His claim was:
(a) Everybody knew that different ethnicities had different brain sizes (b) It was an uncomfortable fact, so nobody talked about it (c) Now nobody knows that different ethnicities have different brain sizes
Randaly
Karma: 2,109
His stated point is about telling things that everybody is supposed to know.
No, that was absolutely not his point. I don’t understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:
Graduate students in anthropology generally don’t know those facts about average brain volume in different populations. Some of those students stumbled onto claims about such differences and emailed a physical anthropologist I know, asking if those differences really exist. He tells them ‘yep’ – I’m not sure what happens next. Most likely they keep their mouths shut. Ain’t it great, living in a free country?
More generally, that was not a tightly reasoned book/paper about brainsize. That line was a throwaway point in support of a minor example (“For example, average brain size is not the same in all human populations”) on a short blog post. Arguments about the number of significant figures presented, when you don’t even disagree about the overall example or the conclusion, are about as good an example of bad disagreement as I can imagine.
Source is here. SD for Asians and Europeans is 35, SD for Africans was 85. N=20,000.
What’s wrong here? 4 degrees of accuracy for brain size and no error bars? That’s a sign of someone being either intentionally or unintentionally dishonest.
...no? Why in the world would he present error bars? The numbers are in line with other studies, without massive uncertainty, and irrelevant to his actual, stated and quoted, point.
I also dispute this- obvious cases include partial disagreement and partial agreement between parties, somebody who is simply silent or who says nothing of substance, and someone who is themself trying to learn from you/the other side.
(In particular, consider a debate between a biologist and the Pope on evolution. I would expect the Pope to be neither offensive nor defensive- though I’m not totally clear on the distinction here, and how a debater can be neither- but I would expect to learn much more from the biologist than the Pope.)
Actually, one of the sources you just linked (Wikibooks) states that officers were usually promoted from the ranks:
They were generally moved up from the ranks, but in some cases could be direct appointments from the Emperor or other higher ranking officials.
For further sources saying the same thing, see here, here, here, or here. See also this:
The most significant step in any successful army career of a Roman plebeian was the promotion to the centurionate. To become a centurion meant having become an officer. The main supply for the centurionate of the legions did indeed come from the ordinary men from the ranks of the legion. Though there was a significant number of centurions from the equestrian rank. Some of the late emperors of the empire prove very rare examples of ordinary soldiers who rose all the way through the ranks to become high-ranking commanders. But in general the rank of primus pilus, the most senior centurion in a legion, was as high as a ordinary man could reach.
Historically, the distinction was based on social classes, but that doesn’t explain why every army follows this arrangement, including those in very different societies.
The claim that all societies use this model is inaccurate. The counterexample that springs to mind is the Roman army; I’m fairly certain that there are plenty more.
I endorse Lumifer’s reason. Other reasons would include less patriotism (as I understand, loyalties in much of Africa are to tribes/clans/families rather than a nationstate, religion, or ideology, so bringing your family abroad of going abroad to look for money would be less of a shift) and less perceived safety (e.g. apparently 75% of Ethiopia’s skilled laborers moved abroad during its famines).
I am Randaly; I didn’t know that specific information before, but it did not surprise me. My understanding was that phenomenon of brain drain is fairly well known.
FWIW, your model is really badly broken if you didn’t expect this- I would expect even most racist models (or, at least, my Turing-test-passing attempts at racist models) to predict this.
Nah, I was deliberately ignoring the other half. The fact that one part of Multiheaded’s comment was correct (though, AFAICT, irrelevant to the above discussion) doesn’t mean that the other part (regarding economic determinism) is too.
See here.
I cannot see how it is different then a mix of historical materialism and economic determinism. Please elaborate.
Economic determinism refers specifically to the economic structure. The basic outlines of the US’s economic structure have not changed since at least the 1930′s, and arguably even earlier. The development of TV, the internet, or for that matter the printing press, are all changes in technology, not changes in a society’s economic structure. Marx, for example, was not a technological determinist; Yvain et. al. are not economic determinists. Changing an economic structure is significantly easier than destroying all technology and preventing new developments.
Other stuff
In that case, I switch this critique to ‘sub-optimal style’- i.e. it was difficult for me to tell who Multiheaded was addressing and how his point was relevant.
Neither of the above. Your comment’s style was suboptimal, technological determinism is different from economic determinism, and the neo-reactionary position is neither. (This is obvious from the fact that they think that they can reverse the left-ward trend of history, but that it will take a concentrated effort.)
(I did not downvote.)
This is evidence that arguments-from-morality do persuade people, not that they should.
I did not find The Devil’s Delusion to be persuasive/good at all. It’s scientific quality is perhaps best summarized by noting that Berlinski is an opponent of evolution; I also recall that Berlinski spent an enormous amount of time on the (irrelevant) topic of whether some atheists had been evil.
ETA: Actually, now that I think about, The Devil’s Delusion is probably why I tend to ignore or look down on atheists who spend lots of time arguing that God would be evil (e.g. Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris)- I feel like they’re making the same mistake, but on the opposite side.
please consider converting your blog into a forum-blog in the style of LW.
This strikes me as somewhat technically difficult: AFAIK, there’s no equivalent of Wordpress for Reddit’s source code.
Disagree with theists that people have ontologically basic souls; further disagree with the claim that the ‘ontologically basic’ / ‘supernatural’ aspect of a god is unimportant to its definition.
(What theists think is not relevant to a question about the beliefs of people who not self-identify as theists.)
Yes. I disagree with them.
(Eliminating the supernatural aspect explains the human mind, and explains away God.)
NSA stuff is classified because its release would alert others to the US’s capabilities; the fact of an accident would not
One would expect the USSR to be equally eager to classify their mistakes, and to have greater success; they are believed to have failed utterly
Any argument in favor of classifying nuclear accidents would apply equally to the Thresher, Scorpion, Guitarro, San Francisco, and Miami, for which no serious attempt was made at classification
Nuclear accidents, judging by the USSR’s experience, almost always involve the loss of an entire ship, and many fatalities. It is not possibly for the Navy to just “lose” a ship or a dozen sailors. (No submarine certified under the navy’s safety plan, SUBSAFE, has ever been lost, for any reason.) It is even less possible for them to evacuate an aircraft carrier and then rely on tugs to move it to a dock for repair..
There are numerous studies that show that our brain’s natural way of thinking out probabilities is in terms of frequencies, and that people show less bias when presented with frequencies than when they are presented with percentages.