#theunitofcaring

my post quoted her on the specific things she said happened and discussed them. I am unclear on what a post that would discuss the actual facts of what happened would look like, if that doesn't count.

So 1) I support your desire to not engage a ton with this particular issue, as it’s horribly toxic and most of the discourse around it is toxic. Of all the blog posts I expected you to feel obliged to interact with, I didn’t think my vaguepost would be one of them.  Feel free to ignore my OP and this reply, the world does not need more Kathy Forth discourse and especially not from people it causes pain.

2) Your post was definitely better than average on this subject. (Like most of your posts on most subjects.) So to some degree I wasn’t talking about you.

3) But if I am to be completely honest, I was somewhat talking about your post, as my thought example for “someone I agree with but still isn’t engaging with the Real.” And yes, your post quoted the specific allegations. My read of the post was that it moved smoothly from that to “and this was dealt with properly and now I’m moving on without any commentary of that.” Maybe other people read it differently, we can disagree. It just seemed an up front way to, well, get them out of the way before talking about the rationalist community more generally.

You can keep the logic of the entire post with basically any events filled in there, so long as you still believed “and they were dealt with by the community.” It’s not telling me much about what you think about the events.

For comparison, someone’s (much blunter) post was “how could someone possibly commit suicide over these trivial events?” It was not a very nice or sensitive post and I would not recommend it. But it was a post that only made sense for specific facts, and could not be written about other sets of facts.

people who care about this keep kosher and will not eat gifts of non-kosher food anyway

(like, there are definitely lots of people who care about this, but the overlap between 'care about this' and 'don't care about kashrut' is very small)

  Would Amenta have independent assisted living...

That really depends on what it is we care about. Obviously, ability to make money isn’t a valuable trait in itself. I know plenty of greens who believe that markets are flawed because they select for fairly arbitrary things like having lucrative interests or looking great in front of a camera instead of raw intelligence, but the degree to which we as a caste overvalue intelligence is part and parcel of the same pathological cultural complex. 

Don’t get me wrong - I certainly wouldn’t turn down another ten IQ points, but I really doubt the benefit would outweigh the crippling insecurity that everyone seems to develop at some point in the green school system. I’m smart for a green, and I’m still sort of a wreck. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to for someone to know they’ll never do valuable work, or possibly even have children, because they’re only slightly above average. 

And that’s the tradeoff we have to make. The benefit of raising the average IQ by ten points isn’t that it’ll make the average green so much more productive, it’s that it massively increases our chances of getting one or two more real, one-in-a-hundred-million geniuses. By far the most compelling argument I’ve ever heard for eugenic credit allocation is that we need scientists who can find a way to get us off this rock. If I could be sure that that’s the limiting factor on our faster-than-light travel program and we had a reliable way to breed for them, I’d be all for it. 

I’d suggest some kind of partial permission system for greens, but we all know how that tends to work in practice. Permissions based on a competitive examination of some kind might be a better bet - at the very least, they shouldn’t be administered by blues - but that still doesn’t get at the core thing I’m worried about. It still leaves us with a toxic cult of usefulness, except now everyone who isn’t a physicist gets to feel worthless. It would be worth it if it would make the whole credit system obsolete in a couple generations, but that’s it. 

We shouldn’t have to care about intelligence of productivity or usefulness. We need to recognize how genuinely awful it is that we’re in a situation where we have to make decisions on these metrics about who gets to exist. Useless people still deserve to be alive, and the fact that we can’t let them is a fucking tragedy. Personally I’m a fan of the Voan system, but I don’t think a strict two children per couple rule would be popular here for any number of reasons - greens are more likely to have more flexible family structures, for one thing, and most people at least want the option of earning more children. 

while I think the government deciding whether or not private companies have the right to fire people under overbroad legal theories like the one put forward in that article is horrifying and I cannot overstate how strongly I oppose it

theunitofcaring replied to your post: What do you think of James Damore comparing Google...

your legal theory applies to those statements also. that matters, and it is not the same as saying those statements are equivalent. propose a legal theory under which the government can punish Google for this firing but not for tons of totally reasonable firings and I’d listen

theunitofcaring replied to your post: What do you think of James Damore comparing Google...

but it doesn’t exist! you either get a world where companies can choose not to employ people for a wide variety of reasons, some fair and some unfair, or you get a world where the government blunders around imposing its idea of justice on everyone at enormous cost to freedom of association

theunitofcaring replied to your post: What do you think of James Damore comparing Google...

I am so so furious at calls for Google to face legal action for this. It would be an outrageous wrong and I am so happy to live in a country that doesn’t allow it.

theunitofcaring replied to your post: What do you think of James Damore comparing Google...

(also, harassment was not the legal justification for firing him? they don’t need and did not provide one)

theunitofcaring replied to your post: What do you think of James Damore comparing Google...

(harassment was a thing a lot of non-Google HR people talked about, I think mistakenly)

Jame Damore said he was fired for "perpetuatung gender stereotypes". At-will employment means Google doesn't have to give a reason for firing James, but if James makes a convincing case Google fired him for an illegal reason then they're on the hook for breaking the law. In practice, this means Google has to give an alternate reason, and make a better case for it.

Additionally, I'd be fine with with freedom of association, if it was freedom of association for all. Google is under investigation for alleged pay discrimination, which is the government meddling in people being able to work for how much they want. This stuff is one sided. I see no point in unilaterally disarming while a more politically powerful ideological coalition is hammering away with goverment intervention.

I don't live in my ideal world, and I don't make policy decisions based on a near-ideal world. I make decisions that make local improvements, because nothing else is simple enough to survive the chaos of life. The goverment has already murdered a bunch of rights, so the best I can argue for (until actually restoring them is on the table) is for impartial application of the violations.

Right, this has only come up in threads.  Typical is that the police will collect evidence, they’ll present it to a blue judge and their expert staff, the staff and judge will look it over and then the judge or possibly a staffperson (yellow) interviews you, and the judge will decide what happens to you.  Anitam in particular is very good at incentives and you will get a reduced sentence for things they want to encourage in criminals, like turning yourself or conspirators in.  All of this happens fast - they consider speedy trials extremely important for deterrence, for not leaving people hanging (…so to speak), and for not occupying the prison system with expensive probable criminals, which means they compromise on some thoroughness and appeals and such but it is absolutely inexcusable for a case to languish in any ambiguous status for weeks, let alone months or years.

It is reasonably well accepted that this process has an error rate - they are making a deliberate tradeoff between that and speed, after all - so while it might go badly for a judge who was found to have particularly high rates of corruption or “yeah I think she has a guilty face” going on, there’s no major pressure to defend a conviction that is overturned for some reason (cops lost the evidence folder and then found it, staffperson found to have been taking especially unacceptable bribes, someone else is found to have committed the crime instead of you) and then there’s some process of recompense for that.

hmm, what makes you say that? you don't think there's a principled difference and you think efforts to find one are just kind of hair-splitting? I'm not sure there is one, I just think 'we should respect self-identifications' is a lousy argument for either

A principled difference sounds like it’s focusing too much on the intent of the speaker. I trust that such explanations are based in intellectual rigour. Otherwise you wouldn’t write nearly so many words on it.

But it doesn’t feel universal. It doesn’t feel like someone would make this particular balance of explanatory factors sometime outside this very moment. I can’t see it being made in 2003 for instance, and I’m skeptical it will fit with how people see race and gender a decade hence.

I should say I was responding both to this post and your follow up post. It’s absolutely great to understand people’s underlying concerns and recognize “constantly questioning what gender means really” often gets interpreted as “I don’t think society should support you when you’re vulnerable.” But there has to be a line between that and “this is true whether it is useful for not.”