TheAncientGeek comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 September 2007 06:57PM

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Comment author: Jiro 29 March 2014 04:55:17PM 5 points [-]

That's a tricky question because modern progressive political views are opposed to religion. And religion is a large source of irrationality. So most examples are going to happen to match modern progressive political views just because of that, even though they're not measured by their agreement with modern progressive political views.

The first example that comes to mind is a decline in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism 1) is irrational and 2) because of left-wing opposition to Israel and the West and support of third world Arab states, is not necessarily reduced by modern progressive political views.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 March 2014 07:52:10PM 2 points [-]

Another example is how a lot more people have realized that central planning doesn't work. An example where things have become less rational since the 1900's is the current irrational belief that race and gender don't correlate with anything significant.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 29 March 2014 08:27:09PM 2 points [-]

...enough to stop treating people as individuals

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 March 2014 08:37:11PM 1 point [-]

Taboo "treating people as individuals".

Also, how would you count things like Affirmative Action and especially the Disparate Impact Doctrine?

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 29 March 2014 10:29:34PM * 6 points [-]

I would count them ss relevant to the US only.

Someone once told me that Obama must be dumber than GWB because he is black. That is what treating someone as an individual isn't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier comment score below threshold [+] (125 children)

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 29 March 2014 11:35:21PM -2 points [-]

I can appeal to negative externalities at this point, and I have evidence for them too.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2014 03:47:45AM 4 points [-]

I can appeal to negative externalities at this point, and I have evidence for them too.

Such as?

I can certainly list negative consequences of the false belief being widespread (and "official"). For example, currently companies must either hire unqualified people or risk being accused to racism and/or sexism since they're workplace ratios don't match those of the general population. People attempting to create alternate accreditation systems regularly get sued on disparate impact grounds.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 30 March 2014 10:11:31AM * 3 points [-]

Companies are not forced to hire literally unqualified people: Myth 10

Btw, AA is a terrible example of creeping progressivism/ir rationality.

Its not obviously irrational, since there are rational arguments on both sides.

It's not a darling of the left, as some self identified liberals don't actually like it.

It's not universal feature of modern liberal democracies -it is mostly an issue in the US.

It's not obviously harmful: the US, with its AA , has higher per capita GDP than Western countries without it.

EDIT And some companies adopt similar policies voluntarily.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2014 07:19:06PM 2 points [-]

Companies are not forced to hire literally unqualified people

However, if they get sued, the burned of proof is on them to show that the people they didn't hire are in fact unqualified. This is hard to do to the court's satisfaction, especially if one gets a left wing judge. Furthermore, it will cost you a lot of money and bad publicity even if you win.

Its not obviously irrational, since there are rational arguments on both sides.

And yet neither you nor anyone else in this thread have presented any in favor of AA.

continue this thread »

Comment author: Lumifer 31 March 2014 04:11:12PM 4 points [-]

Companies are not forced to hire literally unqualified people: Myth 10](http://www.understandingprejudice.org/readroom/articles/affirm.htm)

I am sorry, do you consider your link to be evidence? It is a piece of handwaving propaganda from a site called "understandingprejudice.org" that doesn't even talk about what's happening in real life, it just mumbles about ways that AA might be interpreted.

Comment author: Vaniver 31 March 2014 04:48:08PM 4 points [-]

It's not universal feature of modern liberal democracies -it is mostly an issue in the US.

You may have heard of a country called India, which had a racism problem that seems worse than the American one, and which attempted to counteract it with affirmative action, beginning over a century ago. The opponents of AA have had their predictions validated, and the proponents of AA have mostly had their predictions disconfirmed, by the Indian experience.

continue this thread »

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 01 April 2014 09:58:17AM 0 points [-]

Also: companies in countries without AA have been known to adopt ethnic monitoring policies voluntarily.

Really, if AA is the most broken thing about progressivism, it's not all that broken.

Comment author: ChristianKl 01 April 2014 10:44:37AM * 4 points [-]

It's not obviously harmful: the US, with its AA , has higher per capita GDP than Western countries without it.

Really? You would need a really, really high effect of affirmitative action to be stronger than all the other economic effects combined.

In mindkilled enviroments people make arguments that they would never make if they would look at the issue with a statistical perspective. This is one of those arguments.

It's not a darling of the left, as some self identified liberals don't actually like it.

That doesn't mean that it's not an effect of progressivism.

continue this thread »

Comment author: VAuroch 30 March 2014 12:37:59AM 3 points [-]

Conditioned on 'has graduated from an Ivy League college', it certainly is not. If anything, it is evidence in the opposite direction.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2014 03:34:39AM * -1 points [-]

These days most Ivy League schools are easy to graduate if one doesn't pick a hard major, so that really means "conditioned on 'was admitted into an Ivy League college' ". Except Ivy League colleges practice affirmative action, so it's still evidence in the original direction.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 March 2014 07:47:52AM 0 points [-]

These days most Ivy League schools are easy to graduate if one doesn't pick a hard major,

We know which majors Obama and Bush picked.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2014 07:06:22PM 3 points [-]

Yes, and they weren't STEM fields, so no additional evidence there.

Comment author: VAuroch 30 March 2014 05:30:41PM -1 points [-]

Even with affirmative action, it's still harder to get into Ivy League schools as a minority than as a white person. You need more talent to get in than the white guy you're competing with.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2014 07:08:28PM 2 points [-]

What on earth are you talking about? The way affirmative action works, is that the cutoff for blacks is lower than the cutoff for whites.

continue this thread »

Comment author: Vaniver 30 March 2014 12:42:19AM 6 points [-]

It is, however, proper application of Bayesian evidence.

With a "must" in there?

Comment author: tslarm 30 March 2014 01:30:34AM * 6 points [-]

"It is, however, proper application of Bayesian evidence."

Nonsense.

If the only relevant pieces of information you had were the race of each man, and the average intelligence of each race, then of course it would be rational to estimate that the man from the 'smarter' race were the smarter of the two. But this is very far from the truth. In the Obama-Bush example, there is more than enough evidence on the public record to swamp any racially determined prior.

I think the principle of 'treating people as individuals' exists to combat a couple of things. One is the tendency to form stereotypes on flimsy or non-existent evidence, to over-estimate the generality and force of those stereotypes that are factually based, and to treat prejudice (i.e. group membership-based priors) as a substitute for even very easily-gathered and reliable evidence about the individual. The other is the direct emotional harm done to people by treating them as members of a group first, and individuals second (if at all). It is possible for this harm to outweigh the benefits of otherwise-rational discrimination.

Comment author: tslarm 30 March 2014 01:36:30AM 2 points [-]

Note: I honestly have no idea about the relationship between race and intelligence, so I deliberately set aside the question of who, if anyone, would have the higher prior in the Obama-Bush comparison. These aren't politically correct weasel words; I would have a hard time properly defining intelligence, let alone measuring it in a culturally neutral way, but if I do see good evidence for a racial intelligence gap then I will readily accept it. All of this is beside the point of the dispute between TheAncientGreek and Eugine_Nier, though, for the reasons I gave above.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2014 03:49:51AM 0 points [-]

But this is very far from the truth. In the Obama-Bush example, there is more than enough evidence on the public record to swamp any racially determined prior.

In principal, yes. In practice there is also so much noise put out by spin doctors that it might very well make sense to fall back on the prior.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 March 2014 07:41:52AM 1 point [-]

If the only relevant pieces of information you had were the race of each man, and the average intelligence of each race, then of course it would be rational to estimate that the man from the 'smarter' race were the smarter of the two.

Even then, assuming the difference between the averages is one standard deviation of either race's distribution and each race's distribution is Gaussian, there is only 76% probability that the smarter guy is the one from the smarter race, which hardly counts as “must” in my book.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 30 March 2014 07:04:27PM 3 points [-]

If both are per-selected to be in the upper Nth percentile for their race, likely given the way affirmative action works, the probability is much higher.

Comment author: EHeller 30 March 2014 05:44:33AM 4 points [-]

Not really. Its privileging a piece of weak evidence (race) against stronger evidence (Obama was in the top 10% of his Harvard law class, Bush was was a C student at Yale).

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