[hrothgar]

Kaitlyn S, on 2016-December-08, 10:17, said:

Nigel wrote:

> Why would anybody want to pillory a forum-member as an idiot? Why not just stick to facts and arguments relevant to the topic?

I've always wondered that too.

Why do schools and universities attach labels to students; describing some of them as "A" students and others as "F" students?
Why do banks assign numeric credit scores to individuals that identify some of them as a good risk and others as a bad risk?

For better or worse, some people's opinions are valuable and others are not...

Often, the people whose opinions are not considered to be valuable get upset when they discover how they have been labeled...

In general, when someone is being dismissed as an idiot or a troll, it is a signal that is is not worth dealing with the specific charges that this individual is bringing forth because experience shows that it is a complete waste of time. The individual does not learn anything from the experience and will shortly generate another ridiculous claim.

[helene_t]

hrothgar, on 2016-December-08, 10:27, said:

In general, when someone is being dismissed as an idiot or a troll, it is a signal that is is not worth dealing with the specific charges that this individual is bringing forth because experience shows that it is a complete waste of time.

So if someone gets quoted ad nauseam I should see it as a sign that it is a vaste of time to read his/her posts?

I wonder if I should apply the same principle to the impact factor of academic journals ....

[mikeh]

why would anyone want to criticize opinions that another poster expressed about someone's views, without reading the posts that attracted the criticism, so as to see whether the criticisms were valid?

We could go on ad nauseam

But before I finally give up on responding to you, Kaitlyn, let me ask you two questions.

1. Do you stand by your assertion that if you were a business owner you would be reluctant to hire a black person out of fear that such a person is more likely than a white person to sue you based on a fake claim of discrimination should you later fire the person for cause?

2. Do you agree or disagree that such an attitude on the part of a business owner is a racist attitude? Don't worry about 'defending it on its merits'....every racist can tell you WHY their racism is justified. Simply affirm or deny that in your opinion the holding of that view is racist. Yes or no is all that is required.

[Winstonm]

nige1, on 2016-December-08, 07:34, said:

Why would anybody want to pillory a forum-member as an idiot? Why not just stick to facts and arguments relevant to the topic?

I don't think anyone initially wants to disparage another member. The trouble comes when the determination and acceptance of facts is confused with ideological beliefs. When one side states the sun rises in the east while the opponent points out the simple documented reality that the sun does not rise at all but, rather, the horizon turns, how should one react when the former continually expresses a conviction in the belief that, no, the sun rises, or that it is not 100% proven so therefore, not factual, and the sun may indeed be rising after all? I don't think it unfair to point out that if the poster is not joking then another reason must be present for the inability to understand the reality of the causes of night and day or the unwillingness to accept overwhelming expert scientific evidence to as near certainty as is humanly possible, and one of those reasons could be stupidity. Another could be malicious ignorance. In some other situations, it could be latent racism.

Btw, none of those expressions of possible causes would be an ad hominem attack as an ad hominem attack is used to counter an argument. Simply saying I am entitled to my belief, or, well, I think I am right, is not an argument but a Monty Python-like contradiction. And you paid for an argument!

No, you didn't.
Yes, I did.

[y66]

The last two posts by Elianna and Z have redeemed this thread for me.

We are obviously not wired to discard information based on categories and if we are entitled to anything it is to pursue our individual preferences up to the point where they conflict with the rights of others to pursue theirs. These conflicts are unavoidable and likely to increase under increasing pressure from increasing competition for scarce resources. Thinking about this more clearly and exchanging points of view aimed at thinking more clearly is helpful.

[mikeh]

y66, on 2016-December-08, 10:58, said:

The last two posts by Elianna and Z have redeemed this thread for me.

Agreed. I regret that my style is (far) more confrontational than theirs. Their posts are always a pleasure to read.

[y66]

From The American Dream, Quantified at Last by David Leonhardt:

Quote

The phrase “American dream” was invented during the Great Depression. It comes from a popular 1931 book by the historian James Truslow Adams, who defined it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.”

In the decades that followed, the dream became a reality. Thanks to rapid, widely shared economic growth, nearly all children grew up to achieve the most basic definition of a better life — earning more money and enjoying higher living standards than their parents had.

These days, people are arguably more worried about the American dream than at any point since the Depression. But there has been no real measure of it, despite all of the data available. No one has known how many Americans are more affluent than their parents were — and how the number has changed.

It’s a thorny research question, because it requires tracking individual families over time rather than (as most economic statistics do) taking one-time snapshots of the country.

The beginnings of a breakthrough came several years ago, when a team of economists led by Raj Chetty received access to millions of tax records that stretched over decades. The records were anonymous and came with strict privacy rules, but nonetheless allowed for the linking of generations.

The resulting research is among the most eye-opening economics work in recent years. You’ve probably heard some of the findings even if you don’t realize it. They have shown that the odds of escaping poverty vary widely by region, for instance, an insight that has influenced federal housing policy.

After the research began appearing, I mentioned to Chetty, a Stanford professor, and his colleagues that I thought they had a chance to do something no one yet had: create an index of the American dream. It took them months of work, using old Census data to estimate long-ago decades, but they have done it. They’ve constructed a data set that shows the percentage of American children who earn more money — and less money — than their parents earned at the same age.

The index is deeply alarming. It’s a portrait of an economy that disappoints a huge number of people who have heard that they live in a country where life gets better, only to experience something quite different.

Their frustration helps explain not only this year’s disturbing presidential campaign but also Americans’ growing distrust of nearly every major societal institution, including the federal government, corporate America, labor unions, the news media and organized religion.

Yet the data also helps point the way to some promising solutions.

More

[nige1]

Winstonm, on 2016-December-08, 10:43, said:

I don't think anyone initially wants to disparage another member. The trouble comes when the determination and acceptance of facts is confused with ideological beliefs. When one side states the sun rises in the east while the opponent points out the simple documented reality that the sun does not rise at all but, rather, the horizon turns, how should one react when the former continually expresses a conviction in the belief that, no, the sun rises, or that it is not 100% proven so therefore, not factual, and the sun may indeed be rising after all? I don't think it unfair to point out that if the poster is not joking then another reason must be present for the inability to understand the reality of the causes of night and day or the unwillingness to accept overwhelming expert scientific evidence to as near certainty as is humanly possible, and one of those reasons could be stupidity. Another could be malicious ignorance.

What's malicious ignorance?
Might another explanation be familiarity with relative motion?

Winstonm, on 2016-December-08, 10:43, said:

In some other situations, it could be latent racism.
Btw, none of those expressions of possible causes would be an ad hominem attack as an ad hominem attack is used to counter an argument.
saying I am entitled to my belief, or, well, I think I am right, is not an argument but a Monty Python-like contradiction. And you paid for an argument!
No, you didn't.
Yes, I did.

Disputing a fact or questioning an argument is fine. Calling somebody stupid or ignorant is an ad hominem attack.

BTW, IMO, you should have a healthy distrust in authority. You don't have go back to Galileo Galilei or Antoine Lavoisier. In the last century, scientific pronouncements on the safety of cigarettes, leaded petrol, nuclear energy, and thalidomide were cast into doubt. Controversies about GM foods and Global warming remain. On such matters, I think we should search out facts and check expert argument, ourselves, as far as we're able. Some Feynman Wikiquotes

Richard Feynman said:

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Richard Feynman said:

I took this stuff I got out of your [O-ring] seal and I put it in ice water, and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it it doesn't stretch back. It stays the same dimension. In other words, for a few seconds at least, and more seconds than that, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees. I believe that has some significance for our problem.

Here is an unrelated quote that mikeh might like...

Richard Feynman said:

[I call myself] an atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this.

[y66]

That atheist-agnostic-weasel quote was too good and tailor made for mikeh who will appreciate the irony, ambiguity and honesty of that quote as well as linking his way of thinking, which I admire, with Feynman's.

[Kaitlyn S]

mikeh, on 2016-December-08, 10:43, said:

why would anyone want to criticize opinions that another poster expressed about someone's views, without reading the posts that attracted the criticism, so as to see whether the criticisms were valid?

We could go on ad nauseam

But before I finally give up on responding to you, Kaitlyn, let me ask you two questions.

1. Do you stand by your assertion that if you were a business owner you would be reluctant to hire a black person out of fear that such a person is more likely than a white person to sue you based on a fake claim of discrimination should you later fire the person for cause?

2. Do you agree or disagree that such an attitude on the part of a business owner is a racist attitude? Don't worry about 'defending it on its merits'....every racist can tell you WHY their racism is justified. Simply affirm or deny that in your opinion the holding of that view is racist. Yes or no is all that is required.

1. As I posted before, I gave a test to measure expected programming talent when I needed to hire programmers. As far as I was concerned, that was the only criteria on which i hired someone.

If I had met the number of people that I wanted to hire plus one, I would have tested further. To me, ability to perform the job is more important than any other factor.

Fortunately I was not ever in a position where I would have to hire someone without being able to test them first. However, when I did do the hiring, discrimination lawsuits were not in my cognitive space, but my HR department apparently had their own biases (as in I was the only person that worked for that small company that would not be considered beautiful or handsome - at least until I did my hiring; it was okay for not attractive people to be hidden in a part of the building where nobody ever had to see them.)

In any event, I'd like to think that I could always have some other way to choose between candidates other than race, sex, or religion.

Plus, you say 'fake' suit - I am assuming that the person suing would think it was legitimate.

2. If the person does it because he doesn't want to work with black people, he is being racist.

If the person does it because he has researched the issue and found that on average the costs for handling discrimination suits, even for "good" employers, was $133 per employee for white people but $372 per employee for black people, and the two people were otherwise exactly equal, then he is making a business decision. The result appears racist, I realize. However, someone from Mars who doesn't give a rat's *** about race but is doing hiring only based on financial factors make make that decision. Does that make him a racist? Why don't you get this? It's such a simple concept. It's scary to me that virtually nobody agrees with me on this.

So, my answer to you is that: If the person is strictly thinking bottom line and has no other biases whatsoever, he is not being racist. If the person has some unconscious bias that is making him think that way, he is being racist, although it's going to be hard to show him that. And yes, I'll admit that this may be happening to me, but I'm not aware of it.

As I pointed out before, I would still try to find some other way to break the tie.

I'll try to put this another way. Out of college, I tried to get a job which didn't pay a lot. I didn't get the position because the interviewer determined that with my level of education, I would be likely to work a few months and then leave for a higher paying job, whereas somebody less educated would stay longer. He may have been right; he may have been wrong. Is he discriminating against me because of my education? No, he is simply making a financial decision that I would be a worse choice because there is some chance that I would be trained and then leave.

Isn't it possible that someone is making a strictly financial decision based on studies, and doesn't care about race themselves?

[nige1]

I agree with Kaitlyn that people often make decisions on financial grounds that have profound moral implications:

• Perhaps it's different now that the US has Obamacare, but I'm told that, in the past, US doctors refused to treat life-threatening conditions because the patient lacked health-insurance.
• In this country, there are a similar quandaries with life-saving medicines. The government won't buy them if they're too expensive. Pharmaceutical companies hike their price whenever they can get away with it.

[jonottawa]

Today is the 1 month anniversary of the greatest day in my lifetime!

Happy Trumpiversary everybody!



And on a less happy note:

Report buried over 2,000 Trump-related racist hate crimes against white kids

The corrupt mainstream media is responsible for inciting this behavior. Sad!

On the subject of racism here's a NSFW disgusting sampling of typical racist Twitter tweets that don't even get taken down EVEN WHEN FLAGGED! It's no wonder that all these racist anti-white hate crimes are occurring.

[jonottawa]

Did Time magazine deliberately make Trump look like the devil - and Hitler?

Why yes! Yes they did! This is what propaganda looks like. This is what Trump has faced ALL YEAR. This is emblematic of the hostile, rigged media environment that Trump supporters have conditioned ourselves to ignore.

[Winstonm]

nige1, on 2016-December-08, 12:23, said:

What's malicious ignorance?
Might another explanation be familiarity with relative motion?

Disputing a fact or questioning an argument is fine. Calling somebody stupid or ignorant is an ad hominem attack.

BTW, IMO, you should have a healthy distrust in authority. You don't have go back to Galileo Galilei or Joseph Priestley. In the last century, scientific pronouncements on the safety of cigarettes, leaded petrol, nuclear energy, and thalidomide were cast into doubt. Controversies about GM foods and Global warming remain. On such matters, I think we should search out facts and check expert argument, ourselves, as far as we're able. Some Feynman Wikiquotes



Here is an unrelated quote that mikeh might like...

1) Malicious ignorance: purposefully remaining ignorant in order to sustain a hateful belief, such as believing that African Americans display the mark God left on Cain rather than being the product of evolution's effect on skin.

2) Disputing an argument by calling somebody stupid or ignorant instead of disputing the argument is an ad hominem attack. If I describe someone with an IQ of 60 as stupid, it is not an ad hominem attack.

And, Btw, there is a substantial difference between authority and expertise. I tend to distrust the former and tend to trust the latter.

[Winstonm]

Kaitlyn S, on 2016-December-08, 13:20, said:

If the person does it because he has researched the issue and found that on average the costs for handling discrimination suits, even for "good" employers, was $133 per employee for white people but $372 per employee for black people, and the two people were otherwise exactly equal, then he is making a business decision. The result appears racist, I realize. However, someone from Mars who doesn't give a rat's *** about race but is doing hiring only based on financial factors make make that decision. Does that make him a racist? Why don't you get this? It's such a simple concept. It's scary to me that virtually nobody agrees with me on this.

There are other posters more qualified than I to dismantle this argument, but even from my relatively uneducated position I would ask how one would find such research and determine its accuracy, not to mention if it were local, state, regional, national, or worldwide, how were the findings determined, and just for good measure was the average cost due to one or two big cases lost due to genuine discrimination reasons and is that the cause of the higher average costs?

I'm sure I've left out mountains of problems but I hope I've made a reasonable case for looking deeper than x cost is 1$, y cost is $2?

Btw. I think you described yourself well, at least how I take you to be, and that is that any racism you may hold is latent rather than overt, and it would indeed by difficult to root out and conquer, but I admire you for addressing the issue.

[MrAce]

Why don't we all go to BBO and arrange a team game between Trump supporters and haters?

Whoever loses say "uncle" to others and we end this topic nicely?

Seriously, if a Water Cooler topic reaches 3000 replies, let's make this a tradition to end it in a team match!

[Winstonm]

MrAce, on 2016-December-08, 16:14, said:

Why don't we all go to BBO and arrange a team game between Trump supporters and haters?

Whoever loses say "uncle" to others and we end this topic nicely?

I doubt if we could come to terms on rules of engagement.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2016-December-08, 11:53, said:

From The American Dream, Quantified at Last by David Leonhardt:

This is a very interesting article. Which is not the same as saying I entirely trust it. I think it warrants discussion.

Here is part of it:

Quote

Psychology research has shown that people's happiness is heavily influenced by their relative station in life. And it's hard to imagine a more salient comparison than to a person's own parents, particularly at this time of year, when families gather for rituals that have been repeated for decades. "You're going home for the holidays and you compare your standard of living to your parents," Grusky, a sociologist, says. "It's one of the few ties you have over the course of your entire life. Friends come and go. Parents are a constant."

I don't think this fits me at all.

First, from when I was young:
I recall a conversation I had with the father of a friend. I was about 18 and he was asking me about how I was thinking about my hopes for the future, especially financial. I was more aware than many 18 year olds of the details of the family finances and generally I thought something like that was fine. I did not think that I needed a larger house than I grew up in. I knew that people were [a lot] richer than we were but I had little interest in this.

And I haven't changed:
We are taking a trip back to Minnesota after Christmas, visiting and such. I may get us some tickets for the Guthrie Theater but I have not yet gotten around to seeing what they are doing or how much it costs. What I have done, and I did it right away, is to dig out my skates. It's been warm there but by January I trust things will have frozen over. I enjoy it, and it's free.

So as near as I can tell, my happiness has never had much to do with my comparative wealth. But you do need enough. That's important. If I have enough, and somebody else has more, I don't care.

That being said, I think the financial circumstances of my early years do in fact strongly influence my views.

Here is what I see as important: My father, with his eighth grade education, and my mother, who had a little high school, could buy a house in a decent neighborhood. Half a block away was the elementary school I went to, half a block in the other direction there was a playground with, in the winter, a skating rink. My father worked, my mother did not, the finances were adequate.

This much was commonly available to many children, and I very much regret that this is not so true today. If a person has this much, and is unhappy because someone else has a mansion, I would strongly suggest that this person grow up. Freedom from hunger is critical, and so is having a reasonably safe environment and knowing where you are going to sleep. Sure you might like more. I learned to water ski behind a high powered inboard owned by someone much wealthier than we were, and after that I would, when I had the cash, rent out a boat and skis. When I didn't have the money, I didn't do that.

Not all deprivation is equal. Not having money for a meal is serious, not having money to go water skiing is not. And this is true whatever the wealth of one's parents was.

So I think the article is worth reading and discussing, but some of it sounds to me like academic studies that have trouble identifying the obvious.

[diana_eva]

Kaitlyn S, on 2016-December-08, 13:20, said:

1. As I posted before, I gave a test to measure expected programming talent when I needed to hire programmers. As far as I was concerned, that was the only criteria on which i hired someone.

If I had met the number of people that I wanted to hire plus one, I would have tested further. To me, ability to perform the job is more important than any other factor.

Fortunately I was not ever in a position where I would have to hire someone without being able to test them first. However, when I did do the hiring, discrimination lawsuits were not in my cognitive space, but my HR department apparently had their own biases (as in I was the only person that worked for that small company that would not be considered beautiful or handsome - at least until I did my hiring; it was okay for not attractive people to be hidden in a part of the building where nobody ever had to see them.)

In any event, I'd like to think that I could always have some other way to choose between candidates other than race, sex, or religion.

Plus, you say 'fake' suit - I am assuming that the person suing would think it was legitimate.

2. If the person does it because he doesn't want to work with black people, he is being racist.

If the person does it because he has researched the issue and found that on average the costs for handling discrimination suits, even for "good" employers, was $133 per employee for white people but $372 per employee for black people, and the two people were otherwise exactly equal, then he is making a business decision. The result appears racist, I realize. However, someone from Mars who doesn't give a rat's *** about race but is doing hiring only based on financial factors make make that decision. Does that make him a racist? Why don't you get this? It's such a simple concept. It's scary to me that virtually nobody agrees with me on this.

So, my answer to you is that: If the person is strictly thinking bottom line and has no other biases whatsoever, he is not being racist. If the person has some unconscious bias that is making him think that way, he is being racist, although it's going to be hard to show him that. And yes, I'll admit that this may be happening to me, but I'm not aware of it.

As I pointed out before, I would still try to find some other way to break the tie.

I'll try to put this another way. Out of college, I tried to get a job which didn't pay a lot. I didn't get the position because the interviewer determined that with my level of education, I would be likely to work a few months and then leave for a higher paying job, whereas somebody less educated would stay longer. He may have been right; he may have been wrong. Is he discriminating against me because of my education? No, he is simply making a financial decision that I would be a worse choice because there is some chance that I would be trained and then leave.

Isn't it possible that someone is making a strictly financial decision based on studies, and doesn't care about race themselves?

If you have two similarly qualified white men and need to choose one, how will you chose?

Step 2. Pretend you have two equally qualified white men, and choose.

The whole thing with discrimination is that you can't eliminate a candidate based on his race. You are expected to make a choice based on job/company needs. It will be unlikely to have two exactly equal, there has to be something that sets two people apart (besides their race, obviously). So you look into that, and into job requirements, and choose something that fits the job. Test them further, whatever you would do with whites.

But you are letting yourself blinded by an irrational fear that someone who works for you will suddenly get butthurt, will not understand the reason for being fired or whatever it is that he might file a lawsuit for, and will further proceed to sue you despite it being too expensive for you - but somehow for this person it's affordable and acceptable. Oh wait, I forgot, he'll find an equally irrational lawyer who'll take his case for free because he knows he'll win even though the decision to fire the guy was not discriminatory.

[PassedOut]

jonottawa, on 2016-December-08, 15:24, said:

Today is the 1 month anniversary of the greatest day in my lifetime!

Happy Trumpiversary everybody!

That explains a lot.