pythia__

I haven't read that book but the voting pattern the American working class exhibits is widespread, and so is unlikely to stem from its unusual love of success alone. This quote from a now-defunct Telegraph blog by Ed West captures the core of the matter (in a somewhat inflammatory style):

>Liberals are baffled and infuriated that poor whites vote Republican, yet voting on tribal grounds is a feature of all multi-ethnic democracies, whether it's Northern Ireland, Lebanon or Iraq. The more a majority becomes a minority the more tribal its voting becomes, so that increasingly the Republicans have become the "white party"; making this point indelicately got Pat Buchanan the sack, but many others make it too. ...

>The Economist recently asked if the Tories had a “race problem”, but it may just be that democracy has a race problem.

Devil's advocate here. What nice things would we have if nobody gave money to people who believe that? Or, if that is what you meant, if the belief itself was extinct?

Your comment to which I responded with mine suggests a dichotomy between morality being "objective and real" through religion and it being "invented delusions that can be ignored". What I was pointing out was that if the evolutionary argument holds true all morality can't simply be ignored in absence of religion: the bloodlines of those who do die out. This evolved morality does not amount only to following your society's agreed upon norms and neither does it derive from them; rather, only those societies whose norms follow the evolved morality thrive and others wither.

The obvious comparison here is to divine retribution. You can borrow a turn of phrase from the Declaration of Independence and say that the punishment comes from Nature/Nature's God. It is encoded in physics itself. If you take the form of moral realism where morality exists in the mind of a god (though not quite the God of Christianity and absent an afterlife affected by your earthly decisions) the parallel seems clear to me.

>It is the only way to understand statements about morality as objective and real rather than as invented delusions that can be ignored.

Not necessary. There is an alternative route through game theory and the notion of an evolutionarily stable strategy. See, e.g., http://www.saet.uiowa.edu/papers/2015/alger%20weibull%20npla.... Put concisely, the argument is that morality is adaptive. In that way morality can be said to be real and not arbitrary.

>I think your post is also wrong on an ethical level

Do you actually mean the argument in the post or the post itself for presenting it?

>You're not just upsetting them, you're upsetting their network.

Right, this would be a valid concern to an amoral profit maximizer. It would have to be balanced against the potential profits from bad publicity and, more deviously, the benefits of a good "redemption story" of changing the functionality at the upset users' request.

As for Facebook, it is an activist business with the power to shape social trends, so it is hard draw conclusions from its particular case.

>having the computer guess is just a bad idea

Not necessarily. If you approach this strictly from a business perspective as a commercial software developer, statistical guesses (not just about gender) that, for example, delight 70% of your users at the price of upsetting 3% can be worth it.

It doesn't trouble me at all from the perspective of this being something Thiel can do that I can't. As long as billions mean something billionaires are going to wield more power than mere morals. From my standpoint, moreover, this is far from the worst use of private donations for an "activist" cause.

As for it being censorship, this event is not properly comparable to the government censorship of speech in China. Read http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html if you haven't. In the US what you can say is restricted through informal, "softer" means like social pressure, which would make it like most places if not for the fact that American cultural institutions are the most powerful in the world; those institutions, in turn, have a complicated relationship with the government. Briefly, American billionaires like Thiel have nothing on the American media or universities in terms of their ability to influence what people think. Government, media and academic opinion form a feedback loop.

There is (thankfully, of course) no Great Firewall of the United States but in practice American thought rarely deviates from the government-approved norms.

It will more likely be (state subsidized?) embryo selection for the genetic markers of intelligence (see, e.g., https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection), not work on proxies like education, that will substantially reduce poverty. While this solution is outside the Overton window in America today, that will change as the benefits become more visible.

I think to focus on the angry ideologues is actually to divert the attention from the real issue, to the extent there is one; namely, that neurotypical humans, whether happy or angry, have a strong, automatic in-group bias. If you are one you can't really stop having an in-group; the best you can do is try to give out-group ideas a fair shake.

Now, this ability appears to be quite rare. I wouldn't be surprised if, worse yet, the kind of personality needed to do it made you less likely to become a journalist. In short, I doubt you could staff a newsroom full of people receptive to out-group ideas. (And if you think that you, yourself, aren't biased this way without very strong evidence for it I would suggest you take an outside view, per https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Outside_view)

Because of all of this I'd appreciate a genuine answer to my question even if I end up disagreeing with it.

Look at both climate change and the genetics of intelligence to see how America's political groups deal with the scientific consensus.

>there is plenty of apolitical journalism

Could you name three major sources of it, preferably not personal blogs? I am asking out of curiosity and disbelief.

>the entire goal of technology is fight the actual laws of nature

I find this a very questionable premise. Technology, being constrained by physics, necessary works with the laws of nature at least to that extent[1]. Well-designed technology, however, most often also works with rather than against its materials[2] and with, rather than against, the human mind that is intended as its user.

[1] E.g., airplanes do not fight physics to fly but use it. The "fight" view is based on an incomplete picture that ignores everything beyond gravity.

[2] This is not the same as the intent of whoever created the materials, hence hacking.

It's not as simple as that. Advances in trauma medicine played a major role in lowering murder rates.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/

>your IQ is irrelevant, it's an outdated way to measure anything practical

This is a common misconception. IQ predicts a lot about a person's life outcomes; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c... for a basic overview.

It is usually a faux pas to bring up your IQ online but that is not because IQ lacks predictive power.

A fundamental problem with huge cities is that smart, talented people go there and never have children who would inherit they smarts. For this reason they are a human resource drain on everywhere else. In short, "cities are IQ shredders" (per http://www.xenosystems.net/iq-shredders/).

I think your objection is less to codes of conduct as such than to their usual contents and the kind of environment they intend to create. You can have a very different code of conduct, e.g., one that goes something like this:

1. Don't be rude.

2. Don't be stupid.

3. Check your identity politics at the door.

4. Listen to the moderators.

5. Do not complain about rules 1-5.

Unnecessary for your personal survival? That's true, but it's a very limited perspective to take. Cockroaches are known to affect our species' health adversely (e.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11240940). If you wish to reduce their and other insects' unnecessary suffering without compromising the interests of humans, a better thing to advocate for is that we use more humane pesticides (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/nx/humane_pesticides_as_the...), not that we refrain from killing them.

>It isn't our job as technologist to build tools to circumvent the law.

Would you say the same thing to those building tools to circumvent the great firewall of China?

No, I was talking strictly about the users.

The paper is about GitHub, which has a reputation for the opposite. Can you point out an instance where you think misogyny wasn't called out on GitHub?

What this makes me wonder is, could they use a cell phone Wi-Fi mesh network at least for a significant part of their communications?

They recently tried to bring over Brazilian Japanese immigrants but were sufficiently dissatisfied with the results to pay them to leave.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/global/23immigran...

My guess is that in a hundred years people will either not need to eat, and thus few will have kitchens, or people will need to eat and will generally be more resource-poor than today, thus requiring them to have kitchens and to use them more often than we do.

I think this is true but hardly surprising. The average participant in an argument on the Internet is interested not in the truth but in winning. Who wins an Internet argument is thought by that participant to be decided by the audience, which is less clever than the debaters and wants quick, emotionally satisfying resolutions. It is therefore a winning strategy for him or her to ignore nuance and instead attack straw men and try to humiliate the opponent. Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement is inverted on Twitter.

Thinking about this long enough makes large-scale democracy very scary because it operates in the same terms on the same media.

In the short term it may or may not be. However, such society is almost by definition more likely to be fit, in the evolutionary sense, i.e., more likely to survive and perpetuate itself. Society surviving means that its benefits will be enjoyed by future generations.