Upvoted your comment for asking in the first place.

If your post was a novel explanation of some aspect of rationality, and wasn't just about landing punches on libertarianism, I'd want to see it. If it was pretty much just about criticizing libertarianism, I wouldn't.

I say this as someone very unsympathetic to libertarianism (or at least what contemporary Americans usually mean by 'libertarianism') - I'm motivated by a feeling that LW ought to be about rationality and things that touch on it directly, and I set the bar high for mind-killy topics, though I know others disagree with me about that, and that's OK. So, though I personally would want to downvote a top-level post only about libertarianism, I likely wouldn't, unless it were obnoxiously bare-faced libertarian baiting.

I will vote it down unless you say something that I have not seen before. I think that it was a good idea to not make LW a site for rehearsing political arguments, but if you have thought of something that hasn't been said before and if you can explain how you came up with it then it might be a good reasoning lesson.

I'd love to read it, though I may well disagree with a lot of it. I'd prefer it if it were kept more abstract and philosophical, as opposed to discussing current political parties and laws and so forth: I think that would increase the light-to-heat ratio.

Not enough information to answer. I will upvote your post if I find it novel and convincing by rationalist lights. Try sending draft versions to other contributors that you trust and incorporate their advice before going public. I can offer my help, if being outside of American politics doesn't disqualify me from that.

I'm interested.

I have similar sensory issues on occasion and believe them to be a component of my autism, but if you don't have other features of an ASD then this could just be a sensory integration disorder. When it's an auditory processing issue, I find that listening to loud techno or other music with a strong beat helps more than other types of music, and ear-covering headphones help filter out other noise. I'm more often assaulted by textures, which I have to deal with by avoiding contact with the item(s).

As for the long day, that sounds like a matter of running out of (metaphorical) spoons. Paying attention to what activities drain or replenish said spoons, and choosing spoon-neutral or spoon-positive activities whenever they're viable options, is the way to manage this.

Given that this now opens the door for artificially designed and deployed harmful viruses, perhaps unfriendly AI falls a few notches on existentialist risk ladder.

I agree that AI deterrence will necessarily fail if:

1. All AI's modify themselves to ignore threats from all agents (including ones it considers irrational), and

2. any deterrence simulation counts as a threat.

Why do you believe that both or either of these statements are true? Do you have some concrete definition of 'threat' in mind?

I think that question is a conversation stopper because those who do not have children who not feel qualify and those that do have children know what a complex and tricky question it is. Personally I don't think there is a method that fits all children and all relationships with them. But... You might try activities rather than presents. 'Oh cool, uncle is gone to make a video with us and we're going to do it at the zoo.' If you get the right activity (depends on child), they will remember it and what you did and said for years. I had a uncle that I only saw a few times but he showed me how to make and throw a bomerang. He explained why it returned. I have thanked him for that day for 60 years.

Sin could be the greatest tool for bad managers everywhere since Total Quality Management.

That sounds like the kind of remark that goes out of its way to offend several categories of people at once. :)

But in that category the gold standard remains Evelyn Waugh's “now that they no longer defrock priests for sexual perversities, one can no longer get any decent proofreading.”

Speaking as an engineer, I'd think he wasn't talking about subjective aspects: "The guy who came first" is the one which was copied (perfectly) to make the clone, and therefore existed before the clone existed.

Ok. Reading the paper now. Some aspects are bit technical and so I don't follow all of the arguments or genetic claims other than at a broad level. However, the money quote is "Therefore, UCA is at least 10^2,860 times more probable than the closest competing hypothesis." (I've replaced the superscript with a ^ becaause I don't know how to format superscripts). 10^2860 is a very big number.

Yes, under two conditions:

1. It is announced in advance and properly implemented.

2. It does not delete other affiliate codes if links are posted with affiliate codes.

Breaking both these rules is one of the many things which Livejournal has done wrong in the last few years, which is why I mention them.

TLDR: “War” is the inter-group version of “duel” (ie, lawful conflict). “Assassination” is the inter-group version of “murder” (ie, unlawful conflict).

My first “intuition about the intuition” is that it’s a historical consequence: During most history, things like freedom, and power and responsibility for enforcement of rules when conflicts (freedom vs. freedom) occur, were stratified. Conflicts between individuals in a family are resolved by the family (e.g. by the head thereof), conflicts between families (or individuals in different families) by tribal leaders or the kind. During feudalism the “scale” was formalized, but even before we had a large series of family → group → tribe → city → barony → kingdom → empire.

The key about this system is that attempts to “cross the borders” in this system, for instance punishing someone from a different group directly rather than invoking punishment from that group’s leadership is seen as an intrusion in that group’s affairs.

So assassination becomes seen as the between-group version of murder: going around the established rules of society. That’s something that is selected against in social environments (and has been discussed elsewhere).

By contrast, war is the “normal” result when there is no higher authority to recurse to, in a conflict of groups. Note that, analogously, for much of history duels were considered correct methods of conflict resolution between some individuals, as long as they respected some rules. So as long as, at least in theory, there are laws of war, war is considered a direct extension of that instinct. Assassination is seen as breaking rules, so it’s seen differently.

A few other points:

• war is very visible, so you can expend a lot of signaling to dehumanize the adversary.
• but assassination is supposed to be done in secret, so you can’t use propaganda as well (assassinating opposing leadership during a war is not seen as that much of a big problem; they’re all infidels/drug lords/terrorists anyway!)
• assassination was a bit harder (even now, drones are expensive), and failed assassination attempts would lead to escalation to war often, anyway
• assassination is oriented towards leaders, who have an interest to discourage, as much as they can, the concept. You can do that, e.g., via the meme that conflict is only honorable when it’s between armored knights on horses and the like. (For best results, add another meme which implies that observing that peasants are not allowed to own armor and horses is “dissent”.)

Who thinks assassination is worse than war?

I could make an argument for it, though: If countries engaged regularly in assassination, it would never come to a conclusion, and would not reduce (and might increase) the incidence of war. Phrasing it as "which is worse" makes it sound like we can choose one or the other. This assumes that an assassination can prevent a war (and doesn't count the cases where it starts a war).

I've always assumed that the norm against assassination, causally speaking, exists mostly due to historical promotion by leaders who wanted to maintain a low-assassination equilibrium, now maintained largely by inertia. (Of course, it could be normatively supported by other considerations.)

It makes sense to me that people would oversimplify the effect of assassination in basically the way you describe, overestimating the indispensability of leaders. I know I've seen a study on the effects of assassination on terrorist groups, but can't find a link or remember the conclusions.

Awwwww :D

PS: If this endorsement of house food quality encourages anyone to apply for an SIAI fellowship, note your inspiration in the e-mail! We receive referral rewards!

Related, Obama authorizes assassination of US citizen. I'm amazed how little anybody seems to care.

Is there a consensus on whether or not it's OK to discuss not-specifically-rationality-related politics on LW?

This looks like very expensive way to kill terrorists, like 100k$ per militant not counting sunken costs such as the 4.5 mil price tag per drone. And not trying to estimate the cost of civilian deaths.

This seems like the sort of activity Google Wave is (was?) meant for.

No idea about the time lag-- my posts show up quickly-- but my intuition says that a fair coin has a 1/2 probability of being heads, and nothing about the experiment changes that.

Nope, new posts should show up immediately (or maybe with a half hour delay or so; I seem to recall that the sidebars are cached, but for far less than two days). Did it appear to post successfully, just not showing up? The only thing I can think of is that you might not have switched the "Post to" menu from "Drafts for neq1" to "LessWrong".

Whoooohooo! Awsomest thing in the last ten years of genetic news for me! YAAY! WHO HOO!!! /does a little dance / I want to munch on that delicious data!

Ahem.

Sorry about that.

But people 1 to 4% admixture! This is big! This gets an emotional response from me!That survived more than a thousand generations of selection, the bulk of it is probably neutral but think about how many perfectly usefull and working allels we may have today (since the Neanderthalls where close to us to start with). 600 000 or something years of speration these guys evolved sperate from us for nearly as long as the fictional Vampires in Blindsight.

It seems some of us are have a bit our ancestors picked of another species in our genes! Could this have anything to do with behavioural modernity that started off at about the same time the populations crossbred in the middle east ~100 000 years ago? Which adaptations did we pick up? Think of the possiblities!

Ok I'll stop the torrent of downvote magnet words and get back to reading about this. And then everything else my grubby little paws can get on Neanderthals, I need to brush up!

Edit: I just realized part of the reason why I got so excited is because it shows I may have a bit of exotic ancestry. Considering how much people, all else being equal, like to play up their "foreign" or "unusual" semimythical ancestors or even roots in conversation, national myths or on the census instead of the ethnicity of the majority of their ancestors this may be a more general bias, that I could of course quickly justify with a evo psych "just so" story but I'll refrain from that to search for what studies have to say about this.

To save everyone the googling: VXX is an exchange traded fund (basically a stock) whose value tracks the level of the VIX index. The VIX index is a measure of the volatility of the markets, with higher values indicating higher volatility (volatility here generally implying lost market value). VIX stands at about 33 now, and was around 80 during the '08 crisis.

Continuing on the "last responsible moment" comment from one of the other responders - would it not be helpful to consider the putting off of a task until the last moment as an attempt to gather the largest amount of information persuant to the task without incurring any penalty?

Having poor focus and attention span I use an online todo-list for work and home life where I list every task as soon as I think of it, whether it is to be done within the next hour or year. The list soon mounts up, occassionally causing me anxiety, and I regularly have cause to carry a task over to the next day for weeks at a time - but what I have found is that a large number of tasks get removed because a change makes the task no longer necessary and a small proportion get notes added to them while they stay on the list so that the by the time the task gets actioned it has been enhanced by the extra information.

By having everything captured I can be sure no task will be lost, but by procrastinating I can ensure the highest level of efficiency in the tasks that I do eventually perform.

Thoughts?

the most extreme example is depressed people having an increased risk of suicide if an antidepressant lifts their akrasia before it improves their mood.

I suspect it’s just a figure of speech, but can you elaborate on what you meant by “evil” above?

Good observations.

Sometimes I procrastinate for weeks about doing something, generally non-urgent, only to have something happen that would have made the doing of it unnecessary. (For instance, I procrastinate about getting train tickets for a short trip to visit a client, and the day before the visit is due the client rings me to call it off.)

The useful notion here is that it generally pays to defer action or decision until "the last responsible moment"; it is the consequence of applying the theory of options valuation, specifically real options, to everyday decisions.

A top-level post about this would probably be relevant to the LW readership, as real options are a non-trivial instance of a procedure for decision under uncertainty. I'm not entirely sure I'm qualified to write it, but if no one else steps up I'll volunteer to do the research and write it up.

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Massimo Pigliucci just recently had a dialogue on Bloggingheads.tv. The title is The Great Singularity Debate.

After Yudkowsky at the beginning gives three different definitions of "the singularity" they discuss strong artificial intelligence and consciousness. Pigliucci is the one who quite quickly takes the discussion from intelligence to consciousness. Just before that they discuss whether simulated intelligence is actually intelligence. Yudkowsky made an argument (something like) if the AI can solve problems over a sufficiently broad range of areas and give answers then that is what we mean by intelligence, so if it manages to do that then it has intelligence. I.e., it is then not "just simulating to have intelligence" but is actually intelligent. Pigliucci however seems to want to distinguish between those and say that "well it may then just simulate intelligence, but maybe it is not actually having it". (Too difficult for me to summarize it very well, you have too look for yourself if you want it more accurately.)

There it seemed to me (but I am certainly not an expert in the field) that Yudkowsky's definition looked reasonable. It would have been interesting to have that point elaborated in more detail though.

Pigliucci's point seemed to be something like that for the only intelligence that we know so far (humans (and to lesser extent other higher animals)) intelligence comes together with consciousness. And for consciousness we know less, maybe only that the human biological brain somehow manages to have it, and therefore we of course do not know whether or not e.g. a computer simulating the brain on a different substrate will also be conscious. Yudkowsky seemed to think this very likely while Pigliucci seemed to think that very unlikely. But what I lacked in that discussion is what do we know (or reasonable conjecture) about the connection between intelligence and consciousness? Of course Pigliucci is right in that for the only intelligence we know of so so far (the human brain) intelligence and consciousness comes together. But for me (who do not know much about this subject matter) that seems not a strong argument for discussing them so closely together when it comes to artificial intelligence. Maybe someone here on Less Wrong who knows more about connection or not between intelligence and consciousness? For a naive non-expert like me intelligence seems (rather) easy to test if anything has: just test how good it is to solve general problems? While to test if anything has consciousness I would guess that a working theory of consciousness would have to be developed before a test could be designed?

This was the second recent BHTV dialogue where Pigliucci discussed singularity/transhumanism related questions. The previous I mentioned here. As mentioned there it seems to have started with a blogg-post of Pigliucci's where he criticized transhumanism. I think it interesting that Pigliucci continues his interest in the topic. I personally see it as a very positive establishing of contact between "traditional rationalist/skeptic/(cis-)humanist"-community and "LessWrong-style rationalist/trans-humanist".community. Massimo Pigliucci very much gave the impression of enjoying the discussion with Elizer Yudkowsky! I am also pleased to have noticed that recently Pigliucci's blog has now and then linked to LessWrong/ElizerYudkowsky (mostly Julias Galef if I remember correctly (too lazy to locate the exact links right now)). I would very much like to see this continue (e.g. Yudkowsky discussing with people like e.g. Paul Kurtz, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll, Steven Weinberg, Victor Stenger (realizing of course that they are probably too busy for it to happen)).

Previous BHTV dialogues with Elizer Yudkowsky I have seen noticed here on LessWrong but not this one (hope it is not that I have just missed that post). Therefore I posted this here, I did not find a perfect place for it, this was the least-bad I noticed. Although my post here is only partly about "Is Elizer alive and well" (he surely looked so on BHTV), I hope it is not considered too much off-topic.

You can tell he's alive and well because he's posted several chapters in his Harry Potter fanfiction in that time; his author's notes lead me to believe that, as he stated long ago, he's letting LW drift so he has time to write his book.

He's writing his book.

In a thread called Acturial vs. Software Engineering - what pays best?, somebody wrote:

Do any of you know how much of an option it is to start a software engineering career with a math/science but not CS background?

My response...

I encourage most people to pursue a math or science degree, rather than comp.sci., even if their long term goals are in the field of software engineering. My opinion is based on personal hindsight (having majored in computer science, I often wish my ability to absorb and apply fundamental math or hard physics was stronger) and on eleven years industry experience (where I've noticed an inverse correlation between the amount of formal comp.sci. training a person's had and his or her strength as a software engineer).

In regards to my personal hindsight; it could well be that had I studied math or physics, that I'd feel my comp.sci. expertise would need brushing up. That's probably true to some extent, but there's another factor; namely that many comp.sci. programs are a less-than-ideal blend of theoretical math (better obtained through a dedicated programs[1]) and practical engineering (most definitely useful[2], but because of its nature easily accessible in your spare time). That last point is critical; anybody who can afford university education, has access to a computer and a compiler. So why not tinker at home - you're passionate, right? Compare with programs like mechanical engineering, chemistry, and most hard physics programs - you probably don't have access to a particle accelerator or DNA extraction lab at home.

Not yet anyway... :-)

That brings me to my observation from industry experience, namely that the best programmers I've worked with often hadn't majored in comp.sci. The point of course not that a comp.sci. education makes for worse programmers. Rather, that people with the audacity and discipline to pursue hard physics or math who also have a passion for programming have a leg-up on those who are only passionate about programming.

I'm sure there's the occasional failed particle physicist applying for a hundred programming gigs without success, but that person would've been just as unskilled as a programmer had he or she majored in comp.sci.

I recall "Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People":

Whether I do it on paper, or in speech, I now try to never mention calibration and overconfidence unless I have first talked about disconfirmation bias, motivated skepticism, sophisticated arguers, and dysrationalia in the mentally agile. First, do no harm!

Time is just a dimension in which there is determinism, so that the slice of the universe at position t is a function of the slice at position t-1.

For this entire discussion, I'm missing the part where the theories/models being discussed lead us to anticipate certain experiences.

The book I used in my college Econ 101 class was this one.

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is a good slim introduction to the economic mindset. For a different approach focused on the application of economic thinking to everyday life The Logic of Life by Tim Harford is worth a look. Neither book covers much of the math of economics but I think that is a good thing since most of the math heavy parts of economics are the least useful and relevant.

ETA: Economics In One Lesson is a heavily free market / free trade 'classical' economic slant.

MIT OpenCourseWare has a lot of material. I also like Bryan Caplan's lecture notes (these sometimes have a libertarian slant).

I don't know that we've ever successfully assimilated a feral human either.

I'm not sure I even know how to parse "wikipedia blog on rationality". But at least in some sense, we apparently are Wikipedia. Congrats.

Alcor whole body suspension

Why not save some money and lose what's below the neck?

I know you said you don't have a ton of time to read but Gary Drescher's Good and Real has been called Less Wrong in book form on occasion. If nothing else, I found it an enjoyable read that gives a good start to getting into the mindset people have in this community.

That reminds me of this discussion.

Of course if you define "luminiferous aether" as generally as "whatever mechanism results in the propagation of electromagnetic waves", then it exists, because electromagnetic waves do propagate. But when it was under serious scientific consideration, the luminiferous aether theory made testable predictions, and they failed. Just saying "they're different concepts" is easier than saying "it's the same basic concept except it has a different name and the structure of the theory is totally different".

I could sympathize with trying to revive the name "luminiferous aether" (or even better, "luminiferous æther"), though. It's a pretty awesome name. (I go by "Luminiferous Æther Bunny" on a few other forums.)

A dystopian society is unlikely to thaw out and revive people in cryostasis. Cryostasis revival makes sense for societies that are benevolent and have a lot of free resources. Also, be careful not to try to generalize from fictional examples. They are not evidence. That's all the more the case here because science fiction is in general a highly reactionary genre that even as it uses advance technology either warns about the perils or uses it as an excuse to hearken back to a more romantic era. For example look how many science fiction stories and universes have feudal systems of government.

Science fiction has a bias towards things going wrong.

In the particular case of cryonics, if there's a dystopian future where the majority of people have few or no rights, it's a disaster all around, but as ata says, you can presumably commit suicide. There's a chance that even that will be unfeasible-- for example if brains are used, while conscious, for their processing power. This doesn't seem likely, but I don't know how to evaluate it in detail.

The other case-- people in general have rights, but thawed people, or thawed people from before a certain point in time, do not-- requires that thawed people do not have a constituency. This doesn't seem terribly likely, though as I recall, Niven has it that it takes a very long time for thawing to be developed.

Normally, I would expect for there to be commercial and legal pressures for thawed people to be treated decently. (I've never seen an sf story in which thawed people are a political football, but it's an interesting premise.)

I think the trend is towards better futures (including richer, with less reason to enslave people), but there's no guarantee. I think it's much more likely that frozen people won't be revived than that they'll be revived into a bad situation.

Or do they figure that if they are revived, FAI has most likely come to pass?

Can't speak for any other cryonics advocates, but I find that to be likely. I see AI either destroying or saving the world once it's invented, if we haven't destroyed ourselves some other way first, and one of those could easily happen before the world has a chance to turn dystopian. But in any case, if you wake up and find yourself in a world that you couldn't possibly bear to live in, you can just kill yourself and be no worse off than if you hadn't tried cryonics in the first place.

We are wired for individual rather than general insights. Stories are much more effective at communicating certain things than treatises are. I would never have believed, in theory, that a man who enjoyed killing could be worthy of respect; only a story could convince me. To use Robin Hanson's terminology, narrative can bring near mode and far mode together.

Why not true stories? I think there you get into Aristotle and why versimilitude can be more effective than mere reality. True stories are good too, but life is disorderly and not necessarily narrative. It's a truism of writing workshops and creative writing classes that whenever you see a particularly unrealistic event in a story, the author will protest "But that really happened!" It doesn't matter; it's still unrealistic. Narrative is, I think, a particular kind of brain function that humans are good at, and it's a painting, not a photograph. To tap into our ability to understand each other through narrative, we usually need to fictionalize the world, apply some masks and filters.

It was not until I read Three Worlds Collide that I began to embrace moral consequentialism. I would not have found an essay or real-life case study nearly as convincing.

ETA: I didn't change my mind just because I liked the story. The story made me realize that in a particular situation, I would be a moral consequentialist.

A possible benefit of fiction is that it leads you to experience emotions vicariously that it would be much more expensive to experience for real, yet the vicarious experience is realistic enough that it serves as useful practice, a way of "taming" the emotions. Textbooks don't convey emotions.

I seem to recall this argument from a review of Cloverfield, or possibly the director's commentary. Broadcast images such as from the 9/11 aftermath generated lots of anxiety, and seeing similar images - the amateurish, jerky camcorder type - reframed in a fictional setting which is "obviously" over the top helps you, the audience, come to terms with the reality.

Fiction is good for teasing out possibilities and counterfactuals, experimenting with different attitudes toward the world (as opposed to learning facts about the world), and learning to be cool.

PS Also why does the Dean equate inteligence with genetic superiority and imlicitly even worth as a person?

See Michael Vassar's discussion of this phenomenon. Also, I think that people discussing statements they see as dangerous often implicitly (and unconsciously) adopt the frames that make those statements dangerous, which they (correctly) believe many people unreflectively hold and can't easily be talked out of, and treat those frames as simple reality, in order to more simply and credibly call the statement and the person who made it dangerous and Bad.

I think there's something to be said for not posting opinions such that 1) LW is likely to agree with the opinion, and 2) sites perceived as agreeing with the opinion are likely to be the target of hate campaigns.

I'm a bit upset.

In my world, that's dinner-table conversation. If it's wrong, you argue with it. If it upsets you, you are more praiseworthy the more you control your anger. If your anti-racism is so fragile that it'll crumble if you don't shut students up -- if you think that is the best use of your efforts to help people, or to help the cause of equality -- then something has gone a little screwy in your mind.

The idea that students -- students! -- are at risk if they write about ideas in emails is damn frightening to me. I spent my childhood in a university town. This means that political correctness -- that is, not being rude on the basis of race or ethnicity -- is as deep in my bones as "please" and "thank you." I generally think it's a good thing to treat everyone with respect. But the other thing I got from my "university values" is that freedom to look for the truth is sacrosanct. And if it's tempting to shut someone up, take a few deep cleansing breaths and remember your Voltaire.

My own beef with those studies is that you cannot (to my knowledge) isolate the genetics of race from the experience of race. Every single black subject whose IQ is tested has also lived his whole life as black. And we have a history and culture that makes race matter. You can control for income and education level, because there are a variety of incomes and education levels among all races. You can control for home environment with adoption and twin studies, I guess. But you can't control for what it's like to live as a black person in a society where race matters, because all black people do. So I can't see how such a study can really ever isolate genetics alone. (But correct me if I'm missing something.)

The Harvard incident is business as usual: http://timtyler.org/political_correctness/

Here is the leaked email by Stephanie Grace if anyone is interested.

… I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:)

Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Please don’t pull a Larry Summers on me,

A few minor fallacies but overall quite respectable and even stimulating conversation nothing any reasonable person would consider should warrant ostracism. Note the reference to "disscused over Dinner". She was betrayed by someone she socialised with.

And yes I am violating my own advice by boldening that one sentence. ;) I just wanted to drive home how close she may be to a well meaning if perhaps a bit untactfull poster on Less Wrong. Again, we need to be carefull. What society considers taboo changes over time as well, so one must get a feel for where on the scale of forbidden a subject is at any time and where the winds of change are blowing before deciding whether to discuss it online. Something inoccus could cost you your job a decade or so in the future.

Edit: For anyone wondering what a "Larry Summers" is.