I think we've made a huge mistake in our notions of "experts", especially the blind assumption that we need experts to tell us something on every arbitrary issue.
On all the recent issues, you can and should engage with reality directly. They're all compact in scope and source materials. There's not a lot to read re: COVID origin arguments, mask efficacy, etc. For example, with masks there's hardly any research, no randomized trials in America, only one in the West (that isn't good enough to use anyway).
There's no secret knowledge on these issues, nor are there any priestly intellectual capacities. Moreover, COVID origin isn't centrally a scientific question as much as a forensic/investigatory issue. Reality is exogenous to academic journals, and this question is structurally exogenous. For example, that Fauci and friends funded research at the Wuhan lab and had an unusually severe conflict of interest by our customary standards is an important fact, one that we don't need peer-reviewed research to know.
It would be worthwhile to model the cognition of "experts" when they address these issues and formulate their opinions and statements. We can easily see in many cases that there's not anything proprietary or extravagant going on.
For example, Sen. Rand Paul was censored and condemned by leftists for saying that cloth masks don't work, or "do anything", which I take to mean reduce COVID spread (in either direction). He's likely correct, though we don't know because we haven't done the trials for any mask type (we don't need trials for all questions, but we need them for mask efficacy for several reasons).
YouTube censored his videos (media interviews). Politifact, a leftist activist/censorship outfit, purported to debunk him by citing an animation of a mask (on the New York Times website). An animation. (And it was an animation of an N95, but treating an animation of any mask as evidence is savagely stupid, truly idiocratic.)
Politifact also cited an "expert". He was a random doctor in Minnesota, a pediatrician. Doctors aren't experts on mask efficacy, much less for a specific pathogen, much less a new pathogen. They're not experts on arbitrary biomedical or epidemiological topics. This experts thing is starting to look like a mystical superstition that will get us all killed. *The experts on scientific questions are the people who conduct research on those questions.* Since there's hardly any research here, there are hardly any experts on this question, and more importantly, we can just read the research and ask whatever questions we have.
The doctor lamented "lies" about masks. He didn't cite any research. I'd bet thousands of dollars he hadn't read any of the few journal articles on the subject at the time (August, 2021).
It turned out he was just a maniacal leftist activist on Twitter, a man who had called for two different Republican politicians to resign in just the previous couple of weeks, for being "traitors" and "liars", retweeted that the governor of Massachusetts "hates children and science". There was no reason for Politifact to cite or know of the existence of a random Minnesota pediatrician, other than he was a Twitter maniac who would give them the quotes they wanted. The Politifact activist who wrote the piece exclusively "debunks" claims by non-leftists or that are incongruous with current mandatory Democratic Party narratives. He stopped fact checking Rachel Maddow when she infamously claimed that the COVID shots prevent infection and transmission, (it's not clear that leftists are aware, even in July 2023, that the shots don't do these things, and why):
"A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else," she added with a shrug. "It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people.""
Politifact never fact-checked the above, just stopped checking Maddow altogether, giving her a free pass. Note that Biden made the same wildly false claims, and to my knowledge has never corrected or apologized.
So the "experts" thing is getting in the way, obscuring reality, preventing us from thinking clearly. You'll also see bizarre citations of the CDC, of some anonymously written CDC webpage, a page full of errors and false citations (their science of masking page), with no stated methodology (e.g. meta-analysis with inclusion criteria). There's no need to just cite other people's opinions, and whether any organization is reliable is an empirical question. The CDC's reliability cannot simply be assumed, and because there's so little research we can just read it, then look at what the CDC says and ask any questions we have. (The CDC doesn't have its own research or data on mask efficacy, which they'd have to publish if they did – they ran no trials. They only cite outside research, have been stunningly lazy, incurious, and misleading.) Certainly, journalists should do this.
It's critically important to not outsource our cognitive activity or our connection with reality. We're dealing with a mass stupidity situation here, where there's very little sign of cognition, much less intellect, on these topics. We've got people unaware that an arbitrary reduction in pathogen population doesn't necessarily reduce infection risk (masks), that we don't know the long-term or even short-term effects of brand new pharma, that finding traces of raccoon dog material mixed with COVID virus on a surface doesn't mean anything at all, that men are much stronger and faster than women even of the same weight, etc. This is not a scientific civilization.
We're seeing too many at-a-distance arguments about experts and science and "who to trust" on issues that can be navigated efficiently with a few key background facts, good alertness, and a 110 IQ. We've got to get people to read, because it's clear even journalists aren't. Just read the damn papers first, and then we can talk about whether we need experts to tell us or explain something.
It's also troubling that we've got a political ideology that explicitly demonizes asking questions. Leftists have a trope of "just asking questions" that they use to marginalize anyone who, well, asks questions that deviate from mandatory narratives and beliefs or is willing to think independently. It's a very bad sign for an ideology to have that kind of dogma, and if you were going to have that trope in your ideology, you'd need to fortify it against its obvious propensity toward bias and motivated reasoning by building a robust framework that differentiates between villainous and sincere questioners, creating lots of room for rigor and curiosity. Leftists haven't done that, with predictable results. (Trying to build the framework would likely illustrate that you need to just get rid of the trope and not marginalize questions at all.)
Social psychologist here. There's a profound lack of cognitive activity in American journalists, and what I'd call legacy leftist media especially. I don't think we can explain what happened here without reference to their off-the-charts partisan political bias. I've never seen anything like it.
It really matters to them that a Republican said something, or takes a particular view. In this case they swarmed on Sen. Cotton, who made the most mundane comments saying it was possible it was a lab leak, that it was worth investigating, etc.
Leftist media like the NYT and WaPo falsely linked him to a "bioweapon" "conspiracy theory". The bioweapon trope stuck like construction adhesive – I see MSNBC activists like Hasan and the Atlantic editor still pushing it. As far as I know, no prominent Republican has ever asserted that it was a bioweapon, suggested it was likely to be, or treated it as a major option.
We also see a historical revisionism (Hasan again), where they falsely assert a racial narrative where Trump first speaks of a China virus, then leftist media fabricate their "debunked bioweapon conspiracy" narrative as some sort of justified deception as a triage against "racism" or what have you. Trump didn't say anything about a China virus until several months after leftist media fabricated their narrative.
There's a profound prejudice and malice toward outsiders/non-leftists that makes objectivity impossible here, especially if those outsiders are Republicans/"the right". And all dissent and rigor is being coded as "right-wing" and "far right" by leftist media now – even longtime leftists and Democratic voters are being falsely tagged that way, if they say, call for schools to reopen, oppose censorship, note the lack of good evidence for mask efficacy (any type of mask, either direction), note that natural immunity outpunches the mRNA shots, etc. Left-right framing is devastating, primes a binary sorting.
I also think it's a big problem that leftist ideology has no commitment to integrity or cognitive independence. Humans generally don't display integrity when tested without an explicit commitment to it. Leftists aren't rewarded for it. It's not extolled and championed in their culture. It's easy to imagine a culture where it is, with a good virtue ethics that is more important than political ideology.
## Reading papers
I agree that journalists and just humans generally should read the damn papers. Those of you who say they can't should first go read some of these papers first. There's too much distance between people's views and reality, including the reality of academic papers. I'm convinced that the most savagely stupid human artifacts are found in journals like Science and Nature.
It's very common for social science studies and papers to be fully invalid or simply false. Fraud is trivially easy in academia, is not seriously investigated most of the time, and academics are unfamiliar with the word "audit". But you can detect catastrophic invalidity by just reading a paper in many cases. For example, here's a recent Nature paper on misinformation, ironically. It's completely false, invalid, and also fraudulent for good measure. Discovering the fraud requires reading a separate paper, since they don't disclose details of their method in this paper, details that make it fraudulent (they rigged their dataset, a dataset which is invalid and unusable anyway). We're not trained to deal with the infinite variability and arbitrariness of social science methods, so if you assume peer reviewed papers must be basically okay and valid, you'll be fooled. I also recommend blocking out all stats – they seem to bedazzle and fool readers, give papers a scientific sheen. Block out the stats, read the words, think about what stats would be valid given the words, then unveil what they did.
There are more false claims in the body. The opening sentence is stunning – gun violence is not a leading cause of death in the US. It's not even close (it's a Top 10 list, and it's in the top 15 that year). It's not actually a category in the CDC's list, but a subset of homicides, which is also not a leading cause of death. (Nor are "guns" the leading cause of death for children, a popular, stunning bit of misinformation – journalism is in awful shape.)
So we have a plainly false claim to open a journal article in Science. They won't retract or correct. (Note that their editor rails against the NRA "and its minions" and touts the promise of "science" to discover something useful re: firearms to push for his authoritarian policy preferences. Yet he publishes false claims and won't correct or retract them. Science indeed.)
Finally, here's a great and devastating example of idiocratic collapse. It's just one paragraph, the opening. Who among you can figure out what he did? Solve for his X. You need to be able to solve an exponential equation. That's your only clue. Ignore his obvious error in the text of calling a tiny number a large number. How did he get that number?
Once you understand the gravity of what he did, you might want to retreat to a cave or something. That stupidity of this savagery could be published in major American outlets is damning. Note it might take you weeks to process it. In fact, it might be hard to articulate what he did. You'll see what I mean, and his words are actually broken in a way that will contribute to the problem. (Not all strings of words are meaningful, and his aren't.)
I communicated with Gavin Schmidt, the head climate scientist at NASA, about this and he understood the core problem. But he wouldn't contact Rolling Stone to tell them it was wildly false and invalid to get them to retract. (They won't correct or retract their hoaxes without lots of pressure, if they advance leftist ideological narratives.) I'm not sure Gavin solved for X though. I wanted to see if he would do it without prompting. The climate scientist at the Nature Conservancy had no clue – she didn't even know the 20th century mean offhand, which still confuses me. I can't possibly be more versed in climate science than an actual climate scientist, but it's possible she's an outlier (her website touts awards of Most Important People, a huge red flag).
Can anyone solve for X? What's the nature of what he did?
These are just some examples of how bad things are out there. This political ideology is devastating to science and reason, and a bunch of people seem to be assuming that someone else is paying attention and gatekeeping. You can model the consequences in your head.
Interesting choice. They desperately need a new sled. When she's not misdelivering my packages to other people, I feel terrible for my USPS mail carrier during the summer months. Those Grumman POS mail vehicles have no air conditioning. Being from Arizona, I didn't even know that was a thing, an actual configuration you could choose for a vehicle made after the Vietnam War. I think she plugs in a fan. I hope they get some kind of hardship pay when it's 95+ degrees out.
But... I have mixed feelings given their coercive monopoly status. It's actually illegal to offer mail delivery in the US. The USPS even raided corporate mailrooms in New York in the 2000s in an attempt to enforce the letter of the law re: urgent mail. The exception to their mail monopoly is urgent communication, which is why FedEx and UPS are able to offer overnight and 2/3-day express delivery, but not regular letter mail. That's the one category that the USPS doesn't have a monopoly on. So the USPS actually tried to determine – to judge itself – whether the stuff these companies were sending via FedEx and other competitors was in fact urgent. They opened people's overnight envelopes to try to evaluate the true urgency level manifested within, as if they could even begin to judge or assess that characteristic of other people's communications... Thankfully they sparked a big backlash and haven't pulled a stunt like that since.
There's nothing about mail or delivering stuff or logistics more broadly that would seem to require government involvement. There's nothing particular about government that makes it uniquely well suited to delivering mail. This should've been privatized from the very beginning. Britain privatized the Royal Mail, and there are lots of other examples of privatized mail carriers. Sometimes people object to the anticipated cost of mailing a letter to maybe a remote town, on the assumption that it would cost a lot more than the flat artificial stamp price today, but I don't understand the objection. If the natural or actual cost of something is X, why would anyone assert that they should be able to pay less than X?
Anyway, they took far too long to choose a new vehicle, and they'll probably overpay. A private company would be more responsible and disciplined. It reminds me of Lysander Spooner's American Letter Mail Company. He decided to try to compete with the USPS, and charged lower prices. They shut him down by force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company
It would be so fun to start a mail carrier in his honor. There are so many opportunities for innovation and creativity in mail and package delivery, and the vehicles could double as ice cream trucks on weekends.
If mail was privatized, they would just stop delivering to rural addresses. Which I'm fine with. Rural communities are subsidized by the federal government far, far too much.
Are you taking about the word "Defense" in Oshkosh Defense? Yeah, this isn't a military vehicle. It's a van, not some sort of modified Humvee or anything.
Oshkosh makes lots of vehicles and some civilian kit like fire trucks, air compressors, etc. They saw the opportunity and designed a van to fulfill the specs. Granted, bidding on government projects is likely in their comfort zone, but I would assume they won fair and square unless there was reason to believe otherwise.
The other two finalists weren't major car companies either, at least not in the US. Workhorse is a very small firm with just over 100 employees total, and Karsan is Turkish company I don't know much about.
The Renault Kangoo is probably too small for emerging USPS needs, though the existing postal vehicles are almost as small as the Renault. The USPS's core business is shifting to package delivery, instead of letter mail. E-commerce has changed the mix. They're the preferred shipping carrier for packages in the US, being generally less expensive than UPS, which is in turn less expensive than FedEx. Packages are bulky.
Also, I think it's irrational for outsiders (e.g. you and I and anyone not involved in the decision) to have strong opinions about the vehicle the USPS selects as the result of its contract and bidding process, much less make some sort of political inference from it. Most things aren't political. Mail delivery van procurement is rarely going to present a genuine opportunity for political insight beyond the usual mundane government procurement issues.
As a brown person and hopefully a champion of reason, I would like to encourage you white folks to be a bit less obedient and compliant with this madness. It is long past time that this ideology was firmly and squarely rejected, contested, questioned. Leftist ideology is extremely troubling and has devolved into a cult.
It should never have been possible for an ideology of this quality to co-opt all these orthogonal communities and organizations and workplaces. This climate of fear, intimidation, and dog-whistle-whistling is unacceptable if we're going to have a decent civilization. I think those of you who disagree with leftist ideology need to be a lot more vocal about it. When your employer, of all things, tries to shove this ideology down your throat, say No. Hard no. Make it clear that you're no more interested in such indoctrination than you would be in a Scientology brown bag or a mandatory prayer break. You need to surface your ethical and substantive disagreement with this political ideology, and to make it crystal clear that it is in fact a partisan political ideology that is being "taught".
This has gone on long enough. It's time to push leftists into the normal cult boundaries that any civilization must have. I think we need to take civilization a bit more seriously than we have – I wouldn't assume that civilization can survive arbitrary ideological assaults. And the stress that leftists are causing everyone, including themselves, is a non-trivial harm and ethically relevant.
Here's the problem though, and for the record I fully agree with you;
It's enough of a third-rail-topic that I can't even respond to this with my normal account; we're already seeing enough attempts at crime-by-association (SSC and the latest accusations) that combined with an apparently welcome tendency to examine all past actions for transgression, even if I thought I had something to say that was currently within the overton window I'd be hesitant to put it on the internet because of how the winds seem to be blowing.
I _certainly_ would not speak negatively of any of these programs at work, that would be an excellent way to end my career (putting this bluntly, you have more leeway than a white man does in speaking up about these things at this juncture; but even that has limits, look at the diversity chief of Apple who was let go.)
I worry this becomes a vicious cycle. We're already past the point that many reasonable voices disengage out of fear, so there is very little pushback until this has gone far enough to become untenable. (And this shouldn't be taken as some right wing dogwhistle, there have been HN articles lately detailing papers showing that this fear is present across the spectrum; and it's somewhat emblemic that I need to clarify this point.)
We're watching the iron law of oligarchy played out in an ideology.
The dynamic where white people feel scared to say what they think is right ultimately silences people of color. Because white people are the majority, what society at large understands about what people of color actually think and want is filtered through white people. In the current environment, white people are in an awkward position where it's socially acceptable to agree with far-out progressive views, but not moderate views that are closer to what people of color themselves actually think and believe.
I don't want a society where white people are told at work they need to "be less white," or are forced to admit they are "gatekeepers of white supremacy." It's morally wrong--it's racism. But it's also contrary to my self interest as a brown guy with a beard living in a majority-white society. My mom, an immigrant from a Muslim country, texted me Trump's ban on critical-race theory training when it came out, apropos nothing. She thought it was a good idea, because it was "evil." My dad, who almost became a professor, is a bit more blasé--he thinks "this is just a weird academic idea and it's fine as long as it stays in academia."
But at the end of the day, white progressives who control the newsrooms of places like the New York Times decide what people of color to platform and amplify, and they don't pick people like my parents to speak for people of color. They pick people like Ilhan Omar, who has extreme views. (My dad noted the other day, again apropos nothing, that he was upset the media had turned Omar into the "face of Muslims in America.")
If white people feel free to agree that we should tell white people to "be less white," but not to disagree, if they feel free to agree with Ilhan Omar, but not express views like my parents, then people of color who agree with the common-sense view are effectively silenced.
Identifying leftism as a harmful ideology is certainly a critical step, however it's very difficult to gain traction with that because the term "leftism" is very, very close to "left wing politics", which is strongly normalised as being entirely acceptable in civilised society and always has been since the start of modern democracy itself.
Indeed if you try and figure out where the line is between leftism and left wing politics, it rapidly becomes very difficult. Left wing political parties at least in the Anglosphere are all fully on board with this new leftism of racism, hatred of Anglo culture and history, and all that comes with it. To take a stand in e.g. the workplace against leftism by arguing it is an intolerant and hateful ideology is equivalent to arguing that all left wing voters are supporters of intolerant and hateful ideology. But many of them are not fully on board with all that stuff, even though their chosen representatives are, so to make progress here requires a way to distinguish between people who vote left because they want a higher minimum wage or something like that (reasonable, not the enemy), and people who vote left because they want statues to all be abolished, conservatives to be driven underground and white people turned into second class citizens in their own countries.
That in turn would require consensus around a term that describes the former, socially acceptable state of left wing politics: back when it was a sort of pro-big-government, pro-regulation, primarily economic belief system. Debates about economics and the role of government are far less fraught and far more intellectual than debates about the intrinsic worth of people based on gender or race, so splitting the left cleanly into the parts that want such debate and the parts that want ideological attacks and no-platforming seems like a necessary first step.
Unfortunately whilst there is an abundance of words to describe the new left wing politics (woke, wokeism, leftism, identity politics, critical theory, neo-Marxism, "anti-racism", third wave feminism etc) there aren't many terms which clearly describe the old left wing politics. Thus the traditional wings get pulled along by the new strains, as they lack the intellectual and linguistic framework to push back or separate themselves from the parasitical takeover of their institutions.
Interestingly, Europe seems to have less of a problem with that. In Europe it's still common to describe the more classical centrist positions as "social democracy". This phrase is is widely understood to mean classical left wing politics focused on economics, welfare, higher taxes etc, but without the overt focus on race and gender.
> Identifying leftism as a harmful ideology is certainly a critical step, however it's very difficult to gain traction with that because the term "leftism" is very, very close to "left wing politics"
They aren't “very close”, they are exact synonyms.
> Unfortunately whilst there is an abundance of words to describe the new left wing politics (woke, wokeism, leftism, identity politics, critical theory, neo-Marxism, "anti-racism", third wave feminism etc) there aren't many terms which clearly describe the old left wing politics
Yes, there are. You even used one of them with a “neo-” in front of it to describe new left-wing politics.
Also, many of your “new left wing" labels are inaccurate; “identity politics”, particularly, isn't specifically left-wing; there are progressive identity politics, center-right neoliberal identity politics (the dominant ones in the Democratic Party, which serve as a capitalist distraction from left-wing economic justice issues), and right-wing identity politics (in the US, various strands of White and/or Christian supremacism/nationalism are prominent here.)
Nobody uses the term identity politics to mean white supremacism. Even the left don't use the term that way.
Marxism is not the right label to describe the post-1950s left wing politics in most countries. Yes, there were fringe wings that were openly Marxist but most left wing politics was committed to incremental change through the ballot box, not total revolution.
They aren't “very close”, they are exact synonyms.
At least I perceive shades of difference in how they're normally used.
"Leftism" is used to refer to a rather extreme, virulent ideology, typified by the conviction that conservatism of any kind of a sort of evil that needs to be wiped out or suppressed. There are no mainstream parties in the west formally espousing leftism, although in the USA the Democrats are now becoming dangerously close to that with their explicitly racial/gender based appointment of Kamala Harris, and some of their recent demands to take Fox News off air.
Left wing politics is a far more mainstream movement found throughout the democratic world. Its focus is typically on economic issues that affect the working classes, they advocate for nationalisation and/or the general pulling of power to the centre, they recognise the legitimacy of their conservative oppositions and in many European countries often enter into coalitions or power sharing arrangements with them. Left wing politics is, at most, the politics of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. And in its more common instantiation, it's more like the politics of Tony Blair. Left wing politicians have up until very recently not been overtly promoting "leftism" in the hard-core sense seen today, but that's now changing.
To me the key difference is whether someone recognises disagreement as legitimate. Even when in very strong political positions, throughout most of the 20st century left wing parties have not tried to suppress their opposition. The exceptions are of course the communist countries, but those parties are hardly referred to as left wing, even though technically they were very much so.
> Marxism is not the right label to describe the post-1950s left wing politics in most countries.
In your original post you said “old left wing politics” not “post-1950s left-wing politics”, but even with the clarification, that probably depends on whether or not you include Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism within Marxism (I don't, but most of both the Right and people who agree with Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism do). If you do include those things, Marxism is, if not covering the left of an absolute majority of countries, at least the single most dominant left-wing movement of the post-1950s and pre-about-1990s period.
If you mean to restrict things to the developed West, then “Socialism" is fairly accurate if somewhat broad, but then Western Cold War era leftism was itself pretty broad.
> Left wing politics is, at most, the politics of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn
Corbyn and Sanders are barely left-wing.
> And in its more common instantiation, it's more like the politics of Tony Blair.
Tony Blair, like Bill Clinton in the US, was part of an 80s/90s center-right reaction against left-wing politics that took over previously left-leaning (overtly Socialist, in the case of the UK Labour Party, more confused in the US Democratic Party case because of the ongoing overlapping post-New Deal and post-Civil Rights Act partisan realignments) parties.
Blair, like Clinton, was no kind of left-wing politician, and certainly not typical of the post-1950s left wing in his country.
Though if you are using “leftism” to mean actual leftism and “left-wing" to mean 1980s-1990s center-right neoliberal “Third Way” reaction, then, yeah, they are very different things.
Hmm, that's an impressive list of links. I picked one at random - the Vox link - and it starts with this paragraph:
"When people talk about identity politics it’s often assumed they’re referring to the politics of marginalized groups like African Americans, LGBTQ people, or any group that is organizing on the basis of a shared experience of injustice — and that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption."
Eh, call it a draw? I'm not wedded to the list of terms people use.
If you mean to restrict things to the developed West, then “Socialism" is fairly accurate if somewhat broad, but then Western Cold War era leftism was itself pretty broad.
Yes, I suppose I could have explicitly stated I was writing from a European/American political context. That's usually the default assumption here on HN though.
Corbyn and Sanders are barely left-wing.
According to them they are very much left wing, more left than anyone else in modern politics! Using a strict dictionary definition that would count the Soviet dictatorship as a left wing political party, yes you're right, but people (in the west) use the word communism to describe that, not left-wing or leftism. And my post is about how language is used today, and how it's changing.
Blair, like Clinton, was no kind of left-wing politician, and certainly not typical of the post-1950s left wing in his country.
He was left wing of a sort. For example he pretty massively expanded the state, but in obfuscated ways that even today are causing problems and haven't really been tackled, e.g. the growth of "quangos", the level of state funding of the charity sector, the large increase in student and academic funding.
To me the acid test is this: if a politician calls themselves left wing, and hardly anyone disagrees, not their opponents and nor their allies, then that's what the word means. Blair is the most ambiguous case because the hard left of his party did sometimes claim he was in reality not left wing at all, but that was never true of Corbyn or Sanders. Not even the rump communist movement would have been so bold as to claim that Corbyn wasn't genuinely left wing.
However, Corbyn and Sanders did not (to my knowledge) ever advocate for suppression of their political opposition. Thus I wouldn't describe them as engaging in "leftism".
This whole discussion is a giant rabbit hole though. Perhaps the terms "left wing" and "woke" are sufficient to distinguish between what I'm calling "classical post 1950 left wing politics" and "the ideology of leftism".
You're assuming racism is the cause of the gaps. Big assumption. Out of wedlock births alone will explain a gap of that size: more than 70% of black American children are born out of wedlock. That's a disastrous figure, an emergency really. There is no point wasting a moment's time on imagined racism when variables like that are looming so large. If that behavior doesn't change, there will be no closing of any gaps.
It will be a chunk. It accounts for a lot of income variance in existing research, like Chetty's at Harvard. He and his colleagues seemed to bury the effect though in at least one of their papers on "inequality", which is frustrating since the effect size was the largest of all their predictors. They're ideologically biased, which is a huge problem in social "science" right now, and they don't want to talk about anything related to individuals' own behavior ot choices. They prefer to focus on blaming exogenous factors, society, etc.
IQ score differences are huge, and I'm not sure that anyone knows why. We might not have the full picture there for another 50+ years. At this point it would very difficult to even research it given that leftists will try to destroy your career if you do (e.g. the SPLC will smear you as a "white supremacist" if you research or discover or report group differences that are unfavorable to a non-white group, as they have smeared Charles Murray). The black-white IQ differences are greater than one standard deviation, which was very confusing to discover in graduate school – I had no idea. Since IQ predicts income, there is little chance of income parity anytime soon, unless we can find a sort of loophole around that relationship. But we won't be finding any loopholes or workarounds if we're not allowed to research it, so...
The out-of-wedlock birth rate and the IQ disparity are beefy predictors because they're so large in magnitude. Those two variables virtually guarantee a large income difference. There's really no way for a group to make as much money as another group if they're having 72% of their kids out-of-wedlock when the other group is at 20-25%, and also spotting the other group maybe 14+ points on mean IQ. Given those starting conditions, I wouldn't even worry about racism or talk about racism. I would focus on the things that I know are real and the I know are having a huge impact. There isn't any evidence of an equivalent effect of racism. That would be interesting to think about. For racism to be as punchy as out-of-wedlock births or IQ, we would need to see a situation like where basically black college graduates couldn't get jobs due to simple racial discrimination, at a really punchy rate. We don't see that. Systemic racism doesn't exist in the US by any definition I would think of based simply on the term. It seems to reduce to subjective construals through a leftist abstraction layer and symbolic/ideological framework. In other words, you need to be a leftist to see it, and if you don't see this invisible thing, you're a bad person. It's an arbitrary ideology at that point, and the timing is nothing short of predominant.
I don't see much nuance or texture there. I think this work is a scratch, has no epistemic standing, meaning, or utility. Modern academic methods are incredibly sloppy and non-rigorous, where they just make all these assertions and synthesize a bunch of bizarre abstractions and purport to describe reality. That's not how humans or any other sentients actually discover reality.
Social psychologist here. The article doesn't back the headline. They never mention the effect size, how much parental finances matter. The mention that smarts "explain 11% of the gap" or something, but they don't provide the number for parental finances, so we're left to just have some vague impression that this variable is "key" to entrepreneurship.
This was a government study, where the government researcher is explicitly talking about how the findings must have specific policy implications. I would bet that they advocated for those policies before ever conducting the study, and that any result would have been used to advance such policies. All we know is that the effect was north of 11% in variance explained. So, is 12%? 17%? 25%? What is it? And at which threshold does this variable become "key" to entrepreneurship? (Also, what would people have predicted in advance? And does the reality alter their policy prescriptions?)
They're also doing potentially invalid things with the stats in not using continuous variables, but rather dichotomizing them. And their slices are arbitrary. They're comparing the top 20% on one thing to the bottom 60% on another, for example, and it's not clear why they chose those specific slices. It could be the it was specifically those arbitrary slices that gave them the story they wanted to tell.
Also, parental finances will correlate with lots of variables, including culture, values, all sorts of behaviors and social norms, as well as concrete domain knowledge in things like business and banking. There could be a disposition effect where the children of people who are more likely to be entrepreneurs are themselves more likely to become entrepreneurs, which is almost trivial right? Or there might be a culture effect where these kids are exposed to the phenomenon of entrepreneurship in a way that is less likely or less strong for other kids.
What I mean is that starting a business doesn't even occur to some people, for various reasons. Like no one they ever knew growing up had a business, compared to someone growing up in Silicon Valley where starting a business or being employee # ≤12 at a startup is almost as common as having two arms. I noticed this kind of cultural difference in the US. I'm a Mexican-American from Arizona, but I've lived in Silicon Valley and the American South (North Carolina). When I lived in Chapel Hill, I ended up knowing a lot of natives from other areas of the state. They would talk about wealth as something that you got from your family – they just assumed that's where you got money. So if they meet someone and notice something expensive they have, like a car or pricey jewelry, or even housewares that seem high end, they might ask others afterward "Does she come from money?" I had never heard that expression elsewhere in the US. Does so and so "come from" money? It didn't make any sense. No one talks like that in Silicon Valley. People don't come from money here – they make it. They talk that way in Mexico though, where entrepreneurship of this sort is rare and poverty and class structures abound. So I think people who grow up affluent are more likely to think about starting a business because it's just kind of obvious or normal to them – it's what people do. It's a natural part of their choice space, something to think about and consider, whereas for others it's totally not, and wouldn't even come up in their thinking, planning, etc. The effect of having affluent parents could mostly be about the literal money situation, like people here are thinking, which is about having access to funding, or it could mostly be behavioral/cultural assumptions. I don't have any predictions or opinions about which is the strongest effect. It would take careful research to find out. But their affluence cutoff includes lots of households that wouldn't have nearly enough money to fund most start-ups. Making $125k a year is not the same as being able to provide seed capital for some business. So in that case, it might about networks and knowing people who have more money to invest. That kind of spills over into the cultural aspect of thinking of starting a business as a totally normal and smart thing to do.
I agree. In fact, I'm not aware of any context or venue where leftists have supported freedom of speech (for non-leftists). They're failing every test. Campuses, disinviting speakers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or even Condi Rice – don't know if the latter was successful). Twitter. Facebook. Any action to remove apps from stores because they lack the vigorous and extremely expensive censorship infrastructure of the big leftist corps line FB and Twitter. Even removing apps and services from web servers, like Amazon did, which was breathtaking. Any infrastructure-level censorship/sabotage like Cloudflare has done at various bizarre points (I think one was an alleged Neo-Nazi website, and the other was merely one of the chans, apparently for the sin of being used by a killer; I have no idea if Prince has tried to censor more, but I found it too depressing to dig into further).
I thought we had a deal, but clearly we don't. I assumed that everyone understood and could predict their own future motives and emotions toward a desire to censor speech they disagree with or find "offensive" (if you're the kind of person who chronically experiences that state of being "offended" – I'm not).
I assumed we all knew that we couldn't possibly trust ourselves to censor dissent from our own views. I assumed that we all knew that our initial impulses toward that would have to be dismissed out of hand, given everything we know about human fallibility, cognitive biases, how incredibly easy it is to be wrong, and the obvious arbitrariness of this time and place – that is, the time and place we happen to be alive. Leftists seem to not be accounting for any of these factors. They think they're right. Well, they know they're right. And they apparently think there's no way their ideology could be mistaken or unwise or harmful in any serious way, or that any of a dozen or so discrete beliefs/narratives/dogmas could be wrong. They for some reason believe that early 21st-century American leftist ideology is airtight, mostly complete, the first complete and totally true belief system in human history, and it's not a huge coincidence that it happens to be the one that's sitting there when they happen to be alive.
And that their whole framework and dogma around their preemptive marginalization of outsiders with the idiosyncratic usage of the word "hate", and an associated set of evidence-free abstractions like "privilege", and a bunch of -phobias that don't actually exist, at all, to the knowledge of serious scientists... well that whole package is of course completely true, just like everything else. No only is it true, but they'll recursively use that sort of immune system package to justify censoring non-leftists, much like how Scientologists tag people as Suppressive Persons (SPs).
This is bad news. Their epistemology is terrible. It was always the elites who were the vanguard defending freedom of speech. It was never expected that regular Joes could be counted on to grok the epistemic and psychological facts that motivated a principled commitment to freedom of speech. It was the intellectuals who understood how easy it is to be wrong, how ideologies can blind us, how our own subjective sense of the certain truth of our beliefs was completely irrelevant to their objective standing, how so many humans in history have had that subjective experience of certainty, with mixed results. Now we face an awkward situation where intellectuals have let themselves stumble into a cult, a cult that has conveniently constructed arguments and rationalizations that purport to justify censorship. So now they can just skirt on past the many robust reasons to defend freedom of speech, if they ever knew them. Because, "hate" obviously. That's all they needed to abandon something so crucial to human progress and growth. Just use an arbitrary human negative emotion word in contradiction to its actual, dictionary meaning, applying it to a huge swath of outsider/non-cult speech, even encompassing someone noting that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. Boom..."hate". Something huge is falling to something very small.
I think gains in I/O will be more noticeable than gains in their CPUs. SSDs are being choked and held back by PCIe 3.0 interfaces at this point. I'm not sure that PCIe 4.0 is any better on latency. It would be interesting if Apple took a big leap forward with a low latency interface like OpenCAPI, or maybe some iteration of RapidIO. Something like Optane over OpenCAPI would be a huge leap in speed. Optane is wasted right now with PCIe.
The PS5 apparently has incredible disk I/O, possible due to RAD's compression technology. A super fast compression codec could make a difference too.
On all the recent issues, you can and should engage with reality directly. They're all compact in scope and source materials. There's not a lot to read re: COVID origin arguments, mask efficacy, etc. For example, with masks there's hardly any research, no randomized trials in America, only one in the West (that isn't good enough to use anyway).
There's no secret knowledge on these issues, nor are there any priestly intellectual capacities. Moreover, COVID origin isn't centrally a scientific question as much as a forensic/investigatory issue. Reality is exogenous to academic journals, and this question is structurally exogenous. For example, that Fauci and friends funded research at the Wuhan lab and had an unusually severe conflict of interest by our customary standards is an important fact, one that we don't need peer-reviewed research to know.
It would be worthwhile to model the cognition of "experts" when they address these issues and formulate their opinions and statements. We can easily see in many cases that there's not anything proprietary or extravagant going on.
For example, Sen. Rand Paul was censored and condemned by leftists for saying that cloth masks don't work, or "do anything", which I take to mean reduce COVID spread (in either direction). He's likely correct, though we don't know because we haven't done the trials for any mask type (we don't need trials for all questions, but we need them for mask efficacy for several reasons).
YouTube censored his videos (media interviews). Politifact, a leftist activist/censorship outfit, purported to debunk him by citing an animation of a mask (on the New York Times website). An animation. (And it was an animation of an N95, but treating an animation of any mask as evidence is savagely stupid, truly idiocratic.)
(https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/aug/11/examining-fal...)
Politifact also cited an "expert". He was a random doctor in Minnesota, a pediatrician. Doctors aren't experts on mask efficacy, much less for a specific pathogen, much less a new pathogen. They're not experts on arbitrary biomedical or epidemiological topics. This experts thing is starting to look like a mystical superstition that will get us all killed. *The experts on scientific questions are the people who conduct research on those questions.* Since there's hardly any research here, there are hardly any experts on this question, and more importantly, we can just read the research and ask whatever questions we have.
The doctor lamented "lies" about masks. He didn't cite any research. I'd bet thousands of dollars he hadn't read any of the few journal articles on the subject at the time (August, 2021).
It turned out he was just a maniacal leftist activist on Twitter, a man who had called for two different Republican politicians to resign in just the previous couple of weeks, for being "traitors" and "liars", retweeted that the governor of Massachusetts "hates children and science". There was no reason for Politifact to cite or know of the existence of a random Minnesota pediatrician, other than he was a Twitter maniac who would give them the quotes they wanted. The Politifact activist who wrote the piece exclusively "debunks" claims by non-leftists or that are incongruous with current mandatory Democratic Party narratives. He stopped fact checking Rachel Maddow when she infamously claimed that the COVID shots prevent infection and transmission, (it's not clear that leftists are aware, even in July 2023, that the shots don't do these things, and why):
"A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else," she added with a shrug. "It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people.""
(https://www.foxnews.com/media/social-media-users-demand-apol...)
Politifact never fact-checked the above, just stopped checking Maddow altogether, giving her a free pass. Note that Biden made the same wildly false claims, and to my knowledge has never corrected or apologized.
So the "experts" thing is getting in the way, obscuring reality, preventing us from thinking clearly. You'll also see bizarre citations of the CDC, of some anonymously written CDC webpage, a page full of errors and false citations (their science of masking page), with no stated methodology (e.g. meta-analysis with inclusion criteria). There's no need to just cite other people's opinions, and whether any organization is reliable is an empirical question. The CDC's reliability cannot simply be assumed, and because there's so little research we can just read it, then look at what the CDC says and ask any questions we have. (The CDC doesn't have its own research or data on mask efficacy, which they'd have to publish if they did – they ran no trials. They only cite outside research, have been stunningly lazy, incurious, and misleading.) Certainly, journalists should do this.
It's critically important to not outsource our cognitive activity or our connection with reality. We're dealing with a mass stupidity situation here, where there's very little sign of cognition, much less intellect, on these topics. We've got people unaware that an arbitrary reduction in pathogen population doesn't necessarily reduce infection risk (masks), that we don't know the long-term or even short-term effects of brand new pharma, that finding traces of raccoon dog material mixed with COVID virus on a surface doesn't mean anything at all, that men are much stronger and faster than women even of the same weight, etc. This is not a scientific civilization.
We're seeing too many at-a-distance arguments about experts and science and "who to trust" on issues that can be navigated efficiently with a few key background facts, good alertness, and a 110 IQ. We've got to get people to read, because it's clear even journalists aren't. Just read the damn papers first, and then we can talk about whether we need experts to tell us or explain something.
It's also troubling that we've got a political ideology that explicitly demonizes asking questions. Leftists have a trope of "just asking questions" that they use to marginalize anyone who, well, asks questions that deviate from mandatory narratives and beliefs or is willing to think independently. It's a very bad sign for an ideology to have that kind of dogma, and if you were going to have that trope in your ideology, you'd need to fortify it against its obvious propensity toward bias and motivated reasoning by building a robust framework that differentiates between villainous and sincere questioners, creating lots of room for rigor and curiosity. Leftists haven't done that, with predictable results. (Trying to build the framework would likely illustrate that you need to just get rid of the trope and not marginalize questions at all.)