Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Because bad guys can in fact win. The belief that the opposite is true is what is called «just world theory».
What an example. You sure are soft on yourself, o truth-lover. Consider a strident democracy lover who organizes an anti-war rally in Berlin 1939. It is not, let's say, as entirely implausible as in the case of a lunatic that he might succeed in changing the course of history. Nevertheless he fails, is arrested and processed. Consider my friends who stayed in Moscow and get summoned to court on this very day for doing the same. The main signal I see here is that they are instrumentally outgunned, perhaps naive, less charitably – deceived by their Western «friends». This isn't much of a blemish on their ideology.
Indeed, I would argue that they constitute its best and truest part. And the worst parts are clearly triumphant, gloating, this is the woke stuff we've written and read so much about.
Bad guys can win, both within and without a movement.
You are. This is the canonical idea of deconstruction (or perhaps better said epistemological break), the motte of it, what I practice, what science practices, the entirely valid practice of skepticism about widely held beliefs/metaphysics/epistemologies/ontologies that you condemn people for using: the tough question of whether we actually know what we think we know, whether our method for ascertaining truths is good enough, and whether the apparent consensus of our esteemed experts is organic, genuine and best-possible attempt at parsing all available evidence.
Pomo garbage in the style of «Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism» is cynical or deluded cargo-cult application of this valid premise, and precisely what ought to be deconstructed – as an attempt to manufacture an inorganic, bad-faith consensus.
It's deconstruction all the way down. You can't escape it. What you are trying to do here is deconstruction of a popular epistemology too.
Indeed, how? Do we just ask a bunch of older white males? Is there, historically speaking, a surer way to know?
Oy, did you see this:
Pedestrian understanding of the mechanisms responsible, but even they agree.
No, their understanding is exactly correct: people cling to power, and power worship is rationalization of the status quo, to minimize losses from opposing the strong or getting crushed along with the weak. Might is right because it can redefine terms, in a perfectly postmodernist manner: words mean whatever the stronger party wishes them to mean, so the only question is, as Humpty Dumpty argued, which is to be master. And with the next master, new meanings come, so no learning from history is possible. Of course, theorizing to the effect that the Universe (devoid of God in your picture, incidentally) is so configured as to make each successive Master in some objective sense external to the struggle more deserving, and his meanings Truer, is nothing more than Just World theory. The world is not obliged to be just.
Kamil flaunts his faux-wise Asiatic cynicism of the Russian prison cell, and the fact that you prop this up as evidence is quite hilarious. Once again, even Greks knew better.
(There's a moral lesson in italic at the bottom).
You've really corn cobbed yourself. Just admit that your whole belief system stands on air and adopt something more mature.
They’re using the veneer of the always-popular sheeple theory, but I think it boils down to the sheeple basically being right, as always.
Minimizing losses is a valid logical reason. An average joe who challenges a muscle-bound giant to a fistfight doesn’t have a pristine epistemology, he’s just stupid. The giant didn’t twist reality.
Perhaps the problem with postmodernists is that since truth is supposedly power, they don’t know what to do with observed power, it’s just meaningless, assigned a value of zero, like history. So they get their asses kicked.
Karlin approved of Putin swallowing russian-speaking territories when it carried no cost, and that was sensible, for him, for the russian people. They weren’t blinded by power, they just saw the world as it was. Now that the cost-benefit has changed, their view must change also. I don’t see where Humpty dumpty is supposed to be, manipulating them.
@Amadan is it fair to call this gibberish? I suppose he can't be thinking he makes a solid point.
You know the mods don't adjudicate how good or logical or correct someone's post is. If you are asking "Can I call this gibberish and insult the OP," no.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sure bad guys can win, and bad ideas can win. But I disagree that there is no signal in winning or losing a battle, or ‘the battle of ideas’. The battle acts like a filter, and the winning side of the solution contains more truth particles, so to speak.
Chinaman says “General who knows his own and his enemy’s strength never loses a battle”. So from his defeat we can infer a flaw in his understanding of the world.
Why do you need postmodernism for that? These so-called ‘epistemological breaks’/paradigm shifts happened without its input, old-school scepticism was enough. Science did not need deconstruction. And practically speaking, you and I agree on a lot of controversial areas of science, so where is the postmodernist gain from all that wild and diffuse scepticism? In Superman studies?
Why deconstruct what can be refuted? What good is a test with only one answer. By contrast, it is harder to refute true ideas than false ones. Per scott, refutation is an asymmetric weapon, stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys.
YesChad.jpg . The alternative is not practical. Did you personally test all the laws of science you rely on every day? We sample, we test on the margins, where popularity fades, or if something doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. No need to argue with the derridas.
Indeed you don't need the teaching of postmodernism for that, which is why your attempts to tar all skeptics with the same brush as Pomo grifters are disingenuous. Personally I'm more informed by philosophy and methodology of science (e.g. Lakatos. I'll save you the trouble, he's Jewish, as are Popper and Kuhn, but not Feyerabend) than e.g. Derrida. But the basic claim is the same in both.
Have you read her argument? How does one refute that crap? It is free of falsifiable claims that can be traced back to a debate over empirical evidence, it is corrupt down to its very method, like your sloppy «truth particles in the winning side» power-worship epistemology. No, the proper «refutation» is discussion of Prescod-Weinstein's curious ideological commitment to slander white people via disingenuous rhetoric after having made a fortunate scientific career and accrued reputation in their society, and of course one can't avoid noticing both parts of her surname when looking into that. By the way, it does seem like she produces perfectly fine science on less political topics.
There is no rule, no shortcut to «thinking straight». This is what broke rationalism. You cannot codify it such that it won't be gamed, you can only try not to delude yourself or be deluded.
This way. Not by pointing out her jewhishness, there's no signal there, because the author is always someone with biases, even when they tell the truth.
Don’t you see the blatant similaraties between @SecureSignals superman rant and this crap, and feminist/african american studies in general? They point to disparities and assume the jew/white male is wrong and has nefarious motives. His ‘narrative-crafting’ assymmetry is her ‘prestige assymmetry’. They use this invented assymmetry to justify a far more concrete assymmetry, privileging the standpoint of the non-jew/non-white male, and the truth-value in their statements.
Make it ‘power-respecting’, at least.
This is just completely contradictory... there are always biases, but there's no signal there? How does that make sense? If there is a bias that is the definition of a signal, if you try to understand the content without taking into consideration their identity then you will be systematically wrong. There would be no signal there if the Jewishness of a content creator was completely uncorrelated with the content, which it is not. There are broad correlations across various disparate subject matters, the bias is averaged in a particular direction that is meaningful and influential to the broader culture.
My 'narrative crafting' asymmetry: "Jews have a particular talent for creating propaganda and narratives that are memetically influential in culture."
Prescod-Weinstein's 'prestige assymmetry': "In American society, Black women are on the losing end of an ontic prestige asymmetry whereby different scientists “garner unequal public approbation” in their everyday lives due to ascribed identities such as gender and race"
Her asymmetry is invented, mine is true. Of course my asymmetry does not say all Jews are better than all Gentiles at this behavior, no more than making a claim "Jews have on average higher IQ than Gentiles" would be making a claim of universality. If you simply assume that there is a positive correlation between IQ and a talent for narrative-crafting, then my claim holds true on that empirical measurement alone. But I admit I go further than that and believe the gap between the two is greater than the IQ gap and is driven by differences in cognitive profile beyond simply intelligence. Something like Verbal Intelligence might be a better proxy for that talent, and the gap between Jews and Gentiles is biggest there whereas the reverse is true for Spatial Intelligence. More Gentiles in MMA, more Jews in Hollywood.
In contrast, Black women are not losing 'prestige asymmetry' due to discrimination by their gender or race, but due to their lower capabilities in producing science.
I affirm my asymmetry and reject Prescod-Weinstein's asymmetry by appealing to innate differences in talent in both cases...
You, presumably, accept that there is an asymmetry when it comes to Black Women contribution to physics, but when it comes to contributions to crafting grand social narratives and propaganda, you throw your hands up in the air and claim we cannot say anything meaningful about the asymmetry of Jewish contributions to these crucial cultural institutions.
IQ correlates with knowledge too, and the ability to create great art and science. That correlates with Truth in the speaker’s statements. Going by identity epistomology, they should be granted a knowledge-and-intelligence-assymmetry bonus instead of your narrative-crafting malus.
To be consistent with your anti-correlation of truth and IQ, you should find the stupidest person available and believe him.
By your own rules, whites have a narrative-crafting advantage over blacks, and they would be right to ignore our statements and go for Prescod-Weinstein ’s crap.
I've never said there's an anti-correlation of truth and IQ, I've said that a greater talent for crafting narratives and propaganda gives a big advantage to a particular identity with a huge bias towards its own interest and an implacably hostile posture towards perceived ethnic rivals.
There is a correlation between IQ and the consequence of ethnic bias, that is certainly true of whites who enslaved blacks armed with social narratives that were by-and-large internalized by black slaves, until whites crafted a new grand narrative that snowballed into an armed conflict and culture victory.
The greater the talent for creating memetically powerful social narratives, the greater the impact of the ethnic bias which you have already admitted exists.
I cleaned up your narrative-crafting argument a bit:
Narrative-crafting ability (a complex form of deception) is correlated with falsehood in the speaker’s statements.
IQ is correlated with narrative-crafting ability.
Jews have high IQ.
Therefore, jewishness of the speaker is correlated with falsehood in the speaker’s statements.
Logically sound so far?
Knowledge, as well as science and art ability, is correlated with truth in the speaker’s statements.
IQ is correlated with knowledge, as well as science and art ability.
Jews have high IQ.
Therefore, jewishness of the speaker is correlated with truth in the speaker’s statements.
I'd like to know exactly which of those statements do you disagree with. We'll call the two sequences A and B. (1A, 2A, etc)
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vfb5Seaaqzk5kzChb/when-is-correlation-transitive
More options
Context Copy link
The idea of capital-T truth and «signals» that you present here is rife with utterly childish essentialism, the pinnacle of muddled Westoid thinking where Truth and Good are One through Jesus or whatever and is-ought distinction is made up by the Devil.
Either that, or this is utter mockery, I'd be tempted to shank you for such a bad faith tactic (which is why people generally don't attempt this kind of Ancient Greek sophistry in person).
Intelligence is causally related to the ability to discover «truth». It is correlated with success in achieving one's goals, because discovery of truth aids in pursuing one's goals. Particularly verbal intelligence is correlated with success in achieving goals in the verbal domain, obviously. What does it mean for something to be true, though? It means simply that it satisfies some relevant constraints. «Do dark matter axions form a condensate with long-range correlation?» is a question for which, presumably, there exists a True answer. «How do I denigrate white people from the position of authority in particle physics» is a question that has some True answers as well. Her answers to both of those questions, Chanda expresses as academic publications, as befits her prestigious role. It is not clear why she thinks the latter is a question worth asking and being answered. @SecureSignals offers his opinion on that. You bristle at his suggestions. But it must have a True answer regardless.
Lies can be true answers to questions. At the same time, Truth isn't an essence, there are no particles of Truth, no single dimension of Truth-Affinity (no matter how much you want to be on top of it), and meditating on correlations of being able to ascertain Truth will get you only a very small part of the way toward good priors. People's interest in enlightening you is not, in fact, causally related to how much they know.
More options
Context Copy link
My assumption is that narrative-crafting ability is correlated with the ability to influence public perception. Just like I'm not calling Superman a "false narrative" or whatever, the "truth or falsehood of Superman" is not my point, the ethnically-motivated influence on American public consciousness is my point.
Narrative-crafting ability is correlated with the capacity to influence public consciousness on religious, political, and moral dimensions.
Jews are better at Narrative-crafting, owing partially to intelligence and partially to other cognitive traits and behaviors that make them distinct from the average White Gentile.
Jews in these cultural institutions are influenced by their identity, and their bias in the generation of culture takes the form of moralizing Jewish identity and vigorously defending it while simultaneously demoralizing White identity and criticizing it.
#3 often times takes esoteric form, like Superman, or Nerd/Jock tropes, endless Holocaust content in Hollywood and in schools, or even the Bee Movie... there's a whole thread here on the trope of "non-whites as successor to whites" described here which has been Hollywood's favorite theme in the past few years.
While any one of these cultural outputs in Hollywood, academia, popular culture alone won't convince someone to jump off a bridge, all of them combined together, with a certain bias, certainly can convince the masses of very wrong premises to be true without second thought, so true as to be completely unquestionable.
Therefore, many closely held truths, in particular surrounding race and White identity, are simply a function of the most memetically powerful propaganda, and the source of that propaganda has an ethnic bias in favor of Jewish identity and against White identity. Basically, narrative-crafting ability correlates with the speaker's ability to insert his biases into the public consciousness in the form of art, culture, and academic study.
IQ correlates with knowledge, but it can also correlate with a talent for deceiving other people with false or self-serving narratives. If you accept identity-driven bias, you have a responsibility to try to discern truth from deception or motivated reasoning, you can't say "whatever the highest IQ person says must, on average, be the most correct." If the highest IQ person has a bias then it is, on average, going to be wrong in a predictable direction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link