I hope you realize that by picking the example of race you make my above comment look like a clever rationalization for racism if taken out of context.
Also you are empirically plain wrong for the average online community. Give me one example of one public figure who has done this. If people like Charles Murray or Arthur Jensen can’t pull this off you need to be a rather remarkable person to do so in a random internet forum where standards of discussion are usually lower.
As to LW, it is hardly a typical forum! We have plenty of overlap with the GNXP and the wider HBD crowd. Naturally there are enough people who will up vote such an argument. On race we are actually good. We are willing to consider arguments and we don’t seem to have racists here either, this is pretty rare online.
Ironically us being good on race is the reason I don’t want us talking about race too much in articles, it attracts the wrong contrarian cluster to come visit and it fries the brains of newbies as well as creates room for “I am offended!” trolling.
Even if I for the sake of argument granted this point it dosen’t directly addressed any part of my description of the phenomena and how they are problematic.
If people like Charles Murray or Arthur Jensen can’t pull this off you need to be a rather remarkable person to do so in a random internet forum where standards of discussion are usually lower.
They don’t know how, because they haven’t researched previous attempts and don’t have a good angle of attack etc. You ought to push the “what if” angle and self-abase and warn people about those scary scary racists and other stuff… I bet that high-status geeks can’t do it because they still think like geeks. I bet I can think like a social butterfly, as unpleasant as this might be for me.
Let us actually try! Hey, someone, pick the time and place.
Also, see this article by a sufficiently cautious liberal, an anti-racist activist no less:
All that said, however, I have come to the conclusion that arguing for racial equity on the grounds that race is non-scientific and unrelated to intelligence, or that the notion of intelligence itself is culturally biased and subjective, is the wrong approach for egalitarians to take. By resting our position on those premises, we allow the opponents of equity and the believers in racism to frame the discussion in their own terms. But there is no need to allow such framing. The fact is, the moral imperative of racial equity should not (and ethically speaking does not) rely on whether or not race is a fiction, or whether or not intelligence is related to so-called racial identity.
Indeed, I would suggest that resting the claim for racial equity and just treatment upon the contemporary understanding of race and intelligence produced by scientists is a dangerous and ultimately unethical thing to do, simply because morality and ethics cannot be determined solely on the basis of science. Would it be ethical, after all, to mistreat individuals simply because they belonged to groups that we discovered were fundamentally different and in some regards less “capable,” on average, than other groups? Of course not. The moral claim to be treated ethically and justly, as an individual, rests on certain principles that transcend the genome and whatever we may know about it. This is why it has always been dangerous to rest the claim for LGBT equality on the argument that homosexuality is genetic or biological. It may well be, but what if it were proven not to be so? Would that now mean that it would be ethical to discriminate against LGBT folks, simply because it wasn’t something encoded in their biology, and perhaps was something over which they had more “control?”
First, that’s basically what I would say in the beginning of my attack. Second, read the rest of the article. It has plenty of strawmen, but it’s a wonderful example of the art of spin-doctoring. Third, he doesn’t sound all that horrifyingly close-minded, does he?
The moral claim to be treated ethically and justly, as an individual, rests on certain principles that transcend the genome and whatever we may know about it. This is why it has always been dangerous to rest the claim for LGBT equality on the argument that homosexuality is genetic or biological. It may well be, but what if it were proven not to be so? Would that now mean that it would be ethical to discriminate against LGBT folks, simply because it wasn’t something encoded in their biology, and perhaps was something over which they had more “control?”
Were it not political, this would serve as an excellent example of a number of things we’re supposed to do around here to get rid of rationalizing arguments and improper beliefs. I hear echoes of “Is that your true rejection?” and “One person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens” …
“Certain principles that transcend the genome” sounds like bafflegab or New-Agery as written — but if you state it as “mathematical principles that can be found in game theory and decision theory, and which apply to individuals of any sort, even aliens or AIs” then you get something that sounds quite a lot like X-rationality, doesn’t it?
If you’ve found such an angle of attack on the issue of race please share it and point to examples that have withstood public scrutiny. Spell the strategy out, show how one can be ideologically neutral and get away talking about this? Jensen is no ideologue, he is a scientist in the best sense of the word.
You should see straigh away why Tim Wise is a very bad example. Not only is he ideologically Liberal, he is infamously so and I bet many assume he dosen’t really believe in the possibility of racial differences but is merely striking down a straw man. Remember this is the same Tim Wise who is basically looking forward to old white people dying so he can have his liberal utopia and writes gloating about it. Replace “white people” with a different ethnic group to see how fucked up that is.
Also you miss the point utterly if I’m allowed to be politically correct when liberal, gee, maybe political correctness is a political weapon! The very application of such standards means that if I stick to it on LW I am actively participating in the enforcement of an ideology.
Where does this leave libertarians (such as say Peter Thiel) or anarchists or conservative rationalist? What about the non-bourgeois socialists? Do we ever get as much consideration as the other kinds of minorities get? Are our assessments unwelcome?
I’ll dig those up, but if you want to find them faster, see some of my comments floating around in my Grand Thread of Heresies and below Aurini’s rant. I have most definitely said things to that effect and people have upvoted me for it. That’s the whole reason I’m so audacious.
Also you miss the point utterly if I’m allowed to be politically correct when liberal, gee, maybe political correctness is a political weapon! The very application of such standards means that if I stick to it on LW I am actively participating in the enforcement of a ideology.
No! No! No! All you’ve got to do is speak the language! Hell, the filtering is mostly for the language! And when you pass the first barrier like that, you can confuse the witch-hunters and imply pretty much anything you want, as long as you can make any attack on you look rude. You can have any ideology and use the surface language of any other ideology as long as they have comparable complexity. Hell, Moldbug sorta tries to do it.
Doesn’t matter. I’ve seen him here and there around the net, and he holds himself to rather high standards on his own blog, which is where he does his only real evangelizing, yet he gets into flamewars, spews directed bile and just outright trolls people in other places.
I guess he’s only comfortable enough to do his thing for real and at length when he’s in his little fortress. That’s not at all unusual, you know.
I hope you realize that by picking the example of race you make my above comment look like a clever rationalization for racism if taken out of context.
Also you are empirically plain wrong for the average online community. Give me one example of one public figure who has done this. If people like Charles Murray or Arthur Jensen can’t pull this off you need to be a rather remarkable person to do so in a random internet forum where standards of discussion are usually lower.
As to LW, it is hardly a typical forum! We have plenty of overlap with the GNXP and the wider HBD crowd. Naturally there are enough people who will up vote such an argument. On race we are actually good. We are willing to consider arguments and we don’t seem to have racists here either, this is pretty rare online.
Ironically us being good on race is the reason I don’t want us talking about race too much in articles, it attracts the wrong contrarian cluster to come visit and it fries the brains of newbies as well as creates room for “I am offended!” trolling.
Even if I for the sake of argument granted this point it dosen’t directly addressed any part of my description of the phenomena and how they are problematic.
They don’t know how, because they haven’t researched previous attempts and don’t have a good angle of attack etc. You ought to push the “what if” angle and self-abase and warn people about those scary scary racists and other stuff… I bet that high-status geeks can’t do it because they still think like geeks. I bet I can think like a social butterfly, as unpleasant as this might be for me.
Let us actually try! Hey, someone, pick the time and place.
Also, see this article by a sufficiently cautious liberal, an anti-racist activist no less:
http://www.timwise.org/2011/08/race-intelligence-and-the-limits-of-science-reflections-on-the-moral-absurdity-of-racial-realism/
First, that’s basically what I would say in the beginning of my attack. Second, read the rest of the article. It has plenty of strawmen, but it’s a wonderful example of the art of spin-doctoring. Third, he doesn’t sound all that horrifyingly close-minded, does he?
Were it not political, this would serve as an excellent example of a number of things we’re supposed to do around here to get rid of rationalizing arguments and improper beliefs. I hear echoes of “Is that your true rejection?” and “One person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens” …
“Certain principles that transcend the genome” sounds like bafflegab or New-Agery as written — but if you state it as “mathematical principles that can be found in game theory and decision theory, and which apply to individuals of any sort, even aliens or AIs” then you get something that sounds quite a lot like X-rationality, doesn’t it?
If you’ve found such an angle of attack on the issue of race please share it and point to examples that have withstood public scrutiny. Spell the strategy out, show how one can be ideologically neutral and get away talking about this? Jensen is no ideologue, he is a scientist in the best sense of the word.
You should see straigh away why Tim Wise is a very bad example. Not only is he ideologically Liberal, he is infamously so and I bet many assume he dosen’t really believe in the possibility of racial differences but is merely striking down a straw man. Remember this is the same Tim Wise who is basically looking forward to old white people dying so he can have his liberal utopia and writes gloating about it. Replace “white people” with a different ethnic group to see how fucked up that is.
Also you miss the point utterly if I’m allowed to be politically correct when liberal, gee, maybe political correctness is a political weapon! The very application of such standards means that if I stick to it on LW I am actively participating in the enforcement of an ideology.
Where does this leave libertarians (such as say Peter Thiel) or anarchists or conservative rationalist? What about the non-bourgeois socialists? Do we ever get as much consideration as the other kinds of minorities get? Are our assessments unwelcome?
I’ll dig those up, but if you want to find them faster, see some of my comments floating around in my Grand Thread of Heresies and below Aurini’s rant. I have most definitely said things to that effect and people have upvoted me for it. That’s the whole reason I’m so audacious.
No! No! No! All you’ve got to do is speak the language! Hell, the filtering is mostly for the language! And when you pass the first barrier like that, you can confuse the witch-hunters and imply pretty much anything you want, as long as you can make any attack on you look rude. You can have any ideology and use the surface language of any other ideology as long as they have comparable complexity. Hell, Moldbug sorta tries to do it.
Moldbug cannot survive on a progressive message board. He was hellbanned from Hacker News right away. Log in to Hacker News and turn on showdead: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=moldbug
Doesn’t matter. I’ve seen him here and there around the net, and he holds himself to rather high standards on his own blog, which is where he does his only real evangelizing, yet he gets into flamewars, spews directed bile and just outright trolls people in other places.
I guess he’s only comfortable enough to do his thing for real and at length when he’s in his little fortress. That’s not at all unusual, you know.
There should be a term for the idealogical equivalent of Turing completeness.