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.
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.