vorpa-glavo
No bio...
User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
We also know race blind liberalism is possible, since the United States lives under it (and to some extent Europe). Do you like the system?
I mean, isn't the complaint that it isn't actually race-blind? Either because we're too lenient on black defendants, or because of affirmative action and DEI?
My preference as a heterodox libertarian would be for a race blind system that actually punished people where appropriate. If that means a higher percentage of black people end up in prison, so be it. So yes, I like the theoretical idea of race-blind liberalism, more or less.
We can't have this discussion properly when you aren't actually willing to grant the basic race facts. You don't just grant for the sake of the argument here; you must grant for the sake of reality. Then we can talk about policy. The way it works, though, is that when we try to establish the facts, we get shouted down. So there is no point and there can be no discussion. The facts remain the facts, and the fact remains that the facts remain denied.
I don't think I've ever shouted anyone down for anything here on the Motte.
Don't get me wrong. I've been working my way through books recommended here and elsewhere. But it is slow going, and I'm not yet fully on board with HBD in its most common form here.
My biggest hang up has always remained that I just don't think that establishing the facts of HBD should have much effect on public policy besides immigration. We have the people inside of the country that we have. We can do some amount of voluntary eugenics under a libertarian/liberal regime, but even changing my view to agree with the common HBD consensus wouldn't really change anything about how I think society should be organized. I had already priced in that some people are naturally going to be more violent, or stupid, and I still think we should treat them as individuals and let them rise or fall on the basis of their own merits.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
Also, on the HBD race debate specifically, the controversy is much older than the Motte, and the same thing happens elsewhere with it. I'm convinced it was all sorted out by 1995 or earlier.
Look, I'm fully open to the idea that I'm totally wrong-headed on these topics, and I always try to keep the idea that I might be biased and believing what I want to believe in view as a possibility. But I genuinely think there are a lot of questions that a lot of HBD people I've interacted with seem ill-equipped to deal with.
For example, if I grant for the sake of argument that the average 85 IQ of African Americans is mostly genetic, and even the part that is environmental is mostly infeasible to change with ordinary interventions, I still have not heard a convincing argument in favor of segregation, which I have seen more than one HBDer advocate for.
Like, I'm fully aware of the "13% of the population commits 50% of the murders" argument, but surely if we were just genuinely tough on crime and caught the bad eggs, there would be no reason for segregation, since the vast majority of African Americans are not murderers? Like, if you just look at averages and standard deviations, then the smartest non-outlier African American in the United States has an IQ of 145. I don't understand why we need a system that segregates that IQ 145 person away from everyone else, just because 1% of his same race cohort are murderers or whatever.
I kind of just don't see why the Steven Pinker-style of HBD-aware liberalism isn't still possible, even if HBD turns out to be 100% true? Do you really assert that we've known since 1995 that such a system was and is impossible with any realistic social arrangement?
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
There’s a reason citizens have “equality before the law.” You surely don’t find the principle alive in science or the animal kingdom.
I feel like you have a bit of a category error here. I don't take "equality before the law" to have to do with the facts about people one way or the other. It is more of a commitment that the legal system tries to make to be fair and impartial to the extent that it can.
Of course, because humans made this system we will fail to live up to that commitment again and again. But when we say that, say, a bicycle thief and a tech CEO are equal before the law when charged with the same crime, we're not saying that they have equal intelligence or abilities, or even equal likelihood to have actually committed the crime. We're saying that we're committed to giving them approximately the same chance to prove their innocence, in approximately the same legal proceedings.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time? Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again? It's boring.
One of the things I always respected about the Motte was the effortposters who were willing to research and put in the work on controversial questions. I find responses like yours extremely disappointing and out of place for what this community used to be.
At the very least, you could link to a past discussion on the Motte or somewhere else that you think did a good job rigorously interrogating the evidence and policy choices, while arriving in the neighborhood of /u/sleepyegg's assertions, so that those of us who are interested in high effort discussions and a free search for truth can have something to sink our teeth into.
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
The final recalcitrant juror is induced to change his mind not by the others successfully convincing him, but by the others socially ostracising and refusing to talk to him.
You are misremembering.
The racist juror is turned by social ostracism, but is not the last to be convinced. (Although I think you could make the case that he realized how ridiculous and unreasonable he was being as the evidence for the defendant's innocence was building up, and his strong priors for guilt based on the defendant's race prevented him from proper Bayesian updates until the ostracism.)
The final juror is convinced when he realizes he emotionally needed the defendant to be guilty, because he reminded him too much of his son or something.
vorpa-glavo
8d ago
I mean, generally speaking a child is an 18 year commitment (and socially this is not usually passed on to fathers)
We could do a Spartan-style thing, and only have women "drafted" for the duration of their pregnancy with the ability to give up the child for adoption, with the children being raised communally.
That said, I really don't think any of that is necessary one way or the other.
vorpa-glavo
8d ago
I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable.
Will the implications ever become unignorable?
I'm actually a bit confused by a lot of the right wing concern about birth rates. The people who choose to have kids in the current environment have some combination of genes (personality traits, etc.) and memes that lead to them being more successful at reproducing.
If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out, because each generation will have a higher share of the reproduction-in-industrialized-information-age genes and memes, and the less fit people with inferior genes and memes that don't lead to reproduction will die out. Why would we even want to dysgenically keep around genes that aren't well suited to reproduction in the current environment?
vorpa-glavo
8d ago
You Are Still Crying Wolf.
I am not "still" crying wolf. I didn't really start being truly, deeply worried about Trump until April 2025.
Before that, I had convinced myself that Trump 1 hadn't been that bad, that despite the weekly outrage articles from the mainstream media, he had mostly governed as any Republican would have. But I really do think Trump 2 has been different.
Where are the criticisms for Biden? Honestly, where are they? Where are the people denouncing the pardons? Calling for them to be overturned, or for the pardoned people to be strung up on things they haven't been pardoned for? Where, in other words, is the action? Where is the demonstration of these values applied to anyone other than Trump? Because I no longer trust anyone who applies standards to Trump due to repeated lessons teaching me otherwise.
I mean, I commented this a year ago.
Biden wasn't really the center of a political movement though, and I think Democrats were a lot more willing to call him out for things like the Hunter pardon. At most, I saw people quietly understanding of Biden breaking with principle to protect family, though I still got the sense there was general disapproval for the pardoning on the Left.
As a third party voter, I have been disgusted by both parties, but I really do think the dynamic is that Obama and Biden did X, and Trump is doing X^2, as /u/lollol put it. It creates a weird dynamic, because I'm happy to condemn them all and say that Trump is still worse in most cases (even if his actions aren't totally unprecedented), but it feels like a lot on the Right are in the position where they both need Trump and are happy that he's punishing the people that they hate, and so they're unwilling to engage in more than light critique with hedging like, "the only difference is that Trump is doing what everyone always did out in the open."
vorpa-glavo
12d ago
Which obviously an absurd hypothetical but how is AI not just another tool?
It absolutely is a tool, but I think that the amount of microdecisions made per artistic subunit matters to a lot of people.
In a human made novel, there are hundreds of microdecisions per page. Choices to use one word and not another.
With AI stories, the nature of prompting is that there end up being far fewer human microdecisions per page. I would guess 10:1 is a good conservative estimate of the typical case in both instances.
Some people want to know that a human being might have consciously or unconsciously used this word in this sentence, which works as foreshadowing for this section later in the book. With an AI assisted story, most such cases are going to be complete serendipity with no greater intention or meaning added by the human author of the piece.
Or if you want another example, recall how kids collected Pokémon cards back in the day. If I told you I had a foil Charizard card that’d be quite impressive. If the guy next to me had a foil, “1st edition” stamp on a Charizard card, the “limited edition” factor makes it much more valuable because of its scarcity.
I actually think most trading cards aren't far off from Bored Ape NFTs at the end of the day. Companies love to put gambling in everything these days from mobile apps, to the random toy boxes that take up an entire aisle at my local Walmart. I think gambling was the first supernormal stimulus that humans discovered - randomness that our brains desperately want to find patterns in.
But like other supernormal stimuli, I think they are best avoided. Play LCGs instead of TCGs, or proxy your TCG cards (or buy singles and play cheaper formats like pauper if you really must buy in to the ecosystem.) They should be game pieces, not another supernormal stimulus like all the phone apps or porn sites try to be these days.
Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity, and it has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the piece - that’s a red herring.
I think this is culturally contingent.
I have personally cultivated an aesthetic appreciation for imitation and replicas, because I want to feel beauty in my life, and if you cultivate the joy of copies you can always cheaply and non-rivalrously enjoy art. What you lose in the ability to be a snob, you gain in the ability to be content with enough and what you have at hand.
Why not have a print of a beautiful piece of art that you love? Why not get a cheap but beautiful study of a famous piece done by an art student?
If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.
If you cultivate an appreciation that leads to the causal chain of a replica, then you can get almost the same "big" feelings from a copy of something. I went to the Nashville Parthenon, and I was blown away by it. It may be a copy, but with the right attitude it can be just as mind blowing and interesting as the real Parthenon, since it is causally downstream of the builders of the original Parthenon. It just happens to not share any of the matter of the original Parthenon, but who cares about a silly little detail like that?
vorpa-glavo
12d ago
We can at least be sure that they were proximally caused by people, even if people didn't actually make the comments.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.
I am a hobbyist writer (100% human-made), and I have also dabbled in adding AI art to my stories. I can tell you that trying to add art almost doubled the time it took me to craft a story, and if anything I got less engagement on the stories I added carefully curated AI art to. Frankly, I don't think people can "see" the human effort that goes into something, even AI art.
I'm honestly sad that most of the large D&D subreddits have banned anything with a whiff of AI, because I think it would be nice if there was a space for non-slop AI-assisted products for D&D. Instead we have r/dndai which is 50% sexy elf girls, and 100% slop.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
The sapience/agency thing is a lot of what I was trying to gesture at with "personal." Obviously, God could be personal and non-interventionist, like the God of the deists, or the gods of the Epicureans.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
but it's unproven any of them exist and as such the epistemic status of these multiverse explanations is actually not quite too far from asserting the existence of a creator God.
The main difference in my mind is whether God is personal or not.
An infinite, impersonal multiverse is about as complex as God, but it is still not a person you can pray to, or who will intervene in your life.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
I do remember feeling jealous in my younger years of the characters in the Bible who got to test their God against the other gods in a battle of miracles.
Oh, it's much worse than that. I've always been jealous of the angels.
Supposedly, they get to make an informed decision about whether to serve God or not. Even if you say humans have it better because they can be forgiven and reconciled to God while angels never can, I prefer to make a single informed choice for all eternity over the fuzzy uninformed choice most Christian churches implicitly claim I must make.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
no one, as far as I'm concerned, has a convincing materialist theory of consciousness, or even a sketch of the beginnings of one.
I am partial to Global Workspace Theory as a materialist explanation, but you may find that either unconvincing or too light on details.
Even gods or ghosts seem more amenable to materialist understanding: if real, they would require a distinct, radical change in what laws govern the material world to something far more complex than what seems to, but they could still be made a part of the material.
I mean, you could have a naturalistic explanation that isn't materialist.
You could just hypothesize that there are motes of mindstuff that come together and produce consciousness, but which are governed by natural laws like everything else in the universe.
I just think this is on the level of the old theories of elan vital (the special "stuff" that supposedly makes life possible.) We got rid of theories of elan vital after we discovered the mechanics of biochemistry.
My intuition is that just as science rendered the superlunary sphere and life into ordinary matter, we will someday do the same to consciousness.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God. (That's obviously a very crude way of phrasing it, but I think that captures the basic intuition common to this family of arguments.)
I'm actually curious why you think they're compelling. Saying Phenomenon A is mysterious, so to explain it I will invoke Phenomenon B - an infinitely powerful, personal, creator deity seems like a nonsense step to me. I think the problem is going to be, God is essentially infinitely complex, so the step jump to God is always going to be almost impossible as a way to rationally explain our mysterious phenomenon. It would literally be categorically easier to invoke some unknown but finitely complex and finitely powerful natural process to explain consciousness, than to invoke God in this context.
It is also a classic God of the gaps argument.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
Conservative means to keep things how they were.
You need to read more Burke and Chesterton.
While there are certainly debates about whether conservatism is more of a temperament or an ideology, usually conservatism is a little more broad than just keeping things how they were.
In the United States, most conservatives worthy of the name are trying to conserve the founding, little-l liberal ideals of the Revolutionary War. It is part of what sets American conservatives apart from the blood and soil conservatives of Europe.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
I'm pro gun rights, but I think there are meaningful distinctions between some of the the things mentioned and guns.
Smoking is mostly dangerous to the person doing it. Yes, yes, there's secondhand smoke, but if you're not frequently around smokers while they light up, it's not that much of a concern. Generally, little-l liberal paternalism is okay with "victimless crimes", and tobacco smoking is pretty close to a perfect example of this. You can't even make the socialized healthcare case against smoking, since it actually saves taxpayers money by killing people early.
Speeding is already illegal. However, traffic laws rely heavily on voluntary compliance with the law, since there aren't enough police in the world to catch all the people speeding. In theory, traffic cameras can also solve this issue, but if there were too many traffic cameras, people might genuinely get up in arms about it. Generally speaking, we are dealing with a bunch of trade offs when it comes to traffic laws, and it is unclear that "lock up anyone who speeds" is the best all around solution for society as a whole.
I also think we generally do make pet owners responsible for injuries and damage that are done by their animals. Tort law probably already covers a lot of the things we'd want from a legal code that deals with dangerous animals.
I mean, it could also be fairies if we're going supernatural. There are all sorts of fairy abduction tales like Tam Lin or Sir Orpheo, which have some interesting parallels to alien abductions. And European fairy myths are continuous with things like the Norse Wild Hunt, which involved bands of supernatural beings flying through the air.
Once you reach to invoke one of the more out there options, a lot of things are on the table.
IIRC, the consensus from twin studies is that intelligence is ~80% heritable, though also note that much of the remaining 20% is due to non-shared environmental effects which are likely near impossible to modify via environmental enrichment.
I'm not actually sure most of these people understand the "heritability" that twin studies are measuring. The way the math works, the heritability of number of legs is close to 0 (because there is basically no variation in leg count), even though we are quite sure that number of legs is 100% determined by genetics. And the equation we use spits out different heritability numbers under different social arrangements: the heritability of literacy is different in places where women aren't educated vs. where women are.
And I honestly lost a lot of faith in Twins Reared Apart studies when I learned a lot of them allow for a shared environment until the age of 8 - it isn't all just twins separated at birth (because there are not enough such twins for most studies.) 8 years is a long time in childhood development, and while I think the Classical Twin Design of looking at identical and fraternal twins raised together is slightly better, I still don't think we can rule out that identical twins end up with more similar "environments" because they look more like one another (and like it or not appearance matters for humans.) I think a lot of the missing heritability between twin studies and GWAS studies is probably explained by weaknesses in twin study design.
One of my friends recently "came out" to me as an HBD person, and I was honestly unimpressed with a lot of his examples (though I don't expect every random HBD person to be a Motte-caliber racial scientist.) He seemed completely dismissive of things like parasites and disease burden as a partial explanation of Subsaharan African low IQ, seemed to not fully grasp at all times how averages and standard deviations worked (since a decent portion of African Americans will end up with IQs of 100+ or 115+, and yet he seemed to reason as if they were all dummies, even if he was perfectly willing to acknowledge "outliers"), and I just didn't think he applied the rigor I know HBD people are capable of in general. (He never brought up GWAS studies or polygenic scores even once!) HBD is an interesting hypothesis, I just want to see well-constructed arguments for it.
rather than the latest bespoke localized novelty theory of the sort that a non-HBD person seemingly has to memorize hundreds of to rationalize the world around them.
The goal isn't to find a single, simple master explanation for everything. The goal is to find the minimum number of explanations with the maximum amount of explanatory power.
Pure HBD clearly doesn't serve as a complete explanation. For example, African Americans are about 20% White admixture and have IQs of 85. If we think that 100% of the difference between African Americans and Whites is explained by genetics, we can predict the average IQs of Subsaharan Africans with the equation: (0.80x) + (0.2 * 100) = 85, and predict that their IQ should be around 81. And yet most of the numbers I see HBD people cite for Subsaharan African IQ are far lower than that. I've sometimes seen claims in the high 60's. A genetic difference between African Americans and Whites, implies a strong environmentally-mediated difference for Subsaharan Africans and African Americans.
But if we're already going to allow that environment effects can cause a one or more standard deviation in IQ from what we expect, I think we then have to double back and question our originally granted assumption that the IQ differences between African Americans and Whites is 100% genetic. It has got to be a mix, and if it is a mix, I don't think we can yet say where African Americans will top out.
On the other hand, I think the nutrition + parasites + tropical diseases explanations seem to have a lot of explanatory power. They're not another thing to memorize, they make predictions that I tend to think are born out in the data, even if they can't explain all of the difference with best estimates for effect size.
This proposal is silly, since you're already taking people who have been selected for a particular trait and putting them in a particular place. Let me put it to you, do you think there would be much white flight if you instead selected for blacks with relatively high SAT/ACT scores or who had Bachelor's degrees?
Even if that group is a smaller one, I think you must understand on some level that there are good eggs and bad eggs, even in a highly crime-prone group like that.
More options
Context Copy link