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If twitter is to be believed, always a hazard, <25 of those killed on 10/7 were minors. A lot of the damage to bodies and vehicles/residences seems to be from weapons the IDF would possess and Hamas could only dream of. Just look at the pics of the burnt bodies and completely blasted up cars. There is footage which is allegedly IDF planes firing at Hamas targets.
It’s very possible there is some truth to the claims of Hamas or civilians crossing the fence targeting civilians, some engaging in rapes. But the Times of Israel has admitted proof of mass rapes are thin. It is more likely that it didn’t happen than that the Israeli government was negligent in grabbing everything they could to maximize PR/ The fact that the beheaded babies claim reached the highest levels of Israeli and American govs suggest a serious level of either dishonesty, or flimsiness with evidence and claims. Of course this isn’t going to be anything anyone in legacy media can touch with a 10 foot pole which is tragic. But I think its likely, that this is going to intensify world skepticism over Israelis.
One thing that seems clear is the notion of Israelis being an independent state has been ripped to shreds. They are as much a client state now as they ever have been and their military tech doesn’t seem to be doing the job in the ground war where Hamas is eating them for breakfast. They are good at splattering civilians but it’s not having the intended effect. Gazans are not turning on Hamas or surrendering. On the contrary, the foundation of Israel is itself in doubt. Unsurprising for a nation that strategically has never declared its borders.
There seems to be a crowd on twitter, kind of unsavory types that argues progress is really just a function of human biocapital, and if you want innovation you have talented, innovative people assortatively mating and producing a lot, fail to have that and whatever gains we make will be subject to stagnation and decay.
I don’t prefer thinking of people that way as I think people are ends, not means, but looking at the way certain lineages and folk seem to produce, regardless of culture or location and certain lineages and folk don’t lends credence to the idea that its biology before it is anything else.
In what category would these advocates sit? I will avoid naming anyone but I suspect Andreeson is in this category or adjacent to it.
Another point-why aren’t inner city blacks voting on what research gets funding? Seems like they would, as we all do have questions and curiosities.
Was never clear to me why academia was such a large and random hodge podge of stuff. It seems to me getting the populace to take a role and interest in what research is funded and what isn’t will can make the process more relevant and vital to everyone and help inform public discussion
Surprised by this reaction, i thought you’d totally love it! Also semi bitter I wasn’t the first to post this.
My thoughts-
I’m guessing he’s just referring to social (as distinct from hard science) research positions, which of course carry a degree of authority but more specifically are a kind of selective (or should be as he’d argue) position like that of a biology professor or physicist.
I don’t see the issue with that? Isnt this what you argue as well Why? Why don’t we have researchers and government administrators and so on who are selected purely on skill like engineers are? This would be distinct from governance and decision making which is done by votes from populations, preferably deliberative and votes from their elected representatives who don’t require high intelligence for their roles just generally good discernment, wisdom and honesty.
In this way we could have decision making done by people who represent all demographics interests but informed by the most qualified
As you’ve shown yourself and as I’ve come to learn more and more, most of the social sciences just seems to have failed. “Not even wrong”, not even measurable, failing to replicate, failing to predict, failing to discern much of anything. What would be so bad about having a set of very skilled individuals pulling out all the hard and brutal empirical facts(defined here as, the things that simply are even if nobody knows it)?
As you’ve said in that article, these researchers could inform the decision makers of what they know. The public and its representatives including opinion columnists and pundits and so on could then use that more agreed upon data to argue and deliberate and consult over what decisions to make. Its like the USA deciding on who to nuke but getting informed on the constantly updating progress by the geniuses at the Manhatten Project. Or say, the knowledge of the crime stats of my cofaith migrants in Europe which has recently started to inform Austrian policy towards refugees.
Ms. Twenge says what drove the parentsā anxiety is a bit of a mystery. For most of the past 25 years, violent crime rates fell and kids lived physically safer lives than ever. But fearfulness increased. She says the best explanation is economic: āI think thereās an interaction between income inequality and parentsā anxieties that get passed on to their children as well. So thereās the idea of you either make it or you donāt, so you better make it.ā Other generations have struggled to make sense of a world turned upside-down: the world wars, the Great Depression and, in the case of millennials, a meltdown of the financial system. None manifested Gen Zās levels of pessimism.
I was thinking about exactly this a few days ago and trying to get into the mind of those considering it. I think my answer is basically yours. Its not the state of the world now so much as the growing lack of confidence in what the future holds (either of good or bad)
Life also feels in some way, more complex and less manageable. I feel this is part to do with the battering of calamities we’ve faced in the past 20 years but also part to do with the rise of the digital era. So news of events close and far which can potentially affect us, which we have no control over, reaches us and spikes our anxiety and dread of possible horrors.
I suspect this is part of the huge rush towards some cultures which offer stability. Bitcoin, stuff that’s Lindy, paleo diets etc. As I tried to articulate in another post, the world almost seems to be growing too complex and unpredictable for any ideology to be discovered to meet the moment and implemented.
Authorities everywhere are also more and more afraid to take responsibility.Just the job market alone for my field has gone crazy. I’m not even kidding when I say employer hesitancy has gone to psychotic levels. I had no less than 7 interviewers, the CEO of my company included for my Mechanical Engineering position….which is insanely hard to get these days anyways as every employer is too afraid for some reason to not pouch dudes with 5 years or more of experience. Its gotten so extreme I’m guessing more than half of ME grads find significant difficulty getting an ME job right after graduating.
They’re spending God knows how much on human resources and hiring firms just to not take a risk! Its like rich people and ever more expensive and odd insurances. The country’s gone mad with anxiety. These employers are not typically behaving rationally.
This was my conclusion (not for me i 100% aim for a family). Just anxiety. There are poor people everywhere who have kids knowing the life they’re probably going to grow up in. But there’s no worry there.
“**(In the same way that conservatives are attracted to leaders that credibly portray new āstrengthā on red issues, liberals are attracted to leaders that portray new āperspectivesā or āinsightā on blue issues. I think some (maybe most?) of the popularity of analysts like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi reflects this phenomena. Eventually a new āissueā will pop up to capture the attention and support of the blue political consumer class. Though, that issue might not be preferable for conservatives!)”
Never thought of it this way but it does appear that liberals are addicted to a new cycle of new ideas in the same way conservatives are attracted to the toughy stand your ground don’t tread on me “conservatism.”
It seems to me a nightmare. Voters voting on the attitude and interest that meshes with their vibes and not on policy that’s in their best interest.
The way I see it, you may be right. Or at least in the sense that while the older version may be dead, the newer version isn’t such a drastic change.
One thing I don’t see happening any time soon is republican political operatives putting their ideology on the side for a moment, and moving beyond campaign gamification to actually talking to their base and having a full conversation about what their aspirations and worries are and what range of actions could they take to get their or smooth that road. As Tanner pointed out, they can’t actually win a majority and they aren’t about to start trying. They’re going to just try to win their elections on vibes then sabotage Dem spending any way they can. Pathetic but thats them.
I think it hasn’t died-as long as operatives are capable of channeling conservative voter resentments of youth, blacks and other minorities, they’ll still be able to pull in votes enough to just keep stabbing Dem spending plans. That’s my most direct answer. It’ll be a while before the Boomer fiscal conservatives die off in enough numbers for change to be apparent.
Though maybe they can speed that along by ignoring covid fatalities and opioid overdoses….as they do already.
This is pretty insightful. Americans are atomized but yearning for that deeper stronger relationship they assume or expect in family.
On a personal note, growing up one of the commands in my faith that was a surprise to me was keeping up ties of kith and kin. It was a surprise to me because I didn’t see the point-you like some family, dislike others why then does God care so much? But most of the non ritualistic laws in Islam and the Quran in particular are heavily based around kith and kin and marriage. A miniscule amount attends to dealing with crime, the economy and finance and how authorities should run the land.
I’m guessing the old and new testaments are probably like that too-attending to the aspects of life that are going to be most relevant to most people most of the time.
In societies where family isn’t what people find most relevant most of the time, and it more like work/friends/social media its unsurprising this yearning for family exists. But I don’t see people with family dominated lives yearning for a career or a life on social media! Seems to go one way.
I think Richard hananias idea of just giving parents the money that’s spent on their kid to use for whatever education they prefer would work
However teachers lobbying is massive. I agree with him that Rufos attempt to ban this stuff at a state level will fail. On a student by student basis it’s probably not something that changes the average students views. But making it everywhere in schools opens it up to being the new state religion a decade from now. We’re not there yet but likely there’s just his way to get out of it and thats it. Defund the woke so to speak
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/202103/can-selfie-predict-your-politics
AI apparently has predictive power psychologists and politicians envy
I’m going to go through the rest of the paper and try to make a layman ready paragraph for it. It is a bit hard trying to make all these terms digestible and feedback is highly welcome…I aim to be as clear and accurate as possible about this issue to a general audience. The last thing I want to be is too wordy or jargony to be easily understood or too simplified to be inaccurate.
I think later I want to leave the reader with a set of tools to call out easily the nonsense involved in this. E,g. say someone comes to you and says their psychological study suggests feeling inspired makes people more religious-these are the 2-3 questions you ask before that paper looks as empty and baseless as it is. Same with ego depletion, stereotype threat, the value of “grit” and so on.
Alright first paragraph of me trying to make this digestible and clear for laymen like myself:
Psychologists(and other social scientists), for the most part, aim to back up verbal statements with statistical procedures. To crunch out an objective number that either affirms or refutes (or does neither) their verbal statements(a construct, hypothesis or theory, or inference, etc), they rely on proxies to measure the statements that they have verbally expressed. If these proxies do not actually measure the statements that they have verbally expressed, there is no number or type of statistical procedure they can attempt, that would somehow then inform them one way or another of how true their verbally expressed statement is or isn’t.
Since every statistical model is a description of either a real or hypothetical aspect of the world, if its expressed variables do not share a closely aligned relationship with the logical structure implied by the verbal statements, exactly how this statistical model was constructed is irrelevant-it simply does not actually say anything definitive about the verbal statement it supposedly describes.
Nobody for example, would say that one could test a hypothesis that high social status influences people to behave dishonestly by randomly assigning a set of people to read a book or watch a show for 10 minutes then measure their performance on a dish-washing task. Such a measurement would be laughed at. If the researcher then crunched out tables of data, or performed some statistical procedure which produced a P-value, this would be obviously useless.
The same logic applies in next to every single case where a researcher seeks out a statistical quantity to justify a verbal claim. When a researcher verbally expresses some proposition, he or she is assuming that the range of measurements implicitly defined by his or her chosen statistical procedure (of any kind), along with the chosen experimental design and measurement model is closely aligned. *Statistics is not simply a kind of necessary procedure for transferring verbal statements into numerical information. If the researcher in question does not have a valid way to measure their verbal statement, statistical inferences are thoroughly irrelevant.*
Unfortunately a large swathe of psychological(and other social science) statistical inferences cannot plausibly be taken as valid expressions of the verbal statements they are meant to in any way, inform.
My guess-
They’d need something to fall back on. A lot of these guys aren’t just rebellious kids chasing a fad. Plenty are but plenty aren’t. Wokeness has replaced traditional Christianity and these guys need it for the same reason they needed tradC. It provides meaning and purpose and drive.
Yeah I guess I don’t now that you point it out.
I think this current iteration of mental health “experts” experienced a massive rise in power as mental illness became a big sort of thing in the past 20 years.
But this rule of experts vision seems to be everywhere ESPECIALLY among liberal arts grads. I’ve read an iteration of this view multiple times in different internet spots to justify the learning they’ve done. Of course it was worth it-now they know exactly what to tell everyone to do!
