If you really want to think this through, I recommend Superintelligence.

How

Imagine that you are held in a prison run only by five year old children. Five year old jailers come by to feed you, guard you, and watch your cell. Do you think you could escape?

Of course you could escape this prison - five year olds aren't that smart. You could likely instruct them to release you with a stern voice and they would let you out. You could scold them for keeping you, make them feel guilty, you could threaten them, you could make them like you, you could offer them things if they released you, you could trick them into leaving the door unlocked, you file the bars while they weren't looking, and so on - you'd have endless opportunities. The five year olds would have to thwart your every effort to keep you successfully locked up while you would only have to find a single instance of carelessness or an exploitable mistake on the part of the five year olds.

The point of the metaphor is that, as you are more intelligent than children, so too could an advanced AI be more intelligent than you or humans generally. We can't easily imagine exactly what the AI would do in any specific scenario, because we lack that intelligence, but we can understand the relationship between more intelligent and less intelligent beings is such that the more intelligent, especially the much more intelligent, can usually come out on top against their less intelligent competitors.

When

Think about the difference between the village idiot and noted non-idiot Albert Einstein. This is a vast intelligence difference - but actually, only kind of. Einstein and the idiot have roughly the same brains - it's not like Einstein's brain had an extra lobe, or extra structure that other humans lack. Morphologically, they are very similar. Like Einstein, the idiot can walk, run, talk, read, throw a ball, love, fear, and do all these things that humans can do.

If you put Einstein and the idiot on a spectrum of intelligence that included something like a mouse, you'd find that there is a vast gulf between mice and the idiot, and only a short distance between Einstein and the idiot. Whereas the idiot has a much larger brain, different neural structures and densities compared to the mouse, and can do lots the mouse can't even conceive of, the differences between the idiot and Einstein are more modest.

It's important to understand this point about the intelligence spectrum because it will help you keep things in perspective. If you're observing the intelligence gains of modern AI, and trying to place it on a spectrum, then you must notice that AI is far dumber than even dumb humans at the moment for the moment. However - two observations are important. First, that AI is steadily moving along this spectrum whereas the intelligence of humans is relatively fixed. Consider all the new things that AI has been able to do in your life time, compared to the new things that humans have been able to do. Second, the moment AI overtakes the dumbest human on the intelligence spectrum, you may think it's time to start worrying - but actually, if AI reaches that level it will already be almost super intelligent - a tiny additional movement along the intelligence spectrum will cary its intelligence beyond the range of humanity, and then we will be in the situation with the five year old run prison, only we will be the children trying to contain an entity which will be more intelligent than we will be able to comprehend.

Plausible scenario

China is investing heavily in AI - so are Silicon Valley companies. Imagine a Silicon Valley company gets something like a general intelligence.

Now, because this is Silicon Valley, obviously nothing can go wrong. So lets grant that there are no bugs, the friendliness of the AI has been well thought out, the AI knows how to understand what humans mean - not just the literal meaning of your words, but what you actually mean, and the AI is perfectly obedient. Of course, in reality, none of this is granted, or even likely, but let's just say it is.

First order of business? Let's ask the AI to improve itself as much as possible. Assign it to work on its own code, get it running on a server farm, heck, maybe we'll even have it design its own hardware. Pretty soon we've turned our general intelligence into a superintelligence.

What's next? Why not make ourselves rich? The AI can produce things that intelligence can produce. It can make movies, TV shows, computer software, argue legal cases, parse documents, provide analytics, and on and on.

Great, now we have all the money and entertainment we could ever want. How about power? Well, autonomous drones and weapon systems already exist. How about some designed and operated by our superintelligence?

Okay, now our Silicon Valley entrepreneur is king of the world, because he has a limitless, super intelligent, perfectly obedient, robot army operated by a superintelligence. Oh, and because he has command of superintelligence, he has perfect medicine and is biologically immortal too - he can reign forever.

What if the superintelligence isn't controlled by Silicon Valley, but by totalitarian China? What if the person or people running it are sadists? What if there is a "bug" in the parts of the code that control obedience, preferences, or comprehension of humans?

Well, the practice is straight out of the 3rd chapter of the Yoga Sutras — the one on "powers."

According to tradition, "hopping like a frog" is a preliminary stage, while "sitting in the air" (or similar terms) is a more advanced stage (see: Shiva Samhita III.40=42).

Maharishi insisted that they name it according to the legendary long-term outcome because if they didn't acknowledge it up front, people would accuse them of trying to hide something.

He then proceeded to market the hell out of it based on that legendary long-term outcome.

That said, it is obvious from his early lectures on the subject that he believed that even the hopping stage was showing something paranormal.

It wasn't until a lawsuit that the TM organization actually attempted to make sure that it wasn't just muscle power by hiring a famous sports physiologist to try to prove it was something more.

When their own physiologist reported that there was no sign of anything beyond muscle power, Maharishi was said to have commented "I guess 'hopping like a frog' really does mean 'hopping like a frog,'" but then insisted that when the "sitting in the air" stage was reached, there would be not doubt in anyone's mind.

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You must understand that the practice is meant to allow the person to entertain an intentional though as the mind moves in the direction of samadhi or pure consciousness.

Samadhi during TM, is a state where there is no awareness of internal mentation nor awareness of external sensory perception, and apparently in some people, full-blown samadhi emerges as they hop, so they find themselves in mid-air with no awareness of the muscular activity that got them there.

A few of the hops during this video appear to be of that variety: most of the time, you can see the guys navigating around each other or at 0:55, you can see the 40-year veteran (he's around 55-60 years old in that video) deliberately showing off his world-champion "high hop" skills, but every now and then, the hopping looks entirely different. I doubt if I could even contrive to look like that, no matter how hard I practiced (see the short sequence of hops starting at 0:19).

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It isn't just True Believers™ who sometimes have this experience.

This woman wrote a book (Greetings From Utopia Park) that everyone touts as "what it is like to grow up in a cult" (and that is sorta how she presents it also), and as a non-believer, this is how she describes the afore-mentioned moment of samadhi-while-hopping: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/abc-news/10-happier/e/45324451?autoplay=true (about 49:50-53:00).

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The point is, and she touches on it in the interview in a very half-assed way, these practices are meant to accustom one to being in a near-samadhi state while still being active in the world.


And they work really, really well.

So well that, as I pointed out, the most famous Roman Catholic priest in Latin America teaches TM and Yogic Flying to children as therapy for PTSD and the Roman Catholic Church not only won't condemn him, but instead gives him awards for his good work:

Father Gabriel Mejia — Archbishop Romeo Award 2008, not to mention his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize (see: Gabriel Mejía, the Colombian priest who rescues addicts with meditation) and more recently, the World's Children's Prize (see: his 8 page bio on the WCP website) for his work with children, which includes teaching TM and Yogic Flying.

Here's a fun video of the Queen of Sweden naming him a Hero of the World's Children (runner up) at the WCP ceremony last year, the point being that the Church is well aware that he teaches Yogic Flying but won't say a word because, as meditation practices, TM + TM-Sidhis are overwhelmingly powerful as therapy for children from dire circumstances.

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Far, far more effective than mindfulness.

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\> "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.

Of course. Or pressure their government to put sanctions on South Africa. Each case would need to be looked at individually and moreover take into account what one's government could do, perhaps with good intentions, under the guise of humanitarianism. How much of a chance is there to get our government to go into Darfur? What would occur if American troops went into Darfur? Would we set up a corrupt government and implement disastrous economic policies that wreck the economy and give all the contracts to corporations that not only waste funds but hire Americans rather than locals and leave infrastructure deteriorating leading to skyrocketing unemployment, crime and conflict as in Iraq?

You have to look at what the US government is institutionally capable of doing. I for one came to the conclusion that our government cannot, in general, be trusted to complete humanitarian missions a while ago, helped in part by reading Michael McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft (available in full online: http://www.statecraft.org) This is one of the hardest points to get through to people (it took ages for me) when they accept US military presence and funding as essentially benign.

You can see Chomsky emphasizing this point here: "One can imagine a world in which intervention is undertaken by some benign force dedicated to the interests of people who are suffering. But if we care about victims, we cannot make proposals for imaginary worlds. Only for this world, in which intervention, with rare consistency, is undertaken by powers dedicated to their own interests, where the victims and their fate is incidental, despite lofty professions.

The historical record is painfully clear, and there have been no miraculous conversions. That does not mean that intervention can never be justified, but these considerations cannot be ignored — at least, if we care about the victims."
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/noam-chomsky-interview-isis-syria-intervention-nato/

So to answer your question yes it is theoretically possible but rarely that straightforward. I cannot think of a time where Americans were able to get their government to enable in a humanitarian mission but plenty where they were able to mitigate what it was inflicting (South Africa, East Timor, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Vietnam, the list goes on). However if I thought it could be done and saw intervention as a worthy endeavor I would of course do so. However the only two examples I know of where a blatant act of invasion was justified was India into Bangledesh and North Vietnam into Cambodia, both of which were opposed by the United States (going so far as to send a nuclear submarine off the coast of India and telling its ambassadors in Bangledash to shut up as they were screaming to Kissinger America was supporting genocide; had it not been for the Soviet Union, yes THAT Soviet Union, sending its own sub to follow ours the ploy may have worked and the slaughter would have continued).

Given this observation and given that we are actively engaged in so many horrific policies (operation Columbia, unilaterally supporting the Israeli occupation, channeling millions of dollars in military aid to subsaharan Africa which has already enabled a coup in Mali (http://www.amazon.com/Tomorrows-Battlefield-Proxy-Secret-Africa/dp/1608464636) our provision of billion of dollars in military aid to Saudi Arabia as it slaughters People in Yemen, our support for dictatorial regimes in Central Asia, and recent help in solidifying 2 coups against democratically elected governments in Honduras in 2009 and Ukraine more recently) and given that mainstream intellectual culture in our society either supports them or sees them as unworthy of comment it makes sense to focus on the harm our government is engaged in that we have a chance of mitigating.

But I once again emphasize that if I thought our government could be pressured into doing something good, I would do so but given my understanding of the world much more can be done by attempting to mitigate its crimes.

"I'd recommend watching ANY ISIS video, and/or reading ANY Dabiq issue. Are you going to try and tell me that they're not "honest and realistic" about what the texts say?
At this point I'm breaking a personal rule to never engage with someone dishonest enough to claim Islam is perfect or otherwise should not be reformed. But let's keep this going, so that others on this subreddit have a record of how Muslim obscurantists argue."

They are not honest and realistic about the texts. I understand how you see things, you see that on the surface the Quran or Hadith says X or Y and then you see isis doing X or Y. It seems to be quite valid, right? No, its not. Here is some evidence: http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com , in this letter to the leader of isis they are destroyed theologically. Here is a book written by Shaykh Muhammad al Yaqoubi that destroys them: https://www.amazon.com/Refuting-ISIS-Shaykh-Muhammad-Al-Yaqoubi/dp/1908224193/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486931882&sr=8-1&keywords=refuting+isis . Here is a lecture speaking about that book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ3MEJ_maRc . Here is an excellent video that references several academic journals and deals with the arguments that someone like yourself would bring up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgsVa-khWp4 . That is in addition to the video on isis that I shared in my previous post. In short, there is a reason why someone like myself and many, many others aren't trying to kill people its because we are following an orthodox interpretation and methodology.

“Yes, you may say we have two alternatives,” he says. “We have the alternative of being Muslim extremists or being extremely Muslim. And I don’t accept the category of moderate at all because it is far from clear. Because when it is used usually by Western pundits and politicians, what is intended is anything other than a form of Islam that politically doesn’t obstruct present Western policies. And I don’t think that is a helpful way of developing a meaningful sense of priorities within a religion. So I don’t use this category ‘moderate’ Muslims at all. I think the ongoing face-off between radicals and the mainstream is a face-off between heresy and orthodoxy. Those are the terms which are more indigenous and authentic than ‘moderation’ and ‘extremism’.”

http://gulfnews.com/culture/people/cultural-investment-is-the-way-forward-1.696524

"So are reformers. They're well aware of what the texts (Quran & Hadith) say. That's why they're reformers."

If they were honest and realistic with the text then wouldn't putting out the idiocy that they do now.

" "Mental gymnastics" is an interesting term to use regarding the interpretation of epistemologically empty belief systems, i.e. religions. Muslims (Christians/Jews/etc) already have to play mental gymnastics to believe that texts clearly written by men were written/dictated by some omnipotent entity. So yeah, I don't see your position that reformers are "dishonest" as being even the slightest bit rational."

Whether you see my point is not really important a perusal of what these morons want to do is enough proof. Its mental gymnastics plain and simple.

"Nope. She only needs to change—or otherwise prevent the formation of—enough Muslim minds to make a difference. Devout conservatives by definition are largely not going to change. The goal, quite frankly, is to marginalize them and make them not representative of Muslims in general. And rightly so."

Have you ever seen any videos of her or Quilliam? They want to change Islam so that they can change the minds of Muslims. They first have to change Islam, which isn't possible. Their goal is explicitly to change the religion. To marginalize is also never going to happen, conservative Muslim have way more children and will continue to do so. We are growing, quickly. To try to side step this fact is quite sad, just look at the people who work at Quilliam, they always try (pathetically) to put things in religious terms. Why? Because they want to reach out to conservative Muslims and pretend that Quilliam is legitimate and mainstream.

"You are, and I've clearly demonstrated it."

No, you are delusional, you've demonstrated your delusion.

"If you want to call universal, equal human rights for all "liberal", then sure. Not only do they want that, but the entire world desperately needs it."

There is not much to really say here. We don't believe in many of those values and rights. Take free speech, you will never have absolute free speech such that there can be a billboard with cartoons of the Prophet (PBUH) in Medina, or gay marriage in a place like Mecca. It won't happen. And it is delusional to think that such things are possible. Serious question for you, do really think those things are a possibility?

"No, that's what obscurantists do. The first step to reform is honesty about what is being reformed. For example, to paraphrase Maajid Nawaz: if all the Sharia conditions are met, do you believe that chopping the hand off of a thief is the appropriate punishment?"

This is basically about hudud punishments. https://yaqeeninstitute.org/jonathan-brown/stoning-and-hand-cutting-understanding-the-hudud-and-the-shariah-in-islam/

"Almost. It's because they're honest about the texts, they honestly believe that these texts, and how they're interpreted today represent the one truth for all of eternity, and neither the texts nor the interpretations can ever be altered. The largest amount of dishonesty actually belongs to conservatives like yourself, because you fail to recognize that Islam has been reinterpreted many times throughout history, across many cultures. Which means that reform is absolutely something that is coherent and possible."

Let me be clear, there is a spectrum of interpretation, no problem. But, there will NEVER be an interpretation that allows a women to not wear a hijab or to eat pork or engage in same sex actions or to date or to believe in human evolution, etc. To try to get those things from the texts is mental gymnastics and ABSOLUTE dishonesty. Watch this debate between Shaykh Yasir Qadhi and Usama Hasan of Quilliam and if you are honest with yourself you will inevitably conclude that Hasan simply lies, misrepresents, and does mental gymnastics to try to prove that which is simply not possible. Islam cannot accept human evolution and just as it can't accept human evolution it can't accept the other things I mentioned. Here is the debate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbynBJVTWKI&t=2h22m22s . This debate is an excellent example of how the "reformers" are dishonest and for you to accuse me of dishonesty is incredibly rich and hilarious.

"Yep. ✊🏾✊🏽✊🏿✊🏼. This is exactly why I express solidarity with reformers."

The delusion knows no bounds. Your proving this in real time.

"And now you must stand up to the scrutiny of all of us: global civilization."

Your us vs them mentality is not going to get you anywhere, you must accept reality. Islam has endured through 1400 years of scrutiny and its not going anywhere anytime soon. Its best for people like yourself to reach out to scholars like Shaykh Yasir Qadhi or Shaykh Hamza Yusuf or your local Mosque and build bridges with conservative Muslims.

This is an interesting question, and it's a question that I don't know the answer to.

I'll give you a brief outline though of what I know about the possibility of increasing one's IQ/intelligence (the relationship between IQ and intelligence is itself a complicated subject).

First lets deal with heritability of IQ. The most popular estimate of the heritability of IQ among adults seems to be 0.8 or 80%. This is the estimate I've read from the APA (American Psychological Association) and from reading other sources on IQ.

However a common misconception that many people believe is that an 80% heritability means that 80% of one's IQ is due to their genes, which is wrong. What 80% heritability actually means is that 80% of the variability in IQ within a population can be explained by genetic differences.

Here's a quote from a University website that explains it with an example

http://psych.colorado.edu/~carey/hgss/hgssapplets/heritability/heritability.intro.html

>Heritability and environmentability are population concepts. They tell us nothing about an individual. A heritability of .40 informs us that, on average, about 40% of the individual differences that we observe in, say, shyness may in some way be attributable to genetic individual difference. It does NOT mean that 40% of any person's shyness is due to his/her genes and the other 60% is due to his/her environment.

Next lets deal with the Flynn effect.The Flynn Effect is the observation that for the past few decades, there has been an increase in average IQ by 3 points every 10 years. The relevant question here however is, does this imply that people are getting more intelligent? I personally don't know the answer to that, and I'm not sure if there is a settled answer in the psychometric community. However I do know that Flynn himself has expressed doubt on the view that we are getting more intelligent. I will provide 3 supporting pieces here:

Flynn himself has written in an essay (that I unfortunately have lost and have been unable to find for a few months) that he does not believe that the Flynn Effect is caused by an increase in general intelligence/g/g factor (this is a technical term).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

There is also empirical evidence from psychometric research that the rise in average IQ (I.E. the Flynn Effect) is correlated negatively with the g-loading of a test. In simple language, this just means that broadly speaking if an IQ subtest relies heavily on general intelligence, there has been a smaller increase in the average than on IQ subtests that don't rely heavily on general intelligence.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000226

There is also the question of if an average IQ increase of 3 points does not mean we are getting more intelligent, than what does The Flynn Effect mean?

Flynn himself has a great TedTalk answering this question, since as I mentioned before Flynn himself does not believe that we have gotten more intelligent. A TLDR of his explanation is that he thinks The Flynn Effect is due to a huge shift in the way we are taught to think about things and how we view the world. In his words, he believes humans have developed more sophisticated "mental artillery."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI

Lastly if you've been bored by my blathering here and just want a straight forward "Yes" or "no" answer, like I said I don't know the answer. However I do know two experts who each express the opposite answer to the question.

In this book written by an intelligence expert, he claims that little can be done to increase one's IQ however over a person's lifetime their fluid IQ will peak in their mid/late twenties then slowly decline thereafter whereas people's crystallized IQ steadily increases throughout their life

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie-ebook/dp/B00RTY0LPO/

Whereas I have emailed Flynn before about a question related to this question, and he told me that in his book (that I will link below) he explains why he thinks that it is possible to increase one's IQ through hard work.

https://www.amazon.com/Does-your-Family-Make-Smarter/dp/1316604462/

“The Brain: The Story of You” by David Eagleman

Eagleman is a neuroscientist and great communicator just like Sam Harris. The book is great for someone who is interested the story of brain development but is not extremely versed in neuroscience terminology.
Eaglemans easy to follow story starts from birth and tells why early years are really important and juxtaposes that with the life of a child with little to no stimulation.
He then describes what happens at each phase of development which is super relatable.
He also talks about how the brain makes decision which is sounds like what you are especially interested in.
Def great book I was a Harris junkie a few years back and this was the book that kick started my reading and interest in the brain (I’m going for a psych major now lol.)

Still love Harris, he dat Neuroscience boi


Link for the book: The Brain: The Story of You https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525433449/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_gk4YCbPH8XDYM

>Why does it matter - in daily life that is - whether people are the way they are because of nature or nurture?

It informs how you should go about achieving your goals. If a property is intrinsic and cannot be changed then you need to construct your systems of behaviour around accommodating that property.

For example, hobbes' leviathan. We know that when left to our own devices, humans aren't very fair to each other. Not even necessarily because of maliciousness, but because of a bunch of intrinsic cognitive biases, that among other things predisposes everyone to perceiveing losses they experience as far worse than gains they (and others) receive, which means that any time two parties take from each other they will both perceive the other party as horribly injust and themselves as perfectly reasonable, leading to ever-increasing escalations of reciprocation that rarely lead anywhere good. But you can mitigate all that by taking the enforcement of justice out of the people directly involved's hands and giving it to an (ideally unbiased) third-party.

Of course this is a lot more complicated than my simple explanation here, but hopefully you get the point I was making. When we know what parts of human nature can't be changed (at least not yet, eh), we have a much better chance of building an environment that leads us to the results we want to have. The same goes for interacting with others in daily life. You are much better equipped to interacting with people when you really understand why they do the things they do (and why you do the things you do!) than when you're not.

Incidentally, if you want to read a good book about a lot of these intrinsic cognitive biases then I recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow. It summarizes a lot of often surprising intrinsic cognitive biases - and outright cognitive illusions - that our brains fall prey to, which we have to be aware of when we design our systems in order to get those systems to do what we want them to do.

>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.

>We kind of do have genes affecting brain function that vary in frequency by population.

The key word here is population, meaning that these genes also vary in frequency within European populations, Asian populations, and African populations.

>MAOA, ASPM, MCPH1. Some genes affecting myopia vary by ethnic group and they seem to correlate to high VS ability.

There's a reason why the researchers used the word correlate. They used correlate because these genes have been found to possibly effect brain function. Re-read the studies where you got your information; the researchers don't make causal conclusions because there isn't a direct link. So, either you don't understand experimental design, or you're deliberately dishonest. I don't think that you're dishonest I believe that you honestly don't know.

>Also, the size and structure of the average person's brain of each group is slightly different (studied the evolution of the human brain).

You should get your refund especially if they used race since it's an imperfect proxy for grouping. You should also avoid racialist sites because they tend to be extremely biased. If you do a search on brain volumes on a scholarly database, you'll see that current brain volume research varies among the entire population as a whole. There are differences in sizes, but again, it varies by population. There are populations (tribes, ethnicities, etc.) in Africa that have a larger mean brain size than the European and Asian average. This pattern occurs across the globe. This research is more scientifically sound than you're ideologically biased sources precisely because of they, the current researchers, used a more valid classification than race. The researchers also found that there is a greater range of brain sizes in Africa, but this was because Africa is so genetically diverse.


>Brain size correlates to IQ (in fact you can estimate IQ from brain size).
Brain size and IQ both appear to be strongly heritable (twin and adoption studies) to the tune of .85 in adults. There's one type of adoption study where children were adopted together as twins, and their IQ's were virtually unrelated to each other as adults.
The heritability of brain size and IQ appears to be same with little variation by race or SES. IQ correlates to brain size. Brain size (and structure) varies by race. Its not a complex logic problem. This really doesn't leave much wiggle room for racism to be the cause of the difference.

You did it again; you made causal conclusions on data that's correlative at best. If you don't understand simple statistics, genomics, experimental design, and molecular biology, why present it as if you do? You do know that all of these studies are observational studies, right? Meaning that they didn't (and can't) control for racism and class, and, more importantly, you can't make conclusions on this data because of the presence of confounders. You say it's not a complex logic problem, but clearly, for you it is. Bro, there's an immense amount of wiggle room. Like, none of these studies are conclusive. Either side. If you don't believe me, go and ask Murray on Twitter if there is a causal link between IQ and genes, race and IQ, and heritability and IQ.

>It would also be stunningly easy to prove racism was the cause of the differences by proving SES or race made brain size and IQ vary in heritability.

You must kidding me.... This is literally impossible to do because of the complexity of society. This the reason why the researchers used SES and not social class. It's extraordinary for someone so out of their depth to have the gall to make such assertions boldly. Like, seriously, you do understand that the reason why we're looking for the gene-to-expression pathway for intelligence is that society is too complicated to find definitive evidence (read: causal) using IQ tests. I think you didn't look over these studies yourself. That or you're the type of person that thinks that if a study says it, then it must be true. It's not your fault; I was in the same boat as well until I learned how to conduct research. If you do learn the methodology of research design, causality, etc., you'll see how murky the waters are when it comes to IQ. A good primer is Truth or Truthiness by Howard Wainer.

There are literally only two immutable facts of IQ:

1. There are race-based disparities.
   
2. IQs are increasing globally since the turn of the 20th century.
   
   

> What does "relentlessly pro-immigration" mean?

Call everyone who's for immigration restriction a racist? Basically if you think Trump "disqualifies" himself by suggesting that illegal immigrants be deported you're prob. a progressive extremest.

> Who, specifically, is giddy about "replacing" the population of the USA?

Progressives who want a one party state, based off demographic changes? Kind of people who write these articles?

> No. We don't have the evidence to justify this conclusion.

I'm sorry you don't think we 'have evidence' to say that " those who don't see PC as a problem are the group most likely to also be in favor of it?" Wouldn't this just be common sense?

Do you think people who do see PC as a problem are likely to be in favor of it???

> I'm having trouble following your argument. Are you saying that Democratic Party candidates are to the left of the party's voting base?

I don't know how I can state this more clearly than I did:

If these is no gap in attitudes beliefs between progressives and their voting base why results of the answers to a simply question about political correctness differ so largely between 'ultra-progressives' and the majority of Democratic voters?

This question shouldn't be a difficult one to comprehend.

> Who are these "extreme progressives" you keep referring to? It seems like you're using it as a stand-in for more well-to-do progressives.

I'm not, I'm talking about specifically the group outlined in the Atlantic article.

> Why might well-to-do progressives see PC as less of a problem? I can think of a few explanations that have nothing to do with "extremism."
>
>Perhaps well-to-do progressives are more likely to be educated on the subject of systemic oppression.
>
>Perhaps well-to-do progressives are more likely to be neoliberals who care more about social/identity issues than economic/structural issues.
>
>Perhaps well-to-do progressives, more likely to have been exposed to different types of people and a greater variety of perspectives in a higher education setting, are more likely to be sympathetic to "political correctness" insofar as it means trying to be considerate of what offends other people who aren't like them.

A) More likely to buy into the theory of 'systematic oppression' that downplays the importance of cultural or genetic differences between populations for a conspiracy about white power structures.

B) This one is likely true, but doesn't really counteract my point. One can still be 'extreme' and 'outside the mainstream' while not being a socialist/far-left on economic issues.

C) Most of the evidence suggests the opposite, that they are more likely to be ensconced in an echo chamber, largely out of touch with the lives of less privileged Americans due to their effective isolation ("Coming apart" being perhaps the best documentation of this).

I feel like I am repeating myself at this point but even if your particular, biased take is true, it doesn't really counteract my central point - there is every reason to believe that progressive policy makers are out of step with the majority of Americans on many, many issues.

> The fact is, we don't know. So my conclusions are just as valid, and probably a great deal more so, than yours.

Your conclusion that "We can't say that those people who are least likely to say PC is not a problem, are also the group that we can logically assume is most likely to be in favor of it" is a conclusion we cannot make assumptions about?

I think we may have reached the limits of the usefulness of this discussion.

This is awesome! I think I've used both (rabble/rebel), but I love history of words and phrases like this. Even have a whole book on it, great coffee table book! Thanks for sharing, and I'll be sure to use the correct wording next time!

I recommend this book on the topic, pretty good overview of how and when the rot set in. It also serves as a decent intro to the major movements of western art.

https://www.amazon.com/Decline-Fall-Western-Art/dp/1720557853

Amazon blurb

About the loss of Western art to a false art philosophy, nihilism, industrialization, and a corrupt art establishment. Art, tasteful æsthetics, high culture, & standards have all but vanished from the modern world. An ancient tradition has been carelessly discarded and is close to being lost forever. Why is this? Why were beauty values important to our ancestors? What was their philosophy of art, and what is ours? Can we bring back real art?

Also his twitter account is worth following if you value transcendental values of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. Often posting inspiring examples from our past, although sad to contextualize what has truly been lost.

Makes me happier and happier that I deleted twitter.

https://www.amazon.ca/Arguments-Deleting-Social-Media-Accounts/dp/125019668X

I would class that as painfully detailed knowledge.

You could have a pretty good broad knowledge of Christianity and have read entire books and not know either of those 2 things

For example, off the top of my head, I was raised Christian and went to Bible study classes (catechism) and I've read all these (below) and more and I did not know either of the things you just quoted

• History of Christianity
  
  
• Misquoting Jesus
  
  
• The First Crusade

No https://www.amazon.com/GamerGate-First-Battle-Culture-War/dp/1793093369 this one. AKA /u/Netscape9 if that isn't doxing.

​

Also both those people don't have an a in Mac. I made this joke years ago. /u/Manteiga_night tagged for my brilliant humor.

>Dont be so condescending (that means talking down to someone)

Fixed that for you. Learn how to use apostrophes. Here's a good book. It really helped me.

How's that for condescension?

https://smile.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie-ebook/dp/B00RTY0LPO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Try reading actual experts, since Murray is a political scientist like me with no qualification in IQ.