I agree it's unkind. And I am not here to defend the abuse Thiel received over his sexuality or before that the overt bullying I read he underwent at university. But, how exactly do you characterise the super rich, anti unionist, hard right Christian, or some of the other more out there sub cultures in the modern day tech scene? The food-as-fuel soylent eaters, the people trying to live forever, the believers in the singularity.. calling people "freaks" is trashy, but is that the worst objection you've got?
The most obvious one is the breakdown of trust in scientific research. A frequent discussion I would have with another statistics friend of mine was that that anti-vax crowd really isn't as off base as they are more popularly portrayed and if anything, the "trust the science!" rhetoric is more clearly incorrect.
Science should never be taught as dogmatic, but the reproducibility crisis has ultimately fostered a culture where one should not question "established" results (Kahneman famously proclaimed that one "must" accept the results of the unbelievable priming results in his famous book), especially if that one is interested in a long academic career.
The trouble is that some trust is necessary in communicating scientific observations and hypothesis to the general public. It's easy to blame the failure of the public to unify around Covid as based around cultural divides, but the truth is that skepticism around high stakes, hastily done science is well warranted. The trouble is that even when you can step through the research and see the conclusions are sound, the skepticism remains.
However, as someone that has spent a long career using data to understand the world, I suspect the harm directly caused by the wrong conclusions being reached is more minimal than one would think. This is largely because, despite lip service to "data driven decision making", science and statistics very rarely are the prime driver of any policy decision.
I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion. Science is relevant for those who care about finding the truth, just because they want to know for sure.
But for most people science doesn't really make much difference in how they choose and operate.
Knowing the truth doesn't mean you are ready to adapt your behavior.
From a political point of view, it may actually be beneficial for a policy to have no scientific basis. What happens when the science gets updated?
You either have to change the policy and admit you were "wrong" to an electorate who can't understand nuance, or continue with the policy and accept a few bad news days before the media cycle resets to something else.
We rack up quite a lot of awfulness with eugenics, phrenology, the "science" that influenced Stalin's disastrous agriculture policies in the early USSR, overpopulation scares leading to China's one-child policy, etc. Although one could argue these were back-justifications for the awfulness that people wanted to do anyway.
Those things were not done by awful people though - they all thought they were serving the public good. We only judge it as awful now because of the results. Nearly of these ideas (Lysenkoism I think was always fringe) were embraced by the educated elites of the time.
Lysenkoism! That's the one. Thank you for reminding me of the name (and for knowing what I was grasping at).
I think some "bad people" used eugenics and phrenology to justify prior hate, but they were also effective tools at convincing otherwise "good people" to join them.
Public policies were made (or justified) based on some of this research. People used this "settled science" to make consequential decisions.
Stereotype threat for example was widely used to explain test score gaps as purely environmental, which contributed to the public seeing gaps as a moral emergency that needed to be fixed, leading to affirmative action policies.
To be honest, whether they had a "study" proving it or not I think those things would have happened anyway.
It's just a question of power in the end. And even if you could question the legitimacy of "studies" the people in power use to justify their ruling, they would produce a dozen more flawed justifications before you could even produce one serious debunking. And they wouldn't even have to give much light to your production so you would need large cultural and political support.
Psychology exists mostly as a new religion; it serves as a tool for justification for people in power, it is used just in the same way as the bible.
It should not be surprising to anyone that much of it isn't replicable (nor falsifiable in the first place) and when it is, the effects are so close to randomness that you can't even be sure of what it means.
This is all by design, you need to keep people confused to rule over them. If they start asking questions you can't answer, you lose authority and legitimacy. Psychology is the tool that serves the dominant ideology that is used to "answer" those questions.
I once did a corporate internal management course that was filled with pseudoscience bullshit. I imagine the impact of that course on the company's productivity was net negative. I'm sure lots of orgs have similar courses.
Learning styles have also been debunked for decades though they continue to be used in education. I saw an amusing line in an article that said 90% of teachers were happy to continue using them even after accepting they're nonsense.
And that's just theories that have been debunked (i.e. proven wrong).
> I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
There have been a number of public scandals regarding immigrant crimes, along with subsequent anti-immigrant riots started via social media and people being sent to jail for internet posts. Social media seems to be more of accelerant for social unrest than than the cause. For me (an outsider) observing the situation, it seems to be mainly caused by immigration.
Many of the areas most upset by immigration barely see any immigrants, whilst many of the most persistent spreaders of rumours about terrible things caused by immigration to the UK don't actually live there. Of course, it isn't just social media that obsesses over immigrants in the UK (and many other places), mainstream print media and politicians are pretty obsessed with them too.
Personally, I would rate the grooming gangs scandal as one of the worse things that happened to a western nation in decades. It literally made me sick to stomach when I read the details. I think the obsession is somewhat justified.
News coverage of child grooming convictions in the month of their conviction was dominated by a different group of scumbags who were convicted of similar crimes up to a decade earlier though, which underlines my point about obsessions quite neatly
THOUSANDS of young girls were sexually exploited for YEARS and the government did nothing about it because they didn't want to appear to be racist. There is no equivalence with any of the "average" sex crimes that happen in modern advanced nations. There really is no equivalence with anything that has happened recently - it is a crime unique in its depravity.
> There really is no equivalence with anything that has happened recently - it is a crime unique in its depravity.
With no intention of downplaying the particular scandal that you're referencing, I don't think this is correct. Victims of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church are also usually estimated to range in the thousands, particularly e.g. in Germany
No credible account suggests the Rochdale grooming gangs' victims numbered in the thousands.
Implying that the recently -convicted gang who spent several years hosting "rape nights" targeting minors in Glasgow I've linked to was somehow less depraved than people of Pakistani descent doing the same thing in Rochdale years earlier because they weren't members of an ethnic minority does kind of underline my point.
Not just Rochdale. You forgot Rotherham, Telford, Oldham, Oxford, Derby, Bradford, Huddersfield, Keighley, Halifax, Bristol, and Newcastle.
Your second point is a hallucination on your part. Nobody is saying it's bad because they're minorities. We're saying it's especially bad because the government was implicated - they very people charged with keeping children safe sacrificed them for political reasons, by the thousands, for years, and still are. That, combined with the scale of crimes by the Pakistani and other rapists and the acceptance these crimes received in their community, form a different type of crime - a massive crime committed by authorities and a whole community over years. That's what's so especially horrifying.
You're literally doing what you're accusing me of "hallucinating" yourself, bracketing a group of crimes by the ethnicity of the perpetrators, and ignoring white British people doing exactly the same thing and also getting away with it for years, and pinning the blame on the crimes committed by ethnic minorities specifically on the "entire community"; Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush, and according to the person I was replying to even the perpetrators aren't as depraved. Police and social services (not generally considered part of "the government") failed to put a stop to grooming gangs for a wide variety of reasons; yes, in the case of Rochdale specifically where there were a number of warnings that shouldn't have been ignored that made it warrant a public enquiry and elevated news coverage. Needless to say social media coverage driven by agendas tended to skip the more robustly established findings that police repeatedly didn't take victim reports seriously out of assumptions about the behaviour of working class girls staying out late at night and often failed in fulfilling basic child protection protocols in favour of the "politicians covered it up and still are" angle. Back in reality, we've had a lot of convictions, multiple public inquires and people from all political parties talk more about them than most other sex crimes put together (even including Jimmy Savile)
In any case, the wider discussion was whether the UK's current ailments and political schisms are "mainly caused by immigration", and its quite hard to logically connect even the immigration-driven controversies like Brexit, "caps on migrant numbers" and fixation on small boat crossings to crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis, mostly in the early 2000s.
There is not a government-wide conspiracy to cover up the sex crimes of white British people. That conspiracy is what people are most horrified by. I don't know how to say this any clearer.
>Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush
Because this is an isolated incident, not something happening at a mass scale in that community.
You are helping mass rape continue by trying to minimize it; you are part of the problem here, right here, right now. Your kinds of thoughts and words are the support that those ongoing mass gang rape of children requires to continue. Hope you're proud of yourself; at least nobody can call you racist.
>crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis
It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.
Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.
There is not a government wide conspiracy to cover up the sex crimes of any people, least of all groups of mostly low-status ethnic minority taxi drivers in cities none of the recent governments have paid much attention to except to discuss sex crimes occurring in them and call for more public inquiries.
Although at police level, it came out yesterday that multiple officers in Rotherham were under investigation for sexually exploiting the victims themselves. Which would sound a much more likely reason why victims were ignored until they became part of wider investigations than some high-level conspiracy to empower taxi drivers to rape. I'm quite comfortable in being able to declare this is a major scandal without having to wait for the ethnicity of the police officers to be identified to decide whether it was an isolated incident or the fault of the entire community.
Only one of us is implying that some gang rape perpetrators and groomers are less of a big deal than others; it isn't me. Whether that is your intention or not, it certainly isn't helping victims get the support they needed or crimes get solved.
> It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.
I mean, yeah, it's super hard to connect immigration routes that British Pakistanis and their ancestors didn't use at any point to crimes some of them committed.
> Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.
We've got stats for sex crimes per capita for the actual UK, for convictions and for reports and for those targeting minors specifically. They certainly don't support your argument that white Britons' sex crimes against kids are "isolated incidents". Statistically, they're actually slightly overrepresented on a per capita basis, and that's after decades of large investigations into specific crimes committed in specific communities.
You're pointing to another rape case(ironic there's so many of them) but the other one was the OG that exposed the British government being involved in the cover up of migrant crimes to not seem racist, where the British citizens talking about the Muslim rape gangs were the ones being persecuted instead of the gangs themselves.
You can't make this shit up. It was a betrayal of the British people of epic proportions, whose trust in their leader was lost forever, because if they're willing to sweep that under the rug to protect their image, what else have they been covering up. Then the post office workers comes up.
Healthcare coverage generally comes with any fulltime job. It's cheap for individuals (I pay about $150/month) but gets more expensive with families, which is a real problem. Most medications are cheap. The only medications I've heard of that are expensive are new ones not yet approved by the insurer. I pay less than $10/month for my medications.
Race is a social construct, but one loosely based on biological reality. As we unravel the mystery of human origins using ancient DNA, we are starting to get a better understanding of the how different groups came to be.
The idea what we are a homogenous species with no biologically important distinctions between groups - which became popular in the postwar period - is coming to end. But, we are also not returning to racial essentialism of the past. The new narrative of human differences will be far more complicated.
Related: A New DNA Test Can ID a Suspect's Race, But Police Won't Touch It
> Tony Clayton, a black man and a prosecutor who tried one of the Baton Rouge murder cases, concedes the benefits of the test: "Had it not been for Frudakis, we would still be looking for the white guy in the white pickup." Nevertheless, Clayton says he dislikes anything that implies we don't all "bleed the same blood." He adds, "If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would."
It's a social construct in the way that all categories are. The question is whether or not a category is useful. I'm saying there are genetic differences between groups, but our structuring of these groups is pretty flexible. There are genetic differences between "continental groups" but there is also a good amount of genetic diversity within sub-Saharan Africa populations because those people did not go through the genetic bottleneck that Eurasians did.
Our understanding of race have been historically contingent. Both the racial essentialism of the colonial period and the "we are all the same under the skin" anti-racism of post-WW2 were based more on political ideologies than reality.
If you tell me you have a test that can distinguish a Japanese person from a Finn, I'd say sure. If you told me you had one that could distinguish a French person from a German, I'd laugh.
> If you told me you had one that could distinguish a French person from a German, I'd laugh.
They are neighbors, so there is of course some overlap if you take some French village close to Germany and a German village close to France. But French native and Polish native, you can, which is why we can track genetic ancestry like this.
Northern Spaniard here; in the North you woudn't be able to distinguish an Asturian from a village from the average Irish (non-redhead, altough there are tons in Galicia and Asturias).
Europe isn't like that; you will find Atlantic/Mediterranean mixes everywhere, and with any gamma inbetween.
"If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not."
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked.
These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.
There is an infinitely long list of things that were part of the environment when that kind of passionate creative problem solving in software was thriving.
What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again.
Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from using regulatory capture to stifle competition while having little enough regulation that small companies can spin up and be nimble? Yes.
Do we need to be listening to N'Sync, wearing JNCOs, watching Beavis and Butthead, and drinking Crystal Pepsi? Probably not. Those were in the air, but not causative.
And, certainly, I see little evidence to support the implicit claim in "anti-woke" that somehow sexism, homophobia, and racism were causative factors that enabled entrepreneurialism to thrive a few decades ago.
People still argue what things made a small city state (Athens) suddenly become the cornerstone of western civilization. That fact is that we have these explosions of human potential where certain groups of people in certain environments make massive leaps, and we don't what the magic sauce is. It's great when it happens, but It's foolish to think that we can somehow socially engineer the same results through brute force, which is the problem with DEI thinking. That is also why so many companies are silently ditching those policies.
DEI is not about brute forcing an environment for success, at all. That's not the goal even a little bit.
DEI is about recognizing that our culture has placed some people at a disadvantage by virtue of properties they have no control over and attempting to remedy that imbalance.
Based on the theory that gaps between groups are caused by systemic factors. The gaps exist, so an explanation and fix is needed, which is morally commendable. The problem is that the theory is far too overconfident and completely ignores the fact that the gaps also show up in cognitive testing.
The foundational document of our nation's government literally treats Native Americans as non-people and slaves (who were overwhelmingly of African descent) as 3/5 of a person.
The majority of Black people in the US are literally descended from people who were brought here as slaves. Half of the country was so attached to the idea of being able to own Black people and treat them as property that they started a civil war to hold onto it.
This is the country that was founded on enslaved Black people, created the Trail of Tears, and placed Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.
It shouldn't be very hard to figure out an explanation for why certain races in the US have historically been at a disadvantage.
Both things can be true. That fact is that some groups that were discriminated against now thrive, and some don't (even after trillions of dollars in public spending). That is why cognitive testing is helpful at figuring out what is going on.
New ideas, such as the US was "founded on enslaved Black people" really only gained attention the last few years because of our inability to solve the gaps. People wanted an explanation, so the past had to be retconned. The other Anglo colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - never had slavery and ended up about as well off as the US.
Perhaps the fact that the US was founded on enslaved Black people is considered a "new idea" is why we have failed to address cultural roots of that systemic problem.
> The other Anglo colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - never had slavery and ended up about as well off as the US.
How well off are First Nations people in Canada and Aboriginal people in Australia and New Zealand?
How would you know when the problem is solved though? If you look at average earnings of groups and correct for IQ, the gap disappears. If you want all groups to score the same on tests of cognitive ability, we've been trying to do that for decades with no success. Every attempt to create a test where all groups get the same average have failed. Sorry, it sucks, but it's the truth.
I don't know what you're trying to say here, but the evidence for malleability of IQ and for SES influence on IQ --- IQ itself being a diagnostic output and not a latitudinal ranking of people by capability --- is pretty strong. It's important when having serious conversations about this to structure the causality correctly: "correct for IQ" sounds at first blush like you've established a causal role for IQ, but really you might be (and probably are) just manipulating whatever X variables are causally linked both to IQ and to other outcomes.
But we currently have a President who described participants in a white supremacist rally as "a lot of good people on both sides" so I think we are very far away from needing a precise definition of "done".
Consider what else you have been misinformed about. Honest question - were you aware of the IQ gaps between groups? Most people I've talked to have no idea.
Perhaps instead of fact checking, we could compare the previous narratives with known public knowledge of the events, to determine if the narratives provided an accurate view of reality. It is easy to distort the truth and still tell no lies.
