Nanugu
13d ago
Agreed. I was trying to say that the post was wild because in retrospect because many of the conflict theorist's beliefs seem justified in retrospect, and that Scott's own revealed behavior is a repudiation of his (and, admittedly, my own) naive inclination towards mistake theory as a descriptive model.
Nanugu
13d ago
He himself is someone who could only be modelled by conflict theory - his public actions and stated opinion were not motivated because he was mistaken about HBD; he misrepresented his own beliefs because the dominant intellectual paradigm prevented the technocracy (ie Scott) from publicly advancing the most accurate viewpoints or influencing policy in a logical direction. He could only be 'convinced' by a display of political power by the opposition. This is exactly the situation presented by the conflict theorist in the quote I pulled.
Nanugu
15d ago
That conflict vs. mistake article is pretty wild to go through.
Mistake theorists think racism is a cognitive bias. White racists have mistakenly inferred that black people are dumber or more criminal.
Not, "mistake theorists believe that black people are dumber, but hide their power levels because doing otherwise would mean sticking their necks out."
Conflict theorists think a technocracy is stupid. Whatever the right policy package is, the powerful will never let anyone implement it. Either they’ll bribe the technocrats to parrot their own preferences, or they’ll prevent their recommendations from carrying any force.
...an almost exact summation of why the technocracy supported anti-HBD views. And the only way to get Scott to reveal his true thoughts was to change who was powerful. No amount of debate and convincing would have worked - he was already privately convinced, after all.
I reject the idea that there is a hard binary - you can believe that mistake theory is right for some circumstances for some people and conflict theory in others. When I talk to my dad about how stupid DEI is, he is receptive. When I argue with my brother about HBD... well it's just a bad idea. Thanksgiving dinners are a lot more pleasant if I just accept conflict theory on that one and recognize the only way to change anyone's mind is to simply win a presidential election first.
Nanugu
28d ago
The checkup itself is pretty routine. If they get referred to a specialist or have to take a test or a vaccine that incurs a separate charge. But surely a base rate for the visit is easy to figure and most added services should be easy to look up as well.
Nanugu
29d ago
Medicine is worse than that. There was some bureaucratic confusion about whether insurance would be available for my kid's routine visit. I asked at the front desk what it would cost, assuming a normal visit with no complications, in case I couldn't apply insurance. She didn't know. I asked her who would. Didn't know that either. Tried calling the billing department, no answer. Looked up the billing information the hospital is required to publish by state law. The 'common' bills they showed did not include checkups. So basically, I could wait months for a different appointment or I could tell them I was willing to pay whatever price they asked after the fact. It worked out.
Vets, dentists, and the Surgery Center of Oklahoma can all quote prices. Medicine could too. I always thought the rightwing's Obamacare should've been: hospitals have to have transparent pricing and insurance companies can only say to the customer, "We'll cough up X money for your procedure based on your prognosis. We'll incentivize you to spend less than X. You can pay more than X if you make up the difference. You are allowed to spend that money at any hospital." The government can maintain a crappy website that lets you do price compare, with the assumption that Amazon or Walmart would make the actual working website.
Nanugu
1mo ago
Bloodtopia clearly isn't importing Ideastan's ideas or way of thinking given that they have kept a distinct immigration policy and concern with bloodlines for 1000 years.
Nanugu
2mo ago
Your whole point was that the urban, educated, irreligious voters who switched from voting D to voting R are an uninfluential component of Trump's constituency. I'm saying that profile fits for a lot of the Trump admin, so your premise is flat out wrong. That RFK Jr, Musk, Vance, and even Trump are at different points of their conversion blue to red only shows that such a conversion is possible.
Nanugu
2mo ago
I'd have Vance and Musk both pegged as more Griggs v Duke than Roe v Wade. Same for RFK Jr. Hell, is Trump even a Roe v Wade Republican?
Nanugu
3mo ago
Von Neumann was very accomplished, but didn't he support preemptive strikes against USSR? Lower IQ people disagreed, and history has proven them right. At least, I prefer our timeline to trying out the one where he got his way. Math has a very high IQ skill cap, but in most other fields the cap is much lower.
Nanugu
5mo ago
I've been curious since reading it a few years ago... how are those suet puddings doing?
Nanugu
6mo ago
It's crass, but the simplest heuristic for 'greatness', if taken to mean the person with the most athletic prowess, is money. Fame also counts for something.
The top badminton player this year won about $650,000, approximately on par with the 460th player in the NBA. NBA (or UEFA, or NFL) money attracts far more competition than swimming, track and field, or gymnastics. It is also a measure of popularity and therefore the size of the starting pool of players.
I wouldn't say that Lebron James is superior to Lionel Messi simply because his net worth is twice as high - but I also wouldn't dismiss the notion offhand. But the US is a richer economy than most, and US sports are overpaid. And, again, Messi gets global fame and recognition as the pinnacle of the world's most popular sport. Once you're getting $500 million, you can afford to value those things more than another $500 million.
In short, I don't think most of the olympians have come through as intense a field as the professionals, and are not nearly as much of talent outliers.
Nanugu
6mo ago
Phelps deserves greatest athlete. His superpower was basically ADHD and a willingness to monotonously spend five hours a day swimming.
But somehow:
I also don't consider hard work, intelligence, or savvy to be part of athleticism.
Usain Bolt is 6'5", Michael Jordan 6'6". Bolt could presumably have made much more money in the NBA than the olympics if he were the athletic equivalent of Jordan. Basketball filters on height but also many other athletic traits, much less unidimensionally than sprinting.
Nanugu
7mo ago
Enlightenment has evidently produced several very different worldviews. The system we have in Anglosphere has been much more benign than the aforementioned.
But rejecting Enlightenment, as I understand it, would require tearing down our institutions and repudiating common values. It's so established - even traditional - that to undo it you have to destroy our entire system and start over from theory. That has not been a successful method historically. Hence the comparison to revolutionary groups.
Nanugu
7mo ago
From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears? Honestly, one reason I can never stomach reaction is because it doesn't just want to drop the torch, it wants to piss on the ashes. It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.
On Pinker and Harris, I have an example of both on my shelf (never read them).
Random paragraph from Better Angels of Our Nature:
Russett and Oneal, the number crunching defenders of the Democratic Peace, also sought to to test the theory of the Liberal Peace, and were skeptical of the skeptics. They noted that though international trade hit a local peak just before WW1, it was still a fraction of the level, relative to GDP, that countries would see after WW2 (figure 5-24).
More than half (certainly more than half a percent) of this looks like objective information to me.
From The Moral Landscape (the concept of which I find asinine):
There are other results in psychology and behavioral economics that make it difficult to assess changes in human well-being. For instance, people tend to consider losses to be far more significant than forsaken gains, even when the net result is the same. For instance, when presented with a wager where they stand a 50 percent chance of losing $100, most people will consider anything less than a potential gain of $200 to be unattractive. This bias relates to what has come to be known as "the endowment effect": people demand more money in exchange for an object than they would spend to acquire the object in the first place.
The paragraph goes on to summarize sone consequences of these findings.
Both cases are a lot more objective and fact based than you imply, dedicating most of their words to explaining and summarizing data-based academic papers. Pinker even includes a graph of the data. Presumably these observations are eventually used to make an argument.
Nanugu
9mo ago
Inheritance of acquired traits is not a major driver of evolution. To the extent that environmental conditions are tranferable through epigenetics, the effects donnot persist through enough generations to result in speciation.
But the fact that Lamarck came up with inheritance of acquired traits as an explanation for evolution shows that natural selection never occurred to him, despite the fact that it is 'tautological'. Lamarck would not need a new theory to explain how species evolved if he knew of one that was already true.
This shows that despite being 'tautological' it was not a trivial realization.
Nanugu
10mo ago
Right, Darwin did not invent thenidea of evolution. He supplied an explanation that is intuitively obvious, even tautological, in retrospect.
Bringing up the example of Lamarck is helpful. He proposed speciation through the inheritance of acquired traits. Why would he ever propose such a ridiculous idea when speciation by natural selection is so obvious?
Nanugu
10mo ago
What Darwin's natural selection added was a description of how new species could develop through gradual, generational change and provide some good empirical examples where that was the obvious best explanation.
Yes, people know that long haired cats produce long haired kittens. Yes, it is obvious that long haired cats will survive in colder climates. What was not obvious was that, given enough time, two populations of cats would branch into distinct forms when geographically isolated, and that this would occur because the least fit would die out and the traits that made them unfit would die with them, while the most fit would survive to pass on those traits they posessed that were suitable for the local environment.
The Spartan constitution attributed to Lycurgus was deliberately unwritten, or at least it was claimed to be so. Some copies apparently did exist, most notably at the oracle of Delphi. Spartans themselves were supposed to maintain it orally.
From Plutarch:
Sparta's government and domestic policy was truly bizarre, though, and doesn't map well to modern politics. Caste society, mostly automated ascetic communism, no private property, iron coinage (to make wealth unwieldy and theft ungainly), two kings, an elected-for-life-council-of-elders, many other peculiarities.
My own two cents is that the value of the unwritten constitution lay in its looseness. It allowed, and depended on, virtuous men to exercise real decision making power.
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