posted on May 15, 2018 02:46 AM by
u/PMMeYourJerkyRecipes
51
u/DELETED63 pointsat 1526374358.000000
honestly these posts are the ones that bother me the most because
what the fuck is even the point of pretending you’re a sublime being of
solely rational thought scoping out the logical truths of a platonic
universe the cartesian dual of ours using bayesian methods untrammeled
by the inherent biases of our wet monkey fleshbrains if you can’t even
acknowledge sampling bias is a thing when it would be inconvenient to
your obvious racism
Why do people (these jerkoffs in particular) get so obsessed with this HBD shit? They ditch their intellectual integrity, their reputations, and all the rest of their worldview, for what? How is this what they want?
*Point of clarification: I'm not saying, "why don't you just take the Blue Pill? Why must you engage with dangerous troofs?" I'm saying, "this shit isn't that solid, considering that you have to lie, bullshit, and twist yourself into a pretzel in piss-poor attempts to defend it. Why is this the hill you're dying on?"*
I think it's a combination of A) the Rationalosphere is already set up to be a vehicle for white nerds' resentment at perceived low status compared to what they deserve, and B) it got invaded by fascists.
>The HBD stuff though, I have no idea. I think it's a combination of the IQ fetishism, combined with community norms and blogposts which acted as a magnet for scientific racists.
Also that I'd wager most people commenting are a) white, b) jewish, or c) indian or east asian
Even granting that all of their claims are true, I'd say half of them haven't considered how the more nasty of the conservatives will use those facts against the claimed 'less-intelligent' minorities and the other half are entirely willful of these policy implications if not actively desire them - see stuccio's (sp?) posts about how obesity and poverty are due to genetics. Iirc there was a follow up question asking why he had to pay for their health insurance or UHC or whatever
> Even granting that all of their claims are true, I'd say half of them haven't considered how the more nasty of the conservatives will use those facts against the claimed 'less-intelligent' minorities
I think the truth is both more noble and far, far stupider. "Truth" is a terminal virtue and censorship is a terminal vice. Disseminating true statements is by definition good and self-censoring for fear of the consequences is by definition bad. Also, "true" should never be construed as meaning anything more than technically correct in the narrowest possible sense, otherwise you're on the slippery slope to censorship.
It's an interesting choice for a moral red line from a community of self described consequentialists with deep qualms about moral red lines in general, but they are at least consistent about it.
> I think the truth is both more noble and far, far stupider. "Truth" is a terminal virtue and censorship is a terminal vice. Disseminating true statements is by definition good and self-censoring for fear of the consequences is by definition bad.
I can vouch for this part, having been steeped in rationalist thought in my younger days. I think Hitchens may have very nearly said exactly this, and Bertrand Russell has many quotes along this line.
This wouldn't be so bad, were it not for the fact that rationalists have an impoverished value system that consists only of "truth" and "quantifiable" measures of human well-being, like "number of math classes taken."
> The HBD stuff though, I have no idea. I think it's a combination of the IQ fetishism, combined with community norms and blogposts which acted as a magnet for scientific racists.
Yudkowsky posted [two](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok) [posts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould) which the already-present neoreactionaries took as a starting pistol. It's continued since then.
> Neoreactionaries were treated as being "weirdos, but our weirdos", for reasons I could never quite understand.
they were literally "their" weirdos - they're from the same Bay Area transhumanist subculture and know each other in real life.
There's something oddly telling about how much of the minutia of transhumanist lore ultimately rests on very traditional, very analog social connections.
And how it's built on a global platform but largely reflects [a small slice of California](http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/califIdeo_I.html).
It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users.
I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!
[Here is link number 1](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok) - Previous text "two"
----
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Even parts just world fallacy and status quo bias with a generous garnish of appeal to nature?
Imagine, for a second, that HBD is true. (If you don't happen to be white and male, imagine that you are and also that HBD is true.) Really try to think through how _comforting_ that would be. All the power heirarchies you find yourself perched atop aren't really unjust; in fact they're inevitable. All your privilege may be unearned, but it's definitely not unwarranted. All the wealth and power your ancestors accrued, often at swordpoint, is nonetheless in the best possible hands. Most importantly, perhaps, there's no longer any tension between doing what's best for yourself and your family and doing what's best for society at large.
True or not, that's a pretty seductive premise.
This is certainly why HBDists are into HBD. It's a political wedge issue to attack egalitarianism with and they know it. That's why all the blather about "well but obviously I don't mean anything *immoral* by it, I just want the facts" is a complete smokescreen.
Because deep down they believe life and society should be an unending savage struggle of all against all, that they're either winning or should be winning, and anyone who is not winning is none of their concern.
The irony becomes more glaring when you consider that a large part of the community identity is charitable giving.
It makes me wonder if someone could sum up in less than 15 words exactly whose future they are securing with their "altruism."
is it only credulity tho?
I just listened to this part and Harris tries to use the analogy of a parallel universe where jews imagine anti-semitism as a cause of the lack of jewish marathon champions, compared to the attribution of the black-white achievement gap in america to the history of racism. What the fuck even?
Klein calls him out on that, but Harris tries to win this rhetorically by calling him an "SJW". This strikes me as extremely manipulative.
I was thinking about the Mengele example, which anybody with the sort of expertise Harris purports to have knows is ridiculous (does he even know the name "Josef Mengele"?)
Harris is also a conman, who trades on his respectability and Spock image to manipulate listeners and so on, I'm not denying that. But there's different moments where you can discern ignorance from deliberate malfeasance.
oh. I always assumed he's just a really naive person, but listening to that excerpt above made me realize that he is in fact manipulative on purpose, so I was just projecting there
I've known of the community since about late 2004. There has *always* been a vulgar rightwing element in the community that would rear its head.
I distinctly remember there was a regular poster, long since forgotten who he is, on either the SL4 or Extropian mailing list who in his email signature linked his geocities-like race realism/Nazi eugenics site.
Race/IQ is the perpetual "taboo" topic that the community has never really stopped talking about. For me at least, it's actually really boring to hear about. If someone hasn't written a blog about it you can always rest assure it'll come up in another one of those "Unpopular Opinions" threads where people always bring up the same shit.
"Unpopular" in reddit-speak always, *always* means "right-wing."
Funny, last time I checked, the American mainstream had a high tolerance for tacky, boring, selfish suburban shitheads and their Dangerous Ideas.
america:
the place where a bunch of libertarians/neocons that defend the status quo can market themselves as rebels championing free speech and unpopular opinions
> on either the SL4 or Extropian mailing list who in his email signature linked his geocities-like race realism/Nazi eugenics site.
ooooh - please dredge your memory, this is useful
Lotta broken URLs but I'm slogging through the archive. this one stops before my time in 2002: http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/
This archives everything until 2003 but in raw text: https://github.com/macterra/extropians
>They ditch ...... their worldview
Are they though?
Now I’m not saying that whole subgroups are like this, but is it surprising that if someone’s view of themselves is wrapped in having some special attribute, they would been drawn to
1. Radical stances/actions that “prove” how much more of that attribute they have than the normies.
2. Arguments that support that special attribute playing a large role in personal outcomes
They know they're prejudiced but they also know they're the smartest and most rational individuals to walk this earth, so it must mean black people are actually inferior
> They know they're prejudiced
I really don't think they do, and that's a serious problem in American society right now, not just among Rationalists. Millennials have grown up with this idea that prejudice is bad - even the alt-right stresses that it's not racist but. The problem is that this message easily becomes *racists are bad*. Not exactly the same thing; now there are two tribes of people, one bad and one not. I'm sure I'm not the same as George Wallace, therefore logically I must be on the other team, and everyone who calls me a racist is obviously wrong, and that means the SJWs must be out of their gourd.
If you want to be rational about it, you might note that prejudice is not an identity but an instinct, one of the many irrational human instincts that [everyone has to fight constantly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM). Not many well-adjusted people treat selfishness or impulsiveness or laziness as groups that you either belong to or not. In fact, just treating concepts as group identities tends to ruin any attempt to address them, by triggering that instinct itself (see "conflict theorists" vs.
"mistake theorists"). Maybe the best rhetorical approach is to treat it as a [behavior](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc). But the online Rationalist community (the entire internet?) is probably too far gone; you can call out a good person's bad behavior and within seconds they'll immediately draw the battle lines between their imagined tribe and yours.
>The problem is that this message easily becomes racists are bad.
Every SSC post on this topic is Alexander asking rhetorically "What can I do to stop getting called racist??" not "What can I do to stop being racist?"
> But the online Rationalist community (the entire internet?) is probably too far gone; you can call out a good person's bad behavior and within seconds they'll immediately draw the battle lines between their imagined tribe and yours.
Is it that people are damned, or is it just that call-out culture simply doesn't work?
It's that once a community decides that you're part of their outgroup they stop being willing to hear you out. SSC could probably change if, say, one of the Scotts had a change of heart and took it upon themselves to disempower a few bad faith cranks. But they are well past being able to listen to criticism from outsiders and I don't see any obvious candidates inside the tent who might take that burden on themselves.
Write a math and citation heavy, completely sociology-free blog post about all the statistical and methodological issues with some piece of HBD crackpottery? Preferably with some tribal jargon about how good rationalists shouldn't take weak studies at face value?
Wouldn't need to be him, specifically. Anyone rationalist-adjacent could probably pull it off. But it would need to be someone the community already knows and trusts, and preferably someone with some anti-SJW street cred. Unfortunately I can't really think of anyone who meets that description who hasn't already drunk the kool-aid.
I wonder how well [this old piece](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/17/someone-writes-an-anti-racist-faq/) fits the bill (the linked article is still online). This is not an endorsement of the linked article, but rather an endorsement for someone posting it to the CW thread and get banned for violating the HBD moratorium.
They're trying to systematize inequality without making an normative judgment or materialist analysis of the power dynamics. Which, of course, is complete nonsense that turns into a bunch of just-so stories.
I love that he dismisses valid criticisms with variations on “Murray
had to do it that way because of his methodology!”, as though his
methodology was some outside force he had zero control over and not,
y’know… something he deliberately chose to get the results he
wanted.
And props to 895158 for not just letting him get away with implying
that in the past few hours since the last discussion he’d gone through
several other datasets to check the correlation coefficients with
Murray’s dataset and it totally all lined up and Murray’s dataset is
fine (r = 0,865), pinky swear!
…Like, imagine how much work it would be just to get all of the data
from Murray’s book and the data out of another book/paper/resource and
clean/normalize the data so it’s comparable and then run them through
statistical analysis. He’s claiming he did that six times! More than six
times considering he says he did it with “pretty much everything else I
can find” as well!
He's more fun than the others because he's so bad at it.
He tries claiming further down that *everyone* he talked to had heard of the incredibly obscure composers Murray includes, but nobody recognised the names of any African American musicians other than Louis Armstrong.
Getting mad at that lie would be like getting mad at a three year old who tells you it was Santa who ate the chocolate cake as he licks icing off his fingers.
"Saint Charles" Murray handily dominates the Quillete region, but faces some tough Final Four competition from the Taki region, Less Wrong region, the Anime Nazi region.
"Murray is a seasoned veteran, but at his age he's going to have to continue to prove himself against young upstarts like Emil Kirkegaard."
"Well, it's all in the way you grip the skull, Jim. If you've got the perfect grip, your measurements will be nothing but net no matter how old you are."
Apparently a 20 page pdf and a paywalled article without giving any page numbers of where to look is good faith arguing. That the one article is paywalled is strong evidence that they only read the abstract i.e. the quality ssc analysis we've come to expect.
Their conversation is [pretty entertaining later too](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8jc7i6/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_14_2018/dyzl6ax/).
>So, in your mind, they just randomly picked things, then? How odd. That would make the book seemingly invalid. As it turns out, they seem to rely on historian agreement. This seems to be basic history.
So close, and yet, so far.
> Why would I need to explain the methodology of someone else instead of simply presenting their data? That seems odd. The fact that every source was in agreement and no history of the world seems to disagree makes these not dubious accounts, but plausible ones.
Yes, who needs methodology? Who needs analysis? Why does everyone keep writing these books and long blog posts? Let's just publish one big excel spreadsheet and be done with it. History solved.
And I'm going to go out on a limb and say not every history of the world agrees...
It's basic history that Friedrich Engels has achieved more than Karl Marx. I'd love to see them try to argue their way out of that omission.
What's the methodology here? Is there a single encyclopaedia in the world that lists Engels but not Marx?
that's pretty damn impressive...I didn't even know it was possible to score that high! Maybe we're just not smart enough to grasp how Murray arbitrarily deciding that a lot of whites accomplished stuff is SCIENTIFIC PROOF for HBD :(
“I like jazz, but I’m not sure that it was really that significant in
the big picture, or enough in the time period in question.”
You see all those black artists back in the day? Well they didn’t
make it big enough due to living in white supremacy so they don’t count
compared to my white artists!
I chuckled a bit when he said in the same thread that he would never want to meet any SneerClub members in real life because he thinks the subs behavior is "...borderline psychopathic behavior and utterly indefensible."
Meanwhile, he said this in reference to an open letter about IQ:
> Say it loud and say it clear: The people writing this opinion are liars. I will remember their names. Edit: It is also pertinent to point out which academic disciplines these people are from: I count very few actual geneticists, most of them seem to be sociologists of some ilk. If I was king, I would defund every department that is involved. I think very little would be lost.
Certainly a well-adjusted human, definitely not obsessively angry over an odd topic.
> the complete omission of art outside of China, Japan, and the West (for example)
Yeah but a lot of those people didn't sign their art, so they aren't Great Men. No signature, no Human Accomplishment^TM . Also, [no flag no country](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTduy7Qkvk8).
That's it. Even if the dataset was entirely valid, the result would be "Which cultures cared about authorship?" and nothing more. What a suspiciously obvious mistake to make.
If only the indigenous American cultures had spent more time developing copyright law instead of [building massive cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan), they might have made the list.
(Estimates vary, by the way, but definitely larger than any European city including London, Rome or Venice at the time, and probably on par with Constantinople)
**Lascaux**
Lascaux (French: Grotte de Lascaux, "Lascaux Cave"; English: , French: [lasko]) is the setting of a complex of caves near the village of Montignac, in the department of Dordogne in southwestern France. Over 600 parietal wall paintings cover the interior walls and ceilings of the cave. The paintings represent primarily large animals, typical local and contemporary fauna that correspond with the fossil record of the Upper Paleolithic time. The drawings are the combined effort of many generations, and with continued debate, the paintings are estimated around 17,000 years BP. Lascaux was inducted into the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list in 1979, as element of the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley.
***
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Edit: I have been
informed that we have thawed the peaches of /r/SSC, successfully
denying them the opportunity to respond to our sneers! (How are they
then responding to /r/sneerclub in that thread? It’s a mystery.)
>You asked me about mockery, not psychopathy. But yes, organized bullying on the internet is psychopathic behavior, even if not every person doing it is psychopathic.
With this much charity I could retire as king of the freeloaders!
So there is definitely an identifiable trend amongst rationalists,
and to a lesser extent, some scientists and other science fans, of…is it
anti-foundationalism? Is it a sort of corrupted verificationism?
“Two bad indicators agree, therefore I have a stronger epistemic
position than if two bad indicators disagree”
What is a greater human accomplishment, discovering a new star after
a coddled life where servants take care of you, private tutors teach
you, elite universities educate you and wealthy patrons buy your
equipment and fund your career, or, uneducated, hungry and kept from any
possessions, escaping from chattel slavery to a life of freedom over a
thousand miles of hostile country, then building an illegal conspiracy
in order to help others do the same?
honestly these posts are the ones that bother me the most because what the fuck is even the point of pretending you’re a sublime being of solely rational thought scoping out the logical truths of a platonic universe the cartesian dual of ours using bayesian methods untrammeled by the inherent biases of our wet monkey fleshbrains if you can’t even acknowledge sampling bias is a thing when it would be inconvenient to your obvious racism
I love that he dismisses valid criticisms with variations on “Murray had to do it that way because of his methodology!”, as though his methodology was some outside force he had zero control over and not, y’know… something he deliberately chose to get the results he wanted.
And props to 895158 for not just letting him get away with implying that in the past few hours since the last discussion he’d gone through several other datasets to check the correlation coefficients with Murray’s dataset and it totally all lined up and Murray’s dataset is fine (r = 0,865), pinky swear!
…Like, imagine how much work it would be just to get all of the data from Murray’s book and the data out of another book/paper/resource and clean/normalize the data so it’s comparable and then run them through statistical analysis. He’s claiming he did that six times! More than six times considering he says he did it with “pretty much everything else I can find” as well!
[deleted]
“I like jazz, but I’m not sure that it was really that significant in the big picture, or enough in the time period in question.”
You see all those black artists back in the day? Well they didn’t make it big enough due to living in white supremacy so they don’t count compared to my white artists!
[deleted]
Human accomplishment is when people who look the most like me make shit I like the most. The more they make, the accomplishmenter it is.
[deleted]
[deleted]
No.
Edit: I have been informed that we have thawed the peaches of /r/SSC, successfully denying them the opportunity to respond to our sneers! (How are they then responding to /r/sneerclub in that thread? It’s a mystery.)
Also, irony is lost on some.
So there is definitely an identifiable trend amongst rationalists, and to a lesser extent, some scientists and other science fans, of…is it anti-foundationalism? Is it a sort of corrupted verificationism?
“Two bad indicators agree, therefore I have a stronger epistemic position than if two bad indicators disagree”
What is this style of thinking?
I feel like I’m missing some context. What question is actually under debate? That Human Accomplishment appears to be racially biased?
What is a greater human accomplishment, discovering a new star after a coddled life where servants take care of you, private tutors teach you, elite universities educate you and wealthy patrons buy your equipment and fund your career, or, uneducated, hungry and kept from any possessions, escaping from chattel slavery to a life of freedom over a thousand miles of hostile country, then building an illegal conspiracy in order to help others do the same?