4 ms·

Lots of abstract conceptualization, not a single concrete example or piece of supporting evidence. Alluring rhetoric, but vacuous.

dri_ft 10y ago
I don't think it's vacuous but I agree it would be clearer with examples.
- danharaj 10y ago
  Maybe vacuous isn't the best word. It's got a lot of empty spaces in between its lines that let you substitute your preconceptions into its narrative. It's rather vague when taken on its own, and if you want to question or verify its assertions, there is nothing concrete to work with.
  - maehwasu 10y ago
    As Moshe_Silnorin demonstrated, the available examples would cause a complete mental shutdown for most people inside the Overton Window, which makes presenting them counterproductive. I do agree with your criticism though, and the author would have done well to present historical examples that have lost their emotional intensity in the present day.
    - Avshalom 10y ago
      Moshe didn't so much demonstrate as state. That said, remarkably convenient that apparently people who don't already agree aren't even capable of hearing examples and evidence, thus rendering it not just unnecessary to substantiate the claims but imperative not to.
Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
If he mentioned the heresies, this post would not be read by those in the Overton bubble. An example, in the Overton bubble the cause of all differences in outcome between people is discrimination or perverse socialization. This leads to the following reasoning: Programming is a well paying, desirable job. White, Asian, Indian, and Jewish males are over-represented in the trade. All people have identical abilities and preferences on average, therefore the demographics of a profession should exactly match the census. We note that this isn't the case, therefore these demographics are the result of a subconscious and economically counterproductive racist and sexist conspiracy. Our reigning ideologies believe in a Lysenkoism of the mind, despite all psychometric evidence. There really are blogs with better epistemology on this topic than the top universities in the Overton bubble. Ideological indoctrination is the practice of instilling in people priors of 0 and 1 on certain topics, immunizing them against empirical experience. It is the practice of making geniuses more deluded than fools.
- leot 10y ago
  > All people have identical abilities and preferences on average, therefore the demographics of a profession should exactly match the census. That is rubbish. A straw man. I've spent more than a decade within the so-called Overton bubble at a university, and this is decidedly not the consensus as I experienced it. All biology is known to yield population variation. That is obviously true by necessity. However, there are both ontogenetic and phylogenetic influences on outcomes. The progressive/egalitarian view is that the cultural dynamics that result from small population differences (that are in any case too high variance to be reliable for making individual discriminations) should not inhibit phylogeny. Put another way, an individual's self-expression should not be limited by the fact of their membership in a particular category. Further, while there may well be, in lab settings, reliable significant population level differences, these differences at an individual level may entirely be swamped by cultural influences, rendering them insignificant. Lastly, the sources of the population differences may, in some instances, be factors that are entirely culturally malleable. Males as a population may have a slight predisposition not to understanding mechanisms better, but instead to finding them interesting, which over the course of development leads to greater competence. This predisposition may be easily changed at a young age by an encouraging mentor or compelling Hollywood film. Similarly, someone may be predisposed to kidney failure not because of bad kidney cells, but because they don't have as strong a compulsion to drink water (a deficit trivially remedied).
  - Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
    I agree that the best evidence of a person's intelligence and inclinations is their phenotype, not the average of their racial group or sex. Thus, race and sex should not be used as a proxy for any characteristic when employing people. We don't need proxies when we can directly measure - though note, some forms of measurement (such as culture fair IQ tests) are illegal for anyone but universities to use in employment, a delightful hypocrisy. Nonetheless, those parts of academia that define the narrative on these topics (sociology, history, feminist academia, and political science) do not believe there is significant non-cultural variation in any economically relevant trait among the sexes or ethnically distinct populations, and put anyone who openly states the obvious through a struggle session that usually results in their firing, as happened with Summers. Though the vast majority of psychologists admit that IQ is largely genetically heritable, accepting the consensus of the twin studies, any future inference about what this implies is outside the Overton bubble. Just as not knowing disease was caused by small invisible germs made us unable to treat disease properly, our inability to admit that intelligence and stupidity are caused by small, invisible alleles has made us unable to treat social pathologies properly. The distribution of intelligence is grossly unfair. But we can fix it if we are willing to admit its cause. Let us seize the high-IQ alleles and distribute them to the proletariat! I think there is a deep sense in which education as a treatment for stupidity is like wearing perfume to prevent the plague. Also, acknowledging these differences prevents racism. Antisemites love pointing out that jews are overrepresented in many high-status occupations, postulating crazy conspiracy theories for why this is the case. But once you acknowledge the IQ gap (Ashkenazi Jews score roughly a standard deviation above gentiles in most psychometric tests) we have an entirely benign explanation and it's evident that these conspiracy theories hold no water. These differences are a perfectly valid subject of inquiry of very little use to the individual, but becomes necessary to discuss when progressives beg the question, assuming falsely (just as antisemites do) that underrepresentation in cognitively demanding endeavours necessarily implies discrimination that isn't based on ability.

dri_ft 10y ago

I don't think it's vacuous but I agree it would be clearer with examples.

danharaj 10y ago
Maybe vacuous isn't the best word. It's got a lot of empty spaces in between its lines that let you substitute your preconceptions into its narrative. It's rather vague when taken on its own, and if you want to question or verify its assertions, there is nothing concrete to work with.
- maehwasu 10y ago
  As Moshe_Silnorin demonstrated, the available examples would cause a complete mental shutdown for most people inside the Overton Window, which makes presenting them counterproductive. I do agree with your criticism though, and the author would have done well to present historical examples that have lost their emotional intensity in the present day.
  - Avshalom 10y ago
    Moshe didn't so much demonstrate as state. That said, remarkably convenient that apparently people who don't already agree aren't even capable of hearing examples and evidence, thus rendering it not just unnecessary to substantiate the claims but imperative not to.

Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago

If he mentioned the heresies, this post would not be read by those in the Overton bubble. An example, in the Overton bubble the cause of all differences in outcome between people is discrimination or perverse socialization. This leads to the following reasoning: Programming is a well paying, desirable job. White, Asian, Indian, and Jewish males are over-represented in the trade. All people have identical abilities and preferences on average, therefore the demographics of a profession should exactly match the census. We note that this isn't the case, therefore these demographics are the result of a subconscious and economically counterproductive racist and sexist conspiracy. Our reigning ideologies believe in a Lysenkoism of the mind, despite all psychometric evidence. There really are blogs with better epistemology on this topic than the top universities in the Overton bubble. Ideological indoctrination is the practice of instilling in people priors of 0 and 1 on certain topics, immunizing them against empirical experience. It is the practice of making geniuses more deluded than fools.

leot 10y ago
> All people have identical abilities and preferences on average, therefore the demographics of a profession should exactly match the census. That is rubbish. A straw man. I've spent more than a decade within the so-called Overton bubble at a university, and this is decidedly not the consensus as I experienced it. All biology is known to yield population variation. That is obviously true by necessity. However, there are both ontogenetic and phylogenetic influences on outcomes. The progressive/egalitarian view is that the cultural dynamics that result from small population differences (that are in any case too high variance to be reliable for making individual discriminations) should not inhibit phylogeny. Put another way, an individual's self-expression should not be limited by the fact of their membership in a particular category. Further, while there may well be, in lab settings, reliable significant population level differences, these differences at an individual level may entirely be swamped by cultural influences, rendering them insignificant. Lastly, the sources of the population differences may, in some instances, be factors that are entirely culturally malleable. Males as a population may have a slight predisposition not to understanding mechanisms better, but instead to finding them interesting, which over the course of development leads to greater competence. This predisposition may be easily changed at a young age by an encouraging mentor or compelling Hollywood film. Similarly, someone may be predisposed to kidney failure not because of bad kidney cells, but because they don't have as strong a compulsion to drink water (a deficit trivially remedied).
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  I agree that the best evidence of a person's intelligence and inclinations is their phenotype, not the average of their racial group or sex. Thus, race and sex should not be used as a proxy for any characteristic when employing people. We don't need proxies when we can directly measure - though note, some forms of measurement (such as culture fair IQ tests) are illegal for anyone but universities to use in employment, a delightful hypocrisy. Nonetheless, those parts of academia that define the narrative on these topics (sociology, history, feminist academia, and political science) do not believe there is significant non-cultural variation in any economically relevant trait among the sexes or ethnically distinct populations, and put anyone who openly states the obvious through a struggle session that usually results in their firing, as happened with Summers. Though the vast majority of psychologists admit that IQ is largely genetically heritable, accepting the consensus of the twin studies, any future inference about what this implies is outside the Overton bubble. Just as not knowing disease was caused by small invisible germs made us unable to treat disease properly, our inability to admit that intelligence and stupidity are caused by small, invisible alleles has made us unable to treat social pathologies properly. The distribution of intelligence is grossly unfair. But we can fix it if we are willing to admit its cause. Let us seize the high-IQ alleles and distribute them to the proletariat! I think there is a deep sense in which education as a treatment for stupidity is like wearing perfume to prevent the plague. Also, acknowledging these differences prevents racism. Antisemites love pointing out that jews are overrepresented in many high-status occupations, postulating crazy conspiracy theories for why this is the case. But once you acknowledge the IQ gap (Ashkenazi Jews score roughly a standard deviation above gentiles in most psychometric tests) we have an entirely benign explanation and it's evident that these conspiracy theories hold no water. These differences are a perfectly valid subject of inquiry of very little use to the individual, but becomes necessary to discuss when progressives beg the question, assuming falsely (just as antisemites do) that underrepresentation in cognitively demanding endeavours necessarily implies discrimination that isn't based on ability.