"It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." -Einstein

I regularly bicker about hypotheticals on the Facebook group. I wish I could give a tidy answer here, but I can't put all hypotheticals in the same category. Some represent reality better than others. "Where will I post my ideas if this group closes?" is a perfectly normal and useful one.

The hypotheticals I question are ones that don't plausibly occur in reality and that are known primarily because they irritate the brain, or allow social signaling, or some other non-useful purpose.

"If a tree falls in the forest..." can be useful since it exposes how unclear language can be, but if people aren't aware of it, it mostly is just trolling.

Another is the "Sophie's Choice" hypothetical. Such as the Trolley problem, where you flip the switch to kill one person or leave it as killing three. This problem is famous not because it represents something people will run into in real life, but because it irritates the brain. The brain evolved in imperfect scenarios, and where apparent bad choices like this are best handled by looking for the many answers it hasn't yet considered. Without this instinct to reject the scenario, we may never have developed tools and many other things.

So, these types of scenarios trigger a natural instinct to avoid the problem, not to answer it, which makes perfect sense given the way our brains work. Without that realization, the question is just shared to bother other people or socially signal. This isn't useful behavior, and thus rejecting those hypotheticals I think is a fine response.

I find that book not just clear, but positively lucid. Your description of it seems so wrong I find it impossible to imagine you've actually read that book.

And by the way: Hurley wrote most of this book, Adams did much of the rest. Dennett just helped polish it and promote it (using his status as one of the world's most influential living philosophers) because it is so obviously deserves that.

A self-identified "black person," has a highly unpredictable amount of actually African genes, and the common results of certain traits will depend on genes that may not cause self-reporting, so your conclusions will all be corrupted.

Are you seriously going to argue that self-reported black people are no less likely to have blue eyes and blond hair than the general world population?

Including the fact that genetic-causation of traits is a hopelessly flawed concept in the first place.

What? Do you deny that eye color, hair color, lactase persistence and blood type are genetically caused?

They are self-reported "black people" with significantly different DNA, including in their skin color, which is supposed to be a defining trait in terms of self-reporting.

I think you are referring to these two segments: Charles Barkley DNA Test, Snoop Dogg's DNA Test.

First, you somehow forget to mention that Charles Barkley also has more European DNA than Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg has more Native American DNA. Is the fact that Charles Barkley has lighter skin than Snoop Dogg so surprising given these data?

Second, I think you are attacking a strawman: nobody here is claiming that the precise skin tone can be perfectly predicted by DNA ancestry percentages.
Skin color is clearly only one of the various traits that concur in the conventional perception of racial appearance.
Indians, for instance, have a range of skin tones overlapping with sub-Saharan Africans, yet Indians are not commonly considered blacks, and they do not self-report as blacks.

If Snoop Dogg's DNA test found, say, 30% African DNA, you could claim to have at least identified one outlier. It wouldn't have invalidated the general claim that self-reported race is correlated with ancestry, since you aren't allowed to generalize from one example, but at least it would have been a data point against it.
But your own example didn't even show that: Snoop Dogg, a self-reported black man, has 71% African DNA.
I'm afraid you shot yourself in the foot.

In regards to having "primarily" Sub-Saharan African Ancestry, the cultural "one-drop rule" tendency to self-report as black with an African-American parent will also cause you to have self-reported black people who actually have less than 50% Sub-Saharan African DNA. So even that will be highly unreliable.

There are of course people with less than 50% sub-Saharan DNA that identify as black. Barack Obama is the most famous example.
Yet most people who identify as black have more than 50% sub-Saharan DNA.

First, I hope it's clear that if we chalk up personality traits and other such individual characteristics to race instead of environment, then the solution to removing certain undesirable traits (like criminality) would be banishment/disenfranchisement etc of an entire race of people, or outright genocide. This is why this is a problem.

As opposed to the banishment/disenfranchisement etc of actual convicted criminals?

You seem to be conflating several claims and committing the is-ought fallacy:

• Whether races exist as useful categories that allow to make predictions about observations is an epistemic question. We have very strong evidence for this claim.

• Whether some races, in modern Western countries, are more prone to have certain "bad" traits (e.g. low IQ, high crime rates, etc.) is also an epistemic question. We also have strong evidence for these claims.

• Whether this correlation between race and "bad" traits is essentially due to genetic factors, is yet another epistemic question. We don't have strong evidence either for or against these claims, and in general they are very difficult to test. Political incorrect as they are, some of these claims, specifically the one about IQ, have some degree of plausibility, due to the high heritability of some of these traits. But the jury is still out.

• Whether we should discriminate against these races with "bad" traits is an entirely different kind of question, a moral question. It doesn't follow from any of the previous claims.

First, I hope it's clear that if we chalk up personality traits and other such individual characteristics to race instead of environment, then the solution to removing certain undesirable traits (like criminality) would be banishment/disenfranchisement etc of an entire race of people, or outright genocide. This is why this is a problem.

I think that might say more about your own attitude to low IQ people than it does about everyone else's ...

DNA Tests can predict a trait that would cause you to self-identify, but that doesn't relate to the rest of your gene profile...and that trait (like hair consistency, nose size and shape etc) may have nothing to do with the other result you're trying to measure. I may self-identify as black because I full lips, but if you then try to measure my athleticism, you may find that's dictated by genes I received from someone Native American or white in my ancestry.

Alleles tend to correlate with each other.

For instance, it is possible for conventionally black people to have blonde hair and/or blue eyes, since the alleles that control hair and eye color are, to some extent, different than those that control skin color. Some black people do indeed have blonde hair and/or blue eyes, but most of them don't.

If I ask you to estimate the probability that a person randomly sampled from the world population has blue eyes, you can do no better than aswer with the worldwide prevalence of blue eyes.
If I then tell you that this person is black, then you can improve the a posteriori probability of your prediction by updating it to the, much lower, prevalence of blue eyes among self-reported black people.
We can do the same even for traits that are not immediately visible, yet entirely genetic, such as lactose tolerance or blood type.

This is evidence that self-reported race is an epistemically useful concept.

EDIT:

They recently tested Snoop Dogg and Charles Barkley for a bit on the George Lopez Show. Snoop Dogg has far more stereotypically "black" physical traits," particularly much darker skin...which would lead you to identify as being more black and having more African Ancestry. It turns out Snoop Dogg was only 70% black, and Charles Barkley's percentage was higher. If you think Snoop Dogg's data, is more indicative of "black genes" and what they result in, you'd be wrong. Thus, self-reporting is not objective scientific data about DNA categories.

Actually, they are both self-reported black people and the DNA test detected primarily sub-Saharan African ancestry in both of them.

You don't see how a logical thought process that would advocate genocide (removing "bad genes" you believe are responsible for undesirable social characteristics or behavior) over changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups pf people is a bad idea?

Assuming I'm parsing this sentence correctly, you favor "changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups of people". Good, so do I. However, the way racial differences are currently not acknowledged is making this difficult. A lot of institutions have policies requiring that admittance to educational institutions or employment be proportional by race. And there are people seriously arguing that arrests should be proportional by race of population.

Also, false egalitarian beliefs have killed far more people than false "racist" beliefs. The way is happens is the following logic:

"As we all know no group is better than any other, yet group X is doing better than other groups. Why is this the case? It can't be that group X is in any way better, it must be that group X is getting ahead by cheating and other nefarious means, thus group X must be punished."

Come to think of it, the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign also followed the above logic. Just replace the first clause with "as we know no group is better than Aryan Germans".

Racism: A specific form of the causation-correlation logical fallacy, where a person looks at different tendencies that happen to align among people of different ethnicities and assumes incorrectly that the ethnicity or genetic aspects of the ethnicity are the CAUSE of those differences. The person then usually acts, speaks, or governs in a damaging and incorrect way based on that mistaken assumption.

Um, the genetic aspects of ethnicity quite likely are the cause of a lot of those differences. Yes, they were ultimately caused by differences in the ancestral environment but genetics are in fact the proximate cause.

Examples: 1. I waved hello to a sleeping Asian person once, and he did not respond. This taught me that Asian people are rude, and I have never said hello to one since!

Um, this example doesn't appear to be about confusing correlation with causation so much as inferring correlation based on insufficient evidence.

The example doesn't match the definition.

Puns

I really don't think you're engaging with the actual points here, which are (1) that puns and similar jokes can be funny simply by being clever, without any "misplacement" required; and (2) that even when a "misplacement" is involved, your theory doesn't appear to identify any reason why the pun should be funnier than a mere plausible mistake that no one would be amused by.

I agree that the particular one I cited, which was simply the first I had to hand, has an extra layer to it that enhances the humour. I already drew attention to that and made clear that it wasn't the relevant point. Let me try again without that distraction.

I'll take, in fact, one of your own examples, the "kidney beans" joke from your longer paper, which I shall modify a little further to bring out a point. Imagine that you are reading a scholarly article on a cannibalistic tribe in some faraway place, and you find this passage: "The Ougalou people consume human flesh only on special occasions such as a victory over another tribe. Their staple diet otherwise is a dish of kidney beans." I suggest that you might find this quite amusing, if you happened to notice it (I suspect it would be easy to pass over without noticing).

There is no "misplacement" here; the dish of kidney beans is (in my hypothetical scenario) perfectly correct. It's just funny that cannibals should turn out to eat kidney beans. There is no one here to lose status (the author hasn't made any kind of mistake; neither has the reader).

Now let's take an example more favourable to your theory, where arguably there is a "misplacement". It happens to be due to the same person who made the "flushed" pun; it purports (not very seriously) to be a quotation, and it goes like this: <<< "Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking copse." -- Johnny Appleseed. >>> So, there's a "misplacement" of sorts here: in some sense "copse" is obviously a mistake for "corpse", and with that "corrected" one has the sort of thing that (say) rock'n'roll stars might say. On the other hand, there's a contrasting element of rightness: Johnny Appleseed (as opposed to, say, Johnny Rotten) might indeed advocate leaving a good-looking copse to posterity.

So, does this fit your theory? A "misplacement" (copse for corpse) with some features matching to improve the validity? I don't think it does. For one thing, unless you're unusually quick-witted, there is a definite delay between the recognition of wrongness and the recognition of rightness. So at the point where the wrongness is noticed the extra validity (in comparison with a mere mistake) isn't there. And when does the joke become funny? With the recognition of rightness, not the recognition of wrongness. If it happens to take you a few seconds to see what's going on, the process goes like this: "Huh? I don't get it. Has he mis-spelled 'corpse'? ... Ohhhh, I see." and it's at the latter part -- after any hypothetical status loss -- that you will laugh if you appreciate the pun.

But let's leave all that aside and suppose that somehow your theory can accommodate those facts. What are we left with? Supposedly the pun is funny because it has a bad mistake ("copse" in place of "corpse") but (because the Johnny Appleseed reference kinda-sorta explains the presence of the word "copse") enough validity to ... well, actually this might be a good point at which to mention that I don't see where the validity requirement comes from in your just-so story about status loss: surely a low-validity case is a better sign that someone has demonstrated their unsuitability for leadership than a high-validity case. Well, never mind. Enough validity for laughing at the would-be leader not to anger them too much, or something.

But: "I make typos all the time. I see them all the time". Apparently typographical errors, even when noticed, don't constitute a serious enough loss of quality to be funny. So why would "copse" in place of "corpse" be suitable joke material, on your theory? It's no worse an error -- no more a sign of incompetence -- than my example of "validty" in place of "validity".

All I'm really doing here is giving more examples where "sudden cleverness" rather than "sudden stupidity" seems to produce humour. And, if I understand correctly, your answer to this is that here we are laughing at ourselves rather than at someone else. Leaving aside the question of whether laughing at oneself can be adaptive if the point of laughter is to indicate to everyone around "look who needs to be low-status" (yeah, maybe it could, just as gracefully losing a dominance fight can be adaptive), it seems to me that there is another big problem with fitting these cases into your theory: There is no substantial falling short of expected quality standards here.

Consider, for instance, the corpse/copse pun. If I'm laughing at myself when I laugh at it, what failure of mine am I laughing at? My brief interval of not seeing what's going on? Unlikely -- the pun is just as funny if seen quickly as if seen slowly, and in any case it's hardly a shameful sign of low status to take a moment to grasp it. What else? I don't see it.

Likewise with the kidney beans. What failure in myself am I laughing at if I find it funny to read that a cannibal tribe eats kidney beans when not dining on human kidneys? Again, I don't see it.

Clowns

Yes, indeed, clowns do more than just dress up in silly clothes. I didn't intend to suggest otherwise. My point is simply that their pies-to-the-face and comic pratfalls and absurd misunderstandings and whatnot are displays of conspicuous incompetence from people we expect to show conspicuous incompetence. So Qe-Qd in your equation can't be large because Qe is low to begin with. And yet clowns can be pretty funny.

Novelty

Of course there's no reason why you should be much concerned with novelty. The only reason I brought it up is that you were saying that your theory, if correct, would "redefine the field": I don't think it would.