I’m not gonna remove anything since this already has a good number of
comments. But for future reference, please don’t fully spell out
usernames with transphobic slurs.
I don’t mean to defend TPO, but I think you’re misunderstanding the
post. Look:
Qualification (on its own) is for idiots who want to sound profound
and advance an ideology without any substance.
It’s clear from this line that TPO is saying qualification is
perfectly suited for people like himself (as well as other commenters on
/r/themotte or /r/slatestarcodex).
> he is a staunch advocate of quantifying by running made-up stats on English-language encyclopedias...
[The Charles Murray methodology.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment)
I'm not joking when I say that one of my favorite TPO comments that got linked here is when he got into a back fat argument with another /r/SSC regular specifically defending the methodology of that book, it was *incredible*.
It's very very elucidating on the motivations of TPO: he's not interested in any sort of scientific rigor, but defending the racist 'research' programme from a set of researchers that defend his particular ideology.
He pays no attention to the steps of:
* construct validity
* causal inference
* methodological development & rigor
It's all about finding the #s involved with everything and then pinning it on genetics
So I was bored and hungry at lunchtime (I ended up choosing to finish off an ill-advised "burrito", so-called, that I bought last night on the way home from an underwhelming jam session; unfortunately I also got drunk at said jam session, so my guitar is still at the bar - I hope) and remembered that I made this comment last night, which led me to do some googling.
1) From the wikipedia page on "fatback", I humbly apologise that I didn't say "good salty pork", since fatback is a common ingredient in salt pork (which is delicious)
2) For all of you who aren't currently vegetarians (you should be, even though I've lapsed myself lately) you all should swallow your prejudices and give *Salo* and other variants of almost-pure-fat cured pork dishes. Yes, I know, it's basically just fat. On the other hand, consider a few things:
2a) Slavic food is good, actually. In a (Western) culinary world dominated by bourgeois traditions in Western European cooking and working class or underclass traditions in American cooking, Eastern Europe and the Balkans - as well as the working class or underclass of e.g. Northern Italy and South-East France - don't really get a fair shake (I'm not excluding Asia or The Global South here, just not being exhaustive, gimme a break). There's a prodigious abhorrence for fat-based dishes unless you're using the fat for frying, and people blanch at the idea of chewing the stuff without even mulling it over.
2b) Prepared properly, dishes dominated by fat can be a lot more subtle, variant, and nourishing than a much more expensive steak cut from the very same animal. I was lucky enough to get invited to go skiing with my brother and dad in France/Switzerland a couple of months ago (twice annually, it seems, I get a week or two to not be penniless, lucky me, scion of a rich and much more practical dad), where the best thing I ate was a braised cut basically of cow's head - the other two plugged away at some sort of super-rich lump of meat that made me feel bloated after sharing just a bite. Proud European moment: an elderly German dude leant across to ask if I was eating calf's head, and whether I was British, and signalled how much he approved of such bravery.
2c) Class: you have nothing to lose but your ritualistically bourgeois obsession with protein! There's something horrifying about meeting an American duck-hunter who tells you "oh we could get 20 ducks in a one day trip out on the lakes" and, upon being asked why one would need that many ducks, cheerfully explains to you that they throw away everything but the breast. Quite apart from the fact that they're missing out on the tastiest bits of the duck, the obsession of the American bourgeois class with only eating the bits of the animal with the most protein and least striation - and then going out for milkshakes afterwards or whatever (also, one reason never to live in the States is the number of social functions where booze isn't a consideration: I couldn't survive) - is ridiculous and performative.
Anyway I forget where I was going with but I love these sorts of dishes, even beyond their capacity for homosexualist innuendo, and you should too.
>They are one of the most criminal groups in the world
No I'm sure colonialism, alcoholization and oppression have nothing to do with that. Everything we see in the world is perfectly reflected by genes :)
>They have a measured IQ around 63. This makes them one of the least-intelligent groups in the world. This is not disputable. I remarked about the results of an administration of the WAIS in the original comment. This qualifies "least intelligent" and shows that it is not "pure opinion" on my part. As I've said elsewhere, the WAIS is not an opinion.
And I'm sure there have been a multitude of studies of measurement equivalence for the WAIS on this topic. Oh wait: we found out that any WAIS before WAIS-IV is highly measurement invariance, especially on indigenous groups. Oops!
>Again, they are one of the least-intelligent groups in the world. They also have very few cultural achievements and what culture they do have is crude.
What's your definition for cultural achievement? A white person made it?
>They have a staggering rate of mental disorder as well. This implies that they are dull, and at the very least, they are dull in the sense that they're unintelligent, which is a fact.
Yeah y'know that nuclear colonialism & environmental racist just never happened no more. I forgot when they published that admixture study showing Native American admixture (which of course aren't the same as Australian indigenous groups - but they show similar outcomes of oppression IRL) is protective against neurodegenerative disorders. Great scientific evidence there :)
When you can’t or refuse to put numbers on something, I’m inclined to
think you’re trying to escape hard thinking, definitive conclusions, or
uncomfortable facts.
Imagine going through life with this fucking
inclination.
Quantification is the realm of people who want to understand the
world and are unafraid of what they find. Qualification (on its own) is
for idiots who want to sound profound and advance an ideology without
any substance. While certainly apocryphal, I agree with this Galileo
Galilei quote
“Reals before feels.” - Whichever Scienceguy You’d Like, Who
Cares
quoting galileo in that instance is pretty rich because galileo was actually inspired by euclid's formal theory of measurement, rather than a half-baked axiom of "the thing I'm trying to measure is quantifiable"
Probably the thing that most exposes these grifters as entirely
unserious in the realm of real science is the inferiority complex they
nurse with respect to the supposed supremacy of their fields. If you
actually spend any time in, for example, a theoretical physics
department, you notice that the stage at which all the most serious
inquiry is being done is the stage of qualitative reasoning.
Like, when you’re trying to understand the algebra structure of local
operators of a conformal field theory you don’t go trying to put numbers
on random shit or comparing to experiment, you use a wide collection of
heuristic arguments (whose validity you check the bounds of
qualitatively) to make claims like “higher derivative operators are less
important in the operator product expansion than operators of lower
dimension, so more complicated operators are suppressed.” Tying together
many such arguments in order to produce an idea that will suggest some
novel method is the very essence of scientific inquiry. Oftentimes a new
qualitative picture of some old equation will be the key insight to a
major breakthrough, from which numerics can sometimes follow or
sometimes not.
The insecure numbskulls who treat numbers as the be-all-end-all of
science reveal more about their own sophistication than that of the
fields they deride without assessing any arguments.
What most exposes TPO as unserious is that when you push back on his claims you get a gish gallop of tangential citations and blatant misapplications of scientific concepts and terminology.
Yeah, I used to think he was a joke, then I realised what he was doing.
He's not trying to convince the person arguing with him (who already know he's full of shit), he's trying to convince the thousand people disinterestedly skimming the thread, who will just see a very impressive-looking post with lots of links to scientific papers. They aren't going to click on the links and see they either don't back up his claims or were written by drooling HBD cranks.
It's unfortunate that The Motte's managers refuse to see how their platform enables TPO's brand of misinformation, and that the spreading of this kind of misinformation harms the discourse they want to promote.
If only someone had identified this sort of technique—maybe given it [a catchy name](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Dark_arts)—and analyzed the ways in which this technique is harmful. Then we might know that to fight it you have to stop giving bad actors a platform.
I still harbour - for a few reasons I won't go into detail about - the increasingly strong belief that TPO is for real. Not "for real" in the sense of saying anything worth saying, but in the sense that he believes his own bullshit. I get the increasingly strong impression that he's somebody who has a deep need to justify the propositions he's invested his very self in, and is willing to do anything at all possible to get there.
It's depressing. He does these inordinately long gish gallops for all sorts of topics; https://www.reddit.com/user/TrannyPornO/comments/92hscy/incorrect_industrial_revolution_idea/
I think this one is about why The Whites are superior to All Groups including and especially The Asians, but it's not very clear
I only looked at one study out of the gish gallop ("Positive historical selection for EA in East Asians") and did a quick skim and found qualification after qualification in the discussion / limitations section.
It also only found evidence in the East Asian population and even a bit of evidence for it in some *Native American* populations
But they discussed:
* How their results can't be evidence for "selection"
* Issues with the entire construct of educational attainment
* Population stratification
* Missing GWAS data from non-European populations (I mean seriously look at the makeup of GWASes globally - ~90% are European)
And I'm too tired and lazy to go any further @ 2:40 AM
EDIT: I lied. I'm coming back to this.
So I looked at two more things
1) The 'Bellecist theory'
I hadn't really heard of the theory that much when I first read about. So, like usual, I googled it.
I found a couple interesting things.
The first paper that popped up was; https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/war-and-state-formation-amending-the-bellicist-theory-of-state-ma - *amending* the theory
and the second article I clicked was explaining why the quote TPO uses is a misrepresentation of the theory; https://duckofminerva.com/2013/06/war-made-the-state-and-the-state-made-war.html
I found a few more studies on the topic showing that it's highly dependent on country-specific factors / model specifications; https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781788112987/9781788112987.00014.xml
And then I was done. TPO, again, was simplifying a vast literature on the nuances of state transformation into a single catchphrase.
2) I looked at the study offered for "Allen is empirically wrong".
Typically when I want to see the merits of a study, I'll go on google scholar and see what other studies cite it. Lo and behold, I found that Allen himself had cited the study; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ehr.12661
I read a couple blog posts on the topic and it seems that it's still under contentious debate in economic history. But unsurprisingly, TPO presents it as if one study toppled the theory.
3) And I took a very quick look at the 'colonialism' study he offered.
It seems to ignore the role of neo-colonialism in the region, which was my only issue at first glance
But then I thought about what the historians on /r/AskHistorians pointed out.
If we 'quantify' colonialism, we're going to miss a lot of its nuances. I.e. how specifics of colonialism (i.e. how decolonization occurred) affected political instability and ethnic conflict in Africa.
I don't know, seems like it falls into the same trap of "we can make correlations :) here's our answer"
Hopefully final edit:
The standard reference on /r/badeconomics for this topic is Acemoglu anyways; https://voxeu.org/article/economic-impact-colonialism
fellow genius here, can confirm that trying to understand CFT by reading wikipedia is definitely an exercise in qualitative reasoning*
\* qualitative reasoning used as per the dumb ass lingo we're coopting
pretty ironic that he uses Galileo as an example, given how in
philosophy of science it’s pretty much canonical that if he had actually
adhered to rules these guys seem to love paying lip service to,
e.g. quantifiable falsification, empirical support, and hypothetical
consistency, he could not have seriously proposed a heliocentric
cosmology in the first place
This study is almost as bad as the one that went around reddit trying
to show there are “seven universal moral codes”. That kind of
quantitative anthropology is always garbage
They always seem to forgot anthropology moved on from telos a long
long time ago
There is nothing in life that cannot be measured. When someone
appeals to complexity as a reason that something cannot be quantified or
quantification cannot be accurate, they’re doing nothing more than
attempting to escape from hard thinking.
Please measure your moral goodness for me. But use my moral
framework which I will not tell you what it is.
Never forget that there’s a long literature arguing some concepts are
undefininable let alone unquantifiable. (Like hell unquantifiability
isn’t an uncommon topic w/in philosophy)
That it’s a quantitative view of the past, not a qualitative one that
tells us nothing.
Yep, that history book you learned everything from tells you
nothing.
This thread is really revealing of the way that TPO & co’s mind
works. They want a penis measuring stick, but foreverything. (See the pop gen twitter thread on
this - https://twitter.com/DocEdge85/status/1083059763624079360)
> There is nothing in life that cannot be measured
and of course the proposition that everything is quantifiable is taken as an axiom without the need for justification
spoken exactly like someone that has never opened a book on measurement theory
I’m not gonna remove anything since this already has a good number of comments. But for future reference, please don’t fully spell out usernames with transphobic slurs.
I’d like to believe his idealistic rhetoric, but he didn’t use numbers at any point, so it’s clearly the last refuge of his pet theory.
After all, “Qualification (on its own) is for idiots who want to sound profound and advance an ideology without any substance.”
I don’t mean to defend TPO, but I think you’re misunderstanding the post. Look:
It’s clear from this line that TPO is saying qualification is perfectly suited for people like himself (as well as other commenters on /r/themotte or /r/slatestarcodex).
[deleted]
Imagine going through life with this fucking inclination.
“Reals before feels.” - Whichever Scienceguy You’d Like, Who Cares
[deleted]
Probably the thing that most exposes these grifters as entirely unserious in the realm of real science is the inferiority complex they nurse with respect to the supposed supremacy of their fields. If you actually spend any time in, for example, a theoretical physics department, you notice that the stage at which all the most serious inquiry is being done is the stage of qualitative reasoning.
Like, when you’re trying to understand the algebra structure of local operators of a conformal field theory you don’t go trying to put numbers on random shit or comparing to experiment, you use a wide collection of heuristic arguments (whose validity you check the bounds of qualitatively) to make claims like “higher derivative operators are less important in the operator product expansion than operators of lower dimension, so more complicated operators are suppressed.” Tying together many such arguments in order to produce an idea that will suggest some novel method is the very essence of scientific inquiry. Oftentimes a new qualitative picture of some old equation will be the key insight to a major breakthrough, from which numerics can sometimes follow or sometimes not.
The insecure numbskulls who treat numbers as the be-all-end-all of science reveal more about their own sophistication than that of the fields they deride without assessing any arguments.
pretty ironic that he uses Galileo as an example, given how in philosophy of science it’s pretty much canonical that if he had actually adhered to rules these guys seem to love paying lip service to, e.g. quantifiable falsification, empirical support, and hypothetical consistency, he could not have seriously proposed a heliocentric cosmology in the first place
This study is almost as bad as the one that went around reddit trying to show there are “seven universal moral codes”. That kind of quantitative anthropology is always garbage
They always seem to forgot anthropology moved on from telos a long long time ago
Please measure your moral goodness for me. But use my moral framework which I will not tell you what it is.
Never forget that there’s a long literature arguing some concepts are undefininable let alone unquantifiable. (Like hell unquantifiability isn’t an uncommon topic w/in philosophy)
Yep, that history book you learned everything from tells you nothing.
This thread is really revealing of the way that TPO & co’s mind works. They want a penis measuring stick, but for everything. (See the pop gen twitter thread on this - https://twitter.com/DocEdge85/status/1083059763624079360)