5 ms·

> suppress lines of thought that have political outcomes that I don't like? Do not fund lines of thought where the harms outweigh the potential benefits, and/o

by nmrm2 11y ago

> suppress lines of thought that have political outcomes that I don't like? Do not fund lines of thought where the harms outweigh the potential benefits, and/or where ethical commitments are violated. That policy is neither particularly strong or particularly uncommon. It's the guiding principle behind IRBs, which are pervasive. (In fact, as Horgan points out, one of the primary motivations for IRBs was racist scientists conducting downright evil experiments on black men.) There are two components to this analysis. First, do benefits outweigh harms? This is easy because there are no benefits. Suppose there is a correlation between race and IQ. What non-evil thing, pray tell, would you have us do with that knowledge? Second, are there any ethical violations? Also easy. Racial superiority theories aren't "political outcomes that I don't like." They are fundamentally Evil; for god's sake, this is one of very situations where the motivation behind Godwin's Law doesn't apply.

peterfirefly 11y ago
> Suppose there is a correlation between race and IQ. What non-evil thing, pray tell, would you have us do with that knowledge? Stop affirmative action? Let it influence immigration policy? Let it inform crime policy? It is in fact possible to find it evil to NOT do so... > Racial superiority theories aren't "political outcomes that I don't like." They are fundamentally Evil; for god's sake, [...] They are exactly "political outcomes that I don't like". Treating people like individuals ought to be considered non-evil but belief in racial equality leads to people NOT being treated like individuals.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  > Stop affirmative action? Affirmative action is motivated by either an absolute belief in diversity being good (e.g., there are benefits for economic minorities that apply ragardless of race), and/or as an intervention meant to correct for structural violence in recent history. The racial question is irrelevant to either of those issues. > Let it influence immigration policy? Let it inform crime policy? Immigration and crime policy written under the belief that some races are genetically superior to others... Didn't I ask for examples that aren't fucking evil? In any case, EVEN IF there is a correlation (after controlling for the hundred of obvious things and god knows what else), other factors (including variation that race doesn't explain and environmental factors) are so extraordinarily dominant that racial variation is more an excuse for racist bullshit than an objective justification for it. Which is exactly why we don't even need to know the answer to the question. > Treating people like individuals ought to be considered non-evil but belief in racial equality leads to people NOT being treated like individuals. I have no idea what this means. WRT affirmative action this is barely an intelligible position, because anyone with half a brain will realize that there are massive environmental factors that definitely dominate any difficult-to-even-validate racial causation. WRT crime and immigration policy: writing either informed by a barely statistically significant correlation that's probably impossible to even actually prove because of thousands/millions of latent variables is pretty fucking far from treating people like individuals. Especially when that "science" conveniently validates white superiority theory.
  - jmorphy88 11y ago
    Despite all your church-lady hyperventilation about eeeeevil and white superiority theory (I thought the "racial question is irrelevant"? Oh, except for those nasty whites...), you are simply wrong about racial differences being impossible to reason about. You are just trying to muddy the waters by pretending that race is some utterly inscrutable field of study that is incomprehensible to mere human minds, and that even daring to open Pandora's box is to invite "racist bullshit", and so we should just shut the whole thing down. Like I said, "political outcomes that I don't like".
    - nmrm2 11y ago
      First, moral frameworks exist for a reason and aren't the realm of "church-lady hyperventilation". For example, most plausible instantiations of the crime policies suggested above are blatantly unconstitutional. Second, there are plenty of objective arguments in my posts here that any racialized theory of intelligence is not worth to studying, and you're ignoring all of them. As one small example, over multiple posts, you and peterfirefly have failed to name one concrete policy option for which an answer to this question is remotely necessary. If anything here is irrational, it is your insistence on studying a correlation that has no value beyond justifying racially motivated policies. If the last 2000 years teach us anything, it's that for any concrete social problem you'd want to solve, a solution motivated by the belief that one race is superior to another is not going to be the optimal solution. > pretending that race is some utterly inscrutable field Belief in superiority on a collection of phenotypes roughly correlated to what we call "race" today pre-dates Darwin by 100+ years. AS a matter of historical fact, the "scientific" notion of race today came about as a post-facto characterization of latent racial superiority theories that existed prior to the scientific era. So yes, race is inscrutable from a scientific perspective because it is not -- at base -- an idea of scientific origin. Here is what we do know. We know that Every. Single. Time. any society has made a decision motivated by the belief that one race is objectively better than another race, the result was a social order that could not be described with any word other than evil. We know that for hundreds of years, crackpots of varying scientific literacy and persuasiveness have evoked the en vogue scientific ideas of the day to claim the inferiority of a group of people with an astoundingly invariant set of latent racial characterizations. And we know that at every point in history, their crackpottery is eventually identified -- even if science doesn't advance enough to demonstrate the crackpottery until years later. (the somewhat pathetic aspect of the crackpottery displayed in this thread that rjkyle is so kindly addressing is that it all has already been disproven, and yet... so don't pretend this is about "scientific truth" or "intellectual inquiry") We know that even if it were reasonable from to outset to choose a given phenotype over all others to study, it would go against the grain of everything we have learned in the last 2000 years to use any notion of inferiority between races as a basis for decision making. We know that even if that characterization had a causal link to intelligence, there are far better and less noisy predictors of intelligence. So, there is no reason to study this correlation. Not today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Nothing good can come of it. If history is a guide, not even intellectual understanding. Anyways, I'm done engaging with you and peterfirefly now. The belief that one "race" is superior to another is detestable, and to claim that there could exist definitive scientific evidence for such a claim fundamentally misunderstands what science is and ignores a rich history of such claims in the history of science
temujin 11y ago
It appears that you consider, among other things, Singapore's rise over the last 50 years to be "evil". This puts you at odds with practically the entire economics profession, and just about everyone else in the world trying to actually improve conditions in poor countries instead of burning perceived witches and warlocks.
- peterfirefly 11y ago
  Finally a Temujin I can get behind! (Didn't care much for the first one.)
- nmrm2 11y ago
  > Singapore's rise over the last 50 years You mean conducting eugenics experiments on low-income women? Or did you mean encouraging only educated people to have children? If you really think sterilizing and performing experiments on the poor without consent constitutes social progress... I don't really know what to say. Anyways, it's a pretty far stretch to say that Singapore's eugenics program had anything at all to do with its economic performance over the past 50 years. More-over, the changes to reproductive rates in Singapore are pretty uniform throughout the population. So even if population control has helped Singapore, it was just the population control -- not the class-centered eugenics schemes. And all of this is discounting the fact that it's not even effective when judged on its own terms... turns out governments don't make for very good PD controllers. > with practically the entire economics profession This is obviously not true. It is not the case that the majority of practicing ecnomists support eugenics... Second, even if this were true, it would be irrelevant. Economists are not geneticists, biologists, anthropologists, etc. They are absolutely not trained to make the sort of assessments I'm talking about above.
  - temujin 11y ago
    Most economists agree that Lee Kuan Yew did a better job at increasing his people's prosperity than almost every other developing-country leader of his era. An increasing number of African leaders (Rwanda's Paul Kagame is an especially vocal example) see him as a primary role model. You are free to believe that LKY's worldview was totally inaccurate and that he owes his success to a ridiculous amount of luck. (As you note, his views on human group differences were not a random eccentricity, they had a major impact on his policy choices in several domains.) Fortunately, those who are doing the most to increase African prosperity today reject your position, and tens of millions of people are benefiting.

by nmrm2 11y ago

peterfirefly 11y ago

> Suppose there is a correlation between race and IQ. What non-evil thing, pray tell, would you have us do with that knowledge? Stop affirmative action? Let it influence immigration policy? Let it inform crime policy? It is in fact possible to find it evil to NOT do so... > Racial superiority theories aren't "political outcomes that I don't like." They are fundamentally Evil; for god's sake, [...] They are exactly "political outcomes that I don't like". Treating people like individuals ought to be considered non-evil but belief in racial equality leads to people NOT being treated like individuals.

nmrm2 11y ago
> Stop affirmative action? Affirmative action is motivated by either an absolute belief in diversity being good (e.g., there are benefits for economic minorities that apply ragardless of race), and/or as an intervention meant to correct for structural violence in recent history. The racial question is irrelevant to either of those issues. > Let it influence immigration policy? Let it inform crime policy? Immigration and crime policy written under the belief that some races are genetically superior to others... Didn't I ask for examples that aren't fucking evil? In any case, EVEN IF there is a correlation (after controlling for the hundred of obvious things and god knows what else), other factors (including variation that race doesn't explain and environmental factors) are so extraordinarily dominant that racial variation is more an excuse for racist bullshit than an objective justification for it. Which is exactly why we don't even need to know the answer to the question. > Treating people like individuals ought to be considered non-evil but belief in racial equality leads to people NOT being treated like individuals. I have no idea what this means. WRT affirmative action this is barely an intelligible position, because anyone with half a brain will realize that there are massive environmental factors that definitely dominate any difficult-to-even-validate racial causation. WRT crime and immigration policy: writing either informed by a barely statistically significant correlation that's probably impossible to even actually prove because of thousands/millions of latent variables is pretty fucking far from treating people like individuals. Especially when that "science" conveniently validates white superiority theory.
- jmorphy88 11y ago
  Despite all your church-lady hyperventilation about eeeeevil and white superiority theory (I thought the "racial question is irrelevant"? Oh, except for those nasty whites...), you are simply wrong about racial differences being impossible to reason about. You are just trying to muddy the waters by pretending that race is some utterly inscrutable field of study that is incomprehensible to mere human minds, and that even daring to open Pandora's box is to invite "racist bullshit", and so we should just shut the whole thing down. Like I said, "political outcomes that I don't like".
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    First, moral frameworks exist for a reason and aren't the realm of "church-lady hyperventilation". For example, most plausible instantiations of the crime policies suggested above are blatantly unconstitutional. Second, there are plenty of objective arguments in my posts here that any racialized theory of intelligence is not worth to studying, and you're ignoring all of them. As one small example, over multiple posts, you and peterfirefly have failed to name one concrete policy option for which an answer to this question is remotely necessary. If anything here is irrational, it is your insistence on studying a correlation that has no value beyond justifying racially motivated policies. If the last 2000 years teach us anything, it's that for any concrete social problem you'd want to solve, a solution motivated by the belief that one race is superior to another is not going to be the optimal solution. > pretending that race is some utterly inscrutable field Belief in superiority on a collection of phenotypes roughly correlated to what we call "race" today pre-dates Darwin by 100+ years. AS a matter of historical fact, the "scientific" notion of race today came about as a post-facto characterization of latent racial superiority theories that existed prior to the scientific era. So yes, race is inscrutable from a scientific perspective because it is not -- at base -- an idea of scientific origin. Here is what we do know. We know that Every. Single. Time. any society has made a decision motivated by the belief that one race is objectively better than another race, the result was a social order that could not be described with any word other than evil. We know that for hundreds of years, crackpots of varying scientific literacy and persuasiveness have evoked the en vogue scientific ideas of the day to claim the inferiority of a group of people with an astoundingly invariant set of latent racial characterizations. And we know that at every point in history, their crackpottery is eventually identified -- even if science doesn't advance enough to demonstrate the crackpottery until years later. (the somewhat pathetic aspect of the crackpottery displayed in this thread that rjkyle is so kindly addressing is that it all has already been disproven, and yet... so don't pretend this is about "scientific truth" or "intellectual inquiry") We know that even if it were reasonable from to outset to choose a given phenotype over all others to study, it would go against the grain of everything we have learned in the last 2000 years to use any notion of inferiority between races as a basis for decision making. We know that even if that characterization had a causal link to intelligence, there are far better and less noisy predictors of intelligence. So, there is no reason to study this correlation. Not today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Nothing good can come of it. If history is a guide, not even intellectual understanding. Anyways, I'm done engaging with you and peterfirefly now. The belief that one "race" is superior to another is detestable, and to claim that there could exist definitive scientific evidence for such a claim fundamentally misunderstands what science is and ignores a rich history of such claims in the history of science

temujin 11y ago

It appears that you consider, among other things, Singapore's rise over the last 50 years to be "evil". This puts you at odds with practically the entire economics profession, and just about everyone else in the world trying to actually improve conditions in poor countries instead of burning perceived witches and warlocks.

peterfirefly 11y ago
Finally a Temujin I can get behind! (Didn't care much for the first one.)
nmrm2 11y ago
> Singapore's rise over the last 50 years You mean conducting eugenics experiments on low-income women? Or did you mean encouraging only educated people to have children? If you really think sterilizing and performing experiments on the poor without consent constitutes social progress... I don't really know what to say. Anyways, it's a pretty far stretch to say that Singapore's eugenics program had anything at all to do with its economic performance over the past 50 years. More-over, the changes to reproductive rates in Singapore are pretty uniform throughout the population. So even if population control has helped Singapore, it was just the population control -- not the class-centered eugenics schemes. And all of this is discounting the fact that it's not even effective when judged on its own terms... turns out governments don't make for very good PD controllers. > with practically the entire economics profession This is obviously not true. It is not the case that the majority of practicing ecnomists support eugenics... Second, even if this were true, it would be irrelevant. Economists are not geneticists, biologists, anthropologists, etc. They are absolutely not trained to make the sort of assessments I'm talking about above.
- temujin 11y ago
  Most economists agree that Lee Kuan Yew did a better job at increasing his people's prosperity than almost every other developing-country leader of his era. An increasing number of African leaders (Rwanda's Paul Kagame is an especially vocal example) see him as a primary role model. You are free to believe that LKY's worldview was totally inaccurate and that he owes his success to a ridiculous amount of luck. (As you note, his views on human group differences were not a random eccentricity, they had a major impact on his policy choices in several domains.) Fortunately, those who are doing the most to increase African prosperity today reject your position, and tens of millions of people are benefiting.