Simon Anhold is someone who's payed to consult governments. Both Western governments and countries like Sierra Leone and Saudi Arabia. If he's simply talking bullshit why do government seek him out as a highly-payed advisor?

I guess the rejection is more based on the fact that his message seems like it violates deep-seated values on your end about how reality should work than his work being bullshit.

Anything about adding symptoms to currently harmless bacteria?

I believe that anyone who says either "logic is sexist and racist" or "I am going to rape this equation"

Nobody linked here says either of those things. In particular the orginal blog posts says about logic:

This is not to say it is not useful; it is. But it does not exist in a vacuum and should not be sanctified.

The argument isn't that logic is inherently sexist and racist and therefore bad but that it's frequently used in places where there are other viable alternatives. That using it in those places can be driven by sexism or racism.

Genetics science says otherwise. Or do you believe that genes have no impact on who someone is?

This fails to even remotely respond to what I wrote.

I don't know, are you? You can trace your ancestry or get genetic tested if your curious.

Yes, in all cases, and since you apparently don't understand the concept being conveyed here: There are no pure-blooded aryans here. There are no pure-bloods at all.

That is a definitional argument -- it's all about how one would define the word "race".

Very much so, yes.

I don't think so. You can look at genetic clusters at different levels of aggregation. At some level each person is unique. At another level a family is similar. One level higher inhabitants of a certain region are similar. Going up, just before the level of "all humans are similar" you encounter race.

I'd argue, as our culture defines race, you really encounter a large number of different and distinct ways of classifying groups of people, of which skin color is just one which gets disproportionate attention owing to historic cultural reasons combined with extreme visual salience (black skin is much easier to notice than eye color). In other periods of time, other ways of grouping people by race got more attention.

That's why I'm suggesting classifying people not by their skin colour, but by the genetic pool / cluster their ancestors belonged to. Of course it's an imprecise, statistical classification that talks mostly about population averages and priors. That classification, however, is correlated with skin colour.

The classification is correlated with a whole bunch of things, skin color being just one. You're right to say we can update our priors on somebody having such-and-such ancestry - but we could do the same thing with any number of other characteristics which we almost entirely - but not quite entirely - ignore. Because we do see hints of that - blondes are ditzy, red-heads are angry, blue eyed people are less trusting of others (this is, as I understand, a German stereotype) - but we don't elevate it to the level of -race-, and indeed treat it more like astrology.

[Edit]Because[/Edit] once you arrive at this point, you're left with a foundation which completely fails to hold up the weighty edifice that is "race"

Well, steelmanning your Chomsky sentence, I assume you mean treating someone's race as the only meaningful information about them. In that case you might want to actually read what I wrote.

No. I mean treating race as a meaningful property of a person in the first place.

In that case what did you mean and how was it relevant to my point?

You start from where you responded to me - the conversation began before that, so my context for this conversation is apparently different from yours. Which is to say - the problem is not the relevance of what I say to your point, but the relevance of what you say to mine.

Do you agree that there is a fact of the matter on the questions relating to race?

No.

Not as a statement of solipsism, but because "race" isn't a well-defined category system, but a product of people's absurd need to draw well-defined boundaries where no well-defined boundaries exist. There's far more difference between a black-skinned person whose ancestors have lived in America for five generations and a black-skinned person whose ancestry remains rooted in Africa, than there is between the black-skinned American and a white-skinned American - yet these two are grouped together in "black" as if that were a meaningful category.

And then the concept of mixed-race; the insistence on treating edge cases as between categories, rather than demonstrating that the joints can't actually be carved there. It's a bit like insisting that the two ends of ring species are, in fact, distinct species - and the middles are mixed-species. If races can mix - and, indeed, if they've spent the past few centuries doing so - there aren't races anymore, just a spectrum of individuals who can't be sorted in any meaningful way. At which point, well, you might as well just treat people as individuals.

Am I from a small tribe in Polynesia because I have an unusual crown formation? Maybe I'm American Indian because of the way my roots wrap around my jawbone? Well, what about my blonde hair and blue eyes? What about my red beard? Where the hell am I in that spectrum? Well, today, I'm "white", because US slavery made that distinction important in our culture, and nothing else. And the fact that I'm "white" instead of a convoluted mess of a dozen different races - mixed race, in point of fact - means that the categorization at play is the product of cultural historical accident, rather than anything resembling truth.

The appreciation is appreciated. :-)

I'm actually vaguely unsatisfied with this. There's a stronger statement about this I feel like I could make, but I can't translate the strong version of this into words; the discussion so far has been an abstract cloud in my brain that isn't condensing properly into a properly pithy form (which is part of why I was long-winded there). It's where all of this ties back into my opening post - about how, historically, people have been utter rubbish at judging the relative merits of groups, and how a spectrum of beliefs about race is a stronger "group" identifier than skin color. But it's not condensing properly.

There's a world outside LW, you realize that right?

Yes. If you want to talk to the world, feel free. Right now you are not.

Someone has a massive overestimation of his own intelliegence. I've only seen this particular argument made a couple times and the people making it were probably somewhat smarter than the average LWer. Also, judging by this comment of yours alone and the fact that it has almost no connection to what I wrote, you appear to be below average for LW.

I will note you fail to address the point. Perhaps you missed it, perhaps not.

I have no idea what you mean by the word "racism". In fact it doesn't appear to have a single meaning, but rather at least two meanings that you switch between as needed in classic motte-and-bailey style.

The identification of individuals as their race, rather than themselves. That is the whole of my use of it.

That looks like a fully general counter argument against admitting that differences in intelligence exist.

It is an assertion that the way you treat others should reflect the way you wish to be treated. Your interpretation makes no sense.

Except when a proponent of affirmative action argues that affirmative action is necessary because the process is still racist and the process is clearly racist because fewer blacks are getting admitted, you have no counterargument because you refuse to look at the evidence that would prduce one. This is not hypothetical, this is the standard argument AA proponents actually use.

I am not one of them.

To put it another way: It's nice that you oppose a bad policy; however, you shouldn't be surprised that if you (collective) endorse intentional ignorance about a topic, the result is bad policy in matters related to that topic.

I do not regard people's religions relating to race as being truths.

Of course, if you refuse to discuss race and crime, someone will point out that more blacks get arrested than whites and claim that this is due to police racism. More generally, once you start lying the truth is ever after your enemy.

The only person who might be considered as pointing this out here is you, I will observe.

For example, you may have heard that social science is in the midst of a replication crisis, well there is one area of social science where that isn't the case, namely IQ research and its correlates. Of course, for most social scientists openly stating that differences of race or gender are significant, or really anything that makes a black, woman, LGBT, or other member of a protected category look bad is career-killing. Hence social scientists are reduced to doing data dredges which unsurprisingly don't replicate. The current state of social science is like what astronomy would be like if astronomers weren't allowed to say anything that might imply the earth might not be flat.

The difference between my intelligence and the intelligence of the average person who makes this argument makes this look, to me, like a bunch of bank robbers, engaged in an argument about how to split their latest prize, accusing one another of theft for trying to argue they should get a bigger take for their particular roles. Which is to say - almost everybody is less intelligent than me, by quite a margin, and certainly a larger margin than may exist between the races. If you want to argue that racism is acceptable on the not-nearly-as-solid-ground-as-you-seem-to-think that black people are less intelligent on average, you're going to have to justify what makes the measures your side intends to take against black people less appropriate if I intended to take them against you. If you think they're subhuman, well, you're sub-me.

But even if you leave me out of it, and there's still somebody smarter than you. While you consider what to do to -your- lessers, consider whether you want your betters to follow your example.

Of course, history also says that people who spread false beliefs about equality are much much more prone to criminal behavior (or at least behavior that would be criminal if the people doing it weren't in charge of the state). This is a special case of the danger posed by people committed to readily falsifiable and false beliefs.

I have little patience for affirmative action and other "social justice" forms of collectivism, because I see where that leads. I have less patience still for collectivists who pretend that their collectivism isn't really collectivism, or who espouse a different kind of social justice - because racial meritocracy is just social justice by another name. Indeed, racism is and was widely practiced in collectivist societies, whose crimes you allude to here.

It's really funny to me that your "terrible" quote and your "doesn't seem wrong" quote are mostly the same things, just with the second emphasizing over and over that you'd be willing to change your mind.

But what's going on here is just our old familiar dilemma of justice vs. truth. It SHOULDN'T be profitable to use someone's skin color as a quick proxy for what's inside their heads. That would be monstrously unfair. People can't help their skin color. It would totally be bullshit that certain shades of human would turn out to be more likely to be late every morning. Imagine if that was also applied to gender? Holy information asymmetry Batman!

Thing is, though, these beliefs will save you money. Extend more trust to folks with the 'good' characteristics, less to those with the 'bad' ones. Hiring a clerk for your urban youth patronized Footlocker? Got 50 applicants? Odds are, the white girl isn't in a gang. She could be, of course. If Warriors has taught us nothing else it is that anyone might be in a gang. But she probably isn't. What about the 30 black dudes? They probably aren't either. The majority of hu-nams aren't. But each of them is more likely to be than she is.

So, you've got a simple set of rules (which I'll snidely sum up as 'Always prefer white dudes for everything'), which seems like, by the numbers, it would save you money. You like money. As Danny DeVito said in that movie, "Everyone does, that's why its called money!". But there's a cost. You don't want to be known as a racist/sexist/age-ist/mental health-ist (even though, you actually would be if you did this).

Solution: Use these rules and rigorously deny that you do. Call it the Silicon Valley strategy, or the Patriarchy, if you are being mean about it.