mine to Trofim’s voice above.
@Trofim @hlynkacg:
How much is Deiseach actually raising basic questions?
To me almost all of what she is doing here is substituting tone for argument.
Consider:
That’s not a critique or even a question, it’s just a spasmodic expression of what? disgust? superiority?
@bintchaos
The fact that you believed that others did not recognize the reference is almost a perfect summary of your participation here.
Their entire point people have been making by bringing it up is that “sociophysics”, as described, sounds more or less like it’s the same thing as “psychohistory” is in those works of science fiction, done by someone who thinks they invented a way to make it work in real life.
(For my part, the Foundation series was the first Asimov I read.)
@all
yeah, that’s how you are going to spin it, but its not what happened.
Deiseach looked stupid on Ghazali, and even though Qays corrected her much more than I did, she turned on me and attacked me vehemently.
Deiseach has attacked me since day one.
Blame the victim.
Its only intellectual charity if its available to both sides.
If its exclusively for one side than its just intellectual welfare.
That’s not a critique or even a question, it’s just a spasmodic expression of what? disgust? superiority?
Amazement that a stupid thought that crossed my mind was then repeated back to me in the blurb for the textbook bintchaos is touting as the great course that is in a field that is going to revolutionise human society and change all that we know as to how humans interact and co-operate.
bintchaos: you came on here and started touting your ideas. Did you serioiusly expect no questioning or pushback when you were tra-la-laing about conservatism being dead in the water and the forthcoming triumph of liberalism, as well as doing an imitation of “an Arabic version of a weeaboo”?
I still think you have not explained or resolved the contradiction between your invocation of al-Ghazali, who clearly supports a theistic version of creation, over the sniping you did about persons in the public eye not “educating their base” about creationism: explain, and as I said, not on the basis that the difference is that al-Ghazali is not a white Christian!
If you are going to purvey thoughts like the following, you need to stand up and defend them, not expect us to fold like a cheap deckchair when you start flinging around “this is sexism! senior white males telling me off!” This is not the campus of Evergreen State College and having a foot-stamping tantrum about “subjective history informed by Dead White Guy Philosophy with a heavy gloss of anglo-saxon cultural chauvinism” impresses exactly no-one, not even those on your side of the political fence.
As to why you think I’ve gone after you – well, you declared yourself to be an “Aspie positive” (back when you were claiming all manner of things). You should therefore be aware of the fixation on a new object of interest that people on the autism spectrum display, and you managed to attract my attention as my new object of interest.
Infant, you have no idea what a real character attack is. If you think my prodding was such, you have led a sheltered life. I’d rather “look stupid” in my interpretation of an Islamic theologian who does not support your atheist materialist universe view of creation (or creationism) than be a – daughter of chaos?
If all you can fall back on is “I’m a victim, halp halp I is bein’ oppressed”, then how on earth are you going to stand up to a thesis examination when you will be expected to stand over and rigorously defend what you are proposing (and that with a properly spelled and grammatically written printed out copy according to the recognised conventions, not your scatter of misspellings, text speak, and wilful ignoring of how biological naming conventions are used)? Do you really think “lol read Prof Galam, senior white guyz, its a Sinner v Sinner TFT” is going to cut it?
Was the above harsh? Yes. I think you’re probably a bright child who has skated by on a broad but shallow knowledge of a scatter of subjects, accustomed to being praised and caressed by adults for your precocity, and you tried the same thing here. Unfortunately for you, old white guys (and gals) know and recognise and even have lived some of the things you are tossing about as cultural references, and can contradict you out of knowledge and experience of our own. You are not going to impress anyone on here by referring to yourself as a “hard-core sci-fi otaku” because we’ve read the Foundation trilogy and other works (possibly before you were even born), and explaining to us about Hari Seldon is teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.
When you drop the affectations and communicate a point in a sensible manner, you do sound intelligent and worth engaging, even if you are still in your salad days. However, if you adopt a persona that causes you to interact with others in a flippant, shoulder-shrugging manner of “I am too cool for school”, you will be responded to in the same way.
Try assuming that you need to lay out your argument in a coherent, cogent manner and provide more back-up than “Dr This One’s study” (because child, the problems with fMRI scans as used in neuroscience explanations of ‘we’ve found the part of the brain that makes you vote Republican’ have been discussed on here before) and “Professor That One’s book” – it’s called the argument from authority and does not stand on its own as sufficient grounds when arguing a case on here.
You claim to be a university student; you have provided no approximation of your age, so that means I am assuming you are somewhere in your very early 20s (which would make me old enough to be your mother and why I can get away with the older person’s habit of calling the young “child”). There are people here who have completed courses of studies at a high level, who have academic careers of their own, or if not that, careers in many fields or interests they have nurtured and cultivated over time. Please try to imagine that this means we are not all 90 IQ red brains on here so your air of intellectual superiority and enlightening the masses comes across very badly.
And I’m a girl
So am I. What’s that got to do with the price of apples? I thought you were a liberal! Do you not believe in the equality of the sexes? Are you really retreating into “help, I am a poor defenceless damsel”? I’m a conservative, and my mother would turn in her grave if I pulled that and ran away crying from anyone.
I take her implied threat of raising a lynch mob to doxx me very seriously.
Okay, I’m appealing to a jury of my peers here. Did you think that was what I was doing? Is that how it read to you? If so (by a simple majority) then I’ll voluntarily absent myself from commenting on here at all for a period of time.
For what it’s worth, I was not trying to doxx or threaten you. I don’t approve of such behaviour and what am I going to do, get a slavering horde of SSC commenters to write pained emails to your university about “we find some parts of her thesis unclear, can you influence her to go into more detail”? I don’t have a mob I can call up at a moment’s notice to harass someone, I can’t even get three people together to go out for Sunday lunch! If my attempt to figure out if “socio-physics” was an actual academic subject, by looking to see what if any universities offered it, made you feel threatened then I apologise because that was not my intent.
That aside, I am afraid. I have never seen that quantity or quality of raw unmitigated hatred on the internet or IRL.
Have you lived your life wrapped in cotton wool inside a matchbox under a glass case? How very quickly you have turned from ‘fearlessly confident in your own intellectual superiority because you are a blue brain and on the winning side of history’ to ‘eek oh no somebody three thousand miles away across an ocean is being mean to me on the Internet’.
If I really frighten you, you must be very easily frightened. I had no idea you were that timid and I do apologise and no, that’s not sarcastic, if you’re that nervous and anxious then I had no idea and will endeavour to be sympathetic.
I will remark that my notions of what counts as “this is a scary threat” may have been influenced by a job where my employer instructed me I should be ready and willing to be stabbed rather than hand over the contents of the till to a knife-wielding robber. Words on screen therefore don’t hold the same weight of apparent threat as “oh yes, you know all those armed robberies in the local area on the news? well this is what we want our staff to do – ” for me.
The whole “Ghazali would be a christian” spew was utterly irrational and quite nuts.
Which is not what I said. I said al-Ghazali believed in a creator God, and if brought forward into our times and had the “Science vs Religion” wars about ‘teaching evolution/creationism in school’ put before him, he would be on the side of Faith and “God made the universe, is the preserver and cause of its continuance, and directly intervenes as His will pleases”. I think it’s plain that al-Ghazali believed in Allah? Or that he can be said to have held that Faith was equal to, or indeed superior to, Human Reason in some questions? Can anyone direct me to where he says “yeah no Allah is only a metaphor”?
Have some pride, girl, and stand up and make your points and develop your case. You seem to be linking three things, from what I can make out of your blog:
(1) Conservatism is dead, it can’t adapt and is ill-fitted for the present and future situation. This means
(2) The victory of Liberalism. Save that this is a Pyrrhic victory, as Islam is the new challenger, growing globally, and memetically immune to Liberalism’s values, which means disaster unless
(3) The science, philosophy, practice of, or government by, socio-physics can save us, as by understanding the complex system of human interactions and social and cultural behaviours, this will permit us to mould, guide, shape and influence such. This is the only way we can channel the Islamic-influenced governments of the global (sometime to be) majority demographic into forms that will be compatible with Western values and allow some kind of survival of Liberalism.
If I am misunderstanding you, then point out where and clear up the error. Tell me what it is that your course of study or theory or thesis is pointing at or aiming towards. This is your chance! Write your analysis of the modern state of society, the pitfalls, and the proposed solution to them!
@bintchaos says:
I apologize for misgendering you, but I don’t see how I was spinning anything. I actually initially wrote that post with “he or she” instead of “he,” etc, but it sounded awful so I used the standard English default of “he” for unknown genders. I also thought of using “xe” but then I was afraid people would think I was making some kind of anti-trans joke.
@Conrad Honcho
What’s wrong with “they”?
@HeelBearCub – “Does anyone else think what Deiseach is doing here is inappropriate?”
Yup. There comes a point where people just need to let things go. Report if you want, but don’t keep escalating endlessly.
@Deiseach
Speaking as one member of your hypothetical jury, Deiseach: No, I did not see your post as threatening to Doxx or summon up an internet “lynch mob”.
That said, I believe that we should take Bintchaos’ statements of how she feels as sincere, and so I would suggest that regardless of your intentions (which I don’t believe to be malicious), continuing to engage her in this or other threads is probably not going to be productive for at least the immediate future, if not longer.
If she is at the point where she actually feels afraid, future posts from you directed towards her are going to get filtered in the minimally charitable way possible, and even attempting to switch to a softer and less confrontational tone is not going to work.
So for now, at least, disengage and walk away.
@Bintchaos
I tried writing a few things here, but I going to hold off laying anything out in detail unless you actually want an attempt at constructive feedback and/or a third party opinion, beyond reiterating that I don’t think Deiseach was threatening you either explicitly or implicitly, and suggesting that you consider whether or not your self-described “empathy wall” may extent to making it more difficult to model someone like her and thus temper your anxiety a bit.
I’d say Deiseach is right. Though bintchaos is charmingly schoolgirlish.
@rlms
It’s plural. Cop out. I do wish there were gender-neutral singular pronouns in English, not only because of people who identify as a non-specific or uncommon gender, but also because “internet.” For instance, I have no idea what gender you are because “rlms” doesn’t contain any gendered clues.
@Conrad Honcho
The singular they has a long and honourable history, and (like many other “problematic” grammatical constructions) is only considered unacceptable because pedantic 19th century grammarians didn’t like it. It’s a perfectly good way to talk about someone of unknown gender, and using it to refer to people who claim a non-binary gender is a fairly logical extension.
PS: I’m male.
Does it take a singular or plural verb? Both sound seriously wrong, applied to a singular subject, to my ear.
@Nornagast
‘Round hyeerr, on the other side of the (apparently unscalable ) empathy wall, we call that dirty tricks.
Think about it terms of payoff with the basic but useful iterated TfT.
In the iterated TfT optimal strategy is Saint v Saint. But optimal game move is copy other player strategy.
The Sad Puppies went Sinner v Saint. So the academy and voting members copied their strat.
Now its a Sinner v Sinner TfT, and no one wins.
The awards committee changed the rules so it can never happen again, and thousands of hardcore scifi otaku (like moi) will never give Correia a fair shot.
gratz, conservatives.
If I correctly understand the claims of the two sides in the controversy, you are assuming the truth of one of them. The view of the Puppies, I believe, is that the other side had long ago defected, just in a less open and obvious way, coordinating both to push some books and authors and to suppress others.
Perhaps someone who was actually involved, as I was not, can confirm or deny that interpretation of it.
This does highlight an apparent inadequacy of IPD for real world scenarios – it cannot model cases where subtle, hidden defection is possible (or can even be alleged).
A post from a Tor-published author. Some of the staff (or editors or what have you) at Tor came out with personal opinions, including allegations about writers published by their own publishing house and their readers who were on the Sad Puppy side as being – well, you can guess the kind of things they said.
There was a lot of heat and not much light generated by both sides.
@Bintchaos – “So the academy and voting members copied their strat. Now its a Sinner v Sinner TfT, and no one wins.”
No one winning is preferable to one side winning and the other losing. You may not think that’s how it was, but the other side thinks that pretty uniformly, and heavily prefer the current situation. At some point, you should ask yourself if maybe your understanding of the initial conditions are less than complete.
The alpha thing is really impressive to me in that it doesn’t sound clumsy at all.
Like Alpha Go (heh), this is one of those surprising cases in recent years where I can viscerally perceive why AI may be a concern in the future.
In the last few years I have the impression that a threshold has been crossed where computers have gone from doing only rote, mechanical things better than humans and doing creative things in cute, weird ways, to computers at least having the potential to do some creative things better than humans, or at least in ways humans seemingly never would have thought of without the aid of computers (and maybe this also speaks to our cyborg future).
Like, I can imagine someone coming up with this version of genesis without computer aid, but I would say they are a 1 in a million language talent, at least, and not just a talent, but like Alpha Go, a talent in a way I really don’t expect humans to be talented.
Based on the fact that every study I’ve seen about behavioural variation in offspring finds that there’s a lot of it, I’m leaning toward the maternal bet-hedging hypothesis rather than the microenvironment hypothesis. The interest of a parent in having at least one offspring succeed no matter the future environment seems like it would have a larger selective impact than short-term influences on the embryo which don’t predict future environments.
However, given that specific short-term influences on embryos have been found to have long-term behavioural impacts, and no mechanism for maternal bet-hedging has been found so far that I know of, I’m going out on a bit of a limb here.
Obviously, all SSC posts should be written alliteratively from now on.
Reading about the delicious sounding ammonia doused pink slime I’m reminded of Jonathan Meades’ description of the average British sausage as “a condom full of abattoir slurry”. Mind you I believe an Australian term for them is mystery bags. Yum.
there are phrases of crystalline perfection…
Various people have proposed that some questions of fact are “basilisks”–questions that must not be asked or answered or investigated openly[1], for fear of their social effects. How would we decide what qualifies as a basilisk in this sense?
As an extreme example, suppose tomorrow some clever scientist works out a way to get weapons-grade uranium from ore in a cheap, easily-concealed, very hard-to-detect way that would be within the budget of any hobbyist. You might make a pretty good argument that the world would be better off without that information floating around.
At another extreme, you can imagine various religious leaders getting together to demand an end to teaching of evolution and cosmology, since many fundamentalists think these ideas undermine their faith. I assume we can all agree here that it would be bad to see information about the theory of evolution suppressed.
So what would be the properties that would make something a basilisk? What, if any, questions of fact or morality should simply be suppressed?
[1] Or maybe things that may be known among the enlightened, but kept from the proles. Or maybe things that may be known to researchers but must be lied about in the popular press. I’m not 100% clear on the details of who’s permitted to know these things.
Basilisks.
That is, the existence of Basilisks are Basilisks. How does the rube take seriously your admonition to always believe the climate scientists when he knows the geneticists have been sanctioned to lie for the greater good?
The only context in which seems to me practical and desirable to conceal the truth is at the first step. The physicist who discovers a cheap and easy way of making atomic bombs doesn’t publish. Beyond that there are at least three serious problems:
1. Once several people know something, it’s hard to keep the knowledge from spreading.
2. If there is someone with the power to suppress true information, he is likely to use that power to suppress information that it is in his interest not be known.
3. If there is a mechanism for suppressing information, people will realize it and rationally be suspicious of even true information.
Until a malicious physicist also discovers it, and we are caught off guard that this is something we need to defend against.
What about getting pregnant in hot tubs?
(And what about hot baths? Is it the heat, or the filth?)
hot tubs can be really hot so I assume it’s that.
The blog post makes suggests that buying chromebooks for students is a waste. He fails to account for the relative cost. 1 full time teacher (let’s say 40k cost to the district for a new teacher) for one year gets you 80 chromebooks ($500 each), which will be good for multiple years. The chrome books might be more cost effective even if on an individual basis they aren’t.
I’m always a bit skeptical about new studies explaining the gender gap in crime because the crime gap isn’t necessarily that big, it’s the sentencing gap that’s massive. If every part of the justice system is as discriminatory towards men as the ones we can reasonably study (sentencing and sentencing length), then men and women might be comitting the same numbers of crime but we just don’t punish the women (enough).
“Of the offenders for whom gender was known, 90.3 percent were males. (Based on Expanded Homicide Data Table 3.) “
Its….rather significant. But a 9 to 1 ratio being big is subjective, I supppppose. Now speeding tickets and sentencing might be a different story.
Can you put a number on what you mean by massive? One of the points in Superforecasting is that when possible, its smart to put a number on predictions and words so people know just what you *mean* by these words.
Something feels really off about that resting heart rate thing tho.
If women and men committed violent crime at equal rates, the world would look massively different than it does. That’s true w.r.t. arrest and incarceration statistics, but also a thousand other things observable in everyday life.
If you imagine a world where half the murders were committed by women but 90% of the arrests/convictions were of men, that would be a world in which at least 40% of all people arrested or convicted for murder were being railroaded.
Yes, men and women commit violent crime at massively different rates, and that’s an inbuilt mental heuristic in both genders.
You’re assuming every murder case ends with a conviction. At least a third of cases don’t even get up to arrests. Then we have convictions but conviction rates seem to be closer to 100%, so I’ll give you that.
Also, how exactly would this theoretical world, where prison populations don’t adequately describe crime statistics, differ from ours? People would try to get innocent men out of prison? We already have that.
>You’re assuming every murder case ends with a conviction.
Yup. Hypothetically, if women were just much better at hiding the
bodies, the murder conviction rates could look as skewed as they
are, but with the unknown murder victims just showing up in the
missing persons statistics.
soreff
It might not be a matter of female murderers hiding the bodies, it might be a matter of using poison or some other subtle method.
The body is right there, the murder is concealed.
I haven’t read much about poison as a murder weapon, but if poison as a suicide method is anything to go by, it’s so hard to pull off with ordinary resources that it’s very unlikely to move the stats much. Particularly if we’re talking about undetectable poisons.
How do you think they got those numbers? When I say “every part of the justice system” I mean investigation, arrest, prosecution, sentencing and whatever else I forgot. The FBI didn’t correct for those numbers because they couldn’t. How do we know how many of those men were wrongly accused? How many cases where they didn’t go after the female offender? We simply can’t know for certain. What we do know is that women, when accused of the same crime as men, are a) less likely to be sentenced at all and b) receive much lower sentences if imprisoned. Other parts of the justice system acting vastly different from judges and jury takes a lot more to believe than the opposite.
With all that said, I think the men do commit more crimes than women but it’s not as big a difference as people generally think. Certainly not 9:1.
I did not contradict that it appears to be the case that in multiple categories of crime, women do appear to receive more lenient sentences. That judgement appears to be somewhat supported by a variety of evidence.
But that the male/female gap in terms of violent crime is very very high is also supported by the evidence, and appears to be a rather ubiquitous observation among societal and mammalian inter-species competition.
Now, an interesting question from that is a bayesian probability calculation. Given that one is M-F, what is the probability that one commits a violent crime? With the knowledge that one has already committed a violent crime, what is the posterior probability that one again commits a violent crime, also given the gender information?
Given thought that one of the apparent societal role of prison is to punish prisoners to act as a example for others to not commit offenses, would differences in the above numbers alter any sentencing? Or would any differences violate other societal principals, with potential mass-psychological effects?
Hosts of questions to ask.
Part of the evidence supporting highly disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by men comes from a society with highly disproportionate sentencing of men. I mean, all of the evidence come from there but you see what I mean. What evidence do you have that wouldn’t be affected by police, judges, juries, attorneys and the general public being very lenient with female criminals?
Victim surveys ought to be least affected. The disparity between these and sentencing strongly suggests major bias in society, although that doesn’t have to be entirely due to bias in the legal system.
Unfortunately the NCVS no longer seems at all interested in publishing any summary data about perpetrators. It’s possible that it’s still in the raw data, though … and if not you could at any rate go back to the data from earlier years to get a feel for how closely it matched the FBI’s UCR data from those years. My guess is that for crimes other than rape and domestic violence, you’d see a pretty close correspondence for serious violent crime.
‘What we find for the crimes for which we have data is probably not true for the crimes for which we don’t have the data’
Not the most persuasive claim. Not saying you’re wrong, just…
My anecdotal experience and what the relative increase in female convicts shows, is that women have been acting more like men when it comes to crime. Stereotypes seem to be lagging (as they are wont to do).
@Besserwisser
The data shows that at least some amateur crimes are fairly comparable, with the caveat that men are stronger. Men and women commit domestic violence (DV) at similar levels (with women actually committing more unidirectional DV), but men more often cause serious DV injuries. With rape we see that women do it a little less, but still pretty close.
Professional crime seems to mostly be heavily male dominated, which makes sense since risky and/or high pay jobs are generally heavily male dominated.
Stoicism seems to result in men reporting crimes a bit less than women, but only a 6% difference.
I’ve also seen a lot of anecdotal data that men are strongly discouraged from reporting female on male rape and this matches the far greater gap that we see between victim surveys and police statistics, than for male on female rape.
Men are also disproportionately victims of crime which, together with other evidence, could point to existing gender differences being due to harsher living environments for men. But no, it’s my fucking heart rate that’s the problem*.
* I don’t know if my heart rate is actually that low nor have I committed any crimes but I’m male so…
Regarding presidential cognitive decline:
I also recall this video comparing Bush Jr in a governor’s race to his speeches as president.
At the time, I interpreted solely to mean that, when running for national office, especially in the GOP, somehow you have to talk to a lower common denominator and put on more of a folksy, “man of the people” demeanor. When voting for governor people want someone to make the trains run on time; when voting for president people want an emoter in chief. That, and running for, and being POTUS is probably incredibly tiring.
But looking back on Bush and thinking about Trump now, I do think age-related cognitive decline may be part of it. I mean, if you compare a young Ron Paul to Ron Paul today, you find the same thing. Ron Paul today seems in very good health, mentally and physically, for an 80 year old. But he’s still an 80-year old. I think because the type of person to run for, and win the presidency tends to be a very energetic personality, it can be easy to forgot that a 70-year old POTUS is stil, well, a 70-year old person. And how many 70 year olds do you know as sharp and quick on their feet as they were when they were 40? I mean, some, maybe, but not most.
Does this mean age should be more of a factor in choosing presidents? Not necessarily. While I don’t think really anyone should be doing the job at all, insofar as we must have a POTUS, I tend to think long experience with e.g. appointing good people and making decisions based on limited information is probably more important than thinking fast, though obviously if it becomes not thinking clearly, it’s a problem.
That’s a little tricky. As you age, there is a tendency to substitute crystallized intelligence (I figured out the answer to that question twenty years ago and still remember it) for fluid intelligence (figuring out the answer now). If you have to deal with novel questions, that makes you look less sharp. If you have to deal with questions that you have an inventory of smart answers to, it may make you look more sharp.
Think of it as a rational trade off, presumably hard-wired into the genes, reflecting the increasing stock of already solved problems and the decreasing payoff period for new solutions.
This seems quite accurate based on my personal experience of older people, and also explains some stereotypes about older people: wise, having a wealth of experience, yet also apt to trot out the same story or argument again and again, sometimes down to the phrasing.
So the trick for a politicians is to just make sure to have a lot of focus-group approved sound bites down pat before you get too old and you’re golden.
Also, even based on my own relatively limited experience with aging (mid 30s), I find I am more likely to do things the same again and again as compared to my 20s: same shampoo, same tea, same workout, etc. (now I understand why every grandma I knew growing up wore the same perfume she’d worn since the 50s). I am, of course, aware I’m doing the same thing; I’m just more comfortable I know what works for me and also less interested in experimenting.
In some ways this means being older is more relaxing, but one can see how old people become less creative than the young: the young really do tend to have a more restless, searching attitude.
Somewhat related: if we manage to medically “fix” aging to one degree or another, such that the new life expectancy becomes say, 150, 200, 300, etc. I wonder to what extent we’ll find that 80-year olds were experiencing aging as opposed to 80-year olds were just experiencing the effects of having lived for 80 years. I imagine an even older society will probably be more conservative.
I’ve wondered about what age (by contemporary notions) an anti-aging tech would tend to stabilize people at.
Being physiologically 20 for 200 years is presumably a different thing than being physiologically 50 for 200 years.
I’ll take either one! Sign me up yesterday.
My assumption, though, is that extending the lifespan to 200 or more will require serious SENS tech, with a character something like “systematically clean up the dreck in all the cells”, which would probably mean physiologically 20 rather than 50. I have trouble imagining tech that could hold you at 50 indefinitely but could not revert you to 20. (I know you said 200 years, but I also can’t really imagine tech that could do that but that had 200 as a hard limit.)
I’ve been both 20 and 50, and the difference isn’t that great. I was past sixty, and with a metal plate in my skull, before I decided to quit SCA sword and shield fighting as too risky. If I could get back to fifty and stay there, I would be satisfied.
I agree with David Friedman on this, at least from the male perspective. Whether my perspective is more or less credible for the absence of half a decade of gratuitous blunt trauma to the head I leave to the audience.
Looking at the other half of the equation, though, 20-year-old female bodies are very good at making babies, and the 50-year-old variety very much less so. Also, 20-year-old female bodies are very often considered sexually attractive by men, and again the 50-year-old variety much less so.
This would create a very interesting and potentially dangerous social dynamic if the world is populated by billions of fifty-something men with a century or two of accumulated wealth, a few hundred million financially struggling twenty-something women, and the same number of the opposite genders wondering where they fit in to the sexual and reproductive marketplace.
The idea I’ve played with, as background for a story for someone else to write, is a world where one has substantial control over apparent physical age. So you have the hundred year old man who is pretending to be twenty so as to chase co-eds–and perhaps discovers he is no more successful at that project than he was the first time around. You have the very bright twenty year old, male or female, pretending to be a hundred so as to be taken seriously in whatever project he is engaged in–something that comes up a little with Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan early in the series. And other variants I haven’t thought of.
As an aside, I attended an event where Ron was a guest speaker a few months ago, and the same event where he also spoke a year prior.
In 2016 he struck me as lethargic, “low-energy,” and his speech was a bit rambling. I came away from it thinking “Wow, he’s definitely lost a step. It’s a good thing he got out of politics. He may not be around for much longer, I hope he can enjoy his time with his family.”
Whereas in 2017, it was almost the opposite. He was energetic, enthusiastic, and his speech was much better structured and on point. Seemed like he was ready to run for office again.
I guess my point is that people have good days and bad. I don’t trust the media to even TRY to control for that sort of thing when covering Trump, much less to actually do so accurately.
Cocaine.
My experience with my mother’s Alzheimer’s was that she had good days and bad days. As it progressed, of course, the good days were steadily less frequent and and less good, but early on, although she was definitely having problems much of the time, she still had some days when she pretty much seemed to be her old self. So someone having a good day shouldn’t be taken as evidence that they don’t really have a problem. Though contra Aapje it also shouldn’t be taken as evidence that they’re using coke; pretty sure that wasn’t the explanation in my mother’s case.
@Protagoras
When I make single sentence posts, that should be taken as strong evidence that I’m joking. I found the mental image of Ron Paul snorting coke quite funny, given his appearance.
PS. I have the same experience with my neighbor, who has Alzheimer’s.
I did think it was probably a joke. Although it’s a not uncommon stereotype that libertarians are Republicans who like to get high.
Does the confluence of Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton, and A. A. Milne call out for an explanation along the same line as the Jewish Budapest nuclear scientists?
The prediction markets are not accurate. At least that’s not what the data you linked support.
The vast majority of the data is on two-way races (or races where the odds of other candidates are so slim they’re effectively two-way), with the only exception being some of the Republican primaries (basically the ones before Rubio ropped the campaing + Ohio), and the general election in Utah. Because they count both predictions each time, the graph ends up roughly symmetric.
So of course events predicted to happen in the 40-60 range are going to happen 50% of the time, because the complementary of every event in the set is also in the set. Now the fact that the 40-50 range happens roughly 45% of the time and the 50-60 range 55% is a good sign, but it’s hardly surprising.
But let’s consider the graph overall, only instead of 10 data points we only count the 5 real ones. Yes, there is a clear correlation, but really what you see is two group of points and not much more. The probability of an event in the 0-20 range happening is somewhere around 7%, with some (although not that much) increase between 1-10 and 10-20. And then events in the 20-50 range happen roughly 40% of the time, with no clear pattern. The problem is made worse by the fact that the least accurate bucket (20-30) is also one of the most used ones (which the graph does not represent)
So prediction markets can apparently separate somewhat very unlikely (or very likely) events from ones where it could go either way, although obviously that separation isn’t perfect. Glancing at the data, it doesn’t seem there are border probabilities that are “avoided” by the prediction market, so an event rated at a 20% probability of happening could be in either bucket, and you don’t know much about its real probability.
One thing they’re pretty good at though is telling you which outcome is more likely (but not how likely). But that’s not supposed to be hard. If polling has any value at all, it’s to tell you who is more likely to win the race. You just don’t know how likely that is unless you look into the methodology and assumption and history. But just looking at the polls basically gives you the mu of the Gaussian without the sigma, and you can easily tell from that who is favored.
Now I don’t have a good explanation as to why prediction markets are so bad at getting things that are not entirely obvious right. Maybe it’s full of people who bet on their team rather than actually think about it. Maybe the fees are so high that people who are good at predicting and could use them to win a lot of money don’t because they can use their skills to get a better ROI elsewhere. Or maybe it’s something else.
It seems to me that the best way to de-fang the potential negative political implications of genetic and race differences is to point out that we have equality before the law DESPITE differences like that.
The myth of equal potential (with its corollaries, inequality as necessarily the result of “oppression” by systemic social structures, and equality of outcome as an ideal) really has to be put to bed, it’s caused no end of trouble – horrific death, mutilation, starvation, broken lives and boredom for millions of people.
Whether or not there are differences in average intelligence by race, there are large and easily observable differences by individuals. Despite which they all have the same legal rights, with some exceptions for extreme cases–much more extreme than anyone claims for average racial differences.
Vamphyre in the House
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/875472740555276288
I’m Jewish and I actually do worry about that. My guess (and it is only a guess, though based on some personal observations) is that most leftist Jewish people worry about this in a vague way that they never quite express (even to themselves); they feel self-conscious about the high average Jewish IQ and preponderance of Jews among the super-high-IQ elite cliques. It is really hard to not notice how many bankers, tech tycoons, media personalities, media owners, and academics are Jewish; and yet one of the great unspoken rules of modern American society is that no one is allowed to notice this (the rule has to be unspoken, of course, because acknowledging the rule in itself violates it).
But I don’t think concealing the black-white IQ gap is the correct answer. That’s just letting the steam build up before it all blows up; it might delay it, but in the end it’ll be much worse. And the new leftist trend of blaming and browbeating white people is not exactly making things better.
I think things would be better if we affirmed that (a) this is a country for all, not just high-IQ people (the academically-dominated American left often behaves as though high IQ implies moral superiority – see Bill Maher’s “Stupidest State” clips), and (b) between-group IQ differences are real. The universities will inevitably have to lose a lot of power in this transition, which is why it will never happen until the pitchforks come out. And it doesn’t have to be angry gentile whites carrying the pitchforks either.
Bottom line, I’m not an optimist.
EDIT: I should clarify: I think pretty much the entire academic elite is at risk if a true ‘populist’ reaction occurs, not just Jews like myself. Perhaps my attitude is colored by the fact that I heard a lot of things about 1930s Europe when growing up; this stuff imprints itself into your imagination. But while others – Scott Aaronson, I’m looking at you – feared Trump for this kind of reason, I fear the opposite. I fear the attitude of “we just need to shut down their viewpoint harder“, as seen in the constant calls to not “normalize” Trump.
Sure, lots of Jewish people do worry about that. (Me, I figure the cat’s kinda been out of the bag for a while). But it’s not the reason for the taboo on talking about the black-white gap. Not everything revolves around Jews.
I should have been more clear. I’m not implying that everything does revolve around Jews. There are other, larger reasons for the taboo. So I don’t agree with Steve that it is the “main” reason.
But I don’t think it’s negligible either.
I think as a jew your jewdar might be much better than the average person. Apparently sam harris is jewish? TIL.
You’re probably right; but even without my specialized Jew-antennae I think it’d be hard to not notice eventually (it also helps that I spent my whole life in/around universities so I know quite a lot of academics, many of whom are Jewish). Didn’t know about Harris though. Chalk up another one, I suppose.
Not one of Sailer’s more astute observations. If that were true, why would Scott ban the term aitch bee dee, then post articles about Hungarian Jewish IQ superiority? Anyway, vampires are afraid of crosses, not the Star of David.
Scott is not exactly typical.
Anyway, vampires are afraid of crosses, not the Star of David.
You’ve got the wrong vampire 🙂
Vamphyre in the House
Vamphyre?
bintchaos, you are Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I claim my five pounds.
@dieseach – aw, just chill. They’re new. They’ll come around.
I realise I am sounding rather “You kids get off my lawn!” but there’s a difference between if they’re actually 14 or they’re 23 and pretending to be 14 (they claim to be studying Esoteric Science at university so they must be in the early 20s).
“Vampire” I don’t mind. “Wamphyr, vrykolakas, strigoi” or any of the local folkloric terms are acceptable.
“Vampyre” is a foolish neologism, the same affectation as referring to “magick”.
“Vam-fire” (for that is how “phyre” is pronounced) is meaningless.
> Internet payment processors and payment regulations are terrible and destroying the nootropics industry and probably a bunch of other industries I know less about, part 459401.
Heh. Yeah but, nootropics are all bull****. Who cares?
”
An analysis showing Donald Trump’s speech patterns getting less fluent and more bizarre over the past few years – might he be suffering from mild age-related cognitive impairment? Also, given that this can be pretty subtle (cue joke about Trump) and affect emotional stability in complicated ways, should we be more worried about electing seventy-plus year old people to the presidency?”
Might he be? You peak anywhere from 19 to 25, with some mental measures declining since age 14 or so. Post age 45, this decline notably speeds up.
Isn’t risk of cancer in general fairly linearly correlated with number of cells? Nothing mysterious about that.
Yes and no; The chance of a single cell going rogue scales fairly simply with number of cells and replication rate of cells. However, it gets more complicated from there; High replication rate for example also makes it easier to squash rogue cells before they have a practical effect. Also, the immune system usually can deal with a few rogue cells, there need to be a few more steps until it develops what we call cancer.
An especially interesting fact is that bigger organism generally can survive small-scale cancer relatively well, and cancer is after a certain point at a very high risk to get cancer itself. So with higher size cancer can become less of a problem in general because it collapses on itself before it gets big enough to actually hurt the organism badly(any similarity to politics is incidental).
Did anyone take Scott’s suggestion and read the Sam[]zdat on Polanyi? I highly recommend it.
tl;dr is that modernization destroys unquantifiable, illegible social value, which is why the numbers say even the poor are getting better off but the poor disagree.
Polanyi wrote in the 40s, and Sam[]zdat suggests the process has been continuing since then.
My question is, has the US actually lost unquantifiable social value since the ’70s? It kind of seems like we might have bottomed during the Industrial Revolution. And for that matter, Polanyi strikes me as idealizing the preindustrial era, whereas other sources suggest that the Fall had already happened by then and you need to go pre-agricultural to find the real good times.
I don’t know if there was a previous bottom, and I’m not quite fully on board with the inexorable social decay theory, but I have noticed that whenever I start researching some modern issue that I’m less than happy with, nine times out of ten something really important to it happened in the early Seventies.
Since the decade’s generally neglected by pop culture (at least compared to the Sixties or the Eighties), I don’t think this is an artifact.
Early seventies? US violent crime starts going up in the early 60s. By the 70s and 80s it’s really getting high. It drops in the 90s. Now it’s over double what it was in 1960, and we’re told that violent crime is at historic lows.
I have a feeling that this is a feature not a bug. Although seeing like a state (thus far – I haven’t finished it) seems to make the case that much of what the state initially did was highly destructive in a number of unquantifiable ways, a point I haven’t seen discussed extensively is why this occurs. There are clear advantages for a state-like entity to be able to see and developing the ability to see with a high resolution wasn’t immediately feasible. In the evolution of a structure for “seeing” the world it is often difficult to “see” at the resolution of lower-level entities.
Instead, the new structure develops a coarse way of seeing the world which enables it to compete with other entities trying to see the same world as it. This coarse way of seeing the world causes unnecessary harm (to the denizens of lower level worlds) due to the lack of precision in it’s vision but it couldn’t be any other way.
I don’t see how that’s a feature.
In response to the zero calorie carbonated drinks/water things – is there actually any proof that they are any good evidence that they are bad for you? I’ve stopped drinking regular sodas and am infrequently drinking diet cokes and so have a vested interest in finding this out.
I’m going to be super pedantic and point out that ranking for fencing is done separately by weapon (and sex), so she’s the 186th best female foil fencer.
My wife will soon be giving an academic talk on ghosts and PTSD. Here is her abstract:
The Haunted Battlefields of Classical Antiquity
D. Felton (felton@classics.umass.edu)
Given the immense physical and psychological trauma associated with military battles, we might not be surprised at the number of eerie events routinely reported during times of war. What might surprise us, however, is how many such reports come from ancient Greece and Rome, in both fictional and non-fictional accounts of war-devastated landscapes. Various uncanny phenomena seen by both soldiers and affected civilians include ghostly armies; reanimated corpses; portentous apparitions; and, considering the sky as part of the battle landscape, unidentified flying objects.
For example, ghostly armies appear in Silius Italicus, Lucan, and Pausanias. The resurrected corpses of soldiers startle their comrades in Plato (Rep. 10.614-21), Lucan (Phar. 6.588-830), and Phlegon (Mir. 3.4-7). Apparitions appear to military leaders to warn or advise in moments of crisis, as with Aeneas (Aen. 2.771-94), Drusus (Suet. Claud. 1), and Julius Caesar (Suet. Iul. 32). Livy, Seneca, Josephus, et al. record instances of ghostly celestial armies and armaments, the latter including such phenomena as flaming spears and shields (Stothers).
The Greeks and Romans interpreted many of these incidents as bad prodigies signifying the impending death of a commander or loss of the campaign/war. Others were rendered simply as mysterious, miraculous occurrences without specific significance, such as the sudden blindness of Epizelus (Hdt. 6.117). Ghostly soldiers were biaiothanatoi, restless spirits of those who had died by violence. Yet there was also skepticism in antiquity regarding such reports, and awareness that psychological stress coincided with increased report of prodigies (e.g. Livy 21.62.1). Modern work on PTSD and its neurological/psychological effects allows for interpretation of such phenomena as Epizelus’ blindness, but rather than trying to rationalize every such occurrence in ancient literature we can also recognize that uncanny incidents were also an authorial strategy for creating atmospheric dread in narratives of war.
Vox responds to IQ critics:
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-iq-response-critics
It’s more of the same.
1. The environmental / genetic differences can’t be quantified
2. The null model is it’s entirely environmental (don’t miss this unstated assumption)
3. Here’s some evidence that environment plays a role.
Conclusion: It’s immoral and wrong to say it has a genetic factor.
Solid argument. Yawn. If I feed my child a bowl of lead paint every morning, environment will play a role. There is lots of evidence that controlled environment still results in IQ differences (but they dispute something in any mentioned study, therefore this data is entirely disregarded as zero information added).
They did go from “no reason at all” to believe genetics plays a role to “no good evidence” which I suppose is an improvement. The best part is how they attempt to handle that their “no genetics” position is a distinct minority view in their field. Quite a rhetorical dance there. The choir will once again high five that genetics has been debunked and the socially acceptable answer will rule the day. Yeah science.
Vox has a quite irritable habit of finding a group of “experts” that only present one side of an issue and inferring that there is only one side of an issue.
The unstated assumption that if there’s no evidence that something is genetic therefore we are justified in believing it’s environmental has always puzzled me.
The interesting thing here (and it appears in a *lot* of policy questions) is when lots of people want political or social factors to determine what priors we use in evaluating evidence. (Or equivalently, how much evidence is needed to be convincing.)
Compare:
a. It would be socially disruptive if the racial differences in IQ were substantially genetic, therefore we should start with very strong priors toward an entirely environmental explanation.
b. It would be socially disruptive if fossil-fuel consumption were substantially changing the climate, therefore we should start with very strong priors toward human CO2 emissions having no climate impact.
I don’t think either of these statements make much sense–I don’t think you can get smarter by introducing what you want the answer to be into your attempts to find out the answer to a question.
I don’t know that it’s even socially disruptive.
Once you grant that the g difference exists and translates to real differences in work ability (to say nothing of criminality, etc.), then you’re already at the socially disruptive level.
Whether the difference is genetic or environmental is primarily relevant to the policy implications.
1) If it’s environmental, then it’s probably some combination of wealth, personal racism, and structural racism.* If so, then even though we haven’t licked the problem yet, we need more programs to address childhood inequality and racism at all levels.
* A more troubling possibility would be minority culture, which is apparently Flynn’s hypothesis. If so, we need interventions to address toxic cultural issues.
2) If it’s genetic, then the good news is that once we develop affordable genetic engineering, we can solve the problem by making that available, so assuming we’re all not grey goo in two generations, we have a solution in sight. The bad news is that many current social engineering programs are at best a waste of resources.
Flynn (yes that one): “The parenting is worse in black homes, even when you equate them for socio-economic status”
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/27/james-flynn-race-iq-myths-does-your-family-make-you-smarter
I don’t think that environmental theory is going to go over well with the usual suspects. For some people there is no other possible answer than white oppression. Certainly historic oppression offered no advantages, but the scale and effect size of the disadvantages is in question. Connecting the dots from racism to math standardized test scores is getting more difficult every year. They have been searching for a silver bullet environmental cause for decades and the gap hasn’t closed much.
I don’t see why it can’t be both. If there’s a genetic component, then the environmental influence on that will have an effect. We need to know this, because interventions addressing environment only won’t make that great a difference – if we remove all adverse affects there will still remain a small but real difference and we won’t be able to handwave it away with “once we make sure there is no more lead paint”.
Same way that if genetics don’t make a difference, then we can’t say that “a smart black child living in a slum with drug-addict single parent and no breakfast will have the same outcome as a smart white child with two parents who give them enrichment opportunities”.
And if there is a genetic difference, then the environmental interventions will have to be tailored to that. There is no easy “one size fits all” solution, and burying our heads in the sand because “talking about population IQ genetics is racism!” will only make the problem worse. The proposed solutions won’t work, people will be as badly off as ever, and we’ll continue to insist ‘it’s structural racism keeping the minority population down’ long past the point where meaningful changes remain to be made re: social attitudes and structures.
Equally, if it’s not genetic, then we have to seriously look at large-scale overhauls of society, and not in a piece-meal “Evergreen student protest demands” sense.
Yep, as I said on the subreddit recently, a big problem I have with arguments for genetic IQ uniformity is that a lot of them consist of just trying to cast a little doubt on arguments against it, and then relying on a very strong morally-based prior to do most of the heavy lifting.
On the Pink Slime link, my previous comment looks to be lost in moderation, probably due to the number of links.
The plaintiff’s case allegations sound at least superficially similar to the Rolling Stone case – ABC wanted to tell a compelling story with hints of systemic corruption and looked for people who would say exactly what they were hoping to hear, relying on third-hand sourcing for some of the material without independent verification or disclosing how weak the sourcing was. The reporting was the TV equivalent of clickbait, “You’ll be shocked at what’s in your food!”
There is no question that the report damaged the company – that was the purpose and it was effective. The major question is whether ABC’s misleading innuendo and strategic omissions crosses the line into false and defamatory. I disagree that the case would have a chilling effect on journalism. It might have a chilling effect on “hot take” narrative journalism, and I am leaning toward that being a positive outcome.
Of all the pieces I found on the case, the Hollywood Reporter did the best work on it.
Yeah, the whole “pink slime” moniker wasn’t an official title but someone one of the whistleblowers used*; for PR/shock value it’s great. “Mechanically recovered meat” isn’t as headline-grabbing or would make people go “yuck” in the same way.
There’s a lot about food processing and processed foods that people don’t know, or don’t want to know – but this is how you get cheap food, after all – ‘use every part of the pig except the squeal’, as it was once said. “Dunking it in ammonia” sounds terrible, but when processing meat (especially when it’s not whole carcasses but things like minced beef and chicken), you need to meet stringent standards for bacterial reduction (so people don’t get sick of food poisoning) and chemicals are needed there. It’s a bit like saying “hospitals force sick patients to use chlorhexidine!” and ignoring that this is to treat and prevent the spread of things like MRSA (my father had to use Hibiscrub when he picked up a dose of MRSA from a hospital stay).
There’s two sides to this: if the whistleblowers had legitimate concerns and these were proven, then the company was not defamed. But on the other hand, the TV station certainly didn’t dial down the sensationalism (they pretty much popularised the term “pink slime”) and it’s undeniable that the reporting had a very serious detrimental effect on the business. I’m also getting a whiff of internal USDA politics from the article linked (and the Wikipedia article on the whole affair) so I’m not sure if the company was simply unlucky enough to be caught in the middle between USDA employees saying “this should not be classed for human consumption” and the higher-up officials saying “it’s fine for use as filler to make pure beef go further for commercial products, why are you complaining?”
As to the chilling effect on the media, I’m not so concerned about that. Frankly, I believe the entire media – from those that consider themselves respectable, reliable, honest, newspapers (and other outlets) of record down to the tabloid fish-wrappers, clickbait purveyors and TV ratings-chasers – should all get a good dunking in an ice-bath. Yes, it is a matter of concern if the work of journalism is shackled by fear of being sued into oblivion, but on the other hand there have been plenty of cases where the media ditched all duties to be responsible and even-handed and went for the most ‘shock, horror’ headline-grabbing presentation of a story that they could.
I’ll give two examples from my own country; one from our national radio and television broadcaster which has a public service remit. This was when the whole clerical sex abuse scandals were getting into high gear. A current affairs programme thought a juicy story had landed in its lap, replete with rape, colonialism, racism and naturally the Evil Catholic Church covering up another scandal. (Not alone were they acting out of public service and journalism motives, but there was/is an institutional leaning towards being on the socially liberal side of things, so a story attacking the formerly dominant Church was just the ticket. Media outlets are not 100% neutral).
Well, they went full-out on the door-stepping and “when did you stop
beating your wiferaping your housekeeper?” angle and broadcast the resulting programme, then sat back and (I imagine) had visions of industry awards and public acclaim dancing in their head for their revelations.Even when the accused lawyered up and said he’d willingly take a paternity test to prove he wasn’t the alleged father, they still doubled down.
Need I say their juicy story collapsed, with a retraction by the people making the allegations, once any kind of real investigation looked to be on the horizon? And having made a public splash of the whole affair in the most lurid form, the broadcaster then had to eat humble pie and pay hefty damages?
The second example comes from my home town, again involves the backwash of the hysteria that accompanied the clerical abuse scandals, and again involved the media absolutely going to town to make a sensational story even more lurid, and again resulted in egg on faces and subsequent having to eat humble pie. Only this time, the lynch-mob atmosphere whipped up by the media coverage resulted in one of the accused (EDIT: incorrect,
but this accused received a lesser sentence
the other had died in the mean time) serving jail time (luckily it was only four days out of a life sentence), until she had to be released when the convictions were quashed (the accused was my former third class teacher so I didn’t believe the story when I heard it, not because ‘no, it’s impossible for that to have happened’ but because she had a temper and I could believe she’d slap or hit someone, but not rape. It just did not fit).(I’m also jaundiced about this because the “exclusive revelations” crime correspondent of one of the papers who basically knowingly wrote a fake story about the involvement of a convicted paedophile in the case is still going strong with a ‘reputable’ career as an expert on crime; the director of a rape crisis centre who pontificated on the sentencing still remained a go-to media source for quotes and expert opinion; the judge who declaimed about the ‘betrayal’ remained on the bench, etc.)
So yeah, when the media can get people sent to jail because they like to make a big splash of a sensational story, I think a little cooling-off is just the thing.
Well said.
I think maybe people who already have a background on the subjects were able to pick up on points they were finally admitting, but I found it confusing. I couldn’t tell when they were agreeing with a point, or just formally describing Murray’s point so that they could disagree with it. All of the 80% agreement stuff is under a section titled “The flawed logic of the Murray argument…”
Also, I have not read the Bell Curve. Does Murray say the differences are caused by genetics, or it is not definitely known? I have seen sources that claim different things, could someone who has read it clarify?
Herrenstein and Murray say (w.r.t the cause of racial IQ differences):
“If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.”
And then they go on to assume an estimate, by offering a(n at times implied) conclusion that the outcomes of black people are determined by hereditary IQ.
It’s been a few years since I’ve read the book, but I don’t recall that at all.
Is that different than saying it is genetic?
The way I see it is either
(1) people are blatantly ignoring that Murray is stating he is agnostic on the cause of the difference
or
(2) that statement is Murray’s Motte, and he otherwise acts under the assumption the difference is genetic
Again, I haven’t read it, but would like to hear from people who have.
I agree with HBC (partially). The Bell Curve is one of my favorite books, but they do prevaricate on this. On the more controversial subjects they do talk out of both sides of their mouths.
Based on the totality of the chapter, I think this part is closest to the truth “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences.” The “resolutely agnostic” part is to provide plausible deniability. But they are very clear that they are just guessing.
The great part of the book are the many statistics proving that IQ has a close correspondence to many important traits. Yet it is the suppositions as above where the book is attacked the most. The people that claim the book is junk science then quote the non-scientific portions of the book and say they aren’t scientific, totally ignoring the fact that the authors would agree that those parts are not scientific.
@Mark V Anderson
It’s still a very weak claim, that is satisfied if 0.0000000000001% of the difference is genetic.
It seems trivially true to me that groups have genetic differences, regardless of evolutionary pressure, as it will be different just by chance/random mutations. It seems strongly proven that genes can impact intelligence. So it seems very unlikely that two groups will have the exact same distribution of genes that impact intelligence.
This would be equally true for the French vs the British, or Paris vs Nantes or one neighborhood in Paris vs another or people who live in one street vs the next street or…
It’s revealing that the Bell Curve critics can never quote a specific part of the book when discrediting it.
The sam[]zdat review of seeing like a state was good but IMO it misstepped by describing the immiseration resulting from central planning primarily as a psychological injury. That is certainly a component but fails to capture the practical consequences of destroying customary knowledge.
(Warning: non-economist talking about economics.)
The problem with increasing legibility is that while it increases the amount of centralized information available to bureaucrats, it does do by destroying a much greater amount of decentralized information available to society as a whole. Market prices condense that decentralized information and propagate it. In other words, Scott’s ‘metis’ is another way of restating the economic calculation problem.
When local people build roads, they build them between the places they want to go and along the routes which are easiest to travel. A footpath becomes a dirt road and the dirt road is eventually paved but the shape of it has been fine-tuned over generational timescales. Those roads are hard to map but they’re good roads.
When bureaucrats build roads, they build them in grids of straight lines. If the line goes through a mountain they dig a tunnel and if it goes over a crevasse they erect a bridge. The straightness of the line doesn’t bend for nature and it certainly doesn’t bend for the convenience of local people. So towns which the roads pass by are abandoned and traffic builds up.
This also points towards a solution to the question of the ideal size of the state. Coase predicts that the size of a firm should be at equilibrium where transaction costs are equal to inefficiencies in central resource allocation. If we look at the state as a firm, then an ideal state would exist where the cost of bureaucratic inefficiency was equal to the cost of converting between different customary practices. Which is at least in theory a question which could be answered.
They probably got lost while looking for BuzzFeed.
Comment of the week (if not the month) right there.
“Abiogenesis” was a strong contender for the title of the poem.
If anyone wants to play with the technology I used to assist in writing it, I made a web app to create rhyming (rather than alliterative) pairs: http://73.172.60.168:8080/rhyme
And now everybody, relax and look at these tiles.
On a large screen.
Close up.
Regarding blind swordfighters, the legend in the Villabrille lineage of the Filipino martial arts is that the style’s founder was trained by, among others, the blind princess Josephina of the Pulahane tribe (in the southern Philippines). This might be purely legend. I don’t know of any historical proof. It’s just what I heard passed down through oral tradition among the people who trained me.
re 1940s cellular phones: if it was all FCC’s fault, why didn’t they appear in Europe earlier, then?
The same way US got regulations caused a worldwide downturn in 2008: there is literally no limit to the evil fo the US govt.
Some people indeed seem to be made of straw and unfortunately they seem to be the loudest. Sometimes you can even see it here when a commenter presents his case in a way that other people suspect that it is an “agent provocateur”, a member of the red “tribe” who tries to make the blue tribe look bad or vice versa. But sometimes you encounter this even in your own team. I used to hang out at a libertarian (heavily “Austrian school” and Rothbard/Block-influenced which in my experience tends to be more straw on average than other libertarians) forum and there were people whose answer to everything was “STATE IS EVIL BECAUSE NATURAL RIGHTS!!!”. It is not as strawmanish as “libertarians are just greedy rich people who like to smoke pot”, but it is still extremely weak. And these sort of people also tended to be the most prolific at that forum.
But I think one should ignore these strawmen anyway, despite them being real. These people are unlikely to be convinced by any reasonable argument and it is important to show their opponents that not everyone on the other side is a strawman. I find this attitude particularly common on the left. Sadly, a lot of very smart and educated people have no exposure to reasonable conservative or even libertarian arguments since they live in a left-wing bubble and equate the right-wing with Fox news (or equivalents in other countries) and liberals with “people who only care about paying less on taxes”). But in my experience a lot of them are receptive to such arguments. Perhaps not to a point of not being left-wing any more but often to a point of drifting somewhere towards Scott’s position or at least acknowledging that Scott-like “left-libertarianism” might be right. But they won’t be impressed by a libertarian who “destroys the left in 5 minutes” in a Youtube video where he talks about how Venezuela is a disaster and people who praise it are idiots because while there are people like that, it’s not going to change the views of anyone who isn’t a strawman (since such people won’t be so misguided anyway) and the strawmen are unlikely to be receptive to any arguments anyway. So even the strawmen exist, arguing against them serves no purpose other than cementing the idea that your tribe is oh so smart and the other is full of nobody but idiots.
i can’t say I’m surprised you appreciated the reading style of Sam[]zdat, my immediate thought upon reading one of the posts over there was that The Last Psychiatrist must have found a new place to blog at.
Apparently I’m not the only one since the only comment was by an Anon wondering the same thing. It was this article, for reference: https://samzdat.com/2017/04/21/how-to-fail-fearless-girl-statue/
edit: seems like Progressive Reformation gazumped me on this one. Should probably have refreshed the page before posting
It was pretty funny to see that you’d posted this practically at the same time as I posted mine. Jinks!
At first I just thought it was a guy who had a similar writing style, hence the facetious speculation that they might be the love-child of SSC and TLP. Now I actually think they are The Last Psychiatrist. From this article we get (boldface mine):
So I’m pretty excited.
In the 5 part Social State essay (begin here: https://samzdat.com/2017/02/01/on-social-states/) they explicitly mention TLP’s narcissism theories and states that Alone’s work is definitive, so they won’t be blogging about narcissism as much.
They aren’t the first writer I’ve read that seemed to be very heavily influenced by that style – the other being Hotel concierge. I think it’s just something certain writers can naturally imitate.
Having now read Hotel Concierge, I can’t tell whether to concede your point or start believing that one extremely prolific guy is writing like four or five different blogs.
For a real world equivalent in a different niche …
Scott, I’m concerned. Having read this Sam[]zdat rant on the Fearless Girl, I strongly suggest you and The Last Psychiatrist get paternity tests (is TLP a man or a woman? eh, whatever). Do you have any hazy memories of chatting up TLP over rum and then waking up in a strange room? Am I the only one who’s seeing this?
In all seriousness, thanks for the pointer to this stuff. It’s awesome.
EMERGENCY EDIT: From later in that post:
And from the TLP classic on the Dove Sketches Beauty Scam:
I’m calling it right now. TLP, you ARE THE FATHER!
Emergency Edit #2: Dang it, somebody beat me to the punch in the comments on that post.
Imagine that you wanted to argue the exact opposite of what that blogpost says about Fearless Girl. Would you be able to do it, using similar rhetoric? If you’re any good at writing blogposts, I believe you could.
The trick to that sort of analysis is that it isn’t a proof, it’s a just-so story. You can write a plausible-sounding story that explains Fearless Girl as signifying pretty much anything, subject only to people looking at your argument and saying “that’s ridiculous”.
My take on Fearless Girl is “hubris.” Unfreeze the scene. Two seconds later, “Fearless Girl” is a red stain.
Don’t believe in fear
Don’t believe in pain
Don’t believe in anyone
That you can’t tame
Stupid girl
All you had, you wasted
I consider it “futility”. Unfreeze the scene, the bull runs by, not trampling but rather swatting Fearless Girl with his tail for her impertinence.
Frankly, I just hate Fearless Girl because really, the Bull was its own piece of art. Make whatever artistic statement you like, but leave
Britneyother people’s art alone.Imagine I were to go to the Musee D’Orsay and set up a painting to the left of Whistler’s Mother so that, if you looked at the two together, Whistler’s Mother was staring at some dude’s exposed junk. That’s basically what Fearless Girl is doing.
As to Jiro’s point, maybe. But it’s entertaining writing and has a point of view I wouldn’t have come up with on my own, and a lot of the psychological insights are probably true. So it’s very worthwhile reading for me.
Charging Bull was originally put up illegally as a piece of guerilla art.
One of the consequences of being subversive is that you legitimize being subversive. If the next guy to be subversive chooses you as the target, you don’t really have much cause to complain. I have little sympathy when a piece of art changes the message of another piece of art that only got across its message in the first place by acting badly.
If the next guy to be subversive chooses you as the target, you don’t really have much cause to complain
Fair point, but Fearless Girl isn’t really subversive art; it’s a piece that was commissioned “by investment firm State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) as an advertisement for an index fund which comprises gender-diverse companies that have a higher percentage of women among their senior leadership. The plaque below the statue states, “Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference,” with “SHE” being both a descriptive pronoun and the fund’s NASDAQ ticker symbol” and installed with the permission of the relevant authorities, all based on an advertising campaign “developed by advertising agency McCann New York”.
So Fearless Girl really does have the Wall Street pedigree (and fits comfortably in with the values of such) that the Bull is supposed to have, which makes Elizabeth Warren and the rest who clambered all over the opportunity to pose with it for the sake of STRONG INDEPENDENT WIMMIN! a bit – shall we say, opportunistic? Willing to turn up at the opening of an envelope?
It’s not this great feminist symbolic victory hoo-haa whatever it’s supposed to be, it’s fitting comfortably in with the system of capitalism that co-opts women as part of the mechanism of making profits without challenging the class and economic status quo, so Lizzie W. and her “I worked my way up from poverty to be a fighter for the marginalised!” image may not be sending the same message by posing with the Girl as she imagines (as pointed out here).
Also, I’m in agreement with the general point: standing in front of a stampeding cow is not “fight like a girl”, unless by that you mean “be stupid”; anyone from the country or with any kind of exposure to a rural background knows if a cow (much less a bull) is running at you, you get the hell out of the way. The message of Fearless Girl, on the other hand, is “stand there like an idiot and get trampled” because a cow is not going to turn aside if you just look sternly at it:
D,
Do you have a source for the stuff about it all being an advertising promo? I’ve heard that before (possibly from you, here?) and it just sounds SO ridiculous… like it HAS to be some sort of crazy right-wing conspiracy…. right? RIGHT?
And even if you’re right, I disagree with this completely. Art is all perception. It is what people think it is. To 99% of people, this thing looks like a brave and heroic feminine figure standing up to the very symbol of the evils of capitalist greed and excess in the middle of its holy cathedral. Therefore, that’s what it is.
If a bunch of right-wingers start marching around wearing swastika armbands, would people respond by saying “LOL those idiots, they aren’t even sending the message they think they are, don’t they realize that symbol is really just the Bhuddist depiction of good luck and fertility?”
No. That’s not the message they are sending, nor is it the message being received. And the same is true in this case.
Fearless Girl is a symbol of feminist rebellion and defiance of capitalism. Whether it should be seen that way or not can be debated, but it IS seen that way.
@ Matt M, It’s not hard to find at all; I presume you can use Google. It’s one of the first things mentioned on Fearless Girl’s Wikipedia page.
@ Jiro, I disagree. It being guerrilla art makes it legitimate for the authorities to remove it, which they did at first. But they added it back and now it is officially meant to be there.
Since Arturo DiModica still owns the statue, I suggest an appropriate response to Fearless Girl (which he despises) is to turn the bull around 180 degrees, and back it up to be a foot or so from the Girl, so she’s staring directly at its nutsack.
@ Deiseach, I agree with you. But the thing is that the symbology of Fearless Girl is backwards. Is academic progressivism more or less powerful than American capitalism? Surely American capitalism has more raw strength at its disposal, but this doesn’t capture the fact that academic progressivism is unified around a single political agenda. If we look at e.g. that Pepsi ad with Kendall Jenner, we see American capitalism kowtowing to academic progressivism, and little of the other way around. The air in my apartment weighs more than I do, but because it’s diffuse and I am a single directed object, I can walk through it easily.
So it’s actually academic progressivism which is the overdog, trampling over American culture. It’s the “fearlessness” of the hunter with the lion in his crosshairs. If they’d wanted it to be accurate, they’d have put up a matador. But that would go against their David-and-Goliath narrative, so suicidal little girl it is.
Another artist, Alex Gardega, had (appropriately, I felt) installed his own guerrilla art piece of a faux-bronze dog peeing right next to Fearless Girl, though of course it was removed soon after.
Your plan has the benefit of being more sustainable, but I assume DiModica would have to convince the exhibitor (NYC) to rotate the bull. He does have some leverage, because he could always take it back. But if he just turns it around one night, I doubt there’d be anything besides that threat and whatever social pressure he can manage to keep them from turning it back around.
@Progressive Reformation
I’d read it the other way around. “I can hire you to do your song and dance to sell my products” comes from a major position of power. That banks sponsor Pride and put rainbow flags up changes Pride more than it changes the banks. And it creates a huge incentive to talk less and less about fundamentally altering the class system or the economic setup.
I’d like to believe that the wall street class came together and devised a plot, something like “Here’s what we do, so long as we give 100% support to all of their various social causes, they’ll consider us allies, and won’t think to cut our heads off over economic policy,” but that’s probably giving them too much credit.
If we look at e.g. that Pepsi ad with Kendall Jenner, we see American capitalism kowtowing to academic progressivism, and little of the other way around.
I would disagree here, because it was Pepsi, which has tried to use the Pepsi generation slogan in its advertising to compete with Coca-Cola as the choice of the hip new young people from the 60s onwards.
Yes, Pepsi got it wrong and were mocked for it, but the fact that they assumed they could take the visible features of the movement, slap their branding on it (all the careful blue colouration of the ad) and turn it into a ‘moment’ for their brand and product means that there really isn’t an actual threat there; Pepsi plainly perceived “antifa” and their ilk as a marketing opportunity with the achingly multi-culti lineup of “student protestors” in the ad (and I don’t think they were far wrong in their assessment of their target market as being more likely to reblog “hell yeah punch a Nazi!” memes than be out on the front lines of demos), they were just a little too blatant about it.
Nobody seriously believed a multi-million dollar fizzy drinks company had suddenly developed a social conscience, which is why the ad fell flat on its face. And that, I think, means that it’s not capitalism kow-towing to progressivism, it’s capitalism seeing a buck to be made here and trying to co-opt progressivist symbolism.
If polyamory ever makes it into wider social acceptance, we’ll be seeing Pepsi ads with Sally, Jill, Bert and Fareed all on their poly date supping Pepsis to beat the band – and not because Pepsi-Co has suddenly been converted to the rights of multiple relationships to be on a basis of legal equality with mono relationships 🙂
@Matt M
I doubt any of this is intentional. All just the result of people acting according to incentives, overall. It would be enheartening were this (or anything else) part of a conspiracy – would speak much higher of humanity’s ability to control things.
@Deiseach
A suffragette (Emily Davison) got trampled when she ran in front of a horse at a race track, in 1913. So there would be some weird continuity, if a feminist would now do so with a bull.
To everyone replying to my Kendall Jenner point: yes, Pepsi did this because it thought it could make a buck by doing so. Still we have my point: companies pay homage to the dominant culture when they advertise, for obvious reasons; so, advertisements tend to strengthen whatever culture happens to have the most spending money in their estimation. Back in the 60s they ran ads like “Don’t let your man be bored by your cooking, buy our sauce”. Now they run this stuff (and then pull it when the dominant culture screams at them). Advertising shapes aspirations to some degree, sure; but it cannot really create aspirations out of nothing. It has to tap into an already-existing aspiration (“I wish I was cool like [insert cool person here]; I’ll buy Cool Guy Brand cigarettes”) which it then strengthens.
In this way the Pepsi ad gives a strong indication of who the market research team at Pepsi thinks their market is; and though they misjudged the reaction to the ad, I trust that they understand something about these people, i.e. cultural markers, political orientation, etc.
@Progressive Reformation
Sure, but you have to differentiate between structural power (American capitalism) and social power (academic progressivism). At the end of the day, the financial elite are not, at all, beholden to the social justice crowd.
Also, I think the social justice crowd is egged on by the financial elite in order to distract from any sort of threat that might come from the economically minded left. Occupy fizzled, but it was something. Hundreds of thousands of people mad about wealth inequality, or the gap between worker pay and CEO pay. After that the media companies owned by the financial elite started focusing intently on social justice. Now they’re all complaining about racial income inequality, and the gender pay gap. The dialogue went from “these evil CEOs are oppressing us!” to “why aren’t more of the evil oppressors women?”
At the end of the day, the financial elite don’t really care about social issues. Rich people don’t have unplanned pregnancies, and if they do, abortion is always available if you have enough money, regardless of what the law says. Race doesn’t matter when you’re rich, the only color people care about is green.
The media is corporate-left. They’re 100% behind Girl Power and yeah for gays! Just don’t talk about none of that “eat the rich” stuff. Just don’t confuse shameless pandering with actual power. The situation between the financial elite and academic progressivism is more like the relationship between the French court and the Catholic Church. “We give you legitimacy, you give us legitimacy and we keep the peasants in line.” Until they don’t.
In this way the Pepsi ad gives a strong indication of who the market research team at Pepsi thinks their market is; and though they misjudged the reaction to the ad, I trust that they understand something about these people, i.e. cultural markers, political orientation, etc.
It seems a large (?) yet unidentified segment of the Pepsi-drinking market are Mennonites, else this wouldn’t be deemed worth making a joke about; so much for market research identification! 🙂
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/
Having read the link, I’m genuinely unsure of what you’re trying to tell me here. I’m not that good at thinking these things through, but I don’t see how any of that post relates to anything here.
I will assume that at the very least the title “The Virtue of Silence” is meant to imply that I should have kept this observation of stylistic similarities to myself. If so, I apologize as I assume you have good reasons for wanting this; I confess that I really can’t see what those would be but I trust your judgment.
And I suppose I am violating the Virtue of Silence by replying, but (a) I’m not even 100% sure this is what you’re trying to tell me, (b) this discussion is already here regardless of this reply, and (c) it’s hard not to reply to something like this!
@Progressive Reformation:
The appropriate response here would be:
Whoosh!
But, since you didn’t catch Scott’s attempt at humor, you might miss mine as well, so …
Scott is making a joke (that he is not going to talk about any love child he may or may not have had with The Last Psychiatrist.)
With regard to the article about Trump’s decline in articulateness… I haven’t had a chance to read the article (I’m current caught in a time crunch and shouldn’t even be posting here), but I’m curious if Donald Trump was under pressure to express his views on nearly as many complex real-world issues on nearly so frequent a basis in the decades before he was campaigning for president.
I feel that Trump’s level of articulateness is roughly where mine would be if I didn’t have the ample experience I’ve had teaching math (where I learned how to explain things precisely yet down-to-earth so people can follow) and were under constant demand to explain my views on technical matters in fields in which I had very little background and no expertise. I guess what I’m saying is that I blame Trump’s frequent inability to pontificate clearly on his lack of qualification for the job he’s in (both lack of background knowledge, and lack of experience in “teaching”) rather than any alleged mental decay.
I also find it interesting that Sarah Palin, when going off script, was (is?) even more inarticulate than Trump, and I don’t remember hearing any speculation of dementia and mental unfitness on her part. A relatively reasonable instance of ageism, I guess, but still I think she is quite possibly a counterexample to “Anyone who talks that way must be mentally deteriorating!”
I suspect one source of Trump’s inability to sound intelligent while discussing a bunch of complicated issues is that he hasn’t spent much time thinking about them. Trump’s clearly pretty bright and extremely verbally adept, but there’s no way to sound smart talking about a complicated topic when today is the first day you’ve ever given the matter ten minutes’ thought. Perhaps the thing I find most unnerving about a Trump presidency is the sense I have that there are huge and important areas of policy on which he’s making decisions, where he has never spent a single unbroken hour thinking hard about the matter.
“Trump’s clearly pretty bright and extremely verbally adept.”
Just find a sound clip of him talking, any sound clip at all (say from this year). He can’t finish a thought. There’s just .. nothing there.
Perhaps you and I aren’t the target market–he seems to do quite well with a lot of Americans.
Satisfying low demands is only quality of selling, not necessarily quality of product.
Is that how you define pretty bright?
A local competence. Not general intelligence, assuming you mean this with “bright”.
The Incredible Hulk is a very popular superhero who converses via variations of “Hulk Smash.” Doing quite well with your base has very little to do with intelligence or verbal aptitude.
—
Actually, if you want to use “popularity” as a metric, Trump is by far the least popular president in living memory across strata of American society. Look at any poll you want from any polling place you want, over the last few months.
—
Trump is basically incoherent when he answers questions/converses with his own voice (rather than reading from a piece of paper or teleprompter).
Yeah, that is observably not true. Remember how low ability humans have a tendency to over-estimate their ability while high ability humans tend to under estimate theirs? quant. suff.
And I’m sorry to bang on about this but its terrifying to me that hostile foreign entities like RU, China and KSA are able to so easily manipulate Trump to perform in their own interests by appeals to his vanity and venality.
Most recently the Qatar disaster.
The segment of the electorate that Trump does well with is termed the “low-information Republican base”. Naturally he is speaking to them in their own language– he’s the low-information president.
Does listening to Trump with a British accent change your opinion?
I suspect the main driver of this is the same as the main driver of all the other negative claims about Trump–the left doesn’t like Trump, and if you don’t like someone, you say uncomplimentary things about him. In the media, it gets dressed up in flowery language or a veneer of objectivity, but ultimately it’s the same as being on the playground calling someone a retard.
There’s a reason we used to believe in the Goldwater Rule, and diagnosing dementia is not very far from diagnosing mental illness.
(And the answer to “then why wasn’t that done to Sarah Palin?” is a combination of “well, they did do some of it”, “the exact insult that gets used against a particular outgroup member is random”, and gendered attacks.)
Well, I’m pretty sure it mainly has to do with Palin not being in her 70’s, although as you point out, gender is a factor as well.
It reminds of those people who bullshit their way into high paying technical jobs, and then can’t do them.
The carbonation thing strikes me as obviously false. I drink unflavored seltzer water on a regular basis (I realize I’m in the minority, as roughly 95% of the stock in my supermarket is of flavored seltzers and Lacroixes and what have you), and one thing I notice consistently is that when I have it on hand, I am far less likely to overeat or binge on sweets or junkfood. When I drink it, I feel more full and more satisfied than with regular water.
When looking at the abstract, it does not seem to compare unflavored carbonated water to regular water, only “degassed” carbonated beverages to standard carbonated beverages, and uncarbonated tap water.
Another major flaw is in the following:”
Here, we show that rats consuming gaseous beverages over a period of around 1 year gain weight at a faster rate than controls on regular degassed carbonated beverage or tap water. This is due to elevated levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin and thus greater food intake in rats drinking carbonated drinks compared to control rats.” which suggests that they only measured the weight gain in rats, but did not measure ghrelin or food intake directly.
I think there are a few possibilities that the study may overlook:
-increased Ghrelin levels do not directly lead to increased appetite or obesity. My only knowledge of this hormone is a quick glance at wikipedia, which seems to suggest that, but I have no experience or knowledge that would back this up.
-There is a difference between flavored or sweetened carbonated beverages and nonflavored. I’d hypothesize (strong) that a major factor of weight gain is that carbonation improves the flavor of the drink, meaning that you drink more of it whether it is plain water or sugar or aspartame or what have you.
-I’d also hypothesize (strong) that whether you drink it with a meal matters. I typically will drink seltzer when I’m at a desk, or after dinner, rather than directly before or during a meal. Typical consumption seems to be to get a giant coke with your big mac, which is the opposite. If the response is in fact hormonal, it may be that having a belly full of water is enough to counter the hormonal hunger response. But if the reason for weight gain is that carbonated drinks make the paired food hyperpalatable (which also seems likely to be a factor from personal experience,) it would follow that changing the time at which you drink a fizzy drink would matter.
-A weak hypothesis: The overall acidity balance of your diet plays some role in weight control. Carbonated drinks are heavily acidic, and if that means you’re messing with your gut microbiome, or if you’re using carbonated drinks to balance out all that mayo you’re putting on your sandwich, that could cause problems.
(Disclaimer: My background is in biomechanics and not biochemistry, so my knowledge of the individual processes involved here is tangential at best.)
I took a look at the full text, and can clear up some details on what they were actually doing. You are right that they are testing regular soda, degassed regular soda, diet soda, and plain water, not carbonated water. Carbonated water seems like the obvious thing to test, and I’m not sure why they didn’t.
However, part of the study involved killing some rats that were all on a normal diet, dissecting their stomachs into pieces, soaking the pieces in the 4 above liquids, than directly measuring the ghrelin secretion of the pieces. They found about triple the ghrelin levels with the carbonated sodas vs the degassed soda. I think this rules out considerations of hyperpalitability, at least as far as direct effects on the stomach. Interestingly, the diet soda induced somewhat more ghrelin release then the regular soda.
I too am a drinker of plain carbonated water, but I haven’t noticed an impact on my appetite one way or another.
>Like a food blog, except it’s RPG rations for dwarves, elves, orcs, et cetera.
Conceptually similar: The manga Dungeon Meshi, featuring mouthwatering depictions of food made of monsters and plants that you find in a D&D style dungeon.
begin_snark
True enough – but consider how low the incarceration rate would be if America only punished,
murderers and rapists, and solely with executions.
end_snark
Just a word of warning, guys…
Are you saying you’re a vampire?
Not me.
So you’re saying that Dracula is a vampire? I mean, it’s not exactly spoilers when the source material is over 120 years old.
‘English was not van Helsing’s birth tongue.’
Dracula.
Nice.
Ok, Abe, but can we possibly skip the endless running around looking for boxes of dirt?
“Did you know: the ancient Egyptian language of hieroglyphs and Pharaohs survived into modern times as the Coptic language and is still the liturgical language of Coptic churches today.”
That’s a big part of how Champollion deciphered hieroglyphics in the 19th Century. He had the priest of the Coptic Church in Paris teach him Coptic.
I did know! And I also knew about liturgical Aramaic! 🙂
I’ve been reading The Dawning Moon of the Mind, Susan Morrow translating the pyramid of Unis. She got a Guggenheim to do it, since the previous translations were gibberish. She makes a good case that Unis was writing about yoga with astronomy metaphors, but as I read I keep thinking it could also be the Penthouse letter pyramid text: ‘Hi, I’m Unis, priest and king of sacred Egyptian wisdom, and this ruler’s got nine egyptian inches, but I always thought the hieroglyphs here were fake until one morning the sky-baboons boner poked open the hot, fertile crack of Dawn-‘
“Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton, and A. A. Milne all played on the same amateur cricket team.”
Chesterton, with his detective Father Brown, comes in last of those six in the Created an Immortal Character or Story metric.
They tried Chesterton at wicketkeeper, but he kept refusing to put down the wicket until he’d figured out why it had been put up in the first place.
Why do high schools start earlier than elementary schools? My impression is that they have to start at different times to share buses and drivers. But if they have to start at 7:30, 8:00, 8:30, why not start elementary school first, rather than high school? Some people say sports. But my impression is that prep schools, which care about sports more than public schools, tend to start later. The linked article implies that private schools have the same schedule as public schools, but I don’t think that’s true.
They don’t want elementary schoolers waiting for the bus in the dark. They couldn’t care less about high schoolers.
Thanks, that’s a pretty plausible reason. I’m skeptical that it’s that pat, though.
But why not, instead of starting elementary at (e.g.) 9 am and high school at 8, start elementary at 9 and high school at 10?
You have to start elementary school before both parents have left for work, else there’s a child-care gap when you can least afford it. That, plus not wanting six-year-olds standing out by the street at night, plus not wanting them dropped off at home alone before at least one parent is back waiting for them, I think pretty narrowly bounds the elementary-school day.
Right, so leave the elementary schedule unchanged, and have the high school start after the elementary rather than before.
I think sports (/other activities) is right. High school days (including after-school activities) are longer, so they need to start earlier to avoid ending too late.
Alternate theory: high school teachers need to do more work in evenings, so they care more about the end time being earlier.
Possible reason: a school that starts earlier also gets out earlier, meaning more time without parental supervision (in a world where both parents work, and aren’t home by 2-3). High schoolers are safer to leave on their own.
Just one data point, but the prep school I went to started at 9 AM for k-12. Winter sports were indoors and so it didn’t matter that it was dark. In the fall and spring it was still light enough to play outdoors at the end of the school day.
Our (public) school district started high school at 9 AM this past year (instead of the previous 7:30 AM)
What did they do with elementary and middle school? Did high school leapfrog over them?
Roughly, elementary schools shifted from 9:00 to 7:45 (although a few shifted to 9:15), and middle schools stayed at 7:30 as before.
So high schoolers can hold down a job after school? I’m not sure how common that is today (although it wasn’t unheard of at my fairly affluent high school), but there is inertia at play too.
I’m sort of bothered by the practice of citing Twitter activity like it was news.
Like — imagine that bozo you knew in high school. Kind of a loudmouth, usually wrong, and when someone pointed out he was wrong he’d get louder to compensate. Everyone knows someone like that, right? I’ll call him Chad.
Now imagine you open the newspaper and it says “CHAD IS ANGRY ABOUT (STUPID THING)”.
This is not news. Chad is one person out of three hundred million, and he’s always angry about Stupid Thing, and everyone sane has already made up their mind to ignore him.
But sometimes my news feed says something like: LEFT WING TWITTER CELEBRATES SHOOTING OF REP SCALISE or: TWITTER GOES CRAZY ABOUT RUMORS ABOUT BEYONCE. And I just — I just think we should stop paying attention to Chad.
(Scott’s post is not as bad, because he’s at least saying “this is evidence that some people think this way” which it at least sort of is.)
Why is the guy who everyone hates always named Chad?
EDIT: OK, a quick google turned up this article (http://www.unz.com/isteve/why-is-chad-a-joke-name/), which wasn’t all that helpful, but oddly enough led me back here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/17/republicans-are-douchebags/). Still unclear on why everyone hates Chad, though.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/chad-thundercock possibly relevant.
FWIW, I’m acquainted with two separate groups who use “Kevin” for the same purpose, and both were using it before _We Need to Talk About Kevin_. “Chad” sounds like a rich country-club name, which probably helps.
Yeah, Chad seems like a current substitute for “Biff” and “Muffy”.
If I understand the genetics paper correctly, it is claiming that Ashkenazi diseases have zero net selection. But since we know that they are diseases, we know that they are under strong negative selection. So for the net selection to be zero, there must be some unaccounted for positive effect.
But of course, we knew that already without any sequencing. You just can’t get diseases from a founder effect 1000 years ago. If Tay-Sachs carriers had no benefit, then the observed frequency must reflect every Ashkenazi being a carrier in 1600. (Also, there are two different Ashkenazi versions of Tay-Sachs!) I haven’t done the calculation for other diseases.
Oh, for thirty seconds in an elevator with Elon Musk!
(In case the drive to find lost cities in difficult environments is strongly heritable, I am about 90% sure I know where another one is, in considerable danger of being looted. The hard part would be getting the money to locate it safely and responsibly; going there to assess its condition in person would be comparatively easy. Alas, finding lost cities doesn’t seem like the kind of thing the Musk Foundation supports. Maybe it just doesn’t come up often enough to be a cause.)
Wow this sounds huge. Could you give more details? If you are not willing to give more public you can PM me. (Please state so in a comment, this is a throwaway)
I should preface this by saying, for what it’s worth, that I’m scraping by in the world of professional archaeology. I’m no one especially important in that world, but also not a random crank.
I don’t want to say too much in this forum, for reasons of security. I can say that the place in question is an ancient Maya royal capital, and also that my reasons for thinking it is where I think it is come from remote sensing and from the ancient hieroglyphic record. If you’re curious, I can tell you in a PM about the evidence that led to that hypothesis, and about how it could be tested.
Is this the opening of a Call of Cthulhu scenario? Because trawling through comment threads to start your investigation into what happened to the lost Alexander Expedition actually sounds like a good opening.
I can never forget the dreadful summer of June 201_, the last time that my good friend Carter was ever to be heard of (in this world, at least – as for others, I fear to even contemplate the possibility, knowing what I now know).
It all began with the seemingly well-favoured but, alas! later to be revealed as ill-starred, Alexander Expedition, which Carter and a group of like-minded scholars had conceived, planned, and put together in order to find a lost royal capital of the Maya.
Backed by a patron of immense wealth whose success in applying the most cutting-edge of scientific and technological advances to the problems of modern civilisation, and whose restlessly inventive, curiously questing, forwardly-thinking mind dared to dream of yet further triumphs on worlds beyond our own globe, had earned a mixture of grudging respect, adulation, and envy from his peers and the public at large, the last time Carter and I communicated, his enthusiasm was irrepressible, his hopes high, his expectations unbounded.
Little did we know! But how could we imagine, even in our wildest and most far-flung fancies, the terrible hidden truths and wisely-buried secrets that had been left to moulder beneath centuries of the brooding jungle’s encroachment, that damnable and damning knowledge that would be all too dearly bought in a mind-shattering moment of ultimate cosmic adumbration? If only that ancient hieroglyphic record, that cursed and mocking repository of unearthly wisdom, had remained lost, or if only Carter and his team had never broken its code and stumbled upon the tantalising hints that led them to their ultimate, unthinkable fate!
But even so, would that have been enough to avert the malice of destiny? For hints and invitations, signals and behests, were disseminated through the psychic sphere from that lost and ancient city, slipping into the unguarded, seeking minds of those who sought to use the techniques of a bygone day and more primitive yet acute knowings of those who quest in the dreamlands and realms of the night paths which loop in tangles throughout time and space, forwards and back, for what is hidden to the waking, daylight senses. Indeed, “sensing” is precisely how Carter described it to me.
🙂
I want to hear the rest of this story.
@Deiseach’s comment was so incredible that I almost hope the site has escaped detection so far because it’s inside “a bubble of localized spacetime curvature”: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.8144.pdf .
Term “non-Euclidian” banned; we now say “non-Alexandrian” instead.
No, you really don’t. Here be there Basilisks.
You mean “remote sensing” as in satellite photos and UAVs, not as in this thing, right? This is setting off the usual scam detectors for me.
I’m pretty certain he does. Remote sensing in archeology has been a big deal for a couple of years now. Things like radar mapping being able to see through trees, or detecting differences in soil from long-ago cultivation.
I’m shocked that anyone would be skeptical of a rando on the internet making confident claims about lost Maya kingdoms unknown to Science!
Seriously, though, yes, the hypothesis that Site X is in Location Y is based on some interesting things that some colleagues and I are doing, or have done, with Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data and GIS. Basically, the ancient Maya had to walk everywhere, so their bigger and more prosperous settlements tended to be at the confluences of low-cost pedestrian routes across the landscape. We arrived at that generalization by the following means: (1) we already knew the locations of most such settlements. (2) My colleagues, who are amazing and have access to some really powerful computers, produced a number of detailed maps of least-cost footpaths covering the whole Maya region. The maps measure “cost” in different ways, but they all agree well with one another. (3) Sure enough, biggish settlements tend to be at natural crossroads; natural crossroads in areas that have been archaeologically surveyed tend to have biggish settlements; and, where survey has been done, we don’t see many crossroads without substantial settlements, or many substantial settlements far from crossroads.
At the same time, we have hieroglyphic evidence that Site X exists and is in a certain general area. But that area is much too large for anyone to just go poking around on the ground until they find it. Fortunately, there is a major confluence of natural travel routes in that area, which has not been archaeologically surveyed. The Maya name of the site helps narrow it down a little bit, because it refers to a kind of geological feature that is pretty rare in the region in question. Last but not least, someone reported seeing a major site right about where we think our Site X is, back in the 1960s.
We think the place has a good chance of having escaped serious looting so far, because it’s really remote. However, the area is becoming increasingly dangerous, so we are preparing a funding application to carry out lidar imaging. If we’re right, the ruins will be readily visible once the data are processed. That information would help the proper authorities concentrate their efforts where they’ll do the most good, and also facilitate our hiking out to the place and checking out its condition.
@npcarter
That sounds fascinating. Do you have links about this? (Remote sensing and GIS are hobbies of mine, although I haven’t done much since I got involved with the battleship.)
@bean – We’re writing up a related paper now. It deals with some other results of our analyses, about different, already-known sites. The main reason we did those analyses was to try to explain why the known sites are where they are, and why they prospered when they did historically. Then our data turned out to be relevant to the problem of the “lost city.” (I use the term ironically; by modern urban standards, this will probably turn out to be more like “a few small lost villages, one of which has a lost palace and some lost temples.”) Once we have the paper submitted, the lidar application will be the next step down a road that I assume leads to our getting swallowed up by the jungle.
Holy cow, Ms. Tolkien competes in sighted fencing competitions. Modified fencing for the blind is a thing, so I assumed at first she was taking part in that, but no. That is crazy impressive.
Wow….its incredible– I’m blown away– does the article name her weapon?
epèe, foil or sabre?
nm I have to read it! tyvm for report!
foil…just wow.
Shotgun.
She uses one of her great-grandfather’s swords, Narsil.
It’s not as clumsy or random as a shotgun; an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.
(removed my comment… reading it back, it seemed like mocking or belittling… never mind)
I think she’s “legally blind”.
That is, she meets the legal criteria for being considered blind, but retains some seeing ability.
If nootropics work on you it’s most likely that you are sleep and choline deprived. Have an omlette and a nap.
Source for the poverty graphic: The World Bank’s new Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals, which has lots of other cool graphics (I like the one showing the change in productivity of the world’s fisheries).
Deadly fire, “It is no coincidence that the 98% is the same figure that is returned by the infamous Kim Jong-un of North Korea who claims mass popularity while reputedly enslaving the general population and starving the majority of his people to death.” Because nothing is ever a coincidence.
I have to wonder if that sort of hyperbole contributed to their concerns being ignored. It’s the sort of erratic language you find in letters written by obsessives, monomaniacs, and the mentally unwell.
@youzicha
It is very rare that decision making will satisfy 98% of the people, because people are generally a lot more diverse than that. So I do see such high percentages of support as a strong indicator that the voting is rigged one way or the other.
Yeah. Then again, I’ve only seen one side on the story, as told by very angry people… but some of the stuff they talk about is pretty binary. Either the only alley that can allow firefighter access to the building is blocked by parking vehicles, or it’s not. And they took photos showing that it was.
When people say again and again “There are billions of safety violations here, and the landlord is never around, there will be a fire at some point and people will die”, and then there is a fire and people die… yeah. That sucks.
Atmospheric CO2 levels started increasing at an accelerated rate about the same time the obesity epidemic took off. Given the linked research on carbonated beverages and ghrelin, can I now blame global warming for my extra pounds?
See my discussion of this possibility in the second half of this article.
Thanks for that. You’re right, it’s an appealing hypothesis and seemed almost too convenient. I am still curious about potential health effects of elevated CO2 levels, even if it’s not causing obesity. CO2 is definitely bioactive, but atmospheric concentrations are still fairly low in an absolute sense. There could potentially be a much bigger effect from people spending more time working indoors than from fossil fuel use. This is interesting for example: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/15-10037/
“Those people” dont try to educate their base on creationism (in spite of being atheists) or climate science, or on the declining fitness parity of conservative ideology.
less than 5% of my readers are creationists when i last asked them this (N=500). though i did talk a little bit about creationism before 2010…but it’s kind of boring. as for climate science, i’m not a climate scientist. i don’t see what i’m supposed to say that you couldn’t get from reading *the new york times* or whatever. nor do i talk about partisan politics much because i don’t have much to say on that issue that adds any value (clearly since like most i didn’t not anticipate and underestimated trump victory likelihoods).
nor frankly talk much about IQ since i’m not a psychometrician. there is a reason i addressed specifically the *genetics* aspect of that VOX piece, because i can speak as a geneticist who knows a lot about that topic.
i’m used to being lied about on the internet and in the media and expect it. a little disappointed that the same would happen on SSC.
anyone can actually read my blog to get a sense of what i do talk about.
also, my atheism is different from sam harris’. i am vocal about it i suppose as i state it matter of factly. but i don’t agree on a lot of points re: religion in comparison to sam (e.g., why it is ubiquitous, how dangerous it is, etc.).
For anyone else who was confused by this, it’s a reply to this comment upthread.
what does fitness parity of conservative ideology mean?
From previous frustrating conversations with bintchaos, I think it means that conservative ideas are going to be less appealing to future demographics, because of increasing educational attainment, growing minority populations, and something something Trump.
Flaws in this theory are left as an exercise to the reader.
john derbyshire wrote a book titled *we are doomed* which is very pessimistic about conservatism. i am not so pessimistic about conservatism because i don’t think these categories will have much truck as we enter the post-liberal democratic era in this century.
@Nornagast
You forgot that most important part! jobs, jobs, jobs!
jobs of the future– related to other posts here like the AI apocalypse.
Are you going to debate that Trump is NOT extremely bad branding for the GOP going forward?
@razib
Ah yes…I used to read you at Unz.
John Derbyshire…didnt he also write Ice People/Sun People?
I think a lot of the protesting students just really hate Trump.
Murray (even though an anti-trumper) is a reachable proxy that they can deny a platform to. In denying a platform to Murray, they are denying a platform to conservatism and the Head Republican (Trump).
Murray is just a dreadful choice as a spokesperson exactly because he’s an old guy with lots of bad press– isnt there anyone better to carry the conservative standard into ideological battle?
umm…did razib just call me a liar?
I’m sorry, I was distracted by @Deiseach’s strawman army, but thats the truth.
I started reading at Unz at the rise of the alt-right, a curious and fascinating emergent phenomenon.
I just think the high-information segment of conservatism should work to inform the low-information segment…because under polarization the base wont accept anything from the other tribe– they are unreachable.
Ditto for liberals of course.
i’m used to being lied about on the internet and in the media and expect it. a little disappointed that the same would happen on SSC
Please don’t take it personally; bintchaos was only using the flimsy excuse to gallop off on their hobbyhorse about conservatism (because, you see, all we conservatives on here are knuckle-dragging American backwoodsmen who probably chaw tobaccy and beat our continually-pregnant wives when we’re not snake handling at the tent revival and ironing our KKK robes whilst wistfully dreaming of the days when Confederate statues were still proudly standing in place, our tiny brains in our pin-heads consumed with envious rage at not even being permitted to stand outside, much less enter inside, the railings of the great, noble, world-renowned, influential and powerful liberal Hogwarts-universities – their coinage – even those of us not Protestant or Americans, or indeed possessed of wives). You could have been anyone in the world talking about anything at all from birdwatching to the price of tea in China, and they’ve have dragged in “yes, but you never condemned creationism and conservatism!”
what does fitness parity of conservative ideology mean?
It’s bintchaos’ King Charles’ Head. Don’t worry about it. They shoehorn it into everything. They like to represent themselves (whether they mean it seriously or whether they are trying to subtly troll) as one of the few, if not the only, left-aligned on here (the Wretched Hive Of Right-Wing Conservative Commenting Scum And Villainy).
miracle dictu…a veritable army of strawmen with Deiseach as the Supreme Leader.
Now I AM impressed!
Just like the skeleton warriors sown with dragon’s teeth every one I strike down is instantly reconstituted!
a veritable army of strawmen with Deiseach as the Supreme Leader
*chew*
*spit*
*bitterly clings to rusty old shotgun as a well-worn to the point of shedding pages like leaves in autumn Bible peeks out from a pocket of my dungarees, already dog-eared to a particularly anti-gay part of Leviticus or wherever the shellfish argument arises*
(That should cover the “God, guns and gays bitter clingers”, right?)
Ah dunno nuthin’ ’bout no armies, but ah reckon y’all hev ’bout ten seconds to git offa mah land ‘lessn y’all want a taste of Ol’ Betsy here *pats stock of shotgun in a meaningful way*
Ol’ Bessie
can we please go back a bit before the straw man apocalypse…
Who has lied about Razib Khan at SSC? Is that an accusation of moi?
Everybody gets lied about on the internet… my example of Murray is case in point– poor old charles murray is covered with a thick carapace of internet lies, slurs, innuendo and half-truths that he can never shed.
That’s why he’s a terrible standard-bearer for conservatism.
Another example is that before I started commenting here people in my social networks told me that Scott was a crypto-conservative and an “idiot”.
Neither one of which is empirically true, as it turns out.
?
“Old Betsy” is the name of Daniel Boone’s rifle in Traditional Americana, and by derivation for Maureen Birnbaum’s sword. Not aware of any appropriate “Ol’ Bessie”.
@bintchaos
Even the most kind, reasonable and fair person will get smeared in a highly polarized environment.
This idea that we just need to wait for this special person who will transcend all divisiveness and be hailed as the Messiah is a pipe dream as well as a dangerous narrative where groups refuse to engage with their vilified opponents.
Jesus ‘turn the other cheek’ of Nazareth got tortured and killed. Ghandi got murdered. Martin Luther King was murdered.
Nice people who fight the status quo get vilified just like the not so nice people who fight the status quo.
@John Schilling
She (Old Betsy) was Davy Crockett’s first rifle.
I imagine “Bessie” is from confusion with the musket, the Brown Bess.
Nah, ol’ Bessie is mah twin sister-cousin-wife’s shootin’ iron. This here ‘un is ol’ Betsy, ah gots her from mah granpappy. Ol’ Bessie, she come from his brother, our other granpappy.
…I was sure that was going to be a Tom Lehrer song.
Nornagest, you may perhaps observe that I feel as though I am the Pa Connors (and his brother, Pa Connors) to bintchaos’ documentary presenter 🙂
To those who want to make this a reference to Daniel Boone’s gun, note that a) it’s not a rifle but a shotgun, and b) whomever is performing this attempt at simulated vernacular will not be pronouncing the T in Betsy.
also, the second author of the VOX piece is a friend (we had dinner yesterday actually). i was offended in part because VOX editors/writers are promoting them as *experts* on genetics. they are behavior geneticists and psychologists. they didn’t have experience on race and genetics, though they did on IQ.
Did you talk about the article with them? My guess is that if you asked they would probably acknowledge that the article wasn’t 100% truthful.
it was three authors. that’s the problem. also, it’s not a scientific article so people can misconstrue things. the biggest problem is that the headline was totally misleading and 75% of ppl aren’t going to read beyond that when they ‘cite’ it.
Welcome to the Internet 🙂
The Gharqad tree sounds like an inverted Baldur’s mistletoe.
About jail population : there is no mystery. The jail population per capita at any given time is proportional to :
Number of criminals (per capita) x Average sentence length.
For instance, for murder, the average sentence length seems to be ~24 years in the US (source) and ~10 years in France (source, Tableau 5). There are a lot of important details ; for instance, these are the sentences, not the effective length in prison (which is closer to 6 years in France). These statistics are pretty crude, and I’ve not vetted them, but the gap is impressive enough.
Is there any evidence that longer prison sentences result in more safety for the average citizen?
My understanding is that the key point is the age when the convict is released. But some people are truly hopeless and keep committing violent crime long after their 20s.
Study
Once you correct sentence length for time served, the difference between the US and Europe is less dramatic (I think it’s 10 vs 5-7 in Europe). Also worth noting: our clearance rate for murder is lower.
But anyway, the point of the tweet was to convey in somewhat crude terms that if you want the US to have an incarceration rate comparable to Western Europe, you’d have to enact policies a lot more unpopular and potentially dangerous than not jailing drug addicts or dealers. That you might have to lessen the sentences of murderers and rapists strengthens this point.
Do more highly educated people have more brain cells or greater brain activity? Since education is correlated with IQ, to people with higher IQs have more brain cells or greater brain activity?
read the book 😉
https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-Fundamentals-Psychology/dp/110746143X
Can you give me a three sentence summary?
I’ll try–
but its a really good book —
Dr Haier’s words:
(my words)
3.
We are right on the cusp of amazing discoveries that can benefit all of mankind.
In the context of scientific research, not philosophical treatments of dualism, that statement is meaningless, I believe.
@HeelBearCub
Not necessarily. It’s possible that people might display different levels of “intelligence” in e.g. different social contexts.
@rlms:
And?
How is that not still biological?
“intelligence”: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills
“biological”: relating to biology or living organisms
Suppose a person’s ability to e.g. solve equations varies depending on whether they are doing a test or trying to calculate how much money they are owed. Then their intelligence is varying, but not on a biological basis (the living organism the intelligence belongs to is the same in each case).
@rlms:
The basis for that variation is still biological though, yes?
We already have the concept of verbal and mathematical IQ, but that doesn’t seem to contravene the idea that intelligence is biological. (I think intelligence is more varied than just those modes, but that is a different conversation.)
The measurement of IQ may not be completely accurate, but I don’t think bintchaos was going down that hole either.
@HeelBearCub
One link of the causal chain for the variation is biological (currently, given that we don’t have AI), but I don’t think it’s the most relevant one in the situation I describe. The parts of the person-environment system you can change to affect the intelligence in my example are non-biological. If you are saying that because a brain is involved at some point, the whole thing is biological, then I could argue that intelligence is 100% a physical phenomenon because all instances of it involve atoms.
On the other hand, the claim that “intelligence is 100% a biological phenomenon” is meaningful if you are talking about the most relevant part in the causal chain. If the situations I describe exist, then it is meaningful and wrong, but I think it’s possible that they are very infrequent. If that’s the case, a person’s intelligence (ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills) is almost always context independent, i.e. biological, and the claim is meaningful and basically correct.
Ummm…guys– the title of the book is the Neuroscience of Intelligence. Dr Haier delineates the history, state of the art, and projections into the future of IQ research– he covers all those topics, like the value and accuracy of psychometrics, reproducibility, sample size, etc.
I think the book you are looking for is the maybe something on the philosophy and ethics of IQ research?
I wish VOX would solicit a counter opinion piece from Dr. Haier…its decidedly un-liberal of them to refuse to publish the piece I read in Quillette… but I suppose they pander to their base for clicks like politicians pander for votes…
@rlms:
We can, for instance, affect your ability to do verbal tasks by piping back your voice to you on a one second delay. This is also “non-biological”, but I don’t think it gets at what bintchaos is saying.
@bintchaos:
As I said, unless you are contemplating dualism (the idea that the mind is a separate, non-biological construct) the biological underpinnings of intelligence are facilely true. So I’m not sure what you are trying to say when you say “intelligence is 100% biological phenomenon”.
This is a separate question from things like: Under what circumstances are IQ tests an accurate measure of intelligence? Are their differing cognitive abilities which are not measured very well by an IQ test? How much do environmental factors like lead, nutrition, induced stress response, or social incentives play in the formation or measurement of intelligence? How inaccurate are individual perceptions of the relative intelligence of individuals? etc.
Intelligence is 100% a biological phenomenon.
This is insulting to intelligent rocks and gaseous cloud beings!
So we need never fear Unfriendly AI, since not being biological, it can never be intelligent? Well, ladies and gentlemen, debate over, MIRI can disband and Nick Bostrom can go find something else to worry about 🙂
@HeelBearcub
Again, I didn’t say that, Dr Haier said it, its an exact quote from the book, and part of a 3 sentence summary of the content that I was asked for.
All your questions are answered in the book…again, I suggest reading it if you are interested. Its not very long, not very expensive and really well written. Dr. Zimmer also recommended it on his list of 10 science books to read.
@Deiseach
why would Unfriendly AI necessarily be non-biological? Have you heard of the Embodiment Principle for Strong AI?
AGAIN
the title of the book is the NEUROSCIENCE of Intelligence
Are you trying to contribute, or just trying to stir up the pot?
@bintchaos:
And I’m trying to get you to expand on what that means, as it doesn’t seem to convey anything useful to me about the contents of the book. I am trying to understand why Haier (or you) think this is a useful statement to make in summary of the thesis of the book.
@HeelBearcub
well…I can tell you what it means to me. Around 2006-7 Eva Jablonka postulated the four dimensions of inheritance: genetic, epigenetic, symbolic and behavioral.
So the idea is that humans also inherit their environment. So genes and epigenes are obviously biological, and gene expression (interaction of genes and environment) results in a biological phenotype. So there are documented cases where prayer or meditation gets expressed as biology too. So I guess that doesnt rule out supernatural “intelligence” or dualism or whatever– as long it could be detected in the phenotype– but I’m not exactly sure how that could be measured or even inferred… So Neuroscience of Intelligence means the phenotype, the gene expression of Intelligence to me.
HeelBearCub, do you think bintchaos is arguing in good faith? I’m happy to stand back and leave you at it, but even on the best reading, a flat statement like “Intelligence is 100% a biological phenomenon” is not going to go unchallenged if we are seriously discussing is AI (a) likely to happen soon (b) likely to be a threat.
If “intelligence” is biological, that a priori rules out any non-biological intelligence, and anything (we can’t even call it an entity if we accept this premise) that seems to be intelligent or acting in an intelligent way (e.g. our AI) is not, it’s just some brute-force Chinese Room with a whole heap of computational power that it’s not really doing anything meaningful or directed with.
For the record, I don’t think bintchaos is serious in all their comments. Some of them are genuine attempts at communication, but some are meant as nothing more than provocations – to my reading, anyway. It may not strike you in the same way.
And now we go direct to ad-hom…
how many times do I have to go through this?
I was asked to summarize the book in 3 lines– “Intelligence is 100% biological” is a direct quote from Dr Haier’s book– on the first page of the preface he says that is the viewpoint that suffuses THIS BOOK. Its his viewpoint.
I agree with him, that is what HeelBearCub asked me, it fits my personal views on intelligence and heredity.
heres more Dr Haier, maybe this will help
@bintchaos:
As I said, I think Deiseach is stirring the pot.
As to Haier, I think I understand what you/he meant by this at this point, but let me ask the following. Can I summarize that point as “Intelligence is very complex, and resists understanding, but this does not mean that it is mysterious and therefore inscrutable. We can study it and ultimately we will be able to understand how biological effects lead to intelligence”.
@Deiseach:
In the context of this discussion, AI is simply a red herring, a non sequitur. We are talking about intelligence as we currently experience here on earth, not intelligence that may be artificially created in the future.
@HeelBearCub
That is a really excellent summary– did you honestly craft all that from my poor impoverished 3 line summary?
Still think you should read the book.
So is @Deiseach permanently my implacable enemy or is this some sort of ritual hazing and witch testing that all new SCC commenters go though?
@bintchaos:
Deiseach has her particular subjects that she gets very, very irritated about.
And sometimes she is like Fender Tremolo in Jean Claude Van Damme’s “Cyborg”
“I like the misery!” (noise warning)
ETA:
Part of what is happening is that you are assuming too low a level of intellectual engagement on the part of your interlocutors.
Regardless of how obvious you think something is, you have to do something like provide proof. Otherwise you will get continually buffeted by those asking for you to substantiate your claims.
HeelBearCub, I personally do not believe in the Wicked Demon or Fairy Godmother AI models, but for those who are legitimately concerned that we are moving very rapidly towards creating a machine intelligence that will be a true intelligence – that it will be at human level – that it will recursively self-improve and surpass human intelligence – and that the time to worry about all this is now, not when it’s staring us in the face – then the question of “is intelligence inherently biological?” is extremely important.
If it is, then we do not need to worry about “artificial intelligence”, since any intelligent machine will only have the semblance of intelligence and not true intelligence, therefore will always be under human control and guidance.
If it’s not true, then we may have a problem.
For what it’s worth, I think true intelligence probably is biological, but a flat statement of “An authority says this in his book” would not, I think, be acceptable to you as the last word on the topic needing no further development or discussion?
But I have no interest in any boiling pots at the moment, I confine myself to being the looker-on as others engage with bintchaos.
The first question that occurs to me on the cellular phone thing is “what about everywhere else?” Among countries without our FCC, it looks like the first cellular systems only preceded us by four years at most (Japan in 1979, then multiple Scandinavian countries in 1981, then the first US system in 1983) with most following afterward.
My impression is that most countries had more in the way of state-run phone and broadcast services rather than the regulated near-monopoly of US midcentury phone service and regulated oligopoly of broadcast. But the fact that cellular seems to have started to hit steam-engine time in the 1980s everywhere at least suggests that specific regulatory decisions in the US may not have been the primary factor preventing its development earlier.
If mobile telephony had been visibly cheaper and higher-bandwidth elsewhere, that seems likely to have produced additional pressure (particularly from wealthy or corporate users on those mobile phone waiting lists) to reallocate spectrum away from TV broadcasters (as it eventually did, albeit much later).
And yet Bahnik & Vranka do not cite you. In my culture this is considered a “dick move”.
The standard is to only cite works whose results you directly use (although this gets really hazy when you want to refer to another study into something vaguely-related-seeming).
I don’t see it that way – if I become interested in depression after hearing a TV program about it, do I have to cite that program in every article I publish about depression later?
Haier:
Emphasis mine.
I think this is a pretty interesting paragraph, when contrasted with that Sam[]zdat review of “seeing like a state.”
One thing I would like to see from intelligence researchers is pretty much any understanding of or concern with the history of the last several centuries. There are reasons, real, actual, compelling reasons, that people start to squirm in their seat when they hear a scientist say “If we can change environments or genes to increase IQ in individuals, we have a moral obligation to do so because more intelligence is better than less.”
African Americans, for example, have a long history with our “moral obligation” to “change environments” for their benefit. Ask some of them how that turned out.
For the most part, the intelligence researchers I read about seem to regard a sentence like “If we can change environments or genes to increase IQ in individuals, we have a moral obligation to do so because more intelligence is better than less.” as being so obviously, self-evidently true and uncomplicated, that they can’t even fathom what the complications might be.
And if they can’t imagine or fathom the complications and ways such a program can go terribly wrong, I have no confidence in their ability to prevent it from going terribly wrong.
Unless there is a totalitarian world order, someone, somewhere will create an enhanced human–
Stephen Hawking
You can’t suppress science, and the Chinese will do it anyway.
Okay, so, the other reason I’m not confident in the ability of intelligence researchers and their devotees to respond to actual social problems their research might cause:
The fact that they read any criticism of their field as a call for utter suppression of the field.
I can’t help but notice that when our host talks about AI threat, very few, if any, of the commenters here go “Oh, so you think we should just stop all AI research everywhere?” But when I say “There are risks in intelligence research that are worth facing head-on, rather than dismissing” several people go “Oh, so you want to try to stop all intelligence research everywhere?”
Much like AI, the fact that genetic engineering and various intelligence boosting processes are likely to become more common and available over the next century is MORE reason to squarely confront and think about the dangers now, not a reason to ignore those dangers.
Because it’s been discussed, and everyone knows it’s impractical and also that he doesn’t want that (I think).
On the other hand, a lot of people DO want intelligence research suppressed and throwing up vague and dire warnings about risk is a time-honored way of suppressing something. So the priors are different.
I’m thinking maybe the riots and death threats to people who published widely-read discussions of heritability of intelligence or racial differences in IQ probably felt, to a lot of researchers, like people trying to suppress the whole area.
Citations?
I think he’s referring to the riot at Middlebury when Charles Murray tried to speak. I don’t think there have been too many riots over AI research (yet).
Also Arthur Jensen and Edward O Wilson got riots and death threats in the past. (For awhile, I think Jensen basically had a cop assigned to him to protect him.) I think Linda Gottfriedson has had some less serious but still unpleasant fallout from her work in this area, as well.
This blog post is an argument for suppressing the whole line of inquiry. He’s essentially making the argument that to even ask these questions is socially destructive and so should be forbidden. Nor is this unique to him.
So I don’t think it’s crazy for scientists to feel like people are trying to suppress their area of research, when they’re getting death threats, riots, and prominent people arguing that their area of research should be suppressed.
There was actually a really great post here about two months ago that talks about this problem, but from the perspective of the meta-point about outsiders not recognizing that there common criticism is already being acknowledged. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/
So, while I can’t recall any specific treatises by muggle-realist scientists about noticing the skulls, I know plenty of other fields where people asking experts if they know about the skulls. The poor track record of outsiders knowing how well experts recognize their own skull-laden paths makes me unsure if this is a great way to criticize muggle realists.
Well, except our own host really doesn’t, as far as I can tell, seem to have noticed these particular skulls. Very few commenters here seem to have, either.
Somebody who has noticed the skulls wouldn’t throw out a sentence like “If we can change environments or genes to increase IQ in individuals, we have a moral obligation to do so because more intelligence is better than less.” because that’s where all the skulls are. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we’ve traveled that particular road to hell quite a few times in the recent past.
Sure, perhaps there is some sophisticated thinking along these lines is going on in the intelligence research field. I would certainly be happy if you would point me towards it!
I thought the skulls were more along the lines of “since we can come up with reasons including but not limited to scientific ones why group B is inferior to group A then we can feel justified eliminating or enslaving or generally not caring about group B.” I don’t think Hitler was interested in using scientific racism to improve Jews.
That doesn’t work logically and it doesn’t provide a good explanation of the history.
Logically, if group B is inferior to group A on average, that does not justify eliminating or enslaving group B. To make such an argument you need to claim differences so great that almost all members of B are inferior to almost all members of A. That isn’t true (unless A are humans and B chimpanzees), so honest research won’t show it.
Historically, we have lots of cases where slaves were from the same ethnic group as owners, lots of cases where some members of an ethnic group were slaves and others high status, even cases where some slaves were high status. So it doesn’t look as though the argument you sketched plays an important role in justifications of slavery, although no doubt it sometimes got used for the purpose.
But we’re not talking about honest research, we’re talking about dishonest twisting of honest research. Isn’t that where the skulls are?
Where are the skulls in intelligence research?
The general case doesn’t apply, as we are talking about justifications for slavery (and other unequal treatments) in a world that is post-enlightenment. (Invalid) justifications are contextual.
The question is, are their relevant skulls in our recent history, and I don’t think you are denying that there are. That the ancient Greeks or Romans or whomever kept slaves under a completely different understanding of right and wrong is largely irrelevant.
I’ve heard that in the ancient world, it was considered morally normal for people to be enslaved for something like having the bad luck to be conquered.
Fast forward to the enlightenment, when there was supposed to be some reason for treating theoretically equal people people very badly, and you get theories that some groups of people are so inferior that being enslaved is doing them a favor by civilizing them.
Dan Carlin claims that this may have been an improvement in morals, as this narrative excluded large numbers of people from being slaves.
BTW. some people believe that 1 in 3 people in Italy were slaves during (part of) Roman times.
Environmental interventions to raise IQ are commonplace and ongoing, and seem like a uniformly positive story. That’s adding supplements to food to get rid of deficiency diseases that lower IQ, widespread vaccination, public sanitation, and public assistance programs to make sure pregnant women and small children get enough to eat. Add in environmental regulations to decrease the number of poisons in the environment, banning lead paint and leaded gasoline, education that’s both free and mandatory, etc. Where is the nightmare scenario here, again?
The nasty bit of history here w.r.t. genes is eugenics. And there were programs to sterilize people thought inferior, which were genuinely awful. (They also wouldn’t have worked to raise average IQ even given centuries to work with, given what they were doing.) So, let’s not give the state the power to forcibly sterilize people, even though we recognize that a lot of stuff is heritable.
There were also the Nazis, who murdered a lot of people they considered inferior. If your claim is that to know the heritability of intelligence or to desire to increase it is to suddenly transform into Hitler, I think you need to provide a little more evidence.
…I have a serious question, and I don’t really know how to phrase it so it doesn’t sound indignant or sarcastic or rhetorical, but here goes:
Why would you think that was my claim?
P.S. My actual claim is that there is a huge excluded middle between “Intelligence research will inevitably be used positively and help everybody!” and “Intelligence research automagically turns you into Hitler.”
That reveiw of “Seeing like a state” goes into that middle quite a bit, much more eloquently than I could.
Sorry, I guess I misread your intent. In fact, I’m still not too clear on what you’re trying to say.
Clearly, if you make any statement of goals without qualifying it, you might be ignoring the dangers that exist in going too far toward achieving your goals. If you say “If we can change environments or genes to increase IQ in individuals, we have a moral obligation to do so because more intelligence is better than less.”, you can assume that implies forcible eugenics or making genetic supermen and raising them in a creche or some other weird awful thing. But more likely, the author was thinking in terms of the kind of interventions we’ve done successfully in the past, like getting everyone their shots and making sure pregnant women and small children aren’t malnourished.
Now, my impression is that you believe that intelligence research and public knowledge of it are likely to lead to terrible things happening. Can you explain why? I know there were eugenics programs in many countries, and they were often quite nasty. (Though also generally quite limited in scope.) Is that what you’re worried will be forthcoming if intelligence research continues and is more widely known? Or is there some other downside you’re worried about?
The removal of lead from gasoline was motivated in large part by its well-documented negative effects on intelligence. Not that lead poisoning doesn’t also cause other problems but the IQ drop is really a pretty big deal.
And as it happens it had a somewhat disproportionate impact on black people.
There were earlier environmental interventions which, while again not specifically targeted to help black people, had a large beneficial effect. Thinking of hookworm mitigation/eradication in the US, for example. Or iodized salt.
Considering these examples, I’d argue that *if* we actually had some environmental intervention at hand to increase IQ, it would actually be evil not to use it. It’s only because we have already done all the obvious things, and we’re not sure whether our currently contemplated interventions would even be effective, that the question is even up for serious debate.
I know, for example, that they are still working on eradicating things like hookworm in black communities in NC (that were left off the expansion of city water).
Conrad Honcho
No. Wrong. Very wrong. Well, okay, right, but a massively, dangerously incomplete picture.
If I could sum up my argument in as few words as possible, it would be:
Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes.
To expand it a little more:
Efforts to improve the lot of a “less able” or “less intelligent” population often radically, catastrophically backfire. And, relatedly, often, hatred does not drive discriminatory practices; rather, discriminatory practices drive hatred.
Further, I would argue that the humanities have found ways to explain how and why these good-natured interventions fail, and that it behooves us to internalize some of this knowledge, lest history repeat itself.
How? Well, the lazy explanation I keep coming up with is this. You know how you and others keep going, “Hey, Hitler wasn’t interested in improving the Jews!” and maybe notice how I keep not bringing up Nazis, but instead bring up American chattel slavery? This is because chattel slavery was sold, and conceived of, as a means of improving Africans. Blacks are like children, and whites are like adults. This means that whites have a responsibility to steward blacks. To bring blacks to a civilized land, and channel them into the kind of work and life that their childlike minds are able to comprehend. We can no more give blacks complete freedom than we can give a baby complete freedom, to do so would be unutterably irresponsible.
Many justifications for slavery read just like this, and it’s really very, very important to note that at no time does “I hate black people and want to hurt them!” enter into the argument. Slavery is not an excuse to hurt blacks or a base profit motive, it is a moral imperative that stems from our love for and concern for blacks.
Similarly, the Soviet planners didn’t starve and immesserate a bunch of Hungarians because of their burning hatred for Hungarians.
You simply cannot erase the risk of similar disasters by teaching people not to hate, because hatred was not the motivation in the first place.
Ribbonfarm’s review of Seeing Like A State describes a certain kind of failure mode for well-intentioned interventions.
The Sam[]zdat review goes into greater detail on this question, as does Scott’s review. I’m sure the book itself is even more comprehensive.
If you read Sam[]zdat’s review, or Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant”, or Kipling’s poem “White Man’s Burden”, you’ll see the way this process of management is not the result of hatred, but one of the causes of hatred. You begin to hate the irrational savages who refuse to be managed by your schemes, no matter how carefully you explain and demonstrate that everything you are doing is for them. The frustration builds into a combination of resentment and disdain.
These are not obscure processes; they have been well articulated by many, many writers.
Here’s a simple failure mode I can see for intelligence research:
“Smart people should be in charge of everything; this much is obvious. The only problem with that is that, until now, we just haven’t been able to identify smart people. Our new research allows us to do this, allowing us to create a true meritocracy. Hooray!
…
Hmm, it seems like a lot of the less intelligent people are rebelling. Their inability to accept our sensible new rules demonstrates their lack of intelligence, and therefore, even more strongly then before, demonstrates the need for the smart people to have large amounts of control. Some repression will have to happen, but it’s for everybody’s own good, after all.”
One of the catch-22s of this dynamic is that if managing people fails, that just shows that the people are so dysfunctional they need even more management. Black people and Native Americans have a lot of experience with this; there has been no time in our history in which they haven’t been heavily managed and controlled by the government, and yet the conclusion isn’t “Maybe stop managing so much and see what happoens?” But rather, “This just shows how intractable the problem is. Maybe we need to start giving them intelligence boosting drugs in the womb!” or “I guess this shows that even with expert management the problem is unsolvable, and we really ought to start realigning our society to deal with the fact that they’ll just always be on a lower tier than whites.”
Why do I think that might happen? BECAUSE IT HAS HAPPENED CONSTANTLY THROUGHOUT THE LAST SEVERAL CENTURIES.
This process happens from people all over the political spectrum and is not, I repeat, NOT motivated by outrageous hatred. Since it isn’t motivated by outrageous hatred, elimination of outrageous hatred will not stop it from repeating.
And what I want is not for the government to halt all intelligence research, and it is certainly not for anybody to get beat up or worse for participating in such research.
What I want is for somebody in the field, or even an interested third party, to be able to mirror this concern back to me. To say, “I can see how even eliminating prejudice does not mean that our policies will be beneficial or use intelligence research well.” or, hell, even, “I see what you are saying, but I disagree because…”
What I get, though, is me saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” and a large number of people going “Yeah, but this time we have good intentions so we won’t get to hell.”
Christopher Hazell:
The scenario you describe of intelligent people imposing more and more restrictive control on the less intelligent people is described as a very bad outcome we should try to avoid, at the end of _The Bell Curve_. They described your scenario with the term “The Custodial State.” Basically like a giant reservation for the low-IQ underclass. And they were absolutely clear that this was a really bad outcome that we needed to avoid.
That’s at least one instance of someone close to this field not only noticing the skulls, but also trying to warn people about them and think how they can be avoided. (Murray later wrote a book advocating a UBI partly on the basis of this concern, and his more recent book _Coming Apart_ is about evidence of ongoing cognitive stratification and what it implies for the country’s future. He’s been *staring* at those skulls for decades, now, asking what can be done to avoid them.)
Note that demanding that he stop talking about such divisive and disturbing stuff wouldn’t have helped *at all* in trying to avoid those particular skulls. If Herrenstein and Murray were right, cognitive stratification is what we’re guaranteed to get, more and more, with all that implies.
Ironically, this reminds me of the end state of increasing automation as described in the recently link short story Mana.
For one striking example, the treatment of Native American children by Canada, one of the world’s more civilized countries. The basic theory, as best I can tell, was that their problem was their culture, so the solution was to take them away from their families, ship them across the country ton institutions where they were forbidden to speak their own language, thus solving the problem in a single generation.
It sure seems like the problem here is not trying to figure out the causes of observed differences, it’s giving some people vast power to play around with the lives of others, either for their own good or for the good of the larger society. That also applies to the nasty history of coercive eugenics in several countries, including the US.
Well, yes, this is why I reject rationality and embrace Catholicism: man becomes enamored of his own construction, disaster results. It’s just the story of the Tower of Babel.
But I think you’re putting the cart before the horse with your slavery example. No one set out to “help” Africans with slavery. They set out to get slaves, and justified it later with “oh we’re helping them.”
Better examples might be colonialism. But there’s a mixed bag there…some colonies came out better off. The Belgian Congo, well…Yes We’ve Noticed The Hands?
“volcano death cults”
How many of them were there?
Eh I edited that out because I couldn’t find the link I wanted. Kindly disregard.
Imagine a world where nobody had ever come up with the idea that nonwhites were less smart or civilized than whites. In that world, what is the probability that whites who were making piles of money from their sugar and cotton plantations wouldn’t have come up with some entirely different justification for slavery? We didn’t start out with racial superiority theories and then somehow invent slavery and colonialism and ethnic cleansing and genocide to apply them. Instead, we[1] used slaves because it paid, and we colonized other lands because we were strong and they were weak, and we pushed natives off the land so we could take it because we were numerous and more technologically advanced than the natives (and they were susceptible to a lot of our diseases). And then we spun up some justifications for those things, applying God, society, science, the law, destiny, etc., as needed.
[1] We meaning humankind; none of us here did any of those things.
In that world, what is the probability that whites who were making piles of money from their sugar and cotton plantations wouldn’t have come up with some entirely different justification for slavery?
Isn’t that how it started? The native indigenous inhabitants were deemed unsuited for the work as they kept rebelling or dying in captivity; the imported indentured white labourers kept succumbing to tropical diseases and besides, they were white too and eventually had to be set free at the end of their contracts; but black African labour was both physically inured to the conditions and survived better in captivity?
And then after a few generations, especially when the Enlightenment swings around, it becomes “Well, the reason we keep slaves is because… (they’re natural inferiors)(slavery gives them a chance to come in contact with our superior civilisation)(the Bible says so) and not because we’re making loads of money off this”.
“As needed” is an interesting way of putting it. One ongoing question I have, in general, is what purpose justifications serve, particularly institutional or society-wide justifications.
Or, actually, let me respond to this question:
With my own question: Why would they need to “come up with” a justification for slavery other than what you assert to be the actual justification? In the world you assert, what is to prevent the whites making piles of money on their sugar and cotton plantations from simply saying “Slavery makes us money and we have enough power to maintain it as an institution”?
Even if we don’t know the exact answer to that question, I think you and I both agree that there was some kind of mental block preventing those white people, in that era, from directly expressing or conceiving of slavery in such a nakedly selfish way. For whatever reason, they (to use your word again!) needed a particular moral scaffolding, a justification other than selfishness.
Here is a related thought: Why weren’t weak or economically destitute white people also exactly as subject to chattel slavery as black people? If the motive is simply profit, the racial angle doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. In other words, if you say, “Well, they wanted to have black slaves, so they came up with the idea that black people were inferior” you are ignoring a prior question, namely, “Why did they want black slaves in particular?” To answer with “Well, white people couldn’t be kept as chattel slaves” leads us to ask: Why not? Because white people as a group were stronger? Well, what led to the ideology that allowed Americans to conceive of “white” as a unified category, rather than stratifying whiteness into free and slave castes?
I think it’s far too simplistic to say either “Well, somebody invented an ideology of black inferiority, and that naturally led to slavery” or, “Well, they wanted to have slaves, so naturally they invented an arbitrary reason to have slaves”. I believe the moral and economic reasoning of slavery fed into each other, as part of a complex series of positive feedback loops.
Here’s something else: I’ve seen a lot of libertarians argue that racial discrimination would rapidly disappear in a free market, because it’s simply not profitable to arbitrarily exclude huge numbers of customers and laborers from your business. If we work under this logic, and under the logic that chattel slavery was itself mainly about profit, then it seems to me that anti-black racism should have rapidly disappeared from the US following the abolition of slavery. After all, once slavery was abolished, the profit motive for discrimination disappeared, and was in fact replaced with a new profit motive that demanded the rapid extinction of anti-black racism.
And yet far from disappearing, it continued to fester. The idea of racial segregation remained very popular for a century or so after slavery was abolished, and still has its adherents here in the states even today. Even if the ideology of black inferiority was merely an invention to legitimize slavery, it somehow managed to significantly outlive that institution.
To me that shows that the ideology did and does matter, that the form it takes can’t be dismissed by saying “Well, somebody would have invented something to justify slavery, so don’t worry about it.”
yeah, it’s called cognitive dissonance
a more convincing reason to tell yourself and others is probably helpful in this regard, but ultimately it’s all cognitive dissonance
Here is a related thought: why weren’t poor black freedmen in the U.S. routinely enslaved?
The bottom line is that slavery mostly came from countries who sold slaves. African countries were selling slaves. There’s also the Arab slave trade but I don’t think that’s relevant.
So, two points: Firstly, was it popular among business owners? You seem to be conflating anti-black racism generally and segregation specifically as well. But I bet it wasn’t that popular among business owners.
Secondly, a failure mode of the free market is cartels. And this is a classic example of cartelization: all business owners agree not to serve blacks (or whites, depending) and the government even enshrines it in law. But outside of this, it doesn’t last.
IIRC, the infamous “Plessy v Ferguson” was about a rail line suing the state to try and overturn it’s segregation policy. Business wanted to integrate, because it was cheaper. The state said it was literally illegal to allow blacks to sit in the same cars as whites.
To answer with “Well, white people couldn’t be kept as chattel slaves” leads us to ask: Why not? Because white people as a group were stronger? Well, what led to the ideology that allowed Americans to conceive of “white” as a unified category, rather than stratifying whiteness into free and slave castes?
Two points in response to this:
1) If you wanted to get your hands on a large number of white slaves in the relevant time period, where were you going to get them? As far as I can tell, there wasn’t much white-on-white slavery going on in Europe at the time. The major exception seems to be Russia, which had legal slavery until 1723, but if you want people to do hard labor in the tropics equatorial Africans are probably a better choice than Russians. There was of course substantial usage of indentured servants from Britain, but those legally had to be freed after their term was up and since they were British citizens it seems likely the British government would have taken a dim view of any attempt to convert them into permanent slaves en masse.
2) It’s also highly relevant that Europeans were mostly Christian, while the available Africans were mainly non-Christian; the idea that you weren’t allowed to keep a fellow Christian as a slave was sufficiently widespread in the early years that some state legislatures found it necessary to pass laws specifying that being baptized as a Christian would not make a slave free.
It’s hard for to tell if the three of you understand that you’re agreeing with me, so I’ll just say, yeah, Loquot, Matt M and AnonYEmous:
Totally to everything you’re saying.
I was answering a question Albatross11 asked, namely:
And the answer to that, it seems to me, is that the probability is actually pretty high, or, more precisely, that the question is not quite formulated correctly.
The racial and national politics of the times channeled the ideas people had about what kinds of slavery were possible or permissible. Despite the fact that the profit motive remains the same, those slavers were, in fact, not able to come up with a justification for enslaving their fellow Europeans.
Of course slavery has a profit motive, but I don’t believe you can therefore say that all the other motives are secondary or irrelevant; they actually exert powerful influence on what we think of as “legitimate” or “illegitimate” means of generating profit.
Let me go even further: The profitability of slavery will remain pretty consistent until automation replaces us. The less you can pay your workers, the more profits to keep for the company, right? And yet there is no powerful bloc of people arguing for the return of chattel, or any other kind of slavery. There would be huge amounts of money in it for very powerful people, and yet, in fact, today we do not see a constantly shifting set of justifications for such a practice, or, in fact, any attempt to justify it at all outside of a few crackpots.
I can’t find a way to explain that without resorting to an ideology other than pure profit. The ideology of racial inferiority (As well as a number of other ideologies!) really did matter, really did do important work in creating a climate that allowed slavery, and in determining what form slavery took.
Galley slavery existed into the 18th century, as did penal slavery more generally.
On the question of profitability … . My reading of the historical evidence is that galley slavery, invented in the Renaissance, was profitable, from the standpoint of the navies that employed galleys, other forms of penal slavery mostly were not. The historical evidence suggests that, once galley slavery, was invented, Mediterranean powers stopped executing able bodied male convicts and condemned them to the galleys instead. More generally, the literature on New World slavery suggests that slave labor was competitive with free labor only for gang labor crops such as cotton and sugar where the cost of guarding and monitoring was relatively low, not more generally. Galley slavery fits that pattern.
During the American Revolution, when the English no longer had a convenient destination for transporting indentured servants, they tried penal slavery with the convicts in hulks on the Thames engaged in work on the river. They apparently found it to be a losing proposition.
So far as transportation was concerned, the British crown had to subsidize it to make it workable–on average, the amount an indentured servant could be sold for was not enough to cover the full cost.
On the other hand, I suspect that slavery would be profitable today, because productivity is much higher and the cost of feeding and guarding slaves isn’t.
Christopher Hazell, I agree with your general points.
However, “If we work under this logic, and under the logic that chattel slavery was itself mainly about profit, then it seems to me that anti-black racism should have rapidly disappeared from the US following the abolition of slavery.”
Slavery didn’t go away– it was brought back by imprisoning black men under grossly unjust laws like changing employment without permission (which I think could turn a job into de facto slavery) or not being employed, and then renting the prisoners out to white farmers and business owners.
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
So as for the housing thing, it’s not just a price thing. It’s a generational class thing.
Price/Income in Dallas is 4. Rent/Income is 30% and used to be 23% before we banned building on a national level in 2006. (Not joking. Sub-Great Depression per-capita for a decade).
So in Dallas, you pay a third in taxes, a quarter to rent, scrape together 80% (aka 20% down) over a decade or so (assuming you didn’t FHA a 3% down loan and pay PMI the first few years) and then go buy a nice little $200,000 house out in some suburb.
And in NYC, it’s 8. Which like yeah no, that’s 3 years of after-tax income on the down, but is still doable in the long run, especially when wages are that high. I mean, we’re paying you an extra 30 or 40 grand a year for sticking around the Metro and that number only goes up when you start talking about people like computer programmers. And I’d rather be out 40% of $90K than 30% of $50K.
The problem is that 75% of NYC is co-ops. Who want 150% down in liquidity.
So if you want to buy your million-dollar condo because you got lucky at your last company and now you have a couple hundred grand in the bank, they won’t let you in.
If you’re the wrong class, they won’t let you in.
If you don’t have a rich uncle, they won’t let you in.
If….
So there’s no hope. Just a hereditary property-owning class controlling all access to the exclusive areas forever.
And you can’t even get lucky enough to buy your way in.
Explanation + citation.
Housing starts fell off 80% between 2005 and 2008 in large part because of GSE scandals (Because 30-year mortgages are insane on their face, so you have to get government backing).
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/07/yes-virginia-our-housing-stock-is-now-way-way-below-trend.html
And that’s from 2011.
Somewhat better chart that puts it in population context is here:
https://idiosyncraticwhisk.blogspot.com/2016/03/housing-part-126-homebuilding-and-rent.html
I too can support any conclusion I want if you let me define (without explanation even) demand.
Most proxies for demand used by Erdman and Delong are insufficient. Total population is of poor (at best) value. Even population growth is often misleading when it comes to housing, using “trends” in housing production without looking at the underlying demographics is an easy way to get the sign wrong.
The first point is that a newborn doesn’t need their own house, they need a small room inside a house, the additional ‘demand’ for housing shows up 15-25 years after a population boom starts* in most cases. Population growth rates in the US bottomed out in the mid 80s at about half of what it was annually in 1960 and even less than that when compared to ’45-’59. A person expecting a housing bust in 2000 due to demographics had a good case going for them on this point.
Secondly household’s have altered in profile dramatically over the years. The average household size fell from ~3.7 to ~2.6 between world war 2 and now. Basically that entire fall occurred between 1945 and 1990 and represents significant demand over that period. Comparing an era (1990-present) without such a boost to that era is going to throw off your calculations.
Where the houses are built also matters. Gross household starts aren’t the same as net. If you are building a single family home in NYC you are probably tearing down an old single family home for the space. If you are building a single family home in Phoenix you are probably just building a new home (this goes for the general age of the stock as well, though what metric to use is complicated), not replacing an old home.
What type of housing is in demand also screws things up a lot, if apartment living comes back in vogue for whatever reason then multifamily units are going to cover a lot of the single unit homes (and multifamily starts don’t tell us much unless we know their average size, and I don’t know if that information is readily available). If more people are going to college or living in communal situations (ie nursing homes) then single family starts are less telling.
In short there were at least two major demographic headwinds against single family starts, and maybe 4-5, with none I know of (though my knowledge isn’t deep enough for that to mean a whole lot) pushing for a major construction boom.
Delong’s graphs on single family starts are biased up by a major building boom during the 70s and 80s due to the baby boomers starting families of their own and smaller household size. Drawing a trend line through these two events and extrapolating leads him and Erdman to the conclusion that housing starts were only a little to high during the 2000s. The bubble, from the standpoint of housing starts/housing demand, probably started during the early to mid 90s.
*an immigration boom would have a different profile, and lots of population booms are part native birth rates and part immigration, and a birth boom will change the profile of what types of housing are demanded.
To continue:
If you get the magnitude of the housing bubble wrong or the timing (or both) then you will draw incorrect conclusions about its cause and fallout. Let’s just say that the housing bubble caused ~3.5 million excess homes to be built and that Delong coincidentally wrote that post at the moment when the market adjustment had evened out the excesses of the boom. Delong’s conclusion is that since ~1 million extra units were built you should roughly see a bounce back in 2009 as building picks back up. He will then go looking for explanations for the elongated recession in the 2007-2010 time period. If instead the boom is cleared out in 2011 then he should be looking at what happened in 2009-2011 to explain the recession.
The entire argument is built on a non rigorous definition of demand (it also often conflates price and cost, which aren’t close to the same thing for housing). Erdman is much (much, much, much) better than Delong on this (and basically every) axis, but if my description of the housing bubble is closer to reality than his it throws off the majority of his conclusions.
Hence why the first chart in that Erdmann link is:
# of housing units per adult not in prison over 16 vs. median rent/median income ratios.
A ratio that was in fact falling at every point since 1991 except for a small blip during the “Housing Bubble”.
And rents were more or less following this, rising at the exact rate at which the supply of housing was falling.
Unless you know something about household composition that I don’t (Read: That the single motherhood crisis is getting noticeably better, and thus reducing households/adult), that suggests that we’re missing 7 Million homes since 1991 and 5 Million since 2008.
/Mind you, Erdmann agrees with you on the recession stuff. The recession should never have happened, just like the 2018 recession should never have happened.
//Yeah, we’re about to have one, because the Fed’s fucking up in the exact same way they fucked up in 2006-8.
What? This description is a gross misrepresentation of the graph. The graph shows a peak ~1989, a decline from 0.57 units per capita to 0.56 per capita in 1993, then a rise back to 0.57 ~1999, before it falls from 2000->2003, then rises from 2004->2009, then falling from 2010 through 2015.
Secondly look at the scales. the units/per person barely budges. Peak of ~0.57 units per person, and a trough of 0.54, a 5% change. The affordability index goes from ~0.23 to ~0.30, a 30% change. I guess housing demand is incredibly elastic, except for 1986 ->1989 when the ratio moved from 0.55 to 0.57 and affordability didn’t change, or from 1999-> 2000 where the ratio fell from 0.57 to 0.55 and affordability dropped by 1/2 as much as you would expect compared to the 2006-2008 -> 2015 fall.
In fact the steepest decline in affordability came from 2007->2009, and the ratio increases slightly in this span. What is going on here???
Oh, affordability is Rent/Income, and there was this recession that started in 2007 and eventually hit UE rates of >10%. What you see starting in 2007 is a decline in incomes leading to a decline in the housing stock and an increase in the rent/income ratio simultaneously, not a decline in stock leading to an increase in rent/income ratio that is posited.
More to come…
Continued from above…
Now lets go back and look at the units/adult historically. Erdman has another post in 2016 where he graphs units /adult going back to 1965, and what do we see? We see that 1989 was an extreme peak up, with units/adult hovering ~0.51 for the 60s and 70s before pushing up to 0.57 in 1989. This presents an entirely different view of the current ratio of ~0.54,while it is now a 20 year low this ratio is basically average for the past 40 years.
To get to the conclusion that 2008-2017 represents massive under building in the US you have to start from the assumption that 1989-2000 is definitively a healthy market. Once again the entire argument hinges on describing when the bubble* began, and what a healthy market would look like.
I want to return to Delong’s argument where he used a “trend” to calculate how many units were over built, and how many missing. Take Erdman’s graph and look at the trend from 1975->1990, project it out and you are almost certainly going to come to the conclusion that there was a massive housing shortage starting in 1990 which is now 25 years old and without it we would have a unit/adult ratio of .70. Or start in 1965 and draw a trend line through the whole graph and 2007 looks a like a perfectly healthy year with wild overbuilding through 2000.
* The term housing bubble is inaccurate, it was a financial bubble where risk was mis-priced. Housing was a portion of this, and house prices specifically were very important
This is not my position at all, my position is that the 2008 recession happened because the 2000 and 1992 recessions weren’t large enough (or more accurately because there weren’t enough recessions from 1980-2008).
I can only assume you mean from a monetarist perspective who listens to people like Scott Sumner. There is no consistent narrative about the fed screwing up in 2006-2008 and it screwing up now using their preferred measures.
Isn’t the real reason for the repeated recessions that the central bank policy to deal with recessions is to increase the money supply, but that there is a lack of investment opportunity? So much of it just goes into a bubble. When that crashes, you get a new bubble and a new bubble, etc.
There appear to be recessions, and repeated recession, without a CB (the Federal Reserve was established after 1900, and pre 1900 there were definitely recessions in the US, though the cause, frequency and depth are not at all agreed upon). Recessions are almost certainly a feature of capitalism, and probably any dynamic economic system.
Sure, but one can presumably make them less frequent or even prevent them; or make them more frequent.
That’s the usual theory for the function of the Fed. Evidence that it makes them less frequent is scarce, given that the worst depression in U.S. history occurred long after the Fed was established and was arguably in part due to its actions.
@DavidFriedman
You can make the same argument about the police. It was created to stop crime, yet crime rates became substantially worse in the 60’s. How could that happen if the police actually stop crime?
One answer is that society changed. To get back to recessions: you’d expect bigger recessions in a more globalized/interconnected economy. It’s especially dangerous to then assume causation based on correlation, because if society is changing to make a problem worse, you’d expect people to react by taking countermeasures, which are not necessarily fully effective, especially at the beginning, as people are still learning. So then it can be true that the countermeasures are somewhat effective, yet that the worst problems happen after some countermeasures are taken.
Another explanation is that the Fed is not actually working effectively. For one, it has economic prosperity as a goal now, which is very dangerous, as letting bubbles happen will enable economic prosperity in the short term. I also point you to the testimony by Alan Greenspan who admitted that he was wrong in his libertarian approach: “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms … I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works. I had been going for 40 years with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”
I would argue that the Western central banks have been either overregulating (by granting too many special privileges) or underregulating (by not preventing abuse of those privileges) or both.
However, the actual efficacy of the central banks is as much a political as an economic question. If wise regulatory behavior can prevent or much reduce recessions, but humans prove incapable of this, that is different from a situation where no regulatory behavior can reduce and/or prevent recessions.
For example, it became enamored of the idea that ordinary people shouldn’t stop crime, shouldn’t try to be heroes, that’s what the police are for. Since most crime occurs when ordinary people are around and police aren’t, net crime-fighting ability of a society goes down when you add police.
Or maybe not, but you’re arguing with the guy who literally wrote the book on alternate legal systems, so “how are the police not the best thing ever for stopping crime” might not have been the analogy to go for there :-)
@John Schilling
My argument merely requires that policing works within a certain societal context. Whether or not alternative models work better is quite irrelevant.
The relevant comparison would be between crime rates in England before and after about 1830, with some attempt to control for other variables–the murder rate, for instance, seems to have been trending down long before that.
If anything, I would expect the opposite. The bigger the economy, the smaller the effect of random events–law of large numbers. I don’t have an adequate theory of the business cycle and am doubtful anyone else does–I like to describe a macro course as a tour of a cemetery or a construction site–so can’t say anything more confident than that.
But it may be worth noting that a recent chairman of the Fed, post Greenspan, confessed to the Fed’s responsibility for the Great Depression.
Do you have any reason to believe that is what was happening in the case of the creation of the Fed? The second most serious depression in U.S. history happened about eighty years before the Fed was created. The most serious, almost twenty years after.
That’s the key point. I use the term “bureaucrat god” for an imaginary regulator who is benevolent, omniscient, and all powerful, able to make economic actors take whatever actions he orders them to (not all powerful in the sense of being able to create stuff out of nothing). It seems clear that an economy run by a bureaucrat god could improve on the outcome of a laissez-faire market–that’s the implication of the existence of market failure. But we don’t have any bureaucrat gods.
In evaluating the unregulated alternative, we assume that economic actors are acting in their rational self-interest, not that they are acting to maximize social welfare. We should make the same assumptions in analyzing the regulatory alternative. If only wise regulatory behavior can produce benefits and there is no way of making regulatory behavior wise, then regulatory behavior cannot produce benefits. That’s the relevant issue.
For details, see public choice theory.
@DavidFriedman
Recessions are often not due to random events, but due to runaway spirals of behavior that is beneficial on the short term, but destructive long term.
Generally, the people involved in the bad behavior hide it as much as possible, which is easier if a system is bigger and more interconnected.
Just look at hurricanes, they need large bodies of fairly warm water to develop out of storms. Similarly, destructive spirals can become bigger if there is a ‘warm’ and large economy to keep providing fuel.
@Aapje:
I don’t think climate metaphors or a very useful way of doing economics. You need an actual theory. I cannot see any evidence that you have one (nor do I–I don’t do macro). Ideally a theory that has made nonobvious predictions in the past that mostly turned out to be true.
@DavidFriedman
My metaphors are not economics, they are meant as rhetorical devices, to make a point.
I also haven’t explained my full theory here. Partial criticism of the current status quo also has value.
The problem with making predictions is that the policies are still mostly the same, so you will get mostly the same as yesterday, which is an easy thing to predict, but which offers little evidence that my theory is right. If you live next to a pool of toxic waste and are already sick, my claim that the toxic waste is making you sick is not really proven if you are still sick tomorrow, if you stay near the pool. To properly test my theory, you have to move away from the pool (or clean it up), to see if this heals you (or expose a healthy person to the waste).
To be a bit more complete, my specific claims are that:
1. The main drivers of prosperity are technological advancement & more efficiency (for example, by free trade and well functioning markets)
2. We are at such a high level of efficiency that only fairly minimal gains can still be made
3. Many economists/politicians are completely fixated on increasing efficiency, where they have irrational expectations, ignoring that far higher gains can be made now by technological advancement
4. A specific example of this irrationality is the mistaken assumption that we are in a post-WW 2 scenario, where there is insufficient production capacity to meet demand.
5. Very obvious evidence that this belief is mistaken is the low demand for capital, visible in historically low interest rates.
6. Artificially increasing the amount capital to even higher levels to achieve economic growth is thus not going to achieve the desired effect + will strongly incentivize fraudulent behavior, as honest capital investments are insufficiently available. The combination of low interest rates with low economic growth is known as stagflation.
7. Fraudulent behavior often ‘works’ in the short term by producing fake growth/wealth, but is destructive in the long term, causing severe recessions. The fake growth deludes people into thinking that their destructive policies work.
8. One way in which people try to increase efficiency is to weaken the position of employees, so they will be more flexible, work for less salary, etc. As the market is not production-limited, but consumer-limited, this just weakens demand (and increases the willingness for people to save, increasing the already too generous capital supply) and the marginal gains in efficiency are not worth the decrease in demand.
9. So with the current policies, I predict mediocre growth, a substantial bubble collapsing every decade or so and permanent low interest rates. What I cannot predict is the exact size and effect of the bubbles, because this depends on how the fraud is perpetrated.
My suggested fixes:
A. Increase taxes on (larger) corporations in a way that cannot be easily evaded (or just end much of the tax evasion), strongly incentivizing investments in R&D (the higher the real taxes, the more incentive to not seek rent, but to invest in the company)*.
B. Choose policies that increase the spending capability and willingness by consumers. This includes reducing the income & wealth disparity.
C. Increase government investments in fundamental research and semi-applied research.
D. Limit the money supply to more natural levels/don’t seek to boost the economy by increasing the money supply
My predictions of my policies:
I. Interest rates go up
II. Fewer recessions/bubbles
III. Slightly higher/similar long term economic growth at first (but with less variance)
IV. Substantially more R&D investment and faster technological improvement.
* Although you might want to do something smarter, where higher investment in R&D results in a lower tax rate, reducing the general disincentive of starting a company caused by higher corporate tax rates, but biased to companies that do not seek rent.
PS. Note that the macro economists of various major institutions seem to be slowly coming around to my view, so I’m not even that heterodox.
No this isn’t true for a lot of reasons. First the size of the economy engulfs small events. A house fire causes a depression for a family, but does basically nothing to the US GDP in aggregate. The larger and more interconnected everything is the smaller even major events are. Hurricane Katrina caused a depression on a scale the size of a city, but not on the size of the entire country.
Secondly all the technology that allows for globalization at least theoretically allows for the correction of market issues much, much faster. If something is under or over priced it should be sorted out far faster in today’s world than a century ago.
“Demand,” as economists use the term, is a function of price. So “insufficient production capacity to meet demand” doesn’t mean anything. Demand at what price? Isn’t it obvious that, for almost everyone, more consumption has positive value, often in quality rather than quantity–better medical care, tastier food, safer autos, … ?
Going into details on your views would take a long time and more effort than I am willing to spend. I’m afraid my immediate response is that inventing economics for yourself works no better than inventing physics or statistics for yourself does, but is even more common.
You do, however, to your credit, offer predictions:
How much do interest rates have to go up over the next decade or so for you to conclude that your theory is false? Real or nominal?
Recessions and hurricanes are not rated in the same way. A recession is judged vs the size of the economy it hits. The 2000 recession caused ~2.5 million job losses which is absolutely greater than the job losses in the panic of 1837, but no one considers that recession worse. “more energy to draw from” ignores that the fact that there is more energy to draw from means it is buffeting against a much more robust system.
@baconbacon
Hurricanes tend to scale with the size and heat of the ocean. The former is pretty much fixed, but if oceans heat up due to climate change, we’d expect to see more damaging hurricanes. The point of the example was not that hurricane damage increases with the size of the country, but rather, that if you increase the things that fuels hurricanes, you get bigger hurricanes. Similarly, if you increase the things that fuels large scale fraud, you get bigger frauds.
Your house fire example is bad, because you can at most point to a very weak link between the size of the country and the ‘size’ of arsonists or other causes of house fires (copycat behavior may scale a little with the number of fires happening within the same language space, but the effect is probably small). So there is no substantial network effect in house fires. There is a strong network effect in fraud, because (for example) when one bank is financially successful on the short term by defrauding people, market forces pushes other banks into the same behavior, when those banks are part of a shared economic and regulatory space. Investments are usually judged relative more to the best performing comparable investment, than to the average.
You are correct that when a global economy has an enormous crisis, while a bunch of more isolated economies have multiple crises that are each smaller, the total effect of the isolated crises can be greater. However, I believe that this is unlikely if the countries have similar regulations before and after entering the global economy, given the network effects of system-wide fraud.
Although it’s debatable whether countries that become part of the global economy give up shitty regulation for much better regulation and thereby reduce their risk profile. But then the effects will be very different per country. So then the argument may be that the American people have to accept a worse situation that harms them, but which benefits humanity overall, because Indians win more than Americans lose.
@DavidFriedman
Imagine that I burn down all shoe factories. Shoe prices will go up a huge amount. Sane capitalists will now rapidly start building new shoe factories, because a good ROI can be made by doing so. So after a while, you’d expect the shoe market to stabilize at very similar level of production to the pre-arson situation, where shoe prices are production costs + some margin, where that margin allows for an acceptable ROI. This level is the natural level of production for the circumstances.
My claim is that in this period between my burning of the factories and the new factories being built, there is underproduction on the supply side, as a ROI opportunity that would normally be taken advantage of, are temporarily not. If you consider my phrasing to be confusing, I invite you to suggest better phrasing.
Now, the natural level of production can change in various ways, like destruction of factories (like in war or due to accidents), changes in production costs, the introduction of new products that (partially) satisfy the demand that was previously filled by a different product, the cost/supply of capital, etc. In some of these circumstances, it is highly beneficial to increase the capital supply to the economy/lower the interest rates. AFAIK, everything I said so far is fairly noncontroversial economics. The point of contention is what the current circumstances are exactly: are we in a situation where it is highly beneficial to increase the capital supply? My claim is that many economists and even more so, politicians, have a tendency to just assume that this is the case, even though the evidence strongly suggests that it isn’t. My analysis is that a major reason for this is because it is fairly easy to increase the capital supply and people are making the fairly common mistake of confusing the tools they have for the tool that is (most) effective. ‘When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’
In a recent discussion we had about carbon taxes, I remarked that you seem to be treating economic adaptation as instantaneous, which is a big mistake. I think that your thinking would improve a lot if you were to address this deficit.
I would prefer to place my trust in experts, but my experience is that they are too often full of it and that I can frequently do better without dedicating my life to the field (this isn’t just true for economics). I disagree with the claim that this involves reinventing economics, because IMO my beliefs are firmly grounded in non-controversial economic beliefs and my disagreements are mainly at the level where the evidence is relatively weak compared to human bias, so the latter will frequently overwhelm the former.
I believe, but cannot prove that my biases are less than average and/or I’m better capable of taking them into consideration. Ultimately, the truth of this is only evident in the outcomes, as you correctly state. However, as you consider yourself unqualified and/or unwilling to spend the time to debate my claims in detail & these claims cannot be easily tested, I cannot simply provide the level of evidence that you desire. However, you have also not given any serious evidence of argument that I am wrong.
I have to add a caveat, my prediction is based on the assumption that no major technological achievement will happen in that period. However, that is obviously a matter of chance. My desired policies are in part about improving those chances. However, it is certainly not implausible that robotics and/or AI will see a major breakthrough that will drastically disrupt the markets.
Also, the bubbles will obviously drive up the interest rates, but primarily in the short term rates. So let me predict that (in the absence of a huge technological breakthrough) there is a 95% chance that the real 10 year US treasury rate will stay below 4% and 75% that it will stay below 3%. Let’s not be silly, so the interest rate has to be above that for a full quarter, so we’ll not count weird short term variance.
Hurricanes are not measured by the % of the heat drawn from the ocean.
Actually this isn’t a given. Hurricanes are not simply driven by the heat of the ocean, but (wild oversimplification) the heat gradient. Even then it still doesn’t follow that increasing the heat of the ocean will automatically lead to a stronger hurricane when measured against the total heat in the ocean and that is how recessions are measured. Yes a country with a 100 billion dollar economy will have larger nominal recessions than a country with a 1 billion dollar economy, but no one measures them in nominal terms, they use rates where the base size of the economy gives perspective to the size of the recession.
You have both assumed your conclusion without demonstrating it, and also assumed a game theory outcome without any thought. The opposite is actually true, if your competitors are engaged in fraud then the best profit move is to expose the fraud, not to engage in your own self destructive fraud (or even just short their companies so you profit when the fraud is exposed).
You only get this scenario in game theory when you include collective ignorance of the long term outcomes or you subsidize and/or transfer the risk of the participants. Your hypothesis would implicate the federal reserve/fannie mae as the causes of the financial crisis, not potential cures.
@baconbacon
This is only true if the regulators/government actually wants to stop the fraud and/or if the fraud is actually against the (then prevalent interpretation of the) rules, which is not a given. These major frauds are frequently initiated by first eliminating crucial rules and/or getting cozy with the regulators (who frequently are the ingroup of the fraudsters, while the people that are defrauded are the far/outgroup).
You only have to look at how whistle blowers are usually treated to see that it’s usually not profitable to expose mass delusions/fraudulent subcultures. It tends to be far, far more self-destructive than playing along, as people often look far more kindly upon conformists than rabble rousers. If a huge number of people are involved in the fraud, it also becomes quite impractical to throw the book at everyone. The legal system is built to excise small numbers of bad people from functioning systems, but can’t deal very well with a totally corrupted system, because its methods would then end up burning it down, rather than reforming it. So society tends to let people away with crimes if enough people commit them.
If you look at actual behavior during recent bubbles, you see that some people assume that they will manage to cash out just before the bubble explodes.
Also, a very large percentage of the people who make the fraud work seem to be quite unaware that they are defrauding. This is partly because the fraudulent systems tend to be complex and there is often a substantial amount of plausible deniability and opaqueness.
Also, people tend to abuse trust based systems. For example, during the housing bubble, mortgages were bundled and the risk of these bundles was misclassified by rating agencies who were trusted to accurately assess risk. So the initial lenders of the mortgages should have been and frequently were aware of the bad loans that they were making, but they passed on these risks to others who assumed that the rating agencies were accurately rating these mortgage-backed securities. By misrating these securities, the capital suppliers were convinced to accept interest rates way below what is generally considered reasonable for the actual risk profile. These lies about the risks broke the capital market, convincing capital suppliers to invest much more of their capital in these securities than they would have (and that they were even allowed to do), if the risk had been accurately assessed.
In (libertarian) theory, the market should have self-corrected after the crisis, by no longer trusting the reputation of the ratings agencies. Of course, that is not what happened, because there were no major rating agencies that did what you suggest would have been most profitable: expose the fraud. As the financial system is built on ratings and the three major rating agencies have nearly complete control over the market, they got away with it.
So, given that actual reality didn’t result in the outcome that you claim should have been the outcome based on your theory of rational market behaviors, this either suggests that your theory is wrong and/or your assumption that people will act rationally is mistaken.
This isn’t a problem of the size of the economy though, it is a problem with the size of the regulators, and the Fed is one of those regulators!
You don’t have to be a whistle blower to profit, you just need an Ameritrade account.
And? Some people denied that it was even a bubble! Describing the motivations of “some” does not give you carte blanch to assuming the motivations of all. For a bubble to form with people thinking they can get out before it pops requires that every new investor be dumber than the previous investors.
A mistake isn’t abuse.
Subprime was a tiny amount of the problem. Prime mortgages were where most of the issues lay, and the issues that came up had nothing to do with fraud by the originating banks. The subprime crisis was an offshoot of the larger mis pricing of risk which existed because of the Fed/Fannie Mae.
Do you have any particular method in mind that doesn’t rely on accurately predicting when the crash will happen?
There are many ways to play a crash without having to accurately predict when it will occur, HOWEVER if you have such information that a major bank is committing major fraud at the time that it is happening then you should definitely be able to time the crash far better than the market average. This would not violate the majority of forms the efficient market hypothesis takes.
Alcohol:
What really convinces me that alcohol really works is that it has a specific effect. It decreases mortality from ischemic heart disease and increases it from all other causes. If you think that there is a confounder, you should argue that the confounder has the same risk profile.
Also, there is a mechanism: alcohol is a blood thinner.
Those figures don’t seem to have been corrected for race.
Why would those figures need to be corrected for race? Even if race is causal, America has the racial profile it has, so dialing back mass incarceration will remain difficult as long as we have as many murderers and rapists as we have. Unless we stop jailing them, which seems unreasonable.
I believe it is the assumption that America should mirror western Europe that he is objecting to.
Not sure if by “he” you meant the author of the tweet (me), but that’s correct.
Because the implicit argument is that America is doing something bad that Western Europe is not doing. If the disparity is caused by race, this may not be true.
> Because the implicit argument is that America is doing something bad that Western Europe is not doing. If the disparity is caused by race, this may not be true.
It’s not clear to me at all that that’s implicit. I took it as narrowly (and effectively) targeting the oft-held belief that America’s barbaric thirst for punitive incarceration was driving our high prison numbers. That’s entirely independent from proposing a specific cause for the gap between us and W Europe, which could include the racial one that you mention.
Look at homicide rates by country, then cross-reference demographics in the US, UK, Germany, France, Norway, etc.
They should be corrected because comparing the US to western Europe is unfair when demographically the US does not mirror any western European country.
If anything a fair comparison would be to look at the nationalities within the US, control for age (at least), and compare criminality with their nation of origin. That’s much more complicated, but avoids a Simpson’s Paradox.
Fine, but the US still compares unfavorably with Botswana, South Africa, Tanzania and Namibia.
(To get into US territory you need to look to former slave/communist states, not just African states. The Caribbean is way up there, as is Russia).
Homicides rates by nation
US: 4.88
Botswana: 10.53
South Africa: 34.27
Tanzania: 7.01
Namibia: 16.93
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Units?
Those look like offenses per 10,000 population to me.
Per hundred thousand, I think.
Rate per 100,000. See homicide rates by country to get a better “outside view” on the subject in general.
I’d assume then he means compares unfavorably in incarceration rates.
Although, putting the two together, I think I’m quite unlikely to stroll through Namibia any time soon.
Oh yeah, but trying to divorce incarceration rates from the context of serious crime rates like homicide, and doing so with a straight face is…well, there are lots of words to describe such an act.
None of them are good.
Regarding the infrastructure article, when I read it a few weeks ago, I was struck by how he missed something so obvious: greed. Is it so hard to imagine that companies are just charging governments and municipalities a fortune for infrastructure work, not because their costs are higher, or due to inefficiencies, or the headaches of unions, but simply because they know they can get away with it due to the various special interests at play in this realm?
Or am I being too cynically naive?
Greed is a constant. Actors always charge what the market can bear. If more rents are being extracted (and it sure seems like they are), then that’s because of a change in the market, not because actors are less virtuous now than they were in the past.
The article attempts, and mostly fails, to find out what changes in the market those are.
(I’ve never studied economics, please correct me.) I don’t see where rents could come from here – there is no sign of monopoly power. You could tell a story where the government gives sweetheart deals to favored companies, but isn’t this stuff done by blind bidding anyway?
Rents can come from a lot of places, not just monopoly power. Asymmetric information, asymmetric access, barriers to entry, preexisting ownership of scarce resources, sending a guy named Guido around to break your competitors’ legs.
But the point I was trying to make above is that saying “it’s rents” doesn’t help us much. Of course it’s rents. Steel and concrete aren’t much more expensive. Land and labor are, but not in proportion. So it’s rents, but the article gives no good argument for what they are, who they’re going to, or how they work.
People say greed is the real cause when gas prices go up. But I never hear an analysis of why greed went up 4% on a random Tuesday, nor do I hear them being happy that greed is decreasing when gas prices go down.
For the question why US infrastructure is so much more expensive than both other countries today and the US itself in the past, blaming greed also just moves the problem. Why is there so much more greed in the US than elsewhere, and also compared to the past?
> nor do I hear them being happy that greed is decreasing when gas prices go down.
Haha, exactly! I often have a feeling that people assigning moral corruption to unfavorable economic decisions (e.g.: prices going up, wages going down, DLCs, etc), were making a fundamental mistake and this comment nails it 😀
Sadly, I think only about half of those cool-sounding titles exist in-game in Crusader Kings II. But I am likely to wind up playing a Byzantine Emperor (or possibly Empress) in the next generation of my current and final campaign. That should open up all the honorary titles that aren’t easy to see from the outside; I’ll be sure to go through the list and award as many as I can before I disband the Empire. Definitely want a Caesar and a Megaduke.
Caesar is an option: http://www.ckiiwiki.com/Honorary_titles#Byzantine_titles
I seemed to recall the Steward being called Logothete, but I was wrong. Sakellarios is still cool, though.
No luck on Megaduke, either. Though IIRC (haven’t played since pre-Horse Lords), “superduke” was the fan term for a character with two duke titles. (Also, when playing ERE, having hereditary doux is/was Doing It Wrong – strategoi(sp?) are/were far superior)
And Mystikos is much cooler as a title for the Spymaster than as a glorified secretary,
I want to say that the game recognizes “Grand Duke”, which is a fair translation for Megaduke, in at least some multi-duchy contexts, but I can’t swear to it. Will definitely appoint a few strategoi just to say that I did, but I’m not sure it’s the best strategy. Have never played as the ERE before, and will probably dismantle and disband the Empire not long after claiming it, so it probably won’t come up.
Yeah, like I said, I haven’t played in a while, and PDX keeps stirring the meta. Could be viceroyalties got hit with a nerfhammer. I liked ’em better than hereditary vassals, personally. If a viceroy was incompetent or uppity it was relatively doable to transfer control to someone better without pissing off the whole empire.
AIUI the Doing It Wrong method was to have mixed hereditary and viceroyal vassals, since they aren’t overly fond of each other – if you can do pure hereditary ERE it would probably work.
Dismantling sounds pretty entertaining, too. If you do an AAR I’d read it 🙂
Exactly. And I’ve already got a perfectly good Sicilian Norman Empire based on an elective Emperor over hereditary Dukes, so I’d rather incorporate as much of the former ERE as I safely can into that structure than try to run two separate Empires with two distinct systems of government.
Or three, because the HRE is also potentially vulnerable if I do this right. Depending on how much of the HRE and ERE I have to cut away to keep the rest stable, this is going to be one messed-up Europe by the time I’m finished.
I really want to like crusader kings. And I keep giving it chances, but every time I do, the same result ensues. I start with great enthusiasm, then almost immediately start getting annoyed about how it doesn’t really represent any of the really interesting aspects of feudalism. It does nothing with legitimacy, with the multi-hattedness nature of multiple holdings, little with dynastic relations, little with the difficulty of raising armies, the value of money, and the only real centrifugal force is rebellion. The great feudalism game has not yet been made.
Yeah, I’ve recently been reading Hume’s history of England, and also recently doing some CKII playing, and the combination of the two meant that in reading Hume I was constantly struck at how little of what he described could be modeled in CKII.
Yeah, the contrast to EUIV is pretty striking. If you read early modern european history, you can often describe what’s going on in EUIV mechanics. But there’s nothing in CKII that even tries to model the Guelph/Ghibelline conflict, the investiture controversy, the rapid and repeated waxings and wanings of the the power of the kings of france, the politics of crusades, or anything else.
The simplistic economic model, including its (lack of) military implications, is my biggest complaint about the current version. But I’m not sure what you mean by “does nothing with legitimacy”; it clearly recognizes and I think reasonably approximates the effects of the various flavors of illegitimate and dubiously-legitimate children. Likewise papal vs royal investiture. And post-Conclave at least it does have nobles and councils effectively clawing back power from Kings who aren’t both strong and careful.
ETA: Agree with cassander that the all-or-nothing spoils distribution of the Crusades eliminates some interesting and important politics.
By legitimacy, I meant legitimacy of title, not in inheritance. Aside from a few minor opinion modifiers, the game treats titles you’ve had for a week the same as ones you’ve held for hundreds of years, titles you usurp or invent the same as those granted by emperors.
And yeah, the all or nothing war results are a travesty, as are the extremely limited options for getting involved in the wars of your vassals/leige. Kingdom wars should be all about getting vassals on board.
Yeah, I think strict pyramid feudalism is a conceit you kinda just have to roll with for CK’s broader mechanics to make any sense as a game. There is a length-of-reign opinion mod, and the way usurpation is coded, it’s much more of a formalization of one’s gains than initiating a coup.
The balance between blobbing and anti-blobbing is very tricky. There’s a Sid Meier vid out there somewhere with essentially that “People don’t like to play waning periods”. When things start to go downhill, only a small subset of an already niche genre find it enjoyable to keep playing instead of starting over.
And, y’know, at least the Crusade results aren’t the HOI4 peace conferences. It’d make more sense with a properly multiplayer game, but in-depth politics with an AI is currently not really plausible. Attempts frequently just lead to exploits.
there are ways to make pyramid feudalism work more interestingly though. For example, when you go to war, you shouldn’t just get to raise vassal troops. Instead, you should get ways to call your vassals into war, like allies, and when you or they get those calls, there should be a range of options from full throated support to active opposition.
Or with titles, not all titles should be equal. 1000 year old dukedoms should give more prestige than one created yesterday, and you should be able to build up the prestige of your titles by getting them recognized by figures like the pope or emperor, particularly if you’ve acquired it by dubious means.
Basically, you need to make the game more about building consensus and less about murdering your inlaws.
Hmm. Examples of feudal vassals in the high middle ages openly rebelling against their lord because said lord waged a war the vassal didn’t support? Not saying it never happened, but examples don’t come immediately to mind.
The “call your vassals as allies”, is I believe the current mechanic for pagan realms. For Christians and Moslems, vassals never officially refuse to support their lord’s wars, but the number of men they send passive-aggressively depends on their present opinion of said lord – and things like calling up their men for prolonged periods will adversely affect that opinion.
Also, unless you have a high level of royal control, the council gets to vote on your hair-brained schemes for offensive wars, and any high-ranking nobles who aren’t on the council are going to be extremely upset about that in a no-troops-for-you kind of way.
Not exactly rebelling, but when John told William Marshall to come with him to try to reconquer territory in France the Marshall refused on the grounds that he had resworn his Norman lands to the king of France with John’s permission, so was the French king’s man when on that side of the channel.
Well, one, I said it should be an option, not that it should happen every time, and two, that’s how Henry V basically conquered france, by getting the dukes of burgundy to side with him and not the kings of france. It’s also basically what happened every time HRE emperors spent too long south of the alps. And the number of times vassals didn’t outright rebel and were just strategically unhelpful? too many to count.
The swarm of bees outside Vox made me double-take, given that we had the exact same thing happen in my city just now. Coincidence? Probably.
Wow, I came in here planning to make a similar comment. Didn’t expect there to be any other Haligonians on SSC.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
…or maybe it’s just us two, I’ve never bothered to find out.
I mean technically it might not even be that. I’m more of an ex-pat, really. But…ehh, close enough. And I’m hoping to move back soon.
This weeks variation on there’s more than one country in the world, you know: why did nobody get cellphones in the forties?
In 1945 how many countries in the world were rich enough and large enough to make it a worthwhile development project? Locking out the largest single potential market probably hinders development, no?
What about bringing the device to market in one country with an eye to shaming other countries into moving on the regulation issues?
The original cellphones were expensive and unwieldy toys for rich people. I’m skeptical that 1960s technology would have improved that much, even if the spectrum had been made available.
Exactly…the broadcast technology is only half the story..
This is why bureaucracies murder innovation, people put far to much weight on phrases like this. The future is unknowable, it has to be walked into to discover. If the US government had functionally made PCs illegal or unprofitable from 1950-1980 you would look back and say “well PCs weren’t ready for the mass market until the 80s anyway, so no big loss”, but this is wrong. You (and I and everyone) are functionally unable to predict what is necessary for technological change to sweep a country. It is unknowable if such a law would have pushed computing technology back 5, 10 or 50 years.
However by eliminating spaces where ingenuity could generate massive gains it is almost certain that we have lost out on many advances… though it is impossible to know which.
What about spending a few billion dollars connecting land lines across the US? If you are in the communications industry in the 40s and the single largest market just outlawed cell phones are you going to pour your money into cell phones or landlines?This decision might not be prohibitive on its own, but it heavily pushes technology in one direction.
Large area is a negative for cellphone networks. It is much easier to cover a large population in a dense country. Low density does increase the value to the user a bit, if the rural area is actually covered, but not enough.
As others have said, cell phones in the ’40s would hav been big, expensive car phones until the ’90s anyway. Digital electronics is what enabled cell phone mass adoption.
I wasn’t talking about large in a geographic sense, but large in a relative sense. The US has plenty of population dense areas you can cover and you don’t have to build nationwide service from day one. NYC is larger (population wise) and far denser than quite quite a few European countries.
First this assumes that technology would have advanced the same with this different pathway opened up.
Secondly, who cares? Lots of people would have loved to have big, expensive car phones during that time period. Instead we got some second (or 10th) best solution.
You need to look at British and German telecommunications expertise in the forties
One thing the article doesn’t make clear is that early mobile communications meant car phones.
The gear was even bigger than eighties handsets.
So it was a toy of the rich. And backing TV was not exactly an insanely stupid choice in the sixties and seventies.
It seems plausible that some portion of the size of the gear might be attributable to the amount of power required to communicate with a single central station per city.
Some other portion might be attributable to the low frequencies.
And a huge chunk would be lack of miniaturisation in the sixties and seventies..the integrated circuit had barely been. Invented
Yes, it seems overwhelmingly likely that this is really the main factor. It requires some now trivial electronics to handle the mobile phone doing things like connecting to the intended target and not generating conflicts with other phones, and in the mid 20th century those electronics would actually have been quite bulky and not at all trivial.
So were many medical advances, cars, computers, television, AC, refrigerators etc, when they were introduced.
“just a toy of the rich” is frequently shorthand for “something amazing that we want to get to the public as soon as possible to increase the standard of living, and is an argument FOR not against.
And also bicycles!
Videos about weird but ridable bikes. There’s some overlap among the videos, but not that much.
The first video is mostly bikes not for sale, but the later ones are mostly commercially available.
I think the videos are at their best if you let yourself be surprised, but I’ll rot13 some descriptions in case you’d rather have some idea of the bikes.
Fgenaqorrfg ovxrf, ovxrf onfrq ba rkrepvfr rdhvczrag (ryyvcgvpny, gernqzvyy), fubrf vafgrnq bs gverf, jbbq (sebz fvzcyr gb neg bowrpg), fznyy craal sneguvat, erirefr craal sneguvat, pbafgnag guvpxarff gevnathyne jurryf, ovxrf gung sbyq hc fhecevfvatyl fznyy, n snpr-sbejneq erphzonag ovxr gung ybbxf zber cenpgvpny guna gur hfhny ovxr, naq ba naq ba.
I went to a bicycle museum in The Netherlands and they had a lot of two seaters, frequently side by side. The reason was that these were primarily sold to rich people, who used it for touring and showing off.
These were mostly popular in the period between the balance bicycle (the first type of bicycle) and the velocipede (a bicycle where the pedals are attached to the front wheel).
Terminology matters. Mobile phones were in fact introduced to the US market in the 1940s, but they weren’t cellular phones – they couldn’t switch base stations mid-call, which limited their usefulness. As described in that article, MTS was cumbersome, requiring an operator to manually connect each call, but back then they didn’t have long-distance direct dialing on landlines either.
Lack of radio bandwidth certainly didn’t help, but it’s not like AT&T was sitting around for 40 years with boxes full of DynaTACs (let alone iPhones) waiting for the FCC to grant their license, which the summary implies.
Of course, Reason will blame the US government for anything. I can see them saying the FAA killed the Concorde and is the entire reason why we don’t have 2-hour transatlantic flights today.
Because the tech wasn’t there. The article, as others have pointed out, totally misses the difficulties inherent in making a cellular network, which is what makes the current system so revolutionary. As an example, the reason cell phones on planes were originally banned was to protect the cell network, not the planes. An analog cell at altitude basically violated the design assumptions, and tended to bounce between stations, knocking out other calls. This stuff is hard.
They also seem to willfully distort ‘private use’, which, AIUI, was basically walkie-talkies with base stations. I don’t think they were switched, for one thing. The other important thing they miss is the Carterfone decision in 1968, which was about a device that attached a private radio to the phone system. Oddly enough, it’s best remembered today for laying the ground for things like answering machines, not for a bunch of people suddenly setting up their own radio relays into the phone system.
(Also, it bears pointing out that Private Land Mobile Radio got started in 1927, well before even Reason claims that the idea for cell phones was around.)
My brain’s so big its cancer gets cancer
“I’m just really glad that the piece admits that IQ is real, meaningful, and mostly hereditary.”
My reading of the article does not see them whole heartedly accepting this. They are first presented under a headline ‘Flawed Logic’ and then attributed as ‘Murray’s premises’
You’re really happy with this article?
Some quotes from the article:
“Intelligence is meaningful. This principle comes closest to being universally accepted by scientific psychologists. Every clinical psychology program in the country trains students in IQ testing, tens of thousands of IQ tests are given in schools every year, and papers in mainstream scientific journals routinely include information about intelligence, even when IQ is not the main object of study. On a more basic level, who doesn’t notice that some people have larger vocabularies than others, can solve harder math problems or organize more complex projects? IQ tests reliably assess these individual differences. Moreover, people who do well on one kind of ability test also tend to do well on others, a phenomenon that is referred to as g, as in general intelligence.”
“There is a vibrant ongoing debate about the biological reality of g, but intelligence tests can be meaningful and useful even if an essential inner g doesn’t exist at all. Good thinkers do well at lots of things, so a test that measures quality of thinking is a good predictor of life outcomes, including how well a person does in school, how well she performs in her job, even how long she lives.”
“Intelligence is heritable. To say that intelligence is heritable means that, in general, people who are more similar genetically are also more similar in their IQ…Like the validity of intelligence testing, the heritability of intelligence is no longer scientifically contentious.”
“Race differences in average IQ score. People who identify as black or Hispanic in the US and elsewhere on average obtain lower IQ scores than people who identify as white or Asian. That is simply a fact, and stating it plainly offers no support in itself for a biological interpretation of the difference.”
I am happy about this because in the past I’ve seen people (especially the Voxes of the time) vigorously deny all of these points. Heck, they even discuss the “social construct” thing less badly than they could have.
Aren’t those quotes just an explanation of Murray’s view. The article says:
“We, and many other scientific psychologists, believe the evidence supports a different view of intelligence, heritability, and race.”
My reading is that a page or two down in the article, they are just explaining Murray’s points, how there is some consensus on those points, but that they disagree and there is also some support for their viewpoint. They do not seem to be accepting of the statements you quoted above, just stating them as Murray’s premises.
The paragraph I wrote may sound like they are making reasonable arguments, but this article begin with “Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science… Sam Harris is the latest to fall for it”
My interpretation is that those quotes are the authors (two of whom are pretty big-name IQ scholars) giving their own opinions.
Fair enough. I’m out of my expertise here to examine more specific points. It did feel to me as though as they led with ‘junk science’ but spent most of the article describing how most of Murray’s points were the consensus. I also find it laughable that Vox can say:
“It is never a good thing to make poorly justified scientific claims”
So I guess I can be happy that the article was not worse, but it still seems far from a desirable outcome.
Far more people read the headline than the article. So the headline can be “let’s burn this hideous witch” and the body of the article can quietly point out that witchcraft doesn’t really have any power and nobody’s cow has actually been hexed.
To quote GetReligion on who actually writes headlines:
It’s well known editor’s make the headlines. But that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands, and give passes all around. Whoever makes the title, it is an issue if most people are getting most of their content from the headline.
But that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands, and give passes all around.
I agree (and things like the Rolling Stone story, where everyone involved wanted it to be true – or at least could be parsed as true – demonstrate this).
But I would, in the past, have blamed reporters for letting misleading headlines go, so finding out that often reporters have no idea their carefully written and balanced story is going out with a headline saying “Witch hexes on rise – you may be at risk!” caused me to be a little more sympathetic to the persons of the press.
If copy editors are sticking on attention-grabbing headlines, and if attention-grabbing headlines sell papers (or get page views), then it’s the business side of the media enterprise that needs to address this, and unfortunately I don’t think that “if it sells, keep doing it” is going to be discarded by the business side (which is primarily interested in how much advertising it can sell to generate revenue and not cluttering up the pages with all that reporting stuff).
But there are those enterprises where “if it sells, keep doing it” does not stop at the headline, and extends to content. Is the argument different in that case?
Also, if reporters are given a pass at having no idea about the headlines, that does not give them an incentive to actually have an idea about what the headline will be.
The thing is, way more people read headlines than read the stories, and way more people read the first couple paragraphs than continue to the end. So if you want to mislead people without lying to them, you imply the lie you want to tell in the headline and the first couple paragraphs of the story, and then bring up the full details that change the whole flavor of the story in the last couple paragraphs, preferably after the jump to A17.
Or you give a section header that says ‘Flawed Logic’, and a bullet list of 5 premises. Some paragraphs later say that you agree with 4 of the items, and only contest the last, because people are definitely not just reading the bullet list.
Pretty handwavey. The first half of the article, explaining why infrastructure costs aren’t due to various things, is good, although I didn’t find the bit on environmental protections satisfying (“it’s hard to believe that countries such as France would be so willing to pave over their natural beauty and slaughter endangered species”… well, things that are hard to believe happen all the time, and the US has some of the strictest environmental laws in the world). It goes downhill after that. The kind of general mismanagement he describes isn’t an explanation, it’s a placeholder for a missing one.
The difference is that in France they have well trained bureaucrats who say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and can be asked about things ahead of times whereas in the US we save money on bureaucrats by just letting everybody sue every development project on environmental grounds and battle it out in the courts. That reduced the sticker price of environmental protection when the relevant law was being passed.
We have bureaucrats. But ours can only say “no” and “approved”. So they’re just another hurdle; you get an “approved” from the bureaucrats and you still have to deal with all the other potential vetoers.
You’re right, I think I’m confusing the EPA with a different instance of regulation by lawsuit.
I honestly don’t know how good the French government’s bureaucracy is.
But from the second/third hand accounts I’ve heard of it, it’s probably not orders of magnitude above American ones. For one thing, French state employees are extremely hard to fire (the closest equivalent being “promoted to work in an out-of-the-way post, usually overseas”), which means administrations can often end up playing Negative Asset Hot Potato (or so I’m told). And there’s a shit ton of paperwork for everything.
Also, we have worker strikes all the damn time. Especially the train workers. Seriously, they organize strikes several times a year.
The sensible argument here isn’t that *any* environmental protections mess up infrastructure, merely that *our specific* environmental protections mess up infrastructure, via allowing NIMBY-motivated lawsuits to delay infrastructure projects for decades.
That’s reasonable and probably true, but it’s not in the article.
I’d like to see more comparisons between building on land that has already been zoned for a purpose versus building on bridges and stuff, and I’d like to see public vs private comparisons. If the US really has forgotten how to build, someone smart stands to make a lot of money…
Rather. He conflates a less cumbersome process with less intent, which is absurd.
(I do wonder how fair it is to lay the blame for inefficient or overly restrictive regulation/regulatory process in general on environmental protections specifically, but I don’t have the information to venture an opinion on it. Missing explanation, indeed—I’d welcome any recommendations on the topic.)
In which he finds the largest part of his answer, and glibly slides right past it. The Washington Post article he links shows time to complete Environmental Impact Statement for large highway projects going from 2 years to 8 years since the 1970s. Before then, it was 0 years, because no such statement was required. And the statement itself is only the smallest part; because of various environmental rights of action, as soon as you announce a project, every environmental and NIMBY group in the area sues, and you’re held up as you deal with each of those suits.
My personal favorite: The new Bay Bridge, which they spent 11 years doing the paperwork on before spending 14 years actually building the thing.
After the original bridge fell down in an earthquake.
/My personal solution: Every EIR should, in the alternatives section, have a section called: “Well, if we don’t do this, they all move to Vegas and run the A/C 24/7 because it’s 112 degrees while living in their 3000 sq. ft. mansions and driving their SUV’s to work”.
I prefer the southeast high speed rail corridor. Established during the first Bush administration, it has not yet finished its environmental impact studies. And the project consists mostly of upgrades to existing right of way.
In cases like that I wonder if the issue is not lack of political will to complete the project. Actually building would cost money, canceling would be bad PR or embarrassing, so let it linger in the planning phase forever.
(1) Not clear that environmental paperwork fully explains what is going wrong. If that were the limiting factor, we’d expect building to take a long time to get started, but to go fast once it’s begun. (2) But certainly environmental paperwork slows things down. Then the question is, is the problem too much paperwork, or is the US as bad at completing paperwork as it is at construction? (3) You point to a reason why the latter might be the case: the US administers via the courts when it should be administering via the executive. I’m 50% on this, if only because America’s litigiousness can be used to explain just about anything. What percentage of construction costs go to law firms?
This wouldn’t fully account for the expense, because chilling effects. If you drag your feet or overbuild on a project because you’re afraid of getting sued, you end up spending more money even if no one actually sues you.
If the environmental paperwork is also accompanied by higher environmental standards (which is theoretically the point of all this red tape), then this could also imply things like more high quality materials, more cautious construction practices, and more specialized labor all of which would raise costs in ways not reflected by administrative/direct legal costs. In addition this would also fit with overall longer construction times. Of course in that case we might be getting some benefits from the expense and we’re really asking for a cost-benefits analysis (I suspect current standards have likely overshot the ideal on environmental safety, but I can’t be sure without more looking into the differences in results from older vs newer practices).
Regarding urban charter schools, the most obvious issue with the claim are selection effects (more motivated students/students of more motivated parents go to charter schools, and charter schools can more easily exclude less motivated/more disruptive students). CREDO, who Kingsland is citing, claims to control for this using protocol they call the Virtual Control Record.
Freddie DeBoer questioned the effectiveness of the control here and linked to a blog discussing another possible issue, survivorship bias (where CREDO is excluding bad charters that close) here.
There is a natural experiment in Boston where charter school applications regularly outstrip supply, and students are awarded slots in a random lottery. Researchers examined longitudinal, individual student level data to compare lottery winners (who attended charters) with lottery losers (who attended public schools) and found [relatively] huge effects.
Brookings has a very nice writeup.
Edit:
Boston seems nonrepresentative of the national charter school experience, however.
I don’t know much about what the topic, but in additional to what AKL said, the article mentions taht New Orleans expanded their charter schools to serve 95% of its schoolkids and sustained the quality.
@AKL:
The finding was specific to urban charter schools in MA, and not a general finding. (and they, as you say, also mention Ohio as a counter example). This would suggest we need to understand why certain charter schools have positive effect, and others neutral or negative. It doesn’t look like we can just say “accio charter” and predict any particular effect.
If Boston is anything like Philadelphia or New Jersey, it’s no surprise the charters did a lot better in the urban areas than suburbs. The difference wouldn’t be in the charters but in the schools they are drawing from; many urban schools aren’t doing much but warehousing students. If the effects of school are very non-linear — very high for the first increment in quality with diminishing returns after that — then it would be much harder for any school to make a large difference over all but the worst public schools.
@HeelBearCub
Totally agree. IIRC the authors briefly discuss possible reasons for Boston’s atypical results vs. e.g. Ohio, but do not go in depth. Even supposing that Boston charters are “better” than public, non-charter alternatives, we can’t do more than hypothesize about the “why” at this point.
I would be very interested in good research along those lines, especially research that attempted to disentangle situationally specific factors from practices that could be successfully “exported.”
The link is about the financial side of charter schools. In this case, selection effects are irrelevant.
Let’s assume:
1. Charter schools have the same effect academically as normal schools; any higher scores are simply a matter of getting better students.
2. Charter schools are 20% cheaper.
In this case, charter schools would still be a good idea just because they save money. If you can select off some portion of your top top students and educate them cheaper, you have freed up that money for other things.
Only if that 20% cheaper is fully generalizable. It matters a great deal why the charter school is cheaper.
Why? So long as #1 is true and the results are held constant?
Let’s say that charter schools ONLY work for bright, motivated students. Per Jask’s point, we could then move all the bright, motivated students to charter schools and save 20% on them, thus freeing up that extra 20% to be used to improve things for the less bright in the public schools.
Obviously if the charter school model only works for some small subset of students that makes it less scalable, but I feel like “well this isn’t infinitely scalable” is hardly a reason to avoid doing something AT ALL…
Probably anything non-horrible will work well for the top 20% of students. Filter out the top 1% of students, and you can probably educate them with Khan academy videos and workbooks and minimal supervision and do fine.
@Matt M:
There is more than one reason why, but let’s take one, which is a kind of adverse selection.
If what Charter Schools do is simply pick off the kids who cost 20% less to educate (remember, students/families are self-selecting into the charter system before the lottery), then you don’t have any actual cost savings, you are just grouping the less expensive and more expensive kids and calling that cost savings. If you look at the cost of the whole system it might actually be rising!
Imagine a very simple model wherein I buy two kinds of cookies, Oreos and Chips Ahoy. I buy the same number of Oreos and Chips Ahoy.
If I calculate my per cookie cost it’s $0.10.
Someone offers to sell my me Oreos for for $0.08 and I jump at it, but afterwards, my per cookie cost at the first supplies jumps to $0.13. It turns out that those Oreos were actually costing me $0.07 at the first supplier, but I did not realize it, because I thought I was buying undifferentiated “cookies”.
You are assuming the existing public schools are already educating these students for 20% less than average students. I’m a bit suspicious of that.
Does a teacher spend less time grading the papers of smarter students? Does the school buy fewer fancy technological gizmos because the smart students don’t really need them? Maybe, but probably not to the full extent possible if you physically separated the smart students out and allowed the entire school to be specifically designed for the needs of a specific type of student.
@Matt M-
I mostly agree with your broader point, but regarding:
Almost certainly. I’ve graded papers, and it’s at least an order of magnitude faster to confirm that an answer is correct than to puzzle through a wrong answer trying to determine just how wrong it is.
I understand Kingsland’s argument is “charter schools can probably get better, or at least equal, results in low-income areas for 20% less cost” and that this implies we “as a society” should educate more students in public schools.
That conclusion relies on the claim that charter schools produce “at least equal” results, which might not be the case even if they get higher test scores. That’s the point I was making. You can’t just assume away the possibility that charter schools might be worse for students.
As HeelBearCub points out, the 20% cheaper figure may not scale. It also may not be the case that charter schools are truly 20% cheaper. It might be that charter schools are just avoiding expenses that are required to provide universal public education (Kingsland notes and adjusts for special education, but there could be others that charters would have to undergo if they took more students).
My sides when a meta-analysis aggregates a bunch of small nulls and its only mention of small-study effects or publication bias is
(There is always publication bias, and publication bias checks are low powered, so if your aggregate shows publication bias, all subtypes are biased.)
Re: the Montana special election. I had responded to Jadagul here.
Mostly the really important point to get out is that the Dem House nominee in 2016 got 40%. So looking at improvement in House election results, this is only a growth of 4%. Not very good when the prediction is “Democrats need a 4-6% swing to take the House in 2018.”
More broadly, it goes to show that there are different data sets you can choose from. 538 chooses to look at change relative to Presidential performance, instead of relative to House performance. Largely because the House election data is very messy. But that’s still a choice, and the human level choices impact even what people consider “purely statistical analysis.”
Isn’t a growth of 4% pretty good when swing states are typically won by 1-2% margins?
Are we talking Presidential or House here? Because the House is much more biased against Democrats (partially due to gerrymandering, but also due to geographic concentration of Democrats) than the Electoral College is. Which is why 538 says Democrats need 4-6 points of swing away from the 2016 House results.
It’s also less good given factors that won’t apply in the midterms: national focus on this race meant there should have been fundraising parity, whereas not every swing race in 2018 will get a national donor base involved in it. Plus the bodyslamming thing.
Did the bodyslam thing end up hurting? There was some speculation that it might be neutral or even positive.
2/3 of the vote was already in by that time, so analysis is further complicated.
And from what I understand the early vote was expected to be different from the same day vote (based on prior elections and demographics) so you can’t even just compare the two and see what the impact was.
But I think it probably is possible to tease out an effect assuming there was some polling on the race going into the election.
i bet it didn’t end up hurting
which is depressing
but there it is
@AnonYEmous
I think this is the explanation for that phenomenon.
4% would have delivered HRC the election in these battleground states.
NOTE: non-Nate Silver data so i cant be steel-manned
But we would like to win the House in 2018.
Could happen…
its early times and Montana isnt exactly a bellwether– I think some recent “jungle primary” elections…Kansas, Georigia, California have shown an up to 8% flip in republican districts.
Watch Georgia 6th for the Ossoff/Handel election later this month.
There’s the danger of attaching too much importance to these numbers. This is a specific House race involving specific voters, in a special election, between two specific candidates. The voters cast their votes based on those facts, not based on national trends.
Trying to use this race to guess how the House of Representatives is going to change in a year and a half seems pointless. If the Democrats had run an amazing candidate who clicked with his district’s voters, he’d have won. If what’s-his-name had clocked a mother of three and member of the PTA instead of a British journalist, he’d have lost.
I feel like every time these conversations start, we enter “but the Democrats start with 246 electoral votes” territory. That was never true. They start with zero, just like the Republicans.
A change from 40% to 44% of the vote for the Democrats in Montana just tells you that the Democrat lost (again). It doesn’t tell you how Pennsylvania is going to vote in 2018.
The approach of intellectual humility is totally true in this case. I wrote the post to point out the desperate overconfidence of the Vox piece, that was ignoring a lot of damning data, just to reassure its readers the next morning in the wake of a symbolic defeat.
Given what we know, there is a decent chance Democrats might take the House in 2018 (which is absolutely needed because the Senate is out of reach due to which seats are up, to get real congressional investigations going and stop the pipeline of toxic legislation.) But it didn’t really get any more likely with a 7 point loss in Montana, and there’s enough reasons to be nervous that we shouldn’t be cheering ourselves up over this loss.
Vox did update their point on Flynn. Originally, they wrote:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170518144940/https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech
But over the next few days, Vox substituted the following:
I thought Harris challenged Murray on the Flynn effect – I guess it’s up to the readers whether they’re convinced by Murray’s answer, but I wouldn’t call it “handwaving,” I would call it a disagreement.
(My understanding is that Murray thinks that the Flynn effect doesn’t appear to be in the same areas of g where researchers have found intra-group differences and therefore is worthy of note but not particularly likely to cast light on the problem. The Vox authors aren’t clear why they think the Flynn effect is relevant to the question, which makes the disagreement hard to score.)
Thanks – I looked for that but somehow missed it. I’ve updated the post.
The usual (strong) argument for why the Flynn effect is relevant goes:
1: An unknown factor X has changed IQ substantially over a relatively short time.
2: This factor may have worked differently on blacks and whites.
3: Therefore it is possible that the IQ disparity and also achievement gap is caused by the Flynn effect
The weaker and more annoying version involves assuming that 2 is obviously true and that it is caused by white people preventing blacks from getting access to X.
I am all in favour of investigating the Flynn effect; either 2 and 3 is true and we can get a lot of smart black people or at worst we learn something new and interesting about how IQ change over a couple generations. I’m good with either.
I believe this gets it backwards.
Given that the Flynn effect is larger than observed racial disparity, it strongly suggests that the observed racial disparity may not be hereditary at all, as it proves non-hereditary effects are strong enough on their own (and we know that the non-hereditary environment of blacks and whites has been quite different in aggregate).
The Flynn effect shows that environmental (in a very broad sense) changes can shift raw scores on IQ tests by quite a bit, more even than the black/white IQ difference if you go back far enough. That demonstrates that the black/white IQ difference could plausibly be entirely environmental. And indeed, this is the same issue that comes up generally here–blacks and whites in the US live in different enough circumstances that it’s really going to be hard to untangle environmental or genetic effects.
You can try to control for some of the environmental differences between blacks and whites to untangle this stuff. The most extreme version of that involves transracial adoption. My understanding is that there’s not a ton of data there, but the data that exists does show a substantial closing of the IQ gap. (But someone please tell me if I’m wrong.) I know that if you simply control for (or partition out) blacks from high socioeconomic status or income, you also narrow the gap but don’t eliminate it. That presumably captures some of the environmental differences, but not all of them.
Actually, given the heritability of IQ and the lower fertility of more educated people in most first-world countries, the Flynn effect raises some serious questions, because what we’d *expect* to see is falling IQ scores (as fewer smart people reproduced than dumb people); instead, we see rising IQ scores.
A critical question about the Flynn effect is whether it represents people actually getting smarter, or whether it represents something more like people being more generally savvy about paper-and-pencil tests and IQ-test-like questions.
As an example of this, think of increasing average height over time. That’s a real increase–something physically changed and everyone got taller.
Now, imagine giving everyone a test on a computer console in 1977 vs 2017. It’s quite plausible that the average performance on the tests would go up substantially in 2017, because by then, everyone is familiar enough with computers that they’re comfortable with the setup and the cognitive complexity of the test is really just what’s on the test. In 1977, maybe a substantial fraction of test-takers would be spending a lot of mental cycles trying to figure out how the heck to use this weird TV-looking thing with typewriter attached to answer these questions.
I’ve read the claim that there are technical reasons to think that the Flynn effect is more like everyone getting better at taking the tests rather than everyone getting smarter, but I don’t really know enough to independently evaluate those arguments.
The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study showed only a small effect in terms of closing the gap. Indeed depending on how you want to parse the results you could argue that it shows no gap-closing effect at all (the adopted white cohort had average IQ 106 at age 17, the black cohort – those with two black biological parents – had IQ 89). There is also little support in the results for a negative effect from self-identifying as black or being culturally affected by stereotypes somehow. The half-black/half-white adoptees were intermediate in IQ score (99 at age 17), which is about what you’d expect from simple genetic effects but rather at variance with what we would get if the lower scores were a result of being culturally classified as black.
Not a huge sample size though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study
One problem is that Murray’s position is “we don’t yet know whether the observed disparity is environmental, genetic, or if a combination, what the combination is, but my personal guess is that it’s a combination.”
Turkmenier, et al.’s position is “the current state of knowledge is such that Murray’s position is absurd and junk science.”
If you accept the responses to Turkmenier that the gap hasn’t closed much, if at all, I don’t see how the Flynn effect isn’t consistent with both the combination hypothesis and the entirely environmental hypothesis. The Flynn effect might close the gap if it starts to level off for whites earlier than for blacks, but if the rising tide continues to lift all boats, then any closure of the gap will at best be minor.
In the podcast, Murray says that the Flynn effect is interesting and needs more study, but that so far it’s not promising on closing the gap because the areas where the Flynn effect shows most improvement aren’t the areas where the gap is measured. Turkminier isn’t very clear why this is “hand-waving”, but I’d love to learn more.
Vox did a follow up, which addresses a number of these issues in detail.
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-iq-response-critics
Reading this, I had a couple factual questions and one basic complaint.
The factual questions:
a. There is a large difference between the claim of a 15 point IQ difference and the claim of a 9.5 point IQ difference. Is this just something Murray’s wrong on? (Or maybe his data is outdated?) Is there enough data that we can all agree on the *size* of the gap? Does the difference here come down to whether we’re controlling for other stuff like family socioeconomic status (SES)?
b. The fact that heritability of IQ is higher for low SES than for high SES kids seems really important, because it suggests that we’re leaving money on the table as a society.
That matters a lot, and I’ll come back to it in a separate comment.
My complaint:
c. The authors are claiming (or letting Vox claim on their behalf) that Murray is peddling pseudoscience on race, when the case they’re actually making is that he’s expressing an opinion about a factual question (whether the black/white IQ difference is substantially genetic) for which there’s not strong evidence either way.
Those two seem *really* different to me. I’m not any kind of an expert in this field, so I can’t independently evaluate whether Murray’s opinion is more likely to be right than Nisbet’s. But one thing the authors have *not* done, at least to my mind, is made the case that Murray’s position on this issue is pseudoscience. Turkheimer’s argument actually seems to me like it should lead him to condemn Nisbet as bitterly as he condemns Murray. If the whole question of how much of the black/white IQ difference is genetic vs environmental is simply impossible to form an informed opinion on, then shouldn’t they be complaining with equal bitterness about anyone who says that the difference is 100% environmental?
Is there a way for an outsider to the field to get any sense of what the likely range of answers is to that question?
I agree. If this level of subtle disagreement is pseudoscience, then much of science is pseudoscience, because you often see disagreements of this sort.
Ultimately, the main difference between Vox and Harris/Murray is that the former argue that there is insufficient evidence to state that it is likely that there is some genetic differences in IQ between races, while the latter argue that the evidence is strong enough to make that claim.
They mostly disagree about the size of the evidence, not the way it is pointing.
I guess the other thing I’d love to see is one of the authors here coming onto Sam Harris’ podcast to discuss where they agree and where they differ with Murray.
The linked article (the Vox article responding to criticisms of the previous Vox article criticizing Murray and Harris) pointed out that the heritability of IQ is much higher for high-SES (wealthy and high class) kids than for low-SES (poor and low class) kids. And I said that this is a big deal, that it implies that we are, as a society, leaving money on the table. Indeed this kind of discussion is why I think we ought to be discussing this whole field openly and without no-platformings and riots and accusations of pseudoscience being tossed around.
To see why this is a big deal, you need to ask why we would see this pattern. Why would IQ be more heritable among high-SES (wealthy, upper class) kids than low-SES (poor, lower class) kids?
Let’s assume that your intelligence (as approximately measured by IQ) comes down to some mix of your genes, your environment, and random stuff outside anyone’s control.
Now, imagine we have some set of “best practices” for raising kids. Probably this is something like a safe, low-violence environment with both parents present and plenty of food to eat, with books and intelligent conversation and no lead paint chips on the walls and such.
What would happen if we looked at a bunch of kids raised with those best practices? They would still have variation in IQ, since that comes from genes, random stuff, and environment. But they’d have less variation, because they’d all be getting about the best environment anyone knew how to give them. So most of the remaining variation would be split between genes and random stuff. In other words, the part that gets assigned to genes (the heritability) will be higher for these kids. We made the environment close to optimal for almost all these kids, so the environmental contribution to IQ became about the same for all of them. So more of the remaining variation came from genes.
Now, suppose we had a group of kids where some families followed the best practices, and some didn’t, and some followed some but not others. What would we observe? We’d see variation in their IQs, too. (More variation, in fact.) But now, when we measured out the causes, differences in environment would account for more of that variation. The effect of genes would be less important, because kids were raised in such different environments. We’d see lower heritability of IQ in those kids.
The implication here is that:
a. high SES parents are providing a pretty uniform environment, in terms of the stuff that matters for IQ. So genetic differences drive a lot of observed differences in IQ.
b. low SES parents are providing a pretty inconsistent environment, some doing well, others doing poorly. So genetic differences get mixed up with environmental differences in IQ.
That implies that there are best practices that could be adopted by more low-SES families, to help their kids out. You could imagine trying to do that with government programs like headstart or universal pre-K. I gather Murray is skeptical that these will have much impact because in general, the effects tend to fade over time. And Turkheimer et al think that the fact they work for a little while means we’re onto something and we should try more.
I’d love to see the authors discuss this with Murray, actually. My guess is that Murray would point to the social dysfunction in the white working/lower classes he described in _Coming Apart_ as a likely explanation for the difference in environments. And I’d love to see smart people with the relevant expertise trying to untangle that.
For example, is heritability of IQ substantially different in blacks and whites? Is it substantially different in single-parent vs two-parent families? When we just flat give poor families more money, do we change heritability of IQ, or average IQ of their kids?
All of this implies thinking of kids’ IQs as something we’d like to raise. I’ll acknowledge there are some skulls along the road here–we ought not to use this as an excuse to send poor kids to boarding schools to take away their culture, or to sterilize the poor, or some such horror. But it sure seems worthwhile to look at whether there’s anything we can do here that’s both useful and non-horrible.
This is the philosophy that I don’t really understand. Why do we need to raise the IQ of everyone to a certain level? I think the goal of closing gaps is noble but if this does not actually lead to broad changes in achievement then there is not necessarily going to be much of a benefit. For the most part, IQ has very low meaning for anyone close to the middle of the bell curve. If self-reported black people close the 10 IQ point gap with white people, will this actually lead to any change? Not to mention, wouldn’t this indirectly decrease the IQ’s of whites since IQ is a normally distributed value?
Why do we believe that people with higher IQ are better in some way? If we increased the IQ of everyone by 50 points, all I expect happening is that PhD’s will be worth absolutely nothing and everyone would be too distracted trying to solve Navier-Stokes equations to work in the mines and keep the economy running.
The answer in The Bell Curve was that IQ correlates with lots of desirable outcomes–stable marriage, income, … .
What matters isn’t the number, it’s the characteristic the number measures. Would you similarly argue that raising real income isn’t worth doing because there will still be as many people below the median as before?
You seem to be assuming that the economy is a zero sum game. If everyone got smarter, at the very worst everyone could do the job he is doing better. More plausibly, jobs where intelligence wasn’t worth much would tend to be replaced, as the supply of low IQ workers went down and of high income workers went up.
Most statisticians would say that correlations without a plausible causal mechanism do not give enough evidence to suggest that raising that value is going to lead to the same gains marriage, income etc. Not to mention, those metrics in and of themselves are not 100% positive. (Is it better if high IQ individuals are more likely to stay in a stable marriage where they’re being abused?)
So again, back to my main point, why are we talking about IQ? Wouldn’t it be better to focus on the characteristics in a more granular way than looking at broad correlative measures? If we want people to have higher incomes, we could easily just change the prerequisites of getting into high income fields. Without a causal mechanism of how IQ actually functions to increase incomes, then there’s no real reason to manipulate this number over any other. Are higher income individuals actually better at their jobs or are they just better at capturing higher salaries?
I was referring to the pure number being normalized to the population and therefore seemingly zero-sum but I concede that I wasn’t clear. Over time the economy would definitely stabilize but are you assuming that the number of robotics PhD’s for example is the main limiting factor of removing low income jobs? What about raw resources or other bottlenecks in the process? There is only a limited amount of people who are allowed to gain college admission in America and worldwide. How will these new high IQ individuals actually change the economy without institutional support? More plainly, how does a higher IQ causally lead to an “improvement” in the economy and where does the data support this beyond correlations?
Sorry if I’m asking a lot of questions. It just seems to me that people are making a lot of assumptions based on (admittedly rigorous) statistical concepts.
It sounds as though you think income is unrelated to productivity–that doctors get a high income because they are allowed to put M.D. after their names, not because they are providing useful services.
If we want people in general to have higher incomes we have to increase the total output of the society. Making entry to fields easier might do that, but not because they are high income–barriers to entry for barbers or flower arrangers or hair braiders make the society poorer too.
I would think the causal mechanism was obvious. IQ is a measure, no doubt imperfect, of people’s ability to process information. Isn’t it obvious that that is a useful skill and so tends to make people more productive?
You are imagining a rigid economy where single factors bottleneck production. That isn’t how real economies work. Output is a continuous function of lots of inputs. Making more of any one input available tends to increase output.
I agree. So how does IQ actually help with this? How does it make an individual more productive? Can a higher IQ doctor cure more patients per day than a lower IQ one? What is the actual differential that we are looking for? Population level statistics don’t tell us this. The point about raising incomes was that adjusting arbitrary numbers does not necessarily lead to improvements in their correlatives.
No, it is absolutely not obvious. No high-IQ skill occurs in isolation and if you ask a surgeon for example, most of their time is spent scheduling surgeries, rounding with their patients and doing surgeries. A CEO tries to solve the problems that occur in their organisation in the most efficient way. IQ gives no information about how a person is going to be ‘better’ at these activities than others. This is like putting people on a football team solely based on their bench press. Correlative but there is a large gulf between the measurement and the actual activity.
If anything, my model is more dynamic since it assumes that increasing IQ is not going to automatically lead to better output. The economy is complex and increasing one input is not guaranteed to increase overall production because of other bottlenecks in the process. High-skill labor is no different to low-skill in most models and we shouldn’t assume there is going to be a productive space for all of these super-geniuses to perform their breakthroughs. There is very likely to be a point of diminishing returns here.
“I would think the causal mechanism was obvious”
Hey look at this @Douglas Knight, people are jumping from predictive to causal. Only took two days!
@grrath- ‘this is like putting people on a football team solely based on their bench press.’
IQ is (bench press) times (sprint speed) times (stuff I don’t understand, plus flaws in various IQ tests). Football teams look really hard at both sprint speed and bench press. You are giving ‘solely’ a workout.
@grrath
One way to think about IQ is success in the face of difficulty. A student with a higher IQ is more likely to be accepted at a difficult medical school, more likely to graduate, with more honors, and more retained knowledge, if we grant the premise that IQ relates to information processing ability. This results in a more capable doctor able to succeed at more difficult tasks. We might see this productivity boost in patients per day, but more likely we are talking about success rates in difficult cases, or the ability to even attempt difficult cases.
This is just a narrative, not a proven statement of fact. Does it seem implausible to you?
@Rick Hull
Nope. Not implausible at all. The burden is on you to prove that that is actually what IQ is measuring. After that, show how neurons integrate information differently based on IQ measurements. After that, demonstrate how gene transcription leads to increase in those skills and the proteins and metabolites that lead to that increase. After all of that, maybe we can start talking about implications of genes and IQ.
I like your theory, it sounds nice and tidy but sounding nice is not a useful characteristic of scientific theories. Everyone who isn’t willing to think critically about this topic would stand to learn that. (If you’ve accepted or rejected this argument on the face value of cool graphs, then you’re probably in that camp.)
To the contrary, if you find my story plausible, care about the truth and the underlying biological mechanisms, and consider yourself a scientist, then the burden is on you to show it true or false. I’m just a computer programmer.
We’ve got one plausible story now. Do you have any alternatives? Which part of my story do you find least plausible?
I’m just really glad that the piece admits that IQ is real, meaningful, and mostly hereditary. This was the main flashpoint of the original debate twenty-five years ago, it’s more important than the stuff on the achievement gap
Hmmm, from a personal perspective, where everything wrong with the world is being blamed on my alleged white male racism, I’m intensely interested in knowing whether the achievement gap really is the result of white people behaving badly or whether the left has been grotesquely slandering the proverbial stale pale male.
Personal motivations aside, it would seem like a pretty good thing for society if we can move the contentious question of what causes the achievement gap into the realm of settled science rather than group on group recrimination.
And a big part of why IQ has faced such resistance in the first place is because of the achievement gap, so it’s actually pretty important that we figure that question out.
I agree that logically it should be important to talk about the achievement gap is because it prevents people from believing in IQ (and I think that was the whole reason Murray even mentioned it in Bell Curve in the first place).
But pragmatically, the opposite seems true – most people are willing to believe in IQ despite the achievement gap (making up whatever theories are necessary to justify it to themselves, like stereotype threat on IQ tests or whatever), but any talk about race makes them really angry and gets them to execute collective punishment on anyone who talks about IQ or genetics. So strategically I think the best plan is to make sure the ideas are out there so that people who care about logical consistency can find them, but be very quiet about them so that it doesn’t cause everyone else to get the torches and pitchforks and burn down various genetic laboratories that are just trying to cure cancer or something.
As for the white male racism, I admit it’s really annoying, but I think it’s important enough to deploy good genetic engineering before something kills us that I’m willing to temporarily sacrifice the cause of making annoying people shut up.
Let me try to steelman denialists:
They believe some true beliefs are too dangerous to be widely adopted, because we live in a fallen world where it’s easy for consequences of these beliefs to run away from you and cause untold damage (since “inhuman social agents” e.g. corps/gvts/etc are not aligned).
—
I really think people give too much weight to IQ, probably because they got overexcited about factor analysis? Factor analysis is a lot weaker than it seems. Also, why do dimension reduction into R^1? Why not R^10? The entire approach is extremely weird and confusing.
Every time people jump from “IQ predicts” to “IQ causes”. Can’t do that. Or at the very least, if you want to do that, you really need a much more airtight case than what I have seen.
I think the two best arguments against the Murray argument are:
1) The possibility that there are genetic racial IQ differences (and even enduring environmental differences) is a basilisk – an idea so dangerous that even being aware of it can cause harm.
Therefore, while it may be OK for domain scientists to be aware of group g differences, and while it may be in the mainstream to believe that those differences probably have at least a partial genetic component, (a) the discussion should be restricted to scientists who are working in the field and (b) as long as we don’t have conclusive evidence for genetically based intragroup differences, we shouldn’t publicly hypothesize that there might be some.
(Not many people make this argument out loud, but I have some sympathy for it. I’d never voluntarily bring up intra-group g differences with my kids, for example – the knowledge can only do harm.)
2) That Murray tends to defend guys like Rushton as reasonable scientists. (I don’t know if Rushton is or not, although he still seems to get a fair number of citations).
I like the idea of a basilisk…but its impractical.
US is already in an arms race with China on AI and cognitive genomics– the Chinese are far less queasy about liberal basilisk concerns.
I really recommend Dr. Haiers book– its short, comprehensive and generally excellent. Dr. Zimmer recommended it too.
OTOH these discussions are compounded by people like Harris and the whole aich-bee-dee community (including Sailer, Khan, Derbyshire, Murray) into some sort of gotcha war where they are counting coup on the liberals over IQ heredity while blinded by multiple motes in their own eyes (climate science, creationism, and the eroding fitness of conservative ideology).
Re: “basilisk,” you don’t have to be so dramatic.
We have lots of examples in history of ideas being vastly misunderstood and used to justify bad things by people who were some combination of unscrupulous and stupid. People react to ideas in relatively predictable ways. Some ideas lie in spots in the “idea-space” where people are prone to misinterpret them in dangerous ways. None of this is new — our society evolved anti-bodies to stay away from certain lines of thought for this reason.
Human minds are complicated software. It’s possible that you don’t want to run certain types of programs on human minds.
I always wondered why people chafe under this, presumably culture war reasons?
I think folks who get fixated on winning the culture war by any means necessary are dangerous lunatics. I worry they may end the world one day.
Isn’t the problem that the GOP has already lost the culture war, or at least they perceive that they have lost?
Are there any examples of reasonable and effective uses of basilisks? I guess by definition it is possible there are many we are unaware of, but I am skeptical of this being a viable strategy.
It might be good if say we didn’t have knowledge of nuclear weapons, except that the Axis or Soviets would have continued developing them.
Classified data and covert intelligence…for example, US has more installations in Africa than there are countries because of the incoming billion man youth bulge.
Certainly dont talk about it openly.
US also keeps knowledge about what KSA is up to because that might induce anti-muslim riots here.
Bintchaos:
None of those people defends creation science. Razib Khan and Sam Harris are, in fact, vocal atheists, with no particular love for religious conservatives. So at least one of those motes belongs to some subset of people on the Right (and a smaller subset on the Left), but not to any of the people you’re talking about there.
“Those people” dont try to educate their base on creationism (in spite of being atheists) or climate science, or on the declining fitness parity of conservative ideology.
so yeah, their motes.
Side note, when people talk about ideas as Basilisks, it always makes me think of the fictional SCP Foundation’s memetic/anti-memetics like this short story:
‘Ideas don’t die.’
http://www.scp-wiki.net/introductory-antimemetics.
@Ilya
People chafe under this because it is the argument we were explicitly and repeatedly taught to reject every time History class got to the Scopes trial. The underlying topic is still evolution, even!
If you read Willaim Jennings Bryan’s closing speech for that trial, you will find that he mostly talks about how believing evolution will lead to atrocities (and 20 years later Hitler demonstrated how right he was).
Multiple times in my public school education we were talk how bad and low-status Tennessee was for taking this position. So yes, culture-war reasons.
@Jaskologist
I think your claim that belief in evolution lead to Hitler is dubious, to say the least. But more importantly, it certainly didn’t lead to atrocities in Tennessee.
@Ilya – didn’t mean to be dramatic, I just think it’s a compact formulation for “idea that can be harmful to know.”
It’s probably patronizing, but IMHO, it’s probably net harmful for most people to know when a stereotype has a basis in fact, especially if they’re not good at separating averages from individuals. I don’t particularly want a hiring manager at a small company to know if redheads are on average not as smart as blonds, and I certainly wouldn’t put it on a middle school curriculum.
On the other hand, I do think it’s helpful to know (a) if you’re involved in research or policy where the issue is relevant or (b) you’re assuming that disparate outcomes are very likely the result of discrimination or unfairly biased procedures.
Who the hell do you think is the base of Sailer/Khan, let alone Harris?
Also, what’s this talk about “fitness of conservative ideology” and on what basis is it put on the same level of settledness than creationism or climate science?
bintchaos:
No, you’re just wrong about the facts here.
Sam Harris comment on creationism
You keep making bold claims of fact that are wrong, and are easily checked. This was thirty seconds of Google searching for me. You’re quickly moving into the same territory as internet political memes forwarded by family members of Facebook, in terms of trustworthiness.
The fact that there are basilisks is itself a basilisk. As I usually put it:
“Some statements are both true and dangerous, and this is one such statement.”
@Anarchy: As Russians would put it: “Manuscripts don’t burn.”
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@J Mann: I just think the term “basilisk” has a bad brand at this point. But yes, I agree with you. I don’t see any particular reason why human minds can’t be easily screwed up by knowing certain types of things that happen to be true.
Sorry bud, the foundation does not have an antimemetics division.
@Ilya and David – thanks.
That’s a shame, because I like the term when it’s not used for “ideas that we shouldn’t think or our descendants will be punished by hypothetical future AIs.” Is there a preferred replacement term?
I agree one reason for forbidding discussion of genetic contributions to inter-group differences is noble. Yes, if group A is shown to be on average more intelligent than group B, this can contribute to dehumanization of group B. That is bad. (My solution to this is my Catholic faith: we are all dumb compared to God). But there is also the selfish reason, that an awful lot of people make political hay by claiming that better outcomes for group A must only be because of oppression of group B by group A, and this justifies giving them political power to “correct” this oppression. Acknowledging that the “oppressor” in question may in fact be that bitch Mother Nature derails the gravy train, because Mother Nature doesn’t file tax forms.
I would much prefer to find a productive way to talk about these issues because when you outlaw truth, only outlaws will have truth. The only people openly and gleefully discussing these sorts of issues are the kinds of people I don’t particularly want making policy decisions.
When I went through NCO school one of the subjects we touched on was “infectious ideas” or “Queeg Questions” (named for the captain in the Cain Mutiny). Ideas that will corrode morale and unit cohesion if they are allowed to spread. Personally I like “Cognitohazard”, the SCP’s name for such concepts, but “Memetic Hazard” would probably be more descriptive/recognizable to the general public.
Also, what’s this talk about “fitness of conservative ideology” and on what basis is it put on the same level of settledness than creationism or climate science?
That’s binti’s tic; as ye may know a Sidles post by the plenitude of links and statements phrased as rhetorical questions, so may ye know a bintchaos post by banging on about conservativism no matter if it is pertinent to the subject or not.
It’s their King Charles’ Head 🙂
There’s an uncontroversial sense in which random information can be epitemically damaging: that’s why educators invariably teach things in a certain order.
If you accept that there are memetic hazards that must be suppressed for the good of society[1], then you still have the problem of deciding:
a. Who should be in the position of deciding what’s a memetic hazard.
The power to decide what ideas must never be discussed implies the power to rule all kinds of inquiries out-of-bounds. Perhaps class warfare and envy is a basklisk, so nobody should be allowed to discuss economic inequality[2] and trying to collect income statistics should get you no-platformed or fired. Maybe the theory of evolution is a memetic hazard that will undermine belief in traditional morality and leave everyone acting like an animal. Some people have argued that questioning the course of our war on terror is giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and should be suppressed.
Prominent, powerful people have made arguments for suppressing all that information at different times. Should they have been followed?
b. Who should be allowed to know these dangerous truths?
Our decision makers get a lot of their information from ordinary-person education and popular culture and media and books. Further, their decisions have to make sense to the voters if they’re to hope to get re-elected. If some forbidden fact is relevant for the decisions they need to make, who provides them with that information, and with the surrounding decades of intelligent discussion and debate and research that puts it in meaningful context? When the president needs to understand that antibiotic overuse is contributing to the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria, do we have a committee of enlightened microbiologists come give him a short course in the theory of evolution, which he’s spent his whole life hearing derided as atheistic pseudoscience, so he makes good decisions? How is that likely to work out?
[1] Maybe there are, I’m not convinced this is true in general.
[2] Attempts to remedy economic inequality accounted for most of the murders of the 20th century, one way or another, so it’s hard to argue that this isn’t a dangerous topic to open.
Indeed, the current position on NSA data collection seems to follow exactly this pattern. Not only aren’t we allowed to know the secrets that they’re collecting, which I think we’d mostly agree does relate to national security, but this is taken to at least one level of meta. We’re not allowed to know *how* they’re collecting the data, nor how many people’s data are being collected. Heck, until Snowden spilled the beans, although there was widespread suspicion, we weren’t even allowed to know that they were doing such data collection at all (which I guess was a second level of meta).
I’m not really sure how you can hide group differences in intelligence or anything else from smart kids in heterogeneous groups.
My daughter is white/Asian, and by the time she was five she was asking questions that ultimately were about sexual reproduction trying to figure out how she was a mix of two races.
I didn’t realize that my advanced classes were mostly populated by Jews because I, well, didn’t think about identifying Jews as a class. If they were obviously of a different race, of course I would have realized there was something up with academic performance.
@Careless
You don’t have to hide the existence of group differences, you just have to hide any genetic basis. That is much easier: genetic homogeneity of IQ is not a priori unreasonable.
Not impossible, perhaps, but implausible. It’s easy to observe similarities between parents and children, in both physical and intellectual characteristics. Intelligence has to be heritable to have been produced by Darwinian evolution, so the only argument for homogeneity would be that the optimal IQ was the same in the different environments in which different groups evolved. There are lots of physical traits for which that is obviously not true, so why expect it to be true for intellectual traits?
@DavidFriedman
There are many traits that differ between groups, but also many that don’t (significantly). I don’t think there are obvious reasons that IQ should be in the former category.
Discrete traits such as number of arms don’t generally differ between subgroups of a species. Are there any continuous variables, such as height or IQ, for which groups that evolved in different environments over a long period of time, such as sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans, and East Asians, have the same distribution?
Er, the problem is that she figured out the genetic basis of differences when she was 5. She’s not going to miss the fact that her advanced classes are 90% Jewish/Asian/part Asian when she’s 12, let alone an adult
I think the intelligence differences between racial groups aren’t really very big in absolute terms–blacks and whites and Asians can all live in the same society just fine, learn languages, learn to read, etc.
I think we notice and care about the differences because we have a society that gets organized more and more along intelligence lines. A lot of your future is determined by how you do in school and what university you go to and what degree(s) you end up with. We have successfully made those things reflect actual differences in intelligence pretty well–though work ethic and such matters a lot, too. The result is that differences in intelligence matter in day to day life. Everyone knows the physicists are smarter than the elementary school teachers, who are smarter than the janitors[1].
Because race is visible, and because races differ in terms of intelligence, anyone can look at the magnet school and notice that the kids are almost all white and Asian. They can notice that when you track kids in school, the low tracks end up a lot blacker than the high tracks. It’s easy to see that a lot of Harvard students are Asian, that most conferences in math, CS, engineerng, and the hard sciences have lots of whites and Asians and not many blacks, and so on.
But we have a really ugly history of race relations in the US. Blacks and American Indians were really screwed over, mistreated repeatedly for centuries. (Asians and Jews also got their share of kicking around, but since they now are both doing well, it seems less salient.)
Because of that ugly history, it seems all too plausible, seeing those differences, that they’re the result of discrimination. People see that the AP classes have very few black kids and say “why are these racist teachers and guidance counselors keeping black kids down?”
This is one reason that the fact of different average IQs for different races is important for the public to know. Because without knowing that, we end up demanding the impossible–demanding that the educational system run itself so that blacks are 1/8 of the graduating physics PhDs, or 1/8 of the kids taking AP Calculus, or whatever.
[1] On average. I’m sure there’s a janitor somewhere who’s smarter than the average physics postdoc, but on average, physicists are very smart, teachers less so, and janitors still less so.
genetic homogeneity of IQ is not a priori unreasonable.
If you’re a creationist, I suppose. If not, you know that genetic differences in IQ must exist for humans to have evolved.
I think the main reason we care about it is the one implied later in your comment. The existence of differences in the distribution of outcomes by race is routinely taken as proof of discrimination and so justification for policies sold as eliminating or making up for discrimination. That argument depends on the implicit assumption that there are no significant differences in characteristics, such as intelligence, that affect outcomes within racial groups. There is no reason to expect that assumption to be true, very little evidence that it is true, and a fair amount of evidence, short of proof, that it is false.
If people are basing policies and judgements on an assumption, it matters whether that assumption is true.
I’ll note that the Vox article (as well as the old APA statement on the Bell Curve) directly and strongly claim that intelligence differs by race. I don’t think that’s really part of the debate among people who study this stuff anymore. The cause of the differences and whether anything can be done about them via policy changes (headstart, universal pre-K, etc.) is where the Vox piece disagreed with Murray.
@Careless
“Er, the problem is that she figured out the genetic basis of differences when she was 5.”
She might have *concluded* that, but she didn’t *know* it any more than if she’d lived in Guatemala in the 1970s and concluded that Guatemalan Mayan men were genetically predisposed to have an average height of 5 ft 2. Even if her conclusion was true, it wasn’t justified.
1. The quality of the factor analysis is irrelevant to any practical question. If you want to make a new test, based on better factor analysis, you are free to do so. Most people are interested in the question of what they can do with existing tests; how those tests were created is not relevant. FWIW, a lot of psychologists think that you should subdivide IQ into math, verbal, and the not practically useful 3d spacial. Which is why most tests don’t give a single number.
2. Most claims people make about IQ are predictive, not causal. The main causal question is whether educational interventions that raise test scores are actually useful.
I am super confused by your comment. I wasn’t talking about how good factor analysis is or isn’t, but about factor analysis itself as a method here.
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I don’t work on psychometrics, I merely object to use of factor analysis methods for causal discovery.
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I think the way dimension-reduction people would do this is to see what the natural dimension of the space “human brain” is (without consulting psychologists — what do they know? The brain is some crazy machine evolution cobbled together, why would it decompose into human concepts like “verbal” and “math”?)
The vast majority of discussion about IQ, including here, is about a single number.
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People make causal claims about IQ constantly, often of the form of “what would happen if [someone]’s IQ were raised or lowered X points.”
I have zero problems with using IQ as an outcome or as a predictor.
If people make unwarranted causal claims, point out those specific claims. I rarely see claims are not charitably interpreted as predictive claims.
If people make unwarranted reductions from M,V to IQ, point out those specific errors. But don’t complain that people don’t use instruments that don’t exist.
@Douglass Knight: I don’t think we disagree?
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But let’s revisit this conversation later when inevitably some silly IQ argument happens somewhere.
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One important thing I believe strongly and want to emphasize is this. If we want to learn about X, and don’t have the right tool yet, it’s better to do nothing than mislead people with the wrong tool. The burden of doing the right thing is on the tool-user, not the tool-maker.
It depends how we’re reading “denialists” but I would argue the real steelman is that lengthy Sam[]zdat reveiw of “Seeing Like A State”
One of the things that endlessly frustrates me about this debate, here and elsewhere, is the idea that the only possible response to a book like the Bell Curve, or to intelligence research in general, is either
A)Utter suppression of all such research, or
B)Continuing all such research and assuming that any problems are utterly minimal and will solve themselves.
Surely, surely there must be some middle ground? I can’t help but think that if intelligence researchers understood the arguments against High Modernism a little better it might, perhaps, help them tailor their research in such a way that it would not be misused as it has been in the past, watch out for past mistakes, or even suggest new avenues of research to undertake.
I honestly don’t see any calls to prevent research into IQ in general.
I see lots of objections to assuming that “IQ=outcome=IQ” and that IQ research means we know racism doesn’t effect outcomes.
@HeelBearCub – agreed.
There are effectively calls to ignore any research by anyone who has received funding from The Pioneer Fund, but that’s a separate question.
Isn’t that exactly what Murray has done? His solution to different group abilities is UBI.
“They believe some true beliefs are too dangerous to be widely adopted, because we live in a fallen world where it’s easy for consequences of these beliefs to run away from you and cause untold damage…”
That’s roughly the point John McWhorter makes toward the end of this talk:
https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/46391
John Horgan has made similar arguments, though about the threat to free will by neuroscience.
I have yet to see an instance of where giving in to SJWism actually helps in any way.
It might help one personally, e.g. to keep a job or a book deal or some such thing. If one has the stomach to compromise oneself that way.
I strongly suspect John Scalzi’s post-Racefail career is an example of such. And Brendan Eich would almost certainly have kept his job at Mozilla with an apology.
@John Schilling
Here’s what I don’t get. Scalzi is held up as some sort of standard bearer of SJ type thinking in sci fi. I read a few of his books and none of it struck me as particularly SJ-heavy. If I had to guess the political affiliation of the author through his books, I would have guessed “dishwater Democrat, not particularly strident about anything.”
His personal activity (blogging or whatever) might be, but that’s a different bucket from what those complaining about people like him complain about, which is that supposedly the actual books are getting pumped full of messaging. My impression of his books was mostly “decent at plotting, some strong moments, tries too hard to be clever, mediocre at best at writing dialogue.”
I agree with you on Scalzi’s writing. But if your books are apolitical light entertainment of middling quality, it’s easy to stand out for anything but your writing. Scalzi made a public about-face in the middle of Racefail, and carried his new “Champion of the Rainbow Coalition” persona not only into his blogging but also into his SFFWA presidency (which came during a socially contentious period).
For what it’s worth, my own analysis of Hugo voting patterns shows at least as much of the post-Racefail shift comes from the reputation/image of the author and publisher as the content of the books. And both sides are guilty of pushing mediocrities with the right author bio, e.g. Larry Correia.
Scalzi’s got two things making him a standardbearer.
1) “The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”
2) A personal feud with Vox Day. (although only VD seems to be keeping up his end)
@’both sides are guilty of pushing mediocrities with the right author bio, e. g. Larry Correia.’
Correia is a brilliant pure action writer, almost as good as young David Drake. The book bomb people he pushes, yeah, some mediocrities. It’s a weak period in SF generally. Flashes of brilliance like Benford’s new WWII A Bomb book or Sandford/Ctein’s Saturn Run, but mostly it’s just a bunch of awards going to whoever sucks up because there just aren’t enough good people doing good stuff out there.
To me, that is just an incredible statement. I think two of the best books in the history of the awards came out recently: Cixin Liu’s 3BodyProblem and KSR’s Aurora. Cixin is a chinese scifi author who is mad popular in China, KSR has written many award-winners, but Aurora is special– actually quoted by IRL physics professors and researchers for its thought experiments on generation ship entropy and exo-planets.
The Sad Puppies event caused some sort of sorting of science fiction into red and blue camps–polarization.
Even science fiction is polarized now.
Thats why I’m interested in games…on observation there don’t actually seem to be explicitly redtribe games and bluetribe games. Games are the dark matter of the social metaverse…maybe they could be common ground.
As an aside I think Correia is pretty bad– reads like formula pulp fiction goes to space.
** sorry about that– this was an experiment to see why the wordpress comment system was behaving like it did– puts your comment directly after the person you were responding to in stead of under the last reply level– so it can come out of time-order– like albatross comment below precedes mine.
That seems plausible. Scalzi seems like a competent writer, and the three books of his I’ve read have been enjoyable but not spectacular, including the Hugo winner. (Which was fun and clever, but not even in the same time zone as something like _A Deepness in the Sky_.)
@John Schilling/The Nybbler
It’s funny, though, that given that a fairly common sentiment on the SJ side of things is “there’s no such thing as neutrality, no such thing as being apolitical, etc”, it’s a bit out of place that this supposed standard bearer doesn’t write standard-bearing novels.
I mean, Pratchett did a better job of everything Scalzi does as a writer. Vastly better writer (up until near the end of his life) and really good at establishing a moral to the story that was usually fairly progressive (ditto – his last novels were the opposite of this; it went from “show” to “tell” very dramatically; Snuff was especially bad).
When I read Redshirts my reaction was that it reminded me of Pratchett’s really early sci-fi stuff, except less inventive.
@Bintchaos – “Thats why I’m interested in games…on observation there don’t actually seem to be explicitly redtribe games and bluetribe games. Games are the dark matter of the social metaverse…maybe they could be common ground.”
That… didn’t work out super well a couple years ago. We just had another flareup at e3 too. But I’d agree the gaming space seems to have come out of it in much better shape than sci-fi fandom.
“As an aside I think Correia is pretty bad– reads like formula pulp fiction goes to space.”
Has Correia actually written anything set in Space?
As someone who is into gaming and not sci-fi, I would have thought gaming was one of the most politically polarized hobbies that existed.
Yeesh, you sci-fi fans must have it REALLY bad…
And the rapid flameout of said flareup has restored a lot of my faith in humanity.
But the prompt apology of the one burned by the flames has rather gotten on my nerves.
Look at the list of award winners since 1993. It’s basically a catastrophe.
I have nothing in common with the Puppies in who should have won, AFAIK, but it’s really obvious that something broke the system there and it’s been broken since then
You’ll note that young David Drake was never nominated for the Hugo. Nor, for that matter, was middle-aged David Drake nor Old David Drake. If you’re a “brilliant pure [X] writer”, and the genre isn’t [X], then the implication is that you aren’t so brilliant in the other things that make up the genre. Science fiction has usually aimed higher than Pure Action, In Space!, and e.g. such stories are almost never considered Hugo-worthy.
Also, for whomever was asking, I’m pretty sure that Larry Correia has never actually set any of his stories in outer space.
@AnonYEmous: the key point is that the apology (which I assume to be sincere) was accepted and there was no further incident, aside from some grumbling among the handful of dead-enders still interested in fighting this.
List of 2002 nominees:
Neil Gaiman: American Gods
Lois McMaster Bujold: The Curse of Chalion
Connie Willis: Passage
China Miéville: Perdido Street Station
Robert Charles Wilson: The Chronoliths
Ken MacLeod: Cosmonaut Keep
I hear all of these authors praised regularly, many of them are very good (Curse of Chalion is probably the best standalone fantasy novel ever written), and the only book on this list people don’t go “You should read this” at me is Cosmonaut Keep – which got last place.
No, I’m sympathetic to the idea that the Hugo awards have fallen since a Golden Age – Bujold goes from almost winning with Curse of Chalion and Falling Free to almost winning with Cryoburn and Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance – but I don’t think you can say that 1993 was the breakpoint.
@John Schilling
To be specific, the closest Correia’s come is very light, very silly “Buckaroo Banzai”-ish short story which is more about parallel earths, though he has a co-written sci-fi novel in the works. Other than that it’s Urban Fantasy (Monster Hunter International series), Swords and Sorcery (Son Of The Black Sword, which miiiight have some subtle hints of a sci-fi explanation in its backstory, but if so much weaker than something like Wolfe’s Severian books), Period Urban Fantasy (Grimnoir), and Action-Adventure/Technothriller (Dead Six books w/ Mike Kupari)
Re: Correia vs. Scalzi, yeah, they’re operating at about the same technical level. The differences are that Scalzi plays to tropes more popular with the WorldCon cognoscenti (“It’s Like Starship Troopers, but the protagonist wakes up and realizes how evil the war is, so he betrays his own species in order to bring peace!”) and as noted distinguishes himself by dint of his personal politics and politicking/networking in the field, whereas Correia is avowedly populist in his writing outlook (write what’s fun, because fans like it and will buy it) and basically built his whole persona around being a publishing/industry “outsider”.
I don’t think you can say that 1993 was the breakpoint.
Why not? Of the books in the 33 years before that, something like 30 are books with reputations or by titanic authors. Of the books in the 23 years after, you’ve got Diamond Age, Deepness, Harry Potter, American Gods (possibly being unfair to 3 Body Problem).
edit: 1993 being chosen specifically because of the Connie Willis problem
I love Connie Willis in general, but wasn’t so impressed w/ Passage (nor her novella “The Winds of Marble Arch” which won in 2000).
Isn’t it fairly normal for a good writer/musician/actor/director/whatever to not win the big prize for their best work, and to end up getting it for a lesser, later work?
Perhaps twenty were written by authors who will be regarded as titanic in 2040? There’s an obvious problem in perspective here. But Stephenson, Bujold, Vinge, Gaiman, Willis, Rowling, Robinson, Haldeman, that’s already a list of titans and most of them are still writing.
There is an observable change, not in the subjective quality or “titanicness” of the works but in the extent to which objective indicators of SJ alignment correlate with Hugo nomination and winners. But the break point for that is 2010, not 1993. 1994-2009, we get a lot of very good books by very good authors who haven’t had time to establish Heinleinesque reputations (and will by definition never be able to establish “founders of the genere” level reputations)
It is indeed very good, but are you taking the position that Lord of the Rings isn’t a novel?
Certainly not a standalone one, given that it’s a trilogy
Also, while I’m here, just wanted to also cosign the goodness of Curse of Chalion.
That The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy, is not “given”. It was written as a single novel, structured as a single novel with six major sections, submitted for publication as a single novel, and published as three simultaneous books due to the limitations of bookbinding technology in 1950. Single-volume editions are now common in hardcover.
@me- ‘It’s a weak period in SF generally. ‘
@bintchaos- ‘To me that is an incredible statement. I think two of the best books in the history of the awards just came out: The Three Body Problem and Aurora.’
The history of the awards includes a lot of first contact and generation starship stories. I intend to read Liu, but I’ve tried Robinson repeatedly and he just doesn’t have much zip. Or bring new stuff to the SF table.
@John Schilling- ‘Science fiction has generally aimed higher than Pure! Action! In Space! -and such stories are generally not Hugo material.’
‘Fill every rift with ore’ was good enough for Keats, and may be expected to outlast the fads of our time. Writers who can’t do good action scenes lack a basic skill of storytelling. It doesn’t help for them to be snotty about their incapacity. Tolstoy wrote good action scenes: Borodino, the finest ladies of Russia at the Bolshoi Ballet wickedly ogling dancing boys in Daisy Dukes. Correia could do either scene: Kim Stanley Robinson could not.
Correia’s not a SF writer at all by the standard of Anderson, Heinlein, Niven, Pournelle, Zelazny; but he has the old Weird Tales razzle-dazzle and a knack for striking status detail.
Three-Body Problem?? Give me a break.
The background stuff of recent Chinese history was interesting, but every single character was a cartoon.
The science stuff was laughable. Take an elementary particle and unfold it in one dimension to make something unimaginably large in the remaining two — okay, I can sort of live with that. But then: write on it? WTF?
My daily log says I was engrossed by 3BP when I started it, and regretted that I would not have access to the next two books in the trilogy for a while. By the time I finished it I wanted to hurl it across the room with great force.
@Dr. Mist
I really liked The Dark Forest Doctrine, the concept of the 3body game as a vector to spread an invasive religion, the tags to mathematical history, Tianamming’s sacrifice, the epic space battle…oh sorry…i have read all 3 books.
But mostly I loved the character of Ye Wenjie…because most days I would just push the button too.
What saddened me most about this whole thread is the polarization of sci-fi. Thanks Puppies!
George RR Martin held the committee’s own awards after the event– Aurora won one of the No Award categories– does that mean conservatives can’t like Game of Thrones/Songs of Fire and Ice now? A lot of SSC commenters are trash-talking Scalzi– well Martin hates the Puppies too. I dont think the Puppies “won” anything.
Your punching back is just slapping yourselves in the face here.
I’m a white male myself, and my main concern about the racism isn’t so much that it’s annoying (though it is). My concern is what sort of things some white males might do when sufficiently pissed off, and implicitly informed that racial conflicts are now an acceptable M.O.
Those sorts of things aren’t exactly good for the sorts of civilization needed for the development of genetic engineering tech, either.
Yeah, attacking people for a shared identity is a great way to strengthen that identity, especially among men. Best way to create more white nationalists is to constantly go on about how bad white people, especially white men, are. (The wives and girlfriends will tend to go along with their menfolk.)
Vox Day often says the alt-right is inevitable, and I am concerned he may be right.
Believing your government should be the special protectorate of its citizens interests as opposed to a globalist cooperative entity is certainly a defensible position. Racially based nationalism, though when articulated carefully can be non-destructive and non-racist, would I think be neither of those things in actual practice.
The problem is that to some white males, government now looks like the special protectorate of the interests of everyone else.
uh huh
the only place that “black” is an identity is America, and to an extent other western countries
why? Because “black” people were chained, then segregated, and generally beaten upon and hung from trees.
“white” isn’t much of an identity right now. And obviously snide jokes aren’t equivalent to chains around your arms and a noose around your neck. But it can feel that way sometimes, and in addition to pissing me off personally, on behalf of myself and others, it’s also a really fucking stupid tactic. I honestly feel that a lot of progressivism is merely action taken without thought to the consequence, saved by the fact that they don’t have enough power to make what they want happen. But that’s another story.
“Don’t disparage Muslims because if they don’t feel welcome they might turn to terrorism.”
“Let’s write article after article about how white men are evil and the cause of all the problems in the world. Nothing bad will possibly come of this.”
“Don’t disparage White men because if they feel put upon they may revolt.”
“Let’s openly discuss whether Muslim Citizens should have their status stripped and be exiled from our country.”
Two edges on that knife.
The US is about 31% non-Hispanic white males and 1% Muslims, so we can at least decide which edge is dominant by the ancient principle of “might makes right”.
Yes, it all cashes out here, the famous: “anecdotally sized populations,” as some resident edgelord called it.
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This type of talk leads to a terrible moral clarity. Lots of people, myself included, do not want to live in the kind of United States, our true or adopted home, where one’s moral worth has to do with how numerous one’s genetic or cultural kin is. People will fight, by word, by political action, and by force if needed, until the political will behind this sentiment is utterly broken.
Well yes, but what do you do when you find out that’s the world you’re living in?
From where I’m sitting, a society where one’s moral worth is determined by how numerous (or aggressive) one’s genetic or cultural kin is only possible outcome of identity/intersectional politics and that’s precisely why I view it as a serpent that must be crushed.
I wouldn’t say “moral worth”, but something like this would seem to be an inevitable consequence of democracy. Whoever is more numerous sets the rules. This is why an assimilationist culture was a good thing; anybody could become cultural kin, provided they could give up the incompatible elements of their own culture.
So how about if we disparage neither Muslims nor white men as a whole, but rather concentrate our criticism on individuals or small groups actually doing something wrong. Bashing every Muslim whenever there’s a terrorist attack is a shitty thing to do. Bashing every white guy when the cops shoot an unarmed black kid is also a shitty thing to do. I don’t see a particular problem figuring out the right thing to do, here.
Because tribalism is a dominant strategy.
The difference between blaming “Muslims” and “white men” is that the former share an ideology, a system of thought which produces certain results. This is why many who wish to criticize “white men” will focus on “whiteness” or “toxic masculinity”, but these are vague constructs which usually mean what the speaker wants them to mean, unlike “Islam” which is a religion with a holy book and priests.
Despite that I don’t blame anyone but the terrorists, anyone who assisted them, and their ideology. I know most who profess to believe don’t believe so strongly or believe strongly in another direction. But terrorism is part of the ideology, as currently constituted.
People who call themselves Muslims share an ideology in the same sense people who call themselves Christians do.
That is, about as much sharing is happening as between Pope Francis and Lyle Jeffs.
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Do you have a single Muslim friend?
Yeah, I think racial identity politics is at least an order of magnitude more dangerous than knowledge about heritability of IQs or other muggle-realist ideas. But racial identity politics is extremely popular on the left, for everyone but whites. This is pretty obviously not something that can work out forever, and in fact, it seems like the rise of Trump is partly about the rise of white ethnic identity politics. I think we will regret opening that can of worms.
I don’t think that’s true at all. There’s no especial enthusiasm for East Asian identity politics, Native American identity politics, Indian identity politics, or Pacific Islander identity politics.
There’s plenty of Pacific Islander racial politics in Hawaii, which is the only state in the US where Pacific Islanders are a demographically significant minority. Native American identity politics were popular a couple decades ago but seem to have burned themselves out.
I’d agree with you on Indian and East Asian, though — specific issues come up occasionally, but there isn’t anything significant on the national level that can be described as a movement.
Thinking through Brad’s point here. A thought, which might be a paranoid one but let’s see where it leads – all these dynamics that are popular in leftism currently seem to be about using a narrative of power/oppression to rationalize redistribution of power and resources.
White men have tended to have the largest amount of power and resources in aggregate, moreso than even more successful groups (like east Asian immigrant descendants) due to their greater numbers. As such, any group that could be depicted as being oppressed by them has taken the opportunity to tap into their resources. We get the big ones of men oppressing women, cis-gendered oppressing queergendered, and whites oppressing blacks. Leaving straight white men situated like an O- blood donor, who can give to all but receive from none.
Still more subjectively – It also seems to be a matter of white culture to be forbearing towards those lesser than you, to give to those that need help, and to believe others when they say they’ve been wronged. Basically the foundations for a high-trust society, being taken advantage of by subcultural forces that realized that they could manipulate those tendencies for gain.
Native identity politics is big in Canada, at least on campus and in the media.
I’m guessing that Native Americans have been washed out by other identity concerns in the U.S. They likely will in Canada as well, as the place becomes more and more multicultural.
Many naive Native activists dream of a grand coalition of the fringes, where everybody joins together to fight the white man, and so are in favour of more immigration. But it’s more likely their special claim on white people’s notice will be diluted, and they’ll end up as “just another minority.”
I recommend trying to found a South Asian Students’ Association at your university, and then trying to found a White Students’ Association at your university. Report back on which one gets acceptance and which one triggers a month of campus-shutting-down protests. That’s the difference.
Okay, so, historically, into living memory, blacks and gay people have been subject to unequal laws, to say nothing of historical time.
One thing that drives me up the wall is that,
in the US at least, obviously white people opened up the “racial identity” can of worms, centuries ago. Different races were given different (lack of) protection under the law. This in turn led to quite a lot of literature and thought about “white identity politics” in the 18th and 19th century, and eventually led to, you know, the civil war.
Look, different races think of themselves AS different races at least partially because legal structures dividing us into different races were invented by our governments and then continued into living memory.
I could tear up progressivism, and its terrible approach to the proverbial privileged white man as much as the next guy, but it is incredibly intellectually dishonest to pretend that “white ethnic identity politics” were somehow invented in the last couple of years solely as a reaction to some kind of incomprehensible left-wing thing that just appeared for no reason.
At least in tech, Asians present the same problem as Jews, only writ larger and more visible. They’re the elephant in the room when diversity statistics come up (though some white male is often rude enough to call attention to it) Mostly they’re implicitly treated as white for statistical purposes, but not reviled the same way whites are. Some Asians are concerned that “diversity” measures might harm them, but if they bring it up they’re “shushed” without rancor.
I have two explanations for this, one reasonable and one tinfoil-hat. The reasonable one is that the Asians know they’re vulnerable as an over-represented group, the actual racist whites don’t like them, and the rest of the non-SJW whites are afraid they’ll jump the wrong way if stirred up. And their success presents a problem to the SJWS.
The tinfoil-hat one is that the Chinese government is sponsoring the SJW movement the same as the Soviets sponsored the peace movement.
@Nornagest
No, but I can imagine it happening. There’s a lot of simmering resentment in the Chinese community about affirmative action, and how the net effect is that it’s incredibly difficult for deserving Asian students to get into top schools, relevant to protected races. Educational achievement is a core value for this community, and there’s a clear causal link in denying them so many opportunities. The character of this group isn’t such that there would be violence, but I can see it coming to a lot of cultural grief.
It would be more accurate to say that white ethnic identity politics are reentering the mainstream as a reaction to some kind of incomprehensible etc. etc.
When I was growing up (in a blue state, but a red part of it), there was a cross-tribal consensus that MLK Jr’s “not by the color of the skin, but by the content of their character” was what we were all aiming for, i.e. that policy ought to be ultimately if not proximately colorblind, and racial identity politics, while perhaps understandable, were ultimately counterproductive. There was plenty of racial tension (this was the era of Rodney King, after all) and there was a lot of disagreement about the extent to which that mission statement had been realized and the roadmap we should follow to realize it more fully. But an overwhelming majority of people would have signed on to the goal itself; the only holdouts in Red or Blue tribes (minority opinion was more complicated) would have been a few old bearded dudes innawoods on the one hand, and a few young bearded dudes on college campuses on the other. Both those groups have existed with roughly their present ideology since the Civil Rights era (as I’ve said before, the racial rhetoric in e.g. Days of Rage is virtually identical to modern rhetoric modulo some vocabulary), but they were pretty thoroughly marginalized.
Sometime in the late 2000s to early 2010s, that consensus started breaking down within Blue Tribe. It took a while for a reaction to appear, because the stigma was and is still very strong. But now we’re seeing it.
@albatross11
You aren’t saying the same thing in these two quotes.
@Brad
“I suggest talking to some.”
What do you think I’m doing lol
Anyways, ideological leftists aren’t really who I’m concerned about. Those I talk to tend to be pretty sensible about this sort of thing, and also tend to reject ideas like ‘color-blind racism’ and so on, even if we tend to disagree about some of our theories and priorities.
I’m concerned with people who use the narrative of leftism for the gain of their ingroup.
…”there’s no such thing as white culture…”
There’s no such thing as ‘Brad.’ You’re actually just a collection of molecules that you’ve arbitrarily decided to identify as a unitive entity.
No sense going into the details every time you introduce yourself though.
Even most SJWs still have a colourblind society as their ostensible goal. After all, racial and sexual distinctions are the villain in their story. However, the status of that particular goal seems to be an awful lot like goal of a stateless society under Communism: people have given up on it happening anytime soon, or, pragmatically, ever.
Forge the sky, I apologize for the edit. It was in the first couple of minutes, I thought what I wrote came off as too snarky and I got rid of it.
For everyone else, s/he is responding to something that was there, albeit briefly, not crazy.
Brad and Nornagest:
Fair enough, let me try to phase this better:
a. White identity politics was a thing for many years, especially in the South. Ethnic identity politics was also a thing in the North, though more narrow–Irish or Italian or whatever.
White identity politics led us to have some really awful policies. So they became radioactive, and that was a good thing.
At the same time, narrower big-city ethnic identity politics became less of a thing, I think mainly because the ethnic groups tended to intermarry and fade into nonexistence (who cares today if Joe O’Hara marries Mary Giovanni?).
b. But there are a lot of racial/ethnic identity politics on the left, where they seem to be quite popular and well-supported, at least when it comes down to black and hispanic identity politics. There’s a whole intellectual structure of arguments for why these are good things, and why viewing morality and policy through a “is it good for our race” lens is good and right. There’s a vast structure of political and social and moral arguments that seem to me to put race at the center of the moral universe.
At the same time, we’ve seen the visible rise of nonwhite elites. That’s a huge win, since it represents talented people who formerly would have been excluded from the elite and now are welcomed. And we’ve also seen a lot of poor whites do relatively badly, and often seen the message from media sources “yeah, shut up about your suffering, you’re playing the game on the easiest setting.”
c. Over time, I think that has created a space for white identity politics to come back, and I think we’re seeing that. I think this is an overwhelmingly bad thing, and I wish I saw how to push back on it. One thing that I don’t think is going to work to push back on it (and shouldn’t logically work) is the argument that racial identity politics by whites is evil and awful and Hitleresque, but racial identity politics by other groups like blacks or hispanics or East Asians or South Asians is laudable.
Where you go wrong, factually, is in paragraph b. There aren’t ” a lot of racial/ethnic identity politics on the left”.
The politics of and regarding African-Americans is sui generis. Hispanic isn’t a race, is barely an ethnicity, and there’s a lot less intra-group solidarity than you seem to think. As seen by rest of the coalition the various Hispanic groups are viewed similarly to how the old coalitions viewed Irish and Italians. I expect things to end roughly the same way for them.
From media sources, or from blogs, tumblrs, and twitter posts that some of you guys inexplicably endlessly seek out?
That’s not happening. We have first generation immigrants acting like first generation immigrants and we have the African-American issues that seemingly will always be with us. There’s no broad leftist conspiracy to advance all the races except the white race which is to be suppressed.
The attitude of college administrators to “La Raza” is the same as it would be to a white group calling itself “the race”?
Brad:
How would we decide which of us is right about the factual claim that there are a lot of racial identity politics on the left? What kind of evidence could we use to decide who’s right?
This NYT Op Ed piece covers a lot of my feelings about the issue, and at least seems to suggest that I’m not the only one to worry about it. That op-ed led to this set of pieces reacting to it.
I Googled around for a few minutes, but couldn’t find an obvious link or article that would make a strong case in either direction.
Racial identity politics means, more-or-less, appealing to blacks by promising to further black interests, hispanics by promising to further hispanic interests, etc. I think this is much more common on the left than on the right. If that’s true, I think we should see:
a. Democrats making way more direct appeals to blacks, hispanics, Asians, etc., based on their interests as a racial group, than Republicans do.
b. Groups with an explicit racial/ethnic identity being considered important supporters of Democrats much more often than of Republicans.
c. Ideologues and academics on the left producing justifications for racial/ethnic identity politics much more often than ideologues and academics on the right.
Does that seem reasonable? What other signs would we look for to see who’s right?
Brad:
As an aside, I agree with you about the cohesiveness of Hispanics as a political group. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans (the three biggest groups) come from three quite different countries, have different interests and histories and problems, and there’s not a whole lot keeping them together politically.
And in general, it looks to me like Hispanics fade into general Americans in a generation or two–the kids grow up here and speak English perfectly, intermarry with random Americans, and think of themselves as Americans with some family back in Mexico.
@Brad re: edit
Thanks, no problem.
@et al
Regarding the prevalence of identity politics in the Left, I can’t speak with great authority but get the sense that, though Brad has a point (leftists aren’t generally pushing them all the time) they are nonetheless very sympathetic to marginalized groups expressing them even with great stridency, and very opposed to powerful groups expressing them at all – though the latter phenomenon is the natural result of the former.
Also, though it is important to remember that white identity was once a powerful and often destructive force, it is also important to place it in proper context. It has very much been the norm for groups of people to identify as separate and somehow superior throughout history, and for that to be a very bad thing for weaker outgroups in the surrounds. Just because white people gave that a scientific gloss a century or two ago doesn’t make it fundamentally different….it was just the explanation that was in vogue after the ‘maybe x people don’t have souls like we do’ sort of explanation became less defensible.
This is important because it suggests different ways to deal with the issue than an explanation that regards white identity as a unique proclivity that needs to be wiped out.
Some people think the only way to to mix populations together till they homogenize. Maybe, but we shouldn’t underestimate the incredible privation the human race would suffer by losing all unique cultures. Another solution would be segregation of different identities, but it’s not clear this is possible without oppression resulting. A third possibility is training people to accept diversity around them in non-destructive ways, which is the current ideal of (much of) the left, but it’s not clear how possible this ultimately is either.
A fourth possibility is genetic engineering of our personalities to MAKE it possible I suppose, but this is ethically and technically daunting.
Certainly the situation of African Americans (and in particular descendants of slaves) in the US is sui generis. But the identitarians do not actually treat it that way. Blacks are oppressed (whether or not descendants of slaves), Hispanics are oppressed, Muslims are oppressed, Native Americans are oppressed; these are all People of Color, and they have identities which matter.
@Forge the Sky
You might be interested in Paul Gottfried’s “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy”. Chapter 2 draws a line from Protestantism to modern identity politics guilt-tripping, noting, e.g., that Sweden’s multicultural policy efforts have not made as much headway in the (few) Catholic regions.
@Brad
While East Asian and South Asian identity politics is not much of a thing in North America, there is of course identity politics in East and South Asia – it’s just that it tends to be on the right-wing side of things (eg Hindu nationalism in India – Modi has been responsible for at least one pogrom).
Meanwhile, in North America, while East Asians tend not to be heavily into identity politics, some are; they and the South Asians who are seem, in my experience, to go less for individual identity politics movements than for casting themselves as being part of a broader umbrella of POC.
And as has been pointed out, Aboriginal identity politics is a pretty big deal in Canada (focusing on the many awful ways they have been and are being screwed over – the treatment of Aboriginal people is basically Canada’s great crime) – I thought it was in the US too.
But I would also argue that, around the 80s and 90s, white people and even everyone else started to let it die down. And now the flames are being fanned again.
It’s especially annoying because my generation didn’t do any of this. I don’t treat people of different races differently and I try not to. I just want everyone to agree on that. And to that end, people who do treat people differently will receive my disapproval, and I will try to cancel them out. I know that’s a lot of people, but all the same when people openly and directly set out to subvert this as a norm it chaps my hide. And it’s not good for the society.
I grew up in that generation, too, and things seemed fine to me, too. But talking to blacks and other minorities, it turns out that a lot of bad shit still happened, it just stayed silent because it wasn’t okay to talk about it. So now they’re trying a different tack: Make noise about every possible and potential racial injustice they become aware of.
A similar thing has happened with complaints about police violence. Has some of it become excessive? Sure. Have some fine, upstanding police officers been lumped in with the bad ones? Yes. Would it be better if we went back to the Always Trust the Men in Blue era? Ehn… I dunno about that.
*correcting my earlier comment: Switzerland not Sweden
@albatross11
If I take your two posts together, I think we have some overlap. It’s my contention that notwithstanding some rhetoric to the contrary, Hispanics, and more accurately specific Hispanic groups, are politically speaking the same sort of phenomenon as the Irish and the Italians were. In your earlier comment you call that “big city ethnic politics” which is a fine name. I think that this is analytically separate from the racial politics surrounding African-Americans, and to go back to your original parent post that we are all posting under, not particularly dangerous. That’s even more so the case for the support on the left, if any, for the racial politics of East and South Asian communities. No immigrant group has as their fondest ambition to take a place along side African-Americans in the American hierarchy. They want to follow the path carved out by the Irish and/or the Jews.
What we are really looking at here, as is almost always the case in America when it comes to race, is blacks and whites.
And in those terms, I don’t think the argument you and some others are making that this is a unique moment in time is all that persuasive. In the 1960-70s there were actual black nationalists. It was the era when Kwanzaa was invented. The afro. Malcolm and Ali. Nor were the 80s or 90s some period of total racial harmony only to be shattered by leftist defectors. We had black-white racial tensions and animosities in the 60s-70s, 80s-90s, and we still do in the 00s-10s. We had professors writing abstruse things about race in all those eras. We had politicians both openly appealing to and dog whistling to those animosity in all those eras.
Yes, it’s a real problem. But it din’t spring into existence when you or I came into political consciousness. It isn’t one part of a picayune college and twitter centered “culture war”. It is a major theme of American history and will continue long after everyone has forgotten what SJW was supposed to stand for.
@Christopher Hazell
Isn’t that just human nature, though? Primates are tribal, and every society throughout history and prehistory has distinguished between “us” and “them.” The only thing perhaps unique among whites is their efforts to rid themselves of their own ethnic politics.
I guess I’m saying I don’t think whites “opened the can of worms centuries ago.” The worms were never in a can, for anyone. The worms were always crawling around, infesting everything, everywhere, for everyone. The only thing whites have been doing with regards to the worms and the can is trying to force the worms into a can.
from blogs, tumblrs, and twitter posts that some of you guys inexplicably endlessly seek out?
Believe me, I don’t seek them out; I trip over ’em when otherwise trying to find and follow content on topics of interest to me.
This is a big part of why I cherish SSC here; it’s possible for people to talk at length and in detail about (say) battleships without feeling the need to parade a particular list of “And here’s why A/B/C is so bad and problematic in their/its attitude to [insert culture war topic]!” (For example, I’d not be horribly surprised to find someone, somewhere had written about the Battle of Jutland with the slant on it that the British foul-ups were all the fault of not promoting enough naval captains from their imperial colonies where non-whites were the majority or something)*
*Rhetorical exaggeration for the sake of effect! If you do indeed know of such a piece, for the love of Jove and all the little fishes, please don’t link me to it!
@Nornagest
They still simmer a bit here in Alaska, given we have the highest fraction of population of Natives of any state (19.4%), the Native Corporations, and the various mostly-Native villages throughout the state. (Particularly on issues of law enforcement and education.)
@Conrad Honcho
That must have been what Jim Crow was about, trying to create a colorblind society. Glad we cleared that up!
True, but see Chris Rock’s infamous rant on the conflict between black people and, uh, the other black people. Or look at the generally-unspoken but I am told quite real intra-black status ladder based on lightness of skin and straightness of hair. Or the subtribes of middle-class descendant of slaves, inner-city descendant of slaves, Afro-Carribean immigrant, and recent central African immigrant.
I think there’s an element of “me and my brother against my cousin; me and my cousins against the world” in most identity politics. Including the white variety; “poor white trash” wasn’t invented as a term of pan-white-dude solidarity.
@Brad
I was thinking more like the Civil Rights Act and the massive educational and cultural push in the US that racism is A Very Bad Things and perhaps The Very Worst Thing. Other people don’t seem to do this much. I don’t think the Japanese care much about insulting the Chinese or the Koreans and the feelings tend to be mutual.
So far as I know, that doesn’t exist, probably because the SJW crowd can’t be bothered to care about that kind of thing. But it’s a really amusing image. Of course, I wonder if we can tie HMS New Zealand (the only ship that carried out specifically nonwhite rituals, and which came out undamaged) into this somehow. Hmm….
Still are. I’ve met a few Nation of Islam types; it’s really odd talking to someone who’s generally friendly and incredibly polite (seriously, they’ve got the Mormons beat there) but whose religion you know casts you as more or less literal devilspawn.
They’ve got nowhere near the political prominence they did in the Seventies, though, or even in the Nineties. (This may appear inconsistent with some earlier posts in this thread; but like I said earlier, the racial politics albatross and I have been describing are mainly a Red/Blue Tribe phenomenon. That is, mainly white, although plenty of what SJ types would call “people of color” belong to those tribes too. Racial politics in black subcultures have followed a separate evolutionary path.)
@Conrad Honcho:
Painting the Civil Rights movement as a thing that white people did is certainly an interesting choice. I seem to recall a handful of non-white people who played a role. As an example of white people trying to push worms
backinto cans, it lacks a certain something.@Conrad Honcho
This seems true to me. From what I can tell, distrust/disdain of people of other races was basically the default and ubiquitous for basically the 1st 99% of human existence. And the great moral innovations of the past couple centuries came from convincing everyone that these worms infesting everything was a bad thing and that we should all put them into cans. I’m not sure it’s right to say that the whites were the ones trying to force the worms in the can, though – at best, maybe one can say that the whites happened to be the ones in power or happened to be the ones to stumble upon the idea of treating people as equals regardless of race. How and why whites happened to be in that position of power rather than any other race, I don’t know, but my guess is just luck of history.
@Iain
The nation that voted for the Civil Rights Act was 90% white. You seem to be implying that it was forced on this unwilling 90%. If it wasn’t the 90% white electorate, then who did it and how?
Also, you said “back into cans.” When were the worms ever in the can? What were societies like before white people opened the can and let the worms of racism into the world? Multicultural rainbow of peace and tolerance and harmony was it?
@lvlln
I’m not sure it’s caught on very well in non-Western nations. I hear Singapore does a really good job of maintaining social order in a mixed religion society, but largely because they brutally crack down on anybody who insults any religion. And they apply it equally, to all religions.
I don’t know enough about the legal systems in other nations to comment, but I understand David Friedman just wrote a book on the subject, so perhaps he can answer: how do non-western nations deal via their legal system (or cultural propaganda) with different outcomes for different ethnic groups? Do they do significantly worse or better than the west or the USA? Or do they even care?
There was no national referendum. I am not sure one would have succeeded (look at the gay marriage referendum in California).
I believe there were only 5 black congressmen in 1964.
The almost universal white leadership were, as LBJ said, made to pass the CRA by the successes of the Civil Rights Movement in making clear the brutality of Jim Crow.
@Conrad Honcho:
Well, I would start by looking at the leadership of the Civil Rights movement, which was rather less than 90% white. Moral suasion from a campaign led primarily by black people convinced a sufficient fraction of white people to get the Civil Rights Act passed. Opposition was, obviously, almost entirely led by white people. Are you really trying to characterize that as “whites […] trying to force the worms into a can”?
(Ignore my “back” into cans; it was just sloppy word choice.)
@Brad
I don’t think that people are arguing that racial nirvana had been reached before SJ people came and ruined everything.
Stereotyping and prejudice is part of the human mind and I would even argue, a logical consequence of the ability to think abstractly. Various studies show that very young children already can be very racist, which progressives generally attribute to society brainwashing children quickly, but which I would argue (also) simply arises in the absence of such. For proof, I offer that children frequently discriminate based on traits on which adults rarely discriminate each other, like red hair or wearing glasses. I’ve never heard a SJ person argue that red hair or wearing glasses are axis of oppression, strongly suggesting that very few adults are discriminated based on those.
As such, I would argue that the best we can do is teach people to be aware of and minimize their natural impulses. I would argue that the evidence suggest that American society was going in the right direction. The election of Obama is one such piece of evidence, but also the substantial reduction in the number of whites who oppose a close relative marrying a black person and the whites who oppose living in a half-black neighborhood, as visible here. I would argue that integration by way of intermarriage and mutual living are hugely important to break down false stereotype and nuance true stereotypes, so those changes seem highly important.
However, what we’ve seen recently is that racial segregation is being championed, for example, at some universities where racially segregate housing is demanded for ‘safety.’ So where once whites demanded racial segregation, which has been justly derided by progressives as retarding black advancement, we now see a move to do the same by some on the left. Similarly, I would argue that teaching racial awareness of discrimination (wokeness), with the claim that any feelings of discrimination are factually discrimination, leads to oversensitivity where many experiences that white people also have are falsely attributed to racial discrimination. There is strong evidence that humans are prone to finding false patterns, blaming scapegoats, blaming others for their own faults, etc. I would argue that teachings that feed this, without adding a counterbalance, are very dangerous.
Do you agree that being falsely accused leads to resentment?
If so, do you agree that resentment along racial lines fuels racism?
@Deiseach
Sorry, I don’t particularly believe you. I live in NYC, a bastion of leftism, read a liberal daily, and listen to public radio. I’m as blue tribe as they come, I don’t have a single friend, relative, co-worker, or acquaintances of any kind that voted for Trump.
Yet somehow I manage to avoid all these allegedly ubiquitous messages from “the media” that white men are cause of all the world’s problems and that any suffering we go through is either fake or a good thing. In fact the only place I go to where I see these sentiments are a regular basis is here, albeit as endless of strawmen and weakmen, rather than played straight.
If I can manage to avoid it without even trying, y’all certainly could if you wanted to.
@Iain
Of course the Civil Rights movement was led by black people, but it wasn’t like black people conquered white people and forced them to not be racist against their will. White people, one at a time, chose to side with the Civil Rights movement. They decided collectively and individually that “racism is wrong” and that white people would change. They would change, they would change their neighbors, and they would change their children.
You can’t change people against their will. They have to want to change. White people were way more racist than they are today, and that is because whites chose to change to be less racist (i.e., pick up the worms one at a time and cram them into that can). At extreme cost. How much time, how much money, how much blood has gone into the efforts, by white America to change white America? We’re not talking about a trivial change or lip service, but deep fundamental changes with life or death consequences that has taken decades and is still ongoing and will continue into the foreseeable future.
I don’t think it’s fair then to deny white people credit for the Civil Rights Act and the ensuing cultural changes. If white people didn’t change themselves, who changed them? It was my white parents, and my white teachers, and my white friends at school who taught me not be racist. Who taught you?
@Conrad Honcho:
Chose? Or were convinced?
Or maybe some of the former and a great deal of the later?
When you talk about “white people” in monolith like this, it very much comes off as the bully who beat you black and blue every day in middle school but did it less and less and eventually stopped. You had noticed that they went to Church and asked them what Jesus would think of them.
Years later they takes credit for stopping that horrible bully from beating you
In the abstract, it’s true that they were the ones who decided to stop beating you, they weren’t forced to, but it’s not fair for them to take credit for it either.
And of course white people aren’t a monolith who can be credited with this thing wholesale (and the actions of black people made into an unimportant trivial detail). The story is far more complex than that.
Mostly what we can say is that the US States (both individually and federally) imposed white supremacy on the land, to great ill effect and without complete remedy.
@Conrad Honcho:
There are two subtly different questions here.
Q1. Do white people deserve credit for the Civil Rights Act?
A1: Sure, some of them do, to the extent that said white people were actually in favour and supported it. There are obvious problems with assigning credit to the opponents of civil rights, but I assume you’re not trying to argue that.
Q2: Does the credit for the Civil Rights Act go to white people?
A2: No. The majority of the heavy lifting was done by black people; white people just had to go “huh, yeah, you’ve got a point, we should really stop being so racist”.
Note that, at the time, this was not seen as a friendly exercise in avoiding identity politics and focusing on the content of a man’s character. Martin Luther King was a politically controversial rabble-rouser. The circumstances surrounding the writing of the Letter from Birmingham Jail, are a good example of the response he got.
If you are buying worms by the canful and systematically dumping them on your neighbour’s head, and he engages in a long and frequently dangerous campaign to convince you that he does not deserve worms in his hair, then you should certainly be commended for ceasing your worm-based assault, but it’s a bit rich to simultaneously start painting yourself as a bold anti-worm crusader.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but fish are probably unaware of water. Isn’t one of the big points of intersectional social justice the idea that it’s really easy for cultural messaging to pass unnoticed among its perpetuators?
Well, that’s you.
I can’t speak to non-western systems in general but, so far as I can tell, most of the systems I looked at took different outcomes for different groups for granted, although “ethnic” might not be the right category.
In Periclean Athens, for instance, famous as an exemplar of democracy, about half the population were slaves and some of the rest were metics, resident aliens with rights restricted in various ways.
The Romany, at least the American Vlach Rom, the group I know most about, have words for male and female Romany, words for male and female not-Romany, but apparently no words that would cover both. Norms about how you are supposed to treat people only apply to Romany. Within the Vlach Rom there are four different Natsiya (“nations”), and different outcomes for different Natsiya are taken for granted.
@Nornagest
I wouldn’t know.
There’s two small groups of people that think it is super important and are hyper-aware of every little doctrinal nuance.
You should have no problem quoting where I’ve said so then.
Brad is apparently the frog who no longer notices the boiling water.
You don’t have to go out of your way to hear disparaging things about whites and white males especially. I’m involved with a bunch of literary communities and not two minutes ago an article on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which basically consists of her obsessive cataloging of all the alleged microagressions that have been committed against her and people she knows, showed up on my Facebook feed from a group dedicated to the poetry of Derek Walcott.
Some might say being involved with literary communities is going out of your way.
@HeelBearCub
What’s the difference?
It is, however, unfair to deny said former bullies any credit for the cessation of bullying, and worse continue to accuse them of inventing bullying itself, whilst every other schoolyard since the beginning of time and continuing to this day is rife with unrepentant bullies.
The natural state of man is tribal. This is evidenced by our history dominated entirely by stories of tribes murdering each other. And modern chimpanzees form tribes, and rip the members of other tribes limb from limb (literally). There is no chimp KKK forcing it on them. It’s just a natural survival mechanism to support animals similar to you and be wary of/hostile to animals different from you. Those animals that did not do this did not survive.
You said “stop bullying,” as if it’s an active, needlessly cruel thing one has chosen to do that they have to simply “stop.” No, racism is a passive, natural thing, that one must actively oppose. If all you had to do was “stop being racist,” it would be incredibly easy and would not have cost all the time, money, blood and tears.
I think your argument only makes sense if you believe the default state is anti-racist, because then going from “evil” to “normal” is, yes, unworthy of recognition. If you think the default state of man is racist, then going from “normal” to “good” is worthy of consideration, or at least unworthy of derision. Do you think the default state of man is racist, or anti-racist?
@manwhoisthursday
I cannot wait until we win the war on microaggressions so we can finally address these interminable nanoaggressions.
@Iain
Which came first, the can or the worms?
It seems kind-of hopeless to parcel out the responsibility for either good or bad things to racial groups as a whole. Some whites had a huge hand in passing the civil rights act, desegregating the schools, sending the national guard to enforce desegregating the schools, and wrecking their political party’s century-old coalition to do so. Other whites stood aside and didn’t care one way or another. Still other whites resisted that process every step of the way. Some whites even *murdered* people campaigning for civil rights. Similarly, some blacks led the fight for civil rights; others endured all kinds of nastiness to get civil rights; still others did nothing but collect the benefits. That’s the normal way things are when you talk about really large groups of people.
There’s neither guilt nor credit to be had for whole racial groups. I no more get to claim credit for the actions of the white guys who fought for civil rights than I must accept blame for the actions of the white guys who fought against civil rights. Those were all done by other people, whose main connection to me is that they looked a little like me.
Some might say being involved with literary communities is going out of your way.
This is kind of the point: if you want to avoid the “hate the white man” stuff, you pretty much have to avoid all contact with anything related to the humanities. Maybe if you’re only interested in STEM subjects, or jockish activities, you can avoid that stuff, but even so.
Or perhaps you’re oversensitive, paranoid and revel in outrage and resentment.
As long as we are just throwing things out there.
Or perhaps different people are in different environments.
I have no first hand experience of discrimination against me for being male and white, but that doesn’t mean that others don’t face such experience.
Which is stupid, because things were clearly getting better then – imperfect, but improving – and now they’re getting worse.
And look, it’s one thing to be vocal about racial injustice. But at this point they’re actively seeking it out. “Possible” racial injustice? That ends up being “you wore a hairstyle we adopted” or “you wore a hat”, i.e. cultural appropriation. It ends up being non-racist statements which are in some way insensitive. It ends up meaning that you can’t even address racist arguments and reject them soundly because you’ve already shown yourself willing to understand the racist argument and that kiiiiiinda makes you racist too, so instead just reject the arguments out of hand which totally fails on the level of convincing people but works great on the level of feeling good about yourself.
I’m not going to say 80s-90s were great. But if we were still acting like that, we could have something beautiful going on. I know that because most people do still act like that and we mostly do. I want to keep that.
Oh yeah, sorry to double post, but
Thing is, it’s not even so much about excessively lumping in all police officers, as it is about murders of black men rising (and I believe murders of police as well). So, I mean, more black people would be alive if we went back to that era. But maybe we wouldn’t feel as good about it. I prefer the former, at this point.
Oh blow me, Brad. One minute you’re saying that anti-white male trash talk is hard to find, and when, if you’re interested in the humanities, that turns out to be obviously untrue, you say we’re oversensitive.
David, I doubt that white males face that much outright discrimination, though there is the issue of affirmative action. However, if you’re much interested in the humanities, it’s hard to avoid constant insults directed towards white people and white males in particular. Your experience in economics may be different.
The micro-aggression argument is that a constant barrage of ‘othering’ comments causes psychological damage, especially in the form of anger, frustration or exhaustion. “Over time, the cumulative effect of micro-aggressions is thought to lead to diminished self-confidence and a poor self-image, and potentially also to mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and trauma.”
Source
I think that it is pretty clear that ‘othering’ happens quite a lot to white men nowadays, often to an extent that can be more correctly called macro-aggressions. My newspaper regularly features the ‘angry white man’ slur, for example. In my eyes, this slur intends to portray white man as irrationally angry, implying that the causality is unreasonable anger -> find fairly random targets to blame; rather than that they have specific objections and their anger is specifically about this. The latter framing requires that the actual complaints are examined, while the former frame allows them to simply be dismissed.
Other people who have complaints/demands are not dismissed as being ‘angry,’ although they frequently are angry.
Dierdre McCloskey claims that when he told his chairman of his plans, the response was “Great. I get one more woman, one fewer man, and I don’t have to hire or fire anyone.” And I remember a comment long ago in a different university about a possible hire, call her Jane: “This is one we would want even if her name was John.”
So there is affirmative action hiring in economics, both by gender and race, which some approve of and some don’t. But I haven’t encountered any attitude of hostility to white males.
Economics is its own ideology, orthogonal to conventional left/right divisions. Paul Douglas was a prominent economist who ended up as a Democratic senator. I remember my father commenting that when he testified before the Joint Economic Committee it would end up with him and Douglas vs the rest of the committee. I had a similar experience on a smaller scale once as the expert witness for one side helping to depose the other side’s expert. He and I spoke the same language.
What if genetically engineered people are what kills us? We all know high-IQ misanthropes. Humans behave in a “speciest” way towards less intelligent non-human animals like monkeys and pigs. Homo Sapiens may have slaughtered less sophisticated species like the Neanderthals early in our history. We seem to explicitly accept a value system where intelligent beings deserve greater moral consideration: see e.g. scientists calling for greater rights for dolphins on the basis of their high intelligence.
I worry about selection effects. When we think of geniuses, we think of people like Feynman and Von Neumann. Those people are “high-functioning geniuses”. But there’s also a big “dark matter” pool of lower-functioning, sometimes misanthropic geniuses.
Why are we working to identify genes for intelligence but not altruism? Why are we working to produce geniuses before figuring out how to bring them up? Grady Towers recommends surrounding them with intellectual peers. But if Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart is correct, this kind of cognitive stratification is exactly what put America in its current precarious political situation. People in the comments of this blog have hypothesized that Blue America’s contempt for Red America’s low intelligence is a key part of the problem.
As an aside, I don’t know about genetic studies, but there is a rich literature in trying to understand how altruism[1] could have evolved. I’ve only scratched the surface of this literature, but it’s something that a lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time thinking about.
My very strong suspicion is that there is a lot of impact of upbringing and environment on how willing you are to seek more cooperative vs competitive strategies, whether you default to defect/defect or tit-for-tat, etc. But there’s probably also some genetic influence.
[1] Though evolutionary biologists define altruism a little differently than we’d do in daily conversation.
I spend a lot of time talking with people on the left. It’s not, in general, about white people behaving badly – though that does come up now and again – but white people don’t have to behave badly in order to a) benefit from the current system and b) contribute to the harms caused to non-whites by the current system. If almost everybody – both whites and non-whites – have an unconscious bias in favour of white/male/tall/attractive, the person benefiting from that doesn’t have to do anything wrong in order to get a prestigious, well-paying job that probably should’ve gone to a more qualified non-white/female/short/ugly person.
How did the system – and our unconscious biases – get that way? It might not have anything to do with white males behaving badly now – though that does happen now and again – but it definitely has something to do with white males behaving badly in the past. Primitive accumulation and all that.
There’s also an argument that the achievement gap is being reinforced – made worse, even – by the educational frenzy of upper-middle class parents with their competitive kindergartens and million-dollar school fundraising efforts and massive tuition increases and all that. They won’t be able to completely pull the drawbridge up behind themselves, but they’re certainly trying. “We’re only trying to help our own children… what could possibly be wrong with that?”
FWIW, I’m a white male, and I’ve definitely benefited throughout my career from implicit biases in my favour. It’s not that I’ve sucked at my jobs, but I’ve been given opportunities to prove myself where other people would’ve had to prove themselves before being given the opportunity. If there’s anything which has held me – and a lot of resentful white men I know – back, it has been social anxiety, which, thankfully, is eminently treatable. Self-treatable, even.
The underlying moral question, for me: If you’re not doing anything wrong, but something wrong is being done on your behalf, and you know about it, what are you morally obligated to do? What if it’s even being done for you by the people it’s harming?
Yup, this is one thing I learned about the US: even a first generation immigrant from Eastern Europe like myself, who had nothing whatsoever to do with dysfunctional history of the US, can still end up embedded into a complicated social context in such a way that unfairness happens.
None of my family was in this country before 1865 (1897 is the earliest I can find). None of my ancestors who lived in this country lived in the South. Whatever was done to black people in America, I didn’t do it and furthermore they didn’t do it. And I’d reject ancestral guilt in any case. I didn’t do it, and putting that burden on me because I share a skin color (roughly) with those who did is out and out racism.
Have I benefited from implicit biases in my favor? I don’t know, obviously. Nor do I know if I’ve been harmed from implicit biases against me. Implicit bias research has had its share of replication issues. I’m certainly not going to accept as a given that I’ve gotten some undeserved benefit (and no undeserved detriment) as a result of my appearance, and that therefore I’m obligated to self-abase in favor of those who presumably got the opposite..
My preference: Try to make sure that the playing field is actually balanced. I don’t think that’s a burden, or racism; it’s just fairness.
My ancestors were discriminated against; I think we were second-lowest on the list of acceptable white immigrants. We even had the Klu Klux Klan speaking out against us, and a brief immigration ban. No ancestral guilt here. That doesn’t mean that I don’t unfairly benefit from how things have changed since then.
There’s no need to accept it as a given. I think there’s an obligation to try to find out if it has probably (or probably not) happened, though, and at least contemplate it. (This is where my left-wing friends would look at me sideways: “Just contemplate it? And don’t do anything about it? Because you benefit from it? Typical…”)
And how do you measure this and how do you do the balancing? From where I sit, the playing field is actually unbalanced the other way, and not implicitly but blatantly. Preferences in college admissions, preferences in certain jobs, respectable organizations pushing for benefits for other races. When HR or an executive search committee talks about “looking for diversity candidates”, that means “anyone who isn’t a white male”.
Things have indeed changed: They’ve gotten far better for black people. But pointing this out gets arguments about the legacy of slavery, the legacy of Jim Crow, the legacy of discrimination. And of course those legacies will never go away, because the past is unchanging.
Stepping back from the particular issues here, I’m interested in the idea of “undeserved benefit.”
In any society, many benefits are undeserved. Most obviously, Americans, both black and white, have the immense undeserved benefit of being born in a developed country instead of, say, Poland in the 12th century or Nigeria today. Anyone with loving and able parents has the undeserved benefit of having had them. Not being mugged or murdered is an undeserved benefit. Being born with genes for a healthy heart, without genetic diseases, … are all undeserved benefits.
Is the implicit theory that we want to create a world in which everyone gets what he deserves. If so what would that look like and how could one imagine creating it, save by an omniscient and all powerful deity?
The alternative, which seems to me to make much more sense, is a world where everyone gets what he is entitled to, which is not at all the same thing. If something belongs to you and you give it to me I am entitled to have it, whether or not I deserve to. That comes closer to being a well defined outcome, although there are obviously still problems, and one that human institutions might get close to producing.
The unbalance in the metaphorical playing field is much larger as between a random American and a random Indian or African than between two random Americans, so why is it the latter you focus on?
Because I have a terminal preference for balancing the field among Americans, but not between Americans and non-Americans?
@DavidFriedman
I’ll concede I do not have a philosophical justification for caring about equity between Americans more than between Americans and non-Americans. My best shot is that I have no control over what other countries do with their policies and that having separate nation states with self determination has seemed to work well in the world for preventing conflict and for other reasons. For your other points:
Public education, child protective services, good mental health services, school lunch programs. Not a complete substitute for good parents (or even close), but at least an attempt at equalizing.
The justice system, personal injury law and homicide victim benefits all exist as a way of trying to create fairness out of these situations.
This is the best argument for universal health insurance.
@DavidFriedman
May God save each and every one of us from getting what we deserve.
@The Nybbler
Both good questions. How would you do it? Let’s say that you don’t want to be blinded by either your own preconceptions or those of others. What gold-standard experiment would you design to measure the amount and direction of bias?
I work in the 3D animation industry, which immediately suggests an idea to me: Motion-capture someone describing their job history and skills, and then apply it, Andy Serkis-and-Gollum-like, to models of different ethnic groups and levels of attractiveness. Have large numbers of job interviewers rate the generated candidates. From the ratings, you should be able to construct a correction function that you’d apply, sports-betting-spread-like, to hiring decisions.
(How this would all work in practise is left as an exercise to the reader.)
But what’s your own personal experience? Have you encountered any implicit biases – or outright prejudice – at work or in your social life, and who did it favour?
I’ve read about all the things you’re talking about, but I’ve rarely encountered them in real life, on the job. The real-life biases I’ve encountered have almost always been in the direction suggested by the left-wing research, to the point that it’s boring and routine. It’s not as bad as it was when I was growing up, but it’s still there.
In my ancestors’ case, there was a legacy of discrimination. In our case, the past hasn’t changed, but the legacy has pretty much disappeared. Now, I’m just another white guy. In large part, that’s because we didn’t go through anything nearly so extended and traumatic as slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and all that. Not much trauma – short healing and recovery time. Massive historical trauma? It’s gonna take a while.
If someone’s broken bone is half-healed, you could tell them, “Why aren’t you back on the rugby field? Your bone is much better than it was! What’s wrong with you, you wimp??” But that ignores the fact that “much better” doesn’t equal “fully healed”.
Is that a fair argument?
@DavidFriedman
That’s a really interesting question. I’ve been thinking about it – or a closely related question, anyway – ever since I read that the guy who coined the term “meritocracy” meant it as a dystopia. If my assumptions seem a little muddled, that’s because they are; I haven’t yet worked out what I think about it.
We never create the better worlds that we imagine, do we? We just try to inch closer to them, one way or another, and we have to be satisfied with having – hopefully – made some small part of the world a bit better.
Have you read Amartya Sen’s (Nobel Prize-contributing) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation? He talks about exchange entitlement and famine. One classic example is the shipping of grain out of Ireland during the potato famine. The Irish were not entitled to the grain – they did not own it and were unable to buy it – so they starved. That seems like an undesirable outcome, doesn’t it? And yet it’s perfectly fine by the moral standards of ownership and exchange entitlement, and the English who were in charge were happy to make that argument and enforce that moral viewpoint.
Entitlement is a reasonable way to organize things most of the time, but, like most good ideas, it shows its flaws when it’s insisted on under all circumstances.
@DavidFriedman
Being concerned about one doesn’t preclude being concerned about both, does it?
Clever, but impractical. And if it came out with the wrong answer, the claim would just be that people were responding to the privileged mannerisms of the privileged group which came through the motion capture. I know of two attempts to do something similar; one the gender-reversed Trump debate (in which female-Trump did _better_ against male-Hillary) and the interviewing.io voice masking experiment, which came up with a null result for male-versus-female.
Oh yes, blatant prejudice and hatred directed against white males. I’ve had this playing field discussion before; I was told that the playing field was SO tilted towards white males that literally no measure against white males could even begin to balance it.
Ah, redlining. Funny thing…. during the time FHA redlining was in effect, my family, all my direct ancestors in the US, lived in areas designated either red or yellow.
Oh, and did I mention my mother’s side of the family is Jewish? To be fair, I can’t claim the Holocaust any more than Obama can claim slavery, but it’s not like the history of Jewish persecution started with Hitler.
We’re talking about different people. There are no former legal US slaves alive today. And if these benefits and detriments are due to past harms being transmitted across generations rather than being due to the current situation, how is it that white people whose ancestors had nothing to do with it somehow get the benefits, and black people whose families were similarly unaffected get the detriments?
Furthermore, if the problem is not a tilted playing field now but damage to the players from generations back, what good does it do to try to even things out? Does this not merely perpetuate the harm? You broke my grandfather’s right knee, I break your right knee, maybe your kid breaks my grandkid’s right knee? What does that accomplish?
@Andrew Klaassen says:
Sen also claims Mao as the greatest humanitarian in history. his work is EXTREMELY suspect and prone to completely ignore context in order to prove his ideological points. This is no exception. The british did not just happen to own all potatoes in ireland by some freak accident, or even by the working of capitalism. They owned them because they spent literally centuries using the power of the state to deliberately impoverish as many of the native irish as they could. These policies persisted until the late 18th century, some well into the 19th. the irish famine was not a product of “entitlement” or capitalism, it was a product of 3 centuries of british colonial policy.
Nit: Pretty sure the British didn’t bother to own any of the potatoes in Ireland. They just made sure to own almost everything edible that wasn’t a potato, on account of the other stuff was actually profitable to export.
@The Nybbler
The interviewing.io thing is exactly what I’m looking for – thanks for pointing me to that.
Fair enough. I’ve only ever heard things like that from cranks, not from anybody who’d have any impact on my career or social life. But we all have different experiences, and I admit that mine are limited to me.
I’ve got a pogrom or two in my ancestry, too, though nothing to compare with the history of Jewish persecution. : – )
In my experience, the answer is pretty obvious: Stereotypes get applied which have nothing to do with a particular individual’s particular history.
Have you not seen that in action? (Even if the stereotype you’ve personally been affected by is “white guys suck”?)
I guess I don’t see the attempt to correct for bias as being the same as harming someone who would otherwise benefit from the bias. My experience leads me to believe that the playing field is still tilted, though, which means that we’ll talk past each other to some degree; if you don’t believe that there’s still some tilt (and maybe there isn’t where you live), I can see how you’d come to your position.
@cassander
That’s one I haven’t heard before. Could you point me to a reference? All I’m finding is that Sen once praised the “barefoot doctor” system that Mao put in place during the Cultural Revolution.
Sen was arguing that most modern famines don’t happen because of food shortages, but because of power relationships. In the famine that affected his childhood and got him interested in the question, the power relationships were kept in place by British free market rules. They weren’t created that way – as in Ireland, colonial actions (I hesitate to say colonial “policy” in the case of India, given the whole history with the East India Company) created the power relationships – but the maintenance of British dominance into the 20th century and the famines that resulted were given a moral gloss by using strictly applied free market principles. “You don’t own it; you can’t eat it.”
Sen’s prescription was democracy; one of his major claims is that famines don’t happen in democracies. What do you think of that? If the Irish had the vote, would people have died during the famine?
On the question of exporting Grain during the potato famine.
I may be mistaken, but the account I saw was that they were exporting grain and importing maize, which produced a net gain in calories. It may be wrong, but you can’t simply take an emotionally telling factoid at face value without knowing more.
@DavidFriedman
I haven’t had a chance to do much searching, but I have found one mention of it near the bottom of this extended discussion of some of the stories that grew up around the famine:
“…it is only fair to point out that the newspapers contain a strong indication that the cargoes of the Porcupine and the Ann were trade goods, not charity; they were consigned to local merchants based in Louth and Meath, who it might be expected would sell them rather than give them away. Speculation in imported corn, moreover, was scarcely unheard-of two years into the Great Famine…”
This claim is in conflict with the “broken leg” analogy. This claim is that people are discriminated against today, and has nothing (directly) to do with slavery, redlining, Jim Crow, or any of the rest of it. The “broken leg” analogy suggests something different, that even if the playing field is level (or tilted the other way) today, that the players who were (or whose ancestors were) subject to discrimination and oppression in the past are at a disadvantage today. It’s possible that both are the case, but they need to be evaluated separately.
If the bias is _current_ bias, and if you can measure the bias and accurately correct for it. it’s different. But if that doesn’t hold, you can’t. And I would argue it does not hold. The remedies and proposed remedies are all too ham-handed, and the bias can’t be accurately measured in any case. If you “correct for bias” by biasing the game in favor of the (black) son of a wealthy Kenyan immigrant over the son of a white sharecropper, you’ve done nobody any good.
@Andrew
Sen on Mao:
This is, of course, nonsense. Chinese LE rose after Mao took over because china pre-Mao started the largest civil war in history, was invaded by the Japanese, then finished the largest civil war in history. Mao doesn’t get credit for saving lives he was ending through his civil war.
this is not false, but also not really meaningful. There exists in the world enough food to feed everyone, the trouble is how you deliver it. Capitalism has a centuries long record of delivering food to people who need it, there has never been a famine anywhere because someone bought up all the food. the closest you get to famines in capitalist societies are Ireland, where capitalism was just beginning to merge after centuries of brutal colonialism, and 1940s India, which was nominally capitalist, but in the middle of a world war where the Japanese invaded burma and stole all the rice that used to be exported to bengal. Neither can be attributed to capitalism.
Again, there was nothing free market about the bengal famine. It was caused by the japanese invading Burma and stealing all the rice to feed their armies.
The Venezuelans had the vote, and they’re starving. It’s capitalism that prevents famine, not democracy.
xhxhxhx wrote about the potato-wheat-maize thing on tumblr.
Thanks for the link. The BBC has a summary of the famine which says that there was a food shortage in 1846-7, but grain imports increased dramatically after 1847 and there was “an absolute sufficiency of food that could have prevented mass starvation, if it had been properly distributed so as to reach the smallholders and labourers of the west and the south of Ireland.” The link you provided focuses on the shortages in the same years as the BBC does, though it goes one year earlier: 1845-7. So both sources appear to agree on the timing of the absolute food shortage portion of the famine.
So the “artificial” famine was 1848-1852, when problems of distribution – of food, money, or power, depending on your point of view – led to continuing needless death.
Wikipedia says that other sources of nutrition were also shipped out of Ireland: “Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon, and ham actually increased during the Famine. … A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue, and seed … 822,681 imperial gallons (3,739,980 litres) of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine.”
If I’m doing my math correctly on the butter numbers, that’s approximately enough calories to keep 40,000 people alive for a year. (Yes, I know, you can’t feed people only butter, and that butter has storage and transport challenges. : – ) Because of the high price of butter calories (and the other calorie source exports mentioned) that presumably could’ve been (was?) traded for a much higher number of grain calories, though grain prices were high that year and I’ve got no idea what the calorie price conversion rate would be. In any event, that was in 1847, and the political/economic/ideological famine happened in 1848-52.
Sounds like the BBC needs to read some Hayek.
This is a conceit of the state/historians, you cannot look at where people suffered and then come to the conclusion that with “proper distribution” it would have been alleviated.
@baconbacon
So the Holodomor was inevitable, and the Soviets should not be blamed for it?
This argument is premised on the assumption that that you’ve gotten opportunities others wouldn’t have……and they didn’t. the first part of this statement is unquestionably true, the second is extremely suspect. Life is not fair, and at some point everyone gets chances they don’t deserve and everyone eventually misses out on something they did deserve. The left wing argument implicitly assumes that the balance sheet is so massively tilted that every white person, especially every white male, no matter his circumstances, is coming out ahead.
Now, maybe that’s the case, maybe it isn’t, but the left makes almost zero effort to actually demonstrate this. In my experience, they consider even asking the question deeply suspect. Given that for decades now the left has been winning political arguments and enacting policies they claim will address these policies, I am left with one of two conclusions. (A) They’re right about the balance sheet, in which case their decades of policy have achieved very little and they have thus disqualified themselves from future policy making by gross failure. (B) They’re wrong about the balance sheet in which case they have solutions for a non-existent problems that just happen to give them money, political power, and prestige. Either way, I don’t feel inclined to listen to their “solutions.”
In my observation – and I may well be wrong – things have gotten better, but we’re not there yet. At one time, the table for prestigious jobs was tilted 100% in favour of white males – and that didn’t include the Irish or the Jews. Now maybe it’s – let me pull a number out of my ass – 60-40 or 55-45 in favour of white males, all else being equal. (All else is rarely equal, of course.) That doesn’t put every white male ahead all the time, but it’s enough to cause systemic unfairness when it comes to prestigious, well-paying jobs.
I’ve only got anecdata, but I’ve been on both sides of the hiring table multiple times. What I’ve seen of biases, stereotypes, and occasional outright prejudice fits what the research has found. Am I seeing what I expect to see because of confirmation bias? That’s possible, of course.
I’d suggest the opposite – they’ve gotten us this far, despite pushback and “surely this is far enough!” objections going all the way back to slavery, so why not let them have another go-round or two and see if we can’t get even closer to the ideal of a level playing field? : – )
You don’t say when you are talking about. Discrimination against Jews in college admission existed at least into the 1920’s and probably later. But the tilt did not actually result in Jews being blocked out of prestigious jobs–they ended up doing very well by that measure.
So I think you have to distinguish the question of whether prejudice existed from the question of how much effect it had.
Suppose you are part of a minority of 5% of the population. Further suppose that 50% of the population are strongly prejudiced against you, unlikely to hire you, buy from you, do you any favors.
The effect of that prejudice will be small, because the other fifty percent can provide all the jobs and customers you need.
In my observation – and I may well be wrong – things have gotten better, but we’re not there yet. At one time, the table for prestigious jobs was tilted 100% in favour of white males – and that didn’t include the Irish or the Jews. Now maybe it’s – let me pull a number out of my ass – 60-40 or 55-45 in favour of white males, all else being equal.
I can accept this argument, but I hear very few people on the left making it, much less following it up with the logical conclusion, maybe left wing politics should focus less on issues of race and gender and more on other sorts of balance sheets.
>I’d suggest the opposite – they’ve gotten us this far, despite pushback and “surely this is far enough!” objections going all the way back to slavery, so why not let them have another go-round or two and see if we can’t get even closer to the ideal of a level playing field? : –
I the rhetoric were “we’re almost there, equality is just around the next bend” this argument might be plausible., but that’s not what I’m hearing. If anything, the level of rhetoric seems inversely proportional to actual state of the balance sheet.
Class comes up a lot, and of course the intersection of All The Things, though one thing about the left is that it’s always fighting with itself about which liberation battle is most important next. What usually happens – and this is on both the left and the right, I’ve noticed – is that people mostly focus on the balance sheets on which they think they’re losing out. Everybody is looking up and seeing assholes, never mind their own shit.
The rhetoric has gone up and down. Abolitionists raised it higher (with good reason) than anything I’ve heard lately.
@Andrew Klaassen says:
as an additional thing to be concerned about, not something to focus on instead of other things.
That’s just saying “don’t fight with each other, we still have those white guys to take down.”
I see a different dynamic. I see a bunch of factions that aren’t so much fighting with each other as they are clamoring for attention from people who aren’t members of said faction. Some factions get traction and others don’t, but they aren’t really in direct conflict with one another most of the time.
If you have to reach that far back for a disconfirming example, I think you’re sort of demonstrating my point that level of rhetoric is not connected to level of suffering in any logical way.
Indeed – and they did well using large doses of hard work, intelligence, and complaining long and loud (and with good reason) about the prejudice they faced. They complained on behalf of other minorities, too, and were responsible for a huge amount of progress against prejudice in the 20th century. A bunch of commie complainers who called out every bit of harmless prejudice they saw.
It’s always more complicated than that, isn’t it? If the non-prejudiced half of the population will face boycotts from the prejudiced half if they hire you, they might let financial considerations make their decision for them. If the prejudiced portion of the community are the financial and social gatekeepers, they might not even need to be half the population in order to enforce discrimination.
But closer to the mark, I think, is Solzhenitsyn’s quote about the human heart. The dividing line isn’t between prejudiced and non-prejudiced people; the line is between how often the implicit biases we have do or don’t influence our decisions, and whether we act to recognize and correct that or not.
they complained by saying the discrimination should stop, NOT that they should get special treatment to make up for said discrimination. that’s a HUGELY different ask.
The historical evidence for the effect you’re claiming is weak. at the end of the day, the only color the capitalist cares about is green, and prejudice always costs you money. Financial concerns are always going to mitigate against prejudice, they will rarely, if ever, uphold it.
You may have missed the vicious Hillary-vs-Bernie supporter infighting, and the (so far) permanent ruptures which resulted. A lotta people ain’t friends anymore. Perhaps the recency of that is colouring my view of how common real infighting on the left is, though.
That’s fair. I’m not sure what the significance of the point you’re making is, though. Jim Crow silenced a lot of rhetoric; it got loud in the ’60s; it got quieter again in the maybe-if-we-don’t-talk-about-it-it’ll-go-away ’80s; now it’s loud again. The level of rhetoric seems to have more to do with how much media gatekeepers want to emphasize conflict or cooperation. It seems like the level of conservative and populist rhetoric has gone up to 11 in the past few years, too; if my talk-radio memories are serving me correctly, I’m pretty sure the latest right-wing intensification of rhetoric preceded the left-wing intensification, if only because angry talk radio preceded the Internet. With the Internet, all the angry people are yelling loudly.
I’ve enjoyed this discussion. Time to sleep, though. I may not have a chance to return to it, so I’ll say now that I’ve appreciated the back-and-forth.
Okay, just one more. : – )
I’ve seen this argument a couple of times now, and I find it a bit bewildering. It doesn’t fit with my experience at all. Capitalists are mostly stumbling along with poor information and implicit biases just like the rest of us. People make hiring decisions for all sorts of reasons other than the corporate bottom line: Will I get along with this person? Will they at least not embarrass me? Do I feel good around them? If I hire them here, will they hire me at another company when the tables are turned? What will our customers think of them? Will they threaten my job? Will they take over my job so I can move on to better things? Will I understand them when they talk, or will I be constantly frustrated by their accent? Are they old and inflexible? Are they young and inexperienced? Can I party with them? What kind of beer do they prefer? Am I hungry and grumpy and therefore this person is an idiot?
Most companies are really bad at predicting performance based on their hiring process, and they aren’t all that hot at evaluating performance on the job, either. In part, that’s because most hires don’t make that much difference to the bottom line. Hire a bunch of average white guys instead of a bunch of minorities who would’ve done the job 1% better? It’s not going to make any difference to the company. It’ll make a difference to the group of people who consistently didn’t get hired, though.
Sure it will — it’ll make a 1% difference. That doesn’t sound like much, but businesses frequently get made or lost on a 1% margin.
Businesses being made of people, they will of course deal with the same biases that every other institution does, but this logic grants a proportional advantage to those that’re less biased. In the long run we would expect to see that reflected in which businesses survive, and ultimately in business culture.
(The signal’s gonna be small and noisy, though, so it might take a long time.)
@Nornagest:
That’s far too facile an answer to what Andrew said.
There is more than 1% variation in the abilities of everyone in a company with hiring authority, and yet they will not all be let go accept for the top. Thus biased hiring practices that cause a 1% degradation in performance can easily exist.
Also, Microsoft Bing exists.
@cassander
It’s called the Tocqueville effect.
And if the prejudiced portion are the lower class, the opposite result happens. Obviously it’s complicated, but my stylized case, where there are ten times as many unprejudiced potential employers as members of the prejudiced group, leaves a lot of room for variation in the details before the prejudice has a big effect.
If there is a serious problem with the prejudiced group objecting to other people hiring members of the minority, then the minority will tend to get hired in less visible positions or in parts of the country where the unprejudiced predominate. In the case of anti-black prejudice, employers didn’t get boycotted for hiring blacks–the railroads had black conductors, restaurants had black cooks, … .
There might well have been problems with hiring blacks in what were seen as elite jobs–a black member of a law firm, say. But that affects only a small fraction of the black population, which means you don’t need very many whites willing to defy such pressure to employ them. And there will be some positions, such as a law firm specializing in black clients, where the pressure doesn’t exist.
I’m not arguing that there is no effect–obviously there is. But I think people greatly exaggerate the size. Again, consider the case of the Jews, Chinese, Italians or Irish. In all cases there was prejudice, but it didn’t result in those people ending up, a few generations down the road, worse off than the descendants of earlier migrations. And in the case of the Chinese and Japanese they, like blacks, were marked–the fact of their ethnic identity couldn’t be concealed, as the identity of the others, after the first generation, sometimes could be.
Sowell’s conclusion in Ethnic America is that the status of American blacks is due to neither genetics nor prejudice but to culture, with the contrast of the West Indian immigrants who are blacker, visibly and genetically, than the descendants of slaves, but do much better.
…I thought that was the point I was making?
Yep. In my experience and observation, the signal is extremely small and the noise is overwhelming.
In small companies, success or failure of the firm is primarily driven by one or two key salespeople, managers, and technical leads, and a massive dose of luck. Most of them fail within a few years for reasons which couldn’t be corrected by hiring slightly better employees. Most of them don’t have the resources to do proper HR anyway; hiring is haphazard; reviews are non-existent or shoddy; promotions depend on the founder’s whim. Butterfly effects are strong, as early investment and technology decisions can lock companies into courses which either doom them or drive them. One guy gets sick at the wrong time, a critical sales meeting goes poorly, a bank payment can’t be met, and the company goes under.
In large companies, sales and production inertia can mean that the results of poor hiring and HR decisions may not have an impact for years. With only a handful of large companies in a given sector, they copy each other’s business fads in an endless go-round, in a way that maximizes noise and minimizes signal. It’s all about total quality management, then it’s all about rank-and-yank, and then it’s all about diversity hiring, and then it’s all about cultural fit, and then it’s all about outsourcing… …and after all that, it’s a failed merger by a CEO who wanted to be on the cover of Business Week that dooms the company.
The model for a signal gradually overcoming noise is evolution, and evolution takes a long, long time. And it’s unreliable: Near-random walks for small signals, getting stuck on local maxima, etc.
In the case of businesses, you don’t even have heritability. I’m still thinking through the implications of that for the ability of signal to overcome noise.
A “level playing field” doesn’t abolish the bourgeoisie, it doesn’t even rein it in or reduce their share of profit; it just makes it more ethnically diverse. It does absolutely nothing for the overwhelming majority of people, regardless of “race” or ethnicity or what have you, because the overwhelming majority of people in this system are set up to fail.
Trying to address implicit bias is a fool’s game; even if it’s real and has the alleged effects, it’s impossible for any policy to effectively control. A social system which requires moral exemplars to even create a semblance of equality is a system which can not be made equal.
Intersectional “activism” is the greatest gift the right could have ever asked for; if we want to fix things, we need to unite across the boundaries nationalists and bigots of all colors fight like hell to erect. Workers of the WORLD, unite.
@Andrew Klaassen
Everything you say up to here I agree with, but this:
Is not accurate. the great thing about capitalism is that it works even if you accept that firm decisions are completely random. Capitalism is a darwinian process, and like evolution, it doesn’t require conscious decision making to produce beneficial results. Managers might not be able to tell which employees are 1% better than others, but at the end of the day, but the bottom line can. in the long run, companies that persistently hire worse people will do worse.
@DavidFriedman
It’d be interesting to see a comparison of people’s perception of bias compared to measured bias. Would they be as wrong about it as they are about things like foreign aid spending, the NASA budget, wealth inequality, and the threat of death due to terrorism?
And bias isn’t a simple thing, of course; we tend to lump different groups of people into different boxes, so not every job is biased in favour of white males. When occupations change in power and prestige and pay, though, it does seem that white males usually somehow end up with biases in their favour when it comes to those jobs. Not always, but often enough to make one suspect that what the left says about bias isn’t completely ridiculous. I like the example of the inversion of prestige that has happened between software programming and middle management over the past half-century or so. (One anecdote that you might enjoy.)
Aye, it’s hard to deny the continuing impact of American slavery (though some people still try). I would doubt that West Indian blacks face no prejudice in the U.S., though… surely Sowell didn’t go that far?
Whites are slightly underrepresented at the big prestigious tech companies. At least anecdotally, it hasn’t gotten whiter since the 80s.
From your anecdote:
I can’t speak for the Soviet Union, but it is certainly not the case that in the United States early 1990s, 70% of programmers were female. The profession has been male-dominated since the Department of Labor has kept statistics.
@cassander
Are you familiar with the randomness of outcomes in Darwinian processes given small fitness differences and small populations? You can play around with a simulator (one of many) here. Playing with a 1% fitness difference (the rest set to default), I’m typically getting the advantageous allele being eliminated from 2 populations out of 5. In the 3 of 5 populations where, as you’d expect, the advantageous allele wins out, it typically takes anywhere from 40 to 300 generations.
Evolution is not a perfect analogue – heritability and reproduction in particular work differently – but hopefully that gives you a better sense of why I’m skeptical about ability of the selective mechanism of capitalism to eliminate hiring bias any time soon, or maybe even at all.
(Another complication of the capitalism-evolution analogy is that companies are usually made up of individuals whose interests only partially overlap with that of the company as a whole. If the company dies, they don’t; if the company makes a bigger profit, it may have little or no impact on an individual’s wages. The company may, in fact, make a profit by lowering their wages. The evolutionary analogue is group selection. Group selection isn’t non-existent in nature, but it’s constantly undermined by individual selection, and advantages that you might expect to be favoured by group selection often don’t get very far.)
@Andrew Klaasen
About Sowell’s comparison of black immigrants from the West Indies to born-and-raised African-Americans, you said:
“Aye, it’s hard to deny the continuing impact of American slavery (though some people still try). I would doubt that West Indian blacks face no prejudice in the U.S., though… surely Sowell didn’t go that far?”
Since hardly any Americans make a visual distinction between born-and-raised black Americans and West Indies black immigrants, I think it’s safe to say that the prejudices they face are more or less identical. And while lots of individual racists still exist in the US, the institutions like universities are either non-racist or actively try to assist black people. Police famously treat black people differently than others, but black people also have higher crime rates and probably are more dangerous to a police officer in personal interactions. Here we get into a chicken-and-egg problem with no easy solution.
It is also important to note that the West Indies were slave colonies. These immigrants were descendants of slaves, same as most black Americans. Unless you want to make such a distinction between sugar-cutting and cotton-picking, this comparison ends up being roughly equal. [Actually sugar-cutting was worse from what I understand.]
As I understand Sowell (and I agree with him), the cultural malaise holding back many black Americans is largely a by-product of failed attempts to help them (plus the decline of traditional American society e.g. the churches – see this graph of out-of-wedlock births, with upwards trend starting ~1960; it scares me that nobody I know is freaking out about this). Since this “help” never occurred in the West Indies, immigrants from these countries do not suffer the same disadvantages and do better.
Underrepresented in terms of population, but what about in terms of programming ability? I think it’d be interesting to apply the bias test I proposed above to prestigious tech company interviewers to see how much they systematically over- or under-estimate programming ability in different groups given the same interview answers.
I suspect that the large tech companies, which have been investing in diversity training and serious HR research for a few years now, would probably score different groups more consistently than either the average company or themselves a decade ago would.
I wouldn’t try to make the argument that things have gotten worse, bias-wise, since the 1980s. I was alive then. : – )
I’m sure the URL will make you skeptical : – ), but it looks like the turning point in the U.S. was sometime in the mid-1960s.
Not visual, no, but how often do we interact with someone in any significant sense without hearing them talk?
@andrew
Yes. fortunately, though, the economy is composed of billions of consumers and millions of service providers. Small population problems are not relevant.
Again, that doesn’t matter. A barber today is exactly as efficient as a barber in Periclean Athens, but the modern barber makes a hell of a lot more money. Why? because he cuts hair in a society that is far richer, so if people want their hair cut, in the long run they have to raise wages in accordance with the general productivity level of society.
@Progressive Reformation
That’s an interesting argument. I don’t know enough about West Indian history to judge it one way or another. Did they face the same post-slavery conditions that blacks in the U.S. faced, with legal segregation in the South and defacto segregation in the North for a century after slavery ended? Were they doing just as poorly as blacks in the U.S. right up until the Great Society?
And for another comparison point: Did the descendants of black slaves who escaped to Canada see the same declines after Great Society-type social programs were introduced in the 1960s?
Yet another comparison point: What about West Indian blacks who didn’t immigrate to the U.S.? My impression is that crime rates are very high in a number of West Indian nations. Are you sure that Sowell isn’t just documenting an ambitious-immigrant effect?
@cassander
Most companies are competing with a small number of competitors within a limited niche. I may have this wrong, but it seems like effective population sizes for firm-on-firm competition are typically small.
Hmm. Now I’m interested in seeing if I can find small-population-effect analogues in various industries. Large fluctuations in population size? High risk of extinction? Founder effects? Low “genetic” diversity? Drift? Inbreeding?
I didn’t mean to come off condescending when I pointed you to evolution simulator, BTW; I wasn’t sure if you were familiar with it, and thought that you might find it interesting if you weren’t.
I’m not sure how that applies to competition between companies with different levels of bias in their hiring practises. Could you clarify?
The main result of discrimination against Jews in certain portions of academia was that CUNY became an intellectual powerhouse.
@Andrew Klaassen says:
Definitely not. If you want to buy a plane that carries 400 people, sure, you need to go to one of about 3 companies in the world. But that picture is not accurate for the thousands of other goods. Just look around the room you’re sitting in right now and try to count the number of brands for the various products you can see. then remember that, for example, all the companies that make lightbulbs and lamps aren’t just competing with the other lightbulb companies, they’re also competing with candle companies, and companies that make gas lamps, and every other type of lighting. And then we have to realize that goods are not bought in isolation. In some hypothetical world where some oligopoly managed to dramatically hike the price of lightbulbs, people would respond by buying few of them. Some of that money would be spent on alternative forms of light, but most would be spent on goods that have nothing to do with light production, simply because of the shift in relative values of goods. Ultimately, every good sees competition not just among the producers of that good, but the producers of every other good.
didn’t think you were. And I wasn’t familiar with that particular model, but I have seen similar math in other contexts.
The point, which wasn’t well articulated, was that you have to look more broadly than a single worker and a single employer. any systematic bias against a group of people pushes down their wages relative to the rest of society. the stronger the bias, the more incentive it creates for people to break the taboo. such bias is self defeating in capitalist interactions because ultimately the cost of not hiring someone is
Being a lawyer stayed high status over the past forty years. When my sister went to Bolt, c. 1970, women were a tenth of the class (by memory but I think right). Currently I believe they are a bit over half the average law school class. So that case doesn’t fit the claimed pattern.
…
His claim wasn’t that West Indian blacks face no prejudice, it was that their income reached the U.S. median in one generation (again from memory, so I don’t guarantee details). They are visibly blacker and genetically blacker than the descendants of southern slaves, so should face at least as much racial prejudice and have more genetic disadvantage. So if the reason American blacks do poorly is either racial prejudice or genetic inferiority, West Indian blacks should do at least as badly.
They don’t, hence Sowell concluded that the cause was neither discrimination nor genetics. His explanation, as best I remember, was that southern plantation slavery was the equivalent of centrally planned socialism–labor doing what the people in charge told it, being fed and clothed by the people in charge. West Indian slavery was more like medieval serfdom–the slave cultivating his own plot for himself plus working some number of hours for his owner. The latter produced a much healthier culture than the former.
But again, all this is memory of a book I read long ago, so for a reliable account you would need to read the book. Which, as I remember, was well worth reading.
@cassander
In theory all these products are fungible and the companies producing them are in competition, but in practise the periods of direct competition tends to be short. Superior price and technology wins out. A candlemaker which has eliminated bias in its hiring practises is not going to win the lighting war against a lightbulb factory that’s full of bigots.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about is the fact that most employees aren’t employed to nearly their full potential. There are a number of reasons for that – one of them is that if you try, you tend to have high burnout and mistake rates, and the potential that you thought you had is diminished; another is that companies don’t like to have irreplaceable people if they can help it; another, I think, has something to do with the coordination that’s required between large numbers of people, though I haven’t worked that one out yet – and that’s another reason that hiring employees who are 1% better won’t make much difference. I haven’t thought that one through very far, though, so feel free to pick it apart.
Price elasticity of both supply and demand varies from product to product, which might allow for a test of your hypothesis. Biased hiring practises, if they have a meaningful impact on final prices, should disappear most quickly in products which are most sensitive to changes in price, since they’ll lose out the most in the global competition between goods. My brain isn’t working quite properly at this time of night, so I’ll ask: Do I have that right?
Interesting. What other contexts does the math arise in?
And that has definitely happened repeatedly with low-skill jobs; I can think of half-a-dozen examples without trying, and I can even think of a couple of examples of medium- and high-skill jobs where that has happened. Fair point. But doesn’t the fact that it happens at a lower wage support the idea that bias is still coming into play?
@DavidFriedman
Although… I have read a whole bunch of doom and gloom over the past couple of years about how becoming a lawyer is now the worst decision you can make, so that would fit the timing perfectly. : – )
More seriously, I’d also be interested in knowing on which bump of the bimodal salary distribution for new lawyers most men vs. women in these equal law school classes end up in.
Edit: Though if anyone would be careful to do everything they could to eliminate hiring bias, you’d figure it would be Big Law.
@Andrew Klaassen
Pretty much all metrics show that men favor high pay, power and prestige much more than women do (compared to other goals, such as a good work/non-work balance, happiness at work, physical safety, etc).
The logical result is that when occupations change in power, prestige and pay, this will cause men to flock to or flee from that occupation. Furthermore, the logical result is that men and women will shape the workplace around their different goals and that those will therefor become less pleasant for the average person of the other gender. For example, a male dominant workplace is more likely to offer high pay, but demand long work hours. A female dominant workplace is more likely to offer part time work and other secondary job benefits, but low pay.
Note that this is all perfectly consistent with the obvious gender roles, where men are expected to be providers and women to be nurturers.
The common progressive narrative, that the main cause of gendered workplace differences is workplace discrimination has resulted in the claim by the mainstream left that the lower average wages for women are because women get less pay for equal work. Obama has argued this, so it is a mainstream/dominant left wing belief.
Statistical analysis has shown conclusively that about 2/3rd of the gendered wage gap is provably not due to workplace discrimination, but because men and women make different work choices and that those work choices impact pay regardless of gender. In other words, a woman who makes the choices that men are more likely to make, also gets the higher pay. The cause of the remaining 1/3rd cannot be assumed to be workplace discrimination, but can also simply be work choices that employers reward, but that are too fuzzy to measure objectively or can be measured, but aren’t. Common sense says that they exist (for example: being hard working or a lazy employee is a work choice that can not easily be measured) and are likely to be rewarded by employers with higher pay. Common sense also suggests that if we see for choices that increase pay and that we can measure than men are way more likely to make those choices, then the same will be true for choices that influence pay that we don’t measure, but that surely exist.
These facts have been known for some time and yet the mainstream left continues to use the narrative that the gender pay gap is 100% due to workplace discrimination.
So given this clear example of how the mainstream left keeps making completely ridiculous claims about workplace bias causing the gendered pay gap (where they cannot prove that even 1% of the gap is due to workplace discrimination), I would suggest that you update your belief that they never make completely ridiculous claims.
PS. I do believe that cases of pay discrimination exist, both against men and against women, but I have seen no credible evidence that allows for a claim that this is worse against a specific gender or to make even a reasonable guess to how large this effect is.
PS2. One of the major ways in which the mainstream left is being deceptive is by cherry picking issues to focus on. When it comes to gendered workplace differences, they tend to focus on top jobs and (total) pay. If you were to look at jobs at the bottom, workplace fatalities, spending power/hour worked; you can build a tragic picture of men suffering, while women have few problems (of course, that would be a biased view as well).
@Andrew Klaassen
Certainly computer programming was at one point female dominated. And certainly it is male dominated now, so it switched at some point. I tend to suspect the 1967 Cosmo article was an anachronism, but that’s before any statistics I have found. I suspect the turnover was in the 1950s and probably has more to do with men returning from the war than anything else. Here’s what Margaret Hamilton (who led the Apollo system software team) had to say:
“When I began as a programmer in 1959, and continuing until now, in every software organization and in every software project I have been involved in, there were always many more men than women programmers.”
The switch took place well before the 1990s.
There is also the issue that the very early programming jobs were mostly mere data entry.
Who is the third? McDonnell Douglas stopped making widebodies almost 20 years ago.
(Of course, there’s the used market, which is a lot more robust than it is for most products. That should probably be factored in. We’ve stopped making new planes that are so much better the old ones are totally obsolete.)
I would assume the three companies are Boeing, Airbus, and Lockheed, but Tupolev and Antanov are also potential choices not to mention the fact that Embraer and whatever the Chinese have also been looking to make in-roads to the larger airliner/freighter market.
Edit: Ilyushin should be on that list as well.
Edit 2: Ninja’d by Bean
Lockheed shut down TriStar production in 1984. They’re out of the airliner game, and I really doubt they’re coming back.
400 seats means it’s a widebody, and the only other company that makes widebodies is Ilyushin, and they do like one a year. China is trying to break in, but so far, they just have paper.
Embraer hasn’t even managed a full-size narrowbody yet, and I think that’s probably a prerequisite for a widebody project.
Sure the tri-stars are pretty much on thier way out but as far as I know Lockheed’s kept the Martin Marietta plant open so they can fulfil heavy transport/tanker contracts the same way Boeing keeps the old McDD team around to work on fighters.
Absolutely not. The line shut down 30 years ago, and the TriStar, though probably the most advanced of the first-generation widebodies, is still a 70s design. It’s at least 3 generations out of date. You’d have to pay an absurd amount of money to get the line up and running again, for an airplane that most airlines have already retired.
(Also, it was built by Lockheed at Palmdale before they merged with Martin Marietta. The responsible group is gone.)
You misunderstand. I’m not saying that restarting Tri-Star production is a reasonable possibility. I’m saying that Lockheed has retained the capability to build large aircraft.
@bean
Ilyushin is still making the Il-96, which is in between 767 and 777s in size. I don’t think tupovlev builds any wide bodies currently, but if they can, they’re both technically part of the United Aircraft Company anyway, so the list is Boeing, Airbus, and UAC/Ilyushin. Antonov was making An-124s, but, IIRC, they stopped a few years ago and they were cargo planes anyway.
@Andrew Klaassen says:
fungibility is not a binary. All products are fungible to a degree, the question is how much. And while the un-bigoted candlemaking might not be able to win, the bigoted lightbulb maker will. There is a reason that big business was the most persistent opponent of jim crow
It’s unquestionably true, but it’s almost universally true, and thus not particularly relevant.
that seems reasonable to me, with the caveat that you also have to account for the fact that the degree to which those hiring practices affect price/quality. An bigoted basketball team that refuses to hire black players probably is going to run into more issues than a similarly bigoted ice hockey team.
context, in this case, meant other presentations of the same math talking about evolution.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “it” and “that” here.
@hlynkacg
Ah. There’s a lot more that goes into building an airliner than just building a big airplane and stuffing seats into it. (My job is part of that ‘lot more’.) Suffice it to say that if you want to put paying passengers on that airplane, Lockheed isn’t a good candidate.
@cassander
They’re building one a year, and the only airline operating them is Cuban. Not even Aeroflot flies Il-96s these days. Seriously, the only people flying Russian airliners are those that are such international pariahs that they can’t manage to get Boeing or Airbus products. Nobody chooses them willingly. Boeing is looking at shutting down the 747 line because they don’t have enough orders to keep the production rate above 6/year in the medium-term. That’s the lowest rate they think they can make a profit at. 1/year isn’t really production, it’s Russian vanity project.
My employer competes against the other guy. If I suggested Ilyushin was a competitor, I wouldn’t be taken seriously.
@bean
I’m on the military side of things, I just know that the Russians are buying several as transports. I know nothing about the civilian production, and certainly wasn’t trying to imply that they were going to be taking contracts from Boeing and airbus any time soon.
Citation Needed.
I’m kidding but also feel the need to point out that the spec was for “a plane that carries 400 people” not “a plane conveys 400 paying passengers in the style to which they have become accustomed”. 😛
Well, you could probably fit 400 people in a KC-135 if you chopped them finely enough.
I actually carried out an experiment by asking a couple of my co-workers what they thought of Ilyushin. Neither of them knew who that was. So I actually overestimated them as being on our radar.
I will admit that under a strict reading of the spec, you don’t need a 400-seat airliner, and as an airliner guy, I read that into it.
Fair enough, and as a former military guy who among other things once worked forward logistics for a major NGO, my first thought was something to the effect of “That’s going to be 36 tons give or take. What do we have that can lift that?” 😀
@ Andrew Klassen
I’m pretty sure the Caribbean populations were doing worse in pretty much every way. Haiti freed itself from French slavery at the turn of the 19th century, then plunged into murderous chaos, tyranny, and crushing poverty. Jamaica’s GDP per capita today is only $5000/year (even the much richer Caribbean nations, like the Bahamas or Trinidad and Tobago, have a GDP of only around $20000/year today, and in 1965 it was less than $3000/year); black Americans had a median income of about $25000/year back in 1965. Not to mention that black Americans live in a country with much better infrastructure, schools, public services, utilities, environmental controls, etc. than virtually all of the Caribbean nations, and this was much more so back before the Great Society.
Some nations like Cuba even had segregation (it ended after the revolution, I think); others like Haiti were black-ruled. Nevertheless, economic and social conditions for black Americans were vastly preferable to those in virtually all of these countries – even with Jim Crow.
The left wing argument implicitly assumes that the balance sheet is so massively tilted that every white person, especially every white male, no matter his circumstances, is coming out ahead.
The major problem is that, in theory, it doesn’t, but in practice it does. I hear, every so often in Portland Oregon, how white men have no reason to be unhappy because “the system is rigged in their favor.”
Then every day I watch homeless white men line up outside my work to get free food.
Imagine an alternate world, where, every Saturday, people are forced to go play in a large casino for one hour. All the games are rigged, and more, they are rigged based on race. They make sure that when a white person plays, they lose 60% of their money, and when a black person plays, they lose 90%.
Here are two very bad theoretical approaches to articulating what is unjust about this:
1. “The game is rigged in favor of white people! White people need to reinvest their winnings to help black people!”
2. “Who cares about race? Everybody is losing money and so talking about race is just a distraction.”
I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain why neither approach actually captures the situation very well, but on the other hand, those two modes of thinking are awfully, awfully popular.
One thing I’ve noticed is that black writers, especially older ones, tend to be very careful with the way they use the concept of privilege. White writers tend to use it carelessly and sloppily but black ones usually say, “I don’t want you to cover yourself in sackcloth and ashes, I want you to listen to problems I have had to deal with that you haven’t had to deal with.”
And then usually white people go, “I can’t believe you want me to cover myself in sackcloth and ashes!!!!!!!!”
Because one of the predominant uses of it is to say “I want to force you to cover yourself in sackcloth and ashes. The black writers who don’t use it that way have no influence over the people who do.
This is just a rhetorical game. The writing is meant to convince you to feel something, it’s not just a neutral history. It’s not uncommon for a guilt trip to begin with “I don’t want you to feel guilty but…”, and this is the same sort of thing.
It’s the sort of thing that’s used as a game precisely because it’s important to listen when people mean it. You can adopt a policy of saying “fuck it I’m not listening” if you want but you seem to be confusing that into a general epistemic position
“Because often it’s bullshit, I don’t want to listen, and because I don’t want to listen, It’s never true.”
So why aren’t the measures taken against white males used against tall or attractive people?
What measures?
Affirmative action? Diversity requirements? Presumption that a disparate impact on short and ugly people implies discrimination? Media telling people how bad it is to discriminate against the short and ugly (aside from obesity in women, which has become a left-wing cause for some reason)?
“obesity in women, which has become a left-wing cause for some reason”
Actually, it’s fatness in general, but I’ll grant that there’s more about fat stigma against women.
To answer your question, there’s quite a lot of prejudice, it hurts people, and it’s not as though people on the right are going to be interested in the matter.
Why shouldn’t they be? Stereotypically, blue-tribers are the thin ones.
Nancy:
It strikes me that one reason fat acceptance ends up on the left is because the left already has built up an intellectual structure that fits well. There’s already an established sort of mental slot to put “people being kicked around by society while nobody much notices.”
My biggest qualm with the fat-acceptance movement, as I’ve understood it, is that I don’t want to see factual questions about health to be answered based on a political movement. I absolutely don’t want fat people kicked around[1], and I also absolutely don’t want medical advice to get shaded to stay on the right side of the activists.
[1] This is self-interest. For similar reasons, I get *really* nervous around trolley tracks.
There’s a lot of bias about fat and health, but I don’t think the fat acceptance movement is the only source of bias. There’s a widespread assumption that weight loss is a panacea, and this has really serious consequences. Fat people’s diseases frequently don’t get diagnosed because many doctors assume weight loss is the first thing any fat person should do. (No cite, just a tremendous pile of anecdotes.) Thin people have trouble getting a diagnosis if they have a fat person disease.
I have no hope of getting accurate information about the risks of bariatric surgery.
That doesn’t really explain why the left goes for that, but doesn’t do that for being short or ugly.
“That doesn’t really explain why the left goes for that [fat acceptance], but doesn’t do that for being short or ugly.”
Such things are hard to prove, but have a theory.
The distinctive thing about fatness, rather than being short (for men) or ugly, is that the culture has the assumption that being fat is a character defect, and sells a solution for being fat which is very costly in effort for a lot of people, but doesn’t work especially well and sometimes makes people fatter.
This has resulted in people who are angrier than they would be if they’d merely been stigmatized.
That’s a just-so story. If things were the opposite way around, you could instead point out that since being short is not treated by the culture as a character defect, it more resembles gender or race, thus explaining why the left does short-acceptance but ignores fat acceptance.
@Nancy Lebovitz
The more logical explanation is that women get judged more on their weight and men more on their height.
As it happens, a lot of people believe that men oppress women and that women have it far worse. This narrative is easily compatible with fat-shaming, but requires rationalizations to make it compatible with discrimination based on height.
But – apart from Randy Newman – there are not people who are loudly anti-short in the way that people are loudly anti-fat or racist. When subconscious bias is all there is, it’s hard to build a movement against it.
random832
Prejudice against short men isn’t entirely subconscious.
I push back against “the Napoleon complex”. Partly it’s that Napoleon wasn’t short. * Mostly, though, it’s that short men get sneered at for what would be considered normal ambition in tall or average men.
While I’m on the subject, I might as well ask. There’s a thing that happens to fat women, or at least I’ve seen a lot of mentions of it. There are men who want sex with fat women, but are unwilling to be seen in public with them. Who knew courage could be so important in relationships?
Anyway, I’ve never heard of this happening with short men, but maybe I’m just not hanging out in the right places.
*however, French and English inches being of different lengths is enough to make me wonder if we’re in a simulation and we’re being trolled
That’s generally the lefty case against “white people” these days – that while many are presumably slavering racists who should be denounced whenever they accidentally let their masks slip, the bigger problem is the majority who don’t recognize that the system is structured to give them tons of advantages, and resist efforts to change the system to make it more equitable. (In other words, “check your privilege”).
And of course this is unfalsifiable, because white people who argue that the evidence is lacking are denounced as being in denial (an ad hominem attack to argue that their evidence is invalid). So you can agree or you can prove them right.
There was a thread a week or two ago about how liberals are untrustworthy advocates of climate science, because the solutions for preventing climate change are often things that liberals want anyway.
Seems to apply just as strongly for the anti-SJW right and racial IQ differences, except with a significant difference being that if the liberal climate alarmists are actually right, we have an unprecedentedly vast problem to solve lest billions suffer, while if the anti-SJW right is actually correct about racial IQ differences, we have about twenty years of unfair rhetoric and marginal discrimination in college admissions and a handful of jobs to answer for.
Are you modeling the “anti-SJW right” as actual racists looking for an excuse to discriminate against black people here? If so, then mostly no, and if not then the connection you are trying to make isn’t as obvious to me as it is to you.
Herbert chose his term poorly. Not the whole of the “anti-SJW right”, but for a large fraction of the people who bring up racial IQ differences, that’s precisely what’s going on.
At least, I suspect as much. Nobody actually admits to arguing in bad faith, but it sure does stink of it.
Can you explain what you mean by “arguing in bad faith?”
Misrepresenting your position. Claiming to be an “objective” seeker of “truth” when in fact you’re already certain of what you believe and are only interested in the “science” that validates it.
In other words, what that holocaust denier with the inverse-color anime avatar was doing a couple of open threads ago.
It applies to everyone. We all have a tendency to bias our perception of the world in the direction that fits our views.
Responding to John, the argument doesn’t require any actual racists, just people who are opposed to affirmative action, non-discrimination law, etc. on other grounds, such as support for freedom of contract. The fact that blacks have lower average incomes than whites is used as an argument for such policies. A non-discriminatory explanation of the difference undercuts those arguments. So we are prejudiced in favor of believing it. We are further prejudiced in that direction because we want to believe that the free market produces generally good results.
Similarly on climate. I am opposed, for reasons having nothing to do with climate, to increases in government power. AGW alarmism, CAGW, provides arguments for increasing government power. So I have an incentive not to believe in CAGW, whether or not it is true.
The conclusion is that you should not trust anyone to have an unbiased opinion–you have to look at the arguments and evidence for yourself. The people you can most trust are the ones whose conclusions go contrary to their biases, and after that ones who have no particular bias on the issue in question.
Two examples. I like to cite the IPCC in climate discussions because it’s pretty obvious that, insofar as they have a bias, it’s in an alarmist direction. Hence when they retract their previous claim of a link between climate change and droughts, you can be pretty sure it’s because the evidence does not support the claim. When they offer estimates of the net effect of warming that are tiny compared to the alarmist rhetoric, you can be pretty sure that, insofar as those estimates are biased, they are biased high, not low.
When I was looking at the legal system of Somalia for my book on legal systems, the first source I found was a book written by a Dutch libertarian who lived in Somalia for the last twelve years of his life and edited by an American libertarian. I didn’t trust it, because I knew it would be biased towards saying things I wanted to believe. Further research discovered books by an LSE anthropologist who had been studying Somalia since the 1950’s and was clearly the expert on the northern Somalia system, and that was what I mostly based my chapter on.
The fact that climate alarmists are proposing policies that they would support even without climate is a reason not to take their belief as evidence that their beliefs are true. It’s not a reason to ignore actual arguments and evidence. Similarly in the other direction. I’ve never argued, on my blog, that people should be skeptical of climate alarmism because I am. I have sketched arguments to support my skepticism and offered arguments, based on evidence people can check, to show that some people and arguments on the alarmist side are dishonest.
This starts to look like Pascal’s Mugging.
The climate science worst-case scenario is that the Earth converges towards Venus. The racial differences worst-case scenario is that Western countries converge toward some unpleasant earthly place — South Africa, say, or worse. Venus is definitely worse than South Africa, but the difference isn’t quite so stark as you paint it.
The entire issue of racial IQ differences is whether the African/MENA mass migration to the West could, with some loving care, resemble the Irish assimilation into America, or whether biology ensures it will more resemble the African assimilation into America, but with enough numbers to perhaps destroy Western institutions.
Without such stakes, these questions would be much more academic. But when a society’s racial makeup is rapidly in flux, anyone trying to forecast the future of that society has to weight the relative importance of that racial makeup and of existing culture and institutions.
Whether you buy… god, I can’t bring myself to even type that stupid euphemism… or not, MENA and sub-Saharan Africa are totally different culturally and in terms of population genetics, and should not be lumped. The fact that they’re both currently not very nice places to live on average is not due to similarity along these axes.
“Venus is definitely worse than South Africa, but the difference isn’t quite so stark as you paint it.”
It’s pretty damn stark. For instance, the population of South Africa is growing, while Venus is literally an uninhabitable hell.
That is not actually a plausible scenario. The “marching morons” scenario where if we don’t ruthlessly eugenicize the low-IQ types out of the gene pool the human race will devolve most of the way back to chimpanzees, rubbish as it is, is less implausible than Earth becoming a second Venus.
Is the difference that stark? Would a deliberate attempt to turn the Earth into Venus inevitably fail? My impression is that it would be possible. It’s unlikely that someone would try, but it’s also unlikely that Idiocracy is a documentary.
The Earth’s oceans didn’t boil away early in its history, and so the past four billion years have seen most of the Earth’s carbon sequestered in sedimentary rock. That’s the carbon you need to make a Venus, and it’s effectively out of reach.
Back in the days of Usenet, I did collaborate with rasfw’s resident climatologist on a “plan” to Venusify Earth, but it basically involved a thousand-plus years in which a totalitarian regime commits the entire human economy to mining Everest-scale piles of carbonate rock and enriched uranium for the last generation of humanity to run through the Giant Nuclear Furnaces. And even then there was a fair bit of handwaving, e.g. how to keep the underground cities cool while the Morlockian technicians ran the furnaces.
I suspect that if I worked at it, I could come up with an even more outlandish scheme to populate the Earth entirely with literal subhuman morons, but as realistic prospects, neither one works.
Interesting, thanks.
This sounds pretty neat and I would read it if it’s readily available.
@psmith: Start around here and follow the replies, especially by John and by Willam Hyde.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.arts.sf.written/oZiDrRVbsVY/qBnoHoaZPNQJ
jesus fucking Christ. That’s it. I’m through with this racist shithole
I mean, I hate to bring it up, but I do hear white people in South Africa are starting to come under serious persecution. Doubt that’s going to change your mind vis-a-vis leaving though, given the going term for such persecution among certain groups.
The fact that people with an ideological commitment X want X ish solutions to problem Y isn’t unusual and isn’t confined to the left..neoliberals think markets are the solution to almost everything, gun rights people think armed teachers are the answer to school shootings, etc.
Is that like “the Humongous”?
Here’s my glowing orb meme.
Of course to get the punch line its necessary to understand that sorcery and witchcraft are indeed punishable by law– (i think its by beheading ) in the Kingdom, where the constitution is the Quran and the consenual rule of law is shariah..
I think convergent gene networks and large sample cognitive genomics may yield results soon– that is what I meant when I said Cochran’s tech is dated.
I agree with Dr. Haier– because its just pandering to the liberal base, exactly like conservatives pander on climate science, evolution, and the relative fitness of conservative ideology in the 21st century.
Sure hope you still feel this way when/if my dissertation on red/blue brain biochemistry and the Soldier/Explorer CCP gets published. 🙂
“I agree with Dr. Haier– because its just pandering to the liberal base, exactly like conservatives pander on climate science, evolution, and the relative fitness of conservative ideology in the 21st century.”
Yes – my point is that the science on some things (IQ having predictive power, IQ being heritable) is so strong that they can’t even deny it in order to pander any more. It’s like when conservatives switched from saying “there’s no such thing as global warming” to “global warming isn’t caused by humans” – even though the second statement is false, the switch from the first to the second statement represents a real (if hidden) victory of science over misunderstanding.
Agree totally– but now conservatives have pushed farther down to “well okfine Global Warming exists and AGW exists but those are meaningless because model tonality and uncertainty“– so where does the drilling stop? Is there a bedrock of acceptance of science?
I’d say it probably stops at “well fine, we need to do something about global warming but probably not spend X% of the budget on it”, where X% is somewhere around the point of diminishing returns.
I was thinking about an irony of IQ heritability the other day: If we managed to magically give everyone the perfect environment to maximize their IQ, the variation in intelligence caused by variation in DNA would be 100% in that population.
That led me to wish for non-relative measures of the impact of environment and genetics on intelligence in these discussions at all times. A statement like “genetic variation is responsible for 50% of the variation in intelligence” is a common statement which is supposed to say something about the relationship between genetics and intelligence, but it’s actually a statement about the relationship between genetics and inequality. With perfect equality, the impact of genetics will go up to 100%; as inequality grows, the impact of genetics will approach 0%.
IQ points seem like the best measure we’ve got, though even they are, in typical practise, measured relatively. But let’s go with them: We know that being poor and thinking about expensive car repairs can temporarily lower your IQ by 10 points or so. We know that being adopted from a low-SES family into a high-SES family can raise your IQ by more than 10 points. I’d be curious to know what impact the provision of, say, disease-free running water has on average IQ scores; how much has chlorine raised average general intelligence? And, on the genetic side, what is the maximum IQ point impact of a single genetic variation? Of the top 10 or top 100 of them put together?
I had a prof years ago who used to explain this beautifully in a lecture called “Hitler Clones vs. the United Federation of Planets”.
It never occurs to most people that the effect size of different inputs varies from population to population. To most people you come across saying something like “In this group, height has a hereditary coefficient of .8, but in this group, it’s down at .4” sounds like absolute lunacy. But it’s easy to see that in a society of Hitler Clones who are genetically identical, any difference in ability must be the result of environmental factors, whereas in a post scarcity society with perfect teaching techniques where everyone is able to reach their full potential, any difference in ability must be genetic (Or at least innate).
So inequality is half of the equation and diversity is the other. As environmental inequality drops, genetic factors become more prominent. As genetic variation drops, environmental factors become more prominent.
The answer to all your questions in the final paragraph are “It varies depending on what population you’re looking at, who you include, and when you test.”
Or not; see the fish link above!
Heh. Nice.
More prominent in relative terms, but not (necessarily) any larger in absolute terms. A tiny effect which explains 100% of existing variation is still a tiny effect. That’s the part around the communication of these ideas that bugs me. Why use variable hereditary coefficients if absolute numbers are available and more meaningful?
(There’s a similar problem with the communication around genetic relatedness that bugs me, too. I remember wondering in high school how I could be 95% related to a chimp but only 50% related to my siblings…)
I was using the unspoken caveat, “All else being equal,” which usually covers things, but the fish link that youzicha referred back to makes a great case for even tiny, random differences leading to large effect sizes – so all else can’t be equal for practical values of “equal”, which is fascinating.
Up next: double-blinded studies on the effects of getting into art school on Hitler clones.
I don’t have full access to this recent study, but if I’m squinting at the provided figures correctly, and plugging them into this formula correctly, all 50 or so IQ-related genes (and 300-ish SNPs) that they’ve found together explain about 6 IQ points in the population of ~78,000 people studied.
Presumably, they’d continue to explain 6 (fixed, 1930s) IQ points whether environmental variation was eliminated or whether we started handing out lead-laced lollipops to random kids.
I’m happy to be corrected on that.
Okay, but why were they clones of Hitler? Wouldn’t you go with storm troopers or something to play off the Star Trek of the other side?
Ahem… what?
Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function. Summary. Criticism.
Missing a night’s sleep will lower your tested IQ by about the same amount. Ever since I became a sleep-deprived parent, I’ve been stupider than I used to be. You could argue that sleep loss is a temporary event, but what if it happens every single day for years on end?
The adoption numbers are from the Vox article that Scott linked to, which claims a positive IQ impact of 12-18 points.
It looks like there is significant variation caused by neither genes nor what we think of when we use the word ‘environment’ (although in published papers it generally gets put in the category ‘non-shared environment’). Even with a perfectly controlled environment including, say, identical clone mothers with carefully managed prenatal lifestyle, you would still have measurable variation which would for all practical purposes be random. Granted, we might only be talking a residual +/- SD of 2 or 3 points, but it would not go to zero.
In adults? There’s a phenomenon in IQ research called the Wilson effect: In young children, IQ is highly sensitive to shared environment. As children grow into adults, the influence of shared environment weakens dramatically. Maybe because environments become much more similar once children reach school age, or maybe because adult and child IQ tests are testing something completely different.
A lot of these studies touted as proving that shared environment matters more than we thought are based on testing of young children. Due to the Wilson effect, these are of questionable relevance to the heritability of adult IQ.
I thought about what I hate about pandering so much…its so disrespectful. Automatically assuming you have to soft peddle the science and the math…I’m an educationist. Everyone can learn. But the polarization is so intense right now that no one will accept learning from the other team’s experts…and you wind up with this ferocious counting coup on the other team’s science or philosophy or history or standard-bearers. I think within group experts have to create better delivery systems to educate members of their own tribe. I think its their responsibility.
That’s what I hope to discover with the Cooperation Competition Paradigm I’m working on…there aren’t superior and inferior traits…
So you might have missed this in the earlier open threads, but bintcchaos is an Islamist and apologist for ISIS [1] [2] [3] who has been abusing an exploit to insert comments out of order.
How is explaining what IS plans, goals and methods are being an apologist?
Since I’m explaining how Islam works does that make me an apologist for Islam?
Aren’t you supposed to know your enemy?
And what has that got to do with the NeuroScience of Intelligence? And we established that I’m just using the reply function from email links, not hacking URLs
Can I report this comment?
Guess not.
Why don’t Americans believe what IS says they want to do when they spell it out? The jihadist tell you exactly what they want to do, why they are doing it, and how they plan to accomplish their goals.
Just read these two books– pamphlets actually, more like field manuals– The Global Call to Islamic Jihad and The Management of Savage Chaos. Instead we have whole books and blogs devoted to micro-analyzing psycho-sexual motives, like a nation of blindmen feeling up an elephant.
This isnt going to end well.
The part where you accuse anyone who disagrees with your assessments of “whitesplaining” is what marks you as an apologist. If you were merely explaining how it works, you would not get so offended by disagreement.
I said mansplaining– is that now the same thing as whitesplaining?
I get the feeling that David Friedman is lecturing me on something I know more about than he does from a position of authority as a senior white male.
Male was kind of the operative word here.
You have been arguing that conservatives who don’t denounce Trump are pandering to their base. It occurs to me that this raises a question associated with the claim that you are an Islamic State apologist.
You have made repeated references to Jihadists. In none of them did you denounce I.S. No comments along the lines of “of course, these Jihadists are rapists, murderers, and generally defaming the good name of Islam.”
There seem to be two possibilities. One is that you are an I.S. supporter, in which case the conversation would be more interesting if you said so. The other is that you are pandering to I.S. supporters by not denouncing it and them.
Which is it?
@DavidFriedman
The third possibility (and the one I believe is most likely) is that bintchaos takes the not-unpopular (on SSC) position that ISIS are an inevitable (or at least logical) consequence of Islam.
@rlms
That is mostly correct…a better summary of my position would be a marine biologist studying a great white shark…my area of study is complex adaptive systems dynamics.
IS was the emergent apex predator in a virulently hostile eco-system created by many parameters (one of which being US interventism in MENA).
So does the marine biologist admire the shark?
@bintchaos:
So you will withdraw your charge of pandering if I explain that I regard Trump as an interesting phenomenon in the American political system that I would like to understand–as in fact I do?
That would correspond to your explanation of why your failure to denounce ISIS is not pandering.
@DavidFriedman
sure, if you express your admiration for DJT as the apex predator in the ecosystem of US government.
But that also implies you have to admire his expert farming of the low-information base for votes and accept that he is killing conservatism’s chance for future majorities.
So would you agree IS is pandering to a low-stability base and killing Islam’s chances of peaceful integration?
I get the feeling that you have no idea how much I do or don’t know about Islam. You could get a first approximation from the chapter on Islamic law in my current book–corrections welcome.
I can’t tell if you know more or less about Islam than I do–my guess so far is more about some elements, less about others. I probably know more medieval Islamic stories than you do and much more about medieval Islamic cooking, but surely less about Ibn Taymiyyah.
I tried to get a clearer idea by engaging you in a conversation on some things I thought interesting, but you weren’t willing to play.
The “senior white male” part says more about you than me.
@Gobbobble
?
nope, the opposite.
I dont think its possible to force a “peaceful integration of Islam”.
As evidence, US has wholly defunded CVE in the acknowledgement that there is no counter-narrative…at least, no counter-narrative that is accessible to the US.
@DavidFriedman
I get the feeling that you are an orientalist and that makes me deeply disinterested in your book.
And yeah, it certainly does– my whole academic life I’ve been lectured to by senior white males on how I dont actually know anything. Not your fault– we all have bias.
And I get the feeling that you’re deeply disinterested in actually engaging with us, and are instead just here to talk at the evil conservatives.
Count me as deeply disinterested in listening to you, too.
I explained how I got here …I fell inlove with Dr S based on UNSONG and the Eternal Struggle.
But I lack sufficient empathy substrate to be the Arlie Hoschild of the high-information conservatives.
So yeah, there is no dhiliz here, as al-Ghazali would say.
You sure are full of reasons not to talk to people.
But I lack sufficient empathy substrate to be the Arlie Hoschild of the high-information conservatives.
Never heard of the person whom I had to Google. Turns out to be the kind of person I should have expected. Bred’n’buttered in Berkeley, California (though could there be another? A merciful and just God surely would not permit such!) and did a “With Rod And Gun Through Darkest Heartlandia” book:
For “one of the most influential sociologists of her generation”, that’s not a name I recognise, so either she’s Only World Famous In Berserkly or I just don’t know enough sociologists – a possibility that I find, oddly enough, cheers me right up 🙂
So basically a missionary to an unreached people group? I thought liberals were generally against that sort of thing.
Or maybe I’m just misunderstanding. But if you’re trying to understand us, you could try being a bit less at odds with community norms.
my whole academic life I’ve been lectured to by senior white males on how I dont actually know anything
Have you considered the possibility that people who have lived longer than you were in the world first and may, just perhaps, have some inkling or experience of things that you do not yet possess? Shocking hypothesis, I know, but nothing should be beyond the bounds of consideration!
FWIW, I lived in Berkeley for several years and I’ve never heard of her. Don’t follow sociology much, though.
The book is about a bunch of different legal systems, only one and a half of which are Muslim. No idea if it would interest you–possibly not, given what you have revealed about your approach to understanding things. I’m not proposing grand theories, just trying to make sense of how other people have solved the problems legal systems exist to deal with.
If “orientalist” means “non-Muslim who finds Islam interesting,” I plead guilty. It sounds as though you probably qualify as well, assuming you are not yourself Muslim, something you have, I think, implied but not actually said.
Can you see why the effect of a comment like this is to make people irritated at you, view you as someone not worth conversing with? The only function of the reference is to show off your purported (for all I know real) erudition. If you had wanted to convey information you would have used terminology there was some hope others here would understand.
@bintchaos
The word is dihliz, not dhiliz. It’s Persian, not Arabic.
Looking it up online, it can refer to: the vestibule of a tent, the (red) tent of the Sultan/commander, the (angled) corridor(s) leading from the courtyard/entrance hall into the main body of the home.
Ah, so is the dilhiz, as used in this sense, something along the lines of what Lewis was getting at in “Mere Christianity”?
And is this the same al-Ghazali as wrote “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”, which argues against material contingency but rather that all events and actions flow from the immediate will of God? A strange choice to be the favourite quote of someone who tells us they study computer complexity theory, do not have any mystical leanings but are solidly physics and materially-based when it comes to social psychology and leading the advance to a better world by guiding mass human consciousness on scientific principles!
It’s a bit rich to be denouncing Harris, Dawkins et al as defectors from the Science Tribe for not going hammer and tongs at creationism when you yourself are always quoting someone more creationist than the creationists! 🙂
@Qays
Thanks for the correction. My spelling is not good, and the spellchecker doesnt do farsi.
@DavidFriedman
Not really sure this is interesting to anyone except you and your incessant witchtesting. When I started to study arabic my prof said to listen to quranic recitation to improve speaking performance. Besides Quran we also read sufi love poetry, arabian odes, classic arabic literature. I was drawn first to Ibn Arabi and from him to al-Ghazali. Then in reading Ghazali’s jurisprudent arguments with Ibn Taymiyya to my narrow-beam focus on Taymiyya and his student Ibn Qayyim.
I also really recommend you read Edward Said’s book Orientalism if you haven’t read it. Here is a pretty good book on Taymiyya you might like–
The Taymiyyan Movement
Not really sure this is interesting to anyone except you and your incessant witchtesting.
You are the one who jumped in here scattering references to all manner of things and using terms in the fashion, as another commenter said, of an Arabic version of a weeabo.
Strangely enough, we do have people on here who are familiar with intelligence agencies, government contracting, various strands of computer science, history, and yes even jurisprudence and Islamic thought, as well as many other topics, and these people came by their knowledge the real way.
If you imagined you could, unchallenged, make assertions based on our presumed ignorance and unfamiliarity with the scraps of Arabic and three letter acronyms you like to toss about, you see that you were mistaken. When you then go on to reply, not with providing evidence to back up your claims, but with petulant accusations of witch hunting and sexism (senior white males daring to think they might know more about something than you!) then you show yourself likely to be one of the following:
(a) a liar, plain and simple, who is not studying the claimed subject at an academic level but has picked up a few words here and there, as a magpie might pick up shiny sweet wrappers
(b) not a liar, but someone with a very shallow knowledge of what they allege they are studying; a facile familiarity that Googling and Wikipedia would give them
(c) to be actually as young as the text speak makes you out to be
(d) a troll
Whichever, if any, of these are true, you also show yourself to be someone not worth engaging with if all you can do is obfuscate and react with “sexism! ageism! witch hunting!”
Put up or shut up, as they say.
@Deiseach
Al-Ghazali’s central argument against the Aristotelians (the “philosophers” whose incoherence he sets out to demonstrate) is, effectively, that they had defected from the Science Tribe, as he conceived of it, by proposing and insisting upon a metaphysics totally divorced from rational proof. He’s quite a foundational figure in the development of modern rationalism, you’d do well not to poo-poo him.
@Qays
yes, that is how I understand Ghazali. And I liked your ScienceTribe of Islamic thought description very much. But I don’t understand why Ghazali is so badly misrepresented in western thought. One would think Orientalists would love The Hermeneutics of Reconciliation and his attempt to modify exegesis of Surah Baqarah to dispute christian shirk.
@bintchaos
Yeah, the al-Ghazali as enemy of reason meme is a bit strange to me as well. I think to a large extent it emerged out of simple linguistic confusion: people (both in the West and in some theologically conservative Muslim circles) read him as criticizing “philosophy” rather than “Aristotelian metaphysics” because the word he uses is “falsafa,” and this initial misapprehension persists because it’s a lot easier on the brain than actually sussing out the intricacies of the debates between the Mu’tazilites and the Asharites.
In terms of his approach to the hard sciences, though, al-Ghazali is firmly rationalist, certainly by the standards of his time. And none of us are Aristotelians anymore anyway.
If one claims to be a witch, one must expect to be tested.
Thanks for the explanation of your background in matters Islamic. Mine began in a less academic fashion.
A very long time ago I got interested in historical recreation and adopted the persona, in that context, of a Maghrebi, a Berber c. 1100. I wanted to know what such a person would be like, so read whatever relevant I could find. One of my activities in recreation was story telling, so I accumulated period Islamic stories that worked for oral presentation. Another was medieval cooking, so I experimented pretty extensively with the period Islamic sources and arranged for the translation of one of them–I, unfortunately, do not read Arabic.
That then intersected with my professional (and political) interests, producing the chapter on Islamic law in my current book on legal systems. Last semester, probably the last time I will teach the course that book grew out of, my class was mostly made up of Saudi LLM students, so I had primary sources in my classroom and was able to learn a reasonable amount about modern Saudi law and the respects in which it is or is not fiqh.
I haven’t read it and probably won’t. Judging by what I could learn about it with a quick online search, it is a larger and earlier example of something that irritated me in Hallaq, the attempt to turn the discussion of Islamic history into a weapon in current political controversy.
Thanks. That sounds more interesting.
And in exchange, three reading suggestions. I am fond of Mohammed’s People, a history of the early centuries done as a pastiche from period sources. The memoirs of Usamah ibn Munqidh, either the older or the more recent translation, is a window into one part of medieval Islamic culture. And al-Tanuhki (The Table Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge) is another and different such.
@Qays
Really? I think conservatives are sortof Aristotelians because they are so focused on the local view…while liberals are more Platonists because they attempt the global view.
@DavidFriedman
The reason you should read Said is to proof your writing against pervasive orientalism…it is very to hard to write objective analysis of anything islamic in the current environment, even if you don’t deliberately incorporate that.
ha! Role playing game.
on ahadith I agree with Qays. It doesn’t matter a whit what non-muslims think of the validity of ahadith.
What are you going to do, argue with Islamic scholars with a thousand years of isnad about validity?
@bintchaos
There are three main schools of classical Islamic theology or metaphysics:
1. the Mu‘tazilites, who adopted large swathes of classical Greek philosophy (which is why they’re often termed Aristotelians or Neoplatonists), and who are today more or less extinct (largely thanks to al-Ghazali)
2. the traditionalists or Atharites (“textualists”), represented by Ibn Taymiyya and the modern Hanbali/Wahhabi/Salafi nexus, who basically rejected all metaphysical speculation as inherently heretical
3. the Asharites, who count al-Ghazali among their number, who are today the predominant Sunni theological school and who basically synthesized the beliefs of the other two schools
While there are certainly individual questions on which the Mu‘tazilites and the traditionalists have more in common with each other than with the Asharites, they’re generally opposed to each other. The modern traditionalists attempted to coöpt al-Ghazali’s criticism of Mu‘tazilite falsafa as a standard traditionalist criticism of all metaphysical speculation (“philosophy” as we understand it), which is why their reading of him has so much in common with the early Orientalist reading (which is itself long out of favor with specialists in medieval Islamic intellectual history in the Western academy, though not out of favor with New Atheist popular scientists and their followers).
@bintchaos- ‘the reason you should read Said is to proof your writing against pervasive orientalism’
My God Ate My Homework students are perennial. My granddad had students in 1920s Idaho going ‘I won’t do my Jane Austen homework because she isn’t Christian enough, give me an A anyway or I’ll call you anti-Christian’. Said’s Orientalism is for students who want to go, ‘I won’t read Jane Austen because she’s not anti-imperialist enough, give me an A anyway or I’ll call you imperialist’. My Dog Ate My Homework students are less anti-intellectual.
Said was a real thinker and his other books are worth reading, but Orientalism pandered to bad students.
@Qays
Thank you for the helpful backgrounder, which should be immensely useful to the SSC commentariat.
Like I said, I studied sufism, shiism, the Mu’tazhilites etc on my path to Ibn Taymiyya.
I think Orientalism is newly manifest in the rise of cottage industry jihadologists morphed into internet pundits who say things like “Ibn Taymiyya was kind of a dick” and flog books on their TLs.
Defectors from MY ScienceTribe.
My particular interest in Taymiyyan tafsir stems from complex adaptive systems theory and John Maynard-Smith (JMS) evolutionary theory of games (EGT). The current resurgence of salafi-jihadism obviously echoes the Mongol invasions environment that Ibn Taymiyya lived in.
@engleberg
I talk with Edward Said’s nephew nearly everyday and he would be very disappointed to hear that.
I have, and your judgement is correct.
Qays, I certainly do not mean to pooh-pooh al-Ghazali, but it is fairly likely that were he writing today, he’d be strongly in favour of Theistic Evolution, sympathetic to the “teaching creationism in schools” side of the fight in America, and be on the Francis Collins side of “believers and scientists”.
You may or may not be aware that P.Z. Myers thinks Collins and his like are not real scientists and are lying to themselves one way or another as to what they really believe.
If I take bintchaos seriously in previous statements about not being a mystic (intelligence has a physical basis and complexity science will work out a way to let us create a scheme to improve society and culture by manipulating the underlying laws of human behaviour and psychology – sounding reminiscent of Asimov’s psychohistory to my ears) and their criticism of atheist scientists and thinkers for not educating the public/their base on climate change and creationism, then al-Ghazali would not be a sympathetic thinker as he plainly values faith, places faith as more important to understanding than unaided and mere human reason, and fairly clearly believes in God as the First Mover and Ground of Being for the universe.
You know, something along the same lines as those Christian theists bintchaos thinks should be getting a stern dressing-down from Harris, Dawkins and others.
Resolve the contradiction for me, please, without it being “Ah yeah, but he’s not a white Christian, that makes all the difference!”
Re: Said, I think the book has some useful things to say but it is certainly of its time, did have an ideological axe to grind, and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then.
I talk with Edward Said’s nephew nearly everyday and he would be very disappointed to hear that.
Excuse me, I’m just clearing my throat and certainly not laughing up my sleeve.
Child, the name-dropping you engage in is becoming absurd. At this point, so far as I am concerned, you are the binti who cried wolf one too many times. You may well be Said’s nephew himself but right now I wouldn’t believe you if you said it was twelve o’clock at noon.
You’ve claimed to be rather too much of a Renaissance person, what with your multitudinous fields of study, expertise to the tips of your fingers on the most obscure elements of Islamic theology and jurisprudence, mysterious hints as to intelligence agency connections, and the Devil knows what else, all this from a person who started off with the tone and prose style of a fourteen year old with the text speak. And now this: “yeah well you only read the book, I talk to his nephew! every day!”
Anyone want to start a list of “things what bintchaos has claimed to know/do/be”? Just for the amusement value?
Mostly I work from primary sources (admittedly in translation). The main exception is in the legal system, but I read a range of sources, and I think I am safe in concluding that Hallaq, who blames the destruction of the traditional legal system (of which he thinks highly) on western Imperialism, is not an orientalist in your sense.
It matters what is true. I’m not interested in arguing with Islamic scholars, I’m interested in understanding legal systems.
@Deiseach
I share your skepticism, but in this particular case it’s at least semi-plausible assuming they are referring to Saree Makdisi, who’s a professor at UCLA.
After all, we speak to a professor from CA all the time here at SSC.
Side Note: Bintchaos, you indicated an interest in maintaining informational security with regards to personally identifiable information. I get that, I have a lot of friends who feel the same way due to bad experiences with cyber-stalkers and such.
Be aware that things like identifying someone whom you communicate with regarding academic topics, combined with your academic areas of interests in other posts, talk about professors, etc, constitute exactly the sort of clues someone so inclined could use to start localizing you.
I am aware that this is a potential double bind for you since you also want to establish credentials and that you know what you’re talking about, but you should be aware that that is the sort of thing that leads to compromised security more often than not having good enough technical measures.
Interesting if true, since the IS position is not one we get much exposure to, but I don’t think any of your links are sufficient to show more than that she believes herself knowledgeable about Islam and wants to correct our ignorance on the subject. It’s true that she appears especially fond of Ibn Taymiyyah, a medieval thinker popular with both the founder of the current Saudi variant of Sunni Islam and the IS.
If she is a supporter of IS, she might be able to answer some questions, in particular what the basis is for the claim of the current IS leader to the caliphate. I assume he is, or at least claims to be, Quraysh, but that’s only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
Baghdadi is Qurayshi, and hafiz ul Quran.
But there is a lot of internal argument in Islam about the sufficiency conditions.
On sufficiency conditions …
As best I can tell, in theory the requirement is assent of the believers as represented by some group of high status figures but there has never been a precise definition. There is an al-Ma’mun story about that.
In practice, it was mostly hereditary succession with the incumbent choosing his successor. I don’t think having memorized the Quran was either a necessary or a sufficient condition. Early on there was a view that the caliph had to be learned in the law, but that got dropped for practical reasons.
Do the ISIS people accept the legitimacy of the standard succession through the Abbasids? Of the Ottoman claim?
I think there’s a 30% chance that bintchaos is Jill/Moon.
Doubtful – I don’t remember Jill/Moon ever having much to say about Islam, and she was particularly interested in psychology, which I haven’t seen bintchaos bring up at all. So unless Jill had a drastic change of interests and spent the last few months immersing herself in Islamic studies, they are in fact different people.
@Loquat
There was a moderately-tinfoil theory floating around that Jill/Moon was a peculiarly dedicated troll, or group of trolls, poking to see how much the community can put up with. If that was true, it raises the probability of bintchaos (a good handle for a troll) being the same person.
I think there’s a 30% chance that bintchaos is Jill/Moon
I don’t think so; Jill/Moon struck me as a True Believer (she used to get very upset when challenged on her facts, or what she perceived as and believed to be facts).
bintchaos seems a lot more relaxed about that, they ignore what they’ve been told to stop doing and they keep on trying to poke and prod a reaction out of people, e.g. in regard to the “ISIS/ISIL apologist” thing, I think they’re not but that it’s in part showing off their knowledge of the “inside baseball” of Islam, in part genuine interest in the situation and an attitude that US/Western intervention has caused a lot of its own problems (and there is definitely something to that) and partly trying to goad someone on here to come out with NUKE ‘EM TILL THE SAND GLOWS! so they can then trill about how this proves we’re all conservatives and conservatism is an non-viable ideology yadda yadda yadda Carthago delenda est.
See the attempt here to get a row going about sexism, which they also tried with me before (amusing, since it’s interesting to be imputed to be sexist about your own sex).
I don’t think Bintchaos can be Jill–the style is too different. I actually wondered if she could be Sidles, but I don’t think that works either.
Bintchaos is Bintchaos. But that doesn’t answer any of the interesting questions about where her odd approach to the conversation is coming from.
If Sidles was capable of changing his posting style this much, he would have done it one of the half-dozen times he got banned. And yeah, Jill had different buttons to push.
Jim is a more interesting theory, but I don’t think Jim understands millennial-flavored progressivism (or any other kind) well enough to convincingly fake it.
I think it is most likely that bintchaos is a newcomer, say 80%, with the remaining 20% divided in decreasing amounts between Sidles, some other commenter, Jim, Moonjill. The posting style is different to Sidles’, but I think he could’ve changed if he’d wanted to. I can’t see Jim being able to pass the ITT regarding Islam this well, and I don’t think Moonjill would be deceptive like this. My headcanon is that bintchaos and Sidles are friends, and he has passed the baton of being SSC’s token confusing left-wing commenter onto her.
To be fair, bintchaos hasn’t passed the ITT for Islam to me. She likes to bust out Arabic words, but that might just make her the Arabic equivalent of a weeaboo; I’ve never seen her pinned down to any kind of explanation of them.
But David Friedman seems to think she’s worth talking to on the subject, and he knows a lot more about Islam than I do, so I’ll defer to his judgment here.
If a sockpuppet/alt, I think Tekhno.
IIRC and incidentally, there were some fly-by-nights who bore a pretty strong resemblance to bintchaos.
@psmith
I’ve been itching to argue against the extremely vague theory on the fitness of conservatism bintchaos has been pushing, but since my computer was down, I had to wait for others to finally pick up on it. I’m occasionally anti-conservative (that was more just signalling/appeasement to try and balance things out – but I mostly stopped that when the survey results came out showing how balanced SSC is on the political spectrum across users, destroying the SSC is right wing narrative), but not like this. I have no idea whether conservatism is unfit or not, and I’ve always been suspsicious of the “wait for them to die off lol” narrative. It could be that conservatism as understood today is doomed (I hope so), but some other ideology of the right will replace it due to age demographic shifts (I hope so), and I honestly think some on the left might rue the death of conservatism if it happens.
The biggest annoyance about bintchaos’ posts is how he/she keeps implying that figures like Sam Harris are either “conservatives” or in some way responsible for creationism and climate change denial, which ties into his/her implicit belief that SSC is responsible for these same things.
@Tehkno
;;sigh;;
I came here because of UNSONG and also someone linked me the Eternal Struggle post. Both of which are purely brilliant. I read Arlie Hoschild’s book Strangers in Their Own Land and thought maybe I could scale the “empathy wall on conservatism” in my own cohort of education and IQ. I’m pretty bad at that part as it turns out, but through no fault of SSC.
?? SSC has no responsibility for low information voter beliefs. How do you make that connection?
But I do absolutely despise Harris and Dawkins, at least in their current instantiations, probably Dawkins more than Harris because he’s a lot smarter and should know better.
I see them as cheaters, defectors from ScienceTribe. Dawkins wrote a chapter in JMS EGT book. And all Harris does anymore is flog anti-Islam propaganda and muslim hysteria.
@Bintchaos – “I’m pretty bad at that part as it turns out, but through no fault of SSC.”
Eh, we’re a prickly lot. There’s a weird way of talking here that everyone is used to, and people who don’t use it really stick out and tend to get hammered for it, and the hammering gets everyone annoyed… If you decide to hang around, you’ll figure it out. It’s not that complicated, I don’t think.
“I see them as cheaters, defectors from ScienceTribe.”
Over Islam, or something else? And why are they defectors for going after Islam? They went after Christianity pretty hard back in the day, and everyone seemed fine with that.
@Everyone else – this thing, where new posters come in, don’t fit the norms, and get dogpiled, is… offputting. It doesn’t work, either. It didn’t work with Jill, Sidles, or Jim. It’s rude, and worse it’s ineffective. We’ve done it enough times that this should be obvious to everyone in this thread, and I *know* y’all are smart enough to generate alternatives.
Dawkins wrote a chapter in John Maynard-Smith “Evolution and the Theory of Games”. He and Harris both full-well understood evo bio and evolutionary theories of culture and religion.
But at this point they have monetized Islam bashing to draw christians to their side of the battle.
For Dawkins, as a militant atheist, a significant percentage of christians become atheists so its a recruitment potential. Muslims dont become atheists, hardly ever.
He suspects Islam is a CSS that has superior fitness to christianity, and he knows atheism has a really high selection gate. He understands cultural transmission and replication.
I think they are both afraid of the transmissablity of Islam. So scaremongering is their only defense. They are defectors.
I also hate cheaters. The Sad Puppies cheated to force their choices onto the ballot. I will NEVER read any of their sanctioned authors.
Probably not the desired effect.
@Bintchaos – “Dawkins wrote a chapter in John Maynard-Smith “Evolution and the Theory of Games”. He and Harris both full-well understood evo bio and evolutionary theories of culture and religion.”
I think I understand what this means. Generally, culture and religion help encourage stability and prosperity up to a point, right? If not, please elaborate?
“But at this point they have monetized Islam bashing to draw christians to their side of the battle.”
…Why shouldn’t they? We Christians have more or less given up on cultural dominance as a lost cause, and not actually useful to our values in any case, and are generally pretty okay about living in the sort of world Team Science claims to want to build. We don’t generally stab, shoot, or explode people for the glory of God with any great frequency. If we’re willing to give up on enforcing our rules through law, why shouldn’t Team Science make allies out of us? Especially when Islam is not nearly so accommodating, and does seem to be on the rise?
“For Dawkins, as a militant atheist, a significant percentage of christians become atheists so its a recruitment potential. Muslims dont become atheists, hardly ever. He suspects Islam is a CSS that has superior fitness to christianity, and he knows atheism has a really high selection gate. He understands cultural transmission and replication. I think they are both afraid of the transmissablity of Islam.”
…All of this seems like excellent reasons to do exactly what they’re doing.
“So scaremongering is their only defense.”
If Muslims don’t convert to atheism, and if Islam is memetically superior to Christianity and possibly to Atheism itself, how is Islam not a serious threat that should be fought tooth and nail, from the Team Science perspective?
“They are defectors.”
What makes them defectors? What value does Islam offer to Team Science?
“I also hate cheaters. The Sad Puppies cheated to force their choices onto the ballot.”
I’m pretty sure they played exactly by the rules as written. If they hadn’t, their plan wouldn’t have succeeded. Can you point out a specific rule that they broke?
“I will NEVER read any of their sanctioned authors.”
Would you have read any of their authors anyway? If not, why should they care?
Don’t think bintchaos is Jill/Moon or a Sidles alt, but I’m pretty darn sure she posts as wenjie on Steve Hsu’s blog. The Steve Hsu approach is to just ignore her. That’s what I do on here as well as on Hsu’s blog. At best she adds nothing to the discussion but at worst she’s just kind of annoying. Pretty harmless, in my opinion.
Whether or not they’re the same person, I suspect they both know very, very little about whatever they suggest they have knowledge on and have really just picked up the buzzwords related to certain topics. I haven’t seen any indication that she has any kind of mathematical sophistication or knowledge on complexity theory (she claims to be familiar with the latter), but who knows.
Do I know you? I don’t recall seeing you as an SSC commenter here over the last 3 months.
But thank you for your input into the socio-lab.
I think I’m arriving at some hypotheses about what separates liberals from conservatives.
One is the end justifies the means for conservatives.
Like Dr. Hsu, I’m not a climate science major, but here is a guy who is that illustrates my hypoth from Dr. Hsu blog.
It doesnt matter to conservatives that the Kochs are funding climate denialism for their own reasons.
Be my guest. After all…everyone tells lies about everyone else on the internet, don’t they?
I’ve been trying to figure out whether that is the case with regard to Islam. She clearly has some knowledge about the current jihadist movement. But beyond that, she either doesn’t know or doesn’t feel like engaging.
One of the major issues for making sense of the legal history is whether the hadith are real or whether all or almost all are later forgeries, as Schacht and some others argued. When I tried to get her view on that, her response was that it was an Islamist argument, with the implication that it was therefor of no interest. That might make sense if she is herself a Muslim but she has pretty clearly implied that she isn’t, so should be happy to look at questions about Islam from outside as well as inside the belief system.
On the whole I find the puzzle of her–what her actual belief system is, what she does or doesn’t know–more interesting than arguments about how conservatism will do in this century and why.
That’s not what happened with any of those people. Jill, Sidles, and Jim didn’t get pushback and eventual bans because they were new and didn’t talk in the register we like (Jim in particular was one of the first people here, but all three stayed around more than long enough to learn the ropes). They got it because they didn’t engage with others, preferring to treat any faint hint of interest as an invitation to hold forth on their various hobbyhorses: Jim’s charming reactionary views, Jill’s naive progressivism, and Sidles’… uh, “empathy-centric cognition blah blah blah the world wonders”. Prove them wrong and they’d move on without acknowledgement, then return to saying exactly the same stuff in the next thread.
That is unacceptable. I’m willing to listen to just about anyone as long as they give some evidence of listening to me, but if you can’t get your head out of your ass long enough to notice that the person you’re talking to might have a point, you don’t belong here. We can all watch Jon Stewart or listen to Rush Limbaugh or just browse our Facebook feeds if for some reason we want that shit; the “autopilot recitation of talking points” niche is very thoroughly filled.
Plenty of new contributors show up and don’t have any trouble with this, whatever their style looks like.
@DavidFriedman
fixed that.
I’m just not interested in Orientalism tyvm.
I’m interested in what adherents (al mumineen, the believers) think about their own religion.
No, they don’t.
@bintchaos
No, you don’t know me. I think I’ve posted once before to give suggestions on foreign language learning. I’ll take your non-denial as admission of being wenjie.
My gut says you chose “wenjie” to post on Hsu’s blog because you thought a Mandarin disqus name would be useful for posting on a blog written by a man with a surname of Hsu (presumably a Wade-Giles romanization of Xu 许, though I never learned Wade-Giles). I don’t know the rules on posting in different languages here, but if you are indeed wenjie and you speak Chinese, feel free to reply in Chinese (Mandarin) – I speak it.
Your knowledge of Islam comes off as superficial to me and I doubt you know anything about complexity theory beyond what you’ve read on wikipedia and popular science articles. I’m far from an expert on Islam, but my math skills/knowledge are a little better than average. So, please feel free to demonstrate your knowledge in the math domain. If your knowledge is beyond my comprehension, I’m certain others here can weigh in.
I suggest these things because I think they’d help your case (of being authentic, sincere, and knowledgeable in what you’re discussing). Maybe you are being sincere and you’re knowledgeable about various topics you suggest you are, but it doesn’t seem so from the way you express yourself. It also doesn’t help when your replies fly off into wild tangents. What does the difference between conservatives and liberals have to do with my comment?
@DavidFriedman
It doesn’t really matter if the hadith are real or forgeries. Some are probably real, some are certainly forgeries, but the notion that it’s possible to tell with any precision which are which using traditional techniques of verification is a legal fiction, as is the notion that individual hadith are accepted or rejected according to their authenticity rather than their content.
The hadith corpus is a body of precedents that can be individually adopted or dismissed using the language of content-neutral transmission analysis to obscure the reality that you’re actually adopting or dismissing them depending on whether or not they support the stance you’re attempting to argue for.
The biggest annoyance about bintchaos’ posts is how he/she keeps implying that figures like Sam Harris are either “conservatives” or in some way responsible for creationism and climate change denial, which ties into his/her implicit belief that SSC is responsible for these same things.
To borrow a term from bintchaos’ apparently favourite Islamic theologian/philosopher, al-Ghazali, bintchaos is an incoherent philosopher 🙂 They lambaste the perceived atheist defectors for not educating their base on climate change and creationism, yet happily use approvingly as (it would seem) some kind of ecumenical thinker a Persian scholar who would oppose and abhor atheist science, someone who seems to have conceived of the Absolute Sovereignty of God in a fashion that even Calvin might have thought “Steady on there!” (I don’t know his opinion on predestination but I think he might have been favourable to the notion).
I also hate cheaters. The Sad Puppies cheated to force their choices onto the ballot.
The Sad Puppies used an exploit that was already in place so the existing Hugo/Worldcon committees could get their favourites onto the ballot and make sure the ‘right’ guy won. Larry Correia had been pointing out for years that the voting slate was open to abuse, he was told that he was imagining things and nothing like this could or did ever happen, so he set out to create a slate in exactly the way he said could be done.
And he did.
And there was much outrage and yelling of cheats and cheaters, and mobilisation to vote against the Puppy slate. Just like Correia said could be done.
Now the PC crowd have decided to make sure this can never happen again – just a pity they weren’t as concerned about possible abuses when their favoured candidates were winning.
As for you not reading the Sad Puppy authors, that’s fair enough. I don’t read the Hugo winners anymore myself because I find that PC side of the fence generally boring and bad writers, too 🙂
I am angry that politics got involved in all this but I have to admit, it opened my eyes to a lot of things. I thought that the Hugos were open to all SF fans to vote on but nope, turns on they’re the property of WorldCon and only people with paid-up memberships can vote for them. As to all the SF writers and otherwise involved who then went “But didn’t you know this?”, no, for years whenever I heard about the Hugos, I heard them pitched as “the people’s choice”, “what the fans – like you – think are the best” and so on, as if they were a representative sample of all SF fandom and not just “the few Americans who go to WorldCon and can vote”.
But as I said, for years now I’ve been not following the Hugo winners because they’re just not my cup of tea.
@facelesscraven
Sorry for the late reply, but I had a time-out for saying mean things.
Re: Dawkins and Harris. No, ScienceTribe should not form an alliance with western civ. Thats my opinion, it is not Dawkins and Harris opinion. I doubt their “enemy of my enemy” approach will deliver the desired results, however.
So…what was their plan? If it was to piss off the committee and the regular members (easily thwarted by the simple device of No Award) and ensure that none of us would read Correia in a hundred thousand years, yeah, fine, that worked out great.
@very interesting
wow…Wenjie comes from 3bodyproblem by Cixin Liu…I guess it will be more recognizable next year when the movie comes out. She’s the girl that “pushed the button”. Its pinned on my TL. Encapsulates my feelings right now.
I have been internet stalked before, and in RL and its unpleasant. I keep my academic and family life private as possible from my internet persona. Dr. “Alexander” does too– its only good internet hygiene.
If you read my blog I wrote about sandpile collapse in MENA a year before the Nautilus article came out. Nuff said.
My thought process is just naturally tangential. I do not actually think I’m very “smart”, just really good at pattern recognition. I’m trying to be a principled SSC commenter here and conform to SSC protocols and standards.
Doesnt always work.
@Deiseach
Actually Ibn Taymiyya is my favorite islamic scholar, as I explained to David Friedman above.
Ibn Taymiyya once called Ghazali a promiscuous thinker over Ghazali’s incorporation of heretical christian ideas. The Incoherence of the Philosophers (which I have read) was a rejection of the incorporation of the ancient greeks into current Islamic thought. Do you honestly think religions aren’t complex adaptive systems?
yes, dihliz means a threshold where in theory one could have a neutral discussion of opposing views–being neither in out or out of the room…like what Dr. S is attempting to create at SSC.
yes, the estimable tactic of poll swarming. More validation of the ends justifying the means for conservatives. Or as Pascal Boyer puts it in Religion Explained, extremists burning the the middle ground to force moderates to choose a camp.
Why do conservatives consistently believe they are being kept out of culture and academe by liberal conspiracies? It hasn’t occurred to you yet that your film, your ideology, your literature and your comedy just aren’t as competitive as in the open marketplace as you think they are?
That would be the simplest explanation– survival of the fittest.
Interestingly I WAS a weeaboo in high school when I started taking Japanese…I think I’m somewhat permeable to other cultures, which would be consistent with Explorer phenotype. We listened to J-pop and watched animes. hahaha, LMC and Genki Rockets. Takes me back.
I agree, that is good internet hygiene. I don’t expect anyone to reveal their personal identity against their will. My point was, it seems like you misrepresent yourself and your knowledge. I find it Very Interesting that you chose a Chinese name to post under at Hsu’s blog and here you post as BINTchaos and express some unconventional opinions on Islam. Honestly, it seems like you just read a lot of wikipedia articles, blogs, and popular science articles. I had that opinion of wenjie before you came here as bintchaos.
My pattern recognition is pretty good, too. Your style of writing is unique and I immediately suspected that bintchaos and wenjie were one in the same (who needs machine learning to detect posters using different handles?). When you started criticizing Hsu and posting links to his blogs it was obvious to me that my suspicion was correct. You seemed to have an infatuation with Hsu until his more recent posts on liberals, after which you seemed to do a 180. If you’re so easy offended, you’re going to have a hard time here.
I didn’t know you had a blog. Honestly, I probably won’t read it.
That is the implication of Schacht’s argument, not just for current law but for the whole history. The question is whether it’s true. Supporters of the traditional view would claim that the elaborate scholarship around hadith and their isnads is sufficiently reliable so that legal conclusions can be based on it.
Everyone, of course, agrees that lots of hadith are bogus. The question is whether the standard collections of authenticated ones contain mostly ones that are genuine, as Islamic legists have long claimed.
I don’t know enough about the evidence to have a confident opinion, although the fact that Hallaq, while attacking Schacht, adopts a position actually not that far from his, makes me suspect that the Schacht view is reasonably close to correct.
@Deiseach
Again, don’t be so sure al-Ghazali was opposed to “atheist” science. He explicitly excludes math, logic, physics, and astronomy from his criticism of philosophy: his bone of contention is with Greek metaphysics, not with science or rationality, and he criticizes Greek metaphysics in part for being not scientific or rational enough.
@DavidFriedman
Hadith traditionalists will make the argument you describe (that the elaborate scholarship is sufficiently reliable so that legal conclusions can be based on it), and this argument is one possible orthodox stance at Islamic law. But it’s sort of like the American strict constructionist argument about the Constitution, whereby even those scholars who insist that they’re going by the literal text of the Constitution as it would have been intended by the Founders wind up issuing opinions that contradict what the Founders probably intended on a not irregular basis.
What actually matters isn’t whether the hadith are “genuine” in the sense of historically accurate representations of what Muhammad actually said or did, but that they’re “genuine” in the sense that they’ve been used as binding precedents by generations of scholars and so have to be taken seriously, even if you wind up finding a reason to dismiss them. If you read works of classical fiqh you’ll find that scholars of all four madhhabs are perfectly willing to dismiss hadith for purely ad hoc reasons – be it by direct matn criticism (“this hadith has a perfectly sound isnad, but it must nevertheless be invalid because its content makes no logical sense/is historically anachronistic/etc”), by finding a way to call into question a link in the isnad, or by simple handwaving (“the hadith is authentic, but circumstances have changed and now the public interest demands we set it aside”).
Hallaq’s criticism of Schacht, as I understand it, isn’t that the traditional hadith sciences are so elaborate that they couldn’t possibly have gotten all that stuff wrong, but rather that the historical verifiability of a given hadith doesn’t really matter for the purposes of the law, since jurists have always been perfectly willing and able to reassess the authenticity of hadith when it becomes intellectually necessary for them to do so, and that so few hadith are classified as mutawatir in the first place (a tiny minority of the hadith present in the canonical collections).
I’d recommend Behnam Sadeghi’s “The Logic of Lawmaking in Islam” if you want to see where the post-Schacht consensus is trending these days.
” I thought that the Hugos were open to all SF fans to vote on but nope, turns on they’re the property of WorldCon and only people with paid-up memberships can vote for them. ”
For what it’s worth, the most common mistake about the Hugos seemed to be believing that it was a juried award with no input from fans.
@Bintchaos – “Sorry for the late reply, but I had a time-out for saying mean things.”
Eh? Well, for the record, you can say whatever mean things you like about me. I won’t particularly mind.
“Re: Dawkins and Harris. No, ScienceTribe should not form an alliance with western civ.”
Who should ScienceTribe form an alliance with? Islam?
“Thats my opinion, it is not Dawkins and Harris opinion. I doubt their “enemy of my enemy” approach will deliver the desired results, however.”
Sure, and fair enough, but surely this is a pretty heterodox view for “ScienceTribe”? You were saying that Dawkins and Harris have betrayed science tribe, but how does that work when they’re doing exactly what they’ve always done: vociferously attacking religious belief?
You can believe that the best tactic for ScienceTribe moving forward is to ally with Islam, but ScienceTribe, as I understand it, has been hostile to ALL religion from the start. If you’re pro-religion, any religion, isn’t it you whose good standing in ScienceTribe should be suspect, not them?
Obviously, none of this means you’re wrong and Harris and Dawkins are right; that’s a completely seperate discussion. I’m just talking about what the sides are in the first place.
“So…what was their plan? If it was to piss off the committee and the regular members (easily thwarted by the simple device of No Award) and ensure that none of us would read Correia in a hundred thousand years, yeah, fine, that worked out great.”
Again, none of you were reading Correia in a hundred thousand years anyway, so no loss to Correia. Correia’s plan was to expose the realities of the Hugo vote, to prove that the award was rotten due to rampant politicing and slate-voting, to challenge the dominant clique’s control over the award, to rouse a rabble on the right, and to get famous in Red Tribe. He succeeded more or less completely on all four goals. Getting Blue-Tribe types to read his books was never a viable option; they’d been treating him and others like him like garbage from the start.
Ditto for Vox Day, whose goal was to destroy the award’s credibility, and gain fame among Red Tribers thereby. And that worked pretty well too.
ScienceTribe shouldn’t make alliances with ANY socio-religious or political ideology. Those things are transients.
I might have read him. Now I never will.
heres my response to Nornagast. Pretty much says it all.
Again, your defense is the Ann Coulter “liberals gave us no other choice” defense, part of BigLiberal Conspiracy Theory, so obviously endemic among conservatives.
@Qays
That is where the Sunni concept of the “uncreated, revealed Quran” comes into play. If the Quran actually contains every possible variation of every law ever required for human welfare in every frame of spacetime for all of eternity, it has to be in some sort of compressed code that can be released/validated by islamic scholarship and study. That code is arabic, thus the “seven thousand layers of meaning”, and the injunctions against translation.
Don’t think bintchaos is Jill/Moon or a Sidles alt, but I’m pretty darn sure she posts as wenjie on Steve Hsu’s blog.
So as well as affecting Arabic culture, they do the same for Chinese over on another blog? Isn’t that cultural appropriation which their side (liberals not conservatives) do not approve of, unless they claim to be biracial Chinese and Arab?
I think the trouble is that they do have a broad but shallow knowledge of the topics they like to mention, but did not anticipate meeting anyone on here with actual and deeper knowledge of the matters at hand – underestimating the enemy, as it were: how smart could we dumb Red Tribe conservatives be, after all? Easy to drop in, dazzle us with their sophisticated and cosmopolitan university-educated intellect, and leave us all shaking our fists in baffled and ignorant fury.
Not quite working out like that, since we do have a few university-educated persons on here ourselves 🙂
Look, I don’t have a dog in this fight; I’ve read a fair amount of SF but I’m not involved in the SF fan scene and don’t care who its awards go to. I didn’t follow the Puppies debacle closely (though I’ve absorbed a fair bit of it through osmosis) because — although I’m certainly no fan of capital-S capital-J Social Justice — it looked to me like stupid fan drama. I still think so.
But from an outsider perspective, I find Deiseach or John Schilling’s takes on it a hell of a lot more persuasive than yours. The Puppies believed there was a segment of the fanbase that wasn’t being represented by the Hugos, so they got that segment voting and got themselves represented. This wouldn’t have worked if they weren’t playing by the rules. When it did work, suddenly everyone that was being served by the status quo complains about “dirty tricks”. And that’s all they’ve got. No attempt at a solution, nothing about the split in the fanbase, unless it’s to whine about conservatism ruining everything. Do you understand how unimpressive this looks from the outside?
Also, I’m quite familiar with the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Its strategic space is way broader than you’re suggesting, and there’s a whole body of ideas on when and how to forgive defection within it; reducing it to a simplistic sinners-and-saints narrative makes me think your knowledge of the subject is very shallow.
I actually use the constitutional context in explaining what I understand to be the difference between Sharia and Fiqh. Constitutional law for a lawyer or conlaw professor is defined by past rulings of the Supreme Court. Constitutional law for a Supreme Court justice is what those rulings ought to be, deduced from his view of what the Constitution means and how it should be interpreted. Similarly, Fiqh is what the legal scholars have deduced from their sources, Sharia is what they should have deduced–law, as it were, in the mind of God.
That may be what matters if you want to predict the result of a law case. But if you want to understand how legal systems work it matters how Islamic law came into existence, and there are at least two quite different accounts out there. Consider the relevance for the issue of to what degree founding documents can constrain the law.
He may make that argument, but what I got from reading him was the claim that a few hadith really go back more or less as far as they claim, but only a few.
Is there any chance I can interest you in reading my chapter on Islamic law and telling me what things you think I got wrong? The book draft is webbed.
@Qays —
Taking a break from this obnoxious little spat, I just wanted to say that your posts are very interesting and I’m looking forward to reading more of them.
@Nornagest
Much appreciated. SSC is one of the best places on the internet as far as I’m concerned, so I’m happy to contribute what I can.
@DavidFriedman
I think your shari‘a/fiqh analogy is pretty good, though I’d caution you that in practice shari‘a is often used in classical legal texts to refer to what “should” be called fiqh.
I’m not sure the distinction between “genuine” prophetic hadith and pre-Islamic Arabian or Roman or whatever law that’s been incorporated into and legitimized by the hadith corpus really matters from the perspective of a practitioner of the law. Or at least, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of the current of Islamic law that’s historically been the most important. A precedent is a precedent, whether it’s passed down by way of the hadith corpus or by way of the madhhab’s own canon (and in many cases it’s easier to circumvent a prophetic hadith than an opinion from, say, the founder of the school).
The exception is the Hanbali madhhab, which is basically the legal exclave of the “hadith folk,” and which treats the hadith corpus with great reverence and is extremely reluctant to discard “authentic” hadith for any reason. But this isn’t really true of the three major madhhabs. The Hanafi and Maliki madhhabs in particular predate al-Shafi‘i’s synthesis of hadith studies and fiqh, and their methodologies therefore hark back to the period when hadith study was not considered integral to the law. Both have a tendency to employ the hadith corpus as a toolbox for building legal opinions rather than as a singularly productive way of divining the “true shari‘a” (with the Hanafis preferring syllogistic reasoning to hadith scholarship to this end and the Malikis preferring their own variety of pseudo-hadith from Malik and his companions in Madina). The Shafi‘is are intermediate in this respect – they show more reverence for the hadith corpus than the Hanafis or Malikis, but are also more tolerant of qiyas than the Hanbalis.
So I think in actuality it doesn’t really matter where the hadith corpus comes from, provided we’re talking about a juridical tradition that’s willing to discard “authentic” hadiths as necessary. For the Hanbalis this is a problem, since they treat the outcomes of the traditional hadith sciences as categorically binding (e.g. if a hadith is authentic it is true, period), but not for the other madhhabs.
And yeah, Hallaq’s main article on hadith basically argues that there are only a handful of mutawatir hadith so the whole debate is sort of a waste of time. Isn’t that a reasonable stance? Treating this tiny sub-corpus as being representative of the prophet’s actual deeds may or may not be historically accurate, but as far as legal fictions go it’s not particularly destabilizing to the integrity of the system. It only becomes a problem when these dubiously-sourced accounts come to constitute a substantial chunk of the legal tradition (as I’d argue they have in the Hanbali madhhab, though Hallaq might disagree with me on that).
I’ve taken a quick look at your chapter, it overall seems good. A few quibbles:
On page two you propose the traditional “the scholar starts from the sources and builds a law out of them” framework, but I’d take a look at Sadeghi’s book, because he basically proposes an inverted framework (“the scholar starts with the law he wants to justify and uses the sources to justify it”).
I think the Hallaqians basically won the argument over the closing of the gates of ijtihad.
You only list three of the four sources of the law: the fourth, qiyas (syllogistic reasoning), is by some measure the most productive historically (though the Hanbalis claim to not believe in it). There’s also a fourth pseudo-source that exists in at least the Hanafi and Maliki schools: “public utility,” called istihsan by the Hanafis and maslaha by the Malikis, though this may be getting a bit too far into the weeds.
The key point of disagreement with Schacht among academics isn’t with his claim that the hadith are mostly post-prophetic, but rather with the notion that classical Islamic scholars were treating large numbers of them as apodictic when they weren’t.
Order the schools Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i, Hanbali.
What you call siyasa shari‘a is actually siyasa shar‘iyya, and it doesn’t mean the general spirit of the shari‘a but rather “discretionary law.” This is the term for the lawmaking capacity of the ruler that lies outside of the shari‘a proper.
The case of the Ottoman explosion of siyasa is indeed an interesting one, though I think there are crucial differences between the postcolonial collapse of the traditional legal system and what occurred in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman jurists constituted a powerful arm of the state bureaucracy and had a great deal of political sway – the same is not true of, say, the Islamic legal scholars in French Algeria. The Ottoman jurists were also trained in the classical legal tradition.
The Ottomans were also far from the first Islamic polity to promote one of the four madhhabs as “first among equals.” In fact, this was the norm throughout Islamic history: the only region where multiple madhhabs coëxisted was Iraq, the Levant, and Egypt. All other regions of the Islamic world have been historically the domain of a single dominant madhhab, and many rulers were much less tolerant of the non-dominant madhhabs than the Ottomans were (for instance, in al-Andalus only Malikis were allowed to become qadis). This sort of thing didn’t really hamper the development or the independence of the various madhhabs. A good book on this is Sherman Jackson’s “The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi,” which examines the thought of an Egyptian Maliki writing at a time when the Mamluk state had attempted to implement policies favoring the Shafi‘i madhhab (I think? might have been the Hanafis).
With regard to the similarities between Jewish and Islamic law, you might consider looking into the literature on potential Islamic influences on medieval Jewish law – many of the great medieval Jewish jurists, including most notably Maimonides, grew up in an Islamic scholarly milieu.
@Nornagest:
First let me preface with the fact that I don’t really have any skin in this game either, as I wasn’ t a follower of the Hugos and, while being in my past a prolific fantasy (and some sci-fi) reader I really wouldn’t know a Hugo from a hole in my head.
That said, this doesn’t seem like a correct summary. AFAIK:
1) The Puppies thought that the Hugos had been taken over by (roughly) infidels, and that they needed to restore the awards to the “real” fans, so that “real” sci-fi and fantasy would be awarded.
2) They didn’t just get more like minded people voting, but engaged in a campaign for a specific book (Correia’s own book) and then a specific slate. That, again AFAIK, is not something people had done before and was seen by many authors as in very poor taste).
@DavidFriedman
Hence fn1 in that chapter.
I’m not planning practice Islamic law–or any other law for that matter. I’m interested in how legal systems work, which includes where they come from. So the difference between Schacht’s version and the orthodox version is interesting to me.
Very likely–it’s not an issue on which I’m competent to offer an opinion. What struck me as unreasonable was that he seemed to be presenting himself as very much a critic of Schacht while taking a position much closer to Schacht’s than to the traditional view of the matter.
While on the subject of Hallaq, this old blog post of mine deals with one reason for my reservations about trusting him.
Thanks. Noted. It’s hard to be sure how much detail to go into on a single legal system.
I thought the hadith in the standard collections were generally regarded as valid, having been purged of a much larger number of doubtful ones. Not true?
Part of what is interesting to me in Hallaq’s story is the claim that, in the traditional system, the legists were effectively independent of the state. That was clearly not true in the Ottoman system. Compare the English church before and after Henry VIII. Anglican clerics might be politically influential, but they were influential from within the state not outside it.
You know this stuff better than I do, but I don’t think that is correct. I’m pretty sure I remember a mention of a non-Maliki chief qadi who was required on certain issues to follow Maliki rules.
Do you have a good source that goes into some detail on these questions? One of the things that interested me about Islamic law was that it seemed to be a polylegal system. I realize that often one madhab was dominant in an area, as the Maliki in al-Andalus, but I thought permitting only a court of one madhab was relatively uncommon pre-Ottoman.
Also, do you have a source that goes into some detail on how, when more than one madhab was functioning in an area, cross cases were handled–which court they went to?
That occurred to me when I came across Maimonides’ comment that the sages recommended no more than four wives. I haven’t checked to see if it is in the Mishnah, and my copy seems to be hiding at the moment.
In any case, thanks for the comments. I have thanks at the beginning of the book for the people who volunteered to correct some of my errors. If you want to be included, email me with your real name.
ddfrATDaviddfriedman.com
And if you are ever in the SF Bay area, perhaps I can invite you over for a medieval Islamic dinner.
@HBC
Not quite. First, people absolutely had done so before (series of reminder posts on their own and friends’ blogs, links with instructions on how to sign up for Worldcon membership, etc). The distinction, to the extent that there is one, is that in 2013 Correia was much louder and direct about it.
To be clear, by “louder and more direct” I am not referring to things like suggesting people get Worldcon memberships and so on, or suggesting a specific work. Again, that was already done on a “network of friends” basis (posts on the lines of “My good Buddy Neil Gaiman’s book is up, you guys all like my writing, Neil’s is awesome, so I think he deserves to win this year and you probably will too. Here’s the link to get a membership, thanks!”). He crafted his pitch as an outsider, not to fandom, but to the insular circle or club that he argued controlled the Hugo, and suggested that a vote for his book was a vote in favor of enjoyable, plot-comes-first fiction and against preachy message fiction. He was also suggesting that people should do likewise and saying what he’d liked this year, and encouraging readers in the comments to share their favorites.
The end result of this was that quite a few people outside the usual overton window of the WorldCon segment of Fandom ended up on the nomination list, though I don’t believe he did. Note his reaction.
He was also engaging (and still is) in a lot of internet argument over articles like this and responding to lines like:
“I want an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories”
and
“I want to never again read entire anthologies of SF stories or large-cast novels where every character is binary-gendered.”
with articles like this and lines like:
“If humans having 5 or 6 sexes in the future is part of your story, write it. If it isn’t part of the story, why would you waste words on it? Oh, that’s right, because MESSAGE.”
By the time the 2014 Hugos rolled around, there was already a lot of bad blood, and that was the point at which Larry and friends doubled down, and so did the people pushing back, and it spilled over into general internet awareness.
As I’ve said before, I think Eric Flint (hardly a rabid right winger) had the best take on it, disagreeing with Correia & Co’s accusations that the Hugo selection was hijacked by people voting on -ideological- grounds (basically pro-left wing and SJW messaging), while agreeing that there has been an increasing gap between what wins awards and that unless you’re GRRM, Lois McMaster Bujold, or Neil Gaiman you can write what wins awards, or what sells, but not both.
The distinction is that where Correia and company saw malice and hijacking of SF Fandom, Flint sees the gap between Literary and Mainstream. He even made a point to speak in defense of the sad puppies writers in response to some of the nastier accusations being slung around.
@DavidFriedman
There are two steps to determining the probative value of a hadith. The first is whether it’s sahih (authentic) or da‘if (weak). All, or almost all, of the hadiths collected in the main collections are sahih.
This is where the second step comes in: a sahih hadith can be ahad (singular) or mutawatir (widespread), according to how many independent narrations can be constructed for it. The exact cutoff point for being considered mutawatir will vary, though three to five+ narrations is common. This is the key distinction, since almost all discussion of the hadith corpus already excludes those deemed weak.
A sahih ahad hadith has less probative value than a sahih mutawatir hadith. The general formulation is that the knowledge provided by a mutawatir hadith is certain (qat‘i, “cutting”), whereas the knowledge provided by an ahad hadith is speculative or probabilistic (zanni, “theoretical”). There are variances between the schools, with the Hanbalis generally more willing than the others to base their arguments on ahad transmissions, but the classical scholars had in the main already reached the same conclusion that Schacht says they hadn’t: that only a very limited number of transmissions could be treated as totally reliable, and that the rest could only be employed in conjunction with other sources of law in drafting rulings (“good enough for government business,” but not good enough to be the linchpin of your argument if the stakes are at all high).
The independence of the jurists from the state wasn’t a binary thing. It was pretty common for rulers to appoint not only qadis but muftis as well (various Andalusi rulers, for instance, appointed shura councils consisting of several muftis whom the chief qadi was required to consult). Rulers also founded madrasas to train jurists, just like the Ottomans. Did this mean that the jurists in these societies weren’t independent of the state? Not really, at least in my experience. The jurists had a degree of political independence even if they were the political appointees of the ruler, because the ruler depended on the community of jurists to legitimate his rule and was loathe to upset them, and because jurists were perfectly capable of operating outside of the state if they felt so inclined (since their legitimacy ultimately derived from their ability to convince laypeople to take their rulings seriously, rather than from any official imprimatur) – or at least this was the case before the Ottoman period. I’m not an Ottomanist, so I don’t know what exactly became of the independence of the Ottoman jurists. I’m sure plenty has been written on the subject. But the comparison with an Anglican cleric to me isn’t particularly illustrative, since the idea of an Anglican cleric operating outside of the Anglican church doesn’t make much sense (who’s going to take him seriously?), whereas the idea of a mufti/law professor operating outside of the state university system or the state department of law makes a lot of sense.
In Egypt and the Levant, where madhhab pluralism was the norm, there evolved a body of rules and conventions governing which “hat,” so to speak, a qadi should wear when adjudicating a given case. A Maliki qadi might be expected to rule as though he were a Hanafi in certain cases. What I was referring to was that these sorts of conventions only arose in societies where there were actually large numbers of jurists belonging to different madhhabs: namely Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq (and possibly pre-Safavid Iran, which is said to have been largely Shafi‘i but which may have had a Hanafi minority). In other regions there was really only one madhhab in town, and scholars who did wind up joining minoritary madhhabs were basically excluded from any sort of higher office (see the case of Ibn Hazm, second founder of the lost Zahiri madhhab and just about the only non-Maliki of any note in the entire history of al-Andalus). The Ottoman Empire’s attempts to strengthen the Hanafi madhhab were if anything much less strict than the policies undertaken by other Muslim states to strengthen their own respective official madhahib.
I don’t think anyone has really looked holistically at this question of how cross-madhhab cases were handled, since in the mono-madhhab regions it wasn’t really an issue: almost everyone in al-Andalus and North Africa was a Maliki, almost everyone in India and Central Asia was a Hanafi, and that’s just the way things were, the courts weren’t going to go brush up on some obscure (to them) variant of fiqh just because some random guy decides to be a Shafi‘i or whatever. You’re only going to find this developed into a comprehensive doctrine in the central Arabic-speaking regions where there actually were multiple madhhabs on the ground, so it’ll be treated as a feature of Mamluk and Ottoman legal culture more than anything. I think the best place to start looking is probably Sherman Jackson’s book on al-Qarafi.
“Very limited number” as “a dozen or so” or “only a few thousand”?
I thought that, as a substitute for multiple independent chains for one hadith, it was possible to consider the substance of a hadith certain if there were several different hadith with the same implication. Isn’t that how the basis for consensus was established?
I had thought that mufti, like the Roman jurisconsult, was a position defined by reputation rather than appointment until the Ottomans. Are you describing anything more than the instructions to the chief qadi of which ones to consult? They were also being consulted by lots of other people, both qadis and litigants, no? Perhaps I am relying too much on Wallaq here.
Those, as I understand it, were supported by waqfs and so out of the control of the ruler, even if the endowment had been provided by a previous ruler. Ford Motor Company has no power over the Ford Foundation. The Ottomans ended up seizing the waqfs and so getting control over the funds that supported legists.
That, I think, was the point I was making.
I’m not an Ottomanist, so I don’t know what exactly became of the independence of the Ottoman jurists. I’m sure plenty has been written on the subject. But the comparison with an Anglican cleric to me isn’t particularly illustrative, since the idea of an Anglican cleric operating outside of the Anglican church doesn’t make much sense (who’s going to take him seriously?), whereas the idea of a mufti/law professor operating outside of the state university system or the state department of law makes a lot of sense.
That seems to be the current situation in the KSA.
Thanks.
@Bintchaos – ScienceTribe shouldn’t make alliances with ANY socio-religious or political ideology. Those things are transients.
So it’s more the allying with Christianity rather than the hostility toward Islam that you’re objecting to? How do you think Harris and Dawkins should be prosecuting their opposition to Islam instead of their current methods?
“Again, your defense is the Ann Coulter “liberals gave us no other choice” defense, part of BigLiberal Conspiracy Theory, so obviously endemic among conservatives.”
Well, I used to be a fairly rabid liberal, so I have a fair amount of personal experience with the realities of the actual factual Big Liberal Conspiracy. And based on that personal experience, Coulter is right for a relatively recent timeframe. Social Justice broke the “peace”, or the closest we’ve come in the last decade.
@DavidFriedman
Hallaq pins the number of mutawatir transmissions at closer to a dozen or so than to a few thousand. In “The authenticity of prophetic hadith” he cites classical sources who claim to have found six to nine total. The distinction you’re referring to is between tawatur lafzi (verbatim concurrence) and tawatur ma‘nawi (concurrence in meaning), but hadith of the latter type were apparently even rarer than those of the former, and in any event not considered to have definitive epistemic weight.
A mufti is a position defined by reputation rather than by appointment, but in al-Andalus the ruler would appoint certain muftis to a council that judges were required to consult. A qadi was obligated, under this system, to base his ruling in the case on the opinion of at least one of the muftis.
That was my impression. It was why I saw his criticism of Schacht as dubious. Schacht says zero, the orthodox literature says thousands, Hallaq says a dozen–which is Hallaq closer to?
But I gather your view is that he was criticizing Schacht on a different basis.
As I understand it, the claim that the Prophet said his people would never be agreed on an error is based on hadith of that type. And since it is the basis for holding that Ijma provides an additional source of authority, it seems to have very considerable epistemic weight.
I find it hilarious that “is an ISIS apologist” and “posts comments out of order” are presented as being of equal weight.
The former is a bigger deal to me but Scott is a really meta guy. If my estimation of him is accurate, having an openly Islamist poster who abides by the blog’s rules is more of a pro than a con in his eyes.
If bintchaos is banned it will probably be for her persistent and obnoxious violation of forum customs rather than for advocating jihad. Which is fine: a ban is a ban, and either way it means having to scroll past less IS propaganda.
When she first started doing the comments thing, I thought maybe she was Dreaded Jim (who also did that), because her comments about Islam pushed me towards Jim’s way of thinking WAY better than anything Jim ever wrote.
I find it baffling.
Much like my confusion about why USians would rather make up fantasy reasons for IS near-pathological but historically validated hatred of and reasons for attacking US and US interests.
And NEways there was a big discussion on 7.5 of how I’m just replying in an email link, and some other commenters tried it and it worked just like I described. So if Nabil is expecting the ban hammer to hit me over that, he will be sadly disappointed.
And I’m a hard sciences type. I’m spectacularly uninterested in psychology, social science and political “science”. My interest in Islam is part of my interest in information theory, evo theory of culture, EGT, chaos, collapse, entropy, CAS, theoretical mathematics, socio-physics and large non-equilibrium systems (what Von Neuman called non-elephants).
I’m not of any of those other people.
And in 77.25 you were asked to stop using the email reply links and claimed you were “NOT DOING THAT”, and blamed your slow Tor/VPN connection instead.
The 77.5 subthread you’re referring to where someone confirmed it was a real issue, began with someone asking Bakkot to fix the email links to not do that anymore.
Regardless of what the cause is, the result is unacceptable (I personally don’t care because I always read comments by searching for the “new” marker, which works fine, but it causes problems for the community) and you have the ability to prevent it.
To be fair, it seems that she primarily follows the threads through the “Notify me of follow-up comments by email” checkbox, and the e-mails generated apparently contain links that place the replies out of order. If she hasn’t been here long enough to get used to how the reply links on the blog work and therefore how conversations flow once they reach the deepest nesting she may not understand why it’s so infuriating to have those replies out of order.
It’s way easier to follow with the automatic thread collapsing and new comment highlighting, so she may not have the same reaction to the misordering as those of us who have been following since those weren’t things.
NOT DOING that was a response to repeated accusations of hacking the URL.
I didn’t realize I was being ordered to not use the email reply links.
@random832
There’s two e-mail reply systems in use on here. One is hosted by Bakkot, but I the other one (that I believe bintchaos is using) I think is WordPress, which we may not be able to affect.
Edit: Of course this doesn’t excuse not using the links here on the website, now that it’s been brought to her attention.
@Catcube
It is a wordpress thing.
I’m trying to follow instructions and do what people are telling me now.
Is this form correct?
@bintchaos:
Just use the SSC comment site itself to reply (by clicking the reply link on the comment), not anything supplied directly by wordpress.
At the deepest nesting level there is not a reply like, use the up arrow link to go back to the previous level of comment and click reply there.
Sample from their blog:
So all the hints they are dropping about their Great Scientific Project mean that they think there really is such a thing as a “red” brain and a “blue” brain (presumably to be demonstrated by MRI scans?) and from this we can extrapolate all manner of things that will eventually lead to us being able to implement social control via SCIENCE!!!!
(a) Haven’t we heard all this – including the “really scientific scientifically-based psychology, not theory about the psyche, will let us manipulate the brains and minds of the masses to create the perfect society”- before in varoius forms?
(b) Wot no acknowledgement of Gail Saltz who seems to have laid the foundation for “there are Democrat brains and Republican brains”? A little ungrateful, don’t you think, to be peacocking around about your great idea and not mentioning that you’re copying someone else’s thought? Though Dr Saltz herself plainly owes a debt to Gilbert and Sullivan:
What I’m wondering is whether it’s cultural appropriation for a person of the wrong ethnicity to call themselves “bint.”
(…since I missed the chance to ask this about the name “Marsh*yne” [actual name currently banned].)
British culture is one of the ones it’s OK to appropriate. And only a bloody wanker would say otherwise.
Is “bint”, when not preceded by “moistened”, even a thing in British culture any more?
It’s originally from Arab culture, as the feminine for “bin” as in “son/daughter of”. Make your own guess about the intent behind “bintchaos” as a pseudonym. Entered British slang during the Colonial era as slang for the sort of Arab daughter likely to be hanging around with British soldiers in the Middle East, so somewhere between affectionate and derogatory depending on context.
And I think was on its way out when Monty Python adopted it as one of several less-than-complimentary nicknames for the Lady of the Lake. Certainly not much call for it in its original application.
On the other hand, lobbing scimitars at random peasants so they can call themselves “Emperor” is the sort of thing a Daughter of Chaos might well do, so maybe she did steal it from the Brits rather than the Arabs.
With the usual caveats about age, region, social class, level of irony etc. “bint” is still contemporary British English slang, yes – generally I would say used to mean something like “silly woman”, on an emotional spectrum somewhere between affection and infuriation.
conservatives pander on climate science, evolution, and the relative fitness of conservative ideology in the 21st century
Ah, the Carthago delenda est of every bintchaos comment 🙂
“What’s your favourite ice cream flavour, readers?”
“The popularity of chocolate is merely conservative pandering to their base on climate change, evolution, and the maladapativity of conservative ideology!”
“Opinions amongst my fellow commenters on summer bedding plants?”
“Gardening is a fakery designed to appeal to the conservative suburban dweller’s fantasies of ancestral estates, in the same way conservatives pander on climate science, evolution, and the chances of their ideology surviving in the 21st century!”
“My God, the rolling news coverage of the Martian invasion shows shocking scenes of devastation in Seattle; who knew the aliens had such a hatred of coffee?”
“Plainly this is the invaders pandering to conservatives regarding their hatred of so-called ‘hipster’ views, just like they pander on climate change science, creationism, and the lack of appeal conservative ideology has to modern 21st century urban liberal educated people!”
hahaha!
this is the kind of elegant but exquisitely content-free elocution that SSC is so famous for and I am so woefully bad at.
When I get my my new Mac-book pro in december I will be able to display the n-dimensional fitness landscape of conservative tendency– until then I bow to you.
(makes obeisance to Deiseach)
Actually, you’re one of the most excellent people at it on here. You just don’t see it.
@Cat Cube:
Deiseach is a master at the righteous indignation tilt at weak-man post with a literary flair.
bintchaos reads significantly different, more “millennial shorthand fill in the gaps with common knowledge”. And they (she?) are changing their posting style quite a bit as we go foward.
hey guys, Deiseach’s channeling Sidles again. Somebody fetch the holy water.
Please don’t. That stuff burns when you splash it on me. I mean her. I mean him.
Somebody fetch the holy water.
Please do, I need to replenish the font by the front door 🙂
There are times when I deeply regret the lack of the thumbs up button.
I don’t know if you are using “consenual rule of law” (sp?) to mean something other than the local legal system, but the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, although closer to following fiqh than almost any other modern society, does not have a strictly Islamic legal system. Like Israel, although to a lesser degree, it has a hybrid of the traditional and modern systems.
Simple example: Jinayat. Under fiqh, if you kill someone his kin may have the right of retaliation, depending on the nature of the killing, and if they do not retaliate are entitled to dia, the Islamic wergeld. In addition, the killer is obliged to free a believing slave or fast for two months. That done, it’s over.
In KSA, he also gets put in jail for ten years or so.
umm…witchcraft or sorcery is a tazir punishment, and yes its a beheading. There have been several since 2010.
Are you now talking about qisas punishments?
Qisas is very big with IS– I have been told that they consider themselves the Wali of the ummah.
Consensual rule of law is from evo theory of culture. Its the rule of law imposed by the consent of the governed.
This is boring– all you guys seem to have is armies of dragon’s teeth straw men and handfuls of radar chaff.
I wasn’t referring to either Tazir or witchcraft. I was responding to your claim that the consensual rule of law in KSA was Shariah, and offering an example to the contrary.
The example involved Jinayat, not Tazir. Qisas is a right under Jinayat but not the whole of it.
Okfine…now I’m really confused…are you saying that tazir and jinayat aren’t shariah compliant?
On the contrary. I am saying that the current treatment of killing in the law of the KSA is not consistent with fiqh, since it adds to the jinayat punishment a term of state imprisonment.
Hence it is not true that the legal system of the KSA is Shariah, although it’s more nearly true than for almost any other modern Islamic state.
You keep referring to Shariah. Does that mean you take the view that “Shariah”, rather than “fiqh”, is the proper label for actual Islamic law, as implemented in actual societies?
I think it makes more sense to think of Shariah as God’s law which only God can know for certain, fiqh as the human attempt to figure out what it is and instantiate it. There can be only one Shariah but the different schools have different uncertain beliefs about what it is, hence produce slightly different versions of fiqh.
I’ve been in communication with Dr. Marik about his sepsis treatment. I’m not knowledgeable enough to have a very strong object-level opinion about whether it works, and there is a daunting graveyard of failed treatments for sepsis, but the potential benefit is so staggeringly large (sepsis causes *millions* of deaths per year worldwide, and many other bad outcomes short of death) that an RCT to evaluate it looks like a very, very good investment. And since someone is getting sepsis every two seconds, it’s worth trying to hurry – many conventional sources of funding are very slow.
However, I’m pretty sure that Sarah’s estimate of $250K to fund a study is very low. It’s true that the claimed effect size is large, so in principle a small study should be able to detect it, but as I understand it there are a lot of fixed costs for these things, and a tiny study may be unconvincing even if it’s statistically significant on paper. Dr. Marik’s own current estimate is ~$2M and I would not personally be surprised if that is low. If someone can credibly test this theory for $250K, they should speak up because I would be happy to fund it right now!
Do you know where the $250K estimate originally came from? Sarah’s linked post seems to say it’s already been established that this will cost that much, but I’m not seeing where that was.
Also, thanks a ton for being proactive and actually reaching out to Dr. Marik, I’ve been procrastinating on figuring out how to vet this for weeks now.
No, I don’t know.
Seen over there: there’s an ongoing clinical trial elsewhere, estimated completion next April, testing Vitamin C for sepsis against placebo. This isn’t quite the same; Dr. Marik’s protocol combines Vitamin C, thiamine and corticosteroids.
This seems like a good sign, as this sort of thing (no novel drugs, likely cheap to do) can get funded. See also ultrasound for Alzheimer’s here, and also here.
On the face of it, Vitamin C for sepsis makes me go “Huh?” (and brings back memories of Linus Pauling’s evangelisation for it) but then again, it’s crazy enough that it just might work!
🙂
(I’d kind of be betting on the corticosteroids, though).
I agree with you on the steroids comment. Low-dose steroids often improve shock symptoms, but their effect on mortality tends to be dependent on disease severity.
It’s frustrating steroids is part of the proposed concoction. The study needs to be set up with vitamin C as the independent variable and steroids being given to every patient. My suspicion is Vit C may have some small benefit in the already malnourished, but I doubt it’s turning the tide is a patient who is already circling the drain.
Dr. Marik showed me an (unpublished?) in vitro study showing that hydrocortisone + ascorbic acid does something to protect endothelial cells that neither does alone. So there is actually reason to think that the combination therapy is important. Of course the model may or may not match what’s really happening in septic patients.
This comment almost convinced me not to donate — there’s an ongoing clinical trial, so the need is less urgent, right?
My second thought was: *I* wouldn’t be convinced by a single clinical trial, so if it’s this promising then it would be great to see multiple slightly-varying trials happen. Donated.
Perhaps fortuitously, Jeff Bezos just made an open solicitation for charitable endeavors on Twitter. He says he wants things “at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact.” I’d say this qualifies very well on both fronts.
Someone should suggest the trial to him. I would do it, but I have virtually no Twitter presence and I suspect someone with a higher profile stands a better chance of getting through.