-Science = the search for the best explanation given available information [1].
-Political belief = shared myths through which we agree society should be organized [2]
Secondly, don't discount bias in science. Once a paradigm is established, good luck breaking it, especially for complex subjects. It usually takes decades (e.g., DNA is the genetic material, microbiomes are a thing, even relativity).
A more appropriate framing to your statement is "The current paradigms trend what modern society considers left, providing the political lens throughout which researchers interpret their results. Therefore, this big statistical model we call an AI leans 'left'."
[1] David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
[2] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
I think you are ignoring the larger point he is making though.
Lets say society agrees on "We want less crime". Scientifically we can make models of human behaviour, do analysis of what causes crime, what prevents it from becoming epidemic etc.
We do have all that data. Poverty, lack of education and healthcare and punitive judiciary with little help for mental health and drug issues are the main causes.
So if the left says "lets reduce poverty, do needle sharing programs, detox clinics, and defund the police in exchange for neighbourhood cops and mental health helpers at shelters and poorer schools" and the right says "lets give cops a tank and a more dangerous looking outfit". One is aligned with the scientific consensus on the solutions that would help, the other is just idealising violence as a solution to a complex problem.
This is reproducible in other areas where there is social consensus on the problem (economy not growing, housing being expensive, cleaning the environment).
Technocratic solutions aren't always the best and a number of opinions and plans are good, but it is quite crazy seeing people disregard solutions that work in every other country on the simple basis of ideology.
The rights main argument to reduce crime is to promote stable family units as stats consistently show that controlling for single motherhood, children of all races show similar rates of criminal activity. This is not popular with some on the left, which is generally committed to a view that people should be free to do what they want in their relationships. This is N example where the right is pursuing a view consistent with the data and the left is not. There are of course many examples going the other way.
But one of the largest cause of the lack of the cohesive family unit is the “War on Drugs” that was statistically more harshly applied to minorities. But when it comes time for police reform and criminal Justice reform, the right bristles.
Yes I know that the Clintons were the major architects of the tough on crime movement in the 90s.
Considering about 50% of black amle americans spend time in jail (most of which for drug offenses) and the drug war is a complete and utter failure, I would argue that the lefts proposed solutions of decriminisalising drugs like weed, and encouraging inner city rehab programms would have a better and faster return on investment to stop "single mothers" than "promote stable family units" which has no policy attached to it other than add more christianity in school.
Thats just my view point.
Definitely one suggestion from the right is promote their view of social morality, Christianity but also a la carte statements: no infidelity, no sex out of wedlock etc.
Another of their arguments is that welfare payments from the state have made it easier for the poor to not stick together and this has been a driver of single parent households. Ie however well motivated there is a potential harmful unintended consequence here.
Isn't it patently obvious that their view of social morality is relativistic? Considering they endorsed multiple men who have openly paid for abortions, cheated on all their partners etc.
If you believe in social morality you do not put a man like Hersel Walker anywhere near a ballot. Or you would suspend candidates with serious allegations like Gaetz being investigated over dating a minor.
If the proposal is social morality, why not lead by example?
> no sex out of wedlock etc
if the right wing view about economics is that the right incentives will fix the market. Having tax benefits for married couples is already an economic incentive, therefore either their economic policy is wrong, or they shouldn't complaint about this as time will correct the market.
> Another of their arguments is that welfare payments from the state have made it easier for the poor to not stick together and this has been a driver of single parent households.
This might hold water on paper. But in reality every country with stronger social nets has lower crime. Even small experiments with universal credit have been fairly promising in lifting everyones living standards.
In my opinion the lip service to "strong on crime" and "welfare disincentivices people working harder" is done because the consequences on those policies reinforce the status quo. They do not want more police or less welfare because its good for society, they want it because it keeps social mobility from happening. And considering how many people in the right are investing in rent-seeking instead of aggresive and innovative capitalistic ventures I think their actions speak louder than their words.
If the entire Republican party moved to back AI and venture investment, and put forward absolute paragons of business with large perfect families I would believe them. But so far all I see is sketchy car used salesman energy millionaries with legacy degrees promoting business loans and rescues for companies that haven't been competitive in 3 decades.
Absolutely they’d support tax incentives for married couples.
As for stronger social safety nets decreasing crime, sounds good. And yet, the claim I’ve read is that in the USA increases to this have not correlated with improved outcomes to eg household wealth among black Americans (since the 60s). Of course we have a complex system here so hard to make any conclusions.
The same argument could be made about Trump and he got record number of votes. A man who has never stepped inside a church and slept with an adult actress while his foreign third wife was giving birth to his 4th kid.
With 26 lawsuits about inappropiate sexual behaviour. And a history as a debacherous family money bachelor.
if the people on the right cared about social morality why reward that history with the highest office in the land? Its hard to imagine somoene more inappropiate and yet it brought unprecedented support.
> Absolutely they’d support tax incentives for married couples.
those already exist and single mother and sex out of marriage have increased since the 60s, so something seems to not add up.
> And yet, the claim I’ve read is that in the USA increases to this have not correlated with improved outcomes to eg household wealth among black Americans (since the 60s).
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
This is a great source to compare median wealth in America. If even wages for upper middle class have fallen in relative terms in the past 50 years, what effect are gonna marginal increases on substandard welfare programs gonna do?
If your rent goes up 10% annually, who cares if your food stamps go up 1-3%?
Below is a link to single motherhood rates by year. The lift off precedes the drug war so to my mind this discredits the idea that drug war is solely responsible for single parent growth, though I’m sure it has contributed. Thankfully it looks like we may have hit a peak.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_stru...
That's were you mix politics and science. Both sides (generally) agree that less crime, better healthcare and more education is good. One just just says that private healthcare leads to better results and that defunding the police just leads to an even less organized force that is even worse at preventing crime. Given how few samples of large societies we have and how different each country is, we are very far from a scientific consensus on how those issues are best solved.
And this is a clear case of ideological, not scientific thinking.
From an example prespective, the next 23 richest countries behind America, all have public healthcare.
From a mathematical prespective, healthcare is a natural monopoly and therefore not bound by market forces.
From a legislation prespective, free laissex faire medical practice is dangerous and impractical therefore regulation is needed, once you interced to that level, you benefit from integration and monolithic procedural systems.
And from a larger economic view, by tying employment to healthcare you reduce labour strength, which means uncompetitive companies can run for longer by keeping their workers hostage, if they could leave for another company the economy at large would benefit.
Other than believe on paper that gubernamental overreach is inefficient, there is no angle you can justify private healthcare as the sole means of addressing a public need. Even the few arguments that are still used to defend the system such as "wait times" hold little wait when you look at the 40% of Americans who skip recommended surgeries due to cost. Wait times are lower because tons of people are not being provided a service. Which is inarguably much worse than waiting, hence why America has lower living standards and lifespan than the countries they bemoan the waits of.
Also, it would work basically by an insurance model, which can work cheaper the more clients it has, quite trivially. That’s why the next 23 richest country manages to pay less for better care.
Look at the crime graphs, 1990 to now. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/2D7B/production/...
Firstly, we're in a very safe historical period. But right wingers try to freak everybody out as their latest wedge issue, no different from prior wedge issues, like scaring people over gay issues or trying to juice turnout by talking about abortion. (The latter recently backfired, of course, but was more effective for them in the past.)
It should be obvious from crime graphs that policing does not shape crime rates, it moves on larger trends that are harder to understand.
Thanks for illustrating the point about paradigm shifts being tough and entrenching bias. This is especially true for soft fields such as history. Doubly so when researchers show cracks in the soft field with physicochemical data that does not agree with the prevailing view.
Sapiens is bad because the author has a limited background. He is the best historian in terms of military dairies, a super cool niche subject. he made great points about it being the original precussor to the modern novel and did some fantastic research into this small lit genre.
He was then forced to take a class of Hisotry 101 in uni, a subject he didn't know or care about. While preparing the class, with material for 18 year olds, he wrote the book. He did not contrast a lot of his findings. And the book became famous because people like Bill Gates and Obama praised it. They praised because the book is well written and it largely has a nice humanitarian angle.
But they miss the problems the book has, because neither of them has a history background. Many of the problems are not in the facts but in the correlations, threads relating them etc, where the author essentially writes abeaautiful chain of causality that is entirely non existant.
In other words, he wrote a fantastic story about the history of humanity, not a true one. It has academic value in so far highschoolers and 101 students can get some interesting facts explained really well. But as a presentation of rigurous historical facts, event sequences or terminology, its not a good resource, at all. There is a reason there is largely cynicism in the "Scholarly review" quotes that are used on the wikipedia page of the very book
Depends on whom you talk to. For example, just today one letter-writer gave a nicely time-and-space-independent definition:
"Conservatism isn’t about halting progress but maintaining the freedom necessary to facilitate it. Conservatism, in the American political sense, represents the ideals of limited government, free markets, individual rights and the rule of law."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-neglected-conservatism-repu...
> Conservatism, in the American political sense
Which is exactly the parent's point.
I don't see how contextualizing an overloaded word ("conservatism") weakens what I quoted. Those principles are independent.
> one letter-writer gave a nicely time-and-space-independent definition
But the quote you gave was specifically American, i.e. not independent of either space or (technically) time.
Indeed,
> Classical liberalism is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics; civil liberties under the rule of law with especial emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government [0]
While your link says,
> Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state.
While not entirely orthogonal, these political positions are also not fully compatible. In particular, religion almost always impinges on individual liberties - especially bodily autonomy. And Burke clearly supported a state that classical liberals would have wanted to tear down.
Anyway I think that’s enough responding to non-sequiturs for today.
> commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation
(from Apple dictionary)
"a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change. specifically : such a philosophy calling for lower taxes, limited government regulation of business and investing, a strong national defense, and individual financial responsibility for personal needs"
No wonder the kids these days have knee-jerk reactions to "conservatism" when Apple hands out such balderdash and people accept Apple's word as gospel.
Is it really a surprise after taking away fundamental bodily autonomy from half of the population? That is a government overreach, if anything.
I'm not expecting you to accept that philosophical position, but I hope it explains how the governmental policy is only an overreach to the extent that a particular unprovable and unfalsifiable philosophical position is correct.
There is a much brighter dividing line between gametes and embryos than between pre-viability and post-viability embryos, so just on the basis of legal certainty it would be better to say that life starts at conception. I also think that it is philosophically parsimonious to define human beings as unified entities with distinct DNA from their parents, otherwise each skin cell should have its own human rights (which would mean that obese people get to cast more votes than skinny people).
In any case, given that there is ambiguity on where to draw the line, the safest approach is to pick the earliest practical point, since mistakenly protecting non-humans is better than mistakenly manslaughtering entities that we later concede were humans. If we take the view that every gamete has to become a human life, then nearly everyone in the country should be arrested as soon as they reach puberty.
It is all about making a certain technology prohibitively expensive so that they can protect their pet projects and their paying constituents.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardgleckman/2022/03/31/the-m...
See for an origin of the term https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/
But that Apple definition is still balderdash.
But if you would have paid any attention to.. well, anything you would have known that it is not about sex, but gender, which usually correlates, but not always.
Also, due to chimerism (I guess that’s what you are getting at with your last two sentences) even genetic sex-determination is only probabilistic — they try to find several Y chromosomes to identify someone’s sex as male.
the right stance extrapolates from current understanding plus history
one has faith in the modern prosperous progressive society, the other has seen them fall to brutality and chaos countless times.
but surely this time it will be different, we are after all educated civilized people.
No seriously, this is the main thrust of conservatism. It perceives the thinness of the veil of polite society and does the only thing that has been seen working consistently so far.
¹ adding a cultural marker here because it's not universal. In NL, this would correspond to "center" if I'm understanding these general labels correctly.