@RobertLiguori's banner p

RobertLiguori


				

				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 04 21:34:07 UTC
Verified Email

				

User ID: 165

RobertLiguori


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 21:34:07 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 165

Verified Email

For reference, can you demonstrate how one would communicate the same idea in a less heated manner? Or is this a case where the poster should have linked to a few /ActualPublicFreakous videos or the like to provide multiple pro-active examples of the vocal phenomenon in question?

If the claim is "Look at this terrible thing that high-class Chinese people did to their children; they crippled their bodies for social fashion.", we can point to the whole trans-grooming brouhaha in the west as a comparison. People are social, and fucked-up societies can and will override the instincts of parents and lay their children on the offer of their particular Moloch; this does not appear to be a race-specific trait, as far as I can tell.

And we can look at a lot of other individual instances of moral atrocity in peoples who don't seem to do that sort of thing super-regularly; we've got the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War off the top of my head. And while I consider that an existence proof against people claiming that the Spanish are saints, I don't think it proves much other than that.

As for the aesthetics, I will point out the degree to which Michael Bay and James Cameron have done really well in China with their movies. I mean, I don't really like the Bayformers aesthetic, but clearly a lot of my fellow Caucasians do, and so do a lot of the Chinese, apparently.

Look, if you want to make an argument here, why not get some actual stats? What do Chinese charity rates look like, both in the mainland and across other nations? How do you see the behavior of Chinese people changing from first, second, and nth-generation immigrants? What are your thoughts on popular Chinese media? Do you have any opinions on the popularity of cultivation novels and stories?

Hey, welcome to TheMotte.

Can you elaborate on why you think that removing honors classes will be super-effective? Can you point to a similar strategy in history that worked well?

Because I think of the original affirmative action policies put in place to limit the number of Jews from higher education at elite universities around the turn of the 20th century, and I note that Jewish advantage in higher education remained durable through those policies.

I think you might want to start by proving that the difference in racial make-up in higher-education in cognitively difficult classes, like math and physics and so on, is actually based in bias, and not in accurately reflecting racial differences in intelligence. You can do this by finding a measure of capacity in these topics that isn't biased, like double-blinded standardized tests or even just lifetime achievement of a racial group in a field across history, and seeing if that measure is reflected uniformly across racial groups.

Let's get some consensus on where north actually is before we call the compass pointing not where we expected it to biased.

Thanks and much appreciated.

No, the reasoning wasn't good enough. If you want people to respond to moderation, you need to give specific feedback. "This is not what we're looking for." is not remotely specific.

Also, since it's perfectly obvious, can you tell us exactly how you were sure that this was a trollish shit-stirrer and not a terse poster asking a question in good faith? Since it's obvious, it should be no trouble, to both cjet79 or you, to say what exactly was obvious about it and how apparently-similar posts that aren't by trollish shit-stirrers are clearly so instead.

Look, you're the mods. You make judgement calls, and our continued presence on this site is evidence that we respect those judgement calls at least enough not to throw our hands up and storm off collectively. But please recognize when you are making those judgement calls and don't just fall back on heavy implications of "It's obvious, and if it's not obvious to you, then clearly you're also a trollish shit-stirrer and probably a ban-evader, so stop asking questions or you might be next." If multiple members of the community are not reacting the way you are to the post and, well, obviously do not find it obvious what is going on, then perhaps it is not actually obvious.

This is not what the community is looking for in moderation. Do better.

For example, better moderation would look like "This is not what we are looking for in a top-level post. We are looking for comments with features X and Y, and without Z, and your comment (while having X) has not enough Y and too much Z."

Also, as the comment reads as not at all antagonistic to me, you should really specify what exactly in it you find antagonistic. As it is, the moderation looks capricious and tells me nothing at all about what I should post to avoid a similar ban.

I've got a small-scale question about nutrition in the ancient world. Specifically, about beer.

Given how important beer was to a bunch of cultures, it seems odd that its benefits would be purely recreational, and given that making beer involves a lot more steps than just boiling water, it also seems odd that if the main advantage of beer was its relative sterility, people would have hit on just boiling water instead of malting grain, heating it at the right temperature, etc.

So, given that there are trace nutrients that you can't easily get in a pure-agrarian focused-on-single-grains society, especially if you're poor and don't eat a varied diet (which leads to pellagra and the like), and that at least some of those nutrients can be found in yeast, my question is this; was there enough nutrients in ancient beer to serve as actual nutritional supplements, with the actual gain being gotten from the yeast, not the alcohol?

If this were the case, then you'd presumably see a selection pressure in ancient civilizations that had less access to high-quality complete animal protein to develop alcohol tolerance, and civilizations that had constant ready access to it would have much less selection pressure.

Is there any research on this that anyone knows of?

I'll happily concur with the basic premise; it's all too easy for me to look at the whiplash people have done and are doing on, well, a whole lot of topics, but most present and obvious would probably be the complete 180 that took place between the George Floyd race riots and 1/6.

Even at the time, you had people copy-and-pasting people's cheering on of one while shrieking in pretend-fear of the other, and it was painfully obvious that there were no actual principles about when, what, and how protest should be done involved, in either case. It should not be at all hard to show that the words of most of Amercia's current set of taste-makers have less reasoning behind them then the latest from ChatGPT, just by looking for simple, recent contradictions.

I am a little curious about your S-disposition term of art. Like, if I want to fuck a vegan, so I spend a period of however long it takes of putting up a convincing front of sympathy-towards-veganism statements and minor displays of activism, but internally my mental state doesn't change, and I cheerfully drop the front once I've gotten what I wanted from her, do we need a word other than 'lie' for what I was doing?

I will say that I've personally reached a point of deep cynicism, and feel that the vast majority of people I encounter are at best moral children who have never considered the multiple and obvious contradictions in the beliefs they espouse (and have also been trained to carefully avoid any factual information or ideas that would lead to those contradictions being too widely exposed), that the expected case is that most people are moral cowards and also wildly disinterested in morality, and thus espouse whatever a surface-view of the world shows them will avoid punishment and make up reasons why those beliefs are good after the fact, and in my more grim moments, I take people at their contradictory word and feel that very many people literally are GPT3-ing their way through their interactions with their fellow humans.

Is this just a here-and-now study? I feel like you could get some really interesting data looking at communist or other totalitarian areas, and seeing what people said in public, what they did in private, and what they said about what they both said and did after the totalitarianism fell.

You're essentially describing a society without sex, composed of organisms so far divorced from humanity as we understand and experience it that I have no 'issues' with it, in the same way I have no issues with the way eusocial insects reproduce.

In our world, it is fundamentally impossible to change your sex quickly, cheaply, and painlessly because sex is not a field set in a cosmic database, it's a very strongly bimodal cluster of traits. Male and Female are the names we give to two distinct ways of being, which affect your biology, mentality, and socialization, and which in turn influence how you grow up, and who you are. If I had been female in my early childhood and teen years, I'd have had vastly different experiences than I did, in addition to physically and mentally developing in the specific testosterone-driven ways I did. And even if you can pretend that you could meaningfully simulate who I would have been if an identical-to-early-me double-X-bearing gamete had been implanted, there is no way you can say what I would and would not have done differently in my life, and you absolutely can't say what everyone else would have done.

If you live in a society with gender and gender roles, you cannot change sex as easily as you change clothes, because part of gender and gender roles is the ongoing process of socialization and gender-specific experiences which further define who you are. In the above-described world, sex doesn't exist any more than "People wearing T-shirts" exists as a meaningful category. In a virtual world, where biology is cosmetic only and doesn't drive meaningful outcomes, you can swap sex with the push of a button, because sex only means what your avatar presents as.


I'd also like to bring up another question, which I agree is considerably more inflammatory than yours, but I feel shows you where some people are in terms of fighting the hypothetical. It's the year 2022. People can quickly, cheaply, and painlessly change their race. There are no long-term side effects of the paperwork. If that were the case, would you have a problem with trans-black people using the N-word (or, to be specific, would you have more of a problem with it than cis-black people using it)?

The answer to this question is not strictly relevant; what I'm trying to demonstrate here is that some hypotheticals are kind of inherently suspicious. If someone asks "If hypothetically <the reason for this thing we've agreed is bad isn't true> were different, would not be bad?", and they don't have an actual strong hypothetical other than the bad thing not being bad, then their question is vacuous, and it is likely that the asker is not asking in good faith, but instead is just trying to thinking of the bad thing as not that bad. In the specific case of gender transition, we've seen what that bad thing looks like when we put trans-female prisoners in prisons with cis-female prisoners; the reason that we sex-segregate prisons rears its head, and we see that if we want to avoid rape and pregnancy in prison, we should treat trans-female and cis-male the same way. And, in the hypothetical universe you mention, if we can look at the behaviors of the people who take the pill, and note that people who were natally male consistently act differently than people who were natally born female and both differ from the vat-born, then it makes absolute sense to discriminate based on birth sex and type, no matter how well the trans individuals in that society pass.

I think the closest thing to a justification would be a bare-faced assertion of a veritable asteroid shower of Russel's Teapots of trans individuals. If you take it on faith that there are innumerable trans people who pass without fanfare in their day to day life, then you can get to the above position.

Of course, you can only hold to that position not only by asserting the existence of the many perfectly stealth trans individuals, but by censoring both the first-hand reports of people who can clearly see that male and female are distinct clusters, and that there are several key distinctions (several of which you mention). But again, if you take it on faith that there are a horde of trans passing people, then people who say they can tell the difference can only be lying, as must be the various medical literature, and likewise any experiments anyone poses which show how poorly a sample of trans people pass in person must be poorly-constructed and malicious.

I think you can end up with similar justifications if you posit any kind of holy doctrine and any kind of powerful Satanic deceiver figure. If you have a revealed truth and a way to dismiss any claims that would challenge that truth, you can justify any excesses the revealed truth claims.

I do not think that you claimed that we had factual equality in good faith. I do not think that you actually believe that hate crimes committed by black people are given the same degree of attention and seriousness as hate crimes committed against black people (despite the relative numbers and severity of these two categories), and I think that you are dismissing this claim as being in bad faith in bad faith yourself.

Can you tell us what would convince you that there is not, in fact, equal treatment of black and nonblack criminal behavior? If you were given another similar incident, or another five, or another dozen? How about if you were shown a statistical gap between the amount black people were prosecuted as a group and the amount of crimes that they committed?

Can you demonstrate this? I admit, I'm not seeing how making selection criteria harder would decrease the likelihood of cheating. I mean, in the extreme case, if you make a test that only one billionth of humanity could pass fairly, then the odds that any given person passed the test fairly (when there are great reputational and financial rewards for passing the test, no deep culture of investigating and calling out cheaters, and strong incentives to have everyone passively trust the process and not assume cheating as a default possibility) are fairly low.

Again, I'm not an expert on MIT's admission methods, but if, e.g., they hold their own proctored and blind-graded exam for all students they are considering admitting, I'd definitely update in the direction of considering MIT more reliable. But given that my default assumption about colleges (which is that they will cheerfully drop admissions standards into the ground to accept those of their favored demographics, and raise the standards on the unfavored demographics to compensate), I simply do not believe that MIT is honestly selecting students according to fair criteria.

Fair; I am operating entirely off of a few article summaries which specifically mentioned that he traded crypto at Jane Street, and if there is evidence that Jane Street wasn't trading crypto at the time, I certainly don't have either any specialist knowledge of Jane Street or notable faith in the article summaries.

The point remains, however; if my (hypothetical) investment manager was bragging to me about how much money he made with Bernie Madoff, I would seek another investment manager, even if said investment manager decried buying into the Ponzi scheme specifically and even if Bernie had other legitimate investments. It doesn't matter if they came out ahead (plus, I, being a suspicious bastard, would figure that a smart investment manager would make damn sure to conceal the fact that they lost money by not doing basic due diligence on Bernie's fund if they did lose money in it); no matter the outcome, my own trust in someone who put money down on Bernie would go inexorably down.

How much IQ would you need to cheat your way through your entire MIT education, I wonder?

My own knowledge of MIT is rudimentary, but I remember it having a strong focus on student trust and honor from looking into the Aaron Swartz fiasco. And it appears that the story of Sam was finding and exploiting high-trust environments where not even bare due-diligence against adversarial actors was being done.

Am I wrong about this? Does MIT gleefully count coup against attempted cheaters? Is there a high-publicity case of a student turning in their roommate for cheating, or a professor being recognized for diligence in uncovering a novel cheating method and bringing it to the attention of all and sundry?

Again, I assume that he needs to have reached a basic minimum to cheat competently; I'll qualify him with "probably smart, with no verys". But nothing I've seen qualifies him as one of the STEM cognitive elite other than some certifications, and in current year, I do not trust any certifiers.

The "Sam is one of the cognitive elite" narrative appears to rest on three pillars; FTX itself (now distinctly counterevidence), his job and educational history (which I don't trust at all without a deeper dive), his accidents of dress and hobby (taking interest in math, logic, debate, and LoL). For myself, I find a missing pillar; I would expect a STEMLord to need to sharpen themselves against the unyielding whetstone of reality to achieve mastery. It certainly could be that Sam was a technical genius who focused all of his productive energies on his set-up for FTX (and then growing FTX), and that he judged a better expected return from laser-like focus on that than a model rocket hobby or a few hundred Project Euler solutions. But absent any hard evidence of such, I consider that Sam could be either a cheat, a liar, and a fraud who is also a brilliant technical mind, or simply a cheat, a liar, and a fraud, and as such do not multiple entities (or properties, I guess).

And, again, if you have evidence that it would be wildly unlikely for MIT to let a cheat, a fraud, and a liar through its programs, I'd love to hear it.

Did he? I honestly don't know. Has anyone done a post-fall post-mortem deep dive on SBF's time in Jane Street?

Would you care to elaborate?

I know nothing about Jane St. other than they're a finance shop that is known for brain-teasers in their interviews. If they have in-depth procedures for, e.g., double-blinding the results of applicants' written responses to their math and statistics questions, so that the person deciding "Yes, this answer shows sufficient mastery of the topic and reasoning skills." has no cues from college or name, then that's a significant data point in favor of me being wrong, and I'd welcome it being pointed out.

But I've been in IT for a while and I know exactly how much brain-teaser questions (or, for that matter, basic tests like FizzBuzz) are actually treated as hard checks when either upper management or even just the interviewer in question really wants the interviewee to pass, and it is not much at all. And I absolutely do not consider Jane Street a quasi-priesthood of intellectual integrity, and that every employee working for them cares utterly about the incorruptible truth, because (again), they hired SBF to trade crypto for them.

But again, I know no specifics, and if Jane Street has specific procedures and checks in place to stop a charismatic fraud from joining their august ranks, I'd love to hear about them in more detail.

I feel like there's a point around good toupees here; it could be that I've been bamboozled by dozens of low-IQ people and just never though to check.

As for my boiling comment, I was making a joke along the lines of room-temperature IQ, in that 212 (F) and 100 (C) are both boiling depending on your measure. And, to be clear, I don't think that SBF is significantly below average, and assume he's between 107 - 115 IQ generally just based on his heritage.

But I put no faith in his words, his presentation of himself, and any evaluation by someone who would either gain by reporting him smarter or be put at risk of retaliation by reporting him dumber as indicators of his smartness. I think that his first talent is shamelessness, and his second is creativity in exploiting trust, and his third is in presentation to limit the number of people who think to check on his first two strengths, and while he could also be quite smart at the shape-rotate-y stuff (and is probably not blisteringly incompetent at it), I see at present absolutely no reason to assume that SBF is "really really good at STEM/maths".

What the heck does the fact that SBF said something (in this case, something nakedly self-serving) have to do with reality, reason, or any truth about the world?

It could be that this is the case, that SBF chooses to play a competitive ranked multiplayer game and generally bring his random teammates down, and deal with a notoriously stressful and distracting environment that (to my knowledge) no one else says is a good flow-supporting distraction like music or walking, and that he puts in zero effort because he doesn't care.

Or, alternatively, he could play the game because LoL is the kind of thing that smart, nerdy, driven people play (because it's so miserable for the casual player), wholly as part of a brand-building activity, and that he not only has no real interest in the game beyond the bare superficial needed to use it as a prop, and the reason he has not gitten gud in his hundreds of hours of play is because either he is profoundly uninterested in learning, improving, and gaining skills, or because he can't, and bronze league is his natural skill ceiling. (Also, as a note: this is entirely from second-hand absorption from one of my friends who plays MOBAs and extremely cursory research. I could be absolutely wrong about the rank of his accounts, the hours he's spent playing, and what both signify. I eagerly await any LoL-players present to chime in with first-hand information.)

My current position is that everything SBF says or has said, and that everything everyone around him who would plausibly benefit from him looking good or be punished for blowing the whistle on him, is suspect. He's a super-affirmative-action-hire, basically; he could be as competent and smart as his rep and just happened to fail horribly in these few cases (or, possibly, used to have been extremely smart and competent and then fried his brain on nootropics), just as an affirmative action hire maybe possibly good have gotten their job even if they'd been evaluated fairly, but there's no real way to know.

I feel like the fact that Jane Street paid Sam a very nice salary to manage crypto trades for them is pretty strong evidence against their own smarts.

But, less facetiously, I'd like to lay out my default assumption here, based on what I've seen of SBF's work and statements so far; he is not IQ <90, and he has ruthlessly exploited the high-trust presumption of society, and because of that, I trust not a single word or explanation that comes from his mouth, nor those of people who would plausibly gain by his own gains. Given his willingness to spend money on regulators and punish dissenters, the general halo effect, and the fact that I know well how easily the job interview process gets twisted in general, I am not willing to assign Jane St. the same impartial evaluation trust that I would a math SAT scantron machine, or a compiler attempting to compile code he wrote.

Again, I don't think that he is an idiot. But I do think that he has absolutely adopted the appearance of smart nerdy things consciously, as part of a presented image, and that I need to consider everything about him from an adversarial position.

For me, it's just parsimony. I have no faith in colleges in general any more, and Sam has demonstrated his ability to manipulate elite institutions, and is also a goober. It could be that he is high-IQ and a goober, or that he's a goober all around and simply bamboozled MIT the same way he did a bunch of others - or it might be that he simply had a lucky interpersonal-connection 'in' to MIT that would have worked whether his boiling-hot IQ was measured in C or F.

I also think it's probably fairly unlikely that we'll get hard data either way, especially now, given the extended time that's passed from any potential objective-ish evaluations like AP exams or SATs. Also, nowadays, it would be trivial for someone of his resources to game a few slightly-harder-to-fake signals, like a ghostwritten StackOverflow profile and some boilerplate personal projects on a GitHub account.

But given the sheer stupidity and utter agnosticism towards the very idea of personal consequences he has displayed so far, I feel like I can safely say he's probably real dumb, in the classic sense, excepting for his ability to lie and manipulate people (which, in fairness, is a non-trivial skill, but also one not necessarily interacting with deep math, science, and programming geekery). I predict that no actual evidence of Sam doing anything difficult and valuable with anything not vulnerable to social pressure, where the results can be verified (meaning mostly math or programming, since those are things I feel I could verify myself) will be found. I am not super-invested in this theory, and I happily admit this is purely a balance-of-probabilities as I see it; I'd be delighted for someone to turn up, e.g., a deeper dive into Sam's LoL rankings, if nothing more objective can be found.

Can we see the math and logic he's said to have done?

I ask because I remember there being something of a dive into his League of Legends ranking based on the infamous investor call, and apparently he was not at all ranked the way a genius mathlete willing to put in the hours would be at all, and also because I myself have seen a lot of people who associate with smart, nerdy things entirely for smart, nerdy cred, and whose actual ability to engage with the crunchy, mathy, requires-focus-and-practice bits of them is completely nonexistent.

I'd absolutely believe that Sam got top marks entirely based on his family and social connections and the fact that a prep school is about making him look good for a college environment that has completely desisted from actual educational discernment. It's absolutely the case that smart people can believe very dumb things, especially when those dumb beliefs are serving as vital shields for their self-image, and that high-IQ memorize-loads-of-facts-and-do-novel-work-with-them types can end up carefully compartmentalizing against the heresies of their day and circle, and get badly bitten when their failure to think in that one context happens to arise.

But until I see Sam's math SAT scores or evaluate some complex code he's written, I'm personally going to hold off on claiming that he's smart.

Do you have a graph comparing the educational outcomes of middle-class two-parent black Americans to non-middle-class non-two-parent Jewish-Americans?

As an aside, I think that you can probably do the same thing yourself for racism. I know that I've had a fair amount of conversations on whether a particular racially-motivated act of discrimination was racist or not, and when I've sensed some confusion around the term, I've gotten good responses by explicitly recognizing and disclaiming some popular alternate definitions of the word, and emphasized that I was referring to racially-motivated acts of discrimination.

Hmm. I don't think that the circumstances of recent Nigerian immigrants actually do mirror, e.g., those of turn-of-the-century Chinese immigrants particularly well, but I'd be interested to hear you break down what you think the salient features of Asian immigrant waves were, and how they compare to the circumstances of the given Nigerian wave.

We've got a lot of immigrants to a lot of nations being done by a lot of ethnic groups across a lot of history for a lot of reasons under a lot of circumstances; we should be able to tell pretty quickly which of those factors (if any of them) most saliently predict outcomes.

Sure, I'll give you two numbers. First from [1]:

The College Board’s publicly available data provides data on racial composition at 50-point score intervals. We estimate that in the entire country last year at most 2,200 black and 4,900 Latino test-takers scored above a 700. In comparison, roughly 48,000 whites and 52,800 Asians scored that high. The same absolute disparity persists among the highest scorers: 16,000 whites and 29,570 Asians scored above a 750, compared to only at most 1,000 blacks and 2,400 Latinos. (These estimates—which rely on conservative assumptions that maximize the number of high-scoring black students, are consistent with an older estimate from a 2005 paper in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which found that only 244 black students scored above a 750 on the math section of the SAT.)

From [2]: (It's interactive and tabular, so you'll have to click around)

In the Homicide Offender vs. Victim demographics, we see that pernicious hate ratio again (with blacks committing 51% of all murders in the U.S. over the past 10 years, and Asians committing less than 1% of murders.) And, as our control, white people ring in 36% of the murders. The remaining 11% are done by a racially-unknown perpetrator.

With blacks being a relatively-consistent 12% of the population and Asians being 6%, we would expect to see ~12% and about 6% of murders. White people with Latinos rolled in (which, for some reason, the violent crime stats always do) get us to 76% of the population.

I will leave pulling the actual p-values as an exercise to the reader, but the numbers are clear; race has an immediate, obvious, and dramatic impact; if you are black, you are several times more likely than average to be a murderer (with, of course, the proviso that the vast, vast majority of black people are not criminals, and 5 times a very small number is still a small number overall), and likewise, if you are Asian, you are several times more likely then average to score a 700+ on the SAT (with, again, the same proviso that only a small minority of that small minority are exemplary math students.) It is absolutely not the case that every black is a dumb violent criminal, and that every Asian is a peaceful geometer-hobbyist. But it is true that black people are wildly overrepresented in violent crime and underrepresented in mathematical achievement, and that the reverse is true for Asians.

Now, I don't have any sources I particularly trust for the dual-parent question, because I haven't examined it, but a quick perusal of sources did give me an entry from the Institute for Family Studies[3], which didn't seem to obviously contradict the other few sources. It gave the percent of Asian children from two-married-parent homes at 85%, with 74% for non-Hispanic whites and 36% for black children. This, obviously, is a much closer outcome ratio than we see in the two above outcome cases; if coming from a broken home was the primary determinant, then we'd see those 15% of 6% (0.9%) do as much crime proportionally as 63% of 12% (7.56%). And yet, the ratio of Asian super-achievement on the SAT to black is 25 to 1; when it comes to violent criminals, the ratio is well over a hundred to one.

As far as I can see, getting married and raising a family is just another outcome in which Asians do better than the average, and black Americans do significantly worse. But I would be fascinated to see if you can find any studies which specifically compare the the outcomes of children of two-parent black households to non-two-parent Jewish and Asian households, to really get into family status as a signifier on its own.


Also, to be clear; this is not a melanin thing. Asians have more melanin than whites, and do better. Blacks have more melanin than whites, and do worse. It's also a purely-statistical truth; we can absolutely drill down to the Igbo or Laotian immigrant populations and see divergent results. Black and Asian are both large, diverse groups which contain many, many, many subgroups, and of course, the individual is the smallest and most significant subgroup of all.

1: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-highlight-inequality-and-hinder-upward-mobility/

2: https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend

3: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-majority-of-us-children-still-live-in-two-parent-families