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| Sorry |
Monday, April 30, 2018
Thursday, April 26, 2018
The Creator ot IAT is against Mandatory Implicit Bias Training
Implicit Bias, the Implicit Bias Test, and Implicit Bias Training have all been in the news lately, especially after Starbucks announced that it was going to shut down 8,000 stores to do Implicit Bias Training with their employees.
So I was intrigued to discover a letter written by one of the creators of the Implicit Bias Test.
Her point of view is interesting. Unlike skeptics like Lee Jussim and Jesse Singal, she certainly believe that the Implicit Bias Test measures... implicit bias, but she's quite against mandatory training. She cites work by others that show how mandatory training makes things worse, not better.
So I was intrigued to discover a letter written by one of the creators of the Implicit Bias Test.
Her point of view is interesting. Unlike skeptics like Lee Jussim and Jesse Singal, she certainly believe that the Implicit Bias Test measures... implicit bias, but she's quite against mandatory training. She cites work by others that show how mandatory training makes things worse, not better.
Yet laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out. As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.The whole letter is a great read, and she also links to Outsmarting Human Minds, an education resource I look forward to using
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
Does Unconscious Bias Training Work?
Not good news for Starbucks, who are shutting down 8,000 stores for unconscious bias training:
Unconscious Bias Training: A silver bullet that may go down like a lead balloon. https://t.co/o96IVXskZ5 pic.twitter.com/FfZEAPVrBr— Rolf Degen (@DegenRolf) 21 April 2018
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
Who is Candace Owens
1. Republicans have a new super weapon in miss Cadence Owens.
This terminator is in her 20s, black, female, conservative, and comes across as super-smart. She has the same anti-PC superjuice running through her veins that fueled Trump and Jordan Peterson. And she uses her fast and lucid speaking ability to preach empowerment rather than oppression. And Kanye West happens to like the way she thinks.
Click here to see a great interview with her.
This terminator is in her 20s, black, female, conservative, and comes across as super-smart. She has the same anti-PC superjuice running through her veins that fueled Trump and Jordan Peterson. And she uses her fast and lucid speaking ability to preach empowerment rather than oppression. And Kanye West happens to like the way she thinks.
Click here to see a great interview with her.
Monday, April 23, 2018
Science is better explained by Logic than Evidence
Climate science is confusing. One side tries to convince me that global temperatures are going up since the Industrial Revolution. The other side tells me that correlation doesn't equal causation. In fact, the climate works in really long term cycles that last hundreds of years. We're on an upswing and in 50-200 years temperature trends will get cooler again.
Then the Global Warming people tell me that there's a consensus of experts saying climate change exists. Then the other side says the experts aren't asked the right question. Of course the earth is getting warmer, the question is why.
Wait, I think there's a way of relieving this confusion. Instead of going over the confusing evidence of global warming, lets work through the logic of global warming.
1. CO2 is a Greenhouse gas, so it traps heat in the atmosphere
2. Humans have caused a steep rise in CO2 gas
3. So humans have caused more heat to get trapped in the atmosphere
Okay, that was easy. Lets do another one.
Vaccine science is confusing. One side tells me about all the awful diseases that disappeared right after vaccines were produced. But weren't they introduced at the same time as basic sanitization? Maybe clean water had more to do with it than vaccines.
Wait, I think there's a way of reliving this confusion again. Instead of going over the evidence of vaccines, lets work through the logic.
1. Researchers give some people the vaccine, and other people a placebo
2. They measure the antibodies before and after, and find that the people with the vaccine have more antibodies.
3. So it's statistically unlikely that the vaccine does not create more antibodies that fight disease.
Okay, that was easy. Another?
Race differences are confusing. Some people tell me that races tend to have different IQs, and differ in personality traits. But races have different experiences too. After centuries of racism, and slavery, and discrimination, how can we expect things to average out? Even today races aren't treated exactly the same.
Wait, I think there's yet another way of relieving this confusion. Instead of going over the evidence of race outcomes, lets work through the logic.
1. Races differ genetically (genetic correlations, not a race gene)
2. Cognitive differences have genetic underpinnings
3. So it's very likely that races have cognitive differences
Graphs and statistics are confusing. That's why we should stop using them to persuade the public of scientific truisms. People are too good at finding alternative explanations for every piece of evidence, no matter how implausible. Straightforward logic is much more convincing.
Then the Global Warming people tell me that there's a consensus of experts saying climate change exists. Then the other side says the experts aren't asked the right question. Of course the earth is getting warmer, the question is why.
Wait, I think there's a way of relieving this confusion. Instead of going over the confusing evidence of global warming, lets work through the logic of global warming.
1. CO2 is a Greenhouse gas, so it traps heat in the atmosphere
2. Humans have caused a steep rise in CO2 gas
3. So humans have caused more heat to get trapped in the atmosphere
Okay, that was easy. Lets do another one.
Vaccine science is confusing. One side tells me about all the awful diseases that disappeared right after vaccines were produced. But weren't they introduced at the same time as basic sanitization? Maybe clean water had more to do with it than vaccines.
Wait, I think there's a way of reliving this confusion again. Instead of going over the evidence of vaccines, lets work through the logic.
1. Researchers give some people the vaccine, and other people a placebo
2. They measure the antibodies before and after, and find that the people with the vaccine have more antibodies.
3. So it's statistically unlikely that the vaccine does not create more antibodies that fight disease.
Okay, that was easy. Another?
Race differences are confusing. Some people tell me that races tend to have different IQs, and differ in personality traits. But races have different experiences too. After centuries of racism, and slavery, and discrimination, how can we expect things to average out? Even today races aren't treated exactly the same.
Wait, I think there's yet another way of relieving this confusion. Instead of going over the evidence of race outcomes, lets work through the logic.
1. Races differ genetically (genetic correlations, not a race gene)
2. Cognitive differences have genetic underpinnings
3. So it's very likely that races have cognitive differences
Graphs and statistics are confusing. That's why we should stop using them to persuade the public of scientific truisms. People are too good at finding alternative explanations for every piece of evidence, no matter how implausible. Straightforward logic is much more convincing.
Sunday, April 22, 2018
For Human Progress (the Idea and the Organization)
Reasons to follow Human Progress on Twitter:
“Since about 1840, each year new babies live three months longer than those born the prior year; each decade, new babies live two and a half years longer.”—@EasterbrookG https://t.co/mVqh2Kp7Mg pic.twitter.com/R2rT3G1e3E— HumanProgress.org (@HumanProgress) 18 April 2018
Tribal warfare was 9x as deadly as 20th century war & genocide. Medieval Europe's murder rate was >30x what it is today. Slavery, torture & frivolous executions were unexceptionable for millennia, then abolished. Rape, hate crimes, child abuse—all down. https://t.co/aec5mRA3FM— HumanProgress.org (@HumanProgress) 18 April 2018
Subscribe to Human Progress to give optimism a fair shot.Around 90% of people worldwide now have access to clean drinking water, up from 80% in 1990. Even in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, three quarters of the population now drink clean water, up from 56% in 1990. All regions have seen progress. https://t.co/fsMKGXxbnb pic.twitter.com/yPCWz5YExS— HumanProgress.org (@HumanProgress) 17 April 2018
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Citation Rate of Humanities and Social Science
Claim: 98% of humanities and 75% of social science academic articles go uncited.
Problem: This research included all items published in journals including letters to the editor, and even obituaries! - Basically things that were obviously never meant to be cited.
This research is also rather old. The original claim comes from the late 80s and early 90s.
Okay, New research:
Social Science citations doing much better. Humanities are doing as bad as ever at less than 20% citation rate.
Problem: This research included all items published in journals including letters to the editor, and even obituaries! - Basically things that were obviously never meant to be cited.
This research is also rather old. The original claim comes from the late 80s and early 90s.
Okay, New research:
Social Science citations doing much better. Humanities are doing as bad as ever at less than 20% citation rate.
Friday, April 20, 2018
RR: Everything is Racism
Here's the controversial video of two black guys getting arrested at Starbucks.
From what I gather, the two men came in and sat down, waiting for their third friend. An employee of Starbucks asked them to leave, they didn't. So the Starbucks called the police, who handcuffed them and lead them out.
After watching the video, it seems pretty unfair that these two men were being led out. They seemed nice enough, and even after they were handcuffed they made no hullabaloo about it. We don't get to see anything that happened prior, so we don't know if the handcuffs were exactly necessary. But the real question that everyone wants to answer is, is this racism?
It's not like it needs to be some kind of explicit overt racism. It could be that that the employee subconsciously added 20% extra concern over the situation because the patrons were black, and that was the extra push they needed to call the police.
And there is some evidence that people are subconsciously racist like that. While I have my suspicions about Implicit Bias Tests that mostly come from Jesse Singal (listen, or read), the Minimal Group Paradigm seems much more convincing to me.
Researchers can incite discrimination by giving some people red shirts or blue shirts. Or another thing they do is make people estimate how many dots are on a piece of paper, and then place them in the group of underestimators or overestimators. And guess what? When they're asked how much money each person should be given they systematically discriminate in favor of their own group, and against the other group.
So humans are tribal and groupish, no doubt. How groupish are we? and which groups are we groupish toward? are the next question we should be asking. There are about a million ways to cut up human diversity, and some of those will matter more to others depending on how people think about themselves in the context of the broader groups.
I suspect that if you put a bunch of black people and white people in a room, they will sort themselves out into black and white. If you put a bunch of black and white physicists and construction workers, they'll sort themselves out by occupation and pay very little attention to race
People like to be on teams. The thing is, there's no reason to believe that race has to be one of those teams. People don't seem to do it at all based on eye color or height or many other arbitrary characteristics. But when you're constantly bringing to mind white people and black people like our society seems to be doing (sometimes with good intentions), it seems like you're likely to create more discrimination, not less.
And that's kind of how I think about the video. This is another instance where people are being told that their race matters, and maybe it does in this situation, but when a viral video comes out telling everybody that their race matters, they're likely to respond by grounding more of their identity in race, not less. And that's exactly the problem we'd like to solve.
So what, do I want to ignore racism?
Well, no. What I think I'd like to do is not blow it up in front of everybody. Red shirts only discriminate against blue shirts when they ground their identity according to that group. If you annoyingly get in the face of a red shirt and say, "you're a red shirt, remember that you're a red shirt, they're blue shirts they're not like you because you're a red shirt. See? Look at your shirt. It's red. Do you see that it's red and not like the others," it seems more likely that that person is going to ground their identity in red shirtedness.
So no, don't ignore racism, but how about not blowing up a someone-somewhere-did-something situation for everyone to see how important their race is? How about a normal human presumption against calling people a terrible word like racist? Or how about not making every situation that could be explained by racism into a definitely-for-sure-racism-and-how-dare-you-deny-it-you-must-be-racist-too? That might help.
From what I gather, the two men came in and sat down, waiting for their third friend. An employee of Starbucks asked them to leave, they didn't. So the Starbucks called the police, who handcuffed them and lead them out.
After watching the video, it seems pretty unfair that these two men were being led out. They seemed nice enough, and even after they were handcuffed they made no hullabaloo about it. We don't get to see anything that happened prior, so we don't know if the handcuffs were exactly necessary. But the real question that everyone wants to answer is, is this racism?
It's not like it needs to be some kind of explicit overt racism. It could be that that the employee subconsciously added 20% extra concern over the situation because the patrons were black, and that was the extra push they needed to call the police.
And there is some evidence that people are subconsciously racist like that. While I have my suspicions about Implicit Bias Tests that mostly come from Jesse Singal (listen, or read), the Minimal Group Paradigm seems much more convincing to me.
Researchers can incite discrimination by giving some people red shirts or blue shirts. Or another thing they do is make people estimate how many dots are on a piece of paper, and then place them in the group of underestimators or overestimators. And guess what? When they're asked how much money each person should be given they systematically discriminate in favor of their own group, and against the other group.
So humans are tribal and groupish, no doubt. How groupish are we? and which groups are we groupish toward? are the next question we should be asking. There are about a million ways to cut up human diversity, and some of those will matter more to others depending on how people think about themselves in the context of the broader groups.
I suspect that if you put a bunch of black people and white people in a room, they will sort themselves out into black and white. If you put a bunch of black and white physicists and construction workers, they'll sort themselves out by occupation and pay very little attention to race
People like to be on teams. The thing is, there's no reason to believe that race has to be one of those teams. People don't seem to do it at all based on eye color or height or many other arbitrary characteristics. But when you're constantly bringing to mind white people and black people like our society seems to be doing (sometimes with good intentions), it seems like you're likely to create more discrimination, not less.
And that's kind of how I think about the video. This is another instance where people are being told that their race matters, and maybe it does in this situation, but when a viral video comes out telling everybody that their race matters, they're likely to respond by grounding more of their identity in race, not less. And that's exactly the problem we'd like to solve.
So what, do I want to ignore racism?
Well, no. What I think I'd like to do is not blow it up in front of everybody. Red shirts only discriminate against blue shirts when they ground their identity according to that group. If you annoyingly get in the face of a red shirt and say, "you're a red shirt, remember that you're a red shirt, they're blue shirts they're not like you because you're a red shirt. See? Look at your shirt. It's red. Do you see that it's red and not like the others," it seems more likely that that person is going to ground their identity in red shirtedness.
So no, don't ignore racism, but how about not blowing up a someone-somewhere-did-something situation for everyone to see how important their race is? How about a normal human presumption against calling people a terrible word like racist? Or how about not making every situation that could be explained by racism into a definitely-for-sure-racism-and-how-dare-you-deny-it-you-must-be-racist-too? That might help.
Thursday, April 19, 2018
Yes, a Beauty Bar is just Soap
Me: Hey, I've been looking for soap in the grocery store for 10 minutes and I can't find any!
FDA employee: Hello sir. That's because we don't let the producers call it soap.
Me: So what do they call it?
FDA employee: a "beauty bar"
Me: So a beauty bar is just soap?
FDA employee: Not really. FDA recognizes soap through the traditional soapmaking process of combining Lye with fat or oils and water. Through this process these ingredients are transformed into soap containing natural glycerin and no lye remains. This is a simple explanation of the saponification process.
Me: And that's not what my soap is?
FDA employee: No, it's a beauty bar.
Me: But when I google what a beauty bar is, I get all these weird spa-like salons. Nobody tells me it's what I'm looking for.
FDA employee: Well I'm sorry sir. We don't own google.
Me: But you do have access to the normal use of words. When I say soap, I mean that bar I take into the shower with me and wash my body with.
FDA employee: But that's not the technical meaning of soap.
Me: I'm not a scientist, I'm a consumer
FDA employee: As the FDA, we have an obligation to make sure you're not taken advantage of. So we need to have precise definitions.
Me: To make sure I'm not taken advantage of because of confusion.
FDA employee: Exactly.
FDA employee: Hello sir. That's because we don't let the producers call it soap.
Me: So what do they call it?
FDA employee: a "beauty bar"
Me: So a beauty bar is just soap?
FDA employee: Not really. FDA recognizes soap through the traditional soapmaking process of combining Lye with fat or oils and water. Through this process these ingredients are transformed into soap containing natural glycerin and no lye remains. This is a simple explanation of the saponification process.
Me: And that's not what my soap is?
FDA employee: No, it's a beauty bar.
Me: But when I google what a beauty bar is, I get all these weird spa-like salons. Nobody tells me it's what I'm looking for.
FDA employee: Well I'm sorry sir. We don't own google.
Me: But you do have access to the normal use of words. When I say soap, I mean that bar I take into the shower with me and wash my body with.
FDA employee: But that's not the technical meaning of soap.
Me: I'm not a scientist, I'm a consumer
FDA employee: As the FDA, we have an obligation to make sure you're not taken advantage of. So we need to have precise definitions.
Me: To make sure I'm not taken advantage of because of confusion.
FDA employee: Exactly.
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
Booze Cruise
Which alcoholic beverages give you the most buzz for the buck?
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"The findings show that Democrats are likely to prefer clearer spirits, like vodka or gin, while Republicans are tend to favor brown liquors, like bourbon or scotch. And while wine-drinkers crossover the partisan divide, they’re ranked as the most likely to vote according to turnout data.
The most “bipartisan” alcohol turns out to be rum, with Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum and Bacardi highlighted in purple in the middle of the spectrum."
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"And it’s striking that at the end that what people really just want to do — what Danny Kahneman told me once — is sit around talking to their friends, and they want to get drunk. So self-intoxication is in some ways a more fundamental concept than Eros, and there’s a complacency."
The above quote is from a very good interview between Agnes Callard and Tyler Cowen. It includes questions like, "if you were immoral, would you get bored?" and "ought we fear death?"
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
That Data is what it is
Research shows that regulation is not holding back dynamism:
From a very fair article on Alex Tabbarock in Washington Monthly.
That data is what it is. Now the question is, why?
RegData addresses that problem by scrubbing the Code for key words such as “shall,” “required,” and “may not.” The theory is that this more accurately measures the number of regulations than simply counting the total number of pages in the Code, as past studies tended to do. RegData also uses artificial intelligence techniques to predict which industry each regulation will affect. The upshot is that, for the first time, economists could more confidently measure federal regulations over time and by industry.and,
Armed with RegData, Tabarrok and Goldschlag set out to show that regulations were at least partly to blame. But they couldn’t. There was simply no correlation, they found, between the degree of federal regulation and the decline of business dynamism. The decline was seen across many different industries, including those that are heavily regulated and those that are not. They tried two other independent tests that didn’t rely on RegData, and came to the same conclusion: an increase in federal regulation just could not explain what was going on.
From a very fair article on Alex Tabbarock in Washington Monthly.
That data is what it is. Now the question is, why?
Monday, April 16, 2018
Being Gay is Immoral and Unnatural
I'm in the midst of my first debate on Debate.org. I didn't make it easy on myself, taking such a hard to defend proposition. But I hope it will help my ability to intellectual empathize, and help me exert control over ideas instead of let them control me.
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I suspect my work it cut out for me on this one. History hasn't been on my side of this debate, and it has me defending two separate propositions. Still, I think my perspective is unique, because I'm not religious, or conservative; and I don't come at this with the kind of dogmatic certainty of others who have debated from my position. So hopefully you can forget about all those people on "my side", and just evaluate me by my word. Because the world doesn't always look the way we think it does.
I almost didn't take this debate because because of the second half, "...and unnatural." Because the two, "moral, and "natural" don't necessarily need to go together. I'm not even sure if they usually go together. Natural things aren't good and manmade things aren't bad. Malaria is natural, aspirin isn't. But I donate to fight malaria, and I was extraordinarily thankful for aspirin when I tore the cartilage in my left knee.
Basically, while I will argue that being gay is unnatural, it is not because it serves my argument that it is wrong. They're independent propositions.
IS BEING GAY NATURAL?
It's perfectly clear that nature has homosexual sex. I've had a dog. The dog tried to have sex with another male dog. Done deal. I lose. Right? But then I did a little reading, and without any word tricks or weird premises... yeah, being gay is not natural.
My dog will have sex with another male dog, but he will also have sex with my leg, or a teddy bear, or a shoe. That doesn't make my dog gay, or teddy-sexual, or a shoe-sexual. It means he has a natural proclivity towards straight sex, but he also has sex with other things sometimes. That's something I can't say about human gay people. These people have sex with the same gender at the exclusion of other genders. My dog doesn't do that. My dog doesn't reject sex with opposite genders. And as far as I can tell no animal in the natural world is "gay" in the same sense of the word as when we use it to describe gay humans.
There's a strong evolutionary biological reason to not expect gay animals to be a thing. Gayness is terribly unfit to survive. I used to reject this argument and say, "okay fine, it's a byproduct of evolution." But I didn't fully understand how evolution works.
What did I miss? Byproducts of evolution are fine, they happen all the time, but not if they MERCILESSLY CUT AGAINST FITNESS. As far as nature is concerned, being a homosexual is no different from being sterilized. You need to understand how quickly evolution would have weeded out any inherent biological basis for homosexuality.
So why do so many gay people insist that it's fully biological? I suspect it was to fight the fundamentalists. It's not enough for gay rights people to say that the fundamentalists don't have good enough reasons. Instead they feel like they have to prove that there's no possible way it can be immoral. And if it's fully biological, then it's not a choice, only choices can be immoral, so homosexuality can't be immoral. Just like it can't be immoral to have blood type A or be a certain ethnicity.
So that makes it a politically convenient belief. What's wrong with it. Well nobody knows where they got there sexual orientation through sheer introspection. That's just not the kind of thing introspection can tell you. You don't know how you got the way you are. None of us do. Why do you think we even debate nature vs. nurture, if we can all just think to ourselves and come up with an answer? You, being you, doesn't make you an expert on how you became you.
But just because it's unnatural, that doesn't make it wrong. So onto the next part...
IS BEING GAY IMMORAL?
It is excruciatingly difficult to argue for any moral proposition without getting lost in complicated and controversial moral philosophy.. I've read philosophy for many years and as far as I can tell, no comprehensive moral philosophy has been decided on. I'm also not going to construct a moral philosophy from scratch and then use it to prove being gay is wrong. I will take the premise that almost everyone else takes, moral intuitionism.
But unlike the most dogmatic of moral intuitionists, I notice a problem. People don't like this, but I think it's clear enough for anyone who pays attention to understand. WE DON'T HAVE THE SAME MORAL INTUITIONS. Conservatives especially, have a strong moral sense of disgust against homosexuality.
To demonstrate this, let me tell you a story.
I was walking with my conservative friend of mine. We didn't argue politics a lot, but from what I could gather he would justify his, for lack of a better word, homophobia with the bible; you know, Old Testament stuff - Man should not lay with another man - Leviticus - etc. Whatever the bible says about being gay isn't the point.
The point is that while he and I were walking, we saw a man greet another guy at Starbucks, and they kissed passionately, like they hadn't seen each other in a while. My friend couldn't help but blurt out, "ew, that's just wrong." And he knew I was with him and that I wouldn't share his feeling. But he couldn't help himself. He had an instinctive repulsion toward what he had just seen.
I found myself thinking about that a lot, and after struggling over my intellectual honesty, I had to admit some things.
First, the bible justification thing was an excuse. He started with moral feelings toward homosexuality and reverse engineered a rationale for it. I found out that psychologists call this motivated reasoning. Our intuition is in charge, and then we make up reasons for why it was right afterward.
Second, "just wrong" is a feeling we assign to many different aspects of human life. The "Just" in "just wrong" connotes that it's not normal wrong, like the kind of wrong that has to do with harming another person. Instead, just wrong irritates our moral sensitivities in other ways.
Third, I thought some things were "just wrong" too. A man sleeping with his sister is "just wrong". When I thought about that proposition, I kept catching myself rationalizing for why I'm REALLY just concerned with harm. What if the man's sister gets pregnant with a disabled baby? So I adjust the hypothetical to control for problem. Suppose he's sterile and she's infertile, NOW is it okay for a man to sleep with his sister? No matter how I changed the scenario, I could not shake this moral ickiness I associated with a man sleeping with his sister.
Or a family that eats their dead family dog for dinner.
Or any form of beastiality (so long as the animal consents)
Another voice in my head yells, "but homosexuality isn't like those things!" But that's the thing, I'm not sure it isn't. The people who have moral feelings about being gay are projecting the same kind of moral disgust that I have with other examples of "just wrong". I'm stuck arguing that my feelings are better than their feelings, which is dumb. Our moral intuitions are just different.
So how do we decide what really is wrong? Well, I think step 1 is we need to be humble and not selfishly and dogmatically shout that our moral intuitions are superior to others. Alternatively, we should think like a community about moral intuitions. Like the story of the blind men and the elephant. They each touch a different part of the elephant an interpret it as different things, but together through community and conversation, they figure out what animal they're touching.
So I think we need to realize that across the world and in time's past, the idea that homosexuality is sin has been prevalent. The prevalence of this view has lead to the unjust persecution of gay people. Please, remember that there's a vast middle ground between "unworthy of persecution" and "right". It is exactly the magnitude of homosexual oppression in history demonstrates how strong and popular anti-gay moral feelings have been.
It's like 10 blind men feel the trunk of the elephant and tell us it's a trunk, and we completely ignore them because we don't feel the same thing.
CONCLUSION:
I know I'm wordy, so I want to consolidate my argument here:
Being gay is unnatural:
- Nature means occurring in nature in contrast to being human specific.
- Homosexual acts occur among animals, but homosexuals do not. (1)
-The difference is that homosexuals perform exclusively or primarily homosexual acts.
- The suggestion that gay people know where they got their sexual orientation is not serious. You do not know how your biology works through sheer introspection
-Homosexuality is effectively the sterilization of the individual. Evolution would never let that biological trait persist for millions of years.
Being gay is wrong:
-We don't feel like being gay is wrong, but individual moral reasoning are flawed (2)
-Instead, we need to look around the world and throughout history to find which moral feelings are robust
-Around the world anti-gay moral feelings are still prevalent (3)
-History of gay persecution demonstrates how frequent and strong moral feelings against homosexuality have been common
I hope I've been clear concerning my position in this debate. In the next section of the debate, I plan on dealing with the ancient greece example my opponent brought up, because it is wildly at odds with the claim that homosexuality is natural.
Good luck and have a nice day :)
1) https://books.google.ca...
2) https://www.sciencedirect.com...
3) http://www.pewglobal.org...
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I suspect my work it cut out for me on this one. History hasn't been on my side of this debate, and it has me defending two separate propositions. Still, I think my perspective is unique, because I'm not religious, or conservative; and I don't come at this with the kind of dogmatic certainty of others who have debated from my position. So hopefully you can forget about all those people on "my side", and just evaluate me by my word. Because the world doesn't always look the way we think it does.
I almost didn't take this debate because because of the second half, "...and unnatural." Because the two, "moral, and "natural" don't necessarily need to go together. I'm not even sure if they usually go together. Natural things aren't good and manmade things aren't bad. Malaria is natural, aspirin isn't. But I donate to fight malaria, and I was extraordinarily thankful for aspirin when I tore the cartilage in my left knee.
Basically, while I will argue that being gay is unnatural, it is not because it serves my argument that it is wrong. They're independent propositions.
IS BEING GAY NATURAL?
It's perfectly clear that nature has homosexual sex. I've had a dog. The dog tried to have sex with another male dog. Done deal. I lose. Right? But then I did a little reading, and without any word tricks or weird premises... yeah, being gay is not natural.
My dog will have sex with another male dog, but he will also have sex with my leg, or a teddy bear, or a shoe. That doesn't make my dog gay, or teddy-sexual, or a shoe-sexual. It means he has a natural proclivity towards straight sex, but he also has sex with other things sometimes. That's something I can't say about human gay people. These people have sex with the same gender at the exclusion of other genders. My dog doesn't do that. My dog doesn't reject sex with opposite genders. And as far as I can tell no animal in the natural world is "gay" in the same sense of the word as when we use it to describe gay humans.
There's a strong evolutionary biological reason to not expect gay animals to be a thing. Gayness is terribly unfit to survive. I used to reject this argument and say, "okay fine, it's a byproduct of evolution." But I didn't fully understand how evolution works.
What did I miss? Byproducts of evolution are fine, they happen all the time, but not if they MERCILESSLY CUT AGAINST FITNESS. As far as nature is concerned, being a homosexual is no different from being sterilized. You need to understand how quickly evolution would have weeded out any inherent biological basis for homosexuality.
So why do so many gay people insist that it's fully biological? I suspect it was to fight the fundamentalists. It's not enough for gay rights people to say that the fundamentalists don't have good enough reasons. Instead they feel like they have to prove that there's no possible way it can be immoral. And if it's fully biological, then it's not a choice, only choices can be immoral, so homosexuality can't be immoral. Just like it can't be immoral to have blood type A or be a certain ethnicity.
So that makes it a politically convenient belief. What's wrong with it. Well nobody knows where they got there sexual orientation through sheer introspection. That's just not the kind of thing introspection can tell you. You don't know how you got the way you are. None of us do. Why do you think we even debate nature vs. nurture, if we can all just think to ourselves and come up with an answer? You, being you, doesn't make you an expert on how you became you.
But just because it's unnatural, that doesn't make it wrong. So onto the next part...
IS BEING GAY IMMORAL?
It is excruciatingly difficult to argue for any moral proposition without getting lost in complicated and controversial moral philosophy.. I've read philosophy for many years and as far as I can tell, no comprehensive moral philosophy has been decided on. I'm also not going to construct a moral philosophy from scratch and then use it to prove being gay is wrong. I will take the premise that almost everyone else takes, moral intuitionism.
But unlike the most dogmatic of moral intuitionists, I notice a problem. People don't like this, but I think it's clear enough for anyone who pays attention to understand. WE DON'T HAVE THE SAME MORAL INTUITIONS. Conservatives especially, have a strong moral sense of disgust against homosexuality.
To demonstrate this, let me tell you a story.
I was walking with my conservative friend of mine. We didn't argue politics a lot, but from what I could gather he would justify his, for lack of a better word, homophobia with the bible; you know, Old Testament stuff - Man should not lay with another man - Leviticus - etc. Whatever the bible says about being gay isn't the point.
The point is that while he and I were walking, we saw a man greet another guy at Starbucks, and they kissed passionately, like they hadn't seen each other in a while. My friend couldn't help but blurt out, "ew, that's just wrong." And he knew I was with him and that I wouldn't share his feeling. But he couldn't help himself. He had an instinctive repulsion toward what he had just seen.
I found myself thinking about that a lot, and after struggling over my intellectual honesty, I had to admit some things.
First, the bible justification thing was an excuse. He started with moral feelings toward homosexuality and reverse engineered a rationale for it. I found out that psychologists call this motivated reasoning. Our intuition is in charge, and then we make up reasons for why it was right afterward.
Second, "just wrong" is a feeling we assign to many different aspects of human life. The "Just" in "just wrong" connotes that it's not normal wrong, like the kind of wrong that has to do with harming another person. Instead, just wrong irritates our moral sensitivities in other ways.
Third, I thought some things were "just wrong" too. A man sleeping with his sister is "just wrong". When I thought about that proposition, I kept catching myself rationalizing for why I'm REALLY just concerned with harm. What if the man's sister gets pregnant with a disabled baby? So I adjust the hypothetical to control for problem. Suppose he's sterile and she's infertile, NOW is it okay for a man to sleep with his sister? No matter how I changed the scenario, I could not shake this moral ickiness I associated with a man sleeping with his sister.
Or a family that eats their dead family dog for dinner.
Or any form of beastiality (so long as the animal consents)
Another voice in my head yells, "but homosexuality isn't like those things!" But that's the thing, I'm not sure it isn't. The people who have moral feelings about being gay are projecting the same kind of moral disgust that I have with other examples of "just wrong". I'm stuck arguing that my feelings are better than their feelings, which is dumb. Our moral intuitions are just different.
So how do we decide what really is wrong? Well, I think step 1 is we need to be humble and not selfishly and dogmatically shout that our moral intuitions are superior to others. Alternatively, we should think like a community about moral intuitions. Like the story of the blind men and the elephant. They each touch a different part of the elephant an interpret it as different things, but together through community and conversation, they figure out what animal they're touching.
So I think we need to realize that across the world and in time's past, the idea that homosexuality is sin has been prevalent. The prevalence of this view has lead to the unjust persecution of gay people. Please, remember that there's a vast middle ground between "unworthy of persecution" and "right". It is exactly the magnitude of homosexual oppression in history demonstrates how strong and popular anti-gay moral feelings have been.
It's like 10 blind men feel the trunk of the elephant and tell us it's a trunk, and we completely ignore them because we don't feel the same thing.
CONCLUSION:
I know I'm wordy, so I want to consolidate my argument here:
Being gay is unnatural:
- Nature means occurring in nature in contrast to being human specific.
- Homosexual acts occur among animals, but homosexuals do not. (1)
-The difference is that homosexuals perform exclusively or primarily homosexual acts.
- The suggestion that gay people know where they got their sexual orientation is not serious. You do not know how your biology works through sheer introspection
-Homosexuality is effectively the sterilization of the individual. Evolution would never let that biological trait persist for millions of years.
Being gay is wrong:
-We don't feel like being gay is wrong, but individual moral reasoning are flawed (2)
-Instead, we need to look around the world and throughout history to find which moral feelings are robust
-Around the world anti-gay moral feelings are still prevalent (3)
-History of gay persecution demonstrates how frequent and strong moral feelings against homosexuality have been common
I hope I've been clear concerning my position in this debate. In the next section of the debate, I plan on dealing with the ancient greece example my opponent brought up, because it is wildly at odds with the claim that homosexuality is natural.
Good luck and have a nice day :)
1) https://books.google.ca...
2) https://www.sciencedirect.com...
3) http://www.pewglobal.org...
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Maybe Facebook is (pretty) Evil
1. 9 questions about Facebook and data sharing you were too embarrassed to ask. It doesn't include the question I'm too embarrassed to ask, "why does Facebook advertising think I'm gay?"
3. "It makes me wonder, has Facebook just become too big and too vast and too consequential for normal corporate governance structures, and also normal private company incentives?"
2. Mark Zuckerberg wrote a long essay on how Facebook is building a global community. It paints a rather dramatic picture of a platform that for many has become merely a meme scrapbook.
Saturday, April 14, 2018
The Right Question
The right question for measuring material progress:
What is the minimum amount of money that you would demand in exchange for your going back to live even as John D. Rockefeller lived in 1916?and a blogpost by HumanProgress it inspired:
you would not be able to enjoy any of the following:
Radio (do you mind phonograph sound quality?)
Television
Timely transportationComputers
Air-conditioningRock ’n roll
International food (forget Vietnamese Pho or falafels!)
Smart phones
A high likelihood of surviving infancyContact lenses
Modern birth control
Antibiotics
Accurate watches
Skype
Effective dental care
The Internet
Friday, April 13, 2018
RR: The Sam Harris Ezra Klein Debate
Before I watched the Sam Harris/Ezra Klein debate on race differences and political correctness, I sided more with Sam Harris.
After watching the debate, I was still sided more with Sam Harris.
I was glad to listen to a relatively respectful conversation though. After reading the articles on Vox, the Tweets, and the e-mails, I was concerned that they wouldn't be able to have a real conversation. They interrupted each other a few times - called one another biased, but things never escalated from that.
I attribute the degree of civility to Sam Harris' not being even vaguely on the right. I kept thinking that while I was listening, "what if Sam Harris were a right wing conservative, saying exactly the same things as Sam Harris, how differently would this conversation play out."
It's not like Ezra Klein is a radical leftist or anything. His speech more than his writing, is careful, considerate, and uncertain. His writing is where he becomes uber-tribal. And that's his talent. That's the craft he's mastered over years and years in journalism. It's hard to tell him he shouldn't do it when there's an army of leftists thirsty for condemnation of the right.
But first and foremost I think Ezra Klein is a liberal. He is as intellectual and open-minded as he can be until it runs into the sacred values of liberalism. I think for Sam Harris, intellectual honesty is his sacred value. And he can be as liberal as he can be until it runs into conflict with the truth. For people like that, intellectual dishonesty is disgusting.
That's a point I didn't think either of them notice when talking about why someone would be interested in racial differences. It's an area where the low-hanging fruits of wisdom can be plucked, because nobody else will go near it. You don't have to be a super-genius to discover something new on the subject, you just have to be socially insensitive. It's like the forbidden fruit sitting there at arm's reach when the entire orchard of knowledge have been plucked dry.
I should probably flesh that idea out a little bit and do a 2 1/2 hour Jordan Peterson-type lecture on how that's the true meaning of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis.
They kept saying that it doesn't matter how race and genes and intelligence correlate, because no matter what people should be treated like equals. Okay, but it matters when we measure differences in race outcomes and use it to infer unequal opportunities, and use that to justify social policy. And even if adjusting for genes doesn't eliminate racial disparities - if minorities still get an unfair shake, the magnitude of the problem goes down. It's less urgent, and we should be willing to spend fewer dollars correcting it. Because it's a smaller problem than we thought.
If the science turns out that way. If it turns out that say, blacks and latinos have genes that give them a higher proclivity for intelligence than whites and Asians, then the problem is bigger than we thought.
Ezra talked a lot about how race differences has been used as a justification for racism and bigotry. While it seems like Ezra and Sam both agree that race differences wouldn't imply that, Ezra seems much more worried about it than Sam.
For me, it seems like justification is the wrong word. Instead I would use, excuse. It doesn't seem plausible to me that racism or bigotry would have been any weaker in time's past if only they hadn't believed in race differences. And I don't think this information would unleash a new wave of racism onto American society. To me it seems like racism is a prejudice, not a conclusion. And if it is a prejudice, then eliminating one rationale for it will only be replaced by another.
I hope Ezra Klein and Sam Harris do another podcast together. I listen to both of their podcasts and they're both of high quality. I just hope that this time, they do it on a topic that is completely different.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After watching the debate, I was still sided more with Sam Harris.
I was glad to listen to a relatively respectful conversation though. After reading the articles on Vox, the Tweets, and the e-mails, I was concerned that they wouldn't be able to have a real conversation. They interrupted each other a few times - called one another biased, but things never escalated from that.
I attribute the degree of civility to Sam Harris' not being even vaguely on the right. I kept thinking that while I was listening, "what if Sam Harris were a right wing conservative, saying exactly the same things as Sam Harris, how differently would this conversation play out."
It's not like Ezra Klein is a radical leftist or anything. His speech more than his writing, is careful, considerate, and uncertain. His writing is where he becomes uber-tribal. And that's his talent. That's the craft he's mastered over years and years in journalism. It's hard to tell him he shouldn't do it when there's an army of leftists thirsty for condemnation of the right.
But first and foremost I think Ezra Klein is a liberal. He is as intellectual and open-minded as he can be until it runs into the sacred values of liberalism. I think for Sam Harris, intellectual honesty is his sacred value. And he can be as liberal as he can be until it runs into conflict with the truth. For people like that, intellectual dishonesty is disgusting.
That's a point I didn't think either of them notice when talking about why someone would be interested in racial differences. It's an area where the low-hanging fruits of wisdom can be plucked, because nobody else will go near it. You don't have to be a super-genius to discover something new on the subject, you just have to be socially insensitive. It's like the forbidden fruit sitting there at arm's reach when the entire orchard of knowledge have been plucked dry.
I should probably flesh that idea out a little bit and do a 2 1/2 hour Jordan Peterson-type lecture on how that's the true meaning of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis.
They kept saying that it doesn't matter how race and genes and intelligence correlate, because no matter what people should be treated like equals. Okay, but it matters when we measure differences in race outcomes and use it to infer unequal opportunities, and use that to justify social policy. And even if adjusting for genes doesn't eliminate racial disparities - if minorities still get an unfair shake, the magnitude of the problem goes down. It's less urgent, and we should be willing to spend fewer dollars correcting it. Because it's a smaller problem than we thought.
If the science turns out that way. If it turns out that say, blacks and latinos have genes that give them a higher proclivity for intelligence than whites and Asians, then the problem is bigger than we thought.
Ezra talked a lot about how race differences has been used as a justification for racism and bigotry. While it seems like Ezra and Sam both agree that race differences wouldn't imply that, Ezra seems much more worried about it than Sam.
For me, it seems like justification is the wrong word. Instead I would use, excuse. It doesn't seem plausible to me that racism or bigotry would have been any weaker in time's past if only they hadn't believed in race differences. And I don't think this information would unleash a new wave of racism onto American society. To me it seems like racism is a prejudice, not a conclusion. And if it is a prejudice, then eliminating one rationale for it will only be replaced by another.
I hope Ezra Klein and Sam Harris do another podcast together. I listen to both of their podcasts and they're both of high quality. I just hope that this time, they do it on a topic that is completely different.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This post is a Random Rant, meaning it's mainly therapeutic and a bit scattered. I try to post Random Rants on Fridays and link to them in the title bar.
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Brains vs. Mouths: World Population concerns
This is your intermittent reminder that everything is awesome, and nobody is happy.
More humans are more mouths to feed. They're also more brains - supercomputers that find ways to feed mouths.
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Fight of the Century: Ezra Klein vs. Sam Harris
The way I read the Sam Harris / Ezra Klein debate:
Sam Harris is the kind of liberal that sacralizes truth. Ezra Klein is the kind of liberal sacralized the good. This maps from Sam Harris' introverted intuitive type personality, and Ezra Klein's extraverted feeling type personality.
Sam Harris is the kind of liberal that sacralizes truth. Ezra Klein is the kind of liberal sacralized the good. This maps from Sam Harris' introverted intuitive type personality, and Ezra Klein's extraverted feeling type personality.
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
This Brain was made for Thinking
Paragraphs like these is why some people don't like SlateStarCodex
So superintelligences may spend some time calculating the most likely distribution of superintelligences in foreign universes, figure out how those superintelligences would acausally “negotiate”, and then join a pact such that all superintelligences in the pact agree to replace their own values with a value set based on the average of all the superintelligences in the pact. Since joining the pact will always be better (in a purely selfish sense) than not doing so, every sane superintelligence in the multiverse should join this pact. This means that all superintelligences in the multiverse will merge into a single superintelligence devoted to maximizing all their values.But I still think Scott Alexander is the man.
Monday, April 9, 2018
Debate on Homosexuality in Process
This week I'm doing my first debate on debate.org on whether homosexuality is unnatural and immoral (guess which side I'm debating on).
Hopefully I'll have some of that debate ready to post by next Monday.
Hopefully I'll have some of that debate ready to post by next Monday.
Sunday, April 8, 2018
A Big Win for Free Range Parenting
On Friday, Gov. Gary Herbert signed bill SB65 that would allow kids the freedom to walk to and from school, wait in parked cars (while their parents run errands in a store, for example), and visit playgrounds solo, according to a story published Monday by the Associated Press. The bill, which doesn’t specify an age limit for the above activities, will go into effect May 8.A win in Utah for Free Range Parenting
Last February I linked to a video of a school in Zealand that practices Free Range Recess.
Letgrow is an organization against treating today's kids as physically and emotionally fragile.
Here is Psychologist Peter Grey's Ted Talk on the decline of play and how it impairs children.
Saturday, April 7, 2018
Friday, April 6, 2018
RR: Family
This post is a Random Rant, meaning it's mainly therapeutic and a bit scattered. I try to post Random Rants on Fridays and link to them in the title bar.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The blessed sleep past 7, but I wake up with a little girl eager to escape her crib. She doesn't cry, she pouts. And when you pick her up from her little caged nest, she insists on bringing her blankie and bunny.
 |
| Me and Wins playing with pasta |
My son, lets call him Stanley Oberfieild Smith, is already on the couch playing Mario.Yeah, he konked out around 6 last night so I'm not surprised he's up so early. His eyes gaze away from his game to smile at us, and now Wins is done in my arms and would like to play with her brother.
It's all too early for me so lets make some coffee and throw breakfast at them. We have hashbrowns, great, we'll let the toaster do the work.
Where's the music? I open my laptop to find... System of the down? No, too early... Radiohead? Too sad. You now what? Nobody's around so lets listen to Bruno Mars.
Hashbrowns are done. Throw them in the troff. Coffee cup is full, and with a tad of milk and a long sip I wonder, "where am I?"
 |
| Lets call him Stanley Oberfield Smith |
2. This Place where I am
I know that I'm not an exception. Somewhere out in the multiverse is another me with more time, and more money, and fewer kids. As Homer Simpson once said, "I have 3 kids and 0 money. Why can't I have 3 money and 0 kids?"
I like to think that this other me does all the things I don't have time for. He hones in on writing as a craft. He works out and still plays basketball. He learned high level statistics which he uses to better understand social science research. He even finishes a Steven Pinker book! He's... not real. Even without kids this version of me is hysterically unrealistic. I wasn't born with the gene for that kind of conscientiousness. Give me a break.
The real no-children me has a whole bunch of extra free time which he squanders. And maybe he's happier, but I suspect happiness isn't what we should be measuring. I'm hardly happy after I watch Don Hertzfield's World of Tomorrow, but it gives me a fullness I take with me. And it's the same kind of fullness I get by having children; watching them learn, seeing them smile, or knowing they're around.
On the other hand, I'm sure I would have filled that hole with something else in absence of kids; something meaningful that I can point to and say, "that makes me full." So maybe I spent extra happiness for the same fullness I could have gotten elsewhere for free.
This certainly isn't a romantic view of family. But I think it's true.
Since I'm obviously thinking aloud here, perhaps for some sort of therapy, let me make one more point before moving on. The other-universe Eli with no kids may have found meaning apart from his offspring. And when you ask him to rank his happiness on a scale from 1-10, he gives a higher number than the this-universe Eli that does have kids. But the other-universe Eli also carries regret with him over what could have been.
I don't think I could have dodged family life without a fair bit of heartache. Maybe that's what this parenting research is missing. The people who tend to become parents need to become parents, or else they're disappointed. I can certainly think of people who just don't "get" having kids, and they drive away into the sunset with time for hobbies and extra cash to spend. And I'm not surprised that these people are happier than others.
But it doesn't seem like most people could do that. I'm not sure that's an option for the family types. My hypothesis is that the family types become less happy after they have kids, but they would become very unhappy/unsatisfied if they grew past childbearing age and never had any. At least, that's how I feel.
 |
| To my other self: This is what could have been |
3. How I Parent
That is, I try to remember that kids are, in fact, not clay. They are who they are, and I don't make them into my project. I give them good incentives for today and tomorrow, but they're not blank slates on which I can write their destinies.
And I try to enjoy my children a little more.
Still, kids remain challenging. Babies cry a lot, and then they get older and throw valuable electronics into the garbage can, and then they get even older and draw pictures all over the walls. I force myself to make very clear, "if... then" statements and consistently follow through on the then when they enact the if. It seems to work, but it only mitigates the frustration of having children. To my knowledge, nobody has ever created a parenting technique that turns little monsters into perfect angels.
My kids are reasonably delightful. They charm the people in the room and they get complimented on how smart or polite they are. But I certainly don't think I did all of that. Though I believe nature ultimately beats nurture in the long run, in the short run they're much closer to 50/50. If my kids didn't have decent genes no amount of parenting could make up for that. And no amount of bad parenting could be made up for with good genes. The bottom line: don't necessarily blame the parent if her child is being a Tasmanian Devil at the grocery store. Kids start off different before we rear them.
I try to parent to their gaps in understanding, not their gaps in morality.
I don't say, "that's bad," I explain why that's undesirable. Throwing crayons everywhere makes a mess. Hitting other kids makes them not want to play with you. Dropping electronics make them break.
There's this whole idea in popular parenting philosophy that every child becomes a sociopath if only they're not instilled with morality from their parents. I could say that it's unscientific, which it is. Child Psychologists measure moral intuitions from a very early age. But I think my more basic objection to that idea is in what it implies. If morality is something that has to be taught, then what responsibility do the immoral have? Ought implies can. Saying that someone who hasn't been taught morality should behave morally is like telling someone they should fly like a bird, and then blaming them if they don't.
Another reason I focus more on the descriptive than the normative with my children, is that it seems to work a lot better. All people, including kids, follow rules better when they understand the rule's purpose. Telling kids not to do something because it's wrong because you say so is lazy and ineffective.
It occurs to me that this might be a split in liberal and conservative parenting philosophies. Conservatives are much more authoritarian. They also tend to have a Divine Command theory of morality (God said it's wrong, so it's wrong). They frequently set reason aside for the authority of their patriarch, that's much of what Faith means to them. And that idea is transcribed onto their parenting methods. "Honor your mother and father," it's not up to you to question whether or not it is right.
I also think examples work better than words.
The idea that parents teach their children is recent in human history. Nonetheless, the children of the past learned to walk like other humans, talk like other humans, behave like other humans, and grow up into normal human adults. They learn from their parents by watching, not because their parents taught them.
My son says thank you and excuse me all the time, because I say it all the time around him. How do I know? Because that's how he learned literally every other part of his language. Nobody taught their kids every word in their vocabularies. Nobody taught them how to construct grammar. And yet, here they are; little speaking creatures.
You might say that they learn the wrong way to speak, so we have to teach them. When kids use the wrong word or over-universalize grammatical rules it's cute. And I certainly don't think you're doing any harm by correcting them. But they're still learning. If they say "falled" instead of "fell" it's okay, they'll learn the exceptions the same way they learned the universals, by listening to examples.
I'm always astounded by parents who are scared to death that a child might cherry pick a "bad word" by hearing it one time on a tv show, but then think they have to force children into saying "please" "thank you" "sorry" and "excuse me"
Children learn to walk because they're bipeds. They learn to talk because they're social animals. And they'll learn other things so long as they have sufficient exposure.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Study on Race and Economic Opportunity
-New longitudinal study finds, "In 99% of neighborhoods in the United States, black
boys earn less in adulthood than white boys who grow up in
families with comparable income."
-The New York Times reports with phenomenal visualizations of the data. Although the data shows black females and latinos do just fine, The New York Times nonetheless make it all about racism. They count data when it can be interpreted by racism (against black men), but they don't count it when it shows no racism (against black women).
-The study does find Black males do better in neighborhoods with less racial bias. How do they measure racial bias?
They measure it with implicit association tests (IAT), and google searches for racial epithets. Read or listen to Jesse Singal for a decent criticism of the implicit racial bias test.
-National Review argues that by adjusting for household income, the authors of the study reduce the importance of family structure.
-The most interesting paragraph in the authors easy to read summary of the paper:
-The New York Times reports with phenomenal visualizations of the data. Although the data shows black females and latinos do just fine, The New York Times nonetheless make it all about racism. They count data when it can be interpreted by racism (against black men), but they don't count it when it shows no racism (against black women).
“you’ve got to explain to me why these putative ability differences aren’t handicapping women,” said David Grusky, a Stanford sociologist who has reviewed the research."— Eli (@EliWilliam2020) 3 April 2018
Yup. And yet you don't have to explain why racism isn't handicapping women? #MotivatedReasoning
-The study does find Black males do better in neighborhoods with less racial bias. How do they measure racial bias?
They measure it with implicit association tests (IAT), and google searches for racial epithets. Read or listen to Jesse Singal for a decent criticism of the implicit racial bias test.
-National Review argues that by adjusting for household income, the authors of the study reduce the importance of family structure.
-The most interesting paragraph in the authors easy to read summary of the paper:
Higher rates of father presence among low-income black households are associated with better outcomes for black boys, but is uncorrelated with the outcomes of black girls and white boys. Black father presence at the neighborhood level predicts black boys' outcomes irrespective of whether their own father is present or not, suggesting that what matters is not parental marital status itself, but rather community-level factors associated with the presence of fathers, such as role-model effects or changes in social norms.
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
Good Babies
The Paul Bloom article ignores conservative moral foundations like authority, sanctity, and loyalty, despite mentioning Jonathan Haidt. I guess that means all babies are liberals. Just the other day my 1-year old daughter shamed me for not composting her diaper.
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Monday, April 2, 2018
Sam Harris vs. Ben Affleck
Here is the notorious video where Sam Harris gets called racist by Ben Affleck.
"So you're saying Islamaphobia is not a real thing"
"You're argument is, black people you know, they shoot each other"
Sunday, April 1, 2018
Thoughts on Russ Robert's Article on Jordan Peterson
Russel Roberts on, What I've Learned From Jordan Peterson
Russ throws in some criticisms of Peterson,
I was recently at a panel discussion of the state of political and cultural life in America. All of the panelists were from what I would call the gentle left — good people to the left of center with a different world view from my own but full of compassion and good intentions. It was something of smugfest — how sad it is that misguided people found Trump appealing. How sad it is that the right has no interest in the left while the left has been reaching out to understand how Trump voters could possibly exist. They chalked up the stupidity of Trump voters to global capitalism that had hollowed out the middle class and driven so many sheep into the arms of the Republican wolf who would only shear them and make a lovely blanket for himself.
Despite their best efforts at anthropology, the panelists were like fish in water unable to imagine what water is. The reason the right is less interested in the left than the left is in the right, is that the left is everywhere. You don’t have to take a trip to Kentucky or to a church to understand the left. The left dominates our culture — Hollywood, the music scene, the universities. And the left can’t seem to imagine that anything they are pushing for might be problematic.This reminds me of the research Jonathan Haidt has done that shows conservatives understand liberals better than the other way around.
Russ throws in some criticisms of Peterson,
There are some scary things about him. The near certainty with which he expresses himself is a huge part of his appeal, I suspect, but that kind of certainty is dangerous in its own way. His seeming confidence in his mission rubs me the wrong way. But I have to concede that there is a danger in my epistemological humility, my eagerness to confess my uncertainty. I am so glad to be increasingly able to say I don’t know.I'll add it to my list of good criticisms of Jordan Peterson, next to Arnold Kling, Scott Alexander (part III), and Sam Harris.
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