One reason for thinking that a measure of talent is poor might be that it is outperformed by other measures. There may not be genuinely good measures of talent. It does occur some sort of retrospective measure based on results is probably better than what the admissions office uses, but that is surely still not a perfect measure, and is also obviously not a practical option to replace what the admissions office uses (unless someone invents a time machine). Another reason to think a measure of talent is poor, though, and this is probably more applicable here, is that a measure may be considered suspect if there is reason to think it is really measuring something else entirely, perhaps because it correlates suspiciously strongly with factors regarded as independent of talent.
Protagoras
This would only be true if affirmative action were carried to the point where the percentage of black students in the elite schools exceeded the percentage of blacks in the general population. I don’t have the numbers handy, but I did go to grad school at an Ivy, not terribly long ago, and that does not match my recollection of the racial make-up there. The undergraduate ranks seemed to be dominated by rich white kids.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you disagreed with his point, but I’m a little surprised that you just don’t understand it. The cutoff you speak of is in the admissions criteria, not in talent (there being no way to measure talent directly). VAuroch is pretty obviously of the opinion that admissions criteria are poor measures of talent, and that in particular minorities are more likely to score poorly on the admissions criteria for reasons other than talent. Again, not surprised if you disagree, but I’m very surprised you couldn’t figure out that that was what he meant.
Mostly the first two. I don’t watch much TV news or read many newspapers any more.
As far as I can tell, the far left position on sex is that most of the stereotypical sex differences are exaggerated, and most of the genuine differences are more the result of socialization rather than biology. I don’t encounter anyone who goes further than that; I’ve never encountered anyone who would replace either “most” with an “all,” or who would replace the “more” with an “entirely,” in the case of sex, and I encounter a lot of people who are pretty far left (being fairly far left myself these days). The situation with race is a little different; some people would replace the second “most” with an “all,” and the second “more” with an “entirely.” But then, the evidence is also different with respect to race. People who think there’s just no difference at all in the case of sex I only encounter as straw characters in conservative rants.
I admit that I encounter people who make a big deal of how edgy and contrarian they are for speaking out about innate differences in the face of the stifling politically correct consensus that race and sex don’t matter at all. It’s pretty amazing how they seem to be everywhere, given the supposedly universal consensus rejecting and supressing such edgy, contrarian views.
Differences in the rate of absorption can definitely be important to addiction; oral amphetamines are not particularly addictive, but amphetamines taken in other ways that increase absorption rate are very addictive. And the last I checked the research on that, there wasn’t much understanding of exactly why the line there is where it is. Perhaps alcohol just works completely differently, but it is also possible that drinking on an empty stomach, or drinking carbonated drinks, doesn’t increase absorption enough to make a difference. Or perhaps it does make a difference, but not enough to have turned up in any research yet; this isn’t an area where small effects would be easy to detect.
I’m not sure about the usefulness of grouping the kind of vague spirituality and religion mentioned in the first paper with the discussions of meditation in the other papers. As the last paper argues, I also would think it would be worthwhile to distinguish different forms of meditation. My general understanding of the state of the literature was that studies of the benefits of “spirituality and religion” were all over the place (it being an incredibly vague category). I also was under the impression that there have been a lot of studies of meditation specifically, and that it was common for them to find substantial benefits, but that there remained controversy over why, over whether some methods were better than others, and over whether meditation was superior to relaxation exercises. I’m certainly interested in all of that research on meditation myself, but it seems to me to be in a different category from other kinds of “spirituality and religion” research.
Yeah, Worm is pretty bleak. I tend to find that a bit overwhelming at times myself; I like the series because of its other strengths (diverse and interesting characters, intelligent plotting, deep and rich setting) with the oppressive tone being a small strike against it for me.
The modern West treats marriage as being primarily about romantic love, which is an idea not shared by earlier cultures. A culture which does not see romantic love as the essential component of marriage would be unlikely to come up with the idea of gay marriage. There may be some convoluted connection between Christianity and the Western ideal of love-based marriage, but it seems likely that if there were a culture that had the same overriding love-marriage association without any religious objections to homosexuality, that culture would endorse gay marriage.
Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander’s blog, is a little like this; he tolerates and engages in a lot more political discussion than Less Wrong, but he is a Less Wronger, as are some of those who comment there. The overlap with the Less Wrong community is far from total, and obviously as Scott’s personal blog it emphasizes his views, and it also doesn’t only only talk about politics (it just doesn’t avoid politics the way Less Wrong does), so it’s probably not exactly what you’re looking for, but it might be close enough for you to find it interesting, if you didn’t already know about it. And I guess if there are any other blogs like Scott’s with a similarly high level of political discussion, I’m interested in hearing about them myself.
Hmmm. Your past 30 days karma is positive. Either you’re saying it was formerly a lot more positive, or any downvoting isn’t having nearly the effect you suggest.
You come to what is more or less the right consequentialist answer in the end, but it seems to me that your path is needlessly convoluted. Why are we judging past actions? Generally, the reason is to give us insight into and perhaps influence future decisions. So we don’t judge the lottery purchase to have been good, because it wouldn’t be a good idea to imitate it (we have no way to successfully imitate “buy a winning lottery ticket” behavior, and imitating “buy a lottery ticket” behavior has poor expected utility, and similarly for many broader or narrower classes of similar actions), and so we want to discourage people from imitating it, not encourage them. If we’re being good consequentialists, what other means could it possibly be appropriate to use in deciding how to judge other than basing it on the consequences of judging in that way?
If accepting universals made one not a materialist, that would rule out some of the great Australian materialists, such as David Armstrong. Thus, that would clearly be a non-standard use of the label “materialist.” Perhaps there are details of Russell’s account of universals which are not shared by Armstrong’s which make it anti-materialist, but you don’t specify any. I know that Russell’s views changed over the years, which of course complicates things, but he certainly didn’t believe in spooky souls, and most of the doctrines of his I can think of which seem to be in possible tension with materialism are either susceptible to varying interpretations or matters he changed his mind on at different points or both.
From what I recall reading about Harvard admissions practices, I suspect that the first explanation, “Harvard selects students with higher expected earnings,” is the biggest factor. And that a lot of schools try to do the same thing, but students who get accepted to Harvard and some other schools are more likely to choose Harvard, since it’s generally regarded as the best.
Writing a Black Company fanfic. I’ve been reading a decent amount of fan fiction recently, and enjoying it. I was pretty surprised that there was so little Black Company fanfic out there, as it seemed like a good setting for fan fiction. So I thought I’d do my little bit to correct the deficiency, and get some practice writing fiction. It’s here.
Very good diagnosis. While I don’t recall where the philosophers of religion came out in this area on the survey, some of the popular arguments for the existence of God seem to rely on a very strong version of mathematical Platonism, a believe that there is a one true logic/mathematics and that strong conclusions about the world can be drawn by the proper employment of that logic (the use of PSR that you mention is a common, but not the only, example of this). Since I reject that kind of One True Logic (I’m a Carnapian, “in logic there are no morals!” guy), I tend to think that any logical proof of the existence of God (or anything else) serves only to establish that you are using a logic which has a built in “God exists” (or whatever) assumption. For example, the simple modal ontological argument which says God possibly exists, God is a necessary being, so by a few simple steps in S5, God exists; if you’re using S5, then once you’ve made one of the assumptions about God, making the other one just amounts to assuming God exists, and so in effect committing yourself to reasoning only about God worlds. Such a logic may have its uses, but it is incapable of reasoning about the possibility that God might or might not exist; for such purposes a neutral logic would be required.
Well, I didn’t want to go into detail, because I don’t remember all the details and didn’t feel like wasting time going and looking it up again, but yes, essentially. The usual form is “if you make these seemingly reasonable assumptions, you get to God, so God!”, and usually the assumptions actually didn’t look that reasonable to me to begin with, and of course an alternative response to the arguments is always that they provide evidence that the assumptions are much more powerful than they seem and so need much closer examination.
I read some of the discussion on philosophy of religion blogs after the survey came out. One of the noteworthy results of the survey was that philosophers who don’t specialize in philosophy of religion were about 3⁄4 atheists. One or two of the philosophy of religion bloggers claimed that their non-specialist colleagues weren’t familiar with some of the recent literature presenting new arguments for the existence of God. As a philosopher who doesn’t specialize in philosophy of religion, I thought they underestimated how familiar people like me are with the arguments concerning theism. However, I admit for people like me it comes up especially in history, so I followed up on that and looked at some of the recommended recent papers. I was unable to find anything that looked at all compelling, or really even new, but perhaps I didn’t try hard enough.
Which I said nothing about. I referred to the undergraduate population (I wasn’t an undergrad, but university campuses aren’t particularly segregated between grad and undergrad populations). Actually, the grad student population generally was more racially diverse than the undergraduate population (mostly due to lots of international students among the grad students).