I really thought the fist time I commented would be about Kolmogorov Complexity or Quantum Mechanics... but this was too much. There are so many things wrong with this... I had to seriously ponder necroing this, but, no... just no.

"Racism. The term has essentially lost all meaning ... the original meaning of racism was." This is already incorrect. Our colloquila definition of racism is not /at all/ related to the original meaning. The original meaning was "The belief that humans are distinguishable by races." That is it. It is the belief that there is such a thing as race. Note, that already, 'race realism' is just another word for "racism", and studies that base things on race are definitionally racist by the "original meaning of racism".

You want the term racism to be "irrational unjustified hatred for the sake of hatred". Which already doesn't make any sense because it is completely devoid of the use of race... but perhaps I'm just being pedantic.
The problem with this is that it completely ignores the fact that racism was a 17th century invention of European colonialism. No one refers to White and Black people before Chattel Slavery in the United States. It is entirely and exclusively an invention of European Colonialism, and that is a historical fact.

So when we talk about 'race realism', we're studying "Is there a biological justification for a distinction invented to entrench colonial powers". That in and of itself is not a question without merit, but it has an extremely low Bayesian prior.

"When it comes to violence, there is a very large gap between white and black incidences of violence. " Sure this is true. However there is a strong correlation between a /bunch of really terrible shit/ and being black. Which given this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/8ey/learned_helplessness/ would suggest a very high likelihood for a strong correlation between increased crime and lower IQ. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886984900242

"it's between 7.5 and 8 times as likely that a black person will commit a violent crime as a white person. That is an absolutely enormous difference. And that fact is something that's important to remember in your day to day life. Just as you avoid high crime neighborhoods, it does make sense to avoid events where there's going to be a predominantly black population attending, just for your own safety." That's incorrect as it ignores the bas rate fallacy and the targets of crimes. You are more likely to be victimized by a White person than you are to be victimized by a black person regardless of your race. This is a simple Bayesian inference and should be obvious for anyone who follows LW/

"That's a fact... It's not racist, it's a fact." Yeah, sticking with the actual definition of racist, not your incoherent one... it's still racist even if it is a fact.

"Atlanta City. Between 1985 and 1997 they spent 2.1 ... Cato Institute." One attempt to equalize education, spending an unknown amount per pupil shows absolutely nothing from a rational and empirical standpoint. There are so many unknowns here that it could mean anything,

"The egalitarians insist that we are all absolutely identical, black slates at birth ... for some reason, one person makes a million dollars, and another person winds up in poverty, and that there's a systemic demographic pattern of this, that there must be some sort of evil force at play, holding the poor person down."

Yes, because the preponderance of evidence indicates that the demographic differences are small, and very unlikely to be innate. It is more likely from a rational and empirical standpoint that social factors are the cause.

"Now the pure fact of the matter is that if you take any two groups, and assign any variable to them that differentiates between the two groups, and measure outcomes, you're going to see different outcomes." That's only true in a trivial sense. If you took connected or unconnected earlobes for example and measured enough people you would see a difference. That's why statisticians have methods for determining the meaningfulness of these statistics. In the Bayesian world, the update would never be considered "strong", so we'd ignore the data because trying to use it for predictive purposes would probably make our models worse.

"Inequality of outcomes is inevitable because we are all unique. And when you put us into a demographic, yes, each demographic is going to have its own outcomes. " Actually, there's a bunch of strong predictors of income, and a strong wage disparity remains even when those things are controlled for.

"these rich grievance-industry government lobbyists are aligning partly on race. You also have feminism as another huge grievance industry" The amount of money contributed from social justice lobbies compared to corporate lobbies is so small that this statement is only true in bizarro land.

"this leads men to work harder than women at dirtier jobs, whereas women are more likely to stay home and raise kids, thus earning less income." Actually, when these factors are controlled for the pay gap remains... did you do any research before making this video? At all?

"Our foundational myth is the blank slate. And so if blacks are underachieving in school as a demographic and if they are more likely to go to prison as a demographic, we need to actually to come up with a theory of mind, a theory of evolution that explains these differences between the races." Or, rather than attempt to revolutionize cognitive science we can see what is staring us right in the face, and infer from very well established scientific results. Namely, black people bear outrageous conditions, and that has created learned helplessness in large portions of them.

"to fight this idiotic squandering of funds" I'm noticing a theme or "They're spendin' my taxpayer monies...". Any attempt to focus on this as a form of waste is premature optimization. http://lesswrong.com/lw/g8a/macro_not_micro/

"Because there are differences between races." Wait! You didn't establish this. You didn't even establish that they are measuring something meaningful. You pointed out two facts that are easily explained with learned helplessness. Did you even think of alternative explanations for the data set? I'm not even saying 'learned helplessness' is /the/ reason, it is simply more likely than "Colonialists conveniently had it right"

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments