If Mort Divine ruled the world

[CiG]

Curious, why do so many of you guys hate Sargon?

 

[rms]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/03/08/iceland-require-firms-prove-equal-pay/98906702/

The government said it will introduce legislation to parliament this month, requiring all employers with more than 25 staff members to obtain certification to prove they give equal pay for work of equal value.

would love to see how the government defines equal value

"Equal rights are human rights," he said. "We need to make sure that men and women enjoy equal opportunity in the workplace. It is our responsibility to take every measure to achieve that."

wait a damn second. opportunity or forced equality?

Iceland has introduced other measures to boost women's equality, including quotas for female participation on government committees and corporate boards. Such measures have proven controversial in some countries, but have wide support across Iceland's political spectrum.

 

[Dak]

https://newrepublic.com/article/140948/bluexit-blue-states-exit-trump-red-america

I don't know what's more amusing about this piece. Three contenders:

1. "Paid our own way"
2. Secessionist talk ("states rights")
3. Strong implicit racism

 

[Einherjar86]

Some truth there though.

 

[Dak]

There is a lot of truth there. But it's all wrongthink the blue states have vilified for years - and which this guy and others won't actually acknowledge as an about face.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Secessionism scares the shit out of me.

How does anyone know it won't lead to civil war, like it did last time? I don't want to see millions of Americans die just because people decided to stop tolerating political disagreement over the past couple decades. Especially if most of the intolerance has been manufactured by our shit media companies.

 

[rms]

well, I imagine representation in all military organizations is overwhelmingly red...just like a lot of the 'shitty parts' of contributing to a modern state

 

[Dak]

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2017/03/07/middlebury-violence-faculty/

The Higher Education Research Institute has asked tens of thousands of professors nationwide if they agree or disagree with the notion that colleges should prohibit racist and sexist speech on campus. Nationally, 33 percent of faculty strongly agreed with the idea of speech prohibition, while 12 percent strongly disagreed. The remaining 55 percent of faculty were in the middle, where they somewhat agreed or somewhat disagreed with the idea.

When I looked at the numbers for the private liberal arts schools of New England, however, things were different. I drilled farther into the data, focusing specifically on the academic departments of professors who signed the letter to Middlebury’s president. While I do not have data on Middlebury faculty specifically, we know which departments the signatories are from. Looking at those departments—sociology, anthropology, film and media studies, among others—almost 50 percent of faculty members from them strongly agreed that colleges and universities should prohibit speech on campus if it can be considered racist or sexist.

That so many professors who embrace humanistic inquiry would support restrictions on speech is simply astonishing and does a disservice to the academe and to the very students that they are supposed to educate.

 

[Einherjar86]

That article is disingenuous.

First, the letter doesn't use the word "prohibit" once. The professors are part of a community in general agreement that Charles Murray's work is outdated, unsound, and (at worst) prejudiced. And it is probably politically motivated, given Murray's track record. More often than not, his work is remarkably blind to verifiable historical reasons for imbalances in apparent intelligence (e.g. "Where Are the Female Einsteins?"). As far as the language of the letter itself is concerned, none of the signatories object to Murray's freedom of speech; they object to legitimizing his ideas in the form of a campus lecture introduced by the college's president.

The most you can say is that the letter asks that some form of response be issued by the college and the president, especially regarding the fact that Murray's originally controversial work did not undergo peer review or submit to the typical demands asked of scholarship. It is intellectually dishonest, dangerous, and misleading to promote Murray's work as an example of acceptable scholarship. This is what the faculty object to.

 

[Dak]

The portion I quoted is supposed to be from some research done by the HERI at UCLA. I tried to find the research as quoted but currently do not see it on their website (I may be looking in the wrong places). I found this:
https://heri.ucla.edu/monographs/HERI-FAC2011-Monograph.pdf
which doesn't break the data down the way it was reported in the article. Maybe the author requested the full data instead of just going off a press release.

I have not read any of Murray's work, but sample differences in mean performance by race on intelligence measures do exist. Separately, twin studies show that intelligence is roughly 50% hereditary/genetic. Anyone up in arms about even discussing these findings has a personal problem.

 

[Einherjar86]

The 50% marker is problematic, and more recent studies suggest the percentage is smaller (others, alternatively, suggest that it fluctuates and can even be larger):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-intelligence-hereditary/)

Researchers are now looking for the genes that contribute to intelligence. In the past few years we have learned that many, perhaps thousands, of genes of small effect are involved. Recent studies of hundreds of thousands of individuals have found genes that explain about 5 percent of the differences among people in intelligence. This is a good start, but it is still a long way from 50 percent.

Another particularly interesting recent finding is that the genetic influence on measured intelligence appears to increase over time, from about 20 percent in infancy to 40 percent in childhood to 60 percent in adulthood. One possible explanation may be that children seek experiences that correlate with, and so fully develop, their genetic propensities.

Murray's work makes use of significantly unsubstantiated and unverifiable data in order to present a deterministic/predictive argument about future social organization, hence his application of biological IQ to the rise of a "cognitive elite" (or some such nonsense). His work isn't in the name of science, it's in the name of political interests invested in rationalizing the conditions of the social demographic.

Serious research into the relationship between genetics and intelligence is ongoing, and in and of itself isn't controversial. Murray's work shouldn't be the benchmark for this kind of work. He gets press because his work is politically controversial, not because it's scientifically sound.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I don't see how the absence of intelligence genes is any more meaningful in an argument on the biological basis of intelligence than is the absence of a gay gene on sexuality. The simple fact is that IQ is hereditary and most children will be born with an IQ within a standard deviation of their parents. Not knowing the exact molecular mechanism behind our intelligence isn't needed to make that claim.

 

[Einherjar86]

Even if it is hereditary, the point is that it doesn't constitute enough of a difference to warrant deterministic claims about future demographic makeup and/or organization, especially since environment can have a substantial impact on the application of intelligence. Change the environmental conditions and you can significantly change intelligence levels, even if genetics provides the baseline.

 

[Dak]

The 50% marker is problematic, and more recent studies suggest the percentage is smaller (others, alternatively, suggest that it fluctuates and can even be larger):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-intelligence-hereditary/)

I said roughly 50% because there is some fluctuation around the mark (40-60%), which your quoted portion notes. The "20% in infancy" note is amusing, I don't know how the fuck they could test that with any confidence.

We've more or less given up on finding single genes to predict/determine almost anything. The fact we can't explain our findings genetically yet doesn't mean they aren't there to be found, particularly when we may be looking for something that is more emergent than a simple on/off biochemical process.

Murray's work makes use of significantly unsubstantiated and unverifiable data in order to present a deterministic/predictive argument about future social organization, hence his application of biological IQ to the rise of a "cognitive elite" (or some such nonsense). His work isn't in the name of science, it's in the name of political interests invested in rationalizing the conditions of the social demographic.

Serious research into the relationship between genetics and intelligence is ongoing, and in and of itself isn't controversial. Murray's work shouldn't be the benchmark for this kind of work. He gets press because his work is politically controversial, not because it's scientifically sound.

Well again, I wasn't quoting that article for anything specific to Murray, which is why the quoted portion wasn't referring to him. However, even just assuming you are correct about Murray's work (again, haven't read any of it), given the completely bonkers, not-even-claiming-to-be-scientific nature of the work of grievance mongers (which are welcomed with pomp to universities), there's no legitimate basis for suddenly objecting to a given speaker "because science!". If speakers should be rejected because they aren't engaging in good science, people like Coates or Butler should be deplatformed. If the response is they don't claim to be scientists, even more reason to dismiss them.

My main interest is in the percentage of faculty either in favor of limitations on free speech, and/or at least non-committal.

 

[Einherjar86]

If speakers should be rejected because they aren't engaging in good science, people like Coates or Butler should be deplatformed. If the response is they don't claim to be scientists, even more reason to dismiss them.

That would be my response, and this is a ridiculous assertion. You're being sensationalist, again.

My main interest is in the percentage of faculty either in favor of limitations on free speech, and/or at least non-committal.

At one of the most liberal colleges in the country, only half of the faculty from four humanities departments worth naming signed a letter that didn't once declare that they wanted to limit free speech.

 

[Dak]

That would be my response, and this is a ridiculous assertion. You're being sensationalist, again.

What's sensationalist about pointing out a clear double standard?

At one of the most liberal colleges in the country, only half of the faculty from four humanities departments worth naming signed a letter that didn't once declare that they wanted to limit free speech.

I don't know what letter you keep referring to.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Even if it is hereditary, the point is that it doesn't constitute enough of a difference to warrant deterministic claims about future demographic makeup and/or organization, especially since environment can have a substantial impact on the application of intelligence. Change the environmental conditions and you can significantly change intelligence levels, even if genetics provides the baseline.

That would assume that the upper-limit for an individual is primarily constrained by environment, which I haven't seen much support for. A person with parents averaging an IQ of 100 and a person with parents averaging 115 may have the same potential for improvement/decline according to environment, but the person with the biological advantage is almost always going to win out no matter how hard the other one tries.

 

[Einherjar86]

What's sensationalist about pointing out a clear double standard?

It isn't a double standard when the methodological approaches are entirely different.

I don't know what letter you keep referring to.

The one that the author of the article you posted keeps referring to, the impetus for the article itself:

https://middleburycampus.com/article/letter-from-middlebury-faculty/

Yeah, serious attack on free speech there...

That would assume that the upper-limit for an individual is primarily constrained by environment, which I haven't seen much support for. A person with parents averaging an IQ of 100 and a person with parents averaging 115 may have the same potential for improvement/decline according to environment, but the person with the biological advantage is almost always going to win out no matter how hard the other one tries.

Douglas Wahlsten, "The Malleability of Intelligence is Not Constrained by Heritability"

Abstract:

In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray claim that a high value for heritability of intelligence limits or constrains the extent to which intelligence can be increased by changing the environment.1 In this chapter it is argued that the calculated numerical value of “heritability” has no valid implications for government policies and that evidence of a nonspecific genetic influence on human mental ability places no constraint on the consequences of an improved environment. On the contrary, a very small change in environment, such as a dietary supplement, can lead to a major change in mental development, provided the change is appropriate to the specific kind of deficit that in the past has impaired development. The results of adoption studies, the intergenerational cohort effect, and effects of schooling also reveal that intelligence can be increased substantially without the need for heroic intervention.

 

[Dak]

It isn't a double standard when the methodological approaches are entirely different.

The methodological approaches may be different, but practically speaking what's the difference? Both bad scientists and activist non-scientists purport to be offering unsubstantiated "truths" which should inform policy. The difference quite obviously what is currently considered goodthinkful.

The one that the author of the article you posted keeps referring to, the impetus for the article itself:
https://middleburycampus.com/article/letter-from-middlebury-faculty/

/shrug. Not the portion I was interested. It is normally expected that the degree to which people will sign something is less than the degree to which one will provide anonymous responses that will be aggregated.

 

[Einherjar86]

The methodological approaches may be different, but practically speaking what's the difference? Both bad scientists and activist non-scientists purport to be offering unsubstantiated "truths" which should inform policy. The difference quite obviously what is currently considered goodthinkful.

The methodologies may be different, but practically speaking what's the difference? Dak, stop trying to be difficult.

Look, I'm fine with Murray speaking at the school, but you're generalizing way too much here with regard to different methodologies and fields of study. Butler wouldn't purport to offer any substantive truth or statistical analysis of gender, and her entire project offers nothing like what Murray's claims to. Depending on the field a scholar appeals to, audiences should expect different approaches. You're comparing apples and oranges, and you can't just throw your hands up and say "well it's all fruit!" People have the right to complain if they order orange chicken and it has no orange in it (or worse, it's sprinkled with blueberries).

/shrug. Not the portion I was interested. It is normally expected that the degree to which people will sign something is less than the degree to which one will provide anonymous responses that will be aggregated.

What are you talking about? You based your accusation that the faculty of Middlebury were attempting to restrict free speech on the article that cites this very letter. As far as I can tell, they're not trying to restrict free speech at all.