I was reading over Esther’s shoulder as she read the ridiculous NRx article that this quote was from, and right after that quote was possibly the worst evolutionary just-so story I have ever heard:

Thousands of winters of scarce, sparse prey and harsh terrain culled a significant percentage of men.  Lack of easy gathering opportunities neutered the production capacity of women, forcing them to depend on the remaining men for food sources.  As men could no longer resort to a fuck and chuck breeding strategy because their children wouldn’t survive in a dearth environment solely on the efforts of the mother, heavy male parental investment emerged as Darwin’s winning gene, keeping the oversupplied ratio of spermatazoa to ovum in deadly check.  As men invested heavily in their mates, they chose fewer of them.  Pressure laid on women to capture a man’s attention and sweat for a long time, not just for the three and half minutes needed to obtain his genes.  Geographic isolation prevented interbreeding with other races less adapted to beauty.

The ugly women went barren and beauty flourished.

The writer here is (as he clarifies later) talking specifically about Scandinavian winters, which he thinks produced uniquely beautiful women, which, OK, let’s just sidestep all that because –

He’s saying that women became really physically attractive in order to attract long-term male parental investment, rather than just the sexual attraction necessary for copulation?!?!?!!

Like the usual critique of evolutionary hypotheses like this is that all the details are underdetermined by existing evidence, making it possible to paint in whichever details are necessary to come to whatever conclusion one has in mind.  But this one doesn’t even paint in the right details!

You had one job

ETA: this seems to be standard ev psych (see Trivers), so I guess the egg’s on my face.

People keep mentioning “the rationalists hang out with white nationalists” when having “rationalists: good or bad?” debates, but they never specify who the white nationalists are, and who hangs out with them, and they don’t call anyone on any specific instances of this behavior.

My social circle includes a lot of rationalists, and if there are white nationalists in my social circle, I want to know because I want to (1) avoid them and (2) re-evaluate the people who hang out with them.

Who are the white nationalists?  Do I know them?  Do I know their friends?

@reddragdiva

Is it just me or is the RationalWiki page for JayMan kind of offensive?

It’s about a black guy who’s into human bio-diversity, AKA scientific racism.  I think it is possible to disapprove of this without saying things like “He may be regarded as a prime example of Stockholm Syndrome.”

It just seems like if the usual line about privilege and listening to the oppressed is true, it has to be true no matter what the oppressed say.  If you adopt “listen to what black people say about race" you can’t throw that out the window once they’re not saying things you agree with; in that case you aren’t really listening, just using them as rhetorical props.

JayMan is reporting part of the black experience, just as Thomas Sowell is, just as Clarence Thomas is, just as Carol Swain is, et. al.  You may not agree with these people, but their views have to go into the bin along with everything else.

ozymandias271:

nostalgebraist:

I’m reading about V. S. Naipaul (cw: racial slurs, racism) and it’s somehow strange to see a famous artist who’s so openly a raging, bigoted, cheating/wife-beating/etc. asshole

Like, there are all these debates about this or that author’s politics and behavior and whether it’s defensible and whether it matters, and then there’s Naipaul, who’s just like, “hey, what’s up, I am unambiguously an utterly terrible human being”

(Also, since he is unambiguously not white, he might be a useful example of the possible limits of the prejudice-plus-power definition?)

I think the correct way to interpret prejudice-plus-power definitions is that POC can be racist, they just can’t be racist against white people. 

(Although to be honest there are some instances of anti-white-people racism that seem to be legitimate problems– like, one of the strongest advocates of “you can be racist against white people” I’ve met was a mixed-race ex of mine who got beat up in middle school for being white and in high school for being Mexican, and felt like both of those were racist. I mean, I disagree with him, I think I have tremendous white privilege and would continue to have it even if I had been beaten up for being white, but it is not as eye-rollingly stupid as the concept of “cisphobia”.) 

I mean, that interpretation makes the most sense to me, I just don’t see how you can get to it from “prejudice-plus-power.”  Or, I guess what I mean is, the usual prejudice-plus-power stuff I see about race tends to flatten everything out to “white people have power over PoC.”  If you want to call Naipaul’s remarks about black people “racist” given prejudice-plus-power, you have to say something about people of Indian ethnicity having structural power over people of African ethnicity (in Britain?), and while I could imagine someone making a case for this, it certainly isn’t one of “the usual assumptions.”

More broadly, I just think it gets at something about how the “structural power” definition just doesn’t quite fit the way people want to use the word “racist” – the idea that Naipaul’s remarks and views are somehow technically “not racist” because of Naipaul’s ethnicity feels absurd.  He’s espousing bog-standard anti-black attitudes, and those anti-black attitudes are racist, period.  Remove the structural power of the speaker, and they’re … yep, still racist.

(How this all applies to his comments about other Indians is of course another kettle of fish.)

(via bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190)