ETHICS: THE RIDER SERVES THE ELEPHANT
—“Nobody is ever going to invent an ethics class that makes people behave ethically after they step out of the classroom. Classes are for riders, and riders are just going to use their new knowledge to serve their elephants more effectively. “— Jonathan Haidt.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-21 20:35:00 UTC
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-odds-of-having-boy-or-girl-2014-10NATURE IS HOSTILE TO MALES. WE ARE HARDER TO MAKE, MORE EXPENDABLE. WE ARE WHERE NATURE EXPERIMENTS.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-21 15:02:00 UTC
Steve Pender just PM”d me a few ideas that were very interesting, and tied in with my interest in stoicism (demonstrated action) as a cultural discipline. If you stop creating (transforming), only work in a bureaucracy, only work with information, and listen only to marketing… what happens?
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-21 14:09:00 UTC
SCARY IDEAS FROM AN ACCIDENTAL PROCESS OF DEDUCTION….
(I need to write about the immorality of the feminist movement, given that it breaks the contract for cooperation between the genders in a division of labor. I can support his with the evidence that women have universally acted to impose immoral laws. I can then demonstrate that it is possible to construct institutions that allow us to cooperate without the systemic theft enacted by women at the encouragement of feminists. And demonstrate yet again that we act almost entirely as gene machines, and all our language is merely justification for one theft or another, or the prevention of one theft or another: a complex negotiation.
Now if morality is objective, and if we can conquer and subjugate pirates, and thieves, why can we not conquer and subjugate all thieves? Even purely immoral ones?
Worse…. IS THAT WHAT MEN ACTUALLY DID?
Roll that one around in your head for a minute: was monogamous, propertarian, paternalism merely the only available solution to prevent the natural thievery of women, as a natural expression of their genetic intuitions, which favor their genetic strategy even at the expense of in-group members. While the male strategy comes only at the expense of out-group members?
Very weird. I have to think about this a bit more.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-21 07:29:00 UTC
MY OBSESSION WITH ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN LIBERTY IS JUST ANOTHER IN A LONG LINE OF GENE EXPRESSIONS
Liberty is a genetic bias, and in my family it’s not a subtle one.
*edited for clarity*
–“The name occurs nowhere else in the world save among a family of Norman knights. But the roots of the Doolittle’s from the Kidderminster area are lost in
the fog of time.
In 19th century England the census shows clumps in Ireland, Kidderminster and Birmingham, Lancashire and Yorkshire, and London. There was some evidence that the northern group came there from Ireland. The London family is the Dollittle line and traces to Kidderminster – through the census and B/M/D documents. The Y DNA ties the Irish group, the American group (all descended from Abraham of Wallingford) and Maurice’s line together. There was some evidence that they may have all come from Kidderminster, and apparently they all did.
So many of that family died, that there aren’t many branches. But, artsy folk and restaurant waiters in Victorian London – it would almost be a surprise if they were really all sons of their mothers’ husbands.(Eds: Markers say no, believe it or not.)
I did learn by a half dozen different methods that most similar haplotypes are found in the Netherlands and central Europe, including Italy, which suggests that this
DNA could have followed only around 50 migratory paths to southwestern
England. Their town is where the Stour and Severn Rivers joined.
The entire family group are the sort of ferociously emotional people that
one would really like to have its story better pinned down than that. They appear in medieval Kidderminster as “husbandmen” on a baronial farm, and as weavers and then clothiers in a town that in late medieval times specialized in textile manufacture.
Multiple lines of them became particularly over the edge Puritans, and they were intimately involved in the Puritan revival there in about the mid 17th century. Abraham was in Connecticut by 1641, and why is quite a mystery, even given that Rev. Davenport could have selectively appealed to this particular man right
across the ESP waves from hundreds of miles away.
I’m not aware of Puritans from the Kidderminster and Birmingham areas participating in the New England migration, despite the appearance in Massachusetts of a town called Worcester. Birmingham may have been a Puritan stronghold, but people there preferred to stay put, organize locally, and fight it out, and soon after Abraham left they actually took over Kidderminster, and it seems that those who left were more likely to go to Ireland.”–
Troublemakers. In Normandy, In Surrey, In the English Revolution, in the Puritans. In the American Revolution.
Liberty is a genetic bias, and in my family it’s not a subtle one.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-21 02:14:00 UTC
EDUCATION: CUNNING VS MORAL
The Perverse Incentives of the Academy.
–“education makes one cunning, not wise, and not moral”–
I was kind of ‘moved’ by Michael Philip’s post today on the motives of members of the academy. It’s been bothering me all day because not only is it true, but I think it qualifies as a bias, and a formal bias at that. Or rather, I think status-biases are probably a category of cognitive bias that I (we) should investigate, document, expand upon, and communicate with some frequency. Because most of the progressive status signals are constructed of cognitive biases (falsehoods).
Cunning favors complexity. Dishonesty favors complexity. Speaking truthfully is in fact laborious – it requires a lot of effort. Speaking the truth however, is a very simple strategy, that requires very little cunning – maybe none at all. Because prohibiting the imposition of costs is a very simple rule. Voluntary exchange is a very simple rule. The rule of law under Propertarian Property Rights (Property-in-toto), is a very simple rule. That demand for the state will increase if their is a lag in the development of property rights, is a very simple rule. These are all very simple rules.
If all moral propositions are decidable, (under propertarian logic, they are), then there is no room for cunning, except to lie. I fact, cunning is a contrary indicator of truth, and of morality.
Yet cunning is such an attractive means of dominance display. For those of us trying to eliminate cunning, we can temporarily display dominance, but only in the art of refuting loading, framing, overloading and suggestion. And since I have no illusions that the incentives to construct complex lies via cunning verbalisms will ever disappear, then I suspect that the defense against cunning will always require wisdom and cunning.
So I have a new to-do, which is to enumerate the cognitive biases we fall victim to in the pursuit of status signals.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-20 19:25:00 UTC
THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE CONSPIRACY THAT DOESN’T EXIST
The point is that women are just as capable as men and the data is overwhelming. However the statistical disparities are not the result of bias but of the distribution of talents and preferences between the genders.
So my point was that no one is biased against female CEOs. And no one is biased against short CEOs. There are just a lot of tall capable men and humans like big strong smart men as their leaders.
I can post all day that men and women are equally productive in the work force. Or that women assimilate into organizations more easily than men. Or that they mature earlier and have longer possible working lives than men. Or that women dominate the middle. And that women improve working conditions.
But the moment I bring up that up here in the high iq range women don’t want to engage in constant combat, prefer to work relationships rather than abstract data, or that men up here outnumber women by an order of magnitude, or that women are less likely to take career risk in loyalty structures, the crazies come out of the woodwork.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-20 10:00:00 UTC
SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT INTERVENE AND MAKE ME A FORTUNE 500 CEO?
Feminists are absurd. Now, here is the data. CEO’s of large companies are (a) really smart, and (b) tall. Now, there is a correlation between height and brain size which correlates with intelligence. But also, the very primitive power that superior height conveys is tangible, and measurable.
Does that mean that the government should redistribute CEO positions from tall people to short people?
Then why should we redistribute CEO positions (or any position in society) from socially superior people to socially inferior people?
I have no problem with the fact that I can never play basketball well, and that in both soccer and volleyball I am working at a disadvantage. I have no problem that in business I am working at a disadvantage. I have no problem that even in the pursuit of desirable women that I am at a disadvantage. These are disadvantages. But I cannot comprehend wanting others to sacrifice the maximum that they can achieve in life to compensate for my disadvantage.
Yet feminists will argue the opposite day in and day out. The fact is that women work fewer hours, are less willing to make economic sacrifices, less willing to take economic risks, are less loyal to internal political networks, and are vastly outnumbered at both the top and bottom of the intelligence and aggressive impulsivity scales.
Just as I cannot possibly sense but 1/100’th of what an average women can about any other human being she encounters in the first fifteen seconds, I understand that nearly all women on earth, cannot make political assessments in the same short time frame.
We are compatible. But we are not equal. And group competition requires we make the best use of our best, because everyone else is merely a commodity.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-20 05:13:00 UTC
WHY MUST STOICISM BE A CHOICE?
Question: If one chooses a stoicism as personal philosophy, or if one is pedagogically indoctrinated into stoic behaviors, why does it matter?
If what remains of stoic thought is largely personal, ethical, and tangentially political, versus metaphysical, pseudoscientific, or particularly rational, then why does it matter if it is the deliberate choice of a minority, or a formal institution imposed upon the majority?
Is it not the behaviors that produce beneficial ends? Is not much of any philosophical framework, mere justification for choosing it? Whereas the product of practicing the necessary disciplines, and adopting the suggested frames of reference, is that we produce beneficial ends whether we make a deliberate choice, or whether we are simply trained like we are trained in all systems of pedagogy: myth, tradition, norm, habit, and justification for them.
All cultures ‘train’ in one civic and personal philosophy or another – because all humans need a framework for decision making given their fragmentary knowledge and diverse abilities. Why should a stoic philosophy be imposed versus a secular humanist, or a buddhists, or a jewish, or a muslim, or even one of ‘scientism’?
Isn’t it a refutation of the value of any framework to claim that it must be chosen deliberately? In other words, are advocates lacking confidence or evidence that that practice of stoic behaviors will in fact produce a good life, a good society, and a good mankind?
(I have touched on this before but I am trying to ask the question a bit better this time.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-20 03:23:00 UTC
ON MALES AND POSITIVES STRESS
(from elsewhere)
A conversation with a female friend and ballet dancer. Who like many women recommend Yoga or some variation.
–“hmmm….. You know, it’s sort of like Yoga.
I’m a man. I can’t ‘hear’ my body – much at all. Not like a woman can. So I don’t get the ‘feelings’ that you would get from these kind of female-enjoyable activities unless there is a lot of motion involved.
Dancing works, fencing works, running fast works, sports work, and lifting really ‘heavy’ weights with full body motion works.
But honestly, if you can imagine the lack of stimuli in a sensory deprivation chamber, then that’s what it’s like for me to do any ‘subtle’ form of exercise. It’s literally emotionally painful.
I have to experience ‘stress’ to feel that ‘calm’ that most women (and beta males) get out of yoga or tai-chee or anything similar. Physical and mental “Stress” without “threat” is my version of physical ‘peace’.
I wish I could have learned how to express that earlier in my life. I should probably write something on the subject so that other men have the words to express how they feel in rational terms. Because this is the problem for a lot of men.
Our bodies love stress. We even love threats. We just don’t want threats with meaningful consequences. That is why men like to play ports. And video games. Physical and mental stress without the danger of physical consequences.
When we can have 3d video games that require full body motion, and where we can run around and safely play ‘war’ from within the safety of our homes, then men will be rescued from the physical and mental harm of post industrial society.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-17 04:21:00 UTC