IGX

Mentioned this in Bux's JP thread. I think several of you would find him interesting. He's butted heads with Sam Harris quite publicly and is a real rational voice on matters of politics and what divides Liberal and Conservative mindsets.

Irrefutably sharp and an outspoken and clear minded critic of the effects of Social Justice activism on campuses.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqUtgFBWezE[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOu_8yoqZoQ[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWgM2gBRQrA[/youtube]

Checked out the first video while hanging out in the parking lot, waiting for the Jiu Jitsu school to open. I like this guy. Seems like a solid voice of reason.

I've seen him speak before. He's quite good.

Good stuff. I'd forgotten about Haidt and need to check out more of his stuff. His takedown of Harris a few years ago (where he compared him unfavorably to Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck) was hilarious.

On it

I have followed Haidt since his 2012 book. This is the highest level discussion with Haidt I have found. Key takeaway:


‘The most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable.’


http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalr ... haidt.html

This from Steve Sailer is very good as well:

"Haidt sometimes gets this, pointing out:

For American liberals…Anyone who blames victims for their own problems or who displays or merely excuses prejudices against sacralized victim groups can expect a vehement tribal response.

In the abstract, most liberals would say that efforts to protect children from violence aren’t wrong. But outside of The Righteous Mind, liberals (like most people) don’t think abstractly. They think in terms of “Who? Whom? Who is the designated victim group in this situation? Whose crimethink is ritually polluting us, like an untouchable’s shadow falling upon a Brahmin?”


You might imagine that potential crime victims would be a group worthy of sympathy, but they are not a “sacralized” bloc. They are just random losers. If they weren’t losers, they’d live in a better neighborhood.

Haidt almost stumbles upon the explanation for what distinguishes liberals from conservatives when he observes:

…political scientist Don Kinder summarizes…“In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’” Political opinions function as “badges of social membership.”...Our politics is groupish, not selfish.

As Avenue Q pointed out, everybody is a little bit groupish. Yet how do individuals decide whom to be groupish about?

What Haidt never quite gets across is that conservatives typically define their groups concentrically, moving from their families outward to their communities, classes, religions, nations, and so forth. If Mars attacked, conservatives would be reflexively Earthist. As Ronald Reagan pointed out to the UN in 1987, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” (Libertarians would wait to see if the Martian invaders were free marketeers.)

In contrast, modern liberals’ defining trait is making a public spectacle of how their loyalties leapfrog over some unworthy folks relatively close to them in favor of other people they barely know (or in the case of profoundly liberal sci-fi movies such as Avatar, other 10-foot-tall blue space creatures they barely know).

As a down-to-Earth example, to root for Manchester United’s soccer team is conservative…if you are a Mancunian. If you live in Portland, Oregon, it’s liberal.

This urge toward leapfrogging loyalties has less to do with sympathy for the poor underdog (white liberals’ traditional favorites, such as soccer and the federal government, are hardly underdogs) as it is a desire to get one up in status on people they know and don’t like."

bennyonesix wrote:As Ronald Reagan pointed out to the UN in 1987, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

A big-ass city-detroying weather-influencing asteroid has our planet's name on it, we just don't know when it is coming yet. We do have the technology now to find it far enough in advance to have a major world-wide response before it hits. I'm interested in what that response will be. Maybe in our lifetimes.

They'll be no arguing over it like global warming.

Same but different with Steven Pinker, who uses a good bit of Haidt in 'The Moral Instinct' from the NYT a few years ago. I've used it in my Global Issues class.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magaz ... ogy-t.html

Pinker made a blog post a few weeks ago to a race is real argument. Heh

bennyonesix wrote:Pinker made a blog post a few weeks ago to a race is real argument. Heh

Of course race is real, and of course it's fascinating how many things we assumed were not fixed are in fact deeply rooted in genetics. Maybe once we sort out epigenetics that'll be an even bigger set of semi-fixed traits.

but then, I'm always a little bemused at what people latch onto as being informative about that discussion. In science. we've barely mastered the alphabet and already people are pinning their some of their darkest hopes on research that no one is doing...which they should be able to do of course. But it's still funny.

I was just laughing at the balls it took.

France doesn't collect racial data on citizens but they test new borns for sickle cell if both parents are from regions exposed to the underlying disease: 75% of babies in Paris were tested last year; 39% of the country.

bennyonesix wrote:I was just laughing at the balls it took.

France doesn't collect racial data on citizens but they test new borns for sickle cell if both parents are from regions exposed to the underlying disease: 75% of babies in Paris were tested last year; 39% of the country.

They should test everybody for sickle cell trait.

Jfc

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-healt ... healthNews
http://www.hematology.org/Patients/Anem ... Trait.aspx
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/ar ... ct/2600468

Bought the The Righteous Mind years ago and it has been in my "to read" stack ever since. I'll make sure it's at the head of the queue.

Here's a timely bit of work on Business Ethics.

http://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-016-0027

Also, his conversations with Sam Harris were both very good. The two are not terribly as far apart as religious apologists would love to paint.

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/evolving-minds

bennyonesix wrote:I have followed Haidt since his 2012 book. This is the highest level discussion with Haidt I have found. Key takeaway:


‘The most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable.’


http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalr ... haidt.html

I don't know where he's getting that, but it's not biologically heritable. In other words, it's NURTURE not NATURE.

Take the most vehement Christian out there. Fuck with time so they get raised in, say, Saudi Arabia...NOW THEY ARE A MUSLIM.

This is historical...actually, take a Christian boy, kidnap him, figure out he's a good candidate for the Jannisaries, then indoctrinate him in Islam, weaponry, deportment, etc, and you have some of the fiercest islamic warriors in history.

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:

bennyonesix wrote:I have followed Haidt since his 2012 book. This is the highest level discussion with Haidt I have found. Key takeaway:


‘The most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable.’


http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalr ... haidt.html

I don't know where he's getting that, but it's not biologically heritable. In other words, it's NURTURE not NATURE.

Take the most vehement Christian out there. Fuck with time so they get raised in, say, Saudi Arabia...NOW THEY ARE A MUSLIM.

This is historical...actually, take a Christian boy, kidnap him, figure out he's a good candidate for the Jannisaries, then indoctrinate him in Islam, weaponry, deportment, etc, and you have some of the fiercest islamic warriors in history.

He's not saying specific religious doctrines are heritable. The predisposition towards a conservative mindset or a liberal mindset appears to be and that may manifest itself in different situations with religiosity. B16 sexaplem of Man U fans in the UK...tend establishment, but Man U fans in Portland lean progressive based on how that aligns with what they find sacred. To a UK fan, Man Us the the old solid standby. To the Portland fan is represent progressive, European values of futbol and a common denominator to bring people together (so they can riot)

Same totem, sacred for different reasons.

put another way...everything we find significantly measurably different between people has a significant genetic component.

HAIDT: Not fundamentally different, but different in predispositions. The most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable. The heritability coefficients vary between 0.3 and 0.6, or 30 to 60 percent of the variance, under some assumptions, can be explained by the genes. It’s the largest piece of variance we can explain.

If you and I were twins separated at birth and raised in different families, our families would pick which religions we were raised in and they would pick how often we go to church or synagogue, but once we’re out on our own, we’re going to both converge on our brain’s natural level of religiosity.

Taking that quote above, I don't think it's anything more than a hypothesis, psychology as a science is so ridiculously soft, it makes creationism seem hard.

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:Taking that quote above, I don't think it's anything more than a hypothesis, psychology as a science is so ridiculously soft, it makes creationism seem hard.

Well it would be entirely consistent with IGX best practice to dismiss an entire field of research about which we know little based on a paragraph taken from a phone interview.

OTOH, you're doing a smashing job of exemplifying his hypothesis that nearly nobody ever changes their mind once it's set.

Lol

Double LOL. A fundamental assumption in psychology was proven to be unfounded last year. Now maybe you have a point or maybe your proximity bias is showing

Blaidd Drwg wrote:

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:Taking that quote above, I don't think it's anything more than a hypothesis, psychology as a science is so ridiculously soft, it makes creationism seem hard.

Well it would be entirely consistent with IGX best practice to dismiss an entire field of research about which we know little based on a paragraph taken from a phone interview.

OTOH, you're doing a smashing job of exemplifying his hypothesis that nearly nobody ever changes their mind once it's set.

You're both kinda right. Haidt can't quantify or locate centers of action yet and he does use vague terms. On the other hand, there is no doubt that human behavior is predominantly conditioned by genetics: as shown by twin studies etc.

I dislike the guy because he's a hardcore neoliberal eugenicist sanguine if not giddy about the demographic replacement of whites. He knows mexicans and dots and afreekans invariably elect Left govs and he thinks his elite can control them.