reader5000

"Consensus" particularly in complex empirical areas (e.g. are eggs healthy?) is observably in constant flux with various strategic actors exerting heavy influence. For any question more complex than pure math there is always uncertainty and strategic bias.

Words cannot cause physical harm.

What if Amazon began censoring authors of color?

This simply opens up a place in the market for uncensored book sales. If I want an honest search of the web I don't go to Google because they heavily censor and bias their search results. If I want to peruse the true set of literature on a particular topic I don't go to Amazon for the same reasons. I really don't see this "safe space" strategy paying off for these major tech brands. The holier-than-thou internet simply makes itself irrelevant. People can tell the difference between an honest retrieval of information versus a heavily censored retrieval of information in accordance with some ideological canon.

Continuity existing between separate categories doesn't mean categories are arbitrary nor artifacts of language. For example adults and children really are separate categories for many important purposes yet there is never a single day when a child becomes an adult.

More in depth article from Reich: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r....

Most empirical data indicates that white people are arrested and convicted at a higher rate relative to basal offense rate than black people.

There is no convincing evidence that arrest rates "severely" overestimate offense rates; if anything it is just as likely arrest rates underestimate offense rates.

NKoS is definitely worth reading especially if you have "boolean" in your username. And it's mostly pictures anyway.

But I thought the more a degree costs the more it magically increases lifetime earnings?

I'm not sure that China is significantly more prone to censorship than Reddit, if at all.

A lot of these debates ignore that evolutionary success is simply defined as persistence. If population A has 90% infant mortality and lives on $1 day but has genetic descendants 1000 years from now, then they are evolutionarily "better" than population B that has <1% infant mortality, lives on $100 day, and has no genetic descendants 1000 years from now. Declaring one group a "have" and another group a "have not" is myopic. Literally every group on the face of the earth at some level believes they are "chosen" and superior to other groups. The only way to actually tell though is to see which genes are still geneing 1000 years, 10,000 years, etc into the future. To date it's not even clear that multicellularity is that great of a branch to be on.

Harvard was founded and held by WASPs in the 17th century, was conquered by Jews in the late 20th century, and will be conquered by Asians in the coming decades. There is the interesting question of whether the cultural relevancy of an Asian Harvard will drift into something like Caltech but you can't stop globalism!

Indeed.

Who gets to determine what is "hatred"? The natural upvote/downvote economy of the internet or a self-appointed anonymous class of bigtech mass-censors? When you go on the internet would you prefer to see reality or an artificial selection of on-canon content pre-approved by the priest-media class as in the age of television? In many ways it doesn't matter because infotech decentralization will slowly find a way, and forcible censorship will no longer be possible.

The same reason we should allow modern day sjws a platform to call for the extermination of whites.

Maybe there's a reason a "bad idea" is clickbait.

The letter is encouraging in that it at least softly implies Microsoft applies a First Amendment analysis to take down issues. A First Amendment analysis is much superior and more just compared to the injustice applied to Alex Jones and any number of 10000s of removed youtube videos and so on. At the end of the day, tech companies need to realize they are just common carrier pipes and do not have authority to police the bits on their servers anymore than a city bus has the authority to police the politics of its passengers.

I would disagree. I think selling a person a computer/electricity which they use to make a podcast is as "wildly direct" as selling server hosting (social media platform) for the podcast.

It is an odd situation where Asians are academically superior to Westerners, yet Western academic universities are globally considered more "prestigious" than any Asian university.

The tension between "all non-Anglo culture is unconditionally progressive" versus "we have to pretend linguistic gender is political" is amusing. The meme that the standard English "he", used in the context of referring to a gender unspecified person, is oppressive can't be older than the 60's; it's probably possible to document its exact source and rate of spread. The meme doesn't even make sense for its own purposes because it disallows an English speaker to refer to a person in a gender unspecified way.

What works for me is purchasing and reading textbooks (look for online college syllabuses for good ones). Probably the best way to read maths texts is to work the problems, but what I do is read it through once or twice. Then switch to a different text on the same subject. Things will slowly start to click, although of course you don't understand something until you can explain it (i.e. write a blog post about it) to someone else.

Yes, when affirmative action becomes status quo, you get a stable population of whoever you are affirming into the profession. However, that is not removing an explicit form of discrimination but rather introducing one.

Certainly, it is quite difficult to predict what psychological profile will succeed in a particular profession. But observing that males tend to succeed in programming is not begging the question whether males have relative genetic predisposition to programming (especially at the top 0.1% google level) but rather serves as evidence for the proposition.

When we observe for instance that Asians are overrepresented as programmers, we don't use that to infer that non-Asians are discriminated against, but rather that for whatever reason Asians seem to possess some trait profile, possibly genetic, possibly not, advantageous for programming work.

I'm not claiming that women were never discriminated against, just that it does not appear to be the best explanation for the observed large trends in gender ratios. For instance it doesn't explain male/female behavior differences in other arenas like criminality while genetic differences does.

I'm not sure about that, for instance the below link claims 91% of victims of sexual assault are female.

https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc...

There are more male programmers than female. Please explain how invoking genetic differences explanations is pseudo scientific, whereas invoking systematic discrimination explanations is not pseudo-scientific.

Consider: There are more male rapists than female rapists. Is this because female rapists are systematically discriminated against? Does our society shamefully teach children that raping is only for boys? Or are males simply genetically more predisposed to rape relative to females?

If males are genetically more likely to rape, should we lock them all up at birth? I guess not?

>The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed on a biological level between 1984 and today.

Alternatively, that the nature of software work changed.

True but this is the first generation where the young people have to pay up front just for the opportunity to work to pay for the old.

And paying on a mortgage yields a house you can live in. Paying on a student loan yields an ongoing exploitation of older generations on younger generations.

The only poor decision made was for the taxpayer to offer student loans in the first place. This necessitated taking the loans in order to be competitive. Canceling existing student debt does not "reward" people who took the loans, it simply nullifies the original exploitation. The only person being "penalized" is the taxpayer who deserves it for handing out $100k loans to 18 year olds.

All of this stuff is accessible in real life, and in a fuller way. I don't think missing out on 1000s of hours of Instagram consumption is a particular disadvantage, especially if those 1000s of hours were spent actually hanging out with friends or playing sports etc.