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To play the devil's advocate: What's wrong with being more selective? I don't think anything is. What's problematic is how people go about it. Our society do

To play the devil's advocate: What's wrong with being more selective? I don't think anything is. What's problematic is how people go about it. Our society doesn't teach us how to be selective with grace and manners. So when people realize they have power in a situation they freak out a bit and might over react in being excessively picky or rude to others.

Kalium 10y ago
Nothing is wrong with being more selective. Everything is wrong if you're the person or group strongly selected against.
ZeroFries 10y ago
Because it raises the conditions necessary for you (i.e. makes those circumstances rarer) to be content and at peace.
internaut 10y ago
The problems with class warfare are similar to those of racial discrimination. The problem is not that there is no basis for using a filter but that assuming everybody is identical within a class (or subset, which has a 1:1 mapping to the notion of class) is a logical error. It is not about morality so much as logic. Suppose I find Italians to be corrupt and untrustworthy. Well evidently there exist Italians who are honest with good intentions. That some of set of Italians genuinely do belong to a mafia is not indicative of the larger group, even if it were so that a majority of Italians were mafiosos. Of course real life is complicated, people have to resort to satisficing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing) and worse yet harmful behavior patterns aren't limited to any subset of the group. Notoriously there exist robin hoods and bad cops. Choosing not to go down the wrong street is reasonable under satisficing but rejecting job candidates for having the wrong names is. All of this is to say that discrimination in of itself is not illogical but discriminating indiscriminately IS.
- jospoortvliet 10y ago
  The problem here is our lack of understanding of statistics. Yes, there probably are differences in averages on things like criminality, intelligence, lazyness and so on between groups like male/female, ethnicity, gay or straight and so on. But, besides the fact that the difference might not be in the direction you think it goes, in all these cares, inter-group variability is tiny compared to intra group variability. That means: it doesn't matter in practice. Whether men ow women are on average more intelligent, those 1-3 average IQ points are so irrelevant compared to the 15-30 points 5 random people in a room would generally differ from each other that it is barely of academic interest and certainly useless to use to judge a random men or women you meet. This thing is true for many differences between groups often discriminated against. Scientist are thus inclined not to research these differences: if they exist they are rarely helpful for policy (too small) but often their reporting results in people misbehaving even more due to their misunderstanding the impact (or rather lack thereof).
  - internaut 10y ago
    It is true that inter-group variability is tiny compared to intra group variability. However I strongly disagree that it does not matter in practice. In practice people are not randomly assigned rooms to be in. They certainly do not meet other people randomly. The result is group identity becomes ever more strongly associated and tribes form. Stereotypes are developed and so on. For example; it does not surprise me that tiny eastern European countries have coders working for Google but much larger and closer minority populations do not. EE workers are natively nowhere close to Google HQ and they don't even share a common language and culture. These are high barriers. That there exist a larger number of people with the hypothetical potential to code for Google (which surely exist because of intra group variability) within that minority American population is not relevant. Those people do not want to code for Google i.e. exchange their labour in this area for money. The eastern european coders from (really) tiny states on the other hand have a strong desire to work in those domains that computer corporations select for in their workers. Even though there are many differences between a typical coder in the United States and a typical Eastern European coder, their shared 'tribe' of basically being geeks trumps everything else. That ought to be GOOD news for those who want to avoid discrimination based on the superficial differences but somehow it does not seem to be taken as this. That's politics. Obviously scientists are under social pressure not to examine such visible differences. This is because they are failures at being scientists. I do not say that lightly. These are atrocious failures of omission. If society only receives measurements it looks for, then why bother doing any research at all? We already know the answers! It is certainly cheaper to confirm society's biases, whether we're in Victorian times or in the present. It's like being a fat man avoiding the weighing scales. I understand your point about the gen.pop taking complex research with many confounding variables and reducing the results to a simplistic and inaccurate story. That worries me as well, not just in cases of racial discrimination, but as a general error. That said I cannot agree it makes no difference for public policy (because of the non-random sorting I mentioned earlier). Public policy ought to be based on reality, if the map does not conform to the territory problems will occur. Any system that produces inaccurate information and then has to depend on the false outputs will constantly be tripping itself up. As a last point, although gen.pop can do dumb things sometimes, that is no reason to feed them platitudes. They do however have bullshit detectors which go off when what the media describes to them isn't what they see in their realities. They are capable of complex thought and thought evolution over time and I fail to see how deliberately misleading them can lead to a greater good without dysfunction. Frankly I think a decline in economic prosperity has a lot more to do with inter-group dynamics going bad, with propaganda causing it to be worse, but as a second order affect. I agree that IQ is far from the deciding factor in most individual cases. 3-5 points really isn't that much. You could get that many points by taking a ten minute walk and a shower! The issue though is that just as gravity does not affect you and I on the microscale we are at, with enough mass/size things start happening that really do impact on us. I don't know if you've ever walked from a room with average people to a room with people who are totally into the thing you're into, but the difference is very palatable to me. I much prefer the second room over the first, even if that first room had a slightly higher IQ. Why? Because I can now get something done! In fact we all can. That almost comes as a relief.

Kalium 10y ago

Nothing is wrong with being more selective. Everything is wrong if you're the person or group strongly selected against.

ZeroFries 10y ago

Because it raises the conditions necessary for you (i.e. makes those circumstances rarer) to be content and at peace.

internaut 10y ago

The problems with class warfare are similar to those of racial discrimination. The problem is not that there is no basis for using a filter but that assuming everybody is identical within a class (or subset, which has a 1:1 mapping to the notion of class) is a logical error. It is not about morality so much as logic. Suppose I find Italians to be corrupt and untrustworthy. Well evidently there exist Italians who are honest with good intentions. That some of set of Italians genuinely do belong to a mafia is not indicative of the larger group, even if it were so that a majority of Italians were mafiosos. Of course real life is complicated, people have to resort to satisficing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing) and worse yet harmful behavior patterns aren't limited to any subset of the group. Notoriously there exist robin hoods and bad cops. Choosing not to go down the wrong street is reasonable under satisficing but rejecting job candidates for having the wrong names is. All of this is to say that discrimination in of itself is not illogical but discriminating indiscriminately IS.

jospoortvliet 10y ago
The problem here is our lack of understanding of statistics. Yes, there probably are differences in averages on things like criminality, intelligence, lazyness and so on between groups like male/female, ethnicity, gay or straight and so on. But, besides the fact that the difference might not be in the direction you think it goes, in all these cares, inter-group variability is tiny compared to intra group variability. That means: it doesn't matter in practice. Whether men ow women are on average more intelligent, those 1-3 average IQ points are so irrelevant compared to the 15-30 points 5 random people in a room would generally differ from each other that it is barely of academic interest and certainly useless to use to judge a random men or women you meet. This thing is true for many differences between groups often discriminated against. Scientist are thus inclined not to research these differences: if they exist they are rarely helpful for policy (too small) but often their reporting results in people misbehaving even more due to their misunderstanding the impact (or rather lack thereof).
- internaut 10y ago
  It is true that inter-group variability is tiny compared to intra group variability. However I strongly disagree that it does not matter in practice. In practice people are not randomly assigned rooms to be in. They certainly do not meet other people randomly. The result is group identity becomes ever more strongly associated and tribes form. Stereotypes are developed and so on. For example; it does not surprise me that tiny eastern European countries have coders working for Google but much larger and closer minority populations do not. EE workers are natively nowhere close to Google HQ and they don't even share a common language and culture. These are high barriers. That there exist a larger number of people with the hypothetical potential to code for Google (which surely exist because of intra group variability) within that minority American population is not relevant. Those people do not want to code for Google i.e. exchange their labour in this area for money. The eastern european coders from (really) tiny states on the other hand have a strong desire to work in those domains that computer corporations select for in their workers. Even though there are many differences between a typical coder in the United States and a typical Eastern European coder, their shared 'tribe' of basically being geeks trumps everything else. That ought to be GOOD news for those who want to avoid discrimination based on the superficial differences but somehow it does not seem to be taken as this. That's politics. Obviously scientists are under social pressure not to examine such visible differences. This is because they are failures at being scientists. I do not say that lightly. These are atrocious failures of omission. If society only receives measurements it looks for, then why bother doing any research at all? We already know the answers! It is certainly cheaper to confirm society's biases, whether we're in Victorian times or in the present. It's like being a fat man avoiding the weighing scales. I understand your point about the gen.pop taking complex research with many confounding variables and reducing the results to a simplistic and inaccurate story. That worries me as well, not just in cases of racial discrimination, but as a general error. That said I cannot agree it makes no difference for public policy (because of the non-random sorting I mentioned earlier). Public policy ought to be based on reality, if the map does not conform to the territory problems will occur. Any system that produces inaccurate information and then has to depend on the false outputs will constantly be tripping itself up. As a last point, although gen.pop can do dumb things sometimes, that is no reason to feed them platitudes. They do however have bullshit detectors which go off when what the media describes to them isn't what they see in their realities. They are capable of complex thought and thought evolution over time and I fail to see how deliberately misleading them can lead to a greater good without dysfunction. Frankly I think a decline in economic prosperity has a lot more to do with inter-group dynamics going bad, with propaganda causing it to be worse, but as a second order affect. I agree that IQ is far from the deciding factor in most individual cases. 3-5 points really isn't that much. You could get that many points by taking a ten minute walk and a shower! The issue though is that just as gravity does not affect you and I on the microscale we are at, with enough mass/size things start happening that really do impact on us. I don't know if you've ever walked from a room with average people to a room with people who are totally into the thing you're into, but the difference is very palatable to me. I much prefer the second room over the first, even if that first room had a slightly higher IQ. Why? Because I can now get something done! In fact we all can. That almost comes as a relief.