(Part 3) Top products from r/AskTrumpSupporters

Great questions. I don't think there's an easy or foolproof answer to them.

>should lay people who have zero expertise in a field trust such general academic consensuses as being broadly correct?

Broadly correct? I would think that's a solid way to look at things. I'm in agreement with you.

>Are there good reasons for non-experts to be skeptical about the scientific consensus on vaccines, climate change or evolution?

"Good" reasons? Eh........I'll give a few scattered thoughts here:

• Some people are just going to be contrarians. I don't have any sources to link at the moment, but I think we've all encountered this at some point.
  
• Other people, often those who feel they have been marginalized by society (ex. white people who watched their friends go to college but couldn't go themselves—I'm referring to my own mother in this case), have a deep longing for "secret knowledge" and the sense of power it brings. Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy gives one of the breakdowns of this phenomenon while Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American History (1966) shows that none of this is new. For people who usually possess traits we associate with intelligence (they are intensely curious and often willing to reading extensively) but who feel like they have been unfairly excluded from the centers of intellectual life, the idea that that everyone but them has it wrong is a bit intoxicating. Especially when a small groups of other marginalized people begin listening to them. I am not justifying this phenomenon—it probably shares some of the same social DNA as the incel movement—but I am trying to humanize it.
  
• In addition to these two groups (contrarians and the intellectually marginalized), we might also add those people who have been turned off by the fervency and (please, don't throw anything at me) fundamentalist fanaticism of some popular science devotees. While 99% of modern people simply go about their days with a fairly healthy view of science and knowledge, we are all aware of the loud fringe who wants to paint anyone who disagrees with them as a "science denier" and launch social media crusades against them. Again, I'm trying to use a scalpel here and not a broad brush—it's the militant defenders of Scientism who have (like their religious counterparts) managed to turn some people off.
  
• Then there are what I like to "gut thinkers." These often genuinely good and kind-hearted people often make decisions (like whether to vaccinated their kids or not) based on emotion rather than strict reason. For them, there is nothing in the world more important than their child and the idea of their child being harmed by something they chose to do terrifies them. While they might not ever realize it, they operate in a similar fashion to those people in the "Trolley Problem" who refuse to pull the lever and save some lives because then someone would be dying as a direct result of their action. These people often hear conflicting stories (vaccines are safe vs vaccines cause illnesses) and it troubles their gut to the point where, rather than sitting down to rationalize a solution, they avoid the issue or default to whatever option requires the least amount of direct action.
  
• Lastly we might add those people who would otherwise accept scientific findings but who have one or two core beliefs or predispositions that can complicate things. For example, while we commonly label American fundamentalists as "anti-science," anyone working in that field knows from the work of the eminent George Marsden that they are rather ardently pro-Baconian science—meaning that they absolutely love empirical, directly observable science based on inductive reasoning. What they reject is deductive science and its long-range projections both forwards and backwards in time. I can say from experience that understanding this and acknowledging it in discussions with these people does wonders for the conversation and really disarms a lot of suspicion.
  
• I don't know that there is a perfect solution here, but one possible approach would be to start affirming "folk culture" within modern society. I'm literally just tossing this one out here and I expected it to be a bit controversial, but maybe it will stimulate some discussion. In essence, we (as modern, scientific Westerners) usually don't find it problematic to acknowledge, accommodate, and affirm indigenous forms of knowledge. In fact, we often condemn those who try to "Westernize" others for being colonial or destroying culture. For those who belong to tribes or ethnic enclaves, practicing non-scientific forms of knowledge is seen as a good thing by most of the intellectual elites in the West. But for those born into Western society, there is little socially-acceptable opportunity to seek out and develop alternative forms of knowledge. Perhaps creating a safe social arena for such a "folk culture" to re-emerge could give these above groups a healthy and socially legitimate avenue for exploring and fulfilling some of their deep unmet needs without the subversiveness that presently undermines a lot of the good work that science is doing.

It is a complex problem, what you are really discussing is how the entire education system is designed and the incentives in that system.

Fundamentally Trump is running on what kind of country you want America to be and in particular its societal make-up.

As a successful businessman the current situation is very favourable to you and I don't see why you would vote to change it. You can get access to good people at competitive rates (the best in China and India ~2 billion population). Taxes in the US can be managed quite well as a high net worth individual.

However many people in the US are not in your position and do not like the direction the country is heading in. They don't agree with large scale immigration and being undercut by immigrant labour. They feel the country is losing its identity.

In relation to your issues:
Hillary Clinton will result in more of the same policies. Trump is opposed to common core but you are right he has not given a detailed policy position on education. Trump is a candidate that will 'shake up the system' or at least try to. I have no doubt that the US workforce can be improved and better educated but this is not something that the president can change in four years. This requires 20 years planning with good policies.

Trump is a man who appreciates and rewards excellence and is more likely to implement policies that allow the excellent to succeed and not be held back. Who is more likely to agree with the following book?

http://www.amazon.com/Real-Education-Bringing-Americas-Schools/dp/0307405397/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463385582&sr=1-1

> Can you give me a source of someone who disproved him and summarize their findings?

Yeah. Just so we're clear, we're talking about Herrnstein & Murray's 1994 book, The Bell Curve. As I'm sure you already know, this book, and its co-author Charles Murray, are among Stefan Molyneux's favorite sources of information about inherited racial differences in IQ.

If you've only heard of The Bell Curve from right-wing pundits, then you may not know that the book generated a brief but intense debate when it was first published. The debate was intense because the authors' claims were controversial. And the debate was brief because everyone quickly realized that the book was trash. The authors probably already knew this, because they declined to publish any of their findings in peer-reviewed journals. In fact, they declined to permit any kind of review prior to the book's publication. In the world of science, this is extraordinarily shady behavior.

As far as I know, The Bell Curve hasn't been in press for at least ten years. Which is a good indication that no one (on the left or the right) cared at all about what Herrnstein and Murray had to say. And that was the state of affairs until a few years ago, when the book's sections on racial differences in IQ seemed to capture the imagination of Stefan Molyneux.

Anyways, for those engaged in the practice of statistics and/or social science, The Bell Curve is infamous as a case study in bad science. The key issues are as follows:

• General intelligence. Herrstein and Murray's conclusions are based on Spearman's notion of "general intelligence" or g, which dates back to 1904. The science has always been dodgy, and the psychometric validity of g was questioned long before The Bell Curve. Psychologists were already moving toward multi-dimensional models of intelligence by the time the book was written. The best critique of g is probably still Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man. The revised edition from 1996 has a couple chapters that directly disprove claims about g made by Herrstein and Murray.
  
  
• Statistical and psychometric methods. Complex data analysis always involves subjective decisions. It's the responsibility of the analyst to provide solid rationale for these decisions. Or in the absence of such rationale, to provide what's known as a "sensitivity analysis" to assess the impact of these decisions. Herrstein and Murray did neither of these. Instead, they analyzed data with arbitrary weighting schemes and with arbitrarily chosen subscores from an aptitude test called the AFQT. And they provided inadequate justification for their choice of weights and subscores. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their findings disappeared when different weights and subscores were used in the same analysis. (That work is documented in this book and in this paper.) These days, we'd call this "p-hacking." And it is a serious breach of scientific ethics.
  
  
• Intellectual laziness. No one disagrees that there are racial differences in IQ. That's obvious from the data. The key issue is whether these differences are due to genetic inheritance, or whether they are due to factors like income, education, and environment. In a rare moment of intellectual honesty, Herrnstein and Murray say: It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not justify an estimate. Which is a nice way of saying "please believe us even though we don't know what we're talking about." That's an acceptable thing to say in some contexts, but not when you're arguing in favor of IQ-based public policy. This quote is taken directly from the book, so I'm not going to provide a link.
  
  During the mid-to-late nineties, a lot of smart people wasted a lot of time disproving nonsense in the The Bell Curve. If you're curious about this stuff, I suppose you could start with this book from 1995.
  If you'd like to see a more recent genomics-based disproof of some of Herrstein and Murray's claims, here is a paper from three years ago. The upshot is that there is way more science opposed to the book than in favor of it. And this would be obvious to any "intellectual" who took a moment to learn about his or her sources. Of course I'm referring specifically to Stefan Molyneux, who has no reservations about accepting The Bell Curve at face value, despite the fact that it is full of outdated science, bad statistics, and sheer fantasy.
  
  Now do you understand why I question anyone who takes The Bell Curve seriously?

...and that is the current state of America. I didn't make it this way, but it is the situation. People want to be entertained and amused ('ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!'), even when it comes to serious matters like government. Neil Postman said it already, we are 'Amusing Ourselves to Death'.

don't do too much work, the article you linked was plenty. In any case, in the same situation as Boehner, Gingrich used all the leverage he had available to get things done. Since he had to work with a Democratic president, he had to forge cross-party alliance. They did objectively accomplish a lot together. I don't know if their partnership was as deep as this book claims, but I think saying Gingrich was only partisan undersells how two of the most powerful politicians of that time had to find common ground for the sake of progress.

https://www.amazon.com/Pact-Clinton-Gingrich-Rivalry-Generation/dp/0195322789

So is this considered illegal?
https://www.amazon.com/Decision-Points-George-W-Bush/dp/0307590631
It is intellectual property of the US Government yet President Bush has published "classified information" as well.

I'm from California and I see what you're saying, with people equating Trump to Hitler and things like that, which I personally think is insulting for people who were actually affected by the Holocaust and things like that. I've literally heard some people say that Trump was going to put gays and immigrants into internment camps once he was elected, which is possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

I think Facebook is purposely designed to be an echo-chamber, so that it guarantees people stay on there longer. The more you see people that agree with your views, the more likely you are to use their platform, the more you use their platform the more Facebook learns about your likes and dislikes and the better they can show you things that you like and remove things you dislike, and the cycle continues
Here are some interesting sources that talk about how social media acts as an echo chamber of sorts:?

https://www.amazon.com/Filter-Bubble-Personalized-Changing-Think/dp/0143121235

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/07/24/486941582/the-reason-your-feed-became-an-echo-chamber-and-what-to-do-about-it

?

A good book to read is, The Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen. He explains in depth the cycle of insurgency.

But to answer OPs question. Yes military action is vital to ending terrorism. I look at terrorist groups no differently as gangs in the USA. They exist mainly because no effective government or order exists in those areas. If we stopped patrolling lets say Baltimore would you expect an increase or decrease in gang activity? You’d see an increase like we did after the Freddie Grey incident which led to a wave of homicides.

So can we flood the area with cops/military? In the short term yes it’ll suppress the gangs/terrorist. But in the long term you have to address/fix why they exist.

You skipped over the part that listed the objectives and influences of Frankfurt School? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Influences_and_early_works

• Transition from entrepreneurial capitalism to monopoly capitalism and imperialism
  
• Socialist labor movement grows, turns reformist
  
• Emergence of the welfare state
  
• Freudian Theory
  
• Marxist Theory
  
• Culture Theory
  
  Would it help you sleep better at night if I called it Critical Theory instead?
  
  Knowledge is power. Go read a book and you will learn that pseudo-experts (a.k.a. Postmodern Intellectuals) are actually found in Social Sciences.
  
  > I see no problem with studying Marx and applying his ideas where they are logically applicable
  
  You seem to trust Wikipedia; Ever heard of Torches of Freedom?
  
  And since you missed the video the first time I sent it, here is Edward Bernays himself, a nephew of Freud, explaining where the idea came from.
  
  > If his ideas are useless, that will be determined as well.
  
  Not if people such as yourself refuse to pick up a book and put down the koolaid.

Okay, thats the meat of it I suppose. That also answers the other question I was hoping to as vis a vis what is you understanding how dominant political power functions to insulate ideology. All I can say is that in my world you are the dreaded reality of a neo-liberal society. The result of the deconstruction of the individual's democratic influence on politics through their labor or through community solely relying on the spectacle of a sham electoral process, but I don't think you really care what I think.

You may never see it yourself, but I think over the coming years you might get a peak under the curtain of how oppression functions. I guess try talking to people on the otherside? I have witnessed oppression, I've seen state violence with my own eyes so forgive me if I think this way of thinking is not grounded in reality. Here's a parting gift, Some books (and a movie) that will really piss you off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afBmN7icFRw
(I hope this movie doesn't turn you into a monster)

https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Ghost-Story-Arundhati-Roy/dp/1608463850

https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273

Keep doing you, never want to meet you

I finally started reading "The Tiger" by John Valliant.

Awhile ago someone posted a TIL and linked to an excerpt of the book, and it was riveting. So I bit the bullet and bought the book, but hadn't found the time to actually start it until a few days ago.

Thus far it has been phenomenal... I can't put it down. And it's added a few reasons to the list of Why you shouldn't fuck with tigers.

I reccomend you read this book

Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich
This is being made into a documentary check for release time.

I saw an interview he did about a book of his, couldn’t tell you when or where but the thesis is basically that Reagan was so successful compared to Goldwater because he moved to the center on economic issues.

https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compassion/dp/0062339338

if you are curious what destroys civilizations there's a book on the topic with some research / ideas on the topic https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revised/dp/0143117009

the thesis of that book is resource appetite exceeding supply causes a dramatic collapse.

so you favor a homogenous culture? ideologically or racially?

Our inventory is old, not as safe as we think it is and desperately needs updating.
read Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety and lose days of sleep afterwords wondering how we made it this far without an accidental detention.

The after effects, sure. But I don't think you can make the case that racism is the primary thing keeping black people down today. For example, take the period between the civil war and the civil rights act of 1964. Black people advanced socially in that time period much more quickly than in the period since the civil rights act, despite the fact discrimination was both legal and extremely common, at least in the south. This tells me there's something else going on. You can see a lot of the problems that plague the black community also plague some white communities, namely crime, poverty, and drug use. Charles Murray writes about said white communities here. And they appear to have similar causes, poor work ethic, single parenthood, and so on. As Thomas Sowell points out,, black culture and redneck culture aren't as dissimilar as you might think.