What truths are actually taboo?

What do you mean by parents treating their children like pets?

There's also the rather disturbing trend of parents treating their children, to a greater or lesser degree, like pets. This is a relatively modern development, since the point that children were no longer required to work from a young age. Pets having sex is, at best, eye-rolling.

On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn't a modern development.

I tend to prefer this kind of explanation because "what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up" seems too sophisticated and neat to be an accurate description of what's going on. I suspect that dynamic comes into play only sporadically, with moralizing (what's proper, what's presentable or impressive, what doesn't discomfort me) taking centre stage most of the time.

Rather, questions of propriety and morality refer to memes that were presumably selected by memetic evolution for some combination of the children's individual and collective benefit.

If memory serves, it was something about not hitting 6-month-olds for touching themselves in Marriage and Morals that prevented Russell from teaching at City College years later...

Really the only acceptable conversation I can think of goes something like:

With the another evident exception being this conversation and those like it that employ sufficient indirection. The ancestor is currently at +4, 100%.

I guess that “taboo” in the OP means ‘what you can't say’, not ‘what you can say but still lots of people are wrong about’. Otherwise it'd be faaaar easier to find taboos.

I agree with the second part of your comment, as I've said.

Good thing + good thing? I don't think that using children for sexual pleasure is a "good thing" at all. It would be if we lived in a universe where the formula is pleasure + pleasure, but it obviously isn't. Do terms such as "meaningful consent" or "exploitation" have any relevance here?

It depends on which religion -- apparently, Orthodox Judaism doesn't.

Agreed. Although if you include the cost of searching, satisficing is the optimal solution.

Yeah, that was pretty much the only thing I could think of. But given that people do not in fact have randomly assigned soulmates who are a much better match than anyone else, holding out for your soulmate is not a possible policy.

Another thing that would qualify is meeting everyone in the world (in reasonable age brackets and filtering by gender if appropriate, and maybe some amount of filtering on culture and interests still counts as not settling) to determine the best possible match, not because you can only be happy with them but because you refuse to settle for the infinitesimally inferior second-best match. But it's very unlikely that you'll be your first choice's first choice, forcing at least one of you to settle for an inferior match or remain single.

Gratuitous bragging: my calculations suggest that there are about ten thousand people in the world I'd be more or less as happy with as with my boyfriend. (It's not that lucky, I meet an incredibly skewed sample.) I have on average two more chances of finding another good match if we break up, and I'm not unhappy about this prospect, which makes "settling" a strange descriptor.

Again, the emphasis of the post is "obvious truths." But yes, I think the reaction to Summers' talk was atypical. Gender differences and IQ and women in mathematics are standard topics in introductory psych textbooks. I think the reaction to his talk was deplorable, but I think that a big part of the explanation here has to do with "former administration official" and "university president." People with these titles are subject to stricter rules.

The fact you are forced to make this claim, which is probably irrelevant to the discussion at hand (e.g. what exactly happened in the Holocaust), is evidence that you are discussing a taboo subject.

A sensitive subject not in itself taboo so long as one includes provisos to prevent reasonable inferences leading to their concluding that I have views that actually are taboo.

I doubt you have real evidence that anti-Semitism is a mental illness, rather than a normal mental state which is common in certain societies and is not harmful to those who possess it.

I think that anti-Semitism is a qualitatively distinct form of racism which ought to be considered on the borderline of mental illness. I'll admit fault for calling it a mental illness without qualification. Here's one reason I consider anti-Semitism to be almost in a category of its own:

Garden-variety racists do not usually suspect the objects of their dislike of secretly manipulating the banks and the stock markets and of harboring a demonic plan for world domination.

Racism is something segregated groups do more or less automatically, starting from early age and due to an evolutionarily sensible preference of the familiar to the unfamiliar. Anti-Semitism doesn't happen like this. Anti-Semitism is not only racial but also religious and nationalist, and it can happen anywhere. It's highly paranoid; the Jews frequently take an Illuminati-type role as the masters of everything. Any infinity of other racisms and poisons are naturally subsumed within it. Garden-variety racists are not typically racialists with a well-constructed theory to support their bigotry, but anti-Semites almost always are. Anti-Semitism is System 2. Conspiracies about Chinese and Japanese subterfuge wax and wane, but anti-Semitism stays. Jews are blamed simultaneously for the worst excesses of capitalism and socialism, for the kidnap and murder of children for ritual, food, and sport. They are out to undermine the true religion and dilute the blood of the best races, and turn the nations into beggars.

And it's been like this for centuries.

I agree that it's sound inference, given the hypotheses "racist" and "not racist."

Yes, given mutually exclusive and exhaustive - if fuzzy - categories that necessarily exist. Ok. Are you saying that it's an unsound inference?

What is more important is the importance given to those hypotheses. I think you're mistaken about what taboos are: they're signals of "not my tribe."

My tribe here being correct and not completely morally reprehensible, which includes lots of people who aren't in what I consider my in-group.

Someone who supports Palestine over Israel is against the 'tribe of Israel,' in the way that a measured discussion of the Holocaust after professing love for the tribe isn't.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with this debate. If you were, you would understand it to be a reflexive response against criticism of Israeli expansion and aggression. The Jewish critics of Israeli militarism are also called anti-Semitic. It has a lot more to do with power worship than tribal signalling, though the latter certainly plays a role in party discipline.

It may be socially or instrumentally rational to yield to such politics, but never mistake it for epistemic rationality.

You'd probably think Bill is a racist. Bill is an extreme example, but for him or a more realistic case could you let me know why inferring this would be a failure of rationality?

What do you mean by "we," "really," and "allowed"? No one will throw you in jail if you do such analysis and post it on your blog, but don't be surprised when the SPLC puts you on hatewatch.

I would be very surprised. I've followed Hatewatch before. Give me an example of this. If these exist, they must not be common.

The more important question is, "are the people who actually decide immigration laws doing a reasonable, thoughtful cost-benefit analysis?"

More important? Sure. Related? No. Of course they aren't. The party that wants the xenophobe vote doesn't need to do that, and the party that wants the Hispanic vote doesn't need to do that.

Right, I disagree with the law, in case you were wondering. I don't think it contributes any significant value. I support marginalizing bigotry, not criminalizing it.

Ah, so you meant a different topic entirely? I mean, presumably, saying you renounce Islam is what would get you into trouble...

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/14/6/623.short

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/67168735/heritability%20of%20iq.pdf

"Socioeconomic status modifies heritability of IQ in young children".

To make a long story short, this analysis of a large cohort of children assigned a 'socioeconomic status indicator' to each family they were following from 0 to 100 based on a large number of factors. They found that the heritability of IQ was a VERY strong positive function of socioenomic status. At the bottom, they think less than 5% of IQ variation is moderated by genetics. At the top of the scale, over 80%.

Obvious interpretation: low socioeconomic status masks genetic predisposition.

By contrast, here's an article that explores how certain racial groups appear to be more violent, until you control for class and demographic, when they suddenly aren't.

That is to say, violence and class have common causes. Intelligence, self-control, personality, etc., all immediately come to mind as relevant, but let's call this cluster of common causes of violence "harmness". Even though the presence of harmness may screen off the ability of race to contribute to predictions of violence and class, one still observes more harmness in the population of blacks than the population of whites.

For example, regarding heredity of IQ:

I'm sorry, but this test in no way differentiates between the hypotheses of biological heredity of IQ and verbal transference of IQ. As is, this just shows that there's an attribute which is positively correlated with being talked to by your parents and academic success, and negatively correlated with welfare. To quote the newspaper article:

“One thing is to say we can change adult language behavior,” Suskind said. “Another thing is to show that it is sustainable, and that it impacts child outcomes.”

Even among links which are strongly supported- like breastfeeding raising IQ- there are selection effects that are hard to estimate, because almost all of our evidence is observational. (Breastfeeding is still a good idea for most parents, even if we're not quite sure how good it is.) If cleverer parents are more likely to breastfeed because of the purported IQ-boosting link, then in order to start separating out the effects of breastfeeding and the effects of heritability we would need to measure the IQs of the parents of both groups, moving from a simple observational study to a massive project (that would still have possible unmeasured selection effects, like the amount they care about health and cleanliness).

do worse than professional-class children entirely because their parents talk to them less.

Emphasis mine. The probability of this conclusion being made by correct reasoning from the evidence supplied is epsilon, and if you didn't realize that when reading that quote, I beseech you to give that lapse of rationality solemn contemplation.

I can't be confident it's more than 2%.

The probability of an unbiased survey of the literature returning this conclusion is epsilon. I suggest updating.

meaning even if you can keep these thoughts separate in your head, they can be dangerous memes to spread, because self-fulfilling prophecies, etc.

I think it is worth considering the mirror of this concern. "Anyone who says X must mean Y" is its own self-fulfilling prophecy, which can only be counteracted by saying X and not meaning Y.

If parents talk more to girls but men are the stereotypically intelligent ones, how could talking more to kids be the difference?

A: females get more words during critical period
B: females more intelligent than males
...
If A, but lots of people think !B, how could A => B be true?

Or rather, I think that genetics possibly plays a large role now, but that if we raised people better than we could essentially eliminate these issues without focusing on genes.

What model of hereditary intelligence predicts significant hereditary differences in the current environment and negligible differences in an environment where people are raised better?

Good point. I wonder if people (other than me) normally understand this sentence that way?

I am, near Knoxville.

And German and Austrian Jews had a distinctive culture and identity, to the point that you could find bigotries amongst them against other Jews.

Same applies to Jews in, ehm, Soviet Russia and other places which did not have institutionalized anti-semitism or had a break from it for a few decades at least? Same applies to many other ethnicities, by the way.

What history of Russia have you been reading?

For serious (though hardly undisputed) evidence that slavery wasn't, in certain respects, "not all that bad" see Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross. Note also that Fogel and Engerman were allowed to say this and that they both remain highly respected academics, despite Engerman existing in just the sort of field that the Sheeple Can't Handle My Thoughtcrime crowd would predict to be most witchhunty.

I'd have to do some reading before responding to the second half of your comment, but to the first, that's relatively easy.

During slavery: black people are somebody's valuable property.

After Reconstruction: black people are a hated but cheap source of labor you can do pretty much anything to.

It's not just a "mid-level vs. top-level" split, but a question of when something like the Holocaust was formulated or became likely to happen. "Hitler planned it all along" sets a much earlier date than "mid-level bureaucrats were competing for Nazi brownies during the War."

I haven't seen particular comments doing what I'm doing here. Of course some opinions are taboo! I think my question somewhat less trivial.

That's not taboo. If you go ahead and do it, you won't face ostracism. Your feeling awkward about it doesn't count. Otherwise, asking someone out on a date would be taboo.

I'd recommend trying it, especially if you usually get suboptimal meals. Make recommendations. Frequent a restaurant enough to know the staff and for the the staff to know you and your preferences.

Aiming to falsify ideas rather than confirm them would be a nice start; that seems to be the most common rut.

I can count on one hand the number of times that I've heard someone worth listening to say "well, science doesn't know everything" in response to anything I've said or heard someone else say.

If the conversation goes:
A: I believe X.
B: X is contradicted by (citation to some study).
A: Well, science doesn't know everything.

then there is essentially no chance A has anything interesting to say about empirical topics - at least those unrelated to that person's job.

I thought it was amusing that someone could wreck their credibility so quickly by saying something so obviously true.

Tone matters here. Whoever says it as if any scientist were under the opposite impression has some serious problems.

Sometimes, saying something true is excellent evidence for believing falsehoods. Sometimes, giving knowledge is excellent evidence of ignorance. See Rand Paul's recent performance at Howard.

I thought it was amusing that someone could wreck their credibility so quickly by saying something so obviously true.

Right, that's the OP's point.

How can something be fundamental and artificial?

This is to some extent a rephrase of some specific Christian apologetic justifications. Note that not all religions which have such a deity which tortures people for eternity. For example most forms of Judaism and some forms of Christianity and Islam believe in at most finite punishment in the afterlife.

Yes, the man of straw made of a thousand years and more of the dogma of hell, and the majority of monotheists still. That's the reality of monotheism.

Smart, compared to a lot of his brethren, who also are one chromosome away from a chimpanzee. Do you plan on spending your life reading the smart astrologers? Me neither.

Is afterlife the "life after", like the after party? Your eternal life, as opposed to your mortal life?

No matter how you slice it, I don't see improvement in this life from the existence of God as portrayed in the Bible (or Allah in the Koran).

Your first question. From the post:

All this is the leadup to my question: what highly probable or effectively certain truths are genuinely taboo? I'm trying to avoid answers like "there are fewer women in mathematics" or "the size of my penis," since these are context sensitive, but not really taboo within a reasonable range of circumstances.

You can say it under a reasonable range of circumstances. "I can only whisper it to close confidants" is not a reasonable range. "I can get away with it except in the comment section at HuffPo" is.

Your next statement, which I think separate. You should say it if it's true. That would be a quite important truth. But it isn't, and I don't see the relevance.