somedude
8mo ago
Yes, I do.
Furthermore, if someone wishes to disagree, they can make an actual claim to the contrary and then defend it with something outside of their own head. Empty metaphysical non-arguments are deeply unimpressive.
somedude
8mo ago
No my schtick is literally "I don't think the facts as presented are either A) complete, or B) particularly supportive of the sweeping conclusions that certain individuals want to draw from them." because we're not talking about IQ or SAT scores in isolation here. We're talking about lowering the requirements for the combat arms across the board, spatial, cognitive, physical, training, the whole kit-and-kaboodle.
So are you trying to say that actually their problem was physical ability and training rather than their deficient cognitize abilities? Is that the argument I've finally compelled you to stand on? If so, I'll just say that is really, really, really not the impression created by anything I can find to read on the subject. I mean they weren't called McNamara's Meeklings, something else was at the top of everyone's mind
Nonetheless, this is a post that directly intersects with the content of my own, rather than some "nigurs r dum also I hate meritocracy" post you imagine me making, so congratulations.
...you get away with it because the Mods let you get away with it.
Hey, show some gratitude. Anyone else would get slapped on the pecker immediately for that "niggers r dum" thing.
somedude
8mo ago
Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern -- a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced. Fenring, reading Paul's emotion, said, "Majesty, I must refuse."
Okay, but this is unfilmable without dubbing in everyone's thought balloons, and everyone craps on the Lynch movie for resorting to that. Visually it's just two guys looking at each other and maybe making a face.
somedude
8mo ago
I hope you can see the problem there
I see several, but the one I'll call attention to is number three.
3: Ergo those who argue that racial differences outweigh individual differences are lying when they claim to support a colorblind meritocracy
I genuinely and sincerely have absolutely no idea how a fully sane and functional human being could possibly come to the conclusion that "I think you're lying about your position, now defend this position that I've decided on for you!" is some kind of valid debate tactic.
It's flat-out bugfuck insane. You can suspect whatever you want, but you have to respond to the posts that actually exist. The idea that anyone else is supposed to care about your personal fantasies concerning what they believe is completely laughable.
somedude
8mo ago
Search results were already sort of an issue from SEO slop-factories gaming the system so aggressively. Chatbots will lower the price of that stuff a bit so we'll probably see a bit more, but I doubt it's going to be that much more of an issue compared to what could be done a few years ago by paying some ESL third-worlder rock bottom prices to produce the stuff.
I dunno, the LLM can churn out slop faster, at a higher quality, and it's only going to get better and faster and cheaper as time goes by. Especially once the people shoveling slop have had time to come up with their own models optimized for what they want to do, ones that don't necessarily talk in the same stilted way as the current high-profile commercial products that can't afford to accidentally say anything offensive.
somedude
8mo ago
I don't think the facts as presented are either A) complete, or B) particularly supportive of the sweeping conclusions that bay area rationalists in general and certain "dark enlightenment" thinkers in particular want to draw from them.
We know, it's getting you to explain why in the form of anything resembling a cogent argument that's proven to be impossible. Reams of irrelevant musing about McNamara's beliefs aren't it.
I don't see how Macnamara displaying a callous disregard for both military tradition and human life is supposed to prove that "niggers r dum" unless the specific tradition being disregarded is the one about equality before God.
Your schtick boils down to "I don't see how someone lowering test requirements to disastrous result is supposed to prove that tests measure anything important" but hey if you pretend the other guy spelled everything wrong and sprinkled in some ethnic slurs then you can still imagine that you came off looking like a winner.
In the mean time @somedude is by thier own admission an account created for the specific purpose of picking a fight with me
And I've been getting away with it because you consistently make such dogshit arguments that there's no sane way to mod me for it. Like what are they going to do, tell me it's against the rules to expect you to provide reasoning for your statements? Order me not to notice when you try to call me out over subjects I have literally never posted upon?
They could try getting in my ass over my tone, but barely-obscured contempt is pretty much your entire gig, and frankly I do an infinitely better job of turning mine into posts that at least comprehensibly intersect with the other guy's actual statements. It'd be pretty ridiculous for anyone to jump to your defense over that while you stand around paraphrasing my arguments as "niggers r dum" at the exact same time.
Basically, cope with it. I treat you with exactly as much respect as you insist on treating the other side with, but at least I don't literally make up my own imaginary version of your posts and then tell you to defend arguments you've never made.
somedude
8mo ago
Bit of a tangent, but what disastrous effects have been caused by having a bottle deposit?
somedude
8mo ago
you still haven't havent explained how McNamara displaying an attitude towards the lives of his nation's troops that would be more at home in a 19th century Tzarist Army than a 20th Century Western one is supposed to prove that generalizations about group differences in IQ are more predictive of future success than say living in a household with both parents present, or disprove the utility of colorblind policies.
That's probably because I've literally never said anything about what the number of parents in a household does or does not predict, nor anything about the effectiveness of colorblind policy. This is absolutely some of the worst argumentation I've ever seen in this community. Seriously, what kind of response are you actually expecting when you try to call someone out for failing to defend arguments they've never made?
You consistently attempt to have these arguments in a fantasy land of your own creation, where progressive Democrats are supposedly HBD advocates, where everyone who argues with you is a supposedly a progressive even if they're actually some kind of right wing shitlord, and where everyone supposedly hates meritocracy regardless of anything they say about it, or whether they've ever said anything about it at all. It's absolutely complete bad faith and I refuse to humor it.
Especially since, again, you've already answered the question once, and all I'm doing is trying to squeeze your reasoning for it out of you. Let's harken back yet again to the first time I'm aware of that someone (not me) brought this subject up to you.
Them: "Wouldn't that suggest that people who think IQ measures something real and useful in real life might have a point? Guy comes up with idea of lowering the threshold on a mental aptitude test to fill a manpower shortage, and now his name is considered cursed for generations. This sure seems consistent with mental aptitude tests mattering in real life."
You: "No. If anything Robert McNamara illustrates my point that it is possible for someone with a high iq to be a complete moron."
See, at this point it hadn't yet occurred to you to just completely disengage on this subject and deflect by asking the questioner to defend some strawman argument, rather you just went ahead and said no. To which I can only say, cool, why not? You must have had some sort of reasoning behind your answer, right? So why are you working so hard to keep it a secret? I mean it's one thing to just lose an argument and stop posting on a given topic, there wouldn't be any reason to follow up in that case, but you insist on running around in circles perpetually banging this exact same drum. If you're going to do that, then I'm going to keep bringing up this extremely relevant historical example and asking for your reasoning on an opinion you've already expressed and continue to advertise.
And I am going to keep bringing it up. Not more than once per thread, ain't nobody got time for that, and I won't be the one starting any of the conversations, but each time someone else does and you wade in with the same old opinions? Yeah I'm pretty sure there's no rule against asking Hlynka to provide reasoning for his own statements on a subject he insists on talking about, so get used to looking at it. Don't worry, I'll make sure to rewrite it each time, maybe start including some highlights of other users asking you to stop shamelessly ducking, so that it doesn't just turn into copypasta.
If you insist on performing this ridiculous show of dodging and calling out strawmen, well I can't stop you, so instead I'm going to have you do it over and over again. Unless you give up entirely and stop responding, in which case I'm going to keep doing it anyway, for everyone else to see.
somedude
8mo ago
I've met too many 60th percentile ASVABs who were demonstrably capable of organizing/supervising complex evolutions involving hundreds of people and dozens of moving parts
This seems to be a great time to bring up one of my favorite subjects when it comes to this debate. You know it, you love it, it's McNamara's Morons.
For those of you who might have missed this little tangent, during the Vietnam War, Secretary McNamara decided to lower the required score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test to as low as the tenth percentile in order to raise a bunch of cannon fodder for the Army. Shockingly, this experiment was a catastrophe. You can read the Wikipedia article here.
Now this particular instance, of someone coming into a complex field that actually intersects with reality and lowering the required scores on standardized intelligence tests, causing disaster to ensue, would seem to be a significant data point when it comes to the relevance of standardized intelligence testing.
I mean, you'd think so, right? Nonetheless I have been chasing this dude around the forum like the Terminator trying to get him to make a post that engages with the example in any meaningful way, to absolutely no avail, all while he continues to bang his drum about how meaningless standardized tests are.
If you happen to click, make sure you expand the comments on that second link. Look at where he goes "How is this an argument against individual merit?" out of literally nowhere, just completely arguing with someone who only exists in his imagination.
At this point I don't really expect any kind of worthwhile response, but I may as well throw this out there if he's going to continue to post about the subject and expect to be taken seriously.
somedude
8mo ago
Oh, so you just call everything you disagree with on the subject of race "HBD" whether the stated reasoning has anything to do with genetics or not. Brilliant. Let me guess, you read their minds and decided you could disregard everything they were saying in favor of your own imagined "real" version of their arguments.
No, progressive Democrats are not HBD advocates. They generally get really agitated whenever anyone brings up HBD as an explanation for anything. Stop posting like anyone else knows or gives a shit about your personal imaginary versions of what everyone thinks.
somedude
8mo ago
Sure, and you can argue that alchemy deserves more credit for being the primitive precursor to chemistry, but I'm still not going to be terribly sympathetic when someone tells me I'm being close-minded about the existence of the philosopher's stone.
somedude
8mo ago
All of civilization and the foundation that allowed science to be developed and flourish, perhaps?
I'm sorry, I meant what have you brought us that is in any meaningful way distinguishable from people believing in fantasy. Human beings make shit up constantly, and even in a world where magic was real and we had a way to tell, you'd still expect there to be a lot more chaff than wheat.
Do you have any way to offer us of telling them apart? Any way to separate the "real" magic from the shit that's actually just people making things up? What are the precepts of this non-materialist brand of science, how were they arrived at, and what makes you think they're true? Or are we just supposed to sort of blandly and noncommittally nod our heads at literally everything?
Generally I want a revival of religion, I want atheism to be a thing of the past and I want materialists to acknowledge arguments and admit they don't know instead of sneering. It seems that's too much to ask, however.
It really is. If this is what non-materialists want, then their arguments are going to need to get much, much, much better. When someone like me brings up "experimental insights" and "testable theories" and such, you need to understand that what we're really asking, what those words literally mean, are "Can we create any set of circumstances where your beliefs about reality being true or false make any discernable difference?"
If the answer is no, then yeah you're going to have to go to the back of the line. Sorry, but the number of things that would fit into the space you're trying to carve out is functionally infinite, they can't all be true, and you're not offering me any decent way to tell which are supposedly which.
somedude
8mo ago
A couple centuries ago, give or take, human beings began interrogating the universe in an organized fashion we call "science" and in the process unlocked incredible powers beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors. Now we can travel places by flight, cure terrible diseases, speak and view across vast distances, rain unfathomable destruction on our enemies, etc. etc. etc.
How far am I supposed to bend over backwards extending charity to all the sorcery that turned out to not actually work? Magical beliefs have been with us since we climbed down from the trees, and after thousands of years we have what? What have you brought us? A handful of anecdotes and some just-so rationalizations for why no one can find any decent evidence when they go looking for it.
To be honest, I'm not sure what non-materialists even want from us materialists. They aren't bringing any experimental insights, they aren't bringing any testable theories, and they don't have any magic that works. Do they just want to get snorted at less when they relate their ESP anecdotes at a party or on an internet forum? I don't know what they expect me to do with what they've given me other than shrug.
Personally I think that if human beings had evolved with the ability to read minds, summon ghosts, teleport, whatever, there would be a bunch of boring guys getting degrees in it by now, explaining how it all works. There would also be a bunch of fantasists griping that whatever specific Harry Potter thing didn't make the cut was actually real too, and those damn scientists with their genetics and neurobiology and ghost summoning were just too pigheaded to see it.
Your personal moral convictions regarding HBD posters don't seem to be especially interesting or important to anyone, and I'm not sure why you would have ever expected otherwise.
Why don't you spend a little bit less time repeating them to an apparently disinterested audience, and a little more time doing things like backing up your ludicrous claims? You stated here that "those were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now" while in this post last week you said "those Anti-policing pushes have been spearheaded by the same class of people who are spearheading HBD awareness, namely secular progressive Democrats."
I want you to either defend these claims, by which I mean name actual names and cite actual evidence of progressive Democrats "spearheading" and "pushing" HBD, or flatly shut the fuck up and stop lying. I'm tired of watching you have these arguments with your feet firmly planted in Bizzarro World.
somedude
8mo ago
Imagine the partisan-flipped alternate universe version of this. Bunch of progressives sitting around an internet forum all baffled while one of the other users rants about conservative Republicans pushing their LGBT ideology. When someone says they support LGBT he gets really combative and insists they're really a conservative, when someone asks exactly which Republicans support it he feigns blindness.
I mean this is just getting stupid. He insists on inserting himself into these conversations but then also insists on holding them in a fantasy world that only he inhabits.
I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now that their chief opponents are secular academics rather than conservative Christians.
Like who?
Either start naming some Bush-era pushers of DEI who have transitioned to pushing HBD or stop foisting your hallucinations on us. You're constantly saying goofy shit like this while everyone else scratches their heads. Like this post from last week.
Yes and it's no coincidence that those Anti-policing pushes have been spearheaded by the same class of people who are spearheading HBD awareness, namely secular progressive Democrats.
Like... what? Progressive Democrats are spearheading HBD awareness? Gosh all the progs I hear from on Twitter and Reddit sure will be surprised, so why don't you just go ahead and list some of these progressive anti-policing Democrat HBD advocates for us?
somedude
8mo ago
Your argument seems to imply that it if you abduct a child from a society in which some number of forced child brothels exist, and then keep that child in your basement and rape them every day, you haven't committed any sin because that was something that could have happened to them in their society anyway. True or false?
If someone from America goes to visit Kidfuckistan, purchases a bunch of child prostitutes, brings them to America, and starts his own child brothel, I can't imagine anyone around here arguing that he shouldn't be thrown into prison for eternity at the very least.
At the same time, once the guy was in the slammer and everything, it would be pretty weird if the kids grew up and decided they were proud Kidfuckistani-Americans and the two weeks they spent as prostitutes in the US before the FBI kicked in the door were a historically unique evil.
somedude
8mo ago
I guess every job in society should just be handed out by lottery then, since figuring out if someone would be good at something or not is apparently impossible. That sure does make hiring easier. Every time say... a civil engineer... quits or retires we can just replace them with someone who was working at McDonald's the day before. Have fun next time you're driving across a bridge.
somedude
8mo ago
Yeah, I feel you on this. I don't have anything against these kinds of farfetched hypothetical "What if magic was real?" conversations, they can be useful points of comparison for sussing out why one holds particular real-world opinions, but I groan whenever a transhumanist hyper-optimist strolls into a discussion about HBD or gender and starts talking about how the problem can be solved by magical Ninja Turtles biotech within a timeframe short enough to even be relevant to current social issues.
somedude
8mo ago
Sure they're still hedging their bets, but in the process they're learning that A) it doesn't actually take the heat off them and B) nobody really cares anyway. Zaslav going out of his way to make sure the public knows Rowling is directly involved in the new show, even as the headlines about her dunking on the trans community flow, is a significant signal.
Everything isn't the gay rights battle. Social media is a lot more ubiquitous now than it was ten or fifteen years ago, and frankly the trans community uses it to be their own worst enemy in ways that are uniquely their own.
somedude
8mo ago
I don't. Seven or eight years ago I think it was South Carolina tried to pass a bathroom bill and the entire media and a shitload of huge companies and sports leagues and such all flipped their wigs and threatened to basically boycott the state until it caved in and the bill was gutted. You'd think they passed a bill to legalize slavery.
Nowdays, not so much. There isn't as much media hoopla, companies are way less eager to wade in, and bills have passed in a number of states. That's not the way this was "supposed" to go. If anything, the last couple of controversies have actually put the boycott shoe on the other foot.
I mean thanks to Hogwarts Legacy it's now been conclusively shown that progressives flipping out on social media over "transphobia" can be safely ignored while promoting your mass-market media product. Sure enough, Rowling sits on Twitter shitposting at trans activists all day like it's 4chan and that hasn't stopped the head of Warner Bros from publicly touting her involvement in the new HP show as a positive.
Compare that with the shitstomping Bud Light took for letting a mere hint of transgender activist marketing waft in the general direction of their product. Behind the scenes people have clearly had serious conversations reassessing what they do and do not need to care about in regard to public opinion. The amount of shits given about progs mad at transphobia has visibly plummeted.
Besides, statistically it's not like the people saying "trans women are women" would actually date one. The number of straight people willing to even countenance such a thing is essentially just a lizardman's constant, and even among the rest of the LGB community the proportion is shockingly low. This is a social/political signalling meme, not something people are living when the lights go out. Memes like that can have great power to be sure, but eventually they run their course.
somedude
8mo ago
Except the LGBT movement wasn't part of my outgroup at first, the religious weirdoes bitching about it were. That outgroup predicted that the LGBT movement would escalate with a series of increasingly unreasonable and disgusting demands, and sure enough here we are.
So no, I didn't apply a heuristic of "my outgroup will demand something disgusting" whatsoever. Rather a movement that was at first nominally part of my ingroup started demanding to teach queer theory to kindergarteners and keep children's "gender transitions" secret from their parents.
The only crowd I've ever known to take an interest in this sort of thing, outside of academic philosophers, are internet theists who've given up on ever winning an argument anyone else cares about. Imagine busting this out because you saw someone chortling at the idea that Star Wars lore is real, and you'll understand how it looks from the outside. The part where everyone gains so much epistemic humility that they quit snorting whenever someone brings up the will of the Force in a serious conversation just isn't coming.
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