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Persuasion through status rather than argument

robkhenderson.com

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Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#211

Post by forgingahead »

pen2l wrote: post #207
rayiner wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you gotta socialize your kids to keep their mouths shut too. My daughter attends a progressive school, and she’s intuited that there’s a de-facto racial hierarchy that she’s none too happy about. (She was recently invited to attend a school-sponsored weekly lunch for black girls, but once a month because she’s half white and half south Asian and I guess that’s how the math works out.) I pointed out that she needs…

[flagged]

His daughter is getting discriminated against, and you have word salad justification for that?

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#212

Post by iinnPP »

sgu999 wrote: post #202
rayiner wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you gotta socialize your kids to keep their mouths shut too. My daughter attends a progressive school, and she’s intuited that there’s a de-facto racial hierarchy that she’s none too happy about. (She was recently invited to attend a school-sponsored weekly lunch for black girls, but once a month because she’s half white and half south Asian and I guess that’s how the math works out.) I pointed out that she needs…

What a strange society you live in... I don't see how any kind of racial segregation can help the next generation do better than the previous one. Having to explain to your kid that they can't do X because of their phenotype feels simply wrong.

Racism has to be a negative for you to feel like that.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#213

Post by iinnPP »

lapcat wrote: post #194
Georgelemental wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure that it's scary. After all, casual racism and sexism used to be a lot more common in the past. Now people are called out and criticized on those. Is that bad? Even if we grant that the rise in self-censorship is entirely due to "casual racism and sexism" (and I don't grant it), wouldn't that meant that 40% of people are secret bigots? That sounds bad, you would rather they be open about their beliefs s…

> I don't grant it Neither do I. > people are secret bigots? That sounds bad, you would rather they be open about their beliefs so you can identify them, no? I don't know how much of a secret it is. This tends to be fairly obvious regardless of whether people say it openly, and depending on which circles you spend time in, you tend to hear it already in private anyway. Perhaps there are many people who were naive, ig…

Odd. None of my private conversations are racist or sexist. Turns out I grew up in the short period where all racism is bad. I'm thankful for that.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#214

Post by vintermann »

lapcat wrote: post #156
Animats wrote: post #149

> In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, 13.4 percent of Americans reported that “felt less free to speak their mind than they used to.” In 1987, the figure had reached 20 percent. By 2019, 40 percent of Americans reported that they did not feel free to speak their minds. This isn’t a partisan issue, either. Gibson and Sutherland report that, “The percentage of Democrats who are worried about speaking their mind…

I'm not sure that it's scary. After all, casual racism and sexism used to be a lot more common in the past. Now people are called out and criticized on those. Is that bad? The other factor is the rise of internet social media, which didn't exist back then. When people spoke their mind, it wasn't broadcast publicly to the whole world, so there was less fear of backlash.

Do you think people are equally racist and sexist today as then? Surely not, it would be terrible news if that was true.

It was possible to get ostracized over racism and especially sexism in the 1960s, or even the 1890s, you just had to do worse things to do it generally.

If more people are afraid of ostracism, that suggest ostracism has increased (even) faster than progress on racism and sexism, and that doesn't sound like it can go on forever.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#215

Post by lapcat »

iinnPP wrote: post #213
lapcat wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't grant it Neither do I. > people are secret bigots? That sounds bad, you would rather they be open about their beliefs so you can identify them, no? I don't know how much of a secret it is. This tends to be fairly obvious regardless of whether people say it openly, and depending on which circles you spend time in, you tend to hear it already in private anyway. Perhaps there are many people who were naive, ig…

Odd. None of my private conversations are racist or sexist. Turns out I grew up in the short period where all racism is bad. I'm thankful for that.

> Turns out I grew up in the short period where all racism is bad.

There was no such period. Like I said, it depends on which circles you spend time in (e.g. your family). Sounds like you were just sheltered from it.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#216

Post by lapcat »

vintermann wrote: post #214
lapcat wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that it's scary. After all, casual racism and sexism used to be a lot more common in the past. Now people are called out and criticized on those. Is that bad? The other factor is the rise of internet social media, which didn't exist back then. When people spoke their mind, it wasn't broadcast publicly to the whole world, so there was less fear of backlash.

Do you think people are equally racist and sexist today as then? Surely not, it would be terrible news if that was true. It was possible to get ostracized over racism and especially sexism in the 1960s, or even the 1890s, you just had to do worse things to do it generally. If more people are afraid of ostracism, that suggest ostracism has increased (even) faster than progress on racism and sexism, and that doesn't so…

> If more people are afraid of ostracism, that suggest ostracism has increased (even) faster than progress on racism and sexism, and that doesn't sound like it can go on forever.

Ostracism is progress on racism and sexism. It's society pushing back against them.

This is a very long war. Wars are ugly. If you think that racism and sexism will just go down quietly without a fight, well, that's not how it works. When they feel most threatened, that's when they'll make the most noise.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#217

Post by david-gpu »

iinnPP wrote: post #212
sgu999 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a strange society you live in... I don't see how any kind of racial segregation can help the next generation do better than the previous one. Having to explain to your kid that they can't do X because of their phenotype feels simply wrong.

Racism has to be a negative for you to feel like that.

[flagged]

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#218

Post by rayiner »

pen2l wrote: post #207
rayiner wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you gotta socialize your kids to keep their mouths shut too. My daughter attends a progressive school, and she’s intuited that there’s a de-facto racial hierarchy that she’s none too happy about. (She was recently invited to attend a school-sponsored weekly lunch for black girls, but once a month because she’s half white and half south Asian and I guess that’s how the math works out.) I pointed out that she needs…

[flagged]

It was easy for me to have theoretical ideas about culture when I wasn’t trying to raise three mixed kids in that culture.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#219

Post by naasking »

tsimionescu wrote: post #144
naasking wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LHC achieves a hard vacuum over 27 km, and also features superconductors along its length, so clearly that combo is doable over an extended length. I'm not trying to trivialize the engineering challenges here, but I've seen that people have tendency to immediately jump from "it's hard" to "it's impossible or infeasible", even though no one's even made an attempt. Some clever engineering could await discovery that…

The LHC tube is 27km long but ~6cm in diameter. It is true that they are pumping down a more impressive vacuum volume though, but not in the tube, but around each of the many, many superconducting magnets. That's about 9000m³ (compared to the ~150m³ of the actual tube). Still, the LHC is hardly maintaining that vacuum continuously all year round. And it is one of the most sophisticated engineering and scientific proj…

It was the most sophisticated engineering not because of the long vacuum, but because of the tolerances, the semi-novelty of the superconducting coils at the time, the sensitivity of the equipment needed, and the extreme data collection capabilities needed to capture and store as much information as possible on picosecond timescales. None of these factors are necessarily applicable to a hyperloop.

Even so, once you've built one LHC, subsequent ones would be substantially cheaper because the primary difficulty is building the scientific and engineering knowledge needed while you're building it. Similar factors apply to programming: the first version of your program took awhile to build, but if you suddenly lost all of the code, rebuilding it would take a fraction of the time because you don't have to build your understanding of the domain the second time around.

Maybe all of these factors combined still wouldn't be enough to make hyperloop economical, but that conclusion is not obvious.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#220

Post by mistermann »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #174
mistermann wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The way formal logic works, and the way we think, talk and convince one another.. they are very far apart. Strict logic is "pedantry", "JAQing off", Sea-lioning, "conspiratorial thinking", etc. I know of no social media platform where this is not true (based on replies and voting). And (seemingly) ironically, "scientific thinkers" are often particularly prone to the phenomenon. > That doesn't mean we can't grasp lo…

I don't remember who i got this from. But It's been part of my thoughts since. Smart people are dangerously good at finding compelling rational arguments for any position. Logic and reasoning has no guarantee what-so-ever to end up correct. Communism is perfectly rational. So is is national socialism, slavery, "a modest proposal", "Brave new world". Self reasoning may just make you more stubborn. two things i think h…

[Please pardon the snark, it is in my nature.]

>Smart people are dangerously good at finding compelling rational arguments for any position.

A much(!) smaller set of smart people can poke holes in such persuasive arguments with ease. The response with rare exceptions will be memes and rhetoric, &/or downvotes, silence, bans or rate limiting on one's account (helping to ensure humans stay locked in their local maxima indefinitely...say, have you seen what's happening in the Middle East, with our unwavering "democratic" support, again?).

> Logic and reasoning has no guarantee what-so-ever to end up correct.

Abstractly, of course not, but at the object level it depends.

>Communism is perfectly rational.

Make the case, and watch me poke holes in it. If this was well implemented as a game, I could even predict how your argument could be attacked before you even state it, and then reveal my predictions after your move and see how close I got.

A problem though: how to judge, since all participants (including me) suffer from delusion?

> Self reasoning may just make you more stubborn.

Love the strategically played "may"! What's the "just" doing in there though?

> Limit the death of the argument. Don't go too many steps away from the axioms or assumptions. Leaps of logic give us the most freedom to creatively warp the outcome.

Artificially constraining scope is excellent for rhetoric and deceit (and thus very popular, in Western culture at least), but perhaps not so useful for discovering truth.

> Die on all the hills. Argue your misguided ideas loudly and proud to your peers.

100% agree. A problem though: culture disallows this. I believe humans have some free will, but not much (for now).

>Discussing dumb ideas is the only way to find what dumb idea is the least dumb.

"Discussing" is ontologically ambiguous, and we've been discussing many ideas for centuries, with little positive outcome. Time for some new approaches if you ask me (man, it sure was a hot summer this year eh?).

>Being scared of being wrong, and aligning with others, leaves dumb ideas unchallenged, and dumber ideas unexplored.

Welcome to HN, and planet Earth (2023). Let's check back in in a few years. :)

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