IlyaShpitser comments on Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016 - Less Wrong
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Oh, really.
"Gay pride" was, I take it, the granddaddy of them all. It doesn't seem difficult to think of some successful gay people, but here in case you're having trouble is a very short list. Oscar Wilde, world-class playwright. Tim Cook, CEO of the world's most successful company. Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, prime minister of Iceland. Benjamin Britten, greatest English composer since Purcell. Freddie Mercury, rock star. Alan Turing, mathematician, computer pioneer and helped win WW2.
"Black pride" is a thing, I guess. Martin Luther King, social and political reformer. Barack Obama, president of the world's only superpower. Desmond Tutu, archbishop. Toni Morrison, Nobel-winning writer. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astronomer and TV star. Louis Armstrong, jazz musician.
Those are actually the only two major "pride movements" I know of. There are "white pride" and "straight pride" movements, kinda, but they're quite different in character and I think in motivation, and in any case I don't imagine you'll have any difficulty thinking of successful white and straight people.
I expect there's such a thing as "trans pride", but transness is much rarer than gayness or blackness and was socially unacceptable for longer. (Hence: fewer of them, and more obstacles to their becoming successful.) Still, off the top of my head I'll name Wendy Carlos, musician, and Sophie Wilson, engineer, both of whom were world-famous (as men) for things that had nothing to do with gender identity before coming out as trans.
What pride movements were you thinking of that don't have examples of successful people to look at?
Nancy, why is this dude still here?
Serious question: have the admins checked The_Lion's comments for evidence of vote manipulation? Their apparent popularity is surprising (and arguably sends a very bad message about the current state of the Less Wrong community), and their content seems to match the interests and opinions of a user who is well-known for abusing the voting system.
It is currently not easy for admins to investigate voting on comments. I'll add that to the list of changes to investigate.
"Dancing bear" is a term. It doesn't literally indicate that he's comparing black people to animals.
I'm not sure the connotation of the term (i.e. a black person being successful at anything is so shocking it's entertainment value all on it's own) makes the statement any better. Especially when discussing, say, one of the most important American musicians of all time (among others).
I think you spelled "except in" wrong.
I don't think Ilya thought the latter.
I know what "dancing bear" means.
No, it means he's saying that all the examples I gave are of people who aren't actually any good at what they do and are interesting only because for a black person to be able to attempt those tasks at all is remarkable. The stupidity and obnoxiousness of that doesn't depend on a comparison with animals.
In any case, one reason why people use metaphors is precisely the fact that the literal sense of the metaphor produces an effect. You call someone a "dancing bear", and your readers are going to get a mental image of a dancing bear and (in so far as they accept what you say) associate it with the person you're talking about. You don't get to do that and claim you're not comparing the person to an animal.
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo.]
In all fairness, this describes a lot of lists of "achievements of minority X in field Y". To some extent, it's a natural result of looking for "achievements" from a tiny minority (e.g. Turks or whatever) in a field where they don't really have a comparative advantage.
Eugene is saying not that "they don't really have a comparative advantage", but that they have a comparative disadvantage so strong that any purported great achievements should be dismissed as fakery, exaggeration, or, if it seems that one of them really has achieved something, "exceptions". In Eugene's view, they're still nothing more than performing dogs, they've just managed the miracle, despite their intrinsic inferiority, of doing it as well as the best real people.
I think it's possible to make the same point, drained of malice. To take Neil deGrasse Tyson as an example, he's a PhD physicist, but when compared to other popularizers of science I'd say he's closer to Bill Nye than he is to Carl Sagan when it comes to scientific productivity. (All three of those are people I like and respect, so this isn't meant as a slur against any of them; if only there were more Nyes and Tysons and Sagans!)
Similarly, I remember the three recurring examples of scientists during my time in elementary school being Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and George Washington Carver. Again, all three are worthy of respect, but it's misrepresenting the mechanics of science to see those three as equally prominent in the history of science, and when comparing groups what matters is not the most extreme member of each group, but the depth of the field.
I agree. But the less hyperbolically you make the point, the more reasonable it is to suggest that the shortage of Einstein-level black scientists is the result of factors other than a fundamental mental inferiority in the black population. And that wouldn't suit Eugine's purposes at all.
(It seems to me, though, that even quite a strong "race realist" position would not come close to justifying Eugine's talk of dancing bears.)
To clarify things, do you believe that there are measurable IQ differences between populations or you think it's all bloody nonsense made up by malicious people?
AIUI, Eugine The Fourth is trying to suggest that there's something more than this going on: that black people are underrepresented in lists of successful people not because there are few of them but because they're mentally inferior for some (presumably genetic) reason.
Black people are not a tiny minority globally, so to first order it would be evidence for that theory if in fact lists of successful black people look like lists of successful Turkish people.
Of course there are other factors; e.g., most of Africa is grindingly poor -- though I expect Eugine would say, or at least imply, that that's because Africa is full of mentally-inferior people -- and while there are quite a lot of black people in the USA they've historically had some difficulties to contend with.
Funny how that worked out for Jews in Medieval Europe...
So, first of all, if you drew up a list of highly successful people in mediaeval Europe, I don't think there would be many Jews there.
Secondly, I take it you have in mind Cochran's theory that European Jews are super-smart because of evolutionary pressure from mediaeval persecution. But Cochran's story isn't simply "they were persecuted, persecution leads to more brains, the end". It depends crucially on the details of the persecution. And the treatment of black slaves in the US is very different in pretty much every relevant respect from the treatment of Jews in mediaeval Europe. The Jews were forbidden to do many jobs but highly lucrative finance was (for bizarre path-dependent reasons) open to them; black slaves in the US were given backbreaking physical labour to do and had no opportunity to choose their work. The Jews were left more or less alone much of the time but subject to occasional slaughter where the best opportunities for survival went to those who anticipated trouble, had accumulated valuable resources for escape, etc; black slaves in the US were subject to constant low-level mistreatment and occasional individual murder, and opportunities for getting the hell out were ... limited. European Jews, Cochran suggests, had very little inward gene flow; female black slaves in the US were routinely made pregnant by their owners, and I'm pretty sure the children were generally (1) also slaves and (2) considered black.
Depends on whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty. From Murray's Human Accomplishment on that topic, pg292:
Personally, I would say that a 30x overrepresentation in the 1100s-1300s is rather medieval, and pretty respectable especially considering the constraints they labored under.
And obviously those constraints did make a difference because once the constraints starting being lifted, Jews began overperforming even more to a degree so absurd that if it were a novel, you'd throw it against the wall in disgust and angrily tweet at the author to look up the phrase 'Mary Sue':
(I won't quote any more since I know we're all familiar with Jewish performance in the 1900s.)
BTW, the original, sourceable quotation uses the image of "a dog walking on its hind legs". Your response still applies.
Heh, typical Eugine. Making a good point in the least pleasant way (preferably also with some exaggerations). The username changes, but the style doesn't.