If you mean that if I go out into the world and measure savageness and emotionalness and terroristness (the freedom-hating thing is straw), I will not find an effect? This is a rather radical claim, and I would like to see such a study. My impression is that studies like that find that there are effects.
If you mean “really” to mean “genetically”, note that my “weak racism” would still be a valid interpretation. (For reference, “weak racism” is the claim that whether the effect is genetic or memetic or societal only matters for what kind of intervention to fix it with, and does not have bearing on whether the effect exists or is something worth talking about.)
Actually no. If one were to ask (Islamic) terrorists how they think society should be organized, one would find that their suggestions contain significantly less freedom than modern western societies.
By “really” I mean exactly what is usually meant: in reality.
Terrorists, as a point of fact, do not see themselves as enemies of freedom. They see them selves as defenders of civilization/morality/Islam,, heroically sacrificing themselves to strike a blow against the dark forces of America. They are willing to give their lives to protect their people from the forces of … well, whatever Bad Thing those dispicable americans did this week. Corrupting our women or spreading AIDS or starting wars without provocation. These are misguided, and any attempt to paint them as evil mutants is incorrect. These are facts.
Women, likewise, are not hormonal balls of emotion and unreasonableness, and black people have, on occasion, produced civilizations,and these days many of them have even integrated into white society. None of this is news. People are people everywhere, and your enemies are not monsters.
You keep stating facts that we all agree on, and straw-manning positions that no one here holds (keywords “enemies” “evil” “mutants” “genocide” “people” “monsters”).
You have failed to answer the weak racist’s position, or even acknoledge it’s existence. In case you missed it, the weak racist’s claim is “There are no inherent genetic differences in intelligence or antisocial behaviour between groups of people, but other heritable factors like culture make the differences between groups worth talking about anyways. Further, we should try to fix these problems (intelligence differences and antisocial behaviour being problems) with compassion and rationality, not hatred or denial.”
Sorry if I was unclear, that was intended as a clarification of my beliefs, not an attack on yours. I am well aware that you do not hold any of the beliefs referred to; they were selected for their empirical falseness. I was treating them as examples of mistakes my heuristic is intend to prevent, and did not intend to imply that theyw ere held by any participant on this site.
As regards your “weak racist’s position”, as stated it is generally accepted here AFAIK. I have never claimed that culture does not cause “differences between groups worth talking about” and I am puzzled that you would imply I should have. What I have claimed and continue to do so is that we should, based on the current evidence, treat culture and upbringing as screening off race for the purposes of intelligence, violent tendencies etc.
Women, likewise, are not hormonal balls of emotion and unreasonableness, and black people have, on occasion, produced civilizations,and these days many of them have even integrated into white society. None of this is news. People are people everywhere, and your enemies are not monsters.
I agree that obviously someone who goes around saying “Blacks are savages; women are incapable of reason” is a vile racist and sexist who should be shunned, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence: the fact that some people use alleged group differences as a pretext for their awful agendas, doesn’t mean that we can’t have a nuanced, evidence-focused, statistically-savvy discussion of which human traits correlate with other traits, and to what extent, and why. It’s certainly true that people are people everywhere, but it’s not very specific; as seekers of a detailed model of reality, we can do better.
For example, with math: Cohen’s d is a common measure of effect-size. It’s the difference in the means (averages) of two groups of things, divided by the pooled standard deviation (a measure of how spread out the data is): essentially, how many standard deviations apart the two group means are. This is an important idea because it means we have a quantitative measure of what it means for two groups to be different. In the absence of data and concepts for talking about data, it’s hard to make intellectual progress: one person might say, “Men are taller than women,” and someone else might say, “No way; there are plenty of tall women,” and they could go on arguing indefinitely. But if you actually have data, there’s no need to argue: you can just note that in this case d is observed to be about 1.41 (source), and that’s all there is to say; the data speaks for itself.
Of course, height is much easier to measure than something more abstract like “aggression” or “intelligence,” and I haven’t said anything about how we might determine what causes statistical group differences in height or anything else, but you see the general principle here: facts about humans can be investigated empirically. When someone like Nyan Sandwich says that they think there is an effect (between some human characteristic like ancestry or sex, and some other human trait), and that they’d like to see a study, they’re not necessarily doubting that people are people everywhere, nor expressing contempt for people different from them; they’re making a falsifiable prediction that, if you did the science, you’d observe that d is not near zero (although exactly what numbers are “near zero” is something that you’d want to ask them to clarify).
Of course. I was merely clarifying as to what I meant by the phrase “all humans are ultimately the same”. When nyan—who is currently trying to ironman racism, or something—questioned the claim that the beliefs I described were “really” wrong, I expounded my claim a little further. I am in no way claiming that we should ignore variations in intelligence, violence etc. I am claiming that it is more useful to assume that the minor differences between individuals do not add up to stereotypes, especially since humans have a well-documented bias towards assuming superficial attitudes are somehow inherent, especially with regards to negatively connotative ones of our political enemies.
TL:DR: a) please read the parents and b) you’re technically correct, but only nominally so, and due to bias it is more effective to ignore this.
What do you mean by “really”?
If you mean that if I go out into the world and measure savageness and emotionalness and terroristness (the freedom-hating thing is straw), I will not find an effect? This is a rather radical claim, and I would like to see such a study. My impression is that studies like that find that there are effects.
If you mean “really” to mean “genetically”, note that my “weak racism” would still be a valid interpretation. (For reference, “weak racism” is the claim that whether the effect is genetic or memetic or societal only matters for what kind of intervention to fix it with, and does not have bearing on whether the effect exists or is something worth talking about.)
Actually no. If one were to ask (Islamic) terrorists how they think society should be organized, one would find that their suggestions contain significantly less freedom than modern western societies.
By “really” I mean exactly what is usually meant: in reality.
Terrorists, as a point of fact, do not see themselves as enemies of freedom. They see them selves as defenders of civilization/morality/Islam,, heroically sacrificing themselves to strike a blow against the dark forces of America. They are willing to give their lives to protect their people from the forces of … well, whatever Bad Thing those dispicable americans did this week. Corrupting our women or spreading AIDS or starting wars without provocation. These are misguided, and any attempt to paint them as evil mutants is incorrect. These are facts.
Women, likewise, are not hormonal balls of emotion and unreasonableness, and black people have, on occasion, produced civilizations,and these days many of them have even integrated into white society. None of this is news. People are people everywhere, and your enemies are not monsters.
You keep stating facts that we all agree on, and straw-manning positions that no one here holds (keywords “enemies” “evil” “mutants” “genocide” “people” “monsters”).
You have failed to answer the weak racist’s position, or even acknoledge it’s existence. In case you missed it, the weak racist’s claim is “There are no inherent genetic differences in intelligence or antisocial behaviour between groups of people, but other heritable factors like culture make the differences between groups worth talking about anyways. Further, we should try to fix these problems (intelligence differences and antisocial behaviour being problems) with compassion and rationality, not hatred or denial.”
I am tapping out of this discussion.
Sorry if I was unclear, that was intended as a clarification of my beliefs, not an attack on yours. I am well aware that you do not hold any of the beliefs referred to; they were selected for their empirical falseness. I was treating them as examples of mistakes my heuristic is intend to prevent, and did not intend to imply that theyw ere held by any participant on this site.
As regards your “weak racist’s position”, as stated it is generally accepted here AFAIK. I have never claimed that culture does not cause “differences between groups worth talking about” and I am puzzled that you would imply I should have. What I have claimed and continue to do so is that we should, based on the current evidence, treat culture and upbringing as screening off race for the purposes of intelligence, violent tendencies etc.
EDIT:Perhaps we are talking past each other. I’m not claiming you can’t get any information from someone’s race, I’m saying that this is due to historical/memetic causes. It’s the difference between loaded dice and an opponent who regularly lies about the results, if you see what I mean.
I agree that obviously someone who goes around saying “Blacks are savages; women are incapable of reason” is a vile racist and sexist who should be shunned, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence: the fact that some people use alleged group differences as a pretext for their awful agendas, doesn’t mean that we can’t have a nuanced, evidence-focused, statistically-savvy discussion of which human traits correlate with other traits, and to what extent, and why. It’s certainly true that people are people everywhere, but it’s not very specific; as seekers of a detailed model of reality, we can do better.
For example, with math: Cohen’s d is a common measure of effect-size. It’s the difference in the means (averages) of two groups of things, divided by the pooled standard deviation (a measure of how spread out the data is): essentially, how many standard deviations apart the two group means are. This is an important idea because it means we have a quantitative measure of what it means for two groups to be different. In the absence of data and concepts for talking about data, it’s hard to make intellectual progress: one person might say, “Men are taller than women,” and someone else might say, “No way; there are plenty of tall women,” and they could go on arguing indefinitely. But if you actually have data, there’s no need to argue: you can just note that in this case d is observed to be about 1.41 (source), and that’s all there is to say; the data speaks for itself.
Of course, height is much easier to measure than something more abstract like “aggression” or “intelligence,” and I haven’t said anything about how we might determine what causes statistical group differences in height or anything else, but you see the general principle here: facts about humans can be investigated empirically. When someone like Nyan Sandwich says that they think there is an effect (between some human characteristic like ancestry or sex, and some other human trait), and that they’d like to see a study, they’re not necessarily doubting that people are people everywhere, nor expressing contempt for people different from them; they’re making a falsifiable prediction that, if you did the science, you’d observe that d is not near zero (although exactly what numbers are “near zero” is something that you’d want to ask them to clarify).
Of course. I was merely clarifying as to what I meant by the phrase “all humans are ultimately the same”. When nyan—who is currently trying to ironman racism, or something—questioned the claim that the beliefs I described were “really” wrong, I expounded my claim a little further. I am in no way claiming that we should ignore variations in intelligence, violence etc. I am claiming that it is more useful to assume that the minor differences between individuals do not add up to stereotypes, especially since humans have a well-documented bias towards assuming superficial attitudes are somehow inherent, especially with regards to negatively connotative ones of our political enemies.
TL:DR: a) please read the parents and b) you’re technically correct, but only nominally so, and due to bias it is more effective to ignore this.