I predict this post will attract a lot of negative comments, but I want to give it the most charitable reading I can. That, of course, is the Straussian reading.
What DeVliegendeHollander is really saying is that nerds are right to hate themselves, and that they deserve to suffer, because they are not truly men. By turning away from the traditional masculine skills and values of leadership, rhetoric, and prowess in combat they (and by extension, Western society) are unworthy of respect. Note in particular the distinction the OP draws between the Western sport of boxing, and the Eastern sport of karate—this distinction between the masculine, self-reliant West and the feminized, exotic East is an ancient trope. But here this trope is inverted, with “nerdiness” being seen as a disease of the West. A further problem is people looking inwards rather than outwards for validation; “gaining validation from respectable looking people choosing to discuss the weather” is presented as a better step. But of course, what the OP really implies is that martial prowess (the obsession of the post) must be turned outwards too. We need a purifying war.
In short, the author is not calling for a New Athens, but a New Sparta, where young boys pass through a series of initiation rituals to take their place in a homosocial, hyper-masculine warrior society. “Nerds” and other unfit individuals must be weeded out, leading to “the bravest, bolderst, cruelest, most aggressive fighters being on top.” How this ideal society would treat women is only hinted at obliquely in the post, but I believe that some variant of “Kinde, Kuche, Kirche” is most likely.
I understand why DeVliegendeHollander should feel that such a message could only be delivered esoterically.
I sincerely hope I am seeing an excellent parody of extremely irrational SJW attitudes here.
For what it worths, or if it is not the case, the central idea here is self-help for people who suffer. This is certainly missing from this reply. If this is a seriously meant as an SJW response, then I would translate it to that lingo as being hurt by patriarchy, and learning to undo this hurt by adapting to it.
A social, political response, New Athens or New Sparta is NOT a major point here, because for some people like me adapting to society is more important to changing it because we have one life, thrown into society (Heidegger).
But actually what little I wrote about a social-political response was less patriarchy, less toxic mascuilinity and less bullying, so it seems to be a misresponse at that. I think I am being pretty progressive here as a far social change is covered except that I simply don’t care as much about social change helping future gens rather than self-help, adaptation for people who suffer NOW.
I think I am in a community of people who don’t have very high fertility rates. I actually have a daughter and I have this impression—parenting hardly ever discussed on LW—that most of the community has no children.
From this it seems logical to me that social change is way way less important than self-help. We are not making many people to live in a future society where everything is right. People with 4 kids may sacrifice their happiness for their sakes. For no-children and few-children people and I think it is the case for us, adapting to society must be more valuable than changing it.
The East vs. West aspect sounds valid but only superficially so—relevant only to the letter, not the intent. Obviously it is about Westernized karate—and obviously to everybody who knows these stuff Muay Thay works just as well. One could raise the same parallel with Greek wrestling not training self-confidence (courage) enough and MT yes.
Re the no kids thing: as of the latest survey, LW is 81% childless but with a median age of 27.67. It’s possible that a lot of the people on here today will be parents in 10 years.
I have this impression—parenting hardly ever discussed on LW—that most of the community has no children.
Let me give you an alternate explanation. Being a parent is very time-consuming. It also tends to draw one’s interest to different topics than are typically discussed here. In consequence, LW readers aren’t a random sample of nerds or even of people in the general social orbit of the LW crowd. I would not draw any adverse inferences from the fact that a non-parenting-related internet forum tend to be depleted of parents.
This isn’t adverse. I don’t really care much what is the actual reasons of other people’s reproductive choices, my point is simply that after having made them, and it is like 0 or 1 kids, it makes more sense to adapt to society than to change it.
(BTW not actually that time consuming. Only if you believe fashionable bullshit that throwing gigantic amounts of attention to kids is necessary for them to turn into succesful and well-adjusted adults. In reality if every second evening is like “shut up and read a book and leave dad in peace to write one”, that is not actually harmful in any way. 50% of the outcome is genes and 50% is outside-the-family environment.)
I guess this is what “Straussian reading” means. Something like postmodern reading—the text always says exactly what you want it to say, regardless of what it said originally—except that with postmodern reading the resulting interpretation is always left-wing, while with Straussian reading the resulting interpretation is always right-wing. :D
That is actually only a subset. The core thing is to solve self-hatred, to love one’s self well enough to retreat from the fantasy world and inhabit the real one. My martial arts solution is only a part of gaining self-respect. I also mentioned communication skills etc.
Having said all that, why is this “real men” thing even wrong? Why do intellectuals tend to hate it? I remember how intellectuals hated it around 1910 or so (at least in Europe, see Stefan Zweig etc.) but today science backs it up better—there are all sorts of casual relationships between prenatal and serum T and various other traits. To put it differently, things like courage and not being depressed seem to be related, although the causal chain is not clear.
Still, courage training, conquering fears, should not be something intellectuals should laugh on as something uncivilized, reactionary or barbarous.
And yeah, courage training, by its very nature, looks like that.
One more though and maybe I should put that in as an edit: basically nerds need to learn from feminists, it is basically the very same ideas for the very same set of problems—the lack of self-respect, confidence. The whole feminist stuff about how to feel empowered and confident and speak up and all that is 100% valid for nerds too. In fact I know women who do exactly this, who conquer their internalize suppression by communication training (Toastmasters), dressing professional, yes, even things like boxing, I know women who gain a feeling of empowerment and confidence from this kind of courage trainig, and it works.
So yeah, nerds need to become “real men” in the sense feminist women aim to become “real men”—or rather, “real persons”, who are not afraid, do not feel suppressed, but feel empowered and brave.
why is this “real men” thing even wrong? Why do intellectuals tend to hate it?
Men die younger because testosterone is harmful to health. See, even nature hates real men. We are just accepting the discoveries of natural sciences. :D
Okay, more seriously (still I feel that this topic inspires me to come up with crazy theories, some of which might incidentally point towards something profound), maybe it is a consequence of game theory and fragmentation of modern society. Think about it this way: if a random person X gains more strength, who benefits from this, and who loses? The person X and their allies benefit, their enemies lose. Maybe it is the structure of the society today that we have very few personal allies and a lot of competitors. Therefore, anyone gaining power is perceived as a loss to most people. In such environment, memes like “do not get stronger, that’s evil” flourish. (Maybe this is not necessarily the culture as a whole, just the subculture of social-science intellectuals, that has few friends and a lot of backstabbing.)
It was different in the past where people were divided into tribes, so when your neighbor become stronger you felt your tribe is becoming stronger, which was a good thing.
It is different for women, because feminism is a powerful tribe today, and when feminists speak about “women”, they usually mean “women who accept (or will accept) feminism”. -- To explain this: imagine the last time when you heard feminists speaking about how we need more women in politics. Did anyone mention Margaret Thatcher or Susan Palin as positive examples of women in politics? Probably no. But they probably mentioned Hillary Clinton. Just saying that “women” in certain contexts does not include literally all women, only those belonging to the tribe. Of course there are also situations where meaning literally all women is the convenient Shelling point, e.g. letting women vote.
Shortly: It is all about selfish motivation. If other people believe they will benefit from you getting stronger, they will support you to become stronger. Today intellectuals don’t believe this when they talk about men, which is why they discourage it.
nerds need to learn from feminists
Exactly this. However, it needs to be “do as I do”, instead of “do as I say” kind of learning. Nerds don’t need to learn feminist theory, because that is a theory constructed to support feminism, not to support nerds. Nerds need to learn feminist practice: supporting each other, constantly shaming the enemies, i.e. bulding a modern tribe. -- Okay, preferably with less mindkilling, if such thing is a real political option.
No, frankly, this is a much older story, not something from the recent decades. Strains of European humanism rejected “macho” attitudes as far back as 1900-1950, I know it from reading authors like Stefan Zweig (E.g. The World Of Yesterday) or Erich Fromm (The Anatomy Of Human Destructiveness). The issue is, largely, that back then the problems to ponder were not the relatively peaceful ones pondered today, but major war and genocide was attributed to a rather bull-headed gung-ho spirit—and I actually think it was correctly attributed so. The European attitudes were basically so in this period that the world around you is full of spilled gas and you do NOT want any sparks to go into it. So it seemed there is so much aggression trying to break out, in major conflicts killing millions that all the sparks better be extuingished—so it is better for everybody to be a bit of a “limp dick” rather than to risk that. And this influenced European literature and intellectualism a lot.
The story was different in America where simply these attitudes were not so dangerous, however, the latest in the 1960′s this strain of European literature also hit America and influenced “hippie” attitudes—Vietnam played an important role in this, the desire for pacifism generate a desire to do away with traditionally masculine attitudes.
Meanwhile, from the 1970′s − 80′s on, there is the opposite trend. During the late Cold War it was understood that traditional war is not much on the table but either pressing the launch buttons or not, and probably nobody will be stupid enough to press those just to play macho. Thus, the world started to seem less dangerous and these attitudes were allowed to come back. Hippie music gave way to punk and Metallica, road movies to action movies, and so on.
However, intellectuals still resist it, because all they see is what Fromm saw—that it is hardly more than a celebration of destructiveness. So there is this apparent rule that to create is good and moral and anything tending towards destructiveness even a bit is wrong and immoral, we are supposed to make but not to unmake. So competition is bad, cooperation is good etc. etc.
This is sort of complicated to explain and understand but probably it is not simply not wanting others to become stronger.
I think overly “limp” intellectualism is connected with nerdiness. The issue seems to be that boys from kindergarten on engage each other in increasingly scarier and scarier challenges and competitions. As long as you keep up, it is sort of fun enough. If you take time out to read books, because you have intellectual interests, you fall back in this kind of thing and then it becomes something not exciting and challenging but rather scary. Then the bullying starts.
So overally it is the process I described about nerds, but I think the aversion to “real men” attitudes is largely the aversion to becoming like the bullies (who were often stupid and anti-intellectual) or an aversion to the fact that indeed there is something not properly developed in one’s own self.
Nevertheless, I think what needs to be done here is to try to formulate the view clearly that not everything that tends towards the destructive, the unmaking, is necessarily wrong. That a world intellectuals often dream about—where everybody is only creative and productive, and never destructive—is the social equivalent of cancer, runaway growth without keeping creating and destroying in balance. But this is not exactly easy to formulate in a generally acceptable way. Purely economically, it can be explained, perhaps, if people think endless economic growth endangers the planet, yet you don’t want to deny people the right to make things, then someone should unmake things, break windows, so to speak, and any group of people assigned that kind of role will obviously have, how to put it, rather “barbarous” morals.
So, essentially it is the reverse stupidity. We have seen that one extreme is harmful, therefore we must go to the opposite extreme.
Yet there are situations which require someone being on the middle of the scale—not a bully, but also not someone scared of conflicts. For example, when people are doing things wrong, someone has to tell them. If everyone is avoiding conflicts all the time, then one incompetent employee can ruin a company, or one incompetent government official can ruin a country. The conflict doesn’t necessarily have to be personal; one possible way of saying “your company is horribly inefficient” is to found a competing company.
However, it is not true that all aggressivity is frowned upon by intellectuals. The taboo applies more strongly to men, and covers only physical violence plus speech that feels like it would incite physical violence. Other forms of violence are tolerated. -- For example, if you hear some guy saying something politically incorrect, it would be unacceptable to slap him, but it is acceptable to call his boss, make him fired, and let his children starve. (That is: physical violence = not okay; social and economical violence coming from the right kind of people = okay.) Actually, if you were a women with the right kind of credentials, it would probably be even acceptable to slap him; and he would be frowned upon for fighting back.
By which I am saying, that the idea of “let’s make everyone unable to fight”, although it leads to some negative consequences, is actually just a facade for something more complicated, roughly “let’s make people unable to fight, unless they are members of our tribe”. Disarming your opponents is not a new idea; the original part here is the one which also calls for disarming everyone neutral. (People mostly don’t care about neutrals, they focus on their enemies. But it is more strategical to first disarm everyone using the memes of global disarming, and then find excuses for why your members belong to a different magisterium.)
It’s a hypothesis. If there are any hormones or other biological pathways that are better predictors for being a “hero”, like, courage, confidence, emotional strength, fierceness in situations appropriate, then I am happy to use them.
Being the complete opposite of the neckbeard who hates himself because he was a coward to bullies and thus does not have the confidence to find a girlfriend—I think this is the primary reason of the suffering of nerds. But hey, isn’t it exacty what I explained in the article?
Me 20 years ago, I am 37. I sorta-kinda solved it about 70% during 20 years. Not efficient at all. Room for improvement. And yes, all the other “neckbears” we played AD&D with and obsessed over videogames—back then it meant Champions of Krynn—with. And their currently 17 years old versions. Mr “euphoric of my own intelligence”, if you seen the photo, if not google it.
… it can “fix” neckbeards who suffer, to become someone who does not suffer. This is also called compassion.
Also, I suppose that on an intellectual forum like LW, even if the majority is not nerds/neckbeards I think almost everybody has many acquaintances who are, because intellectuals cluster together. Maybe the typical LWer was the high school kid who was interested in physics and Linux, and the neckbeard guy was someone who was interested in superhero comics and D&D and they ended up hanging out together because it was less bad than hanging out the majority oafs who were only interested in fucking and fighting and sports on TV.
Hm, not necessarily, but it is not like I am Prometheus bringing the perfect solution from the gods. I direct attention to the problem. Propose an solution. I hope to get other people thinking to come up with better ones.
Well, so far I only get objections, hardly anything along the lines of what I expected like “wait I am actually a psychologists I have a better idea!!”
I did skim this post and it caused me to spend some time thinking… but what I can’t escape is the way the whole speculation is framed is entirely missing the point. I mean, “Merely by asking the question you show you couldn’t possibly understand the answer.”
Let me try 3 ways to illustrate my point:
1)
I wrote a short story some time ago about an unattractive girl who was lamenting her unpopularity. She was crying to herself, and out loud she wished she could go somewhere where people loved her for her mind, where appearance didn’t matter. So out pops her Fairy Godmother who transports her to an island filled with people who want the same thing. They are all immediately loving and accepting of the girl, but she’s still miserable. Her fairy godmother reappears and asks why she is so unhappy on the island. The girl says, “Because they’re all so ugly!”
2)
Even neckbeards (your term) do not find each other attractive.
3)
The neckbeard wants his sexual appeal to be based on the beauty and purity of this mind and his thoughts and his character, and not on his physical appearance. But the only people he really cares about viewing himself that way are hot, sexy, young girls.
As a final thought, I have concluded (from experience) that my right hand gives me 99.8% of the pleasure I could ever hope to get from a woman, without all the baggage. The question you should be asking is not why isn’t the girl interested in you, the question is why should you be interested in the girl at all?
As an aside, I joined this website within the past 2 days. I am almost to the point of abandoning it. There is a clear environment of intellectual inbreeding here. Groupthink. I long for a place where people are devoted to individualism.
This place isn’t that. It has a collectivist feel. Original thoughts are not tolerated here. Rather, conformity is a requirement.
I long for a place where people are devoted to individualism.
Brian: Look, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals! The Crowd: Yes! We’re all individuals! Brian: You’re all different! The Crowd: Yes! We’re all different! Man in crowd: I’m not... Man in crowd: Shhh! Brian: You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves. The Crowd: Yes! We’ve got to work it out for ourselves! Brian: Exactly! The Crowd: Tell us more! Brian: No! That’s the point! Don’t let anyone tell you what to do!
Brian is wrong about about a few things. We’re not “all different”. We have differences, and we have similarities. And it’s simply stupid to try to work everything out for yourself. Other people have brains too. Why not leverage them?
There is a clear environment of intellectual inbreeding here.
Yes, the intellectual influences here tend to be a subset of what is generally available. That’s why I came here. Intellectual influences like Jaynes, Kahneman, and Korzybski are in good taste. That’s the shared epistemological influences.
There is some inbreeding in the sense of a history and culture that has developed over the years on top of that. Is that surprising? Would it impress you more if being a member of the list had no discernible effect on members?
It has a collectivist feel.
If you’re looking for devotional prayers to individualism, you’ve come to the wrong place. Though I and others will take our individualist hobby horses out for a jaunt every now and again. There are a pretty high percentage of individualists here, and something like a third of the list self identifies as libertarian. I’m of the Stirnerite egoist variety myself.
But there are plenty of collectivists here. You’ve got that right. I’d say they’re the majority. Ideological utilitarians, no less. But they can have good ideas too, and it’s actually interesting to get a peek into their alien minds, to be in a culture where ideological individualists and collectivists actually interact.
If you instead want everyone singing from the individualist hymnal, you’ve come to the wrong place. There is not a shared moral philosophy, and it would not be individualism if there were. We’re hardly an average cross section either. I’d say this is more one of the few meeting grounds of moral ideological extremists.
There are some other forums that complain about a certain “SJW takeover” of LW. I think it is not entirely true, still, reading e.g. Star Slate Codex comments, who are generally from the LW community, sometimes make me go “holy fuck”. The issue is, the whole SJW thing has little influence here in Europe and I swear it had little influence on the English-speaking, American-majority Internet before 2009. But I think around that date basically liberal college students decided that their former collective political hobby, namely: hating Bush, is no longer relevant and hating religious conservatives is a too low hanging fruit, and basically decided to hate each other as a new hobby, and thus even people with good liberal/progressive credentials got called stuff like transphobic or not a staunch enough feminist ally or whatnot, and it is a death spiral of hate, posturing and small-team squabbling. Resembing the groupuscules, mini-groups of the French student revolutionaries in 1968.
I don’t think this takeover happened entirely, still the fact that Scott Alexander has to fight against the worst, least compassionate, least understanding, and least intellectual honest aspects of SJWism suggests that even the LW community cannot entirely shut out this new social phenomenon, is not entirely waterproof to it.
The “entryism” some right-winger babble about seems to be unfortunately and surprisingly, true. There are SJWs entering “neutral” institutions and generate hatred and faction inside. And I think I do see some “entryism” in LW.
And it is IMHO sad, because I do think causes like feminism or trans-acceptance have very positive aspects to them. However SJWism is not that, it is rather that abusing these causes to generate hatred between generally good people who are generally sympethetic to these causes. And it lowers intellectual quality. And that is what is problematic. Above all, there is one thing Euro social democrats could never understand American liberals: their propensity to guilt-trip themselves and each other. To hate themselves for crimes they did not actually personally commit. Now with SJW stuff I see this behavior on steroids really, and this is where I draw the line. I won’t hate myself being a largely masculine-oriented straight guy as long as I know I am not a bigot with women or gays. And I want to help people who suffer from self-hatred problems—although, admittedly, in this article the self-hatred was instilled in them by very masculine, patriarchical bullies, not by SJWs. Still, I am sensitive to self-hatred issues coming from other sources, like, this kind of guilt-tripping.
Nevertheless, that the same author would write a story which can be partially summerised as saying “Wouldn’t it be awesome to be a T-Rex! You could kill homophobes! I’d laugh so hard!” is pretty disturbing.
But its not as disturbing as the people who decided that debating using logic is racist, and first rap should be allowed in formal debates, and then the US national debate championship was won by people screaming incoherently.
Entryism isn’t new it’s been around for at least a century (possibly longer):
Look at what “entryism” in science fiction in America.
Look at what entyism did to non-speculative fiction (or the visual arts) in the western world.
I won’t hate myself being a largely masculine-oriented straight guy as long as I know I am not a bigot with women or gays.
That’s your problem right there. What do you mean by “bigot”? Do you even have a coherent definition for that word, since in practice it means whatever the SJW’s say it does.
IMHO real bigotry is largely understood as trying to either increase one’s status or feel better about one’s status by undermining the status of others. A classic example is when people use excuses like “not enabling unhealthy habits” to be a huge prick to fat people online, largely to feel better about oneself comparatively. This is obviously a facade, “haha look at that hippo” is not really about worrying about the health of others but more like “I am better, I may be unemployed and single, but at least thinner”. Sometimes it is about real status—using discrimination to undermine competition. I think it is not hard to understand.
For example, my non-bigotry about gays is plain simply not having the slightest interest in them their either way, not spending a second of my time on them. Let them marry a car for all I care or adopt an ox, it is no skin off my back. I am selfish enough to not be hateful—means, largely focusing on what I want, not really being much interested in loving or hating people who don’t really have anything I want. And I don’t need to crutch up my masculinity by calling some else a sissy. I am fairly certain in it anyway. With women, it is largely trying to evaluate coworkers etc. by their actual individual merits or faults. I don’t need generalized heuristics. I don’t to wonder about theories whether women in general make good leaders. I can just give a temporary leadership to every individual for two weeks and try them out. And in relationships I don’t try some kind of exactly measured equality, I am not ideological, but I am simply trying to pay attention to the desires and views of my partner and not dismissing them thinking it is just woman-talk. That is all really, I consider it common sense, not ideology.
Non-speculative fiction: I am confused, isn’t Ludlum, Clancy etc. actually kinda borderline conservative?
Visual arts: another name for bullshit, yeah, but I think they did not get ideologized, they got simply colonized by talentless self-congratulating snobbery of artists who could not draw a fruit bowl accurately.
IMHO real bigotry is largely understood as trying to either increase one’s status or feel better about one’s status by undermining the status of others.
This is a useless definition. Since status is more-or-less zero sum this means that anyone trying to increase his status is being a bigot. In practice of course, this definition is applied selectively, i.e., you’re not a bigot if you’re raising your status in an SJW-approved way or a member of an SJW-approved group.
A classic example is when people use excuses like “not enabling unhealthy habits” to be a huge prick to fat people online, largely to feel better about oneself comparatively.
For example, isn’t the above sentence technically bigoted by your definition since you’re raising your status by lowering the status of people who engage in “fat shaming”?
Non-speculative fiction: I am confused, isn’t Ludlum, Clancy etc. actually kinda borderline conservative?
I meant high-brow fiction, e.g., Finnegan’s Wake.
Visual arts: another name for bullshit, yeah, but I think they did not get ideologized, they got simply colonized by talentless self-congratulating snobbery of artists who could not draw a fruit bowl accurately.
It was ideologically while the takeover was happening, i.e., in the first half of the 20th century. A lot of modern artists justified they’re “art” by arguing how they were rebelling against bourgeoisie respectability.
I think the main issue is assuming that outside SJW groups nobody cares about things like bigotry, homophobia or sexism. I think they do—in obviously lower-profile, less incisive, less loud, unfortunately less noticable ways. But more functional and saner ways.
I agree that my definition of this later may not be very good, because ultimately it is not really an ideology outside that, just a sort of a common sense and common decency which is hard to nail down exactly.
One thing is certainly style and manners. I used the fat-shamer group as an example because the basic philosophy does not come accross as very wrong (“don’t enable unhealthy habits by uncritically approving them”) yet the style is both abrasive and puerile at the same time.
One weird thing I recently realized that 2-3 generations ago people may have had worse ethics, but better manners. For example a lot of people were racists but less obvious ways than today because they were still able to talk with POC in a polite way. They would not let their kids harass POC kids because in their mind being born so was something sort of a disability and a “well bred” kid would not harass e.g. people who were born blind either, right? At least not in 1950 or so.
So, weirdly enough, I think a large part of non-SJW non-bigotry is not even ethics but just resisting the poor manners of these times, just the common old-fashioned idea to not insult and offend people if you can avoid it. Terms like “tact” that somehow went out of fashion.
There is one other aspect I could identify. One, trying to treat people as individuals, not representatives of groups. In this sense, non-SJW non-bigotry is actually centrist, because both extremes seem to not do it, some folks dismiss the views of women in STEM, while SJWs dismiss the views of white straight men in politics. So this centrist attitude is simply giving everybody a chance or two to prove themselves as individuals. I would say, it is working from an experience of plenty - an attitude that things are not so hurried, time is not so expensive as to have to resort to prejudices, essentially heuristics, when individual “tests” can be used.
I agree that my definition of this later may not be very good, because ultimately it is not really an ideology outside that, just a sort of a common sense and common decency which is hard to nail down exactly.
What do you mean by “just a sort of a common sense and common decency”? You yourself later admit that until extremely recently no one considered these ideas to be “common sense”. What you are thinking of as “a common sense and common decency” is nothing more then SJW (and their predecessors’) memes that you’ve acquired by osmosis.
For example a lot of people were racists but less obvious ways than today because they were still able to talk with POC in a polite way. They would not let their kids harass POC kids because in their mind being born so was something sort of a disability and a “well bred” kid would not harass e.g. people who were born blind either, right?
What on earth are you talking about? You appear to have no idea either what the USA was like in the 1950′s or what it’s like now. The above statement has so little relation to reality I don’t even know where to start. Really, you might want to look for sources of news about what’s going on in other countries that don’t have an absurd level of “left-wing/SJW” bias.
One, trying to treat people as individuals, not representatives of groups.
Except the groups people are members of is correlated with their properties as individuals. Thus, someone who treated people based on merit would still wind up treating members of different groups differently.
some folks dismiss the views of women in STEM
What evidence convinced you of this? That they oppose “women in STEM” initiatives? That they wind up hiring fewer women then men and when asked to justify this point out sex differences?
The former would seem to be the kind of opposition to “treating people as members of groups” that you seem to condone, the latter is a consequence of the kind hiring people based on merit you also claim to approve of. (Incidentally here is another case where it is useful to have true, as opposed to “non-sexist”, beliefs in order to see what’s going on.)
I would say, it is working from an experience of plenty—an attitude that things are not so hurried, time is not so expensive as to have to resort to prejudices, essentially heuristics, when individual “tests” can be used.
How are tests any less heuristics than what you dismiss as “prejudices”? For example, why aren’t tests bigoted for treating people as members of the groups “passed” and “failed” rather than individuals?
What you are thinking of as “a common sense and common decency” is nothing more then SJW (and their predecessors’) memes that you’ve acquired by osmosis.
But a large aspect of it is actually very old. Look at how a gentleman talks to a lady in any old movie. Politely etc. Or in novels from the 19th century. Monte-Cristo, whatever. Concepts like tact, polite and gentle behavior, and taking other people’s feelings into account stems from much older times than SJW stuff. Imagine an old novel or movie hero like Monte-Crisot meeting a gay person. Likely he has a very, very negative opinion of it but he still does not go “lol look at the faggot, did you suck many dicks today lol” because that 4chan level behavior is not allowed to an old fashioned gentleman. Most likely he keeps a stiff upper lip, discusses the weather politely and does not say anything directly at all, although later on he may whisper in his friends eye “the Viscount is apparently practicing unspeakably unnatural vices”.
I am still fairly “well bred”, not on that 19th century level, but I was taught to be polite way before I ever heard about any other left wing or progressive idea than socialism. And I don’t understand the confusion here. What are we even talking about? Isn’t it obvious that for example Vox Day has the kinds of manners and style any people who were raised to be polite in a conservative family who never subscribed to progressive ideas still find repulsive? I am confused what is even the issue here.
You appear to have no idea either what the USA was like in the 1950′s or what it’s like now. The above statement has so little relation to reality I don’t even know where to start. Really, you might want to look for sources of news about what’s going on in other countries that don’t have an absurd level of “left-wing/SJW” bias.
The other way around. I am not from Internet Default Country (I actually hate the defaultism) and probably this is why we may have a misunderstanding of manners. Recently America got overally poor manners, e.g. calling places people eat burgers with their hands, not using utensils, still “restaurants”. But I think this was not always so. William F. Buckley Jr. had acceptable gentleman manners to my standards, i.e. my parents could invite him over dinner and he would fit in. Would Buckley be anything but polite to minorities? Would he let his kids go all 4chan on POC kids? Contemplate this please.
Thus, someone who treated people based on merit would still wind up treating members of different groups differently.
That is theoretically acceptable—he is not treating groups a such at all, just individuals. In practice this is not an issue because there are early filter. If blue people have 30% lower IQ than green people, and to graduate from a university takes 110 and your job requirement is 110, every blue and green graduate has an equal chance at you: because of the university pre-filtering.
How are tests any less heuristics than what you dismiss as “prejudices”?
Excuse me? You have a team of 3 women 2 men. Instead of going “well women don’t make good leaders” you can test every member as a temp leader for 2 weeks. How is that not better?
The former would seem to be the kind of opposition to “treating people as members of groups” that you seem to condone, the latter is a consequence of the kind hiring people based on merit you also claim to approve of.
Now you got me thinking. I don’t actually condone of the treating people as members of groups, I think if I was I would just join the SJWs :) Individuals it is. However, my biases of evaluating individuals are influenced by prejudice, and prejudice is one of the many things that affects the behavior of other individuals, like, internalizing it and so on. This simply means that you examine some individuals more carefully than others. Again I find it common sense and not ideology.
Our boxing trainer is a refugee from Kosovo, a hugely conservative society with zero SJW influence. Yet he does this instinctively, because it makes sense. Some big muscular 28 years old guy comes for the first training, T oozing out his ears, he quickly gets he is probably feels okay with all this and will not be very bad at it, so he does not need to invest much attention into him, just go through the routine training. Some meek and timid 14 years old girl comes for the first training, he invests a lot of attention, because he needs to figure out she is really clumsy or just needing encouraging, and similar things. She is in an environment that feels hostile for her due to gender roles and all that, she needs more investment to get up to speed. Does this feel like SJW ideology to you? To me it is such a common sense thing...
Likely he has a very, very negative opinion of it but he still does not go “lol look at the faggot, did you suck many dicks today lol” because that 4chan level behavior is not allowed to an old fashioned gentleman.
Those are two very different social registers. 4chan/8chan is the analogue of what people say in say a wild west saloon. (Keep in mind most westerns you saw cleaned up the language to be kid-friendly).
Outside of the chans there is very little overt “bigotry” in America. Heck careers have been ended because someone said something the could be interpreted as “racist/sexist/etc.” if you squinted enough.
If blue people have 30% lower IQ than green people, and to graduate from a university takes 110 and your job requirement is 110, every blue and green graduate has an equal chance at you: because of the university pre-filtering.
Except universities aren’t actually doing this pre-filtering. Also, what if your job requires 120?
How are tests any less heuristics than what you dismiss as “prejudices”?
Excuse me? You have a team of 3 women 2 men. Instead of going “well women don’t make good leaders” you can test every member as a temp leader for 2 weeks. How is that not better?
1) Would you mind actually answering my question.
2) Assuming you mean that trying people out for 2 weeks gives you more data then just the gender, I agree. Of course, it also takes 2 weeks per person and you might have problems under some of the less competent test-leaders, not to mention potential for drama.
Yet he does this instinctively, because it makes sense. Some big muscular 28 years old guy comes for the first training, T oozing out his ears, he quickly gets he is probably feels okay with all this and will not be very bad at it, so he does not need to invest much attention into him, just go through the routine training. Some meek and timid 14 years old girl comes for the first training, he invests a lot of attention, because he needs to figure out she is really clumsy or just needing encouraging, and similar things.
In particular, he’s using all the information available to him, including gender, in determining how to treat the person. This is what I’m advocating. Of course if he leads her to believe she’ll ever be as strong as the typical man, that’s borderline fraud and I wouldn’t approve.
In another thread you mentioned that merely knowing how race and sex correlated with other important characteristics constituted being a bigot. Here you seem to be trying to back-paddle.
Since I am trying honestly, I probably did not understand your question fully. I suspect a methodology / epistemology issue here?
2) Assuming you mean that trying people out for 2 weeks gives you more data then just the gender, I agree.
I am vary of statistical decision making when it comes to judging individuals. I would use them for judging things. For example many heuristics predict my marriage is not supposed to be working and yet it does. The reason is that we are not typical people. Atypical people cluster and this why groups of atypical people generate a statistics-distorting gravity field :) I think if I posted a job ad about a LISP programming job, that would such attract such atypical people that all statistics would be near useless. Now, posting a job ab about a bartender job, they would be way more useful. Let’s just say I am not very interested in typical people and what they do. So if statistics works for evaluating them, great, but not interested.
Watching purplepilldebate.reddit.com gives me precisely this impression. The RP side is largely about “how to be attractive for statistically typical women” while the BP side is “we are atypical, stop generalizing over us”.
In particular, he’s using all the information available to him, including gender, in determining how to treat the person. This is what I’m advocating.
That is obvoiously a good idea. However the point is, gender info is like 10-20% of the picture, and actually empirical individual features like being clumsy at the sandbag make up 80-90%. My point is simply suspending judgement until the most of the information available is individualized. “Prejudice” IMHO literally means “too fast judgement, not waiting for the individual data to roll in”.
I am vary of statistical decision making when it comes to judging individuals.
Taken literally the above sentence is anti-rational nonsense.
The reason is that we are not typical people.
Great, another Special Snowflake(tm).
Atypical people cluster and this why groups of atypical people generate a statistics-distorting gravity field :) I think if I posted a job ad about a LISP programming job, that would such attract such atypical people that all statistics would be near useless.
What do you mean by that. That it’s impossible to do statistics on the people who show up for a job ad about LISP programing? Hint: “using statistics” =/= “assume everyone is average”.
Watching purplepilldebate.reddit.com gives me precisely this impression. The RP side is largely about “how to be attractive for statistically typical women” while the BP side is “we are atypical, stop generalizing over us”.
And yet the Red Pillers have more success then the Blue Pillers. Furthermore, people routinely overestimate their “specialness”. Something like 75% of people believe themselves to be above average intelligence. What I suspect the Blue Pillers are really objecting to is that people are using the outside view on them.
“Prejudice” IMHO literally means “too fast judgement, not waiting for the individual data to roll in”.
That’s what the word originally meant, but that’s not how it’s used today. Today “prejudice” is the proverbial reason what police arrest blacks at a higher rate then whites. The fact that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate then whites is considered one of those “statistical” things you aren’t supposed to apply to people.
I think you are turning a bit hostile now and not being as constructive as before. Please try to do it again, you will rarely get with your kinds of views a debate partner who is disagreeing and yet non-dismissive, so I may be kinda useful for you.
Yes, there are “special snowflakes” and statistics about average people are poor predictors of them. In fact the very fact you are here at LW instead of upvoting pictures of cute cats on Reddit makes you a bit special, too.
Special snowflakery is an expected and rational outcome if we take the Maslow pyramid seriously (I not always, not sure if it is well evidenced, but it is so accepted that I will use it now) and see the last 50 or so years in rich countries as collectively moving up on it. A “collapse” could kick people down to the lowest level of it, but as of currently, more and more people travelled to the self-actualization peak (or esteem subpeak) and yes, it made them different.
So due to this societal pyramid-climbing, there are more atypical people now than a few decades before.
Interesting anecdotal evidence: I remember when everybody was a “rocker” or “raver” in Mitteleuropa. Now it seems people are into this band or that band, building up an individually customized musical taste, not joining one “army” or other.
Hint: “using statistics” =/= “assume everyone is average”.
Customized stats are perfectly right, if they are done at all—but that is my point. “Prejudice” is usually average stats, uncustomized.
And yet the Red Pillers have more success then the Blue Pillers.
I suspect people who spend too much time complaining on Reddit about women are probably not that successful: the succesful ones must be the “silent” ones who learn the methods but do not waste much time about this online bitterness-fest. In fact, besides the time wasted, I suspect bitterness alone must be a success-inhibitor. Specific example:I have the impression that while Vox Day’s bio shows all the high-status checkmarks and he looks handsome, he is simply too bitter to be an efficient seducer. I don’t think a startpoint of resentment can efficiently start something that is supposed to evolve into something like romantic love. Finally, I would say, success means getting what you want, and I think the BP side simply does not want loveless and trustless, selfish, transactional relationships at all. If my marriage was a bargain instead of a strong “alliance for life” for mutual help when one of us is down, I would rather be alone. In other words, I have zero interest in selfish women while RP is optimized precisely on them—in fact, they are even saying only selfish ones exist, but I think they mainly think so because they are selfish men and these two types tend to find each other.
Note: I mean selfish in the sense of “going for a narrow range of short-term visceral benefits”, I don’t mean in the sense of expecting any benefit at all, in that sense everybody is selfish: nobody starts a romantic relationship out of pure pity.
Unselfishness is understood as broad range of longer-term conscious benefits, something sort of a precommitment (called marriage vow actually) “I would not let you suffer in loneliness if you would ever become disabled, disfigured or whatever, and expect the same”. At the end of the day, I mean by unselfishness the mutual acceptance of weakness, bad luck, faults and generally unsexy qualities, now or potentially in the future, and thus not expecting lust to be always generated and fulfilled. Selfishness, from this angle, seems a lot like overconfidence/hubris: I will always be perfectly desirable/lustable and I expect my partner to do the same.
I know this sounds like an unusual definition of these terms, but just look at e.g. how children are raised: when kids who share cookies are praised for being unselfish, they are effectively trained to value the broader, long-term, conscious benefit of approval and popularity over the short-term, narrow, visceral benefit of MOAR sugar high.
Blue Pillers are really objecting to is that people are using the outside view on them.
Absolutely agreed. But I don’t think it is bad if you are sure you are atypical enough, the important part is “roughly similar previous cases”. Roughly similar. As long as you have reasons to think the outside view is based on NOT roughly similar cases, you are good.
Epistemologically, similarity means similar causal factors. This is why all this evidence-based forecasting (this all came from Joel Spolsky) seems a bit bogus: if you know the important causal factors, you may as well quantify their effect directly, if you don’t, you don’t know if it is similar or not. Spolsky invented evidence-based forecasting of software project deadlines to be based on the mis-estimates of the same team of programmers working on similar problems. This is IMHO the major difference. It was never about the mis-estimates of other people. Who are the actual people in question totally matters.
To put it differently, evidence-based forecasting or the outside view works for you if you look at your past 10 relationships and see why they ended or what the issue was, but you cannot randomly choose 10 people and assume their lessons apply to you.
The outside view is especially nefarious in PPD because what I see is a bunch of selfish (as defined above) people insisting that a bunch of unselfish people are totally like them. This reminds of me of religious people insisting that atheism is only a different religion or racists insisting anti-racist means anti-white: the inability to understand that the other group is truly different: that is why they are different group.
In fact, originally one of the reason programming companies were so bad at forecasting (which created the demand for this) is that they used the outside view of “brick-laying”, trying to forecast like a construction project after the blueprints are closed—with catastrophic results see The Mythical Man-Month.
That’s what the word originally meant, but that’s not how it’s used today.
Today = left-wing extremes I care little about and probably you should, too.
Special snowflakery is an expected and rational outcome if we take the Maslow pyramid seriously (I not always, not sure if it is well evidenced, but it is so accepted that I will use it now) and see the last 50 or so years in rich countries as collectively moving up on it.
Yes, as people ascend Maslow’s pyramid they desire to express themselves, in our culture one way of doing that is by chanting in unison about how unison about how unique you are.
At the end of the day, I mean by unselfishness the mutual acceptance of weakness, bad luck, faults and generally unsexy qualities, now or potentially in the future, and thus not expecting lust to be always generated and fulfilled. Selfishness, from this angle, seems a lot like overconfidence/hubris: I will always be perfectly desirable/lustable and I expect my partner to do the same.
So, sort of like the standard Blue Pill concept of love based on that “special feeling” and being confident it will never disappear.
I have the impression that while Vox Day’s bio shows all the high-status checkmarks and he looks handsome, he is simply too bitter to be an efficient seducer.
Well, Vox Day is now happily married with a beautiful wife and a son.
The outside view is especially nefarious in PPD because what I see is a bunch of selfish (as defined above) people insisting that a bunch of unselfish people are totally like them.
Didn’t we (generalized we) have this debate last century about capitalism vs. socialism. How did that turn out?
This reminds of me of religious people insisting that atheism is only a different religion or racists insisting anti-racist means anti-white
That’s because anti-white is the only explanation consistent with the anti-racists’ actions.
Today = left-wing extremes I care little about and probably you should, too.
That’s because your country’s government and state apparatus hasn’t been taken over by them to extent mine has.
Speaking of definitions. You still haven’t said whether your definition of “racist” includes believing true things about how race correlates with things like IQ or criminality.
Yes, as people ascend Maslow’s pyramid they desire to express themselves, in our culture one way of doing that is by chanting in unison about how unison about how unique you are.
Unconstructive snark. You can do better.
So, sort of like the standard Blue Pill concept of love based on that “special feeling” and being confident it will never disappear.
No, don’t confuse it with Disneydiots. More like the mutual respect and support based on admitting our own weakness and forgiving the weaknesses of the other, because it is mutually beneficial and also develops an attachment, is stable. It is more like two incomplete people making one more functional whole, where they can make up for each others faults and so on.
Well, Vox Day is now happily married with a beautiful wife and a son.
That is a far easier achivement than “spinning plates”. Any BP can do it, in the worst case compromising on the beauty aspect which is not necessarily very important.
Didn’t we (generalized we) have this debate last century about capitalism vs. socialism. How did that turn out?
Very well. We learned socialism does not scale up to whole societies, but it works well enough in a small enough scale, if people have a strong attachment. Conservative societies practiced this mini-scale socialism all the time. Extended family etc. For a unit of a whopping two people it is supposed to work. For two million, not.
To be fair it gives me a shudder that you even doubt two-people socialism or ten-people socialism. Obviously I doubt million-people socialism too, but if you are unable to form such kinds of bonds even with family, spouse, or blood-brothers in the Donovanian sense, it comes accross as almost pathological to me, like narcissism, sociopathy or reading too much Ayn Rand. Do you have children? There is no way in hell a person can be anything but socialist with his own kids.
You still haven’t said whether your definition of “racist” includes believing true things about how race correlates with things like IQ or criminality.
To determine that, first race needs to be real thing. The issue is, race is largely a grouped model developed in the colonial era to deal with a suddenly huge number of of ethnicities and nationalities. So English and Dutch were grouped into white, Yoruba, Hausa and Ethiopian into black and Han and Japanese and Vietnamese into yellow. Except when you look at a world map of IQ you see a sharp drop between China and Vietnam even though they are the grouped into the same yellow race. Things like this suggest racial categorizations not being predictive enough, we need more detailed ethnicity or genetic clusterrs. There is another problem: a measure that does not predict the differences between Canada, Mexico, Mali and India does not look like a very useful measure. Or there is a methodology, data-collection issue.
Don’t even start criminality, all you do is make the job of the leftists easy with that. Criminality is extremely easy, even trivial to argue from a social oppression angle, be that lack of opportunities, culture fucked up through brutalized childhood or simply the oppressor classes defining what is a crime. If you look at how many things were called crimes in history or even today how screwed up things are crimes in say Iran, even from my moderate angle it largely shows how rulers rule societies, not much else. At the very least you need to define a subset of crime. Violent crime is better for example, but still not perfect at all.
Yes, as people ascend Maslow’s pyramid they desire to express themselves, in our culture one way of doing that is by chanting in unison about how unison about how unique you are.
Unconstructive snark.
I was being serious. How about you try taking my arguments seriously rather then dismissing them as snark.
Didn’t we (generalized we) have this debate last century about capitalism vs. socialism. How did that turn out?
Very well. We learned socialism does not scale up to whole societies, but it works well enough in a small enough scale, if people have a strong attachment. Conservative societies practiced this mini-scale socialism all the time. Extended family etc. For a unit of a whopping two people it is supposed to work. For two million, not.
My point was that when you see “a bunch of selfish (as defined above) people insisting that a bunch of unselfish people are totally like them”, the ‘selfish’ people are generally correct.
To be fair it gives me a shudder that you even doubt two-people socialism or ten-people socialism.
Two-people socialism can work under the right circumstances. Ten-people socialism can sort of work (for small values of work) under extremely special circumstances at best. Then you would insist it does makes me wonder to what extent you’re dealing with reality there.
To determine that, first race needs to be real thing. The issue is, race is largely a grouped model developed in the colonial era to deal with a suddenly huge number of of ethnicities and nationalities.
Yes, and the colonial-era model more-or-less cuts reality at the joints as modern genetic analysis confirms.
Except when you look at a world map of IQ you see a sharp drop between China and Vietnam even though they are the grouped into the same yellow race.
Do you have more information about the data for that map? It certainly doesn’t agree with the data I’ve seen, at best it appears to be trying to show data on “indigenous populations”. Here is a map that I found after a little searching. I can’t vouch for it’s data source either, but it certainly seems a lot more believable.
And frankly your argument amounts to a version of the fallacy of gray.
Don’t even start criminality, all you do is make the job of the leftists easy with that.
I am not interested in your concern trolling.
Criminality is extremely easy, even trivial to argue from a social oppression angle, be that lack of opportunities, culture fucked up through brutalized childhood or simply the oppressor classes defining what is a crime.
Yes, anything is easy to argue if your willing to dismiss contrary evidence as “racist”.
Violent crime is better for example, but still not perfect at all.
Sure, restrict to murder. You still get extremely strong correlations with race.
There are two separate issues here:
1) Is it “racist” to observe that race correlates with propensity to commit murder.
2) Investigating the cause of that correlation. One explanation is different rates of poverty. This explanation can be tested by comparing black and white populations of the same economic status. (Spoiler: the correlation doesn’t go away.)
Of course, in order to investigate the cause one must first admit that the pattern exists.
How about you try taking my arguments seriously rather then dismissing them as snark.
I am trying, but “chanting in unison” is simpy not constructive. It is a fact that human interests and identities in rich nations multiplied beyond counting. I don’t know what is so chanty or unisonic about it. Also, it probably comes from having basic needs met a lot of free time. I think we should be understanding it instead of dismissing it as chanting, snowflakery, or that famous scene from Brian’s Life. But it seems you are trying to judge it hard or dismiss it instead of engaging with it.
I mean I understand your dislike for it—you like to be in surival mode and I respect that—I am in between, hedging my bets for the need for that but also preparing for a world beyond scarcity. But it is useful to set that aside and try to understand society as it is, without judging it quickly.
My point was that when you see “a bunch of selfish (as defined above) people insisting that a bunch of unselfish people are totally like them”, the ‘selfish’ people are generally correct.
Yes, because “unselfish” ideas in the last 100-150 years were crazily beyond the Dunbar number: world peace, socialism for all, and so on. But this is no reason to dismiss it within that number, simply that habit of correctly dismissing universalist unselfishness is not useful for that. It is simply a different thing.
Ten-people socialism can sort of work (for small values of work) under extremely special circumstances at best.
Yes, and the colonial-era model more-or-less cuts reality at the joints as modern genetic analysis confirms.
Which analysis? I think the genetic distance between 2pac Shakur and Haile Selassie must be fairly big.
Let’s get real here. How high is a chance that pre-scientific categories based on mere looks would just magically happen to be true? What would make them so? Do you think behavior genes move together closely with UV-protection (or D-vitamin uptake) genes? Why would they ever?
Specifically for the US, it would be more useful to think in terms for ex-slaves rather as blacks: it could have more explanatory power on both sides, social prejudice and discriminatory institutions, both problematic sub-culture and yes even some dysgenic effects. Why a sample size of 1 is not that useful, it seems interesting that that most powerful half-black man in the US is not of ex-slave stock.
Here is a map that I found after a little searching.
Thanks, I was simply lazy with my googling. Yet, the problem is that it works exactly the same way the infamous book “The Spirit Level”, who present similar stats for inequality. And it is problematic for the very same reason, it breaks down if you apply the trend to more detailed cases. Since Italy is obviously more stupidly organized in every possible way than Denmark or Canada, whatever the tests behind the map measure is simply not that relevant for real life…
Have you ever considered such a thing as test-taking ability? Such as the East Asian habit of cramming hard and studying your ass off increasing your test-taking ability: and reversed for lower-IQ groups?
I am not interested in your concern trolling.
Wait a bit ,CT is something done inside a political community. Since I am not inside yours but in between yours and your opponents, this does not apply. IMHO a prerequisite for CT is to first identify as allies.
Sure, restrict to murder. You still get extremely strong correlations with race.
And restrict it to being a murder victim and you get the same correlation. If black-on-black murder is the most common in the US i.e. gang war the first prediction that comes to me is “holy shit, that is some intense competition for drug-dealing positions”, and then I would to investigate what made that niche so desirable to compete for, perhaps lack of other niches?
Investigating the cause of that correlation. One explanation is different rates of poverty. This explanation can be tested by comparing black and white populations of the same economic status. (Spoiler: the correlation doesn’t go away.)
A classic case of reversed stupidity. Lefties do this i.e. The Spirit Level and you just reversed it. No, it is absolutely wrong methodology to start from an observed correlation, control for some factors and then assume whatever was not controlled out and I like it is true.
Correlation tends to be so incredibly misleading that if it was on me I would do away with those kinds of studies entirely and focus on purely studying individual factors with clear casual chains.
E.g. it was an excellent criticism of The Spirit Level that by the same logic selective garbage collection leads to suicide. (Scandinavia). You may as well claim on the same logic that having nordic genes leads to suicide. This is simply pointless.
Correlation is IMHO a mind-killer because it diverts attention away from causality. The problem with correlation is having things exactly backward, going from effects to causes instead of causes to effects. it is “this is this aggregate phenomenon, how do I explain it?” which is an absolutely wrong approach, the correct approach being “here is this singular factor, what does it cause”?
IMHO one rule of rationality is to ask very, very rarely what caused X as long as X is something aggregate. Rather ask what does Y cause.
It would be funny to watch you debate with someone who believes in The Spirit Level. Very similar methodology.
Ten-people socialism can sort of work (for small values of work) under extremely special circumstances at best.
Is this so special?
The extended family isn’t socialism, as seen by the fact that it’s members own most things separetly and cooperate on a more-or-less reciprocal basis. At least as reciprocal as the Red Pillers you’re calling “selfish”.
I think the genetic distance between 2pac Shakur and Haile Selassie must be fairly big.
Wow, inpresive conclusions from what is effectively a single gene.
Let’s get real here. How high is a chance that pre-scientific categories based on mere looks would just magically happen to be true?
What do you mean by “mere looks”, no the victorian era categories weren’t based only on skin color, they involved other things including behaviour.
What would make them so? Do you think behavior genes move together closely with UV-protection (or D-vitamin uptake) genes? Why would they ever?
No, but they move together with having antcectors from the same continent, thus being in the same gene pool.
Thanks, I was simply lazy with my googling. Yet, the problem is that it works exactly the same way the infamous book “The Spirit Level”, who present similar stats for inequality. And it is problematic for the very same reason, it breaks down if you apply the trend to more detailed cases. Since Italy is obviously more stupidly organized in every possible way than Denmark or Canada, whatever the tests behind the map measure is simply not that relevant for real life...
It’s relevant, it’s just not the only relevant thing.
Wait a bit ,CT is something done inside a political community. Since I am not inside yours but in between yours and your opponents, this does not apply. IMHO a prerequisite for CT is to first identify as allies.
Then make your objections in your own name. Don’t try to disguise them as tactical advise about how by telling the truth I “make the lefties’ job easier”.
And restrict it to being a murder victim and you get the same correlation. If black-on-black murder is the most common in the US i.e. gang war
Note the conclusion you’re jumping to, on apperantly no evidence besides highly distorted ideas filtered through pop culture.
the first prediction that comes to me is “holy shit, that is some intense competition for drug-dealing positions”, and then I would to investigate what made that niche so desirable to compete for, perhaps lack of other niches?
And yet for some reason poor whites don’t kill other poor whites at the same rate. Also, the black on black murder rate was much lower back during the Jim Crow days when the niches available to blacks really were more limited.
A classic case of reversed stupidity. Lefties do this i.e. The Spirit Level and you just reversed it. No, it is absolutely wrong methodology to start from an observed correlation, control for some factors and then assume whatever was not controlled out and I like it is true.
What do you think I assumed is true? Could you point me to where I assumed it. I’m not sure what causes this correlation, or rather how much of it is genetic versus culture. You seem to be agreeing with the SJW position that says we souldn’t even be allowed to think about explanations other then “white racism”.
Correlation tends to be so incredibly misleading that if it was on me I would do away with those kinds of studies entirely and focus on purely studying individual factors with clear casual chains.
So you’d do away with all science except physiscs and parts of chemistry? Or do you only apply this standard when the conclusions make you uncomfortable?
IMHO one rule of rationality is to ask very, very rarely what caused X as long as X is something aggregate.
So since temperature is the aggregate of the movement of the molecules in a substance, we shouldn’t investigate what causes temperature changes? To say nothing of investigating, say the causes of diseases.
No, but they move together with having antcectors from the same continent, thus being in the same gene pool.
The earliest succesful migration out of Africa is 60K years ago, that is calculation with 15 years 4K generations. The rest is largely the math how much evolution is even possible in such a timeframe.
You seem to be agreeing with the SJW position that says we souldn’t even be allowed to think about explanations other then “white racism”.
Not really, that is an equally bogus one, because that kind of explanation assumes there is something uniquely bad about whites. Really is closer to a shitfest of all the tribes against all the tribes and then some are winning. The most likely explanation is—I am more or less a Fukuyamaist, I tend to think just about everything comes from social capital i.e. trust—trust, cooperation, coordination breaking down when people look or act to alien to each other.
So you’d do away with all science except physiscs and parts of chemistry? Or do you only apply this standard when the conclusions make you uncomfortable?
What? No. It is perfectly doable in social science. E.g. experimenting with throwing better schools in this hood, more police in that one, jobs in a third one, rewards for snitches in the fourth etc.
So since temperature is the aggregate of the movement of the molecules in a substance, we shouldn’t investigate what causes temperature changes? To say nothing of investigating, say the causes of diseases.
I think I should explain it in longer detail in a post… but in a nutshell going back from effects to causes is always way harder than the other way around: you can easier observe what a lighting strike causes than what causes a lightning strike. With aggregate effects it becomes even harder and it is easy to err, and thus it is easy to mislead intentionally (“there is a correlation, most common causes A, B, C can be ruled out thus it must be my pet idea D!”). If the goal is to improve, not blame, you are better off playing with individual variables and see if they improve things.
The most likely explanation is—I am more or less a Fukuyamaist, I tend to think just about everything comes from social capital i.e. trust—trust, cooperation, coordination breaking down when people look or act to alien to each other.
Or when the system to punish defectors breaks down.
If the goal is to improve, not blame, you are better off playing with individual variables and see if they improve things.
We’ve been doing that for the past ~60 years (WRT black achievement), things haven’t been improving.
Or when the system to punish defectors breaks down.
I have a theory for that, just don’t know how to test it. The idea is that the community the defection seems like happening from is not the actual community. It is based on what Theodore Dalrymple experienced in East Africa, I think Tanzania, which rhymes with some of my experiences near the underworld of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Basically what they do or did there is villages sacrificing a lot to get 1-2 guy educated and into a government job, who will then use corruption, bribery, pull to divert resources into his village. Being corrupted is a community duty and virtue with regard to his village. It looks like defection, but only as long as you think the nation-state and its rules and laws are his real community. If the real community is the village, it is not a defection.
I think e.g. the oligarchical gangsterism in Russia after the Soviet collapse was not defection: there was nowhere from, the state and nation/empire as a community, in the consciousness sense, stopped existing. The actual community these people operated in was the nomenclature’s Old Boys Networks and they did obey the rules and laws of that community e.g. remember a repay favors, deliver the service you were bribed to deliver and so on.
I know very little about the situation in the US, but the anecdote that studying well may be seen as acting white and thus defection from the black community is something you should be investigating. Are the people defecting from the white / national community even parts of it, in their own eyes?
I think e.g. the oligarchical gangsterism in Russia after the Soviet collapse was not defection: there was nowhere from, the state and nation/empire as a community, in the consciousness sense, stopped existing.
The reason the nation/empire stopped existing as a community is because so many people were defecting from it. The “nomenclature’s Old Boys Networks” was a substitute community that developed among parts of the elite, and my understanding is there was a lot of defection and back-stabbing even within it.
Today “prejudice” is the proverbial reason what police arrest blacks at a higher rate then whites. The fact that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate then whites is considered one of those “statistical” things you aren’t supposed to apply to people.
This is part of a very complicated set of issues. Note that although almost all drugs (with the notable exception of crack) are used more frequently by whites than blacks according to anonymous surveys. See for example data here. But blacks are more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than whites. The entire racial crime issue is really complicated. I recommend reading Yvain’s piece on race and the judicial system. Any simple explanation of what is going on really doesn’t easily meet all the facts.
Note that although almost all drugs (with the notable exception of crack) are used more frequently by whites than blacks according to anonymous surveys. See for example data here. But blacks are more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than whites.
I suspect a Simpson’s paradox here. To avoid this you would have to show that drugs are used more frequently by whites than by blacks of similar socioeconomic status. Otherwise, showing that whites use more drugs may just mean that whites can afford more drugs.
I long for a place where people are devoted to individualism.
Really?
but she’s still miserable. Her fairy godmother reappears and asks why she is so unhappy on the island. The girl says, “Because they’re all so ugly!”
:-)
As to LW, all self-selected groups show some signs of groupthink, but I think you’re mistaken that “conformity is a requirement”. I would recommend not paying much attention to your karma and up/down votes.
Nice suggestion, that I not pay so much attention to my karma and up/down votes. However there is a simple flaw: I have to care if I want the freedom to initiate an article, don’t I?
This recent exchange sent my karma from +10 to −9. What am I supposed to learn from this? That I am expected to conform to this community’s agenda, otherwise I’ll be shunned.
OK, this is my last post. I accept that I have been shunned from this community. And I am now leaving. And I am very, very pleased with myself that it only took me 3 days of occasional attention to determine what a complete waste of time it would be to invest time here.
I would recommend not paying much attention to your karma and up/down votes.
To be fair, I have some fears of losing the privilege to submit posts to Discussion. Currently at 39 and I think the threshold is 4? I could fuck it up with one unpopular post. Other than that, I would not care.
I guess the implied strategy is: post comments first, articles later. Posting comments will usually bring you positive karma quickly. (Note that this strategy works slowly when you mostly comment on old articles.) Other possible strategy is: post an uncontroversially good article.
For posting controversial articles you should get some karma capital first. Don’t take this personally.
Gaining karma is not difficult. If you ever feel the need for more karma, recall that you are smarter than an average bear and should be able to figure out simple karma-acquisition strategies.
Could be interesting, though. Maybe if we made it clear that the karma didn’t actually stand for anything...
No, who am I kidding. We’re humans; Pavlovian conditioning is a thing. In our society, numbers going up are in and of themselves a reward. It’d probably get pretty tribal, I’d imagine; LW’s claims of rationality notwithstanding, we seem to devolve into heated arguments quite frequently.
(And speaking of of LW’s “rationality”: I registered an account here last November, but I’ve been a lurker long before that, and it seems like the signal-to-noise ratio of LW has dropped significantly since the “good old days”. Any ideas on why? Is it because of people like Eliezer and Scott having mostly deserted LW? Or is it the influx of new users causing an overall decrease in average quality, because the gems are getting buried in heaps of dung, so to speak? Do we need more people going around downvoting everything, thomblake-style?)
It’s possible that it was the “dazzle of the new”, as you put it, but there seemed to be a genuinely higher quality comments section as well, in the sense there were less heated discussions. I mean, compare the quality of discussion here versus that of the discussion, say, here. Now, you could argue that there’s a qualitative difference here—abstract thoughts about AI versus feminism, a highly politicized topic—and I would agree that that’s a legitimate distinction to make, but still: there used to be a time when LW wouldn’t really bring up political discussion at all unless it was strictly relevant. And even when politics was brought up, like, say, here, there was a genuine effort to remain polite and on-topic which, frankly, I’m not really seeing as much in the newer threads. Maybe I’m just imagining things; I don’t know. But even if I am, I can only describe my own impressions—and right now, in my impression, there really does seem to have been a definite drop in the quality of discussion.
To keep positive karma? Absolutely not. Upvotes are more frequent here than downvotes.
Articles are judged more harshly than comments, because there is the “does this deserve to be a separate article, instead of a comment in Open Thread?” factor. And karma gains/loses from an article are greater than from a comment.
Let me put it this way:
You wrote an article with strong questionable claims, ...that you admit are just random stuff which would work only through chance, ...and you also admit it is poorly written and edited, ...touching a politicized topic, which is kind of a taboo here,
...and your total karma is still positive, despite the losses from this article.
To me it seems that getting negative karma requires a lot of work. (Okay, we have a successful example in this very thread, but that is a rare situation.)
Wait a bit please—is nerdiness politicized now? Or is rather, you mention anything related to social gender (terms like “masculine”) and it is automatically politicized? This really raises the question to what extent you want the personal become political. I rather would not want this.
There was a man who said “anything that affects a lot of people is political”. But that man was Janos Kadar, a bolshevik dictator…
I really hope there is not much over overlap with Hacker News… I find Paul Graham’s essays, at least outside his domain (software engineering,investing, “startups”) tedious and boring, with very little insight. Read this and count how many times you feel like you are being subjected to vacuous windbaggery: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Well, if it is zero, then we are not on the same page. My issue was that there are different reasons to censure speech, sometimes people are just puritans, sometimes they want to prevent very real psychological damage, triggering, depression, felt repression, instilled self-doubt and low self-esteem to others. Not understanding this, looking at it from a lofty “free speech and brave enquiry vs. puritans” angle is the textbook case of “blinded by privilege”. I mean privilege is abused 99 out of 100 times by SJW types but this is the precise case where it applies. There is speech that is jus too sassy to puritans, and there is speech that hurts like a knife, right in the self-esteem. How is it hard to understand that? Yet PG is almost sweating from the effort to avoid understanding that and basically advertising “here I have no vulnerabilities”.
Much of PC is bullshit, but much of it is just basic compassion, a desire to not damage others emotionally. PG does not understand the difference at all.
I predict this post will attract a lot of negative comments, but I want to give it the most charitable reading I can. That, of course, is the Straussian reading.
What DeVliegendeHollander is really saying is that nerds are right to hate themselves, and that they deserve to suffer, because they are not truly men. By turning away from the traditional masculine skills and values of leadership, rhetoric, and prowess in combat they (and by extension, Western society) are unworthy of respect. Note in particular the distinction the OP draws between the Western sport of boxing, and the Eastern sport of karate—this distinction between the masculine, self-reliant West and the feminized, exotic East is an ancient trope. But here this trope is inverted, with “nerdiness” being seen as a disease of the West. A further problem is people looking inwards rather than outwards for validation; “gaining validation from respectable looking people choosing to discuss the weather” is presented as a better step. But of course, what the OP really implies is that martial prowess (the obsession of the post) must be turned outwards too. We need a purifying war.
In short, the author is not calling for a New Athens, but a New Sparta, where young boys pass through a series of initiation rituals to take their place in a homosocial, hyper-masculine warrior society. “Nerds” and other unfit individuals must be weeded out, leading to “the bravest, bolderst, cruelest, most aggressive fighters being on top.” How this ideal society would treat women is only hinted at obliquely in the post, but I believe that some variant of “Kinde, Kuche, Kirche” is most likely.
I understand why DeVliegendeHollander should feel that such a message could only be delivered esoterically.
I sincerely hope I am seeing an excellent parody of extremely irrational SJW attitudes here.
For what it worths, or if it is not the case, the central idea here is self-help for people who suffer. This is certainly missing from this reply. If this is a seriously meant as an SJW response, then I would translate it to that lingo as being hurt by patriarchy, and learning to undo this hurt by adapting to it.
A social, political response, New Athens or New Sparta is NOT a major point here, because for some people like me adapting to society is more important to changing it because we have one life, thrown into society (Heidegger).
But actually what little I wrote about a social-political response was less patriarchy, less toxic mascuilinity and less bullying, so it seems to be a misresponse at that. I think I am being pretty progressive here as a far social change is covered except that I simply don’t care as much about social change helping future gens rather than self-help, adaptation for people who suffer NOW.
I think I am in a community of people who don’t have very high fertility rates. I actually have a daughter and I have this impression—parenting hardly ever discussed on LW—that most of the community has no children.
From this it seems logical to me that social change is way way less important than self-help. We are not making many people to live in a future society where everything is right. People with 4 kids may sacrifice their happiness for their sakes. For no-children and few-children people and I think it is the case for us, adapting to society must be more valuable than changing it.
The East vs. West aspect sounds valid but only superficially so—relevant only to the letter, not the intent. Obviously it is about Westernized karate—and obviously to everybody who knows these stuff Muay Thay works just as well. One could raise the same parallel with Greek wrestling not training self-confidence (courage) enough and MT yes.
Re the no kids thing: as of the latest survey, LW is 81% childless but with a median age of 27.67. It’s possible that a lot of the people on here today will be parents in 10 years.
Let me give you an alternate explanation. Being a parent is very time-consuming. It also tends to draw one’s interest to different topics than are typically discussed here. In consequence, LW readers aren’t a random sample of nerds or even of people in the general social orbit of the LW crowd. I would not draw any adverse inferences from the fact that a non-parenting-related internet forum tend to be depleted of parents.
This isn’t adverse. I don’t really care much what is the actual reasons of other people’s reproductive choices, my point is simply that after having made them, and it is like 0 or 1 kids, it makes more sense to adapt to society than to change it.
(BTW not actually that time consuming. Only if you believe fashionable bullshit that throwing gigantic amounts of attention to kids is necessary for them to turn into succesful and well-adjusted adults. In reality if every second evening is like “shut up and read a book and leave dad in peace to write one”, that is not actually harmful in any way. 50% of the outcome is genes and 50% is outside-the-family environment.)
DeVliegendeHollander writes a post on how nerds could be protected from bullying and you interpret this to mean that:
?
This is the exact opposite of what he is saying.
I guess this is what “Straussian reading” means. Something like postmodern reading—the text always says exactly what you want it to say, regardless of what it said originally—except that with postmodern reading the resulting interpretation is always left-wing, while with Straussian reading the resulting interpretation is always right-wing. :D
Um, no, he writes a post on how nerds can become “real men” X-/
That is actually only a subset. The core thing is to solve self-hatred, to love one’s self well enough to retreat from the fantasy world and inhabit the real one. My martial arts solution is only a part of gaining self-respect. I also mentioned communication skills etc.
Having said all that, why is this “real men” thing even wrong? Why do intellectuals tend to hate it? I remember how intellectuals hated it around 1910 or so (at least in Europe, see Stefan Zweig etc.) but today science backs it up better—there are all sorts of casual relationships between prenatal and serum T and various other traits. To put it differently, things like courage and not being depressed seem to be related, although the causal chain is not clear.
Still, courage training, conquering fears, should not be something intellectuals should laugh on as something uncivilized, reactionary or barbarous.
And yeah, courage training, by its very nature, looks like that.
One more though and maybe I should put that in as an edit: basically nerds need to learn from feminists, it is basically the very same ideas for the very same set of problems—the lack of self-respect, confidence. The whole feminist stuff about how to feel empowered and confident and speak up and all that is 100% valid for nerds too. In fact I know women who do exactly this, who conquer their internalize suppression by communication training (Toastmasters), dressing professional, yes, even things like boxing, I know women who gain a feeling of empowerment and confidence from this kind of courage trainig, and it works.
So yeah, nerds need to become “real men” in the sense feminist women aim to become “real men”—or rather, “real persons”, who are not afraid, do not feel suppressed, but feel empowered and brave.
Men die younger because testosterone is harmful to health. See, even nature hates real men. We are just accepting the discoveries of natural sciences. :D
Okay, more seriously (still I feel that this topic inspires me to come up with crazy theories, some of which might incidentally point towards something profound), maybe it is a consequence of game theory and fragmentation of modern society. Think about it this way: if a random person X gains more strength, who benefits from this, and who loses? The person X and their allies benefit, their enemies lose. Maybe it is the structure of the society today that we have very few personal allies and a lot of competitors. Therefore, anyone gaining power is perceived as a loss to most people. In such environment, memes like “do not get stronger, that’s evil” flourish. (Maybe this is not necessarily the culture as a whole, just the subculture of social-science intellectuals, that has few friends and a lot of backstabbing.)
It was different in the past where people were divided into tribes, so when your neighbor become stronger you felt your tribe is becoming stronger, which was a good thing.
It is different for women, because feminism is a powerful tribe today, and when feminists speak about “women”, they usually mean “women who accept (or will accept) feminism”. -- To explain this: imagine the last time when you heard feminists speaking about how we need more women in politics. Did anyone mention Margaret Thatcher or Susan Palin as positive examples of women in politics? Probably no. But they probably mentioned Hillary Clinton. Just saying that “women” in certain contexts does not include literally all women, only those belonging to the tribe. Of course there are also situations where meaning literally all women is the convenient Shelling point, e.g. letting women vote.
Shortly: It is all about selfish motivation. If other people believe they will benefit from you getting stronger, they will support you to become stronger. Today intellectuals don’t believe this when they talk about men, which is why they discourage it.
Exactly this. However, it needs to be “do as I do”, instead of “do as I say” kind of learning. Nerds don’t need to learn feminist theory, because that is a theory constructed to support feminism, not to support nerds. Nerds need to learn feminist practice: supporting each other, constantly shaming the enemies, i.e. bulding a modern tribe. -- Okay, preferably with less mindkilling, if such thing is a real political option.
No, frankly, this is a much older story, not something from the recent decades. Strains of European humanism rejected “macho” attitudes as far back as 1900-1950, I know it from reading authors like Stefan Zweig (E.g. The World Of Yesterday) or Erich Fromm (The Anatomy Of Human Destructiveness). The issue is, largely, that back then the problems to ponder were not the relatively peaceful ones pondered today, but major war and genocide was attributed to a rather bull-headed gung-ho spirit—and I actually think it was correctly attributed so. The European attitudes were basically so in this period that the world around you is full of spilled gas and you do NOT want any sparks to go into it. So it seemed there is so much aggression trying to break out, in major conflicts killing millions that all the sparks better be extuingished—so it is better for everybody to be a bit of a “limp dick” rather than to risk that. And this influenced European literature and intellectualism a lot.
The story was different in America where simply these attitudes were not so dangerous, however, the latest in the 1960′s this strain of European literature also hit America and influenced “hippie” attitudes—Vietnam played an important role in this, the desire for pacifism generate a desire to do away with traditionally masculine attitudes.
Meanwhile, from the 1970′s − 80′s on, there is the opposite trend. During the late Cold War it was understood that traditional war is not much on the table but either pressing the launch buttons or not, and probably nobody will be stupid enough to press those just to play macho. Thus, the world started to seem less dangerous and these attitudes were allowed to come back. Hippie music gave way to punk and Metallica, road movies to action movies, and so on.
However, intellectuals still resist it, because all they see is what Fromm saw—that it is hardly more than a celebration of destructiveness. So there is this apparent rule that to create is good and moral and anything tending towards destructiveness even a bit is wrong and immoral, we are supposed to make but not to unmake. So competition is bad, cooperation is good etc. etc.
This is sort of complicated to explain and understand but probably it is not simply not wanting others to become stronger.
I think overly “limp” intellectualism is connected with nerdiness. The issue seems to be that boys from kindergarten on engage each other in increasingly scarier and scarier challenges and competitions. As long as you keep up, it is sort of fun enough. If you take time out to read books, because you have intellectual interests, you fall back in this kind of thing and then it becomes something not exciting and challenging but rather scary. Then the bullying starts.
So overally it is the process I described about nerds, but I think the aversion to “real men” attitudes is largely the aversion to becoming like the bullies (who were often stupid and anti-intellectual) or an aversion to the fact that indeed there is something not properly developed in one’s own self.
Nevertheless, I think what needs to be done here is to try to formulate the view clearly that not everything that tends towards the destructive, the unmaking, is necessarily wrong. That a world intellectuals often dream about—where everybody is only creative and productive, and never destructive—is the social equivalent of cancer, runaway growth without keeping creating and destroying in balance. But this is not exactly easy to formulate in a generally acceptable way. Purely economically, it can be explained, perhaps, if people think endless economic growth endangers the planet, yet you don’t want to deny people the right to make things, then someone should unmake things, break windows, so to speak, and any group of people assigned that kind of role will obviously have, how to put it, rather “barbarous” morals.
So, essentially it is the reverse stupidity. We have seen that one extreme is harmful, therefore we must go to the opposite extreme.
Yet there are situations which require someone being on the middle of the scale—not a bully, but also not someone scared of conflicts. For example, when people are doing things wrong, someone has to tell them. If everyone is avoiding conflicts all the time, then one incompetent employee can ruin a company, or one incompetent government official can ruin a country. The conflict doesn’t necessarily have to be personal; one possible way of saying “your company is horribly inefficient” is to found a competing company.
However, it is not true that all aggressivity is frowned upon by intellectuals. The taboo applies more strongly to men, and covers only physical violence plus speech that feels like it would incite physical violence. Other forms of violence are tolerated. -- For example, if you hear some guy saying something politically incorrect, it would be unacceptable to slap him, but it is acceptable to call his boss, make him fired, and let his children starve. (That is: physical violence = not okay; social and economical violence coming from the right kind of people = okay.) Actually, if you were a women with the right kind of credentials, it would probably be even acceptable to slap him; and he would be frowned upon for fighting back.
By which I am saying, that the idea of “let’s make everyone unable to fight”, although it leads to some negative consequences, is actually just a facade for something more complicated, roughly “let’s make people unable to fight, unless they are members of our tribe”. Disarming your opponents is not a new idea; the original part here is the one which also calls for disarming everyone neutral. (People mostly don’t care about neutrals, they focus on their enemies. But it is more strategical to first disarm everyone using the memes of global disarming, and then find excuses for why your members belong to a different magisterium.)
I’m puzzled by your fixation with testosterone. It may be the thing that gives you and me our nether parts, but testosterone does not a man make.
It’s a hypothesis. If there are any hormones or other biological pathways that are better predictors for being a “hero”, like, courage, confidence, emotional strength, fierceness in situations appropriate, then I am happy to use them.
Why the interest in heroism?
Being the complete opposite of the neckbeard who hates himself because he was a coward to bullies and thus does not have the confidence to find a girlfriend—I think this is the primary reason of the suffering of nerds. But hey, isn’t it exacty what I explained in the article?
Who being the opposite? You?
Me 20 years ago, I am 37. I sorta-kinda solved it about 70% during 20 years. Not efficient at all. Room for improvement. And yes, all the other “neckbears” we played AD&D with and obsessed over videogames—back then it meant Champions of Krynn—with. And their currently 17 years old versions. Mr “euphoric of my own intelligence”, if you seen the photo, if not google it.
Being the complete oppositse of a neckbeard is of interest to others because...?
… it can “fix” neckbeards who suffer, to become someone who does not suffer. This is also called compassion.
Also, I suppose that on an intellectual forum like LW, even if the majority is not nerds/neckbeards I think almost everybody has many acquaintances who are, because intellectuals cluster together. Maybe the typical LWer was the high school kid who was interested in physics and Linux, and the neckbeard guy was someone who was interested in superhero comics and D&D and they ended up hanging out together because it was less bad than hanging out the majority oafs who were only interested in fucking and fighting and sports on TV.
Are you saying that the only way to fix ones neckbeardism is to become the complete opposite?
Hm, not necessarily, but it is not like I am Prometheus bringing the perfect solution from the gods. I direct attention to the problem. Propose an solution. I hope to get other people thinking to come up with better ones.
Well, so far I only get objections, hardly anything along the lines of what I expected like “wait I am actually a psychologists I have a better idea!!”
There’s already quite a lot of self help material on this site.
Of this kind?
No, but that cycles back to the question of who this is aimed at.
Intellectuals who personally may not be neckbeards but probably know some.
You’ve switched back to talking as though you are only offering generic advice, not a very soecific scheme for becoming ultra macho.
I did skim this post and it caused me to spend some time thinking… but what I can’t escape is the way the whole speculation is framed is entirely missing the point. I mean, “Merely by asking the question you show you couldn’t possibly understand the answer.”
Let me try 3 ways to illustrate my point:
1) I wrote a short story some time ago about an unattractive girl who was lamenting her unpopularity. She was crying to herself, and out loud she wished she could go somewhere where people loved her for her mind, where appearance didn’t matter. So out pops her Fairy Godmother who transports her to an island filled with people who want the same thing. They are all immediately loving and accepting of the girl, but she’s still miserable. Her fairy godmother reappears and asks why she is so unhappy on the island. The girl says, “Because they’re all so ugly!”
2) Even neckbeards (your term) do not find each other attractive.
3) The neckbeard wants his sexual appeal to be based on the beauty and purity of this mind and his thoughts and his character, and not on his physical appearance. But the only people he really cares about viewing himself that way are hot, sexy, young girls.
As a final thought, I have concluded (from experience) that my right hand gives me 99.8% of the pleasure I could ever hope to get from a woman, without all the baggage. The question you should be asking is not why isn’t the girl interested in you, the question is why should you be interested in the girl at all?
As an aside, I joined this website within the past 2 days. I am almost to the point of abandoning it. There is a clear environment of intellectual inbreeding here. Groupthink. I long for a place where people are devoted to individualism.
This place isn’t that. It has a collectivist feel. Original thoughts are not tolerated here. Rather, conformity is a requirement.
Brian: Look, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We’re all individuals!
Brian: You’re all different!
The Crowd: Yes! We’re all different!
Man in crowd: I’m not...
Man in crowd: Shhh!
Brian: You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves.
The Crowd: Yes! We’ve got to work it out for ourselves!
Brian: Exactly!
The Crowd: Tell us more!
Brian: No! That’s the point! Don’t let anyone tell you what to do!
Brian is wrong about about a few things. We’re not “all different”. We have differences, and we have similarities. And it’s simply stupid to try to work everything out for yourself. Other people have brains too. Why not leverage them?
Yes, the intellectual influences here tend to be a subset of what is generally available. That’s why I came here. Intellectual influences like Jaynes, Kahneman, and Korzybski are in good taste. That’s the shared epistemological influences.
There is some inbreeding in the sense of a history and culture that has developed over the years on top of that. Is that surprising? Would it impress you more if being a member of the list had no discernible effect on members?
If you’re looking for devotional prayers to individualism, you’ve come to the wrong place. Though I and others will take our individualist hobby horses out for a jaunt every now and again. There are a pretty high percentage of individualists here, and something like a third of the list self identifies as libertarian. I’m of the Stirnerite egoist variety myself.
But there are plenty of collectivists here. You’ve got that right. I’d say they’re the majority. Ideological utilitarians, no less. But they can have good ideas too, and it’s actually interesting to get a peek into their alien minds, to be in a culture where ideological individualists and collectivists actually interact.
If you instead want everyone singing from the individualist hymnal, you’ve come to the wrong place. There is not a shared moral philosophy, and it would not be individualism if there were. We’re hardly an average cross section either. I’d say this is more one of the few meeting grounds of moral ideological extremists.
There are some other forums that complain about a certain “SJW takeover” of LW. I think it is not entirely true, still, reading e.g. Star Slate Codex comments, who are generally from the LW community, sometimes make me go “holy fuck”. The issue is, the whole SJW thing has little influence here in Europe and I swear it had little influence on the English-speaking, American-majority Internet before 2009. But I think around that date basically liberal college students decided that their former collective political hobby, namely: hating Bush, is no longer relevant and hating religious conservatives is a too low hanging fruit, and basically decided to hate each other as a new hobby, and thus even people with good liberal/progressive credentials got called stuff like transphobic or not a staunch enough feminist ally or whatnot, and it is a death spiral of hate, posturing and small-team squabbling. Resembing the groupuscules, mini-groups of the French student revolutionaries in 1968.
I don’t think this takeover happened entirely, still the fact that Scott Alexander has to fight against the worst, least compassionate, least understanding, and least intellectual honest aspects of SJWism suggests that even the LW community cannot entirely shut out this new social phenomenon, is not entirely waterproof to it.
The “entryism” some right-winger babble about seems to be unfortunately and surprisingly, true. There are SJWs entering “neutral” institutions and generate hatred and faction inside. And I think I do see some “entryism” in LW.
Look at what “entryism” in science fiction in America. When shit like this deserves a Nebula and is nominated for Hugo then yes, SJW “entryism” does lower quality: http://www.apex-magazine.com/if-you-were-a-dinosaur-my-love/
And it is IMHO sad, because I do think causes like feminism or trans-acceptance have very positive aspects to them. However SJWism is not that, it is rather that abusing these causes to generate hatred between generally good people who are generally sympethetic to these causes. And it lowers intellectual quality. And that is what is problematic. Above all, there is one thing Euro social democrats could never understand American liberals: their propensity to guilt-trip themselves and each other. To hate themselves for crimes they did not actually personally commit. Now with SJW stuff I see this behavior on steroids really, and this is where I draw the line. I won’t hate myself being a largely masculine-oriented straight guy as long as I know I am not a bigot with women or gays. And I want to help people who suffer from self-hatred problems—although, admittedly, in this article the self-hatred was instilled in them by very masculine, patriarchical bullies, not by SJWs. Still, I am sensitive to self-hatred issues coming from other sources, like, this kind of guilt-tripping.
I don’t think that story got a Nebula—the author won a Nebula for this:
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/summer_2010/fiction_the_lady_who_plucked_red_flowers_beneath_the_queens_window_by_rache
[EDIT: My mistake, both stories won Nebulas.]
Nevertheless, that the same author would write a story which can be partially summerised as saying “Wouldn’t it be awesome to be a T-Rex! You could kill homophobes! I’d laugh so hard!” is pretty disturbing.
But its not as disturbing as the people who decided that debating using logic is racist, and first rap should be allowed in formal debates, and then the US national debate championship was won by people screaming incoherently.
This is how civilisation dies.
Entryism isn’t new it’s been around for at least a century (possibly longer):
Look at what entyism did to non-speculative fiction (or the visual arts) in the western world.
That’s your problem right there. What do you mean by “bigot”? Do you even have a coherent definition for that word, since in practice it means whatever the SJW’s say it does.
IMHO real bigotry is largely understood as trying to either increase one’s status or feel better about one’s status by undermining the status of others. A classic example is when people use excuses like “not enabling unhealthy habits” to be a huge prick to fat people online, largely to feel better about oneself comparatively. This is obviously a facade, “haha look at that hippo” is not really about worrying about the health of others but more like “I am better, I may be unemployed and single, but at least thinner”. Sometimes it is about real status—using discrimination to undermine competition. I think it is not hard to understand.
For example, my non-bigotry about gays is plain simply not having the slightest interest in them their either way, not spending a second of my time on them. Let them marry a car for all I care or adopt an ox, it is no skin off my back. I am selfish enough to not be hateful—means, largely focusing on what I want, not really being much interested in loving or hating people who don’t really have anything I want. And I don’t need to crutch up my masculinity by calling some else a sissy. I am fairly certain in it anyway. With women, it is largely trying to evaluate coworkers etc. by their actual individual merits or faults. I don’t need generalized heuristics. I don’t to wonder about theories whether women in general make good leaders. I can just give a temporary leadership to every individual for two weeks and try them out. And in relationships I don’t try some kind of exactly measured equality, I am not ideological, but I am simply trying to pay attention to the desires and views of my partner and not dismissing them thinking it is just woman-talk. That is all really, I consider it common sense, not ideology.
Non-speculative fiction: I am confused, isn’t Ludlum, Clancy etc. actually kinda borderline conservative?
Visual arts: another name for bullshit, yeah, but I think they did not get ideologized, they got simply colonized by talentless self-congratulating snobbery of artists who could not draw a fruit bowl accurately.
This is a useless definition. Since status is more-or-less zero sum this means that anyone trying to increase his status is being a bigot. In practice of course, this definition is applied selectively, i.e., you’re not a bigot if you’re raising your status in an SJW-approved way or a member of an SJW-approved group.
For example, isn’t the above sentence technically bigoted by your definition since you’re raising your status by lowering the status of people who engage in “fat shaming”?
I meant high-brow fiction, e.g., Finnegan’s Wake.
It was ideologically while the takeover was happening, i.e., in the first half of the 20th century. A lot of modern artists justified they’re “art” by arguing how they were rebelling against bourgeoisie respectability.
I think the main issue is assuming that outside SJW groups nobody cares about things like bigotry, homophobia or sexism. I think they do—in obviously lower-profile, less incisive, less loud, unfortunately less noticable ways. But more functional and saner ways.
I agree that my definition of this later may not be very good, because ultimately it is not really an ideology outside that, just a sort of a common sense and common decency which is hard to nail down exactly.
One thing is certainly style and manners. I used the fat-shamer group as an example because the basic philosophy does not come accross as very wrong (“don’t enable unhealthy habits by uncritically approving them”) yet the style is both abrasive and puerile at the same time.
One weird thing I recently realized that 2-3 generations ago people may have had worse ethics, but better manners. For example a lot of people were racists but less obvious ways than today because they were still able to talk with POC in a polite way. They would not let their kids harass POC kids because in their mind being born so was something sort of a disability and a “well bred” kid would not harass e.g. people who were born blind either, right? At least not in 1950 or so.
So, weirdly enough, I think a large part of non-SJW non-bigotry is not even ethics but just resisting the poor manners of these times, just the common old-fashioned idea to not insult and offend people if you can avoid it. Terms like “tact” that somehow went out of fashion.
There is one other aspect I could identify. One, trying to treat people as individuals, not representatives of groups. In this sense, non-SJW non-bigotry is actually centrist, because both extremes seem to not do it, some folks dismiss the views of women in STEM, while SJWs dismiss the views of white straight men in politics. So this centrist attitude is simply giving everybody a chance or two to prove themselves as individuals. I would say, it is working from an experience of plenty - an attitude that things are not so hurried, time is not so expensive as to have to resort to prejudices, essentially heuristics, when individual “tests” can be used.
What do you mean by “just a sort of a common sense and common decency”? You yourself later admit that until extremely recently no one considered these ideas to be “common sense”. What you are thinking of as “a common sense and common decency” is nothing more then SJW (and their predecessors’) memes that you’ve acquired by osmosis.
What on earth are you talking about? You appear to have no idea either what the USA was like in the 1950′s or what it’s like now. The above statement has so little relation to reality I don’t even know where to start. Really, you might want to look for sources of news about what’s going on in other countries that don’t have an absurd level of “left-wing/SJW” bias.
Except the groups people are members of is correlated with their properties as individuals. Thus, someone who treated people based on merit would still wind up treating members of different groups differently.
What evidence convinced you of this? That they oppose “women in STEM” initiatives? That they wind up hiring fewer women then men and when asked to justify this point out sex differences?
The former would seem to be the kind of opposition to “treating people as members of groups” that you seem to condone, the latter is a consequence of the kind hiring people based on merit you also claim to approve of. (Incidentally here is another case where it is useful to have true, as opposed to “non-sexist”, beliefs in order to see what’s going on.)
How are tests any less heuristics than what you dismiss as “prejudices”? For example, why aren’t tests bigoted for treating people as members of the groups “passed” and “failed” rather than individuals?
But a large aspect of it is actually very old. Look at how a gentleman talks to a lady in any old movie. Politely etc. Or in novels from the 19th century. Monte-Cristo, whatever. Concepts like tact, polite and gentle behavior, and taking other people’s feelings into account stems from much older times than SJW stuff. Imagine an old novel or movie hero like Monte-Crisot meeting a gay person. Likely he has a very, very negative opinion of it but he still does not go “lol look at the faggot, did you suck many dicks today lol” because that 4chan level behavior is not allowed to an old fashioned gentleman. Most likely he keeps a stiff upper lip, discusses the weather politely and does not say anything directly at all, although later on he may whisper in his friends eye “the Viscount is apparently practicing unspeakably unnatural vices”.
I am still fairly “well bred”, not on that 19th century level, but I was taught to be polite way before I ever heard about any other left wing or progressive idea than socialism. And I don’t understand the confusion here. What are we even talking about? Isn’t it obvious that for example Vox Day has the kinds of manners and style any people who were raised to be polite in a conservative family who never subscribed to progressive ideas still find repulsive? I am confused what is even the issue here.
The other way around. I am not from Internet Default Country (I actually hate the defaultism) and probably this is why we may have a misunderstanding of manners. Recently America got overally poor manners, e.g. calling places people eat burgers with their hands, not using utensils, still “restaurants”. But I think this was not always so. William F. Buckley Jr. had acceptable gentleman manners to my standards, i.e. my parents could invite him over dinner and he would fit in. Would Buckley be anything but polite to minorities? Would he let his kids go all 4chan on POC kids? Contemplate this please.
That is theoretically acceptable—he is not treating groups a such at all, just individuals. In practice this is not an issue because there are early filter. If blue people have 30% lower IQ than green people, and to graduate from a university takes 110 and your job requirement is 110, every blue and green graduate has an equal chance at you: because of the university pre-filtering.
Excuse me? You have a team of 3 women 2 men. Instead of going “well women don’t make good leaders” you can test every member as a temp leader for 2 weeks. How is that not better?
Now you got me thinking. I don’t actually condone of the treating people as members of groups, I think if I was I would just join the SJWs :) Individuals it is. However, my biases of evaluating individuals are influenced by prejudice, and prejudice is one of the many things that affects the behavior of other individuals, like, internalizing it and so on. This simply means that you examine some individuals more carefully than others. Again I find it common sense and not ideology.
Our boxing trainer is a refugee from Kosovo, a hugely conservative society with zero SJW influence. Yet he does this instinctively, because it makes sense. Some big muscular 28 years old guy comes for the first training, T oozing out his ears, he quickly gets he is probably feels okay with all this and will not be very bad at it, so he does not need to invest much attention into him, just go through the routine training. Some meek and timid 14 years old girl comes for the first training, he invests a lot of attention, because he needs to figure out she is really clumsy or just needing encouraging, and similar things. She is in an environment that feels hostile for her due to gender roles and all that, she needs more investment to get up to speed. Does this feel like SJW ideology to you? To me it is such a common sense thing...
Those are two very different social registers. 4chan/8chan is the analogue of what people say in say a wild west saloon. (Keep in mind most westerns you saw cleaned up the language to be kid-friendly).
Outside of the chans there is very little overt “bigotry” in America. Heck careers have been ended because someone said something the could be interpreted as “racist/sexist/etc.” if you squinted enough.
Except universities aren’t actually doing this pre-filtering. Also, what if your job requires 120?
1) Would you mind actually answering my question.
2) Assuming you mean that trying people out for 2 weeks gives you more data then just the gender, I agree. Of course, it also takes 2 weeks per person and you might have problems under some of the less competent test-leaders, not to mention potential for drama.
In particular, he’s using all the information available to him, including gender, in determining how to treat the person. This is what I’m advocating. Of course if he leads her to believe she’ll ever be as strong as the typical man, that’s borderline fraud and I wouldn’t approve.
In another thread you mentioned that merely knowing how race and sex correlated with other important characteristics constituted being a bigot. Here you seem to be trying to back-paddle.
Since I am trying honestly, I probably did not understand your question fully. I suspect a methodology / epistemology issue here?
I am vary of statistical decision making when it comes to judging individuals. I would use them for judging things. For example many heuristics predict my marriage is not supposed to be working and yet it does. The reason is that we are not typical people. Atypical people cluster and this why groups of atypical people generate a statistics-distorting gravity field :) I think if I posted a job ad about a LISP programming job, that would such attract such atypical people that all statistics would be near useless. Now, posting a job ab about a bartender job, they would be way more useful. Let’s just say I am not very interested in typical people and what they do. So if statistics works for evaluating them, great, but not interested.
Watching purplepilldebate.reddit.com gives me precisely this impression. The RP side is largely about “how to be attractive for statistically typical women” while the BP side is “we are atypical, stop generalizing over us”.
That is obvoiously a good idea. However the point is, gender info is like 10-20% of the picture, and actually empirical individual features like being clumsy at the sandbag make up 80-90%. My point is simply suspending judgement until the most of the information available is individualized. “Prejudice” IMHO literally means “too fast judgement, not waiting for the individual data to roll in”.
Taken literally the above sentence is anti-rational nonsense.
Great, another Special Snowflake(tm).
What do you mean by that. That it’s impossible to do statistics on the people who show up for a job ad about LISP programing? Hint: “using statistics” =/= “assume everyone is average”.
And yet the Red Pillers have more success then the Blue Pillers. Furthermore, people routinely overestimate their “specialness”. Something like 75% of people believe themselves to be above average intelligence. What I suspect the Blue Pillers are really objecting to is that people are using the outside view on them.
That’s what the word originally meant, but that’s not how it’s used today. Today “prejudice” is the proverbial reason what police arrest blacks at a higher rate then whites. The fact that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate then whites is considered one of those “statistical” things you aren’t supposed to apply to people.
I think you are turning a bit hostile now and not being as constructive as before. Please try to do it again, you will rarely get with your kinds of views a debate partner who is disagreeing and yet non-dismissive, so I may be kinda useful for you.
Yes, there are “special snowflakes” and statistics about average people are poor predictors of them. In fact the very fact you are here at LW instead of upvoting pictures of cute cats on Reddit makes you a bit special, too.
Special snowflakery is an expected and rational outcome if we take the Maslow pyramid seriously (I not always, not sure if it is well evidenced, but it is so accepted that I will use it now) and see the last 50 or so years in rich countries as collectively moving up on it. A “collapse” could kick people down to the lowest level of it, but as of currently, more and more people travelled to the self-actualization peak (or esteem subpeak) and yes, it made them different.
So due to this societal pyramid-climbing, there are more atypical people now than a few decades before.
Interesting anecdotal evidence: I remember when everybody was a “rocker” or “raver” in Mitteleuropa. Now it seems people are into this band or that band, building up an individually customized musical taste, not joining one “army” or other.
Customized stats are perfectly right, if they are done at all—but that is my point. “Prejudice” is usually average stats, uncustomized.
I suspect people who spend too much time complaining on Reddit about women are probably not that successful: the succesful ones must be the “silent” ones who learn the methods but do not waste much time about this online bitterness-fest. In fact, besides the time wasted, I suspect bitterness alone must be a success-inhibitor. Specific example:I have the impression that while Vox Day’s bio shows all the high-status checkmarks and he looks handsome, he is simply too bitter to be an efficient seducer. I don’t think a startpoint of resentment can efficiently start something that is supposed to evolve into something like romantic love. Finally, I would say, success means getting what you want, and I think the BP side simply does not want loveless and trustless, selfish, transactional relationships at all. If my marriage was a bargain instead of a strong “alliance for life” for mutual help when one of us is down, I would rather be alone. In other words, I have zero interest in selfish women while RP is optimized precisely on them—in fact, they are even saying only selfish ones exist, but I think they mainly think so because they are selfish men and these two types tend to find each other.
Note: I mean selfish in the sense of “going for a narrow range of short-term visceral benefits”, I don’t mean in the sense of expecting any benefit at all, in that sense everybody is selfish: nobody starts a romantic relationship out of pure pity.
Unselfishness is understood as broad range of longer-term conscious benefits, something sort of a precommitment (called marriage vow actually) “I would not let you suffer in loneliness if you would ever become disabled, disfigured or whatever, and expect the same”. At the end of the day, I mean by unselfishness the mutual acceptance of weakness, bad luck, faults and generally unsexy qualities, now or potentially in the future, and thus not expecting lust to be always generated and fulfilled. Selfishness, from this angle, seems a lot like overconfidence/hubris: I will always be perfectly desirable/lustable and I expect my partner to do the same.
I know this sounds like an unusual definition of these terms, but just look at e.g. how children are raised: when kids who share cookies are praised for being unselfish, they are effectively trained to value the broader, long-term, conscious benefit of approval and popularity over the short-term, narrow, visceral benefit of MOAR sugar high.
Absolutely agreed. But I don’t think it is bad if you are sure you are atypical enough, the important part is “roughly similar previous cases”. Roughly similar. As long as you have reasons to think the outside view is based on NOT roughly similar cases, you are good.
Epistemologically, similarity means similar causal factors. This is why all this evidence-based forecasting (this all came from Joel Spolsky) seems a bit bogus: if you know the important causal factors, you may as well quantify their effect directly, if you don’t, you don’t know if it is similar or not. Spolsky invented evidence-based forecasting of software project deadlines to be based on the mis-estimates of the same team of programmers working on similar problems. This is IMHO the major difference. It was never about the mis-estimates of other people. Who are the actual people in question totally matters.
To put it differently, evidence-based forecasting or the outside view works for you if you look at your past 10 relationships and see why they ended or what the issue was, but you cannot randomly choose 10 people and assume their lessons apply to you.
The outside view is especially nefarious in PPD because what I see is a bunch of selfish (as defined above) people insisting that a bunch of unselfish people are totally like them. This reminds of me of religious people insisting that atheism is only a different religion or racists insisting anti-racist means anti-white: the inability to understand that the other group is truly different: that is why they are different group.
In fact, originally one of the reason programming companies were so bad at forecasting (which created the demand for this) is that they used the outside view of “brick-laying”, trying to forecast like a construction project after the blueprints are closed—with catastrophic results see The Mythical Man-Month.
Today = left-wing extremes I care little about and probably you should, too.
Yes, as people ascend Maslow’s pyramid they desire to express themselves, in our culture one way of doing that is by chanting in unison about how unison about how unique you are.
So, sort of like the standard Blue Pill concept of love based on that “special feeling” and being confident it will never disappear.
Well, Vox Day is now happily married with a beautiful wife and a son.
Didn’t we (generalized we) have this debate last century about capitalism vs. socialism. How did that turn out?
That’s because anti-white is the only explanation consistent with the anti-racists’ actions.
That’s because your country’s government and state apparatus hasn’t been taken over by them to extent mine has.
Speaking of definitions. You still haven’t said whether your definition of “racist” includes believing true things about how race correlates with things like IQ or criminality.
Unconstructive snark. You can do better.
No, don’t confuse it with Disneydiots. More like the mutual respect and support based on admitting our own weakness and forgiving the weaknesses of the other, because it is mutually beneficial and also develops an attachment, is stable. It is more like two incomplete people making one more functional whole, where they can make up for each others faults and so on.
That is a far easier achivement than “spinning plates”. Any BP can do it, in the worst case compromising on the beauty aspect which is not necessarily very important.
Very well. We learned socialism does not scale up to whole societies, but it works well enough in a small enough scale, if people have a strong attachment. Conservative societies practiced this mini-scale socialism all the time. Extended family etc. For a unit of a whopping two people it is supposed to work. For two million, not.
To be fair it gives me a shudder that you even doubt two-people socialism or ten-people socialism. Obviously I doubt million-people socialism too, but if you are unable to form such kinds of bonds even with family, spouse, or blood-brothers in the Donovanian sense, it comes accross as almost pathological to me, like narcissism, sociopathy or reading too much Ayn Rand. Do you have children? There is no way in hell a person can be anything but socialist with his own kids.
To determine that, first race needs to be real thing. The issue is, race is largely a grouped model developed in the colonial era to deal with a suddenly huge number of of ethnicities and nationalities. So English and Dutch were grouped into white, Yoruba, Hausa and Ethiopian into black and Han and Japanese and Vietnamese into yellow. Except when you look at a world map of IQ you see a sharp drop between China and Vietnam even though they are the grouped into the same yellow race. Things like this suggest racial categorizations not being predictive enough, we need more detailed ethnicity or genetic clusterrs. There is another problem: a measure that does not predict the differences between Canada, Mexico, Mali and India does not look like a very useful measure. Or there is a methodology, data-collection issue.
Don’t even start criminality, all you do is make the job of the leftists easy with that. Criminality is extremely easy, even trivial to argue from a social oppression angle, be that lack of opportunities, culture fucked up through brutalized childhood or simply the oppressor classes defining what is a crime. If you look at how many things were called crimes in history or even today how screwed up things are crimes in say Iran, even from my moderate angle it largely shows how rulers rule societies, not much else. At the very least you need to define a subset of crime. Violent crime is better for example, but still not perfect at all.
I was being serious. How about you try taking my arguments seriously rather then dismissing them as snark.
My point was that when you see “a bunch of selfish (as defined above) people insisting that a bunch of unselfish people are totally like them”, the ‘selfish’ people are generally correct.
Two-people socialism can work under the right circumstances. Ten-people socialism can sort of work (for small values of work) under extremely special circumstances at best. Then you would insist it does makes me wonder to what extent you’re dealing with reality there.
Yes, and the colonial-era model more-or-less cuts reality at the joints as modern genetic analysis confirms.
Do you have more information about the data for that map? It certainly doesn’t agree with the data I’ve seen, at best it appears to be trying to show data on “indigenous populations”. Here is a map that I found after a little searching. I can’t vouch for it’s data source either, but it certainly seems a lot more believable.
And frankly your argument amounts to a version of the fallacy of gray.
I am not interested in your concern trolling.
Yes, anything is easy to argue if your willing to dismiss contrary evidence as “racist”.
Sure, restrict to murder. You still get extremely strong correlations with race.
There are two separate issues here:
1) Is it “racist” to observe that race correlates with propensity to commit murder.
2) Investigating the cause of that correlation. One explanation is different rates of poverty. This explanation can be tested by comparing black and white populations of the same economic status. (Spoiler: the correlation doesn’t go away.)
Of course, in order to investigate the cause one must first admit that the pattern exists.
I am trying, but “chanting in unison” is simpy not constructive. It is a fact that human interests and identities in rich nations multiplied beyond counting. I don’t know what is so chanty or unisonic about it. Also, it probably comes from having basic needs met a lot of free time. I think we should be understanding it instead of dismissing it as chanting, snowflakery, or that famous scene from Brian’s Life. But it seems you are trying to judge it hard or dismiss it instead of engaging with it.
I mean I understand your dislike for it—you like to be in surival mode and I respect that—I am in between, hedging my bets for the need for that but also preparing for a world beyond scarcity. But it is useful to set that aside and try to understand society as it is, without judging it quickly.
Yes, because “unselfish” ideas in the last 100-150 years were crazily beyond the Dunbar number: world peace, socialism for all, and so on. But this is no reason to dismiss it within that number, simply that habit of correctly dismissing universalist unselfishness is not useful for that. It is simply a different thing.
Is this so special?
Which analysis? I think the genetic distance between 2pac Shakur and Haile Selassie must be fairly big.
Let’s get real here. How high is a chance that pre-scientific categories based on mere looks would just magically happen to be true? What would make them so? Do you think behavior genes move together closely with UV-protection (or D-vitamin uptake) genes? Why would they ever?
Specifically for the US, it would be more useful to think in terms for ex-slaves rather as blacks: it could have more explanatory power on both sides, social prejudice and discriminatory institutions, both problematic sub-culture and yes even some dysgenic effects. Why a sample size of 1 is not that useful, it seems interesting that that most powerful half-black man in the US is not of ex-slave stock.
Thanks, I was simply lazy with my googling. Yet, the problem is that it works exactly the same way the infamous book “The Spirit Level”, who present similar stats for inequality. And it is problematic for the very same reason, it breaks down if you apply the trend to more detailed cases. Since Italy is obviously more stupidly organized in every possible way than Denmark or Canada, whatever the tests behind the map measure is simply not that relevant for real life…
Have you ever considered such a thing as test-taking ability? Such as the East Asian habit of cramming hard and studying your ass off increasing your test-taking ability: and reversed for lower-IQ groups?
Wait a bit ,CT is something done inside a political community. Since I am not inside yours but in between yours and your opponents, this does not apply. IMHO a prerequisite for CT is to first identify as allies.
And restrict it to being a murder victim and you get the same correlation. If black-on-black murder is the most common in the US i.e. gang war the first prediction that comes to me is “holy shit, that is some intense competition for drug-dealing positions”, and then I would to investigate what made that niche so desirable to compete for, perhaps lack of other niches?
A classic case of reversed stupidity. Lefties do this i.e. The Spirit Level and you just reversed it. No, it is absolutely wrong methodology to start from an observed correlation, control for some factors and then assume whatever was not controlled out and I like it is true.
Correlation tends to be so incredibly misleading that if it was on me I would do away with those kinds of studies entirely and focus on purely studying individual factors with clear casual chains.
E.g. it was an excellent criticism of The Spirit Level that by the same logic selective garbage collection leads to suicide. (Scandinavia). You may as well claim on the same logic that having nordic genes leads to suicide. This is simply pointless.
Correlation is IMHO a mind-killer because it diverts attention away from causality. The problem with correlation is having things exactly backward, going from effects to causes instead of causes to effects. it is “this is this aggregate phenomenon, how do I explain it?” which is an absolutely wrong approach, the correct approach being “here is this singular factor, what does it cause”?
IMHO one rule of rationality is to ask very, very rarely what caused X as long as X is something aggregate. Rather ask what does Y cause.
It would be funny to watch you debate with someone who believes in The Spirit Level. Very similar methodology.
The extended family isn’t socialism, as seen by the fact that it’s members own most things separetly and cooperate on a more-or-less reciprocal basis. At least as reciprocal as the Red Pillers you’re calling “selfish”.
Wow, inpresive conclusions from what is effectively a single gene.
What do you mean by “mere looks”, no the victorian era categories weren’t based only on skin color, they involved other things including behaviour.
No, but they move together with having antcectors from the same continent, thus being in the same gene pool.
It’s relevant, it’s just not the only relevant thing.
Then make your objections in your own name. Don’t try to disguise them as tactical advise about how by telling the truth I “make the lefties’ job easier”.
Note the conclusion you’re jumping to, on apperantly no evidence besides highly distorted ideas filtered through pop culture.
And yet for some reason poor whites don’t kill other poor whites at the same rate. Also, the black on black murder rate was much lower back during the Jim Crow days when the niches available to blacks really were more limited.
What do you think I assumed is true? Could you point me to where I assumed it. I’m not sure what causes this correlation, or rather how much of it is genetic versus culture. You seem to be agreeing with the SJW position that says we souldn’t even be allowed to think about explanations other then “white racism”.
So you’d do away with all science except physiscs and parts of chemistry? Or do you only apply this standard when the conclusions make you uncomfortable?
So since temperature is the aggregate of the movement of the molecules in a substance, we shouldn’t investigate what causes temperature changes? To say nothing of investigating, say the causes of diseases.
The earliest succesful migration out of Africa is 60K years ago, that is calculation with 15 years 4K generations. The rest is largely the math how much evolution is even possible in such a timeframe.
Not really, that is an equally bogus one, because that kind of explanation assumes there is something uniquely bad about whites. Really is closer to a shitfest of all the tribes against all the tribes and then some are winning. The most likely explanation is—I am more or less a Fukuyamaist, I tend to think just about everything comes from social capital i.e. trust—trust, cooperation, coordination breaking down when people look or act to alien to each other.
What? No. It is perfectly doable in social science. E.g. experimenting with throwing better schools in this hood, more police in that one, jobs in a third one, rewards for snitches in the fourth etc.
I think I should explain it in longer detail in a post… but in a nutshell going back from effects to causes is always way harder than the other way around: you can easier observe what a lighting strike causes than what causes a lightning strike. With aggregate effects it becomes even harder and it is easy to err, and thus it is easy to mislead intentionally (“there is a correlation, most common causes A, B, C can be ruled out thus it must be my pet idea D!”). If the goal is to improve, not blame, you are better off playing with individual variables and see if they improve things.
Or when the system to punish defectors breaks down.
We’ve been doing that for the past ~60 years (WRT black achievement), things haven’t been improving.
I have a theory for that, just don’t know how to test it. The idea is that the community the defection seems like happening from is not the actual community. It is based on what Theodore Dalrymple experienced in East Africa, I think Tanzania, which rhymes with some of my experiences near the underworld of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Basically what they do or did there is villages sacrificing a lot to get 1-2 guy educated and into a government job, who will then use corruption, bribery, pull to divert resources into his village. Being corrupted is a community duty and virtue with regard to his village. It looks like defection, but only as long as you think the nation-state and its rules and laws are his real community. If the real community is the village, it is not a defection.
I think e.g. the oligarchical gangsterism in Russia after the Soviet collapse was not defection: there was nowhere from, the state and nation/empire as a community, in the consciousness sense, stopped existing. The actual community these people operated in was the nomenclature’s Old Boys Networks and they did obey the rules and laws of that community e.g. remember a repay favors, deliver the service you were bribed to deliver and so on.
I know very little about the situation in the US, but the anecdote that studying well may be seen as acting white and thus defection from the black community is something you should be investigating. Are the people defecting from the white / national community even parts of it, in their own eyes?
The reason the nation/empire stopped existing as a community is because so many people were defecting from it. The “nomenclature’s Old Boys Networks” was a substitute community that developed among parts of the elite, and my understanding is there was a lot of defection and back-stabbing even within it.
This is part of a very complicated set of issues. Note that although almost all drugs (with the notable exception of crack) are used more frequently by whites than blacks according to anonymous surveys. See for example data here. But blacks are more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than whites. The entire racial crime issue is really complicated. I recommend reading Yvain’s piece on race and the judicial system. Any simple explanation of what is going on really doesn’t easily meet all the facts.
I suspect a Simpson’s paradox here. To avoid this you would have to show that drugs are used more frequently by whites than by blacks of similar socioeconomic status. Otherwise, showing that whites use more drugs may just mean that whites can afford more drugs.
Really?
:-)
As to LW, all self-selected groups show some signs of groupthink, but I think you’re mistaken that “conformity is a requirement”. I would recommend not paying much attention to your karma and up/down votes.
Nice suggestion, that I not pay so much attention to my karma and up/down votes. However there is a simple flaw: I have to care if I want the freedom to initiate an article, don’t I?
This recent exchange sent my karma from +10 to −9. What am I supposed to learn from this? That I am expected to conform to this community’s agenda, otherwise I’ll be shunned.
OK, this is my last post. I accept that I have been shunned from this community. And I am now leaving. And I am very, very pleased with myself that it only took me 3 days of occasional attention to determine what a complete waste of time it would be to invest time here.
Have fun, all!
That trolling is not a particularly rewarding activity.
To be fair, I have some fears of losing the privilege to submit posts to Discussion. Currently at 39 and I think the threshold is 4? I could fuck it up with one unpopular post. Other than that, I would not care.
I guess the implied strategy is: post comments first, articles later. Posting comments will usually bring you positive karma quickly. (Note that this strategy works slowly when you mostly comment on old articles.) Other possible strategy is: post an uncontroversially good article.
For posting controversial articles you should get some karma capital first. Don’t take this personally.
Gaining karma is not difficult. If you ever feel the need for more karma, recall that you are smarter than an average bear and should be able to figure out simple karma-acquisition strategies.
Yes, but I need to be smarter than the average LW user for that and that sounds hard. I don’t think Reddit-style “look at that cute puppy” would work.
No, you don’t—it’s neither a zero-sum game, nor competition for a limited resource. The average LW user has a lot of positive karma.
Now you have me wondering what a zero-sum game for karma would look like on LessWrong.
(Or on Reddit, for that matter.)
My guess goes to “pretty ugly”.
Could be interesting, though. Maybe if we made it clear that the karma didn’t actually stand for anything...
No, who am I kidding. We’re humans; Pavlovian conditioning is a thing. In our society, numbers going up are in and of themselves a reward. It’d probably get pretty tribal, I’d imagine; LW’s claims of rationality notwithstanding, we seem to devolve into heated arguments quite frequently.
(And speaking of of LW’s “rationality”: I registered an account here last November, but I’ve been a lurker long before that, and it seems like the signal-to-noise ratio of LW has dropped significantly since the “good old days”. Any ideas on why? Is it because of people like Eliezer and Scott having mostly deserted LW? Or is it the influx of new users causing an overall decrease in average quality, because the gems are getting buried in heaps of dung, so to speak? Do we need more people going around downvoting everything, thomblake-style?)
Are you sure it was what you thought it was in the good old days rather than the dazzle of the new (or at least newly phrased)?
It’s possible that it was the “dazzle of the new”, as you put it, but there seemed to be a genuinely higher quality comments section as well, in the sense there were less heated discussions. I mean, compare the quality of discussion here versus that of the discussion, say, here. Now, you could argue that there’s a qualitative difference here—abstract thoughts about AI versus feminism, a highly politicized topic—and I would agree that that’s a legitimate distinction to make, but still: there used to be a time when LW wouldn’t really bring up political discussion at all unless it was strictly relevant. And even when politics was brought up, like, say, here, there was a genuine effort to remain polite and on-topic which, frankly, I’m not really seeing as much in the newer threads. Maybe I’m just imagining things; I don’t know. But even if I am, I can only describe my own impressions—and right now, in my impression, there really does seem to have been a definite drop in the quality of discussion.
To keep positive karma? Absolutely not. Upvotes are more frequent here than downvotes.
Articles are judged more harshly than comments, because there is the “does this deserve to be a separate article, instead of a comment in Open Thread?” factor. And karma gains/loses from an article are greater than from a comment.
Let me put it this way:
You wrote an article with strong questionable claims,
...that you admit are just random stuff which would work only through chance,
...and you also admit it is poorly written and edited,
...touching a politicized topic, which is kind of a taboo here,
...and your total karma is still positive, despite the losses from this article.
To me it seems that getting negative karma requires a lot of work. (Okay, we have a successful example in this very thread, but that is a rare situation.)
Wait a bit please—is nerdiness politicized now? Or is rather, you mention anything related to social gender (terms like “masculine”) and it is automatically politicized? This really raises the question to what extent you want the personal become political. I rather would not want this.
There was a man who said “anything that affects a lot of people is political”. But that man was Janos Kadar, a bolshevik dictator…
How about “Look at that cute quote of Paul Graham”? (Terry Pratchett might also be a good bet.)
I really hope there is not much over overlap with Hacker News… I find Paul Graham’s essays, at least outside his domain (software engineering,investing, “startups”) tedious and boring, with very little insight. Read this and count how many times you feel like you are being subjected to vacuous windbaggery: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I mean, if LW needs heroes outside LW I would recommend Steven Dutch for starters: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pscindx.htm
Zero.
Also given your hangups about believing anything that could be perceived as “racist” you would do well to study that article more carefully.
Well, if it is zero, then we are not on the same page. My issue was that there are different reasons to censure speech, sometimes people are just puritans, sometimes they want to prevent very real psychological damage, triggering, depression, felt repression, instilled self-doubt and low self-esteem to others. Not understanding this, looking at it from a lofty “free speech and brave enquiry vs. puritans” angle is the textbook case of “blinded by privilege”. I mean privilege is abused 99 out of 100 times by SJW types but this is the precise case where it applies. There is speech that is jus too sassy to puritans, and there is speech that hurts like a knife, right in the self-esteem. How is it hard to understand that? Yet PG is almost sweating from the effort to avoid understanding that and basically advertising “here I have no vulnerabilities”.
Much of PC is bullshit, but much of it is just basic compassion, a desire to not damage others emotionally. PG does not understand the difference at all.
:-D