How is that not scientific racism? It's just mildly and passively racist, and scientifically it seems plausible, but it's racist nonetheless, because he's trying to excuse an outcome which is almost certainly affected by bias to some degree, using scientific arguments in the context of *changes to hiring practices.* That essay wasn't addressing academic interests and sent to a psychology journal. It was a suggestion for a company to change its hiring practices.
Science doesn't deal with morals and ethics. It deals with theories, and proofs.
And that's why we don't put science in charge of our social interactions or hiring practices. The world would be an ultra-utilitarian dystopia. And now we've come full-circle back to why scientific racism is wrong.
The scientific correctness of his arguments is irrelevant to the moral or ethical issues here.
A lot of people seem to think that scientific racism is only wrong if the science is wrong. Not so, it's equally wrong whether the science is rock-solid or nonsensical pseudoscience.
Using science to try to justify racism is an ethical problem first and foremost, any incidental scientific problems are a footnote.
You realize that equality of opportunity is pretty much meaningless, right? Animals in the jungle have equality of opportunity. That's why conservatives love to throw the term around so much, it gives them the appearance of having some interest in equality when they don't.
It sounds like you think that equality of opportunity means "no clear and gratuitous bigotry in hiring" and little else.
We should not consider an idea to be bad if it causes inefficiencies (especially from a trickle-down economic point of view). Efficiencies can certainly be bad. The most efficient state of affairs would create a utilitarian, anti-human hellhole. We should be willing to sacrifice efficiencies for the good of society.
To increase equality at all, we need some degree of equality of outcome for certain inputs.
Some of those authors certainly are. Remember that scientific racism and sexism aren't necessarily science problems, they're ethics problems first and foremost. One can use scientifically ironclad arguments to advocate for racism and sexism, and it is still just as ethically wrong as ever.
Both Geoffrey Miller and Lee Jussim appear completely blind to these ethical issues and support scientific racism and sexism in their column - *especially* Miller. He supports scientific racism and sexism like it's 1899. He needs to take an ethics in science course NOW.
David P Schmitt is the only author who understands the ethical problems and mostly stays away from that side of that argument, focusing closely on the science. I see no obvious fault in his column and find it agreeable.
Debra Soh also appears completely blind to the ethical issues. She reads the document like it's an academic essay and not an office email arguing for a change in hiring policies. She's giving scientific sexism a free pass.
The Google employee was absolutely wrong to "raise the issue for debate" in the context of hiring policy. These issues are irrelevant at Google outside of research in any neuroscience or psychology department they may have.
No, there are real differences (obviously not including pseudoscientific fields like phrenology) but using knowledge of those differences for just about any practical purpose (other than perhaps specialized medical treatment) would be racist. There is almost no ethical way to make use of the results of this research.
Hehe I'm glad you enjoyed it! But yeah, the article is advocating for scientific racism and sexism, which is a total nonstarter IMO. Not a fan of going back to unrestrained prejudice in lieu of affirmative action either.
Meanwhile the highly educated elite essentially do the moral equivalent of putting the cherry on top of an ice-cream-sunday that someone else scooped into the glass, the glass that someone else washed, the ice-cream that someone else made from the milk that someone else farmed, and these cherry-placers declare to themselves and the world "look, I made you an ice-cream-sunday."
Replace the cherry with some plastic figures and the ice cream sundae with a wedding cake fit for royalty, and you have an excellent analogy for why CEOs are paid such ridiculous amounts.
What if the "least amount of money that the law will allow" were raised to well above subsistence level, causing top-end incomes to be pulled down to afford minimum wage workers? I wonder whether it would fix this hellworld or cause this awful economic system to collapse.
Hear hear! Seriously, these are the last gasps of common, garden-variety bigotry. We're on the cusp of pushing all the racist uncles into the same closet as the nazis and the klansmen, and they're really not happy with that. Better days are ahead.
No it doesn't. Personal preference? Personal preference for race or gender in business? That's called bigotry. And "authoritative shaming and public posturing" are just attempts to hand-wave away my disagreement with scientific racism as hollow (an appeal to hypocrisy). If you think that the essay in question does not actually support scientific racism or oppose affirmative action entirely, we could debate that.
If you agree that it is making those arguments but disagree that the essay should be disregarded because of that, it's better if we agree to disagree.
You're right, the sources trace back to his own quotes. Honestly I didn't make it all the way through, I quit when I'd had enough baseless assertions that scientific racism/sexism (dressed up as meritocratic, business-optimal and fair) was good and right, and affirmative action was worse than leaving society's prejudices free to do what they will.
I've read it. It is well thought out (considering its goal) and sourced (where sources are used, but there are a number of baseless assertions), and very cleverly written, but the ideas it expresses are not reasonable or novel.
The essay is meticulously written to keep one's racism radar close to background noise level. The effort put into this document's stealth is admirable. There are only a few sentences that should send it into yellow alert.
But under this document's matte black, angled surface, it carries a rather primitive payload of scientific racism and sexism. and blanket opposition to the concept of affirmative action. The author makes his argument by attempting to dress these concepts as the lesser evils and the more meritocratic and logical options. It's a great work of underhanded political writing hiding a rather crude and unremarkable argument.
I was just thinking today that the "thought processes" of the economy have very little perception of time. There is no past and very little future, just the present moment and short-term plans. I'm confident that if businesses could commit to a plan that would cause the earth to blow up in 5 years but would massively boost profits in the meantime, they would do it.
We cannot try to slow this down (AKA America First), we cannot really ignore the problem (AKA basic income). However there needs to be an effort to get people onto the fact that they need to change, because people can change faster then a computer can. This includes Training the employees, and changing businesses to allow people who do not have the experience to get in and build the experience.
Actually you have a couple of the options mixed up. Basic income isn't ignoring the problem, it's setting the foundation for a long-term solution. Training and relocation is ignoring the problem. It's Wile E. Coyote running straight from the cannonball instead of stepping to the side. The cannonball represents artificial intelligence and the cartoon coyote represents an attempt to continually outsmart it, no matter how quickly it's advancing or how fast it will eventually become or how exhausting it is to keep the effort up. Jobs getting more scarce and demanding over time? Let them train and relocate and eat cake.
Basic income sidesteps the problem of people continually having to make themselves smarter or more useful than AI and having to fight over the ever-dwindling number of jobs for such people while the owners of the means of production are pointlessly hyper-enriched until the economy collapses or some kind of atrocity is undertaken to correct it. If the economy is supposed to serve mankind, under these conditions it should be harnessed to do so via basic income. The only reason to disagree is if you worship it as a godlike AI that exists for its own purposes (whatever they may be) and that should not be interfered with.
I switched to Mint long ago. Not only does it have the window controls in the right place, but it has a much more sensible selection of default applications, and I can get it with MATE, a desktop manager that's not trying to be an avant-garde tablet interface.
It's not automation in general you need to worry about, it's killbots specifically. All is not lost until a practical autonomous killbot is developed. Then we enter the Oppression Singularity, leading quickly to widespread killbot-powered genocide. This is much closer to completion and more immediately dangerous than the disembodied AI with superhuman intelligence that some people keep harping on about.
They can sign their names to the guestbook for the right side of history and score some brownie points with the public...that's gotta be worth something.
Slashdot Mirror
How is that not scientific racism? It's just mildly and passively racist, and scientifically it seems plausible, but it's racist nonetheless, because he's trying to excuse an outcome which is almost certainly affected by bias to some degree, using scientific arguments in the context of *changes to hiring practices.* That essay wasn't addressing academic interests and sent to a psychology journal. It was a suggestion for a company to change its hiring practices.
Science doesn't deal with morals and ethics. It deals with theories, and proofs.
And that's why we don't put science in charge of our social interactions or hiring practices. The world would be an ultra-utilitarian dystopia. And now we've come full-circle back to why scientific racism is wrong.
The scientific correctness of his arguments is irrelevant to the moral or ethical issues here.
A lot of people seem to think that scientific racism is only wrong if the science is wrong. Not so, it's equally wrong whether the science is rock-solid or nonsensical pseudoscience.
Using science to try to justify racism is an ethical problem first and foremost, any incidental scientific problems are a footnote.
"With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the blackjack and hookers..." - Disney
You realize that equality of opportunity is pretty much meaningless, right? Animals in the jungle have equality of opportunity. That's why conservatives love to throw the term around so much, it gives them the appearance of having some interest in equality when they don't.
It sounds like you think that equality of opportunity means "no clear and gratuitous bigotry in hiring" and little else.
We should not consider an idea to be bad if it causes inefficiencies (especially from a trickle-down economic point of view). Efficiencies can certainly be bad. The most efficient state of affairs would create a utilitarian, anti-human hellhole. We should be willing to sacrifice efficiencies for the good of society.
To increase equality at all, we need some degree of equality of outcome for certain inputs.
Some of those authors certainly are. Remember that scientific racism and sexism aren't necessarily science problems, they're ethics problems first and foremost. One can use scientifically ironclad arguments to advocate for racism and sexism, and it is still just as ethically wrong as ever.
Both Geoffrey Miller and Lee Jussim appear completely blind to these ethical issues and support scientific racism and sexism in their column - *especially* Miller. He supports scientific racism and sexism like it's 1899. He needs to take an ethics in science course NOW.
David P Schmitt is the only author who understands the ethical problems and mostly stays away from that side of that argument, focusing closely on the science. I see no obvious fault in his column and find it agreeable.
Debra Soh also appears completely blind to the ethical issues. She reads the document like it's an academic essay and not an office email arguing for a change in hiring policies. She's giving scientific sexism a free pass.
The Google employee was absolutely wrong to "raise the issue for debate" in the context of hiring policy. These issues are irrelevant at Google outside of research in any neuroscience or psychology department they may have.
Have you tried watching H.265/HEVC-encoded anime? :-P
No, there are real differences (obviously not including pseudoscientific fields like phrenology) but using knowledge of those differences for just about any practical purpose (other than perhaps specialized medical treatment) would be racist. There is almost no ethical way to make use of the results of this research.
Hehe I'm glad you enjoyed it! But yeah, the article is advocating for scientific racism and sexism, which is a total nonstarter IMO. Not a fan of going back to unrestrained prejudice in lieu of affirmative action either.
Meanwhile the highly educated elite essentially do the moral equivalent of putting the cherry on top of an ice-cream-sunday that someone else scooped into the glass, the glass that someone else washed, the ice-cream that someone else made from the milk that someone else farmed, and these cherry-placers declare to themselves and the world "look, I made you an ice-cream-sunday."
Replace the cherry with some plastic figures and the ice cream sundae with a wedding cake fit for royalty, and you have an excellent analogy for why CEOs are paid such ridiculous amounts.
What if the "least amount of money that the law will allow" were raised to well above subsistence level, causing top-end incomes to be pulled down to afford minimum wage workers? I wonder whether it would fix this hellworld or cause this awful economic system to collapse.
When you say 'racism', do you mean 'White people simply wanting to live around their own kind, and to have their own countries'?
Not exclusively, although racism is inherent to white nationalism.
If so, why do you regard that a crime ONLY when white people do it? Isn't that 'racist' of you?
Total strawman. All forms of ethno-nationalism are wrong.
Well bad news, people create racist pseudosciences or try to use the results of scientific research to justify racism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Hear hear! Seriously, these are the last gasps of common, garden-variety bigotry. We're on the cusp of pushing all the racist uncles into the same closet as the nazis and the klansmen, and they're really not happy with that. Better days are ahead.
No it doesn't. Personal preference? Personal preference for race or gender in business? That's called bigotry. And "authoritative shaming and public posturing" are just attempts to hand-wave away my disagreement with scientific racism as hollow (an appeal to hypocrisy). If you think that the essay in question does not actually support scientific racism or oppose affirmative action entirely, we could debate that.
If you agree that it is making those arguments but disagree that the essay should be disregarded because of that, it's better if we agree to disagree.
You're right, the sources trace back to his own quotes. Honestly I didn't make it all the way through, I quit when I'd had enough baseless assertions that scientific racism/sexism (dressed up as meritocratic, business-optimal and fair) was good and right, and affirmative action was worse than leaving society's prejudices free to do what they will.
I've read it. It is well thought out (considering its goal) and sourced (where sources are used, but there are a number of baseless assertions), and very cleverly written, but the ideas it expresses are not reasonable or novel.
The essay is meticulously written to keep one's racism radar close to background noise level. The effort put into this document's stealth is admirable. There are only a few sentences that should send it into yellow alert.
But under this document's matte black, angled surface, it carries a rather primitive payload of scientific racism and sexism. and blanket opposition to the concept of affirmative action. The author makes his argument by attempting to dress these concepts as the lesser evils and the more meritocratic and logical options. It's a great work of underhanded political writing hiding a rather crude and unremarkable argument.
False dichotomies FTW, amirite?
You could've been one of the pregnant women who needed the drug you jacked up the price of...or one of their fetuses.
But the new verb should be "to Shkreli." Daraprim did nothing wtrong.
I was just thinking today that the "thought processes" of the economy have very little perception of time. There is no past and very little future, just the present moment and short-term plans. I'm confident that if businesses could commit to a plan that would cause the earth to blow up in 5 years but would massively boost profits in the meantime, they would do it.
We cannot try to slow this down (AKA America First), we cannot really ignore the problem (AKA basic income). However there needs to be an effort to get people onto the fact that they need to change, because people can change faster then a computer can. This includes Training the employees, and changing businesses to allow people who do not have the experience to get in and build the experience.
Actually you have a couple of the options mixed up. Basic income isn't ignoring the problem, it's setting the foundation for a long-term solution. Training and relocation is ignoring the problem. It's Wile E. Coyote running straight from the cannonball instead of stepping to the side. The cannonball represents artificial intelligence and the cartoon coyote represents an attempt to continually outsmart it, no matter how quickly it's advancing or how fast it will eventually become or how exhausting it is to keep the effort up. Jobs getting more scarce and demanding over time? Let them train and relocate and eat cake.
Basic income sidesteps the problem of people continually having to make themselves smarter or more useful than AI and having to fight over the ever-dwindling number of jobs for such people while the owners of the means of production are pointlessly hyper-enriched until the economy collapses or some kind of atrocity is undertaken to correct it. If the economy is supposed to serve mankind, under these conditions it should be harnessed to do so via basic income. The only reason to disagree is if you worship it as a godlike AI that exists for its own purposes (whatever they may be) and that should not be interfered with.
I switched to Mint long ago. Not only does it have the window controls in the right place, but it has a much more sensible selection of default applications, and I can get it with MATE, a desktop manager that's not trying to be an avant-garde tablet interface.
It's not automation in general you need to worry about, it's killbots specifically. All is not lost until a practical autonomous killbot is developed. Then we enter the Oppression Singularity, leading quickly to widespread killbot-powered genocide. This is much closer to completion and more immediately dangerous than the disembodied AI with superhuman intelligence that some people keep harping on about.
They can sign their names to the guestbook for the right side of history and score some brownie points with the public...that's gotta be worth something.