lexcorvus

The solution: be rigorous about treating individuals fairly, be willing to apply valid generalizations cautiously and only when necessary, and remember that seemingly biased results might simply be reflecting real differences between groups. (This last point can be grokked by meditating, Zen koan–like, on the question "Are women underrepresented in the NBA?"—a question to which both the answers "yes" and "no" are defensible.)

[1]: http://catb.org/jargon/html/O/on-the-gripping-hand.html

"Tech" isn't a single thing. If you want to make non-geeky spaces for tech, go ahead and do it. But lots of geeks do like tech, and they understandably make geeky environments. Why can't everyone, as the bumper sticker helpfully puts it, coexist?

I think they can. But I also think that the association of geekiness with tech isn't a random quirk of history, but rather indicates a common origin. The kind of personality and psychological profile that predisposes one to an interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics also predisposes one to geekiness. Moreover, geekiness isn't gender-blind: men are simply more likely than women to be geeks. Indeed, people on the autistic spectrum are especially likely to be geeks, and the overrepresentation of males among autistics is incontrovertible. [1]

There's nothing wrong with creating non-geeky tech spaces that cater to non-geeks (male and female alike)—indeed, I think it's an excellent idea, and not only because it's generally more welcoming to women—but let's also let geeks be geeks.

[1]: http://www.autism.org.uk/about-autism/introduction/gender-an...

You may still believe in the benefits of diversity, but there are also costs. One of them is that little kids can't ride American subways alone.

There's a large cluster (with, of course, lots of subclusters) that includes almost all sub-Saharan Africans—basically, everyone except Khoisan (Bushmen) and Pygmies. As Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza puts it: "differences between most sub-Saharan Africans other than Khoisan and Pygmies seem rather small." Even then, the African supercluster is still distinct from Europeans, and indeed from everyone else. Cavalli-Sforza again:

The most important difference in the human gene pool is clearly that between Africans and non-Africans

For more on this important subject, I recommend these two short articles:

http://www.vdare.com/articles/052400-cavalli-sforzas-ink-clo...

http://www.vdare.com/articles/053100-cavalli-sforza-ii-and-s...

Likewise, simply because the variation within sub-Saharan Africans is greater than the variation between them and other groups doesn't mean the cluster doesn't exist [2]. Indeed, it's easy to tell from a genetic analysis what percentage of a person's ancestry comes from each cluster, including sub-Saharan Africa [3].

The study in the OP indicates that fingerprints are like DNA in this regard. That doesn't mean the study is right, simply that it shouldn't be rejected based on Lewontin's Fallacy.

[1]: This is why anthropologists can reliably determine sex based even on fragmentary skeletons (such as "Lucy").

[2]: The edges of the clusters are often fuzzy, but again this doesn't negate their existence. The clusters "red" and "green" are fuzzy, too, but that doesn't make the categories meaningless.

[3]: For example, this is the premise behind Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS show "Finding Your Roots" (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/). It is true that the label "African-American" is imprecise, as most African Americans have some European admixture, but typically over 70% of their ancestry is sub-Saharan African (http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/02/henry-louis-gates-exactly...).

It is hard to imagine technology restriction working, because we have to get past imagining this terribly powerful tool being wielded by our utterly incompetent and corrupt rulers. The same problem exists in contemplating effective protectionism. The most obvious outcomes of both these tools simply amount to featherbedding if not outright theft. As a result, protectionism has gained a bad name, and technology restriction is well outside the policy landscape. Yet in actual reality, the problem is not with the tool, but the wielder. Once we admit that USG isn't working and has to go, we can imagine replacing it with something that doesn't suck—and can actually wield such a tool.

—Mencius Moldbug, "Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot" (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-alt...)

In the colloquial sense of not liking people simply because of their ancestry (or other such categories), I can assure you that the creator of Urbit is not a bigot. But, as with all Orwellian terms, bigot tinkers with the tools you use to think, so the word is best avoided.

Just gonna drop that one in there? I'd love to see evidence of this. (As a happy non-vegan, I kind of hope it's not true.)

The equilibrium price would be set by the demand for money-as-currency. But in the limit of instantaneous (electronic) settling of payments, this demand premium converges on zero, with the only residual demand being for money-as-store-of-value.

The purchasing power of hard money increases with time only to the extent that reality changes, i.e., for the same reason that each year you can buy more CPU cycles per inflation-adjusted dollar. And it's exactly as "deflationary" as the falling price of CPU cycles. This is perceived to be a problem only because of a double meaning of the word deflation: a contraction in the money supply causes a potentially harmful general drop in prices, whereas increased productivity causes a beneficial increase in the purchasing power of money. Those who fear the latter need to explain why it's bad that, e.g., smartphones keep getting better and cheaper every year.

Unfortunately, the usual strategy is to describe both kinds of price decreases as "deflationary", point out that deflation has historically been harmful, and then conclude that hard money must be harmful as well. That this logic is applied to hard money and not to smartphones is most parsimoniously explained by the political incentives that led to the abandonment of hard money in the first place, together with the associated displacement of descriptive "political economy" by prescriptive economics.

For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. So odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.

On the other hand, I sometimes say "If immigration is so great, why don't you take a foreign lodger into your house?" At least these "Refugees welcome" people are putting their flats where their mouths are.

That's the one. It seems like an obviously good idea. Are all seemingly good ideas actually good ideas?

But when through seeming coincidence some 96% of tech jobs are held by men I'd say there's something larger afoot.

Through what seeming coincidence are 100% of NFL player jobs held by men? Or 80% of health-care jobs held by women?

My theory is sexism. It provides a testable hypothesis that has been proven multiple times. It makes predictions on other effects we'd see. Those have also been proven.

Sexism is (a) not mutually exclusive with group differences and (b) is, in many of its claimed forms, wildly inconsistent with many observable facts. As an exercise, I suggest you try making a list of such facts. You might start by listing job categories dominated by women. (I'll get you going: health care, day care, education, publishing.) As a follow-up, try listing areas where men are objectively worse-off than women. (Maybe start with: homelessness, intellectual disability, autism, workplace fatalities, imprisonment, lifespan.)

If you scratch most supposedly definitive examples of unfairness caused by sexism, you'll find some variant of the Blank Slate hypothesis underneath. Once you admit the possibility that men and women might not be blank slates, many of the patterns that appear to be "sexist" suddenly make sense. For example, many people assume that women and men have the same innate aptitude and inclination for "tech" (broadly defined). From this point of view, any deviations from "equality" (i.e., proportional representation) must derive either from overt sexism or from an endemic sexist culture. But when you accept the possibility that men and women may differ in more than stature and genitalia, suddenly it's not so clear.

What's yours?

Due to a combination of genetic and non-genetic differences, different groups are systematically different, and have different aptitudes and inclinations. Group differences lead to a first-order effect: all NFL players are male because all qualified players are male; some majority of those inclined to health care are female. The preponderance of a particular group also leads to a group culture reinforcing group identity. This leads to a second-order effect: female health-care workers create a feminine culture, attracting further female workers (while repelling male workers). This latter effect is sometimes called "sexism", but it's an inevitable consequence of human nature. Efforts to fight it will (a) cause massive collateral damage while (b) not working. (Has the Civil Rights Act of 1964 brought racial and gender harmony? It seems to me that in many ways things are worse than ever.)

I'd guess we actually agree on many things, and in particular we want many of the same outcomes—or, at least, I want a subset of the outcomes you want. Let's say I want O and you want O + O'. Included in O is people of all races, colors, religions, genders, and national origins living prosperous, fulfilled lives free (as much as possible) of conflict and strife. Included in O' is the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Often (as with the Civil Rights Act) the intent of policies in O' is to achieve outcomes in O, but I believe that not only does O' not achieve O, it frequently achieves not-O. Believers in O' would rather wreck college athletics with Title IX, or wreck the black community with welfare, than admit that O' doesn't achieve its stated goals. That would lead to their being accused of "sexism" or "racism", and O'-believers are as eager to avoid such accusations as they are quick to deploy them against their enemies. (Whereas I don't care, because I see them for the Orwellian terms of abuse they are. Just call me a "crimethinker" and be done with it.)

Freedom of association covers this case. If Company A irrationally discriminates systematically against any competent group, Company B can hire members of that group at a discount and beat Company A on labor costs. As companies C, D, E, etc., figure this out, their demand bids up wages, and everyone wins except Company A.

But no. Freedom of association is biased against "marginalized" groups—an ever-expanding set that seems to be converging on "anyone who isn't a normal white (or maybe Asian) male". In the land of the free, "freedom" means "your company can hire whom it pleases, as long as the demographic pattern of those hires pleases me."

It's not the job of companies to make "marginalized" groups feel welcome, or to be a good "culture fit" for anyone in particular, unless you (and the US Federal Government) make it their job. Which it seems you're only too happy to do. Destroying freedom of association? Apparently a small price to pay.

Infinite or effectively infinite identity systems are not impossible to make spam-free. There is a very easy way to make them spam-free. Install a dictator. The dictator (call him "Zuck," because that's his name) is then subject to political pressures of various kinds, and pretty much has no choice but to decide, say, which kinds of videos you can and can't host.

[1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/urbit-dev/zuck/ur...

By this definition, has there ever been a communist country?

It was just as obvious a hundred years ago that horse manure piling up in city streets was just going to keep getting worse.

we can all agree that it's a non-renewable resource which will not be around forever

True but irrelevant. The oil supply is finite only in physical terms, not in economic terms. It is possible to extract an unbounded amount of value from a bounded resource. All you need is an increasing price, which happens automatically as supplies decrease, and which provides an incentive for substitution. I'd happily take a wager that humanity will transition off petroleum long before we "run out" of oil.

(a) Has the global mean temperature recently increased?

(b) Have human activities contributed to changes in climate?

(c) What are the likely effects (positive and negative) of a rise in global mean temperatures?

Only nutball cranks think (a) is false. This is our strawman: if you reject "climate change," you must be a crank. In addition, much debate centers on (b)—if climate change is "our fault," it should be up to us to fix it. But (b) is irrelevant except insofar as it affects our options if the answer to (c) turns out to be "We are facing a global catastrophe." If astronomers discovered an asteroid on collision course with Earth, no one would be persuaded to inaction by the argument that "the asteroid isn't our fault."

If you examine the political incentives producing the answers to (c), it's obvious that in the current climate (heh) negative consequences are favored over positive ones. In other words, an ambitious young climate scientist seeking to maximize her chances of tenure would be foolhardy to undertake a detailed investigation of the likely benefits of global warming.

What we're seeing in climate science is, I think, a close parallel of what happened in Russian biology under the Soviets—specifically, the work of Stalin's favorite biologist, Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko developed a theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics (complete with fabricated laboratory experiments), which had obvious adaptive value in a régime seeking to develop, via social engineering, the "new Soviet man." Similarly, predicting global catastrophe is adaptive in a régime where government-funded science must be solving Important Problems™, and where most members of the permanent government believe the majority of proposed anti–global warming measures (alternative energy, conservation, carbon taxes, etc.) are good ideas anyway.

So, do we really face global catastrophe as the result of climate change (human-induced or otherwise)? In an environment of Lysenkoist climate science, it's hard to say for sure. But you'll notice that the heritability of acquired characteristics didn't exactly pan out. And given that most climate simulations are currently "off model" [1]—i.e., their predictions don't match reality—we can reasonably guess the safe way to bet.

[1]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5747

https://melaniekillingervowell.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/b...

http://upload.democraticunderground.com/top10/09/362_kiss1.j...

This is true, but the same can be said of the Hollywood blacklist [1] during the Red Scare. Do you support Hollywood blacklist–style ideological litmus tests in technology? If you think such things are a bad idea, and you think a culture that encourages them is dysfunctional, then legality is really beside the point.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist

Current profitability is irrelevant. What matters is net future (discounted) profitability. People who malign companies for not currently being profitable apparently don't understand this, but investors do, and the market certainly does.

Many great companies are massively unprofitable while in their early growth stage, then become massively profitable in their later years, and are valued accordingly. If you can exchange $1B in profits this year for (say) $2B in profits next year, you'd be a fool (assuming current discount rates) not to make the trade.

Well, at least it's a step up from bumper stickers.