Posts
Comments
Frito Bandito writes:
So what you’re saying is, sometimes people are too stupid to know what’s good for them and others, and you need a quasi-dictatorial regime to get them into doing it?
Cochran replies:
Most people won’t wear seatbelts. You don’t need a dictatorship: just a government that isn’t crazy. In 1940, the government would have imposed quarantine without much agonizing. Of course, you couldn’t have had a big AIDS epidemic back then.
A government that isn't crazy huh? (u_u)
That problem seems insolvable except it somehow has been solved from time to time.
You are being suspiciously simplistic here. Needing to work hard to get a bride is one of the things that most vitally supports a culture of work ethic among men. Very few other things seem to have as big an impact. Most Fields medalists probably didn't work hard primarily because they wanted to attract a wife, though I bet many of them actually did. But the culture of work ethic being normative for men certainly seems vital to supporting their efforts!
To summarize:
Men can attract women with hard work (note not about money per se, it can be status)
The above is one of the strongest factors that contributes to a cultural expectation of hard work being normative for men
This has strong impact on the output of high performers
If it wasn't for the ruthless class segregation in the modern West, where people with high genetic potential are quickly identified and sorted by the academic system into subcultures where men attracting mates with hard work still happens things would probably be pretty bad. If you don't think this happens I would direct you to Charles Murray's book Drifting Appart. And even the upper classes are drifting away from this model, this looks to me like a social disaster in the making. Things will overall still get better due to other factors in the medium run, but the opportunity costs are terrible. (<_<)
Note that this is an interesting example of a social problem dilemma as Dalrock emphasizes. Talking about something will make it worse, but unless it is talked about the fundamentals will continue to get worse. It generalizes to other problems I think. The best course of action is to beforehand determine if talking about the social problem is likely to result in change to address it, if not it shouldn't be talked about. Your opinions?
I want to emphasis that because men have significantly more outliers when it comes to achievement and social outcomes (both positive and negative ) , we should expect such a change in culture to ceteris paribus result in a net decrease in very exceptional achievements. Young men are also responsible for the vast majority of violent crime. We should expect delayed marriage and drop in marriage to push in the direction of more violence as well.
I don't think you should. But maybe this is because I feel the same way (;_;) despite being just someone who endorses HBD and dislikes Progressivism but thinks Moldbug wrong. I like this comment you made elsewhere much better than the one you linked to though:
Progressive takeover of a community is strongly empowered by a journalists noticing nonprogressive ideas floating there.
We've been noticing this process for a long time now. I now think I was wrong on this in the past. This should be a sign for what you call the "outer right" that we will only inflame the now inevitable escalation of status warfare, as social justice debates hijack attention away from human rationality to value and demographic warfare and people like us are systematically excluded from the intended audience. An explanation of some related costs for those who can't think of them. I think your and Anissimov's site More Right makes a nice Schelling point to regroup and continue our exploration of human rationality applied to controversial topics.
Further, those who pushed continental drift were not COMPLETELY isolated from Harvard at all! They knew the theories and the data.
He wasn't proposing complete isolation, just sufficient isolation to make fixating particular craziness difficult. It is uncharitable to think he proposed this. After all the academic community in Alpha Centauri would hardly be isolated from our own, the 4 year time lag isn't that much in academic circles, I've seen papers in some fields published abroad picked up here only after a 10 year time lag for example.
His basic argument is not that intellectual cooperation isn't useful, his argument is that intellectual cooperation is not a good way to investigate whatever craziness happens to get fixated in the community of intellectuals in question. It seems a stronger version of the argument that science advances by scientists holding on to old theories dying off and being replaced by younger ones, he posits entire fields can most easily be fixed by being replaced by a fresh fork of them from Alpha Centauri.
To give a technobable example, if someone here proposes duotronic dylithium computers might not violate the will of the Great Zod, and might be worth investigating, he would be widely seen as violating the Geneva convention and denounced for unethical research and being a quack, everyone after all knows multitronic plasma computers are the most promising branch. But once we see the data stream from Alpha Centauri's working version and note cats are not living with dogs there yet, this becomes harder to claim.
The speed of light is our friend in this regard, but I expect it is more likely we will become very fast, so what is today tiny lag will become very problematic, rather than traveling to the stars. But that is getting ahead of myself, if we don't have competing craziness we might not get starships or mind emulations. (;_;) So how can we get some of the benefit of this today where we are all one with Harvard?
A commenter there writes:
Russia is an interesting case. You’ve got a whole school of Russian linguists, with roots back in the Soviet era, who think they can reconstruct really ancient language families. American linguists (with a few exceptions — Joseph Greenberg) think they’re crazy. (I’m not competent to decide who’s right.) There’s also a tradition of Soviet/Russian sociologists, anthropologists, and archeologists doing old-fashioned investigations of ancient “ethnogenesis” of modern nationalities while Westerners have been busy convincing themselves that all this stuff is socially constructed and part of the “invention of tradition.” Peter Turchin is somebody who benefits from having a foot in the Russian camp (his dad was a dissident and his family got kicked out in the 1970s and he keeps up his ties with Russian researchers) and not worrying too much about marching in step with Western academic historians. And David Anthony’s work on Indo-European origins benefits a lot from him keeping up with former East Bloc archeology and archeologists and ignoring the “pots not people” Anglo-American orthodoxy.
As an aside I think, the pots not people people seem to have been wrong. People probably came with pots.
This seems like an argument for forcing graduate students to take a second language, and keep up with work outside English.
Any other ideas?
The point on torture being useful seems really obvious in hindsight. Before reading this I pretty much believed it was useless. I think it settled my head in the mid 2000s, arriving straight from political debates. Apparently knowing history can be useful!
Overall his comment is interesting but I think the article has more important implications, someone should post it. So I did. (^_^)
From this day forward all speculation and armchair theorizing on LessWrong should be written in Comic Sans.
Probably. Possibly. Yes.
Because the article and the article linked to are two different takes. I did explicitly note they are related.
I notice with some amusement, both in America and English literature, the rise of a new kind of bigotry. Bigotry does not consist in a man being convinced he is right; that is not bigotry, but sanity. Bigotry consists in a man being convinced that another man must be wrong in everything, because he is wrong in a particular belief; that he must be wrong, even in thinking that he honestly believes he is right.
-G. K. Chesterton
The dissident temperament has been present in all times and places, though only ever among a small minority of citizens. Its characteristic, speaking broadly, is a cast of mind that, presented with a proposition about the world, has little interest in where that proposition originated, or how popular it is, or how many powerful and credentialed persons have assented to it, or what might be lost in the way of property, status, or even life, in denying it. To the dissident, the only thing worth pondering about the proposition is, is it true? If it is, then no king’s command can falsify it; and if it is not, then not even the assent of a hundred million will make it true.
--John Derbyshire
I wish he accepted the bet, it would increase how seriously I take him (not very much except this article). I'm willing to predictionbook it and make a karma bet on it. Sorry I'm really poor and waaaay to risk averse. Its irrational I know :(
I put 30% chance on BitCoin on your 5 cents benchmark by January 1st 2014.
Interesting, I can't recall an article Moldbug wrote with which I would agree as strongly as with this one. Maybe his recent spur of activity is worth following after all, just ignore the comment section.
I like HBDish authors a lot so my list will be biased to those blog. Gregory Cochran & Henry Harpending, hbd* chick (~_^) and Derbyshire are cool. Foseti is a must for Reactionaries. Over in the interesting but scary corner we have Federico who seems to have managed among other things to steel man the straw Vulcan (see his now probably deleted Emotion is The Mindkiller post) and Nick Land is the best transhumanist academic continental philosopher I've read in years, which is really low praise but his Reactionary writing is very much knurd.
Enjoy your corruption to the Dark Side! (^_^)
I disagree with Moldbug on many things, but I disagree with this even more.
I consider this an uncharitable reading, I've read the article twice and I still understood him much as Konkvistador and Athrelon have.
This.
While it's as hard as ever to make sense of Moldbug's stream of consciousness, it seems like he is stuck in a circular redefinition of "underdog". The regular definition involves comparing priors, while his is comparing posteriors:
While I disagree with quite strongly with some of his content and think he is over-hyped compared to other Dark Enlightenment authors, this seems an uncharitable reading. I'm somewhat familiar with his style and think you are wrong on your interpretation.
His point is that such action would be much more favoured if done against Exxon Mobile than MIT.
Ethnic minorities (Tibetans, Mongols, etc.) have a legally recognized status, with affirmative action policies, (some) exemption from the one-child policy, etc.
By that standard Western countries also don't have one class of citizens.
Tl;dr: we ought to take note that this is not libertarianism or conservatism, the authors are just using libertarian concepts to make good old progressivism more coherent and effective. I'm totally fine with it :)
It is a libertarian approach to doing progressivism. Those have been tried in the past, most notably much of the progressivism in the first half of the 19th century was libertarian in approach, but I would argue they have been systematically underused at least in the 20th century.
Not that I'm a dirty prog mind you. (~_^)
Are you sure you are being consistent here considering what you have noted about gender/sexuality related discussions on this forum? Or do you just think that this is less true of marriage than similar subjects. Perhaps because so few people here are married?
Interesting blog post though the story about Paul seems a bit too neat. Is there anyone here who studied the time period, Christianity and the Bible a lot? If so please comment on the plausibility of this scenario.
I don't think it did much for Soviet or Chinese citizens.
China and the politics of human biodiversity
Half-Sigma's probably last post on his old blog. HBD has no future?
I believe that the taboo against HBD will last indefinitely. As the scientific evidence mounts ever more so in favor of HBD, the taboos against speaking about it only seem to grow stronger. In 1994, the Bell Curve was published and generated massive coverage in the media. Now, if it were published today, it would be blacklisted and left unmentioned. I remember first becoming aware of HBD in 2005, when Cochran, Harpending, etc. published their article about Azhkenazi intelligence, and I read about it in an online news piece. Steven Pinker seemed to have taken note of it, and later said that the most dangerous idea in science was that ethnicities differ in talent and temperament because of their genes. I seriously doubt anyone would mention such an explosive piece of writing in today's news media. Ever since James Watson talked about racial differences in intelligence, and he lost his job, it has been clear that even mentioning HBD will cost you your career - even if you helped discover DNA.
Different HBD writers have discussed when and under what conditions HBD will be commonly accepted by Americans. At this point, I don't think Americans will change on their own. While truths last forever, taboos against them can last for centuries. As America and Europe become less white, there is less and less chance that whites in those places will talk about non-whites are different from them. I think America and Europe will be in an Orwellian state of denial about HBD onward and onward, and they won't change that on their own.
But, Chinese scientists don't grow up in a culture which forbids HBD research. If anything, the Han would love to prove their superiority. The question is: will Chinese elites adopt Western attitudes towards race and racism? If they do, they too may forbid their scientists from researching HBD, because doing as much will make them appear parochial and uncouth to the greater world community.
If they don't, and instead embrace their ethnic heritage, then I see no reason for them to back off from HBD, and every reason for them to talk about how Chinese have bigger brains than whites, are more cooperative and are all together less animalistic than whites are, for all the reasons Rushton laid out.
In short, it boils down to this: will Chinese elites seek to become part of the greater global community and line their pockets, or will they cling tightly to their parochial identity and rage against all who oppose their path to power? That may yet be the great matter of the 21st century, much the way it was with how Germany had to confront that dilemma a century ago.
Which road will they take on this?
While truths last forever, taboos against them can last for centuries.
--"Sid" a commenter from HalfSigma's blog
John Derbyshire Wonders: Is HBD Over?
The flourish of HBD books and talk in the years around 2000 was, to switch metaphors, early growth from seeds too soon planted.Had the shoots been nourished by a healthy stream of scientific results, they might have grown strong enough to crack and split the asphalt of intellectual orthodoxy.But as things turned out, the maintenance crew has had no difficulty smothering the growth.
Even the few small triumphs of HBD—triumphs, I mean, of general acceptance by cognitive elites—have had an ambiguous quality about them.
For example, Freudian psychoanalysis (defined by Nabokov [33] as people’s belief“that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths [34] to their private parts”), which was radically nurturist in its “explanations” of human personality development, is now defunct, thanks to developments in pharmacology.
But, while this anti-nurturist victory has diminished the quantity of nonsense in the world, like one of Robert E. Lee’s [35] battles it has not been followed by any significant occupation of enemy territory. In the applied human sciences pure “blank slate [36]” nurturism is still entrenched. Educationists, for example, insist that given the right environment, any child can do anything [37]. In criminology, even the boldest of conservative writers tell us that illegitimacy and fatherlessness are the root causes, as if those factors themselves were uncaused.
The differences you must admit are rather large. And would you expect such differences in opinion in say a Physics or Computer Science department by gender or hair colour? I'm willing to bet 20 dollars that differences when breaking down economists by hair colour would be much smaller. I would also expect differences due to age to be comparable order of magnitude but also smaller. I would expect breaking down economists by income or ethnicity would produce similar differences can't say whether greater or smaller.
I'm making these predictions based on my model of this being politics driven.
Yay! Thank you so very much, I edited the link into the opening post.
An interesting question and one that should be easy to answer empirically. The observation attached to it isn't incorrect, but I do think you should remember there is such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy. (~_^)
I up voted the article and down voted you.
Are the cads outbreeding the dads? by the anthropologist Peter Frost
That natural selection is shifting males to a more caddish build seems plausible considering the wide variety of social changes in the past few decades caused in part by the changed economics of sex, these include the rise of single motherhood and the various indicators showing a relative decline in male economic and academic performance (Baumaister 2012). The question is whether humans had enough preexisting variation on these traits for natural selection to do this so rapidly. I would lean towards saying yes we did. (~_~;)
The seeming contradiction with high religious fertility is easy to resolve:
- The very religious cohort is no the only one with relatively high fertility and is rather demographically small and somewhat endogamous.
- The very religious don't necessarily live up to their standards as well as the less religious or non-religious do, indeed blue vs. red state white American comparisons of behaviours related to sex are often used to point this out.
LessWrong Science: We do what we must because we can.
For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead and haven't opted for cryonics.
Great! Looking forward to future ones.
I can imagine Star Robin Hanson writing an angry blog post about what this implies about Starfleet's priorities.
Have you seen any Star Trek? Star Robin Hanson would have a lot of angry posts to write.
LessWrong readers are about the only group of humans on the planet that I can see explicitly describing such rules and then making them work. It is far more common to end up with this kind of arrangements but put up some façade to save face.
That is so horrible to hear! My condolences.
Perhaps you are right, I sort of pattern matched it to cryonics as something that feels like lonely dissent because while there are other's in the world who support your idea you aren't likely to ever encounter them in your everyday life.
most of them are clowns.
Not among the set of scientists.
A decade after Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, why is human nature still taboo? by Ed West
As Pinker recalls: “Research on human nature would be controversial in any era, but the new science picked a particularly bad decade in which to attract the spotlight. In the 1970s many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class’. The traditional misgivings about human nature were folded into a hard-left ideology, and scientists who examined the human mind in a biological context were now considered tools of a reactionary establishment.”
So Richard Herrnstein was called a racist for arguing, in 1971, that “since differences in intelligence are partly inherited, and since intelligent people tend to marry other intelligent people, when a society becomes more just it will also become more stratified along genetic lines”, even though he was not even discussing race. He received death threats and his lecture halls were filled with chanting mobs.
Then there was EO Wilson, whose Sociobiology concluded that some universals, including the moral sense, may come from a human nature shaped by natural selection. The aim of the book was to describe things such as violence and altruism through evolution, yet a widely-read article by a group of academics accused him of promoting theories that “led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany”.
As Pinker says: “The accusation that Wilson (a lifelong liberal Democrat) was led by personal prejudice to defend racism, sexism, inequality, slavery and genocide was especially unfair – and irresponsible, because Wilson became a target of vilification and harassment by people who read the manifesto but not the book.”
On Paternal Age and genetic load from the West Hunter blog by Gregory Cochran.
I'm not sure that is a good heuristic, spending a lot of time in somewhere might mean he considers the ideas or at least debating them fun, which is not quite the same as important. If someone was studying my online habits they'd be better off assuming I optimize for fun rather than impact. (^_^')
Just a few minor political digs in it, otherwise it is an appropriate critique of H's work. I was more concerned with the overall LW climate as I tried to show with my cited example.
In other words -- trying to use a language a liberal might understand better -- articles like this make me feel unwelcome.
I'm also starting to feel unwelcome here.
I've been seeing more and more sings of an intellectual chilling in the past few months and a shrinking of acceptable ingroup political variation.
Things like users commenting on there being concerned about there being "insufficient liberal spin". Now obviously the no mind-killer norm kept the concern unpopular and a well worded post calling it out was written... but still what concerns me is that I don't recall things like this happening at all before.
Remember LessWrong is 3% conservative and ~30% socialist and another ~30% "Liberal"! People say "Wow" when they see someone being socially conservative. Do we really need majority ideological biases and group feelings reinforced and further privileged?
I endorse this recommendation, but I can't help but wonder who is your favourite? (^_^)
I wonder if the topic of "moral foundations" would better be considered as "human universals that sometimes contribute to some of the things that get labeled 'morality'." Because plenty of the time, the instrumental ones also contribute to things that get labeled "immorality".
Don't forget pathological altruism for the harm equality foundation.
My opinion on the site:
I'm not sure you saw my point here. Yes VDARE is a politically oriented site, its goal being immigration restriction thus duh some people with racist attitudes are probably writing for it. Selectively applying such standards for the discussion of some policy issues seems like a bad idea. I can see your point if I was citing someone with a very poor reputation who happens to be right, but I don't at all agree citing someone who is ok when it comes to data and its interpretation, who happens to have written for a magazine that sometimes isn't ok.
Original link is broken. This seems to be the same video.