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ForumsDiscussion Forum → Inauguration Day, Inauguration Hooooooraaay!
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Inauguration Day, Inauguration Hooooooraaay!
2018-01-25, 5:54 AM #6921
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.
2018-01-25, 6:02 AM #6922
Originally posted by Eversor:
I think it's actually quite concrete. What is the problem that any kind of reform is supposed to address? It may be the wrong goal, for example, to say that every industry should have a male-female ratio of employees in proportion to ratio of men to women in the general population.


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.
2018-01-25, 6:05 AM #6923
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".
2018-01-25, 6:06 AM #6924
I'm a clinical psychologist, my name is Freud, trust me.
2018-01-25, 6:15 AM #6925
Originally posted by Reid:
It's not about top down reform, it's about creating good arguments and evidence to convince moral people to act differently.


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.

Originally posted by Reid:
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.


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?
former entrepreneur
2018-01-25, 6:22 AM #6926
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.
2018-01-25, 8:41 AM #6927
Quote:
JP: ..."They[Women] are doing fine in medicine. In fact, there are far more female physicians than male physicians. There are lots of disciplines that are absolutely dominated by women. Many, Many disciplines. And they're doing great!"

According to the Kaiser Foundation, based on current available data on licensed and practicing physicians, the distribution of physicians in the US is thus: Women - 326, 902 Men - 623, 054

They even break down the distribution by state, and a quick glance confirms that in every state, men outnumber women. He wasn't even remotely close in his guess-work. Where in the hell is he getting this nonsense?

When he says, "they're doing great," perhaps he means that female physicians earn more than male ones? But a quick glance at the department of labor and statistics data suggests that, in fact, in 2016 physicians and surgeons were ranked as one of the top occupations in which women’s median earnings as a percentage of men’s median earnings are the lowest. Specifically, female physicians earn on average $1,476; and male physicians earn on average $2,343.

No matter which way you slice it, Peterson is full of it on this one. What really makes me sick is that he's so confident in his lie that everyone believes him. Most definitely not a cult leader.


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.
2018-01-25, 10:15 AM #6928
Originally posted by Eversor:
I don't think it's entirely analogous to that. The traits that he's saying are feminine are those that directly correlate to being less capable of securing higher wages. If someone is agreeable, they're less likely to be stubborn and demand that their boss pay them more, ultimately to their own detriment. But having curly hair doesn't make a person any more or less capable of negotiating higher wages for himself/herself. If someone was paid less because they had curly hair, I agree, of course it would be discrimination, because possessing that trait has nothing to do with one's ability to convince their boss to pay them more. But the argument here is that, in a free market economy, where people have to forcefully tell their employer that their labor is worth more than their bosses want to pay them, it's a disadvantage not to have a personality type that insists that they get paid more. It's not a matter of what one deserves, but what they are able to accomplish. And, according to Peterson's analysis (let's temporarily bracketing whether the analysis is correct or not) women disproportionately exhibit that trait, even if they don't possess it universally/by necessity.
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.

Quote:
I'm not quite getting this. He acknowledges that part of the pay gap can be attributed to outright discrimination. So it doesn't entirely conceal the role that the mere fact of being a woman plays (rather than possessing "feminine traits"), and, subsequently, that discrimination plays. Isn't it feasible that behavioral traits could be partially responsible for the pay gap, even to a significant extent?
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.

Originally posted by Reid:
Maybe later I'll write a post on just how misleading "meritocracy" is, and reference the vast amount of studies showing just how deeply biases inform hiring practices.
Detecting merit being the dual problem to detecting privilege.

Quote:
Yeah. Conscious discrimination is not 100% the cause of the pay gap. Pretty much every sane person believes that. The more nuanced take is that it's still very prevalent and explains much of the gender pay gap.
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.

Originally posted by Eversor:
I think it's actually quite concrete. What is the problem that any kind of reform is supposed to address? It may be the wrong goal, for example, to say that every industry should have a male-female ratio of employees in proportion to ratio of men to women in the general population.
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.
2018-01-25, 12:58 PM #6929
Originally posted by Jon`C:
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.


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

Quote:
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?


Originally posted by Jon`C:
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.


Yes, definitely.
former entrepreneur
2018-01-25, 3:38 PM #6930
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.
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2018-01-25, 4:34 PM #6931
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.
2018-01-25, 4:35 PM #6932
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.
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2018-01-25, 4:40 PM #6933
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.
2018-01-25, 6:10 PM #6934
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
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.
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2018-01-25, 9:35 PM #6935
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/politics/trump-mueller-special-counsel-russia.html

Lol
2018-01-25, 9:52 PM #6936
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
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!


Thou shalt not ascend to a local maximum
2018-01-25, 10:31 PM #6937


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.
2018-01-26, 8:20 AM #6938
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.
ORJ / My Level: ORJ Temple Tournament I
2018-01-26, 10:41 PM #6939
2018-01-27, 1:45 AM #6940
Guillotines start in California, then.
2018-01-27, 2:08 AM #6941
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).
former entrepreneur
2018-01-27, 4:07 AM #6942
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.
former entrepreneur
2018-01-27, 6:26 AM #6943
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?
former entrepreneur
2018-01-27, 9:21 AM #6944
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.
2018-01-27, 11:55 AM #6945
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.
former entrepreneur
2018-01-27, 6:59 PM #6946
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?
2018-01-27, 7:19 PM #6947
All part of the plan to make the United States the world’s foremost exporter of financial crime
2018-01-28, 9:52 AM #6948
Guys what's up with Trump's nepotism in running a country?
Looks like we're not going down after all, so nevermind.
2018-01-28, 9:52 AM #6949
All part of the plan to make the United States the world’s foremost exporter of financial crime
2018-01-28, 10:08 AM #6950
Yeah, but what about this?
former entrepreneur
2018-01-28, 11:51 AM #6951
Originally posted by Eversor:
Yeah, but what about this?


What about it?
2018-01-28, 12:53 PM #6952
Originally posted by Reid:
What about it?


Originally posted by Jon`C:
All part of the plan to make the United States the world’s foremost exporter of financial crime


.
former entrepreneur
2018-01-28, 12:54 PM #6953
i.e., it was a joke
former entrepreneur
2018-01-28, 1:00 PM #6954
But sure, might as well file it under cons in the long list of pros and cons of the JCPOA
former entrepreneur
2018-01-28, 7:46 PM #6955
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.
2018-01-28, 7:48 PM #6956
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.
2018-01-28, 8:19 PM #6957
A nice quote from Matt Taibi:

Quote:
This is who we've always been, a nation of madmen and sociopaths, for whom murder is a line item, kept hidden via a long list of semantic self-deceptions, from "manifest destiny" to "collateral damage." We're used to presidents being the soul of probity, kind Dads and struggling Atlases, humbled by the terrible responsibility, proof to ourselves of our goodness. Now, the mask of respectability is gone, and we feel sorry for ourselves, because the sickness is showing.

So much of the Trump phenomenon is about history. Fueling the divide between pro- and anti-Trump camps is exactly the fact that we've never had a real reckoning with either our terrible past or our similarly bloody present. The Trump movement culturally represents an absolute denial of our sins from slavery on – hence the intense reaction to the removal of Confederate statues, the bizarre paranoia about the Washington Monument being next, and so on. But #resistance is also a denial mechanism. It makes Trump the root of all evil, and is powered by an intense desire to not have to look at the ugliness, to go back to the way things were. We see this hideous clown in the White House and feel our dignity outraged, but when you really think about it, what should America's president look like?

Trump is no malfunction. He's a perfect representation of who, as a country, we are and always have been: an insane monster. Frankly, we're lucky he's not walking around using a child's femur as a toothpick.

When it's not trembling in terror, the rest of the world must be laughing its ass off. America, land of the mad pig president. Shove that up your exceptionalism.


Guess I'm on a posting spree tonight. Lock and load.
2018-01-28, 8:21 PM #6958
This could be interesting. Trump showed receptiveness to testifying under oath, but does he really understand what that could mean for him?

Quote:
One source, who knows Trump as well as anyone, told me he believes the president would be incapable of avoiding perjuring himself. "Trump doesn't deal in reality," the source said. "He creates his own reality and he actually believes it." (The president's attorney, Ty Cobb, did not respond to a request for comment.)


https://www.axios.com/trump-white-house-worry-about-talking-to-mueller-93acd452-a053-47bd-87fd-7deb8c9c6883.html
2018-01-28, 8:36 PM #6959
Originally posted by Reid:
A nice quote from Matt Taibi:



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


As someone in the "rest of the world", I can tell you: it's not funny.
2018-01-28, 9:11 PM #6960
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.
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