And with another nail in the blank slate coffin, let the prevarications begin, e.g.
"Feynman was tested at 125"
and yet
There are some points to consider. There are and have been various publishers of IQ tests over the years and various forms of test. We don't have any clear idea what IQ test Feynman took or what it emphasized.
The IQ test that Feynman took was probably scored by the quotient method, meaning that an attempt was made to estimate his 'mental age' and the result was then divided by his chronological age and, finally, multiplied by 100.
IQ tests aren't scored that way any more—instead, a distribution of test scores is formed by giving the test to a large sample of test takers. A result one standard deviation above the mean of the sample group gives an IQ of 115, and so on.""
You can say that about blacks (esp males): they're more risky. Just because you're not supposed to look at those actuarial tables, doesn't mean it's not a statistical reality.
Maybe the car insurance example was bad, but I think the situation is a little more complex than pure statistics.
The US has a very long history of racism against minorities. It's been difficult to get a strong system in place to combat racism. Ageism against young people has a built in correction system called aging.
But is that not what the review system is for? What prevents a host from reviewing potential guests' history on a case-by-case basis to determine their level of risk?
Black men are more risky because of a history of systemic racism forcing them into situations where they need survival and status systems outside of the law. Young people are more risky because young people are impulsive and stupid. So it seems appropriate to treat these two things differently.
What was the percentage of blacks and/or women at Lotus notes when Mitch sold?
How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of from his Berkeley compound?
Diversity for thee, but not for me.
Also, while we're discussing Things You Should Not Notice: what are the numbers as far as litigiousness of "protected" groups? If I'm looking to hire someone, non-protected status (whether it's race, unionization, etc.) means I'm more likely to hire them (all else being equal). Like the blowback from affirmative action, I don't see an objective discussion about litigation risk (whether or not it's substantiated). It's human nature to asymmetrically attribute failure to others and success to oneself. Add racial/gender rent-seeking to the equation and you get an especially potent, counterproductive miasma. Just look at Buddy and Pao - they've made entire careers out of entrepreneurial race/gender grievance litigation.
Why can't all this under-utilized talent create a tech company dominated by blacks and women? Why not create a Meyerhoff like program to prove your hypothesis rather than ask me to subscribe to the latest social engineering fad?
> What was the percentage of blacks and/or women at Lotus notes when Mitch sold?
> How many low-income/minority households is Mitch within walking distance of from his Berkeley compound?
> Diversity for thee, but not for me.
Can I ask you a quick question here? What does any of this matter? Diversity isn't about protecting yourself from character assassination. It's about promoting fairness, equality, and opportunity for everyone in society.
If you look in the past of anyone, you will find things they regret and things that may draw censure from the pro-diversity and intersectional feminist mindset. That's natural. That's to be expected. Society is, by any reasonable and several reproducible metrics, extremely biased in favor of white men. We all grew up influenced by that society. It is therefore almost inevitable that anyone with these sorts of experiences has and will continue to have both privilege and mistakes in their past.
What matters is going forward, how we all take these things we've been fortunate enough to be handed (along with the misfortunes and difficulties we've endured) and use those to promote a fairer, more just world for those who come after us.
We can sit here and argue if this messenger is the ideal messenger. Which is odd, because in many other fields we view past mistakes as a teaching opportunity. Ultimately, the people in power should cede and share some of that good fortune and cultural windfall to create a more equal world rather than waiting for history to repeat itself with violent uprisings. History suggests that such uprisings are not kind to even bystanders.
> Why can't all this under-utilized talent create a tech company dominated by blacks and women? Why not create a Meyerhoff like program to prove your hypothesis ...
Because creating an environment that mimics the societal advantages white men get in the US and most of the western world is infeasibly expensive.
I mean, seriously. How would you even? You'd have to raise kids from birth in a theme park with meticulous care to shield them from the deleterious effects of racism and sexism.
> rather than ask me to subscribe to the latest social engineering fad?
Progressivism isn't a fad. It's the consistent direction of society since the dark ages.
It's about promoting fairness, equality, and opportunity for everyone in society.
Except for white people, which is why the parent is worried about character assassination. It's a real worry when building a business these days. There's no amount of compliance to progressive ideals that will protect you if you have light colored skin.
Progressivism isn't a fad. It's the consistent direction of society since the dark ages.
Yes, it is. The pendulum swings one way for a little while, then it swings the other way. It's been happening that way for thousands of years.
> Except for white people, which is why the parent is worried about character assassination.
This just isn't true. White people hold incredible advantages in modern society. Especially white men. When people ask you to express empathy & are bitterly frustrated when most refuse, they lash out. But that lashing shouldn't be surprising.
One need only look at how the police would treat you if you ran from them vs. the many highly publicized (but hardly unique or isolated) cases where police officers acted outrageously against people of color in the US.
> The pendulum swings one way for a little while, then it swings the other way.
Sorry, but this is wrong. The world is consistently more progressive and permissive over time. We certainly have had major reversals of this in history, but these never recover to quite the same level of conservatism.
And quite frankly, we all have agency in this. We can change the world for the better, if we act in concert. The sum of individual actions is our society, and the sum of societal actions is the arc of history. So stop acting like it's inevitable.
White people hold incredible advantages in modern society.
Not anymore. There was a white man recently who could only get his work published by using an Asian pen name. Look at all of the white men who have had their careers destroyed by the mere allegation of sexism, racism or homophobia, the scarlet letters of your so called "progressiveism". Just ask Pax Dickinson, Brendan Eich or Brad Wardell.
The world is consistently more progressive and permissive over time.
This is easily disproved if you knew even a little world history. Any time a civilization gets significant wealth and comfort, it becomes more progressive. That progressivism in turns creates its downfall, after which wealth becomes scarce and the people become more conservative again. Round and round it goes since the creation of Babylon. The Roman Empire followed this cycle, until it was sacked by the Visigoths. It was followed by the dark ages. Then came the renaissance and its progress, followed by the stark conservatism of the Victorian era. We just finished a long upswing. The pendulum has already started swinging back towards conservatism.
Technology continues to progress. Humanity and its flawed ideologies follow predictable cycles.
What do you know of my "intact" career or finances, pray tell? As far as I know, you don't know me or anything about what I'm doing for a living, or what my finances look like.
Lying by implication is still lying, and _tu quoque_ is no defense. So @PopeOfNope said "careers destroyed", which I agree is overstated in my case if not in Pax's. That does not justify you making stuff up to assert "intact". Since I cannot retire, I'm doing the next thing, and we shall all see how intact I am when it launches.
As for "censure", look it up. All the definitions that do not include the essential adjective "official" have to do with judgment, and unofficial judgments like all opinions vary. Mozilla received more criticism from all sides (and still does) than I did over what happened last spring.
BTW, I came here via subtweets. Feel free to at-name me directly in the future.
With the millions of dollars from diversity initiatives, I'm sure someone could pull it off.
Also, I think you're missing the entire "classism" thing. I'm Polish, and just because I'm white doesn't mean I have the world handed to me. Kind of the opposite actually, everything that I've ever gotten in life was thanks to fighting the system (whether it was my work or my parents' work).
I could say I deserve something, but honestly I don't really think I do. The world is not a fair place.
The world IS fundamentally unfair. That doesn't mean that society should foster fundamentally unfair policies. I don't know why you would think that this would be wise, or after even a casual perusal of history you'd think it was novel or sustainable.
> Also, I think you're missing the entire "classism" thing. I'm Polish, and just because I'm white doesn't mean I have the world handed to me. Kind of the opposite actually, everything that I've ever gotten in life was thanks to fighting the system (whether it was my work or my parents' work).
It simply wasn't the subject of this conversation. "White privilege" is a specific set of special treatments you get in the US. It is not, "Magically you have a perfect life." It's undeniable that with white privilege you're less likely to be summarily executed by law enforcement, as an example.
But economic and other social divides still exist. Polish and Irish people are excellent examples of other axis of discrimination and racism that still exist in the world today.
> I could say I deserve something, but honestly I don't really think I do.
We're all raised to accept racism as normal. It's not surprising that you feel this way. But remember, you're not the one who's history is getting them shot in the street in the US right now, so you're probably going to feel slightly less personal pain and be asked to express slightly more empathy at this exact moment.
> With the millions of dollars from diversity initiatives, I'm sure someone could pull it off.
One other thing, you underestimate the magnitude of this problem. You'd literally need to make a private island with a controlled social environment and raise children from birth meticulously in a Truman-Show-like theme park to actually isolate all the cultural influences that are being discussed here.
Take the issue of sexism. This is baked into NEARLY ever message children receive, from birth and onwards. How would you ever actually reverse that? You can't, outside of a vacuum. You can only try to counter-balance it and hope the next generations can continue that process.
> If you look in the past of anyone, you will find things they regret and things that may draw censure from the pro-diversity and intersectional feminist mindset. That's natural. That's to be expected.
Serious question: is it also "expected" that people will lose their jobs because of those things, like Brendan Eich?
Can we please avoid the "lose their jobs" rhetoric here? Eich's job was never in danger even in the C-suite, until he moved from CTO to CEO. One of the job duties of being CEO is to be the face of your company to the world. Another is to command the continued trust of your employees. Another is not to embroil the organization in unprofitable distractions.
"Lose their jobs" has emotional impact precisely because one envisions a hard-working, paycheck-to-paycheck breadwinner with minimal savings. The inability of a man who'd been around for Netscape's IPO to advance from CTO to CEO -- whatever you think about whether that's good or bad, or whether Eich had a way to recover the situation, or anything -- is a very different matter, and implying a comparison between the two cases leads to unclear thinking.
Once we've made the distinction clear, we can say, no, it's unjust for a non-management worker who's not representing the company to be fired by their manager over political activities, and no, Eich "losing his job" isn't precedent because it's not at all related.
Yeah poor Eich, would would have to exercise his golden parachute because his role as face of a company was jeopardized by being a bad face for the company.
Hold on, I'm shedding tears I'm so frustrated for him. Maybe he'll have to retire as a multi-millionaire at 65 instead of 60 now.
I guarantee you that far, far more trustafarians are using their "privilege" to indulge a negro fetish or whatever "social justice" meme happens to be trending rather than risking anyone's equity in something entrepreneurial.
You think that a typical person would use the millions they made and plow it back into not one but three hair-brained ventures (Musk with Tesla, SpaceEx, Solar City)?
Consider one of the comments below, something like "I would be entrepreneurial too if I didn't have to pay for rent and food."
Bullshit. If that poser inherited millions he would scarcely summon the energy to snap selfies at some BLM "protest".
So you disagree with the article because there are some number of trust fund kids who aren't entrepreneurs? The article does not make the claim that having money is required for entrepreneurship, simply that it is extremely influential (more influential than any genetic component).
That said, maybe this comment is a parody of a viewpoint. If I've missed something, excuse me.
The problem is, a substantial (and potentially growing) segment of the population doesn't agree with you.
If racism is _the_ problem, why does it produce perfectly antipodal outcomes for different "people of color"? i.e. Asians are economically ascendant (surpassing whites on most metric), while blacks, well... you get the idea.
Rubbing the amulet of "structural racism" so much has entirely debased the term.
Are you really equating the plight and histories of Asian-Americans and African-Americans in America over the past 3 centuries? You can do that with a straight face?
Hint: one history includes codified discrimination until ~50 years ago and legal enslavement until ~150 years ago and the other one doesn't. Well, I'll give you that Asian Americans faced codified discrimination into the 20th century, but don't overlook the "antipodal" patterns of how each ethnic group came to be in America.
Hint 2: Asian Americans came over, at a minimum, in indentured servitude.
I must point out that, by insisting on tying this to race, this discussion has quickly degenerated into "Who's been discriminated against the most?" which has exactly nothing to do with whether or not the criminal justice system in general is screwed up. Most all of us agree that something must be done. Do you want to gather together to fix it, or spend time in endless identity politics? I mean, even if you're "right", Who cares? Isn't the goal to make a change for the better?
Your suggestion that there is a tenuous connection between the problems with our criminal justice system and racism is laughable. The connection is self-evident and unavoidable.
@rmxt may or may not be right, personally I think he is, but stating outright that segregation (within living memory) has "exactly nothing" to do with the current state of criminal justice is clearly a hasty statement... that given a moment to think about I'm sure you'd take back, right?
...and if he is right, then the reason why he's right will be useful for solving the problem. It's pretty tough to solve a problem when you don't understand what caused it.
By the way, dismiss identity politics at your risk. It might be uncomfortable to talk about, but it underpins a lot of current affairs: crime, Russia, Gamergate, ISIS.
The testosterone argument is a bullshit one in this context: the article you posted isn't trying to connect the dots in the disingenuous way you are, it's talking about prostate cancer. It does not attempt to suss out whether or not testosterone levels are the cause of crime, period. The misstep you are taking is assuming that testosterone causes crime, rather than correlates with it. Even this article [1], which you will probably salivate over, doesn't suggest that testosterone causes crime, merely that it correlates with misbehavior (in a very particular setting, namely prison). Here's [2] research that suggests that socioeconomic status mitigates the correlation between testosterone and misbehavior. At a minimum, this suggests that we have a chicken-egg dilemma between testosterone and misbehavior. The next question I would ask is: Do troubled settings and poor childhoods engender higher testosterone levels in adulthood?
Lastly, above and beyond any correlation between testosterone and crime, how do you propose to use this information to inform policy decisions? My main gripe in this fantasyland of HBD-speak is that people use this information as "scientific" grounds for enforcing their racist policy predispositions. I'd like to hear where you think you would take this testosterone point, but all too often people (and unfortunately, I get the impression that you are one of them) imply that these few studies are grounds for damning and castigating entire populations because of their perceived inferiority and incorrigibility.
EDIT for posterity: I would like to point out that you posted your cousin/uncle link upthread after I posted my GP comment above. I wouldn't have made as strong a comment had I seen links or sources.
Don't assume bad intentions. I used to think that there is a strong racial component, simply because it matched my everyday experiences. Only after I started traveling more did my opinion change - I'm now pretty sure that its mostly cultural.
Your previous reply sounded a lot like those "you are not allowed to say this" stuff that does a lot of harm, because it suffocates discourse.
So thanks for posting a factual follow-up, we need more of those and less of the political correct group-think dismissals.
Thank you for the reminder. I genuinely am not trying to suffocate discourse and I am interested in engaging in conversation, but I have no qualms about pointing out disingenuous or deceptive pseudo-discourse when I see it. Posting a link to a study that mentions testosterone in a different medical context, and using it to justify to racist institutions is, IMO, inflammatory and dishonest to say the least.
Thanks for the effort of listing those, some of them definitely cross the line. However, I disagree that staying silent is always the best way to handle this - there is an audience that can still be influenced by convincing arguments, even though they might remain invisible.
Your theory is just damn racist. You make a huge jump from correlation to causation that isn't warranted from the data you present -- it's that (I stress, obnoxiously unsubstantiated) jump that's damn racist.
Ex: "Melanin is positively correlated with crime. <Insert some unsubstantiated purely conjectural causal explanation about how melanin effects the psyche>" is exactly the same argument, and is (I hope obviously) damn racist.
The study cited also doesn't say what you think it does, and your misreading is obnoxiously wilful, to the point that it's clear you're looking for evidence to back something you believe a priori. But someone else has already taken that on.
Anyway, the bar for these sorts of claims is high for a reason: people have made these "black men just have medical differences that make them more susceptible to violence/rape/murder/crime" arguments since the existence of modern medicine. The evidence behind these claims has always been pure bullshit racism masquerading as science.
First, Even if testosterone plays a role in male incarceration rates, your conjecture that a 15% increase in average testosterone can explain the severe racial disparity in incarceration rates in unsubstantiated. Even if "X causes Y", it does not follow that "15% more X causes xx% more Y".
Second, there are tons of alternative explanations (e.g. socialization). Nature vs. nurture is adolescent-level stuff, and obviously males and females are socialized differently. Stop being thick.
Third, that's not how science (or anything except religion) works. You don't get to make fallaciously substantiated conjectures and then demand everyone believe them until the core claim is disproven.
edit: Oh wow, based on prior coments you're actually just straight up early 20th century style racist, or a troll, or both. Done engaging you, and really hoping you're just a stupid troll and don't believe anything you're saying here.
1) men commit violent crime at much higher rates than women. Why?
2) sexism? stupidity? Or perhaps "being male" (higher testosterone levels)
3) males who self-identify as black have about 15% more testoterone (courtesy of that racist institution, the National Institutes of Health)
4) is is really so crazy that a population with higher testosterone levels tends to be be bigger, and when they indulgent a violent proclivity, the outcome is more severe than when, say, a japanese women gets upset at the flower shop?
"Feynman was tested at 125"
and yet
There are some points to consider. There are and have been various publishers of IQ tests over the years and various forms of test. We don't have any clear idea what IQ test Feynman took or what it emphasized.
The IQ test that Feynman took was probably scored by the quotient method, meaning that an attempt was made to estimate his 'mental age' and the result was then divided by his chronological age and, finally, multiplied by 100.
IQ tests aren't scored that way any more—instead, a distribution of test scores is formed by giving the test to a large sample of test takers. A result one standard deviation above the mean of the sample group gives an IQ of 115, and so on.""
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/11/08/richard-feynma...