Also, a few days back I found this interesting post on Reddit. The guy's an idiot, but I found Chomsky's take on debating interesting. Chomsky, a skillful debater who has done it for many decades, basically thinks it's worthless.

It's not about top down reform, it's about creating good arguments and evidence to convince moral people to act differently.

I brought it up previously, but people who are aware of their own biases tend to make less biased choices, whereas people who believe they aren't biased make more biased choices. A nuanced, evidence-based approach to understanding the gender wage gap will help people understand the mechanisms of the pay gap and will lead moral people to make better decisions. People like Jordan Peterson seek to discredit and dismiss the gap as unnecessary fluff, which abets unconscious discrimination.

His suggestion might as well be "women aren't suited to vote since their predisposition is to do what their husband tells them" or "women can't be leaders because they're prone to hysterical fits".

I'm a clinical psychologist, my name is Freud, trust me.

Sure it is. Other countries have robust laws that do a much better job at decreasing the pay gap than the United States does. Policy solutions absolutely can be applied in order to address this. It's not entirely about changing people's preferences/moral attitudes/convictions.



Right, but I think the points that Peterson is making is that the issue isn't reducible to hiring practices. A large component of it is also the differing preferences/inclinations/propensities between men and women, and what sorts of jobs they'd pursue in the first place. He attributes that difference to innate differences between gender. We both agree it's not reducible to that alone, and both of us are pretty skeptical that it's a very important factor at all. I don't disagree with you that discriminatory hiring practices are an important part of this issue, but there's also the social/cultural issue having to do with why do men disproportionately work in certain industries (and women are disproportionately represented in others), and to what extent is it wrong/unfair that it turns out that way?

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/09/american-universities-are-welcoming-chinas-trojan-horse-confucius-institutes/

Human beings: oh, that's disturbing.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/communist-propaganda-has-infiltrated-more-than-100-us-colleges-posing-as-chinese-language-institute/article/2646692

Right wingers: oh, this communist plot to destroy the west with cultural marxism is disturbing.

TBH, I took him at his word on that too, but yeah, this is the kind of thing that makes me suspicious of the guy. How could he be so off the mark unless his "sources" aren't exactly.. genuine.

I agree, they aren’t exactly the same. Being disagreeable makes you that much worse at almost every job. Having curly hair doesn’t. Why would a rational employer want to pay worse people better on average?

What I can tell you is that being disagreeable by itself isn’t enough to get more money. Any ******* can walk into their boss’s office and demand more money. Actually convincing your boss to pay you more requires additional masculine displays. Always confidence, often stubbornness, sometimes even boorishness. So is it really that disagreeable people dig their heels in and demand more pay, or is it that the bosses admire them for having the balls to do it?

This is, again, the problem with an overfit model. Also with multicollinear variables. Saying things like, “but my model says you’ll close 5% of the gap by being less agreeable!” is wrong because that isn’t how statistical models work. If disagreeability correlates with masculinity, and masculinity correlates with at all with confidence, your model says literally nothing about whether disagreeability or confidence is important. It says either of them are important, or both of them, or neither of them if another variable is collinear. Literally the only thing this model says is that acting like a man means you’ll get paid more.

Because statistics.

Basically this is what they did. They didn’t like what the univariate analysis said, so they picked a whole bunch of behaviours that are well known to correlate with gender and added them to the model. So now you have some 20 variables each contributing 5%, and this little flappy vestigial t-rex arm gender variable that still explains a little bit, but only because they couldn’t think of any more variables to perfectly describe the average woman. Such a model doesn’t actually say anything - it is meaningless, obfuscatory garbage. A statistical dog whistle.

Look up overfitting and multicollinearity.

Detecting merit being the dual problem to detecting privilege.

Also the fact that women are under immense social pressures during childhood and adolescence to behave certain ways and adopt certain preferences. For example, female students exhibit both more skill and more interest in mathematics during mandatory education, so where the **** are all of the female mathematicians, physicists, and engineers?

I can’t speak for other fields, but I can for software. It’s socially acceptable for a young man to nerd out, stay up all night in his bedroom tinkering with a computer. It’s not socially acceptable for girls. It’s socially acceptable for boys to hang out with other kids to talk about computers, but it’s not appropriate for a girl to hang out with a bunch of boys. Girls aren’t going to be top students in undergraduate, they’re at too much of a disadvantage. Which means they’re also going to be selected against by top employers, so they get shunted into worse jobs. And then the sexual harassment starts.

I can easily imagine other industries working out the same way.

Regulating ratios obviously isn’t going to work, but maybe making it so people with feminine behavioural traits can make as much money as men will show that women are at least welcome in the industry? idk.

Just for the sake of clarity, those are the exact sort of thing I had in mind when I posed this question:





Yes, definitely.

This is why I enjoy watching him so much, because is is more rational than many of his opponents, but only because he is on the close side of the huddle of monkeys ****ing a football and nobody with sense is going to get in there. So it's kind of a trainwreck situation, but with recreational equipment rape.

So sort of a reverse situation compared to what we have with Donald J Trump, where nobody could possibly be as dumb as their opponent that everyone simply ends up dogpiling on the guy, but then get bored, and tries to make up for this by forming a circle jerk around him.

I actually had a short e-mail exchange with him a while ago. He keeps talking up his obsession with individualism, so I was going to see if I could trick him into admitting that Satanism and Thelema are superior models ('true' or not in all cases) of individual liberation than Christianity in the coming decades, but he seemed like he was taking 30 seconds to apply to thousands of e-mails. Was impressed I heard back from him based on the level of adulation he must be receiving.

I then (quite obviously) drunkenly e-mailed him about how he reminds me of Rick Sanchez and how that might not be a good thing, so I am assuming he has blocked my e-mail.

The other day I wondered how a conversation between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson would go.

Turns out they did do a podcast together, but I lost interest in listening to it as soon as I read that they spent basically the entire duration pissing over whether or not Peterson would be allowed to conflate the definition of truth with Darwinian fitness (Pragmatism?), which even more bizarrely I seem to have read is intertwined with his need to make epistemic room for his religious beliefs! It would be strange indeed if he appealed to some kind of metaphorical Darwinian-inspired conception of truth just to avoid addressing some of the ****ed up things his religious ideas are causing him to believe.

That was the podcast that got me to e-mail him, for sure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/politics/trump-mueller-special-counsel-russia.html

Lol

Thou shalt not ascend to a local maximum

Commenter on that article suggests that Trump's recent congeniality to the idea of testifying under oath before the special counsel was timed to soften the blow of this story. Makes sense to me.

So, Trump did order Mueller fired after all.

He just keeps digging his own grave.

And of course, the classic "fake news media" cop-out.

Guillotines start in California, then.

Pretty cool video. But it's hard to imagine that there's enough momentum to slap Google, Amazon and Facebook with antitrust laws, especially given it would have to overcome all of the resistance that they've put in place themselves (with lobbyists, with their leverage over/ownership of media companies, etc).

I mean, he compares applying antitrust laws to Facebook, Google and Amazon to the antitrust case against Microsoft in the 90s, as if the fact that the USG's willingness to bring an antitrust case against Microsoft indicates that they might be willing to do the same against Facebook, Google and Amazon. But the antitrust case against MSFT didn't result in the company being broken up; looking back at that example doesn't make me think it's any more feasible that that would happen to those companies.

And how would these companies be broken up, anyway? I could imagine Facebook having to spin off Instagram, Messenger, and Whatsapp into entirely different companies. But those products don't really compete with Facebook. I suppose even though Facebook owns those other services they already compete with each other in the sense that people have a limited amount of screen time per day, and those services each is fighting each other to take up as much of people's time and attention. But they also each cover a distinct niche, and allow users to connect with each other in very different ways. So Maybe if they were broken up into different companies, Instagram have to develop something that would compete with Facebook? Wouldn't Facebook crush it before it even got off the ground, because it already has a monopoly on that kind of social network, and it isn't going away? And you couldn't break up the Facebook as a service, because a monopoly would quickly emerge (because network effects).

Still, breaking up those companies would still de-consolidate a lot of the data that Facebook and Google has collected on us, and that would also create more competition between them. That'd be good, although of all things that competition could be used for to inspire innovation, I don't know if it should be used to force companies to come up with more creative ways to capture information about their customers to sell to marketers.

That being said, despite all my skepticism, I'm actually not opposed to the idea.

Also, is there any reason to think he's right that Google would've been crushed by Microsoft were it not for the without the antitrust case brought against Microsoft? By the time Google came onto the scene, everyone thought that search was done and that it was impossible to make money in the space. Did the antitrust case really make Microsoft any less capable of crushing Google than they would've been had it not happened? And I don't really see how bundling IE with Windows would've given Microsoft the ability to keep Google down. (And what would Microsoft have been able to do were it not for the antitrust case? Integrate IE even more into the OS?) I mean, didn't that help Google, by giving more people access to the web?

He didn’t say that the United States would prosecute antitrust suits against those companies. In fact, he literally said the opposite: that it won’t happen in the US, partially due to their lobbying spend, but the process might start in the EU or a red state somehow. He was pretty consistent saying that the US government deliberately isn’t holding these companies accountable to the law, and that the situation won’t change until US voters do a better job selecting candidates.

Yes, Microsoft would have crushed Google without US v. Microsoft. The settlement was behaviour modifying. Prior to the settlement there was no way to truly set your default web browser in Windows; you could choose the default program for opening .htm files, for example, but running links, or clicking on link controls in other programs, would always launch Internet Explorer. After the settlement, Microsoft patched in a public API for setting the default web browser, and in the next version of Windows they introduced a user interface for controlling it outside the browser. A corresponding suit in Europe forced them to do the same thing for media players. After this, they voluntarily introduced settings for other default programs, like email clients, and settings for the default web search engine. Without this lawsuit it is very likely that Microsoft would have used their web browser dominance to force people to use Live Search / Bing, because that’s exactly the kind of thing they had been doing before.

There is nothing wrong with a natural monopoly. The problem is when a company abuses their monopoly position to try to get monopolies in other markets. That means, for example, breaking up Microsoft into web browser, OS, and office suite companies would have made the market more dynamic. All of those companies would have enjoyed de facto monopolies, but none of them would have been able to use that leverage to sell a product that they don’t make. In much the same way, splitting up AT&T into regional monopolies didn’t increase competition, but it created space for a new market: cell phones, and dedicated cellular service providers.

Well... ya certainly can't get past the fact that that sounds like small beans compared to the massive power that the big tech companies today have over entire industries.

So Pfizer got a huge tax cut thanks to the GOP, is cutting funding for research, while spending billions on a stock buyback.

Is a guillotine even enough at this point?

All part of the plan to make the United States the world’s foremost exporter of financial crime

Guys what's up with Trump's nepotism in running a country?

All part of the plan to make the United States the world’s foremost exporter of financial crime

Yeah, but what about this?

What about it?

.

i.e., it was a joke

But sure, might as well file it under cons in the long list of pros and cons of the JCPOA

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/theres-been-a-massive-shift-to-the-right-in-the-immigration-debate/

Nazism works, people. If you bodycheck the overton window, spread propaganda about a people group, and use Hitler's plans to subvert the media, you can change the politics of a nation.

Though 538's title is misleading: the actual political offerings on immigration have shifted to the right. Democrats came to the table basically offering all of what the new far-right anti-immigration Republicans wanted minus DACA.

A nice quote from Matt Taibi:



Guess I'm on a posting spree tonight. Lock and load.

This could be interesting. Trump showed receptiveness to testifying under oath, but does he really understand what that could mean for him?



https://www.axios.com/trump-white-house-worry-about-talking-to-mueller-93acd452-a053-47bd-87fd-7deb8c9c6883.html

As someone in the "rest of the world", I can tell you: it's not funny.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/01/28/iran-spends-billions-on-weapons-programs-terrorism-while-ignoring-iranians-basic-needs-report-finds.html

What an inhumane country, any country which could neglect it's poor is clearly a ****ty place that deserves a change in governance.