Escape the echo chamber • Hacker News Board

Re: Escape the echo chamber

#61

Post by lopmotr » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 7:53 PM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

3131s wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell them that it is completely impossible to set up rigorous controls in a study of ethnicity and intelligence anyway. The bigger question is why do some people care so much and why are they so focused on ethnicity among many other data points that could be predictive of intelligence. I typically ask these people if some connection between race and intelligence actually existed, is it your intention to change how so…

It's an empirical matter, but my hunch is that most of the people who focus on correlations between intelligence and ethnic groups or phenotypical perceived "race" are racists. Many people aren't aware that you can be a racist without knowing it. (In a broader sense we're all racists, as practically everybody overgeneralizes based on stereotypes.) It's important to stress that the differences between members of the p…

You seem to be defining racism as being interested in differences between races. I don't think that's a common definition.

Personally, I'm interested in it because there are so many people interested in blaming one race for the problems of another or in assuming that a large group of people of one race will behave the same as another in the same situation. People wonder why African countries are so poor and look everywhere for possible reasons except at the people themselves. People think the Chinese "should have" a religion because they're quite rude and inconsiderate but don't consider that they might be so genetically different that they don't need or can't sustain the fantasy of a religion the way white people can. I just made up that last one, but I'm certainly open to its possibility.

Re: Escape the echo chamber

#62

Post by lopmotr » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

throw2016 wrote: post #53

ScottBurson wrote: post #6

Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers. Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he’d believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and ope…

Do we really need 150 pro and opposing studies to understand? For instance if a society import a minority white population, enslave and oppress them for hundreds of years and then conduct IQ tests to declare they are somehow deficient. How would the rest of the world look at that? Would they simply look at the IQ test results, or have deeper questions? First people are enslaved and segregated for hundreds of years an…

Slavery causes IQ differences? That's a popular but incredibly unsupported claim. White people really have been enslaved and oppressed and bounced back pretty fast. See Jews for instance, or Irish in America, or Slavs, who gave us the word "slave".

In fact, I challenge you to produce any evidence at all for the slavery->IQ hypothesis. It's so ridiculous that young black people have reduced ability to work because their ancestors 5-10 generations ago were forced to work. It's even more ridiculous that the Chinese who were just as oppressed in even more recent past are doing perfectly well now. Maybe oppression only lasts multiple generations when the victims blame another race for it? In that case, we should be working to stop black people from blaming white people. We should be stamping out the idea of "white guilt" because that would be making the problem worse!

Re: Escape the echo chamber

#63

Post by primitur » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 9:56 AM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #58

scatters wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purebred dogs suffer a host of genetic diseases resulting in considerable suffering.

I realize you're not the same person, but I'd still like to find out if people are against racial purity or eugenics for a real reason or just "because Nazis". The whole idea of eugenics is to reduce genetic diseases and suffering. Surely, if diseased children started to appear, the same program would stop them from reproducing and spreading it. Low intelligence humans already have considerable suffering too because…

>Racial Purity

>Impose Interbreeding

Sorry, too extreme for me. I do not subscribe to your reasoning that any form of racism is acceptable - "because scientific purity".

If you can't see what it is with 'racial cleanliness', I suggest you go have a look at the places its been happening for, say .. the last 300 years. You'll see plenty of reasons why there should not be any kind of racial policies, enabled by science, that allow "cleansing of so-called undesirables".

I mean this sincerely, humans cannot be trusted with their own race.

Re: Escape the echo chamber

#64

Post by lopmotr » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 4:12 AM UTC

primitur wrote: post #63

lopmotr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize you're not the same person, but I'd still like to find out if people are against racial purity or eugenics for a real reason or just "because Nazis". The whole idea of eugenics is to reduce genetic diseases and suffering. Surely, if diseased children started to appear, the same program would stop them from reproducing and spreading it. Low intelligence humans already have considerable suffering too because…

>Racial Purity >Impose Interbreeding Sorry, too extreme for me. I do not subscribe to your reasoning that any form of racism is acceptable - "because scientific purity". If you can't see what it is with 'racial cleanliness', I suggest you go have a look at the places its been happening for, say .. the last 300 years. You'll see plenty of reasons why there should not be any kind of racial policies, enabled by science,…

You mean racial mixing should be chosen by cultural preferences/technology/wealth, which what's always been happening, rather than scientific reasons aimed at improving anything? I can't see how arbitrary human culture is any better than more purposeful breeding. Culture selects for racial purity in some cases, and for mixing in others, but it often depends on political history - Koreans don't want to mix with Japanese because politics, not because they're too far away from each other. Is politics really a better decider than science?

Use race for eugenics though is a very coarse metric and I wouldn't advocate for it unless we somehow lacked any better measures. I think a better program would measure performance in whatever criteria people think are desirable and go for those regardless of race. It might turn out that the tallest people are black, and you end up with a lot of black genes if you like tallness. So it might look racist, and it might shrink the populations of some races relative to others. But again, that's what already happens through arbitrary reasons anyway. We're already breeding more blacks and less whites simply because blacks are generally poorer than whites and poor people tend to have more children. I don't see how you can be happy with that (selecting for poverty!) but not with people putting the quality of their children ahead of their own personal desire to spread their genes.

Re: Escape the echo chamber

#65

Post by dang » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 11:42 PM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #64

primitur wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Racial Purity >Impose Interbreeding Sorry, too extreme for me. I do not subscribe to your reasoning that any form of racism is acceptable - "because scientific purity". If you can't see what it is with 'racial cleanliness', I suggest you go have a look at the places its been happening for, say .. the last 300 years. You'll see plenty of reasons why there should not be any kind of racial policies, enabled by science,…

You mean racial mixing should be chosen by cultural preferences/technology/wealth, which what's always been happening, rather than scientific reasons aimed at improving anything? I can't see how arbitrary human culture is any better than more purposeful breeding. Culture selects for racial purity in some cases, and for mixing in others, but it often depends on political history - Koreans don't want to mix with Japane…

Would you please stop using HN for generic ideological arguments? They lead to nothing new, only generic ideological flamewars, the thing we need least here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Escape the echo chamber

#66

Post by dang » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 11:54 PM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #48

primitur wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all perfectly appealing reasons to step one iota closer to the reality described, which is that we should promote the DNA-privileged forward on the sexual reproduction stack. Which is something, I think, a little different to all the nice, shiny new things we're getting from CRISPR, et al., sure. Its the dangerous, vile things I care about: opening the door for selective breeding and clones, racial purism,…

What's wrong with racial purism? We do it with dog breeding. What are the ethical problems?

Race-war flamebait is off-topic here and we ban accounts that post like this. Please keep it elsewhere from now on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Escape the echo chamber

#67

Post by jonathanstrange » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 8:31 AM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #61

jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an empirical matter, but my hunch is that most of the people who focus on correlations between intelligence and ethnic groups or phenotypical perceived "race" are racists. Many people aren't aware that you can be a racist without knowing it. (In a broader sense we're all racists, as practically everybody overgeneralizes based on stereotypes.) It's important to stress that the differences between members of the p…

You seem to be defining racism as being interested in differences between races. I don't think that's a common definition. Personally, I'm interested in it because there are so many people interested in blaming one race for the problems of another or in assuming that a large group of people of one race will behave the same as another in the same situation. People wonder why African countries are so poor and look ever…

The point is that there are no races in the sense people talk about them colloquially. Phenotypical 'race' doesn't match genetic makeup well enough to serve as a reliable indicator of anything.

Nationalities like Chinese have even less to do with genetic makeup, and Africa is a whole continent, so talking about African countries as a whole is pretty much nonsense unless you're referring to their geographical location on the same continent.

Re: Escape the echo chamber

#68

Post by lopmotr » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 1:09 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #65

lopmotr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean racial mixing should be chosen by cultural preferences/technology/wealth, which what's always been happening, rather than scientific reasons aimed at improving anything? I can't see how arbitrary human culture is any better than more purposeful breeding. Culture selects for racial purity in some cases, and for mixing in others, but it often depends on political history - Koreans don't want to mix with Japane…

Would you please stop using HN for generic ideological arguments? They lead to nothing new, only generic ideological flamewars, the thing we need least here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not ideological. I'm trying to understand some apparent contradictions in popular beliefs.

Re: Escape the echo chamber

#69

Post by lopmotr » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 1:12 AM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #67

lopmotr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be defining racism as being interested in differences between races. I don't think that's a common definition. Personally, I'm interested in it because there are so many people interested in blaming one race for the problems of another or in assuming that a large group of people of one race will behave the same as another in the same situation. People wonder why African countries are so poor and look ever…

The point is that there are no races in the sense people talk about them colloquially. Phenotypical 'race' doesn't match genetic makeup well enough to serve as a reliable indicator of anything. Nationalities like Chinese have even less to do with genetic makeup, and Africa is a whole continent, so talking about African countries as a whole is pretty much nonsense unless you're referring to their geographical location…

There really are lots of strong correlations between race and measurable qualities. That alone means it's a real concept - it has predictive power. Simple examples are hair color and eye coolor.