Moss_Piglet

Karma: 676

Moss_Piglet 5 Feb 2014 14:37 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: On saving the world
And yet not traditional enough to see any problem with the UK’s disastrous immigration policy. The BNP exists pretty much entirely because the “conservative” party is more concerned with not being called racists than with doing what the majority of their constituents have demanding for decades.

Moss_Piglet 25 Jan 2014 2:04 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Polling Thread
“Genuinely desirable” seems like the problem here, in that it’s conflating base sexual attraction with a more pragmatic evaluation of someone’s prospects.

Beta males certainly have many admirable qualities; they’re reliable productive and civil, usually friendly and loyal as well. But those qualities, while again being very important, are simply not attractive.

Alpha males, on the other hand, are really quite a menace. The Dark Triad traits which make them attractive also mean they are shiftless and poor contributors to society, at least for the most part.

Hence the pattern of “Alpha fucks, Beta bucks.” Women want to get the Alpha but will, if forced to by circumstances, trade sex to Betas for resources / security.

In that context, female “Betas” would be the low-risk women men settle for reluctantly while “Alphas” would be high-risk women who are highly sought after.

Moss_Piglet 21 Jan 2014 2:38 UTC
19 points
on: Tell Culture
The problem here is that, as far as I can tell, a “Tell” culture would immediately become a “Lie Ineptly” culture.

Most of the time, in my experience anyway, when you don’t want to help someone it’s usually for a reason you couldn’t say without nuking or at least damaging the relationship. Even worse, the level of detail / emotion in the “Tell” is much higher than the straightforward “Ask” which makes the usual evasions seem hollow and requires more elaborate excuses. And most people suck at spontaneous deception, since usually the only ones of us who get any practice tend to get weeded out of normal society pretty quickly as is.

“Telling” sounds great if your goal is to quickly burn up your social capital for favors, which can be a smart move if you’re not planning on seeing someone again anyway. But you can’t really build a useful relationship that way; blunt honesty and bad lies aren’t going to get you trust / comfort and without that you’re fighting uphill for every little thing.

Moss_Piglet 16 Jan 2014 19:26 UTC
9 points
on: Division of cognitive labour in accordance with researchers’ ability
Something which strikes me is that scientists having science as a job at all is a somewhat new idea; unless I’m wrong, it used to be that a lot of the great naturalists were either independently wealthy aristocrats and pursued scientific inquiry as a hobby, or were monks and were supported by the other brothers of their orders. On the one hand, they worked at their own paces and on topics close to their own interests (hard to imagine Mendel getting grant money, especially with his publishing rate), but on the other there are a lot of very bright people who aren’t born into much money or a particularly religious bent who ought to at least consider science.

Still, I think a smart person could sort of split the difference; an ascetic or fraternal order devoted to naturalism might have some appeal and solve a few of the basic problems. New initiates could be put to work reproducing experiments which otherwise would be ignored in the rush to publish unique papers, established scientists who aren’t cut out for corporate life or constant grant haggling could relax and focus on their actual jobs, the scientific community would be able to self-regulate with less direct interference by outsiders, and governments or rich individuals who want to appear smart or socially-conscious could patronize the order directly without the intermediary weirdness of setting up organizations of their own to vet applicants. There are concerns with group-think and corruption, but then again it’s not like those would be novel issues given what happens in peer-reviewed journals or university departments.

Is this a terrible idea, and if not how would you sell it?

Moss_Piglet 16 Jan 2014 18:42 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Division of cognitive labour in accordance with researchers’ ability
You jest, but from what I understand that’s not far off. He wasn’t exactly a polygamist, but at the very least a serial philanderer.

Moss_Piglet 16 Jan 2014 18:35 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Stupid Questions Thread—January 2014

Any problems here?

That people are stupefyingly irrational about risks, especially in regards to medicine.

As an example; my paternal grandmother died of a treatable cancer less than a year before I was born, out of a fear of doctors which she had picked up from post-war propaganda about the T4 euthenasia program. Now this is a woman who was otherwise as healthy as they come, living in America decades after the fact, refusing to go in for treatment because she was worried some oncologist was going to declare a full-blooded German immigrant as genetically impure and kill her to improve the Aryan race.

Now granted that’s a rather extreme case, and she wasn’t exactly stable on a good day from what I hear, but the point is that whatever bits of crazy we have get amplified completely out of proportion when medicine comes into it. People already get scared out of seeking treatment over rumors of mythical death panels or autism-causing vaccine programs, so you can only imagine how nutty they would get over even a small risk of actual government-sanctioned murder in hospitals.

(Not to mention that there are quite a lot of people with a perfectly legitimate reason to believe those RNGs might “just happen” to come up in their cases if they went in for treatment; it’s not like American bureaucrats have never abused their power to target political enemies before.)

Moss_Piglet 15 Jan 2014 19:55 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Thought Crimes

Imagine an agent with an (incorrect) belief that only by killing everyone, would the world be the best place possible, and a prior against anything realistically causing it to update away. This would have to be stopped somehow, because of what it thinks (and what that causes it to do).

That doesn’t quite follow.

Thinking something does not make it so, and there are a vanishingly small number of people who could realistically act on a desire to kill everyone. The only time you have to be deeply concerned about someone with those beliefs is if they managed to end up in a position of power, and even that just means “stricter controls on who gets access to world-ending power” rather than searching for thoughtcriminals specifically.

Moss_Piglet 15 Jan 2014 17:32 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Calvin’s comment on: Stupid Questions Thread—January 2014
So if we assume a measure is invalid, it is useless to us (as an accurate measure anyway; you already pointed out a possible rhetorical use)?

If you’ll forgive my saying it, that seems like more of a tautology about measurements in general than an argument about this specific case. If you have evidence that general intelligence as-measured-by-IQ is invalid, or even evidence that people unfamiliar with the field like Dr Atran or Gould take issue with ‘reifying’ it, that would be closer to what the original question was looking for.

I realize this comes off as a bit rude, but this particular non sequitur keeps coming up and is becoming a bit of a sore spot.

Moss_Piglet 15 Jan 2014 17:20 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Luke_A_Somers’s comment on: [Link] Changelings, Infanticide and Nortwest European Guilt Culture
Not to mention that we don’t know for sure that there even is a significant population difference here. It could just as easily be one of the things which humans seem to be generally consistent on as a species.

The point I was making, albeit ineptly, is that good research on the topic would be interesting and any potential ideological fallout shouldn’t deter people from it.

Moss_Piglet 15 Jan 2014 17:11 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Brillyant’s comment on: Thought Crimes
There’s a very commonly accepted line of thought around here whereby any sufficiently good digital approximation of a human brain is that human, in a sort of metaphysical way anyhow, because it uses the same underlying algorithms which describe how that brain works in it’s model of the brain.

(It doesn’t make much sense to me, since it seems to conflate the mathematical model with the physical reality, but as it’s usually expressed as an ethical principle it isn’t really under any obligation to make sense.)

The important thing is that once you identify sufficiently good simulations as moral agents you end up twisting yourself into ethical knots about things like how powerful beings in the far future treat the NPCs in their equivalent to video games. For that, and other reasons I’m not going to get into here, it seems like a fairly maladaptive belief even if it were accurate.

Moss_Piglet 15 Jan 2014 4:12 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Calvin’s comment on: Stupid Questions Thread—January 2014
From the OP:

What are your best arguments against the reality/validity/usefulness of IQ?

-

appeals that would limit testing or research even if IQ’s validity is established are not [welcome].

Emphasis mine.

We all know the standard “that’s racist” argument already, newerspeak is clearly asking for a factual reason why measures of general intelligence are not real / invalid / not useful. Not to mention that the post did not make any claims about, or even mention, heredity of intelligence or race / gender differences in intelligence.

Moss_Piglet 15 Jan 2014 0:59 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Anatoly_Vorobey’s comment on: AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything
It’s funny to me that you would say that, because the way I read it was mainly that slave morality is built on resentment whereas master morality was built on self-improvement. The impulse to flee suffering or to inflict it (even on oneself) is the the difference between the lamb and the eagle, and thus the common and the aristocratic virtues. I wouldn’t have thought to separate the two ideas.

But again, one of the reasons why he ought to be read more; two people reading it come away with five different opinions on it.

Moss_Piglet 15 Jan 2014 0:04 UTC
7 points
in reply to: knb’s comment on: AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything
Maybe you can give some common misconceptions about how people recover from / don’t recover from their addictions? That’s the sort of topic you tend to hear a lot of noise about which makes it tough to tell the good information from the bad.

Do you have any thoughts on wireheading?

Have you tried any 19th/20th century reactionary authors? Everyone should read Nietzsche anyway, and his work is really interesting if a little dense. His conception of Master/slave morality and nihilism is a much more coherent explanation for how history has turned out than the Cathedral, not to mention that the superman (I always translate it as posthuman in my head) as beyond good and evil is interesting from a transhumanist perspective.

Moss_Piglet 14 Jan 2014 22:08 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Dangers of steelmanning / principle of charity
The comparison doesn’t have a great connotation, given that “fundamentalist” is typically an epithet, but it’s not too far off in terms of the denotation.

Personally though, I would say it’s more of an Exoteric / Esoteric split; conservatives seem to spend most of their effort preserving outward forms and rituals of their cultures in an effort to keep the fire going, where reactionaries see it as burnt out already and so look back for the essential (in both senses of the word) elements to spark a new one. A good example is comparing Chesterton’s Catholic apology with Evola’s promotion of Tradition, not to imply that you can’t be a Catholic reactionary but just as an example of a differing mindset. Of course, esoterica being what it is, it’s a bit tough to get a grip on and much easier to talk about than to understand fully.

Moss_Piglet 14 Jan 2014 19:34 UTC
6 points
in reply to: gothgirl420666’s comment on: Dangers of steelmanning / principle of charity

(Is there a notable difference between the politics held by someone described as “Reactionary” and someone described as “far-right”? I can’t figure this out. “Reactionary” seems to me like basically meaning “far-right, but smart”.)

“Far Right” implicitly invokes the Overton Window; most anything you can″t comfortably say in public anymore is Far Right, even if it is actually thought by the majority of people or was itself a leftist position a few decades ago. Saying something is Far Right or Far Left from an assumed neutral position can be useful to elucidate the boundaries of conventional thought, or to exploit anchoring in an unsophisticated audience, but provides little information on it’s own.

In general, Reactionaries want to reboot society[1] to before some big event which symbolizes the beginning of visible civilizational decline (Like May 1968, Reconstruction, the French Revolution, the English Civil War, the Protestant Reformation, the Edict of Milan, etc.), whereas Conservatives try to keep the status quo from deteriorating further with constant patches. That said, today’s conservatism becomes tomorrow’s reaction as the traditions they failed to conserve are destroyed fully in the next Great Leap Forward.

I realize that’s general to the point of vagueness but it’s tough to hit a moving target in the first place even when you know what you’re aiming at. Golden Dawn and the Tea Party are both “far right,” and neither are particularly reactionary IMO, but they’re also fairly dissimilar so comments about one don’t apply much to the other.

[1]One big stumbling-block to understanding this is the wrongheaded idea that technological advance and moral “progress” are inseparable, seeing the return of (for example) an ancien-regime style aristocracy as somehow necessitating turning off the internet or throwing away antibiotics. Culture and technology are certainly linked, so you should expect large shifts in one to affect the other, but human nature itself changes fairly slowly and it is very suspicious to see alterations to social organization racing ahead of the demographic changes which naturally guide them.

Moss_Piglet 12 Jan 2014 15:47 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Tuxedage’s comment on: AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything
Is this a fist-fight or can blacktrance use weapons?

Moss_Piglet 8 Jan 2014 20:56 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Sophronius’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist
You are absolutely correct on the facts, and in a saner world I could leave it at that, but you seem to have missed an unspoken part of the argument;

The common factor isn’t genetics per se but rather an appeal to inherent nature. Whether that nature is the genetic legacy of selection for vastly different ancestral environments or due to the epigenetics of sexual dimorphism is very important in a scientific sense but not in the metaphysical sense of presenting a challenge to the ideals of “equality” or the “psychic unity of mankind.”

When Dr Shalizi writes the rhetorical question “why it is so important to you that IQ be heritable and unchangeable?” in the context of “‘human equality’ and ‘genetic identity’” his tone is not that of scientific skepticism of an unproven claim but rather an apologetic defense of an embattled creed. Really, why is it so important to you what the truth is? After all, we don’t have any evidence to suggest that the doctrines are wrong, so why not just repeat the cant like everyone else? Who else but a heretic would feel need to ask uncomfortable questions?

For the most part, scientists writing against the hereditarian position don’t bother debating the facts anymore; now that actual genetic evidence is starting to come out they know it’ll just make them look foolish in a few years, and the psychometric evidence has survived four decades of concentrated attack already. It’s all about implications and responsibility now, or in other words that the lie is too big to fail. It’s hardly important to them if the truth at hand is a genetic or an hormonal inequality, they just want it to go away.

Moss_Piglet 8 Jan 2014 0:31 UTC
17 points
in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist
You seem to ascribe a fair amount of bad faith to me and I’m not sure why. Maybe because this line of argument pattern-matches to MRA thought?

Anyway I didn’t “abandon” the jobs point so much as point out that men are universally, even ignoring job choice, more likely to get into and be hurt in accidents. Accidental death and injury being far far more common than homicide and assault, that alone blows the “physical danger” argument out of the water. Not quite as dramatic as an industrial accident or a robbery-gone-wrong sure, but then again shark attacks are more dramatic than dying of heart disease.

And with regards to crime, your statistics do not say what you think they say. The national gang center says half of law enforcement agencies reported an increase in gang crime, not that ~50% of violent crimes were committed by gang members. Looking at the FBI unified crime reports, I can only find clear breakdowns of victims / circumstances in homicide, but it looks like even subtracting the entire number of gang-related deaths from the male death total still leaves them with more than three times the number of homicide victims that women have (9,917 male victims − 884 gang/institutional murder victims / 2,834 female victims = 3.19). And remember, the homicide rate today has been masked by medical advances for decades; male victimization rates are actually much higher than crime statistics indicate, and again most of these guys are ‘civilians’ rather than career criminals.

The whole point of my original post was this; it doesn’t matter if you look at crime victimization or workplace injury or accidents or all of them or something else entirely, because by any and all reasonable measures a man is in more “physical danger” in his everyday life than a woman is (yes, even the mythical Average Man/Woman). There are a handful of crimes which women are at special risk from and need to be cautious of, but men will disproportionately die or be injured in pretty much any other way you could imagine.

(BTW, I’m not the one downvoting you. One of those times when an anonymous karma system is more of a pain than a positive.)

Moss_Piglet 7 Jan 2014 22:34 UTC
21 points
in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist

There’s a very big difference between men being part of violent crime and dangerous jobs and needing to worry for your physical safety as you walk down the street.

No, no there isn’t.

Most crimes, including most violent crimes, are not rape. Aside from rape, men are much more likely to be the victim of a crime, especially a violent crime. So if you’re talking about how much someone should be worried about being the victim of a violent crime… how exactly is maleness supposed to protect someone when it predicts a much higher likelihood of being targeted by criminals?

And even beyond that, even mundane stuff like being hit by a car while on the shoulder of the road is more than twice as likely to kill a man as a woman. With no malice at all, a man is still in significantly more danger of dying or being injured just going about his everyday life, whether driving to work or walking down a flight of stairs. Again, no “dangerous job” needed; men are in greater physical danger even in commonplace situations.

Women have every reason to fear for their safety, and rape is a very serious problem, but it boggles the mind to see attitudes that men couldn’t possibly understand how dangerous it is to be a woman when those very same men are the ones much much more likely to be hurt or killed “whenever he leaves the house”.

Moss_Piglet 7 Jan 2014 20:37 UTC
28 points
in reply to: Locaha’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist

a male [...] does not experience a constant physical danger (and the associated stress of being aware of said danger) whenever he leaves the house.

With the exception of rape, which tends to be a special case in most senses, men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of every other type of violent crime including homicide. In addition, men make up 92% of workplace deaths (and presumably a correspondingly high proportion of the injuries) and are also significantly more likely to die in an accident off the job (again, presumably a similar distribution of injuries).

The idea that men are somehow protected from physical danger by “male privilege” is simply a preposterous notion.