Snargorf's comments

I've actually found it works a lot better if both people just allow the contentious statements. Just let each person say, "Oh that's ridiculous because..." and the other replies with "You're totally missing this point..." Even if people raise their voice or scoff, it's fine. The key is to just keep going.

If you go on long enough, the points do start sinking in.

Too many people assume that acrimony means that the discussion must end immediately. But that's not true at all. It's exceptionally hard, sometimes, to meet clashing beliefs with entirely soft voices and polite manners. You don't have to suppress everything you want to say. You can let it out. So can the other person. It's good. (Obviously it shouldn't raise to a degree where people are screaming continuously or acting violent).

Maturity doesn't just mean always speaking softly. It can also mean being able to make and reject points forcefully, and not wilt like a delicate flower if the other person does the same.

The real key is that people need to not be so delicate. Accept the natural difficulties of clashing belief systems. Just stick in there, let the acrimony happen, don't give up. Eventually - 10 or 20 or 30 minutes later - you'll get to something meaningful simply because there's no way to talk that long without both people having a lot of time to make real points.

It's pretty trivial to apply these signals to nearly any collectivist social movement.

1. Action for action's sake - Black Lives Matter protests to block highways.

2. Exploit the fear of difference - Those horrible racist uneducated people are nothing like us, we can't let them take the country! This is basic tribalism and it applies to every major social movement.

3. Rewritten: "To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Anti-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be good, moral egalitarians. This is the origin of anti-fascism."

Here I've applied them to Western progressivism, but if you deny the basic assumptions of any collectivist social movement you could apply them. Scientology, communism, socialism, fascism. Switch a few unimportant words and there you are with the same meaningless parallels.

The human mind is a great pattern matching machine but has a problem with false positives.

EDIT: It's important to remember when comparing Trump to old fascists that the people who defeated those fascists enacted Trump's policies. For example, in 1945, immigration policy in all western countries was effectively, "whites only".

So if you're gonna notice parallels between Trump and Hitler, you have to notice even closer parallels between Trump and the people who defeated Hitler. You should also notice the differences: Trump is an isolationist who wants to start wars less than Hillary - a lot like pre-WW2 America.

Wait wait. So:

1. White people commit racism and violence against blacks

causes

2. White people flee to the suburbs

causes

3. Urban centers to deteriorate.

Let's examine:

1->2 So white people were fleeing... their own violence against blacks?

2->3 So when those violent people left, this cause the areas to get... worse?

Apparently you believe white people being present is a problem, and white people leaving is a problem. Their presence hurts blacks, and when they leave it hurts blacks too. So literally everything is the fault of white people, whether they're coming or going, here or there.

Even more surreal - these blacks voluntarily moved towards the whites. Then the whites moved to escape the blacks. And the bad guys here are... the whites! The ones who blacks want to live around, and who are trying to flee them.

It really is remarkable the rationalizations a mind is capable of.

>If women are disadvantaged

Except they're not. In fact, in tech, they're advantaged. Female names on resumes get more callback than male names. This has been studied.

The reason there are fewer of them is because fewer of them are interested.

You don't even need to look that hard.

Poor eyesight has no adaptive benefit. Yet many, many people need glasses. I guess it's just 'difficult' for our genes to grow a sharp eye focusing system, so they often get it wrong.

The same may be true of homosexuality. So even if there's nothing adaptive about being gay, it keeps happening because sexual tuning in the brain is a hard target to hit.

Homophobia may be an adaptation to this. It makes parents force their children to act straight even if they're gay.

There are reasons.

China has a long history of advanced (for the time) civilization and a high-IQ population (~105). They were backward for just a few centuries because of a series of bad ideologies - isolationism, followed by communism. For most of history China was the highest-tech civilization on Earth. All they had to do to achieve demographic transition was get back to their historical norm.

Africa has no history of advanced civilization and a low-IQ population (~75). There's reason to think they'll sustain higher birthrates than everyone else, indefinitely. To achieve demographic transition they'll have to do something they've never done before.

The hypothesis I put forth (implicitly) is that homosexual genes are still around because of the massive social pressure to have children and to never admit being gay.

Now that this pressure is gone, we could see a huge drop in these traits over the next few centuries.

It's not in every culture, it's between cultures as well.

Africa adds 30 millions people every year. Pretty much everywhere outside of Africa is below replacement fertility.

In the 20th century, Africans were 10-15% of the world population; by the end of the 21st the could be >50%.

Not in 200 years.

What we're seeing now is a partial die-off.

Eventually, evolution will re-assert itself. The sub-populations who, for whatever reason, continue to grow in population will come to dominate the numbers, after the non-breeding groups die off.

E.g. in America, fertility is passing below replacement rates - on average. But the Amish population still doubles every 20 years. In 200 years, there will be hundreds of millions of Amish.

We could be looking at a world of Amish, Quiverfulls, poor tribalistic Africans, religious Muslims, and orthodox Jews. There will be very few left-liberals, the childfree movement will be gone (like the Shakers already are). Gays and other queer people may breed out of the gene pool if their modern freedom reduces the fertility of their genes.

Modernity may very well be self-defeating, because the future belongs to those who show up.

Families breed with other families similar to themselves.

My old hypothesis is that in a reasonably free society, families reach their "destination" socioeconomic status after 3 generations.

Even if they immigrate as refugees on rusty boats, or lose everything in a holocaust or internment camps. Or, even if they win the lottery. After three generations, they hit their level, whether it's at the bottom or the top. And then they stay there.

It's IQ, an absence of stimulation-seeking behavior, a long mental time horizon, and a non-susceptibility to addictive chemicals or behaviors, and an absence of costly mental and physical diseases. It's genetic.

Everything you described is simply ways that rich people avoid living around poor people. Yes, it generally excludes blacks, but that's incidental and only because blacks tend to be poor.

On the flipside, these policies keep out poor whites as much as poor blacks, for the exact same reasons.

Rich black basketball players, musicians, doctors and politicians have no problem living in mostly-white neighborhoods. Of course, rich Asians also have no trouble living in white neighborhoods, because there are no racial segregation policies.

I find it amazing how you attribute the simple dynamics of people sorting themselves by wealth, which have been very strong in all urban societies everywhere ever, and make them out as though they're some sort of racial targeting system. e.g. 19th century Paris was almost all white French and had the same wealth clustering patterns for the same fundamental reasons.

A Baphomet pentagram hidden under the arrow would've been a lot more amusing.

If there ever was a major war between civilized nuclear powers, and it didn't immediately go nuclear, we might end up with a weird sort of gentleman's agreement where it's accepted to fire nukes into your own country (at invading enemy forces) but not at another country.

I can see that being an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Those rates were basically fiction. All they led to (and the only reason they could be levied) was a huge system of fake on-paper money-losing schemes. People would arrange all sorts of business ventures and other schemes to appear to be losing money, and thus reduce their taxes.

The actual tax receipts as a percentage of income were very close to what they are today.

Actually, wealth inequality in the West was higher before World War One. They called it the 'gilded age' for a reason.

It only got a lot more equal because WW1, the Depression, and WW2 combined destroyed most of the stuff the rich people had.

Only recently has wealth inequality re-approached pre-WW1 levels.

Source: Piketty.

Markets don't exist without states?

Do you not believe that markets existed 1000, 2000, 5000 years ago, in areas that were tribal or feudal or in anarchy?

Do you not believe that markets exist in Somalia and other conflict zones today, where there is no functioning government?

Markets exist any time there are two or more people with goods that they could and would trade.

"(generally)" ?

But you're right, it's sad how many people insist on feeling smart by taking a general statement as a universal statement and nitpicking it. It's so tiring.

Hong Kong, perhaps? Or Chinese-American?

I was really focusing on mainlanders; I've not noticed this from people born in the West. And less in Hong Kong (though still present).

Non-Chinese students also have those same problems, but they don't cheat like the Chinese.

Chinese students cheat because cheating is part of Chinese culture. Go to China and you'll be shocked at how little people care about others in public, or society at large.

This is a place where bystanders will watch cars swerve wildly around an open manhole cover over and over, nearly getting in accidents, doing nothing to help. When the Westerner comes by and closes the manhole cover, the Chinese are surprised. They'd never consider doing anything like that, because - what's in it for them?

This is a country where people pay others to go to prison for them. If they clip a child with their car, they'll deliberately run over the child again and again to make sure he dies and doesn't create hospital bills.

I was never more staggered by rampant, blatant cheating, plagiarism or dishonesty than when I spent a semester studying in a university there. For someone raised in the West, Chinese callousness and dishonesty towards strangers is unbelievable until you experience it.