The findings reveal that 20.7% of the studied articles in behavioral economics propose paternalist policy action and that 95.5% of these do not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers.
-- Niclas Berggren, source and HT to Tyler Cowen
In questions of this appalling magnitude, I find the best way to “overcome bias” is often to find perspectives which seem to make each answer obvious. Once we recognize that both A and B are obviously true, and A is inconsistent with B, we are in the right mindset for actual thought.
--Mencius Moldbug
″...smiling down from their huge piles of utility...”
I thought of that too. O.o
Glenn Beck being Eliezer’s Finest Apprentice …. God must be a fanfic writer.
The important thing to keep in mind is that this is true in a context where good statistical evidence is available. Rationalist advice tends to degrade over time to its literal meaning. In light of the title it is important to emphasise that someone providing contrary anecdotal evidence against your own or someone else’s anecdotal evidence, obviously shouldn’t be down voted.
In the absence of strong evidence, especially in new or uncommon areas, anecdotes may be the best thing you can get.
This seems important enough for Main to be honest.
I disagree with Moldbug on many things, but I disagree with this even more.
I’m sorry your nick is a bit ifffy so I’m not sure as to your sincerity. If you are don’t worry, eventually this will clear up with future participation. Just in case you are not a troll, I wrote this out.
I do agree that the fake egalitarianism of insisting we treat people decently because they are objectively all the same, instead of that simply being the right thing to do, is really dangerous in the long term, if society one day realizes they aren’t objectively all the same according to most measures and damaging in the short run because it least to things like bad education policies or dehumanizing people society decides to scapegoat for some differences.
This however is far from only being a problem with “race”, it turns up in many different places and on different issues. Class, gender… It even exists in lesser measure with individual differences.
We must stay and fight.
Here I kind of disagree. I don’t see this as a war with sides, that attitude is perhaps useful if you are doing politics in the comment section of a news site, but not that great when it comes to participating here. I see this as more a interesting solvable question that has some unfortunate signalling and politics mixed in. I take the LW community at its face value and so far it surprisingly seldomly disappoints in being a place genuinely interested in truth. I always try hard to make sure that if anyone is going tribal and being mindkilled it isn’t me, especially since “HBD fans” like me may still turn out to be wrong (check out some of the criticism raised by Chuck at Occidentalist).
So lets keep away from the fighting words and try being genuinely curious about the outcome. Also if people want us to leave so much worse for them, they don’t own rationality and by refusing to judge ideas on their own merits they are shooting themselves in the foot.
Those not shooting themselves in the foot might find races easier to win.
When I first read my friend’s post, I had a major “I notice that I am confused” moment, because it just seemed so implausible that someone who understood actual atheist arguments (as opposed to dead little sister Hollywood Atheism) could convert to religion, and Catholicism of all things.
Catholicism is actually one of the intellectually more formidable religions. If you accept a few key axioms of Christianity (and even most atheist Westerners do) and think about their implications for a lot of time it seems remarkable how vulnerable you are to converting to it.
In Christianspace, for the intelectual who likes playing around with very abstract dry concepts Catholicism seems to be a strong attractor. While protestants have played around with reversing its stupidity traditional Western civilization is fundamentally Catholic civilization. It gets the halo effect from a whole lot of art and great thinkers and pretty Churches. Then there is also the sheer majoritarian argument in its favour since it is by far the largest denomination and has institutional continuity going back more than 1500 years. When people around the world think Christianity, they think Catholic.
Also as Moldbug says:
Thomas Aquinas derived Catholicism from pure reason. John Rawls derived progressivism from pure reason. At least one of them must have made a mistake. Maybe they both did. Have you checked their work? One bad variable will bust your whole proof.
I can imagine Star Robin Hanson writing an angry blog post about what this implies about Starfleet’s priorities.
Have you seen any Star Trek? Star Robin Hanson would have a lot of angry posts to write.
One could claim that that’s due to different gene pools but if that were the case, one would expect to see schools which have homogeneous populations to be similar to their home countries. But one doesn’t see this.
I don’t know if we see this for homogeneous schools or not, but I do know that on things like PISA scores when broken down by ethnicity, American students do reasonably well compared to the countries from which their ancestors came from.
Asian Americans outscored every Asian country, and lost out only to the city of Shanghai, China’s financial capital.
White Americans students outperformed the national average in every one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except Finland (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, an immigration restrictionist nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the population).
Hispanic Americans beat all eight Latin American countries.
African Americans would likely have outscored any sub-Saharan country, if any had bothered to compete. The closest thing to a black country out of PISA’s 65 participants is the fairly prosperous oil-refining Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago, which is roughly evenly divided between blacks and South Asians. African Americans outscored Trinidadians by 25 points.
No friends. Closing The Gap is not the most important issue to which educators should worry about, while its perfectly possible I’ve been reading too much Steve Sailer or was too impressed with Murray’s Real Education, what isn’t possible is that Closing the Gap is low hanging fruit. And there is low hanging fruit in education.
Upvoted for this. There are just so many counter indications in so many countries both developed and developing for such a long period of time that we should have realized that closing the gap is hard and additional increases in spending cognitive capital to try and solve it rather than manage it uneconomical. People who want to do good things for children should try and figure out how they can learn more or learn the same amount with less stress, how all the kids can do better, rather than stress that some kids are doing so much better than others.
Massive investments in the tried approaches due to egalitarian concerns are pure moral posturing and signalling at best, and very bad entrenched science at worst. For anyone who has the stomach to shut up and multiply the opportunity costs paid for this are simply staggering. Because signalling matters and this provides a neat source of makework for educators (keeping them fed, employed and feeling they are productive) I’m ok with not scaling down, but any additional effort has so much greater pay off’s elsewhere that I simply have to speak up.
Watson was right about Africa. Larry Summers was right about women in certain professions. Roissy is right about the state of the sexual marketplace.
Democracy isn’t that great. A ghetto/barrio/alternative name for low-class-hell-hole isn’t a physical location, its people. Richer people are on average smarter, nicer, prettier than poor people. The more you strive to equalize material opportunities the more meritocracy produces a caste system based on inborn ability. Ideologies actually are as crazy as religions on average. There is no such thing as moral progress and if there is there is no reason to expect we have been experiencing it so far in recorded history, unless you count stuff like more adapted cultures displacing less adapted ones or mammals inheriting the planet from dinosaurs as moral progress. You can’t be anything you want, your potential is severely limited at birth. University education creates very little added value. High class people unknowingly wage class war against low class people by promoting liberal social norms that they can handle but induce dysfunction in the lower classes (drug abuse, high divorce rates, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, more violence, … ). Too much ethnic diversity kills liberal social democracy. Improving the social status of the average woman vis a vis with the average man makes the average man less attractive. Inbreeding/Out-breeding norms (and obviously other social norms and practices too) have over the centuries differentiated not only IQs between Eurasian populations they have also affected the frequency and type of altruism genes present in different populations (visit hbd* chick for details ^_^ ).
Have a nice day! ~_^