All of BlueAjah's Comments + Replies

"Can you actually provide this evidence to us?"

I could, but it's 7:57am here, and I need some sleep. And half the information you want is in Arabic, and the other half requires you to understand genetics. And I don't think you actually care about the answer. But you could probably Google it yourself if you could suppress your biases and your snark.

Remember, you're looking for these facts, but not necessarily with the exact wording: 1. They saw the USA as somewhere where people are allowed to do whatever they want far more than in other countries ... (read more)

8ArisKatsaris
First of all, you're still not showing how it's genetic differences produce these different outcomes. Some very liberal people I know or have read tend to be atheists that were nonetheless born in Arab backgrounds. Nothing you've said, even if I were to concede an actual difference in values, indicates how these different values is produced by genetics rather than religion. Have you seen an Arab atheist argue that we should "pray 5 times a day" for example or "cover ourselves from head to toe"? Probably not. So is there any correlation about someone's values when you know they are genetically Arab but you screen off the influence of religion? e.g. How about Christian Egyptians for example. How different in values are they from Christian Greeks compared to Muslim Egyptians? As for the "never criticize our leaders" value, that's a meme that some particular ideologies have attempted to spread in different times from Northern Europe to Slavic nations to China to the Arab world. If there's any causation between it and any particular known genetics of any ethnic group, I don't have any evidence to identify it. There's no subservience meme present in the Arab world nowadays that I wouldn't be able to identify in the Slavic world 30 years ago or in the Germanic world 70 years ago... Osama Bin Laden in his declaration of war against America starts by speaking "It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies" This is the sort of ordinary anti-imperialist speech that talks about unjust aggression, looting the wealth of the nation, etc. Nothing of particularly different values in it. I haven't read the message in its entirety but I looked for the words "depravity" "anarchy" "freedom", etc, and I couldn't find them in the list of O

Environmentally in this context just means anything that's not directly genetic or inherited epigenetic. It doesn't mean plants and animals or anything like that.

IQ is mostly genetic (in rich egalitarian countries like the USA), but everyone seems to agree that there's still some environmental factors that smart parents can do to make their children a tiny bit smarter. I don't know exactly what those factors are though. Probably any kind of practice with thinking and studying would help a tiny bit, but perhaps other things to do with better care such as nu... (read more)

5Desrtopa
IQ is significantly genetic, but there's considerably more than a little bit of variance in intelligence between people given the same DNA, and that's without bringing in the effect of raising people in widely divergent cultures.

I can't find anything right now on what effect parents' class (what does that mean? SES?) has on educational attainment for people of the same IQs. Someone else may want to look it up if they're better at googling than me.

But it doesn't matter. We already know that wordsum, IQ, and educational attainment are measuring similar things. Wordsum seems like a good proxy for IQ. It gives sensible answers in all the graphs, and it is said to correlate .71 with adult IQ.

Do you have a point, or some sort of theory about what I was saying? Do you disagree with the idea that Republicans are smarter (except at the top end) than Democrats, or that "liberals" are smarter than "conservatives"?

3A1987dM
I don't. My point was that using a test that heavily relies on ‘learned’ knowledge such as Wordsum may have exaggerated the effect (compared to what one would see if one used a more culture-neutral test such as Raven's progressive matrices) when some of the groups have historically been educated more than others for additional reasons besides IQ (even if said reasons correlate with IQ, so long as the correlation isn't close to 1).
7A1987dM
What I mean is, someone with IQ 115 from a upper-class family will be more likely to go to college than someone with IQ 115 from a lower-class family.
0Kawoomba
Explain that claim, please.

But educational attainment is directly caused by IQ, so that wouldn't make any sense.

2A1987dM
Not exclusively IQ -- parents' socio-economic status also matters.

The police officer is PAID to do that. He isn't doing it for free out of the goodness of his heart like the superhero is. He didn't have to make his own moral judgements like the superhero. He didn't have to resist the option of just taking whatever he wanted in life while nobody could stop him.

By the way, you should know better than to believe the PC propaganda about Ghandi.

-2snewmark
Oh cool, so if I pay you will you let me kill you?

I think all those traits correlate, even when measured independently to avoid that effect.

Which makes sense for many reasons.

One reason: who are people going to marry? People of the same worth as themselves, but not necessarily from the same category. Smart rich men get to marry beautiful women, or the kindest women, or the most honest women, whichever they prefer. So the positive traits get mixed with each other, and the negative traits get mixed with each other.

It's funny when you realise that Godzilla was an unforeseen consequence of Science used for evil purposes. Godzilla is actually a metaphor for the dangers of science. So, you ironically made a cartoon that makes sense.

But you misunderstand humour. Humour is mostly about building rapport. So for smart people that could involve jokes that are intelligent. But that doesn't make intelligence the defining characteristic for humour.

No, he's saying that liberalism and conservatism also come with sets of beliefs about the nature of reality and sets of predictions about the consequences of their actions. Some of which are wrong (for both groups). And he's saying we should be able to guess which group has a better understanding of the world by comparing their IQs. Which I think is a valid point, except that the example he chose is one where IQ clearly creates a bias of its own, and one where black people probably miscategorise themselves.

This article has a lot of bell-curve verbal IQ graphs from GSS (General Social Survey) data for the years 2000-2012, using the wordsum score as a measure of intelligence:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/04/verbal-intelligence-by-demographic/

It shows Republicans as smarter than Democrats, but Liberals smarter than Conservatives, and White people smarter than Black people, and some other comparisons.

5Vaniver
Kind of; the great thing about those distributions is that you can talk about more of the distribution than one summary statistic. There's a clump of high IQ democrats, a clump of low IQ democrats, and then a clump of medium IQ democrats, whereas the Republicans look like one clump of medium IQ republicans. There are more Democrats from 0 to 5, more Republicans from about 6 to 8, and a tiny few more Democrats from 9 to 10. This matches with the prediction that there is a significant group of low-vocabulary people who vote predominantly Democratic, the middles voting somewhat more Republican, and the highs about evenly split.
1A1987dM
I'd expect the correlation between IQ and WORDSUM to be much weaker when controlling for educational attainment, so some of those graphs will have to be taken with a grain of salt.

You've called two different things "Argument Goodness" so you can draw your diagram, but in reality the arguments that the expert heard that led them to their opinion, and the argument that they gave you, are always going to be slightly different.

Also your ability to evaluate the "Argument Goodness" of the argument they gave you is going to be limited, while the expert will probably be better at it.

Declaration of bias: I am a liberal, I am intelligent, but I'm not a Democrat or Republican.

It's hard to measure liberalism. For example, half the black people say they are conservative and half say they are liberal. But most outsiders would say most black people are liberal (and it's common for 100% of black people in an area to vote for Obama). People judge their liberalism against people like themselves, so it's hard to compare groups.

If you count most black people as liberals, then that intelligence difference between liberals and conservatives might d... (read more)

5Desrtopa
Could you give a citation for this? I've heard other studies claiming the opposite, and I'm not inclined to accept either at face value without knowing what actually went into the studies.

Again, I disagree. Cults can't form around anything. They can only form around issues that would make them social or intellectual outcasts. And in a world in which there were poorly hidden aliens, too many intelligent people would be of the opinion that there are poorly hidden aliens, and no such cult could arise.

But the more important point is... IF I start to think that there are poorly hidden aliens, that could be due to one of two reasons: either because I have reasonable evidence for their existence, or because I'm being influenced by some sort of bia... (read more)

Yes, but dying is against God's law... so they've cleverly got around that problem.

6BerryPick6
Not true for every religion. Judaism has certain specific instances where it is accepted that it would be better for one to die than commit a sin. Also, martyrdom would not be such a large aspect in Christianity (or, at least, in early Christianity) if dying for God wasn't considered a good thing.
6JohnWittle
A variance in the population that large, from "preserve oneself" to "do not preserve oneself", is ridiculously unlikely to remain in human beings after the past 3 billion years of evolution.
5MugaSofer
Ah ... no. Among Americans, maybe. Ah ... I can't say I have. Source please? I must say, the fact that you aren't bothering to defend these views seems to indicate you expect us to already hold them. Am I misreading you here?

The United States is renowned as a beacon of freedom.

The United States is probably number one in the world for using freedom as a buzzword, but amongst first world nations, the United States really doesn't stand out for freedom at all. If we're talking about legally favoring actual liberties over paternalism, not "freedom" as an applause light, countries like the Netherlands stand out ahead of the U.S.

What the U.S. does stand out for among first world nations is being big and powerful and throwing its weight around, which is, in fact, exactly what the terrorists in question attest to actually taking issue with.

4aeder
How do you define freedom? Is it freedom for everyone to have guns in home? Is it freedom is guaranted employement? Is it freedom is the right for the government medical care? Is it freedom the right to die on the street in case of lost job? Is it freedom the right to say anything - except that is censored? What is freedom? P.S. It's sometimes a fun to hear the speaches of "The United States is renowned as a beacon of freedom" from the country which more or less put racism under control less then 50 years ago. Does the USA was the "beacon of freedom" in the 1950's then "white only" tables still appear in public?

Because I've looked at the evidence, and that's what the evidence says.

Can you actually provide this evidence to us?

The United States is renowned as a beacon of freedom. Some people think that's a good thing, some people think that's a bad thing, but they mostly agree it's a beacon of freedom.

Citation needed: I've never seen the people who hate America call it "a beacon of freedom". They tend to call it stuff like "imperialist aggressor" instead. And likewise "imperialist aggressor" is rarely used as a descriptor of Am... (read more)

4Desrtopa
You're urging someone else to show evidence for their statements or retract them, while countering with assertions for which you yourself do not provide evidence. There's a substantial body of work on the bias Eliezer describes in this article, and while, yes, obviously people have different personalities, people tend to ascribe much more explanatory power to personality as opposed to circumstance when analyzing other people's actions, as opposed to their own. People will readily, say, write off another person as an asshole for chewing them out over a simple mistake, when they would have done the same thing if they had had that person's day and thought it a perfectly reasonable reaction to their circumstances. When it comes to analyzing strangers, it would be hard for the average person to weight personality more relative to circumstance as an explanation than we already do.
4PhDre
Do you have any sources that suggest that emotional reactions (such as ease of incitement to anger) are significantly different from individual to individual? I feel it more likely to be the case that you are still using the correspondence bias when you say that you'll kick the vending machine when "the bus was late, the train was early, my report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten my lunch money for the second day in a row" - these circumstances have provoked a emotion in you that you identify as anger. When you see a third party kicking a vending machine, attributing his action (kicking the machine) to a fundamental trait ("the man has an angry personality") is an example of the correspondence bias. People are less likely to think "that guy is having a bad day and the machine swallowed his last dollar" than "he is an angry person" because we attribute actions to personality traits in other people. You might be overvaluing genetics here. I think that the correspondence bias is also displayed when we look at different countries or cultures. For example, traveling in Spain, one might think that Spaniards are warm loving people, because they make an effort to talk to tourists and communicate with them. Compare this to those who live in New York City, which has a reputation for curt, impolite citizens (probably because traffic is bad in the city, and everyone is trying to get to work ducking and weaving in between mobs of tourists who just get in the way - visitors to the city fall victim to the correspondence bias when thinking "New Yorkers are rude!").

"Nobody chooses their genes or their early environment. The choices they make are determined by those things (and some quantum coin flips)."

All true so far... but here comes the huge logical leap...

"Given what we know of neuroscience how can anyone deserve anything?"

What does neuroscience showing the cause of why bad people choose to do bad things, have to do with whether or not bad people deserve bad things to happen to them?

The idea that bad people who choose to do bad things to others deserve bad things to happen to them has never been based on an incorrect view of neuroscience, and neuroscience doesn't change that even slightly.

3Chrysophylax
The point TGGP3 is making is that they didn't choose to do bad things, and so are not bad people - they're exactly like you would be if you had lived their lives. Always remember that you are not special - nobody is perfectly rational, and nobody is the main character in a story. To quote Eliezer, "You grew up in a post-World-War-Two society where 'I vas only followink orders' is something everyone knows the bad guys said. In the fifteenth century they would've called it honourable fealty." Remember that some Nazis committed atrocities, but some Nazis were ten years old in 1945. It is very difficult to be a "good person" (by your standards) when you have a completely different idea of what being good is. You are displaying a version of the fundamental attribution error - that is, you don't think of other people as being just like you and doing things for reasons you don't know about, so you can use the words "bad person" comfortably. The idea "bad people deserve bad things to happen to them" is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that there is such a thing as a bad person, which is unproven at best - even the existence of free will is debatable. There are people who consider themselves to be bad people, but they tend to be either mentally ill or people who have not yet resolved the conflict between "I have done X" and "I think that it is wrong to do X" - that is, they have not adjusted to having become new people with different morals since they did X (which is what criminal-justice systems are meant to achieve).

You couldn't be more wrong. What you should say is that you don't notice the impact your political opinions have on the world, because it happens slowly, because people with radically different political views tend to live in far off countries that you don't think about or in the distant past, and because currently people like you have somewhat sensible political opinions in terms of their short-term consequences (but not at all sensible in terms of their long-term consequences).

Your life would be very different if you lived under a different political re... (read more)

0MugaSofer
I didn't downvote this, but I think next time you make such a ... nonstandard ... claim you should back it up with evidence, not just baldly state that the prevailing/opposing view is false. On the other hand, I may have an unusually low prior for "People have different personalities, so they want different things for their countries."
8ArisKatsaris
The past chief center of nazism in the world (Germany) became one of the most anti-Nazi nations. That's evidence against the preposition that politics are significantly based on genetics as opposed to e.g. education. Similar evidence may be the anti-monarchism of the Soviets when Russia was previously the most absolutist monarchy in Europe, the anti-communism of current Eastern Europeans, etc, etc We can also mention how populations with the same ethnic base have becomes adherents of different political practices (e.g. South Korea vs Norther Korea) On the whole I don't see genetics having more than a minor effect on people's politics, if any. It's certainly extremely overshadowed by factors of culture/education/etc.
6Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
This is an interesting and fairly significant claim. What is your evidence that it is true?

But there can't be any cross-cultural confusion, because it is written in English. Vietnamese or Japanese people either know what the English words "blue" and "green" mean, or they don't speak English at all and wouldn't be reading this story.

And if the story was written in Vietnamese, it would use "xanh lá cây" which means green and "xanh dương" which means blue, rather than just "xanh". Just because people normally use the same word to describe two different colours, doesn't mean they can't see the difference between those colours, and don't have ways of describing the difference when they need to.

No, blue is what is collectively perceived as blue, while also not being collectively perceived as any other colour (or color if you are a "gray"). That's how they came up with the objective, standard, scientific definition of blue above.

And the sky isn't pure blue, it's a quarter of the way between blue and green.

7Alicorn
This is a charming phrase.