I agree with your point about the value of appearing confident, and that it's difficult to fake.* I think it's worth bringing up, but I don't think it's a particularly large component of success. Depending on the field, but I still don't think there's really many fields where it's a notably large component of success (maybe sales?).

*I've encountered it. I'm an inexperienced web developer, and people sometimes tell me that I should be more confident. At first this has very slightly hurt me. Almost negligibly slight. Recently, I've been extremely fortunate to get to work with a developer who also reads LW and understands confidence. I actually talked to him about this today, and he mirrored my thoughts that with most people, appearing more confident might benefit me, but that with him it makes sense to be honest about my confident levels (like I have been).

Side-stepping the issue of whether rationalists actually "win" or "do not win" in the real world, I think a-priori there are some reasons to suspect that people who exhibit a high degree or rationality will not be among the most successful.

For example: people respond positively to confidence. When you make a sales pitch for your company/research project/whatever, people like to see you that you really believe in the idea. Often, you will win brownie points if you believe in whatever you are trying to sell with nearly evangelical fervor.

One might reply: surely a rational person would understand the value of confidence and fake it as necessary? Answer: yes to the former, no to the latter. Confidence is not so easy to fake; people with genuine beliefs either in their own grandeur or in the greatness of their ideas have a much easier time of it.

Robert Kurzbans' book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind is essentially about this. The book may be thought of as a long-winded answer to the question "Why aren't we all more rational?" Rationality skills seem kinda useful for bands of hunter-gatherers to possess, and yet evolution gave them to us only in part. Kurzban argues, among other things, that those who are able to genuinely believe certain fictions have an easier time persuading others, and therefore are likely to be more successful.

I think the lumping of various disciplines into "science" is unhelpful in this context. It is reasonable to trust the results of the last round of experiments at the LHC far more than the occasional psychology paper that makes the news.

I've not seen this distinction made as starkly as I think it really needs to be made -- there is a lot of difference between physics and chemistry, where one can usually design experiments to test hypotheses; to geology and atmospheric science, where one mostly fits models to data that happens to be available; to psychology, where the results of experiments seem to be very inconsistent and publication bias is a major cause of false research results.

There are multiple things that could be wrong with your friend's response.

• It could draw a wrong inference given its premises.
• It could have wrong premises.
• It could, even if its conclusion is technically correct in some sense, be misleading.
• It could, even if its conclusion is correct, be a just plain weird response.

As regards the first of these, the three situations are indeed very closely analogous. (Not exactly -- you chose different arguments in the different cases. A: ill-defined, ugly-history, no-good-measure, within-versus-between. B: ill-defined, ugly-history, within-versus-between. C: ill-defined, ugly-history, no-good-measure.)

As regards the second, I think not so closely. For instance, so far as I know the notion of strength doesn't have at all the sort of ugly history that the notion of race does, nor the (less ugly) sort that the notion of intelligence does. (Maybe it has a different sort of ugly history, something to do with metaphorical use of "strength" by warmongering politicians perhaps.) And I bet you can get something nearer to a usable culture-independent test of strength than to a usable culture-independent test of intelligence. And, as I said earlier, I greatly doubt that there's more variation in anything anyone expects to be a matter of strength within strong/weak than between those groups. (Incidentally, you wrote "more variation between ... than among" which is the wrong way around for that argument.)

I'm not sure how much we should care about the third and fourth of those points since I think we agree that the conclusion is dubious at best in each case. But for sure the context is different (e.g., one reason why people who think there's no such thing as race or intelligence bother to say so is that there are other people saying: oh yes there are, and look, it turns out that this traditionally disadvantaged race to which I happen not to belong is less intelligent than this traditionally advantaged race to which I happen to belong; nothing like this is true for strength) and it seems like that makes a relevant difference. (E.g., your friend's response to the comment about strength seems weirdly aggressive for no reason; in the case of a comment about race or intelligence, there's at least an understandable reason why an otherwise reasonable person might be touchy about them.)

So no, I don't think the situations are perfectly analogous, though they're close. If we consider only the first kind of error, then the analogy is pretty good. And if you were making an explicit argument then that would be OK. But you aren't; you're presenting your parody arguments, and inviting readers to point and laugh and draw their own conclusions. And if one of the parody arguments is laughable for reasons that don't correspond to defects in the arguments you're parodying (e.g., because it depends on saying that there are lots of scientific articles out there saying that strength is purely a cultural construct) then you're inviting readers to conclude that claims like "race isn't real" and "intelligence isn't real" for terrible reasons. It's like dressing someone up in a clown costume, getting them to present an argument, and saying "wasn't that silly?". The argument may well be silly, but it will feel sillier than it is because of the clown suit.

I confess that I have not read much of what has been written on the subject, so what I am about to say may be dreadfully naive.

A. One should separate the concept of effective altruism from the mode-of-operation of the various organizations which currently take it as their motto.

A.i. Can anyone seriously oppose effective altruism in principle? I find it difficult to imagine someone supporting ineffective altruism. Surely, we should let our charity be guided by evidence, randomized experiments, hard thinking about tradeoffs, etc etc.

A.ii. On the other hand, one can certainly quibble with what various organization are now doing. Such quibbling can even be quite productive.

B. What comes next should be understood as quibbles.

B.i. As many others have pointed out, effective altruism implicitly assumes a set of values. As Daron Acemogulu asks (http://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-effective-altruism/daron-acemoglu-response-effective-altruism), "How much more valuable is to save the life of a one-year-old than to send a six-year-old to school?"

B.ii. I think GiveWell may be insufficiently transparent abut such things. For example, its explanation of criteria at http://www.givewell.org/criteria does not give a clearcut explanation of how it makes such determinations.

Caveat: this is onlybased on browsing the GiveWell webpage for 10 minutes. I'm open to being corrected on this point.

B.iii. Along the same lines I wonder: had GiveWell, or other effective altruists, existed in the 1920s, what would they say about funding a bunch of physicists who noticed some weird things were happening with the hydrogen atom? How does "develop quantum mechanics" rate in terms of benefit to humanity, compared to, say, keeping thirty children in school for an extra year?

B.iv. Peter Singer's endorsement of effective altruism in the Boston Review (http://bostonreview.net/forum/peter-singer-logic-effective-altruism ) includes some criticism of donations to opera houses; indeed, in a world with poverty and starvation, surely there are better things to do with one's money? This seems endorsed by GiveWell who list "serving the global poor" as their priority, and in context I doubt this means serving them via the production of poetry for their enjoyment.

I do not agree with this. Life is not merely about surviving; one must have something to live for. Poetry, music, novels -- for many people, these are a big part of what makes existence worthwhile.

C. Ideally, I'd love to see the recommendations of multiple effective altruist organizations with different values, all completely transparent about the assumptions that go into their recommendations. Could anyone disagree that this would make the world a better place?

On #4 and #6, the point is that even if everything I wrote was completely correct [...] it would not imply there is no such thing as strength.

Certainly true, but the most conspicuous problem with the parody argument in this case isn't that, it's that the statements about scientific journals etc. are spectacularly false. (Much less so for intelligence.) So someone reading your parody sees the parody argument, correctly says "wow, that's really stupid" -- but what they're probably noticing is stupid is something that doesn't carry across to the original.

And (I'm repeating things that have been said already in this discussion) while indeed any quantity of scientific papers finding problems with universal strength test wouldn't imply that there is no such thing as strength, they would give good reason to avoid treating strength as a single simple thing that can be easily compared across cultures -- and that is the version of the "no universal test, so no such thing as intelligence" argument that's actually worth engaging in, if you are interested in making intellectual progress rather than just mocking people who say silly oversimplified and overstated things.

I could have easily chosen to cite one that would have explicitly said race is a social construct.

Yes, I know; that's why I said "It's true, though, that some people say race is a social construct".

It is true that normally, taking people at their word is charitable. But if someone says that a concept is meaningless (when discussing it in a theoretical fashion), and then proceeds to use informally in ordinary conversation (as I conjectured that most people do with race and intelligence) then we cannot take them literally at their word. I think that something like my interpretation is the most charitable in this case.

I completely agree: the fact that something isn't simple and one-dimensional and perfectly unambiguous doesn't make it completely unreal or completely useless. So, for the avoidance of doubt, if anyone says "intelligence is multidimensional and hard to measure and culturally loaded; therefore there is no such thing as intelligence" and means the Stupidest Possible Thing by that last bit rather than something subtler, then I think they're wrong.

Incidentally, so far I think everything I have posted in this discussion has been downvoted exactly twice. I guess one is Eugine/Azathoth/VoiceOfRa; would anyone like to lay claim to the second lot? I'm curious in particular, about whether there's any information in the downvotes beyond what I already have from Zoltan's disagreement with me plus the fact that, duh, I'm posting non-neoreactionary opinions in a discussion of race and intelligence, so of course VoiceOfRa is going to downvote me. So: if you're reading this and downvoted me for a reason other than seeing me as a sociopolitical enemy, you can probably improve the effectiveness of your downvote by telling me why you gave it. Thank you.

This sort of analogical reductio ad absurdum only succeeds in so far as whatever makes the parody arguments visibly bad applies to the original arguments too.

This is more or less true for your arguments when they are parodying "no such thing as intelligence" (though I don't think the conclusion "there is no such thing as strength" is particularly absurd, if it's understood in a way parallel to what people mean when they say there's no such thing as intelligence).

But it's clearly not true, e.g., for #4. If you divide the human species up into races and look at almost any characteristic we have actual cause to be interested in, then the within-group differences do come out larger than the between-group differences. Whereas, e.g., if you divide people up into those who can and those who can't lift a 60kg weight above their heads, I bet the between-group differences for many measures of strength will be bigger than the within-group differences.

#5 is interesting because what Toni Morrison actually calls "a social construct" at the other end of the link is racism, not race. It's true, though, that some people say race is a social construct. But so far as I can see the things they mean by this don't have much in common with anything anyone would seriously claim about strength.

#6 takes a not-very-convincing argument from authority against belief in race and turns it into a completely absurd argument from authority against belief in strength, because in fact there are good scientists saying that race is an illusion or a social construct or something of the sort, and there aren't good scientists saying the same thing about strength.

It seems to me that your parodies of arguments in class A are consistently less successful than those of arguments in class B -- which is entirely unsurprising because intelligence and strength are similar things, whereas race and strength are much less so.

[EDITED to fix a weird formatting problem. I think start-of-line octothorpes must signify headings to Markdown.]