611–620 of 756 posts
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> what environment can we create that benefit as many people as possible That can't be researched (effectively). Policies affect the current situation, not the desired one.
You create the desired situation by affecting the current situation.
I don't particularly have a problem accepting that intelligence could be genetic. But then people use that to argue that the people at the top deserve everything they have. The exact same argument was made back when we had slavery. Now its just used to justify wage slavery and gross wealth inequality and policies which punish the poor. (It also is grossly oversimplified and discounts reversion to the mean and that tw…
> But then people use that to argue that the people at the top deserve everything they have. Doesn't genetic endowment imply the exact opposite. If the "people at the top" got there because of a factor over which they had no influence—what was once called a gift—how can they deserve their place? You might argue that they are the people who should be at the top because of their abilities, but that has nothing to do wi…
Them: You just need to believe that genetics matters!
Me: Okay, fine I do.
Them: Well, then you must agree with
Me: Nope, I still want to tax billionaires out of existence and use that to support your "stupid poors" and your ideal of a ruling class and an underclass with unlimited market exploitation created by birthright of genetics is wrong (again, for the sake of argument, it still doesn't really work this way). "From each according to his means, to each according to his needs" and they need more. Economically, Elon Musk should be playing with nightmare-mode level taxation levels, all the "stupid poors" need the difficulty slider backed off for them -- instead we have that nearly reversed.
Whatever you call it (leftist/progressive/socialist) isn't founded at all on a rejection of genetics, attacking that gets you nowhere.
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Its not an objective fact in the sense that there is nothing rigid in political and economic science like we have in mathematics or physics, but yes, every instance of attempts at building socialist governments have been tied at the waist to authoritarianism. In all cases, they have resulted in collapse (USSR), limped along under authoritarian rule (Cuba, Venezuela, Madagascar), or have thrived after jettisoning actu…
> every instance of attempts at building socialist governments have been tied at the waist to authoritarianism Hence the fierce insistence from large parts of the socialist movement throughout history that it must be radically democratic - otherwise oppression, rather than liberation will be the result.
The socialist option is to deny individuals the right to own personal capital at all to prevent said inequality, and instead to create a system to allocate capital in a way that is best for society, i.e. through the government. But it turns out that all the ways that society requires capital are practically beyond counting, and the system is so complex, that any government looking to even be minimally successful in overseeing that allocation process requires large amounts of power over virtually every aspect of society. Guess what? That's authoritarianism.
Take this thought experiment. Say we decide we want to make a new entertainment service to compete with Netflix. But creating it requires capital: money to pay programmers, money to pay for servers, money to pay for content production, etc. In a capitalist society, we just have to convince enough people that there is enough return on investment to give us their money. They don't even have to like watching TV, they just have to be convinced its a good use of their excess money. And they could be millions of people, or it could be a single individual. On the other hand, in a socialist society, we have to convince the proxy for society in charge of doling out society's collective capital (i.e. the government) to give us their money. So now the decision on what content to produce is directly influenced by the government. Even if these people are democratically elected, they will cater exclusively to the majority opinion, and in the more likely case, they will cater to whatever consolidates their power. Oops! Now you have state-controlled media. Seems unlikely the people controlling said media will devote much air-time to opposition parties or ideas, or that your functioning democracy will last very long in that scenario.
The point is that socialism without authoritarianism is a paradox. Socialism cannot function without authoritarianism, because the process of allocating capital in society is far too complex for a reasonably constrained governmental body to undertake. It needs an authoritarian level of power to effectively manage society's capital (and as history shows us, even then it rarely is actually effective). Insisting on non-authoritarian socialism is like insisting on a diet consisting exclusively of ice cream and cake while also living a long, healthy life. Perhaps it sounds nice, but it is fundamentally impossible.
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Since when does fascism / alt right need facts to further their agenda? Cutting off research funding for sensitive topics does nothing to stave off our fall into dystopia. If it's ok to do affirmative action based on race, it's also ok to do it based on other genes. I wonder why every progressive in this thread is suddenly afraid of having to discriminate people based on yet-unknown gene factors when their crowd is o…
> Since when does fascism / alt right need facts to further their agenda? Cutting off research funding for sensitive topics does nothing to stave off our fall into dystopia. Did I say I wanted to cut funding to genetics? What I did was explaining a perspective which I don't share for the most part. What I said is that the idea of willfully designing the shape of a society based on some features of the body (blood, ge…
Science is about learning things. How or whether those learnings should be applied is a question of politics. Blanket-censoring entire fields of research for political reasons is not the answer to anything.
You talk about how you don't want extreme race-based policy, but at the same time the only injustice you're contemplating on correcting is based on race. I don't hear any calls to pay reparations for any past injustices that were based on non-racial issues, not from you, not from "the left" in general.
Chomsky wrote the definitive progressive answer to all this 50 years ago: https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20block... Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve. Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the…
What could be more devastating to a line of inquiry than derision and scorn? easy! a collective yawn!
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Genes describe lot of things from obese tendency to height to IQ to your looks. If someone has an IQ of 70, there are very likely to live a difficult life. Yes IQ is not intelligence you will say but still there is a limit to everyday functioning if someone's IQ is low. Ask a conventional ugly person(specially female) about their life.
I agree with you, but an IQ of 70 is mentally disabled, so it's not really a good example of "bad" genetics, so much as it is an example of a disability.
From the article: Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes. The fact that this area is controversial suggests to me that it is worth exploration. I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely con…
I truly don’t believe my people are genetically smarter because we have a truly awful abysmal track history in governing.
My guess as an immigrant who went to community college here and then to University here is that students just have too much choices/freedom. They are told they should strive to whatever they want. I and my friends grew up told you need to choose a major that will bring bread on the table, that should be the only priority.
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IMO, biological differences and barriers certainly exist and are non-trivial, but the differences between private and public schools demonstrates the degree to which institutional finesse can accommodate student strengths and shortcomings, including differences in intelligence or disability. In other words, we have a long way to go. In some schools around the Bay Area, we have half the students on the fastest track,…
I do wonder what’s gained by this. There are plenty of physics professors (perhaps even most) that didn’t do calculus until college or at least senior year of high school, what’s the advantage?
The gains become clear depending on the degree to which you know what you want, and especially if you're thinking about graduate programs.
1. Calculus in some sense is somewhat disorganized, and it sucks that it's a gateway to more math in the US. By finishing Calculus early you can move on to the math you wanted to learn, such as Linear Algebra.
2. University students may have to spend about a year learning Calculus. That's a long time, and to some people they'd rather spend their money better by learning something else or graduating early.
3. If you're thinking about graduate studies in something technical such as Econ or Stats, then you'll probably want at least Analysis. The problem is that in the grand scheme of things, even Analysis does not leave you very prepared to do things, it just makes you prepared to learn more, so you may want to get ahead of this problem.
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Not OP, but no it's not. For example; are the Nordics or most of Europe socialist? If they are and are functioning it means it can work. If they are not, maybe people have differing opinions of what socialism entails. What usually is a "no true scotsman" argument is when someone only calls something socialist when it's not working, because if an implementation is working that would deflate the argument. See a few pos…
> are the Nordics or most of Europe socialist? Absolutely not. They are primarily market based with a relatively large welfare state. How is that even a question?
Market socialism is a thing, and the form of socialism that most of the more thoughtful socialists prefer.
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Then the issue is with the self-described socialists who don't want socialism. Market based capitalism with wealth distribution and strong social safety nets is not the same thing as a society in which the means of production are communally owned. In fact, the two are in direct opposition of one another, and cannot coexist. I don't disagree with you that most "socialists" want what is essentially a government modeled…
Communal ownership of the means of production is not the definition of socialism. It's merely compatible with the actual definition, which is worker ownership of the means of production. Some socialists, such as Marx, argue that the logical endpoint of socialism is communal ownership of the means of production at some point in the future when the average worker produces more than their need.
So the issue becomes that for socialist-structured companies to become effective and commonplace extensive government intervention is required. At that point the line between "worker" and "communal" means of production becomes pretty thin. Like a large amount of socialist theory, there is a lot of verbiage and effort devoted to theoretical concepts that, when the rubber meets the road, boil down to irrelevance.