Frito Bandito writes:

So what you’re saying is, sometimes people are too stupid to know what’s good for them and others, and you need a quasi-dictatorial regime to get them into doing it?

Cochran replies:

Most people won’t wear seatbelts. You don’t need a dictatorship: just a government that isn’t crazy. In 1940, the government would have imposed quarantine without much agonizing. Of course, you couldn’t have had a big AIDS epidemic back then.

A government that isn't crazy huh? (u_u)

That problem seems insolvable except it somehow has been solved from time to time.

C'mon, how many of the Field medallists were doing maths in order to earn as much money as possible in order to get a bride? (I agree that that's probably what's going to happen in the medium-long term, but for different reasons.)

Note that this is an interesting example of a social problem dilemma as Dalrock emphasizes. Talking about something will make it worse, but unless it is talked about the fundamentals will continue to get worse. It generalizes to other problems I think. The best course of action is to beforehand determine if talking about the social problem is likely to result in change to address it, if not it shouldn't be talked about. Your opinions?

I want to emphasis that because men have significantly more outliers when it comes to achievement and social outcomes (both positive and negative ) , we should expect such a change in culture to ceteris paribus result in a net decrease in very exceptional achievements. Young men are also responsible for the vast majority of violent crime. We should expect delayed marriage and drop in marriage to push in the direction of more violence as well.

You know I really do feel like I am clinging bitterly to my priors and my meta at this point as I joked on twitter recnetly. I knew this was inevitable should our presence ever be noticed by anyone actually important like a journalist. What I didn't know was it would still hurt.

This emotion shows in my reply. Should delete it?

All this an no mention of the benefits of many minds working together on a common pile of information and hypotheses? There is a human intellectual bias to notice some secondary effect and completely miss the dominant effect.

Further, those who pushed continental drift were not COMPLETELY isolated from Harvard at all! They knew the theories and the data. They were more exposed to the data in their own back yards, and may or may not have benefited from not being so close to the sphere of influence of Harvard's authority. But even this is a weak hypothesis, is there some reason to think that if Harvard had set up a remote campus in South Africa that it would not have been a Harvard geologist who revived continental drift?

As a counterexample to this all, consider the BIg Bang. Before the Big Bang, the common belief among astronomers was a steady state universe that went on and on. Was the big bang theory thrown over by astronomers remote? No, it was thrown over by astronomers and physicists at Princeton and Bell Labs,, neither of which could be imagined as anything but central and authoritative in the fields in which they participated.

We have PLENTY of people that don't get sucked into the usual crap. In fact many of them, like the Indonesians as described in the OP, don't get sucked into the good stuff either! In my opinion, we need to encourage more people to work hard to LEARN the 'usual crap' more fully before thinking they have much of use to add by being independent.

The speed of light is our friend in this regard, but I expect it is more likely we will become very fast, so what is today tiny lag will become very problematic, rather than traveling to the stars. But that is getting ahead of myself, if we don't have competing craziness we might not get starships or mind emulations. (;_;) So how can we get some of the benefit of this today where we are all one with Harvard?

A commenter there writes:

Russia is an interesting case. You’ve got a whole school of Russian linguists, with roots back in the Soviet era, who think they can reconstruct really ancient language families. American linguists (with a few exceptions — Joseph Greenberg) think they’re crazy. (I’m not competent to decide who’s right.) There’s also a tradition of Soviet/Russian sociologists, anthropologists, and archeologists doing old-fashioned investigations of ancient “ethnogenesis” of modern nationalities while Westerners have been busy convincing themselves that all this stuff is socially constructed and part of the “invention of tradition.” Peter Turchin is somebody who benefits from having a foot in the Russian camp (his dad was a dissident and his family got kicked out in the 1970s and he keeps up his ties with Russian researchers) and not worrying too much about marching in step with Western academic historians. And David Anthony’s work on Indo-European origins benefits a lot from him keeping up with former East Bloc archeology and archeologists and ignoring the “pots not people” Anglo-American orthodoxy.

As an aside I think, the pots not people people seem to have been wrong. People probably came with pots.

This seems like an argument for forcing graduate students to take a second language, and keep up with work outside English.

Any other ideas?

Interesting comment by Gregory Cochran on torture not being useless as is often claimed.

Torture can be used to effectively extract information. I can give you lots of examples from WWII. People often say that it’s ineffective, but they’re lying or deluded. Mind you, you have to use it carefully, but that’s true of satellite photography. Note: my saying that it works does not mean that I approve of it.

... At the Battle of Midway, two American fliers, whose planes had been shot down near the Japanese carriers, were pulled out of the water and threatened with death unless they revealed the position of the American carriers. They did so, and were then promptly executed. Later, at Guadalcanal, the Japanese captured an American soldier who told them about a planned offensive – with that knowledge the Japanese withdrew from the area about to be attacked. I don’t why he talked [the guy didn't survive] – maybe a Japanese interrogator spent a long time building a bond of trust with that Marine. But probably not. For one thing, time was short. I see people saying that building such a bond is in the long run more effective, but of course in war, time is often short.

You could consider the various agents that the Germans inserted into England: the British captured almost every one of them, and gave them the choice of cooperation (which included active participation in British deception schemes) or execution. Most cooperated.

The Germans tortured members of the various underground groups in Europe – and some of them never broke. But some did. You may have heard of Jean Moulin not breaking under torture, even unto death: but the Gestapo caught him because Jean Multon did break. To avoid being tortured, Multon agreed to work for the Gestapo. Over the next few days he led his captors to more than 100 members of the Resistance in Marseilles. He then gave away more in Lyons. Some of those he betrayed themselves broke under torture by the Gestapo. Things snowballed, and the whole network was torn to pieces.

People often argue that people under torture will say anything that their interrogators want to hear, and are thus useless as sources of information. There is something to that, but to a large degree that depends on what goals the interrogators actually have. For example, in the Iraq war, American higher-ups often didn’t want information – they wanted their fantasies confirmed. They knew that anti-American guerrillas couldn’t be motivated by nationalism or Islam – they had to be paid Baathist agents. Or there had to a connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. Whatever. Most told something close to the truth, but that wasn’t good enough, and so, torture. In much the same way, Stalin tortured until he got what he wanted – false confessions for show trials, rather than actual information about Trotskyist conspiracies (that didn’t even exist). Most people broke – I remember that a Chekist said, admiringly, that Lev Landau held out a long time – three broken ribs before giving in. The Japs at Midway wanted real info, not ammunition for their fantasies.

If an interrogator wants valid information, he can see if the stories of several different prisoners agree. He can see if their story checks with other sources of information. etc. It’s like any other kind of intelligence.

At least some of the arguments about the effectiveness of torture are obviously false, not even meant to make sense. For example, I have seen people argue that torture is pointless because the same information is always available by other means. Of course, since the products of various kinds of intelligence often overlap, you could use that argument to claim that any flavor of intelligence [ cryptanalysis, sigint, satellite recon, etc) is useless. But multiple leads build confidence. Sometimes, you can get information via torture available in no other way. If you are smart, and if information is what you really want.

This seems an insightful and true statement. We seem to like "protecting" ought by making false claims about what is.

How many people will agree with a statement depends on what typeface it's written in.

Is slavery immoral? Is employment immoral? Can morality be a matter of degree?