Jesweez
23hr ago
I think almost everyone does as well, but when you ask how much relative value nonhuman life has that’s where you get the difference between the “this is something to be concerned about and aim to address” people and the “this doesn’t affect humans so why should I care” people.
And so because of that, we’re likely to keep reducing the web of life on the planet.
Yeah, it doesn’t affect you much if the manatee disappears. There may be some complicated knock on effect like more frequent algal blooms that make the beach a shitty place to be and affect the fishing industry. But we’re good at ignoring this type of thing.
Heck even if our cousins the chimpanzees (between 100k - 300k still exist in the wild), or the orangutan (~50,000 are left) disappeared, doesn’t really matter to you.
Ultimately it’s a spiritual principle. Either non human life on earth has value, or only human concerns do.
I have a foundational semi religious belief that the biota of the planet has innate value, so for example, if someone destroyed the rainforests of the planet tomorrow, even if through some magic this was made to have no impact on human wellbeing, I’d be forced to consider it unspeakably tragic.
Apparently not all humans share this belief.
Jesweez
1d ago
We’ll see, hopefully not.
But, I don’t think a person has to be murdered to have been dehumanized either.
Can you imagine being a Haitian in Springfield right now?
I specifically chose species which don’t have others that easily fill the gap.
There aren’t birds that blot out the sky or native parrots or cold water manatee creatures in the US anymore, personally I think that’s something of value that disappeared.
We don’t miss them because of shifting baseline syndrome.
But for example, let’s say I’ve seen the manatees in Florida.. I have, they’re really beautiful. These huge gentle warm water mammals that just float up into the river systems and natural springs. You can be on a paddle board above a group of them and pet them, they just hang out underneath.
It would be sad if we lost these. Wouldn’t you agree?
I find it hard to understand people’s attitudes towards nature sometimes. It’s typically, “sure we could lose that and we’d survive fine!”.
A lot of things could be lost and we’d survive ok. Just pick a dystopia from fiction. 1984, Brave New World, humans survive! We’re doing fine!
Should the response be then “who cares?”, or, are there other things in the world that matter than just human survival?
I agree you can also promote violence against someone by making Hitler comparisons or similar.
it's STILL not dehumanizing them.
What would be required to dehumanize somebody?
I feel that trying to paint someone as a pet snatcher and eater because of their ethnicity is pretty close.
Jesweez
1d ago
I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.
But yes you can post it.
Jesweez
1d ago
Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that
Source?
I’ve never seen this shown, despite all the times it’s claimed.
But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them.
People will kill for their pets.
Somebody harming our pets is a sick and severe crime to most of our moral systems.
To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.
Those people are going to be in harms way, there’s no two ways about it.
I think one key fact is that the central example of a human-extincted species is some bug living only on one type of tree in the rain forest
We’ve got a bunch of more impactful recent extinctions than that.
A few that come to mind:
The passenger pigeon, whose flocks were so large they used to black out the sun for days on end as the billions of birds passed.
Stellars sea cow, the largest sirenian ever known to exist and the only which existed outside of warm tropical waters.
The dodo, one of the dozens of quite unique Australian animal species which went extinct in the past couple centuries, and which has become synonymous with extinction.
The thylacine, another Australian example. The largest marsupial carnivore on the planet. Not only its species but the entire family it represented is now extinct.
The carolina parakeet. The only parrot species native to the USA.
Of course there are a lot more which are not fully extinct but have been reduced so drastically it’s sort of similar.
The American buffalo. The right whale. Much of the range of the wolf, of bears, the general abundance and size of life in the ocean which has decreased over time, etc. etc.
it’s often common to publish the code you used to run your analysis in the supplemental material section.
How much you want to bet they didn't do it in this case?
Idk. $50?
It’s not that uncommon of a practice.
Here, fuck it. I’ll save you the trouble.
Let’s find the study. Here it is:
Very first line: tells you where to get the data. Good sign.
Now open the actual pdf.
Go to the end of the report.
Hey, look at that! There’s a link for all the code and data used in the study.
https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/124923/version/V1/view
That page is interesting, they share metrics and it looks like 224 people have all downloaded the data and code they shared. Open science is definitively the way to go!
I’m digging around, and wow, they even provide a document called replication_instructions to walk people through the process of replicating their analysis. That’s really going all the way for open and reproducible analyses.
I’ll drop the $50 down to just an: “I was wrong, maybe I shouldn’t make such quick assumptions”.
Edit: reading your other response you were looking for catastrophic impacts on humans, which isn’t the main point of what I wrote, but I’ll keep it up because I think it’s an interesting subject.
The chytrid fungus pandemic has taken a staggering toll on amphibian life around the planet. Probably the most impactful invasive species in the world from the standpoint of affected species and proportion of global biodiversity.
White nose syndrome is another fungal epidemic that has decimated bat populations across North America.
Fun finding, there’s a study connecting the collapse of bat populations to increased infant mortality. Bats consume copious amounts of insects. When they disappear, farmers have been found to increase their use of pesticides in affected counties. These pesticides have medical implications for humans.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg0344
Another example with a more direct human impact, the disappearance and near extinction of the American Chestnut. Once was among the most prized and useful tree in North America for both its wood and its nuts. It was among the most common tree across eastern forests. In the early 1900s, chestnut blight arrived from Asia and essentially erased the species from the North American landscape within a decade.
Other invasives like cheatgrass generate much higher fire risks in the west, and aquatic invasives such as zebra mussels are extremely expensive for management organizations to deal with. The latter can reorganize entire food webs when introduced and end up having impacts on local economies such as fisheries.
Jesweez
1d ago
Disagree that climate change experts are usually the ones to downplay positive news.
Often climate activists get mad at certain climate scientists for talking up the progress that’s been made or reasons for hope.
Some examples: Michael Mann (doom and gloomers really hate this guy), Zeke Hausfather (here’s an example of the measured tone he tends to take).
Jesweez
2d ago
Ah, cool, that’s right about the estimated size of the Flynn effect
Roughly 30 IQ points
Jesweez
2d ago
It’s possible to never take a nice, hot shower. You can live fine and happy without ever doing that!
Jesweez
3d ago
Yes, I know this is a version of the "we're the normies; they just keep getting crazier!" argument, but ... I think the craziest are saying their quiet part out loud.
Whats the radical part of that sign?
Demanding for it to be free? I do agree that it should be the gentlemen’s responsibility to pay.
Jesweez
3d ago
Sorry, I think I initially misunderstood you. Yeah, crime data is likely to be available to the public, but there's the "in an easily parsable format" part of my initial statement. Generally, I think you should make it as easy as possible for others to double-check your work, and minimize "fuck you citations".
Data literacy is your own responsibility. Most people don’t have it, but that’s not the fault of the people who did learn to work with data. I think it should be more of a responsibility to learn this skill in our society.
As far as making your analysis available to double check, it’s often common to publish the code you used to run your analysis in the supplemental material section. Not always, but not uncommon. If so you can explore the assumptions that were made.
What do you do when the only data you have is from a time when a more strict and selective immigration process was applied, or refers to to completely different groups, or ignores immigration background and just lumps everyone into "US born"? By the time you get proper data, it's too late, the immigration is fait accompli.
I feel for you, but you should use other methods to try and convince me that you’re right and we need to shut down immigration levels rather than relying on cheap tricks.
You could have convinced me of anything using such rhetorical tricks, so clearly I should have antibodies against those if I aim to get by in the world.
Furthermore, you’re implying that recent immigration is obviously related to higher crime, but how did you come to that conclusion? Can I trust that your reasoning is based on anything other than what social media algorithms show you? You would obviously say no, but I know that there are powerful algorithms and echo chambers which pump out fear content about immigrants 24/7, so don’t be surprised when I am skeptical and ask for harder proof.
It’s not that I’m saying that there’s no way that immigrants post 2018 are committing high rates of crime, it’s just that all the other data I can get my hands on makes me doubt that this is the case.
But you can take solace in the fact that the emotional rhetorical stuff is the language that 90% of the population speaks anyway, so you have a clear advantage in the court of public opinion if your goal is just to reduce immigration no matter what actual data on rates of violence say.
It is my experience that studies in general do not publish raw data at all
Studies typically don’t publish the raw data but often work from public datasets. This type of data wouldn’t be something that the study authors collected, but data that the state of Texas in this case collected.
I doubt that it’s not public.
Is the crime rate of the country they're coming from enough to consider it plausible that they're more violent?
That’s an actual argument worth discussing.
Data would be what we use to see if that intuition is correct or not.
But posting one news article that supposedly defines an entire class of millions of people, then defending that by saying “at least I posted one example”, is just obviously a poor way to make any given point.
Similarly, saying “we don’t have the data showing that X is Y therefore you should believe that X is Y” also is not a convincing argument. It’s just how you feel, and opinions are nothing special, everyone’s got one.
Yeah, but an offshoot can go more than one way. For example "post-rationalism" is still an offshoot of rationalism (though I think we still have a decent amount of unrinoic Rats). In any case my personal belief is that the Rationalist movement was an utter failure as far as truth-seeking is concerned, and that is because of, rather than despite, Rationalist principles.
I mean, we’ve got to reason about the world somehow.
You can do so using logical errors if you want, it sure is comfy.
Jesweez
3d ago
I haven’t seen that the data isn’t available. I doubt that the data underlying the study I linked isn’t public. You should be able to access it. You might look into this. I honestly don’t care to.
(It’s not my job to go digging into these datasets).
But, it is my job to say:
Hey, one news article about a psycho is nowhere near enough to categorize an entire class of people as violent.
That’s just silly, and obviously so. Yet for some reason I get more pushback for pointing that out than the original claim got.
Honestly might be a sign of some heavy motivated reasoning going on in this forum. You guys are an offshoot of the rationalist movement for Pete’s sake. Isn’t pushing back on simple logical fallacies to be expected around here?
In fact, I’ll go further and say that this is an isolated demand for lack of rigor.
In a forum of people who read rationalists, in a subculture directly descended from blogs with names like “Less Wrong” and people who write long winded posts on logical fallacies,
That we should totally disregard an obvious day 1 of class example of a logical fallacy. Because hey, it’s against a group we tend not to like around here.
Isolated demand to let the fallacy against Haitans slide! We all know they’re bad anyway, it doesn’t really matter if we can prove it or not.
If I were to use the same tactic (one news article about a killer?) to show that conservatives are categorically dangerous, I’d get laughed out of the forum and for good reason. That’d just be ridiculous on the face of it.
Maybe one or two very patient mottizens would explain to me some of the very basics of how logical fallacies work. A few Scott Alexander posts and I’d be on my way having been educated.
Hooray for rigor! But, eh … here it’s about immigrants, and that’s kind of our thing around here. Why bring rigor to something we already know is bad? That’d be a total buzzkill.
Jesweez
3d ago
So how do you know immigration is such a blood soaked affair?
Just going off preconceived ideas? You liked the vibe of how it sounds?
And does nowhere collect data on this? Just a complete black hole?
Meanwhile I’m able to find that the places that do report data on undocumented immigrant crime seem to typically report lower rates of crime than citizens.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate
Jesweez
3d ago
Not at all isolated.
“Group X coming here has been a blood soaked affair!”
Um… source?
Does group X kill people at a higher rate than group Y, Z, A, B, or C?
Or are we just engaging in hysterics because it’s an out group?
Jesweez
4d ago
Pretty bad response. In any group of millions you can find examples of anything you want.
As we all know, cardiologists are horrible, horrible people.
As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?
Why just one case?
You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.
(Hopefully one that doesn’t fall into the base rate fallacy..)
They’re perhaps too certain about the probability of severe outcomes, but I also would be careful about overcorrecting and not giving them enough consideration.
Earth history shows that the climate system we live in is frequently capable of erratic behavior far beyond what current dialogue about climate change tends to consider. The tail risk of triggering such a state has unknown probability, but it is important enough that it should enter into any discussion about the human relationship with our environment.
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