(Part 3) Top products from r/samharris

\> "What then about people who are giving donations in secret? How is that virtue signaling? Oh, I forgot, you don't answer direct questions - that's not your idea of a honest conversation, right?"

Signaling also explains the rarity of anonymous donations. In the 1990s, Glazer and Konrad calculated anonymous donations to non-profits on file at the Pittsburgh Business Library. They found that the highest anonymous donation rates were to the Pittsburgh Philharmonic at 1.29 percent, Carnegie Mellon University at 0.26 percent, and Yale Law School at 0.21 percent. I collected data on the International Rescue Committee’s donations in 2017, and less than 10 percent were anonymous. If people donate to charity, in large part to receive status benefits, it makes sense that few people donate anonymously.

Signaling explains the “watching eyes” effect. In experimental studies of donor behavior, researchers have consistently found that images of eyes nearby increase the probability of donating.10 This suggests “the existence of automatic cognitive mechanisms for detecting social gaze and regulating social behavior accordingly.”

Signaling can explain why so few donors research charities before contributing. As Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson describe in Elephant in the Brain, donors usually do not spend time researching which charity most effectively helps their cause of interest because doing so generates private information. The donor gets signaling credit when donating to a charity that is publicly known, such as large, wealthy charities with name recognition like Amnesty International, high-profile natural disasters, or local churches and schools well-known to an individual’s local community.

Even when donors research charities, they mainly do so to validate the donation they have already made. Only 6.5 percent of donors claim to do comparative research on how much charities are accomplishing before making a charitable contribution. Less than one percent of donors spend more than a day researching charities. In experimental settings, researchers have found that people often do not choose welfare-maximizing options, even when they are given information about effectiveness.

>And I don't pretend that I have anything more than a populist's understanding of these topics. I'm surely just scraping the surface of most topics, misunderstanding things, and I would never think I can be part of an academic conversation because I listen to a couple podcasts.

And I respect you understanding your own ignorance in a topic, because that shows intelligence. Philosophy, interestingly, is the subject that most makes me feel more stupid the more I've studied it, so you're definitely not alone! That being said, many people from the new atheist / "skeptic" community act like this gem

>Yeah, I just say "this is interesting, I'd even like to talk about it with strangers", but I acknowledge the second part of your sentence and am OK realizing my understanding is often limited and quite possibly wrong.


And I think you should use that understanding as motivation to maybe go directly to the sources that these podcasts engage with :) Philosophy is a subject with so many fantastic, but extremely accurate introductory books and I go back to them every now and then to refresh myself on the basics. My favorite example is Prof Simon Blackburn's - Think and another really good piece which goes into a lot of informal logic as well as the jargon: The Philosopher's Toolkit

I find both of those to give an excellent simplification of some of the bigger elements of philosophy without overstretching and misrepresenting their subject matter! :)

Ben Thompson explored Facebook's effect on elections two years ago:

> This [engaging content rising to the top] is a big problem for the parties as described in The Party Decides. Remember, in Noel and company’s description party actors care more about their policy preferences than they do voter preferences, but in an aggregated world it is voters aka users who decide which issues get traction and which don’t. And, by extension, the most successful politicians in an aggregated world are not those who serve the party but rather those who tell voters what they most want to hear.

As South China Morning Post points out, if your candidate selection process is hijacked, you only get the illusion of control.

Look at the recent Italian election. The recently formed Five Star Movement gained 31% of the votes earlier this month.

From Bloomberg:

> The five stars in its name represent the five issues it cares most about: public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, the right to internet access and environmentalism.

Meanwhile, Americans traffic the conventional wisdom that a vote for the environmentalist or libertarian fringe candidate will have an adverse affect on that voter's preferences. Every American, like me, who was offered Bush vs Kerry AND Clinton vs Trump in their voting lifetime has an obligation to evangelize something like the alternatives offered in /r/endFPTP.

Since you appear to be sincere, I will do my best to reciprocate the sincerity.

It is important to distinguish the difference between direct democracy and representative democracy and why the latter is more generally what people mean when talking about "democracy". Direct democracy is where the voters directly vote for policies. A representative democracy is where voters elect someone else to make decisions on their behalf. Direct democracy in the US is somewhat rare because some issues are too complex to be boiled down to yes/no answers. For instance, how should our healthcare system function? That is not something that can be put on a ballot with a yes/no question. In addition, there are some policy issues that require technical or classified/sensitive knowledge that might preclude the general public from being able to vote on.

These issues have been well understood for hundreds of years which is why, when the US government was designed by its founders, the primary mode chosen was representative democracy. There are still direct democracy aspects in the form of referendums, though (mostly conducted at the state level).

A few last notes: beyond just being a representative democracy, the power of the US government is divided so that no one person or branch can have too much power. This is very important to think about when we're talking about how political change happens in the US. It is not as simple as a voter can vote and a thing changes. Another thing to keep in mind is that, beyond the three branches of government, there are other influences involved in what the actual policy outcomes are. Lobbyists (which can be a both good or bad influence) and bureaucrats both have influence over what the actual policies are. Some people in the public policy world called policymakers + lobbyists + bureaucrats the "iron triangle" of the policy making process.

(Note: I know a lot of people read "lobbyist" and immediately think icky-icky thoughts (I do, too, to an extent) but this word can also refer to think tanks and other groups who you might consider expert level authorities on whatever the policy issue may be. For instance, if you're a scientist working on a revolutionary new technology that will help solve climate change, you could hire yourself a "lobbyist" to go up to the hill and plead your case. These cases are not the majority but they should not be discounted in the policy making process.)

Now on to a few points you made:

>I feel like a democracy that legitimizes opinions from infantile and ignorant citizens is a large disservice to our civilization.

This is an ancient criticism of democracy (see Plato's Republic, for instance, in which Socrates calls democracy the worst of all possible governments). It is also an issue that is frequently studied by scholars of public policy, government studies, political science, etc.. "The Policy Making Process" by Charles Lindblom is a nice, very short primer on some of these dilemmas.

Two questions are immediately self-evident: 1) How big is the problem of uninformed electorate? and 2) what are the alternatives?

For 1), the problem is concerning but not staggering. But, more importantly, it can be addressed. It is why democratic countries should require history and civics as part of fundamental education. Good education is essential for a democratic society. In addition, a free and open press is also crucial for a democratic society (to ensure that good information is widely available and accessible). Generally speaking, more education translates to more civic engagement, lower crime rates, and higher lifetime satisfaction. So there's ample reasons why democratic countries should focus significant resources on educating their populations.

For 2), the alternatives are not better, especially in the long run. There are some compelling arguments for monarchies (Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes) or technocracies (The Republic by Plato) but there's very serious, much more concerning problems with these approaches. For monarchies, concentrating power in a single person can seem compelling when compared to ineffectual or slow moving governments. A monarch can snap his/her finger and, boom, issue solved. This, however, assumes a benevolent/good monarch. Suppose you end up a tyrannical monarch? Things go tits up real quick. For technocracies, everything depends on how you select your technocrats. How does one define "smart" and is it the only thing we're concerned with as a society?

Over the long run, in non-democratic societies, the ruling class may have very different views/aims/goals than those of the general population and there is no mechanism to keep these two in alignment. The more "generations" of leadership there are, where the ruling class (who holds all the power, may veer further and further away from the general interests of society and more concentrated on their own interests (like staying in power, making sure they live comfortable/luxurious life, etc.) while the general population suffers. This is one reason why democratic societies are, despite their failings, better than non-democratic societies.

>We have to remember that the IQ distribution of humans follows a binomial model meaning that half of the damn planet is below a 100 IQ. Now of course IQ is not a perfect metric for one's competence in determining suitable figures to run our state - but generally, I would think yes.
>
>...
>
>But despite this huge ethical violation, it would almost always result in a more equipped entity to run the state, which in turn betters our future.

I agree IQ is not perfect (far from it, imo) and actually misleading about how "smart" a person is or can be. Or whether being "IQ smart" even be useful for running a government. I therefore absolutely disagree with it being a basis for who gets selected for public office.

I can think a litany of issues with selecting public officials by IQ: 1) There are lots of IQ tests available online (old MENSA tests, newer tests, etc.) where, given sufficient time to study/understand, most folks can do quite well on these tests. 2) How well you perform on these tests can vary dramatically from day to day, hour to hour. Consider: how well would you do on an IQ test after waking up or shortly before bed? How can we be confident that the IQ test is administered at someone's moment of peak performance? 3) The abstract questions asked on IQ tests may simply not apply to the requirements of a public official. I think this is a problem with IQ's general validity as a measure of intelligence. 4) There is a very well known relationship between IQ and health and nutrition. It therefore is not just a measure of intelligence alone. 5) It would ultimately give whoever writes/grades these IQ tests enormous political power. These would be the gatekeepers for political power which would be a very corrupting situation to be in.

Sarcasm and scientific articles are a terrible mix. It supercharges whatever biases the author already has, while making them take more hard-line stances on claims than they often should.

I get that this article is really entertainment, but if anyone wants a fair criticism (that is still effective at shutting down some of Peterson's arguments) take a look at Sense & Nonsense by Laland & Brown.

<300 page book that is pretty accessible and summarizes the current state of knowledge on what parts of human behaviour are evolved vs dependent on environment.

TBH I wish everyone who wants to discuss this topic would read it, as some science is bunk, but some is definitely not. And the topic is very controversial, so there are TONs of hit/smear pieces out there on both sides.

Hitchens never moved to the right, at least not in his professional life (he did spend some time in a Cuban work commune during his Oxford days, after all). Same with Sam. Their positions are almost entirely consistent with classical liberalism.

Don't confuse today's Left (capital 'L') with traditional leftism.

The use of the term 'neo conservative' has become a pejorative on the Left for anyone who does not take an absolutist view on the illegitimacy of US military operations globally. It is a use 'neo conservative' that is almost entirely divorced from the political philosophy of neo conservatism (which is outlined in a fascinating book by Francis Fukuyama).

Hitch in his own words 1

Hitch in his own words 2

I like this Hitch quote in particular (From the second video), on the rise of jihadism:

>"You couldn't really have a more clear confrontation between let's at least say left liberalism and the right. And the Left says, 'well, I don't know... what about East Timor?'... This is disgraceful. To try and evade, to try and sit out a moment like that really invites historical condemnation."

(I believe the East Timor bit was a jab at the whataboutism of Chomsky and his faction of the Left).

> Atheism now has a strong foothold in western society.

Blatantly false, unless you consider approximately 3-7% of the population explicitly identifying as atheist as a "strong foothold":

• In Canada: "Christians, representing 67.3% of the population, are followed by people having no religion with 23.9% of the total population." Those explicitly identifying as "atheist" were a tiny fraction of the 23.9% identifying as having no religion, which can be found in the statscan data.
  
• In the United States: "According to the Pew Research Center, in 2014, 22.8% of the American population does not identify with a religion, including atheists (3.1%)".
  
• In Europe, numbers are slightly larger: "According to another poll about religiosity in the European Union from 2012 by Eurobarometer, 16% are Non believer/Agnostic, and 7% are Atheist".
  
  ---
  
  > (Peterson on Belief) It’s not in dispute that human beings are a biological product of an evolutionary history.
  
  Although Peterson incorporates evolutionary arguments in his work, he also clearly has pretensions to a dualist position on the nature of being and consciousness: From an interview with Peterson https://youtu.be/07Ys4tQPRis?t=814
  
  > You can say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the material world, and you can make a perfectly coherent set of tools out of those presuppositions, but those set of tools do not cover everything that you need, and it's no more viable as an explanation than the explanation that, no, consciousness is somehow fundamental to being, and of course being is different than material reality.
  
  ---
  
  > The new atheists, the four horsemen (Harris, Hitch, Dawkins, Dennett) that think the belief in god is false, and religion corrupt and outdated.
  
  Although they all share the common belief that God does not exist, there are some actual differences in their positions. Dennett, for example, argues we should teach religion in schools, but he wants it presented as objectively as possible. That is, by providing the facts about all religions without any spin or bias to any one particular religion. https://youtu.be/DTepA-WV_oE?t=233 . Also see is book Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

> Andrew Yang--who is openly advocating for a saner politics--is getting smeared by hyperbolic, fear mongering, and poorly informed media outlets.

See, I'm not so sure. Yang himself is engaged in hyperbolic fear mongering. No doubt inspired by Trump himself, he's pushing a very extreme agenda of populism and identity politics. That's why Yang writes about "the Great Displacement" and why his book is called The War on Normal People and it is also why Yang's message echoes well with the rants of actual right-wing populists like Tucker Carlson. Let's be frank: these guys are all selling the same poison. At best Yang is interested in expanding the consumer market.

So, quelle surprise, Yang's extremist populism is going to be called out for being... extreme populism. And while Yang may take calculated risks to appeal to those groups who like extreme populism, the down-side is that people are going to accuse him of... appealing to extreme populists. None of this is particularly disturbing.

Anyways it will be interesting to see if Americans will ever find the language to unite and overthrow their capitalist overlords. I very much doubt it but it's interesting to watch figures like Yang and Sanders test out words and phrases.

I think the onus is not on me - but on the person preaching the "Green Deal" to the rest of the nation. If you are going to preach - it is up to you to do everything in your power to be as pure as you possibly can be.

So I am ready to scrutinize the preacher and to nail him and her on any possible point of hypocrisy.

And yes it matters to me - because I believe that progressives are generally phonies who value virtue signalling and group solidarity above anything else.

If the word went out that global cooling was the real enemy - progressives would do a 180 turn and start preaching about that.

Wait a minute - that's actually what in fact DID happen. Global cooling was the disaster du jour in the 1970s through maybe the mid-80s.

And yes - I do consider myself a strong environmentalist.
And finally, you need to tell your fellow progressives that their support of illegal immigration is severely impacting all environmental issues in the USA, including greenhouse gases.

The details are laid out in the book "How Many Is Too Many?: The Progressive Argument for Reducing Immigration"
https://www.amazon.com/How-Many-Too-Progressive-Immigration/dp/022619065X

> He frequently quotes Indian culture and instruments

I'm sure it helps that his wife (of Indian heritage),
Pia N. Malaney
, has written on The Quality of Life in Rural Asia.

Have you ever read Yuval Harari's book, Sapiens? This isn't really an answer to your question, but based on this post, I think you would like it.

>You've pulled numbers out of the air, basically

That's strange, I would've imagined you disproving my figures since I made them up. That would certainly be a lot more convincing than endlessly repeating "utopian" and "data driven" while hiding behind Pinker.

edit: speaking of utopia, you should read this book. Pinker wrote a glowing recommendation for it. https://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Realists-Build-Ideal-World/dp/0316471917/

> Citation fucking needed.

https://www.amazon.com/Human-Accomplishment-Pursuit-Excellence-Sciences/dp/0060929642

Extraordinary. Just read it. Book in reference is In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy by Frédéric Martel.

One Article

Another


She got Asylum in the Netherlands (1992)by falsely claiming that she was being forced into a marriage in Somalia. (Her family was middle class and lived in Kenya). She was able to get Asylum because she said she was fleeing directly from Somalia. She rode her story to Dutch Parliment in 2003. She was outed in 2006. She fled to the United States where she took up a post at the AEI (The American Enterprise Institue, YES THE SAME NEO CONSERVATIVE think tank that paid Murray to write the Bell Curve. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried, and I have an active imagination.)

TIL thanks u/bloodsvscrips

This part has drama written all over it (lots of edits to the wikipedia page so fair warning it’s contentious). link

Wikipedia has this book listed as the source for the comments about her family life being amicable. It’s written by a Harvard professor.

She admitted to lieing about her name, date of birth, and the way in which she got to the neatherlands but denies other accusations. She resigned from Dutch Parliment shortly before it began proceedings to remove her.

Former Vice President AL Gore wrote a letter on her behalf when an honorary diploma from Brandeis University was rescinded for some of her previous speech. He defended her right to condemn Islam Wholesale.

My Hot take: Islam is shit... we all know that. There is a good chance that she lied to attain fame in the wake of 9/11.

Edit: The video shows her Muslim school and her brothers Christian school that they went to. That puts serious doubt on the family being radical. That appears to be a fact. Zembla the TV series looks legit.

> Can we get Nawaz, Harris and Murray to have a conversation about this?

Throw in also Nicholas Wade, the author of A Troublesome Inheritance, the book I'm reading right now, which provides nuanced insights into how different human populations evolved differently and how those differences are reflected in the genome, while also subject to continued evolution and fluidity.

> "Why arrest a murderer? It's a fools errand to expect to end murder."

That might be the weakest analogy i've ever encountered and I hope you'll admit it wasn't very thought out.

"Believe it or not, being in this country "illegally" is not a crime in and of itself"

It is a violation of federal immigration law to remain in the country without legal authorization, but this violation is punishable by civil penalties, not criminal. Chief among these civil penalties is deportation or removal, where an unlawful resident may be detained and removed from the country.


Nice misdirection.


I have put myself in their shoes and my views remain the same, I think it's you who are being limited in your thinking. Allow me to suggest what I think is a valuable book:

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

> The 'Death' is clearly inflammatory but not meant to represent 'White replacement' or anything, just the gradual shift of European 'culture' in the face of immigration.

The title of Murray’s book is a reference to ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England’ by George Dangerfield. Plenty of other authors have referenced it in titles.

Dangerfield’s book is one of the most famous political books written in/ about the U.K. during twentieth century. The ‘death’ in Murray’s title, therefore, isn’t to be taken as literally and wouldn’t have been intended to inflame.

Ok, for one, most of psychology has been debunked. This guy touches on it https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_ambridge_10_myths_about_psychology_debunked

Ink blots are bogus, behavioral psychology can not accurately predict much other than the extremely obvious. Gayness was once considered a mental disorder even though now they've found gay genes. And much of Freud was wrong about everything and up until neuroscience, psychology has been more of an art than science. When you look back at history, you see people making an initial down payment on a behavior they find to be separate and run with it until you have whole books written on initial false assumptions. Kind of like if you believe in the afterlife, that leads to believing in God and that leads to believing much of the bible and that leads to extreme irrational beliefs. A snow ball of falseness with just one initial belief.

And then there is the documented history of racists, homophones, and sexist psychologists. In this book, they show just how strange and barbaric the beliefs of most of psychology was, not only as it was study but as a practice. https://www.amazon.com/Imbeciles-Supreme-American-Eugenics-Sterilization/dp/0143109995

In fact, you find the most racist "rats" in the science of psychology, because psychological findings are so easy to manipulate, unlike chemical reactions or physics, there is more room for eugenics and supremacist to fudge numbers or be extremely bias in their findings.

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Cattell_Controversy.html?id=Ry48mQEACAAJ

Talks about one of the most influential psychologists that turned out to be a pseudoscience eugenicists.

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/65rwe7dm9780252074639.html

He talks about the Pioneer fund, that happens to of funded Murray for the Bell Curve, and that is the guy that Sam had on.

Only recently has psychology been refined to the point that it produces some legit studies of significance, that can be replicated and of value, but if you look closer at the not so distant past, it was pretty much a breeding ground for racist elites. Murray is just continuing the tradition. OR that is at least the counter argument at the moment. I am open to Murray being correct, but I will not swallow this bitter pill, as easily as Sam. Now you can see that this is not at all like simple Climate change deniers of science. This is challengers to a very questionable book.

In that post /u/Bernardito recommends "War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam", who was described as:

> Rather than pointing the finger at the "grunts" fighting a dirty war on the ground, Greiner argues that the responsibility for these atrocities extends all the way up to the White House and the Pentagon. The escalation of violence on the ground can be attributed to several factors: a U.S. political leadership afraid for the United States to lose its credibility and unable, against better advice, to stop the war; a military that devised a strategy of attrition based on "body counts" as the only way to defeat an enemy skilled in unconventional warfare; officers who were badly trained, lacking in motivation and interested only in furthering their careers; soldiers who realized they were utterly disposable and sought to empower themselves through random killing. The result was the torture, rape, maiming, and murder of countless Vietnamese civilians.

... so saying that he's "whitewashing the US military" is a bit of a stretch. He's just saying that book isn't that great, and recommended a better one.