CaveJohnson

Karma: 662

CaveJohnson 28 Dec 2011 20:10 UTC
29 points
on: Eutopia is Scary—for the author

(put your hand up if you are currently terrified that the majority of women can vote in modern democracies)

Of course I am! Terrified about the majority of men voting too.

CaveJohnson 11 Jun 2011 14:33 UTC
28 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Scientific misconduct misdiagnosed because of scientific misconduct
I think you don’t have a clear picture of how highly functional low IQ people can be. This is in sense natural, since I mean how many people with an IQ of 70 do you know? Its silly but I sometimes have to remind myself they are by definition as common as people with an IQ of 130. They hold jobs and they manage to reproduce just fine, so they aren’t exactly the helpless drooling passives that popular imagination paints them as.

Also I think its often underestimated how different low IQ people of different types can be from each other.

Can a 13 year old learn to drive a car safely? Yes. Can he work in a factory? Yes. Can he run a farm? Yes. Can he be a soldier? Yes. Can a group of 13 year old children use lanugage at basically the same level as most human groups? Yes.

But how well would a 13 year old do compared to 18 year old on a IQ test? Not that well I suspect.

If the test got mislabelled as that of a 18 year old, what would be his estimated IQ? In abstract thinking he may not be that better than a 18 year old with a 70ish IQ but in many many other regards the test wouldn’t do him justice by putting him in the same category.

Black job performance is slightly better than what would be expected going just by their IQs. And Blacks with IQs in the 70s are generally on average more functional than Whites or East Asians with the same IQ. This has been the basis of some speculation that low IQ Whites and East Asians do worse on average because the sample contains not only people who are plain dumb, but a greater fraction people who suffer from other disabilities and more general brain damage (and/or underdevelopment) too, than is found in the group of IQ 70 Blacks.

CaveJohnson 25 Jan 2012 19:38 UTC
26 points
on: I’ve had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
“How dare you not engage in what you consider counter-productive debate!”

[Meta] No LessWrong Blackout?

CaveJohnson18 Jan 2012 19:48 UTC

23 points

49 comments1 min readLW link

CaveJohnson 13 Jun 2012 15:00 UTC
22 points
on: Rationality Quotes June 2012

In general, nothing is more difficult than not pretending to understand.

--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, source

CaveJohnson 8 Feb 2012 17:51 UTC
19 points
on: Rationality Quotes February 2012

When people talk about the importance of democracy, it is never democracy as it has ever actually functioned, with the politicians that have actually been elected, and the policies that have actually been implemented. It is always democracy as people imagine it will operate once they succeed in electing “the right people” — by which they mean, people who agree almost completely with their own views, and who are consistent and incorruptible in their implementation of the resulting policies.

--Ben O’Neill, here

Considering the above quote can be used to criticize nearly any popular political position I don’t think it is inherently mind-killing. Also since we all agree democracy is a good thing this isn’t even very political. The original article and context obviously does make it somewhat political.

CaveJohnson 18 Jan 2012 19:36 UTC
19 points
on: Rationality quotes January 2012

Most people are theists not because they were “reasoned into” believing in God, but because they applied Occam’s razor at too early an age. Their simplest explanation for the reason that their parents, not to mention everyone else in the world, believed in God, was that God actually existed. The same could be said for, say, Australia.

--Mencius Moldbug

CaveJohnson 12 Jun 2012 20:10 UTC
18 points
on: Glenn Beck discusses the Singularity, cites SI researchers
The question now becomes what is Glenn Beck’s username on LessWrong?

CaveJohnson 28 Jan 2012 17:48 UTC
18 points
on: I’ve had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions

Let’s do the impossible and think the unthinkable! I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.

Anarcho-capitalists are right.

Most upper class and wealthy jobs are actually rent seeking activities as argued in this video by fellow LessWrong user Aurini.

CaveJohnson 26 Jan 2012 10:18 UTC
18 points
in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: I’ve had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30 000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both between and within ethnic groups. Although limited to American data, it puts into question both the contact hypothesis and conflict theory in inter-ethnic relations. According to conflict theory, distrust between the ethnic groups will rise with diversity, but not within a group. In contrast, contact theory proposes that distrust will decline as members of different ethnic groups get to know and interact with each other. Putnam describes people of all races, sex, socioeconomic statuses, and ages as “hunkering down,” avoiding engagement with their local community—both among different ethnic groups and within their own ethnic group. Even when controlling for income inequality and crime rates, two factors which conflict theory states should be the prime causal factors in declining inter-ethnic group trust, more diversity is still associated with less communal trust.

Lowered trust in areas with high diversity is also associated with:
- Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
- Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in one’s own influence.
- Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
- Higher political advocacy, but lower expectations that it will bring about a desirable result.
- Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
- Less likelihood of working on a community project.
- Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
- Fewer close friends and confidants.
- Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
- More time spent watching television and more agreement that “television is my most important form of entertainment”.

CaveJohnson 23 Sep 2011 9:50 UTC
17 points
on: Rationality Quotes September 2011

One of my favorite genres in the prestige press is the Self-Refuting Article. These are articles that contain all the facts necessary to undermine the premise of the piece, but reporters, editors, and readers all conspire together in an act of collective stupidity to Not Get the Joke

--Steve Sailer

CaveJohnson 10 Jun 2011 14:58 UTC
17 points
on: Scientific misconduct misdiagnosed because of scientific misconduct

In reevaluating Morton and Gould, we do not dispute that racist views were unfortunately common in 19th-century science or that bias has inappropriately influenced research in some cases. Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that modern human variation is generally continuous, rather than discrete or ″racial,″ and that most variation in modern humans is within, rather than between, populations. In particular, cranial capacity variation in human populations appears to be largely a function of climate, so, for example, the full range of average capacities is seen in Native American groups, as they historically occupied the full range of latitudes, say the study authors.

I likewise do not dispute the colour orange has no clear discrete border to the colour red, and that indeed both are a social construct. This seems an implicit appeal to Lewontin’s fallacy. Though in this case it seems almost like a half-hearted ritual denunciation put there as safety precaution because they are criticising the, in debates oft cited, saint Gould.

When thinking about the climate and cranial capacity connection the most likley explanations seems to be simply that cold clime, all else being equal, requires, more smarts, but please note that it is also possible that cranial capacities vary due to the problem of temperature regulation of the brain (the relationship between surface and volume matters in this sort of thinking).

CaveJohnson 1 Apr 2012 14:51 UTC
15 points
in reply to: Multiheaded’s comment on: George Orwell’s Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer

Even today you see the more extreme elements of the Right scouring the net in what can be described as a search for ammunition, their bottom-line being already as entrenched as that of the Left extremists.

Why does right wing extremism scare you so much more than left wing extremism when the former is utterly despised as the definition of evil by most Westerners while the latter is only ever lukewarmly condemned?

Do extreme right wingers have some particular super power that I’m not aware of? The right wing are the guys who have been on a losing streak since Stalingrad and if you listen to Moldbug for a century before that too. I need some actual evidence that I should worry about them getting power anywhere in the West without being bombed into the stone age by the US five minutes later (bombing European right wing extremists, especially racist ones is the stuff of victory, moral superiority and war fantasies for them—check out American video games, adventure novels and action movie villains), than say of me personally being struck by lightning when I’m walking my dog on a rainy Saturday evening.

Reading some of your comments I can’t shake the feeling that you for some reason see their intellectual ammunition as so much more formidable than what is usually consumed by intellectuals that it despite the massive incentives against it threatens to one day quite suddenly break out and become popular among the smart fraction. Is this a correct reading?

CaveJohnson 7 Jan 2012 15:59 UTC
15 points
in reply to: brazil84’s comment on: Undiscriminating Skepticism

The other thing is that poor man’s genetic engineering—i.e. eugenics—has been available for some time now and people are very reluctant to embrace it. Even without forced sterilization, it hardly seems outrageous to tweak public policy so as to incentivize the smartest people to reproduce more and discourage the stupidest.

It is widely employed in the US by parents using (for whatever reason) modern reproductive technology.

Of course we don’t call it that, but please what else is it, when the eggs of women with very high SAT or even GRE scores cost thousands of dollars to obtain than those that are merely average? What else is it when you search for a tall/athletic/musically talented/ academically successful sperm donor? Or terminating a pregnancy where the fetus is identified to have a genetic disorder?

CaveJohnson 2 Aug 2011 16:50 UTC
15 points
on: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die
Sometimes I wonder. Status is zero sum. The extremely long lived are high status (this includes fictional entities such as Gods, Elves or wizards). Cryonics or life extension may just sound like “I’m higher status than you.”

The natural response is to seek devastating arguments or just blurt out: “What makes you so special?”

I’m sure someone has brought this up before, can anyone provide links? I’m afraid I still haven’t caught up to the LW culture and am not done with the sequences or catching up on the old debates (which I’m guessing from this thread, is a regular topic) by a long shot.

CaveJohnson 1 Jul 2011 6:59 UTC
14 points
on: Introducing… The Less Wrong Forum!
While its application to gaming might be reasonable (a LW gaming forum for groups formed on the main LW site seems a very good idea), I feel discomforted by this development. Internet forums have their own dynamics and if this becomes a real unofficial shadow site this might create problems. Due the different structure of moderation it messes with LW’s status as a well kept garden.

You simply can’t replicate the effects of the dynamics of karma voting and the special demographic that visit LW without the … dynamics of karma voting and the demographic that visits LW.

The discussion section already fulfils nearly all the positive functions of a forum with barley any downsides.

CaveJohnson 10 Aug 2012 12:15 UTC
13 points
on: [Link] Admitting to Bias
A interesting NYT article I saw linked to in your inside higher ed link.

Social Scientist Sees Bias Within

SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Not surprising at all.

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.

Right but unlike gays those nasty non-liberal minded students clearly deserve it! Amirite?

I’m sorry GLaDOS but while distortions of the map are important and probably what we should talk about it, I agree with Lammers from the OP here. We should not dismiss the human cost of this situation for the minority of students with non-liberal views.

What most impressed him about the issues raised by the study, Inbar said, is the need to think about “basic fairness.”

CaveJohnson 19 Jan 2012 22:59 UTC
13 points
on: Rationality quotes January 2012

We should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.

--Aristotle

CaveJohnson 11 Jun 2011 15:23 UTC
13 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Scientific misconduct misdiagnosed because of scientific misconduct
Farming, simple irrigation systems, pottery and other crafts (with objects of great beauty made for the upper class), walled cities, some siege engines, long distance trade, domestication of animals, iron working, sailing, class divisions, chariots and writing.

This they could all eventually develop with no input from the outside in favourable climactic conditions.

Exposed to outside influence I think they can pick up things like clockwork, ocean worthy ships, machine tools, the internal combustion engine, radio and television (and improve it on their own as well). Even basic nuclear technology, computers and some complex medical equipment isn’t completely out of the picture, though don’t expect any refinements. As a society they can probably get clean water, electrification, good roads, decent hospitals, reasonable safety from crime and quality primary school education.

This is what I’d expect of a civilization with an average IQ of 70. But please remember this civilization requires some adaptation, what I wrote goes for a “civilized” people (or at least a people that practised farming for some time) with an IQ of 70. Not all hunter gatherer populations with that IQ would be able to make this work. Self-domestication in humans isn’t really primarily about raising IQ as some people assume it is.

CaveJohnson 28 Jan 2012 22:57 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: I’ve had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
You do realize we are talking about retention of children raised in a culture right? Orgasmium cults and brainwashing indoctrinators would tend to out compete most others by such measures. A cult worshipping a baslisk that hacks your brain into absolute loyalty would also win out.

Optimizing for allure will not optimize for welfare. At least not under these mechanisms of “choice”. It also means our value sets can be out competed by really convincing paperclippers.

From the perspective of many traditional cultures Westerners may as well be Supper Happy people.

CaveJohnson

[Meta] No LessWrong Black­out?

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