I see none of the characteristic tropes of the SJ movement (anything a member of an Oppressed Group says about their situation must be accepted unquestioningly
You don’t need to be neoreactionary to not agree with that claim. I would guess >75% of the public don’t agree with that claim.
take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men
I don’t think anybody here argued lately that the average woman is less intelligent than the average man. I also doubt that’s standard nrx.
Comments that (explicitly) even contemplate the possibility that the social conservatives might be wrong on this stuff get lots of disagreement
It’s quite easy to get lots of disagreement on LW by saying things about IQ that are not in line with the academic research about the subject. Quite a few people on LW actually read relevant research papers. Don’t confuse pro-science with nrx.
On the other hand I haven’t seen strong disagreement with people who question whether “homosexuality is a deviance that should be worked against”.
Opinion that are by the admission of the author not well thought out deserve to be challenged. If you don’t challenge badly thought out opinions on charged topics you don’t get high quality discourse.
You don’t need to be neoreactionary to not agree with that claim.
Of course! I wasn’t saying that everyone on LW is neoreactionary. I was saying (1) I don’t see SJ-isms and (2) I do see NRx-isms.
I don’t think anybody here argued lately that the average woman is less intelligent than the average man.
In the lengthy discussion that started from this comment, there were a number of people (who were not all VoiceOfRa, though one of them was with a different username) arguing that it’s credible that rating a prospective employee’s likely competence much higher if the name on the application is John rather than Jennifer (with no other differences) is not evidence of prejudice, because being named John rather than Jennifer could be good evidence of a substantial difference in competence (even given the other information in the application indicating equal ability).
I don’t know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women. (Not quite the same thing as intelligence but closely related. The job in question was as a lab manager in a university science department.)
And, guess what?, VoiceOfRa (operating at that time under the name of Azathoth123) was in fact saying in so many words that women are less intelligent than men. (Not, however, simply taking it for granted that everyone knows they are, so my description above isn’t perfectly accurate. Sorry.)
Don’t confuse pro-science with nrx.
Don’t worry; I’m not.
Opinions that are by the admission of the author not well thought out deserve to be challenged.
I agree (with the caveat that if the author admits they’re not well thought out, then “challenge” isn’t exactly what’s called for—the author already knows they might be wrong—but something more like analysis and critique) but I think you may be misunderstanding my point. I’m not saying “waaaah, leftist comments get challenged”. I’m saying “moderately leftist comments get sharp disagreement and downvotes; immoderately rightist comments get less disagreement and fewer downvotes; therefore it doesn’t seem right to categorize LW as a place where ‘the left is the aggressor’”.
So, in particular, I was not and am not saying (1) that it’s bad that “progressive” comments get challenged, nor (2) that it’s bad that they get downvoted, nor (3) that it’s bad that “conservative” ones get a more positive reception. (As it happens I think 1 is good, 2 is bad in that the downvoting seems rather indiscriminate, and 3 is more or less neutral.) I just think 1,2,3 are clearly true and hard to reconcile with Lumifer’s explanation of his own choice of what to take issue with, as being because “the left is the aggressor” in his circles.
I don’t know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women.
That boils down to not understanding statistics which is something for which you can get downvoted on LW.
You don’t need a general difference in intelligence for the average person in a given hiring poll with gender A being more capable than the average person in the same hiring poll with gender B.
The job in question was as a lab manager in a university science department.
Whether or not men are on average smarter than woman has nothing to do with a particular job. It’s a general statement.
with the caveat that if the author admits they’re not well thought out, then “challenge” isn’t exactly what’s called for—the author already knows they might be wrong
No, if someone posts rubbish the fact that they know they post rubbish doesn’t mean they deserve less challenge.
We can turn this into a mathematical-skill pissing contest if you like; for what it’s worth, I don’t much favour your chances. If you’re talking about means versus variances: this is only a large effect when you’re hiring from the tails of the distribution, and a lab-manager post doesn’t require really exceptional ability in any domain.
has nothing to do with a particular job
The point of my specifying the job is that it’s a job on which performance is (1) likely to be a matter of general competence in some broad sense, rather than specialized skill that, e.g., men might be much more likely to spend a long time learning for some cultural reason, and (2) sufficiently related to general intelligence that if someone holds that men are systematically better at it, it’s reasonable to guess that this indicates they think men are smarter.
the fact that they know they post rubbish
Knowing you’re posting rubbish is not the same thing as posting something you know isn’t well thought out. The comment I guess you have in mind here is not “rubbish”, and its author’s acknowledgement neither says nor means “I know I was posting rubbish”. (If we truly adopted a standard saying that every comment on LW needs to be carefully thought through and made watertight before posting, then “who should ’scape whipping?”.)
If you’re talking about means versus variances: this is only a large effect when you’re hiring from the tails of the distribution, and a lab-manager post doesn’t require really exceptional ability in any domain.
I’m not even talking about that. People who apply for a job aren’t randomly drawn from the general population. There no reason to assume that the average of the subset with applies for a job is the same as for the general population,
True enough. So, tell me: Do you think it credible that (1) there is little overall difference in the distribution of lab-managerial competence between men and women, but (2) among undergraduates applying for lab-manager positions there is a big enough difference between the competence of men and the competence of women to make it rational to rate the former 0.7 points above the latter on a 5-point scale given applications identical in every respect other than the name? (You can find the information the raters were given here; it’s fairly brief but far from content-free.)
If so, what sort of differences do you think would do this? How big would they need to be, in your judgement?
(If we truly adopted a standard saying that every comment on LW needs to be carefully thought through and made watertight before posting, then “who should ’scape whipping?”.)
Especially on politics I would expect that people post what they consider to be carefully thought out or otherwise explicitly say that they haven’t thought it through in the same post.
I accept that sometimes people think they have put careful thought into an issue but still end up wrong, but not even having the standard of careful thought before posting is bad.
not even having the standard of careful thought before posting is bad.
I too would like to see more careful thought before posting, but that isn’t the same as saying that any comment not fully thought through before posting is “rubbish”.
You are making the assumption that my circles and LW are the same thing, I am not sure on which basis. I do hang out on LW, but not only here. And I did mention meatspace, too.
At least one of us is failing to understand the other, because I’m having trouble how that comments relates to anything I said. Unless you think I was taking “in the circles I move in” to mean “in LW, and only LW”. I wasn’t; but I was taking them to include LW.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying “in the circles I move in, X is true” then I don’t see how that’s a useful explanation unless you’re saying that (1) LW is among the circles you move in and (2) it resembles the others in that X is true there.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying “in the circles I move in, X is true” then I don’t see how that’s a useful explanation
OK, let me reformulate things this way. Let’s say there is a variable s (which stands for snark) defined on the [-1..1] interval so that when it is at −1 the snark is entirely directed at the left wing, when it’s at 1 it is entirely directed at the right wing, and the intermediate values determine the proportions in which both left and right get snarked. This variable s is a function of two other variables: the subject who’s doing the snarking and the location in which the snarking takes place.
You assume that s is predominantly a function of location. This is not true in my case. For me, s is predominantly a function of the subject (me) and the influence of location is secondary.
In other words, the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
I suggest that this is unwise; snark on LW won’t do anything to repair the opinions or attitudes of people elsewhere. If one place is Too Green and another Too Blue, then someone who frequents both does no favour to the place that’s Too Green by complaining about bluism there merely because they’re annoyed by the excessive bluism in the other place.
(Of course, you might not be able to help it; or you might not care. Fair enough, in either case. But if you do happen to care about the quality of discourse at LW and happen to be able to overcome your annoyance at overzealous progressives elsewhere, I suggest that you would do better to match the snark to the venue.)
But if you do happen to care about the quality of discourse at LW
I think you’re confusing the quality of discourse with political tilt. The former is not a function of the latter. Besides, as I mentioned in another comment, how you see the tilt depends on where you set your zero point. I do not consider LW to have a conservative tilt.
I think you’re confusing the quality of discourse with political tilt.
Why do you think that? I’m not suggesting that you match your snark to the venue because that would push LW politics in “my” direction. (At least, I don’t think I am.) I’m suggesting that you do it because it will tend to improve the quality of discussion at LW. I would make the same suggestion if we were in some left-leaning place where you were complaining at all the conservatives because you were annoyed by all the neoreactionaries elsewhere.
But if, as seems to be the case, you don’t share my perception that LW has a lot more right-wing nastiness than left-wing nastiness, then fair enough.
Anyway, it’s pretty rude of me to be trying to tell someone else whom he should be snarking at. Sorry about that.
Reason 1: Because I think that there’s some chance (maybe not very large) that if an LW denizen is wrong about something and gets snarked at, it may be what they need to improve; and that for any given quantity of snark this effect will be larger if the snark is aimed at a larger deserving subpopulation of LW; so that if there are more people wrong in way A and fewer wrong in way B, snarking about A is more likely to do good than snarking about B.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW has more people in need of anti-far-right snark than people in need of anti-far-left snark.
(Of course—I repeat myself—if you’re snarking just for the fun of snarking then you needn’t care about that. And perhaps the chances of any good ever coming of snarking at anyone are negligible.)
Reason 2: Because if LW is welcoming to people in group A and hostile to people in group B, these groups playing roughly symmetrical roles on opposite ends of some spectrum, there is a risk of a positive-feedback loop that pushes LW further and further in the A direction and away from the B direction until it becomes severely and unfixably partisan, which (as you have already remarked) is not how LW is supposed to work and (as you haven’t remarked but I think is true) makes LW a less interesting and useful place by decreasing its intellectual diversity.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW is welcoming to rightists and hostile to leftists. If so, then shifting that balance a bit would reduce the danger.
(How real is the danger? I don’t know. Maybe less real since the More Right folks left LW. Still there, though, I think.)
(An important note that perhaps I should have written some time ago: all this left/right stuff is of course a crude but useful one-dimensional simplification of reality and if taken too seriously raises the risk of the kind of us-versus-them thinking that we’re all too familiar with. And the axis we’re really looking at here doesn’t exactly correspond to the usual left/right political axis—it’s much more concerned with social, and less with economic, issues. Please be assured that I understand all this and am using terms like “left” and “right” only as a convenient shorthand.)
so that if there are more people wrong in way A and fewer wrong in way B, snarking about A is more likely to do good than snarking about B.
I am sorry, my life’s purpose is not to bring balance to the universe, one forum at a time. I am not in the re-education business.
for reasons already discussed I think LW has more people in need of anti-far-right snark than people in need of anti-far-left snark.
Well, go for it :-) As I already noted, I don’t think so.
there is a risk of a positive-feedback loop that pushes LW further and further in the A direction and away from the B direction until it becomes severely and unfixably partisan
Given that NRx used to inhabit LW and then almost all of them went away while LW stayed as it is, I consider this risk negligible. Unless, of course, direction A is leftward :-D
Also, don’t forget that LW is populated mostly by Americans. From the European point of view, both US Democrats and US Republicans are right-of-centre.
And the axis we’re really looking at here...
I don’t know which axis are we looking at. Is there an axis at all or you just dont’ like a particular thought cluster?
my life’s purpose is not to bring balance to the universe, one forum at a time.
Fair enough! As I said: you aren’t obliged to care about this stuff.
I don’t know which axis are we looking at.
Take one of those political questionnaires. Throw out all the questions about economics and foreign policy, and keep the ones about social issues. Administer the questionnaire to a representative sample of Americans and Western Europeans. Take the first principal component. That axis.
I wouldn’t put it that way because there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy, and because there are other areas of morality where the “social left” are the puritans (e.g., meat-eating and pollution).
Wow. I wonder what you mean by ethics, then. A change in economic or foreign policy may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths if there’s a war—how can these not be ethical matters?
Is your axis one of Haidt’s five moral axes
No, I don’t think so.
I am still not quite sure how do you see it.
I’m sorry about that. I’ve tried giving handwavy qualitative descriptions. I’ve told you how to identify it statistically. I’m really not sure there’s much more I can reasonably be expected to do.
Wow. I wonder what you mean by ethics, then. A change in economic or foreign policy may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths if there’s a war—how can these not be ethical matters?
Interesting. Our minds work sufficiently differently so that we hit minor misunderstandings on a very regular basis :-/
When I said “close to zero ethics in economics and foreign policy” I meant that decisions in this spheres are not driven by ethical considerations. Once you take out things like naked self-interest, desire for money and/or power, the necessity to keep up appearances, etc. the remaining influence of ethics, IMHO, is very small.
You, on the other hand, said “there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy” meaning that decisions in that sphere have meaningful consequences which we can evaluate ethically. That’s certainly true, but under this approach I can say that there is a lot of ethics in earthquakes. An earthquake “may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths”, but is it an ethical matter?
No one (so far as we know) chooses whether there are to be earthquakes.
People do choose whether to start wars, increase or decrease minimum wages, levy new taxes, etc. (Governments choose directly; in democracies, their electorates choose indirectly.)
I don’t know to what extent people in government are thinking ethically when contemplating foreign and economic policy, though they frequently claim they are. I am fairly sure that when I vote, I am greatly influenced by my estimates of the candidates’ parties’ likely foreign and economic policy, and that I am thinking in ethical terms about what policies would be best.
Of course I may be fooling myself about that, and the politicians may certainly be lying about what drives their policies. But the same is true on “social” issues. I don’t know of any reason to be more confident that (say) abortion policy is really more driven by politicians’ or voters’ ethics than (say) taxation policy.
I don’t know to what extent people in government are thinking ethically when contemplating foreign and economic policy, though they frequently claim they are.
You can examine their decisions (“revealed preferences”) and check whether they require ethical imperatives as an explanation or they can perfectly well be explained without considering ethics.
I appreciate that this is not a trivial exercise (e.g. distinguishing between “we cannot ethically do that” and “we cannot do that for the sake of keeping up appearances” is going to be difficult), but so is much of real-life analysis.
I don’t know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women.
I do. Men have a higher variance than women and the employer only hires from the tail end.
(You can say that that still counts as men in a subgroup being more competent, of course, but it’s not what we normally mean by “men are more competent than women”.)
I don’t think anybody here argued lately that the average woman is less intelligent than the average man.
Given how different the distributions are, it’s hard to say (and not very meaningful) which has the higher average. It might even depend on which average you use.
You don’t need to be neoreactionary to not agree with that claim. I would guess >75% of the public don’t agree with that claim.
I don’t think anybody here argued lately that the average woman is less intelligent than the average man. I also doubt that’s standard nrx.
It’s quite easy to get lots of disagreement on LW by saying things about IQ that are not in line with the academic research about the subject. Quite a few people on LW actually read relevant research papers. Don’t confuse pro-science with nrx.
On the other hand I haven’t seen strong disagreement with people who question whether “homosexuality is a deviance that should be worked against”.
Opinion that are by the admission of the author not well thought out deserve to be challenged. If you don’t challenge badly thought out opinions on charged topics you don’t get high quality discourse.
Of course! I wasn’t saying that everyone on LW is neoreactionary. I was saying (1) I don’t see SJ-isms and (2) I do see NRx-isms.
In the lengthy discussion that started from this comment, there were a number of people (who were not all VoiceOfRa, though one of them was with a different username) arguing that it’s credible that rating a prospective employee’s likely competence much higher if the name on the application is John rather than Jennifer (with no other differences) is not evidence of prejudice, because being named John rather than Jennifer could be good evidence of a substantial difference in competence (even given the other information in the application indicating equal ability).
I don’t know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women. (Not quite the same thing as intelligence but closely related. The job in question was as a lab manager in a university science department.)
And, guess what?, VoiceOfRa (operating at that time under the name of Azathoth123) was in fact saying in so many words that women are less intelligent than men. (Not, however, simply taking it for granted that everyone knows they are, so my description above isn’t perfectly accurate. Sorry.)
Don’t worry; I’m not.
I agree (with the caveat that if the author admits they’re not well thought out, then “challenge” isn’t exactly what’s called for—the author already knows they might be wrong—but something more like analysis and critique) but I think you may be misunderstanding my point. I’m not saying “waaaah, leftist comments get challenged”. I’m saying “moderately leftist comments get sharp disagreement and downvotes; immoderately rightist comments get less disagreement and fewer downvotes; therefore it doesn’t seem right to categorize LW as a place where ‘the left is the aggressor’”.
So, in particular, I was not and am not saying (1) that it’s bad that “progressive” comments get challenged, nor (2) that it’s bad that they get downvoted, nor (3) that it’s bad that “conservative” ones get a more positive reception. (As it happens I think 1 is good, 2 is bad in that the downvoting seems rather indiscriminate, and 3 is more or less neutral.) I just think 1,2,3 are clearly true and hard to reconcile with Lumifer’s explanation of his own choice of what to take issue with, as being because “the left is the aggressor” in his circles.
That boils down to not understanding statistics which is something for which you can get downvoted on LW.
You don’t need a general difference in intelligence for the average person in a given hiring poll with gender A being more capable than the average person in the same hiring poll with gender B.
Whether or not men are on average smarter than woman has nothing to do with a particular job. It’s a general statement.
No, if someone posts rubbish the fact that they know they post rubbish doesn’t mean they deserve less challenge.
We can turn this into a mathematical-skill pissing contest if you like; for what it’s worth, I don’t much favour your chances. If you’re talking about means versus variances: this is only a large effect when you’re hiring from the tails of the distribution, and a lab-manager post doesn’t require really exceptional ability in any domain.
The point of my specifying the job is that it’s a job on which performance is (1) likely to be a matter of general competence in some broad sense, rather than specialized skill that, e.g., men might be much more likely to spend a long time learning for some cultural reason, and (2) sufficiently related to general intelligence that if someone holds that men are systematically better at it, it’s reasonable to guess that this indicates they think men are smarter.
Knowing you’re posting rubbish is not the same thing as posting something you know isn’t well thought out. The comment I guess you have in mind here is not “rubbish”, and its author’s acknowledgement neither says nor means “I know I was posting rubbish”. (If we truly adopted a standard saying that every comment on LW needs to be carefully thought through and made watertight before posting, then “who should ’scape whipping?”.)
I’m not even talking about that. People who apply for a job aren’t randomly drawn from the general population. There no reason to assume that the average of the subset with applies for a job is the same as for the general population,
True enough. So, tell me: Do you think it credible that (1) there is little overall difference in the distribution of lab-managerial competence between men and women, but (2) among undergraduates applying for lab-manager positions there is a big enough difference between the competence of men and the competence of women to make it rational to rate the former 0.7 points above the latter on a 5-point scale given applications identical in every respect other than the name? (You can find the information the raters were given here; it’s fairly brief but far from content-free.)
If so, what sort of differences do you think would do this? How big would they need to be, in your judgement?
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo.]
Especially on politics I would expect that people post what they consider to be carefully thought out or otherwise explicitly say that they haven’t thought it through in the same post.
I accept that sometimes people think they have put careful thought into an issue but still end up wrong, but not even having the standard of careful thought before posting is bad.
I too would like to see more careful thought before posting, but that isn’t the same as saying that any comment not fully thought through before posting is “rubbish”.
You are making the assumption that my circles and LW are the same thing, I am not sure on which basis. I do hang out on LW, but not only here. And I did mention meatspace, too.
G: “I notice that although the sort of agitprop you complain of comes from all sides here on LW, you’re only complaining about one of them.”
L: “That’s because in the circles I move in, the left is always the aggressor.”
G: “Well, here on LW there seems to be distinctly more right than left.”
L: “Oh, I wasn’t talking about LW.”
… Then what was the relevance of your original response?
Huh? You asked about me. I answered about myself. There is no narrowly-specialised clone of me for which LW is the entire world.
At least one of us is failing to understand the other, because I’m having trouble how that comments relates to anything I said. Unless you think I was taking “in the circles I move in” to mean “in LW, and only LW”. I wasn’t; but I was taking them to include LW.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying “in the circles I move in, X is true” then I don’t see how that’s a useful explanation unless you’re saying that (1) LW is among the circles you move in and (2) it resembles the others in that X is true there.
OK, let me reformulate things this way. Let’s say there is a variable s (which stands for snark) defined on the [-1..1] interval so that when it is at −1 the snark is entirely directed at the left wing, when it’s at 1 it is entirely directed at the right wing, and the intermediate values determine the proportions in which both left and right get snarked. This variable s is a function of two other variables: the subject who’s doing the snarking and the location in which the snarking takes place.
You assume that s is predominantly a function of location. This is not true in my case. For me, s is predominantly a function of the subject (me) and the influence of location is secondary.
In other words, the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
I suggest that this is unwise; snark on LW won’t do anything to repair the opinions or attitudes of people elsewhere. If one place is Too Green and another Too Blue, then someone who frequents both does no favour to the place that’s Too Green by complaining about bluism there merely because they’re annoyed by the excessive bluism in the other place.
(Of course, you might not be able to help it; or you might not care. Fair enough, in either case. But if you do happen to care about the quality of discourse at LW and happen to be able to overcome your annoyance at overzealous progressives elsewhere, I suggest that you would do better to match the snark to the venue.)
I think you’re confusing me with this guy.
I think you’re confusing the quality of discourse with political tilt. The former is not a function of the latter. Besides, as I mentioned in another comment, how you see the tilt depends on where you set your zero point. I do not consider LW to have a conservative tilt.
Why do you think that? I’m not suggesting that you match your snark to the venue because that would push LW politics in “my” direction. (At least, I don’t think I am.) I’m suggesting that you do it because it will tend to improve the quality of discussion at LW. I would make the same suggestion if we were in some left-leaning place where you were complaining at all the conservatives because you were annoyed by all the neoreactionaries elsewhere.
But if, as seems to be the case, you don’t share my perception that LW has a lot more right-wing nastiness than left-wing nastiness, then fair enough.
Anyway, it’s pretty rude of me to be trying to tell someone else whom he should be snarking at. Sorry about that.
Well, that would be a straightforward uncharitable reading :-D
Why do you believe this to be so?
Reason 1: Because I think that there’s some chance (maybe not very large) that if an LW denizen is wrong about something and gets snarked at, it may be what they need to improve; and that for any given quantity of snark this effect will be larger if the snark is aimed at a larger deserving subpopulation of LW; so that if there are more people wrong in way A and fewer wrong in way B, snarking about A is more likely to do good than snarking about B.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW has more people in need of anti-far-right snark than people in need of anti-far-left snark.
(Of course—I repeat myself—if you’re snarking just for the fun of snarking then you needn’t care about that. And perhaps the chances of any good ever coming of snarking at anyone are negligible.)
Reason 2: Because if LW is welcoming to people in group A and hostile to people in group B, these groups playing roughly symmetrical roles on opposite ends of some spectrum, there is a risk of a positive-feedback loop that pushes LW further and further in the A direction and away from the B direction until it becomes severely and unfixably partisan, which (as you have already remarked) is not how LW is supposed to work and (as you haven’t remarked but I think is true) makes LW a less interesting and useful place by decreasing its intellectual diversity.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW is welcoming to rightists and hostile to leftists. If so, then shifting that balance a bit would reduce the danger.
(How real is the danger? I don’t know. Maybe less real since the More Right folks left LW. Still there, though, I think.)
(An important note that perhaps I should have written some time ago: all this left/right stuff is of course a crude but useful one-dimensional simplification of reality and if taken too seriously raises the risk of the kind of us-versus-them thinking that we’re all too familiar with. And the axis we’re really looking at here doesn’t exactly correspond to the usual left/right political axis—it’s much more concerned with social, and less with economic, issues. Please be assured that I understand all this and am using terms like “left” and “right” only as a convenient shorthand.)
I am sorry, my life’s purpose is not to bring balance to the universe, one forum at a time. I am not in the re-education business.
Well, go for it :-) As I already noted, I don’t think so.
Given that NRx used to inhabit LW and then almost all of them went away while LW stayed as it is, I consider this risk negligible. Unless, of course, direction A is leftward :-D
Also, don’t forget that LW is populated mostly by Americans. From the European point of view, both US Democrats and US Republicans are right-of-centre.
I don’t know which axis are we looking at. Is there an axis at all or you just dont’ like a particular thought cluster?
Fair enough! As I said: you aren’t obliged to care about this stuff.
Take one of those political questionnaires. Throw out all the questions about economics and foreign policy, and keep the ones about social issues. Administer the questionnaire to a representative sample of Americans and Western Europeans. Take the first principal component. That axis.
So, basically morals, especially sexual morals? An axis with libertines at one extreme and puritans at the other?
I assume we’re throwing out “social” issues which are just economics in thin disguise, right?
I wouldn’t put it that way because there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy, and because there are other areas of morality where the “social left” are the puritans (e.g., meat-eating and pollution).
Funny :-/ I think there’s close to zero ethics in economics and foreign policy (there is some in handwringing and propaganda around them, though).
Is your axis one of Haidt’s five moral axes or it’s something different? I am still not quite sure how do you see it.
Wow. I wonder what you mean by ethics, then. A change in economic or foreign policy may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths if there’s a war—how can these not be ethical matters?
No, I don’t think so.
I’m sorry about that. I’ve tried giving handwavy qualitative descriptions. I’ve told you how to identify it statistically. I’m really not sure there’s much more I can reasonably be expected to do.
Interesting. Our minds work sufficiently differently so that we hit minor misunderstandings on a very regular basis :-/
When I said “close to zero ethics in economics and foreign policy” I meant that decisions in this spheres are not driven by ethical considerations. Once you take out things like naked self-interest, desire for money and/or power, the necessity to keep up appearances, etc. the remaining influence of ethics, IMHO, is very small.
You, on the other hand, said “there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy” meaning that decisions in that sphere have meaningful consequences which we can evaluate ethically. That’s certainly true, but under this approach I can say that there is a lot of ethics in earthquakes. An earthquake “may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths”, but is it an ethical matter?
No one (so far as we know) chooses whether there are to be earthquakes.
People do choose whether to start wars, increase or decrease minimum wages, levy new taxes, etc. (Governments choose directly; in democracies, their electorates choose indirectly.)
I don’t know to what extent people in government are thinking ethically when contemplating foreign and economic policy, though they frequently claim they are. I am fairly sure that when I vote, I am greatly influenced by my estimates of the candidates’ parties’ likely foreign and economic policy, and that I am thinking in ethical terms about what policies would be best.
Of course I may be fooling myself about that, and the politicians may certainly be lying about what drives their policies. But the same is true on “social” issues. I don’t know of any reason to be more confident that (say) abortion policy is really more driven by politicians’ or voters’ ethics than (say) taxation policy.
You can examine their decisions (“revealed preferences”) and check whether they require ethical imperatives as an explanation or they can perfectly well be explained without considering ethics.
I appreciate that this is not a trivial exercise (e.g. distinguishing between “we cannot ethically do that” and “we cannot do that for the sake of keeping up appearances” is going to be difficult), but so is much of real-life analysis.
I do. Men have a higher variance than women and the employer only hires from the tail end.
(You can say that that still counts as men in a subgroup being more competent, of course, but it’s not what we normally mean by “men are more competent than women”.)
That would be plausible if hiring, say, professors, but this was for a lab manager job. Not very tail-y.
Given how different the distributions are, it’s hard to say (and not very meaningful) which has the higher average. It might even depend on which average you use.