jabowery

Don't let Stefan read this or he might slit his wrists.

The theory upon which the Social Causality Prize I is based isn't "social causation theory" but algorithmic information theory. Algorithmic information theory is the only formalization of evidence-based argument. Molyneux should drop what he's doing and familiarize himself with it.

For those serious about showing the social pseudosciences to the exit of, well, "society", may I offer the Social Causality Prize I, now open at the X-Prize Foundation's heroX site. The prize presents a wide range of social data and challenges those who believe they have the best theory of US society, to demonstrate its superiority via Ockham's Razor: Produce the smallest program that outputs the provided social data file. This test has a rigorous foundation in the theory of artificial general intelligence as accepted by founders of Google's DeepMind such as Shane Legg, who wrote he thesis on compression as the general intelligence benchmark.

The question "Can We Rebuild Black Wall Street?", posed by the black nationalist Nation of Islam's publication "Final Call", can only be answered with a bit of background in political economy. Black Wall Street was built on oil profits. These profits derive from property rights protections -- in this case mineral rights. If the costs of those protections are paid for out of taxes on things other than the property rights themselves, the profits are subsidized by the tax system. This is the basic con game of so-called "capitalism"*. Since some blacks in Oklahoma had acquired land prior to the discovery of oil on that land, they were in a position to reap some of the subsidized profits of this con game. The escalation of a relatively common extralegal mode of dispute processing (a 19 year old WHITE had been lynched a year earlier for shooting a cab driver in that town) into a full blown battle had a simple objective: Make the owners of the oil rights sell cheap to some sociopaths that knew the con game forwards and backwards. This con game is as old as civilization. The shift of tax burden off property rights, on to economic activity is a stage in the "progress", into decay, of civilization -- a stage missed, by the way, by such "luminaries" as Carroll Quigley. It is, therefore, a very highly developed art -- even genetic predisposition -- in the oldest of civilized cultures, which is why Silicon Valley is now over 2/3 "Asian" -- primarily south Asian. The answer, therefore, to "Can We Rebuild Black Wall Street." is, "Probably not." for the simple reason that Africans are not as highly coevolved with civilization as are, for example middle eastern or south Asian cultures. *There is another con game corresponding to so-called "capitalism" to which African cultures are more highly adapted, and that is treating society as one big tribal organization with a "big man", or tribal chief, rule. This is what we're starting to see emerge in the US in a process that started with the Civil War's abrogation of the 10th Amendment -- expressing in the imperial presidency. In this form of the con game, the subsidized profits increasingly centralize in the "public sector". Look at the concentration of blacks in Washington D.C. and the fact that the counties surrounding Washington D.C. have the highest per household median income, if not net assets, in the US.

The login prompt doesn't specify email. Moreover LastPass filled in my username as usual. That was the problem.

Visiting the board today, my login credentials were rejected. I reset my password via the emailed link and was logged in. When I logged out and attempted to log back in, it, again, rejected my credentials. I again reset my password and was logged in. After a time out, I was again unable to log in and reset my password. I strongly suspect if I log out now, I'll have to reset my password again.

There are many instances of "not enough" and "too much" in life. In the present day, we are well beyond the point of "not enough" -- particularly in the case of network effect businesses, so it was hardly much of an omission to focus on the "too much" end of the model. Chief among these morals are those that keep society from disintegrating such as keeping one's word and -- just as important -- not imputing to people words they had not said and holding them to those words with "morals". The latter is what I am addressing. I take it, then, that you dispute the conventional notions of natural selection as having been operative in the natural history of Earth. Is that correct? It's fine to posit alternative theories of "creation" but it's one thing to recommend that people go read a book on the evolution of civilizations -- where we're dealing with the soft sciences -- and quite another to introduce a physics paradigm with biological relevance that overturns received theory. Please provide cite to a, hopefully concise, essay on the ways in which natural selection and your notion differ. Note, this requires something like what Nowak, Wilson, et al did in debunking the Hamilton inequality as the basis for explaining eusocial "altruism": They brought both the old and the new paradigm into the same universe of discourse so they could be commensurate and thereby rationally compared.

The respondents would say that the major defect in democracy is the tendency for the majority to vote itself more and more money. A population with less disposable income also has less disposable time and resources in general to devote to political action in self-interest, however unenlightened. So a UBI would tend to balance out popular interests (again, however unenlightened) against business interests seeking more immigrants. Moreover, an immigrant that might be competing for an income resource is less of a threat than an immigrant that _will_ be competing for exactly the same income stream. The latter obtains under the UBI.

Here's an angle that Roger Stone may have missed in his estimates: What if the Frankfurt School's involvement with the OSS's "denazification" program created a congenital defect in the Deep State that did more than merely reflect the Frankfurt School's animus toward working class Germans? What if this congenital defect generalized this animus to include working class white Americans? Moreover, what if this congenital defect was baked into the Deep State utilizing sophisticated Soviet techniques then deployed including pedophilia sexual blackmail? NB: By its very nature, the Deep State has an opaque structure which could have, and would have been utilized by moles to create central points so that only a few individuals would need to be controlled, and then only on the most critical occasions. JFK and RFK assassinations would be easily explained by this. But what about the assassination of MLK? NB: MLK's last book before he was assassinated "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community" proposed a radically different approach to civil rights than the affirmative action welfare state: Universal Basic Income If Universal Basic Income had been adopted, the deadly embrace between college educated whites and the rent-seeking welfare state could have been averted. More to the point working class whites would not have seen blacks as enemies. Moreover, the UBI would have made it politically impossible for the Democrats to sneak through the immigration replacement of the working class as every immigrant would be seen as a direct threat to an existing income stream to the working class. The Southern Poverty Law Center took over the "Poor People's March" movement started by MLK's last book, and ensured that any attempt by working class whites to defend themselves against the affirmative action welfare state would be portrayed as resurgent Naziism. In this paradigm, Roy Cohn's connection with Columbia University (attending there at exactly the time the Frankfurt School was working for the OSS) as well as pedophilia help explain why Senator Joe McCarthy rejected Robert Kennedy and hired Roy Cohn at the height of McCarthy's influence and, from that moment forward, McCarthy's stock declined to his death a few short years later. PS: Yes I'm quite aware that Roy Cohn was Trump's attorney in the late 1970s. This may explain the extreme hysteria of the Cultural Marxist regime -- and its use of "Russia" as a kind of preemptive strike.

Distinguish between the genetic capacity for culture and the consequences of the exercise of that capacity. In this context, it may be helpful to think about the genetic capacity for "morality". The genetic capacity for "morality" and an explosion in the genetic capacity for "culture" arose together. There are those who argue for a naturalistic definition of "culture" as the result of mimicry (the "meme" being the quasi "unit of selection"). One may accept for the sake of argument that in, say, birds songs evolve as a result of mimicry and still accept that in humans the presence of moral agency requires a definition of "artificial" that incorporates moral agency. In other words, if we accept that everything "artificial" is also "natural", then we must either abandon the concept of "artificial" or accept that "artificial" things have a property that distinguishes them as a subclass of "natural" phenomena. That distinguishing property has been proposed by some as any phenomena "caused by humans". This would include phenomena over which humans bear no moral responsibility. This begs the original question: What phenomena "caused by humans" involve no moral responsibility?

What you measure about a theory with the test data is the theory's ability to losslessly compress it -- or to approximate the data's measure of Kolmogorov complexity -- prediction errors included and quantified as units of information such as bits. This brings data, theory and error into the same dimension: Algorithmic information. This is why elsewhere in this forum I stated: If all the major databases that social scientists use to publish their papers were appended in one big file, and prizes were awarded for making ever smaller executable archives, it would totally nuke the social pseudo-scientists cum quasi-theologians. This would be vastly more powerful in the good that it would do than 1000 Stefan videos. Advances in artificial intelligence required rigorous formalization of "the scientific method". See "Open Problems in Universal Induction & Intelligence".

There is reason to believe some of these alleles were around for a long time in various populations but not subject to substantial selective pressure. There's an important difference between the timing of the appearance of a mutation and the timing of its selective sweep through the population. These studies don't tell us when the mutation first appeared, nor even where it first appeared. A mutation -- particularly a loss-of-function (aka recessive) mutation -- can appear in the population, spread by drift and not be subjected to any substantial phenotypic expression and disappear by drift before having a chance to demonstrate selective advantage. In this kind of situation, you need two circumstances for a selective sweep: The recessive mutations drift into enough population frequency to encounter themselves in enough individuals for the statistics of their homozygous phenotypes to affect population frequency. The environment has to confer selective advantage to these recessive phenotypes. The important thing to note is the timing and geography of the selective sweep of these alleles (not just their appearance and drift) -- which is what these papers are addressing. Here's the problem with the agricultural diffusion hypothesis of Vitamin D selection: The neolithic spread agriculture throughout Eurasia very rapidly. While there may well have been vitamin D selective pressures for lighter skin throughout Eurasia for tens of millenia prior to the neolithic selective sweep, the selective sweep of the neolithic alleles petered out toward the east (Tarim Basin and, perhaps, Lake Baikal) even though agriculture spread to latitudes comparable to those in Europe. Now for a brief aside: In any hypothesis testing, a better criteria than Popperian "falsifiability" is the Plattian "strong inference" arising from having multiple competing hypotheses that are placed under the same testing regime. In other words, "poking holes in a theory" is sophistry unless you have one or more competing theories subjected to the same tests. No theory is "perfect". You have to be quantitative, not qualitative. In the current circumstance, I'm offering a competing hypothesis for the neolithic selective sweep that explains the geographic limits as well as timing: Dogs. Paleolithic Europeans had been under symbiotic coevolution with wolves for a longer period of time than paleolithic Asians, and this coevolution had been going on for about 10,000 years (if not more) prior to the neolithic. This produced a unique strain of human: Everyman an alpha. That is to say, every Euroman was the head of his own hunting pack -- his "gang" -- his "dawgs". This resulted in a less eusocial and more individualistic strain of human. Moreover, this strain reversed almost a million years of collectivist primate evolution going back to group conflicts (gang wars) -- behaviors apparent in our closest primate relatives: chimps. In wolves, "warfare" is more properly viewed as champion warfare -- with the alpha of each hunting pack doing battle with the other alpha. Subordinate wolves skirmish but generally only one on one. When two Euroman-headed packs encountered each other in overlapping hunting territory, a similar champion warfare conflict would obtain -- with the two humans engaging in the male sexual selection of natural duel -- as with virtually all other sexual species. This 10,000 year symbiotic evolution with wolves produced a predisposition toward natural duel as the appeal of last resort in dispute processing that became formalized with the neolithic's increased population and migration. Agriculture's pressures toward collectivism thence "civilization" were a natural extension of the long evolutionary history of primate gang warfare but against the grain of Euroman individualism. Natural duel was formalized but it also impeded the penetration of civilization into northern Europe until nearly 1,000 years ago when JudeoChristianity finally pacified the last of the Euroman holdouts. It was this sexual selection among Euromen, amplified by agriculture's population pressures, that produced sexual selection among Euro-women -- nuclear family structure, individualism, self-reliance and and explosion of diverse recessive pigmentation.

Of course. Your imputation was unnecessarily uncharitable. My ironic literary style was to highlight the (repeatedly posed) question of timing of the appearance of so many mutations in a short period of time circa 8,000 years ago. Yes, genes affecting pigmentation, hair and eye, as well as skin, are (to varying degrees) pleiotropic and their phenotypes (to varying degrees) multigenic. The question still remains "Why circa 8,000 years ago and not earlier?" Look, let me help you get beyond rhetorical posturing (ie: imputing to me ignorance of basic evolutionary concepts) to a substantive argument that addresses the timing issue that I have raised (now how many times?) -- giving you the benefit of the doubt as to whether you would prefer intellectually honest discourse over scoring rhetorical points with the ignorant among us: The paper "The Timing of Pigmentation Lightening in Europeans" posits that the reason so many pigment-altering mutations swept through Europe within a few millennia of 8,000 years ago, is that agricultural migration increased both population sizes and genetic diffusion into Europe. This then provided the raw material on which natural selection (ie: Vitamin D deficiency) could operate. Do you agree that might explain the timing?

There was selection pressure but the late time -- 8,000 years go -- demands that you answer the question that I have, now repeatedly, raised about the Vitamin D deficiency hypothesis: Since anatomically modern humans -- indeed European humans -- were, 36,000 years ago, at least at as high a latitude as the highest latitude currently estimated for the origin of white skin, why did they wait to evolve white skin until the appearance of a variety of other changes in physical phenotype such as eye color and hair color, nearly 20,000 years later?

Saying, in effect, "Successive generations are comprised of those characters that were successful in prior generations." is a "fit" target for the accusation of tautology. Defining the consequences of human volition as "natural" leaves the word "artificial" stranded.

I read it. They quoted a casual comment by a passing reader of a poster paper. Her comment doesn't prove or disprove anything but it is evidence that the reporter for sciencemag wanted _some_ kind of "explanation". Since the paper itself merely showed evidence of the 8,000 year old origin of white skin, what was the sciencemag reporter to do? Solution: Grab the first person that supported the old notion that vitamin D deficiency was the driver. If anything has been "disproved" by these new data on the young date of white skin, it is that old notion.

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Blonde hair appeared 11,000 years ago. White skin evolved 8,000 years ago. If these had been climate adaptations, they would have occurred much earlier.

This is incorrect and is the downfall of so-called "white-identity". Somewhere around 1.2 billion years ago, multicellular organisms started to overcome the "tribalism" of clones, inherent in mitotic reproduction. This they did with haploid cells produced by meiosis known as "gametes". Somewhere around 600 million years ago, sexual selection became strong enough to overcome mitotic "tribalism" and produced the Cambrian explosion of life forms. It was hundreds of millions of years later that a few species tried to regress to the multicellular level, taking the form of eusocial insects. By largely abandoning sexual selection, eusocial insects got stuck in an evolutionary dead-end but, because of their ecological dominance, became important components of the biosphere. The general pattern of sexual selection became fixed in various forms of male duel and female mating preference (rape being very rare in sexual species). These are the two primordial aspects of individual sovereignty. In the primate line leading to humans, we see the first signs of vertebrate warfare outside of the naked mole rat's eusocial organization -- in which natural duel is compounded with gang warfare. Other supposed cases of gang warfare in vertebrates, such as wolf packs in conflict, are more properly thought of as its nascent form in "champion warfare" in which outcome is decided by two alpha males in natural duel -- regardless of the lower level conflicts which, in any event, rarely entail even two ganging up on one. Civilized man has taken the preliminary primate gang warfare to new levels and is therefore on the road toward eusociality. However, there was at least one human culture that was in contact with civilization for millenia and chose, instead, to enforce natural duel as the appeal of last resort in dispute processing. This was an attempt to return to the individual sovereignty of sexual reproduction driven by the ancestral memories of that more reliable basis for evolution established with the Cambrian explosion. The result was great diversity in phenotypes of hair color and eye color, as well as a predisposition toward individualism and individual integrity. It wasn't until about 1000 years ago that the last of that culture was overcome by civilization.

An academic note for those interested in formal justification of Ockham's Razor: Quantitative justification for preferring simple theories is usually attributed to Ray Solomonoff's early 60's work on algorithmic probability based on Kolmogorov complexity. However, it appears the first such justification appeared in Harold Jeffreys's early 30's book "Scientific Inference". The main difference between Jeffreys's and Solomonoff's later work was the formal system used to encode theory. Solomonoff used Turing machines -- making his work directly applicable to computation. Jeffreys used Principia Mathematica's theory of types. Interestingly, PM's theory of types has become the modern basis for computer science largely taking the place of Turing's "tape memory" machine. Marcus Hutter's 2007 paper On Universal Prediction and Bayesian Confirmation does a wide survey of this history and favor's Solomonoff's treatment on technical grounds that I don't quite comprehend, but I tend to trust his judgement on these matters. Be that as it may, the key insight that enabled Solomonoff's approach seems to be that rigorous formalization of theory (to account for _all_ observational data) yields a string of symbols and the length of that string can be used to numerically compare competing theories' probabilities of being correct.

The de facto role of so-called "social science" is that of theology in a theocracy: Provide pseudo-scientific justification for the political agenda of those with whom the "social scientists" identify. Think about your example: There are multiple powerful interests that want open borders. They fund social scientists via public institutions. Social scientists return the favor by providing "scientific papers" justifying open borders with high sounding arguments that amount to things like: "If you increase diversity, things get better -- at least in the long run." This is basically what Putnam says in "Bowling Alone" which was one of the more honest attempts to measure the actual effects of "diversity" on societies -- and he found that things actually got worse for most people in the things that matter most. So he refused to publish his findings until he could come up with a chapter about why it was all ok -- which is basically "at least in the long run". If all the major databases that social scientists use to publish their papers were appended in one big file, and prizes were awarded for making ever smaller executable archives, it would totally nuke the social pseudo-scientists cum quasi-theologians. This would be vastly more powerful in the good that it would do than 1000 Stefan videos.

There is a lot of noise about "rent seeking" but the best way to think about it is in terms of privatizing positive externalities generated by others. This is the mirror image of crony capitalists socializing their costs (as in the 2008 Wall Street bailouts). In classical economics, these privatized positive externalities are called "economic rents" because they were originally associated with the portion of land value arising from such external investments as a military to defend the realm. Such increases in land value are based on the rent the land owner can charge tenant farmers, for example. My contention is that Quigley's "institutionalization" arises as "authorities" (whether capitalist, religious, military or political) figure out ways of shifting the effective tax burden off of their privatized positive externalities and onto things like economic activity, or their socialized negative externalities.

Who said society is or isn't moral? Who said society is or isn't responsible? They evolve out of the statistics of the exercise of individual agency -- and, since you apparently missed this fundamental point in what I said -- that is the locus of the "moral". FDR had a lot of "help" -- Marx and his minions for instance. So did the framers of the US Constitution -- Guttenberg, Luther, Bacon, etc. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/10/001-economics-as-eugenics http://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf And then there is the current bidding war for young women between the economy and the family that selects out of the next generation the very qualities demanded by the economy -- whether you want to say they are genetic or learned they will have an impact on population genetics and do so in a short period of time because the so-called "demographic transition" which is occurring world wide is based on just such a bidding war.

Denial of moral agency as influencing which "practices that survive" is denial of moral responsibility for consequences. Moral responsibility for culture must place priority on prior causes such as genetics: Without the genetic capacity for culture there is no culture. Not only is it possible to construct a culture that degrades the genetic capacity for culture; I would submit that our current culture is, in fact, degrading the genetic capacity for culture. That's why this topic should be given priority by moral philosophers.

Well, I could go into a detailed review of Quigley's insights in TEoC but I agree with your positive assessment of his emphasis on instrumental organs "evolving" institutional sclerosis. It is central to the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations and is really the point I was trying to make about rent seeking in another topic in these fora. In other words, it is the no-brainer profits from instrumental organs that selects no-brainer rentiers taking over those organs causing institutional sclerosis. Quigley's mode of explanation of this, the most critical aspect of his theoretic framework, is more kinematic than dynamic. You really need dynamics if you want to fix things.

Yes and none of that is inconsistent with what I said about the non-aggression axiom.