73 Comments

which is why (among perhaps a few other excuses) i wail and gnash my teeth over the cult of "tl;dr" and those who treat compromise like a disease.

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"If the student fails the course, is the teacher to blame for grading objectively? What about the students who get ‘D’ grades and respond by working harder?" This is strained analogy

"Good point. I don’t doubt the pernicious effect of negative messages. However, I’m not sure what you think is the solution: to censor ourselves for fear of making the situation worse?"

This is also as far fetched. No, but we can simply think different, the discussion anyway was not whether you can, but whether it is right to be racially biased about negative yet true statistics making them weight on an individual, you know the thing about more black people in jail, doesn't mean the next black individual is more prone to break the law.

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Obviously yes. But where do you see those implication? Did you need a disclaimer?

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Iq tests are made based on paradigm typical of west society. Mind also that a stone age men would make close to 0 score in iq tests, probably, that wouldn't make him less intelligent, if you accidentally time travelled as a newborn in this past you would do the same because not exposed to what men become. Also a culture non receptive of west paradigm is not necessarily worse.And yours are anyway a bonafide racist claim as you include genetics and not culture, being jew is no genetic it is a descent, yes so it is partially genetic but they were primarily a people.

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Well, sometimes there are good ideas that wouldn't hold a pure money based analysis, and its good in in fact about "forcing" the economical model to change, to take the good out of it.

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In fact, take anarchy, I know its difficulties nevetheless i propose it. Afterall even democracy has its difficulties, never overcome.

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In fact you are not racist as long as you limit it to observe the somatic traits, including possible difference in force strength whatever. Once you correlate race to a cultural behaviour well you are plain wrong, culture is not linked to race but interdipendently, say, if a southafrican get adopted by americans he will have an american culture. And even among cultures there can be different individual behaviour so we always have to consider the individual.But this has not to be implied every time.

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But actually it is false, i bet you agree.

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While I appreciate this post, I think there are also times when people should give more disclaimers than they do.

People tend to hold many beliefs with too much confidence. One of the best ways to encourage them to be more skeptical is to demonstrate that you are skeptical of your own beliefs. The way one does this, is by offering disclaimers.

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As a concrete example:

Hardworking Americans voted for Clinton; ergo Obama voters are non-working elitists.

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Hopefully,I didn't see anything on the webpage linked to your name, so I disregarded your message.. Any significance in the numerical sequence I was not able to discern? (there was an apparent transcription error in one of those sequences)Also, I wasn't 100% clear on the message I did receive, proving apparently a little cleverness will get you only so far :)

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Seems like people already mentioned this, but every example you list falls into one of the rethorical fallacies. Here is a good list of those: http://www.nizkor.org/featu...

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Dynamically, often we when we say we prefer some proposed alternative to the status quo, we are accused of claiming that alternative beats any other policy.

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Phil Goetz,That is exactly his point: the more common use should be the default. At this point, you are just in disagreement what the more common use is.nb - I am assuming you are replying to Robin.

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HA, if you're saying that my statement is not strong evidence for the truth of my limited claim not to have had status in mind on this particular occasion, I can see why that's reasonable. But rest assured that I'm aware that status influences my social interactions plenty, both consciously and, no doubt, unconsciously.

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I agree with Phil that many of these "assumptions" just seem like simple Bayesian updating. For example:

If you say you prefer option A to option B, you also prefer A to any option C.

If there exists a C such that you prefer C to A, then I'd expect you to be talking about why you prefer C to B, not why you prefer A to B. So the fact that you're talking about A>B indicates that C probably doesn't exist. Why shouldn't I update my beliefs about your preferences this way, unless you add an disclaimer?

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