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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Why just one case?

At least I provided a case, unlike the original, completely unsupported assertion.

You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.

Respectfully, no. Societal cohesion and solidarity is a fragile, fickle thing that we barely understand and do not know how to sustain across lengthy periods. Slapping a number on something doesn't necessarily mean that you're using the right statistic, or that the thing you're trying to measure is even actually legible with the methods and information at hand.

Statistics around illegal immigrants are notoriously unreliable, because many jurisdictions do not cooperate with federal immigration efforts, and illegal immigrants (for completely understandable reasons) are disproportionately likely to use falsified identity documents and avoid getting involved with state agencies, including law enforcement. We don't even actually know how many there are in the country - the media has been using the same number for appx. thirty years, across high and low migration periods alike.

Reasoning from examples has flaws, but at least we can draw direct lines from immigration to particular incidents, like that one.

Pretty bad response. In any group of millions you can find examples of anything you want.

As we all know, cardiologists are horrible, horrible people.

Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me

“Oh, you don’t want your nation flooded with Haitian refugees? Got a source on why that’s bad? A peer reviewed, published government source?”

In fact, I’ll go further and say that this is an isolated demand for lack of rigor.

In a forum of people who read rationalists, in a subculture directly descended from blogs with names like “Less Wrong” and people who write long winded posts on logical fallacies,

That we should totally disregard an obvious day 1 of class example of a logical fallacy. Because hey, it’s against a group we tend not to like around here.

Isolated demand to let the fallacy against Haitans slide! We all know they’re bad anyway, it doesn’t really matter if we can prove it or not.

If I were to use the same tactic (one news article about a killer?) to show that conservatives are categorically dangerous, I’d get laughed out of the forum and for good reason. That’d just be ridiculous on the face of it.

Maybe one or two very patient mottizens would explain to me some of the very basics of how logical fallacies work. A few Scott Alexander posts and I’d be on my way having been educated.

Hooray for rigor! But, eh … here it’s about immigrants, and that’s kind of our thing around here. Why bring rigor to something we already know is bad? That’d be a total buzzkill.

Haiti scores 338 on the World Bank’s measure of Harmonised Test Scores, which is more than 1.8 standard deviations below the UK – the equivalent of 27 IQ points. So if Britain has an IQ of 100, Haiti has an IQ of 73.1, although other measures peg it at 67. I think that should be sufficient data then?

Ah, cool, that’s right about the estimated size of the Flynn effect

Roughly 30 IQ points

Flynn effect isn’t on G, and even with Flynn effect, racial group gaps and rank ordering do not change

Not at all isolated.

“Group X coming here has been a blood soaked affair!”

Um… source?

Does group X kill people at a higher rate than group Y, Z, A, B, or C?

Or are we just engaging in hysterics because it’s an out group?

If the data isn't published and accessible to the public in an easily parsable format, it's a bit disingenuous to do the "um... source?" thing.

So how do you know immigration is such a blood soaked affair?

Just going off preconceived ideas? You liked the vibe of how it sounds?

And does nowhere collect data on this? Just a complete black hole?

Meanwhile I’m able to find that the places that do report data on undocumented immigrant crime seem to typically report lower rates of crime than citizens.

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate

So how do you know immigration is such a blood soaked affair?

This is exactly what I mean. What do you do when institutions tasked with truth-finding do not make raw data available to the public, and only publish when it reaches the conclusions they wanted to reach to start with? We're indeed left with pretty unreliable ways to figure out the truth, but one thing is for sure "Uh, source?" is very disingenuous.

Meanwhile I’m able to find that the places that do report data on undocumented immigrant crime seem to typically report lower rates of crime than citizens.

There's several issues here. Like I mentioned, the datasets are not public, so the work is not replicable by anyone who'd want to double-check it. Secondly, the category of "US-born" has little to no implications on the debate. Members of the various rape-gangs in Britain were all "British-born", and yet none of them would exist, if Britain had a more strict immigration policy.

I haven’t seen that the data isn’t available. I doubt that the data underlying the study I linked isn’t public. You should be able to access it. You might look into this. I honestly don’t care to.

(It’s not my job to go digging into these datasets).

But, it is my job to say:

Hey, one news article about a psycho is nowhere near enough to categorize an entire class of people as violent.

That’s just silly, and obviously so. Yet for some reason I get more pushback for pointing that out than the original claim got.

Honestly might be a sign of some heavy motivated reasoning going on in this forum. You guys are an offshoot of the rationalist movement for Pete’s sake. Isn’t pushing back on simple logical fallacies to be expected around here?

I haven’t seen that the data isn’t available. I doubt that the data underlying the study I linked isn’t public. You should be able to access it. You might look into this. I honestly don’t care to.

It is my experience that studies in general do not publish raw data at all, only aggregated end-results that make the point that the authors want to make. You can sometimes ask the authors to give you the raw data, but they tend to ignore internet randos doing it, and it's not unheard of for them to dismiss even other academics when they get a whiff that they might want to see the data to refute the original study.

Hey, one news article about a psycho is nowhere near enough to categorize an entire class of people as violent.

Is the crime rate of the country they're coming from enough to consider it plausible that they're more violent?

You guys are an offshoot of the rationalist movement for Pete’s sake.

Yeah, but an offshoot can go more than one way. For example "post-rationalism" is still an offshoot of rationalism (though I think we still have a decent amount of unrinoic Rats). In any case my personal belief is that the Rationalist movement was an utter failure as far as truth-seeking is concerned, and that is because of, rather than despite, Rationalist principles.

Isn’t pushing back on simple logical fallacies to be expected around here?

It's certainly within the bounds of acceptable discourse, and so is pushing back on the pushback.

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