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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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I don’t believe anyone operates this way in real life.

We all use models that are GIGO if said model provides a slightly better view of the world and it is very costly to acquire a better model. It’s called a heuristic.

So yes, I’m going to mind my P&Qs more when I see generic male black youths walking in my direction compared to generic Asian girl youths.

If I am approving someone for say a loan, then I have harder data and therefore the cost to acquire a better model is rather limited.

If the girls were all tatted-up and the guys were dressed like this would that change your calculus any?

A pet theory I've been playing around with is that the reason that the intellectually inclined introverts seem to gravitate towards intersectionality/HBD is that for whatever reason they never developed the ability to read any social signal more discrete than "looks like me = friend, looks like other = threat".

And all these pet theories you have are Bulverism, derived by working backwards from "The HBD believers are wrong, bad, and stupid, let's try to come up with a reason 'why' in a way that insults them". Which is fine if you're into insults but not a good way of determining anything about the world.

Are you also going to argue that Kepler's equations are wrong or not worth studying because he arrived at them by working backwards from a belief that the academic consensus of his day was incorrect?

Edit to add: Contra the popular consensus here, the measure of a theory's quality is not in it's intellectual or social merit, but a combination of how well it explains observed reality and how well it predicts future behavior.

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