Elephantine Culture
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: The bigger hatred makes you feel, the smaller you are.
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Okay, time to wax clinical, I think. So the cartoon looks something like this…
The social interdependence of humans means that the social standing of individuals possesses far more survival value than the theoretical standing of their beliefs. Since it’s far better to belong to present coalitions than to be right about absent facts, the machinery of the latter is placed at the disposal of the former. This is the drum I’ve been beating for years now, as well as Haidt’s thesis.
As we’ve witnessed first-hand, the machinery of belonging operates in ways that can be quite ugly. Shaming, scapegoating, denigrating, and bullying seem to be the most natural and readily available communicative modes—schoolyard stuff I’m sure all of us have suffered (and employed) in our childhood.
Despite all the bad press these methods generally receive, people employing them think they are entirely justified, either regardless of the harm that results or (in the case of ‘trolls’) because of it. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, given the existential stakes of inter-group competition in human prehistory. The idea is that some version of the ‘false-negative selection bias’ is at work here: it’s better to jump at thousand shadows than to miss one killer. Evolution often favours the quick and dirty over the slow and scrupulous. It doesn’t matter if innocents are punished, so long as the dragnet reliably catches genuine competitors. You can see the same evolutionary principle at work in PTSD, where the low resolution of the ‘quick and dirty’ fear system regularly mistakes innocuous stimuli for potentially lethal threats.
It really is quite remarkable, if you think about it. It’s no surprise that the perceived facts of the matter make no difference, since each party in the dispute duly believes that it has cornered the truth. The surprising and alarming thing is the way even obvious second order claims find themselves batted aside. So, even though it’s obviously the case that all parties could be wrong, arguments that turn on appeals to this fact have no more immediate impact than those that argue contrary facts.
I say ‘immediate impact’ because I find it very interesting the way Vox felt compelled to return after a year or so, convinced he had arguments that could demolish this second order case. This might hold for ACM and her party as well, but I know my every attempt to make this second order argument was either buried under red herrings or ignored outright. Vacuous dismissal, personal attack, accusations of communicative malfeasance—anything but a simple acknowledgement that, yes, they could be wrong. It really is quite extraordinary—and alarming.
One of Haidt’s recurring themes in The Righteous Mind is the injunction to step outside of the moral circuits we find ourselves caught up in—to avoid, as much as possible, becoming embroiled. The book’s raison d’etre, after all, is to find some way of resolving America’s political impasse. It’s a classic Enlightenment approach: before you can solve a problem, you must first learn what that problem is.
So what is Haidt’s solution? Not much more than a vague call for institutional ‘decompartmentalization.’ ‘Compartmentalization,’ as those weary souls who have weathered my rants against the literary establishment know, is what I call the process of ‘belief and value-grouping’ enabled by information technology. It’s the whole reason I opened TPB to Vox and ACM in the first place: an attempt to cut against the psycho-technological grain, to reach out–if only to ponder the blisters on our fingers!
The idea is that information technology, far from being a communicative panacea, is deeply mixed bag, especially given the consumer ‘belief culture’ it finds itself expressed in. Just think of Fox News. Rupert Murdoch’s genius lay in realizing the way belonging trumps being right, and that ‘facts’ (group specific values and beliefs) were simply a market like any other. Beliefs and values are in the process of being branded and commodified in a manner and on a scale without historical precedent. Call it the ‘birds-of-a-feather effect’: absent any geographical or material constraint, people will generally gravitate toward groups that confirm their values and beliefs.
This is why I see Haidt’s conclusions, not to mention our first hand experiences here, so damn depressing. Haidt isolates, for instance, Newt Gingrich’s 1995 demand that Republican representatives not move their families to Washington as a crucial turning point in the collapse of political civility and cooperation in Washington. It’s far more difficult to hate the father of your kid’s best friend than it is the stranger across the aisle.
The more difficult it is to sort us from them the more difficult it becomes to maintain an adversarial coalition mindset. You listen to the father of your kid’s best friend. And thinking back, this rings true of many of the most profitable political debates I’ve had: they all began in the absence of any clear-cut political identifications. (The biggest error I made picking ACM as a left-wing counterpart of Vox was the fact that I had an obvious axe to grind—which is to say, the way I came in ‘pre-identified’ as one of the ‘evil them.’). What we need to do, Haidt is suggesting, is redesign our political institutions so as to complicate the kinds of identifications made by their members.
This seems simple enough. Segregation is the problem, the lack of common identifications and the meaningful interdependencies that give rise to them (Vox’s boxes are anything but the cure he imagines them to be!). And this totally makes sense, given that our cognitive egocentrism is likely the evolutionary product of daily, existential interdependence. Our self-serving biases are the product of a high-pressure social atmosphere, one where concession and compromise are inescapable facts of daily existence.
And this is what I find so depressing! Industrialization had already sucked much of the social air out of the human room by relocating material dependency beyond the pale of identification. We live in an age where strangers make all the implements of our survival, a time when we can shut down all interpersonal contact whatsoever, and still survive. But the degree to which we needed to socialize, we were still pretty much stranded with the people—along with the attitudes—that chance and geography served up to us. The social atmosphere was thin, but it was still an atmosphere, still a check on the violence and radicality of our values and beliefs.
No longer. Now, stranded with the bland injunction ‘to believe’ and stamped with the false conviction that having an opinion is all it takes to be a ‘critical thinker,’ we can float and gravitate toward whatever values and attitudes ‘just feel right,’ utterly ignorant of any rational criteria whatsoever, let alone any knowledge of our tragic dispositions to be duped. Now the worst of us can call and call, do everything they can to appeal to what’s worst in us. Since we are hardwired to be self-exculpating and other-denigrating, these kinds of attitudes exert a gravitational attraction almost inversely proportional to their rational warrant.
We can now effortlessly join communities were bigotry is simply ‘common sense,’ where punishing perceived out-group competitors on the basis of nothing more than an ill-will and a hunger for celebrity can double as ‘good clean fun.’
Compartmentalization is the theory that the internet, by removing the geographical brakes on cognitive egocentrism, will lead to an increasingly ‘elephantine’ culture, one that is ever more fractious, extreme, and irrational. In the United States, for instance, the worst case scenario would be that the present political polarization will eventually generate genuinely disastrous economic consequences, which will lead to even more polarization, and thence to a complete breakdown of democratic institutions.
Since I’m not a psychologist, all I can do is appeal to those of you who are. It would be interesting, I think, to run experiments on the patterns of groupishness that arise given different communicative logistics. Over the past few weeks there’s been more than a few times where I’ve found myself wondering how old my interlocutors were, thinking that the willingness to adopt, let alone tolerate, abusive and irrational modes of social discourse was simply the product of some kind of generational sea change in communicative expectations.
How do the attitudes of a group evolve when extremists are given a voice? How do they evolve when communicative logistics force or incentivize collaborative activity with out-group competitors? What, for that matter, is the base rate for ‘ideological mutation’ in various kinds of groups?
The list of potential questions go on and on. As do the worries.
Three Pound Brain 
“The surprising and alarming thing is the way even obvious second order claims find themselves batted aside.”
Such as? (My problem may be trying to rectify a more mathy idea of second order logic here, and not being sure how you are usng it.)
Claims about claim-making.
Gotcha.
Fascinating and, yes, frightening ideas here. I feel, however, that this discussion (as so far presented) is itself a bit one-sided.
Is this tendency toward a more elephantine culture, I wonder, not to some extent checked by the internet’s tendency to erode certain social boundaries – to depolarize – in some cases? Here I think of the impact of the internet, especially in regards to gender and sexuality, in Iran. Or, do you think this latter tendency to be nonexistent.
Well, internet can certainly facilitate exposure – by sheer accident – to different modes of thought (hey, women over there don’t wear burkhas, and lo and behold, their society hasn’t kershploded yet!). BUT. But but but… People, usually, don’t seek out that experience, and in fact seek the contrary of that experience, what a nice lady once described as a moderation policy intended to ensure “safe places” where people can be “comfortable”.
This desire for mental “comfort” as far as online experience goes is what brings about a kind of “compartmentalization” Scott seems to be talking about.
I think blogs reinforce confirmation, but there are forums that facilitate debates and discussion.
Vox notes lots of people debate stuff on his site – but why would he?
RoH is an SFF book review site for the most part, I’ve rarely seen large debates conducted on any such site.
As I said, personal experiences like interaction with two sites on the internet is a terrible sample to base conclusions off of.
“but why should he” should be “and why would he lie?”
Well, Saajan, people tend to chose forums based on their pre-existing preferences and biases as well. Also, do note that I am not making my claims based on reviewing our current most discussed environments, but the way things seem to be organized in general.
“Forum has too many dirty lieberulz among mods ? Choose a different forum” applies pretty universally.
I suppose my experiences make me think Scott has a skewed view of real life. Most neighbors, finding their politics conflict, seem to stop talking politics and talk about other things.
I think there will always be people who seek agreement and only agreement, but thanks to the internet more people have a chance to see alternatives.
It’s not either/or, but a matter of degree. Do you remember back when we were looking for a left-wing extremist site? The reason it was so difficult (and why ACM was a blessing) was simply that they all seemed to make so much SENSE, meaning that the general political sensibility of this board (as I’m sure Gareth will tell you) is lefty liberal. We gravitate with the best of them – which is why skepticism becomes so important.
Otherwise, all I’m doing is making a rank, sweeping macro-social guess – one which is only ‘important’ insofar as it reveals the ‘internet brings us all together’ assumption as another rank, sweeping macro-social guess. It’s a long time worry of mine, but one which seems, symptomatically at least coming true. Murray’s latest book, Coming Apart has a bunch more troubling data that I want to consider.
Everyone has a skewed view of reality 🙂
However, picking and choosing neighbors is expensive (I did, however, do exactly that as soon as I could afford) while picking and choosing online environments is free.
The balance of cultural advantages versus disadvantages is the million dollar question. If you take the standpoint of a muslim traditionalist in Egypt, say, you might have grounds to call the Arab Spring as an example of the way the internet facilitates radicalization. The question really is one of how it impacts the status quo: if you think that status quo is good, then radicalization will seem bad. And vice versa.
anything but a simple acknowledgement that, yes, they could be wrong.
Devils advocate: Could you be wrong about your intentions in writing the book?
I’m not thinking of ACM in regard to the question, I think she’s banking on you acting like you can’t be wrong (she uses a sliver of that in anyone else to spring board her many times larger can’t be wrong attitude), but more of the genuine people on her blog (well, genuine and riled up into a righteous fury right now).
My unconscious may be chock full of nasty intentions – of course. I’ve never argued otherwise. I certainly don’t think so for a number of reasons.
If this were the case, you would think it would express itself in my life in ways other than my fiction!
Well, you’ve got a metric there, as opposed to people who claim but grant no metric for failure.
Sorry to add on the question on top of all the bullshit you’re having to deal with right now. I couldn’t deal with even a fraction of that shit.
Just throwing this out there, some researchers in my program are involved in work that might be relevant to the questions you pose at the end of the article (re: youth standards for argumentation, collaboration/competition, conceptual change, and how these are expressed in an online medium). I’ll link two papers from the project which I think are relevant– I’ve only seen presentations so I’m not sure if these particular ones will cover those specific topics. But, if you’re curious about some (off the top of my head) current work relevant to these topics (and there is a lot, in social & ed psych/learning sciences) here’s an example:
Click to access Instructional%20Science_2003_31(4-5)_255.pdf
Click to access 07%20NERA%202010_Winter%20GlobalEd2%20paper_Yukhymenko%20et%20al.pdf
Very cool. I will check these out!
@Callan:
“well, genuine and riled up into a righteous fury right now”
I can almost assure you no one, let alone ACM, gives a fuck about Neuropath, PoN, AE, or Scott.
Ever have one of your friends tell you a bad date story, or a story about how their waiter/mechanic/cashier/professor was an asshole?
Did you care for more than a few minutes after the story was told? Vox is talking about Muslim immigrants, Valente is talking about her new books, Moon’s last review was Throne of the Crescent Moon.
Honestly I doubt most of Theo’s or Moon’s *readers* (as opposed to this overly dramatic notion of followers) even come to TPB.
No one cares. It’s like the bad date or bad service from months back, the world moves on.
@Scott:
I think just about everything you’ve said in this essay is a reiteration of things you’ve said before. I think I followed most of this closely but even I don’t really remember the sequence of events where you opened TPB up.
You told Seth you could write essays about the subtext in your work, why you arranged scenes the way you did. I know myself and other fans have asked you to discuss your writing from an aesthetic perspective.
So explaining why and how you wrote some of the scenes would be interesting and give people something to talk about. Some of the best posts on TPB have been biographical, I’d love to hear how you came to the conclusions about feminism that you did or how did you come up with the Inchoroi.
So you could kill two birds with one stone, hell maybe sell some more books even.
If Vox is the ultimate evil, feel free to debate him on certainty & war or challenge his “Blacks have never assimilated” article when it comes out. Just make sure you continually compare him to Conphas or something, you know, to plug the books.
-Sci
Saajan, if no one remembers, why do we bother talking about whether a book is mysogynistic? No one will remember/be influenced/be encouraged by it – they’ll just forget. Why bother with gender in genre threads of so many pages? Why does Valente rag on about ‘rabid animal’ name calling at all – we’ll all just forget anyway? I’m sure no ones riled up whilst on the toilet or eating dinner, but if they return to the subject it’ll be there, fresh and raging, like they’d never left.
I can almost assure you no one, let alone ACM, gives a fuck about Neuropath, PoN, AE, or Scott.
Ignoring the Scott part (as he isn’t the arena of debate like the books are), that’s the problem. The irony is that burning books is less effective than this at making people not give a shit.
My point is no one is sitting at home being angry about how the books need to be banned or some author who runs TPB may or may not be sexist.
No one on the “side” of Vox or Moon, save perhaps one or two people at best, are reading this post.
Even if they were, what’s new in the post that wasn’t in other posts?
As for this supposedly troubling turn of events -> Just because people who read Vox or Moon agree with Vox or Moon about Scott and his works, it doesn’t mean they agree with Vox or Moon about everything else.
But when your one sample point is yourself, you can draw all kinds of conclusions about the world.
I’m trying out your cockpit, Saajan and I’m wondering if you estimate I’m hurting anyone else or hurting any supporting infrastructe? As you say, if no ones reading these posts, what does it matter if I say they are riled up into a righteous fury?
Oh, it doesn’t matter it’s just, with a high probability, erroneous. No one is riled about about Scott or his books.
Which is my point, we’re at the point where its open mic night and only your friends and a few stragglers are left.
The opportunity cost of this post is all the interesting posts that might benefit Scott financially and increase the happiness of his fans.
If the goal is to actually draw back people who might be on the Moon or Vox “side”, then I’d suggest posting an actual argument instead of the latest, longest scolding tract on why no one but the loyal TPB’ers are adherents to reason.
Which is my point, we’re at the point where its open mic night and only your friends and a few stragglers are left.
Well, my post was to Scott, so I’m fine with that. I’m not like Kalbear, pretending to talk to someone so as to loud hailer to others. Well, sometimes, but not this time.
I’ll offer the compromise that it was simply my guess it’s the case/was the case (lazily,I didn’t specify that before). Will you offer any compromise back, or attempt to fly me into the ground, Saajan?
Confused -> Is there anything to even compromise about?
I mean, I don’t mind if you want to think people are deeply angered at Scott after Moon’s Neuropath posts, or that anyone really cares about Scott’s multiple post campaign beyond those of us who’d wish he’d post something interesting again.
Apparently fan-fiction was a legal kerfuffle, maybe we can put out a call to fan art?
I wonder what happened to Seth? Has anyone been getted the ‘potted posts’ feeling. There seems to have been more than a few newbies cropping up, saying ‘I’m a supporter but…’ then vanishing without responding to questions.
It’s too bad because there were a couple of assumptions he seemed to be making that I wanted to pin down. I don’t know if you want to bat for him, Sci, but one had to do with the place of heterosexual erotica in fiction. There seems to be this assumption that any writing that identifies the writer as a heterosexual male is ipso facto sexist or misogynist. So for instance, Seth seemed preoccupied by the differences in descriptive detail between differing kinds sexual representation, and suggested that he was troubled by the fact that it was gendered. Like I always say, there isn’t a sex scene or gendered description that I write that I’m not overly self-conscious of (which for me, always equals some kind of sideways tweaking and problematization), but even if I weren’t, I’m not sure I see how that qualifies a scene as sexist or misogynistic. Is all heterosexual erotica instantly misogynistic? Does the author have a moral duty to desexualize the narratorial voice?
I was thinking that I should write an essay – an apologia. But I’m sure you’ve encountered much of what I’ve had to say over the months and years Sci!
Heh, I think Seth is just less invested than most of us. Plus I find the comment structure to be a poor place for prolonged discussion as it gets hard to keep track of comments.
I was thinking about this a bit, the question of anything sexual targeted at a male audience. PoVs will lend themselves to male gazes if the PoV is male, and in a sense that is just writing in character.
I think the eye-brows get raised more when sexuality is paired with degradation, or when women exist almost completely as sexual goals.
I don’t think people have a lot of issues with the consensual sex in your books so much as the fact that a woman theoretically rapes a man but then gets her head blown off which turns into a joke later. There’s also the sexual desire conflated with men wanting youth, which I get you were attempting to address….but the line “plain in the way of abused children” sticks out as a glaring example of poor word choice.
There’s also the “men can’t help themselves” trope that runs through the books, which seems like a callback to the “boys will be boys” defense.
But this is also guesstimation – what you need is to draw more people into discussion. You should definitely write some kind of essays on your views, starting with your reply to Seth – I’ve definitely gotten a better understanding of your positions over the 7-8 years since I first saw your discussions with Matt Stover on Dead Cities.
You’re going to get flak no matter what you write, from some quarters, as these are controversial subjects. But I think the authentic voices -as opposed to my second hand analyses – will be good -> I know the female posters on Westeros seemed more irritated by your post to Seth when I linked to it than the males.
I also realize there’s a feeling you’ll be repeating yourself, but right now so many of your thoughts are scattered across comments and interviews it is hard for anyone to respond/discuss in a meaningful way.
Feminism arose in the context of social constructivism and its blank slatist commitments, and this has lead many in the movement, I think, to systematically misdiagnose the profundity of the problem. Since cultural products are central to socialization, censorship becomes the natural locus for critique: if we can only get our representations right, we can get on top of this problem. The problem is twofold: First, given our inability to justify the legislation of representations according anything but the most obvious norms, feminists have no recourse to actual censorship, and so have to resort to censoriousness – post facto argument, shaming, and so on. Second, if socialization occurs across a biologically skewed ground, then ‘getting our representations right’ is not only not the answer, but not even possible. Some different approach is needed (not unlike the recent movements to spearhead boys-only sex education that confronts biology head on).
The ‘boys will be boys’ argument is a facile rationalization of an oppressive status quo in the philosophical blank slatist picture. It’s the statement of a profound social dilemma in the scientific biological picture. Anyone who persists in adhering to the facile blank slatist approach quite literally has nothing but moral outrage to offer, because short of actually having a clear sense of the problem, any solution offered will be at best a stab in the dark. I think the paradoxical position of feminism today illustrates this impasse.
One of the big questions NP raises is what happens IF it turns out that men have something like a ‘rape module’ in their head. The crazy thing about the whole slasher, psycho-killer genre is the voyeurism, the way the genre reproduces the crime for consumption, not from the standpoint of the victim, but from the standpoint of the perpetrator. In NP, genre sexploitation is twisted, turned and tweaked in many different ways. It’s all so obviously problematized – the book actually directly references the problem in different places, simply because I knew I would face knee-jerk condemnation.
Interesting. A combination of this and your last comment to Seth should be your next post.
Whether people agree or disagree, it is at least a response that can be debated and discussed.
Seconded.
Scott, you mentioned an interest in how changes in our perspectives might change relative to age. I think you would be interested in the work of developmental psychologist, Robert Kegan. His research has led him to elaborate on five stages of the evolution of self. His book The Evolution of Self discusses these chronological stages. A follow up book called In Over Our Heads points out that most of us don’t ever develop the perspective typical of the fifth stage. Unfortunately, according to Kegan, the fifth stage perspective is the one neede to deal effectively with the challenges of the modern world. Most of us stall in our development at the third or fourth level of personal evolution.
Definitely worth a looksee, particularly give the strange view BBT takes on the self…
Segregation is the problem, the lack of common identifications and the meaningful interdependencies that give rise to them (Vox’s boxes are anything but the cure he imagines them to be!). And this totally makes sense, given that our cognitive egocentrism is likely the evolutionary product of daily, existential interdependence. Our self-serving biases are the product of a high-pressure social atmosphere, one where concession and compromise are inescapable facts of daily existence.
You’re just amazingly ignorant of not only history, but even recent social science, Scott. Putnam, Letki, and others have shown, contra your groundless assumptions, that ethnic diversity reduces social cohesion, social capital, and neighborhood trust. Segregation isn’t the problem, immigration and forced integration are!
The amusing thing is that you’ve noticed a “generational sea change” and failed to realize that this is at least in part the result of the very increased diversity that you think is the solution. You yammer on constantly about the vital importance of uncertainty and doubt, and yet you never seem to ever reconsider your utterly conventional left-liberal assumptions.
The first inter-ethnic skirmishes are already taking place everywhere from the USA to Hungary, the failure of multiculturalism has been announced by one mainstream European politician after another, and you’re still rambling on as if it’s the early days of the Civil Rights era.
Putnam, Letki, and others have shown, contra your groundless assumptions, that ethnic diversity reduces social cohesion, social capital, and neighborhood trust.
What did they do, look at a ghetto and conclude ‘THIS skin caused this!’. Or to be more charitable, it’d be interesting to look at the scope of their investigation.
We’ve talked about these studies on this blog before. He’s not ignorant of them. The conclusions are subject to interpretation, however. Social science isn’t physics.
What do you mean “the first inter-ethnic skirmishes” ? Inter-ethnic skirmishes are older than writing, no ?
I hate to pile on (really I do…you are outnumbered here, Vox, and it feels like bullying), but what is obvious and often ignored in these kinds of ethnic skirmish arguments is that it boils down to economics. It can be easily argued that the reason it appears there are racial/ethnic skirmishes is poverty combined with (overly simplified to illustrate) “If you people could just look and act exactly as whites do, you wouldn’t have this problem.” It’s unreasonable and, I would argue, self-defeating. While there are many cultural practices that I find abhorrent, there are also often times many things to offer, that could potentially improve an insular, stale culture that only seems to worship wealth and planet-rape. Alternate views on how things are or should be are healthy for a society. Saying, “Nope, our way is the only way, the proven way, the best way” without thinking it through is, I believe, denial that is leading to the very things that these studies want to lay on the powerless. The powerless don’t shake the earth, the powerful do. This is just a fancy form of the bully being caught and saying, “Well, he started it.”
“Industrialization had already sucked much of the social air out of the human room by relocating material dependency beyond the pale of identification. We live in an age where strangers make all the implements of our survival, a time when we can shut down all interpersonal contact whatsoever, and still survive.”
Two sentences, well crafted. Curiously enough, the post almost reads like a defense of etiquette, or at least the social graces that allow people to get past the fact that they’re strangers to find common ground. I’ve read that one of the best ways to view someone as respectful and intelligent is to treat that person with respect and intelligence. Come to think of it, that was probably over at You Are Not So Smart. http://youarenotsosmart.com/
I’m going to continue some of the back and forth I had with Theo in the previous post here, since that way it’s easier to keep track of.
Theo wrote:
“That’s why the superintelligence thing stings them so much whereas most people don’t give a damn or find it amusing.”
This is both true and false. It’s true that the ‘superintelligence’ thing touches a nerve. However, I’ve actually found “most people” become immediately defensive in real life if you even insinuate you might be more clever than they are. On the internet this behavior can be tolerated because you have no direct social ties to those around you. If the people in your day-to-day life tolerate you lording your ‘super intelligence’ over them.
Theo wrote:
“I don’t think I’m indisputably correct”
I’m going to highlight this (somewhat out of context) because this admission means that you must harbor some doubt. This alone is sufficient for people to start finding common ground and perhaps trying to understand perspectives. So, given that you’ve done that much, I’ll oblige and read some of your essays. At least this way I can critique your actual opinion and not the things I assume your opinion to be.
Oh, one last thing. One key concept we generally agree upon in these here parts is that the more intelligent, educated and well-read a person is, then the more competent that person becomes at rationalizing prior intellectual commitments. Of course, this blade cuts both ways…
Oops.
The sentence
“If the people in your day-to-day life tolerate you lording your ‘super intelligence’ over them.”
Should read:
“If the people in your day-to-day life tolerate you lording your ‘super intelligence’ over them they must have the patience of saints.”
the present political polarization will eventually generate genuinely disastrous economic consequences, which will lead to even more polarization, and thence to a complete breakdown of democratic institutions.
Oh, that’s a sure thing already. But it’s not the present political polarization, rather, it was the post-1980 political consensus that unlimited debt-spending was good for the economy that has already generated the negative economic consequences we’re just beginning to see. Italy’s democracy has fallen, Greece’s democracy has fallen, and the USA’s likely will in the next 20 years. The next stage in the Ciceronian cycle appears to be approaching, rule by aristocracy.
We’ve talked about these studies on this blog before. He’s not ignorant of them. The conclusions are subject to interpretation, however. Social science isn’t physics.
True, but something beats nothing. Where are the empirical justifications for Scott’s claims? If Scott’s view on segregation were correct, he wouldn’t be so depressed. Science, logic, history, and current events are all lined up against him, and what has he presented in support? Not a damned thing. And yet, he still clings to his belief despite of the growing weight of evidence against it. He’s not a bad skeptic, he’s not a skeptic at all, as evidenced by his lack of tranquility.
However, I’ve actually found “most people” become immediately defensive in real life if you even insinuate you might be more clever than they are. On the internet this behavior can be tolerated because you have no direct social ties to those around you. If the people in your day-to-day life tolerate you lording your ‘super intelligence’ over them they must have the patience of saints.”
The people in my day-to-day life don’t mind it at all. Unlike many here, they don’t regard my mere possession of it as “lording” it over them. They even find it amusing, judging by the way they usually laugh after asking what I’m presently reading. My soccer team nicknamed me “dottore” and found it absolutely hysterical that I introduced tactics to the scuola calcio…. until the kids beat the local professional club’s team four times in a row. I’ve found that it’s primarily the moderately intelligent who erroneously believe they are highly intelligent who get defensive when they encounter the real thing.
I’m going to highlight this (somewhat out of context) because this admission means that you must harbor some doubt.
Didn’t you understand what I wrote about probability from the very start? I don’t even believe in the existence of certainty in the form of 100% probability, nor do I subscribe to the binary certainty/uncertainty model that is thrown around here. In that sense, I am far more of a true skeptic than Scott or other would-be champions of doubt. The probabilities can’t always be quantified perfectly, but they can be reasonably estimated and utilized in predictive models.
Anyhow, once I tear apart Delavagus’s posts on Pyrrhonism, many of the core flaws of the ancient foundation for the Uncertainty Principle will be readily obvious to everyone.
“But it’s not the present political polarization, rather, it was the post-1980 political consensus that unlimited debt-spending was good for the economy that has already generated the negative economic consequences we’re just beginning to see. Italy’s democracy has fallen, Greece’s democracy has fallen, and the USA’s likely will in the next 20 years. The next stage in the Ciceronian cycle appears to be approaching, rule by aristocracy.”
If I had to pick one thing that’s going to be the biggest factor in economic collapse, I could probably do no better than to agree with you about the debt, or at least the principles behind accruing such an unmanageable amount of it. I also believe that more than just our democracy will disintegrate (assuming it’s integrated now…) in the next 20 years.
But I sincerely hope you’re wrong about the aristocracy. Although I’m not sure how much difference would be apparent from the way our government works now.
Sorry I haven’t been around much Vox. I still have no idea what you’re talking about regarding certainty. What is your position again?
Should crime be statistically linked to immigration according to your view Vox? More immigration, more crime?
Should war more generally be statistically linked to ethnic desegregation? More desegregation, more war?
More immigration of people more likely to commit crime -> more crime. This is not rocket science. The abstract concept of immigration doesn’t commit crimes, people do.
But crime in Canada has gone down, even as immigration has ramped up.
What if the real link is ghettoization, not immigration?
As I said, immigration in itself is not required to raise crime. It matters what kind of people you are importing. You have to also take any preexisting or independently acting crime trends into account.
Re “ghettoization”, this merely moves you a step. Is it not true that (ceteris paribus) ghettoization tends to be lower (if not outright nonexistent) if the population is homogeneous, and that immigration increases ghettoization? But, you’ll say, this is where desegregation comes in. You would have had a point a few decades ago, but it has already come in, and the results are neither convincing nor pretty.
And crime is only the top of the iceberg. Permanent fault lines in the electorate create monolithic voting blocs and render democracy a lot less efficient system of government.
“it’s primarily the moderately intelligent who erroneously believe they are highly intelligent”
Can you quantify what you mean by moderately and highly intelligent?
The probabilities can’t always be quantified perfectly, but they can be reasonably estimated and utilized in predictive models.
Which you then treat as a source of certainty anyway, regardless of what grevous moral harm it may cause. What would you do if your immigration idiology was proven to be false, after you’ve enacted it? Do you put aside any resources to make up for if you are wrong? No, you bet the whole lot – that’s still utter certainty. Predictive models my ass, you don’t give a shit what happens if you’re wrong (unless it’s a question of economics and your money/could sting your hip pocket).
Which you then treat as a source of certainty anyway, regardless of what grevous moral harm it may cause.
Bark bark bark. Woof.
What would you do if your immigration idiology was proven to be false, after you’ve enacted it?
Do exactly what the USA did after its previous moratoriums on immigration and open the borders again. The far more relevant question is for you: what will you do now that your pro-immigration policies and multicultural ideology have already been shown to be false, socially and economically destructive, and conducive to ethnic violence?
Do you put aside any resources to make up for if you are wrong?
You have got to be kidding! Clearly you don’t understand that the governments of the West have already borrowed trillions to pay for their expensive immigration policies. So, first of all, there will be more resources if I am right. And in the very unlikely event that I am wrong, the governments can borrow or print more money, just as they’ve been doing for the last century. Until the global financial system collapses, which is going to happen, thanks in small part to the unnecessary financial pressures created by immigration and multiculturalism.
Bark bark bark. Woof.
Not good enough, Beale. Find your dad for your hug.
I’d go out on a limb to propose that Putnam’s social trust is not entirely a good thing, and that having a relatively high degree of social trust makes one more vulnerable to various attacks leveraging trust, both on interpersonal and institutional level.
It’s kinda like “facebook effect” when people let their guard down, automatically trust people about who they are (and get genuinely SHOCKED when lesbian from Iran turns out to be overweight American), and share information about their whereabouts without considering just how easy it would be for Mr. McRapinson to get them with all that info.
Trust is a weakness 😉
I congratulate you on your bravery in writing such an extended mea culpa post – it’s far too rare, and most of us don’t have the courage to do it.
However, you may want to make the “I may have been wrong”, “I have employed bullying and faux-objective neutrality”, and “I realise that my interlocutors will have been wondering how old I am” a bit more explicit – as it is, it’d be really easy to draw the conclusion that you intended those to apply to them more than to yourself.
Bullying? Who ? Where? 0__O wat.
Ah, but without back-handed condescension, Scott just wouldn’t be Scott. 😉
I gotta let all this bottled man-rage out somehow…
I think it’s more your talking style as an academic. It makes people feel like you are scolding or lecturing at them, instead of wanting dialogue.
The post also reads like a continuation of a protracted tone argument, which will, to those who have no cause to think well of you, seem like a cover-your-ass maneuver used to obfuscate an inability to actually defend your artistic choices.
It’s less the condescension that disappoints me than the blithe assumption that if there’s teaching to be done, Bakker is the one to do it, rather than learning about feminism, oppression, & misogyny from experts. As an ex-academic myself, that’s a clear marker of someone who’s smack in the middle of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and/or who’s mortally afraid that they’ll never do any better than they already have, so what they’ve already done must be defended at all costs.
Why does everyone assume I assume I’m the only competent person in the room? When people lay criticisms I don’t understand, I ask questions, then get accused of trying to control the debate (among other things) rather than any real response. And now you, suggesting that it’s just me and my fear to learn or to be humbled by the possibility of learning or whatever the character defect attributed to me. Let me assure you, I spend most of my time feeling like I have chicken noodle soup sloshing through my brain! I feel under-read and over-opinionated and so on and so on. This is why, when someone asks me something I don’t understand I ask questions rather than call them names and contradict. And when someone asks me questions I try to answer as honestly and articulately as I can.
That said, I have encountered an enormous amount of personal abuse these past months, as well as encountered more than few individuals with no interest aside from insulting me and impugning my reputation. How many names by how many people do I have to be called to earn the right to a little snark now and again?
If you doubt my sincerity, then lay your grievances on the table. What questions have I failed to address?
@Somhairle Kelly
I think it speaks to very different experiences/perceptions. In Scott’s mind, as I see it, he’s attempting to point out the dangers of assuming depiction equals endorsement and how anger pushes away those who would consider your arguments.
To others, this seems like a derailment when the topic that should, in many minds, be under discussion is depiction of women in varied compromising ways. It’s also seen as telling someone their anger over some depiction is overwrought, which is also seen as derailment.
So Scott, in attempting to make his point – which he I guess thinks hasn’t been understood, is in fact seen as furthering attempting to derail/obfuscate. It’s a big negative feedback loop.
@ Somhairle Kelly
“Bakker is the one to do it, rather than learning about feminism, oppression, & misogyny from experts”
Sadly, I’m afraid there’s no such thing as formal expertise in feminism (and the concept of “expert in opression” brings rather odd vistas to mind 😉 ).
Feminism, most unfortunately, is a very diverse movement with a very weak “culling response” in regards to its own self-professed members, which allows radically different and even polar opposite views to end up under the same feminist umbrella.
Take, for instance, the rather straightforward issue of MTF transsexuals – it takes one a single google search to find out that so-called “expert” (or at least, prominent activist, since we agreed “feminism expert” is a murky concept) positions range from acceptance to claims that ” “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves” and claims that transsexuals intend to “colonize feminist identification” (how that is supposed to work is beyond me, but I am not a prominent feminist activist and probably am missing the right brainmeats for the task)
Same goes for positions on pornography, prostitution (and other forms of compensated sexual exchange), BDSM, marriage, pretty much any issue of politics, models dealing with causal factors behind oppression (though my favorite brand of worthless gobbledegoo, one revolving around assertions that depictions of violence reinforce IRL violence, etc., seems especially common in feminist discourse 😦 ) – everything has numerous mutually exclusive, or at the very least, extremely divergent, positions which are all labeled “feminist” and are expressed by “prominent” “experts in feminism”.
That makes “learning” from “experts” about feminism a rather daunting task fraught with dangers and liable to lead to very underwhelming result.
P.S.:
Given how divergent and discordant the field is, Scott is as much of an expert in feminism as Janice Raymond, as long as you are willing to accept that an XY individual can be such ;).
At least he doesn’t hate trannies (You don’t Scott, do you ? 🙂 )
Only the one’s they put in Fords back in the 80’s.
Theo wrote:
“They even find it amusing, judging by the way they usually laugh after asking what I’m presently reading.”
Maybe they find YOU amusing. Or are being politely dismissive. Have you considered the possibility that not only are you not as smart as you think you might be, but that your social sensibilities might also be out of whack? (These things plague me every day!) Have you ever tried to measure your own effectiveness? That is: how often do you manage to persuade someone on the opposite side of an argument that you are correct? My feeling is that your online personality is so abrasive and pundit-like that it probably doesn’t happen often.
Theo wrote:
“Didn’t you understand what I wrote about probability from the very start?”
I understand it can be difficult to keep track of who has read what and who is saying what in this internet dogpile. I just started to read your stuff. My default position was to assume that anyone who called My Favorite Author “wangsty” was probably just full of shit, but as it turns out, you’re only about 99% full of shit. Last night I tortured myself a little by reading the freely available parts of TIA. At least you give Daniel Dennett his due, albeit with several backhanded compliments.
Theo wrote:
“Something beats nothing.”
Even if we assume the studies to be a flawless indicator that diversity drives social capital down, we can’t then say that homogenizing all cultures becomes the way forward. Trends in the modern world will simply not permit that.
Interracial Couples on the Rise
“Interracial partnering across the USA has reached new peaks, according to Census data released Wednesday that reflect sharp increases in the percentages of people of different races who are married or living together.
Among opposite-sex married couples, one in 10 (5.4 million couples) are interracial, a 28% jump since 2000. In 2010, 18% of heterosexual unmarried couples were of a different race (1.2 million couples) and 21% of same-sex couples (133,477 couples) were mixed.
The data show “we’re becoming much more of an integrated, multi-racial society,” says demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution.
“This is a movement toward a post-racial society, but most social scientists would agree we’re a long way from a colorblind or post-racial society,” says sociologist Dan Lichter of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
“Race is still a category that separates and divides us,” but “this might be evidence that some of the historic boundaries that separate the races are breaking down,” Lichter says.
Christelyn Karazin, 38, of Temecula, Calif., on Friday celebrates the 10th anniversary of her marriage to Michael Karazin, 39. She is black; he is white.
She says the Internet has allowed more people of different races to interact. She and her husband, who met online, “would never have met” otherwise. “He’s from Westport, Conn. His father is a judge. My parents are from the country in Texas. My mom picked cotton.”
Saw this article on Huffington Post
” A new analysis of 2010 U.S. Census data has found that same-sex couples are more likely to be interracial or inter-ethnic compared to their heterosexual counterparts.
Analyzed by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, “Same-Sex Couples In Census 2010: Race And Ethnicity” found that 20.6 percent, or more than one in five same-sex couples, were interracial or inter-ethnic, compared with 18.3 percent of straight unmarried couples, and 9.5 percent of straight married couples”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/26/gay-couples-interracial-interethnic-2010-census_n_1456613.html?ref=gay-voices
Awesome. Also, if I recall you’re a spiritual person right? Thought you might want to check this out:
http://www.firstshowing.net/2012/first-trailer-for-documentary-samsara-has-stunning-70mm-imagery/
It’s a trailer for Samsara.
Continuing this trend of assimilation, biracial babies are on the rise:
“The number of mixed-race babies has soared over the past decade, new census data show, a result of more interracial couples and a cultural shift in how many parents identify their children in a multiracial society.
More than 7 percent of the 3.5 million children born in the year before the 2010 Census were of two or more races, up from barely 5 percent a decade earlier. The number of children born to black and white couples and to Asian and white couples almost doubled.”
“Also, if I recall you’re a spiritual person right?”
If you asked me that five years ago, I would have said yes without hesitation. Today, I don’t really know what spiritual means so I will just say tha I’m a Buddhist of the Mādhyamika variety.
Thanks for the link. I greatly admire Ron Fricke’s Baraka as well as the work he did on Koyaanisqatsi (he was the DP). The film looks beautiful (shooting on 70mm film will do that..if you haven’t seen Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet I would highly recommend. It, too, was shot on 70mm). I look forward to seeing this.
Have you considered the possibility that not only are you not as smart as you think you might be, but that your social sensibilities might also be out of whack?
No, I know very well where I stand. And my social sensibilities are actually quite good. Do you think I seriously talk about Sextus Empiricus or Neo-Keynesian economic theory in social settings or with women? I get along fine with pretty much everyone. It’s not like anyone gets terribly bent out of shape over the burning questions of whether Kourtney is sexier than Kim or if the Vikings should draft Kalil instead of Claibourne. There are 10,000x more people that care about drivel like that than about justified true belief. And the Vikes should draft Kalil or Ponder will end up like David Carr.
That is: how often do you manage to persuade someone on the opposite side of an argument that you are correct? My feeling is that your online personality is so abrasive and pundit-like that it probably doesn’t happen often.
Very often. You’re incorrect. Just to give one example, many of my hard core libertarian readers were formerly Bush-voting Republican conservatives. I’ve also convinced thousands of people that the current wars and military occupations in the Middle East are not only unjustified, but detrimental to the USA and the American military… including a few of my fellow pundits.
Last night I tortured myself a little by reading the freely available parts of TIA. At least you give Daniel Dennett his due, albeit with several backhanded compliments.
Dennett is the only one of the five addressed who doesn’t completely embarrass himself with his arguments. But, even you will have to admit that he badly screwed the logic pooch with his lancet fluke analogy. It’s not the religious who “forgo having kids”. And I absolutely love this brilliant reasoning.
Trends in the modern world will simply not permit that.
We’ll see, won’t we. People told me I was crazy when I said the Euro was going to fail ten years ago too. Not so much now.
This is a question for Vox – I was reading the past several comment threads and noticed your views on the inequalities between different societies/cultures. I was curious if you’d read “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, which addresses, via extensive research, how geographic conditions contribute to different societies advancing at different rates (mainly due to early adoption of agriculture), and if you had any comments on the author’s thesis.
Theo wrote:
“Do you think I seriously talk about Sextus Empiricus or Neo-Keynesian economic theory in social settings or with women?”
Did I say I thought that? Please point out where.
Theo wrote:
“formerly Bush-voting Republican conservatives”
Oh, so you got one group of people who are prone to thinking blacks and women are inferior and you convinced them that YOUR way of rationalizing everything was better. Your achievements do not fail to impress.
Theo wrote:
“It’s not the religious who “forgo having kids”.”
This is correct to an extent, but you are ignoring some evidence. Clergy (those with the highest level of ‘memetic infection’ if you’ll excuse my use of a term you probably hate) forgo having kids often. Many religious people also choose to abstain from sex altogether. The costs of religiosity are also not simply limited to reproductive limitation. As you point out in your manuscript, religious people donate a lot of money. They spend a significant portion of their time in church and worship. Occasionally they fight and die for their beliefs. Like Dennet, I’m not entirely sure this is 100% bad, but the fluke analogy is not as flawed as you have convinced yourself it is. After all, much of religious behavior is aimed at promulgating.
Theo wrote:
“We’ll see, won’t we.”
I have noticed an uptick in the number of stories regarding anti-semitism in Europe, and the recent Trayvon Martin hullabaloo can be seen as being in line with your viewpoints. But the macro trends favor Dawkins’ ilk far more than his opponents. Back in 2005, Dakwins did a documentary where he interviewed a pastor. The pastor used angry ad hominem attacks against Dawkins, and forced him to leave the premises. The guy? Pastor Ted Haggard who later resigned his post because he was snorting meth with a gay prostitute.
Like seriously, the Imam at the Al-Aqsa mosque was more calm. I guess that meth gets to one, eh?
Anyhow, I’m curious about something: you link to Stross’ blog on your site (under ‘interesting links’). Is there something specific about ‘rapture for nerds’ type thinking that intrigues you?
What do you mean “the first inter-ethnic skirmishes” ?
The first murderous inter-ethnic skirmishes of the European post-multicultural era. You’re correct, these are hardly the first in world history.
I sincerely hope you’re wrong about the aristocracy. Although I’m not sure how much difference would be apparent from the way our government works now.
Yeah, me too. Actually, that’s an example of my flexible beliefs. I’d long assumed that the collapse of Western democracy would lead to dictatorship, but after reading Cicero and looking at the current situation, it became relatively obvious that any post-democratic transformation would be to an aristocracy, not a dictatorship. Which, of course, precisely what we’re seeing now in Italy and Greece with their unelected, IMF-installed governments.
I was curious if you’d read “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, which addresses, via extensive research, how geographic conditions contribute to different societies advancing at different rates (mainly due to early adoption of agriculture), and if you had any comments on the author’s thesis.
Yes, I have. I thought he had some interesting points, but he put far more weight on his thesis than the evidence permitted it to bear. And I thought that he didn’t really think through the geography of South America vis-a-vis Europe. Also, when a civilization doesn’t even invent the wheel, I don’t think it’s geography that is the problem.
Did I say I thought that?
No, you questioned my social sensibilities. I was merely pointing out the absurdity of assuming that because I enjoy ruthlessly carving up intellectual charlatans while discussing intellectual issues, this necessarily translates to inept social behavior with average people. It certainly can, of course, it just doesn’t happen to in my case.
Oh, so you got one group of people who are prone to thinking blacks and women are inferior and you convinced them that YOUR way of rationalizing everything was better. Your achievements do not fail to impress.
You’re moving the goalposts. But I’ve also convinced many women that women should not have the right to vote, which apparently many of you would appear to assume is impossible. I have yet to convert a Packers fan to the Truth NFL Faith, however, so obviously my skills of persuasion have limits.
But the macro trends favor Dawkins’ ilk far more than his opponents.
I very much disagree. Atheism is strongly correlated with economic prosperity. It’s on the decline. The interesting thing from the most recent Pew Report on religions is that children raised atheist convert to religion as adults at a much higher rate than children raised religious convert to atheism.
Is there something specific about ‘rapture for nerds’ type thinking that intrigues you?
No, I find the Singularity to be extremely boring and bordering on self-parody. There was a guy who was a serious believer in it at VP; I invited him to write a post for our edification, but all he came up with was some lame, rehashed Vinge and Kurzweil. I’ve done a little AI design myself, and I’m skeptical that genuinely self-aware, self-willing technology is actually possible. I’ll believe it when I see it. I just like Stross’s work. He has a great short story in Toast that actually has an economics-based punchline, and he’s produced some interesting musings on post-scarcity economics.
Theo wrote:
“bordering on self-parody”
Stross certainly plays it for laughs in Accelerando. I’ve never done AI research, so I don’t know how plausible ‘higher than human’ machine intelligence really is, but I always bet on science. I suggest you read David Chalmers’ treatise on the Singularity, it’s not bad and considers many possible counterarguments against it.
Theo wrote:
“I’ve also convinced many women that women should not have the right to vote, which apparently many of you would appear to assume is impossible.”
I don’t think it’s impossible. We have 4000 years of patriarchy to lean on when we want to put the pressure on them to behave a certain way. That said, I would love to see you convert A Cracked Moon in this regard. See, now the goal posts are really far away… but it should be a trivial kick for your Super Intellect.
Theo wrote:
“Atheism is strongly correlated with economic prosperity.”
No kidding.
Theo wrote:
“The interesting thing from the most recent Pew Report on religions is that children raised atheist convert to religion as adults at a much higher rate than children raised religious convert to atheism.”
That’s one hell of a way to cherry pick which statistic you cite. From the same poll:
“The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%. Moreover, the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three fairly distinct religious traditions – evangelical Protestant churches (26.3% of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant churches (18.1%) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9%).”
Also, considering you have such a low opinion of blacks, you might ask yourself why this statistic is true: “black Americans are the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation” You have something in common with them! Of course, they didn’t use their Super Intelligence to empirically determine the truth of the Bible, right? Right?
This is fun. Stick around Theo, you sure make this place more lively.
That said, I would love to see you convert A Cracked Moon in this regard. See, now the goal posts are really far away… but it should be a trivial kick for your Super Intellect.
Good shot, red 1!
“black Americans are the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation” You have something in common with them!
Oh, and it was a critical hit! Double damage!
I’m afraid to actually wade too deeply into the discussion here, because if I start posting arguments on one side or the other it might well end up absorbing more of my time than I have to spare. But I do want to make one point which I think might help to frame the argument between Vox, Bakker, and his retinue in a more useful way.
ACM, as I see it, is not much more than a troll, out to get a reaction from her opponents. Vox, on the other hand, is actually intelligent, articulate, and mostly genuine, even if he is wrong about many things.
Now, there is good reason to believe that some of the typical views of the left are wrong, and some of the typical views of the right are correct, and vice versa. And some of the views of the left may be true, or at least tenable, but not for the reasons that we want to say they are; again, vice-versa as well.
To put this in terms specific to the case at hand: Vox probably knows at least one thing that we don’t know, although we can’t at this moment know which thing that might be. Thus, discussion with Vox, an intelligent representative of the other side, is actually a learning opportunity, and to avoid our own biases, we should give him the benefit of the doubt, and read his arguments with the most generous interpretation in mind. We’re not on television, where the left and right are more concerned about looking like they’re winning than actually getting anything out of the argument. It’s perfectly fine if it looks like we’re losing, if we take the rhetorically weak position, as long as we’re gaining something from the discussion.
Gaining what? A memory of most generously interpreted claims with no metric given for how they could be wrong? Granted, I do read fiction, but that’s not what you mean, is it?
Are there any other sources you listen to, where you try and absorb your generously interpretation of their claims with no metric for how those claims could be proven wrong, over and over? Your hypothesis is that’ll turn out fine? Any metric for how that could be false?
Here’s how this might play regarding one of Vox’s least palatable ideas. Vox seems to argue that shipping out ethnic minorities, if it were possible, would result in a more cohesive and more prosperous society. While I find this idea reprehensible, I also find it unfortunately plausible from a purely logical perspective, at least in the first point. And yet–I still think I am correct in opposing his idea, but not for the reasons I wanted to believe were true. That is, I am against this kind of national ethnic segregation not for utilitarian or practical reasons, but for purely moral ones. I don’t believe it is right to enforce segregation, even if it were to benefit us in some tangible respects; I believe instead that we have a moral obligation to allow the minority citizens among us to make, largely, their own choices about where they go and what they do. In other words, it turns out that I am the dogmatist on this issue–not my opponent; and painting him as illogical and ignorant was just a way for me to avoid admitting my own dogmatism, my own moral position which I seem to hold beyond the realm of argument. Instead of claiming he is wrong, I now have to claim that he is evil. But wait–aren’t we leftist atheists supposed to live ‘beyond good an evil’? Or didn’t I know myself as well as I thought?
It’s certainly an interesting phenomenon, that one can change one’s argument in midstride, without ever really losing confidence in the conclusion.
aren’t we…supposed to live ‘beyond good an evil’?
No, it’s just some don’t question their reflexive moral reaction, while others do. Everyone has a reflexive moral reaction against someone slicing open someone elses skin and cutting at organs (well, apart from sociopaths), yet what are surgeons but serial commiters of such acts?
Are surgeons beyond good and evil? The seem to act like they are? And indeed some folk, for religious reasons, refuse any medical treatment, ever. What if they’re somehow right, aye? “Well crap, they can’t be”, but now you don’t have the athiest excuse to dismiss them and support your use of medical treatment.
Scott and Roger:
You may want to check out a paper published today in the journal Science, where analytical thinking is shown to be correlated with repression of religious belief.
The abstract:
“Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions.”
It also cites a 2007 article by Paul Bloom that argues that dualism emerges naturally in children (and thus could be considered a basal philosophical concept that arises irrespective of cultural milieu).
I would love to see you convert A Cracked Moon in this regard. See, now the goal posts are really far away… but it should be a trivial kick for your Super Intellect.
If you can arrange for a discussion between us, I’ll be delighted to give it a try. If nothing else, it promises hilarity.
we should give him the benefit of the doubt, and read his arguments with the most generous interpretation in mind.
Hell, you don’t even have to do that. All I’d hope for is that people would be honest about the relative weights of evidence on either side of an issue, at least with themselves. We all have groundless assumptions instilled in us by our educations and upbringing that we never got around to questioning. My observation is that those instilled in us before the age of 7 and at university are those we question least.
In other words, it turns out that I am the dogmatist on this issue–not my opponent; and painting him as illogical and ignorant was just a way for me to avoid admitting my own dogmatism, my own moral position which I seem to hold beyond the realm of argument. Instead of claiming he is wrong, I now have to claim that he is evil.
This is exactly the phenomenon that I and many of the Dread Ilk find so remarkable about TPB. Underneath all the professed skepticism, we see the dogmatism and moral certainty very clearly here and marvel at the fact that we’re accused of being the dogmatic moral certaintists, when, by any objective measure, we are less dogmatic and less morally certain on many issues by comparison.
I don’t even disagree that in some, perhaps even many circumstances, it would be immoral to forcibly deport foreign residents or even citizens. And yet, what if that is the best way to prevent another Rwanda, Yugoslavia, or Holocaust? In that case, wouldn’t it be immoral to refuse to act? It’s not a question of good versus evil; there is no good to be found here.
Due to foolish policies of the past, there is only the choice between bad and worse. The tragedy of false ideologies is that they impose evil dilemmas on those who did nothing to cause the problem.
The best way to have prevented Rwanda, Yugoslavia, or the Holocaust would have been to defuse or prevent the internal conflict to begin with. Granted that is a far larger project in scope, but probably not in total effort. Prevent Hitler from rising to power and you prevent the Holocaust. What you’re recommending is not a “strike the root” solution. It’s more like you’re involved in the logistics of evacuating refugee people once a conflict has become critical. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The “best” way is to start far prior to where your intervention takes effect. The “best” way is to eliminate the simmering hatred that gives rise to the Anders Breiviks, Hilters or Milosevics of the world. But this is exactly the place where you take a nap, because you don’t think Breiviks or Hitlers can be prevented, and you don’t think people can peaceably coexist unless they smell the same to each other, which in turn virtually guarantees future fodder for people like Hitler, Breivik… and any plan to create a world where they don’t exist you dismiss as dreamy left-liberal utopia. What remains are only solutions still open after your pessimism about humanity has take most of the chess pieces off the table.
Vox, this sounds like a false dilemma to me. I accept the empirical evidence that you cited, Quoting you, “…ethnic diversity reduces social cohesion, social capital, and neighborhood trust.” But then, “And yet, what if that [forcible deportation] is the best way to prevent another Rwanda, Yugoslavia, or Holocaust?”
Is the latter (genocide), an inevitable consequence of the former (distrust, reduced social cohesion)? Have you demonstrated this point? Has anyone?
I will set aside whatever benefits diversity might bring to a society (something else concerning which you have presented no argument), just given that we find it morally repugnant to forcibly deport people, or even to segregate our societies by softer means, how certain must we be of an outcome to undertake such actions? How far must we have gone to find other means to prevent disaster, and to encourage harmony and stability before we leap to such extreme measures? Surely, armed with empirical evidence and a knowledge of history, we can take effective steps short of radical segregation to prevent the tragedy that you say awaits us.
I admit ignorance. Have you campaigned for any measures short of segregation? Have you done anything with your considerable influence to promote any other approach to this problem? Have you even investigated the possibility?
I’d just like to once again point out that “social cohesion” and “social trust” as defined within this context aren’t an unconditional good.
Too much of that stuff makes one vulnerable to all kinds of subversive tactics (you know, like the morons who keep their doors unlocked “because there wasn’t a robbery or a stranger-rape in a decade in their neighborhood”.
Vox, this sounds like a false dilemma to me.
Well, you can always wait for the next round of mass slaughter. Then build memorials, vow “Never Again”, and continue to encourage the creation of more inter-ethnic conflict points. Repeat as desired.
Is the latter (genocide), an inevitable consequence of the former (distrust, reduced social cohesion)? Have you demonstrated this point? Has anyone?
No, it is a probable result of diverse human populations in the same political entity. The former isn’t a cause of the latter, it is a warning sign of it. I have not done the detailed work. I don’t know. It’s based on historical observation and logic: mass murders and mass deportations take place much less often in homogenous populations with the obvious exception of Communist societies.
how certain must we be of an outcome to undertake such actions?
I need to know your metric for certainty before I can answer that question. I think “when laws are being passed that differentiate between groups” is probably a reasonable rule of thumb. If there is no law governing relations with the minority groups, there probably aren’t enough of them for anyone to care.
Have you campaigned for any measures short of segregation? Have you done anything with your considerable influence to promote any other approach to this problem? Have you even investigated the possibility?
I haven’t done anything at all except a) oppose the construction of a southern border fence, and b) point out that George Bush was wrong when he said it wasn’t possible to deport 12 million illegals. I suppose I did also demolish Michelle Malkin’s attempts to justify the WWII internment of the Japanese, but that’s tangential. I guess I’ve also tacitly endorsed the establishment of Aztlan, come to think of it, although I don’t think they should be given Texas since it won its independence on its own.
Is there a tag that collects all your articles on immigration? Are these at WND?
Your views remain paradoxical, Mr. Bakker.
Pressure to conform can be more important than being right, and this can be bad.
True.
Look at Fox News!
In a world without Fox News, one in which all media broadcast the same point of view, the pressure to conform to it is much higher, hence the likelihood of this point of view being wrong is higher. Having Fox News leads to less pressure to conform, because you now have a choice in points of view to which to conform. The more alternatives, the less pressure to be wrong.
How come a world without fox news is a world where all media broadcast the same point of view? Coming up on my radar as false dichotomy.
Found a paper TPB readers might enjoy. Bakker, it might be interesting if you made a page for the accumulation of studies concerning cognitive biases.
The Foreign-Language Effect: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/18/0956797611432178
Also, Vox, I’m not sure you realize this but you are an example here. You mentioned studies by Letki and Putnam – which many of us have actually read here at TPB – and yet fail to realize how the conclusions you draw from these studies showcase your explicit racism, as you seem to completely ignore the results that these scientists suggest are more significant than race as effecting social cohesion or the confounding variables other than race.
I invite you to take some tests and post your results: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
I’m with Momentarily Participating Observer. I’m all from learning from every experiece and you might have knowledge to offer us, Vox. It just isn’t what you think.
Awesome. It reminds me of an old odd thought I had a couple of years back. All these ‘alternate pathway’ approaches to dealing with various brain related ailments (the ‘Brainport’ stuff in particular) got me wondering whether there might be some kooky way to ‘shut down’ certain cognitive biases the way clinical depression seems to do.
Could you imagine training children to visualize ‘fractal panda bears’ while problem-solving because this allows them to do an end run around their ‘self-promotion apparatuses’…
Anyone ever make that electrostimulation cap, btw?
Your underlying assumption is wrong. You assume that people who think that diversity reduces social cohesion want it to be true. They don’t. Everyone wants it to be false, but it just isn’t.
Again, social cohesion is not a universally good thing (much in the same way glucose is not a universally good thing).
Environments with high peer trust are trivial to exploit.
I agree. My response is to the claim that people who say that diversity reduces social cohesion are racists who only say that to justify their own prejudices.
I simply encourage you to read the papers Vox is citing, pdimov. I’m only suggesting that this instance showcases his biases specifically, not some principle of generality. We all bring our own unique conceptual frames of perspective to experience and our words, our actions betray our implicit assumptions. Though Letki’s hypothesis explicitly focuses on colour as reducing social cohesion her results aren’t conclusive and other variables measured overshadowed race as a significant factor. Vox mentions none of them. She concludes offering a handful of future theses, any or all of which might eliminate race as the significant variable Vox is suggesting.
Also, the morality of distinctions aside, I believe social cohesion, within the studies, is framed in terms of productive capacity, of social utility.
Just found this Daniel Abraham blog post:
Concerning Historical Authenticity in Fantasy, or Truth Forgives You Nothing
Awesome. There’s a Westeros Discussion here, with the main Gender and Genre thread here.
There’s a collection of other authorial responses to women in historical fantasy in there, I didn’t read them all yet but they seem worthwhile.
Oh…I meant to also quote the section that mentions Scott.
I saw this a few days back. Apparently they were an egalitarian, enlightened bunch, back then. I’m not convinced that’s the case now! One of the interesting things about Haidt’s moral tastebud approach is how it provides a lense to understand the moral sensibility of all human cultures, as well as the artificiality of the Western ‘do-no-harm’ conceptual mindset. Roles, roles, roles. Get caught out of character, and the hammer comes down.
If I’m not mistaken, the roles of women in the Christian Middle-ages were pretty rigourously bound to the reproductive…
Theo wrote:
“If you can arrange for a discussion between us, I’ll be delighted to give it a try. If nothing else, it promises hilarity. ”
I’ll see what I can do. For what it’s worth I do think you’re more intellectually honest than she is, even if in some sense I’m on her “side”.
ACM doesn’t even pretend to be arguing – that’s honesty. Of the worst kind, perhaps.
Theo can’t see his way past his own conviction, which is the recipe for dissimulation. He’s a slave of his ‘interpreter,’ as Gazzaniga calls it, or something along those lines. Confabulation is the worst kind of dishonesty because it sounds so damn honest. In philosophy and the sciences, the more drastic our conclusions, the more we hedge our bets. Theo, from what I can tell, is all in all the time on the most drastic moral claims imaginable.
The answer is always staring him in the face, and knowing all the ways the brain cherry-picks and games and skews and self-congratulates matters not at all. His brain gives him a lie, which he turns into gospel.
Scott, how you separate your pessimistic “men are probably hard-wired to be sexist” view from Vox’s pessimistic (or as he sees it, pragmatic) “some races are probably hard-wired to be barbarous” view?
The fact that there’s no credible way to define ‘race.’
With respect to gender, the animal kingdom is chock-filled with sex-specific neurobiological differences – and I think it’s reasonable to presume the same is the case with humans. Then you look at cross-cultural patterns…
It’s a good question, though, because it highlights just how sticky and fraught the issue is.
What do you think? Do you really believe that the reason that sexual violence is so gender specific across all cultures is simply a matter of all those cultures having the same short circuit? Or is it biological?
I think one thing that defines me is that I like the whole ‘gaming ambiguities’ thing. I’m the kind of person who read The Selfish Gene, then read Behe’s creationist screed Darwin’s Black Box, then read several incisive critiques of THAT… etc. I like the back and forth! Theo’s willing to engage on that level, and I’m down with that even if he puts himself of the pedestal of Super Intelligence and Biblically-inspired moral superiority.
ACM just wants to shit on your parade without the basic decency of reading.
Furthermore, she does something that I find somewhat unforgivable, which is to attack the narrative at the prima facie level. It’s like saying Fahrenheit 451 is a book about how pulp makes good kindling.
Again, Theo at least UNDERSTOOD what you were doing. He didn’t like it, and he has a moral position that leads him to view it as ‘wangsty’ but he gave it a fair shake given his epistemic commitments.
No? *shrug*
Maybe I just softened up because he likes Lovecraft. That goes a long way.
It doesn’t change the fact that I still consider myself someone committed to women’s equality in the realms of political rights, income/pay, and freedom from fear of sexual violence. The thing that irks me to no end is that she thinks that this is somehow betrayed by the fact that I love your books (ironically nothing could be further from the truth).
“What do you think? Do you really believe that the reason that sexual violence is so gender specific across all cultures is simply a matter of all those cultures having the same short circuit? Or is it biological?”
I think one of the challenges we’re seeing is that even attempting to argue these positions requires a great deal of cross-disciplinary knowledge. Even if there are biological factors, are we so changed to biology that it matters?
I sense, seeing responses over the web, that there is a feeling you are seen as making the “boys-will-be-boys” defense with fancier language. Part of this is I think you have a complex position – regardless of whether I agree with it – that cannot fit in comment sections easily. It also is at minimum an argument with two parts ->
Why you believe the things you do and how you sought to raise the issues you see in your work?
I will say I think it is a dialogue worth having, and if there’s something you should keep posting on it with your pseudo-admirable stubbornness [;-P] it should relate to asking these questions and drawing in discussion. At some point, even to prove you wrong, we’ll ideally see people from varied disciplines speaking w.r.t their fields of expertise.
I look forward to it.
rsbakker: The fact that there’s no credible way to define ‘race.’
Common sense aside, I remember reading a study in which a genetic test has been found to match self-identification with about 90% certainty. I can’t find the link now though.
Jorge: Alternate pitch; the books (or maybe even just the way books work in general) prompted a more contemplative approach than the usual from him? Maybe that’s why ACM only read 6 pages – to avoid that effect?
Thing is, Scott, sexism-as-we-know it is just too damn complex to be genetically defined (much like assembling an AK is too damn complex).
Methinks that some vague biological potentiating factors that manifest more or less reliably across cultures (bear in mind that, you know, most “traditional” cultures little more than legacy meme preservation machines) are more likely than dedicated “sexism subsystem”.
To me, it seems unlikely that there’s a whole dedicated “rape module” there, but it seems quite likely that there are personality characteristics (and thus, persistent brain states) that increase likelihood of committing rape (example that comes to mind would be various impairments of impulse control, but that’s easymodo. I’m sure resident meat jockeys can name better rape-correlating personality traits)
As is all isms!
Pinker has an extensive list of cross-cultural universals that suggest biological behavioural bases at the end of his blank slate book. But it’s not about genetically defining the risks so much as it is one of building institutions that are sensitive to, and so actually reflect, our growing knowledge about human nature. Take Abu Graib a few years back. Once you know the susceptibility of humans to commit abuse (often sexual) when placed in positions of power over other humans in the absence of any effective oversight, you can see how horribly misguided (and for the Bush Administration, self-serving) the ‘bad apple’ argument is. At least some of the blame, you begin to think, lies with the planners, who were too naive to take human nature into account when designing their Iraqi detention and interrogation system.
This is the very reason some feminists are inclined to howl when you talk about biologically entrenched predispositions to sexual violence in men: they want their bad apples – moral outrage demands clarity – and they fear that talk of institutions is just simply a dodge, smokescreen, a way to excuse the perpetrators. But in point of fact I’m not excusing anyone, just casting the ‘blame net’ further. We need an education system – especially given the porn-drenched reality of contemporary society – that specifically addresses the real vulnerabilities of boys.
The question of whether men have a modular subsystem devoted to assessing the sexual vulnerability of women is an open, empirical question. The reason I’m pessimistic is simply because we’re mammals, and it’s hard to believe that things like the gang rape activity of dolphins (which is quite horrific) is a matter of ‘dolphin culture.’
Oooops, Scott, see my reply below – punched a wrong reply button.
You should really install some neater comment management plugins. Current arrangement really really hates long threads.
I’ll take a boo. I’m such a knob when it comes to these things…
I don’t think that cross-cultural universals are reliable indicators of a “strong” biological basis (though they are indicators of areas where such investigation is more likely to be fruitful). Across primitive cultures, many, if not most, skills are remarkably similar (of course, specifics differ, but foraging is foraging is foraging even if slightly different in implementation between savannah and rainforest) and more advanced cultures both carry over some luggage from back then, and, for most of history actually had used to retain a lot of “old time” legacy forms of productive activity (farming remained more or less the same until very recently) – though of course you might argue that some of those similarities are biological in origin too (would seem less plausible though)…
Whether cultural “universals” (which seem to be falling apart in some regards in more modernized cultures, BTW) came to be because of specific genetic adaptations (and if so, just how functionally specific are those adaptations), or just due to more-or-less similar starting conditions causing a conversion on similar local maxima by more-or-less similar systems remains to be demonstrated.
As for Abu Graib, well, first quite frankly, bad apples or good oranges, it was a brainchild of folks who sincerely believe that torture is an effective intelligence gathering technique despite scientific evidence to the contrary, folks who are anything but naive. The only way in which officers at Abu Graib “failed” their superiors is the “not getting caught” part (admittedly, the most important part). Second – I don’t buy England’s claims of being “goaded” into it (and by extension don’t consider AG a case supporting the hypothesis regarding strongly gendered nature of propensity for abuse), but that’s an IMHO
Now, Scott, I gotta ask – what is the thing with “porn-drenched reality of contemporary society” ? You seem to be more than a little bit concerned with “porn drenching”, despite that, well, at least as far as my knowledge goes (I’m going a bit out of my depth here, and am gonna call Third for backup, since she’s the person with unusual breadth and depth of knowledge about all things rape) no provable connection between porn consumption patterns and rape (or even the somewhat vague “rape proclivity” factor) was found, experimental studies that tried to demonstrate a connection with aggression against women were found lacking and failed replication, but most importantly, in-the-field studies (which are the only studies that really matter 😉 ) across the globe do not indicate any connection between porn consumption and negative attitudes towards women. So… why so concerned? [jokerface]
P.S.:
I am perfectly willing to buy that dolphins can have cultural traits, since, you know, if something is smart enough for figuring out tool use despite lacking an organ even remotely resembling a decent manipulator, something is smart enough to have culture and that culture may very well be keen on rape 😉
As far as rape among other species goes, I favor ducks. Yes, they’re not mammals so less relevant for gleaning insights into humans, but they 1) are very unlikely to have anything that passes for a culture 😉 and 2) boy are they vicious motherfuckers
‘More likely’ is the only reliability there is! But your point is well-taken: the great dilemma of evopsych, for instance, is one of distinguishing ‘forced moves’ (similar tools in similar environments leads to similar problem solving) from spandrals from actual adaptations.
Personally, I think its best to look at ‘culture’ as simply ‘biology by other means,’ but most insist on the old dichotomies, so… Ultimately, the only question that really matters is, How do you fix it? Where you stand on the biology-culture continuum is going to have a huge impact on how you answer that question. If it is the case that ‘sexual opportunism’ is an adaptation (as I think it almost certainly is) that is expressed differently by either gender, then you’re going to want to pull the boys aside and have a frank talk about their predilections.
I use pornography in the pejorative sense. I have no problem with erotica. Degradation is problematic, whether consensual or not – don’t you think? Think of Japanese sex doll culture, and the popularity of child dolls. No one is harmed, but my-my it tweaks some deep seated moral intuitions, doesn’t it?
For me the normalization of ‘porn-culture’ is of piece with the slow shedding of traditional norms, and the development of new norms more closely aligned with basic biological imperatives. The uglier those imperatives (from our traditional standpoint) the more alarming the future promises to be. So the world of Neuropath is the world kids are growing up in now, where pornography is a pervasive norm, impacting every dimension of male/female relationships. The polls that came out during the Rihanna assault case were more than little dismaying, you have to agree. I’m just starting Charles Murray’s (yes, that Charles Murray) Coming Apart, and it’s got me thinking about the way the internet could be facilitating the formation of ‘normative ghettos,’ subcultural pockets lacking any cohesive demand for cooperation and self-denial. (Or as I like to call it, reality TV.)
This is ‘elephantine culture’: one where socialization becomes ever more forgiving (or even celebratory) of irrational and unconstrained consumption. Adorno’s nightmare.
There’s no answers to any of this, of course.
“‘More likely’ is the only reliability there is! But your point is well-taken: the great dilemma of evopsych, for instance, is one of distinguishing ‘forced moves’ (similar tools in similar environments leads to similar problem solving) from spandrals from actual adaptations.”
Well, if only evopsych could move towards actually investigating connections between behaviors and alleles (and thus towards solving this dilemma) and away from publishing what amounts to “evolution narratives” of varying plausibility (I recall folks at Peter Watts’s blog coming up with an “evolution narrative” that ties “captive bonding” and hypothetical vampires, quite plausibly so 😉 )
“Personally, I think its best to look at ‘culture’ as simply ‘biology by other means,’ but most insist on the old dichotomies, so… Ultimately, the only question that really matters is, How do you fix it? Where you stand on the biology-culture continuum is going to have a huge impact on how you answer that question. If it is the case that ‘sexual opportunism’ is an adaptation (as I think it almost certainly is) that is expressed differently by either gender, then you’re going to want to pull the boys aside and have a frank talk about their predilections.”
If I recall my FWB’s rape lectures correctly, there are no less than nine formally recognized subtypes of rapists which can be grouped into five groups with very distinct motivations, and various opportunists are only one such group, and by far not the most dangerous one (there is not enough data to determine whether female-on-male and female-on-female rape fits that taxonomy).
Methinks you are overgeneralizing rapists a lot (a common mistake for a non-rapist I’ve been told).
It’s entirely possible that some types on that spectrum have biological predisposing factors of varying specificity and strength, but the spectrum of rapist taxonomy seems just too diverse to be brought about from a single functionally specific genetic complex (a single adaptation).
To me it looks more like a bunch of dissimilar decision makers converging upon the same “solution” in response to wildly different “problems” rather than similar decision makers acting out a “pre-defined” “solution” to similar set of “problems”.
” I use pornography in the pejorative sense. I have no problem with erotica. Degradation is problematic, whether consensual or not – don’t you think? “
Okay, non-consensual stuff is a no-go of course, but…
…Scott, I admit I can’t claim any degree of objectivity here, being a sadist and all (***unverifiable background claim alert*** :D)… But, who gets to determine what consensual acts between legally-sane adults are “problematic”? By what criteria (“you guys creep me out” / “you make my imaginary skymonster friend cry” 😉 )?
” Think of Japanese sex doll culture, and the popularity of child dolls. No one is harmed, but my-my it tweaks some deep seated moral intuitions, doesn’t it? “
Sounds absolutely awesome by me, as long as the number of actual children that get molested drops. It’s a perfect win – people with unwholesome tendencies towards children get to satisfy their urges in a legal manner, children are safer from molesters (who are busy shagging dolls), sex-doll producer is providing employment and taxes for the economy while making a fortune.
Sounds too elegant to actually work, lol.
“The polls that came out during the Rihanna assault case were more than little dismaying, you have to agree.”
I am sadly not aware of the polls and am barely aware of the case (it was basically some domestic abuse between two annoying celebs, amrite?).
Were those “internet poll” kind of polls, by chance ?
“This is ‘elephantine culture’: one where socialization becomes ever more forgiving (or even celebratory) of irrational and unconstrained consumption” “
I find the notion of rational / irrational consumption to be… problematic 😉
Just what exactly is it ? And what is “rational” consumption ?
The polls were sponsored by the Boston Globe if I’m remembering correctly.
Who said anything about any single adaptation? From a social justice standpoint, though, what really matters is the predisposition (or complex).
The Japanese sex-doll thing really illustrates the complexity of the problem: You’re willing to set aside the moral intuition in favour of a intellectual consideration of actual harm. This seems to be a very modern, and quite unnatural (from a human standpoint) way of approaching these issues. ‘Unambiguous harm reduction’ simply doesn’t play that decisive role in the day-to-day moral decision making of the vast majority of the world. ‘Wrong’ comes first, the ‘reasons’ second. The petri dish my career seems to be becoming is an ample demonstration of this, I think!
Are you familiar with Adorno, at all, 01? If not, I’m guessing you would love him. The idea I’m talking about here is how the Enlightenment and the rise of science had utterly discredited ‘moral knowledge,’ making it impossible to command social consensus on the ‘good life,’ forcing liberal democracies to retreat from that as a legislative realm, letting all the monkeys whack and whack in a moral vacuum of drives and fitness indicators…
One of the coolest explanations for the failure of SETI I’ve ever encountered is the argument that civilizations at some point trade virtual reality for real reality to maximize fitness indicators. We don’t hear them because they’re living inside their PS3OOO’s!
” The polls were sponsored by the Boston Globe if I’m remembering correctly.”
I mean, were they conducted online ? Cause online polls, at best, tell us what the least occupied, most bored, and quite often most trollish, part of visitors thinks. At worst, it tells us what a single bored person thinks.
“Who said anything about any single adaptation? “
Well, several distinct genetic adaptation that converge on different kinds of rape seems even less plausible.
Also, the whole shebang completely ignores female-on-male rape 😉 (which is under-reported and under-investigated even when reported, but is nonetheless documented)
” The Japanese sex-doll thing really illustrates the complexity of the problem: You’re willing to set aside the moral intuition in favour of a intellectual consideration of actual harm. This seems to be a very modern, and quite unnatural (from a human standpoint) way of approaching these issues.”
Well, like I said many times, fuck nature 😀
” ‘Unambiguous harm reduction’ simply doesn’t play that decisive role in the day-to-day moral decision making of the vast majority of the world. ‘Wrong’ comes first, the ‘reasons’ second.”
Well, Japanese sex doll industry suggests we’re slowly, oh so slowly, making progress and clawing out of the intuition pit, no ?
” The petri dish my career seems to be becoming is an ample demonstration of this, I think! “
No offense, but IMHO what it demonstrates is the turd principle. Which is, if you decide to pick up a turd, it won’t hurt the turd all that much (it will still be a turd) but you will get your hands smeared in shit 🙂
Something every blogger sooner or later discovers upon facing a troll (and no offense, but it was patently obvious that subject is motivated solely by inflicting as much unpleasant feelings upon chosen target as possible)
” Are you familiar with Adorno, at all, 01? “
Passing familiarity from long ago. Found Dialectic of Enlightenment to be an excruciating read. Maybe I should give him another try, or something.
” The idea I’m talking about here is how the Enlightenment and the rise of science had utterly discredited ‘moral knowledge,’ making it impossible to command social consensus on the ‘good life,’ forcing liberal democracies to retreat from that as a legislative realm, letting all the monkeys whack and whack in a moral vacuum of drives and fitness indicators… “
Well, that’s perfectly okay state of affairs as monkeys are whacking something other than monkeys (that would be severely disruptive)
It’s not like there even has to be a way to establish “good-life” consensus (and pre-Enlightenment society’s ability to do so seems to be a mite exaggerated). We’ve been operating like that for centuries already, and so far, it’s playing out relatively nice (I mean, to pick your new favorite scab a little bit more ;), ACM might dislike you very much and entirely irreconcilably, but she is exceedingly unlikely to travel from alleged-Thailand to shoot you, let alone succeed in such an operation. That’s a pretty decent baseline, you gotta agree)
“One of the coolest explanations for the failure of SETI I’ve ever encountered is the argument that civilizations at some point trade virtual reality for real reality to maximize fitness indicators. We don’t hear them because they’re living inside their PS3OOO’s! “
Sounds like a rather happy end for a civilization, as long as something more… simpleminded and predatory does not come around to pwn the “dreamers”.
apropos of nothing:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-consolation-of-philos
And from there, there’s this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/
Look at this quote!
“…people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn’t.”
Scott has been saying this all along: philosophy is still stuck on the same old issue the Greeks were tackling.
I’ve been having a problem with confirmation lately… It’s been freaking me out, feeling justified.
You should be careful Scott. Theo used the “one time in band camp” joke in The Irrational Atheist. Maybe your brains are both doing similar things but gaming different semantic ambiguities.
😛
well, technically, it was apropos of this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/
(and about ‘nothing’)
I’ll see what I can do. For what it’s worth I do think you’re more intellectually honest than she is, even if in some sense I’m on her “side”.
Thanks. Intellectual honesty is something for which I strive, and I encourage my readers and critics alike to hold me accountable.
He didn’t like it, and he has a moral position that leads him to view it as ‘wangsty’ but he gave it a fair shake given his epistemic commitments.
Actually, I rather liked the first two books. I thought the third one fell apart. And the “Wängsty” thing is just short for “The Prince of Wängst”. It has nothing to do with moral positions, but rather, Scott’s unique method of argument. And, of course, his affection for umlauts.
Theo can’t see his way past his own conviction, which is the recipe for dissimulation. He’s a slave of his ‘interpreter,’ as Gazzaniga calls it, or something along those lines.
Sweet Freud, but do you seriously never give up on the inept armchair psychoanalysis? You’re so far off-base that everyone who is familiar with me just laughs at you, but you’re so wedded to your dogmatic convictions that you don’t even bother to look at the available evidence.
The fact that there’s no credible way to define ‘race.’
Sure there are. The races are just human subspecies. It’s no harder to tell an African from a European than it is to tell a lynx from a cheetah. In the last seven years, genetic scientists have reported multiple genetic markers that distinguish between various races. Wired had a story about DNAWitness a few years back, a test that claimed 99 percent accuracy in determining race. And beyond race, human beings aren’t even all equally homo sapiens sapiens given the discovery about non-Africans being genetically part homo Homo neanderthalensis.
The subspecies comment is incorrect. There is too much genetic flow. Humanity is practically panmictic nowadays.
Also, only some Africans from sub-Saharan regions lack the H. neanderthalis DNA, but I think you’re right in critiquing the “there is such a thing as race” position. This is a misconception started by (among others) Gould and Lewontin who are very smart (and thus very skilled at defending prior political commitments).
However, just because there is such a thing as race doesn’t mean that they are perfectly definable homogenous things (Lewontin is correct in this regard). You cannot lump an African-American with a !Kung tribesman. The African-American could easily share many more genetic markers with the white European he rides the bus with than the tribesman. He would, however, share a certain group of genetic makers we might associate with a ‘race’ therefore giving the concept legitimacy.
And just because there are races doesn’t mean that genetically encoded difference in IQ or behavior exist between the races. Since so much genetic variation is shared amongst the races, it is very likely that genes affecting IQ and behavior are homogeneously distributed between any races you care to name.
The cultural and historical experience of each race though is dramatically different however thus parsimony compels us to assume that it is these things that most account for any differences we see in scholastic performance, etc.
That was me. My symbol never changes. I post as Endo over on ROTYH.
I’m getting tired. The readability of that last post was awful. I apologize.
Let’s do some editing, shall we?
“You cannot lump an African-American with a !Kung tribesman.”
should be
“You cannot indiscriminately lump an African-American with a !Kung tribesman.”
“And just because there are races doesn’t mean that genetically encoded difference in IQ or behavior exist between the races.”
should be
“And just because there are races doesn’t mean that genetically encoded differences in IQ or behavior exist between them.”
“The cultural and historical experience of each race though is dramatically different however thus parsimony compels us to assume that it is these things that most account for any differences we see in scholastic performance, etc.”
should read
“The cultural and historical experience of each race has been dramatically different. Thus parsimony compels us to assume that it is these things that most account for any differences we see in scholastic performance, etc.”
You cannot indiscriminately lump an African-American with a !Kung tribesman.
You’re not obliged to. Discriminate between them all you like.
And just because there are races doesn’t mean that genetically encoded differences in IQ or behavior exist between them.
No, by itself it doesn’t. Correlating the results of a genetic test with the results of an IQ test isn’t that hard though.
The cultural and historical experience of each race has been dramatically different. Thus parsimony compels us to assume that it is these things that most account for any differences we see in scholastic performance, etc.
Experiments with black children raised in white families don’t support this thesis. The only way for the cultural and historical experience of their race to be a factor in this environment is for it to be genetically encoded.
See comment no. 35. Not sure how it got up there.
Because were here to break the three pound comment system!
Yeah, it’d be interesting to run such a child through a performance test where others (of the predominantly white status quo) can see him, Vs a performance test which he forfills online, only appearing as text to an assessor (even have the latter again, but say the assessor was himself an adopted child of that skin). I think Cordelia Fine’s ‘A mind of it’s own’ has some examples of self perception of skill reducing actual skill.
You’re not obliged to. Discriminate between them all you like.
That doesn’t make much difference when if you happen to support a governmental system that doesn’t descriminate.
No, by itself it doesn’t. Correlating the results of a genetic test with the results of an IQ test isn’t that hard though.
The IQ test being itself a product of a particular, relatively arbitrary set of genetic traits (permeating into culture). Your belief in IQ tests being some absolute measure rather than a relatively arbitrary measure derived from a set of genetic traits (permeating into culture).
If you think the IQ tests you refer to are awesome, okay. But not referencing that they come from a particular beholder is missleading.
pdimov:
“Experiments with black children raised in white families don’t support this thesis. The only way for the cultural and historical experience of their race to be a factor in this environment is for it to be genetically encoded.”
I am not aware of any contemporary studies (I will look it up). Such a study would have to control for a host of deeply embedded confounding variables. A black kid in the US raised by a white family would still be exposed to potentially negative messages from TV.
There is something called “stereotype threat”. That is, someone who fits into a stereotyped category will suffer from impaired performance in a tested task if they are consciously or subconsciously reminded of the stereotype. In one recent well-controlled experiment, it was shown that blacks who took a test did better if the word “IQ” was not surreptitiously used prior to the test. The implication is that the word “IQ” has aquired such negative subconscious connotations to the black populace, that it can trigger stereotype threat.
A similar effect can be provoked in women with math exams.
So, no. Genetics is not the only explanation. Please be aware that this does not mean I deny that IQ is heritable… it is estimated to be 40-60% genetically determined. I just don’t think studies have adequately corrected for pernicious social influences. These influences are sufficient (in my mind) to account for the roughly 5-10 IQ point difference seen between black and white means in the US.
tl;dr
Neil deGrasse Tyson would shit on this thread.
Waidafuknmoment !
The mythogenic black/white IQ gap in USA is ~10 points ? (Pardon my ignorance, racial differences in standardized tests are not my forte)
The IQ test being itself a product of a particular, relatively arbitrary set of genetic traits (permeating into culture). Your belief in IQ tests being some absolute measure rather than a relatively arbitrary measure derived from a set of genetic traits (permeating into culture).
I’m having every argument in the book thrown against me. 🙂
Problem is, the results of every cognitive-loaded test correlate strongly. The standard IQ tests are just a test, not the test. IQ also correlates with other interesting things, so even if viewed as an abstract number having no significance on its own, it still has significance as a predictor of other things having significance on their own.
So, no. Genetics is not the only explanation. Please be aware that this does not mean I deny that IQ is heritable… it is estimated to be 40-60% genetically determined.
More like 70+.
I just don’t think studies have adequately corrected for pernicious social influences. These influences are sufficient (in my mind) to account for the roughly 5-10 IQ point difference seen between black and white means in the US.
Maybe, in your mind. The problem here is that all social policies that have been tried in an attempt to counteract these environmental factors and erase this difference have failed. Reality, so far, has refused to play along.
It is possible to come up with explanations as to why these social policies have failed and still retain the environmental hypothesis. But from a pragmatic point of view, it doesn’t matter. The genetic hypothesis has been proven to better predict the outcome of a given social policy, so it should be used unless and until another hypothesis can claim an advantage.
Stepping back a bit, people confuse the relatively socially beneficial delusion that all people are equally capable with its being true. It need not be. When a social policy assumes that this is true and fails, we need not be surprised or offended, and need not take further steps ensuring that the results are in accordance with the delusion. It is these further steps that deal the most damage.
The mythogenic black/white IQ gap in USA is ~10 points ?
10-15. It’s plausible to expect it to be lower if you throw away all post-1965 immigration, but I’m not aware of any studies doing that.
Problem is, the results of every cognitive-loaded test correlate strongly. The standard IQ tests are just a test, not the test.
What is ‘the’ test?
IQ also correlates with other interesting things, so even if viewed as an abstract number having no significance on its own, it still has significance as a predictor of other things having significance on their own.
Interesting things to you. Things that are significant to you. As I said, you don’t identify the position of the beholder. You haven’t taken a step back from the frame and changed from ‘This is significant’ to ‘Oh, wow, I saw that as universally significant, but it’s actually significant to me specifically’. Sure, vouch that it’s significant to you – but to try and pass it off as significant by some galactic standard – seems to have no foundation to speak of.
Interesting things to you.
No, interesting to social scientists and social “engineers”. Educational achievement (see “achievement gap”), median income, percent of home ownership, median life expectancy… various measures of success, in other words.
So the social scientists dictate what you find interesting?
No, it’s interesting to you. Your plucking from what others find interesting to them, something that’s interesting to you. It’s not interesting per se.
Once you say it from the perspectaval, “It’s interesting” becomes the far less convincing “I find this interesting/they find this interesting”. That’s a fact and it shouldn’t hurt your point to acknowledge that.
One is subjective (and has little consequences), the other is objective and has consequences for the society.
I do find them interesting, yes. I also find gravity interesting, for the same reason, but it doesn’t care and is not affected by my interest in it.
Indeed, gravity will go on existing if the human race was wiped out.
IQ tests – not so much. IQ is affected by your interest in it – ie, if you and everyone else is dead, it’s gone. It’s not like gravity.
I think you’re treating IQ tests as existant as gravity. What is IQ, like a kind of physics or something?
IQ is a number on the basis on which we can make conclusions about aspects of the real world. Kind of like mm Hg is a number on the basis of which we can make conclusions about barometric pressure and height above sea level. Yes, the former is about humans and the latter isn’t.
Or rather Homo neanderthalensis. It seems a little unlikely that most non-Africans are descended from gay neanderthals.
Given that this made me laugh out loud you cant be all bad. 🙂
“Experiments with black children raised in white families don’t support this thesis. The only way for the cultural and historical experience of their race to be a factor in this environment is for it to be genetically encoded.”
Not quite. stereotype threat is a documented effect in social psychology that can explain performance gap for persons belonging to any group stereotyped for some quality, particularly in threatening environments. Blacks adopted into white families can be considered a high threat environment, considering they are probably raised in middle or higher class white neighborhoods. The only way to rid the effect is to eliminate the stereotype, which is exactly what scientific racism seeks to cultivate. This is just another way the cumulative effect of your and Vox’s thinking actually warps the society you inhabit.
I was about to post about stereotype threat, but WordPress decided to screw my moment of triumph.
Or maybe I’m just a dumb latino who can’t use computers herp derp.
😉
Ah yes, stereotype threat, I forgot. I’m sure that you know that further studies have been unable to replicate it, and I’m sure that this doesn’t faze you.
Latent racism is the favorite (and best, I admit) way to explain away inadmissible results, because it’s close to unfalsifiable. Things don’t work the way we said they ought to work, therefore there is a hidden evil force acting against us, skewing our results. Let’s put a face (or two) on it so we could demonize more effectively!
In this specific case though, in the nature vs nurture debates, you don’t have to compare races. Twin studies have also shown that nature (genes) trumps nurture (upbringing). No stereotyping there, everyone involved is white.
And, I forgot to add, it works in the other direction as well. A high IQ child raised in an average IQ family remains high IQ.
I’m sure that you know that further studies have been unable to replicate it
Do you have a link? Generally some idea of the further study quality is worth evaluation by any particular reader.
If you want to play the “further studies…” game, then further studies have shown no difference between black and white IQ scores. You simply want the “further studies” that favor your position to be true and not those that don’t. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re wrong (or right), just that it isn’t determined. Ask yourself why you’re trying to achieve the conclusion you are. Ask yourself why you even have an opinion. Now, if you want to claim that I’m as dogmatic as you are, that’s fine. In fact, that is a great conclusion.
“In this specific case though, in the nature vs nurture debates, you don’t have to compare races. Twin studies have also shown that nature (genes) trumps nurture (upbringing). No stereotyping there, everyone involved is white.”
Ah, but that’s not exactly testing the same thing, is it. Even if the 60-70% biological estimate is correct, that is irrelevant to differentials in group (race or what have you) scores.
You simply want the “further studies” that favor your position to be true and not those that don’t.
“Want” has nothing to do with it. What matters is what theory works and what doesn’t.
Ah, but that’s not exactly testing the same thing, is it. Even if the 60-70% biological estimate is correct, that is irrelevant to differentials in group (race or what have you) scores.
I wouldn’t call it irrelevant, but in either case, this is the claim I was responding to:
The cultural and historical experience of each race has been dramatically different. Thus parsimony compels us to assume that it is these things that most account for any differences we see in scholastic performance, etc.
Do you have a link?
No, sorry. I don’t often engage in such debates so I don’t keep ammunition handy. Take my “further studies” claim with as many grains of salt as you like.
Do you have a link?
No, sorry.
The following is not one of the studies I remember reading:
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2012-00560-001/
but it’s very recent and is a meta-study. I haven’t actually read it – the PDF is behind a paywall, but the abstract seems pretty clear. It’s about the gender gap though, not the race gap.
Men and women score similarly in most areas of mathematics, but a gap favoring men is consistently found at the high end of performance. One explanation for this gap, stereotype threat, was first proposed by Spencer, Steele, and Quinn (1999) and has received much attention. We discuss merits and shortcomings of this study and review replication attempts. Only 55% of the articles with experimental designs that could have replicated the original results did so. But half of these were confounded by statistical adjustment of preexisting mathematics exam scores. Of the unconfounded experiments, only 30% replicated the original. A meta-analysis of these effects confirmed that only the group of studies with adjusted mathematics scores displayed the stereotype threat effect. We conclude that although stereotype threat may affect some women, the existing state of knowledge does not support the current level of enthusiasm for this as a mechanism underlying the gender gap in mathematics. We argue there are many reasons to close this gap, and that too much weight on the stereotype explanation may hamper research and implementation of effective interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Even if the 60-70% biological estimate is correct, that is irrelevant to differentials in group (race or what have you) scores.
I’d be interested to hear your explanation of the fact that some races and ethnicities have a higher apparent IQ than whites. Stereotype threat lowers apparent IQ, right?
Thanks for a sample.
We conclude that although stereotype threat may affect some women, the existing state of knowledge does not support the current level of enthusiasm for this as a mechanism underlying the gender gap in mathematics.
As I’ve read it, people have brought up stereotype threat in a ‘Well, for a start, there’s stereotype threat’
This seems to say the same – it’s one problem occuring in part of a population (thus affecting the whole populations scores) along with others. It certainly implies some sort of hope of closing the gap/implies there are problems to be solved (and not problem solving at a genetic manipulation level, I’ll just casually assume).
And bah, paywalls…!
Think of racial diversity as a rainbow. The colors of the rainbow aren’t neatly and precisely divided between one another on the color spectrum, but this does not mean that color is arbitrary. It isn’t – we can see the differences with our own eyes.
Not really. Looking at the real differences would be like looking at the contents of a hard drive in pure bit form – human unreadable format. Like trying to read the matrix. Maybe you can pull out a blond here, a red head there. But we are too complex to see how complex we are.
–Gerald Manley Hopkins
If anything, “race gap” in IQ being genetic would be an optimistic thing. It would mean that it could be engineered away as soon as human genetic engineering becomes more mainstream
And once again, IQ being a product of a certain cognitive mindset – what you’re talking about is essentially programmed religious upgrade. To take that cognitive mindset and take what it thinks is significant and force the world to fit that mould. OR it looks like all the lower IQ guys are getting brought up to speed with the rest of us/the ones who are the … I dunno, chosen? And that’ll help them out, of course!
Snap outta the frame and the latter becomes the former.
Well, it’s hard to argue against something that has so much existentialism in it 😉 but I’ll try.
Can it be said that intelligence, defined as generalized information processing and problem solving capacity, exists in any meaningful way ?
If so, then it can be said that having lower intelligence generally decreases your fitness and quality of life, and isn’t that fundamentally different from having fragile bones or something like that (you can of course claim that perceived inferiority having fragile bones is a cognitive mindset thing too – but that doesn’t change the fact that, well, a person has to go to a hospital and spend time in cast every time said person misses a step on a ladder)
Increasing this general intelligence of the population is thus as desirable as curing bone diseases in a population (whether it is indeed desirable is an ethics thing)
IQ tests seem to be sufficiently well correlated with “generalized information processing and problem solving capacity” to be successful at tracking the progress of such a project, irrespective of what you chose to believe regarding the desirability of such a project.
Can it be said that intelligence, defined as generalized information processing and problem solving capacity, exists in any meaningful way ?
I think that’s vague and it’s in terms of that I ask: Why do you need to say it exists? For what practical purpose? Why this need to say, without it being a means to an end, that something exists? An end in itself that it exists? Hardly, it’ll latter be used to justify something else, and/or that will be used to justify actions.
This might just be me. I have a hard time remembering names. Because I really don’t see much too them, for example. Making grand significance of a speck upon the real subject.
If so, then it can be said that having lower intelligence generally decreases your fitness and quality of life
Do you know how to make immunisations? If not, does that decrease the fitness and quality of your life?
Beyond such medical wonders, what exactly is it that reduces fitness and quality of life? Rampaging saber tooth tigers that must be outwitted? Or a post industrial landscape, where powerful martial entities have declared they own all land and your going to have to be (their kind of) intelligent enough to run their industrial machines in order to even get a mortgage, let alone have a patch they wont use their forces to dispute.
What reduces quality of life when what you decide intelligence is, is lowered?
Though you might get me if you said lowered wisdom…
IQ tests seem to be sufficiently well correlated with “generalized information processing and problem solving capacity”
The test is correlated with the designer of the tests definition of intelligence.
Sometimes I’ve discovered a self referencing logic in myself pretending to be meaningful. Personally it’d really bug me for someone else to raise it, as I wouldn’t wont to concede it to some random dummy. So as to look after myself, the only thing I want conceded is that the full model of the idea has been visualised by the other guy. Then I feel that was a good convo’ (oops, conversation – that shorthand got Roger bothered once! 😉 )
“I think that’s vague and it’s in terms of that I ask: Why do you need to say it exists? For what practical purpose? Why this need to say, without it being a means to an end, that something exists? An end in itself that it exists? “
Well, it would be nice to agree that something, perhaps vague something, that can be called intelligence, exists, and we both acknowledge that (that is, your and mine subjective models of reality both acknowledge that certain types of agents have property “intelligence” and a description of this property – otherwise, we happen to perceive very different realities and won’t have a very efficient conversation)
“Do you know how to make immunisations? “
Depends on how you define it. I am definitely capable of carrying out inoculations per a formal protocol. I have some formal medical training (cause, you know, given my kind of hobbies, it would be irresponsible not to have any such training 😉 )
As to QOL, I think that having more extensive knowledge of human biology and medicine would increase my quality of life, but, sadly, there are limits to current human learning, and limits to time available to me.
Knowing more (and then even more because MOAR IS NOT LESS 🙂 ) would be cool. Hope flesh jockeys eventually figure out some knowledge-download thingy.
” Beyond such medical wonders, what exactly is it that reduces fitness and quality of life? Rampaging saber tooth tigers that must be outwitted? Or a post industrial landscape, where powerful martial entities have declared they own all land and your going to have to be (their kind of) intelligent enough to run their industrial machines in order to even get a mortgage, let alone have a patch they wont use their forces to dispute.”
Absolutely irrelevant.
Again, fragile bone analogy.
It doesn’t matter whether you need stronger bones to punch out tigers, operate machinery, or are just not fond of ending up with both legs broken because there was a very slight irregularity on the ground which you overlooked.
Having stronger bones is better than having brittle ones, ceteris paribus.
Having greater capacity to effectively retrieve and accurately process information as well as make better (relative to your goals) decisions based on that information is better than having poor information processing and decision making.
My position is really simple – being healthy, resilient, strong and smart is better than being diseased, fragile, weak and stupid, irrespective of whether you’re facing tigers, nasty corporations, religious nutballs or impending asteroid collision 😉
“What reduces quality of life when what you decide intelligence is, is lowered?”
Reduced ability to analyze the surroundings and make high-quality decisions that would further your goals. Reduced ability to assert your own goals when faced with manipulations from smarter agents. General reduced ability to manipulate your surroundings to your betterment.
Basically, everything that makes it really shitty to be a chimp as compared to being a more-or-less normal human (even a disabled human with damaged hands is still better off, exactly because of this elusive “intelligence” thingy)
“Though you might get me if you said lowered wisdom… “
Wisdom seems even vaguer and more elusive than intelligence, and might be a natural byproduct of it 😉
otherwise, we happen to perceive very different realities and won’t have a very efficient conversation
Yeah, quite inefficient. But I think if I agreed there is (on such vague terms), we’d be even more inefficient – so much more room to talk right past each other! We actually have to talk details when I don’t, rather than agreeing on vague cartoons that enable talk past talk.
I’ll narrow down – in terms of participants playing chess, there seems to be a process which is more than just random moves being made.
I think that having more extensive knowledge of human biology and medicine would increase my quality of life
Seems more like a memory thing first and foremost?
Absolutely irrelevant.
It’s not. Your mixing up the human created world and the natural world as being the one. One kind of healthy and ‘accurate’ information processing in one environment (eg the desert) wont cut it in the highly artificial world (eg stockbroking), nor the latter in the former. The fitness tests are entirely different, that should be obvious. Except the fitness test for one is simply a product of an artificial construct – that fitness test is someone forcing another to make their foot fit the shoe. Sure, nature makes us force our foot to fit the shoe all the time … so much so we just get used to doing that. Even when it’s actually another human making us do it for their gain, when it is not necessary.
Reduced ability to assert your own goals when faced with manipulations from smarter agents.
And who are these agents?
Do they happen to be related to the people who designed the IQ test?
Well fuck, there’s a manipulation! “Were totally giving you a way of guiding your own life – all you have to do is get your brain conformed to our…”
Basically, everything that makes it really shitty to be a chimp as compared to being a more-or-less normal human (even a disabled human with damaged hands is still better off, exactly because of this elusive “intelligence” thingy)
I look at what your saying – more or less human? This doesn’t sound like huge, deep blue like stuff? Eat, drink and be merry? Since when did the simple things in life require uber intellect? Well, since the structure started demanding your foot fit the shoe, actually.
“Seems more like a memory thing first and foremost?”
Not entirely.
Learning a book by heart is just *data*, not knowledge. Learning several medical textbooks by heart is not the same thing as having the knowledge (and skills, if you wish to count those separately from knowledge) of say, an actual surgeon.
But even merely having perfect memory/recall “as seen in scifi” would be a pretty decent start. Definitely better than what I have to settle for now.
“It’s not. Your mixing up the human created world and the natural world as being the one.”
The difference to me is pedantic and irrelevant.
I see a landscape before me. It has other agents and various objects and irregularities on it. It has intrinsic properties of various kinds.
I need to attain my goals by exploiting and reshaping the landscape.
The question of whether the landscape is synthetic or natural is only relevant as far as the answer could affect optimal choice of actions in regards to it (a corporation can be sued… and asteroid or a virus – not so much)
“One kind of healthy and ‘accurate’ information processing in one environment (eg the desert) wont cut it in the highly artificial world (eg stockbroking), nor the latter in the former. The fitness tests are entirely different, that should be obvious.”
It is not obvious to me that success at surviving in a desert and stockbroking do not both benefit from a “general intelligence factor” in an agent attempting those actions.
Pre-requisite knowledge and skills are different, yes. Acquiring and using them (as well as deciding acquisition of which skills to prioritize) is a question of intelligence
“Even when it’s actually another human making us do it for their gain, when it is not necessary.”
How is facing another human so fundamentally different from facing our hostile, revolting mother nature 🙂 ? Humans are part of nature, sadly, not transcendent lovecraftian creatures…
“And who are these agents?
Do they happen to be related to the people who designed the IQ test?
Well fuck, there’s a manipulation! “Were totally giving you a way of guiding your own life – all you have to do is get your brain conformed to our…”
Well, if you imply subterfuge on part of test designers or accidental excessive specialization in definition of intelligence (a local maximum problem), then those challenges can be readily addressed by using different tests designed by unrelated (and even mutually unfriendly) parties and checking for correlation to establish a course that gets you most attractive pattern of across-the-board improvement.
This, of course, assumes that a “general intelligence” is actually a thing which, IIRC, we refused to agree upon 😉
Also, am I getting the “all kinds of minds, even the ones that are obviously maladaptive in current environment, are equally worthy of remaining as they are” vibe, or am I reading too much into your comments ?
“I look at what your saying – more or less human?”
More or less NORMAL human. Let’s not try to pretend that there is no such thing as “abnormal” condition. If it was so, then people who lost a leg in a shark attack wouldn’t need prothetics, poor people wouldn’t need UHS.
Things like stopping HIV and malaria would be oxymorons (If there’s no such thing as “normal human condition” and thus no such thing as “disease”, what’s your beef with those little fellows? 😉 )
” This doesn’t sound like huge, deep blue like stuff?”
Wait, what ?
Eat, drink and be merry? Since when did the simple things in life require uber intellect?
The “be merry” part is uber-complicated and highly subjective. Plus, ensuring that you go on eating and drinking for as long as possible and don’t accidentally die a horrible, excruciating, disgraceful death just because of some virus that happens to thrive in bat guano is a hard task fraught with dangers and concealed pitfalls that require (yes!) intelligence to foresee and infrastructure to actually handle, irrespective of whether you live in post-industrial state or not.
You know, nature is not your friend.
Nature is nobody’s friend.
Well, since the structure started demanding your foot fit the shoe, actually.
No, since it turned out that the universe is a hostile, cold and uncaring place with no loving deity to look after us, that nature is a bitch full of horrible shit of which “corporate motherfuckers” are just a tiny (and by far not the most vicious) subset, and generally there are plenty of things that are out to get you one way or another, for a whole variety of reasons.
Why this need to say, without it being a means to an end, that something exists?
It is a means to an end. As a variable, it has good predictive powers and must be controlled for in studies.
The test is correlated with the designer of the tests definition of intelligence.
There are other tests that measure intelligence besides the IQ tests – SAT, LSAT, AFQT. The results are strongly correlated. You can approximate someone’s IQ based on his score on one of the above.
The question of whether the landscape is synthetic or natural is only relevant as far as the answer could affect optimal choice of actions in regards to it (a corporation can be sued… and asteroid or a virus – not so much)
Ie, try and exploit some notion that the corporation is responsible, while you padddle around the landscape changing it/exploiting it to better suit your goals, with no sense of responsibility.
It’s a second subject whether you could really keep up this viewpoint when it becomes close and personal.
But on the main subject, you’ve really no sense of responsibility. You don’t see a natural landscape and upon it a landscape that you or those you support are responsibile for it’s shape. So why are you jumping into a conversation that’s about responsibility? You couldn’t imagine that as a subject, so you thought it was about something else?
Or otherwise I don’t know why you raise this whole ‘upgrade their brain’ – why, to your mind, better equip these other agents? Wont they just get in your way more? Where’s this notion for change coming from?
Well, if you imply subterfuge on part of test designers
I imply a blindness to ones own biases that gives the result of subterfuge, without the intention. Such is often called religion.
then those challenges can be readily addressed by using different tests designed by unrelated
The only unbiased are the dead. Though tests made by zombies strikes me as a cool story idea.
Scott nags on about this all the time – you’re certain you can find the unbiased test. Ala plato’s cave, you’re so used to seeing from your own particular skewed viewpoint (as opposed to my own skewed viewpoint) ever since you can remember that you see skewed as straight and by extension of the idea, you’re sure you can find an unskewed test out there that you can find.
If you had your head on sideways and lived alone on a desert island, then the wold being sideways would not be the world being sideways. It’d be the world being the world. THAT is the subterfuge I refer to. THAT trick. Upon all of us.
Also, am I getting the “all kinds of minds, even the ones that are obviously maladaptive in current environment, are equally worthy of remaining as they are” vibe, or am I reading too much into your comments ?
Equally worthy by who’s judgement?
Here, even closer, you confuse your judgement, or those you’d support, as being the same as natures darwinistic arrangement.
and don’t accidentally die a horrible, excruciating, disgraceful death just because of some virus that happens to thrive in bat guano
And you can see how I second guessed this in raising immunisations before – exactly how much of societies current infrastructure do you think we really need in order to do immunological research and production/distribution?
But that’s really not going to be an arguement to you, as it’s all just a landscape that your going to rat race in.
So, if your so concerned about an agonising death, how about having a yoke around your neck, being a slave for the rest of your life? Or shit, that’s okay, you’d deal with that landscape – but dying, gosh, that’s BAD!
You can’t see there’s a certain degree of death in various forces moving to remove your liberties for life? A sort of undead?
No, since it turned out that the universe is a hostile, cold and uncaring place with no loving deity to look after us, that nature is a bitch full of horrible shit of which “corporate motherfuckers” are just a tiny (and by far not the most vicious) subset, and generally there are plenty of things that are out to get you one way or another, for a whole variety of reasons.
And yet your dealing with the landscape suddenly, conveniently ends. What, there are more threats on the landscape – these corporate mofo’s? But – you’re jiggy with that, allowing these threats to just exist…wait, how is that compatable with ‘dealing with a landscape’s threats’?
Please don’t rush to explain how what you’ve done fits a certain agenda. Just tell me what you’ve decided to do in future.
PS: Deep blue is the computer that beat the chess master Kasperov.
Ya know what, if I proposed that maybe, in THE FUTURE, when we figure out everything there is to figure out about, oh, I dunno, joint disease, that we should make it so that no one suffers joint disease, no matter how mild, it would be remarkably uncontroversial, trivial even.
Nobody would speculate that it is tantamount to forcing my “culture” of mobility and my sense of priorities upon others.
Go figure.
The vagueness in your ‘we should make it’ and exactly what that means is the problem (I can think of a range of what that could mean – between offering it, or holding people at gun point and making them, or between that peoples access to food and shelter is reduced by legal/martial enforcement if they don’t accept it).
You put it sooo reasonably that other people write you a blank cheque for what actions you can take upon others – cause surely you’d use that reasonably (they think, ala a galactic standard of reasonable, when really your just reasonable in their subjective evaluation. But they don’t see that, so you’re not subjectively reasonable, you’re just…reasonable). Which of course all hinges on some people deciding FOR other people what will happen in their lives. But all very reasonably.
“Ie, try and exploit some notion that the corporation is responsible, while you padddle around the landscape changing it/exploiting it to better suit your goals, with no sense of responsibility.
It’s a second subject whether you could really keep up this viewpoint when it becomes close and personal.
But on the main subject, you’ve really no sense of responsibility. You don’t see a natural landscape and upon it a landscape that you or those you support are responsibile for it’s shape. So why are you jumping into a conversation that’s about responsibility? You couldn’t imagine that as a subject, so you thought it was about something else?”
Sorry, what ?
Again, to me, the distinction between natural and synthetic as far as “surrounding landscape” goes is purely a matter of whether there’s a practical difference (the example of suing a corporation was used to illustrate an interaction that is completely socially defined, as opposed to interactions that aren’t subject to much legislative whim)
Or is your point that socially constructed elements on the landscape should arouse a greater deal of responsibility and care on my end, or what ?
“Or otherwise I don’t know why you raise this whole ‘upgrade their brain’ – why, to your mind, better equip these other agents? Wont they just get in your way more?”
Well, i’m not competing with most of them, and in fact I stand to indirectly benefit from a society where extremely poor decision making arising from intelligence deficits is less common, and activities correlating with high intelligence test scores are more common.
Plus, my subjective ethics consider “providing people with easily available universal healthcare and prophylaxis regimens” a **good** thing, and I don’t see “engineering away hypothetical genetic factor responsible for decrease in general intelligence” as anything but a specific hypothetical case of providing for a healthier population.
The latter part is, obviously, an ethical stance and not an argument – a different person can assert that ethical thing to do is to keep all the cool shticks to the social elite with equal degree of argumentative support 😉
” you’re certain you can find the unbiased test. “
I made no such claim.
Also I specifically pointed out that tests designed by different parties with different goals and biases correlate, so you could play it safe and ensure a more-or-less even across the board increase if you’re afraid that basing such a project upon a single test and a single theoretical framework would land you in a nasty local maximum situation or something.
” Equally worthy by who’s judgement?
Here, even closer, you confuse your judgement, or those you’d support, as being the same as natures darwinistic arrangement.”
Nice dodge man. Still, same subjectivity issue applies to any measure of human activity .
Decreased joint mobility? By who’s judgement ?
Decreased quality of life ? By who’s judgement ?
I guess by a combination of medical professional and patient judgement, lol.
Also, I don’t get why you drag Darwin into this – I have no respect for “nature” and it’s shenanigans, and don’t assign any inherent ethical or functional value to the descriptor of “natural”.
So if your argument is that such interventions are entirely social constructs and make mankind less “natural”, my response is “fuck yeah, and that’s awesome”
” And you can see how I second guessed this in raising immunisations before – exactly how much of societies current infrastructure do you think we really need in order to do immunological research and production/distribution?”
Not dying a horrible death due to a virus was just an example of how the Biblical not-quite-gem of a slogan can suddenly blow up 🙂
” But that’s really not going to be an arguement to you, as it’s all just a landscape that your going to rat race in. “
Of course 🙂
” So, if your so concerned about an agonising death, how about having a yoke around your neck, being a slave for the rest of your life? Or shit, that’s okay, you’d deal with that landscape – but dying, gosh, that’s BAD!”
well, it is conceivable to do something about slavery (though aren’t we all inescapably “slaves” to the whims of an uncaring and literally mindless not-quite-god known as “evolutionary process” 😉 ? ), doing something about death after you have died seems problematic.
If you have any information regarding evidence for existence of necromancy and possibility of becoming an IRL lich, please share 😀
“You can’t see there’s a certain degree of death in various forces moving to remove your liberties for life? A sort of undead?”
liberties are a completely artificial construct, a social invention not unlike corporations or courts. Admittedly, I am subjectively fond of people having “liberties”, but I am quite convinced there’s nothing “natural” about such state of affairs, so I don’t see how ensuring that said social constructs keep being part of the “landscape” (which I support of course) contributes anything to your argument.
” And yet your dealing with the landscape suddenly, conveniently ends. What, there are more threats on the landscape – these corporate mofo’s? But – you’re jiggy with that, allowing these threats to just exist…wait, how is that compatable with ‘dealing with a landscape’s threats’? “
Why, dealing with landscape doesn’t end – I just stated that the landscape is hostile and always was hostile, and that corporate mofos are just one of the many threats to be navigated and handled in one way or another (depending on what the landscape is and what your resources are), and by far not the worst landscape has to offer.
” PS: Deep blue is the computer that beat the chess master Kasperov. “
Then the meaning of your reference to it in the post above eludes me. Did you imply that living a “happy” life does not require a great deal of intelligence (I just didn’t get it cause, you know, I don’t consider DB all that remarkable 😉 ) ?
“The vagueness in your ‘we should make it’ and exactly what that means is the problem (I can think of a range of what that could mean – between offering it, or holding people at gun point and making them, or between that peoples access to food and shelter is reduced by legal/martial enforcement if they don’t accept it).”
So your complaint is an implementation concern along the lines of “but what if DEATH PANELS” ?
” Which of course all hinges on some people deciding FOR other people what will happen in their lives. But all very reasonably. “
Right now, blind idiot not-quite-god of evolution randomly and thoughtlessly “decides” what will happen with people’s lives.
I find such arrangement… abhorrent (this is again an ethical stance – people fond of being in “harmony” with “nature” are free to disagree 😉 )
Or is your point that socially constructed elements on the landscape should arouse a greater deal of responsibility and care on my end, or what ?
Should is a weird word.
If you paint yourself into a corner, what do you do, just suddenly think ‘okay, the landscape around me is wet paint and how do I handle what just exists?’
That’s how it seems from this side – like you don’t have much of a perception of your own hand upon the landscape and being responsible for your own predicament. Or maybe when it’s obvious, rather than subtle, you do? I’ll pitch a spider man like scenario – you just engage the landscape and some ‘agent’ rushes past, others after him, but it’s not your business. But then latter your extra extra curricular gets damaged by this guy. Maybe he even damages it at a political level. Laws change and you get jailed for doing what you do. Did you paint yourself into a corner?
Well, i’m not competing with most of them, and in fact I stand to indirectly benefit from a society where…
Okay, that’s a hypothesis of yours you’re working from.
Plus, my subjective ethics consider “providing people with easily available universal healthcare and prophylaxis regimens” a **good** thing, and I don’t see “engineering away hypothetical genetic factor responsible for decrease in general intelligence” as anything but a specific hypothetical case of providing for a healthier population.
What if the treatment cleans up particular inclinations as well – like, say an inclination to engage in sadism? Gets rid of that. Because that’s healthier? Like healthier in an objective sense, someone asserts.
But anyway, I don’t see how you equate your idea of IQ as being some health indicator. Yes, you bring up the brittle bones. Are you going to bring up examples where having less of your idea of IQ puts people into hospital or death just as much?
Me: ” you’re certain you can find the unbiased test. “
You: I made no such claim.
Yup, merely acted on such a claim without even making it. “then those challenges can be readily addressed by using different tests designed by unrelated” and you give out all the criteria needed for what you say, because you know the critera.
Also I specifically pointed out that tests designed by different parties with different goals and biases correlate, so you could play it safe and ensure a more-or-less even across the board increase if you’re afraid that basing such a project upon a single test and a single theoretical framework would land you in a nasty local maximum situation or something.
Lots of different people support the bible as well – there’s a correlation.
You’re treating it as if, like a method invented for measuring centimeters, this invented method is equally measuring something objective.
It’s measuring certain peoples personal interest in certain materials. Of course there are correlations – lots of people have a personal interest in having sex, for example. This doesn’t actually lend some correlation credibility to anything in particular. Oooh, we all feel the same – it has to matter? No. Your talking about what is essentially a trend, being treated as if it was a rule (like physics).
Nice dodge man. Still, same subjectivity issue applies to any measure of human activity .
Decreased joint mobility? By who’s judgement ?
Decreased quality of life ? By who’s judgement ?
I guess by a combination of medical professional and patient judgement, lol.
I’m back to asking for the examples of the actual threat, as I asked for above.
Also, I don’t get why you drag Darwin into this – I have no respect for “nature” and it’s shenanigans, and don’t assign any inherent ethical or functional value to the descriptor of “natural”.
Then I don’t know why you bring in health before? Exactly what threat are these people supposed to be facing, if not darwinistic?
So if your argument is that such interventions are entirely social constructs and make mankind less “natural”, my response is “fuck yeah, and that’s awesome”
Not my argument. And what you have is raw ‘Hey, I just know!’. And…that’s it.
so I don’t see how ensuring that said social constructs keep being part of the “landscape” (which I support of course) contributes anything to your argument.
My argument which is about the responsibilities involved if one cares to support that second landscape? Maybe the second landscape I refered to that is overlayed onto the natural landscape/reality?
Why, dealing with landscape doesn’t end – I just stated that the landscape is hostile and always was hostile, and that corporate mofos are just one of the many threats to be navigated and handled in one way or another (depending on what the landscape is and what your resources are), and by far not the worst landscape has to offer.
So you’d say that in the movie Erin Brockovich, basically the town was under attack by tornado’s, bears, the plague, or some kind of ‘landscape’ stuff. Whilst the poisoning of the town was a mere fragment of all that?
Could you describe the threats of the landscape (lets not draw too long a bow and try and bring in some new bird flu from another country – the company was local, lets keep the examples local)?
Did you imply that living a “happy” life does not require a great deal of intelligence
Yes. But you treat the infrastructure of current society as how it has to be, rather than something that could be designed to fit the foot, rather than the other way around and everyone has to make their brain fit the shoe, so to speak.
So your complaint is an implementation concern along the lines of “but what if DEATH PANELS” ?
I’m not sure what you mean by death panels? My concern is the blank cheque your proposal asks for. Hand me a blank cheque to do whatever the hell I want – how much do you trust me? Pro tip: I’m very okay with you not trusting me with that power.
Right now, blind idiot not-quite-god of evolution randomly and thoughtlessly “decides” what will happen with people’s lives.
I find such arrangement… abhorrent (this is again an ethical stance – people fond of being in “harmony” with “nature” are free to disagree 😉 )
Correction – the blind idiot not-quite-god PUT this sense of abhorrence in you. You act out your jailers fantasy. Correction, you ARE your jailers fantasy. Where the fuck do you think your abhorrence came from? Some special other place?
Question it and maybe that’s some way of pulling back from the idiot god to a degree, being somewhat seperate for awhile. Or give into the feeling of abhorence. Wollow in it. Be carried upon it’s furious flow, utterly. Just as god intended.
“If you paint yourself into a corner, what do you do, just suddenly think ‘okay, the landscape around me is wet paint and how do I handle what just exists?’
That’s how it seems from this side – like you don’t have much of a perception of your own hand upon the landscape and being responsible for your own predicament.”
The question of painting yourself into a corner (and, by extension, avoiding it) relies heavily if you have sufficiently high “general intelligence” to detect this circumstance before it is too late (despite being freaky and elusive, general intelligence is useful like that).
AFTER one has painted oneself into a corner, the “cause” of this condition becomes largely irrelevant – the paint is already there, and you have to handle what just exists.
” I’ll pitch a spider man like scenario – you just engage the landscape and some ‘agent’ rushes past, others after him, but it’s not your business. But then latter your extra extra curricular gets damaged by this guy. Maybe he even damages it at a political level. Laws change and you get jailed for doing what you do. Did you paint yourself into a corner? “
Yes, since in this scenario, I apparently lacked the – dun dun dun – intelligence and / or information to detect the potential danger that agent posed, and act upon opportunity to further my goals by assisting in its neutralization.
Could’ve used some more of that elusive “general intelligence” thingie there, lol
” Okay, that’s a hypothesis of yours you’re working from. “
More like a theory, since empirically, I have already benefited in many ways from high-intelligence individuals being present in society. Also from post-industrial arrangement in general (were it not for credit organizations and computerisation, my quality of life would have likely dropped by a lot)
” What if the treatment cleans up particular inclinations as well – like, say an inclination to engage in sadism? “
Are we talking about modifying existing citizens or “designing babies” ? If the former, how many additional IQ points (or for that matter, points on any of the correlating tests) do I get for “trading in” my sadism ?
” Gets rid of that. Because that’s healthier? Like healthier in an objective sense, someone asserts. “
Given that this assertion already failed when “disadaptation” criteria were introduced in ICD and DSM, the side (re)doing the assertion would have to face an uphill battle and would need some damn good arguments. Being presented such fascinatingly good arguments, who knows what I’d do. But I don’t think that after several decades of “normalcy” debates in psychiatry regarding highly socialized paraphiliac behavior any new fancy argument would emerge.
Having said that, if I ever decided to get kids, I’d definitely prefer this stuff engineered away. It’s a mite of a fuss, and remarkably expensive fuss.
” But anyway, I don’t see how you equate your idea of IQ as being some health indicator. Yes, you bring up the brittle bones. Are you going to bring up examples where having less of your idea of IQ puts people into hospital or death just as much? “
Why, you yourself brought up a situation where a person gets in a nasty situation due to not being able to detect potential threat on part of a given agent in time.
Then of course limited intelligence will keep screwing a person over in ways both petty (get into debt to buy some silly fucking gadget-phone-thingamajig) and profound (escalate a petty conflict in a bar, go to jail. Get involved in an unworkable scheme, go broke. Go mountaneering without security beacons over an unsecure route, get killed. etc.)
Accident proneness correlates with having lower “intelligence” irrespective of class and other such shenanigans (money can’t save the stupid 😦 )
It’s basically having a lower quality decision making system.
Sorry, but given how decision making is the bee’s knees of human activity, I don’t see how having an inferior decision making apparatus can be seen as anything but a dire tragedy.
” Lots of different people support the bible as well – there’s a correlation. “
Even scarier, some “intelligence test” designers were Russians and sorta-communists at that.
Nonetheless, the test output correlates with that of capitalist designers 😀
” You’re treating it as if, like a method invented for measuring centimeters, this invented method is equally measuring something objective. “
So your claim is, that general intelligence, and by extension, general apparatus for solving problems, simply do not exist, and all indications as to presence of a common variable reflecting general quality of decision making (ranging from something as social as job achievements to something as basic as general accident proneness) is an artifact ?
” It’s measuring certain peoples personal interest in certain materials. “
Should I interpret it as a claim that there is no measurable difference in general problem solving ability in humans / no such thing as general problem solving ability ? That mental state of people with IQ of 60 is more or less just their “taste”, not unlike preferring one book over another ?
Cause that’s a damn audacious claim, given the vastness of evidence in favor of a generalized problem-solving ability in humans and animals alike.
” Then I don’t know why you bring in health before? Exactly what threat are these people supposed to be facing, if not darwinistic? “
Do we seek to improve people’s health out of Darwinistic concerns, to help them spread around their genes ?
Many diseases don’t affect reproductive potential all that much, yet we don’t ignore them.
” My argument which is about the responsibilities involved if one cares to support that second landscape? “
Wait, so you see “being randomly born with a bunch of genes that limit your cognitive perfomance” a kind of liberty that needs to be “preserved” against utilitarian encroachments ?
” Maybe the second landscape I refered to that is overlayed onto the natural landscape/reality? “
Could you please rephrase this ?
” So you’d say that in the movie Erin Brockovich, basically the town was under attack by tornado’s, bears, the plague, or some kind of ‘landscape’ stuff. Whilst the poisoning of the town was a mere fragment of all that? “
Well, the events certainly concerned the corporate part of landscape, but you gotta admit that the entire issue was resolved in pretty civil and mild-mannered way, though court and compensations. You can sue a corporation and win (they did), which is an option that only works for “social” parts of landscape (works nicely with asshole corporations), and my point was that this very feature makes corporate threats relatively mild.
You seem to have a remarkable amount of distaste towards corporations and capitalism (even regualted capitalism) in general, don’t you 😉 ?
” Yes. But you treat the infrastructure of current society as how it has to be, rather than something that could be designed to fit the foot, rather than the other way around and everyone has to make their brain fit the shoe, so to speak. “
You know, upon contemplating a mite, it seems to me that you propose a “milder, slower society”, sacrificing, if need be, rate of technological progress and degrees of comfort for an ability to extensively and less stressfully acomodate humans with less-than-stellar perfomance?
Would that be accurate?
” I’m not sure what you mean by death panels? My concern is the blank cheque your proposal asks for. “
Death pannels is a reference to exaggerated, comical moral panic conservitards had over UHS due to a very implausible hypothetical implementation option.
My proposal does not require a bigger blank cheque than proposal to extensively re-engineer entire infrastructure of society in a never-before-seen manner, obviously sacrificing current rate of technological progress and creating unprecedented forms of social regulation. Especially, you know, given ludicrously poor track record of such projects.
” Correction – the blind idiot not-quite-god PUT this sense of abhorrence in you. You act out your jailers fantasy. Correction, you ARE your jailers fantasy. Where the fuck do you think your abhorrence came from? Some special other place?
Question it and maybe that’s some way of pulling back from the idiot god to a degree, being somewhat separate for awhile. Or give into the feeling of abhorence. Wollow in it. Be carried upon it’s furious flow, utterly. Just as god intended. “
Unless you want me to take “free will” seriously – and if you do, I will just laugh at the silliness of such a suggestion, no offense – it is patently obvious that I can not escape my functional envelope. I am a probabilistic machine, and so is every other living thing.
Thus, my attempt to “pull back” would be as defined by blind idiot natural selection as my abhorrence towards the process of randomly reshuffling traits of living, feeling things to be produced. There’s of course is a chance to bootstrap into something different, but what exactly would be the outcome is defined by current design, so no system can ever completely “escape” the “jail” of its design legacy, no matter how radically you cull legacy components proper.
The good news, however, is that by questionable virtue of being blind and idiot (and there’s no argument regarding evolutionary process’s utter lack of intelligence despite apparent considerable “firepower”) there was no intent to put that abhorrence in me, much like there was no intent to put a capacity for rhetorical flair in you.
Those things just happened. Randomly.
It is by blind chance that I have ended up capable and willing to conclude that randomly designing future humans (as it is done now) is morally repungnant.
And since there’s no plan behind this little random circumstance, and no coherent argument to be presented in favor of a different attitude (No way to get to “ought” from “is”), I might as well stand by it.
Who knows, maybe one day, agents forged by random idiot god of evolutionary process with manage to metaphorically tear out its figurative throat 😉
It is by blind chance that I have ended up capable and willing to conclude that randomly designing future humans (as it is done now) is morally repungnant.
I had a mega post but I got to this and…atleast to me it seems I’d be just droning on to post it? I’ve saved it in wordpad, if you want it, otherwise I’ll cease somewhat gracefully now.
Vox = Baron Zemo. You heard it here first.
You were getting the marvel super villain vibe as well? “You will bow before my mighty intellect!”
There’s also a smell of imperial Kree about the man. Hmmmmmm…..
Saajan, I’m not big on comic culture, but wiki suggests that Zeno was at the very least, an ingenious and prolific inventor, not a self-proclaimed Intertube Debaet Souperchamp
Well, he wore a bag over his head (after killing his own side) which got super glued to his face. You’ve got to read the subtext! 😉
Scott, your sense of feminism is getting a bit vague to me. When did Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin or Catherine Mackinnon ever say they thought it was a few bad apples? They used to say all men are potential rapists, which fits in very well with what you’re arguing here. It seems like your whole argument with feminism – certainly radical feminism – is probably a non argument. You’re making a scientific case FOR radical feminism, not against. You don’t always have to be the outcast!
I wonder if it is even possible to be an outcast in feminism (or not to be one – it all depends upon whom you ask)
It’s a paradox!
Wait, you never masturbated to an anatomy textbook ? ^_^
Cursed reply buttons!
If I were arguing with them life would be a bit easier I think. There really is no such ‘thing’ as feminism, no compatible set of claims that could encompass it aside from a few emancipatory goals. In this latest round of debates I’ve yet to encounter any scholarly feminists – something which I find puzzling, but I guess makes sense given the low repute name-calling and shaming have in academic circles. (My guess, though, is that they would all have misgivings about my approach – Dworkin, certainly.)
ACM and her crew are naive feminists, like the bulk of feminists you encounter on the web or in real life. Their thinking strikes me as squarely ‘common sense,’ which is to say, entrenched in all the ways we’re geared to make our moral superiority stick. Bad apple thinking, through and through.
But you know what, academic name-dropping is pretty much the only tactic I haven’t employed. It would feel disingenuous simply because its been so long since I actively read any feminist literature (all the way back to the Camille Paglia days!). Maybe its time to dust of Speculum… Nothing like Irigaray quotes to put the fear of jargon into your interlocutors.
Don’t worry, it’s not like feminists are obliged to acknowledge “academic authority” of other feminists.
I’m pretty sure that for every academic you cite the opposing side can find an academic aligned to their viewpoint. Hell, I think there might even exist an “academic sorta-feminist” that would fit Vox’s fancy (there are pro-life, motherhood-first feminists after all, lol )
Scott,
Your argument consists of many pieces, ranging from the validity of your position on biology to the efficacy of subversion itself and then to the efficacy of your subtext.
I think each piece needs a lengthy thoughtful blog post at minimum, and isn’t something you can defend via a comment here or there.
People rarely bring their A-game to the internet unless they already think the person is worth taking the time out for. As I’ve said in the past, it’s all about the “Second Date”. I suspect this is why academic feminists haven’t bothered to comment or have seen fit to dismiss your arguments.
Right now it seems you have some hazy predictions of biology that seemingly can be addressed by long pornographic passages (that honestly range from intriguing to laughable to disturbing). What conclusions we’re supposed to draw, and why you thought certain passages would work – These things escape me.
I’ve never really understood the problem have with name dropping by the way, I personally find it important to divulge where my ideas come from and also allow the opportunity for others to provide alternate readings.
Name dropping in internet debates is primarily an authority display tool, not a scholarly one. Often, you find yourself dismissed simply because of the name you attach to it as well. I guess my question would be, Why would you think that arguments should not speak for themselves without any genetic taint one way or another?
But you’re right. I do need to pull this all together into one apologia that I can simply LINK. But remember, the big theme for me is moral certainty.
I suspect no academic feminists have jumped in because a) Few are aware of it, it’s such small potatoes, or b) Because, as an academic, they spend so much time inveighing against so many of the tactics I’ve been up against. It’s hard to penalize kids for ad hominem attacks in papers, then commend them elsewhere!
One of the most frustrating things about this debate is simply the way they characterize my books by default as being ‘chock full of pornography.’ Really they’re not.
Given that priming is a fact, there’s really no way I could get a ‘fair reading’ by partisans of either side. Language is just too amorphous not be stamped into shapes of our own making. (Larry’s shallow reading of Mimara is a perfect example – he want’s to argue her character is shallow, he picks one of many, many narrative observations, then says this is the kind of box Bakker puts his characters in). It’s just the way it works.
All I’m trying to say is that I’m not perfect, but I’m not stupid, I’m not derivative, and if you look for more you will find it.
I know academics who would describe themselves as feminists have looked at the arguments at different times, but I don’t know how many have followed in closely.
Where I think you’ve erred is trying to “set the table”, as in worrying about second order claims, when you should “get down to dinner”. Presenting your positions on actual considerations outside of tone will, IMO, serve to some extent as a natural filter. People uninterested may simply dismiss, but genuine adversaries are more likely to come in because the topic is of interest.
I think several topics that’ve been mentioned are interesting, but sadly seem to have become tangential.
“Is Western culture going to become more pornographic in the future?” is something I am deeply interested in for example.
I wonder about the definition here of pornographic. Indeed, it almost seems to cover ‘what offends me’ as well as ‘what I like’ (or maybe even just the former?).
Assuming your definition of pornography also covers ‘what I like’, do you actually like ANY of the sex stuff in the series, at all?? The only bit I can recall that I liked is an Akka and Esme scene and the line ‘two bodies, one warmth’, which I thought romantic. But I doubt anyone has an issue with that bit.
Saajan, did you actually enjoy any of the sex stuff (let alone the rape!)? I doubt it – if not, how does that come under the definition of pornography? Or is your definition of pornography purely a negative one?
I just mean pornographic as in sexual. I suppose “erotic” might have been less pejorative.
You found any of the books scenes erotic? Personally?
This is the weird double definition thing – even Scott seems to do so above, saying he’s okay with erotica and uses pornography in a pejorative sense.
How can a definition work thats not the same for everyone who reads it? “Oh, this stuff is bad bad pornography – that those other guys like!” Well then that definition fails in terms of those other guys actually understanding what the fuck we are talking about. We’re not all using one definition.
I’m gunna bet the bank you did not find the scenes erotic at all, Saajan.
We feel other people might like this bad shit. But what language do we have to express that – we call it erotic, when we don’t actually find it erotic ourselves? We call it just shit, when we suspect someone else gets titilated by it? Part of us wants to call it sexual content, while another part of us does not in the least find it sexually stimulating. How can it be sexual content then?
Ah, I think I end up pitching open ended questions there. I don’t have a conclusion to the issue to pitch at this time.
“How can a definition work thats not the same for everyone who reads it?”
This is the problem – of all theoretical argumentation – in a nutshell. I remember debating a feminist who was trying to argue that all heterosexual intercourse (and representations thereof) were instances of sexual violence – and being called a misogynist for the trouble! Even when everyone has a level head, the problem of ‘interpretative underdetermination’ makes any sort of resolution impossible.
It’s fucking philosophy folks!
This is the primary reason why I’m always trying to make the second order move… Some times it’s easier to make claims about divisive claims. But only some.
But I think if feminists would realize the interpretative quandary they so obviously find themselves in, the trivial fact that they can never make their totalizing interpretations stick, the now substantiated fact that moral interpretation possesses a number of unique challenges to all parties – in other words, if we could all just be honest about our confusion, the debate would be transformed.
The problem, of course, is that we all seem to instinctively connect moral certainty with moral warrant. We are loathe to acknowledge our confusion, because we need to make our condemnations stick – especially post facto.
There really is no such ‘thing’ as feminism, no compatible set of claims that could encompass it aside from a few emancipatory goals.
Today’s half serious theory of feminism:
Principle #1: Whatever befalls women is mens’ fault.
Principle #2: Women need more power.
(If you find these contradictory or irrational, your patriarchal thinking is obsolete.)
As a direct consequence of these two principles, the primary tactic of feminism is to accuse men that something is their fault, then demand power for women.
This easily answers your question of why a feminist would prefer to engage you instead of Vox.
“Keep it simple – Omar likes it simple.”
Point being, “scenes with sex in them” is what I was saying. I think sometimes you guys get your heads in the clouds and the basic questions go unanswered.
Simply put, R. Scott Bakker == Reed Richards.
Saajan,
I wonder if we simply don’t have a word for, say, erections and vaginas interacting, that is not sexual? Perhaps the closest is how some say that rape is about power, not sex.
Anyway, I’m trying to say that saying it has pornography or erotica implies it titilates/excites someone else. If we take ‘scenes with sex in them’ as non titilating/neutral, then the significance ‘long passages of pornography’ had is lost. It’s not evidence towards anything.
On reflection, apart from in medical texts, it’s like such things HAVE to be titilating for someone, even if not ones self. It’s incredibly primed in us, it seems.
Simply put, R. Scott Bakker == Reed Richards.
You know, I was thinking FF too! But I was thinking Ben Grimm. I know, that doesn’t really make any sense!?
Scott,
I think under most legislature your erotica and your pornography are both filed under ‘pornography’. And obviously it’s all tied to a certain amount of martial enforcement. It’s difficult to engage it at a confusion level, when prior definate assertions of ‘pornography’ defined within the context of it’s assertion, may very well trickle into what is martially enforced. The guns have not been put down, so to speak (well, in a certain sense, literally).
I guess that ties to the genuine detractors of the books weve seen so far – they feel the books are still being propegated. So how much harm (as they see it) would occur while they sit around merely thinking about it instead of acting?
Hard to find a safe space to think?
I propose we call sexual content…Sexual content!
Can I haz soup-er intelligence badge too now ? 😛
So medical journals have teh ‘sexual content’s? They describe all the bits! They even have pica-tures!
Sometimes I wonder if the books carry too much history from anacademic background. A background which is far more used to switching to a clinical mode of thought.
Sure medical books have sexual content in them!
Wait, you never masturbated to an anatomy textbook ? ^_^
Study showing the achievement gap being closed: http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncw/listing.aspx?id=771
Is there a tag that collects all your articles on immigration? Are these at WND?
Hmmm, no, there is not. I haven’t really written all that many, though, maybe five or six out of about 550. You can find immigration-related posts on my blog with the tags “immigration”, “invasion”, and “vibrancy is our strength”, through.
You were getting the marvel super villain vibe as well?
Well, I’ve already got the mountain lair, the armory, and thousands of heavily armed Dread Ilk obedient to my every order… so long as the order involves killing Yankees, Russians, and Skrulls. Now I’ve only got to perfect my master plan and I’ll hold the planet hostage for ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
On the other hand, alot of marvel super villains have felt guilt at some point in their lives. I’m guessing no.
Did you catch this article? Seemed like something you’d appreciate. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/04/27/the-irrationality-of-irrationality-the-paradox-of-popular-psychology/
Having sat on a few juries, watched trials, etc. I can say that the jury never in my experience overall thinks it has all of the facts. There are always lingering questions and wondering why, it seems like common sense, didn’t one side or the other explain some lingering point that would have made the deliberations easier. Sometimes this is because for whatever reason, one side or the other managed to prevent that from being brought up over some legal argument.
What the article seems to miss is, what do you do when you cannot know all of the facts? What happens when your information is incomplete and there is no way to get the rest of it? The implication seems to be, “Don’t make a decision.” That is sometimes not an option.
Psychology, as Bible says in *Neuropath* tends to look more and more like alchemy or astrology, except at least those two occult forms of pseudoscience at least tried to provide some answers. Neuroscience would have handled the whole thing differently, I think. Maybe the most useful thing in the article is the idea that we cannot handle being 100% objective. More data frequently leads to more questions and no action.
Which is how so many Democrats seem to get labelled “wishy-washy” or as wafflers. Republicans tend not to have problems with making bad decisions and standing by them. If it had been wrong, they wouldn’t have made the decision, therefore it must have been the correct thing to do, facts be damned. People, as authoritarians, tend to feel more comfortable with a confident bad decision maker than a good slow, cautious one. Of course, that’s a gross generalization.
If you read “Blink” and decided it was gospel, you are an idiot. Of COURSE we should be wary of the results psychological research. One of the biggest scandals in science in the last two years involved Marc D. Hauser, how was (ironically) involved in ethics research. It turned out he outright fabricated data.
OK. So. Here we are. The people in white coats are succumbing to unethical behavior even when their research deals with the exact same subject.
Do you know what this means? THE WHOLE FUCKING THING IS A JOKE.
I can imagine Diogenes just fucking laughing his ass off at the circus humanity has become. Only when it concerns the absolutely nightmarish crap neuroscience is uncovering and doing does the laughter stop (or does it get louder… I don’t know).
Very cool – and apropo! Thank’s Luke.
Is anyone else here following Vox’s review of Delavagus’s posts? It’s a little surreal, to say the least. At this point, I’m wondering if he’s having us on bit.
I used to think he was capable of self-parody, until I realized…
This shows just how deep the second-order thorn has pricked him.
A bit?
This page is under his “target rich zone” headline. The man is a skilled TROLOLOLOLOL.
Still amusing (in a “well ain’t the world fucked” sort of of way).
Is anyone else here following Vox’s review of Delavagus’s posts? It’s a little surreal, to say the least.
You think it’s surreal now? Just wait until I demonstrate how fundamentally incompetent his contortions of Pyrrhonism are. Forget his lack of precision, his errors are simply breathtaking, and in one case, even exposes the fatal flaw in Scott’s entire uncertainty principle. It seems somebody didn’t read Sextus very closely, or perhaps even at all.
Do you know what this means? THE WHOLE FUCKING THING IS A JOKE.
If you consider that what purports to be gold standard peer-reviewed lab science has been shown to have an 11% replication rate, it should be clear that science is a complete and utter joke. If it’s not engineering, it can’t be trusted. Science is corrupt and unreliable bullshit. Philosophical uncertainty is both impotent and incoherent. Pragmatic predictive models based on postulates, only utilized so long as they deliver functional results reasonably in line with their predictions, is the only way to go if you actually want to get anywhere. If you just want to stare at your navel, be as uncertain that you like.
“Is it a belly-button? Is it a black hole in a shining field of stars? I can’t possibly know!”
Vox wrote:
“If it’s not engineering, it can’t be trusted… Science is corrupt and unreliable bullshit. ”
So, when you get cancer or develop multiple sclerosis you’re going to go to an engineer right? I mean, it’s not like you had a lot of credibility with me to begin with, but you just completely lost it.
Each subject has different standards. Physics has a very high threshold for what counts as an official discovery, chemistry and biology are somewhat less rigorous, and then psychological research should be taken with a heavy grain of salt.
However, to condemn an enterprise that has eradicated diseases, lowered mortality from inherited disorders, and begun to understand the cell at its most basic regulatory level is stupid and narrow-minded. No, that’s not a strong enough statement… it’s straight-up trisomy 21 Down’s Syndrome retarded.
So, when you get cancer or develop multiple sclerosis you’re going to go to an engineer right? I mean, it’s not like you had a lot of credibility with me to begin with, but you just completely lost it.
Sure I did, moron. So tell me, do you recommend those with cancer or multiple sclerosis see scientists or philosophers? As for me, I’d go see a doctor.
However, to condemn an enterprise that has eradicated diseases, lowered mortality from inherited disorders, and begun to understand the cell at its most basic regulatory level is stupid and narrow-minded. No, that’s not a strong enough statement… it’s straight-up trisomy 21 Down’s Syndrome retarded.
I always enjoy seeing mid-wits attempting to confront the highly intelligent; they never have any clue that they’re in over their heads. 11 percent reliability, moron. And, ironically enough, the scientific study that reported that was specifically examining cancer-related scientific research. What part of IT IS NEARLY 90 PERCENT UNREPLICABLE do you find so hard to understand? You’re making the science fetishist’s mistake of confusing your image of ideal and nonexistent science for the real thing in the real world.
The scientific method is certainly a useful tool. But science, the profession, is corrupt, dishonest, and has been shown with the scientific method to be astonishingly unreliable. Moreover, it was engineering that took the major chunk out of most of those diseases. It wasn’t science or scientists that came up with the idea for sewage systems.
The following is entirely predicated on the assumption that you, when you mention the 11% thing, are referring to the Begley commentary in Nature, viewable for some here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html (paywall)
You are way overreaching with this.
First of all, it refers to preclinical cancer studies ONLY. It is not a commentary on “science,” it is a commentary on a very small subset of science. Moreover, the commentary is based on a mere 53 trials. Based on THIS ALONE, your claims are dramatically overblown.
Second, this commentary itself will not be reproduced, because the details Begley has made available are extremely vague (he claims he had to agree to not make public which studies he examined to get access to their methodology).
Third, following on the previous point, this commentary does not represent an operation of the scientific method. There is no experimental setup. There are no reproducible (or not) results. This isn’t even a meta-analysis. There is literally no data presented by Begley whatsoever to support his allegations.
I am in no way saying science is perfect. Far from it. However, drawing the conclusions you have drawn based on the available evidence (which is, practically speaking, none at all) is grossly negligent.
Third, following on the previous point, this commentary does not represent an operation of the scientific method. There is no experimental setup. There are no reproducible (or not) results. This isn’t even a meta-analysis. There is literally no data presented by Begley whatsoever to support his allegations.
You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. Are you seriously going to claim that attempting to replicate previous scientific experiments is not science? That possibility of “self-correction” is the primary basis of the claim for science’s supposed superiority to other forms of gathering knowledge!
During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development. Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated.
Moreover, you’ve got ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You’re claiming that I’m being grossly negligent for drawing conclusions based on the available evidence… what does that make you, who appear to be arguing the opposite position based on absolutely nothing at all. If you do have any statistics on what percentage of published, peer-reviewed scientific experiments are successfully reproduced, I would certainly like to see them.
No, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Begley’s commentary is not science. Did you notice how it is called a commentary, not a study, not an investigation, not a meta-analysis? Maybe Begley’s team did the experiments they claim, maybe they didn’t. Probably they did, but we have no way of knowing. We have no way of knowing WHAT they did. There is no data, so it is not science. What Begley published is an editorial, nothing more. It is a serious allegation, and medical science in particular could use more scrutiny, but using this as a lever to attempt overturning the entire edifice of scientific inquiry is laughable.
wow.
this is wingnut logic tied up with a nice little bow.
understanding something about the replication rate of scientific results simply requires knowing something about science. last year’s Results section becomes next year’s Methods section.
there’s really no point in even addressing the Science versus Engineering “argument” either. my lab has mostly biomedical engineering PhDs working on basic science. is it science, or engineering that we’re doing? please.
the whole thing reeks of free market fundamentalism, cherry picking, and “i have a hammer the whole world is a nail-ery.” there’s no point refuting it, since the basic claims are laughable, and the “argument” has been reduced to name calling and CAPITALS.
he’s like a kid running around attacking stone buildings with a plastic hammer screeching “11%! dread ilk! i tho sthmart! i read a thtudy one time!”
i’d love to stay and play, but i have to prepare for a meeting to develop lesson plans for teaching medical students (“herp derp, i see a DOCTOR when my tummy hurts, not a THIENTITHT!”). who do you think trains them?
(hint: scientists)
sad.
/thread. (finally)
my lab has mostly biomedical engineering PhDs working on basic science. is it science, or engineering that we’re doing? please.
If your paycheck depends on doing something that works, it’s engineering. Otherwise, if you properly adhere by the scientific method, and your results can be replicated, it’s science. Otherwise, it’s something else.
i’d love to stay and play, but i have to prepare for a meeting to develop lesson plans for teaching medical students (“herp derp, i see a DOCTOR when my tummy hurts, not a THIENTITHT!”). who do you think trains them?
(hint: scientists)
Everyone can apply the scientific method and perform a scientific experiment. Engineers do. Doctors did. The difference is that professional scientists do science for science’s sake, whereas engineers and doctors are interested in what works.
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-grant-chasing-corrupts-science.html
my lab has mostly biomedical engineering PhDs working on basic science. is it science, or engineering that we’re doing? please.
That depends. If it usually works, then it must be engineering. Obviously.
Maybe Begley’s team did the experiments they claim, maybe they didn’t. Probably they did, but we have no way of knowing. We have no way of knowing WHAT they did.
Ah, Schroedinger’s Science, I see. The cat may or may not be dead and we can’t know until it is peer-reviewed and published in a reputable magazine. I like it.
His comment was published in a reputable magazine, Nature. That doesn’t make it science. Even if he published each and every study they attempted to replicate in full, along with all of their experiments showing non-reproducibility (which he will not) it would still not be anywhere CLOSE to sufficient reason for tossing out science as a whole, for the simple reason that he’s talking about a frankly miniscule number of studies in one tiny corner of one discipline. Much, much more research would be required. As he has not done any of that, I will just say that any research at all is required, because it hasn’t been done to a sufficient standard of evidence. As it stands, it amounts to nothing more than hearsay.
Even if he published each and every study they attempted to replicate in full, along with all of their experiments showing non-reproducibility (which he will not) it would still not be anywhere CLOSE to sufficient reason for tossing out science as a whole, for the simple reason that he’s talking about a frankly miniscule number of studies in one tiny corner of one discipline.
You aren’t sufficiently precise in your use of the term “science”. No, it’s not a reason to throw out the scientific method, or science. Yes, if he has chosen a representative sample of studies, and his reproduction rate is as low as he claims, it is a sufficient reason to prefer the hypothesis that the reproduction rate of presently published studies is lower than, say, 30%. In other words, it is a sufficient reason to not call presently published studies “science”, because they are nothing of the sort. They are Science, a way to appropriate government money, with the veracity of the results being mostly irrelevant for this goal.
I am being precise enough in my usage for the current discussion, the point of which is to establish that what Begley did is not “science,” and is insufficient evidence to conclude anything except for “more research needed”.
It doesn’t matter whether Begley did “science”. What matters is whether he’s right in his inability to reproduce, and consequently, whether the studies he tried to reproduce are “science”, and hence, what can we conclude about the larger area of “medical science” based on this representative sample, and further, what can we conclude about the larger still area of “science” based on that.
Well, we can’t know if he’s right. That is my point.
I agree. These were your points 2 and 3. I’m addressing point 1, that is, what can we conclude if we assume that he is right. And my conclusion is not that we need to throw out science, my conclusion is that we should actually do science. Proper science, whose results can be replicated.
(From where I stand, I suspect that he’s right, because he gains nothing by erroneously or deliberately claiming inability to replicate. But I do admit that we can’t know for certain.)
Oh, I see. I still don’t think it’s quite proper to generalize too much from this (it should be repeated [ha] in other domains), but we’re much closer to agreement than I thought.
for those interested in replicability in epidemiology:
Click to access 218.full.pdf
for those interested in the statistical case (assuming p < 0.05, which is obscene):
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
for those wanting to inveigh agin' tha gubmint takin' all'at money for quote 'Science' endquote:
theblaze.com
for those interested in the statistical case (assuming p < 0.05, which is obscene):
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
The link is good, but what were you trying to say? And in what way is p < 0.05 obscene?
“If you consider that what purports to be gold standard peer-reviewed lab science has been shown to have an 11% replication rate, it should be clear that science is a complete and utter joke.”
There’s a massive, massive gap between the claim you’re making and the evidence you’re presenting, Vox. Why don’t show some intellectual honesty and either fill the gap or walk back the claim.
“That depends. If it usually works, then it must be engineering. Obviously.”
If it usually works, can it also be science, Vox, or are you defining science as stuff that doesn’t usually work?
“There’s a massive, massive gap between the claim you’re making and the evidence you’re presenting, Vox. Why don’t show some intellectual honesty and either fill the gap or walk back the claim.”
I agree. On this issue Vox is arguing for the sake of a network television audience; i.e. the weight of his argument, or soundbite, is largely rhetorical, and dangerously so insofar as it may be persuasive to uncritical listeners. The study he cites is suggestive but the weight that it can bear seems to me to be extremely limited. Let’s pretend that the cameras are off and we’re all seeking after the truth here.
Indeed. Where does the 11% replication stat come from? From the process of error removal. It’s laughing at the other guy pulling all these ticks of himself, as if only the guy removing the ticks could have had any.
According to adherents.com there are roughly 4200 different religions in the world today. Since only one can be the correct faith, this makes science roughly 460 times more accurate than religion.
His comment was published in a reputable magazine, Nature. That doesn’t make it science. Even if he published each and every study they attempted to replicate in full, along with all of their experiments showing non-reproducibility (which he will not) it would still not be anywhere CLOSE to sufficient reason for tossing out science as a whole, for the simple reason that he’s talking about a frankly miniscule number of studies in one tiny corner of one discipline.
So you think it is PUBLISHING that makes it science? Look, slowboat, the science part is done, whether the replicated experiments are published or not. Anyone else can attempt to replicate those experiments too if they want. Furthermore, why should science as a whole be tossed out? Even if it is only 11 percent reliable, that’s still enough to produce some useful results.
You’re reacting like a cultist whose god was just shown to be nothing but wood and stone.
There’s a massive, massive gap between the claim you’re making and the evidence you’re presenting, Vox. Why don’t show some intellectual honesty and either fill the gap or walk back the claim.
I’m demonstrably far more intellectually honest than any of the pathetic faux skeptics here. Notice that Ochlocrat and I are the only two who have presented any evidence whatsoever. He showed 20 of the 47 studies examined were successfully replicated. That indicates somewhere between 11% and 44% of science that is actually tested can be considered reliable. Hardly a sure thing. There is an INIFINITE gap between the claim everyone attempting to defend science is making and the evidence they are presenting. And furthermore, little faux skeptics, how do you know that you know science works anyhow? Where is the justification for your justified true belief? How do you get past the dread Agrippan Trilemma?
Scott, that’s your cue to babble some more nonsense about second order belief that you and your readers here clearly don’t understand. One observes no small amount of certainty here, and there certainly isn’t much imperturbability or suspension of judgment.
Sigh. I was responding to your oh, so clever bon mot, “we can’t know until it is peer-reviewed and published in a reputable magazine”. I am finished with this topic. You attempt to compensate for your ignorance and incomprehension with bluster and insults. I’ve had my fill of reactionary attack dog antics. Go ahead and have the last word (you’d be desperate to take it no matter what, I know). Maybe you can even come up with another amusing name to call me.
Where does the 11% replication stat come from? From the process of error removal.
Not at all. Again you fail to understand the point. There is no process of error removal. Most scientific studies are not replicated. I’ve already demonstrated to numerous scientists’ satisfaction that science cannot be considered self-correcting except in the most meaningless and trivial sense that applies to virtually every other discipline… including theology.
Takin’ it slow: It would require some group attempting to replicate all the studies involved in order to extract any 11% statistic. Who is doing this? Some mysterious second group with the resources to attempt all those studies again and prove the scientific community doesn’t bother to? Or is it the scientific community itself attempting to run all these studies a second time or more?
I’ve already demonstrated to numerous scientists’ satisfaction that science cannot be considered self-correcting except in the most meaningless and trivial sense that applies to virtually every other discipline… including theology.
I presume those particular scientists for some reason also agree science does not produce any new technologies – they’d say atom bombs and mobile phones came to exist purely because of engineers?
According to adherents.com there are over 4200 religions in the world. Since presumably only one is the correct faith, we can estimate that science is roughly 460 times more accurate than religion. That’s not even counting the tens of thousands of dead religions, each of which could have been the right one. Science, despite its numerous failures, is still far more reliable than religion.
Whoops, repeated myself. Thought my earlier post was deleted for some reason. Sloppy.
I should have known the thread would deteriorate in this way. It’s a basic impasse in my capacity to have a discussion with Vox.
Am I willing to read his tract decrying Dawkins, Hitchins etc as idiots? Sure.
Am I willing to entertain his notions that mongrel people like me are inferior? Sure, whatever.
Am I willing to sit here and argue about basic misconceptions regarding race and IQ? Sure, no problem.
But then we come at last to that final problem with Theo’s worldview: science works.
Here is a system based on the assumption that EVERYTHING can be reduced to basic secular laws, without the need for supernatural explanatory agencies such as ghosts, demons, angels, gods, etc. And this system works so well that it can eradicate diseases, create hitherto unknown materials, manipulate biology (God’s creation is apparently amenable to easy manipulation even by Retard Latin American Graduate Students) , put man on the moon, predict and create a new state of matter (Bose-Einstein condensate), allow for super-efficient data storage and transmission, etc. You know… the modern world.
Since Theo can’t account for secular science’s unstoppable success, he is left with only one option: to belittle it (even though he cites “scientific” research when it suits his argument).
So, dialogue is not possible. My worldview hinges on science’s demonstrable power (which I think is obvious) and his hinges on disparaging that very system.
We’re literally talking past each other on this basic point.
Am I willing to sit here and argue about basic misconceptions regarding race and IQ?
Basic misconceptions held by one James D. Watson, for which he was kicked out of “respectable” science.
The social interdependence of humans means that the social standing of individuals possesses far more survival value than the theoretical standing of their beliefs.
He was not “kicked out”. He lost a publicly visible position. He also apologized for his comments. Watson, as brilliant as he is, has also always been renowned for having an acute case of foot-in-mouth disease.
First, I find it unlikely for the co-inventor of the DNA to fall prey to basic misconceptions. Advanced misconceptions, maybe. Intricate misconceptions, perhaps. Basic? Sorry.
Second, his case demonstrates beyond any doubt for which beliefs one loses social standing (and his job), and therefore, in which direction does the social pressure apply on the question of race and IQ, and how strong it is. And the topic of this post of Scott’s is precisely how social pressure makes people hold wrong beliefs.
With all due respect to Mr. Watson, he did not invent the DNA 😛
Also, I find the sheer ferocity of debate around racial IQ differences and policy implications people try to tag on it to be absurd.
Sheesh.
Let’s assume, as a thought experiment, that a given ethnic group is indeed on average 5-10 points below “European”. What are the implications ? If I need a worker with IQ of no less than X, I will still just test the potential employee directly, not try to infer his score based on the fact that he belongs to a large group of people who ON AVERAGE … See where I am going, huh ?
If I need a worker with IQ of no less than X, I will still just test the potential employee directly…
You can’t, it’s illegal to test IQ (in the US) because of disparate racial impact.
IANAL, but linky ?
Cause it’s legal to deny employment to police applicants with excessive IQ
http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836#.T6AtJFw9UeM
Which would be somewhat impractical if the test itself was illegal to apply, no ?
My previous response has probably been caught up in a spam trap. Let’s try again. IQ tests as a precondition for employment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_public_policy#Employment
The doctrine of disparate impact:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_Impact
@pdimov
“The Act proscribes not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation. The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.”
Hello there! If the job you are hiring for is so dumb that you can not reframe IQ-test derived questions as explicitly job-relevant, then the job you offer does not need no IQ :).
also, according to a legally knowledgeable peer, “you can still drive an 18-wheeler through contract law shticks”.
So, if you REALLY need a high-IQ person (as opposed to just leveraging the state of labor market to be a raging dick) and can demonstrate that, you can do it.
Yes, some employers get away with tests that are blatantly equivalent to an IQ test (the famous Microsoft puzzles), others don’t.
http://articles.cnn.com/2012-03-08/us/us_new-york-firefighter-lawsuit-bias_1_vulcan-society-black-firefighters-entrance-exam?_s=PM:US
If you can’t “get away with it” (that is, frame it in a way that will make the court admit that you had a “rational basis”, or sneak it into the contract via some probation-shmobation trickery), then most likely you either aren’t smart enough (oh the irony) or don’t need high-IQ applicants in the first place.
Dude, have some mercy. Can you imagine what kind of cognitive dissonance one has to suffer when simultaneously drawing support from scientific studies slightly-relevant to his agenda and claiming that “Christianity” (not a specific text mind you, but like, the whole truckload) is a great tool for predicting human behavior… Jesus wept, indeed.
Have some compassion for poor Beale, will you ?
How can I have compassion if I derive my moral precepts from a car engine?
WROOOOOOOOOOOOOM VROOOOOOOOOOOOOM
It’s interesting to me that when I started conversing with our two favorite Bakker trolls (Vox and ACM) my initial feelings were something like: ACM is worthless, Vox at least tries. In the span of less than a week I have completely flip-flopped and actually started to see the comparison as insulting to ACM. They might both be haters but I can at least see where ACM comes from. Kinda.
I think it had something to do with implication that I’m a subhuman mongrel.
01 wrote:
“With all due respect to Mr. Watson, he did not invent the DNA”
I know, I actually laughed out loud at that shit, and I try to not be petty when it comes to science. Thank goodness Newton invented the gravity and Lavoisier invented the oxygen!
“I think it had something to do with implication that I’m a subhuman mongrel.”
Well, he gotta hafta hate somebody – hatin’ helps group coherence and gives a sense of purpose, also provides the much needed distraction from lingering existential questions such as “why didn’t god give Jesus a safeword?” (because god knew Jesus is tough as nails)
Also, hatin’ on us jews is kinda unpopular since the a certain major jew-hater received his gas bill, and you guys provide a bearable, if not entirely adequate replacement (if only ye subhuman mongrels didn’t, on average, share a religion with Theo 😦 )
I know, I actually laughed out loud at that shit, and I try to not be petty when it comes to science. Thank goodness Newton invented the gravity and Lavoisier invented the oxygen!
I anticipated that reponse the moment after I hit the Post button, but oh well, what’s done is done. Now… you could, in principle, try to address the substance of my comment without focusing too hard on whether Watson invented the DNA. Or maybe you could not.
I presume those particular scientists for some reason also agree science does not produce any new technologies – they’d say atom bombs and mobile phones came to exist purely because of engineers?
Who said that? Science produces some new technologies, but not most of them. Remember, not only did technology precede science, but technology produces more new science than science produces new technologies. Do you know so little of the history of science?
Since Theo can’t account for secular science’s unstoppable success, he is left with only one option: to belittle it (even though he cites “scientific” research when it suits his argument). So, dialogue is not possible. My worldview hinges on science’s demonstrable power (which I think is obvious) and his hinges on disparaging that very system.
Perhaps we can’t have a meaningful dialogue, but only because you can’t read. When did I ever say that science doesn’t work? The fact that it is intrinsically unreliable doesn’t mean that it is entirely useless, after all. In fact, I’ve even pointed out when it becomes reliable, which is when it reaches the level of engineering.
The problem is that you are engaged in purely magical thinking. You can’t bear to even consider the possibility that your little god isn’t perfect. And you clearly don’t understand it either; science is absolutely is based on “on the assumption that EVERYTHING can be reduced to basic secular laws”. It’s particularly amusing coming from people who believe in human equality, which science quite clearly shows does not exist in any way, shape, or form.
My worldview hinges on science’s demonstrable power (which I think is obvious) and his hinges on disparaging that very system.
Yes, you’re the very sort of dogmatic certaintist that Scott so avidly decries. Your worldview is barren indeed; you might as reasonably and effectively base it on the demonstrable power of your car’s internal combustion engine. You don’t even realize you’re committing a major category error.
“Oh, great and mighty Chevrolet, how shall I live?”
Since presumably only one is the correct faith, we can estimate that science is roughly 460 times more accurate than religion.
A silly metric, but amusing. And there are, I note, many kinds of science. Biology is not astrophysics, for example. Economics is not psychiatry. Are you sure you want to play this game?
Well, I’d rather trust the moral guidance of a car than that of a hypothetical, mythological creature that happens to be a power-drunk creep who contrived an ironic torture ritual (carpenter…fixed to a wooden execution device with nails…so…subtle!) for his own son whom he conceived via an unusual and not entirely consensual process, and all that merely to somehow kick-start his own “forgiveness” towards the creatures he himself engineered.
😉
Since Theo can’t account for secular science’s unstoppable success,
You’re completely wrong. It’s religion that is unstoppable, not science. Science has been stopped dead in its tracks on multiple occasions, in fact, pretty much whenever a government wants to shut it down. Religion, on the other hand, always survives the worst even the most murderous governments can throw at it.
Like a cockroach.
Yes Theo, I’m comitting the ‘sin’ of certainty, but at least mine is backed up by, you know, reality.
Also, I’m not deriving moral principles from science you stupid dolt.
Folks we’re wasting our time. Vox thinks science is so unreliable it’s a joke – what we haven’t quite come to terms with is that he means this in the definitional sense: once it becomes reliable it is no longer science, but engineering. Thus science, despite a couple of centuries of astounding success over mother nature, is and shall remain in perpetuity, an unreliable joke. We’re talking to a crazy man who’s invented his own language but still wants to talk to us.
I think it’s more that the ideas will propegate to others. Others who might be less fixedly certain in their discussion about the ideas. So it’s worth looking at the ideas in advance rather than waiting. Even though my 11% question wasn’t touched, it gives some clues. And the ‘people had bows an’ arrows before science!’ approach.
We’re talking to a crazy man who’s invented his own language but still wants to talk to us.
Correction: you’re the one who wanted to talk to me. I couldn’t care less about any of you. Bakker claims it’s important to challenge me. I think Bakker is utterly insignificant, even though I occasionally agree with him.
I’m not deriving moral principles from science you stupid dolt.
Of course you’re not… for the obvious reason that you can’t. You’re just incoherent, that’s all. I’m not the one who claimed “my worldview hinges on science’s demonstrable power”, after all. I just find it amusing that you don’t understand the link between your worldview and your moral principles.
And my worldview has nothing whatsoever to do with science, pro or con. I don’t base my worldview on hammers, lawnmowers, or accounting either. They’re all just tools.
Like a cockroach.
Call on the Gates of Hell all you like. They won’t succeed. And that, my dear skeptics, is what you call a very successful predictive model.
Nobody worships Osiris anymore, yet the Egyptian religion lasted longer than Christianity has existed by a long shot. Time destroys all things, eventually.
Hail Omnissiah! Hail the Machine God 😉
Nobody worships Osiris anymore…
Blasphemer!
There is a saying in the biomedical science community.
“Just because it was published in Nature doesn’t mean its wrong.”
A considerable part of the training of graduate students is reviewing top journal articles and picking them apart. I see here some disconnect from what a journal article is too the laymen here to what it would be to someone on the inside. You’re acting like a prestigious journal article is the findings of science while to it should be considered to be simply a group of people’s argument for a position based on presented evidence.
The real filter for practical scientific claims isn’t whether it gets published but whether years latter scientists have used the findings in their own work, found it to be useful/accurate.
Another big factor for something like cancer research is most of it is on the mind blowing complexity of how human cells operate and that the conceptionally easy, low-hanging fruit has largely been already harvested. This stuff gets better understood over the course of generations and the efforts of thousands rather than much by individual articles. This is exactly the kind of scepticism that gives science its institutional strength though, that free inquiry will bumble towards better knowledge over time. This is a far less heroic process than its usually made out to be.
So Vox, I don’t thing your example entirely supports your conclusion but it does go to show that there is something of a gap between what might be considered the current “informed layman” interpretation or these things and what is actually intellectually justifiable. This does not discredit the real scientific process though, more that the process by which the sausage gets made is a lot uglier than most people realize.
The lesson isn’t that science doesn’t work unless its immediately practical. The lesson is to be more sceptical of individual scientific papers.
The real scandal is that with how the university system and funding process works there is a disincentive in these fields to attempt to be more rigourous and conduct more statistically robust studies. Largely because the system has not properly adapted to how much the cost of doing good research has ballooned in the past 20-30 years while government funding has been stagnant. As it is it scrapes by using graduate students as cheap labour with increasingly poor career prospects. Publish or perish has caused some real problems in how science is done.
Hey Scott – Third just tried to post (with a different IP and a wordstress acc) with no outcome. Appears your blog has her automatically sent to spam and/or or blacklisted by email. Could you take a look at it when you have time ?