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Samuel Taylor Coleridge had an opium addiction too. We should legalize drugs and help people who get addicted, not just ban substances that some people use responsibly.
You're right --- but as John Maynard Keynes famously wrote, "In the long run, we're all dead".
In the medium term, it is unreasonable to expect middle America to compete with workers from countries with no environmental laws, no safety regulations, and no worker safety. Likewise, it is unreasonable for ask us free people to compete with H1-B holders who cannot leave their jobs without being deported.
Besides, historically speaking, we make productivity advances fastest when labor is expensive. In a sea of cheap labor, technology stagnates. Of course, in the long run, we're going to have a single integrated global economy. But a policy of immediate free trade and free movement is not a feasible or fair way of getting to this state.
IQ is not boosted much by intensive education, especially in adults. Intensive education can raise IQs during childhood, but by the time these children mature into adults, their IQs are roughly where you'd expect by extrapolating from demographic factors.
Education is a prerequisite for making best use of one's intellect. Do you propose witholding education from boys so that adult outcomes are more equal?
IQ correlates very well with all sorts of things, including career choice (e.g. physicists have very high IQs) and lifetime earning. By any objective measure, IQ is at the very least a prerequisite for brilliance.
More likely, I think, is that it contradicts the feminist narrative that every gender disparity that disadvantages women is the fault of the patriarchy and every gender disparity that favors women is evidence of inherent female virtue.
This belief is accurate. Men and women have similar IQ means, but men have greater variance. This difference implies that there are more low-IQ men than there are low-IQ women, and also that there are more high-IQ men than high-IQ women.
Denying reality, even with the best of intentions, ultimately does everyone a disservice. We should of course encourage intelligent and driven women to succeed. We can do that while acknowledging that, yes, brilliance is more common in men.
It's increasingly difficult to opt out of browser autofill
Good. I hope browsers autodetect these web font tricks and pop up similar warnings. I can't stand when some random website make thinks it can do a better job of credential security than major browser makers.
I'm glad I'm not the only developer who can't stand the kind of PM you describe.
Microsoft has a lot of deadweight, mostly holdovers from the Ballmer era.
The crimethink goes deeper than that. IQ indeed differs by heritage. Why shouldn't other personality traits? What if one group has personality traits that on average lead to greater success getting through the process at a corporate hell like Oracle?
It shouldn't matter. I dream of a day when we look at people and people and not representatives of their identity groups.
But the relation of those groups with what we call "race" is almost zero.
The everyday races correspond to real, observable genetic clusters. There are real characteristics shared by members of these large groups, e.g. the epicanthic fold in East Asians.
The genetic phylogeny doesn't lie. The Sub-Saharan diversity you're mentioning --- e.g., between Bushmen and the Igbo --- is about large-separation clades within the larger continental grouping.
Why would it be surprising that the child of someone who is white and someone who is half white might go on to appear mostly white? You yourself mention that your genetic makeup (presumably from 23andme or something) also suggests a "mostly white" appearance. In this case, there's a pretty good match between phenotype and genotype.
You absolutely can predict someone's phenotype from her genotype, roughly speaking. In cases of recent admixture, the exact gene expression can be uncertain. Just look at Mendel and his peas! Even this variable heredity has limits. There was a zero percent chance that you'd end up looking like a typical Japanese person.
I don't understand your point. I'm not claiming that the classic races are fixed for all time. I'm not suggesting that we can't arrange genes in new combinations. I am claiming that people today cluster in certain historically-contingent ways and that these clusters reflect the everyday understanding of race.
When you take a big corpus of genomes and split them using impartial mathematics into similarity-clusters, you get clusters that almost perfectly match the continent-scale races that people self-report. That's not "arbitrary". Furthermore, people in these groups differ in characteristics that are measurable and important.
When I say that "race exists", I mean that there are real differences between the k={3,4,5} groupings and that almost always tell someone's group affinity by sight alone. The existence of marginal cases doesn't somehow invalidate the reality and utility of the high-level groups.
When people say "race doesn't exist", the general public reads that as "there are no differences on average between people from the various continents", and this claim is not only false, but it's so false that one doesn't need sophisticated instruments to tell.
I believe that this confusion is deliberate and is part of a misguided attempt to eliminate bigotry by delegitimizing the classification schemes upon which bigotry is built. This strategy is doomed, because you can't take away people's eyes and ears.
Could you list what races you think exist, and some kind of paper that establishes a scientific method for where the dividing lines in the genetic gradients are drawn and why such a line needs to be drawn at all?
Let's define our terms. By "race", I mean the classic continental groupings of people whose ancestors come from areas centered on Europe and the near east, east Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. When we say "race", we're talking about that category to which people readily self identify and to which we can easily assign others. When we say "race exists", it means that these categories are not arbitrary.
More generally, they're big ancestor clusters. You can see the clusters yourself if you take genome corpuses and run principal component analysis (or other grouping algorithms) on them. If you select k=3, the classic continental races come out of the data.
I'm not sure how much more real a taxonomic classification scheme can get. We use the same genomic approach for organizing the rest of life.
With more groupings, you get finer-grained population clusters nested inside the larger ones. If you look for enough clusters, you start seeing an "Irish" grouping. Can we agree that, say, the Irish, the Italians, and the Slavs are distinct hereditary groups? Can we agree that they're more similar to each other than, say, the Irish are to the Pygmies?
You could, in principle, put everyone into her own cluster. Sure, at k=7e9, race doesn't exist. But that's not a very useful classification scheme, because it ignores the reality that there are high-level classifications that we can see with our own eyes.
How do you convince yourself you're not one of them and therefore actually the cause of the very problem you lambast scientists for?
That's an excellent question. Epistemology is hard. The best we can do is try to explain observations using the best-predicting theories we can find. I reject the "race does not exist" theory because it fails to explain observable facts about the world. This theory requires, in order to explain our observations, elaborate systems of oppression. It's full of epicycles. Even so, it fails to predict the result of studies like the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study.
The "race corresponds to allele clusters" theory makes better predictions. It explains heritable and persistent differences in measurable characteristics. It agrees with genomic observations. It requires no hidden assumptions. This latter theory isn't politically correct, but this status can't affect its truth value. We delude ourselves about things all the time.
Look: the traditional continental race classification scheme is a crude folk theory. It's very embarrassing for science when even a crude folk theory makes better predictions than the best theory to come out of the academy.
Eppur si muove.
scientists getting behind the idea that there are clear racial lines dividing us all will not contribute to the peace-making.
I disagree. Science promulgating obvious falsehoods like "race does not exist" breeds distrust of all science. Science needs to acknowledge that race exists in order to save science from the postmodern nihilism of politics. The world is never made a better place through scientific censorship.
85% of genetic variation exists within local populations
That's Lewontin's Fallacy [1]. There's no logical reason to think that genome-wide diversity within populations somehow proves that large-scale impactful allele frequency differences between conventionally understood races do not exist.
They do. You can measure them. Given someone's DNA, you can identify his content-scale race. (You can actually narrow someone's ancestry much more narrowly too. Race is a cakewalk.)
[1]:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10315/abstra...
"In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. It has therefore been proposed that the division of Homo sapiens into these groups is not justified by the genetic data. This conclusion, due to R.C. Lewontin in 1972, is unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors. The underlying logic, which was discussed in the early years of the last century, is here discussed using a simple genetical example."
Race absolutely correlates with genetic clusters. Look at this map, [1], and say that there's no correlation between genetic markers and continental origin. Forensic anthropologists can identify race very well using nothing but bone structure.
The idea that race is scientifically invalid is complete nonsense. You can argue that race doesn't correlate with phenotypical characteristics that we care about (okay, but it does though), but arguing that race itself is just in our heads is nonsense.
Is it any wonder that more and more people distrust science on issues like evolution, climate change, autism, and so on when scientists claim that you can't really tell whether someone is white, black, or asian?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_history_and_geography...
If neanderthals were alive today, respectable people would call them homo sapiens sapiens and it'd be racism to suggest otherwise. Any evidence that you could distinguish neanderthals on the basis of genetics or morphology would be called pseudoscience and people like Stephen Jay Gould would publish elaborate sophistries explaining why anyone who notices differences between neanderthals and humans is a wicked person.
Never hire executives from Wall Street. Not even once.
We can't make America a homogeneous country. What we can do is stop demonizing successful groups and blaming them for social disparities. You're not going to make any progress so long as your discussion is limited to blaming white men for everything.
why must we pick ethnicity as the dividing feature?
Human behavior is largely heritable. Ethnic groups represent groupings of heredity.
(Look: I know the first sentence is one of those things you just can't say. Nobody wants to admit to believing it. But it's true. Instead of raking me over the coals for saying something that is true and unpleasant, how about we find a way of grappling in a fair, humane way with reality?)
The way out of this trap is to emphasize the shared identity of people in the country instead of encouraging them to think of themselves as members of distinct ethnic groups within that country.
It's for that reason that the identity politics of today's social justice advocates infuriates me. These activists can't see that their divisiveness is actually bringing them further from their goals.
While it's true that, a priori, there's no reason that ethnic homogeneity should be a prerequisite for a welfare state, this idea is misleading because it supposes that all ethnic groups contribute to the welfare state equally. I know that it's modern dogma that all groups are equal in all respects, but hear me out: what if they're not?
What if, for whatever reason, ethnic group A subsidizes B's existence? This difference will damage the social cohesion necessary for a welfare state to exist. In the real world, we observe huge group differences in productivity, educational attainment, conscientiousness, fecundity, and other characteristics, and in the real world, we see that mixing groups does indeed damage social cohesion. I understand that this observation is unpopular --- but this unpopularity doesn't make it wrong.
I don't think it's politically possible to create a strong welfare state in a country populated by identifiable groups with differing socioeconomic contributions to the common good.
Others have commented that it's the size of the country that makes welfare impossible --- that it just doesn't work over a certain size. As a practical theory, I think that's true, but I don't think size itself is the root cause. I think that as a country's population increases, the visibility of low-contributing groups increases, and it's this visibility that reduces the will to create a global welfare state.
Then why is Modafinil still a controlled subtance? What about Adderall? They both greatly improve cognitive performance in healthy people, and they are widely used by healthy people, but we all do this ridiculous dance where we pretend that we're only using these drugs to treat medical conditions.
It angers me that a drug yielding cognitive improvement of X in an Alzheimer's patient is progress, but the same drug yielding the an improvement of X in a healthy patient is abuse. There should be no stigma against improving ourselves.
Donald Trump didn't claim the media was manufacturing negative coverage about him, making up quotes or taking quotes out of context and altering poll numbers throughout his entire campaign?
He did make those claims, and as it turns out, the media really was doing these things --- not only against Trump, but as it turns out, against anyone not-Clinton in the primaries.
"Fake news" is psychological projection.
You'll have to do some research off-HN, sorry. I'm already treading very thin ground by questioning the polite consensus on these topics. It's too dangerous to bring up the real issues at a place like HN.
Try scanning, say, the Unz Review once in a while. Hold your nose and look at the content. Yes, everyone respectable will denounce the place, but make up your own mind. Occasionally, you'll see an article that makes you say, "Hrm. That makes sense." You'll have been trained to reject this feeling, to attribute it to something evil within yourself. You'll want to go running back to your comfortable lies. Ignore this sensation, just for a moment, and give new ideas the benefit of the doubt.
I suppose one thing that's safe to talk about is the campus rape issue. The official story is that the American college is about as dangerous as a third world country when it came to sexual assault. After Rolling Stone's piece was revealed to be a complete fabrication, this claim started to lose its currency. But until this debunking, everyone went along with the idea that campus was some sort of awful, dangerous place and that men were demons. The Jackie article was far from the first one painting an unreal image of gender relations.
I'm having a hard time thinking of anything other examples I can denounce in polite company. All I can say is that the official story is that human being are blank slates upon birth, with all characteristics socially constructed, and that this idea is false. Nothing in our society makes sense if you ascribe to the blank slate idea, but the media pushes it anyway. The intellectual contortions that the mainstream media uses to preserve the blank slake hypothesis are embarrassing and credibility-destroying.
"Fake news" is itself fake news. Look at the timing: immediately after Clinton lost, a consensus emerged among the losers that we have to do something about all the "fake news" floating around the internet. The timing is a huge DNC banner in the sky.
The whole fake news hullabaloo is obviously partisan. It provides a psychological relief valve that allows the left to blame its terrible loss on some external evil. It also provides the left a mental system for justifying literal censorship of the right. "Fake news" isn't about public responsibility. It's a strategy for winning the next election.
The old media has been lying for years, especially about race, gender, and sexuality. People saw through these lies, because the reality asserts itself to anyone who sees and hears, but most felt trapped, unable to report the evidence of their eyes without losing friends, family, and jobs. When these people saw new media come along that told the truth about the things they saw with their on eyes, people felt a sense of relief and began believing everything these new media reported, even things about which old media has been truthful and about which new media is lying.
The lesson here is that if you have a platform and social trust, don't abuse that platform to lie, even in the name of "social justice". It's tempting, but it won't work. The truth will come out, and you'll have irreversibly damaged your reputation.