Base Commander: Anything I do at this point will only make things worse. Anything!
Chief of Police: Many people would charge in anyway.
Base Commander: Oh, the urge to do something during an emergency is very strong. It takes training and discipline to do nothing.
Freefall by Mark Stanley.
What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought.
(see also 99.5% of programming job candidates fail the FizzBuzz test, though this seems a stretch).
This is misleading. Bad programmers spend more time interviewing before being hired, thus the pool of job interview candidates is biased towards bad programmers.
One of the ideas I take out of this is that these issues can be examined as the result of unconscious cognitive bias. IE sexism isn’t the result of any conscious thought
In order to claim that our system 1′s conclusions based on someone’s sex, i.e., what you’re calling “unconscious sexism”, is indeed a bias you need to establish that it leads to false conclusions, as opposed to our system 1 merely noticing that a lot of things correlate with a person’s sex. Nearly all discussions of “unconscious sexism”, including the linked article, simply and falsely asserts that sex doesn’t correlate with anything important. For example, the linked article says:
Increasingly, scientific evidence demonstrates that the sex of an individual can reliably predict some aspects of their career experience, i.e. there is evidence of systematic discrimination against women.
Observe that it doesn’t even bother to mention the other explanation, that the sex of an individual correlates with traits, such as intelligence, relevant to his or her carrier. Despite the fact that we have good evidence that this correlation does exist.
Yet none of these sights [of the Scottish Highlands] had power, till a recent period, to attract a single poet or painter from more opulent and more tranquil regions. Indeed, law and police, trade and industry, have done far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit, to develope in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England
Frankly, the whole passage Steve Sailer quotes at the link is worth reading.
This might—purely hypothetically—lead to a massive boom in octopus population, causing the octopi to eat everything edible, causing mass starvation.
This relies on group selection to work.
I was under the impression the unicorn was Alicorn’s cameo. Alicorn asked for a cameo as a unicorn, Eliezer agreed and even promised to make it plot relevant. I’m not sure what actually happened was quite what Alicorn had in mind.
For an example from today’s news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that “Banksy” might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses “he” as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that’s not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as “he” from affecting you subliminally.
Or possibly because the prior for the gender of the kind of person who’d the kind of things Banksy does is heavily in favor of him being male.
Why? There were Frenchman with German friends near the border before the two world wars as well.
This kind of costless analysis is especially beloved by medicine and health professionals, whose only measure of value is health (e.g. their “quality of life” measure is essentially just health integrated over lifespan). I would have hoped rationalists would better recognise the complexity of human value.
Yes, and the people who already have HIV don’t have a long expected lifespan. Note that the suggestion was based on existing procedures for other STDs and those were anywhere near as lethal.
The fact that the quarantine is compulsory ought to give the game away that it’s not in the interests of the HIV sufferers.
It’s not in the interest of the people who already have HIV, it is in the interest of the people who might get it.
it’s founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning
Well I’ve been looking around NRx for a while and have seen a lot fewer false facts then in the “mainstream” sources. Do you have any examples of NRx false facts.
As for “bad ethics”, If you define “bad ethics” as ethics that go against the current Progressive possition then yes NRx has “bad ethics”. Of course by that definition any one who had 1994!”good ethics” has 2014!”bad ethics” and conversely, similarly someone who has 2014!”good ethics” like will turn out to have 2034!”bad ethics” and conversely, [Edit: and someone pointing out certain true facts has “doubleplusungood ethics”].
Yes, employers have noticed that blacks tend to be less qualified than whites, even when the blacks have degrees (remember affirmative action is pervasive in colleges) and this effects who they decide to hire. So I don’t see your point.
You still need a theory, a.k.a., a prior on the kind of data you expect to be compressing. Otherwise you run into the No Free Lunch Theorem.
We just really don’t know very much about the roman economy, and are unlikely to find out much more than we currently do.
On the other hand we do know a lot about what happened in 1921, Krugman just wishes we didn’t because it appears to contradict his theories.
Generalizing from one example isn’t good .. science, logic or argument. But it’s better than generalizing from the fog of history.
Um, no. History contains evidence, it’s not particularly clean evidence, but evidence nonetheless and we shouldn’t be throwing it away.
if the tests focus on Shakespeare and medieval Europe then they can be accused of cultural bias
Um, “cultural bias”, i.e., limiting important posts to people who’ve assimilated into and agree with the culture, was a large part of the point of the Chinese Examination System and a big part of the reason why the system remained so stable.
If you want to take the concept seriously, I recommend you see about finding old encyclopedias and old books predicting the future. Look at what they believed was “inevitable”, look at how badly those predictions turned out. This will hopefully counteract the tendency the imagine the future by simply doing a first order extrapolation of present trends (Hi Michaelos).
This is, of course, assuming the goal is actually to make predictions that will at least resemble the future.
A “grand mistake” in philosophy has little ill effects.
Um, they’ve been known to result in up to a quarter of the world’s population living under totalitarian dictatorships.
but even European monarchs have had plenty of disputed successions and civil wars.
That’s because you’re taking the highlights from over a millennium of history over multiple countries. Here are a few examples from MoreRight of systematically going through all Kings in a dynasty and evaluating them.
Thinking about it, one way to describe the difference between Progressives and NRx is how much they trust human reason versus other optimization processes.
Progressives tend to elevate human reason above all else. Notice how Yvain’s reaction to Moloch is to flinch in horror and attempt to defeat it by the power of human reason.
NRx (and reactionaries and conservatives) believe that Gnon is frequently better than human reason. Notice that Nyan’s reaction is attempt to capture Gnon by analyzing it. Notice also that of the four components of Gnon, the one neoreactionaries most distrust, Cthulhu, is the one that relies on human reason alone for its ability to optimize for truth.
The amusing thing is that Mitchel’s argument proves much more than he wants it to prove.
Notice that the above argument applies just as well to the original experiment being replicated.