Sam Harris and the ideology of reason

Can we add Gladwell to that list of examples? I almost stumbled over that sentence when he wasn’t listed.

There may be some resemblance here to the perils of believing in one’s own moral virtue.

Moral virtue is a good thing! But even those possessed of genuine virtues are probably wiser to be extremely diffident about their virtue. “Maybe I’m being motivated by vanity here,” or excess anger, lust, etc. are all good cautions to keep in mind, even for those whose vanity, anger and lust are generally in a virtuous mean.

So too for dogmatism, prejudice, and the other epistemic vices. Rationality is a virtue! It’s a good thing, and we should all strive for it! (In a balanced way, and not to the exclusion of others.) But however much you have of it, you are still in peril on any given occasion of fooling yourself. Better to doubt your own capacities.

“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ: think it possible that you may be mistaken.”

I have many reasons to hate Cromwell, but that particular injunction gets something right.

At the time Murray wrote The Bell Curve, these claims were not scientifically controversial

This has nothing to do with ‘reason’; Harris here is engaging in wholesale revisionism.

Most of the criticism of Murray and his plainly racist argument at the time came from scientists familiar with the field. IQ tests had for decades before been recognized as remarkably flawed and subject to a host of confounding variables.

Murray’s (and Harris’s too, btw) understanding of genetics(both population and individual), human development and ‘race’ can be best summed up by this

Wielding ‘reason’ from a position of ignorance is no better than the unreasoning faith Harris abhors. He is proof that the Dunning-Kruger effect is not confined to the conventionally unintelligent…

Anybody who watches Star Trek should know that reason is a tool to find the truth, not the truth itself. You make a good comparison between the unquestioned faith in reason some atheists have and the unquestioned faith in god most religions require.

an argumentative capacity to generate convincing rationales for why the reasoner is right, and others are wrong

or, as is so often demonstrated in blog comments and on cable teevee, why the reasoner’s implicit “tribe” of the like-minded is right and various “others” are wrong and wrong-headed in ways worthy of contempt. The ‘myside bias’ is strongly social — we have a point-of-view certainly, which we may conceive of as individual, and we have this magnetism that aligns us with imagined social groupings with personal identifications.

The individualism of our culture maybe makes us try to reason about reason as if reason is all going on inside an individual’s head, but it is not: thinking is social.

We use the word “reason” to cover a multitude of poorly distinguished behavioral phenomena and individual and group skills. During the several hundred thousand years of human evolution, when the human brain was growing in size, at least two physical components of the brain were increasing in size and capability: the frontal cortex and the cerebellum. (the brain is probably not so neatly compartmentalized that this can be an entirely accurate way of speaking, but bear with me; this is not a comment on anatomy) The former seems to be “where” we imagine meanings and rationalize our behavior after we impulsively do what we do and perhaps also imagine and rehearse our future behavior and ponder the meaning of life and similar silliness. The latter — the cerebellum — is where the control models for our fine motor skills and elaborate learned habits appear to be centered.

Some of what we call “reason” is this process of rationalizing after-the-fact, whatever the impulse or behavioral fact was, plus defining where and with whom we belong and thus, who we are, in an imaginatively abstract social context. Putting this capacity for rationalization into overdrive in elaborate arguments of a philosophical, religious or ideological character appears to have an important social-psychological function, simultaneously enhancing cooperation among strangers and differentiating human sub-groups, in part by manifesting in society the paralyzing ambivalence of the individual. It can be tied up in ritualized pronouncements and rhetoric freighted with meaning, but signifying very little. It hardly seems an exaggeration to venture the possibility that argumentativeness, storytelling, hypnosis and human hyper-sociality are closely related.

Humans also developed this other, complementary capacity for understanding the mechanical, perhaps as a by-product of working with our hands and tools. As JQ was arguing the other day, we are remarkably good at throwing spears and catching balls on the fly.

It is when our tool-making/using capacity employs reason, rather than vice-versa, that we get some taste of the power of reason to do more than — or something other than — motivating the mob.

Consider what we are doing here: using systems of notation. It was no accident, I think, that Newton’s Principia involved the invention of the calculus, a system of “reasoning” employing a system of notation as a means. And, not surprising in a way, that talking rubbish about a Watchmaker God would become a more popular pastime than integration and differentiation.

We do seem to have these two capacities — one for storytelling and one for mechanical control — and they blend together in ways that surprise and befuddle us. By itself, the storytelling capacity feels an affinity for magic: ritual incantations whose meanings have the power to compel. And, the mechanical intelligence invents machines that control natural processes and gets results. Jedi Knights and Sith Lords.

Possibly, we were a happier species when the group was a couple of hundred people and the tool was a dog that seemed to respond to our nurturing, emotions and gestures.

Be that as it may be, we do seem to be confused by having these two capacities resident in our intelligence, individual and social. I am not sure philosophy can ever recover from Aristotle’s discovery of the syllogism or whoever’s proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. When we find a mechanical procedure that works, we imagine that it has meaning as magic. We cannot help ourselves; it is human nature.

I know I’ve made the point in comments before that most casual argument takes the form of hypnotic trance induction, but our rationalization of argument tends to emphasize the power of the “mechanical” form, which is a tribute to mathematics and logic, I suppose. Somehow, if only we could apply the mechanical method of geometry, we could be sure of the truth of our mental map of the world. And, it is true that if we go out and carefully measure, and apply the reasoning of Euclid, we can draw a map as a representation of a mechanical model that works, in a pragmatist’s best sense.

But, it is confusing. The “frontal context” (again not an anatomy lesson) wants to believe, in the sense of believe in something meaningful — not incidentally the believer’s own worth or purpose or motivation. Nothing wrong with that. But, a different process.

The actual, historic Enlightenment shed the illusions of conforming faith and Scholasticism (whose abbes, if anything, loved Reason even more than the philosophes) by adopting critical method: a use of tools along with a skepticism that loosened the grip of belief a bit. They still wanted the belief, of course.

Random musings of the overly caffeinated during a Friday morning off.

One possible (but by no means necessary) implication is that individuals with an unusually high faith in the power of individual reason to demolish prejudice may, precisely by virtue of that belief, be especially vulnerable to a feedback loop in which their reasoning reinforces their own prejudices rather than undermining them.

Not defending Pinker et al but I think one could just a plausibly speculate that those who are especially jaded about individual epistemic virtue are more likely to just adjust their cuews to whatever is more expedient to them, professionally and socially.

I was re-reading some if Tony Judt’s old essays today, someone who I imagine must have prided himself on independent thought, and while I’ve never shared his politics I think they stand up very well as a result.

In general I roll my eyes at any argument of the form “I prefer to use data rather than emotion”. Everyone uses data. Everyone uses evidence. Unless you’re in a romcom about a stuffy scientist who learns to love.

When you say something like that, your argument is basically just “I’m smart and you’re dumb”.

Henry: you wisely but perhaps ultimately confusingly finish by saying “obviously, the kind of criticism I’m making here can be turned back itself against critics, myself included. But that’s sort of the point”.

Which leaves me wondering. If I had $1,000 for each time I’ve seen a post or article stating that – not that I agree – all supporters of Brexit or of Trump (or before that, Regan) or of Marine Le Pen are by definition stupid or ignorant, I could take a rather long and enjoyable holiday. Likewise for statements (rarely on CT, of course) that all Marxists are by definition stupid, ignorant or murderous.

So if we are in a world where nobody can be expected to put forward a rational argument, but everybody starts with emotionally comfortable beliefs and then rationalises them, what is the use of sites like CT? Other than to echo a restricted set of comfortable beliefs?

@Paul Delaney, #3

Because they are axiomatic beliefs, not beliefs that are subject to reasoning or sense data.

My beliefs exactly. This is why I get so annoyed at those “atheists” who claim they have proven there is no god. I happen to think there is no creator god, but this is not provable through reason. I believe, after many years of pondering the question, that the existence or non-existence of God is an axiom. Just as it has been shown that the whole of geometry is equally complete and valid no matter which of three possible parallel axioms you decide to use.

A little less than ten years ago I picked up one of those blog questionnaires that used to go round in those days, in this case about atheism. Here’s one of the questions, and my answer:

Q9. Of the “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?

None of the above. Both Dawkins and Dennett would be good on their own territory, if only they’d stick to it. I went off Dawkins when I first read about memes, which is some time ago now. Dennett these days is quite openly an evangelist, and I don’t trust evangelists. Hitchens has very little to offer in this area; I haven’t seen much by Sam Harris, but what I have seen suggests that he’s a twit. The only self-proclaimed atheist writer I’ve got any time for is Philip Pullman; he takes religion seriously as part of real, intelligent people’s lives.

Harsh but fair, I feel.

I went off Dawkins when I first read about memes, which is some time ago now

What’s wrong with memes?

Both Dawkins and Dennett would be good on their own territory, if only they’d stick to it.

Agree with this, except they both *are* good on their isn’t territory, regardless that they don’t stick to it.

To Asteele @20.

Having read Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped from the Beginning” (strongly recommended) recently, I think you’re exactly right.

I left a similar comment elsewhere today, but: I think the defense of Reason isn’t really anything more than a defense of ‘successful,’ well-educated white men as the rational, worthy owners of culture and knowledge. They see fundamental challenges by people unlike themselves (“identity politics”) as ill-mannered rebellion against the true order of Nature. They want to dismantle any argument that might dispute the legitimacy of their institutional privilege; if we can’t intuitively accept well-educated white men as our overlords because they’re morally superior or economically superior, then by George we’re going to accept them because they’re genetically superior.

This attitude has been adopted even by proponents much farther down the food chain, also. If I’m intemperate enough to indulge in arguments on social media, and I have a visibly-female username/pic, 100% I’m going to be accused of getting emotional or being triggered — no matter how calmly I type, or how diligently I avoid mentioning widows and orphans and homeless dogs. It would be depressing, if I’d ever expected anything else.

Stephen @16: So if we are in a world where nobody can be expected to put forward a rational argument, but everybody starts with emotionally comfortable beliefs and then rationalises them, what is the use of sites like CT? Other than to echo a restricted set of comfortable beliefs?

“Echoing a set of restricted beliefs” is derisive and simplistic. Simplistic because the tribe has fuzzy borders. It’s beliefs change as do their expression. Derisive because “tribalism” = “connection and belonging”. It’s okay to seek connection and belonging. It’s not a weakness and it’s not undignified. The pose of rugged individual seeker and servant of Truth is a) itself a tribalist pose and b) comes with a lot of irrational aggression/hostility, presumably from a denied vulnerability to the need for the tribe. For examples see: the internet.

Re: the OP (and bruce wilder’s helpful contribution)

I’d be interested for someone to compare/contrast Mercier and Sperber with Hanson’s signalling thesis

The apparent similarities are striking.

The “self-proclaimed atheist” thing is culturally interesting. The only Australian I can think of who would fit that label is Phillip Adams, who is the exact opposite of the Four Horsemen, both personally and in terms of his politics (left, but non-dogmatic).

Off-topic: googling, I discovered he had just been refused entry to India, but not because he might upset the religious sensibilities of the BJP. Rather, it’s because he, like most Australians, opposes the Adani mine proposal.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/why-did-india-deny-australian-radio-legend-phillip-adams-a-visa/story-1su56eNg9hr2ITz4pWggFL.html

#33 – Pullman is very very mainstream, as far as English Christianity is concerned; his atheism (if it is atheism) is basically the sound of the melancholy long-withdrawing roar.

Dawkins is odd. I remember reading the ‘memes’ passage in The Blind Watchmaker; after a couple of pages I actually started skipping forward to get to the bit where he’d give up on this extended gag and admit it was just a bit of makes-you-think-eh handwaving. He never quite did, though. Dawkins the Rationalist is in a line of popularisers going back to the likes of J. B. S. Haldane and C. E. M. Joad, but there’s something a bit evangelical about memetics that doesn’t quite fit in – and I think Dawkins the Atheist is an honorary American.

For me the bottom line in the IQ debate is that some schoolkid might learn that there is so-called “scientific evidence” and use it to belittle and ridicule another kid on the playground. That would be really harmful. All of these rational types should cease this discussion at once.

Why are so many people uncomfortable thinking of intelligence as a single dimension, or as inherent?

Because it’s plainly not a single dimension, and because most of the dimensions aren’t inherent, and because the ones that are aren’t hugely useful except in fringe cases. Being smart or stupid isn’t a huge deal almost always: the things that are big deals are things like responses to new information that contradicts what you already “know”, or how to deal with social conflicts… and the vast bulk of that is known to be learned and thus teachable.

So a focus on intelligence-the-innate-bits is… not useful, and suggests either ignorance of the above or bad faith.

[speaking as the product of an extremely expensive education, paid for — thankfully — by my government, the key part of a gifted education program is exposing smart kids to their own propensity to failure before their brain fossilises at around 20 and they think themselves infallible forever. If this doesn’t happen you’re actually better off with the dumb kids.]

Maybe it’s to do with the special status of the Church of England?

If you grow up as a non-believer in mainstream Britain you still get Christianity rammed down your throat at regular intervals albeit in a pretty half-hearted way (at school assemblies, on the radio, etc). This leaves a lingering feeling of annoyance, and causes occasional passive-aggressive outbursts.

OP: “Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s recent book…”

Don’t tell anybody these guys are evolutionary psychologists.

“providing a compelling case that reasoning did not evolve as a capacity to figure out the world, so much as an argumentative capacity to generate convincing rationales for why the reasoner is right, and others are wrong.”

I don’t understand the notion of “reasoning” being considered. What convincing rationale am I making for beliefs I already hold, when I: conclude that the car in front of me is likely to make a left turn, based on their turn signal flashing; conclude that I need to stop by the ATM because I don’t have enough cash for the farmer’s market; decide that eating a big meal at bedtime gives me insomnia, based on recent experience and elimination of alternative explanations; decide that it’s raining, based on that noise outside; figure out that the problem is in the second for loop, not the first one; catch a ball thrown to me, etc.?

It’s absolutely just some kind of awful prejudice on my part, but I’m not the least surprised that these guys are French: so far, it sounds like trying to use EP to justify pomo bullshit, and if anybody could that, it’s them.

I think Dawkins the Atheist is an honorary American.

I always had him pegged as an honorary Anglican but I’ve only read two of his books and avoided his Twitter.

We do need good reasoning, but also ought to acknowledge that even good reasoning seldom yields a single correct answer. There can be a range of different,
even sometimes inconsistent, views of a matter. This is not to say there
are no bad reasoning and wrong answers. Good reasoning can help us reject wrong answers without necessarily reaching a single right answer.

I agree that our prejudices, biases, fears and social identities often get in the way of good reasoning. We tend to overestimate our ability to transcend our own parochialism.

A good way to help overcome our parochialism is to pay close attention to external views, especially the views of minorities, other genders, other ethnic groups and foreigners.

Two replies to comments:

Magistra @ 13

my current approach is that 50% of the population are going to have below average IQ by definition, so we need to create a society in which such people can lead a happy and satisfying life and contribute fully with their own talents

That was the main point of Murray’s The Bell Curve; the racial questions were in one chapter, the entire rest of the book was about that exact question–how do we make a decent society for people who aren’t that smart, because things have been getting worse for them for the last 50 years.

Heliopause @ 41
“What if it actually were the case that IQ was a valid measurement of intelligence and that the {blacks < whites < Asian} inequality did in fact attain?"

In terms of social policy there would be no consequences, at least in a minimally moral society.

Except one: we would be unsurprised when engineers and mathematicians were disproportionately Asian, just as we are unsurprised when the fastest runners are disproportionately men.

Thanks for this post.

It led to my own post .

That was the main point of Murray’s The Bell Curve; the racial questions were in one chapter, the entire rest of the book was about that exact question–how do we make a decent society for people who aren’t that smart, because things have been getting worse for them for the last 50 years.

The entire history of everything Charles Murray has ever written suggests that he doesn’t give a fuck about creating a decent society; indeed, undermining the very concept of a decent society has been his life’s work.

Jerry Vinokurov @ 37, you’ve put it very well – earning you a re-post on on the same subject ;)

If you expect an action or event to have consequences of one kind, and it turns out to have consequences of a different kind, then the rational response, and especially the scientifically rational response, is probably to reflect on the likelihood that there are defects in your understanding and that you need to revise your views. A scientist who conducts an experiment or takes an observation and gets results at odds with the theoretical model has to consider whether the theoretical model should be amended.

In this instance, on Sam Harris’s own account, the results he got when he published his email exchange were at odds with his expectations; if he wants to behave rationally, he should react by considering how he might have got things wrong. Ezra Klein had different expectations about the results of that publication, so perhaps Sam Harris has something to learn from Ezra Klein on the point in question.

Magistra @ 13

Well, my current approach is that 50% of the population are going to have below average IQ by definition, so we need to create a society in which such people can lead a happy and satisfying life and contribute fully with their own talents.

And then SamChevre @ 48

That was the main point of The Bell Curve

& it’s a mistaken approach unless you can show that IQ is (1) primarily independent from environmental/social factors and (2) that a genetically “cognitive elite” has found a way and will continue to prevail as an independent social class to the relative detriment of others.

The main point of the Bell Curve was to establish (1) and (2) and then propose social remedies that allowed for (2) to continue. But

Reason

Reason had a pair of shoes
But quickly wore them out;
The uppers still looked very well,
But underneath was doubt.

Of course that let the water in,
And then it let in stones:
They skinned her feet; the flesh was thin,
And soon she walked on bones.

Why not? But now, the trouble is
The joints are working loose.
At what point will the girl admit
You can be too abstruse?

C. H. Sisson (1976)

Kiwanda @42:

What convincing rationale am I making for beliefs I already hold, when I: conclude that the car in front of me is likely to make a left turn, based on their turn signal flashing; conclude that I need to stop by the ATM because I don’t have enough cash for the farmer’s market; decide that eating a big meal at bedtime gives me insomnia, based on recent experience and elimination of alternative explanations; decide that it’s raining, based on that noise outside

Speculating here because I haven’t read the book, but the author’s could very well distinguish between actions based on observation, pattern recognition, and explicit social instruction (each of your examples) and those based on abstract reasoning.

Communal decisions will have often fallen beyond the realm of the former 3: should we stay longer and forage here or look elsewhere for food? The person with a limp has an answer, but it requires a convincing argument.

how do we make a decent society for people who aren’t that smart, because things have been getting worse for them for the last 50 years.

And that’s how you can tell that Murray isn’t that smart, because as an actually-smart person things have been getting worse for me too. An actual proper-smart person would have controlled for that, but Murray is just a poseur, a wanker.

I’ve mentioned before… certain personalities lead to a lack of social success and to conspiricising about how people are working together to keep people like you down. And this isn’t dependent on race/gender/sexuality… but the fact that there is in fact systemic oppression/marginalisation means that some people — the members of marginalised groups — will blunder into correct insights, and straight white guys will just disappear up their own arseholes.

#43 well yes, but ‘la raison tonne en son cratère’ would make the same point, would it not?

Charles Murray has nothing to do with New Atheism, being more of a piece with people like James Q. Wilson or Daniel Patrick Moynihan and all those researchers at policy institutes who devise elaborate justifications for the policies they were hired to support. The idea that the marketplace of ideas is an imperfect market because of big money seems to me to get powerful support precisely because in spite of everything Charles Murray is taken seriously. (Pinker is neither a New Atheist nor is he a traditional conservative, as Pinkerian Panglossianism has never been a favored tactic of reactionaries. They vastly prefer the loss of the golden age…of the world in their youth as they misremember it. Or moan about how the Bad People are destroying all that is holy and good.)

So moving on, the thing about the New Atheists is that they are 9/11 atheists. What’s New about them is that they are all right-wingers. Their pose as tough-minded respecters of fact and logic, exemplars of reason and martyrs thereof, is the same pose of libertarians and economists frustrated by the wooly-minded irrationality of people who refuse to accept the validity of economic theorems. Libertarians and economists ae entirely reputable categories of people in the academy. It is hard to understand why they should be singled out for their self-pity.

There are two issues about these right-wing atheists. First, does it really make sense to attack the idea of rationalism as intrinsically flawed? That kind of buys into their self-image, even though the real issue I think is scientism, in the sense of a fallacious appeal to authority. The thing about their “science” is that it’s bad science. As near as I can tell, they are mostly sincere, like libertarians and economists, because their political prejudices motivate them to accept weak conclusions from partial evidence (like libertarians, or economists who ignore economic history.)

In addition, they are very commonly I think prone to scientism in a second sense, the belief that a set scientific method defines science, and that research mimicking their preferred model of real science is more convincing than other kinds of evidence. As in, Charles Murray’s elaborate statistical studies are science, because they look like their idea of science, whereas the mere fact that every race has made great intellectual achievements isn’t. Africans domesticating plants doesn’t count as evidence. Only science, as they define it, counts.

There is the second issue about atheists, which is, are atheists a bunch of assholes because theism, supernaturalism, religion isn’t a problem? I know that the rightward shift of the owners is changing the political landscape. But Trump recently recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel to please his base. The notion that it is merely ill-mannered to attack sweet, harmless religion seems like a bold assumption to me.

Lastly, Mercier and Sperber are basically arguing that people who are good debaters get laid more, and that the differential reproduction of good debaters over the millennia has driven selection for “intelligence.” Hansen and Simler have recently added that self-deception over motives is so helpful to being a good liar/debater that self-deceivers about their own motives, since they got laid more, that over the millennia self-deception as to motives was hardwired into the brain. I seriously doubt that either partnership has made any case at all for such selective advantage, much less a compelling one.

But I concede that blather about evolution sure sounds like science, and coming up with experiments and statistical studies looks like science. Pinker’s graphs sure look like good science, at a glance. Nonetheless, I think, it’s scientism. Talking about rationalism as an evil seems entirely beside the point.

Not meant as a defense of Harris. I’ve read his book and I wouldn’t put it on the reasonable side in this debate unless “reasonable” means “offending and not offending the ‘correct’ people.”

I always liked the apparent ambiguity of Goya’s “El sueño de la razon produce monstruos”. Is it when reason falls asleep and loses its hold, or is it that reason itself dreams up these horrors?

But it turns out that Goya’s epigraph to the etching makes it clear that the former meaning was intended.

A helpful corrective may be found in the argument for original sin by a certain Enlightenment thinker- see this website’s epigraph.

@48
“Except one: we would be unsurprised when engineers and mathematicians were disproportionately Asian, just as we are unsurprised when the fastest runners are disproportionately men.”

I was speaking of social policy, not expectations.

@68
“the thing about the New Atheists is that they are 9/11 atheists. What’s New about them is that they are all right-wingers.”

This is not true.

b9n10nt:

Speculating here because I haven’t read the book, but the author’s could very well distinguish between actions based on observation, pattern recognition, and explicit social instruction (each of your examples) and those based on abstract reasoning.

These distinctions are so fuzzy as to be untenable: maybe I apply modus ponens to a statement by my driving instructor regarding turn signals, and the observed turn signal; probably I need to carry out some addition and subtraction to estimate my needed cash reserves; the evaluation of explanations for insomnia can surely be an abstract, deductive process.

Even if reasoning is not explicit and at a conscious level, it’s still reasoning, whether or not it falls in Kahneman and Tversky’s “System 2“. Surely the intention is not to focus the analysis so much as to verge on tautology, that is, saying that “reasoning” == “abstract reasoning” == “argument”, and by these restrictions to claim that “reasoning” is mainly used to persuade.

Slightly off topic but this piece shows yet again the rhetorical power of appeals to ‘reason’.

Tl;dr The Economist magazine has consistently posited the battle between austerity and its opponents as one between austerity’s ‘rationality’ and its opponents ‘irrationality’.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2018/03/31/how-the-economist-has-portrayed-austerity-since-1945/

For anyone interested, I followed the links back through the Ezra Klein vs Harris argument and found this review about the current state ( as of several years ago that is) of research on intelligence.

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf

This was co authored by the psychologist whose piece upset Harris.

Bad people use ‘facts’ and ‘logic’
Bad people are bad
Therefore facts and logic are bad

I got curious, and when I checked I found, unsurprisingly, that there is an article about New Atheism on Wikipedia, where I found, among other things, this sentence

In his book Why I Am Not a Christian, published in 1927, the philosopher Bertrand Russell put forward similar positions as those espoused by the New Atheists, suggesting that there are no substantive differences between traditional atheism and new atheism according to Richard Ostling.

and this sentence

In a 2010 column entitled “Why I Don’t Believe in the New Atheism”, Tom Flynn contends that what has been called “New Atheism” is neither a movement nor new, and that what was new was the publication of atheist material by big-name publishers, read by millions, and appearing on bestseller lists.

The problem with reason is that those pesky things called axioms, definitions, and goals, are what give an argument a truth value. Since my axioms, definitions and goals are different from yours, and since they are a matter of choice, my arguments are immune to yours and vice-versa.

Most, if not all political / social discourse of the type referred to by the OP is a kind of marketing. Like, X is true, despite what the despicable Y say or stuff like that, where the emphasis is, in case you missed it, in the despicable part. Such maneuvers are just code for Don’t be a Y, believe X!. Like an old cigarette commercial, but for axioms, definitions and goals.

It’s not completely pointless, though, as it usually keeps us from just shooting at each other. Or from starting to talk like a cheap Osho clone after looking into the dark abyss that lies behind.

J-D, good point about the earlier atheists. I doubt the current crop are humble enough to admit that Russell did it first and better, and for all his bleating about how terribly he is eving censored I doubt Sam Harris will ever suffer the workplace problems Russell did (he was barred from employment at a university in the us I think). I can see why they wouldn’t want to give credit too much though – for all his rabble fishing Russell never had the same strain of arseholey bullshit that the modern crop show. And I think he was way less likely to be misled by racism and violent bigotry masquerading as reason.

Shoulders of giants and all that.

b9n10nt:

“Abstract reasoning” == “argument” is not a tautology.

Nor did I claim it to be, but maybe I was unclear. My “equality” that you quote is a narrowing of the focus of discussion, not the tautology you get if you do narrow the focus.

Thanks for the link; indeed, what could broadly be construed as reasoning, they call *inference*, and by *reasoning*, they mean a particular system 2 version: “Reasoning, as commonly understood, refers to a very special form of inference at the conceptual level, where not only is a new mental representation (or conclusion) consciously produced, but the previously held representations (or premises) that warrant it are also consciously entertained.”

Their claim is an evolutionary one: “The main function of reasoning is argumentative; Reasoning has evolved and persisted mainly because it makes human communication more effective and advantageous”. Here the sense of “argumentative” is I think intended to mean something far broader than the OP’s “…argumentative capacity to generate convincing rationales for why the reasoner is right, and others are wrong.” Reasoning is inference, in the broad sense, rendered into communicable form. As such, it’s plausible, and not particular surprising, to regard its function as communication. (Where function is used here and by the authors in a biological sense: an effect of a trait that causally explains its evolution and persistence.)

This is a much more plausible understanding of “reasoning” than what comes across in the OP, which is more or less that reasoning (with no specificity, just *reasoning*) is only how we “win”, by bullshitting others, or feel better about our beliefs, by bullshitting ourselves. Nor do the circumstances of its evolution, even if correct, constrain the use of reasoning only to persuasion (per M&S) or “wining arguments” (per interpretations of M&S).

Dipper

Those two papers would appear to flatly contradict each other.

I don’t think that’s right; it seems to me that both are consistent with the possibility that a combination of many different genes can have a significant effect on intelligence but no single gene has a significant effect.

Incidentally, I notice that you posed a couple a of questions earlier which nobody responded to, so for whatever they’re worth I offer you my responses:

Is arguing for a genetic basis for intelligence wrong when it is done in support of conclusions we don’t like but right when done in support of conclusions we do like?

No.

Is it wrong to say that lower educational results of a particular race are due to genetics but acceptable to say lower educational results of a particular class are due to their inferior genetics?

No.

By what double-think are we calling the schoolboy atheists ‘right wing’? Those I’m at all aware of would describe themselves as moderate left-leaning – social democratic – though it’s quite true that they’ve been very influenced by their own participation in resisting identity politics and standing up for free speech as they see it.

They’re intellectual authoritarians of a particularly unreflective kind, but calling people who never vote conservative (which at least it seems is true of Dawkins and I’d also guess characterises Harris having listened to a few of his podcasts) seems like a voice from an echo-chamber.

@95
You realize, of course, that if everybody who supported Western interventionism in the early 2000s is a right-winger then large percentages of self-identified centrists and liberals, maybe even quite a few here, are right-wingers. Principled opposition to it was not common and to cast it as a problem peculiar to atheists is strange.

(Tbc I’m not defending him or claiming he’s on the Left)

On February 26, 1940, the Board of Higher Education of New York City appointed British philosopher, logician, essayist, and social critic Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) to a Philosophy chair at the College of the City of New York to teach courses in mathematics and logic. As soon as the announcement became public, William Manning, a bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, sent a letter to the New York Times denouncing Russell as a recognized propagandist against both religion and morality. This letter prompted strong opposition against the appointment, voiced particularly by organized conservative religious and patriotic groups. … The debate moved to the courts when a mother filed a suit against the Board of Higher Education requesting the annulment of the appointment. The legal argument was that Russell was a foreigner, and aliens were not eligible for civil service jobs unless they proved their expertise in a competitive examination–something that the college failed to do. The court case against Russell also included ‘moral’ arguments, accusing his books of being “lecherous, salacious, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, atheistic, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber” (cited in Dykhuizen 1973:20). A month later, in spite of the fact that great philosophers like Whitehead, Montague, Ducasse, and Dewey defended the appointment and praised Russell’s academic and moral qualifications, the judge favored the plaintiff, and rescinded Russell’s contract on the ground that his writings menaced the public health, safety, and morals of the community. The court ruling went even further, stating that the appointment constituted a “chair of indecency, ” and that it was “an insult to the people of New York.” The court’s order was unsuccessfully appealed, and Russell was not allowed to teach.

http://schugurensky.faculty.asu.edu/moments/1940russell.html

Skimming the Dawkins page, I would consider some of the comments islamophobic—unfortunately I don’t think that places him on the Right. Anyway I probably shouldn’t have waded into this as I’ve never paid attention to any of them for years…

Let’s pretend that Harris is correctly representing the current state of the genetics of cognitive traits – which is right as far as I know it (eg the recent Nature and PNAS papers cite above and by the David Reich essay). Then does one’s assessment of the tone of the email exchanges alter?

If one reads and accepts the arguments of Corey Robin in The Reactionary Mind it’s pretty obvious why right wingers (like the ‘New’ Atheists) get excited by an alleged ‘measure’ of intelligence. If it were proven that ‘G’ is a real thing and that it follows the Bell Curve (as Murray has argued) regardless of whether or not this is a racial thing, it would be a piece of evidence in favour of hierarchy. And the Right is all about hierarchy.

That intelligence is a thing in itself is sorta weird, especially given that natural selection would suggest that adaptation to different environments would make such a property very fungible, more a family resemblance than a substance. But that an IQ test devised and revised long before we knew anything about neurology, designed for the classroom, a miniscule bit of natural history that has existed for a couple hundred years at most, seems like basing our physics entirely on what happens with a sputtering gasoline combustion engine in a 1952 lawnmower. Basically, this essentially neurological story has been shifted to a mystical gene controversy because it is all just a mcguffin for KKK-philia. The themes pursued by the racists – Sullivan, Murray, et al. – long preexisted IQ. A good look at the history of “scientific” racism – and the way Darwin, reacting against it, thought through the theory of natural selection – is presented in Adrian Desmond’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause – which shows how political Darwin’s theory was, and how that was a good thing.

“Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s recent book, The Enigma of Reason, is excellent on this throughout, providing a compelling case that reasoning did not evolve as a capacity to figure out the world, so much as an argumentative capacity to generate convincing rationales for why the reasoner is right, and others are wrong.”

That is what Mercier and Sperber say that they say. But it really isn’t what they say. They provide a compelling case that reasoning did not evolve as a capacity for individuals to figure out the world, so much as an argumentative capacity that allows us to figure out the world together. It’s a really excellent book; it is perhaps an ironic confirmation of their thesis that they persist in misrepresenting it.

As for the “getting laid more” argument in the comments thread: I love debates between people none of whom seem to have read the book they’re arguing about. There is no argument anything like that in the book. The commenters seem to be reasoning as follows: the high-profile school of evolutionary psychology (Cosmides, Tooby, Buss and so on) seem to reduce everything to getting laid more (a bit unfair with regard to Cosmides and Tooby, not so much to Thornhill or Buss or Miller). Therefore, anyone who appeals to evolutionary considerations must reduce everything to getting laid more. In fact, these days pretty much everyone on all sides is aware of the need for theorising to be constrained by evolutionary plausibility, but not everyone is a follower of Tooby and Cosmides.

From his book I would have guessed Harris, if he weren’t motivated by hatred against Islam and the Islamic world, was contemptuous of people who he felt refused to dissociate fundamentalism from a more reasonable form of Islam, as one might say has happened with Christianity. I didn’t know about his interest in Hindu or Buddhist thought. It doesn’t come across in the book as that, only as Westernized woo. Which is what it *would* come across as, if he’d learned it mostly from books, right?

Hitchens did start out on the left, but consciously moved to the right after 9/11. Maybe after Clinton and 1998.

I’m willing to concede that Sperber and Mercier are talking about something most people call reason. I’m not willing to concede that I’ve been using the word the wrong way because I use it differently than they do.

“As for the “getting laid more” argument in the comments thread: I love debates between people none of whom seem to have read the book they’re arguing about.”

Though in this case the people who do follow Tooby and Cosmides are so numerous and annoying in places like this that I’d rather disagree with them entirely than give the impression there are a few places where I could be persuaded to agree with them.

Neil Levy @114

Thank you for the clarifying intervention.

However, there’s no getting around that neuro-adaptive explanations for a fixed trait require long-term differential reproductive success among variants. “Getting laid more” is only reductive to the extent that it implies an ego-centric adaptive process.

Your In fact, these days pretty much everyone on all sides is aware of the need for theorising to be constrained by evolutionary plausibility doesn’t contradict your antecedent anyone who appeals to evolutionary considerations must reduce everything to getting laid more. Am I misunderstanding?

Faustus @113

While looking for my copy of Why I Am Not A Christian I found two fine Russell quotes (OT but which I will post w/the moderator’s indulgence later). In the meanwhile:

Bertrand Russell – part 4: The same intellectual integrity that made the philosopher unable to accept religious beliefs also prevented him from embracing atheism

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/bertrand-russell-agnostic-atheism

Off-topic but worth a look—
Bertrand Russell (1922, “Free Thought and Official Propaganda”)
It is clear that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search. Both these obstacles exist in every large country known to me, except China, which is (or was) the last refuge of freedom. . . Credulity is a greater evil in the present day, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread information, and owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power. (reprinted in Sceptical Essays)

It’s been years since I last went into the swamp of heredity and IQ but I appreciate Dipper’s frustration. The problem is that “heritability ” does not have the meaning most people think it does and that includes researchers who have no excuse.

Heritability (in the narrow sense, h2) is the additive genetic variance for a quantitative trait divided by the total phenotypic variation within a particular environment. It is a population statistic and does not say anything about inheritance or genetic determination of a trait in any individual.

Heritability is not a constant even for clones with the exact same genes. It varies for the same population in different environments. A trait can be totally determined by genetics and have a heritability of zero. Example: normal limb development is controlled by genetic factors with no environmental input (other than gross defects due to toxins). Everybody has five fingers. But because there is no genetic variance for number of fingers the heritability of having five fingers is zero. Heritability of a trait can be 100% in one environment but be zero in another.

Claims that gene associations with school performance say something about genetic determination of educational ability for any other population or any other environment are misleading at best.

Cosma Shalizi, a statistician associated with Crooked Timber, has attempted to make the issue of heritability and IQ accessible to those with a minimal background in math. It’s well worth reading: ( http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html) as is his paper on intelligence and factor analysis (http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html) Richard Lewontin has written extensively on the misuse of heritability as well: http://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Lewontin-Jensen-Bulletin-of-the-Atomic-Scientists.pd

Confessions of a eugenicist (excerpts from an April 1, 2068 FT interview of former IQuest CEO Eugene White):
Ft: So, you got in at the ground floor of the eugenics industry in the late 20 teens. What was it like?
Eugene: Well, it was a heady experience as you might imagine. Total exhilaration, we were changing the world -conquering the world with human intelligence. High-resolution genotyping of human populations was just getting underway, universal IQ testing was controversial but happening anyway. I and a couple of buddies at DKP were chatting over coffee one morning and suddenly realized that we knew how to do it – that is breed humans for intelligence. There were some legal and ethical obstacles to over-come but that’s what made it fun in a way. It was all done through self-selection mind you – coerced matings were strictly out of bounds even then.
FT: Really, no coerced matings even in the early years? What about the infamous Jacobs affair?
Eugene: Well, you had to bring that up didn’t you. Yes, there was the Jacobs scamdal. Simple story. One of our founding partners, Jordan Jacobs set up his own shop off the books in a remote corner of the world, got involved in human trafficking, sex-slavery and forced matings. We were as astonished and appalled as anyone when it came to light, and there it was happening right under our noses.
FT: You had nothing to do with his operation? Derived no benefit?
Eugene: Let me be clear, any progeny of the Jacob pedigrees that happened join us later did so voluntarily. I would love to say more but I am constrained by legal counsel.
FT: To this day?
Eugene: Unfortunately, yes there are still places in the world I cannot go out of fear of being thrown in jail. Some people just have no idea what we’ve done to… er for them. Our breeding approach on the other hand was entirely voluntary, prospective mates knew what they were getting into. Everything was arranged through social media. And it worked, of course. Our genome selection models were primitive by todays standards and not terribly accurate, but more than good enough to breed with. Once the easy alleles were combined we went after the hard stuff, the rare alleles and epistatic factors.
FT: At what point did you realize that the concept of race, which was popular then, was irrelevant?
Eugene: Oh, right from the beginning, of course. Anyone who knew anything about human genetics even in those days knew that race was a myth, a social construct maintained for political purposes. Even us lowly DKP grads knew that IQ is determined by hundreds of loci. In that case, what were the odds that all of the best alleles ended up exclusively in European and Asian populations? It all seems obvious now, but back then it was an uphill battle against entrenched prejudice. By arranging blind matings through social media we were able to circumvent cultural barriers to interbreeding thus unlocking the awesome power of human genetics! It was genius! …. Sorry, I still get excited. … In fact, because Africa is the center of origin of the human species, the population there was a huge repository of rare favorable alleles. We were the first to take advantage of that and spent enormous resources in genotyping the African populations in order to bring those alleles into play. We are all the smarter for it!
FT: Were you not surprised then when it was your industry that actually lead to destruction of racial barriers?
Eugene: I wish I could say we saw that coming but the honest answer is no. We had our own cultural blind spots. By focusing on IQ, traits traditionally associated with race such as skin color, facial features, etc were quickly homogenized. In hind sight it seems so obvious. Of course, the down side was that at least initially many of our elite progeny were considered unattractive – ugly even. Not because of skin color mind you, café au lait was quite appealing across most cultures even in those days. Rather, the problem came with other physical characteristics: outsized head (bigger brain), small frame (less muscle mass to compete with the brain), barrel chest (large lung capacity to keep the brain oxygenated).
FT: So do you find me unattractive then?
Eugene: No offense, but actually I suppose not. But that hardly matters standards for physical beauty have since evolved accordingly. In any case, I am sure you are attractive enough to your mate.
FT: Indeed, he is a sleek SuperG40. If you don’t mind my asking what is your IQ?
Eugene: Ah, I was hoping you would get around to that. Last tested In 2018 my IQ was 125, smart enough but not genius level. Adjusting to the current standardization that corresponds to an IQ of about 80. Its not that I have gotten dumber of course, its that rest of the mostly younger population has gotten smarter. So you see, in just a couple of generations we have made great strides in elevating the IQ of the general population. I am quite proud of that and also humbled because of course I have been left in the dust.
FT: Are you bitter about having been deposed as CEO, by a SuperG30 no less?
Eugene: Well, it might have been handled more gracefully certainly. The irony is that the SuperG30’s were our breakout generation of IQ elites. Smart as a whip and utterly ruthless, if a bit clumsy on the dance floor. On the other hand, have you been in her house? The women has no taste. Sometimes I think we have gone too far in ignoring other traits of humanity in favor of IQ.
FT: Well I quite like Amanda’s decor – stark and austere – straight to the point. Seriously, do you have regrets?
Eugene: Sometimes when I am in the shower I wonder how things might have worked out if we had gone a different direction – say breeding for athletic ability instead of IQ. We did marketing studies and IQ was actually less popular than physical prowess. But, I was not athletic and had a relatively high IQ so I went with my prejudice. Ironically, had we gone the other way I might still be a considered a mental giant!
Ft: Yes, it is remarkable that so much was achieved by a group of humans that were by today’s standards rather dim. So how do you spend your days in retirement?
Eugene: Well my alma mater, Dunning-Kruger Polytechnic, gave me an office. So I am writing a memoir. “Few remember the IQ wars and why we fought”.

Continuing the russell side topic, something about the new Atheists public behaviour that has always turned me off is that they act as if they’re the first people in the world to notice there is no God, and they are all chuffed as if they’re presenting a great revelation to us all. I don’t get the feeling they give much credit to previous generations of thinkers for whom this revelation may have been more troublesome, and who may have been slightly less publicly offensive in their presentation of it. I don’t read these dudes’ books because I’m confident in my atheism and feel no need to assert or affirm it, so I don’t need one of their dumb rhetorical guidebooks, especially if it’s leavened with a heavy faith in the power of American weapons to redeem Muslims. But in their “deeper” written works do they give credit to past thinkers? Do they build on their work in any way? Or are they just restating Russell with extra sneer?

(I *have* read some Russell, not because I sought comfort in others sneering at the religious, but because I was under the impression that he was a great thinker separately from the sideshow that is modern atheism)

b9n10nt: “NB to the Brits: Yankees and Red Sox are ‘American cricket’ clubs”

LOL. Waiting for a study on why Americans are so obtuse as to require dumbed-down cricket. Hereditary? Who can say?

(I’m American, but only recently recognizing my genetic limitations.)

1) The so-called New Atheists are not by any reasonable standard right wing. In the US at least there’s essentially no such thing as an atheist right winger.

As for their support of hierarchy, it seems to me that it comes down to a support for listening to people who I’m now what they’re talking about, and privileging those inputs over those of people with less expertise.

2) I’ve read a fair amount of Harris and I listen to the podcast regularly, and I don’t believe he is a racist. He thinks religion is a font of bad, violent ideas, and that the worst of religious extremism and violence (today) comes from Islam.

As far as I know he doesn’t endorse Murray’s hypothesis, and has on numerous occasions on his podcast questioned the motives of anyone who strongly advocates for the research. But Harris is a free speech absolutist, and while that’s problematic in a lot of cases to me, it’s clearly not the same thing as endorsing Murray’s conclusions. Which, again, he doesn’t.

3) None of 4 Horsemen claim to have proven God’s non-existence.
4) “Scientism,” is a weird insult. The reason scientism is a thing is because science (scientific naturalism) works. No other system of “knowledge,” or so called methods of knowing has so consistently been demonstrated to accurately describe reality.
I agree with Dennett, who considered accusations of scientism an “all-purpose, wild-card smear.”
5) Harris’s use of the term ‘deplatforming,’ is dumb and makes him sound like a whiny right winger, which again, he’s not.
6) Murray is pretty clearly a racist, or at least racist-curious, and Harris shouldn’t have given him a respectful platform for broadcast it. That said, I don’t think Harris was ‘taken in,’ by pseudoscience, I think rather that it demonstrates the limits of free speech absolutism.
7) I did find Klein’s responses to be evasive and couches in false collegiality. I listen to both of Vox’s podcasts regularly (weekly, pretty much) and really like them and Klein. I also enjoy Harris’s podcast, and listen to it pretty much every time as well, although he can be, as someone noted upthread, a dick.

The accusation of ‘scientism’ doesn’t prwsuppose that science doesn’t ‘work’ but that it is not the only form of intelkectusl inquiry that works.

“In the US at least there’s essentially no such thing as an atheist right winger.”

Reason, ladies and gentlemen. Tickets five dollars, please tip the doorman on your way out.

The alt-right can accurately be described as exclusively atheist right-wingers.

I’d like to find a definition of “scientism” that means something, but in practice what it means is being a scientist, rather than one of the elect who knows how to put natural science in its place and reinterpret it to be more socially useful for the speaker’s purpose.

How anyone purports to know that science is always in the interest of the cruel and powerful, and other forms of knowledge are always in the interest of the weak, is beyond me. Both that and the reverse are equally ridiculous.

bianca steele:

Elites aren’t only purveyors of injustice, but they always are. There isn’t a law that “Science serves the masters”, but a tendency: Gravitational fields exist, but they are often overcome or simply have no relevance. Light is bent, but it illuminates nonetheless.

The null hypothesis would be that the institutionalized practice of science is merely the pursuit of Truth, outside of any social context. The study of geology has had no relation to oil extraction, the study of physics has had no relation to militaries, likewise computer science, biology no relation to imperialism, etc…

It’s untenable to suppose that the distribution of scientific inquiry stems from some self-evident awareness of what’s a problem and what’s a priority.

& this has not been unique to science! On the contrary, science has been socially catholic (happy Easter!) compared to the Arts.

Engels cd say this much shorter and to the point…

@128
”Smart as a whip and utterly ruthless, if a bit clumsy on the dance floor. On the other hand, have you been in her house? The women has no taste. Sometimes I think we have gone too far in ignoring other traits of humanity in favor of IQ.”

As I wrote before -(and like always – it was ignored) – y’all need to learn how to dance – it also solves all these ”religious and racial” problems – and about having ”no taste” – that’s the other thing – all these friends of mine with a great IQ’s have this major problem with ”interior design” – not as much as our ”F…faces” but… still…

What’s about this obsession with Kant Quotes on the walls of y’all toilets anyway…?

Charges of scientism against people like Harris (or Pinker inter alia) don’t quite hit the mark. I think it’s more that they are often just purveyors of sciency-ness. Their use or reference to some of the trappings of the physical sciences seems ‘sciency’, and bolsters their credentials as hard-nosed rationalists, but it mostly cannit be described as rigorous and systematic inquiry.

nastywoman @146
“if a bit clumsy on the dance floor.”
That bit was indeed inspired by your sage comments.

I don’t have much interests in the Rationalâ„¢ squad (Harris, Pinker, the Less Wrong guys… Dawkins and Dennett I admit I find more interesting, but not so much either), mainly because (as Jerry Vinokurov and the OP pointed out), they actually tend to be too close to pseudo-science to my taste.

But I would welcome a CT discussion of Mercier and Sperber. Like steven t johnson, I remember reading their article in the context of a thread here by John Holbo, and I remember liking the psychology part but also being completely unconvinced by the evolutionary part of the argument. Beside, I admit I’m rather skeptical of the idea “a compelling case that reasoning did not evolve as a capacity to figure out the world, so much as an argumentative capacity to generate convincing rationales for why the reasoner is right, and others are wrong” can be made at all (for reasons I gave in the original thread). But I would be glad to see a discussion of their arguments by people who are convinced (like Henry here, apparently).

Murray is pretty clearly a racist, or at least racist-curious

Murray contends that Africans are inherently intellectually inferior to white people. That’s racist. If Murray were to argue honestly, he would contend that racism is the correct lens through which to view human history and biology.

Dr. Hilarius@126 is of course quite correct that heritability is a tricky concept. I would only add that heritability is rarely measured or even discussed in EP work. By rarely, I mean I’ve never seen any example whatsoever. But the heritability of an adaptive trait matters very much in evolutionary history.

anon@128 hits the sore spot, right between too true to be funny and too plausible for a good April Fools’. But I’m a bad person and was amused anyhow.

Joseph Brenner@129 is also funny. If it’s an April Fools’, it fooled me.

Faustusnotes@130 also forget Col. Ingersoll, or even H.L. Mencken etc. Most curious is the bizarre idea that religion is a sideshow, when it is philosophy that is in the small tent. It is not clear that Russell is relevant for anything. The Spanish barber shaves all the men who come to his barbershop, and the ones who don’t come to the barber shop, shave themselves. There is Russell’s teapot…but that’s atheism, and even more to the point, most people refuse to accept the point about science.

engels@136 “The accusation of ‘scientism’ doesn’t presuppose that science doesn’t ‘work’ but that it is not the only form of intellectual inquiry that works.” I disagree. Science has demonstrated variation in human beings, for instance, in sexual behavior, including homosexual behavior. Anyone who insists that moral and legal systems should acknowledge this behavior is often properly condemned as scientistic. The more pompous reactionaries will prattle about Hume’s Is/Ought distinction, ignoring empirical issues like Can’t Be/Must Be/Can’t Know/Results Will Vary. The charge of scientism is that science doesn’t work in the sense that the anti-scientist intends on accepting some other way of knowing, no matter what the empirical evidence is. Like the OP, most people do not contest scientism as a fallacious appeal to authority, a false claim as to what the science really says. Indeed, like the OP falling for Mercier and Sperber, they will make their own fallacious appeals. Hostility to scientism (or as the OP has it,) does not arm you against sciencey rhetoric.

Benign Intent@137 defends the validity of seeing scientism as a crime precisely because he thinks science doesn’t “work.” That thinking science does work is epistemic arrogance. I think it’s the other ways of knowing that don’t work and that insisting they can supersede mere science is the real epistemic arrogance. “The social sciences especially can put on a good show of science without being able to either identify and control for all relevant variables in experiments or replicate observations. You can measure and model all you want, but there’s a fundamental unknowability about economics, sociology, etc…that do not similarly handicap the physical sciences.” The belief that only investigation relying on the exact same scientific methods—or worse, THE scientific method—count as real science is itself the second most common form of scientism I think. (Again, fallacious appeal to the authority of science, alleging it says something it does not, would be I think the most common.)

Or to put it another way: Philosophy, religion and law are likely the three largest competitors to science for making truth claims about the world, not the social sciences. I think it would be foolish to claim epistemic humility for any of them, especially in comparison to science. Yet it would be foolish to claim the social sciences are no more successful at finding out how things are than philosophy, religion or law, because the social sciences don’t seem to do controlled experiments the way they do in physics. Besides, if you look closely, the historical natural sciences have the same epistemological problems as any historical social science, which means you can’t even hold this position consistently in regards to the natural sciences.

Collin Street@141 “I mean, historians can’t run a control wwii exactly the same but with hitler dead in 1939; this means there’s no scientific way of knowing that hitler’s personality had a negative impact on german war goals. But we do know this, because science isn’t the only way of knowing.” This again expresses the scientism in thinking the only way to really know is using the controlled experiment a la the natural sciences. It is no accident that the example offered is not a good one. It is not at all clear that Hitler’s “personality” had a negative effect on German war goals. There was considerable continuity in Germany’s goals in WWI and in WWII, regardless of Hitler’s personality. And Germany in the last analysis started a war it couldn’t win in WWI without Hitler’s “personality” causing failure.

“Scientism is, specifically, the mistake of not realising this. Science as all knowledge. Either not seeing the limits of the scientific approach or not seeing the successes of non-science thinking.” Who said they see science as all knowledge? Direct experience of the world gives us all a great deal of knowledge. It’s just that science is indeed the best way to give us more knowledge of the world, beyond our personal experience. Again, the implicit claim that philosophy, religion and law have taught us more about the world is breathtaking, but not in a good way.

Trying to read this charitably, it may be the real objection is that there’s more to life than science. Indeed there is. It’s claimed that there are people who think if it’s not STEM it’s worthless. I’ve seen a lot more people who think if it’s not Godly, then it’s worthless. But for what it’s worth, I disagree with both. Science is the only good way to learn the world. It’s not why we live, but it really helps with how we live, which is a good thing in my book. The thing is, thinks like literature and drama and cooking and dance and love are experiences, not knowledge.

Neil Levy@145 has claimed that Mercier and Sperber are misunderstood because they are inadvertently misrepresenting their own work. It would be best then to explain that to them, not us. But regarding the idea that Sperber is a cultural evolutionist rather than an Evolutionary Psychologist? That seems to be based on the idea that evolutionary theory applies to anything that can be labeled a replicator. I don’t agree, for a start, because genes are not replicators, cells are, no matter what Dawkins said in The Selfish Gene.

Further I think that heritable variation in the population is essential to an evolutionary theory. I don’t know how you can define variation in a culture. I don’t know how you can distinguish replication in a culture from historical change. The idea is as incoherent as the meme concept. I don’t know what speciation of cultures could mean. I don’t know what could constitute reproductive isolation of cultures could mean. I don’t what differential reproduction of cultures could mean. I don’t know what convergent evolution of cultures could mean. I don’t know what homology could possibly mean when talking about cultures.

I’m not very familiar with cultural evolution people (save thepossibly related Structural Demographic Theory from Peter Turchin.) But a lot of it sounds very much like a borrowing of terminology to sound more scientific, i.e., like the natural sciences. Which is to say, it sounds like scientism. If it’s like Turchin, a fixation on hypothesis falsification is completely compatible with amazing explanatory lacunae.

“The chain from fit behaviour to changes in gene frequencies is typically long and convoluted. And then there are mechanisms like drift, where the chain doesn’t lead back.” Even with kin selection, there is differential reproduction (more getting laid) on relatives’ part. But I agree wholeheartedly with your point about genetic drift being an alternative explanation. I would suggest for example, that reasoning abilities are partly a random outcome of increased encephalization in the hominin lineages. The increased encephalization is associated with increased life span. Longer living adults had more offspring survive. It’s Sperber who insists there has to be an adaptive reason for the reasoning powers. If there are evolutionary theorists who pay more than lip service to genetic drift, well, I can only say they don’t ever write popular science.

#147

Sam Harris is complaining about attacks on his “intellectual and moral integrity”?!

He doesn’t possess a shred of integrity, he is a complete fraud.

He calls himself a neuroscientist – well, he isn’t.

He calls himself a philosopher – well, he isn’t.

Furthermore, he is utterly shallow and vulgar: he talks about “reason” as if there hadn’t been a philosophical debate about what that word is supposed to mean for the past 2500 years. He talks about science as if the layman’s idea of the Wiener Kreis was correct and their purported ideas had triumphed. He talks about Islam like someone who did a bit of reading on Wikipedia and then picked up his talking points from the neocon/alt-right kabal.

I can’t believe we’re even taking people like him seriously at all, the same goes for Jordan Peterson – a complete fraud as well. Just check out e.g. his ramblings on postmodernism: he hasn’t read or understood a thing, neither Derrida, nor Foucault, nor Habermas or whathaveyou – it’s obvious, and yet he claims to enlighten the world with deep and previously unspeakable insights.

We should stop engaging with fraudsters like this and not play their game – it’s beneath us.

Layman @135 thinking that stating “the worst of religious extremism and violence (today) comes from Islam.” implies racism, is really an inference too far if you ask me. In today’s world many
would agree that that statement is true. That doesn’t imply that belief in its correctness is the same as believing this is due to character defects unique to brown people or whatever. In fact many historians and many CTers would state that its primarily a reaction to colonialism. Having a
plausible explanation other than (that religion is intrinsically bad), doesn’t make his statement untrue. It would help if the atheists would acknowledge that the position of being the currently most violent religion has changed with time, and that that just might imply that other historical circumstances are a major driver of extremist violence.

The actual charge of racism, requires more than just of dislike of a particular religion.

Going right back to the OP: “an individual has prejudices, uses reason to elaborate good rationales for those prejudices, and then convinces himself through his own reasoning capacity that he was right all along”.

But if you live long enough, you will very likely find that as time passes you have changed your mind on several matters, and even if you haven’t you will notice that some other people have.

It seems to me that this must be due to being convinced by reasoned arguments against one’s original prejudices, or to collision with or abrasion against objective reality persuading one, rationally, that the original prejudices were wrong.

If that is so, then reason can overcome passions.

I realise this argument will not appeal to those who can never change their minds.

I notice that some of you guys and gals seem to be quite ready to accept that blacks are dumber than whites, it’s just that you just don’t find the arguments and models convincing enough. Is that true?

The reasoned answer to the average IQ hierarchy (black < white < asian) is, when it comes to policy: so what? No way anyone is seriously going to be ok with discriminating a person on the basis that someone else who shares some vague phenotipics with him/her happens to be dumb.

BTW, here’s new and interesting data. Kids of rich whites stay rich, while kids of rich blacks… not so much.

Buried in the article under a lot of other things is a striking observation:

these pockets [where black boys did well as adults] were the places where many lower-income black children had fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own fathers were present or not.

It’s funny in a way, really, because if you had asked Larry Elder a while ago, that’s about exactly what he would have told you (among a plethora of other related things).

Swami: oh go on, please explain to me the argument for preserving the cultural identity of my nation… Even better, explain what the hell this has to do with either the original post, or the issues of IQ and race as constructs or reifications…

Trader Joe:

Perhaps there is no God and that will be one more thing in life I am wrong about – but perhaps there is and my awe at this amazing universe of ours is even more enhanced because of it.

Perhaps there is a God and that will be one more thing in life I am wrong about – but perhaps there is none, and my awe at this amazing universe of ours is even more enhanced because of it.

politicalfootball @ 155

I’m probably even more uncomfortable with Gould’s distinction than you. He kind of arrogantly decides that he has the right to say what authorities there should be for everything that is “not science.” He decides he has the right to say that all the methods of thought he thinks are good, are not methods non-scientists should ever get to use, and he calls that respect for non-scientists.

I would agree that there’s something off about Harris’s use of science. My issue with “scientism” is this: I can agree that there are wrong ways of using science. The philosophers who use the word “scientism” believe there are wrong ways of using science, which they use the word “scientism” for. If I use the same word, I implicitly say I agree with them about other things too. I don’t.

I suppose I could say, “well, I’m sure they’re reasonable, so I’ll assume they agree with me,” and use the word anyway.

‘I can’t believe we’re even taking people like him seriously at all, the same goes for Jordan Peterson – a complete fraud as well. Just check out e.g. his ramblings on postmodernism: he hasn’t read or understood a thing, neither Derrida, nor Foucault, nor Habermas or whathaveyou – it’s obvious, and yet he claims to enlighten the world with deep and previously unspeakable insights.’

As you point out, these people are objectively stupid (and how ironic is that). When they excoriate those with ‘low IQs’ it never occurs to them that they might be prime examples of such people (it’s difficult to imagine isn’t it? A stupid middle class white person).

But while we all sit around and wonder ‘why, why could it possibly be, that the mass media are so friendly to Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris and Steven Pinker et al and, on the other hand, so unfriendly to Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman and Alain Badiou and David Harvey et al (and in terms of column inches and TV interviews…this is unarguably true)’…you do have to ask:

cui bono?

Or, as I always ask myself before considering the truth of any political proposition, think:

‘Who would benefit if it were widely believed that this were true?’

@165
”If the other readers of this blog can’t grasp the argument for preserving the cultural identity of their nation, then I can always explain it for you all.”

You for sure don’t have to – as lately it has been explained so often – by all kind of… ”explainers” with all kind of… different ”reasons”… and as I don’t know what ”nation” is your ”nation” – and thusly what ”cultural identity” you want to ”preserve” – and nearly all of my friends are ”multicultural” and most of them are ”multinational” – and that seems to be kind of the unavoidable future – at least for all of the so called ”advanced countries” – what ”cultural identity” – again do you want to preserve?

And please don’t tell US the ”German-American Identity” as it got such a bad name lately with all of these erections of Baron Von Clownstick!

On the other hand if you would say you want to preserve the Italian-Irish-American Indian identity WE would be all with you – but only if you don’t overcook the Pasta!

Capisce?

Swami
In the article you cite, Richard Haier writes, in part

If we can change environments or genes to increase IQ in individuals, we have a moral obligation to do so because more intelligence is better than less. … This progress does not depend at all on whether or not average group differences are due partially to genetic influences.

If he’s right, and progress does not depend at all on whether average group differences are due partially to genetic influences, then it would seem there’s no good reason to investigate that question.

Trader Joe @ 163

It seems to me that someone who says “I’m an atheist” isn’t arguing against anything, but describing what they believe. Telling them an atheist he doesn’t understand religion because he disagrees with you, and that he has an obligation to understand your religion, seems no different to me than telling a Jew the same thing.

My memory, which may be faulty, is that Hitchens didn’t just support the 2003 Iraq War, he supported the Republican Party, Republican/neoconservative publications and pundits, and Republican candidates. And that Hitchens started attacking people on the left for anti-war positions. That seems pretty decisive to me as evidence that he didn’t consider himself a leftist anymore.

180. Yes. With high sin taxes in NYC, booze and smokes don’t come cheap. He was a disgusting slag.

TM @ 179

Very helpful clarification. Thank you.

F. Foundling:

That is, the group crucially relies on faith in *individual*’s ability to reason

I think your very thoughtful post (pointing out the dangers of group-think) elides a distinction that can best be explained by analogy to the hardware/software distinction. Reason may be a social “app” that relies on discrete modules of “hardware” (pre-frontal cortices) to run, much like on-line gaming. Thus, the individual is necessary for effective reasoning, but reason still does not reside in the individual. Just as on-line gaming doesn’t achieve its potential if you’re doing it alone, so reason is somewhat defective if the “app” is only running on a single piece of hardware at a time.

. In a similar way, one can and does ‘discuss’ alternative possibilities with oneself wihin one’s own mind.

But this is precisely when “reason” is likely to just be “rationalization”. Or so the research indicates…It takes enormous self-discipline and (again) social support to act on reason as opposed to telling ourselves that we’re acting on reason.

attempts to discredit reason through cynical observations about its workings and origins, seem to imply that we should be committed to something else than reason, but it remains unclear what that something is.

In groups, under the right conditions, as you say, reason works like nothing else.

But, individually…commit to “self”-awareness as a non-cognitive experience. Slow way way down, meditate, contemplate, attend to immediate pre-conceptual experience (“the foot feels the foot when it feels the ground”). Practice seeing through the ego without denying the ego.

Radical epistemic humility is your licence for such “woo”. It’s not like we’re doing what we’re doing because of reason, anyway.

@167
“On the other hand, Hitchens supported the second Iraq invasion and Bush in 2004. Of course these appalling positions are associated with the right-wing, although there were many sorts of useful idiots in 2002-2003. So then?”

I’ll just say again that if every liberal or leftist who supported Western intervention at some point in their lives is a right-winger then probably most of them are. If they want to take the position that liberals are in fact right-wingers, fine, but then damned near everybody is a right-winger and identifying it as a peculiarly atheist problem is meaningless.

What we’re seeing here is not cogent analysis of the class known as atheists but rather retrofitting of reality to fit a preconception. Atheists come in all political types but tend not to be right-wingers. Even a few minutes of internet research shows this.

Omega CentauriThe predictable effect of suggesting an association between Islam and extremist violence in the context of airport security is to encourage airport security staff to hassle people with dark skin; in this way, Sam Harris chose to do something that would contribute to making the world a worse place for people with dark skin. Do you suppose he’s too great a dolt to understand this?

Hellblazer, the argument is quite simple. Institutions are essential to outcomes, and cultural mindsets and shared values are the underlying foundation upon which formal institutions (such as the rule of law, democracy, property rights and such) are built. The reason I mentioned it is that the original post denigrated Murray for noting that the emerging makeup of France is in risk of becoming no longer French and therefore extremely likely to be made up of people without shared French cultural mindsets and values. This threatens to undermine the institutional fabric of the nation.

Hidari, Psychology is certainly a different field from physics. Yet, there is overwhelming evidence that IQ can be measured and that it is strongly associated with outcomes in life, including career success, school success, income, marriage, avoidance of drug abuse, cooperation, patience and avoidance of crime. It is an extremely powerful characteristic in social science, and pretending it isn’t emasculates the field. If you want links so you can brush up on the topic I will gladly provide them if you promise to read them and respond.

Nasty, My family is multi ethnic (black, white and Hispanic mixture). What is your point? See my response above to Hellblazer. The point is that massive sudden population movements of people from another culture with radically different values, shared mindsets, expectations and beliefs will undermine the institutions of society. I was speaking specifically of France in response to the original post’s hackneyed attempt to suggest massive inflows don’t matter and to imply that Murray (who experts in the field overwhelmingly agree with) is a racist for stating what the experts believe to be true.

JD, the reason to investigate the question is to understand which levers will best respond to improving social outcomes. Is the problem a dysfunctional family culture? Victim mentality? Failure to read to children? Low expectations? Inequality of outcomes affecting desire to try? Lack of education? Poor nutrition? Institutional discrimination? Low IQ? In most cases it is going to be a mix of these and others, but the remedies need to correspond to the diagnosis.

@Trader Joe 04.02.18 at 7:08 pm
>as soon as someone says they are an atheist because of “reason” or that those who are religious don’t have reason on their side I know the person doesn’t at all understand what they are arguing against … Faith/religion begins exactly at the point where reason ends.

Well, that (basing beliefs on something other than reason) is exactly what is unacceptable to a (typical) atheist. You are saying that religious belief cannot be assessed by rational inquiry, and they don’t think that any belief should be exempt from assessment through rational inquiry. They do understand you – to the extent that it is possible to understand this – they just think it’s a wrong and harmful attitude towards thinking and life. What’s more, you, too, would agree – as would most sane people – that this is a wrong and harmful attitude with respect to any other subject that one may think about besides religion. ‘I just *believe* that I/you can fly if I/you jump out of this window, and I don’t have to justify it rationally?’ ‘I just *believe* that this and not that medicine will help me/you against this disease, and I don’t have to justify it rationally?’ ‘I just *believe* that Trump is a good president, and I don’t have to justify it rationally?’ ‘I just *believe* that the tenets of Marxism-Leninism are correct and I don’t have to justify it rationally?’ This is just not how ‘believing’ is supposed to work. In fact, back in the old days, when religions thrived and proliferated, they did do their best to justify themselves rationally with alleged facts (so-called miracles, prophecies, epiphanies etc.) just like any other conviction needs to be justified. It’s just that in their case, the facts happened to be false.

Unlike love and awe, faith is not primarily a feeling but a conviction that something is a fact, implying the affirmation of said fact. (A fact other than one’s own emotional state that one registers, that is). And basing any conviction or affirmation of such a fact solely on feeling is, again, unacceptable to a (typical) atheist (as well as, again, to a typical theist when it comes to issues other than religion). You are free to say that you love Batman and that you are awed by Batman; as soon as you say that you think Batman actually exists, people will expect you to substantiate that.

If rationality is the use of means appropriate to the ends, then reason is the means by which we arrive at the most rational solutions. Patient attention to the real world tells us that cloud-seeding works better than dancing if the end is inducing rain. Cross-checking, repetition, accurate measurement, agreed standards are all tools to aid in this. Nothing mysterious here – my dog is rational when he looks up and down the fence and then decides that one way offers a better route than the other. Bees decide on the best nest site by communicating their finds, checking the information on offer and then “voting” – that is, they reason their way to a solution.

This says nothing about ends, and ends are complicated. There is almost always more than one, and situations are rarely static. Every predator has to weigh the prospect of injury against the worth of the meal, and re-evaluate this as the contest goes on (just as the prey has to weigh flight against fight). Many judgements about rationality are judgements about ends.

Science works best when the ends are simple (“we want to how stars work” is a simple end, even if the means to get there are complex). Studying human (or animal) behaviour involves first assessing multiple, competing, changing ends, always from incomplete information. Why anyone would think the same methods are appropriate is a mystery to me.

Ok – so I lost the ‘/end sarcasm’ tag on the last post (no, I don’t believe in the statistical basis for the greater intelligence of agnostics)

And also stuffed up the links for my batman photos:

Batman Station: https://goo.gl/images/86kCVh
and Batman Park: https://goo.gl/images/5HzA7s

Now going to focus on paid employment for the rest of the day, as I should have been doing…

:(

I feel like I’ve got something to say about this, but keep having trouble pinning it down. Here’s one last try:

Sam Harris seems like a good example of someone who believes he’s reasonable, but clearly isn’t– in fact it’s so clear, there are some who doubt he’s really trying, but I don’t see any need to go there. Human beings are capable of bigger delusions.

When confronted with someone like this, there are a few natural reactions– you might try to pin down the source of his delusions; you might try to contrive an argument that can punch through them; you might look for arguments that might win over the undecided spectators– or you might just spout off to show other members of your tribe how smart you are, and how tightly you belong.

There’s another step after all that though, which Henry alludes to at the end of his piece: how do you know you’re any better?

At this point we have many examples of people who should know better falling into cognitive traps, and worse denying the problem and resting contrary evidence with convoluted arguments.

(Even a man who is pure of mind, and recites his Socrates at night may become a wolf…)

A really intelligent person can rationalize almost anything.

Since Ezra Klein is on everyone’s minds, I might remind you all about his piece from 2014, “Politics Makes Us Stupid”, http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid

To spend much time with Kahan’s research is to stare into a kind of intellectual abyss. If the work of gathering evidence and reasoning through thorny, polarizing political questions is actually the process by which we trick ourselves into finding the answers we want, then what’s the right way to search for answers? How can we know the answers we come up with, no matter how well-intentioned, aren’t just more motivated cognition? How can we know the experts we’re relying on haven’t subtly biased their answers, too? How can I know that this article isn’t a form of identity protection? Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?”

There have been many results that point in this direction in recent years, and there’s very little in the way of encouraging news. We keep learning more about how bad the traps are without hearing any good way of staying out of the traps.

Do I need to point out that there are few, if any intellectual tribes that can claim to be immune to them? The liberal/left/educated may indeed be doing better than the right at present– I certainly think they are– but it’s also pretty clear to me that the left sometimes fails, sometimes pretty badly, and when it does it’s *just* as recalcitrant to listen to anything like reason on the subject.

One possible conclusion from this is to simply give up on reason: we’re all fools and knaves on some level, so we might as well embrace it and learn how to play the game…. and personally I think I’ve been seeing an increase in numbers of people who’ve essentially given up on anything like reasoned debate. At this point everyone knows that there’s evidence out there that contrary facts don’t seem to persuade, and in fact they seem to cause people to dig in and cling harder to their errors. If the only thing that persuades is an engaging narrative however devoid of facts, than what else can we do but give ’em what they want?

Now, this strikes me as a dangerous development, even from the point of view of a persuasive strategy– playing fast and loose with the facts is just handing ammunition to the other side. If you don’t like the “both sides do it” line, then you probably shouldn’t start doing it.

Sam Harris is indeed overplaying his stance as a bold defender of reason, but in this light, it strikes me as the vice that pays tribute to virtue. We may yet wish for more such defenders of Reason, though preferably ones a bit better than Harris or Pinker.

steven t johnson

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. I’ve very much enjoyed reading and contributing to this thread. I’m going to try and be clear (for my own sake, I suppose) on the distinction between scientific knowledge and the presumption of social scientific knowledge. It’s entirely possible there’s some error to my thinking so…caveat emptor!

First of all, I realize I likely misunderstood you back @156 when you wrote:

Philosophy, religion and law are likely the three largest competitors to science for making truth claims about the world, not the social sciences. I think it would be foolish to claim epistemic humility for any of them, especially in comparison to science.

In other words, you were saying that philosophy, religion, and the law arrogantly make truth claims when they should realize how provisional (at best) their supposed truths are. In essence, you believe that they should exhibit epistemic humility, but they do not.

I took you to mean the opposite, but if I now read you correctly this time then I entirely agree.

@188 you respond to my example of knowledge “killing non-threatening neighbors is bad”. I was only trying to come up with a prosaic example of legal, religious, or philosophical knowledge to show that it wasn’t true, at least not in the same manner that scientific knowledge is true. My example was clumsy, but we agree that, as you put it, ” The instant assumption that philosophy, religion and law have taught any single thing is the real epistemic arrogance, in my opinion. ”

Now, with regard to the natural history of Hawaii…As I wrote, the geological history of Hawii is inferred from controlled observations. The physics used to establish the ages of the different islands, their chemical composition, as well the ecology of colonization and biology of subsequent evolution can all be proven via controlled experiments. We know that Hawaii is volcanic rock, that it formed X millions of years ago, that the inhabitants colonized the islands and evolved there. We know this about Hawaii not merely due to historical inference, but inferences based upon (or verified by) controlled observations. It is the controlled observations that justify our certainty.

The idea that one cannot even make a factual claim about the origin of the German state is bizarre on the face of it.

Really? Okay, it’s bizarre, I grant you that, but it is wrong?

First of all, the statement “the German state originated when…” is either a causal statement or it’s merely an unverifiable tautology (what we often refer to as a “fact”). Let’s assume we’re not discussing the latter:

When, precisely, does the German state originate? & what properties constitute the existence of the German state that were lacking before it’s origination? What happened that caused it to exist when before it did not? If there was a ceremony or a document that we claim established the state, would we allow that such an event or artifact merely represented the state that had already, for all intents and purposes, formed? Would it not be strange, and equally ignorant of the people and institutions that existed 1 hour, 1 day, 1 year, or 100 years prior to say, “Before this moment, there was no state. It was birthed into being at 9:45 pm on this Thursday 1871.” That seems equally bizarre! (Or again, simply tautological declaration of no historical -which is to say, causal- import).

Otherwise, if we grant the social sciences “facts” that are somehow true even though they can’t be known independently of a knower the way scientific knowledge can be, are we to suppose then that the social world is a separate “magisterium” from the physical world? That there are different kinds of knowledge that pertain to each and can not be evaluated by a consistent, definable, criteria? That, too, would be bizarre.

@Joseph Brenner If the work of gathering evidence and reasoning through thorny, polarizing political questions is actually the process by which we trick ourselves into finding the answers we want, then what’s the right way to search for answers? How can we know the answers we come up with, no matter how well-intentioned, aren’t just more motivated cognition? […] Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?

We – in the sense of a collection of individual selves – don’t reason our way out of that. Because reasoning our way out by carefully weighing evidence and examining logic using our own reason is not how things work. I would even say that’s not how things are supposed to work. The way it actually works, which also happens to be massively more efficient, is that other people force us to understand. So we never understand injustice, we never see the flaw in our reasoning, we never examine our prejudices: they make us understand, they point out the flaws, they challenge our prejudices.

And for that process to work, it is sufficient (but also necessary) that they may be heard by us</i. And there is the rub.

Do I need to point out that there are few, if any intellectual tribes that can claim to be immune to them?

Because, see, neither intellectual nor political society should be structured as “tribes” and if they are, they cease to be intellectual or political society properly understood. Left and right in the relatively functioning democracies of the XXth century for instance were not opposing tribes, they were opposing modes of expression of groups who did not convene (which I understand in the sense of Spinoza) on some questions (typically the legitimacy of sharing political power with the lower classes) but who generally convened on significantly larger questions (explicitly, typically national values; implicitly, shared educative achievements within a common social system). When this situation of confrontation within a larger system of shared values prevails, superior cognitive properties emerge from the confrontation.

But current advanced democratic western societies do not satisfy the property of shared educative achievements, so have become too unequal to allow this formerly mode of convening. Hence, only pure confrontations between unequal groups remain, and in that social context there is indeed neither theoretical argument, nor empirical ones, nor indeed realistic hopes that superior cognitive achievements will emerge from the confrontations.

So

[H]ow do you know you’re any better?

You aren’t and you never will be. Never. Your society might be, though. So if you value reason, a rational approach to problems… then you should strive to establish the social conditions that allows for the “universalization of the means of access to universal” as wrote a dearly missed friend. In that respect, I’m not impressed by the achievements of the Rationalâ„¢ squad, to say the least, but those of the recent standard-bearers of political liberalism (both Clintons, Blair, Obama, Macron…) are from stellar either.

Layman @ 135
As I said, I listen to Harris regularly, and have read him a fair amount. I don’t think he is a right winger or a racist He dislikes religion and thinks Islam is worse than Christianity right now. He is a very strong supporter of ex-muslims (Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali).

Noting that the majority of religiously motivated violence comes from one religion (he may be wrong, I think this is a complex question), and that the tenets of that religion encourage violence is not racist (I’m thinking of the fatwa againdt Rushdie and the Charlie Hebdoe attack). Again, he may be wrong I just don’t think he’s a racist.

Is it an Appeal to Authority to listen to climate scientists on climate? Or biologists on evolution? Or geologists on deep time? Or to listen to epidemiologists instead of anti-vaxxers? I think they bemoan the death of respect for competence and expertise, especially as it relates to government, science, medicine, etc…

b9n10nt @ 134
I’m not really thinking about the social sciences here, but rather the so-called hard sciences.

To your second point, I don’t disagree, but the corrective to that is more and better science, not to counter it with faith-based assertions or woo.

Collin Street @ 141
Science indeed has a lot of severe limitations. It’s a very ugly and messy way of knowing, but still superior to the alternatives.

How do we know what effect Hitler’s personality had on Germany’s war goals You assert that we know it was negative, but that’s all it is… An assertion. You would support it by marshalling and assessing facts (or as close to facts as we can get in this kind of very fuzzy case). I guess I’m talking about empiricism.

Also, I don’t know what you were trying to achieve with your condescending ‘sigh,’ but I’m confident it didn’t have the effect you were aiming for.

Alex SL @ 143
Your point 1) is essentially the definition I’m using.

Politicalfootball @ 154
I agree with you. Murray is a racist.

Steven t. Johnson @ 156
What you said…

Omega Centauri @ 160
I generally agree with you, and you said what i was tiring to say more coherently than I was able to, but I think that most of the Big Name, or movement atheists, or whatever you want to call them, would acknowledge that the position of being the most violent religion has changed. But would also assert that eliminating religion would radically reduce violence.

Mario @ 163
Where are you getting the idea that anyone on this thread is ‘quite ready to accept that blacks are dumber than whites?’ I don’t think there’s a single comment that could possibly be read that way.

Swami
In the article you previously cited, Richard Haier wrote, in part

If we can change environments or genes to increase IQ in individuals, we have a moral obligation to do so because more intelligence is better than less. … This progress does not depend at all on whether or not average group differences are due partially to genetic influences.

Now you write that

the reason to investigate the question is to understand which levers will best respond to improving social outcomes

If it is true that ‘progress does not depend at all on whether average group differences are due partially to genetic influences’, then it cannot be the case that investigating the question will contribute to understanding ‘which levers will best respond to improving social outcomes. If Haier is right on this point, you must be wrong; if you are right on this point, Haier must be wrong.

Omega Centauri
You are eliding the difference between a belief and a statement (spoken or written). The speaking or writing of a statement is an action and more than a belief; an explanation or justification of the belief is never enough by itself to explain or justify the making of the statement.

The question I asked you which you did not answer was about whether you thought Sam Harris was such a dolt as to fail to understand the predictable consequences of his action. I did not refer to the possibility, which you have since suggested

I’m not sure if Harris is willing to let potential consequences to others affect what he say’s in public

that he does know but doesn’t care; that would be worse, not better. Indifference to the harm one’s actions cause to others is vicious and monstrous.

@3

“As a Christian I am sometimes accused of holding non-falsifiable beliefs. And I am quick to say guilty as charged! Why? Because they are axiomatic beliefs, not beliefs that are subject to reasoning or sense data. I suspect that for you that Harris is wrong not merely because he is applying reason inappropriately, but rather because his viewpoint is, for you, wrong axiomatically.”

I’ve noticed this over the years on web forums where creationists battle their critics: their belief that labelling a proposition as an “axiom” means “not requiring any justification ever”.

You’d think a rationalist would have set them right about it by now. Or at least one of the theists who do understand logical theory (there are a few).

Parallel to this is is the misconception that Godel’s Theorem shows “everything is based on faith”, which I’ve seen Jordan Peterson tweeting. In so far as the claim is that “Everyone has unjustified axioms”, it doesn’t require Godel to be mentioned, as it’s already built in to the way creationist use the term “axiom”.

F. Foundling #192: “…back in the old days, when religions thrived and proliferated, they did do their best to justify themselves rationally… It’s just that in their case, the facts happened to be false.”

I think the first part of this is correct, but the second needs amendment. To begin, reason is the same, in BOTH cases of science and religion.

First let’s define reason, to get us all on the same page. The mechanism of reason is the weighing of distinctions. These distinctions always boil down into being paired, i.e. into having two parts. There is a rather small set of distinctions: Identity (between two things). Difference (between two things). Equality. Inequality. Number (which is generated by pairwise operations: succession, addition, division). Negatives. Opposites. Before/after. Flow (with beginning and end). Cause/effect. Subject/predicate.

Exclude “subject/predicate” for a moment, and try to make any statement in science or religion without using one of the others, at least in the basis of your statement.

The distinctions of reason fall into two main groupings, Separated (e.g. difference; negatives) vs. Endpoints of a continuity (e.g. before/after; subject/predicate). These two groups are very much like Points vs. Size, a cognitive distinction which shows up in the arithmetical cognition of very young children. (And is very close to cardinal vs. ordinal in mathematics).

We can categorize further. Reason is performed within an even smaller set of general fields: Space, Time, and Grammar. Grammar miniaturizes space and time; it’s a combined form within a boundary. (Example, you are taking time to direct your eyes over these symbols in the spatial format of this comments thread.) Grammar is therefore the precursor that envelops smaller well-known subsets, e.g. the game.

Advanced reason often overlaps the distinctions and the fields, into various higher forms.

This is a present metaphysics of reason, quite in advance of its use in science.
__________________

All the mechanical distinctions of reason are used in religion too.

But you write that with regard to FACTS in religion, “in their case, the facts happened to be false.”

I think this is not quite right. In the case of religion, the facts are “not falsifiable”.

Science is defined NOT by the mechanics of reason. Science is defined by 1. presumed falsifiability of results, and 2. its restriction of domain to the material universe. The history of science shows that science’s results can be extended further into the material world, into new and unexpected discoveries, into deeper theories. This is its virtue.

But consider that science works and finds new things, yet we have difficulty characterizing the eternal status of its results. The history of science so far demonstrates that it finds no final laws, at least we wouldn’t know how to recognize or to say if it did. There are just ever-more basic laws in a process of erasure and expansion that may have no end. It might be wiser to say that new science is the unfixed, expanding membrane of intellectual cognition. (Some discussions in Quine follow upon this conception.)

Thus it is, that there may be no final scientific laws, just as there may be no God.

But for people who need a closure, that won’t do. Religion’s unfalsifiability is a NECESSARY function, to call them out of despair or out of consciousness of sin by salvation through faith. A change in intellectual opinion or intellectual framework is not a change in consciousness. Change in consciousness is a nonverbal thing. Yet verbal reason is all we possess to communicate outside of direct personal contact. So religion employs the mechanisms of reason in a discourse that is heavily characterized by repetition, storytelling, circularity, metaphor, taboo and hiddenness.

Indeed several religions go further for some few of their most intellectual adepts, with a practice or symbolic construction that first sets up a discourse by reason, and then directly contradicts it with negation or mystery. There are examples in jnana yoga, Zen koans, meditation upon the Christian trinity, etc.

This process may be illuminated in the future by brain science, but for now, athiests who would expunge religion ought to consider that it offers a lot of things to people in need. Society is not about to put all of them into psychotherapy at $200 an hour — and often it isn’t what they need, it doesn’t work as well.

steven t johnson:

Kiwanda@167 manages to assume social issue positions a libertarian might pretend to count as left wing, while ignoring Hitchens’ support for imperialist war on Serbia (and the Chinese embassy,) misrepresenting it as defending Muslims.

Evidently I need to repeat the conversation. Why did I note, from the wikipedia article on Hitchens’ political views, that Hitchens was “against the first Iraq invasion, anti-Zionist, pro-choice, against capital punishment, against the “War on Drugs”, pro LGBT rights, fought NSA surveillance, favored intervention to protect Muslims in Bosnia, favored Nader in 2000, Obama in 2008. And not a big fan of Henry Kissinger or Mother Teresa.”?

Because I was responding to Layman: “Anyone who thinks Hitch and Harris aren’t right wing isn’t paying attention. Which right-wing boxes do they miss ticking? ”

So Hitchens misses ticking a few right-wing boxes. Although, again, as I noted, he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, so there’s that.

Now maybe, per bianca steele, he ceased being a leftist, because leftists were against the 2003 Iraq invasion, and he attacked them for that: attack leftists, for any reason, and you’re not one. Maybe, per steven t johnson, those not-right-wing positions are coming from Hitchens’ dark libertarian heart, and not a true and good leftist one, and his anti-Zionist views were an expression of crypto-anti-semitism, despite many of his statements.

So maybe Hitchens was no true leftist, despite a variety of not-right-wing positions. Yeah, OK, sure. I don’t actually know why this is an interesting question. He was anti-Zionist; in general, that’s good. He was in favor of the 2003 Iraq invasion; that’s bad. Why is it important which particular tribal box he is placed in, or whether a good position comes from an unstated, unknown, bad motive? It isn’t, and doesn’t. What matters are issues, not tribes.

And not personalities, either. I don’t know why here, Henry needs to get clear that Sam Harris is a bad, bad person, just as last round, he needed to get clear that Jon Chait is a bad, bad person, and next week, presumably he’ll need to affirm that James Fallows is History’s Greatest Monster.

I’ve noticed this over the years on web forums where creationists battle their critics: their belief that labelling a proposition as an “axiom” means “not requiring any justification ever”.

Please, tell me: before whom does one have to justify one’s axoims? and who enforces the proper justification of axioms and definitions? And furthermore – who ensures that appropriateness is judged in a nondiscriminatory and appropriate way?

I’m sure this logical theory of yours has something to say on the matter, but I wonder: on what, then, are these assertions based?

@JD,

“If Haier is right on this point, you must be wrong; if you are right on this point, Haier must be wrong.”

It is always possible HE is wrong (pun intended), but actually I read him as saying we are morally obligated regardless of the root cause, not that the cure is generic regardless of cause. IOW, it doesn’t matter if the cause of traffic fatalities is texting or speeding but we need to reduce it either way, but the way we reduce it differs based upon the root causes.

@Layman,

“Is it lost on you that those on the far right in France have been saying this exact thing for nearly 150 years?”

No. People abuse arguments on every side of a debate, especially when politics is involved. To dismiss a sound argument because someone abused an unsound but similar argument is just bad reasoning.

I am extremely pro immigration. But immigration can not be overwhelming. The immigrants need to adapt to (or gradually add to and improve) the cultural mindset and values. Slow rates of immigration, which allow diverse groups to assimilate are probably extremely healthy (they have been in the US), especially in higher IQ groups (college degrees, doctors, IT professionals, etc). This is absolutely not the case with the current crop of Muslims entering Europe (though I believe it is very true for most Muslim immigrants in the US).

Again, even though my family is mostly… (oops, you don’t want to hear it), I worry the rate of Hispanic immigration in the US has been too fast (for healthy assimilation) since the late 60’s. This is certainly debatable, but I spend a lot of time in subsections of California with poorly integrated sub-culture. This can lead to the situation where first and second generation immigrants thrive, but third generation revert back to the institutional and cultural problems they were trying to run from in the first place.

“Would white people on the right in France view you as part of the solution to protecting France, or part of the problem? If they see you as part of the solution, then clearly fears of the Other are silly and racist. If they see you as part of the problem, then you’re very confused, man.”

I am sure they have multiple perspectives, but as being neither of the right or French I can’t say exactly. The key point is that it is rational and moral to be concerned with the make up of the group one belongs to, especially in a democracy where those entering can help to determine what you have to do even if it is against your will or interest.

I strongly support the economic arguments of moderately high levels of liberal immigration, my concern is with overwhelming tides of rapid immigration which undermines the institutional foundation of a successful nation. To the extent some in France recognize this danger then I am in agreement with them, even if this means that they don’t want me in their tribe (I don’t speak a lick of French and honestly doubt I share many of their mindsets or values, though I almost certainly share more than does an uneducated, clannish Syrian refuge).

Swami

The reason I mentioned it is that the original post denigrated Murray for noting that the emerging makeup of France is in risk of becoming no longer French and therefore extremely likely to be made up of people without shared French cultural mindsets and values.

That is a distortion; the original post described Murray as counting black and brown faces. The idea that you can detect likely changes in mindsets and values by counting black and brown faces is both ludicrous and vicious.

I don’t frankly care whether you agree with my views or not. They harm no one

So glad the American Christian Right’s craziness never has any effects on anyone else

I might address any response(s) to my comments in more detail later, but for now – just a quick note on the specific commonly raised objection that religious views harm nobody, which I happened to catch a glimpse of. Now, a very abstract deism with no practical implications may harm nobody *directly*, but it’s a bad habit – if you indulge in such thinking in this respect, you are likely to indulge in it in other, more directly harmful respects. Personally, I would get a bit nervous if I were to hear a person in my proximity assert seriously their belief that there is a giant seven-legged pink elephant with three and a half compound eyes hovering in the sky above us, even if this had no obvious consequences for our current interactions in practice and the person appeared to be speaking and acting, for the time being, in an entirely sane manner in every other respect.

However, apart from the precedent one gives to oneself, there is the issue of the precedent one gives to others. Most theists don’t just stop at a very abstract deism, but rather have more detailed ideas about God with specific implications for everyday life, ethics, laws and so on, and that is where the results really get messy (I need not elaborate on this). And that’s the real purpose of theism, really. I mean, come on – what would be the point of having such a dramatically deviant notion about the very essence of our universe if one *didn’t* use it to draw any conclusions about one’s actual life from them? Really, everything in our entire existence just happens to be produced and at least potentially controlled by a living rational being with unimaginable and possibly infinite capabilities, but this *won’t* have any practical implications for our lives? Please. The function of a God in a human’s worldview is to be an *authority*, a higher primate in the hierarchy – someone whose favour one seeks to earn and whose disfavour one seeks to avoid by obeying them and pleasing them. As long as we have theism, this is what we’ll get; and as long as we have this, we will be having the trouble resulting from that obedience and favour-seeking. And as long as some people are able to justify their abstract deism devoid of practical implications in an irrational way, others will be able to justify their regular theism with practical implications in the same irrational way.

As an aside – I have never paid much attention to Sam Harris and it looks as if I would disagree with him on quite a few things, but looking at his website and his interaction with Jordan Peterson, I have to say one thing in his favour: at least he is *not* Jordan Peterson.

@219 “but why would you set yourself that goal? There’s nothing to be said in favour of that goal”

You cannot possibly be serious.

@216
– when the famous Mayflower anchored at what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the tip of Cape Cod – and small scouting groups began exploring the land in search of a place to build Plymouth Colony, they were encountered by members of the Wampanoag tribe – Robert Cushman, a member of the Pilgrim church referred to as ”heathens”
– and one of the Indians – a very wise and very reasonable man told the new settlers:

”I am extremely pro immigration. But immigration can not be overwhelming. The immigrants need to adapt to (or gradually add to and improve) the cultural mindset and values. Slow rates of immigration, which allow diverse groups to assimilate are probably extremely healthy (they have been in England), especially in higher IQ groups (royalty, etc). This is absolutely not the case with the current (around 1620) crop of Muslims entering Europe (though I believe it might become true for most Muslim immigrants if one day also Muslims will immigrate to the US)

How visionary?

and awesome… reason?

But on the other side:

the slow rates of immigration, which allowed diverse groups to assimilate in London probably were extremely healthy for the London Real Estate Market – especially in higher wealth -(and not necessarily IQ) – groups (Muslim Sheiks, etc). This is absolutely not the case with the current crop of Muslims entering Europe – they just don’t bring enough dough – and I’m just joking –
if it is allowed?

An open letter to fervent agnostics and atheists:

Religious conviction is merely the most common “spell” that enables greed, fear, and ignorance to motivate people’s actions. There’s plenty of evidence that conviction in reason, or “the ancestors”, or ____ would do the trick just as well were they to similarly capture peoples’ attention.

If you try to kill their gods with any hint of arrogant disdain, with any sense of I-know-something-you-don’t-know, with any trace of greed or fear in the attempt, they will resurrect their gods with even greater conviction, or buy into your wisdom but make a cheap dogmatism of it and go about their ignorance just as they were.

There’s a subtle but profound difference between trying to fight religious conviction and trying to make religious conviction socially-irrelevant. Sam Harris and the New Atheists seem like they are doing the former. I think it’s gratifying for them but not wise.

@215

Despite what you seem to think, it wasn’t me that thought up ‘cui bono’. And the phrase has persisted for thousands of years. You might want to think about why.

As for your second point, I have noticed that many ‘types’ get hysterical when it is pointed out to them that most statements of ‘fact’ (most of all in the political realm) are not made by disinterested, unmotivated scientists, dispassionately searching for truth, but instead by people who ‘have skin in the game’: i.e. people who have interests (which may well be material), motives and reasons for making statements, and not just in general, but motives for making claims at this specific time. And it is an essential part of critical thinking to think about what these motives and reasons might be, and how they affect what we, as listeners and readers, are to make of these truth claims.

It would be superfluous to go through (e.g.) the front page of the New York Times or the Guardian today and go through all the ‘big stories’ and reflect on whose interests they might serve: i.e. as I said, who would benefit if it were widely believed if these stories were true? And not just ask ‘why are these claims being made’ but (as someone on CT once pointed out) to also ask: ‘why are these claims being made now‘?

Superfluous, but not uninteresting.

I find the on-line partisans of New Atheism and creationism have a lot in common, since they both have a tendency to invoke “logic” as a cover for gaps in justification, and they both seem to be unclear about their epistemology, which is the real issue, not logic. NAs tend to unreflectively take a crude positivistic view, but their fearless opponents don’t seem to be clear that they’ve broken away from that game, rather than just playing it differently. Similarly, as far as “scientism” is a failing it seems to occur as much within the world of Young Earth Creationism, the ideological controls on permissible data are just set differently but there’s the same degree of bawling that Science Says what it was required to say.

Anyway I’ve just seen this:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/religious-conservatives-can-remind-the-rest-of-us-how-to-argue/

Religious diversity might have something to do with fostering religious tolerance. Diversity of any social kind, perhaps. Conformity, more than conviction, seems to have been the usual goal of those who would campaign for shared and common rituals. I understand the village mayor who wants silence for the Presbyterian minister doing the invocation at a high school football game. I am not sure what militant atheists are after.

I do not “believe in” facts. I am tempted to joke that the facts do not need my faith in them and I find it tiresome to provide what is unnecessary. I do sometimes need to believe in the worth of more intangible entities, including my “self”. In this, I think I avoid a category error. But, I can see the heroic pose of fighting for Truth might serve a similar purpose.

@JQ: I agree that “fervent agnostic” is probably an oxymoron. But if an agnostic is also insomniac and dyslexic, then surely that one will lie awake nights wondering if there really is a Dog.

When I started reading this thread I was wondering when someone would bring in Cosma Shalizi’s excellent work on the subject of “factor g”. Here is what I think is the best-known paper (discussed at length here on CT a few years back, AIR):

http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

Then someone did (around comment 100 I think). Thanks for that.

The usual suspects would do well to read it closely, try to understand it, and ponder it for a few days, or years, or whatever. Even if they finally can’t manage to wrap their heads around it then, at least the time spent thinking about it will save them from dropping what are (to be generous, perhaps unconsciously so) essentialist and racist arguments into these threads.

Re 190 etc. Those who consider the number of Muslims in France (about 9% of the population) “overwhelming” should be reminded that France until quite recently ruled over a large colonial empire with many Muslim populations. It is perplexing that often the very same Frenchpeople who oppose the presence of Muslims in their country regret the French retreat from Algeria.

Swami: “I am sure they have multiple perspectives, but as being neither of the right or French I can’t say exactly.”

Ah. So you know so much about France, French culture, and the nature of French immigration policy that you are prepared to argue that the latter is an existential threat to the former; while you know so little about France and French culture that you cannot hazard a guess as to where you, personally, might lie on the immigration hazard scale imagined by Frenchmen?

That’s a fine needle you’ve threaded! I’m tempted to think you understand what I was getting at, and so are simply dodging the question.

That aside, if you don’t know anything about France, why did you bring it up?

Isn’t “fervent agnostic” an oxymoron

No: the content of a position is independent from the force with which one defends it (cf. raging moderate)

casmilus

Apologies if it sounded somehow “excited”, I didn’t mean it to, I just wanted to highlight the problem all of this rationality business has when taken by its word. At the end, you either accept that somewhere at the core of every system of arguments there is one or more leaps of faith, or you keep banging your head at the “irrationality” of other people.

Your appeal to the proposition that no interesting discussion is possible unless your framework applies reminds me of the way many religious folks argue: if God did not exist, then the world would be horrible. Therefore… . I sympathize, really, I do.

At the end, evolution as an explanation for the existence of life requires a mind that is ready to understand and accept both the arguments and the data. This involves a model of the universe (axioms), and a certain type of goal when assimilating information that not everybody has. Arguments can’t normally change that.

Travitt Hamilton @204

Where are you getting the idea that anyone on this thread is ‘quite ready to accept that blacks are dumber than whites?’ I don’t think there’s a single comment that could possibly be read that way.

Well, if someone comes to you saying “I have this data that shows blacks are dumber than whites”, and your reply is not an F-word and an U, but instead is “I’m not convinced by the data”, you have certainly bought the form of the argument. You are, implicitly, saying: “Other data may convince me”.

There’s enough of that in this thread.

John

The study of history has progressed since the 18th century.

@244
Did someone ever ask you a question and you responded, “I don’t know.” Then they ask you again and you say, “I. Don’t. Know.” Then they ask you a third time and you say, “I don’t f****** know, stop f****** asking me!”

Swami
I am not sure I understand what you mean when you write that the cited account from Charles Murray was ‘at best poorly worded’.

If somebody supposes that it is possible to get a good idea of a person’s cultural values and mindset by observing skin colour, the idea is both ludicrous and vicious.

If somebody does not suppose that it is possible to do such a thing, but writes an account which suggests belief in some such idea, then the account is (obviously) poorly worded.

If you concur that it is not possible to get a good idea of a person’s cultural values and mindset by observing skin colour, but you think there is some method of getting a good idea of a person’s cultural values and mindset by some other kind of quick and easy scanning method that would be applicable on a large scale (as, for example, in immigration screening, or in airport security screening), you have not made clear what you think that method is, and I can’t think of any myself.

For people whose actual purpose is to select out individuals of darker (or lighter) skin colour, in some such context as immigration screening or airport security screening, we can at least say that what they are proposing is practicable, although it can have only pernicious effects.

If you dream of selecting people, in a similar context, by their cultural values and mindsets, it’s pure fantasy.

It makes sense to frame an objective of reducing the harm caused by something like malnutrition, or environmental lead exposure; that’s a good objective, and that’s a sensible way of framing it. If it happens to be the case that some groups of people have been more severely harmed by malnutrition than other groups, then it’s highly likely that one effect of reducing the harm caused by malnutrition will be to reduce inter-group differences, but that does not make it sensible to frame that as the objective. If you pose the question in the form ‘How can we reduce inter-group differences?’ then you have no basis for denying that one means of attaining your objective is to starve everybody so that they’re all equally malnourished, which shows that you have made a poor choice of framing.

Nothing quite so enjoyable as bashing the people of faith on the weekend where (some?) are celebrating pacifist resistance and the life of Martin Luther King. Religions and faiths vary a great deal.

Anyone else notice that?

I thought you were quoting Gibbon in support of actual Roman attitudes, rather than borrowing his words to express a certain enlightenment outlook on religion.

If the former, Mary Beard is a better source: “Romans knew the gods existed; they did not believe in them in the internalised sense familiar from most modern world religions.” The magistrates certainly took religion very seriously, as they were certain the power and prosperity of Rome rested on divine favour.

@b9n10nt 04.03.18 at 4:26 pm
It is one thing to say that reason works best or ‘achieves its full potential’ in groups, it is quite another, and very extreme, to say that it does not even reside in the individual. The very procedures of reasoning by definition do take place in individual brains and there is nothing in their nature that presupposes a group. A discussion still changes only individual minds. Once again, a group can ‘rationalise’ just like an individual can, and a lot of things unrelated to reason can cause a discussion to result in a wrong consensus, or to shift the opinions of most participants in a wrong direction. Conversely, when we think individually, we are never truly alone, the internalised voices of other people – as well as the voices of our own previous or alternative ‘selves’ – are, in a way, present constantly. Therefore, I don’t even see what this discussion is about, in practice. ‘Think it possible that you may be mistaken’? Yeah, not a bad idea, but it should not degenerate into ‘assume that you are mistaken if the majority disagrees with you’.

>commit to “self”-awareness as a non-cognitive experience
I readily admit that I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about and how this can be an alternative to reasoning.

Hidari@232

I had never supposed you thought up the useful phrase “cui bono”, since I do know who first used it. I’m not sure you know that, though. (Hint: it wasn’t Cicero.) But I rather doubt that you know the context in which it was used: when investigating a crime, ask yourself which of the suspects profited by it. If you think that committing a crime is the same as putting forward a political proposition, you are deeply confused.

I note that you haven’t answered my question. I will rephrase it. Would you accept that a political proposition may be true even though its being believed would benefit people you dislike, or false even though it would benefit people you like?

If not, why not?

@Mario 03.31.18 at 9:58 pm
>The problem with reason is that those pesky things called axioms, definitions, and goals, are what give an argument a truth value. Since my axioms, definitions and goals are different from yours, and since they are a matter of choice, my arguments are immune to yours and vice-versa.

As I see that Alex SL 04.01.18 at 6:59 am has pointed out, if that were true, all discussion between humans would be impossible. As for goals, I don’t think that they should affect the truth value of a statement. As for differences in definitions, they should only lead to the use of different language, not to substantially different factual statements (also, differences in definitions should be, as far as possible, minimised and explicitly clarified, or else discussion can become impossible). As for axioms, ‘first principles’ and such-like (factual ones, not value judgements), they are legitimate only if they are truly self-evident to any human (stuff like ‘five is more than three’ and suchlike); if we disagree about their veracity (as in ‘there is a God’), they shouldn’t be considered axioms, or else, again, discussion will be impossible.

@nastywoman 04.05.18 at 4:56 am
Ahem. If you are looking for a way to advertise the benefits of allowing immigration into your country, drawing attention to the historical experience of the Native Americans may not be your best choice.

@Faustusnotes 251 – Am I wrong to think that men may have an inherent advantage when it comes to STEM? Perhaps. But either way my policy is still the best: Don’t worry about equal outcomes; just be as fair as possible.

I also think that the idea that we should be pressuring females to do STEM is entirely wrong-headed and is going to contribute to a lot of women wishing they had done what they wanted to do instead of what some STEM-inflamed counselor or teacher encouraged them to do. There is indeed a lesson to be learned from the “paradoxical” fact that women participate most in STEM in countries where women have the least freedom. I am an engineer myself and most of my supervisors for the past 20 years have been women. They’re great and they love what they do. But they are doing it because they wanted to, not because someone pushed them into it.

@Layman,

I didn’t bring up France, the OP did. I didn’t suggest an “existential” threat, I suggested that dramatically changing the cultural values by rapidly changing the population will undermine the institutions. I fully endorse a people’s right to decide whether they want to offer me the ability to immigrate. Whether I “make the cut” is totally irrelevant to me. The larger principle here is that I support self determination. My guess is that 90% of the readers of this blog did too until their political tribe lined up against it a year or two ago, in response to what the other political tribe did.

@ Ogden

The longer thread explained my reasoning. The answer is that a massive influx of people with dramatically different underlying values and cultural mindsets and shared beliefs, habits and metaphysical worldviews undermines the institutions of a society. This isn’t an argument against immigration (I am strongly pro increased immigration) it is an argument against excessive rapid unassimilated immigration where it undermines a nations instititions — formal and informal.

If France wants to allow immigrants at a level which threatens to undermine its cultural institutions, they should be free to do so. I hope they do so knowingly though and not naively. Your Mennonite etc discussion misses the point altogether. My concern isn’t with thousands of Mennonites, it is with so many Mennonites arriving so quickly in such overwhelmingly large numbers that the social fabric of the nation is uprooted (obviously not a real threat). I think citizens should have a say on the matter before this happens.

@faustusnotes

Try following the conversation and try to avoid calling people names and distorting their arguments. It shuts down dialogue and open-minded inquiry (possibly your goal?)

I am a strong proponent of legal immigration. I am strongly against unmitigated illegal immigration. Yes, I would recommend the legal immigration be broad based (to avoid significant unassimilated sub pops from forming), be based upon education, or employer need, but that is just me. As above, the decision is the French peoples’. In the US, it is our decision, and we have ways to make that decision within our established institutional traditions.

@JD
“If you concur that it is not possible to get a good idea of a person’s cultural values and mindset by observing skin colour….”

I do concur, but after walking around Paris and actually interacting with people in France I did indeed encounter a large number of people who were clearly very, very culturally different from those traditionally in France. But you are of course right that skin color was insufficient to determine this.

“If you dream of selecting people, in a similar context, by their cultural values and mindsets, it’s pure fantasy.”

My argument has been restated repeatedly. I see no harm with small reasonable amounts (the rate arrived at democratically) from diverse, even extremely diverse, cultures. The reason is that they will tend to assimilate quickly as people adapt to the dominant culture. Large, sudden, overwhelming influxes of people with vastly different cultures from the receiving state threatens to undermine the institutions.

Screening (for increased legal immigration) is easy based upon cultural similarity and proportions. In the US, there is no issue with assimilation from Canadians, for example. They share most underlying beliefs, worldviews, language, education and cultural habits. Another screen can be based upon education or being a doctor or being a professional, or by allowing employers to bring in qualified workers. I strongly recommend against suddenly importing massively excessive numbers of non-Enlightenment cultures, which will have trouble assimilating -clan based cultures, cultures not believing in individualism and universal morality and so on.

“If you pose the question in the form ‘How can we reduce inter-group differences?’ then you have no basis for denying that one means of attaining your objective is to starve everybody so that they’re all equally malnourished, which shows that you have made a poor choice of framing.”

So in your mind I am now borderline arguing for malnourishing people? May I suggest we end it with that?

Look at that swami, doing a Harris. As soon as someone points out to you that you are arguing not from reason but from a pre existing set of assumptions, you start whining that you’re being censored. No one is shutting down debate, just pointing out that you have avoided any logic in your arguments. You’ve used a slippery set of non-sequiturs to hijack a discussion about whether black people have lower IQ into support for your pre existing view that Mexicans shouldn’t come to America, via muslims in France. If you don’t want people assuming you’re a racist, try and construct an argument that doesn’t depend entirely and completely in your pre existing prejudices.

You might also try remembering that France had many African Muslim colonies and most of those non-assimilating black people are actually French. But you’ve already made it clear you know nothing about France, so it doesn’t surprise me that you just assumed French people must be white. Again, when someone makes an argument on wrong assumptions to get to a position they already obviously held, one is inclined to assume they have motives. If you want to disprove that assumption, don’t whine about being shit down, make a better argument, perhaps starting with some facts. We’re talking about reason, remember.

Paul Delaney, men don’t have an “inherent” advantage, they have an explicit one: they stop women going into STEM. it’s not a case of being fair to everyone but of undoing the unfairness directed at women in his field. There’s plenty of work been done on these subtle and not so subtle barriers, it isn’t hard to find. If you care about the truth of this (and I suspect from your throwaway “if I’m wrong,so what?” That you don’t ) then read the book I recommend, it has a lot of very useful information about the history of women in STEM and why women don’t do STEM now, when they used to be so into it.

F. Foundling @260

It is one thing to say that reason works best or ‘achieves its full potential’ in groups, it is quite another, and very extreme, to say that it does not even reside in the individual. The very procedures of reasoning by definition do take place in individual brains and there is nothing in their nature that presupposes a group. A discussion still changes only individual minds. Once again, a group can ‘rationalise’ just like an individual can

This is all very clear and reasonable. Obviously “the train’s been running late, I can sleep in 5 more minutes” is experienced as effortless and individual. There’s an innate capacity that is felt. What is a plausible path from that to “reasoning does not reside in the individual”? You could start by seeing that mathematics is itself always culturally-transmitted. Yes, we calculate instinctively, but through symbolic thought and language, we developed & preserved mathematics, which becomes emergent from our ability to instictively calculate and use language. Could the development of mathematics be construed as “social”, not “residing in an individual” until it was downloaded, so to speak?

Leaves a group of humans to be reared by non-communicative robots, and they will develope a language with each other, I would predict. Mathematics isn’t happening, though. Is reasoning more like language or is it more like mathematics? How do we know?

Just gonna leave this here
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

JD,

Thanks for being the only person who actually even tries to address the argument.

The reason I use the word “undermine” is specifically because I am obviously referring to adverse change according to the citizens. I never implied they were synonyms, one is a subset of the other, and i was indeed making the point that adverse “changes should be resisted” as you said it. Of course there are adverse changes other than caused by massive immigration, but here we are right back to the prior issue of understanding root causes. In addition, as per my original word choice of “change”, I am recognizing that the immigrants can make positive improvements too.

Let me provide a simple example. Let us say you have two neighboring states. State A is made up of almost exclusively of five million well educated Hispanics, and has a high standard of living, high levels of trust and low crime. State B is made up of 100 million radical white supremacists, who though generally peaceful are very low in trust, have no rule of law, low average levels of education and intelligence, a non scientific world view, with an extremely dysfunctional economy with double digit unemployment and standard of living one tenth of state A. Due to the discrepancy in economic opportunity, tens of millions of people from B would love to immigrate to A, but in doing so would convert (pervert?) A to something closer to B.

I am arguing that it would be both logical and just for the People of state A to democratically decide (if they choose) to prohibit the immigration of excessively large numbers people from state B. Indeed, failure to do so would completely undermine their institutions and way of life. Screening is kind of obvious. They could take no people from state B, or a subpopulation least likely to be low trust white supremacists.

If you disagree, please tell me why.

On screening….

When bringing in millions of immigrants, one does not need to be exact in determining that each individual is likely to assimilate and add value to society. Canadians, on average would be a much safer bet for France or Panama than the average person from the white supremacy state. Doctors would be a better screen for intelligence than the unemployed. Native speakers would be superior, all else equal to those not speaking the language of the receiving country. In addition, part of the argument for assimilation is that balance of country of origin in general helps assimilation by repressing the tendency of forming non assimilated enclaves within the larger society. Again, the screening process in such a case could be as simple as a maximum of one hundred thousand people per nation per year with no other screening at all.

Immigration is screenable for cultural similarities and assimilation, if that is what is desired by the receiving nation.

“…my point is that the framing you have suggested is capable of supporting a conclusion which I’m sure you would reject…”

I did not frame it that way, you suggested framing it that way and then went on to engage in this silly repudiation. I explicitly framed it (building off Haier who is the subject matter expert) as desiring to increase intelligence by understanding where challenging subpops and increasing the problem area via targeted solutions. The original point was that Haier and I wanted to increase intelligence not make it equal and lower. This is an absolutely absurd distortion of the argument. See my example on smoking rates to Collin below.

Faustus,

I never complained of (or mentioned) censoring, just of you trying to stifle conversation and suppress dissenting views by name calling. My complaint to you was to quit calling people “racist,” now resurrected as “doing a Harris” and “pre-existing prejudices”. I have repeated my argument on excessive levels of unassimilated immigration threatening to undermine institutions at least a half dozen times. Could you please try to repeat it or even copy and past it and respond to it? I have provided a concrete example to make it easier above. Feel free to join in, but please stop the personal attacks, it really does suppress open conversation, and an open dialogue is what we want, right?

Collin,

The argument was clearly to INCREASE INTELLIGENCE and to do so it would be useful to understand and address differences in subpops by targeting solutions to the challenge areas. To argue that this suggests enforced malnourishment to force equality reflects an error in JD’s framing.

If I wanted to reduce lung cancer rates and subpop studies showed that smoking was four times as prevalent in Asian Americans, for you and JD to conclude this justifies forcing Hispanics to take up smoking is absolutely silly. Please try to engage in the issue at hand rather than (ineptly) shifting the discussion to me ( textbook ad hominem).

Feel free to answer whether state A is justified in repressing or managing immigration from state B as above.

@b9n10nt 04.07.18 at 6:41 am

The way I use the words at least, the fact that something is, wholly or partly, culturally transmitted does not justify saying that it does not ‘reside’ in an individual. I can learn to ride a bicycle from someone else, but once I have learnt it, I’m the one riding it. I fully agree that reason(ing) relies heavily on cultural transmission; in addition, it always operates in interaction with other humans’ reasoning, unless the individual lives on a desert island – which is exactly why the whole discussion is pointless: the injunction ‘Don’t let your reason operate alone’ is unnecessary, because it never operates alone. Whatever Sam Harris’s mistake was, it wasn’t that his reason ‘operated alone’, it was inevitably interacting with the reasons of lots and lots of other people. Now, if the injunction is really a way to say ‘don’t let your reason reach conclusions different from those of (our) group’, then it is no longer superfluous, but it gets pernicious instead. Anyway, this has become too much of an argument about words, nuances and connotations, so I’d rather stop here.

Swami

I am unable to imagine how anything resembling your example of ‘State A’ and ‘State B’ could arise; it is so far remote from anything I have knowledge or esperience of that I don’t feel competent to comment on it. If you would like to provide some information about a case that actually exists, I will do my best to comment on it if I can.

Moving away from specific cases to general principles, I observe that people have a range of reasons for migrating from one country to another, but many of them can be grouped under two general headings. Sometimes migrants find that what it’s like to live in their country of origin is unsatisfactory; sometimes they expect that what it’s like to live in their country of destination (or what they imagine it’s like) will have features congenial to them. Using the example you’ve mentioned of migration from Canada to America, it’s unlikely that the people who make that choice would want to turn America into something close to a copy of Canada; if they preferred Canadian culture and values to American culture and values, they’d be unlikely to be trying to migrate in the first place.

When bringing in millions of immigrants, one does not need to be exact in determining that each individual is likely to assimilate and add value to society. Canadians, on average would be a much safer bet for France or Panama than the average person from the white supremacy state. Doctors would be a better screen for intelligence than the unemployed. Native speakers would be superior, all else equal to those not speaking the language of the receiving country. In addition, part of the argument for assimilation is that balance of country of origin in general helps assimilation by repressing the tendency of forming non assimilated enclaves within the larger society. Again, the screening process in such a case could be as simple as a maximum of one hundred thousand people per nation per year with no other screening at all.

Immigration is screenable for cultural similarities and assimilation, if that is what is desired by the receiving nation.

I didn’t believe that the first time you affirmed it, and repeating it does not make me more disposed to accept it. I can’t myself figure out how such screening could be done effectively, and I can’t figure out what your suggested model is; for example, I can’t figure out whether you’re suggesting aiming at drawing the migrant intake from a range of countries or the opposite, deliberately preferring some countries of origin to others.

The original point was that Haier and I wanted to increase intelligence not make it equal and lower.

I still can’t figure out how it’s supposed to contribute to that goal to investigate the reasons for inter-group differences (if any) in intelligence.

If I wanted to reduce lung cancer rates and subpop studies showed that smoking was four times as prevalent in Asian Americans, for you and JD to conclude this justifies forcing Hispanics to take up smoking is absolutely silly.

If you want to reduce lung cancer rates, it’s clear how trying to reduce smoking rates across the board is helpful, but it’s not clear how investigating differences in lung cancer rates between different groups is supposed to be helpful.

Oh swami, please tell me how name calling silences your “dissenting voice “? Who or what are you “dissenting “ from, did you mean to say “disagreeing”? And are you such a delicate flower that the mere sight of a stranger on the internet accusing you of doing a Harris makes you lose your will to reply? Truly it must be difficult to “dissent” under such circumstances! Yet here you are, still making the same mistakes.

There are three errors in your attempt at argument. Shall we go through them? The first is your assumption that institutions require the same mindset and cultural values to survive. If we allow your position that “the rule of law” is an institution, it certainly does not need everyone to have the same mindset – it simply needs them to know the law, or even less onerously, to do what the police say. People within a culture can have vastly differing mindsets without immigration, and yet you seem unperturbed by the possibility that native Americans or French are undermining their own institutions. Which leads us to your second error – the assumption you share with Murray that black and brown people are not French. You have repeatedly given us this assumption- you push me to respond to it as your concrete example – despite having been repeatedly told that you are wrong. There are many French from Africa and the pacific who are black or brown, who were born in France during or after the colonial era. You have acknowledged you know nothing about France but despite being told that you are wrong and given examples, you persist in this error.

Perhaps you don’t know this, or don’t understand, but let me lay it out plainly for you: when you say black people cannot be French you are being racist. When you persist in this view despite evidence to the contrary in the face of determined opposition, you are being stubbornly racist. I’m sorry if telling you this makes you feel your “dissenting “ voice is being stifled, but words have meaning and in this case this word means what you are doing.

So, what is your third error? The idea that assimilation is a good and positive immigration outcome that can be achieved, and that is good for the institutions of a country. I know why you make this error – because you don’t know anything about migration politics, multiculturalism, defenses of multiculturalism from the right, or the body of criticism of frances experiment in assimilation. It’s no ones job here to enlighten you on a huge body of work that you clearly are ignorant of. I might make the effort, but your response to error 2 really doesn’t convince me its worth the time. Haters gonna hate, amirite?

I recommend you back up and figure out how you got all this shit so wrong, reflect carefully on why you came on here making an openly racist statement and then repeatedly defended it, and then ask yourself if you really are up to the task of criticizing other people’s reasoning faculties.

Certainly dogmatism is bad in all its forms, religious or scientific. On this we already agree! I think the challenge is to characterize the difference between science and religion without going off into our own definitions. The cause is intellectual clarity. We all feel and know the difference, the challenge is to put it into words. Maybe we keep stumbling because science and religion are different kinds of fictions.

Science never proves anything. It may disprove prior hypotheses. If it leads to a new discovery, then science is successful. Yet the causes that are suggested, even for the mechanism underneath a new discovery, may be changed in the future. So we can’t say that science gets us to anything final. It is always possible that the laws may be revised.

Deeper than that, science depends upon a metaphysical-type structure that seems to simply appear to us — time, extension, mass, force, field etc. Mass, force and field have undergone their own revisions, and perhaps will be revised or even erased in the future, for a better metaphysical playground. But what are numbers and logic and where did they come from?

According to the dictionary definitions of “miracle” and “falsifiable”, a miracle is NOT falsifiable, even “in principle”. The only thing one can certainly say, is that the claim that a miracle previously occurred is “not physically verifiable”. It must be taken on faith — which is the whole point, to some religions! A miracle is not an occurrence that is repeatable like a science experiment. “In principle” here seems to mean something like, “If only I were there to refute it, when it allegedly happened”. But you weren’t.

The important scientific point is, what is the FUNCTION of a miracle to religion? It is to call upon faith, in order to disconnect the individual’s rational discourse — because rationality always locks-in the level of consciousness from which it is spoken, and it must be disconnected to allow a real change in consciousness. Then afterward, rational speech is re-entered or reconnected from the next level. So it may appear to an outside observer that nothing has changed. (This is what psychotherapists try to do too. At least, good ones do. They reframe your story.)

Note that religion need NOT be based upon miracles, upon trust in authority, etc. Buddhism is a good example. It is entirely to be validated by internal experiment, and it has stood the test of “repeatableness” over centuries. What in Buddhism serves as the replacement to faith? Ans.: steps 7 & 8 of the eightfold path.

On the other hand, Kurt Gödel was a theist. I think that for him (he does not write this), the exact problem was, where does logic come from? What is logic’s substratum? He explored the descriptions of perception in Husserl and decided that the universe must be a Leibnizian monadology with God as the central monad.

This is not an “argument from authority”. Forget any refutation of this belief, forget your disparagement of it. The proper question is, quite aside from what you yourself believe, how and why did a genius like Gödel come to this fiction?

A problem for evolutionary theory is how it would generate the mechanics of reason. There are some clues which might push forward the investigation. We know already from research into the arithmetical perception of very young children that they exhibit two abilities: counting, and comparing sizes of sets. The little ones don’t yet know, but we do, that these combine into the higher number operations. There’s a possible avenue for future brain research: maybe arithmetic has something to do with brain development from birth (ontogeny).

On a different question, the origin of negatives — There is an interesting theory by Derek Bickerton (whom Peter T mentioned in #273 above) that evolutionary advantage would have been gained by a species that evolved or learned to communicate about the availability of food that is NOT seen before us, but is available in another place (e.g. a bee dance). Abstractly, this is an “indication-of-something-absent”, a new ability which afterward might be combined into further evolution. It may be the essence of symbol.

So that is a good hypothesis for the social origination of one of the most important basic rational operations, “not”.

But after science proposes, how could we have gone from these natural origins of the perception of numbers and negatives, to a valid physical mathematical theory which then applies IN RETROSPECT, all the way back to the minutes after the Big Bang — but billions of years BEFORE life evolved the math?

It seems as if evolution is getting us to something that somehow already pre-exists, but which needs an advanced symbolic form to be expressed. We seem compelled to posit a sort of pre-existing metaphysical space in which the math is already there, waiting to be discovered. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem, a circular logic. Science has uncovered an arc which it has snipped out of some cosmic circle, an arc which it widens and fortifies successfully with evolved symbol and technology. Maybe the snipping is coexistent with reason’s bipartite form: the making of endpoints is a necessary requirement, and science can never be complete. It is will always be an arc of a larger circle.

This makes religionists like Berkeley wary, because they know that circular logic already has a prior home in religious discourse. So how is science different?

Scientists shrug and say, “Well, it’s obviously a success, and we will learn more, and maybe figure it out later.” But that could be nascent dogmatism. Then, science is just better religion.

Maybe the circularities and paradoxes exist in any description, and this is the next big clue.

For me this isn’t a call to theism. It’s an observation that we may be inside of fictions of varying usefulness. The mechanics of reason, including Kant’s categories and the like, are the storyteller’s frameworks. Gregory Bateson made the point that perhaps if we see that it’s also a systematic distortion, we might find a rigorous way to go wider. The circularities, uncertainties, paradoxes may be part of the glue. We would have to call them out, and explain how they keep getting revised, updated. We might be able to describe a surface onto which reason, consciousness, aesthetics & the sacred can all be mapped.

JD,

“I am unable to imagine how anything resembling your example of ‘State A’ and ‘State B’ could arise; it is so far remote from anything I have knowledge or esperience of that I don’t feel competent to comment on it.”

It is an extreme hypothetical to determine if there are any situations where you would agree to restrict immigration. It is like the old joke where the man asks a woman if she would sleep with him for a million dollars.

“Of course” she answers.
“Would you take a hundred dollars?” He responds.
“Of course not,” she replies, “what do you think I am — a prostitute?”
“We’ve already established that,” he says, “now we are just haggling over price”

Feel free to back off from there and let me know where you would personally draw the line. But if you concede the point, then you, and I and Charles Murray are in agreement that it is justified and probably wise to restrict or control immigration in some cases, and that this does not need to have anything to do with racism. Again, I already suggested that the representative democracy can then draw its line as it sees fit.

“…if they preferred Canadian culture and values to American culture and values, they’d be unlikely to be trying to migrate in the first place.”

People immigrate for other reasons than preferring culture and values. Do you need examples?

“I didn’t believe that the first time you affirmed it, and repeating it does not make me more disposed to accept it.”

I didn’t repeat it, I provided simple, indeed glaringly obvious, examples. The most obvious part of the answer is that an immigrant (on average, assuming large numbers) from Finland to Sweden is more likely to share cultural similarities than a person from Vietnam or Syria. If that isn’t obvious, then I do not know what is. A wave of immigrants speaking the native tongue is easier to assimilate, all else equal, than one not doing so, especially if those not speaking the language are coming in in large enough numbers to establish a subcultural enclave. If selecting for intelligence, patience, trust, and cooperativeness, studies show these are highly correlated with intelligence and thus you could select for education and so forth.

“If you want to reduce lung cancer rates, it’s clear how trying to reduce smoking rates across the board is helpful, but it’s not clear how investigating differences in lung cancer rates between different groups is supposed to be helpful.”

I guess you never worked in marketing then. If you can identify characteristics of the target subpop which can respond to your efforts, then you can address the issue more efficiently. This could involve setting up clinics in the problem area, writing messages in the language or aimed at viewing habits of the target group and so on.

Swami: “When you are done rambling on about what is and is not an existential threat or whether I brought something up or responded to the OP…”

I’d say I’m with Collin on this: If you can’t own up to what you’ve said thus far, or understand the problems with it, there’s not much point in talking with you.

“I am not pretending to be qualified to discuss ANY other countries’ desires…”

Yet here you are, so doing.

I already assured you, and any review of the earlier comment thread will back up, that I was not making the claim that our goal was equalizing outcomes.

Swami: you’ve run out of free support.

Swami is around rambling but refusing to respond to the three errors I pointed out, even after he or she asked me to specifically detail errors. Could it be that swami is t arguing in good faith!?

Oh but here now we have another good example of swami being ignorant on migration: he or she thinks Swedes would make better migrants than Vietnamese because they have closer cultural values. The Vietnamese, of course, came as refugees in large and largely uncontrolled numbers to a variety of western countries, and have proven to be excellent migrants in all of them. They follow the rule of law, support institutions, generally just get along. Oops! Swami’s theory fails. They were probably much less compatible with swami’s vague notion of “western cultural mindset” (wtf is that anyway!?) than Syrians, who are fleeing from the near east, a much more developed country than 1970s Vietnam, an obvious familiarity with Christianity, and a long history of interconnection with cosmopolitan cultures in the region. Yet swami has Lumped a bunch of rich Muslim/Christian middle easterners in with a bunch of very poor Buddhist South East Asians. I wonder what Vietnamese and Syrians have in common that would cause swami to lump them together in opposition to western people, given their huge differences… anybody … anybody … ?

Really swami if you want to persist in this line of reasoning you’re going to have to try harder. Alternatively you could give up, admit you know nothing about the politics or history of migration, and start wondering what prejudices led you to “reason” your way into this dead end.

Swami
1. If it is important to you to have an answer from me to the question ‘Is there any possible situation in which restrictions on immigration are or would be justified?’, then my answer is ‘Probably there are, although I’m not sure, but in any case I don’t understand how the question is supposed to be of any practical relevance.’ In particular, the question has no evidence relevance to the present discussion of what Charles Murray has said or of what Sam Harris has said. More generally, as a matter of fact all countries do currently have laws and policies regulating immigration, and there is no practical possibility in the foreseeable future of any country abandoning these (even though I know that some people argue that they should, and their arguments have some merit).

2. Of the many ways in which immigration (to one country or another) has been regulated in the past, or is regulated in the present, or which have a realistic possibility of being adopted in the foreseeable future, some are in fact racist, and they don’t stop being so just because there are others which are non-racist.

3. In the original post, Henry wrote:

The prejudices thus reinforced might be gross ones, as in the case of Charles Murray, whose idea of a good time in Paris is to count the black and brown faces around him and warn of the foreign hordes overwhelming Europe.

Whatever was going on in Charles Murray’s mind, which we can’t read, the practical effect of his statement was to encourage racism; if he didn’t recognise that, it was foolish of him, and it would also be foolish for us not to recognise that.

Also, Europe is not in danger of being overwhelmed by foreign hordes, and has no need to change its current immigration laws or policies to defend against a danger of being overwhelmed by foreign hordes. In practice, suggesting otherwise has the effect of encouraging racism, and it’s foolish not to recognise that.

4. Sam Harris has suggested that airport security screening should focus on people who might conceivably be Muslims. If there are any people who could not conceivably be Muslims, and who could be detected as such at an airport security screening, the number of them must be insignificantly small; Sam Harris stated, when challenged, that he himself falls within the scope of the category ‘people who might conceivably be Muslims. So the suggestion has no value for improving airport security; but in practice it has the effect of encouraging racism, and it’s foolish not to recognise that.

People with dark skin getting hassled by airport security because of their dark skin is not a purely hypothetical issue but something that has been reported as actually happening. It should not be encouraged.

5. What you have written has not made clear to me in sufficient detail what immigration policy you are advocating. There isn’t enough information for me to form a view about whether what you’re suggesting is feasible or about whether, if feasible, it’s a good idea. However, talk about the importance of immigrants being ‘culturally similar’ or ‘ready to assimilate’ is the kind of thing that often, in practice, has the effect of encouraging racism, and it’s foolish not to recognise that.

I can’t at this instant think of any reports of people with dark skin being hassled by immigration officials because they have dark skin, but when I reflect it seems it would be surprising if that doesn’t happen, and it’s something else that should not be encouraged.

6.

I guess you never worked in marketing then.

You guess right. I don’t know whether you consider that to be a deficiency, but I don’t.

Given what is known about smoking and about lung cancer, it seems obvious to me that information about them should be disseminated so as to reach as many people as possible through as many media as possible in as many languages as possible, independently of variations (if any) in rates of lung cancer in different population groups. You don’t need that kind of demographic information to perceive the value of putting warnings on every cigarette pack, for example.

Lee A. Arnold I enjoyed your posts in the thread. But I do want to push back a bit against your 284.

But after science proposes, how could we have gone from these natural origins of the perception of numbers and negatives, to a valid physical mathematical theory which then applies IN RETROSPECT, all the way back to the minutes after the Big Bang — but billions of years BEFORE life evolved the math?

Through an excruciatingly difficult process of trial and error that literally lasted millennia and which is of course ongoing. That’s how. And then again, our best theories are far from being even remotely valid, and we know it. Indeed, that’s just about all we really know.

It seems as if evolution is getting us to something that somehow already pre-exists, but which needs an advanced symbolic form to be expressed.

Nah. Evolution got us some cognitive tools, forged for some ends (talking, social interactions, locating food, whatever). And we make the best we can with them to figure out a world that couldn’t care less for our goals and prospects. So we almost always get things dramatically wrong, and rarely achieve any progress, even of the most minute sort. All this keeping in mind that these cognitive tools are dramatically maladapted to the tasks and we probably can’t really transcend them.

We seem compelled to posit a sort of pre-existing metaphysical space in which the math is already there, waiting to be discovered.

Really? I don’t think so. There is something to be discovered, sure. And we’re trying out best with our feeble abilities. Mostly we fail, but occasionally, we make modest progress. That’s it. Nothing pre-existing or metaphysical there. In essence, everything we’re doing is just like my two-year old who sees his ball rolling under the couch, then peaks under it and is happy to see it there (and ten minutes later losses his ball in another room and nevertheless peaks under the couch, because it worked last time around).

“It seems as if evolution is getting us to something that somehow already pre-exists, but which needs an advanced symbolic form to be expressed.”

You mean like the Periodic Table? That expresses facts that already existed before life, at least according to what is called “scientific realism” in Anglophone philosophy, and also according to “speculative realists” such as Quentin Meillasoux. If you read “After Finitude” you can see the latter does also have a line about taking the side of science against religious obsurantism, although he doesn’t play it as his strongest card.

Z #296: “our best theories are far from being even remotely valid… rarely achieve any progress…”

I think that many physicists and chemists would disagree with these assertions, but I don’t want to make a massive fallacious “argument from authority”.

My problem is that science sometimes uses mathematics to find something very new, unexpected, even revolutionary. Discrepancies in the positions of the known planets vs. the gravitational equations led to the discovery of farther planets in our solar system. Maxwell’s mathematical laws led to the prediction of the existence of radio waves. Planck’s mathematical assumption to explain the absence of any real “ultraviolet catastrophe” that was predicted in error by a mathematical law before his correction, led quickly to the development of quantum mechanics — a theory which is valid to remote decimal places. There are other examples of this particular method of discovery in science.

I think we can state that certain branches of mathematics somehow apply deeply and extensively to some things which must have existed before humans.

So then the question would be, what is the “somehow” in that statement? Why does mathematics apply? How do we characterize the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”? (Wigner)

The evolutionary supposition is that trials and errors lead us to greater and greater cognitive comportment with the regular patterns which existed before (or so we presume it existed before) the time of humans in the universe. (For surely, as you write, “there is something to be discovered”.) Investigations find these regularities repeated across a wide range of physical phenomena, and they can be abstracted into symbolic form, divorced by the mind from any physical instantiation.

If the regularities are so well-described by mathematics (which is also productive of further discovery), why can’t we say that this mathematics pre-existed too, and we are discovering it?

Layman,

“Why? How? What do you mean by ‘cultural similarities’? And what does it matter?”

This has been my central argument throughout the discussion with at least a half dozen people. The argument is that society is a complex adaptive system made up of the coordination of millions of people. The coordination is accomplished by a combination of

INFORMAL VALUES , habits, mindsets, behavioral tendencies, beliefs and so on, along with,

FORMAL INSTITUTIONS and organizations. The formal institutions include rules and laws, constitutions, corporate entities, formal religions, social orgs and so on

The basic argument is that the formal institutions and informal culture are complex and codependent. They fit together like puzzle pieces and evolve together with interactions going both directions, but that changes in one leads to changes and adaptations in the other. An institution within one set of cultural values may work differently or not all in another cultural setting (a common argument is that democracy works differently in clan based religious rather than individual based and liberal societies).

See the link in the comment above to Faust for more details.

Canada and the US, for example, share many cultural and institutional similarities in part due to their common or shared histories and extensive interactions. Vietnam and Chad, as another example, share few.

What does this have to do with immigration? Simple. Extremely large numbers of very different cultural immigrants not assimilating into the culture will change the institutions and institutional outcomes (not always for the better either). This is the non racist explanation for managed immigration (I support large scale legal, well assimilated immigration).

Lee A. Arnold I think we can state that certain branches of mathematics somehow apply deeply and extensively to some things which must have existed before humans.

Agreed, mathematics has proven to be a very efficient tool to describe the physical world.

So then the question would be, what is the “somehow” in that statement? Why does mathematics apply?

Any answer to that question will necessarily involve a certain amount of circularity, as it purports to reason on the tools we use to reason, but here is what’s happening, in my opinion. The physical world exists and is mostly very simple, logically speaking, so it exhibits a lot of regularities. Math being more or less the name we give to the outcome of our human cognitive capabilities when they are exercised in the search of the regularities produced by the rigid application of simple rules, I’m not surprised that math is the most efficient tools we have to investigate the physical world (to me, the question is bit like asking why a single rope is somehow a convenient tool to draw circles, or why a round form will somehow be efficient if we want to roll things). Note that this outlook makes the clear prediction that math should relatively less useful to describe phenomenon with a lot of inbuilt contingent complexities. This prediction is I think correct, think about the relative uselessness of math in history or even evolutionary biology (the latter case being the most interesting in terms of demarcation, as the part of it in which math is indeed useful – say cladistic or predator/prey interactions – are precisely the ones which indeed conform to logically simple rules).

The evolutionary supposition is that trials and errors lead us to greater and greater cognitive comportment with the regular patterns which existed before (or so we presume it existed before) the time of humans in the universe.

I don’t understand this sentence. More specifically, I don’t understand the meaning of “comportment with the regular patters”.

Investigations find these regularities repeated across a wide range of physical phenomena, and they can be abstracted into symbolic form, divorced by the mind from any physical instantiation.

Yes, because this physical phenomena share the property of being logically simple, and the way human minds investigate logically simple constructions is through a range of symbolic computations we call math (and which I believe we are able to perform for completely different reasons) .

If the regularities are so well-described by mathematics (which is also productive of further discovery), why can’t we say that this mathematics pre-existed too, and we are discovering it?

Well, you can say it, for sure. It sounds more or less like standard Platonism, which is a fine philosophical position. But I’m personally not convinced that anything we said before gives any really strong evidence for this position. The symbolic part (so the math proper) depends in my opinion much too strongly on the peculiar cognitive characteristics of the human brain. So young Homo sapiens find it easy to manipulate discreet units, then to count with natural numbers and then build maths around this starting point. A tiny proportion of them eventually learn (with great efforts) Fourier transforms and the Poisson formula. Perhaps young Rhinolophus sapiens (a sapient horseshoe bat) would find it easy to manipulate Fourier transforms and the Poisson formula, and some would eventually learn (with great efforts) that the Poisson formula can be conceptualized as integrating over a discrete set called the natural numbers. Whose math is the pre-existing one we are all discovering? All of them, as for Balaguer? What does that even mean? More precisely, how is this position bringing us any new useful knowledge? At least the position in which math is seen a human tool which we use (among other use) to investigate the world has the virtue of making clear predictions as to which field will benefit from mathematical investigation, as we saw above.

Swami: “Extremely large numbers of very different cultural immigrants not assimilating into the culture will change the institutions and institutional outcomes (not always for the better either).”

Yes, I understand you’re saying that, but 1) I don’t think you’re going to find many good examples – or any for that matter – that demonstrate this phenomenon (unless you count invasions as immigration), and 2) ‘not always for the better’ is hardly a defense of the claim Murray makes.

This is the entire point of my original retort about France and the right claiming the looming demise of France-ness due to the Other for 150 years. Here we are 150 years later and France is still France!

Similarly, US immigration was essentially open and unconstrained, other than by the economics of the effort required, for decades. Many people complained (as do you) that this influx of Irish or Italians or Poles or Germans would destroy the culture and institutions of the country; yet here we are, culture different but not destroyed, institutions more or less intact.*

And of course you’ll reply that those people weren’t very culturally ‘different’ from us, but that is not what people like you said and thought at the time. They were wrong, as I suspect you are wrong. Why not? Why should you (and Murray, and Harris) be right this time when everyone else has been wrong on this exact matter in this exact way? How is your claim different, better founded, than when it has been made many times before?

(*I suppose you could argue that our institutions are quite wobbly, but I’d blame the rabid right and the people they elect for that, not the immigrants they discriminate against. Wouldn’t you?)

Z #304: “not convinced that anything we said before gives any really strong evidence for this position.”

I am not arguing for that position. I am trying to describe the contours of a story which has made it undecidable. To that end, I want to point out that the following may not be true:

“The physical world…is mostly very simple, logically speaking”

The physical world may not be mostly simple. The physical world might be mostly complex, but then simplicity emerges at progressively higher levels of organization.

Example: Dozens of elementary particles –> Atoms of hydrogen & oxygen –> Molecule of water.

In this case, simplicity emerges from complexity. This is the inverse of the observation that complexity can be generated from simple rules. But it needn’t be either/or. Maybe the universe exhibits BOTH complexity-to-simplicity and simplicity-to-complexity in different phenomena. Any way, it would have no bearing on the ontological status of numbers and mathematics.

Swami: “Similarly, southwestern US states are seeing extremely large rates of illegal immigration of Hispanics. I believe the current number of immigrants in the US is close to 40 million.”

It is hard to make any sense at all of this claim. Hispanic immigration into the US – both legal and illegal – has been declining for nearly two decades. More people of Hispanic ancestry are born in the US in each year than immigrate to the US, by a very wide margin, and this has been the case for two decades. Nearly two-thirds of people of Hispanic ancestry in the US were born in the US – which means they are citizens, part of the ‘culture’ of America you’re so worried about – and that proportion is growing, not declining, largely because the rate of immigration has been falling for two decades.

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2017/09/18/facts-on-u-s-latinos/

If it is the case that a US population with greater than 17.6% Hispanic ancestry (or 20%, or 50%, or more) will no longer be American, how do you explain the quintessential American-ness of Texas (40%)? California (40%)? Colorado (20%)? Have you been to those places? I get that you’re no expert on France, but how about somewhere closer to home?

And for all this railing about Hispanic immigration, are you aware of the fact that the majority of immigrants to the US each year are not Hispanic? That nearly as many people from Asian nations immigrate to the US as those from the Americas? Did you know that the proportion of foreign-born residents of the US is not significantly higher today than it was in the 1910s and 1920s? How did we mange to survive that with our ‘culture’ and our ‘institutions’ intact, I wonder?

Lee A. Arnold. I agree with what you write, especially

Maybe the universe exhibits BOTH complexity-to-simplicity and simplicity-to-complexity in different phenomena. Any way, it would have no bearing on the ontological status of numbers and mathematics.

Perhaps Lee a Arnold is unaware of the existence of the three body problem? Or the joke about how quantum chromodynamics can’t even solve the zero body problem…?

How would the three-body problem, or any other system that doesn’t have a deterministic solution, be used in an argument to validate or invalidate the metaphysical pre-existence of numbers or even of complex mathematical relationships?

You wouldn’t, if you were wise. Whoever comes with “metaphysical pre-existence of numbers” is a crank and should be ignored.

See

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/

Layman at 313 links the Matthew Yglesias article that outlines the biggest problem with Murray and anyone who defends him — the step to *actual* policy prescriptions where his proposed consequences aren’t actually supported by data/science, while the racist consequences of those policies *are* fairly well supported.

There’s also a stair step argument affect that I’ve often seen from self-described “rationalists” who’ve suffered what the old less wrong refers to as an “affective death spiral”, basically the consequence of only treating people who largely agree with you as other “rationalists” that Henry describes.

Basically the argument runs in steps from solidly or fairly well supported weak propositions to *much* stronger propositions with very weak or no support, and if you argue with any part of the chain, you are treated as if you are arguing *only* with the initial relatively well supported propositions and thus “irrational”.

The anatomy of it runs like this.

1. Relatively weak proposition for which there is at least *some* fairly solid scientific backing, even if it may be disputable — e.g. “There is such a thing as general intelligence”. Yes, we can smash a bunch of vectors of intellectual skills into one vector and call it G or IQ, and it turns out there’s some good evidence that people can’t change this IQ dramatically by learning.

Arguing against the entire structure of 1. is fairly fraught and possibly “irrational” but there are serious caveats for which there is pretty good scientific backing as well. a) Our measurements of this IQ have a pretty large error component. b) Results can change *somewhat* due to experience. As an anonymous commenter said above, “85 doesn’t go to 115”, *but* it certainly might go to 90-100 depending on teaching and environmental context and that could make a huge difference in people’s lived experience. c) Most of the common IQ tests and *especially* nearly all of the proxy tests (like SAT/MCAT/etc.) have very clear and well established racial, cultural and educational biases. d) The vector mashing to achieve one score elides the fact that it’s possible to have very high competencies in some realms of intelligence along with very weak ones in others, resulting an average IQ score, but vastly different potential than “average” depending on how much your future context values your competencies.

2. Somewhat stronger proposition for which there is less but still pretty good support:
“Because there’s this thing called general intelligence that doesn’t appear to change dramatically over time or with training, it is a genetic trait, determined at birth.”
Somewhat less conclusive, caveat b above already notes that there is *some* fluidity, and it’s extremely hard to tease out the difference between genetics and very early environment, especially pre-natal environment.

3. Much stronger proposition for which there is much weaker and highly disputed evidence: “Racial groups exhibit differences in IQ. This is partly the result of a genetic trait inherent in those racial groups.” Disputed strongly due to clear and obvious racial biases in most tests. Murray and others hang their hat on the fact that this effect still exists (though much smaller) in tests without known or obvious (but not necessarily non-existent!) racial/cultural/educational biases, but this still hand-waves away other context (discrimination contributing to poorer average pre-natal and early childhood environments which clearly *does* affect tested IQ). It also does not answer deconstructions of the exact way in which we mash the vectors to create G/IQ. The actual algorithm used much weight different components of intelligence, and the way in which they do so may contain further racial/cultural/educational biases. The mere fact of significant racial disparities in the results of apparently non-biased tests that line up with stereotypes should probably cause us to question either the tests further or the inherent weightings of our G calculation about as quickly as we question a prior that there should not be major racial disparities, but this never seems to occur to these “rationalists.”

4. Finally we get to the meat of the argument where things go completely off the rails! They now introduce a proposition for which the balance of scientific evidence is almost completely on the other side and present it as the inevitable “rational/logical” conclusion from arguments 1-3. I.E. “The disparities in socio-economic results between racial groups is primarily/only the result of differences in their overall IQ”. This completely ignores the “glass ceiling” phenomenon combined with the the *HUGE* variance in individual G/IQ which *swamps* even fairly large racial disparities. It completely ignores *clearly substantiated* factors which have nothing to do with IQ that have produced and continue to contribute to real and wide socio-economic disparities between races like, say, *slavery*, Jim Crow laws, or redlining. It completely ignores that discrimination and poverty *have been shown to reduce results on every IQ test, not just obviously biased ones*. It ignores that while “you can’t get 130 from 85”, most of the difference in racial group results on not-obviously biased tests is within the range of what you *can* get from a combination of environmental differences.

5. The wacky completely unsubstantiated claim in 4 is now used as the basis for policy prescriptions that go completely *against* all reasonable evidence. “We should not attempt to rectify socio-economic imbalances based on race/ethnicity because it is futile. It’s all encased in genetics and nothing we do can help.” This completely ignores the huge individual variance in IQ, and completely ignores the wide and strong body of evidence that IQ *is* variable to a small degree based on environment and known interventions, especially in early childhood. And completely ignores the other factors noted in 4. that contribute to disparity which have nothing to do with intelligence.

Yglesias pretty solidly demolishes 5. in the article linked in 313, so I won’t waste more words there, but there’s a lot more to be said about the problems with this string of arguments and how people like Murray work (I haven’t read Harris, so I’m sort of assuming he does similar things as I trust Henry and others *far* more than I trust anyone who gives Murray the time of day in an argument).

The main argument tactic for the purveyor of the stack is to treat as many of your arguments as possible as if they are supposed to apply further up the stack than you intend. If you ever even once *mention* that there is *some* legitimate dispute about whether you can really claim 1. or 2. at all or whether it is useful, given the caveats, to claim 1. or 2., You can reliably assume that every point you bring against any other spot on the stack or step moving down it will be treated as if it is supposed to be an argument against 1. or 2. and if it fails as such, you are clearly being “irrational”.

In general, you will almost always be treated as if any point you make is supposed to apply to something further up the stack (i.e. more supportable) than what you are *actually* making a point against. The better debaters are good at making these pushes smaller and more believable to the point where you can easily get caught by them if you’re not familiar with the structure of and constantly on the lookout for this gambit. The real fools and hacks will basically answer the Yglesias article (which focuses primarily on step 5) as if he has solely and exclusively offered arguments that genetic intelligence does not even exist, even though he’s clearly *granted* that point for the sake of argument.

Lee a Arnold I was just pissing about.

When I was 15 I got my hands on a book of IQ tests and, certain that I would be great, did one. I don’t recall my exact score but it was shockingly bad, maybe 85. So I went through the solutions, figured out how the tests work, did another one and got a much higher score, again I don’t recall but it was above avergse. These tests obviously depend on education, and most obviously anyone from a school or background that encourages this kind of testing will likely have been schooled in stuff like pattern recognition. The instructions for the questions are also often very vague and highly dependent on how the test taker understands questions, formal English, etc.

As someone with a background in maths and physics I don’t believe that intelligence is a meaningful idea at this stage in our cultural development. It simply can’t be teased out from education (most obviously, you score 0 on an IQ test of you can’t read). While I have met people with obvious real “talent” for mathematics the vast majority of us were trained – rigorously and continuously. But people with no background in maths think we’re smart. It’s obvious to me that in the soup of environmental, educational and cultural influences on intellectual development, our native biology is probably irrelevant, and certainly impossible to tease out.

Also I have never met a self confessed MENSA member who wasn’t a dickhead. So there’s that.

@323 “Every time somebody greets me with ‘Christ is risen!’ after Easter”

That’s very interesting. Where do you live, FF, and what is the majority Christian sect?

No-one ever said that to me, or in my hearing, even in my Anglican churchgoing youth, Not only that, but it would seem deeply weird in any context other than an actual religious service.

I’m in Australia, where the default assumption is either agnosticism or nominal Christianity, depending on the social group.

John Quiggin@324 has apparently not had much contact with religious people. This particular observance I think is Orthodox, if not specifically Russian Orthodox. But the basic principle that religious people are relentless in their efforts to pressure people is one that doesn’t take much experience to learn. When Gideon Bibles are distributed to display in business waiting rooms and high school class rooms, they are making a statement. That’s why the OP’s contempt for atheists is so dubious. Atheists aren’t just the kind of people who enjoy telling kids there’s no Santa Claus.

(I suppose at this point I have to acknowledge that philosophy cannot justify saying there’s no God any more than most philosophy of science can justify saying there’s no magic. I don’t know why people think so highly of philosophy and anti-science “science” that agrees philosophy has a point.)

And if we’re talking about who believes black folks are different – let’s not forget all those appalled by the Access Hollywood tape, who yet somehow are totally cool with…
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/culture/gabriel-hays/2018/04/12/hateful-hip-hop-top-us-rbhip-hop-songs-objectify-women-55

The evidence is pretty damning. I grew up with Gil Scott-Heron. The notion that genes or skin pigment predicts anything seems entirely loopy. Cultures?

That’s an entirely different question. Restaurant features b/w snaps of Bardot topless is ‘degrading’ – music lyrics about ‘b—” and sundry other sexist slang. The coolest, as the Grammy awards and Billboard charts confirm each year.

Different rules and expectations from white liberals regarding black folks?

Similar to steven t johnson, I was going to say that the “Christ has risen” exchange was very common in Russia (around Easter) when I lived there, and so I’d assumed it was an Orthodox thing. (I hadn’t much otherwise heard it outside of an actual church in the US.) That it was somewhat inescapable was a well known source for jokes, too – there was a funny story about people using the “indeed he is” reply inappropriately because of having said it so many times, where then leader of the communist party, Zyuganov, was especially made fun of for having done this.

On Australia, I wonder if it’s regional, John, or if you just don’t notice the religious life anymore. When I moved to Melbourne about 8 months ago, one of the first things that stuck me was the large number of churches and, especially, religious schools for kids. (There are _many_ more of those than in most parts of the US, I think.) Within a KM or so of my house, there are very large and fancy Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, and Anglican schools (some gender segregated as well.) They advertise their religious affiliation quite heavily, and talk about “teaching values”, so I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some substantial religious element. And, the “anti” adds on TV during the mail-ballot over same sex marriage were as vicious or worse than anything I’ve seen in the US. (Statements made by the Catholic church here in Australia were just as bad or worse than in the US, too.) So, maybe Melbourne is different than Brisbane, or perhaps it’s just (happily) blurred into the background for you. I’m not sure.

Thanks for the clarification, John – I appreciate it. (I’m interested to learn more about the education system in Australia – my impression is that the private system is fancy and wealthy [and often religiously affiliated, though as you say, that may be somewhat nominal], and that the public system is under-funded. If you or anyone else can recommend a good source on it, I’d be grateful.)

@Matt 04.13.18 at 12:36 am

Indeed, in some of the more eastern parts of the former Soviet Bloc the picture is completed by the fact that even the poor inept hustlers that have picked the ungrateful job of claiming some part of the communist heritage for themselves – and who are consequently shunned and derided by the advanced and sophisticated pro-Western polite society* – have tended to embrace religion as part of their general reorientation towards local identity and tradition.

* which tends to prefer the likes of Reagan, Thatcher, Yeltsin, Pinochet and maybe, you know, just a little bit of that nostalgic flavour of Franco~Mussolini~you-know-who for old times’ sake – as well as anything currently sponsored by USAID, NED, etc.

@F. Foundling 04.13.18 at 1:52 pm

I had to post again, as I felt some remorse for formulating my previous comment about ‘hustlers’ in a general way that could be interpreted as maligning also the numerous fundamentally decent, often aging people active in or supportive of the (ex-)communist organisations, especially in the rank and file. Their unflinching loyalty maintained in spite of vicious abuse and ridicule is quite admirable. Unfortunately, the leadership is mostly cynical and corrupt, and it is the one taking the initiative to embrace religion – or, in many countries, right-wing economic ideology, figures like Thatcher and Churchill, etc.