Update: Hell-bad revoked. Thanks, Eliezer.
The_Lion
Karma: −485
I always maintain “If there is a quantitative difference, I sure as hell hope we never find it.”
You may want to practice reciting the litany of Gendlin.
I think that’d lead to some pretty unfortunate stuff.
Ok, while we’re nitpicking Paul Graham’s essay, I should mention the part of it that struck me as least rational when I read it. Namely, the sloppy way he talks about “poverty”, conflating relative and absolute poverty. After all, thanks to advances in technology what’s considered poverty today was considered unobtainable luxury several centuries ago.
Does this really apply to “most blacks”, or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities
Most blacks do in fact live in the inner cities.
just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
What news sources are you reading? Most mainstream news sources don’t report on the goings on in the inner cities at all unless it involves blacks getting shot by cops, or can be spun as a natural reaction to a black getting shot by a cop.
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn’t get away with telling black people where to sit.
So, how did the movement she started work out for black people?
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
It should be obvious how focusing on one of these groups and downplaying the significance of the other creates two different political opinions. Paul Graham complains about his critics that they are doing this (and he is right about this), but he does the same thing too, only less blindly… he acknowledges that the other group exists and that something should be done, but that feels merely like a disclaimer so he can display the required virtue, but his focus is somewhere else.
So why are you focusing your complaining on Paul Graham’s essay rather than on the essays complaining about “economic inequality” without even bothering to make the distinction? What does that say about your “ugh fields”?
In fact a remarkable number of the people perusing strategy (1) are the same people railing against economic inequality. One would almost suspect they’re intentionally conflating (1) and (2) to provide a smokescreen for their actions. Also since strategy (1) requires more social manipulation skills then strategy (2), the people pursuing strategy (1) can usually arrange for anti-inequality policies to mostly target the people in group (2).
If you would ask the same question on http://skeptics.stackexchange.com it would be closed as being too vague
You do realize that’s a problem with skeptics.stackexchange not with AmagicalFishy’s question.
The destroyer of science and rationality isn’t the uneducated blue collar, but the “fortune cookie” journo trying to “communicate” science.
Not all changes are good. In fact, most potential changes would be absolutely awful.
Basically one huge problem here is that there isn’t enough data compared to the number of variables involved.
Not to mention that this is a problem in what Taleb would call extremistan, i.e., the distribution of possible outcomes from intervening, or not-intervening, are fat-tailed and include a lot of rare possibilities that haven’t yet shown up in the data at all.
So if it became socially mandatory for EA members to donate all their disposable income, do you think that would be good for the EA movement?
It helps prevent holiness spirals.
Yes, that’s what happens.
You may want to adjust your beliefs to reality.
You really need to leard better excuses than “only following orders”.