I would call “moral progress” the process whereby a society’s behaviours and their CEV get closer to each other than they used to be. And this looks pretty much like it, to me.
I would call “moral progress” the process whereby a society’s behaviours and their CEV get closer to each other than they used to be.
What? So would you call an incorruptibly evil society highly “morally progressed”? What about the baby eaters since they both believe they should and do in fact eat babies?
Babyeater babies don’t want to be eaten, or particularly want to eat their peers, and those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time, so “eat babies” isn’t the ‘coherent’ part of the babyeater CEV.
Babyeater babies don’t want to be eaten, or particularly want to eat their peers, and those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time,
Using the observation that being dead precludes wanting to (and endorsing) eating babies as an adult as a technical reason that “those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time” is highly misleading. I’d go as far as to call it bullshit.
We could equally as accurately say “those who will never develop into non-paperclipping adults constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time” (therefore CEV means paperclipping!)
so “eat babies” isn’t the ‘coherent’ part of the babyeater CEV.
Any attempted implementation of CEV that does not result in the eating of babies sounds like a catastrophic failure. It would seem to result in the sneaking in of non-babyeater values at every excuse.
Insert abortion debate: Right to choose is morally coherent, and right to life is morally coherent. It is debatable which of these would constitute moral progress.
However, what is not morally coherent, is that women have sole power over reproductive decisions, but men have an obligation to support those choices whatever they may be, that husbands don’t have a say, that unmarried men can be forced to support babies, but women cannot.
This is not moral progress, but anti white male democratic coalition.
One could coherently argue that right to choose, but no right to child support is moral progress
One could coherently argue that right to life, plus right to child support is moral progress.
One cannot argue that right to choose plus right to child support is moral progress. It is morally right that he who pays the piper, calls the tune, and that she who calls the tune, gets stuck with the piper’s bill.
I agree that the current system is inconsistent. If women are allowed to abort babies because babies are an expensive burden, men should either have an equal say in that decision or men shouldn’t be obligated to support those children. Either one would make sense.
Speaking as a pro-lifer, that’s nonsense. Men aren’t the ones using their bodies as life support. Also, “anti white male”? Really? I’m pretty sure you don’t have to be white to get an abortion.
However, what is not morally coherent, is that women have sole power over reproductive decisions, but men have an obligation to support those choices whatever they may be, that husbands don’t have a say, that unmarried men can be forced to support babies, but women cannot.
This is not nonsense, as far as I can tell.
Given “Accidental Pregnancy”, the woman’s decision tree (A) goes:
A1 - Keep the baby, support it, including whatever costs and benefits. A2 - Get an abortion, costs and benefits are avoided.
The man’s decision tree (B), according to the quoted statement, goes:
A1 - The woman kept the baby; (Bx|A1) - Support the woman and baby. What this man thinks or wants or would have decided is irrelevant. A2 - The woman got an abortion; (Bx|A2) - No baby, no costs, no benefits. What this man thinks or wants or would have decided is irrelevant.
Once you’ve boiled down the calculations, given unforeseen pregnancy, the men have zero decision power according to such a system in theory, and must pay a cost independently of whatever they could possibly do in exactly half of the possible outcomes.
In other words, whether you pay a cost or not is entirely not up to you, for no specific reason whatsoever other than “aren’t the ones using their bodies as life support”. Does this sound like a fair setting, and more importantly, does it sound like an optimal system to play in?
Ok, the quoted position is not nonsense. But it is totally rejected by society’s decisions about involuntary medical procedures and economic support of children. Once those decisions are made, there is no space for anything like what the quote advocates for.
First point: Abortion is a medical procedure. Society is generally unwilling to force anyone to undergo a medical procedure. Given the special moral issues arising out of abortion, why do you expect a different result here?
Second point: society has decided that a child’s economic support should come from all biological parents, rather than the people raising the child. There are (and have been) other decisions made by other societies. So what? That doesn’t make the current position incoherent (as sam seems to argue). Men know (or should know) the risks when deciding whether to have sex.
I mostly agree on all of this, at the very least denotationally agree on everything.
I’m quite on a different end of the spectrum when it comes to whether this is morally optimized, but of course this is because I work from different assumptions and when I picture it, I also imagine a completely different social framework than most people who think this is the “right” way to do it would imagine around it.
Errh. Not sure how I could rephrase the above to make it less confusing, but hopefully your model already knows the gist of what I’m saying.
I’m not sure I understand your position—more specifically, I’m not sure what connotations you disagree with. I was trying in this instance to make statements without relevant connotation at all, but it seems that my attempts fell short.
This pattern-matches to the noncentral fallacy described by Yvain, and can be very easily read as an attempt to categorically identify abortion as nothing other than what people generally identify as “medical procedures”, while abortion clearly has some elements (even in flat-out physical materialistic terms, let alone social, moral, legal, etc.) that are not quite like most medical procedures.
If I want to push the meta-analysis a bit further...
So what?
This seems dismissive of the issues. At this point in the paragraph, it holds some connotation of “Your arguments are worthless, society is right because that’s what society decided”, which is clearly not intended (or so I would presume) but still sneaks into the reader’s stream-of-consciousness.
In general the tone of the comment feels a bit like you’re saying that society has decided something, nothing can be done about it by one individual, the Enemy’s arguments are invalid, and thus society is right. This (probably unintended) connotation is very much one I strongly disagree with.
This pattern-matches to the noncentral fallacy described by Yvain, and can be very easily read as an attempt to categorically identify abortion as nothing other than what people generally identify as “medical procedures”, while abortion clearly has some elements (even in flat-out physical materialistic terms, let alone social, moral, legal, etc.) that are not quite like most medical procedures.
Doesn’t this support my position? Even if an abortion was only a medical procedure, it wouldn’t be available to vindicate the man’s choice over the woman’s choice. And you correctly note that it isn’t only a medical procedure
This seems dismissive of the issues.
Sam says there’s only one correct moral choice. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, but I was dismissive of that position.
Doesn’t this support my position? Even if an abortion was only a medical procedure, it wouldn’t be available to vindicate the man’s choice over the woman’s choice. And you correctly note that it isn’t only a medical procedure
Fully true. It’s the pattern-matching connotation of “Here, I argue using known fallacies” that was off-putting, more than the facts stated and the actually-implied reasoning.
I cringe at the phrase “vindicate the man’s choice over the woman’s choice”, because it’s clear to me that this isn’t a mutually exclusive two-choices-only scenario (there are more than two possible solutions to this “problem”, if one wants to think of it in these terms), but that reaction is a matter of gender-equality humanism (which most people, due to historical circumstance, refer to as “feminism”) more than the actual issue at hand.
We’re assuming false dichotomies here. We could have a society where women get to decide whether or not to abort, but if they don’t they are encouraged to give the child up for adoption if they can’t afford to raise it, and if they choose not to, rhat’s their business and they aren’t entitled to demand that anyone else help them out financially. EDIT: that way, a woman is not forced to undergo a medical procedure if she doesn’t want the child.
I haven’t seen anyone assuming that you can’t have abortion and no childcare, or childcare and no abortion. The main point of contention is that the grandparent is arguing that those are the only coherent options—that abortion and childcare is self-contradictory/discriminatory.
But it is totally rejected by society’s decisions about involuntary medical procedures and economic support of children. Once those decisions are made, there is no space for anything like what the quote advocates for.
Exactly so: Moral and social decay. People behaving badly, bad behavior being encouraged, and frequently enforced. Hurtful consequences, decadence, and all that. “Society” is making wrongful decisions to advance the interests of one group at the expense of another, a characteristic flaw and failing of democracy.
A previous society decided that women and their children were not entitled to support except by a contract voluntarily entered into by both parties, whose terms differed strikingly from current terms. The question then is, which society was right?
The question at issue is moral progress. That society has decided X is not, in the context of this debate, evidence that X is right, since a previous society decided Y.
There are (and have been) other decisions made by other societies. So what?
The question is, which society was right? I argue that this society’s decisions constitute evil, decadence, moral decay, and are an indictment of democracy.
Well, if so, their cynical exploitation of the karma mechanics is working; it’s at −3, soon all discussion will be silenced by the Toll.
EDIT: Well, there it goes. To defend my point, deliberately invoking mechanics designed to discourage feeding trolls to prevent discussion on topics you disagree with is cynical exploitation. Karma is intended to rate the quality of a comment, not to censor certain topics of discussion. I personally would consider this just as reprehensible as creating new thread to reply to comments in a Karma Tolled old one, which has been met with severe sanctions.
Who the blazes upvoted this comment? I was hoping the troll toll would cut back on troll feeding, but it won’t work if people keep upvoting trollish behavior.
(And yes, sam0345 behavior is trollish, even if they earnest hold these views. There is no reason hijack a conversation about CEV into a MRA talking point regarding an explosive political issue)
Would one of the mods please kill this thread before we get a pile-up?
Edit: Looks like I’ve been karmassinated, as several of my old comments in unrelated threads are getting downvoted.
I would call “moral progress” the process whereby a society’s behaviours and their CEV get closer to each other than they used to by.
That’s actually the best definition of “moral progress” that I’ve seen. A big step up from “more like the values that I currently wish to signal having”, the default definition.
People on Lesswrong saying their CEV includes X or leads to Y, are not using the term technically but as a poetic way of saying X and Y look about right to me and I’m confident I’m not wrong. Substituting that into the definition makes it much less impressive for human use. And if you check writing on CEV you see the definition is nearly circular for technical use in FAI design.
And if you check writing on CEV you see it is nearly circular for technical use in FAI design.
Just not true. The writing on CEV does a lot to constrain technical thinking about FAI design. It isn’t a complete solution, nor is it presented as one but it certainly does rule out a lot (most) proposals for how an FAI should be designed and created. It simply doesn’t fit the definition “circular”.
(I had previously ignored this comment but upvotes as of now suggest that it may be successful in being actively misleading! As such, rejecting it seems more important.)
We seem to have a misunderstanding. Lots of writing on CEV refers to something called moral development or moral progress. I was criticizing the usefulness of the quoted definition of this something to CEV development not work on CEV in general. I’ve edited the sentence somewhat to clarify that.
I would call “moral progress” the process whereby a society’s behaviours and their CEV get closer to each other than they used to be.
Is this a possible use of ‘CEV?’ So far as I understand CEV, it’s not possible that it could change: our CEV is what we would want given all the correct moral arguments and all the information. Assuming that ‘all the information’ and ‘all the correct moral arguments’ are constants, how could the CEV of one society differ from that of another?
The only way I can think of is if the two societies are composed of fundamentally different kinds of beings. But the idea of moral progress you describe assumes that this is not the case.
Is this a possible use of ‘CEV?’ So far as I understand CEV, it’s not possible that it could change
Yes. Society’s behaviors and their CEV can get closer together without the CEV changing at all. Also note that while CEV is a (very slightly) different thing to CEV even though neither of those “CEVs” change at all.
A potential criticism of army’s definition is that it allows for “cultural wireheading” and as such would be a lost purpose if “moral progress” was substituted in as a all-purpose goal or measure of achievement. (That said, I’ve never really thought of “moral progress” as that-which-should-be-optimised anyhow.)
It describes how to compute that-which-should-be-optimized.
As a descriptor that people find useful when analyzing cultures.
Because not being itself my entire utility function doesn’t mean it or related components thereof doesn’t have a significant part in it.
It’s still only marginally useful. For example I don’t believe I have ever used the phrase before and if I have it was because it was necessary to guess the password of a teacher.
Very nearly everything does not happen to be that-which-should-be-optimised.
Yes. Society’s behaviors and their CEV can get closer together without the CEV changing at all.
So we’re not saying that the CEV of a culture changes (this is a constant), but that the culture’s actual moral practices and reasoning can change in relation to its CEV. And change such that it is closer or further away. Do I have that right?
(That said, I’ve never really thought of “moral progress” as that-which-should-be-optimised anyhow.)
Presumably, we wouldn’t want to optimize moral progress, but rather morality.
So we’re not saying that the CEV of a culture changes (this is a constant)
The CEV of a culture changes (a little bit) every day. CEV is a constant. This is because humans (and groups of humans) aren’t stable, consistent optimisers. From what I understand the CEV of a culture is relatively stable, certainly more stable than the culture itself. Nevertheless it is not a fixed. We, all things considered and collectively want (very nearly tautologically) for our CEV to be stable because that (approximately) maximises our current CEV. We just aren’t that consistent.
but that the culture’s actual moral practices and reasoning can change in relation to its CEV. And change such that it is closer or further away. Do I have that right?
That is one way in which the previously quoted proposition could be valid, yes.
Presumably, we wouldn’t want to optimize moral progress, but rather morality.
I want to optimise whatever my preferences are. Morality seems to get a weight in there someplace.
I thought the whole point of CEV was to extrapolate forwards in time towards the ultimate reflectively-consistent set of values to formulate one single coherent utility function (with multiple parameters and variables, of course) that represents the optimal equilibrium of all that humans would want if they were exactly as they would want to be and would want exactly that which they would wish to want.
he CEV of a culture changes (a little bit) every day. CEV is a constant. This is because humans (and groups of humans) aren’t stable, consistent optimisers. From what I understand the CEV of a culture is relatively stable, certainly more stable than the culture itself. Nevertheless it is not a fixed. We, all things considered and collectively want (very nearly tautologically) for our CEV to be stable because that (approximately) maximises our current CEV. We just aren’t that consistent.
This reminds me more of CAV (Coherent Aggregated Volition) than CEV. CEV is, IIRC, intended as a bootstrap towards “Whatever humans would collectively find the best possible optimization after infinite re-evaluations”, if any such meta-ethics exists.
I thought the whole point of CEV was to extrapolate forwards in time towards the ultimate reflectively-consistent set of values to formulate one single coherent utility function (with multiple parameters and variables, of course) that represents the optimal equilibrium of all that humans would want if they were exactly as they would want to be and would want exactly that which they would wish to want.
The Coherent Extrapolated Volition of one group of humans is not the same thing as the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of another group of humans. Humans populations change and even evolve over time due to forces that are not carefully constructed to move the population in the same direction as the CEV of their ancestors and so later generations will not have the same CEV as previous ones.
CEV is, IIRC, intended as a bootstrap towards “Whatever humans would collectively find the best possible optimization after infinite re-evaluations”, if any such meta-ethics exists.
Eliezer has a lot to answer for when it comes to encouraging magical thinking along the lines of “all (subsets of) humans have the same Coherent Extrapolated Volition”. He may not be confused himself but his document certainly encourages it.
Thank you. I had slightly misunderstood what you were saying, but I also hadn’t looked at all the variables and you pointed right at what I was missing.
Eliezer has a lot to answer for when it comes to encouraging magical thinking along the lines of “all (subsets of) humans have the same Coherent Extrapolated Volition”.
No, his argument is that CEVs of any (subset of) humans is a tiny cluster in value space.
No, his argument is that CEVs of any (subset of) humans is a tiny cluster in value space.
He has, in fact, made that argument (as well). I repeat the claim:
Eliezer has a lot to answer for when it comes to encouraging magical thinking along the lines of “all (subsets of) humans have the same Coherent Extrapolated Volition”. He may not be confused himself but his document certainly encourages it.
It depends on how you define “humans”, but considering how old some of the references to the Golden Rule are at least some of our utility function is older than most civilizations. Do you have any proof that previous generations were fundamentally different to us, and not, like most (all?) humans today, confused about how to implement their utility function (if we give the poor healthcare, they wont have an incentive to work!)
It is trivially true that restricting the definition of ‘human’ can reduce the possible differences between the CEVs of subsets of humans. This is just a matter of shifting the workload into the ‘human’ definition. Unless you plan to restrict the definition of human to one individual, however, there are still going to be differences between the CEV of subsets (except by coincidence).
but considering how old some of the references to the Golden Rule are at least some of our utility function is older than most civilizations.
Having a weak-to-moderate norm in favour of doing things that you would consider helpful or at least not harmful to others in your social group does seem to be popular (not as consistent or as strong as norms against excreting waste products in public but right up there!). That CEVs of various combinations of humans are similar isn’t the point. Of course they will be. In fact, on average I’d expected them to be more similar than the groups of humans themselves are. But they are not identical (except by coincidence).
that previous generations were fundamentally different to us, and not, like most (all?) humans today, confused about how to implement their utility function (if we give the poor healthcare, they wont have an incentive to work!)
That isn’t a dichotomy. Clearly both past humans and current humans aren’t effectively optimising toward their respective CEVs. But those CEVs are also going to be different because there isn’t any magic (or focused expenditure of optimisation power) holding the CEV constant!
(I’m not sure what “fundamental” means exactly so I’ll just note that I’ve never proposed any kind of difference beyond “not the same”).
Eliezer has a lot to answer for when it comes to encouraging magical thinking along the lines of “all (subsets of) humans have the same Coherent Extrapolated Volition”. He may not be confused himself but his document certainly encourages it.
...
Clearly both past humans and current humans aren’t effectively optimising toward their respective CEVs. But those CEVs are also going to be different because there isn’t any magic (or focused expenditure of optimisation power) holding the CEV constant!
It would be great if you wrote up a short discussion level post to clear up what seems to be a common misconception. Please consider doing so.
It would be great if you wrote up a short discussion level post to clear up what seems to be a common misconception. Please consider doing so.
I’m not sure how useful that would be, or rather whether I’m the right person to be doing it. I thought I said everything that needed to be said in this thread already but it wasn’t necessarily successful at reaching the target audience. Perhaps someone more in tune with the idealism behind the disagreement could explain better.
Unless you plan to restrict the definition of human to one individual, however, there are still going to be differences between the CEV of subsets (except by coincidence).
I meant that, say, Neanderthals have a good chance of a serious CEV difference. However, your statement that all humans have different CEVs is unsupported by any evidence. For example:
norms against excreting waste products in public
Historically, dumping waste products was considered relatively harmless; sure it smells a little but hey, what doesn’t? These people lacked the germ theory of disease, remember. No-one thought deliberately spreading disease was OK.
However, your statement that all humans have different CEVs is unsupported by any evidence.
It is, but my prior that two logically different things turn out to be exactly identical is pretty small. EDIT: OTOH, I think that almost all humans’ CEVs would be so similar that a world with a FAI optimizing for CEV would be very unlikely to feel like a dystopia to Group B, unless the membership criteria to Group A are deliberately gerrymandered to achieve that.
Of course there will be some variation between individuals, yes. But, as you say, probably not enough to matter; unless you’re actively filtering it should average out the same for most large groups.
why would our ethics have changed much more than, say, our diet?
Nobody said that they would have.
You are arguing against a straw man. Please read some of the message you replied to or the ones preceding it. Even, say, 1⁄3 of the sentences is likely to be sufficient—I’ve been repeating myself to make this clear.
You are claiming that the CEV of any group of humans—including all humanity—changes over time, yes? You seem to think this is a self-evident truth, but I have yet to see any examples of such a change. You removed the first half of that sentence—as I pointed out, if human morality evolved (which I assume you believe) then there is no reason to think that it would change any more than human dietary preferences—a child may discover sweets taste better than cabbage, and henceforth refuse cabbage in favor of sweets, but this is true for all children. What you are suggesting the same as if I claimed our taste buds had rearranged themselves, and that is why the Romans ate roast dormouse and we don’t.
Both sides of this debate are hamstrung by failing to distinguish between basic values and extrapolated volition. There have been major shifts in ethics within living memory, regarding race, gender, the environment and sexuality. Whether they are shifts in basic valiues or in the way basica values are extrapolated is not obvious.
Except that it is. You don’t dissuade a racist or a misogynist or whatever with brain surgery. You just show them that their model of minorities/women/homosexuals/whatever is flawed. You don’t alter their brain to terminally value, say, preventing slavery, you just show them that to satisfy their existing terminal value of avoiding human suffering they should prevent slavery. That has no effect on Coherent Extrapolated Volition.
Except that it does, because having been persuaded they extrapolate differently. But maybe by CEV you mean some idealised version.
Your impression that it is obvious that changes in de facto ethics are not changes in basic values rests heavilty on the assumption than basic values are in hardware, not software. That is not obvious , either.
Except that it does, because having been persuaded they extrapolate differently. But maybe by CEV you mean some idealised version.
CEV is not (and was never, AFAIK) meant to be self-applied by one individual to oneself.
More importantly, CEV’s archetypical example of “volition” should show how persuading someone that they want box A doesn’t change their CEV to “obtain A” if they need that diamond to pay for their own food, nor how persuading them that they should not want the diamond and that the diamond is worthless would change the fact that their CEV would still want to get box B, to get the diamond, to sell it, to pay for food, to live longer. No matter how effectively you persuade them that box A is really really shiny and that diamonds are really really evil.
‘There’s a “principled distinction between discussing CEV as an initial dynamic of Friendliness, and discussing CEV as a Nice Place to Live” and his essay was essentially conflating the two definitions. ’
the assumption than basic values are in hardware, not software
The observation that a racist (or whatever) is using, albeit imperfectly, the same criteria to declare various courses of action “right” or “wrong”. What they lack is the knowledge that minorities are not evil mutants.
Very idealistic. What if putting down other humans is an actual terminal value for some people?
Something in their mind would most likely be broken for this to happen, according to data I’ve seen. Even the worst polypaths (sociopath + psychopath + whatever pathy you want to throw in for the most despicable example of human possible) apparently still see themselves as heroes “saving the world”, or at least as some kind of “good guy in the long run”. Not that I’m implying that the “All Evil people are actually Good because they just know that the world needs balance and humans need a common enemy” myth is true, because that’s been shown false even more clearly.
More importantly, CEV aims are reflectively coherent values. If they have a terminal value of killing people, this value is extremely likely to conflict with other of their values, maybe even with their own wishes regarding self-values (“I wish I didn’t enjoy killing humans so much”), and would definitely not cohere with most other humans’ values unless there’s four billion people out there who secretly desire very very much to kill humans all the time but live in utter misery thanks to a global conspiracy that successfully chains them down or some other just-as-unlikely factor (e.g. some undiscovered freeloader’s problem or tragedy of the commons that we’ve somehow never noticed).
Overall, my current odds are very very low that any such value would survive extrapolation when you attempt to have a reflectively coherent system where someone wishes they didn’t value X, but do value it.
Every (neurotypical) human I have ever observed, even indirectly, terminally valued human life. Have you ever met a racist? They’re not evil mutants, they simply don’t think minorities are people (and may think they are an active threat to “real” humans.) Of course, a mind that terminally values killing humans is possible. I simply haven’t seen any evidence that it exists in real life, and plenty of evidence for minds with a stable CEV that terminally values human life (among other things.)
Part of the problem here may be that you are using a strong notion of racist. So the issue may be definitional. For example, I have a close relative who says nasty things about other racial minorities (especially that people from a certain racial group are stupid, lazy, fat, etc.). I’m pretty sure that person has no desire to kill people of that racial group. There are different degrees of racism.
Yes, I was using a “strong” racist as an example. But that close relative’s claims that the minorities are lazy/fat/whatever is either correct or incorrect as a point of fact, and has no effect on their terminal values.
In my experience, they are. [confused on basic matters of fact]. Could you provide a counterexample?
You could call me a proto-racist in that I think that some races are more intelligent than others, more civilized, more violent, while still very much human.
There are no confusions of fact between me and someone who hates people of “lesser” races, only a lack of compassion.
While I’m going to have to disagree with you on a point of fact there, (is that inherently less civilized? Whatever, we’re getting off topic.) I note that someone who agrees with you but argues for, say, racial warfare or whatever, is likely under the impression that these natural differences between races are likely to jeopardise White civilization, and/or believes that these differences are more drastic than you do.
not necessarily. Sometimes it seems that way and would take quite the conspiracy to make it not true, but it could be either way and the point would be the same.
Oh, it’s entirely beside the point. I’m just curious.
… which races are we talking about here? On reflection, I can’t think of any race that seems less civilized. I could just about buy a difference in intelligence, and I can see how you might think violent inclinations are affected by race (although I’m pretty sure that’s sociological,) but I don’t really see how you can plausibly make the claim that civilization has a racial component.
I’m under the impression that controlled studies have found race-intelligence links. (maybe this is my confusion of basic facts). Seems plausible.
Sociology is pretty strongly corellated with this race thing, and race is more visible. Violence is definately linked to race in the USA (even if it’s only through social class, but I’ve seen arguments that race is an even better predictor).
It would be nice to have some solid literature surveys on this. Unfortunately, given the controversy, it’s hard to just trust what the academics are saying.
If it’s linked “through social class”, it’s not linked directly, which is what’s under discussion. No-one is claiming that race has no effect on class and/or class has no effect on the traits under discussion. You are claiming that low intelligence and violent tendencies are racial characteristics, which is generally considered racist nonsense by, well, non-racists.
You are claiming that low intelligence and violent tendencies are racial characteristics, which is generally considered racist nonsense by, well, non-racists.
Which are you more interested in being, non-racist or correct?
I hope that question doesn’t come off as too offensive, and it may turn out that you are genuinely more interested in being non-racist than correct. Given the treatment of prominent biologists for stating truths, one whose livelihood depends on public opinion and who isn’t an expert in biology might decide that adopting the dogma of the times is the wisest move.
But supposing that you are actually curious- that you are seriously attempting to determine the quantitative effect that race has on crime or intelligence or so on- what makes “0” such a special number? Sure, it’s the null hypothesis, but the null hypothesis for the effect of class on violence or intelligence is also 0. Why reject one out of hand, and not the other? Notice that we don’t have non-classists breathing down our necks to ensure we don’t point out that the poor are disproportionately represented in the jails.
Which are you more interested in being, non-racist or correct?
This seems like a seriously good question to me, at least for most of us. The fact that racist beliefs (true or false) are very strongly correlated with being a bad person is worth noticing. We may just be better off not knowing such things, if true.
Let me note that what is correlated with badness may be more the fact of speaking racist beliefs, not of ‘having them’—the latter is hard to collect info about, absent mind-reading technology.
It seems extremely likely that there’s a correlation between having racist beliefs and speaking them. In particular, the more extreme one’s racist beliefs are, the more likely that one will a) consider racist beliefs acceptable to say (some combination of illusion of transparency and typical mind fallacy) and b) will consider more moderate racial claims as less controversial in comparison.
True, though in general I don’t think we have much trouble discovering the unspoken beliefs of other people through their behaviors. I grant of course that if a racist belief has no relationship to someone’s behavior whatsoever, then it cannot be the cause of being a bad person (since this seems to be very much an issue of behavior).
But in such a case, I think serious questions could be raised about whether or not this belief is actually a belief the person holds.
The fact that racist beliefs (true or false) are very strongly correlated with being a bad person is worth noticing.
So, what do you mean by a “bad person” and how do you know that this includes both true and false beliefs? A related issue may be what one means by a “racist belief”. For example, is it a racist belief that Tay Sachs is more common among Ashkenazic Jews than the general population?
You’ve asked me a series of questions here about the terms I’m using, and I’m not sure how precisely to respond. I don’t think either of us is, for example, in the dark as to what ‘bad person’ means.
So could you, on the basis of your best guess about what I mean to say, just voice your objection?
My objections were I thought apparent. I apologize for the illusion of transparency on my part. Simply put “bad person” is highly subjective, and I don’t at all have a clear notion of what it means. Is a thief who gives some of his money to charity a bad person? Clear, agreed notions of what was a “bad person” would be essentially equivalent to solving most moral questions.
As for racism, my point was that I can give explicit examples of differences between what are classically called racial groups that you probably agree are all actual genetic differences that have substantial impact on their lives. Tay Sachs in Ashkenazim isn’t the only example. sickle-cell anemia in some African groups and Huntington’s disease in Western Europeans are other examples.
I suspect that you don’t consider yourself a bad person. So what we mean by “racist beliefs.” It seems one doesn’t just mean statistically significant differences in genetics that express themselves in the phenotype. So does one mean such beliefs when related to intelligence? Or does one mean people who assign lower moral worth to some races? if the last is the case, then your statement is probably true by most definitions of “bad people” but then completely useless and uninteresting for the discussion at hand.
Clear, agreed notions of what was a “bad person” would be essentially equivalent to solving most moral questions.
I agree that clear agreed upon notions of what a ‘bad person’ is would amount to clear and agreed upon notions of morality. But I think we clearly have the latter, and so the former as well. We may bounce back and forth over tricky cases, like your charitable thief, but that doesn’t mean we are in a state of fundamental confusion or disagreement about anything. (EDIT: notice, for example that you didn’t just ask me ‘is a thief a bad person?’)
So does one mean such beliefs when related to intelligence? Or does one mean people who assign lower moral worth to some races? if the last is the case, then your statement is probably true by most definitions of “bad people” but then completely useless and uninteresting for the discussion at hand.
This last point would follow if intelligence were as irrelevant to moral worth as is a vulnerability for blood diseases. But we evidentially don’t think it is irrelevant. If I told a random black person on the street that I thought him more vulnerable to sickle-cell on the basis of his race, he would probably just agree with me. If I said he was probably stupid, on the basis of his race, he would (rightly, I think) call me a racist in the morally pejorative sense.
So again, it’s an open question as to what exactly the relationship is between intelligence and moral value such that this is different from the relationship between vulnerability to blood-disease and moral value. The fact that this is an open question should leave open the option that intelligence has nothing to do with moral value, as you imply. Yet I think we have substantial intuitive evidence that this isn’t a good way to go.
I am non-racist because assuming all humans are ultimately the same has proved a better heuristic than the natural tendency to assume that people’s flaws are inherent aspects of their nature. In addition, statistically, I am almost certainly biased against other races (as are you.) While there is probably a negligible effect of race on intelligence and violence, it’s almost(?) too small to measure and the problems of taking it into account are far greater than the amount of influence it has.
TL;DR: I’m non-racist in order to be correct. It’s a heuristic that has served me well, and has served it’s users well historically.
I am non-racist because assuming all humans are ultimately the same
What do you mean by this? Do you mean that all humans are equally smart? Or do you mean assuming some humans are in fact smarter than others but smartness isn’t correlated with say skin color? If the latter, that “all humans are ultimately the same” doesn’t seem like a good summary.
Edit: Or are you attempting some version of what Christians mean by this statement, namely “all humans have a soul and all souls are equal before God”?
I was also slightly offset by this, particularly the vague phrasing “ultimately the same”, which by reflex I would’ve asked to taboo. However, by charitable interpretation, I think the intended meaning is that everyone is running on the same source code. Even if the source code contains modules that take set values according to runtime events and then become irreversible (or extremely difficult to alter), which leads to the same “program” doing vastly different things and having different capabilities.
An example intuition pump here might be to imagine a standard PC running a custom OS that enables or disables a bunch of its key features and messes a bunch of its parameters or will use different optimization subroutines and garbage collection procedures during it startup routine all according to some hidden, unknown algorithm that takes pictures of the user during said startup as input.
Obviously the sourcecode and hardware are the same, but the behavior and capabilities will be radically different depending on the user. You might even be able to hack parts of the OS during runtime to enable certain disabled features or tweak some parameters, but how much can be hacked and how to do it is unknown at first.
I think the intended meaning is that everyone is running on the same source code. Even if the source code contains modules that take set values according to runtime events and then become irreversible (or extremely difficult to alter), which leads to the same “program” doing vastly different things and having different capabilities.
Well, this can be made trivially true through a suitable choice of the line between “source code” and “set values”. For example, define the laws of physics and basic biology to be the “source code” and let our DNA and upbringing be the “set values”. I fail to see how this is interesting.
I took his statement to mean, “the variation among individual humans across the entire human species is far greater than any variation between racial subgroups, to the point where the racial variations become negligible”.
While there are of course minor differences between individuals, they tend not to correlate with anything much, and are generally far, far smaller than humans tend to assume. Those terrorists don’t hate our freedom, those women aren’t naturally more emotional, and those blacks aren’t really savages.
I would not object to Bugmaster’s summary, although it seems somewhat overly specific.
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.
Is that really true, though ? As far as I know, and I may be wrong, there are some flaws that are indeed attributable to race. For example, white people suffer from a lack of UV protection as compared to almost everyone else; Asians find it more difficult to metabolize alcohol; etc.
Granted, you are very probably right about intelligence and violence, though.
Sorry, I meant flaws in their personality or whatever. The psychological unity of mankind and all that. Your co-worker kicks his desk because he’s an angry person, you kick your desk because your alarm clock didn’t go off and you had to skip breakfast and then it was raining … or, more to the point, we have to keep on killing Them because those bastards wont stop trying to kill us. And so on.
In case you’re not just trolling, you should be aware that your comments might be better received if you were a bit less abrupt and toned down the snark.
People always assume that acknowledgeing a trait in a person requires you to have an explanation for it. And then they note that all possible explanations are politically controverisal, so they conclude that the trait does not actually exist. This is bad logic, as far as I can tell.
The fact is, race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence, violence, etc. I offer no explanations.
What do you mean by “race?” I notice a lot of discussion below on this topic already, but the term is unclear to me, and I don’t see how anyone can usefully disagree or agree without this information. Some people use “race” to indicate loose groupings based around skin color, whereas others mean much more strictly a specific genetic group.
Incidentally, there is no canonical “race,” just generally-agreed upon loose labels that vary from person to person. Because of this, it is generally not useful for predicting anything, and should be avoided, I think. A “white person” from Sicily and a “white person” from Iceland do not have much more in common with each other than they might with a disparate other range of people, so it’s not a meaningful grouping (except perhaps when speaking of historical things). It is wiser to be more exact.
There’s the additional danger that you will be misunderstood, and that someone will (very reasonably) think that you are advocating simple-minded racism of a common sort. Saying “race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence,” etc. is a fairly specific sort of social code, and if you don’t actually mean that “black people are dumb” or “Asians can’t drive,” (and I’m not saying that you necessarily do) then you should find another sort of phrasing.
Incidentally, there is no canonical “race,” just generally-agreed upon loose labels that vary from person to person.
yes, “race” as normally used is woefully underdefined.
Because of this, it is generally not useful for predicting anything, and should be avoided, I think.
Woah there. To the extent you can agree on a test for race, it will be useful for prediction. Obviously some tests (actual genetic heritage) will be more interesting that others “lol what’s ur skin color”. As you say:
A “white person” from Sicily and a “white person” from Iceland do not have much more in common with each other than they might with a disparate other range of people, so it’s not a meaningful grouping (except perhaps when speaking of historical things). It is wiser to be more exact.
Yes, agree. Let’s be specific enough so that we all agree which set of people we are talking about, and agree that that is a meaningful grouping. Then I think we will find that membership in that set will predict many things.
There’s the additional danger that you will be misunderstood, and that someone will (very reasonably) think that you are advocating simple-minded racism of a common sort. Saying “race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence,” etc. is a fairly specific sort of social code, and if you don’t actually mean that “black people are dumb” or “Asians can’t drive,” (and I’m not saying that you necessarily do) then you should find another sort of phrasing.
Saying that race is a good predictor of such things is roughly equivalent to saying “black people are dumb” or whatever (with suitable disclaimers of probabilisticness that really should not be needed on this site). Call that simple minded if you like; I’d rather be right than high-minded.
(and just-so it’s clear, racially-based (or anything-based, really) hatred is stupid and unproductive. compassion is so much nicer.)
To the extent you can agree on a test for race, it will be useful for prediction. Obviously some tests (actual genetic heritage) will be more interesting that others “lol what’s ur skin color”.
I would suggest that most people do have a common test for race. It is something along the lines of, “To what extent does this person match a small set of specific physical characteristics?” For someone to be “black” in many places in modern America, it means that their skin tone is relatively dark, their lips are big, their nose is wide, and so on. But of course, this tends to fall apart under close scrutiny, and is complicated by a lot of cultural baggage, like the fact that “white” is the default, so those of mixed-race are often identified with (or themselves choose to identify with) their minority identity. A prominent example is President Obama, who has few of the physical characteristics of the stereotypical “black” person. This is why it is a very sloppy and pretty useless label, and even though most people agree on a “test,” it remains so.
Saying that race is a good predictor of such things is roughly equivalent to saying “black people are dumb” or whatever (with suitable disclaimers of probabilisticness that really should not be needed on this site). Call that simple minded if you like; I’d rather be right than high-minded.
Of course, it’s absolutely better to be right. But it’s very difficult to determine whether you are right or wrong without rigorous definition of your terms and inquiry. You think that race correlates with other traits, and I agree—but only with strong caveats and reservations, particularly when it comes to questions of causation. That’s why I began by asking: what do you mean by “race”?
EDIT: You appear to be engaged in several other discussions along these lines, so please just let me know if you consider this one is too parallel to the others to be useful. It can be difficult to explain yourself to several people all at the same time, I know.
See this for my full opinion on all of this. Anything I said that contradicts that is deprecated.
The quick version of what I mean by “race” is those things that are both heritable and clustered with visible and genetic markers. Not exactly the classic definition of “race” because it includes memetic heritage as well as genetic.
I show you a picture of an asian person (if you’re good at distinguishing them, you notice they’re of Japanese ethnicity, specifically) that you do not know, and it is obvious that I’ve photoshopped clothing, background, and other environmental visual cues that could reveal that person’s culture. You only have their body frame and their face to work with.
What is your probability assignment that this person is of generic asian (japanese) culture, as opposed to any other culture (e.g. that of amazon hunter-gatherer tribes)? Is this probability equal to that for any other culture, as per an even-distribution hypothesis?
Look at the context. Racism only predicts violence and civilsiation inasmuch as it predicts culture, and culture predicts those things better—hell, you couldn’t get a razor blade between culture and civilsiation. So why does Nyan_Sandwich
call himself a proto-racist?
The primary observation is one of race. You can visually see that someone is of asian race. You cannot immediately ascertain a specific culture without first learning and recognizing in practice behaviors strongly associated with that culture.
e.g. If you don’t know anything about japanese culture at all, you will not know that a person of japanese race who does not get upset when a stranger who is also japanese calls them by first name without honorifics is most likely not of typical japanese culture, nor will you understand why another does get upset in the same situation. Thus you cannot use their culture as a predictor, since you don’t have any signals that tell you which culture they’re part of. Race is much easier to use as a data point.
Racism only predicts violence and civilsiation inasmuch as it predicts culture, and culture predicts those things better (...)
This is not obvious, nor does it follow trivially from any logical assertions I’ve seen yet. I’ve never seen claims either way backed by sufficient evidence to move my prior significantly in either direction.
You cannot immediately ascertain a specific culture without first learning and recognizing in practice behaviors strongly associated with that culture.
That does not have the slightest bearing on what is most stronglty correlated wtih what, what the causal mechanisms are, and why on Earth Nyan-Sandwich would want to call himself a proto-racist.
I call myself a racist in that I would predict differing values for intelligence, propensity to violence, etc based on observing someone’s race. I find it interesting that there are people who would not. The ones that are especially attached to racial equality have to go to all sorts of lengths to justify why race isn’t evidence of these things.
I call myself a proto-racist because despite being racist on matters of fact, I try to not make the (default) step from there to hatred or smugness. I think it fucking sucks that some people are disadvantaged in intelligence, or in ability to function as a member of civilized society. I think we should do something nice (help) instead of something mean (genocide).
If culture comes form acculturation , it doens’t come from genes, and therefore has nothing significant to do with race. The statistical correlations you make so much of aren’t worth making anything of unless they indicate mechanisms.
statistical correlations aren’t worth making anything of unless they indicate mechanisms.
tell it to the statistics establishment. Methinks I can make better predictions using not-causally-explained statistics than I can without. For example, If I learn of a person who is black and american, I can predict that he is 5x (or whatever it is) more likely to be in prison. I can predict that he is more likely to be a part of that awful antisocial gansta culture.
Of course, if I then learn that at this very moment, he is wearing a cardigan, a lot of that goes away.
If you restrict yourself to causal models, you do very poorly. I might even be tempted to say “I guess you’re fucked then”
If you throw out information you have reason to believe is true but can’t explain the mechanism for your model is more coherent but less powerful. Does that make sense?
No. How exactly are you defining a causal vs a statistical model? What I find confusing is in the Newtonian physics limit of what you can know, I don’t think you can do better than a causal model, in some sense. I understand that it can happen that non-causal models can predict better if knowledge is not complete, I am just trying to find a way to state that formally.
Let’s talk about fluid dynamics. In FD, we have many equations that were determined by measuring things and approximating their relationship. For example, the darcy weisbach equation for drag in a pipe: dP = fd*L/D*rho*v^2/2. This equation (and other like it) is called a corellation, or an empirical equation, as opposed to a theoretical model. To demonstrate the power of corellations, consider that we still can’t predict fd from theory (except for laminar flow). At this point, it’s just a lack of computing power, the use of which would be esentially the same as measurement anyways. There were times in the past, though, where we didn’t know even in principle how to get that from theory.
Bascially, you need to be able to look at the world and describe what you see, even if you can’t explain it. If we’d taken the policy of ignoring corellations that couldn’t be understood causally, we still wouldn’t have airplanes, plumbing, engines, etc.
I don’t think these sorts of equations are good examples of what you are trying to say, since laws of physics and related equations are counterfactual and thus causal. That is, if I were to counterfactually change the length of the pipe in your equation, it would still predict the loss correctly. Invariance to change is precisely what makes these kinds of equations useful and powerful, and this invariance is causal. The fact that the equation is ‘ad hoc’ rather than deduced from a theory is irrelevant to whether the equation is causal or not. Causality has to do with counterfactual invariance (see also Hume’s counterfactual definition).
I think a better example would be something like the crazy “expert voting” algorithm that won the Netflix prize. I think in that case, though, given sufficient knowledge, a causal model would do better. Not because it was causal, mind you, but just because observing enough about the domain gives you as a side effect causal knowledge of the domain. In the Netflix prize case, which was about movie recommendations, ‘sufficient knowledge’ would entail having detailed knowledge of decision and preference algorithms of all potential users of the system. At that point, the model becomes so detailed it inevitably encodes causal information.
The people who supply statistics to people who are looking for causal mechanisms.
For example, If I learn of a person who is black and american,
“American” isn’t a race. An american of any race has a n enhanced likelihood of being in jail, becaue the US imprisons a lot of poeple. Have I converted you to Americainism?
Make sure you’re distinguishing between the claim that P(intelligence = x|income = i) = P(intelligence = x|race = r,income = i), which would be that poverty screens off the effects of race, and the claim that P(intelligence = x|race = r) = P(intelligence = x), which is the claim that intelligence and race are unconditionally independent. The first claim is only relevant to nyan_sandwich’s claim if by “good” you mean “better than income” rather than “worth knowing.”
As it stands, both of those claims are pretty obviously false if you take a look an unbiased look at the data. Life is not fair.
By poverty, I meant background, not income (which is determined by background to an extent, along with talent and so on.). Just a point of clarification there. And yes, I was claiming both that poverty screens off race. However, note that it was not merely intelligence—a much more plausible claim—but violent tendencies and “civilization”.
I’ve retracted the civilization thing because it’s not clear what it even means.
do you think violent tendency is less corellated with race than intelligence? (it depends where we are talking about. I would expect only a very weak link here in my hometown (vancouver), a strong link in US and european cities)
I’ve retracted the civilization thing because it’s not clear what it even means.
Well, historically, it meant the idea that they couldn’t produce or participate in civilizations, due to poor impulse control or whatever. But fair enough, that was always your least defensible claim.
I would expect only a very weak link here in my hometown (vancouver), a strong link in US and european cities)
As has already been pointed out, if you expect the link to be weaker in different societies, than the link is caused by society. If you compare people of different races raised and living in the same conditions, and there’s no difference, then racism is wrong. If there is a difference—for example, if black men are still just as likely to commit crimes—then, and only then, do you have a point. Consider slave-owners who refused to educate slaves because they were stupid—of course they were, when did you last meet a slave who could read or write?
If you compare people of different races raised and living in the same conditions, and there’s no difference, then racism is wrong. If there is a difference—for example, if black men are still just as likely to commit crimes—then, and only then, do you have a point.
Only then could propensity to crime be an inherent, genetic thing. And the inference that that was the case may still be wrong, for example if black people are bombarded by messages that they are supposed to be become criminals, or are otherwise influenced by the people around them. It would be very difficult to seperate the inherent genetic traits from those that are caused by percieved race.
I feel like we are talking past each other, so I am going to take this opportunity to state and steel-man the position of the modern “racist” in its entirety. (maybe this should be a discussion post).
Let’s start with something simple that I hope we can agree on. Group people by genetic heritage, and by social class, and by intelligence, and by antisocial behaviour. “Genetic heritage” is clear enough, I hope. “Class” is rather slippery in this analysis unless we are careful with it. Let’s pin it down right now to be talking about environment, not where a person ends up. We’ll see why later. Anyways, if you make these groupings, you will find that there is a lot of mutual information between them. That is, they are not independent. If you don’t believe this, assume it for now.
There are two ways we could take it from here, and I’m not sure which is right: We could note that race is conditionally independent of the others given social environment. Then we would conclude that race and class were caused by some other variable (who your parents were), and that only class causes intelligence and antisocial behavior. Note that we defined “class” in such a way that it cannot be caused by race, or cause race. As far as I can tell, this is the world as the non-racists see it. This could very well be the case.
Another way it could be is that race does impact intelligence and antisocial behaviour indpendently of class. This is what I’ll call “strong racism”. I would not be suprised if this were the case.
At this point, I hope I’ve said nothing controversial. The redefinition of “class” rubs me the wrong way, but I couldn’t think of anything else to call that node. Ok, let’s move on to the implications.
Let’s boot up the racist and see what he says about all this. The racist says “I don’t care which of the two it is, and here’s why:”. Uh oh, here we go.
Let’s do a little thought experiment: group someone’s genes by those that define who they are as a person, and those that define what they look like. Let’s say there’s no overlap between these, that is, that a given gene cannot both impact personhood and appearance. (there’s reasons to suspect overlap, but this is a thought experiment). Let’s further say that, for obvious reasons (subpopulations), having gene A, which affects appearance, is quite strongly corellated with having gene alpha, which affects personality. Extend this to most of the genes so that you can largely predict someones appearance genes from which cluster of personality genes they come from, and the other way around. Does it seem unreasonable to talk about which cluster you belong to without specifying which of appearance or personality you are refering to, given that you can say things like “people with visual trait X have personality trait Y”, which I hope seems reasonable itself, in this case. Note that this is the imaginary world where “strong racism” is correct.
Ok, given that, if you’re still reading, let’s draw a parallel to the weak racist world where genes affect appearance and such, and memes affect intelligence and personality and such, and these factors are both highly heritable and highly corellated. (This is our world). When asked to comment, the weak racist says “Why should it matter whether a highly heritable component of who someone is is genetic or memetic or on the 13th chromosome or the 14th? Can’t we just point to the empirical clusters and say ‘that there is a meaningful cluster’, given that it does seem to cluster in a meaningful way?”. At this point the lines are open and the objections are coming in fast:
“But you can’t just hate someone because they belong to some disadvantaged empirical cluster”. Correct, in fact, I would say that we should say “that fucking sucks and we should go kick God’s ass for creating such an unfair world”.
“But there are places (like Vancouver) where, for selection and social reasons, race is independent of other things, therefore race is not interesting.” Yes, then no. In our imaginary strongly racist world, there are places where green eyes and black hair does not corellate with a ketchup fetish and kleptomania, but in most of the world it does, so “wiggin” is still a meaningful term. More generally, just because you can find a subset of your survey population that does not have the corellations you find in the whole, doesn’t mean you can reject the corellations in the whole. Especially given that if you look at enough subpopulations, you’ll find ones that go just about any way you like, so you might as well cherry-pick your data if you are going to do that. All such a non-corellation proves is that the variables of interest don’t have a common atomic cause (or that you have selection effects in your data).
“What about a guy who wears a cardigan and goes to harvard? If you learn he is black, should you then conclude he is stupid and violent like the stereotype?” No, because no matter how things go, who you became screens off any possible cause.
I’ve run out of things to say. At this point though, we know how to react to all of the possible cases:
There is no link between race and behaviour. ⇒ yay happy liberal world.
There is a link between race and behaviour, but it’s mostly memetic-historical. ⇒ That really sucks for some people, and we should go kick God’s ass with a memetic and social intervention.
The is a link, and it’s partially genetic. ⇒ That sucks, and we should go kick God’s ass with a hybrid memetic/social and genetic (when feasable) intervention.
There. Now we have comprehensive lines of retreat. Now and only now are we prepared to go take an unbiased look at the data, because none of the possibilities are scary anymore. I haven’t looked very hard, but I think it’s the third case. Not that I really care; I’ve got plans however it happens to be.
That’s modern compassionate steel-man racism. Sorry for the length.
Only then could propensity to crime be an inherent, genetic thing. And the inference that that was the case may still be wrong, for example if black people are bombarded by messages that they are supposed to be become criminals, or are otherwise influenced by the people around them. It would be very difficult to seperate the inherent genetic traits from those that are caused by percieved race.
I think childhood role models and so on is a part of one’s upbringing and “society”, don’t you?
Let’s start with something simple that I hope we can agree on. Group people by genetic heritage, and by social class, and by intelligence, and by antisocial behaviour. “Genetic heritage” is clear enough, I hope. “Class” is rather slippery in this analysis unless we are careful with it. Let’s pin it down right now to be talking about environment, not where a person ends up. We’ll see why later. Anyways, if you make these groupings, you will find that there is a lot of mutual information between them. That is, they are not independent. If you don’t believe this, assume it for now.
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 differenc between loaded dice and an opponent who regularly lies about the results, if you see what I mean.
At this point, I hope I’ve said nothing controversial. The redefinition of “class” rubs me the wrong way, but I couldn’t think of anything else to call that node. Ok, let’s move on to the implications.
“Upbringing”? “Background”? I’m OK with class, TBH, as long as we both know what we mean.
Let’s boot up the racist and see what he says about all this. The racist says “I don’t care which of the two it is, and here’s why:”. Uh oh, here we go.
Here we go indeed. The racist is supposed to hold a belief abut how he world is, i.e. that intelligence and so on are as much racial characteristics as skin tone.
Let’s do a little thought experiment: group someone’s genes by those that define who they are as a person, and those that define what they look like. Let’s say there’s no overlap between these, that is, that a given gene cannot both impact personhood and appearance. (there’s reasons to suspect overlap, but this is a thought experiment). Let’s further say that, for obvious reasons (subpopulations), having gene A, which affects appearance, is quite strongly corellated with having gene alpha, which affects personality. Extend this to most of the genes so that you can largely predict someones appearance genes from which cluster of personality genes they come from, and the other way around. Does it seem unreasonable to talk about which cluster you belong to without specifying which of appearance or personality you are refering to, given that you can say things like “people with visual trait X have personality trait Y”, which I hope seems reasonable itself, in this case. Note that this is the imaginary world where “strong racism” is correct.
Fair enough. This is what our pet racist here believes is true, yes?
Ok, given that, if you’re still reading, let’s draw a parallel to the weak racist world where genes affect appearance and such, and memes affect intelligence and personality and such, and these factors are both highly heritable and highly corellated. (This is our world). When asked to comment, the weak racist says “Why should it matter whether a highly heritable component of who someone is is genetic or memetic or on the 13th chromosome or the 14th? Can’t we just point to the empirical clusters and say ‘that there is a meaningful cluster’, given that it does seem to cluster in a meaningful way?”. At this point the lines are open and the objections are coming in fast:
No no no no no.
Consider various brands of Wiggin.
For whatever reason, Wiggins are usually born to disadvantaged families, and must live off. ketchup and steal simply to survive. They often have trouble breaking these habits when they are fortunate enough to escape their poverty
The genes responsible for black hair and green eyes are heavily correlated with the ones causing kleptomania and a craving for ketchup.
Wiggins are constantly expected to steal and eat ketchup, and people generally behave as society expects.
Now, in all these situations Wiggins do, in fact, steal and eat ketchup. However, in the first case, once we know that this particular wiggin grew up in a well-to-do environment, we should no longer expext them to steal our ketchup. In addition, we should expect anyone who grew up in a disadvantaged home to act “wiggin-like”, not just those with black hair and green eyes.
In the second case, there is no need to consider the upbringing of a particular Wiggin, since they all have similar odds of stealing our ketchup. In this case, however, we can perform genetic tests to identify whatever genes may be causing this problem; and of course there is a case to be made for sterilizing Wiggins to prevent their criminal genes from spreading—especially to non-wiggins, who would interfere with our ability to judge the likelihood of ketchup-theft by a particular individual.
In the third case, we have something of a dilemma. On the one hand, we need to protect our ketchup from thieving Wiggins. On the other hand, assuming any Wiggin will try and steal it will only encourage them. In this case, while we realize that a wiggin-like appearance is a risk factor for ketchup-theft, we must strive to treat them equally; only hiding our ketchup if we know they already steal (and we should do likewise to non-wiggins.)
“But there are places (like Vancouver) where, for selection and social reasons, race is independent of other things, therefore race is not interesting.” Yes, then no. In our imaginary strongly racist world, there are places where green eyes and black hair does not corellate with a ketchup fetish and kleptomania, but in most of the world it does, so “wiggin” is still a meaningful term. More generally, just because you can find a subset of your survey population that does not have the corellations you find in the whole, doesn’t mean you can reject the corellations in the whole. Especially given that if you look at enough subpopulations, you’ll find ones that go just about any way you like, so you might as well cherry-pick your data if you are going to do that. All such a non-corellation proves is that the variables of interest don’t have a common atomic cause (or that you have selection effects in your data).
What this proves is that you should take location into account when estimating the odds of a particular individual acting like a Wiggin.
“What about a guy who wears a cardigan and goes to harvard? If you learn he is black, should you then conclude he is stupid and violent like the stereotype?” No, because no matter how things go, who you became screens off any possible cause.
Not necessarily. If race determines violent tendencies and intelligence, then, while he may well be unusually intelligent, we should still be wary of him attacking us. Furthermore, we should increase our probability that he is unusually stupid for a cardigan-wearing harvard-goer, and achieved that status by some other means than intelligence.
There. Now we have comprehensive lines of retreat. Now and only now are we prepared to go take an unbiased look at the data, because none of the possibilities are scary anymore. I haven’t looked very hard, but I think it’s the third case. Not that I really care; I’ve got plans however it happens to be.
I’m pretty sure that admitting that, if racists were right, genocide would be justifiable, is a line of retreat. But then I already admitted that, so whatever. The problem is that you can’t get from “I update my probability of a harvard degree downward when I learn that he’s black” to “racists are right”. You have to check if the environment is causing all or most of the differences.
For whatever reason, Wiggins are usually born to disadvantaged families, and must live off. ketchup and steal simply to survive. They often have trouble breaking these habits when they are fortunate enough to escape their poverty
The genes responsible for black hair and green eyes are heavily correlated with the ones causing kleptomania and a craving for ketchup.
Wiggins are constantly expected to steal and eat ketchup, and people generally behave as society expects.
Now, in all these situations Wiggins do, in fact, steal and eat ketchup. However, in the first case, once we know that this particular wiggin grew up in a well-to-do environment, we should no longer expext them to steal our ketchup. In addition, we should expect anyone who grew up in a disadvantaged home to act “wiggin-like”, not just those with black hair and green eyes.
In the second case, there is no need to consider the upbringing of a particular Wiggin, since they all have similar odds of stealing our ketchup.
Not entirely, since the environment where a particular Wiggin grew up, is affected by his parents’ genes.
In this case, however, we can perform genetic tests to identify whatever genes may be causing this problem; and of course there is a case to be made for sterilizing Wiggins to prevent their criminal genes from spreading—especially to non-wiggins, who would interfere with our ability to judge the likelihood of ketchup-theft by a particular individual.
In the third case, we have something of a dilemma. On the one hand, we need to protect our ketchup from thieving Wiggins. On the other hand, assuming any Wiggin will try and steal it will only encourage them. In this case, while we realize that a wiggin-like appearance is a risk factor for ketchup-theft, we must strive to treat them equally; only hiding our ketchup if we know they already steal (and we should do likewise to non-wiggins.)
This makes a lot of assumptions about psychology that are not at all obvious. For example, it might be that if Wiggins have less opportunity to steal ketchup, fewer of them will do it and eventually the strength of the expectation itself will decrease.
Not entirely, since the environment where a particular Wiggin grew up, is affected by his parents’ genes.
Well, yes. I was simplifying for clarity.
This makes a lot of assumptions about psychology that are not at all obvious. For example, it might be that if Wiggins have less opportunity to steal ketchup, fewer of them will do it and eventually the strength of the expectation itself will decrease.
The entire point of the example is that the assumption that they want to steal ketchup is what causes it. If you assume they will try (as evidenced by hiding the ketchup when you see them,) then they will conform to expectations by trying. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of the purest sort.
To be honest, I just made this one up to have a third example, and also to show the level of self-reference possible. It’s much less grounded in reality.
To be honest, I just made this one up to have a third example, and also to show the level of self-reference possible. It’s much less grounded in reality.
I was basically drawing attention to that fact. Also Ockham’s razor is a great way to cut down on self-reference in these kinds of situations.
As has already been pointed out, if you expect the link to be weaker in different societies, than the link is caused by society.
It could also mean that the link is weakened by different social conditions to different extents. It could be a selection effect on the kind of people who move to Vancouver.
In any case, even this statement has politically incorrect implications, namely that we shouldn’t be considering Black/Ebonics culture as equal in value to mainstream culture.
By “caused by society” I was referring more to a lack of role models, higher likelihood of a low-income upbringing, alienation due to societal discrimination etc.
However, I would indeed claim that any culture that is encouraging violent tendencies and discouraging academic success should be improved by any means possible.
By “caused by society” I was referring more to a lack of role models, higher likelihood of a low-income upbringing, alienation due to societal discrimination etc.
In that case the argument of yours I quoted in the parent is almost a complete non-sequitor.
If the link varies amongst persons of the same race in differnt places, then it’s not that much to do with race, is it? Would you predict that an African-American offspring of two college professors living in New England was a violent imbecile?
The fact is, race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence, violence, etc. I offer no explanations.
Eh? What is this thing you call “race,” Earth Monkey?
We used to think the answer was obvious. You know, it’s obvious what “race” someone is, isn’t it? Until you start to look at the details.
Race is a cultural convention. There is a science of population genetics, and it isn’t about “race.” Rather, people use population genetics to infer the social marker called “race.”
I adopted an African girl. What “race” is she? What determines this? She has tribal markings on her eyes—or the scars from tribal medicine for conjunctivitis, hard to tell—but the markings are characteristic of her region and tribe, so someone who knows could tell where she comes from, as to the region.
I once had a friend tell me that my Chinese daughter was, of course, going to be more intelligent than the Ethiopian girl. The Chinese daughter is no slouch, intellectually, but her younger sister is definitely smart as hell. My friend was a racist. Lots of people are racist. That is, they believe that race is a biological or even a “spiritual” reality. He wasn’t being mean, he was just being ignorant.
I adopted an African girl. What “race” is she? What determines this?
What determines it? Ancestry. Race is basically a way of asking “who were your ancestors?” and accepting a blurry answer because, well, each person has a lot of ancestors! That version of race is obviously a biological reality, because people have different ancestries, even going back long distances, and the ancestry distribution can be geographically plotted. If you go back thirty generations for me, I would need to have about a billion distinct ancestors for there to be no inbreeding; the entire world didn’t have that many people! Europe, the probable source for most of my ancestry, only had about 50 million people thirty generations ago, and even then it’s unlikely that all of them are my ancestors- for one, many of them didn’t have any children! I’d estimate somewhere less than 10% of the total world population at any point since 1000 AD is in my ancestry, and the distribution of their contribution to my ancestry is pretty localized. It’s probable there’s many people out there who share none of my ancestry for a full thirty generations back, and there’s one who (probably) shares it completely.
Knowing she was adopted from Africa, odds are good that she’s mostly African. That’s only one step more informative than “human,” since it only gives you the archaic racial category- Negroid- which tells you as much as “Caucasoid” or “Mongoloid.” Ethnicity would give a much narrower picture- about one person in six is African, but only about one person in four thousand is Gurage.
Adding on the data that she’s Ethiopian muddies the picture- due to its northeastern position, Ethiopia has been the site of significant mixing, and there’s quite a bit of ethnic diversity: the primary ethnicity, Oromo, is only a third of the population- your Chinese daughter, though, most likely has significant Han ancestry (92% of the population of mainland China).
So, using the archaic terms and assuming she’s from one of the more prevalent ethnicities, your daughter probably has about 60% Caucasoid ancestry and 40% Negroid ancestry.
I once had a friend tell me that my Chinese daughter was, of course, going to be more intelligent than the Ethiopian girl.
So, good IQ estimates in Africa are generally hard to come by, but Ethiopia supposedly has the world’s lowest average IQ, at 63 (administered in 1991, sample size of 250), and China is estimated to have an average IQ of 100. Working off that data (and assuming both groups have a standard deviation of 15), that gives a 96% chance that the Chinese daughter is smarter. Now, the Ethiopian data is spotty, especially the normality assumption- one of the pitfalls of historic IQ testing is that 0 scores are treated as 0s, dragging down the average, instead of an separate number of “people who didn’t understand the concept of the test.” It’s also not clear what selection effects adoption has; children that get adopted out are likely to not be representative of the country as a whole, and it’s hard to say if that would be a positive or negative effect. If we use the African American average IQ of 85 instead of the estimated Ethiopian averaged IQ, and still assume that we should use the Chinese average, we get a 76% chance that the Chinese daughter is cleverer.
Of course, given that they’re your daughters, there’s not much reason to guess; you could just get them both tested, which would be way cheaper and more informative than sponsoring another test of Ethiopian national IQ.
It’s probable there’s many people out there who share none of my ancestry for a full thirty generations back,
Yep. The most recent common ancestor of living humans lived at least a couple millennia (i.e. about seventy generations) ago. (EDIT: I’m not fully convinced that that implies that for any time t later than that, there’s at least one with you no ancestry at time t. I’m too tired to trust my cognitive abilities right now.)
and there’s one who (probably) shares it completely.
Do you have any reason in particular to suspect that you and your sibling may have different biological fathers, or is the “probably” a 1-is-not-a-probability self-nitpick?
Do you have any reason in particular to suspect that you and your sibling may have different biological fathers, or is the “probably” a 1-is-not-a-probability self-nitpick?
It’s not “1-is-not-a-probability” so much as it is “the base rate of this is not 0″; there’s also the chance that I was switched at birth (hospitals are much better at avoiding this now than they have been in the past). If my family signs up for 23andMe, then the probability will either shoot up towards 1 or drop down to negligible, but until then I’m going with the base rate.
Really during your life you haven’t encountered much net evidence towards either direction shifting your probability assignment away from the base rate, e.g. how much you look like your parents, whether you share some uncommon medical condition with either of them, blood type, etc.?
I have very little expertise in quantifying the effect of that evidence, and in the aggregate it doesn’t seem strong enough to make the probability negligible or large.
The strategic concerns here are also amusing to ponder. (There’s several reasons that 23andMe shows you 2nd and higher cousins with no prompting, but wants your approval before they show you first cousins.) The more one suspects being swapped at birth, the more important it is to find one’s birth family for health prediction. But, I’ve had my SNPs read, which I imagine screens off much of the benefit of knowing family history for medical conditions. It’s also less damaging to the existing family structure: most people who learn they were swapped at birth maintain their relationship with the parents that raised them, and also gain some sort of relationship with their genetic parents.
If you suspect infidelity, though, then the picture is very different. Again, learning your birth father tells you something about health, and may be a valuable social relationship (for one, they may not have any other children; in the swap case, there’s someone else in the mirror of your situation); it’s probably tremendously destructive to your current family arrangement, though.
It’s also not clear what selection effects adoption has;
Also, probably the effects of nurture contribute to keeping their average IQ that low; it seems unlikely to me that the fact that the average IQ of African Americans is 22 points higher is entirely due to the European genetic admixture in the latter. (EDIT: And I hadn’t even noticed you mentioned Ethiopians have lots of Caucasoid ancestry too!)
I adopted an African girl. What “race” is she? What determines this?
What determines it? Ancestry. Race is basically a way of asking “who were your ancestors?” and accepting a blurry answer because, well, each person has a lot of ancestors!
That is not what “race” means when people use the word. Race is a division of humanity into categories. Who determines the categories? Do those categories naturally occur? On what does the “race” category depend? Can “race” be identified visually? Can it be genetically determined?
Yes, if you divide people up into “races,” or into geographical population groups, and study their genetics, you can find statistical significance, but the two divisions will produce differing evaluations for individuals.
The classic way to identify someone’s “race” involves identifying one’s own group visually (and sometimes behaviorally, perhaps through dialect or language), and then lumping together those who don’t seem to match “my race” into other groups. That is why someone who is “mixed race” will be lumped into the “other group,” until the mixture becomes small enough to not be visible. How people perceive themselves is irrelevant to this process.
“Race” is a racist concept, naturally. The word “racist” is hot, and gets mixed up with racial chauvinism, but that’s distracting. I use “racism” to refer to the belief in race as an objective reality.
That version of race is obviously a biological reality, because people have different ancestries, even going back long distances, and the ancestry distribution can be geographically plotted.
I wrote that population genetics was a reality. Race is not. It’s arbitrary, and race is not scientifically defined. The conclusion is a non sequitur. Race has been totally discredited academically, and that’s not just political correctness.
Knowing she was adopted from Africa, odds are good that she’s mostly African.
Odds are entirely that she is African, i.e., she was born in Africa. I know that her grandparents were born in Africa, in her tribal region. Beyond that, I don’t know. Probably it goes back further, but there are always strays.
If her ancestry plot maintains “African” location, say entirely, back, say, 20 generations, does that mean that she is racially “African”? I hope you’d know that this could give results that might seem preposterous to those who depend on visual identification of “race.”
The basic question is being ignored. How is “race” identified? As used, my “race” does not depend on where I was born. It depends on … what? Where someone else was born? Who, specifically? What lumps all these people together? And separates them from others, who might look quite the same?
That’s only one step more informative than “human,” since it only gives you the archaic racial category- Negroid- which tells you as much as “Caucasoid” or “Mongoloid.”
“Archaic racial category.” So race is being used to define race? Those are just as you stated, “racial” categories, which assumes some identity based on … what?
Ethnicity would give a much narrower picture- about one person in six is African, but only about one person in four thousand is Gurage.
Adding on the data that she’s Ethiopian muddies the picture- due to its northeastern position, Ethiopia has been the site of significant mixing, and there’s quite a bit of ethnic diversity: the primary ethnicity, Oromo, is only a third of the population- your Chinese daughter, though, most likely has significant Han ancestry (92% of the population of mainland China).
Lucky guess about my Chinese daughter. The one-child policy impacts Han Chinese the most.
However, “Ethiopian” tells you almost nothing about “race.” Let’s start with this: Each tribal grouping in Ethiopia, by default, considers itself to be very different from the others. There are over seventy such groupings in Ethiopia, if we mark them by language.
So, using the archaic terms and assuming she’s from one of the more prevalent ethnicities, your daughter probably has about 60% Caucasoid ancestry and 40% Negroid ancestry.
Unlikely, in fact. She’s from the Kambata-Timbaro Tribal Region, her native language was Kambatigna. It’s a minor ethnicity, there are maybe a few hundred thousand Kambata.
In the U.S., she is readily identified by people as “Black.” She doesn’t look “Ethiopian” (which is popularly known through high-Arab ancestry general appearance). Is “Black” a race? What defines it?
I once had a friend tell me that my Chinese daughter was, of course, going to be more intelligent than the Ethiopian girl.
So, good IQ estimates in Africa are generally hard to come by, but Ethiopia supposedly has the world’s lowest average IQ, at 63 (administered in 1991, sample size of 250), and China is estimated to have an average IQ of 100. Working off that data (and assuming both groups have a standard deviation of 15), that gives a 96% chance that the Chinese daughter is smarter.
Was that a test administered racially, or was it according to how and where the child was raised and tested?
What kind of intelligence was measured? Intelligence generally confers survival value, but the form of intelligence selected shifts with environment.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Of course, given that they’re your daughters, there’s not much reason to guess; you could just get them both tested, which would be way cheaper and more informative than sponsoring another test of Ethiopian national IQ.
Ethiopian “national IQ” is totally irrelevant. Somehow, Ethiopia, with that supposedly low IQ, managed, almost uniquely in Africa, to avoid extended outside control, with an ancient and literate culture.
What I personally know is that, possibly contrary to stereotypes, the Ethiopian girl is highly competitive, she stars at whatever she does, the Chinese girl—raised here since she was under a year old—is shyer and suffers from the shadow of her younger sister. Both girls have no difficulty figuring out how to do what they want on computers. I have no confidence that IQ tests would tell me much of value, though at some point both girls will be tested to determine if they belong in “gifted” programs.
My racist friend knew nothing about my daughter’s ethnicity, he was judging entirely on “African,” based on his early experience with “Blacks” on the street in America (are they “African”?) , which wasn’t, shall we say, “positive.”
Sorry I ddin’t read all of your wall of text yet, but I find it fishy that you’re allowed to redefine “racism” to mean “non-hating acknowledgement of differences due to ancestry” but Vaniver isn’t allowed to use race in the normal sense of “what’s ur ancestry?”.
Eh? What is this thing you call “race,” Earth Monkey?
Genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.
“Race is a cultural convention.”
A quote from wikipedia:
“Forensic physical anthropologist and professor George W. Gill has said that the idea that race is only skin deep “is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm” and “Many morphological features tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones. This is not surprising since the selective forces of climate are probably the primary forces of nature that have shaped human races with regard not only to skin color and hair form but also the underlying bony structures of the nose, cheekbones, etc. (For example, more prominent noses humidify air better.)” While he can see good arguments for both sides, the complete denial of the opposing evidence “seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all”. He also states that many biological anthropologists see races as real yet “not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship”.
The input is the claim ‘Race is a cultural convention.’ You output the interpretation: ‘None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.’ Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists’ claim is really what you take it to be.
Perhaps what is being denied is not the existence of morphological variation between human populations, but rather the conceptualization of these differences under the traditional concept of Race, with its assumptions of discreteness and of other markers of cultural and bio-diversity strictly mapping on to a small set of physiognomic markers. Perhaps what is also being asserted is that the precise boundaries between races, and how large or small a ‘race’ gets to be, is culturally constructed and varies across different groups possessing ‘race’-like categories. Is it more likely that anthropologists are speaking somewhat loosely and infelicitously, or that they think the existence of darker and lighter skins in different parts of the world is a Grand Alien Conspiracy?
Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant. You get a photo of Colin Powell and he was about light-skinned as Bush—so since different people of the same skin-hue are one called ‘white’ and the other ‘black’, one thinks it might the division may be entirely a cultural artifact.
Also there’s no single characteristic which doesn’t fluctuate gradually across populations—so any grouping seems again entirely arbitrary.
But a visual that got me to understand the above view was too-simplistic was this graph here at Lewontin’s argument and criticism. Though any one characteristic wouldn’t suffice to divide humanity meaningfully into races, several characterics taken together in can form clusters...
If you used to believe this yourself, then maybe you can explain to me what you mean(t) by ‘entirely a cultural artifact.’ Did you think that the people in question didn’t have different skin tones? That skin tone isn’t a genetic trait? That there was no correlation between a racial grouping and any phenotypic or genetic marker, like skin color? That genetic relatedness is confabulated in a grand game of make-believe?
“there’s no single characteristic which doesn’t fluctuate gradually across populations”—No, some traits have reached fixation in a population, or are totally absent. But I take your point. It’s still understandable that categories predating our modern, sophisticated notions of genetic variation would be controversial in their attempted modern reimaginings.
Did you think that the people in question didn’t have different skin tones?
Colin Powell did not have a different skin tone than George W. Bush; yes—no categorization based on skin-color would actually put Colin Powell in a different category than Bush, while putting him in the same category with Condoleeza Rice: Relevant photo.
And whole groups that Americans called non-white (like Middle-easterners) looked likewise pretty white to me.
That there was no correlation between a racial grouping and any phenotypic or genetic marker, like skin color?
There was correlation with physical characterics obviously—much like you could say that Swedes are more often blonde, but that the actual lines drawn around the category didn’t really have anything to do with physical characteristics—same way that Swedish citizenship correlates with blondness but isn’t defined by blondness.
Colin Powell did not have a different skin tone than George W. Bush; yes—no categorization based on skin-color would actually put Colin Powell in a different category than Bush, while putting him in the same category with Condoleeza Rice
I’ve seen the photo. So your claim is that anthropologists, like yesteryou, once believed that 100% of ‘black’ people had darker skin than 100% of ‘white’ people, with zero overlap? This seems very implausible.
And whole groups that Americans called non-white (like Middle-easterners) looked likewise pretty white to me.
That’s no coincidence. American authorities typically group most Middle Easterners with Europeans as ‘Caucasians.’
the actual lines drawn around the category didn’t really have anything to do with physical characteristics—same way that Swedish citizenship correlates with blondness but isn’t defined by blondness.
But being of Swedish descent does have biological meaning and significance, albeit to a lesser degree than being of African descent. So what can be meant by the claim that race is ‘merely’ like being Swedish? Is it merely a fuzzy quantitative shift, not a categorical disagreement about what ‘race’ is or how it fits into the natural world?
Allow me to attempt to rationally reconstruct what the younger you and the straw-anthropologist believed. Based on the evidence that changed your mind, I gather that your old view was not that racial distinctions were nonexistent, but that they were biologically superficial. The obvious phenotypic variations very nearly exhausted the distinctness of each racial group. So when you advocate racialism, what you’re really trying to draw attention to is that race is more than skin deep, that there are many many genetic traits, some very significant, that break down along racial lines of various sorts. And this is indeed an important point, though framing it as a dispute over whether ‘races’ are ‘real’ is, to put it mildly, misleading.
So your claim is that anthropologists, like yesteryou, once believed that 100% of ‘black’ people had darker skin than 100% of ‘white’ people, with zero overlap?
I don’t know about anthropologists. I thought I explained that my yesterme saw the opposite of what you just said: saw that some people labelled ‘black’ had skins as light (or almost as light) as ‘white’ people. So I saw the dividing line between ‘black’ and ‘white’ to be utterly arbitrary, a line arbitrarily drawn in some continuum, and which best seemed to identify cultural not biological differences.
Keep in mind that my yesterme was a Greek boy, and had no occasion to have known about e.g. Afro-textured hair or different nose structures, etc. or any other collection of physical characteristics that together could form a cluster.
gather that your old view was not that racial distinctions were nonexistent, but that they were biologically superficial.
No, I’m not talking about mere superficiality, nor about how insignificant or significant the traits were. I’m talking about an utterly arbitrary line drawn between populations of people. As if someone had arbitrarily said that the numbers >72 are the “orange” numbers and the numbers <72 are the “purple” numbers.
With only one trait in question to divide the races, this judgement of mine would have remained valid—no matter if it’s something as insignificant as skin-color or as significant as IQ.
It’s the combination of more than one trait (e.g. skin-color AND hair-texture AND nose-shape) that makes racial visual identification a classification of actual observed clusters in the human species—again REGARDLESS of whether the traits are “significant” or “superficial” or “important” or whatever.
So you were guilty of two bits of ignorance. Instead of my ‘racial traits are all superficial’ (which sounds like a much more plausible error for multiculturalists, anthropologists, etc. to make), your view was that (a) ‘there is only a single phenotypic trait distinguishing each race from the others,’ and (b) ‘these traits exist on a continuum smoothly linking all the races.’
Since these two old views of yours are how you understand the claim ‘race is a cultural construct,’ you are then asserting that people who reduce race to a cultural construct are ignorant of, or in denial regarding, the fact that different racial groups have different common ancestors over long stretches over time, owing to reproductive isolation. So you are effectively asserting that the anti-racialists are guilty of doubting the existence of continents, mountain ranges, and other sources of reproductive isolation that could interrupt various continua. This seems like an extremely implausible claim to impute to others, whether or not you naively believed it yourself; so you’ll need to cite sources demonstrating that the people in question really did hold this view.
You are also asserting that the ‘race is a cultural construct’ crowd think that race is not merely superficial, but reducible to a single trait and nothing else. For instance, anti-racialists can allow that east Asians have an epicanthic fold, or can acknowledge that they have darker eyes and hair than Europeans, but cannot acknowledge both of these facts, since this would then be asserting that races are distinguished by clusters and not by single phenotypic effects. Again, this is an extraordinary claim, much more radical and ridiculous than my moderate suggestion that anti-racialists tend to think of this clustering as ‘only skin-deep.’ So again, you are obliged to provide some references demonstrating that this is the stance of anti-racialists, on pain of straw-manning.
People can see what I’m “asserting” by reading my own sentences. Any assertion that I actually make, you can quote word-for-word. All your assertions about my supposed assertions, I disavow.
Downvoted, because putting words in another man’s mouth is one of the tactics I least appreciate and least want to see in this forum. I consider it a form of slander.
Aris Katsaris, you’re the one accusing the field of physical anthropology (and other people sharing anti-racialist views of this sort) of promoting the unargued assumption “Race is a cultural convention.” and of dismissing the possibility of any alternative view. As yet, in this entire conversation you have provided no evidence of this; so I’ve instead had to focus on clarifying what you mean by this accusation. (I was not under the impression that trying to unpack and understand libel was itself libelous; but if so, I will tread with caution...) Your evidence that this is a plausible accusation, and your explanation of what this accusation means in concrete terms, both reduce to your own past experience of believing:
the dividing line between ‘black’ and ‘white’ to be utterly arbitrary, a line arbitrarily drawn in some continuum
… which seems to be denying the occurrence of the mechanism (reproductive isolation) that blocks continuous variation. If this is not a fair characterization of your characterization of the anti-racialist position, then explain what you really mean and why my exposition is off-base. And again, quoting you:
I’m not talking about mere superficiality, nor about how insignificant or significant the traits were. I’m talking about an utterly arbitrary line drawn between populations of people. As if someone had arbitrarily said that the numbers >72 are the “orange” numbers and the numbers <72 are the “purple” numbers. With only one trait in question to divide the races, this judgement of mine would have remained valid—no matter if it’s something as insignificant as skin-color or as significant as IQ. It’s the combination of more than one trait (e.g. skin-color AND hair-texture AND nose-shape) that makes racial visual identification a classification of actual observed clusters
… which seems to be denying that racial groups have more than a single trait in common. If this is not a fair characterization of your characterization of the anti-racialist position, then, again, explain how.
Good-faith use of the technique of paraphrasing in order to make sure you’ve understood what the other person has said is extremely important, indeed an indispensable one for successful discussion. Part of why it’s important is precisely because it’s so easy to misunderstand someone; so it’s my goal to be corrected by you, if I have misrepresented you, and paraphrasing serves both this goal (by making transparent my understanding of you) and the goal of clarifying what’s actually under dispute. If the sky is not blue, I desire to believe that the sky is not blue. But I cannot revise my model of your argument and beliefs if you do not articulate specifically what I got wrong, and what the right explication is.
You mistook my interpretation for a straw-man. (Note: Accusing people of ‘slander’ is rather less conducive to productive discussion than noting a straw-man fallacy and moving on; and simply pointing out the error and how it occurred is more conducive still.) But my ‘superficiality’ interpretation was an attempt to steel-man your position, and when you completely dismiss my steel men and assert they are not what you meant, it severely limits my interpretive options. Hence my more recent interpretations do make your position appear weaker. Perhaps that means you should reconsider whether your view is justified. Or perhaps that means I misrepresented you; in that case, it should be supremely easy to explain how I did so, and to clarify precisely how your intended meaning differs from what I said.
Given the downvoting I received, I updated upwards on the possibility that I was wrong on my interpretation of the thread, and reread it from the start. As such I’m retracting my accusation of you as a troll—though I still don’t appreciate some of your communication tactics (next time please just ask whether I’m asserting something), and I still can’t tell if you’re arguing in good faith, I can see how you may indeed be doing that, given some unclear/badly communicated bits on my part, including how I didn’t clarify that I wasn’t necessarily agreeing with all the parts of the quote I provided.
I’m at work right now, but later today, I will try to briefly “unpack” my position again, from scratch, hopefully bridging the inferential gap between us.
Given how much karma you have on this site, and how reasonable most of your comments are, I’m updating upwards myself on the chance that I’ve been using some discussion tactics that needlessly put people on the defensive. I apologize for not clearly distinguishing my paraphrases and counter-arguments.
Also, I don’t think that quotation you cited is totally crazy. It does need some defending and unpacking, and if you want to jettison some parts of it, feel free. I’m familiar with some of the excesses people on both sides of the racialism debate can fall into, and part of my motivation for pushing you on this issue was an honest curiosity to see if you have examples of the kinds of excesses that give you such a dim view of the anti-racialist side of the issue. Since this seems to be essentially a terminological dispute, I don’t particularly care about whether we retain use of the word ‘race’ or not; but I do care about the deeper-level misconceptions fueling the controversy.
I’ll try here to clarify some points better than I did last time, and then I’ll bow out of this thread.
First of all, in regards to the George W. Gill quote—my primary desire in providing that quote was to indicate forensic anthropologists consider ‘race’ to be more than a cultural construct. The last part of the quote, which refers to the opposing views, I should have left out as I’m not actually informed enough about the academia to discuss the extent that the ‘cultural construct’ view is politically motivated or not.
Now trying to unpack my own views on the ‘race’ and ‘cultural construct’ issue. Some plain facts both yesterme believe and I still believe: “Race” as the word is typically meant, is a grouping of people, visually identified as such by other people—in this they differ from things like e.g. ‘nationalities’ which can’t be visually identified.
So effectively “racial categories” is a map. But a map may be drawn either
A) in non-arbitrary lines, according to some natural shape (e.g. a map of continents) -- in which it identifies some reality that an objective disinterested observer would map in roughly the same manner. In which case we can call said model a natural model. or B) it may be drawn almost entirely according to political/cultural and arbitrary criteria which no two observers would draw in the same way unless they both rested on the same cultural tradition. In which case we call it a “cultural construct”.
E.g. if someone is asked to divide human beings in two great categories according to biology that relates to reproductive functions, it’s easy enough to figure that the human species would “naturally” be divided into males and females—because there’s a biological reality under that. Such dividing lines, between people with XX and people with XY chromosomes is an obvious Schelling point.
But consider the calendar. The solar year is a natural enough division. A month so-and-so, roughly following the moon, but not quite. And a week or a century aren’t natural divisions at all—they’re dependent on cultural constructs.
If you try to divide human history into eras, the cultural construct becomes even more visible. Even if you go with “Hellenistic” “Classical” “Middle Ages” “Rennaisance” “Modern era” in one corner of the world, you’ll have to go with “Heian” and “Edo” eras in another corner. And even limited in one area of the world, it’d all be about what we as history-readers are supposed to consider significant.
Now going back to the issue of race—both the current me and the yesterme believe that what human beings call “race” is between (A) and (B) -- to significant part a cultural construct, but not completely. The difference between me and yesterme is that some years back I considered race to be almost entirely a cultural construct, -- because I saw no clear clusters (and therefore no “natural” categories) for any one characteristic and I hadn’t yet visualized how a combination of multiple characteristics could form “natural” clusters when any single characteristic by itself did not.
Having now visualized this, I realize that such clustering can actually form “natural” racial categories, some of which will match up really with what people identify as such.
That having been said, race in America at least is obviously still to some extent a cultural construct—which is why e.g. partly-African partly-European descent people are much more often grouped with completely-African people than with completely-European descent people.
Now any former belief of mine doesn’t need to have also been held by other people in order to treat ‘race’ as a cultural construct. They need have ONLY considered the particular clusters that our society calls “clusters” as cultural constructs, rather than as naturally occurring categories.
This certainly doesn’t mean that they need have disbelieved in “mountain ranges” or “continents” or even that there exist populations of largely differing genetic characteristics—they needn’t even disbelieve that a natural map can indeed be drawn. They need only disbelieve that society’s current map is natural.
Now I’m bowing out of this thread. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by further elaboration of beliefs of my yesterme or even my current me on the subject.
Aris Katsaris, you’re the one accusing the field of physical anthropology
No, I don’t remember accusing that field of anything. Since your comment begins with a blatant falsehood, I will not bother reading the rest of it. Downvoting it unread, and classifying you as a troll.
No, I don’t remember accusing that field of anything.
You seem to have forgotten how this conversation got started. Someone said “Race is a cultural convention.” You argued that this claim, although common in physical anthropology (you cited George W. Gill’s view to support this assertion), is false. I suggested a more charitable, steel-mannish reading of the “Race is a cultural convention.” thesis, and asked you what your own reading of this common multiculturalist thesis is. You responded “Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant.”, and then proceeded to unpack your own earlier views. We’re still trying to do that unpacking, and unless you’ve silently changed your mind about the structure of this discussion, you’re still trying to give an exposition of what the anthropology textbooks in question, and most other people who support this view, have in mind.
My suggestion is that you have yet to give an interpretation of “Race is a cultural convention.”, and of the general anti-racial-categorizations thesis, that would plausibly have been held by academics, since the denial of more than one racial trait statistically clustering together, and the denial of non-continuous human variation, both reflect truly fundamental misunderstandings of human phenotypic and geographical variation. At the very least, a great deal of textual evidence would be needed to justify attributing such a strong, absurd thesis to so many anti-racialist people. Now: Where, precisely, do you disagree with my representation of this discussion? And where, precisely, do you disagree with my specific counter-arguments?
Since your comment begins with a blatant falsehood, I will not bother reading the rest of it. Downvoting it unread, and classifying you as a troll.
It’s understandable that you’re angry; dissonance (both internal and social) inevitably makes us angry. Intellectual virtue isn’t about being stoically immune to such responses from our very primate brain; it’s about how you handle them when they arise, how you minimize the damage. Just a word to the wise.
And whole groups that Americans called non-white (like Middle-easterners) looked likewise pretty white to me.
Middle Easterners’ skins do look noticeably darker than those of typical native English speakers of European ancestry, to me. But then again, so do those of certain (but not all)¹ Italians, whom I don’t think any sizeable number of Americans would call non-white.
ISTM that there’s much larger variation in skin colours among Italians than among northern Europeans or among Middle Easterners. (All the people in this picture are Italian with no sizeable foreign admixture that I know of except in one case, and none is albino or anything like that.)
...and seven hours after I post this, I see a friend of mine whose skin is almost as pale as that of a typical Irishwoman and I remember that her parents are from the Middle East. God, I am full of crap certain times.
The input is the claim ‘Race is a cultural convention.’ You output the interpretation: ‘None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.’ Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists’ claim is really what you take it to be.
The problem is that when asked to justify that statement ‘Race is a cultural convention’ anthropologists in interpret it in the way you describe in your second paragraph, but they than proceed to use it in arguments as if it means ‘None of the phenotypic variations (except possibly skin color) associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments’.
Names of racists who believe other races are inferior? Racists who think other races are an active threat? Commenters who have claimed racists are evil mutants? I’m not sure what you could be asking that couldn’t be answered with, at most, a quick Google search or the phrase “all of them?”
Sorry for being too vague (I tend to be so when posting from my smartphone). What I was asking for, specifically, is for names of racists who “simply don’t think minorities are people”. My priors are that this is a straw-man, but if not, please excuse my ignorance of racist doctrine.
While I’m having a surprisingly hard time finding any quotes by racists (I’m mostly getting quotes about racism, which is of course very different,) I’ve definitely seen quotes from slave-owners and British Empire types talking about how the savages cannot control their impulses, have low inteligence and so on. Hitler would be the obvious answer, but it’s always hard to be sure what he actually believed - we still don’t know what religion he was, for instance.
Luckily, there are sites dedicated to calling out racists. Unluckily, they are often taken in by trolls, and of course the more intelligent/charismatic/educated racists are often filtered out.
Nevertheless:
I´m not racist but I believe black people are closer to gorillas than to white people… that´s why we shouldn´t get mixed with black people, we are different species and they should stay at Africa? or to the zoo, somewere far away from us, as I said I´m not racist and I don´t pretend to insult anybody, but black people is a threat to our race
Think of all the violent, animalistic, starving, illiterate and un-evolved “things” in Afghanistan today, and you will get some idea of what America would be like if whites hadn’t come here. If you want to know what America will look like when the blacks and hispanics finally take it over, you need look no further than the continent of Africa, or the crime ridden and decimated country of Mexico.
So go ahead, Mr. Wackadoodle, and spout your equality bullshit. Deny the statistics that prove unequivocally that the white race is the only fully evolved and truly intelligent race in the world. Without the white wealth and subsequent charity, the majority of the black, brown, yellow and red people in the world would already have died of disease or starved to death.
We need to kill Somali women and children (pirate breeders and future pirates) and STOP the UN from giving these miserable people free food, it only prevents their numbers from diminishing naturally from hunger.
Pathetic race can’t even feed itself. We need to just let natural selection work its course.
The frequency of tautological phrases and similar redundancies by niggers when trying to communicate through spoken language is directly related to a nigger’s slowness of thought.
Humans tend to be able to think much quicker than they speak, just as they can read silently more quickly than they can read out loud. For this reason, a human who is trying to express a message verbally will tend to have thousands of words at the ready, and have ample time to select the appropriate word and place it in line to be spoken at the appropriate instance.
Niggers, however, are a different story. Despite the fact that the average nigger has only mastered about 600 words, it still struggles with word retrieval, and tends to need extra time for this “thinking” process. As a result, absent the use of “gap-fillers”, a nigger’s oral expressions would have significant periods of silence between words (imagine trying to speak to someone in Greek by using an English-to-Greek dicitionary—there would be pauses while you looked up the next word).
Since niggers cannot be silent, they either fill the gaps with eeks and ooks (mmmhhmm) or with meaningless rhetoricals (gnomesayin) or with tautological phrases (any phrase with words that are superfluous because they are implicit). Many humans use tautologies to some extent (e..g., in the phrase “whether or not” the words “or not” are superfluous because they are implicit in the word “whether”). Still, niggers take it to a much higher level. In your example, the nigger who says that he will “kill you dead, Muddafuggah” is using the words “you dead” so that he can stall for time, so to speak, while his primitive brain searches for and then retrieves the word “Muddafuggah.”
The Genetics of the White races and the Negro races are much different. One of the most important things is the average brain size of a White is much larger than that of an average Negro. This makes a big difference in how well someone can perform in a civilized society.
Whites have always been the creators of civilizations and inventions.
Blacks have literally never made it above the mud hut. They are also the only race that never invented the wheel.
The average pure Negro IQ is just below 70.
The average pure white IQ is well above 100.
Thus it was not the heart which was the seat of the soul, according to the stone-age Jews, but the blood itself. They believed that by drinking the blood of a Christian victim who was perfect in every way, they could overcome their physical short comings and become as powerful as the intelligent civilized beings among whom they had formed their parasitic communities. Because of this belief, the Jews are known to have practiced drinking blood since they made their first appearance in history.
What Mr. Beck was getting at is that we, the human beings here in the U.S., need a renewal of at least full segregation, if not the outright repatriation of all of the baboons back to Aperica immediately.
My local rag, nauseatingly ultra-liberal, was extremely critical, voicing their outrage that the event was all white.”All white?” So what? If it had been all nigger they would have flipped out with joy, like they did over the recent Martin Lucifer Coon “I held a dream” bullshit. The only dreams that filthy spook ever had were about white women,cold cash, and Communism.
These differences are believed to be derived from the decreased intelligence and increased animal sex drive of the Negroid, with larger penises allowing for more efficient and brutal rape
how many young white females will be raped and murdered by nonwhites in the decades to come, because of the message of trusting and loving racial aliens that programs like this implant in them?
Also to note is that in the prehistoric times different species of hominids did mate on occasion and produce fertile hybrids. That’s part of evolution.
So no matter which way it is used and it is a great piece of propoganda lies....the fact that Whites and blacks can produce a fertile offspring is NOT proof that they are the same species.
Meanwhile, back in reality land, we see that the group with the biggest pile of corpses at their feet is the multiculturalists who have the blood on their hands of all the whites who have been raped and killed by those wonderful non-whites we just can’t get into our nations quickly enough so that they can breed us out of existence.
I sincerely hope that a couple generations from now, the triumphant whites will look upon all the anti-white movies and literature from our age like Harry Potter as it should be looked upon: irrational filth designed to justify a genocide
The black man down the street was caught with drugs. Send everyone who isn’t white or christian back to africa. I’m calling it now: liberals and wanna-be conservatives who are too cowardly to say what I am saying will come around in 2012 to realize that if we don’t clean up, we’ll suffer tenfold. Disagree with me if you want, as the constitution gives you the right to hate America
I have heard that niggers have thicker, denser skulls that have sometimes been able to stop weak bullets(.22lr) and deflect strong ones(.45acp).
Also, niggers have simple, primitive brains that are smaller and less developed.
Niggers are used to living in a half-unconscious state where no thinking is done and impulses are immediately acted upon.
Could it be possible that a headshot to a nigger’s brain would only slow the nigger down?
Satisfying my criteria for moral consideration, I suppose. I’m not entirely sure what the details of these criteria are, but CEV would presumably extract this metric, along with the other components of my utility function.
People tend not to value killing one-of-us, where “us” can be defined very broadly or very narrowly, or anywhere inbetween. Is that one terminal value or many?
IMO, not counting psychopaths as human amounts to a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
The no-true-Scotsman fallacy applies to an argument when it excludes particular cases by rhetoric rather than for objective reasons. It does not apply to any particular drawing of category boundaries on its own.
I’ve always interpreted no-true-Scotsman as warning about the dangers of arguing by definition. At the very least, saying psychopaths are not human runs the risk of being argument by definition.
(OTOH I think language should also depend on what you value: if your utility function is the number of inwardly-thrice-bent metal wires capable of nondestructively fastening several standard sheets of paper together at an edge in the universe, it’s handy to have a single word for ‘inwardly-thrice-bent metal wire capable of nondestructively fastening several standard sheets of paper together at an edge’, whether that’s a natural category or not. But you shouldn’t pretend it’s a natural category.)
A: No human thinks red shirts are better than blue shirts. B: Lots of psychopaths think red shirts are better than blue shirts. A: I meant true humans. Psychopaths aren’t really humans, so don’t count. B: What about my friend Billy? He is not a psychopath but thinks red shirts are better than blue shirts. A: True humans are non-psychopaths who are not your friend Billy.
Not “No true Scotsman”:
A: No human thinks red shirts are better than blue shirts. B: Lots of psychopaths think red shirts are better than blue shirts. A: I meant true humans. Psychopaths aren’t really humans, so don’t count. B: What about my friend Billy? He is not a psychopath but thinks red shirts are better than blue shirts. A: Oh, I guess I was wrong—some humans think red shirts are better than blue shirts.
The second is just using a nonstandard definition, not redefining the word to fit the line of argument, so does not fall under the No True Scotsman fallacy. Even if you’re gerrymandering reality ahead of time, it doesn’t count as No True Scotsman (At the very least, that isn’t even an argument yet, so can’t be a fallacious argument!)
Clearly not. As I noted upthread, True Scotsman requires that the redefinition is happening for rhetorical, rather than objective, reasons. The relevant reference class could have been picked out ahead of time, and I wouldn’t predict those two folks are going to continue that dispute.
Maybe I just need to read up on the theory a little more, because I’m still quite confused. Is my CEV the set of things I would want given all the correct moral arguments and all the information? As opposed (probably) to be the set of things I want now?
I can see how the set of things I want now would change over time, but I’m having a hard time seeing why my CEV could ever change. Compare the CEPT, the Coherent Extrapolated Physical Theory, which is the theory of physics we would have if we had all the information and all the correct physics arguments. I can see how our present physical theories would change, but CEPT seems like it should be fixed.
But I suppose it’s also true that CEPT supervenes on a set of basic, contingent physical facts. So does CEV also supervene on a set of basic, contingent wants? If so, I suppose a CEV can change depending on which basic wants I have. Is that right?
If so, does that mean I have to agree to disagree with an ancient greek person on moral matters? Or that, on some level, I can no longer reasonably ask whether my wanting something is good or bad?
Is my CEV the set of things I would want given all the correct moral arguments and all the information? As opposed (probably) to be the set of things I want now?
Yes. This needn’t be the same for all agents: a rock would still not want anything no matter how many correct moral arguments and how much information you gave it, so CEV is indifferent to everything. Now you and Homer are much more similar than you and a rock, so your CEVs will be much more similar, but it’s not obvious to me that they are necessarily exactly identical just because you’re individuals of the same species.
Technically this is just EV (extrapolated volition); then CEV is just some way of compromising between your EV and everyone else’s (possibly including Homer, but presumably not including rocks).
Thanks, I think I get it. Do you have any thoughts on my last two questions:
If so, does that mean I have to agree to disagree with an ancient greek person on moral matters? Or that, on some level, I can no longer reasonably ask whether my wanting something is good or bad?
I’d say that would just mean that the two of you mean different things by the word good (see also TimS’s comment), but for some reason I feel that would just amount to dodging the question, so I’m going to say “I don’t know” instead.
I think you’ve got the right idea that CEV aims to find that fixed, ultimately-best-possible set of values.
If I understand correctly, CEV is mostly intended as a shortcut to arrive as close as possible to the same ethics we would have if all humans sat and thought and discussed and researched ethics for [insert arbitrarily large amount of time] until no more changes would occur in those ethics and the system would remain logically consistent and always the best choice for all circumstances and in all futures barring direct alteration of elementary human values.
There may be some conflation between CEV and particular implementations of it that were discussed previously, or with other CEV-like theories (e.g. Coherent Blended Volition). I may also be the one doing the conflating, though.
The only way I can think of is if the two societies are composed of fundamentally different kinds of beings.
None of the people alive in Homer’s times is alive today. Dunno about how “fundamentally” different we are—I’d guess the difference between CEV and CEV is very small but not exactly zero.
Okay, I think I’m starting to get it. Is the idea that, both of us given all the correct moral arguments and all the information, an archaic Greek person and myself would still want different things?
Yes. For a more philosophical (and extreme) take on the issue, you can read Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Warning: Nietzsche is made of hyperbole, so it’s often quite difficult to understand his substantive point.
In this case, the point is that the Greeks divided the world into good and bad, while we moderns divide the world into good and evil. What’s the difference? It is possible to bad at a sport, but acting within the norms of the sport, it is impossible to be evil. Imagine how your moral perspective would be different if you only judged people based on whether they were “good at life” or “bad at life”.
Warning: Nietzsche is made of hyperbole, so it’s often quite difficult to understand his substantive point.
Indeed, I like Nietzsche’s philosophy as I know it from second-hand accounts, but when I tried to read his own writings I had to force myself through the pages and gave up. (Maybe I used a bad translation or something.)
In this case, the point is that the Greeks divided the world into good and bad, while we moderns divide the world into good and evil. What’s the difference? It is possible to bad at a sport, but acting within the norms of the sport, it is impossible to be evil. Imagine how your moral perspective would be different if you only judged people based on whether they were “good at life” or “bad at life”.
ISTM that many (most?) LWers also divide the world into good and bad, so, to the extent this is a fundamental disagreement between values rather than someone’s confusion due to not knowing something/not thinking stuff through, CEV might be closer to CEV than to CEV!
BTW, I think I’ve also seen a two-dimensional model for that; I don’t remember how the quadrant other than “good”, “bad” and “evil” (people who aren’t terribly good at life, but at least try hard not to harm others as a result of their incompetence, even to a cost to themselves) was labelled—wimps?
BTW, I think I’ve also seen a two-dimensional model for that; I don’t remember how the quadrant other than “good”, “bad” and “evil” (people who aren’t terribly good at life, but at least try hard not to harm others as a result of their incompetence, even to a cost to themselves) was labelled—wimps?
Sounds like two axes, one going from competent to incompetent, the other from well-intentioned to ill-intentioned.
Yes. (Not sure about the exact labels on the axes, but that was the spirit.) IIRC, “good” was the quadrant (competent, well-intentioned), “bad” was (incompetent, ill-intentioned), “evil” was (competent, ill-intentioned) and I don’t remember the label on the remaining quadrant.
Yes. Apparently sam0345 (if that’s what he means by “his moral ideal”) thinks the two of you would still want very different things; wedrifid and I think you would want slightly different things.
a) The word “different” seems to be missing from the above.
b) I don’t k now how CEV is defined or whatt it is suppsed to be. Old-fashioned metaethics from that “diseseased discipline”, philosophy, seem much clearer to me.
C) I have only ever been saying that, as so far stated, such questions are imponderable.
I have read Pinker’s arguments in detail in his book. I don’t think Homer would have agreed. I bet this is not approaching Homer’s CEV, this is self-domestication of humans. In any case mind sharing how you implemented CEV checking on a mere human brain?
I meant, our behaviour being closer to our CEV than Homer’s behaviour was to his CEV, if that makes sense. (Are you thinking of anything in particular about Homer or was it an arbitrary example?)
In any case mind sharing how you implemente CEV checking on a mere human brain?
I wouldn’t, but I can roughly guess what the result would be. (Likewise, I couldn’t implement Solomonoff induction on any brain, but I still guess general relativity has less complexity than MOND.) If I had no way of guessing whether a given action is more likely to be good or to be bad, how should I ever decide what to do?
I meant, our behaviour being closer to our CEV than Homer’s behaviour was to his CEV, if that makes sense.
I don’t think that makes sense. Also, I am pretty sure that Xenophon’s behavior (massacre and pillage the bad guys and abduct their women) was a lot closer to his moral ideal than our behavior is to Xenophon’s moral ideal.
Further, the behavior Xenophon describes others of the ten thousand performing is astonishingly close to his moral ideal, in that astonishing acts of heroism were routine, while the behavior I observe around me exhibits major disconnect from our purported moral ideals, for example the John Derbyshire incident, though, of course, Xenophon was doubtless selective in what incidents he though worthy to record.
I meant, our behaviour being closer to our CEV than Homer’s behaviour was to his CEV, if that makes sense. (Are you thinking of anything in particular about Homer or was it an arbitrary example?)
“It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair. But when dogs shame the gray head and gray chin and nakedness of an old man killed, it is the most piteous thing that happens among wretched mortals.”
Hmm… Well, the definition of a CEV is something like a point attractor in the space of a society’s moral attitudes. So it’s not too surprising if there is convergence of the society towards that CEV ie “moral progress” as you define it is to be expected. Though whether there is a point attractor as opposed to an attractor cycle (or chaotic attractor) seems to be an open question of course.
However, I’m struck by the thought that a Spartan society becoming “more perfectly Spartan” or a Taliban society becoming “more purely Islamic” over time would count as moral progress by the same token. So that the more thoroughly the slaves, women etc. are indoctrinated to accept the prevailing Spartan or Taliban norms, the “better” the society becomes. Does that also match your concept of moral progress?
No, CEV is the goals societies “moral attidudes” (eg slavery) are tying to satisfy, applied to the FAI’s best guess of the actual stste of reality (eg black people weren’t created by God with the purpose of acting as slaves to whites) and averaged out.
So that the more thoroughly the slaves, women etc. are indoctrinated to accept the prevailing Spartan or Taliban norms, the “better” the society becomes. Does that also match your concept of moral progress?
Well, is the indoctrination reversible? i.e., could those people to reject Spartan or Taliban norms if they heard the right arguments, as happened to Lukeprog? (Which suggests to me a heuristic to tell which of two memeplexes is closer to the CEV of humanity: is the fraction of adult A-ists who convert to B-ism per year larger or smaller than the fraction of adult B-ists who convert to A-ism?)
Which suggests to me a heuristic to tell which of two memeplexes is closer to the CEV of humanity: is the fraction of adult A-ists who convert to B-ism per year larger or smaller than the fraction of adult B-ists who convert to A-ism?
That seems like a good heuristic for telling who has the best missionaries, writes the cleverest arguments, or best engineers society to reward their believers. I’m not sure it’s a good heuristic for actually extrapolating volition.
Perhaps a superintelligent mind could create an argument that would convince any human of any belief. Why should such an ability have moral implications?
Yes, it probably is reversible. It seems quite plausible to me that for most pairs of human ideological systems A, B, there is some combination of arguments, evidences, life-experiences etc. that would cause a randomly-selected adherent of A to switch to B. (The random selection would tend to avoid the most fanatical and committed adherents, but I’d guess even most of them could probably be “deprogrammed” by the right combination of stimuli.)
However, if you want to count the actual numbers of conversions happening right now, the statistics are messy: apparently just about every religious group (including the group of non-religious) claims they are the “fastest growing”, all with some empirical justification. I found this Wikipedia article highly amusing in that context.
But what’s the point here? If we are talking about humanity as a whole, then this may just show that there is no single CEV for all human societies everywhere. Instead, there are a huge number of attractor points in the moral attitudes space, and any given society tends to converge to the nearest attractor point… unless and until a major shock throws it out again (or breaks up the society).
Global humanity as a whole may perhaps now constitute a single society, and be moving towards the “liberal democracy” attractor point, which therefore defines a local CEV… but only because it’s already in that basin of attraction. And even that’s empirically more dubious than it was twenty years ago (I don’t see China, Russia, or most of the Islamic world still moving that way, and a lot of Western countries have themselves become distinctly less liberal / democratic in recent years.)
However, if you want to count the actual numbers of conversions happening right now, the statistics are messy: apparently just about every religious group (including the group of non-religious) claims they are the “fastest growing”, all with some empirical justification. I found this Wikipedia article highly amusing in that context.
Note that if at the beginning of the year A had one billion adult adherents and B had one hundred, and since then 160 of the former have converted to B and 60 of the latter have converted to A, my heuristic would still point towards B being wronger than A even though B has doubled in size and A has stayed pretty much the same. (And anyway, I was thinking more of memeplexes who have existed for at least a couple of generations—with new ones it would be much more noisy.)
I don’t think violence has declined. State violence has increased. Further, since we are imprisoning a lot more people, looks like private violence has increased, supposing, as seems likely, most of them are being reasonably imprisoned.
Genghis Khan and the African slave trade cannot remotely match the crimes of communism.
And if it has declined, Xenophon would interpret this as us becoming pussies and cowards. Was Xenophon more violent and cruel than any similarly respectable modern man? Obviously. But he was nonetheless deservedly respectable. We rightly call the ten thousand brave, not criminal.
Social acceptance of brave, honorable, and manly violence has greatly diminished, and so brave, honorable and manly violence has greatly diminished. But vicious, horrifying, evil and depraved violence, for example petty crime and the various communist mass murders, has enormously increased.
Further, since we are imprisoning a lot more people, looks like private violence has increased, supposing, as seems likely, most of them are being reasonably imprisoned.
This doesn’t follow, unless by ‘violence has increased’ you mean that there are more incidents of violence. But this would be consistant with violence being extremely rare. So are we imprisoning people for violent crimes and at a higher rate?
I have the same questions about your claims of increased state violence. Has the rate of state violence gone up, or just the number of incidents? It’s the former we’re interested in.
I would call “moral progress” the process whereby a society’s behaviours and their CEV get closer to each other than they used to be. And this looks pretty much like it, to me.
What? So would you call an incorruptibly evil society highly “morally progressed”? What about the baby eaters since they both believe they should and do in fact eat babies?
Babyeater babies don’t want to be eaten, or particularly want to eat their peers, and those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time, so “eat babies” isn’t the ‘coherent’ part of the babyeater CEV.
Using the observation that being dead precludes wanting to (and endorsing) eating babies as an adult as a technical reason that “those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time” is highly misleading. I’d go as far as to call it bullshit.
We could equally as accurately say “those who will never develop into non-paperclipping adults constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time” (therefore CEV means paperclipping!)
Any attempted implementation of CEV that does not result in the eating of babies sounds like a catastrophic failure. It would seem to result in the sneaking in of non-babyeater values at every excuse.
Insert abortion debate: Right to choose is morally coherent, and right to life is morally coherent. It is debatable which of these would constitute moral progress.
However, what is not morally coherent, is that women have sole power over reproductive decisions, but men have an obligation to support those choices whatever they may be, that husbands don’t have a say, that unmarried men can be forced to support babies, but women cannot.
This is not moral progress, but anti white male democratic coalition.
One could coherently argue that right to choose, but no right to child support is moral progress
One could coherently argue that right to life, plus right to child support is moral progress.
One cannot argue that right to choose plus right to child support is moral progress. It is morally right that he who pays the piper, calls the tune, and that she who calls the tune, gets stuck with the piper’s bill.
On second thoughts, let’s not!
I agree that the current system is inconsistent. If women are allowed to abort babies because babies are an expensive burden, men should either have an equal say in that decision or men shouldn’t be obligated to support those children. Either one would make sense.
Speaking as a pro-lifer, that’s nonsense. Men aren’t the ones using their bodies as life support. Also, “anti white male”? Really? I’m pretty sure you don’t have to be white to get an abortion.
EDIT: Is this seriously being downvoted?
I agree with your statements as written. However:
This is not nonsense, as far as I can tell.
Given “Accidental Pregnancy”, the woman’s decision tree (A) goes:
A1 - Keep the baby, support it, including whatever costs and benefits.
A2 - Get an abortion, costs and benefits are avoided.
The man’s decision tree (B), according to the quoted statement, goes:
A1 - The woman kept the baby; (Bx|A1) - Support the woman and baby. What this man thinks or wants or would have decided is irrelevant.
A2 - The woman got an abortion; (Bx|A2) - No baby, no costs, no benefits. What this man thinks or wants or would have decided is irrelevant.
Once you’ve boiled down the calculations, given unforeseen pregnancy, the men have zero decision power according to such a system in theory, and must pay a cost independently of whatever they could possibly do in exactly half of the possible outcomes.
In other words, whether you pay a cost or not is entirely not up to you, for no specific reason whatsoever other than “aren’t the ones using their bodies as life support”. Does this sound like a fair setting, and more importantly, does it sound like an optimal system to play in?
Ok, the quoted position is not nonsense. But it is totally rejected by society’s decisions about involuntary medical procedures and economic support of children. Once those decisions are made, there is no space for anything like what the quote advocates for.
First point: Abortion is a medical procedure. Society is generally unwilling to force anyone to undergo a medical procedure. Given the special moral issues arising out of abortion, why do you expect a different result here?
Second point: society has decided that a child’s economic support should come from all biological parents, rather than the people raising the child. There are (and have been) other decisions made by other societies. So what? That doesn’t make the current position incoherent (as sam seems to argue). Men know (or should know) the risks when deciding whether to have sex.
I mostly agree on all of this, at the very least denotationally agree on everything.
I’m quite on a different end of the spectrum when it comes to whether this is morally optimized, but of course this is because I work from different assumptions and when I picture it, I also imagine a completely different social framework than most people who think this is the “right” way to do it would imagine around it.
Errh. Not sure how I could rephrase the above to make it less confusing, but hopefully your model already knows the gist of what I’m saying.
I’m not sure I understand your position—more specifically, I’m not sure what connotations you disagree with. I was trying in this instance to make statements without relevant connotation at all, but it seems that my attempts fell short.
Well, for one example:
This pattern-matches to the noncentral fallacy described by Yvain, and can be very easily read as an attempt to categorically identify abortion as nothing other than what people generally identify as “medical procedures”, while abortion clearly has some elements (even in flat-out physical materialistic terms, let alone social, moral, legal, etc.) that are not quite like most medical procedures.
If I want to push the meta-analysis a bit further...
This seems dismissive of the issues. At this point in the paragraph, it holds some connotation of “Your arguments are worthless, society is right because that’s what society decided”, which is clearly not intended (or so I would presume) but still sneaks into the reader’s stream-of-consciousness.
In general the tone of the comment feels a bit like you’re saying that society has decided something, nothing can be done about it by one individual, the Enemy’s arguments are invalid, and thus society is right. This (probably unintended) connotation is very much one I strongly disagree with.
Doesn’t this support my position? Even if an abortion was only a medical procedure, it wouldn’t be available to vindicate the man’s choice over the woman’s choice. And you correctly note that it isn’t only a medical procedure
Sam says there’s only one correct moral choice. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, but I was dismissive of that position.
Fully true. It’s the pattern-matching connotation of “Here, I argue using known fallacies” that was off-putting, more than the facts stated and the actually-implied reasoning.
I cringe at the phrase “vindicate the man’s choice over the woman’s choice”, because it’s clear to me that this isn’t a mutually exclusive two-choices-only scenario (there are more than two possible solutions to this “problem”, if one wants to think of it in these terms), but that reaction is a matter of gender-equality humanism (which most people, due to historical circumstance, refer to as “feminism”) more than the actual issue at hand.
We’re assuming false dichotomies here. We could have a society where women get to decide whether or not to abort, but if they don’t they are encouraged to give the child up for adoption if they can’t afford to raise it, and if they choose not to, rhat’s their business and they aren’t entitled to demand that anyone else help them out financially. EDIT: that way, a woman is not forced to undergo a medical procedure if she doesn’t want the child.
I haven’t seen anyone assuming that you can’t have abortion and no childcare, or childcare and no abortion. The main point of contention is that the grandparent is arguing that those are the only coherent options—that abortion and childcare is self-contradictory/discriminatory.
Exactly so: Moral and social decay. People behaving badly, bad behavior being encouraged, and frequently enforced. Hurtful consequences, decadence, and all that. “Society” is making wrongful decisions to advance the interests of one group at the expense of another, a characteristic flaw and failing of democracy.
A previous society decided that women and their children were not entitled to support except by a contract voluntarily entered into by both parties, whose terms differed strikingly from current terms. The question then is, which society was right?
The question at issue is moral progress. That society has decided X is not, in the context of this debate, evidence that X is right, since a previous society decided Y.
The question is, which society was right? I argue that this society’s decisions constitute evil, decadence, moral decay, and are an indictment of democracy.
Maybe people (e.g. MileyCyrus, I guess) are just objecting to this conversation and downvoting everything.
Well, if so, their cynical exploitation of the karma mechanics is working; it’s at −3, soon all discussion will be silenced by the Toll.
EDIT: Well, there it goes. To defend my point, deliberately invoking mechanics designed to discourage feeding trolls to prevent discussion on topics you disagree with is cynical exploitation. Karma is intended to rate the quality of a comment, not to censor certain topics of discussion. I personally would consider this just as reprehensible as creating new thread to reply to comments in a Karma Tolled old one, which has been met with severe sanctions.
Cynical exploitation? The point of the karma mechanics is to downvote comments you don’t want to see more of.
“I don’t want see more of this” != “I don’t want people to reply to this” (though the two are correlated); the Toll is about the latter.
Yes.
The problem is not nine months servitude, but twenty years servitude.
Who the blazes upvoted this comment? I was hoping the troll toll would cut back on troll feeding, but it won’t work if people keep upvoting trollish behavior.
(And yes, sam0345 behavior is trollish, even if they earnest hold these views. There is no reason hijack a conversation about CEV into a MRA talking point regarding an explosive political issue)
Would one of the mods please kill this thread before we get a pile-up?
Edit: Looks like I’ve been karmassinated, as several of my old comments in unrelated threads are getting downvoted.
Downvoted; if discussing things is trolling, what exactly is the point of the site? This is not an assassination attempt.
That’s actually the best definition of “moral progress” that I’ve seen. A big step up from “more like the values that I currently wish to signal having”, the default definition.
People on Lesswrong saying their CEV includes X or leads to Y, are not using the term technically but as a poetic way of saying X and Y look about right to me and I’m confident I’m not wrong. Substituting that into the definition makes it much less impressive for human use. And if you check writing on CEV you see the definition is nearly circular for technical use in FAI design.
Just not true. The writing on CEV does a lot to constrain technical thinking about FAI design. It isn’t a complete solution, nor is it presented as one but it certainly does rule out a lot (most) proposals for how an FAI should be designed and created. It simply doesn’t fit the definition “circular”.
(I had previously ignored this comment but upvotes as of now suggest that it may be successful in being actively misleading! As such, rejecting it seems more important.)
We seem to have a misunderstanding. Lots of writing on CEV refers to something called moral development or moral progress. I was criticizing the usefulness of the quoted definition of this something to CEV development not work on CEV in general. I’ve edited the sentence somewhat to clarify that.
Perhaps. If so we can curse our shared language. I was replying to the below quote but I notice “its” isn’t a unique reference!
Is this a possible use of ‘CEV?’ So far as I understand CEV, it’s not possible that it could change: our CEV is what we would want given all the correct moral arguments and all the information. Assuming that ‘all the information’ and ‘all the correct moral arguments’ are constants, how could the CEV of one society differ from that of another?
The only way I can think of is if the two societies are composed of fundamentally different kinds of beings. But the idea of moral progress you describe assumes that this is not the case.
Yes. Society’s behaviors and their CEV can get closer together without the CEV changing at all. Also note that while CEV is a (very slightly) different thing to CEV even though neither of those “CEVs” change at all.
A potential criticism of army’s definition is that it allows for “cultural wireheading” and as such would be a lost purpose if “moral progress” was substituted in as a all-purpose goal or measure of achievement. (That said, I’ve never really thought of “moral progress” as that-which-should-be-optimised anyhow.)
Then why is “moral progress” a useful concept?
Shoes aren’t that-which-should-be-optimized either, but that doesn’t mean that the concept of shoe is not useful.
It describes how to compute that-which-should-be-optimized.
EDIT: Replied to wrong message. (Curse my android!)
As a descriptor that people find useful when analyzing cultures.
Because not being itself my entire utility function doesn’t mean it or related components thereof doesn’t have a significant part in it.
It’s still only marginally useful. For example I don’t believe I have ever used the phrase before and if I have it was because it was necessary to guess the password of a teacher.
Very nearly everything does not happen to be that-which-should-be-optimised.
So we’re not saying that the CEV of a culture changes (this is a constant), but that the culture’s actual moral practices and reasoning can change in relation to its CEV. And change such that it is closer or further away. Do I have that right?
Presumably, we wouldn’t want to optimize moral progress, but rather morality.
The CEV of a culture changes (a little bit) every day. CEV is a constant. This is because humans (and groups of humans) aren’t stable, consistent optimisers. From what I understand the CEV of a culture is relatively stable, certainly more stable than the culture itself. Nevertheless it is not a fixed. We, all things considered and collectively want (very nearly tautologically) for our CEV to be stable because that (approximately) maximises our current CEV. We just aren’t that consistent.
That is one way in which the previously quoted proposition could be valid, yes.
I want to optimise whatever my preferences are. Morality seems to get a weight in there someplace.
I thought the whole point of CEV was to extrapolate forwards in time towards the ultimate reflectively-consistent set of values to formulate one single coherent utility function (with multiple parameters and variables, of course) that represents the optimal equilibrium of all that humans would want if they were exactly as they would want to be and would want exactly that which they would wish to want.
This reminds me more of CAV (Coherent Aggregated Volition) than CEV. CEV is, IIRC, intended as a bootstrap towards “Whatever humans would collectively find the best possible optimization after infinite re-evaluations”, if any such meta-ethics exists.
The Coherent Extrapolated Volition of one group of humans is not the same thing as the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of another group of humans. Humans populations change and even evolve over time due to forces that are not carefully constructed to move the population in the same direction as the CEV of their ancestors and so later generations will not have the same CEV as previous ones.
Eliezer has a lot to answer for when it comes to encouraging magical thinking along the lines of “all (subsets of) humans have the same Coherent Extrapolated Volition”. He may not be confused himself but his document certainly encourages it.
Thank you. I had slightly misunderstood what you were saying, but I also hadn’t looked at all the variables and you pointed right at what I was missing.
Who knows? It’s possible EY thinks it will be. There doens’t seem to be any authoritative answer to that.
Poll here
No, his argument is that CEVs of any (subset of) humans is a tiny cluster in value space.
He has, in fact, made that argument (as well). I repeat the claim:
It depends on how you define “humans”, but considering how old some of the references to the Golden Rule are at least some of our utility function is older than most civilizations. Do you have any proof that previous generations were fundamentally different to us, and not, like most (all?) humans today, confused about how to implement their utility function (if we give the poor healthcare, they wont have an incentive to work!)
It is trivially true that restricting the definition of ‘human’ can reduce the possible differences between the CEVs of subsets of humans. This is just a matter of shifting the workload into the ‘human’ definition. Unless you plan to restrict the definition of human to one individual, however, there are still going to be differences between the CEV of subsets (except by coincidence).
Having a weak-to-moderate norm in favour of doing things that you would consider helpful or at least not harmful to others in your social group does seem to be popular (not as consistent or as strong as norms against excreting waste products in public but right up there!). That CEVs of various combinations of humans are similar isn’t the point. Of course they will be. In fact, on average I’d expected them to be more similar than the groups of humans themselves are. But they are not identical (except by coincidence).
No!
That isn’t a dichotomy. Clearly both past humans and current humans aren’t effectively optimising toward their respective CEVs. But those CEVs are also going to be different because there isn’t any magic (or focused expenditure of optimisation power) holding the CEV constant!
(I’m not sure what “fundamental” means exactly so I’ll just note that I’ve never proposed any kind of difference beyond “not the same”).
It would be great if you wrote up a short discussion level post to clear up what seems to be a common misconception. Please consider doing so.
I’m not sure how useful that would be, or rather whether I’m the right person to be doing it. I thought I said everything that needed to be said in this thread already but it wasn’t necessarily successful at reaching the target audience. Perhaps someone more in tune with the idealism behind the disagreement could explain better.
I meant that, say, Neanderthals have a good chance of a serious CEV difference. However, your statement that all humans have different CEVs is unsupported by any evidence. For example:
Historically, dumping waste products was considered relatively harmless; sure it smells a little but hey, what doesn’t? These people lacked the germ theory of disease, remember. No-one thought deliberately spreading disease was OK.
That is not a fully general counterargument against your lack of any evidence at all.
But there’s no magic changing it! If you assume human morality evolved, why would our ethics have changed much more than, say, our diet?
It is, but my prior that two logically different things turn out to be exactly identical is pretty small. EDIT: OTOH, I think that almost all humans’ CEVs would be so similar that a world with a FAI optimizing for CEV would be very unlikely to feel like a dystopia to Group B, unless the membership criteria to Group A are deliberately gerrymandered to achieve that.
Of course there will be some variation between individuals, yes. But, as you say, probably not enough to matter; unless you’re actively filtering it should average out the same for most large groups.
Nobody said that they would have.
You are arguing against a straw man. Please read some of the message you replied to or the ones preceding it. Even, say, 1⁄3 of the sentences is likely to be sufficient—I’ve been repeating myself to make this clear.
You are claiming that the CEV of any group of humans—including all humanity—changes over time, yes? You seem to think this is a self-evident truth, but I have yet to see any examples of such a change. You removed the first half of that sentence—as I pointed out, if human morality evolved (which I assume you believe) then there is no reason to think that it would change any more than human dietary preferences—a child may discover sweets taste better than cabbage, and henceforth refuse cabbage in favor of sweets, but this is true for all children. What you are suggesting the same as if I claimed our taste buds had rearranged themselves, and that is why the Romans ate roast dormouse and we don’t.
Both sides of this debate are hamstrung by failing to distinguish between basic values and extrapolated volition. There have been major shifts in ethics within living memory, regarding race, gender, the environment and sexuality. Whether they are shifts in basic valiues or in the way basica values are extrapolated is not obvious.
Except that it is. You don’t dissuade a racist or a misogynist or whatever with brain surgery. You just show them that their model of minorities/women/homosexuals/whatever is flawed. You don’t alter their brain to terminally value, say, preventing slavery, you just show them that to satisfy their existing terminal value of avoiding human suffering they should prevent slavery. That has no effect on Coherent Extrapolated Volition.
Except that it does, because having been persuaded they extrapolate differently. But maybe by CEV you mean some idealised version.
Your impression that it is obvious that changes in de facto ethics are not changes in basic values rests heavilty on the assumption than basic values are in hardware, not software. That is not obvious , either.
CEV is not (and was never, AFAIK) meant to be self-applied by one individual to oneself.
More importantly, CEV’s archetypical example of “volition” should show how persuading someone that they want box A doesn’t change their CEV to “obtain A” if they need that diamond to pay for their own food, nor how persuading them that they should not want the diamond and that the diamond is worthless would change the fact that their CEV would still want to get box B, to get the diamond, to sell it, to pay for food, to live longer. No matter how effectively you persuade them that box A is really really shiny and that diamonds are really really evil.
Well, that’s your guess.
EDIT: double-post.
‘There’s a “principled distinction between discussing CEV as an initial dynamic of Friendliness, and discussing CEV as a Nice Place to Live” and his essay was essentially conflating the two definitions. ’
Pardon? I think you may have accidentally replied to the wrong comment.
No. Have you ever changed your mind on an ethical question? I’m serious.
...
The observation that a racist (or whatever) is using, albeit imperfectly, the same criteria to declare various courses of action “right” or “wrong”. What they lack is the knowledge that minorities are not evil mutants.
Very idealistic. What if putting down other humans is an actual terminal value for some people?
Something in their mind would most likely be broken for this to happen, according to data I’ve seen. Even the worst polypaths (sociopath + psychopath + whatever pathy you want to throw in for the most despicable example of human possible) apparently still see themselves as heroes “saving the world”, or at least as some kind of “good guy in the long run”. Not that I’m implying that the “All Evil people are actually Good because they just know that the world needs balance and humans need a common enemy” myth is true, because that’s been shown false even more clearly.
More importantly, CEV aims are reflectively coherent values. If they have a terminal value of killing people, this value is extremely likely to conflict with other of their values, maybe even with their own wishes regarding self-values (“I wish I didn’t enjoy killing humans so much”), and would definitely not cohere with most other humans’ values unless there’s four billion people out there who secretly desire very very much to kill humans all the time but live in utter misery thanks to a global conspiracy that successfully chains them down or some other just-as-unlikely factor (e.g. some undiscovered freeloader’s problem or tragedy of the commons that we’ve somehow never noticed).
Overall, my current odds are very very low that any such value would survive extrapolation when you attempt to have a reflectively coherent system where someone wishes they didn’t value X, but do value it.
Every (neurotypical) human I have ever observed, even indirectly, terminally valued human life. Have you ever met a racist? They’re not evil mutants, they simply don’t think minorities are people (and may think they are an active threat to “real” humans.) Of course, a mind that terminally values killing humans is possible. I simply haven’t seen any evidence that it exists in real life, and plenty of evidence for minds with a stable CEV that terminally values human life (among other things.)
Just not true. Not all racist people are confused on matters of fact in such a convenient way.
In my experience, they are. Could you provide a counterexample? Bearing in mind that I was using “people” to exclude evil mutants.
Part of the problem here may be that you are using a strong notion of racist. So the issue may be definitional. For example, I have a close relative who says nasty things about other racial minorities (especially that people from a certain racial group are stupid, lazy, fat, etc.). I’m pretty sure that person has no desire to kill people of that racial group. There are different degrees of racism.
Yes, I was using a “strong” racist as an example. But that close relative’s claims that the minorities are lazy/fat/whatever is either correct or incorrect as a point of fact, and has no effect on their terminal values.
You could call me a proto-racist in that I think that some races are more intelligent than others, more civilized, more violent, while still very much human.
There are no confusions of fact between me and someone who hates people of “lesser” races, only a lack of compassion.
While I’m going to have to disagree with you on a point of fact there, (is that inherently less civilized? Whatever, we’re getting off topic.) I note that someone who agrees with you but argues for, say, racial warfare or whatever, is likely under the impression that these natural differences between races are likely to jeopardise White civilization, and/or believes that these differences are more drastic than you do.
not necessarily. Sometimes it seems that way and would take quite the conspiracy to make it not true, but it could be either way and the point would be the same.
Oh, it’s entirely beside the point. I’m just curious.
… which races are we talking about here? On reflection, I can’t think of any race that seems less civilized. I could just about buy a difference in intelligence, and I can see how you might think violent inclinations are affected by race (although I’m pretty sure that’s sociological,) but I don’t really see how you can plausibly make the claim that civilization has a racial component.
let’s take civilization off the table for now.
I’m under the impression that controlled studies have found race-intelligence links. (maybe this is my confusion of basic facts). Seems plausible.
Sociology is pretty strongly corellated with this race thing, and race is more visible. Violence is definately linked to race in the USA (even if it’s only through social class, but I’ve seen arguments that race is an even better predictor).
It would be nice to have some solid literature surveys on this. Unfortunately, given the controversy, it’s hard to just trust what the academics are saying.
If it’s linked “through social class”, it’s not linked directly, which is what’s under discussion. No-one is claiming that race has no effect on class and/or class has no effect on the traits under discussion. You are claiming that low intelligence and violent tendencies are racial characteristics, which is generally considered racist nonsense by, well, non-racists.
Which are you more interested in being, non-racist or correct?
I hope that question doesn’t come off as too offensive, and it may turn out that you are genuinely more interested in being non-racist than correct. Given the treatment of prominent biologists for stating truths, one whose livelihood depends on public opinion and who isn’t an expert in biology might decide that adopting the dogma of the times is the wisest move.
But supposing that you are actually curious- that you are seriously attempting to determine the quantitative effect that race has on crime or intelligence or so on- what makes “0” such a special number? Sure, it’s the null hypothesis, but the null hypothesis for the effect of class on violence or intelligence is also 0. Why reject one out of hand, and not the other? Notice that we don’t have non-classists breathing down our necks to ensure we don’t point out that the poor are disproportionately represented in the jails.
This seems like a seriously good question to me, at least for most of us. The fact that racist beliefs (true or false) are very strongly correlated with being a bad person is worth noticing. We may just be better off not knowing such things, if true.
Let me note that what is correlated with badness may be more the fact of speaking racist beliefs, not of ‘having them’—the latter is hard to collect info about, absent mind-reading technology.
It seems extremely likely that there’s a correlation between having racist beliefs and speaking them. In particular, the more extreme one’s racist beliefs are, the more likely that one will a) consider racist beliefs acceptable to say (some combination of illusion of transparency and typical mind fallacy) and b) will consider more moderate racial claims as less controversial in comparison.
True, though in general I don’t think we have much trouble discovering the unspoken beliefs of other people through their behaviors. I grant of course that if a racist belief has no relationship to someone’s behavior whatsoever, then it cannot be the cause of being a bad person (since this seems to be very much an issue of behavior).
But in such a case, I think serious questions could be raised about whether or not this belief is actually a belief the person holds.
The question is how causal is that correlation.
So, what do you mean by a “bad person” and how do you know that this includes both true and false beliefs? A related issue may be what one means by a “racist belief”. For example, is it a racist belief that Tay Sachs is more common among Ashkenazic Jews than the general population?
You’ve asked me a series of questions here about the terms I’m using, and I’m not sure how precisely to respond. I don’t think either of us is, for example, in the dark as to what ‘bad person’ means.
So could you, on the basis of your best guess about what I mean to say, just voice your objection?
My objections were I thought apparent. I apologize for the illusion of transparency on my part. Simply put “bad person” is highly subjective, and I don’t at all have a clear notion of what it means. Is a thief who gives some of his money to charity a bad person? Clear, agreed notions of what was a “bad person” would be essentially equivalent to solving most moral questions.
As for racism, my point was that I can give explicit examples of differences between what are classically called racial groups that you probably agree are all actual genetic differences that have substantial impact on their lives. Tay Sachs in Ashkenazim isn’t the only example. sickle-cell anemia in some African groups and Huntington’s disease in Western Europeans are other examples.
I suspect that you don’t consider yourself a bad person. So what we mean by “racist beliefs.” It seems one doesn’t just mean statistically significant differences in genetics that express themselves in the phenotype. So does one mean such beliefs when related to intelligence? Or does one mean people who assign lower moral worth to some races? if the last is the case, then your statement is probably true by most definitions of “bad people” but then completely useless and uninteresting for the discussion at hand.
I agree that clear agreed upon notions of what a ‘bad person’ is would amount to clear and agreed upon notions of morality. But I think we clearly have the latter, and so the former as well. We may bounce back and forth over tricky cases, like your charitable thief, but that doesn’t mean we are in a state of fundamental confusion or disagreement about anything. (EDIT: notice, for example that you didn’t just ask me ‘is a thief a bad person?’)
This last point would follow if intelligence were as irrelevant to moral worth as is a vulnerability for blood diseases. But we evidentially don’t think it is irrelevant. If I told a random black person on the street that I thought him more vulnerable to sickle-cell on the basis of his race, he would probably just agree with me. If I said he was probably stupid, on the basis of his race, he would (rightly, I think) call me a racist in the morally pejorative sense.
So again, it’s an open question as to what exactly the relationship is between intelligence and moral value such that this is different from the relationship between vulnerability to blood-disease and moral value. The fact that this is an open question should leave open the option that intelligence has nothing to do with moral value, as you imply. Yet I think we have substantial intuitive evidence that this isn’t a good way to go.
I am non-racist because assuming all humans are ultimately the same has proved a better heuristic than the natural tendency to assume that people’s flaws are inherent aspects of their nature. In addition, statistically, I am almost certainly biased against other races (as are you.) While there is probably a negligible effect of race on intelligence and violence, it’s almost(?) too small to measure and the problems of taking it into account are far greater than the amount of influence it has.
TL;DR: I’m non-racist in order to be correct. It’s a heuristic that has served me well, and has served it’s users well historically.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean that all humans are equally smart? Or do you mean assuming some humans are in fact smarter than others but smartness isn’t correlated with say skin color? If the latter, that “all humans are ultimately the same” doesn’t seem like a good summary.
Edit: Or are you attempting some version of what Christians mean by this statement, namely “all humans have a soul and all souls are equal before God”?
I was also slightly offset by this, particularly the vague phrasing “ultimately the same”, which by reflex I would’ve asked to taboo. However, by charitable interpretation, I think the intended meaning is that everyone is running on the same source code. Even if the source code contains modules that take set values according to runtime events and then become irreversible (or extremely difficult to alter), which leads to the same “program” doing vastly different things and having different capabilities.
An example intuition pump here might be to imagine a standard PC running a custom OS that enables or disables a bunch of its key features and messes a bunch of its parameters or will use different optimization subroutines and garbage collection procedures during it startup routine all according to some hidden, unknown algorithm that takes pictures of the user during said startup as input.
Obviously the sourcecode and hardware are the same, but the behavior and capabilities will be radically different depending on the user. You might even be able to hack parts of the OS during runtime to enable certain disabled features or tweak some parameters, but how much can be hacked and how to do it is unknown at first.
Well, this can be made trivially true through a suitable choice of the line between “source code” and “set values”. For example, define the laws of physics and basic biology to be the “source code” and let our DNA and upbringing be the “set values”. I fail to see how this is interesting.
I took his statement to mean, “the variation among individual humans across the entire human species is far greater than any variation between racial subgroups, to the point where the racial variations become negligible”.
While there are of course minor differences between individuals, they tend not to correlate with anything much, and are generally far, far smaller than humans tend to assume. Those terrorists don’t hate our freedom, those women aren’t naturally more emotional, and those blacks aren’t really savages.
I would not object to Bugmaster’s summary, although it seems somewhat overly specific.
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.
Is that really true, though ? As far as I know, and I may be wrong, there are some flaws that are indeed attributable to race. For example, white people suffer from a lack of UV protection as compared to almost everyone else; Asians find it more difficult to metabolize alcohol; etc.
Granted, you are very probably right about intelligence and violence, though.
Sorry, I meant flaws in their personality or whatever. The psychological unity of mankind and all that. Your co-worker kicks his desk because he’s an angry person, you kick your desk because your alarm clock didn’t go off and you had to skip breakfast and then it was raining … or, more to the point, we have to keep on killing Them because those bastards wont stop trying to kill us. And so on.
And there I was thinking civilisation was memetic, not genetic.
In case you’re not just trolling, you should be aware that your comments might be better received if you were a bit less abrupt and toned down the snark.
No one said it was genetic.
People always assume that acknowledgeing a trait in a person requires you to have an explanation for it. And then they note that all possible explanations are politically controverisal, so they conclude that the trait does not actually exist. This is bad logic, as far as I can tell.
The fact is, race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence, violence, etc. I offer no explanations.
What do you mean by “race?” I notice a lot of discussion below on this topic already, but the term is unclear to me, and I don’t see how anyone can usefully disagree or agree without this information. Some people use “race” to indicate loose groupings based around skin color, whereas others mean much more strictly a specific genetic group.
Incidentally, there is no canonical “race,” just generally-agreed upon loose labels that vary from person to person. Because of this, it is generally not useful for predicting anything, and should be avoided, I think. A “white person” from Sicily and a “white person” from Iceland do not have much more in common with each other than they might with a disparate other range of people, so it’s not a meaningful grouping (except perhaps when speaking of historical things). It is wiser to be more exact.
There’s the additional danger that you will be misunderstood, and that someone will (very reasonably) think that you are advocating simple-minded racism of a common sort. Saying “race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence,” etc. is a fairly specific sort of social code, and if you don’t actually mean that “black people are dumb” or “Asians can’t drive,” (and I’m not saying that you necessarily do) then you should find another sort of phrasing.
yes, “race” as normally used is woefully underdefined.
Woah there. To the extent you can agree on a test for race, it will be useful for prediction. Obviously some tests (actual genetic heritage) will be more interesting that others “lol what’s ur skin color”. As you say:
Yes, agree. Let’s be specific enough so that we all agree which set of people we are talking about, and agree that that is a meaningful grouping. Then I think we will find that membership in that set will predict many things.
Saying that race is a good predictor of such things is roughly equivalent to saying “black people are dumb” or whatever (with suitable disclaimers of probabilisticness that really should not be needed on this site). Call that simple minded if you like; I’d rather be right than high-minded.
(and just-so it’s clear, racially-based (or anything-based, really) hatred is stupid and unproductive. compassion is so much nicer.)
I would suggest that most people do have a common test for race. It is something along the lines of, “To what extent does this person match a small set of specific physical characteristics?” For someone to be “black” in many places in modern America, it means that their skin tone is relatively dark, their lips are big, their nose is wide, and so on. But of course, this tends to fall apart under close scrutiny, and is complicated by a lot of cultural baggage, like the fact that “white” is the default, so those of mixed-race are often identified with (or themselves choose to identify with) their minority identity. A prominent example is President Obama, who has few of the physical characteristics of the stereotypical “black” person. This is why it is a very sloppy and pretty useless label, and even though most people agree on a “test,” it remains so.
Of course, it’s absolutely better to be right. But it’s very difficult to determine whether you are right or wrong without rigorous definition of your terms and inquiry. You think that race correlates with other traits, and I agree—but only with strong caveats and reservations, particularly when it comes to questions of causation. That’s why I began by asking: what do you mean by “race”?
EDIT: You appear to be engaged in several other discussions along these lines, so please just let me know if you consider this one is too parallel to the others to be useful. It can be difficult to explain yourself to several people all at the same time, I know.
See this for my full opinion on all of this. Anything I said that contradicts that is deprecated.
The quick version of what I mean by “race” is those things that are both heritable and clustered with visible and genetic markers. Not exactly the classic definition of “race” because it includes memetic heritage as well as genetic.
I will reply there. Thank you.
I thought genes had something to do with race, but feel free to clarify.
Across cultures?
Currently unknown, since they are strongly correlated anyway; race is also a good predictor of cultures.
Not really. There are people of just about every race in just about every culture.
I show you a picture of an asian person (if you’re good at distinguishing them, you notice they’re of Japanese ethnicity, specifically) that you do not know, and it is obvious that I’ve photoshopped clothing, background, and other environmental visual cues that could reveal that person’s culture. You only have their body frame and their face to work with.
What is your probability assignment that this person is of generic asian (japanese) culture, as opposed to any other culture (e.g. that of amazon hunter-gatherer tribes)? Is this probability equal to that for any other culture, as per an even-distribution hypothesis?
Look at the context. Racism only predicts violence and civilsiation inasmuch as it predicts culture, and culture predicts those things better—hell, you couldn’t get a razor blade between culture and civilsiation. So why does Nyan_Sandwich call himself a proto-racist?
The primary observation is one of race. You can visually see that someone is of asian race. You cannot immediately ascertain a specific culture without first learning and recognizing in practice behaviors strongly associated with that culture.
e.g. If you don’t know anything about japanese culture at all, you will not know that a person of japanese race who does not get upset when a stranger who is also japanese calls them by first name without honorifics is most likely not of typical japanese culture, nor will you understand why another does get upset in the same situation. Thus you cannot use their culture as a predictor, since you don’t have any signals that tell you which culture they’re part of. Race is much easier to use as a data point.
This is not obvious, nor does it follow trivially from any logical assertions I’ve seen yet. I’ve never seen claims either way backed by sufficient evidence to move my prior significantly in either direction.
That does not have the slightest bearing on what is most stronglty correlated wtih what, what the causal mechanisms are, and why on Earth Nyan-Sandwich would want to call himself a proto-racist.
“Want to”? Perhaps he merely thinks it’s an accurate description.
I call myself a racist in that I would predict differing values for intelligence, propensity to violence, etc based on observing someone’s race. I find it interesting that there are people who would not. The ones that are especially attached to racial equality have to go to all sorts of lengths to justify why race isn’t evidence of these things.
I call myself a proto-racist because despite being racist on matters of fact, I try to not make the (default) step from there to hatred or smugness. I think it fucking sucks that some people are disadvantaged in intelligence, or in ability to function as a member of civilized society. I think we should do something nice (help) instead of something mean (genocide).
Come on, man. Do you even probability?
If culture comes form acculturation , it doens’t come from genes, and therefore has nothing significant to do with race. The statistical correlations you make so much of aren’t worth making anything of unless they indicate mechanisms.
tell it to the statistics establishment. Methinks I can make better predictions using not-causally-explained statistics than I can without. For example, If I learn of a person who is black and american, I can predict that he is 5x (or whatever it is) more likely to be in prison. I can predict that he is more likely to be a part of that awful antisocial gansta culture.
Of course, if I then learn that at this very moment, he is wearing a cardigan, a lot of that goes away.
If you restrict yourself to causal models, you do very poorly. I might even be tempted to say “I guess you’re fucked then”
I don’t like this. Not sure why.
Could you clarify what you mean, here?
If you throw out information you have reason to believe is true but can’t explain the mechanism for your model is more coherent but less powerful. Does that make sense?
No. How exactly are you defining a causal vs a statistical model? What I find confusing is in the Newtonian physics limit of what you can know, I don’t think you can do better than a causal model, in some sense. I understand that it can happen that non-causal models can predict better if knowledge is not complete, I am just trying to find a way to state that formally.
Let’s talk about fluid dynamics. In FD, we have many equations that were determined by measuring things and approximating their relationship. For example, the darcy weisbach equation for drag in a pipe:
dP = fd*L/D*rho*v^2/2. This equation (and other like it) is called a corellation, or an empirical equation, as opposed to a theoretical model. To demonstrate the power of corellations, consider that we still can’t predict fd from theory (except for laminar flow). At this point, it’s just a lack of computing power, the use of which would be esentially the same as measurement anyways. There were times in the past, though, where we didn’t know even in principle how to get that from theory.Bascially, you need to be able to look at the world and describe what you see, even if you can’t explain it. If we’d taken the policy of ignoring corellations that couldn’t be understood causally, we still wouldn’t have airplanes, plumbing, engines, etc.
I don’t think these sorts of equations are good examples of what you are trying to say, since laws of physics and related equations are counterfactual and thus causal. That is, if I were to counterfactually change the length of the pipe in your equation, it would still predict the loss correctly. Invariance to change is precisely what makes these kinds of equations useful and powerful, and this invariance is causal. The fact that the equation is ‘ad hoc’ rather than deduced from a theory is irrelevant to whether the equation is causal or not. Causality has to do with counterfactual invariance (see also Hume’s counterfactual definition).
I think a better example would be something like the crazy “expert voting” algorithm that won the Netflix prize. I think in that case, though, given sufficient knowledge, a causal model would do better. Not because it was causal, mind you, but just because observing enough about the domain gives you as a side effect causal knowledge of the domain. In the Netflix prize case, which was about movie recommendations, ‘sufficient knowledge’ would entail having detailed knowledge of decision and preference algorithms of all potential users of the system. At that point, the model becomes so detailed it inevitably encodes causal information.
The people who supply statistics to people who are looking for causal mechanisms.
“American” isn’t a race. An american of any race has a n enhanced likelihood of being in jail, becaue the US imprisons a lot of poeple. Have I converted you to Americainism?
Culture is culture, not race.
Better than, say, poverty? Source please.
Make sure you’re distinguishing between the claim that P(intelligence = x|income = i) = P(intelligence = x|race = r,income = i), which would be that poverty screens off the effects of race, and the claim that P(intelligence = x|race = r) = P(intelligence = x), which is the claim that intelligence and race are unconditionally independent. The first claim is only relevant to nyan_sandwich’s claim if by “good” you mean “better than income” rather than “worth knowing.”
As it stands, both of those claims are pretty obviously false if you take a look an unbiased look at the data. Life is not fair.
The left-hand side of the first equation was supposed to be P(intelligence = x|income = i)?
Yes, it was. Thanks for the correction!
By poverty, I meant background, not income (which is determined by background to an extent, along with talent and so on.). Just a point of clarification there. And yes, I was claiming both that poverty screens off race. However, note that it was not merely intelligence—a much more plausible claim—but violent tendencies and “civilization”.
I’ve retracted the civilization thing because it’s not clear what it even means.
do you think violent tendency is less corellated with race than intelligence? (it depends where we are talking about. I would expect only a very weak link here in my hometown (vancouver), a strong link in US and european cities)
Well, historically, it meant the idea that they couldn’t produce or participate in civilizations, due to poor impulse control or whatever. But fair enough, that was always your least defensible claim.
As has already been pointed out, if you expect the link to be weaker in different societies, than the link is caused by society. If you compare people of different races raised and living in the same conditions, and there’s no difference, then racism is wrong. If there is a difference—for example, if black men are still just as likely to commit crimes—then, and only then, do you have a point. Consider slave-owners who refused to educate slaves because they were stupid—of course they were, when did you last meet a slave who could read or write?
Only then could propensity to crime be an inherent, genetic thing. And the inference that that was the case may still be wrong, for example if black people are bombarded by messages that they are supposed to be become criminals, or are otherwise influenced by the people around them. It would be very difficult to seperate the inherent genetic traits from those that are caused by percieved race.
I feel like we are talking past each other, so I am going to take this opportunity to state and steel-man the position of the modern “racist” in its entirety. (maybe this should be a discussion post).
Let’s start with something simple that I hope we can agree on. Group people by genetic heritage, and by social class, and by intelligence, and by antisocial behaviour. “Genetic heritage” is clear enough, I hope. “Class” is rather slippery in this analysis unless we are careful with it. Let’s pin it down right now to be talking about environment, not where a person ends up. We’ll see why later. Anyways, if you make these groupings, you will find that there is a lot of mutual information between them. That is, they are not independent. If you don’t believe this, assume it for now.
There are two ways we could take it from here, and I’m not sure which is right: We could note that race is conditionally independent of the others given social environment. Then we would conclude that race and class were caused by some other variable (who your parents were), and that only class causes intelligence and antisocial behavior. Note that we defined “class” in such a way that it cannot be caused by race, or cause race. As far as I can tell, this is the world as the non-racists see it. This could very well be the case.
Another way it could be is that race does impact intelligence and antisocial behaviour indpendently of class. This is what I’ll call “strong racism”. I would not be suprised if this were the case.
At this point, I hope I’ve said nothing controversial. The redefinition of “class” rubs me the wrong way, but I couldn’t think of anything else to call that node. Ok, let’s move on to the implications.
Let’s boot up the racist and see what he says about all this. The racist says “I don’t care which of the two it is, and here’s why:”. Uh oh, here we go.
Let’s do a little thought experiment: group someone’s genes by those that define who they are as a person, and those that define what they look like. Let’s say there’s no overlap between these, that is, that a given gene cannot both impact personhood and appearance. (there’s reasons to suspect overlap, but this is a thought experiment). Let’s further say that, for obvious reasons (subpopulations), having gene
A, which affects appearance, is quite strongly corellated with having genealpha, which affects personality. Extend this to most of the genes so that you can largely predict someones appearance genes from which cluster of personality genes they come from, and the other way around. Does it seem unreasonable to talk about which cluster you belong to without specifying which of appearance or personality you are refering to, given that you can say things like “people with visual trait X have personality trait Y”, which I hope seems reasonable itself, in this case. Note that this is the imaginary world where “strong racism” is correct.Ok, given that, if you’re still reading, let’s draw a parallel to the weak racist world where genes affect appearance and such, and memes affect intelligence and personality and such, and these factors are both highly heritable and highly corellated. (This is our world). When asked to comment, the weak racist says “Why should it matter whether a highly heritable component of who someone is is genetic or memetic or on the 13th chromosome or the 14th? Can’t we just point to the empirical clusters and say ‘that there is a meaningful cluster’, given that it does seem to cluster in a meaningful way?”. At this point the lines are open and the objections are coming in fast:
“But you can’t just hate someone because they belong to some disadvantaged empirical cluster”. Correct, in fact, I would say that we should say “that fucking sucks and we should go kick God’s ass for creating such an unfair world”.
“But there are places (like Vancouver) where, for selection and social reasons, race is independent of other things, therefore race is not interesting.” Yes, then no. In our imaginary strongly racist world, there are places where green eyes and black hair does not corellate with a ketchup fetish and kleptomania, but in most of the world it does, so “wiggin” is still a meaningful term. More generally, just because you can find a subset of your survey population that does not have the corellations you find in the whole, doesn’t mean you can reject the corellations in the whole. Especially given that if you look at enough subpopulations, you’ll find ones that go just about any way you like, so you might as well cherry-pick your data if you are going to do that. All such a non-corellation proves is that the variables of interest don’t have a common atomic cause (or that you have selection effects in your data).
“What about a guy who wears a cardigan and goes to harvard? If you learn he is black, should you then conclude he is stupid and violent like the stereotype?” No, because no matter how things go, who you became screens off any possible cause.
I’ve run out of things to say. At this point though, we know how to react to all of the possible cases:
There is no link between race and behaviour. ⇒ yay happy liberal world.
There is a link between race and behaviour, but it’s mostly memetic-historical. ⇒ That really sucks for some people, and we should go kick God’s ass with a memetic and social intervention.
The is a link, and it’s partially genetic. ⇒ That sucks, and we should go kick God’s ass with a hybrid memetic/social and genetic (when feasable) intervention.
There. Now we have comprehensive lines of retreat. Now and only now are we prepared to go take an unbiased look at the data, because none of the possibilities are scary anymore. I haven’t looked very hard, but I think it’s the third case. Not that I really care; I’ve got plans however it happens to be.
That’s modern compassionate steel-man racism. Sorry for the length.
I think childhood role models and so on is a part of one’s upbringing and “society”, don’t you?
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 differenc between loaded dice and an opponent who regularly lies about the results, if you see what I mean.
“Upbringing”? “Background”? I’m OK with class, TBH, as long as we both know what we mean.
Here we go indeed. The racist is supposed to hold a belief abut how he world is, i.e. that intelligence and so on are as much racial characteristics as skin tone.
Fair enough. This is what our pet racist here believes is true, yes?
No no no no no.
Consider various brands of Wiggin.
For whatever reason, Wiggins are usually born to disadvantaged families, and must live off. ketchup and steal simply to survive. They often have trouble breaking these habits when they are fortunate enough to escape their poverty
The genes responsible for black hair and green eyes are heavily correlated with the ones causing kleptomania and a craving for ketchup.
Wiggins are constantly expected to steal and eat ketchup, and people generally behave as society expects.
Now, in all these situations Wiggins do, in fact, steal and eat ketchup. However, in the first case, once we know that this particular wiggin grew up in a well-to-do environment, we should no longer expext them to steal our ketchup. In addition, we should expect anyone who grew up in a disadvantaged home to act “wiggin-like”, not just those with black hair and green eyes.
In the second case, there is no need to consider the upbringing of a particular Wiggin, since they all have similar odds of stealing our ketchup. In this case, however, we can perform genetic tests to identify whatever genes may be causing this problem; and of course there is a case to be made for sterilizing Wiggins to prevent their criminal genes from spreading—especially to non-wiggins, who would interfere with our ability to judge the likelihood of ketchup-theft by a particular individual.
In the third case, we have something of a dilemma. On the one hand, we need to protect our ketchup from thieving Wiggins. On the other hand, assuming any Wiggin will try and steal it will only encourage them. In this case, while we realize that a wiggin-like appearance is a risk factor for ketchup-theft, we must strive to treat them equally; only hiding our ketchup if we know they already steal (and we should do likewise to non-wiggins.)
What this proves is that you should take location into account when estimating the odds of a particular individual acting like a Wiggin.
Not necessarily. If race determines violent tendencies and intelligence, then, while he may well be unusually intelligent, we should still be wary of him attacking us. Furthermore, we should increase our probability that he is unusually stupid for a cardigan-wearing harvard-goer, and achieved that status by some other means than intelligence.
I’m pretty sure that admitting that, if racists were right, genocide would be justifiable, is a line of retreat. But then I already admitted that, so whatever. The problem is that you can’t get from “I update my probability of a harvard degree downward when I learn that he’s black” to “racists are right”. You have to check if the environment is causing all or most of the differences.
Not entirely, since the environment where a particular Wiggin grew up, is affected by his parents’ genes.
This makes a lot of assumptions about psychology that are not at all obvious. For example, it might be that if Wiggins have less opportunity to steal ketchup, fewer of them will do it and eventually the strength of the expectation itself will decrease.
Well, yes. I was simplifying for clarity.
The entire point of the example is that the assumption that they want to steal ketchup is what causes it. If you assume they will try (as evidenced by hiding the ketchup when you see them,) then they will conform to expectations by trying. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of the purest sort.
To be honest, I just made this one up to have a third example, and also to show the level of self-reference possible. It’s much less grounded in reality.
I was basically drawing attention to that fact. Also Ockham’s razor is a great way to cut down on self-reference in these kinds of situations.
I specifically wanted a self-referential example because many posited real examples are self-referential in some way.
It could also mean that the link is weakened by different social conditions to different extents. It could be a selection effect on the kind of people who move to Vancouver.
In any case, even this statement has politically incorrect implications, namely that we shouldn’t be considering Black/Ebonics culture as equal in value to mainstream culture.
By “caused by society” I was referring more to a lack of role models, higher likelihood of a low-income upbringing, alienation due to societal discrimination etc.
However, I would indeed claim that any culture that is encouraging violent tendencies and discouraging academic success should be improved by any means possible.
In that case the argument of yours I quoted in the parent is almost a complete non-sequitor.
How so? You claimed I was dissing “Black culture”.
Oh, sorry. I was dissing “Black culture” and pointing out that my argument followed from what I thought you meant.
If the link varies amongst persons of the same race in differnt places, then it’s not that much to do with race, is it? Would you predict that an African-American offspring of two college professors living in New England was a violent imbecile?
Eh? What is this thing you call “race,” Earth Monkey?
We used to think the answer was obvious. You know, it’s obvious what “race” someone is, isn’t it? Until you start to look at the details.
Race is a cultural convention. There is a science of population genetics, and it isn’t about “race.” Rather, people use population genetics to infer the social marker called “race.”
I adopted an African girl. What “race” is she? What determines this? She has tribal markings on her eyes—or the scars from tribal medicine for conjunctivitis, hard to tell—but the markings are characteristic of her region and tribe, so someone who knows could tell where she comes from, as to the region.
I once had a friend tell me that my Chinese daughter was, of course, going to be more intelligent than the Ethiopian girl. The Chinese daughter is no slouch, intellectually, but her younger sister is definitely smart as hell. My friend was a racist. Lots of people are racist. That is, they believe that race is a biological or even a “spiritual” reality. He wasn’t being mean, he was just being ignorant.
What determines it? Ancestry. Race is basically a way of asking “who were your ancestors?” and accepting a blurry answer because, well, each person has a lot of ancestors! That version of race is obviously a biological reality, because people have different ancestries, even going back long distances, and the ancestry distribution can be geographically plotted. If you go back thirty generations for me, I would need to have about a billion distinct ancestors for there to be no inbreeding; the entire world didn’t have that many people! Europe, the probable source for most of my ancestry, only had about 50 million people thirty generations ago, and even then it’s unlikely that all of them are my ancestors- for one, many of them didn’t have any children! I’d estimate somewhere less than 10% of the total world population at any point since 1000 AD is in my ancestry, and the distribution of their contribution to my ancestry is pretty localized. It’s probable there’s many people out there who share none of my ancestry for a full thirty generations back, and there’s one who (probably) shares it completely.
Knowing she was adopted from Africa, odds are good that she’s mostly African. That’s only one step more informative than “human,” since it only gives you the archaic racial category- Negroid- which tells you as much as “Caucasoid” or “Mongoloid.” Ethnicity would give a much narrower picture- about one person in six is African, but only about one person in four thousand is Gurage.
Adding on the data that she’s Ethiopian muddies the picture- due to its northeastern position, Ethiopia has been the site of significant mixing, and there’s quite a bit of ethnic diversity: the primary ethnicity, Oromo, is only a third of the population- your Chinese daughter, though, most likely has significant Han ancestry (92% of the population of mainland China).
So, using the archaic terms and assuming she’s from one of the more prevalent ethnicities, your daughter probably has about 60% Caucasoid ancestry and 40% Negroid ancestry.
So, good IQ estimates in Africa are generally hard to come by, but Ethiopia supposedly has the world’s lowest average IQ, at 63 (administered in 1991, sample size of 250), and China is estimated to have an average IQ of 100. Working off that data (and assuming both groups have a standard deviation of 15), that gives a 96% chance that the Chinese daughter is smarter. Now, the Ethiopian data is spotty, especially the normality assumption- one of the pitfalls of historic IQ testing is that 0 scores are treated as 0s, dragging down the average, instead of an separate number of “people who didn’t understand the concept of the test.” It’s also not clear what selection effects adoption has; children that get adopted out are likely to not be representative of the country as a whole, and it’s hard to say if that would be a positive or negative effect. If we use the African American average IQ of 85 instead of the estimated Ethiopian averaged IQ, and still assume that we should use the Chinese average, we get a 76% chance that the Chinese daughter is cleverer.
Of course, given that they’re your daughters, there’s not much reason to guess; you could just get them both tested, which would be way cheaper and more informative than sponsoring another test of Ethiopian national IQ.
Yep. The most recent common ancestor of living humans lived at least a couple millennia (i.e. about seventy generations) ago. (EDIT: I’m not fully convinced that that implies that for any time t later than that, there’s at least one with you no ancestry at time t. I’m too tired to trust my cognitive abilities right now.)
Do you have any reason in particular to suspect that you and your sibling may have different biological fathers, or is the “probably” a 1-is-not-a-probability self-nitpick?
It’s not “1-is-not-a-probability” so much as it is “the base rate of this is not 0″; there’s also the chance that I was switched at birth (hospitals are much better at avoiding this now than they have been in the past). If my family signs up for 23andMe, then the probability will either shoot up towards 1 or drop down to negligible, but until then I’m going with the base rate.
Really during your life you haven’t encountered much net evidence towards either direction shifting your probability assignment away from the base rate, e.g. how much you look like your parents, whether you share some uncommon medical condition with either of them, blood type, etc.?
I have very little expertise in quantifying the effect of that evidence, and in the aggregate it doesn’t seem strong enough to make the probability negligible or large.
The strategic concerns here are also amusing to ponder. (There’s several reasons that 23andMe shows you 2nd and higher cousins with no prompting, but wants your approval before they show you first cousins.) The more one suspects being swapped at birth, the more important it is to find one’s birth family for health prediction. But, I’ve had my SNPs read, which I imagine screens off much of the benefit of knowing family history for medical conditions. It’s also less damaging to the existing family structure: most people who learn they were swapped at birth maintain their relationship with the parents that raised them, and also gain some sort of relationship with their genetic parents.
If you suspect infidelity, though, then the picture is very different. Again, learning your birth father tells you something about health, and may be a valuable social relationship (for one, they may not have any other children; in the swap case, there’s someone else in the mirror of your situation); it’s probably tremendously destructive to your current family arrangement, though.
Also, probably the effects of nurture contribute to keeping their average IQ that low; it seems unlikely to me that the fact that the average IQ of African Americans is 22 points higher is entirely due to the European genetic admixture in the latter. (EDIT: And I hadn’t even noticed you mentioned Ethiopians have lots of Caucasoid ancestry too!)
That is not what “race” means when people use the word. Race is a division of humanity into categories. Who determines the categories? Do those categories naturally occur? On what does the “race” category depend? Can “race” be identified visually? Can it be genetically determined?
Yes, if you divide people up into “races,” or into geographical population groups, and study their genetics, you can find statistical significance, but the two divisions will produce differing evaluations for individuals.
The classic way to identify someone’s “race” involves identifying one’s own group visually (and sometimes behaviorally, perhaps through dialect or language), and then lumping together those who don’t seem to match “my race” into other groups. That is why someone who is “mixed race” will be lumped into the “other group,” until the mixture becomes small enough to not be visible. How people perceive themselves is irrelevant to this process.
“Race” is a racist concept, naturally. The word “racist” is hot, and gets mixed up with racial chauvinism, but that’s distracting. I use “racism” to refer to the belief in race as an objective reality.
I wrote that population genetics was a reality. Race is not. It’s arbitrary, and race is not scientifically defined. The conclusion is a non sequitur. Race has been totally discredited academically, and that’s not just political correctness.
Odds are entirely that she is African, i.e., she was born in Africa. I know that her grandparents were born in Africa, in her tribal region. Beyond that, I don’t know. Probably it goes back further, but there are always strays.
If her ancestry plot maintains “African” location, say entirely, back, say, 20 generations, does that mean that she is racially “African”? I hope you’d know that this could give results that might seem preposterous to those who depend on visual identification of “race.”
The basic question is being ignored. How is “race” identified? As used, my “race” does not depend on where I was born. It depends on … what? Where someone else was born? Who, specifically? What lumps all these people together? And separates them from others, who might look quite the same?
“Archaic racial category.” So race is being used to define race? Those are just as you stated, “racial” categories, which assumes some identity based on … what?
Lucky guess about my Chinese daughter. The one-child policy impacts Han Chinese the most.
However, “Ethiopian” tells you almost nothing about “race.” Let’s start with this: Each tribal grouping in Ethiopia, by default, considers itself to be very different from the others. There are over seventy such groupings in Ethiopia, if we mark them by language.
Unlikely, in fact. She’s from the Kambata-Timbaro Tribal Region, her native language was Kambatigna. It’s a minor ethnicity, there are maybe a few hundred thousand Kambata.
In the U.S., she is readily identified by people as “Black.” She doesn’t look “Ethiopian” (which is popularly known through high-Arab ancestry general appearance). Is “Black” a race? What defines it?
Was that a test administered racially, or was it according to how and where the child was raised and tested?
What kind of intelligence was measured? Intelligence generally confers survival value, but the form of intelligence selected shifts with environment.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Ethiopian “national IQ” is totally irrelevant. Somehow, Ethiopia, with that supposedly low IQ, managed, almost uniquely in Africa, to avoid extended outside control, with an ancient and literate culture.
What I personally know is that, possibly contrary to stereotypes, the Ethiopian girl is highly competitive, she stars at whatever she does, the Chinese girl—raised here since she was under a year old—is shyer and suffers from the shadow of her younger sister. Both girls have no difficulty figuring out how to do what they want on computers. I have no confidence that IQ tests would tell me much of value, though at some point both girls will be tested to determine if they belong in “gifted” programs.
My racist friend knew nothing about my daughter’s ethnicity, he was judging entirely on “African,” based on his early experience with “Blacks” on the street in America (are they “African”?) , which wasn’t, shall we say, “positive.”
Sorry I ddin’t read all of your wall of text yet, but I find it fishy that you’re allowed to redefine “racism” to mean “non-hating acknowledgement of differences due to ancestry” but Vaniver isn’t allowed to use race in the normal sense of “what’s ur ancestry?”.
Genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.
A quote from wikipedia:
“Forensic physical anthropologist and professor George W. Gill has said that the idea that race is only skin deep “is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm” and “Many morphological features tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones. This is not surprising since the selective forces of climate are probably the primary forces of nature that have shaped human races with regard not only to skin color and hair form but also the underlying bony structures of the nose, cheekbones, etc. (For example, more prominent noses humidify air better.)” While he can see good arguments for both sides, the complete denial of the opposing evidence “seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all”. He also states that many biological anthropologists see races as real yet “not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship”.
The input is the claim ‘Race is a cultural convention.’ You output the interpretation: ‘None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.’ Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists’ claim is really what you take it to be.
Perhaps what is being denied is not the existence of morphological variation between human populations, but rather the conceptualization of these differences under the traditional concept of Race, with its assumptions of discreteness and of other markers of cultural and bio-diversity strictly mapping on to a small set of physiognomic markers. Perhaps what is also being asserted is that the precise boundaries between races, and how large or small a ‘race’ gets to be, is culturally constructed and varies across different groups possessing ‘race’-like categories. Is it more likely that anthropologists are speaking somewhat loosely and infelicitously, or that they think the existence of darker and lighter skins in different parts of the world is a Grand Alien Conspiracy?
Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant. You get a photo of Colin Powell and he was about light-skinned as Bush—so since different people of the same skin-hue are one called ‘white’ and the other ‘black’, one thinks it might the division may be entirely a cultural artifact.
Also there’s no single characteristic which doesn’t fluctuate gradually across populations—so any grouping seems again entirely arbitrary.
But a visual that got me to understand the above view was too-simplistic was this graph here at Lewontin’s argument and criticism. Though any one characteristic wouldn’t suffice to divide humanity meaningfully into races, several characterics taken together in can form clusters...
So such groupings are in fact meaningful.
If you used to believe this yourself, then maybe you can explain to me what you mean(t) by ‘entirely a cultural artifact.’ Did you think that the people in question didn’t have different skin tones? That skin tone isn’t a genetic trait? That there was no correlation between a racial grouping and any phenotypic or genetic marker, like skin color? That genetic relatedness is confabulated in a grand game of make-believe?
“there’s no single characteristic which doesn’t fluctuate gradually across populations”—No, some traits have reached fixation in a population, or are totally absent. But I take your point. It’s still understandable that categories predating our modern, sophisticated notions of genetic variation would be controversial in their attempted modern reimaginings.
Colin Powell did not have a different skin tone than George W. Bush; yes—no categorization based on skin-color would actually put Colin Powell in a different category than Bush, while putting him in the same category with Condoleeza Rice: Relevant photo.
And whole groups that Americans called non-white (like Middle-easterners) looked likewise pretty white to me.
There was correlation with physical characterics obviously—much like you could say that Swedes are more often blonde, but that the actual lines drawn around the category didn’t really have anything to do with physical characteristics—same way that Swedish citizenship correlates with blondness but isn’t defined by blondness.
I’ve seen the photo. So your claim is that anthropologists, like yesteryou, once believed that 100% of ‘black’ people had darker skin than 100% of ‘white’ people, with zero overlap? This seems very implausible.
That’s no coincidence. American authorities typically group most Middle Easterners with Europeans as ‘Caucasians.’
But being of Swedish descent does have biological meaning and significance, albeit to a lesser degree than being of African descent. So what can be meant by the claim that race is ‘merely’ like being Swedish? Is it merely a fuzzy quantitative shift, not a categorical disagreement about what ‘race’ is or how it fits into the natural world?
Allow me to attempt to rationally reconstruct what the younger you and the straw-anthropologist believed. Based on the evidence that changed your mind, I gather that your old view was not that racial distinctions were nonexistent, but that they were biologically superficial. The obvious phenotypic variations very nearly exhausted the distinctness of each racial group. So when you advocate racialism, what you’re really trying to draw attention to is that race is more than skin deep, that there are many many genetic traits, some very significant, that break down along racial lines of various sorts. And this is indeed an important point, though framing it as a dispute over whether ‘races’ are ‘real’ is, to put it mildly, misleading.
I don’t know about anthropologists. I thought I explained that my yesterme saw the opposite of what you just said: saw that some people labelled ‘black’ had skins as light (or almost as light) as ‘white’ people. So I saw the dividing line between ‘black’ and ‘white’ to be utterly arbitrary, a line arbitrarily drawn in some continuum, and which best seemed to identify cultural not biological differences.
Keep in mind that my yesterme was a Greek boy, and had no occasion to have known about e.g. Afro-textured hair or different nose structures, etc. or any other collection of physical characteristics that together could form a cluster.
No, I’m not talking about mere superficiality, nor about how insignificant or significant the traits were. I’m talking about an utterly arbitrary line drawn between populations of people. As if someone had arbitrarily said that the numbers >72 are the “orange” numbers and the numbers <72 are the “purple” numbers.
With only one trait in question to divide the races, this judgement of mine would have remained valid—no matter if it’s something as insignificant as skin-color or as significant as IQ.
It’s the combination of more than one trait (e.g. skin-color AND hair-texture AND nose-shape) that makes racial visual identification a classification of actual observed clusters in the human species—again REGARDLESS of whether the traits are “significant” or “superficial” or “important” or whatever.
So you were guilty of two bits of ignorance. Instead of my ‘racial traits are all superficial’ (which sounds like a much more plausible error for multiculturalists, anthropologists, etc. to make), your view was that (a) ‘there is only a single phenotypic trait distinguishing each race from the others,’ and (b) ‘these traits exist on a continuum smoothly linking all the races.’
Since these two old views of yours are how you understand the claim ‘race is a cultural construct,’ you are then asserting that people who reduce race to a cultural construct are ignorant of, or in denial regarding, the fact that different racial groups have different common ancestors over long stretches over time, owing to reproductive isolation. So you are effectively asserting that the anti-racialists are guilty of doubting the existence of continents, mountain ranges, and other sources of reproductive isolation that could interrupt various continua. This seems like an extremely implausible claim to impute to others, whether or not you naively believed it yourself; so you’ll need to cite sources demonstrating that the people in question really did hold this view.
You are also asserting that the ‘race is a cultural construct’ crowd think that race is not merely superficial, but reducible to a single trait and nothing else. For instance, anti-racialists can allow that east Asians have an epicanthic fold, or can acknowledge that they have darker eyes and hair than Europeans, but cannot acknowledge both of these facts, since this would then be asserting that races are distinguished by clusters and not by single phenotypic effects. Again, this is an extraordinary claim, much more radical and ridiculous than my moderate suggestion that anti-racialists tend to think of this clustering as ‘only skin-deep.’ So again, you are obliged to provide some references demonstrating that this is the stance of anti-racialists, on pain of straw-manning.
People can see what I’m “asserting” by reading my own sentences. Any assertion that I actually make, you can quote word-for-word. All your assertions about my supposed assertions, I disavow.
Downvoted, because putting words in another man’s mouth is one of the tactics I least appreciate and least want to see in this forum. I consider it a form of slander.
Aris Katsaris, you’re the one accusing the field of physical anthropology (and other people sharing anti-racialist views of this sort) of promoting the unargued assumption “Race is a cultural convention.” and of dismissing the possibility of any alternative view. As yet, in this entire conversation you have provided no evidence of this; so I’ve instead had to focus on clarifying what you mean by this accusation. (I was not under the impression that trying to unpack and understand libel was itself libelous; but if so, I will tread with caution...) Your evidence that this is a plausible accusation, and your explanation of what this accusation means in concrete terms, both reduce to your own past experience of believing:
… which seems to be denying the occurrence of the mechanism (reproductive isolation) that blocks continuous variation. If this is not a fair characterization of your characterization of the anti-racialist position, then explain what you really mean and why my exposition is off-base. And again, quoting you:
… which seems to be denying that racial groups have more than a single trait in common. If this is not a fair characterization of your characterization of the anti-racialist position, then, again, explain how.
Good-faith use of the technique of paraphrasing in order to make sure you’ve understood what the other person has said is extremely important, indeed an indispensable one for successful discussion. Part of why it’s important is precisely because it’s so easy to misunderstand someone; so it’s my goal to be corrected by you, if I have misrepresented you, and paraphrasing serves both this goal (by making transparent my understanding of you) and the goal of clarifying what’s actually under dispute. If the sky is not blue, I desire to believe that the sky is not blue. But I cannot revise my model of your argument and beliefs if you do not articulate specifically what I got wrong, and what the right explication is.
You mistook my interpretation for a straw-man. (Note: Accusing people of ‘slander’ is rather less conducive to productive discussion than noting a straw-man fallacy and moving on; and simply pointing out the error and how it occurred is more conducive still.) But my ‘superficiality’ interpretation was an attempt to steel-man your position, and when you completely dismiss my steel men and assert they are not what you meant, it severely limits my interpretive options. Hence my more recent interpretations do make your position appear weaker. Perhaps that means you should reconsider whether your view is justified. Or perhaps that means I misrepresented you; in that case, it should be supremely easy to explain how I did so, and to clarify precisely how your intended meaning differs from what I said.
Given the downvoting I received, I updated upwards on the possibility that I was wrong on my interpretation of the thread, and reread it from the start. As such I’m retracting my accusation of you as a troll—though I still don’t appreciate some of your communication tactics (next time please just ask whether I’m asserting something), and I still can’t tell if you’re arguing in good faith, I can see how you may indeed be doing that, given some unclear/badly communicated bits on my part, including how I didn’t clarify that I wasn’t necessarily agreeing with all the parts of the quote I provided.
I’m at work right now, but later today, I will try to briefly “unpack” my position again, from scratch, hopefully bridging the inferential gap between us.
Given how much karma you have on this site, and how reasonable most of your comments are, I’m updating upwards myself on the chance that I’ve been using some discussion tactics that needlessly put people on the defensive. I apologize for not clearly distinguishing my paraphrases and counter-arguments.
Also, I don’t think that quotation you cited is totally crazy. It does need some defending and unpacking, and if you want to jettison some parts of it, feel free. I’m familiar with some of the excesses people on both sides of the racialism debate can fall into, and part of my motivation for pushing you on this issue was an honest curiosity to see if you have examples of the kinds of excesses that give you such a dim view of the anti-racialist side of the issue. Since this seems to be essentially a terminological dispute, I don’t particularly care about whether we retain use of the word ‘race’ or not; but I do care about the deeper-level misconceptions fueling the controversy.
I’ll try here to clarify some points better than I did last time, and then I’ll bow out of this thread.
First of all, in regards to the George W. Gill quote—my primary desire in providing that quote was to indicate forensic anthropologists consider ‘race’ to be more than a cultural construct. The last part of the quote, which refers to the opposing views, I should have left out as I’m not actually informed enough about the academia to discuss the extent that the ‘cultural construct’ view is politically motivated or not.
Now trying to unpack my own views on the ‘race’ and ‘cultural construct’ issue. Some plain facts both yesterme believe and I still believe: “Race” as the word is typically meant, is a grouping of people, visually identified as such by other people—in this they differ from things like e.g. ‘nationalities’ which can’t be visually identified.
So effectively “racial categories” is a map. But a map may be drawn either
A) in non-arbitrary lines, according to some natural shape (e.g. a map of continents) -- in which it identifies some reality that an objective disinterested observer would map in roughly the same manner. In which case we can call said model a natural model.
or B) it may be drawn almost entirely according to political/cultural and arbitrary criteria which no two observers would draw in the same way unless they both rested on the same cultural tradition. In which case we call it a “cultural construct”.
E.g. if someone is asked to divide human beings in two great categories according to biology that relates to reproductive functions, it’s easy enough to figure that the human species would “naturally” be divided into males and females—because there’s a biological reality under that. Such dividing lines, between people with XX and people with XY chromosomes is an obvious Schelling point.
But consider the calendar. The solar year is a natural enough division. A month so-and-so, roughly following the moon, but not quite. And a week or a century aren’t natural divisions at all—they’re dependent on cultural constructs. If you try to divide human history into eras, the cultural construct becomes even more visible. Even if you go with “Hellenistic” “Classical” “Middle Ages” “Rennaisance” “Modern era” in one corner of the world, you’ll have to go with “Heian” and “Edo” eras in another corner. And even limited in one area of the world, it’d all be about what we as history-readers are supposed to consider significant.
Now going back to the issue of race—both the current me and the yesterme believe that what human beings call “race” is between (A) and (B) -- to significant part a cultural construct, but not completely. The difference between me and yesterme is that some years back I considered race to be almost entirely a cultural construct, -- because I saw no clear clusters (and therefore no “natural” categories) for any one characteristic and I hadn’t yet visualized how a combination of multiple characteristics could form “natural” clusters when any single characteristic by itself did not.
Having now visualized this, I realize that such clustering can actually form “natural” racial categories, some of which will match up really with what people identify as such.
That having been said, race in America at least is obviously still to some extent a cultural construct—which is why e.g. partly-African partly-European descent people are much more often grouped with completely-African people than with completely-European descent people.
Now any former belief of mine doesn’t need to have also been held by other people in order to treat ‘race’ as a cultural construct. They need have ONLY considered the particular clusters that our society calls “clusters” as cultural constructs, rather than as naturally occurring categories.
This certainly doesn’t mean that they need have disbelieved in “mountain ranges” or “continents” or even that there exist populations of largely differing genetic characteristics—they needn’t even disbelieve that a natural map can indeed be drawn. They need only disbelieve that society’s current map is natural.
Now I’m bowing out of this thread. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by further elaboration of beliefs of my yesterme or even my current me on the subject.
No, I don’t remember accusing that field of anything. Since your comment begins with a blatant falsehood, I will not bother reading the rest of it. Downvoting it unread, and classifying you as a troll.
You seem to have forgotten how this conversation got started. Someone said “Race is a cultural convention.” You argued that this claim, although common in physical anthropology (you cited George W. Gill’s view to support this assertion), is false. I suggested a more charitable, steel-mannish reading of the “Race is a cultural convention.” thesis, and asked you what your own reading of this common multiculturalist thesis is. You responded “Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant.”, and then proceeded to unpack your own earlier views. We’re still trying to do that unpacking, and unless you’ve silently changed your mind about the structure of this discussion, you’re still trying to give an exposition of what the anthropology textbooks in question, and most other people who support this view, have in mind.
My suggestion is that you have yet to give an interpretation of “Race is a cultural convention.”, and of the general anti-racial-categorizations thesis, that would plausibly have been held by academics, since the denial of more than one racial trait statistically clustering together, and the denial of non-continuous human variation, both reflect truly fundamental misunderstandings of human phenotypic and geographical variation. At the very least, a great deal of textual evidence would be needed to justify attributing such a strong, absurd thesis to so many anti-racialist people. Now: Where, precisely, do you disagree with my representation of this discussion? And where, precisely, do you disagree with my specific counter-arguments?
If by ‘troll’ you mean ‘someone acting in bad faith,’ might I suggest that your human psychological model is a bit implausible? (Or, possibly, you have become too personally invested and are not applying your own model carefully. I couldn’t say.) A corollary of Hanlon’s Razor: ‘Never attribute to trolling that which is adequately explained by good-faith misunderstanding or disagreement.’
It’s understandable that you’re angry; dissonance (both internal and social) inevitably makes us angry. Intellectual virtue isn’t about being stoically immune to such responses from our very primate brain; it’s about how you handle them when they arise, how you minimize the damage. Just a word to the wise.
Technically, libel.
Middle Easterners’ skins do look noticeably darker than those of typical native English speakers of European ancestry, to me. But then again, so do those of certain (but not all)¹ Italians, whom I don’t think any sizeable number of Americans would call non-white.
ISTM that there’s much larger variation in skin colours among Italians than among northern Europeans or among Middle Easterners. (All the people in this picture are Italian with no sizeable foreign admixture that I know of except in one case, and none is albino or anything like that.)
...and seven hours after I post this, I see a friend of mine whose skin is almost as pale as that of a typical Irishwoman and I remember that her parents are from the Middle East. God, I am full of crap certain times.
The problem is that when asked to justify that statement ‘Race is a cultural convention’ anthropologists in interpret it in the way you describe in your second paragraph, but they than proceed to use it in arguments as if it means ‘None of the phenotypic variations (except possibly skin color) associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments’.
That’s extremely strange and surprising, if true. Can you provide an example of this?
Care to name names?
Names of racists who believe other races are inferior? Racists who think other races are an active threat? Commenters who have claimed racists are evil mutants? I’m not sure what you could be asking that couldn’t be answered with, at most, a quick Google search or the phrase “all of them?”
Sorry for being too vague (I tend to be so when posting from my smartphone). What I was asking for, specifically, is for names of racists who “simply don’t think minorities are people”. My priors are that this is a straw-man, but if not, please excuse my ignorance of racist doctrine.
While I’m having a surprisingly hard time finding any quotes by racists (I’m mostly getting quotes about racism, which is of course very different,) I’ve definitely seen quotes from slave-owners and British Empire types talking about how the savages cannot control their impulses, have low inteligence and so on. Hitler would be the obvious answer, but it’s always hard to be sure what he actually believed - we still don’t know what religion he was, for instance.
Luckily, there are sites dedicated to calling out racists. Unluckily, they are often taken in by trolls, and of course the more intelligent/charismatic/educated racists are often filtered out.
Nevertheless:
source
Some other examples:
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
What do you mean by “people”?
Satisfying my criteria for moral consideration, I suppose. I’m not entirely sure what the details of these criteria are, but CEV would presumably extract this metric, along with the other components of my utility function.
People tend not to value killing one-of-us, where “us” can be defined very broadly or very narrowly, or anywhere inbetween. Is that one terminal value or many?
Well… IMO, not counting psychopaths as human amounts to a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
The no-true-Scotsman fallacy applies to an argument when it excludes particular cases by rhetoric rather than for objective reasons. It does not apply to any particular drawing of category boundaries on its own.
I’ve always interpreted no-true-Scotsman as warning about the dangers of arguing by definition. At the very least, saying psychopaths are not human runs the risk of being argument by definition.
Well, I’d say it depends on the complexity of those objective reasons. “The way to carve reality at its joints, is to draw simple boundaries around concentrations of unusually high probability density in Thingspace. Otherwise you would just gerrymander Thingspace.”
(OTOH I think language should also depend on what you value: if your utility function is the number of inwardly-thrice-bent metal wires capable of nondestructively fastening several standard sheets of paper together at an edge in the universe, it’s handy to have a single word for ‘inwardly-thrice-bent metal wire capable of nondestructively fastening several standard sheets of paper together at an edge’, whether that’s a natural category or not. But you shouldn’t pretend it’s a natural category.)
“No true Scotsman”:
Not “No true Scotsman”:
The second is just using a nonstandard definition, not redefining the word to fit the line of argument, so does not fall under the No True Scotsman fallacy. Even if you’re gerrymandering reality ahead of time, it doesn’t count as No True Scotsman (At the very least, that isn’t even an argument yet, so can’t be a fallacious argument!)
“Everybody likes to watch a beautiful sunset”
“Fred doens’t. Mind you, he’s blind”.
“Then he doesn’t count”
True Scotsman or not?
Clearly not. As I noted upthread, True Scotsman requires that the redefinition is happening for rhetorical, rather than objective, reasons. The relevant reference class could have been picked out ahead of time, and I wouldn’t predict those two folks are going to continue that dispute.
I was referring to extinct species and subspecies of human. Of course psychopaths are human, but AFAIK they have always been a small minority.
The existence of blind people is not usually taken to disprove “human beings have sight”.
Indeed. Imagine someone arguing that past civilizations saw colour differently to modern humans; it makes a pretty god analogy for this discussion.
Maybe I just need to read up on the theory a little more, because I’m still quite confused. Is my CEV the set of things I would want given all the correct moral arguments and all the information? As opposed (probably) to be the set of things I want now?
I can see how the set of things I want now would change over time, but I’m having a hard time seeing why my CEV could ever change. Compare the CEPT, the Coherent Extrapolated Physical Theory, which is the theory of physics we would have if we had all the information and all the correct physics arguments. I can see how our present physical theories would change, but CEPT seems like it should be fixed.
But I suppose it’s also true that CEPT supervenes on a set of basic, contingent physical facts. So does CEV also supervene on a set of basic, contingent wants? If so, I suppose a CEV can change depending on which basic wants I have. Is that right?
If so, does that mean I have to agree to disagree with an ancient greek person on moral matters? Or that, on some level, I can no longer reasonably ask whether my wanting something is good or bad?
Yes. This needn’t be the same for all agents: a rock would still not want anything no matter how many correct moral arguments and how much information you gave it, so CEV is indifferent to everything. Now you and Homer are much more similar than you and a rock, so your CEVs will be much more similar, but it’s not obvious to me that they are necessarily exactly identical just because you’re individuals of the same species.
Technically this is just EV (extrapolated volition); then CEV is just some way of compromising between your EV and everyone else’s (possibly including Homer, but presumably not including rocks).
Thanks, I think I get it. Do you have any thoughts on my last two questions:
I’d say that would just mean that the two of you mean different things by the word good (see also TimS’s comment), but for some reason I feel that would just amount to dodging the question, so I’m going to say “I don’t know” instead.
I think you’ve got the right idea that CEV aims to find that fixed, ultimately-best-possible set of values.
If I understand correctly, CEV is mostly intended as a shortcut to arrive as close as possible to the same ethics we would have if all humans sat and thought and discussed and researched ethics for [insert arbitrarily large amount of time] until no more changes would occur in those ethics and the system would remain logically consistent and always the best choice for all circumstances and in all futures barring direct alteration of elementary human values.
There may be some conflation between CEV and particular implementations of it that were discussed previously, or with other CEV-like theories (e.g. Coherent Blended Volition). I may also be the one doing the conflating, though.
None of the people alive in Homer’s times is alive today. Dunno about how “fundamentally” different we are—I’d guess the difference between CEV and CEV is very small but not exactly zero.
Okay, I think I’m starting to get it. Is the idea that, both of us given all the correct moral arguments and all the information, an archaic Greek person and myself would still want different things?
Yes. For a more philosophical (and extreme) take on the issue, you can read Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Warning: Nietzsche is made of hyperbole, so it’s often quite difficult to understand his substantive point.
In this case, the point is that the Greeks divided the world into good and bad, while we moderns divide the world into good and evil. What’s the difference? It is possible to bad at a sport, but acting within the norms of the sport, it is impossible to be evil. Imagine how your moral perspective would be different if you only judged people based on whether they were “good at life” or “bad at life”.
Indeed, I like Nietzsche’s philosophy as I know it from second-hand accounts, but when I tried to read his own writings I had to force myself through the pages and gave up. (Maybe I used a bad translation or something.)
ISTM that many (most?) LWers also divide the world into good and bad, so, to the extent this is a fundamental disagreement between values rather than someone’s confusion due to not knowing something/not thinking stuff through, CEV might be closer to CEV than to CEV!
BTW, I think I’ve also seen a two-dimensional model for that; I don’t remember how the quadrant other than “good”, “bad” and “evil” (people who aren’t terribly good at life, but at least try hard not to harm others as a result of their incompetence, even to a cost to themselves) was labelled—wimps?
Sounds like two axes, one going from competent to incompetent, the other from well-intentioned to ill-intentioned.
Yes. (Not sure about the exact labels on the axes, but that was the spirit.) IIRC, “good” was the quadrant (competent, well-intentioned), “bad” was (incompetent, ill-intentioned), “evil” was (competent, ill-intentioned) and I don’t remember the label on the remaining quadrant.
Yes. Apparently sam0345 (if that’s what he means by “his moral ideal”) thinks the two of you would still want very different things; wedrifid and I think you would want slightly different things.
Okay, thanks for taking the time to explain. This has been very helpful.
While we’re speculating anyway...
How different do you guess CEV and CEV would be?
[pollid:205]
a) The word “different” seems to be missing from the above.
b) I don’t k now how CEV is defined or whatt it is suppsed to be. Old-fashioned metaethics from that “diseseased discipline”, philosophy, seem much clearer to me.
C) I have only ever been saying that, as so far stated, such questions are imponderable.
It’s in the question; it seemed redundant to me to put it in the answers too.
I have read Pinker’s arguments in detail in his book. I don’t think Homer would have agreed. I bet this is not approaching Homer’s CEV, this is self-domestication of humans. In any case mind sharing how you implemented CEV checking on a mere human brain?
I meant, our behaviour being closer to our CEV than Homer’s behaviour was to his CEV, if that makes sense. (Are you thinking of anything in particular about Homer or was it an arbitrary example?)
I wouldn’t, but I can roughly guess what the result would be. (Likewise, I couldn’t implement Solomonoff induction on any brain, but I still guess general relativity has less complexity than MOND.) If I had no way of guessing whether a given action is more likely to be good or to be bad, how should I ever decide what to do?
I don’t think that makes sense. Also, I am pretty sure that Xenophon’s behavior (massacre and pillage the bad guys and abduct their women) was a lot closer to his moral ideal than our behavior is to Xenophon’s moral ideal.
Further, the behavior Xenophon describes others of the ten thousand performing is astonishingly close to his moral ideal, in that astonishing acts of heroism were routine, while the behavior I observe around me exhibits major disconnect from our purported moral ideals, for example the John Derbyshire incident, though, of course, Xenophon was doubtless selective in what incidents he though worthy to record.
“It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair. But when dogs shame the gray head and gray chin and nakedness of an old man killed, it is the most piteous thing that happens among wretched mortals.”
in context of Pinker’s observation.
Hmm… Well, the definition of a CEV is something like a point attractor in the space of a society’s moral attitudes. So it’s not too surprising if there is convergence of the society towards that CEV ie “moral progress” as you define it is to be expected. Though whether there is a point attractor as opposed to an attractor cycle (or chaotic attractor) seems to be an open question of course.
However, I’m struck by the thought that a Spartan society becoming “more perfectly Spartan” or a Taliban society becoming “more purely Islamic” over time would count as moral progress by the same token. So that the more thoroughly the slaves, women etc. are indoctrinated to accept the prevailing Spartan or Taliban norms, the “better” the society becomes. Does that also match your concept of moral progress?
No, CEV is the goals societies “moral attidudes” (eg slavery) are tying to satisfy, applied to the FAI’s best guess of the actual stste of reality (eg black people weren’t created by God with the purpose of acting as slaves to whites) and averaged out.
Well, is the indoctrination reversible? i.e., could those people to reject Spartan or Taliban norms if they heard the right arguments, as happened to Lukeprog? (Which suggests to me a heuristic to tell which of two memeplexes is closer to the CEV of humanity: is the fraction of adult A-ists who convert to B-ism per year larger or smaller than the fraction of adult B-ists who convert to A-ism?)
If you’re curious, you could try doing this heuristic on the Pew American religion survey which includes rich conversion data: http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf (The results may surprise you!)
Thank you, I’ll take a look at that.
That seems like a good heuristic for telling who has the best missionaries, writes the cleverest arguments, or best engineers society to reward their believers. I’m not sure it’s a good heuristic for actually extrapolating volition.
Perhaps a superintelligent mind could create an argument that would convince any human of any belief. Why should such an ability have moral implications?
Well, such an ability would just as easily persuade you that the sky is green, so I’m guessing no.
That’s my point.
I know, I was agreeing with you. Persuasiveness is not the same as accuracy.
Yes, it probably is reversible. It seems quite plausible to me that for most pairs of human ideological systems A, B, there is some combination of arguments, evidences, life-experiences etc. that would cause a randomly-selected adherent of A to switch to B. (The random selection would tend to avoid the most fanatical and committed adherents, but I’d guess even most of them could probably be “deprogrammed” by the right combination of stimuli.)
However, if you want to count the actual numbers of conversions happening right now, the statistics are messy: apparently just about every religious group (including the group of non-religious) claims they are the “fastest growing”, all with some empirical justification. I found this Wikipedia article highly amusing in that context.
But what’s the point here? If we are talking about humanity as a whole, then this may just show that there is no single CEV for all human societies everywhere. Instead, there are a huge number of attractor points in the moral attitudes space, and any given society tends to converge to the nearest attractor point… unless and until a major shock throws it out again (or breaks up the society).
Global humanity as a whole may perhaps now constitute a single society, and be moving towards the “liberal democracy” attractor point, which therefore defines a local CEV… but only because it’s already in that basin of attraction. And even that’s empirically more dubious than it was twenty years ago (I don’t see China, Russia, or most of the Islamic world still moving that way, and a lot of Western countries have themselves become distinctly less liberal / democratic in recent years.)
Note that if at the beginning of the year A had one billion adult adherents and B had one hundred, and since then 160 of the former have converted to B and 60 of the latter have converted to A, my heuristic would still point towards B being wronger than A even though B has doubled in size and A has stayed pretty much the same. (And anyway, I was thinking more of memeplexes who have existed for at least a couple of generations—with new ones it would be much more noisy.)
I don’t think violence has declined. State violence has increased. Further, since we are imprisoning a lot more people, looks like private violence has increased, supposing, as seems likely, most of them are being reasonably imprisoned.
Genghis Khan and the African slave trade cannot remotely match the crimes of communism.
And if it has declined, Xenophon would interpret this as us becoming pussies and cowards. Was Xenophon more violent and cruel than any similarly respectable modern man? Obviously. But he was nonetheless deservedly respectable. We rightly call the ten thousand brave, not criminal.
Social acceptance of brave, honorable, and manly violence has greatly diminished, and so brave, honorable and manly violence has greatly diminished. But vicious, horrifying, evil and depraved violence, for example petty crime and the various communist mass murders, has enormously increased.
This doesn’t follow, unless by ‘violence has increased’ you mean that there are more incidents of violence. But this would be consistant with violence being extremely rare. So are we imprisoning people for violent crimes and at a higher rate?
I have the same questions about your claims of increased state violence. Has the rate of state violence gone up, or just the number of incidents? It’s the former we’re interested in.