Comment author: Viliam 11 March 2016 08:55:30AM *  1 point [-]

Carey's list of publications doesn't look particularly bullshitty.

I looked at a random paper called "The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species" and I was like: well, at least he studies something about glaciers per se, i.e. how they became endangered.

Then I clicked at the abstract and saw this:

to understand why glaciers are so inexorably tied to global warming and why people lament the loss of ice, it is necessary to look beyond climate science and glacier melting—to turn additionally to culture, history, and power relations. Probing historical views of glaciers demonstrates that the recent emergence of an “endangered glacier” narrative stemmed from various glacier perspectives dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: glaciers as menace, scientific laboratories, sublime scenery, recreation sites, places to explore and conquer, and symbols of wilderness. By encompassing so many diverse meanings, glacier and global warming discourse can thus offer a platform to implement historical ideologies about nature, science, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global power dynamics.

So again, it's not about glaciers per se, but about, uhm, the cultural symbolism of glaciers.

So it's still the same thing. When talking about "glaciology", I expect something like "here are the physical processes how glaciers are made, and how they melt", but instead the guy produces something like "here is what glaciers mean in fairy tales, and here is how glaciers are compared to penises by feminists". The difference is that to write the former, you actually have to study the glaciers, while to write the latter, you only have to collect stuff people said about glaciers.

Technically, "collecting stuff people said about something" could be called science, but then it's not a subset of glaciology but rather a subset of culturology or whatever. And even in that case it should be done more scientifically, i.e. include some numbers. For example, if we are really collecting "stuff people said about glaciers", I would like to see data about how many people believe that glaciers symbolize penises, et cetera. Without those data, the research is worthless even as a subset of culturology.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 13 March 2016 09:20:42PM *  0 points [-]

Technically, "collecting stuff people said about something" could be called science

"Collecting stuff people said about something" is pretty much a definition of the classic form of the discipline of history. History is based on written primary sources; that's why "prehistory" refers to the time before written sources. More recent history has added archaeology, economics, statistics & demography, and other sources in addition to documentary ones — but the core of it is still about using what people wrote in the past as sources for what happened in the past.

(To ask whether history is "science" is kind of like asking whether medicine is "chemistry". History is much older than natural science as a discipline, although a great deal of current history makes use of scientific evidence. This doesn't mean that all [or even most] historians have a scientific mindset or make good use of scientific evidence, of course.)

Comment author: fubarobfusco 02 March 2016 03:50:34PM *  4 points [-]

"You could also, if you had a sufficiently good understanding of organic biology and aerodynamics, build an airplane that could mate with birds. I don't think this would have been a smart thing for the Wright Brothers to try to do in the early days."
— Eliezer, in this interview with John Horgan, when asked whether AIs will experience sexual desire

"As you know, birds do not have sexual organs because they would interfere with flight. In fact, this was the big breakthrough for the Wright Brothers. They were watching birds one day, trying to figure out how to get their crude machine to fly, when suddenly it dawned on Wilbur. "Orville," he said, "all we have to do is remove the sexual organs!" You should have seen their original design."
— Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba" (1986)

Comment author: fubarobfusco 24 February 2016 12:00:32AM 2 points [-]

Noise happens. Even if X is predictive of Y, it's rarely perfectly predictive.

For instance, suppose that 1000 students take a math test, then take a different math test that covers the same material with different problems. It is highly likely that their rankings on the two tests will be strongly correlated. It is highly unlikely that their rankings on the two tests will be exactly the same.

And it is quite possible that a few students will do vastly better on one test than the other, due to things that have nothing particularly to do with their mathematical ability. If you give a math test to a sufficiently large student population, then some student's boyfriend will have gotten hit by a car on the morning of the math test. That will probably mess with their scores.

Comment author: James_Miller 23 February 2016 10:58:04PM 1 point [-]

Doesn't the word "ALL" make your statement self-contradictory?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 23 February 2016 11:49:58PM 0 points [-]

No, it just makes it something other than a belief: an axiom, a game-rule, a definition, a tautology, etc.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 16 February 2016 10:31:38PM 4 points [-]

It seems to me that "People in Group A are better than people in Group B" is often a piece of rhetoric used to make it harder for people from Group A and Group B to cooperate with each other. This is frequently to the benefit of a small subset of one or the other group.

In short: Who benefits from elevating this sort of hypothesis to consideration? Usually, not you.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 13 February 2016 12:20:07AM 1 point [-]

When, if ever, is it morally acceptable to lie or deceive?

Comment author: Jiro 11 February 2016 03:34:00PM 0 points [-]

Culture with radical disagreement on values?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 12 February 2016 12:28:31AM 2 points [-]

Folks often make elaborate claims about their own cultures' values, and equally elaborate claims about the cultures of people they are afraid of.

These claims may not always be well-founded or intellectually honest.

The survey might get more honest answers by asking questions like, "Do you believe that immigration to your country threatens you, benefits you, or ...?"

Comment author: RaelwayScot 26 January 2016 08:12:33PM 1 point [-]

What are your thoughts on the refugee crisis?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 26 January 2016 08:52:25PM 6 points [-]

There's a whole -osphere full of blogs out there, many of them political. Any of those would be better places to talk about it than LW.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 06 January 2016 09:49:55PM *  1 point [-]

Consider sleep. The consciousness that goes to sleep ends. There is a discontinuity in perceived time. In the morning, the wakening brain ...

[...] will be capable of generating a perfectly functional consciousness, and it will feel as if it is the same consciousness which observes the mind which is, for instance, reading these words; but it will not be. The consciousness which is experiencing awareness of the mind which is reading these words will no longer exist.

You cease to exist every night. Indeed, there are all sorts of disruptions to the continuity and integrity of consciousness, ranging from distraction to coma to seizures to dissociative drugs. But people who experience these still care about their future selves. Why? Are they in error to do so?


My point here is that we can argue "this consciousness ceases to exist" with about as much strength for sleep as for more exotic processes. The difference is social and psychological, not metaphysical: we are accustomed to sleep, and to treating the consciousness who is born in the morning as the same consciousness who died the night before. It makes sense socially to do so; it is adaptive to do so; it is certainly more conducive to an intuitive understanding of things like memory.

But sameness — identity — is pretty darn tricky. Electrons don't have it; where does it come from?

Comment author: AmagicalFishy 27 December 2015 04:53:38AM *  4 points [-]

I don't think this is a stupid question, but everyone else seems to—that is, the immediate reaction to it is usually "there's obviously no difference." I've struggled with this question a lot, and the commonly accepted answer just doesn't sit well with me.

If different races have different skin, muscle/bone structure, genetics, and maybe other things, shouldn't it follow that different races could have different brains, too?

I know this is taboo, and feel the following sort of disclaimer is obligatory: I'm not racist, nor do I think any difference would necessarily be something drastic or significant, but the existence of a difference is something that seems probable to me.

Edit: Though it's obviously included, I'm not talking specifically about intelligence!

Comment author: fubarobfusco 27 December 2015 05:58:44AM *  4 points [-]

Given that various mental disorders are heritable, it's not clearly impossible for psychological properties to be selected for.

However, unlike dark or light skin (which matters for dealing with sunlight or the lack of it), mental ability is generally useful for survival and success in all climates and regions of the world. Every physical and social setting has problems to figure out; friendships and relationships to negotiate; language to acquire; mates to charm; rivals to overcome or pacify; resources that can be acquired through negotiation, deception, or wit; and so on. This means that all human populations will be subject to some selection pressure for mental ability; whereas with skin color there are pressures in opposite directions in different climates.

So why is this such a troublesome subject?

The problem with the subject is that there's an ugly history behind it — of people trying to explain away historical conditions (like "who conquered whom" or "who is richer than whom") in terms of psychological variation. And this, in turn, has been used as a way of justifying treating people badly ... historically, sometimes very badly indeed.

Classifications don't exist for themselves; they exist in order for people to do things with them. People don't go around classifying things (or people) and then not doing anything with the classification. But sometimes people make particular classifications in order to do horrible things, or to convince other people to do horrible things.

"Earthmen are not proud of their ancestors, and never invite them round to dinner." —Douglas Adams

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