Shrug. My understanding of nihilism was that statements about morality, meaning, and science were all dependent on the skepticisim that was nihilism, which was a blackhole that only acknowledged that which could be proven. I stand to be corrected.

Nihilism is skepticism rehashed.

The Greeks had already thought all that **** out.

https://media.giphy.com/media/LjE4Ekudj824M/giphy.gif

Touchdown Bat!

He's confusing it with radical constructivism.

Maybe I was wrong about it then. I thought it went beyond history and applied to science as well.

can you give an example?

Only kind of related but who’s read Borges?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yehk8XBd5Pk
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Discipline and Punish and Manufacturing Consent seem like two sides of the same coin to me.

I don't trust shrinks either tbh

But psychology isn't even really a hard science

Maybe I'll give him another look. I just wasn't really impressed with him in the Chomsky debate

Do you think that’s the nature of the discipline or the fault of those who study it?

If I had to guess it's just more complicated and also it's a relatively young science

It's like biology is less of a hard science than physics cause in ways the systems you are dealing with are more complex as they build on chemistry which builds on physics. Psychology then builds specifically on human biology. As a result it's understandable that it's less precise ATM

Ideas like social darwinism are not the fault of psychology or other sciences of course. That is just a blatant misinterpretation, and if anything real science would have prevented such an idea being spread.
Of course psychology is less exact than physics or mathematics, and that is not at all a bad thing, it doesn't make it inferior. The problem, I think, occurs when people try to treat psychology or sociology etc. as more of an exact science, for instance by treating statistical correlations as causal ones. Feynman has an interesting essay about that, I think

These days astronomy is apolitical too

But that wasn't true in Galileo's time

To be fair Darwin himself wrote stuff about how blacks are inferior IIRC

Times change

That is also true, in a sense. The essence of all science is apolitical, or rather, science is completely apolitical when it's carried out and treated right

Didn't know that. Ouch, and I had Darwin on such a pedestal

Abe Lincoln did too.

You can’t expect a person from the past to be completely enlightened by today’s standards. In Darwin’s time the idea that whites and blacks were intellectually equal was pretty much entirely off the table. In the 1830’s after Nat Turber’s rebellion most whites who opposed slavery simply didn’t want blacks around period. Most white people who didn’t own slaves considered simply killing all blacks a solution at least worthy of consideration. In fact, many northerners had even more calloused opinions than southerners because interaction was so rare.

So unless you thought Darwin was some kind of Buddha it’s not really relevant to what he achieved. It’s very unlikely that any white person reading this would have been so revolutionary if we had lived back then.

There’s also a problem of language where causation is so hard to establish scientists can also come across as absurd avoiding claiming a causal relationship. The surgeon general finally had to say ok Jesus **** smoking causes cancer!

Don't know about that, but Darwin was explicitly warning people of the dangers of Social Darwinism.

I've always hoped that there were a few people in Darwin's time enlightened enough not to be racist, and that people like him might be among them. And Darwin's personal views on black people do not take away the fact that his theory of evolution in itself is scientific, and social darwinism is an unscientific misinterpretation of it

That's why I added an IIRC, cause I'm hazy on the details

From what I remember he wrote a book called The Descent Of Man which had some racism in it

I obviously agree this doesn't discredit the theory of evolution

It seems like it has less to do with the institution being corrupt in this case than it does that people will always appeal to that kind of authority when constructing an argument

The argument can be pro oppression or anti oppression, or it could have nothing to do with oppression.

E.g. both proponents of slavery and abolitionists appealed to the authority of scripture to argue their point.

One of the ideas of science, however, is that you find out if you got it wrong by testing. But you guys are totally right that in reality no institution is entirely neutral, and that people will often appeal to science to defend their arguments, and then often do so erroneously (like with social darwinism)

Are we objective to the possibility that the races are not equal?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTO-BsdRO1w


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She says a lot of good stuff but I don’t like the idea of injecting the left with a fresh dose of woo.

I think phrasing it as "the races being unequal" reminds people of things like eugenics and other forms of scientific racism. And it gives undue validity to the concept of race as a straight forward and self evident biological construct, which it's not. It's largely superficial.

Are there statistical differences between groups with regard to things like IQ? Probably. This is likely to be true whether you compare black Americans to white Americans or french Americans to Russian Americans. I wouldn't be surprised if you found some sort of statistical disparity just comparing right handed individuals vs left handed ones. In a way it seems less likely for different groups to match up completely in every domain than for there to be some sort of statistical disparity.

I think the implications of this are less profound than a lot of "race realists" tend to presume.

:yeah:

I thought she was annoying during the debates but she's alright in some of the one in one interviews

To be fair I think her whole new age vibe is something that's existed on the left for a while.

I actually disagree.

There are likely to be disparities between groups either way, because it's just a random distribution of certain traits and there's no reason for them to be identical.

Like there can be average height differences between groups as well. There's no inherent reason all groups should be equally equipped in every domain.

I agree that's why I said the stuff about french Americans vs Russian Americans and left vs right handed people. You will find arbitrary statistical differences any time you compare two groups of people, imo

The thing to remember is they are statistical differences, not hard rules.

There’s this and that impediment to drawing a convincing conclusion and we jump all over them when science doesn’t align with what we’re comfortable with or even might have the potential to. Hell, we can’t study race. Race isn’t even real. Black people don’t even have darker skin. It’s not like back in Darwin’s day when people were just pulling science out of their ass in accordance to social taboos. We’re all about the truth.

I forget where but I saw this thing we’re German-Americans beat German-Canadians by like 15 IQ points. Variation is definitely the rule. That’s another impediment that social scientists would have to deal with but like who’s really going to bother?

I'm not saying there isn't some taboo ground there but based on what I've seen, science dismantles the old white supremacists narrative more than it holds it up.

Like the very idea of race has no basis in biology and the way we categorized people by race were largely based on superficial cues that don't match up with specific genetically distinct groups.

Right. It’s just by magic that people notice you’re the only white guy in a crowd.

I don't see why it would any more than less taboo traits like height, dick size, etc. Statistical differences between groups are to be expected.