651–660 of 946 posts
2. Quantum computing
3. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem
4. Denotational semantics
In all four cases, I make no claims to real expertise. However, in each of these cases there was a powerful moment of epiphany, when after much groping in a conceptual fog a light seemed to turn on, and an essential clarity, simplicity, and intuition clicked.
1. Everyone is the main character in their own story. This manifest in all sorts of ways - from people not being there when you need them the most, from friends dying off as soon as proximity changes, to how and why get people get promoted in jobs. This isn't necessarily bad, but if you don't know how to navigate this it can be quite painful and confusing. 2. Representation matters. I knew this for a long time, but i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. I've heard similar things, but as a non-minority, you don't see what happens when you aren't looking or when people think they can get…
>You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention. Yeah I totally buy that. >With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ig…
This was the status quo for a very long time. Mentioning people's race was like mentioning people's weight. It didn't work.
> I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s.
The 2005 study "Are Greg and Emily More Employable Than Jamal and Lakisha" applied to jobs 5000 times with a stack of carefully crafted fake resumes that were randomly assigned names that were either stereotypically white (e.g. Greg, Emily) or black (e.g. Jamal, Lakisha.) The same resumes with white sounding names received 50% more callbacks. Over 5000 job applications. What we were doing in the 90s/2000s was not working and the fact that many white people find the polite approach more comfortable is not a good reason to stick to it. This isn't a social problem-- we're talking about people's basic chance of success in life. This idea that we can have equal opportunity by deliberately avoiding intervention is a proven fallacy. Pushing through the discomfort to find what actually works is a worthwhile undertaking. If another race with a far larger population was 50% more likely to get job callbacks than you were, I guarantee you'd agree.
The increase in political tension our culture has seen in the past decade plus is vastly more complex than the most visible catalyst of any given moment. Blaming social progress for the increasing resistance to social progress doesn't make sense. You could just as easily blame fascism or any other activist end of a political blob. As flawed and overly bandwagoned as it may be, "wokeness" is addressing real problems that oppress people in measurable ways every day. "Anti-Wokeness" is just another value signalling position to have that highlights political fault lines far older than any living American.
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Regarding #3, the following David Graeber quote always stuck with me: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Sapiens by Harari covers this extensively. So much of human development is our ability to ascribe fictive boundaries and definitions to things. Rules, authorities, myths, money, culture, countries, companies. What are any of them? They're all made up. We could just stop believing in all of them tomorrow.
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I’ll bet this does not replicate, the effect of stereotype threat is notoriously overvalued. Don’t fall for junk science.
Women that dedicate their careers to chess still dramatically underperform men at the professional level. There is even a different rating level and title system for women: women earning the "women grandmaster" title need 200 fewer ELO points than the grandmaster title for men. No woman has ever won the World Chess Championship, and there are far fewer female GMs than male GMs.
With almost all sports males have a dramatic physical advantage[1] so it's not really fair to have males compete with females.
With chess there is no physical advantage, so why keep separate tournaments for males and females? What is the reasoning for preventing males and females competing in chess?
[1] In the 90s, ISTR reading about a tennis match between a #3-rank female player against a #5000-something-ranked male, and the male player simply dominated. I wish I could find that article now, but it was a print mag and I don't remember which one it was.
1. Everyone is the main character in their own story. This manifest in all sorts of ways - from people not being there when you need them the most, from friends dying off as soon as proximity changes, to how and why get people get promoted in jobs. This isn't necessarily bad, but if you don't know how to navigate this it can be quite painful and confusing. 2. Representation matters. I knew this for a long time, but i…
Point 3 also hit me a few months ago during a Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast about Rome. Caesar got back from his conquests and half the senate wanted to punish him for crimes against humanity that he conducted during his wars. However, he also claimed massive amounts of land for Rome. Long story short: he wasn’t punished. And this happened 2000 years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure > As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Is as helpful as you may have intended. The comment was about not wanting to be the first, even if the group is welcoming…
For the colorblindness part, I think my core objection to the cultural changes which have occurred since I was a kid is not to increased awareness of biases per se, but rather this phenomenon: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb My feeling is that the best way to reduce subconscious bias is to have good race relations. And the best way to have good race relations is to have more positive interactions than negative interactio…
I say this from Mexico, sitting next to my Mexican wife and her mother.
1. Everyone is the main character in their own story. This manifest in all sorts of ways - from people not being there when you need them the most, from friends dying off as soon as proximity changes, to how and why get people get promoted in jobs. This isn't necessarily bad, but if you don't know how to navigate this it can be quite painful and confusing. 2. Representation matters. I knew this for a long time, but i…
Regarding #3, the following David Graeber quote always stuck with me: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure > As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Is as helpful as you may have intended. The comment was about not wanting to be the first, even if the group is welcoming…
I find the unatonable original sin spin placed on white people these days in the USA to be a tad bit repulsive personally.
To be clear, many Hispanics agree. Many of their ancestors played a role alongside the rest of their fellow whites. Whites are still admired by Asians as well.
This anti-white thing is largely an American phenomenon and other far left folks around the world that are resentful and cannot accept responsibility for their own condition. The rest of them deal with the hand they’re dealt, and go to work. As no one has more influence over their lives than them. We just accept it rather than adopt victimhood as a way of life. That’s how you create losers.