4 ms·

After reading a few of the articles in the new sub, if that is far-right then far-right has a very different definition to the one being popularized. Take this

• api 8y ago
  The post you linked is not bad. I checked the poster's comment history and was a bit surprised not to find a raving misogynist who hangs on one of the "men's rights" subs, since in my experience anyone willing to spend hours arguing in favor of biological determinism is grinding some kind of racial or gender axe. I think you found an outlier. Hmm... I almost deleted that... I realize that sounds really really cynical. I've just become so accustomed to organized trolls trying to "red pill" people by sounding rational and balanced at first and then gradually trying to argue people into believing that Hitler was right. So any time I see a level headed argument in favor of biological determinism or some analogous position I always assume the poster is participating in a companion thread on 4chan or Discord somewhere where they're talking about how to "red pill" the target audience. There's a little bit of this on the extreme left too but nowhere near as much and they're not as active.
  • belorn 8y ago
    The linked article can be summerized into a few word sentence: The p-value of a famous study, cited by researchers and media, is claimed to be 0.33. I am completely amazed that from there you interpret biological determinism, leading to red pill, leading to nazi worship, and finally landing at the far-right. I guess that answer my question why people think it is far-right, while my own definition of far-right is no where near that.
    • api 8y ago
      On further thought I think it is this: I question the motives of anyone who invests a lot of their time in the debate and discussion of the merits of various metrics for ranking the value of human beings unless they are on the skeptic side. Generally those who argue for even tangentially defend stereotypes or or metrics that can be used to a priori rank people by quality of meat are at the very least flirting with some kind of totalitarian elitism. Perhaps this is hypersensitivity and overreaction, but I am not sure. I have studied human history. The instant the camel of a priori anonymous judgement of other people gets its nose under the tent, literal hell on Earth follows. Every single time. I do not believe humans are all (physically) equal, but I do believe that it is important to treat people that way by default and to absolutely reject the aggregates-to-individuals fallacy here. That kind of reverse projection of statistics is always problematic or downright erroneous, but here it is also toxic and evil. Save biases from MTBF statistics for hard drives or other inanimate objects. (Even there it is problematic!) Since you can't go from aggregate to individual with humans, what is the value of defending potential means of doing so?
      • Izkata 8y ago
        > unless they are on the skeptic side. ...Consider that the orchestra post that triggered these last couple replies is the skeptic side. > Since you can't go from aggregate to individual with humans, what is the value of defending potential means of doing so? I'm not sure this is going to follow, since I'm not sure this more-general question is still based on the orchestra study, but if so: That's not the point of focusing on stuff like it. The point is specifically to debunk claims of institutionalized sexism/etc that get taken at face value.
      • manfredo 8y ago
        You seem to be entrenched in the position that the only possible reason why someone would want to study population level differences is to justify some sort of racist or otherwise evil agenda. There are plenty of reasons to do so, and more broadly I take issue with the notion that there needs to be any justification for expanding our understanding of the universe. Take for example the disparity in prison populations between women and men. If we believe that there are no differences in behavior or tendencies between the sexes (and a large number of people do), then it would be fair to conclude that our justice system is exhibiting blatant sexism against men. Around 80-90% of prisoners are men. This is very far from equality of outcome; one sex is around an order of magnitude more likely to be a prisoner. But there is a strong body of evidence to suggest that even absent any discrimination differences such as these will likely exist. Men exhibit higher levels of aggression and risk tolerance. These patterns exhibit themselves relatively uniformly throughout all societies regardless of development levels, cultural trends, etc. If we did not perform this kind of population level analysis then society may have tried to balance our prison population with bad policy that tries to engineer an equality of outcome when there is no reason to expect equality of outcome. Is the above "flirting with some idea of totalitarian elitism"? Are we "ranking the value of human beings" by concluding that men are more likely to get incarcerated even in non-discriminatory systems? I think it'd be ridiculous to say yes. And if using population level analysis to justify a 10 to one disparity in prisoners is justified, then it's also justified to use population level analysis to reach the conclusion that, say, a 5 to 1 disparity in tech jobs can be reached without discrimination. On the note of "ranking the value of human beings", plenty of people in my workplace would agree with your statements. But then they'd turn around and engage in the very practice you describe. For instance, at our recruiting events we give each candidate a star if they're black, Hispanic, or female. If they're an Asian male they get an "ND" which stands for "negative diversity". Whether a resume has two, one, zero starts, or an "ND" is used when determining which to include in our candidate search. We're ranking the value of human beings explicitly, on the basis of our own political ideology.