"Progressives" should embrace guns and reject abortion.
That would make them palatable to these mysterious deplorables that seem to hold sway over the US political system, giving them access to the halls of power.
Then said progressives, having kept their powder dry, could expend it on what really matters - convincing the deplorables that science is a thing, and that climate change will kill us all if we don't act.
That said what I've always been told is to start with myself: maybe my "opponents" are dumb.
That doesn't help anything but my ego.
Instead I'd recommend looking into common ground or another way to present my arguments.
I disagree deeply with a good number of you but still I think most of you don’t realize most of the time since I either shut up or at least present my views somewhat carefully in the hope that someone might get some inspiration.
I've also changed my own, long held opinions on certain topics (e.g. drug policy) not because anyone here ridiculed me but because somebody took the time to explain instead of shouting troll, downvoting and flagging.
I wish more people here would opt for that solution.
1) Mass shootings are horrific, and it seems insane that anyone can own an assault rifle with such low barriers, but at the same time, death from gun violence is statistically low compared to, say, auto accidents. If being in favour of stricter gun regulation to save a few tens of thousand of lives (in a country of hundreds of millions) means alienating a huge percentage of the population, then why not let that one slide. Things will be no worse than they are now.
2) Many people (certainly me) would say that abortion is a woman's right but even if abortion is illegal, back street abortions will still take place. They may be in unsanitory and dangerous conditions, and some deaths will result. But again, statistically speaking, that will only impact a small percentage of the population.
3) Climate change however, seems like it presents an existential danger that could wipe us out as a species. Our growth driven economies seem unequipped to deal with this ultimate tragedy of the commons. Statistically, it will kill 100% of us, or severely degrade our grandchildren's lives, unless we somehow get our shit together on a global scale.
To use a crappy analogy, imagine we're all locked inside a giant container with limited air. There's a blocked air vent at the top, which we can only reach of we all stand on each other's shoulders - i.e. cooperate.
In such circumstances, why continue bickering over what music we should play while we wait for suffocation? Surely it would be better to listen to the other guys music, if it got him onside, and allowed us to move away from our tribal stances and work together on some action against the common threat.
The effects of mass shootings isn't just about the amount of people killed. It's about the anxiety it creates nationally or globally. That's basically what makes terrorism so powerful, but it's not as easy to measure those effects and what they can lead to.
From G.K. Chesterton: "A critic once remonstrated with me saying, with an air of indignant reasonableness, “If you must make jokes, at least you need not make them on such serious subjects.” I replied with a natural simplicity and wonder, “About what other subjects can one make jokes except serious subjects?” It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all.
... The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is not a careless joke. The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is a careless solemnity. If Mr. McCabe really wishes to know what sort of guarantee of reality and solidity is afforded by the mere act of what is called talking seriously, let him spend a happy Sunday in going the round of the pulpits. Or, better still, let him drop in at the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Even Mr. McCabe would admit that these men are solemn — more solemn than I am. And even Mr. McCabe, I think, would admit that these men are frivolous — more frivolous than I am. Why should Mr. McCabe be so eloquent about the danger arising from fantastic and paradoxical writers? Why should he be so ardent in desiring grave and verbose writers? There are not so very many fantastic and paradoxical writers. But there are a gigantic number of grave and verbose writers; and it is by the efforts of the grave and verbose writers that everything that Mr. McCabe detests (and everything that I detest, for that matter) is kept in existence and energy. How can it have come about that a man as intelligent as Mr. McCabe can think that paradox and jesting stop the way? It is solemnity that is stopping the way in every department of modern effort. It is his own favourite “serious methods;” it is his own favourite “momentousness;” it is his own favourite “judgment” which stops the way everywhere." - from Heretics, 1905
And a highly cited study from 2013 addressing Damore's topic directly: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...
The evidence is not 'cherry picked'. It is abundant, comprehensively researched, and well replicated. Take a trip to Google Scholar yourself. It is certainly not 'fringe'. That's why the public reaction was so absurd. Damore was fired for exactly the type of phenomenon Sam Altman is talking about in this post.
Damore wasn't arguing that men's and women's bodies were different - he was taking papers about biological differences and stretching them to supporting his unfounded claims that social differences are based on biology, not social constructs, because he was upset at Google's programs that fight social biases. Some of his citations are cherry picked nonsense, for example the big five analyses saying women are neurotic [1], which have been discredited as being weak lexical factor analysis that can't be attributed to biology [2] (like gender).
The fact that you think these papers are relevant to Damore's memo just further proves the vagueness of his diatribe, and demonstrates your own willingness to project your own views onto it.
> There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys...
The second link is about the advantage men have in mechanical reasoning and how it likely contributes to their representation in STEM fields. It's the title of the paper.
From the Stanford article (which is not peer reviewed):
>Trying to assign exact percentages to the relative contributions of “culture” versus “biology” to the behavior of free-living human individuals in a complex social environment is tough at best. Halpern offers a succinct assessment: “The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.”
Yet again, Damore's paper wasn't making the argument that observational biological differences exist, the point of which you've missed because you're eagerly still trying to prove it right now. Damore's diatribe was that Google's combating of social bias was wrong, and he cherry picked specific data and stretched evidence to falsely support his viewpoint. Which, in context to this thread, is still neither progressive nor conservative and continuing to be proven vague.
No, it wasn't. In fact, the exact opposite: he literally says "I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that ... we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases".
Your [2] doesn't even cite [1], and in any case, [1] has almost 800 citations, while [2] is only cited by the author herself in her other papers. Seems like a stretch to call [1] "discredited".
Number of citations is terrible metric to defend a paper because the reason [2] has less citations is because [2] was published 3 years ago, while [1] was published almost a decade ago.
Appeals to popularity are logic fallacies for a reason.
You have the base for a really good argument that could sway people who are on the fence about the issue but when you say things like "vagueness of his diatribe" you alienate the people you want to change the most.
That is objectively false - Trump won because white voters in the rust belt swung 25 points from Obama to Trump. If you were right that they voted only Republican out of tribalism then Obama would never have won those states.
Trump may have won michigan by only 10k votes, but Obama had a margin of half a million in 2012.