aqouta
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User ID: 75
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity
If you and @HlynkaCG want to talk about the white-identity right I beg you, just call them that. There is nothing inherently tied to HBD belief that implies the importance of racial identity. That you think I'm a white identarian is exhibit A that your understanding of the whole topic is deranged.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms. One is a belief about the cause of statistical outcomes and the other is ideological movement. If you assumed that HBD was true are you actually saying that you'd be committed to white identarianism? Surely not right? The only thing holding you back from pushing for ethno states isn't the really quite difficult to defend belief that there is no variance in average aptitudes between races? Can you actually say that? Say "If I were convinced that there was a statistical difference in outcomes between racial groups I think ethno states would be a good idea".
If you're not willing to say that please stop putting those words in my mouth.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
I have long argued for race blindness. HBD is simply true and its truth is useful in counter arguing against the belief that different outcomes are caused by racial discrimination. I know this cannot be the first time you're seeing this position, why do you keep ignoring it?
aqouta
8mo ago
While this is true their borders don't seem to reflect reality at all. The dominant strain on the left is absolutely not HBD believers who oppose a color blind meritocracy on the grounds of believing in HBD.
aqouta
8mo ago
If you ask me "We didn't actually get away with it, so you can't blame us for trying" isn't much of defense.
The NFL is not meaningfully "we" and I don't understand why you insist that it is. You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us. It's like you making a some point about culture and then I spend reams of text explaining how young earth creationists are wrong and thus your real motivations are some version of backwards theocracy.
aqouta
8mo ago
That sounds like the facts on the ground, but maybe the argumentation was particularly bad. If this was seriously a turning point moment for @hlynka I'd be interested in seeing the actual comments.
aqouta
8mo ago
how do the people that believe in pure determinism (or determinism plus stochastic randomness) react to a physical threat? If someone stands in front of them and says, "if you deny free will, I will punch you in the face", do they behave as though they believe that there is no free will to be exercised on the part of either party, that everything that follows is a mere consequence of the state of the universe with possibly a roll of the dice to determine the outcome? Many will affirm that they do, in fact, believe that, but pretty much no one would be willing to bite the bullet and say that neither individual has a choice in what follows.
Your scenario doesn't really seem to prove anything at all? I don't believe I'm writing this comment by some kind of libertarian free will, that is to say I my writing of this comment was always destined to happen from the very moment of the big bang down to the edits and spelling errors. Making it meta and putting the question of determinism into the scenario really just serves to confuse. I would react probably similarly to any other scenario where someone threatens to hit me if I don't lie with maybe some variation because it's a stranger than average lie to demand.
aqouta
8mo ago
The scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and a significant portion of users here defended it. To be clear, The NFL had been collecting Wonderlic score on players since the late 70s, and what they got caught doing was artificially adjusting the scores of high-performing black players downward to change the racial distribution of disability payouts. On a dime I saw users who had claimed to support standardized testing flip from "the data obviously supports our conclusion" to "we must correct manipulate the data to better reflect the truth
Can you link to this? I might have missed a subthread but this does not comport to my memory of this particular scandal.
aqouta
8mo ago
Probably needs to be sold as a kind of color blind absolutism without going too much into the goals beyond that. Claim that people are using race data to do nefarious things and ban it. Might need to make an example out of some of the racial hustlers. It is probably unrealistic but the other options aren't particular realistic either, what does maximal freedom of association look like and how could it be sold?
aqouta
8mo ago
There is no rule of the universe that says we need to pay attention to race. No reason something like "the black professional class" when referenced needs to elicit anything but confusion the way that the "blonde working class" might. Why do people like Greene never have to answer the reverse question? When we enter our two hundredth year of affirmative action and the gap still doesn't close are the African Americans not going to ask the same question of why? If blank slatism is still the only option on merit then what possible conclusion could they reach besides a conspiracy among the other races? Why would this be a more acceptable answer?
What actual mechanism causes some poor black kid in a bad area of town to have any idea whatsoever how many black people are accepted into Harvard? If not told by people intentionally trying to stoke up racial animus would they ever notice if zero black people were in Harvard even after a hundred years? The solution is easy. Stop taking the statistics, make it illegal, or at least highly suspect, to ask for race on a survey not specifically for the purpose of determining health differences. This is the obvious and only stable way forward, we will find our way to it or suffer disasters.
aqouta
8mo ago
I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground.
I acknowledge there exists a motte of social gender understanding that jettisons nearly the entirety of the movement's beliefs which is merely overly neurotically fixated on gender trappings. As you say though, it has practically no constituency because from that standing it really can't make any demands. The movement needs more than mere preference as motivation to justify demands for extraordinary treatment.
There is a clear and tangible need motivating treating adoptive parents like parents. They've taken on a real responsibility for the care of a child. If they just really liked PTA meetings and being seen pushing a stroller around we wouldn't humor them, or at least wouldn't tolerate any kind of top down demand to humor them.
If we reduce the question of trans down to "some people want to be treated s or they're the opposite sex". Then sure, it's coherent, and I'm even willing to humor it to a degree even though I think it'd be better liberalism to just say men can wear dresses and be treated like women while still being men if they want. This is of course all academic, we're talking about a reasonable version of trans activism that doesn't exist and won't ever be prominent.
aqouta
8mo ago
I mean they need a reasonable offramp and Trump isn't that. This is why the Democrats have, correctly, zeroed in on the strategy of just pointing out the wild stuff Trump does and not talking about much else. If the republicans want to be the party of normal they need to actually take up that mantel.
aqouta
8mo ago
Look, the problem isn't just that people who don't think gender essentialism is a coherent worldview think that we're sacrificing the wellbeing of many children and adults needlessly. That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics. It's deeply unsettling to have what seems like plain reality not just denied but the denial to have in many cases incredible force behind it. There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim. There does not appear to be any limiting principle.
aqouta
9mo ago
@The_Nybbler might be slightly too narrow on what it takes to be a libertarian but it really does seem quite strange to call yourself a libertarian and then endorse laws like seatbelt laws. I just call myself a normal liberal so I can go one way or the other but it's hard to take some who calls themselves a libertarian seriously when they take a case where all the relevant externalities are internalized, risk of injury due to not wearing a seat belt, and decide the state should have a say. It just feels like one of the most central cases of not being a libertarian.
aqouta
9mo ago
I'm more narrowly addressing calling the removal of books censorship. To answer your question I recognize the word game being played. There are positive and negative liberties that live under the same umbrella. welfare is framed as liberty maximizing because it frees the recipient of needing to earn those resources and thus opening up their options. I think this form of positive liberty is something worth considering and in many cases pursuing. But it has little to do with negative liberty which is fundamentally about being unconstrained. Between the two types of liberty you can indeed probably describe nearly all policy, where you constrain you do so to benefit others which is their positive liberty and where you do not constrain you are doing so in furtherance of negative liberty so the only type of policy that could do neither would be one that constrains to no benefit which would be a strange policy indeed.
Because of this reasoning I'm pretty much indifferent to naming a party that isn't particularly constraining after liberty, and on balance I think the "moms of liberty" group falls closer on the side of negative liberty. After all they're just asking for the state to use their resources in a way slightly more aligned with their interests so they aren't clearly constraining anyone besides maybe state employees.
aqouta
9mo ago
I take freedom of speech pretty seriously. I'm tired of people trying to dilute it into describing the process through which state runs schools decide how to apportion the limited space they have in school libraries and school curriculum. No one is banning books, that's a false framing. People are saying they don't want the state to use their tax money to buy books to make available in buildings their tax money spent constructing for the purpose of indoctrinating their children. If I write or love a book I have zero right for the state to put that book in public schools and I don't have any idea where the belief I might have such a right comes from.
The exact right process to decide which books go in such a building is the local government and that precisely the process these people are lobbying. How else could it possibly be?
aqouta
9mo ago
It'd depend on the reporter a think and what kind of story they can get out of it. "There are obscure forums where people are discussing wrong think" is a dog bites man story.
aqouta
9mo ago
If the NYTs does do this at least someone should point them to https://www.vault.themotte.org/ it wouldn't take a journalist that long to get a feel for what the community values outside of picking some nuts in a community oriented around allowing nuts to cook.
aqouta
9mo ago
The consensus building is both tiresome and against the rules but at least the readership very obviously leans liberal as distinct from progressive. The commentariat is a mixed bag of disagreeable people who will take basically any position besides main stream progressivism when the opportunity arises. The readership like more than anything novel arguments and novel arguments are what are reward by replies and upvotes, irregardless of the perspective. People appreciate Christian arguments that they've never seen before over arguments that more align with their beliefs but appear to be a dime a dozen. That doesn't change that there are what, six to ten regular Christian posters?
aqouta
9mo ago
We've stayed under the radar because we are very small. Even Scott is only recently on the radar and he's orders of magnitude larger.
aqouta
10mo ago
People naturally cluster their beliefs about things into this neat little narratives. They see John running and get attached to some particular theory about why he is running. They interpret his pace and the look on his face to mean he must be running from someone or something and then build out theories about what the pursuer could be. They think extensively about all the different types of pursuers and that occupies so much of their mind space that they end up way, hilariously, over estimating the likelihood of each of those theories. It's very easy to accidentally discount the possibility that he's just out for an exercise run and made a funny face way below where it belongs if you're not careful.
The practice reminds you to think critically about each additional compounding conditional in this way and prevents common failure modes. It fits nicely with the demand to measure both probability and confidence in things like bets. I've seen myself moderate my beliefs in real time when faced with the need to define odds and offer a bet, it's a humbling thing to have happen.
It also breaks you out of the "my team vs their team" mindset. When I assign a probability besides one or zero to something I've given myself a reasonable out to it not happening. I'm less emotionally invested in some outcome and can more easily resist each new piece of evidence to the contrary causing me to double down about how it really, if you squint, supports my original position. I think this is something a lot of people who end up sucked into ideological pipelines could avoid most of their bad ends if they adopted. "From the evidence before I think I was still right in favoring outcome X, but I see I now that I was too confident and maybe evidence Y and Z should be less compelling to me in the future" is a much superior mental state to "No, bullshit, I was always right and there must be some kind of conspiracy to hide the truth". And the latter appears to be a very common occurrence.
Can you make due without these tools? Absolutely. Some people are able to free solo crazy climbs. But I find it strange that you don't least recognize their value.
aqouta
10mo ago
Putting a probability to your beliefs is just a health tool to get you out of the silly narrative mindset where you get committed to one narrow line of possible events. It gives you a bunch of other useful tools for thinking about uncertain events like making sure that compounding conditionals should lower your probability rather than raise it. It's not really a substitute for having gut feelings but it's a very useful set of tools for discussing and reasoning about these gut feelings.
aqouta
10mo ago
On a meta-note: I feel a ton of this discussion about transgenderism is getting repitive. I'm seriously considering putting together a document with the most commong arguments pro and con, so instead of spending way too much time poorly reconstructing the same counterarguments, I can just say “you are using argument 69a, please see rebuttals 23a through c.”
This could be an interesting project. I find it's often hard to argue against the entire memeplex because the argumentation shifts constantly as it runs up against dead end and starts a new one until the interlocutors are exhausted.
aqouta
10mo ago
Olympics have allowed trans athletes for 20 years. This isn't that new, and it wouldn't take a huge amount of data to do a t-test.
Olympics get their competitors from some pipeline. That pipeline has not had actual trans people in it. This is ridiculous.
my response is that guessing is not a good enough reason to restrict people's actions and liberties on something like this.
We're only guessing that global warming is going to be catastrophic based on the information we have. We don't have to experience something to have a pretty good idea of the results.
This is not the question at hand, as I've spent thousands of words explaining.
Of course it isn't to you. You want the question to be some impossibly nebulous thing where we have to calculate the exact advantage so you can compare it to other unearned advantages like height. And because it's impossible to actually calculate something like that you're going to keep pleading ignorance. It's all such blatant tactics.
You don't get to claim the null hypothesis on this.
Do you think it's not possible to believe in HBD and not be a race essentialist? True or false HBD is an empirical observation. Race essentialism is a political orientation.
To bring in your Marxist example HBD isn't the belief in the proletariat siezing the means of production. It's the recognizition that compound interest causes capital to accumulate. A brute fact about the world recognized by anyone interested in the truth that can be put towards propaganda about the virtues of building businesses and endowments for your children or propaganda about how you need to kill the capitalists while you still can before they own everything.
You're like someone who has seen the Marxist propaganda and has decided to react by disbelieving in compound interest and refuse to differentiate between the Marxists and your allies on those grounds.
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