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mrrrgnon One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

I'm trying to figure out what you mean by "white supremacy" because you use it so often it seems like something nebulous.

So it seems that "white supremacy" is a catchall term for anything that argues a biological basis for group differences. Thank you for the links and for not just being aghast that I didn't know this. :]

mrrrgnon Googlers Are Protesting Company’s Deals with Big Oil

> Are you implying that the Googlers involved are doing this to advance themselves?

I'm stating the obvious fact that former Googlers have made themselves notable by engaging in public activism while at the company. Both conservative and liberal. If one dreams of becoming an activist and one happens to work at Google there are footsteps to follow in.

Insofar as personal advancement goes. While there are exceptions, it should be fair to expect that what one does at work may be somehow related to personal advancement. This can be advancement in terms of getting promotions, growing skills, or establishing a reputation.

Wholly selfless people aren't the norm in corporate work environments. That's fine. You can be a good person and not wholly selfless.

mrrrgnon Googlers Are Protesting Company’s Deals with Big Oil

This sounds exactly like the kind of thing that people who have various other religious conversions say. They have this profound ineffable moral "awakening" and then see fit to start integrating it into every aspect of their lives up to and including trying to "awaken" other people. It's very disturbing to see people go through this process in my opinion as it's a stark reminder that even the most intelligent and thoughtful human beings can essentially have their minds hijacked. It makes me wonder if and when I'll have my mind hijacked, or if it already is (people who have been pwned this way surely don't realize it).

mrrrgnon Googlers Are Protesting Company’s Deals with Big Oil

At this point it's looking like the potential to kickstart a professional "activism" career is becoming a fringe benefit at Google. Given that, it's probably best to protest things that will win the attention of mainstream [non-tech] audiences so as to position oneself for the maximum possible upside.

mrrrgnon Lifetime Earnings Are 40-50% Heritable

I absolutely don't disagree with you. Personality traits and aptitudes are strongly inherited, along with some genetic randomness and some environmental conditioning. What I don't like is full on genetic determinism. Human beings transmit both genes AND memes for a reason. As sentient beings we inhabit two universes. The one made of atoms and the one made of thought and ideas.

Compare, say, humans and ants.

Ants seem to have a ROM of sorts: software embedded in genes and immutable within a single organism's lifetime. They only inhabit the world of atoms.

Humans have a ROM to cover basic functions but also writable memory. We can change our behaviors within a single lifetime and then if that wasn't cool enough we can also TRANSMIT those behaviors without genes via the world of thought and ideas (language).

We ought to never forget that. Fatalism binds us too strongly to the physical world. It's a bad path that leads to nihilism (struggle against nature is futile), cruelty (everyone deserves their lot in life since if they were capable of more they would have achieved it), and despair (self-actualization is impossible, I am an automaton).

mrrrgnon Lifetime Earnings Are 40-50% Heritable

While I think on the whole our society is very biased toward a Boasian view of nature versus nurture: "give me a child and I can raise it to have any personality and aptitudes via deliberate rearing techniques." I'm skeptical of some of the conclusions being drawn from this study.

Environment has not been entirely separated out here it seems. And while a comparison of fraternal and identical twins detangles things somewhat it doesn't completely.

My intuition is that a person's personality and aptitudes (around 50% heritable according to many studies) can help them to take advantage of their environment in certain ways. So it's not that environment doesn't matter at all. It's just that people with varying attributes will leverage their environment in different ways, leading to different outcomes.

It would be even more interesting to me to see the personality profiles of the children compared against their future earnings. My guess is there would be a strong correlation since personality -> interests -> career choices.

Then it would just so happen that identical twins have similar personalities. Leading to the results we see here.

Admittedly I'm hopeful that if we could figure out the correlation between personality and environment maybe we could shift our focus away from the unhealthy extremes of 100% nurture (leads to children being pushed by their parents to fit into a mold that may not suit them) and 100% nature (genetic fatalism leads to apathy and hopelessness). Instead what if we took a child's natural gifts and personality profile into account and tailored their environment to maximize their potential within those constraints? Seems like a more hopeful and useful path.

mrrrgnon Chick-fil-A’s first UK location to close after pressure from LGBTQ rights group

> Fascinating to see such clear ramifications of allowing religious beliefs to creep into the outcome of successful product expansion.

Dicks sporting goods recently took a stand against firearms that raised the ire of some of its customer base. Tons of companies go out of their way to support political messages all the time. I'd say taking moral/political positions is very much a normal tactic these days in the business world.

Time will tell how it pans out, but my guess is that it isn't some sort of disaster. Most people seem apathetic to such messaging and for every person who decides to buy a chicken sandwich from Popeye's instead of Chik-fil-a in order to "fight hate" there will probably be another one or two who go out of their way to eat Chik-fil-a in order to "stick it to the man" or whatever.

I'm just curious when this phenomenon started. Has it always existed? It seems like a straightforward tactic for building brand loyalty (staking out a position on some sort of lifestyle issue).

mrrrgnon Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

There's no way that you can form a tally from the sum total of a person's entire lineage in order to equalize them according to their ancestors struggles. Attempts to do this seem mostly to act as a laundering scheme for financial privilege. Now all someone from a wealthy family needs to do to justify their admission to elite institutions is to find some great great grandparent who plausibly suffered a systemic injustice.

I see the good intentions here, but I get the impression that well meaning rule oriented people are being used to further the very injustices they mean to solve.

mrrrgnon When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials

1982 - 1996, that is more than ten years. But the people in that range would have shared formative experiences during the '00s. Thus the moniker millenials.

mrrrgnon When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone

As the namesake suggests, "millenials" are ideally people who were young-adults around the 00's. That generally means born from the early/mid 80's to mid-90's.

Gen z were/are young adults during the '10s. Gen alpha will be young adults during the '20s.

Generally a person's pre-teen/teen/early 20's are very formative so the shared experiences that a generation will have probably do form a real connective tissue within the age cohort that separates them from those with different experiences. A binary (anyone less than x years old is a y) isn't so useful to describe such a phenomenon.

mrrrgnon The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

"Operation Mockingbird is an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early 1950s and attempted to manipulate news media for propaganda purposes."

mrrrgnon Dead Malls

I feel like you misread the thread here and jumped hastily into taking an accusatory tone.

The argument in the thread was essentially:

Person One: It's bad to say that one group "took over" an area from another instead of using a term like "demographics shifted."

Person Two: Why is it bad? If someone said that White people "took over" an area it seems unlikely that a negative connotation would be assumed.

You responded with an offhand comment about gentrification being involved with racism, then painted a picture of the person you were responding to as someone who lives in a gated community playing golf with out of touch people.

The thread was already becoming a terrible exercise in whataboutism. This added element of describing commenters as if they were bad guys from 1980's summer camp films made it even worse.

mrrrgnon Secret Memos Show the Government Has Been Lying About Backpage All Along

Why not discuss the article rather than post drive by links to supposed "bias fact check" sites which don't themselves seem to be authoritative....?

mrrrgnon The Population Bust

If the tendency to have large families is heritable in some measurable way, maybe because of beliefs or personality traits, wouldn't the carriers of whatever makes them have more babies eventually overtake the rest of the population?

It may not be the case that this is how it will work, but it's not a foregone conclusion that "on average" most people will continue to not want to have kids even in the "first world."

(Don't Mormons for instance have a fertility rate well above replacement despite also having higher than average incomes?)

mrrrgnon Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

What comes after we pull ourselves out of the "marketplace of ideas?" With no marketplace where will original thought come from?

The whole point of the marketplace is to sift through all the bad stuff and find the diamonds in the rough. You can't have a market without bad stuff, and the benefit of having a market is that it finds good stuff.

A world with less bad ideas is a world with less good ideas.

It's not impossible to create. It's not necessarily bad. But it would make our society much less dynamic.

mrrrgnon Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

A lot of partially informed individuals en masse may act more "informed" on the whole than what you're giving them credit for. It's also a less brittle organizational structure than having a few authorities who are supposedly totally or mostly well informed. If any of the authorities aren't actually as well informed as you'd thought, it has a large impact. It would take a very substantial number of peers in a peer to peer system to create the same sort of miscalibration.

mrrrgnon Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

There is a difference between a platform and a publisher. Publishers can curate, platforms aren't supposed to.

As I understand it, whether social media companies are platforms or publishers forms the actual core and substance of this debate about "free speech."

edit Apparently there is no legal distinction between a platform and a publisher? It looks like this article may explain the confusion that I myself had. => https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-...

mrrrgnon A Black Hole Engulfing the World's Bond Markets

I guess it's not a penalty if you are able to invest the money you get from the helicopter drop in assets, or a sweet gaming rig, while other people are just paying down debt?

mrrrgnon “My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

> I don't remember any sanctions on Chechen republic after it separated from Russia, for example.

The double standards are all explained by geopolitical maneuvering. Western powers pulled Kiev into their orbit and threatened to use that influence to harm Russia's economic and military capabilities.

The tl;dr is that Russia needs access to warm water ports. They were happy to lease a port from the Ukraine until rumors began spreading in Kiev that Russia's lease would be ended.[1][2] Because the Russian economy and military couldn't afford to lose access to a naval base with a warm water port they decided to take drastic action.

Another odd footnote about this situation is that Crimea was given as a "symbolic" gift to the Ukraine while the USSR was still strong.[3] It's not like it's some ancient sacred Ukranian land. It's just very valuable for trade and military purposes.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/na...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Pact

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_transfer_of_Crimea#Compli...

mrrrgnon The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

> That sounds a bit naturalist fallacy

When we see things in nature, it's always possible that they serve a purpose. Adaptive traits are selected for. It's also possible they aren't.

It seems there are three possibilities:

  - Trait is useful.

  - Trait was useful (no longer is).

  - Trait is neutral.

> Besides shouldn't proper deep thinkers should be able to weigh risks of ideologies?

Shouldn't a good programmer be able to look at a program and its input and determine with 100% certainty whether or not the program will halt?

It might seem so but of course we know from computer science that they [in the general case] cannot. Deep thinking and intelligence alone aren't enough to predict all of the possible routes through a complex problem space.

Some things just have to be tried in order to be understood. And because of that it's probably safe to stick with things that have been tried before over things that seem reasonable to some smart but not all knowing person but that haven't been tried before.

Aren't most mutations harmful afterall?

mrrrgnon The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

Certain personality types are more likely to ignore social pressure and pursue logical conclusions of ideals. It's probably no accident that such personality profiles only account for a small percentage of our population as logical conclusions based off of faulty models can lead to huge disasters.

The great mass of people who don't do much deep thinking act as a dampener and probably prevent our society from shaking itself apart as it whips to and fro across the space of all possible ideologies.

mrrrgnon The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

Well I'll be. I'd thought that the rules were more strict. It appears that even if the bank does run out of bills more can be created by writing on pieces of paper.

mrrrgnon The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

We sort of live in a finite universe in terms of matter and energy right? Conservation laws seem to imply that. So at a large enough scale life would have to be zero sum. I guess what people may actually be arguing about is at what scale the finite aspects of the universe actually matter?

On an anecdotal level, while thinking that everything is zero sum all the time probably isn't good, I find that the majority of the people I interact find it very difficult to imagine that anything is "zero sum." Since they associate "zero sum" with mean things like harsh competition. It seems like that's its own sort of "bias."

mrrrgnon The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

Monopoly is a zero sum game. So perceiving it as such shouldn't be the bias that leads to poor strategy.

(edit: it seems that it may be possible to play monopoly in a way that generates infinite money and with no win condition)

mrrrgnon Woman with Transplanted Uterus Gives Birth, the First in the U.S

What's "their kind?"

mrrrgnon Women candidates for tech jobs did worse when their voices were masked as men's

I think the easiest solution would be to just conduct the interview via text only. You could even apply filters to transform some common grammatical structures or word choices with gender cues into a more neutral form.

mrrrgnon How Chinese Students Saved America's Colleges

Their point stands. The Chinese government is a bad actor with a history of tapping university students for industrial espionage. Their population also dwarfs ours which could justify some concern about American students being "crowded out."

mrrrgnon Women candidates for tech jobs did worse when their voices were masked as men's

Have you heard a woman's voice in this "masked" state? It still sounds extremely feminine because of the manner of speaking. It's very odd. You can even hear it in this short clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqRIvd9d5s

That alone gives the observation questionable merit.

mrrrgnon Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

I hope that they normalized the data to account for the number of words spoken during each debate, rally, etc... This is important because of Zipf's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

If they didn't, the findings are invalid.

mrrrgnon Jobs Involving Routine Tasks Aren't Growing

Progress implies moving toward a goal. What goal are we moving toward? Our society and economy aren't optimized for scenarios involving large scale unemployment. What use is automation if it only leads to mass human suffering?