English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

2:02 PM

@Robusto Uh, I think I've heard it a few times, but I wouldn't call it common.

Ich haue Dir auf die Fresse, daß Deine Zähne im Arsch Klavier spielen or something like that. Or Ich haue Dir aufs Maul, or whatever.

Robusto

Yeah, that sounds like what I heard.

Fresse would make sense.

RegDwight

So would Maul. And then you can hauen or schlagen, auf or in...

Robusto

Doesn't Ich haue Dir auf die Fresse, daß Deine Zähne im Arsch Klavier spielen need a werden at the end?

RegDwight

Nö.

Robusto

Blunter that way, I guess.

Billare

2:04 PM

@Cerberus It is controversial if you think through things. Evolution implies all sorts of things that the very people who champion it don't think it worth pondering.

Robusto

0

Q: who vs that as a pronoun

I have seen many writers using "that" as a pronoun in cases where "who" should be used. For example, a book author says I apologize to those of you that are unable to obtain electronic copies. Should it not be I apologize to those of you who are unable to obtain electronic copies. Or is it...

Dupe?

Billare

@Cerberus Discussing philosophy of sociobiology is a very big reason I'm committed to the Philosophy stack exchange.

RegDwight

2

Q: How to use: who/that

I often get confused when trying to use who vs that. Some examples that often confuse me: THAT The person that went to the store. The people that went shopping. The persons that went shopping. The group that went shopping. WHO The person who went to the store. The ...

usage grammar

Billare

Since the horrors of World War II, intellectuals and academics have kind of reinterpreted past applications to biology as a kind of Whig history.

Cerberus

@Bill: "Evolution implies all sorts of things that the very people who champion it don't think it worth pondering." Hmm, what sort of things?

Billare

2:06 PM

There must be inevitable moral progress, so all the past people who draw conclusions from studying evolution that mandated eugenics, hereditarianism were wrong.

Cerberus

Oh, I see.

Billare

Well think about what we were discussing yesterday:

Cerberus

Yes social Darwinism is a bit dangerous still.

Robusto

@Cerberus — And yet social Darwinism is certainly everywhere in evidence.

RegDwight

@Robusto Yup, it's more direct. Spielen werden sounds like distant future and too formal a register.

Billare

2:07 PM

Remember when I said that perhaps the English people might have benefited eugenically from the rules England adopted deciding who was to be elevated to the peerage?

Cerberus

@Rob: I meant the historical movement, which included the idea that the weak should not be helped, because it would strengthen the race if they just died.

Billare

Social Darwinism, strictly speaking was wrong, because the people who invented it thought that without proactive measures, society would "decay."

Robusto

@Cerberus — That's more Calvinistic than Darwinistic, in a way.

Billare

They didn't understand Mendelian genetics.

There is no "ratchet". However, just because society doesn't decay doesn't mean all its gifts will accrue equally to everyone.

Cerberus

@Bill: Hmm I remember your saying something about that: so how did they pick peers? Based on physical fitness? I thought not?

@Rob: Calvinistic? How so?

Robusto

2:10 PM

The idea that there are the elect and the damned.

Billare

That was another mistake of the Social Darwinsists: equating physical fitness with fitness as a technical term.

Cerberus

@Rob: Oh, I see. Well I suppose it was deterministic in a way, agreed.

Billare

Physical fitness \neq evolutionary fitness. Evolutionary fitness can select for weak animals, such as when birds go off to islands and become fat and immobile.

Cerberus

Agreed.

Billare

It's true that they would not survive against their mainland peers, but building up wings and muscle and survival tactics is costly, versus simply growing fat and eating and reproducing, with no predators.

So "fit" specimens of birds aren't evolutionary fit.

Cerberus

2:12 PM

Besides, Social Darwinists fail to bring forward any convincing argument why the "strength of the human race" should be important at all, especially as opposed to morality.

Billare

Well, no man is an island.

You can't adopt a strictly individualist view of things.

Well, I don't think its practical.

Cerberus

What if we all perished, but in a morally right way?

Robusto

@Cerberus — Perish the thought.

Cerberus

Hehe.

Robusto

When I perish, I want it to be as immoral as possible.

Cerberus

2:13 PM

How very... postmodern of you!

Billare

I'm not sure I understand the question, Cerberus. Can you rephrase?

Cerberus

Okay, suppose the human race would get stronger and stronger, in whatever way you want, by natural or social selection: why would that be desirable? What ultimate goal would it fulfill?

Billare

Right. So natural selection takes no ultimate goal. But therein lies the great strength of human beings that can help us escape the brutal logic of evolution: We can guide our future evolution.

We're the only creatures to ever figure out the rules.

Cerberus

We can; but why should we?

Robusto

How do we apply the idea of evolution to human history? Has it occurred genetically, or has our ability to tamper with our environment forestalled natural selection? Does the DNA of Egyptian mummies show marked differences from that of modern-day human beings?

Billare

2:16 PM

Because the laws of natural selection are extremely general and inevitable.

It is legitimate, in some way, to worry about the "degeneracy" of a society.

If "productive' members of society aren't having children, they WILL get replaced.

Cerberus

@Robusto I believe selection among the types that exist already can happen quite fast; mutation however will probably take tens of thousands of years.

Billare

You could have a situation of mind-bending inequality.

Think of our bodies actually for example.

Robusto

@Billare — That's what Hitler worried about.

Billare

Each of our individual cells is like a society.

Cerberus

So what if my body died? Why should I keep it alive?

Billare

2:17 PM

@Robusto I'm not Hitler. Hitler was an idiot who misinterpreted the data first of all, and he had bogus scientific studies backing him. He had no idea what he was talking about.

Cerberus

@Bill: I don't think Rob meant that.

Billare

@Cerberus Our body PRIVLEGES certain cells in our body. For example, brian cells receive 25% of the metabolic requirement.

Robusto

@Billare — The point is, whenever you label something "degenerate" you are implying that there is a paragon from which that thing degenerated. And how do you ever absolutely define your paragon?

Billare

OK, I can only address one thing at a time.

First, to Robusto.

Robusto

There is no unequivocal definition of what is good, so there can be no unequivocal definition of what is not good.

Billare

2:19 PM

There is no magical "paragon" for us to hold in the air. There's no "natural" one either.

It is entirely idiosyncratic.

Cerberus

My main point is this: we have several things to consider, among which is morality; I see no reason why the fitness of the race should trump morality. It is just another thing to consider.

Billare

For example, we might think that we are pretty spiffy as a species, but it is debatable whether ants would trade places with us.

Nevertheless, there are certain values we hold above other ones, which is obvious to see from our language.

Robusto

@Billare — My point exactly. It is subjective in the extreme.

Billare

We clearly hold our large brains in massive esteem. That is at least one element of the "paragon."

It is somewhat "subjective", but that doesn't mean that there better answers than others.

In no culture I can think of do people celebrate stupidity.

Our capability for thinking is the way we separate from ourselves from "lower animals."

Robusto

@Billare — Hahahaha! You're kidding, right?

Turn on Fox news and say that again.

Cerberus

2:22 PM

Naturalistic fallacy

The naturalistic fallacy is often claimed to be a formal fallacy. It was described and named by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica. Moore stated that a naturalistic fallacy is committed whenever a philosopher attempts to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term "good" in terms of one or more natural properties (such as "pleasant", "more evolved", "desired", etc.). Arthur N. Prior defined it as …the assumption that because some quality or combination of qualities invariably and necessarily accompanies the quality of goodness, or is ...

(This is what I accuse traditional Social Darwinists of, not any of you.)

Billare

Fox News is low-brow. It is a cultural marker, not celebrating stupidity.

The naturalistic fallacy is wrong...

Robusto

@Billare — Sez you.

Billare

Yet it is, at the same time, ridiculous to claim that our preferences are entirely arbitrary.

Cerberus

I believe there are groups of pubescent children among whom not knowing smart stuff is considered cool.

Billare

We paint our hospital walls blue and green, because natural selection has imbued us with preferences for those colors over other ones.

We value intelligence, because more intelligent individuals in the past survived and reproduced.

Cerberus

2:25 PM

And yet it is not valued universally, I believe.

Though, yes, it is valued in a great majority of cases.

Billare

Sociability and intelligence, I personally believe, are very highly rated amongst most cultures of the world.

Humor is another quality.

Cerberus

Agreed.

Billare

Say there was some external event right, that was causing all sociable and intelligent people to die off.

The creme of society.

Would it be the "naturalistic fallacy" to worry about the implications?

Cerberus

But the thing is that being "highly rated" is sometimes not valued by others, partly based on jealousy.

Billare

Moreover, human society is not just something that pops out of human beings collectively.

We've been a species for 200,000 years.

Only for 50 years have we had the majority of children surive to age 5.

Cerberus

2:28 PM

@Bill: It would not be naturalistic fallacy if you defined some deeper goal not derived from the way nature works but from elsewhere.

Enter morality.

Billare

How is morality "not the way nature works"?

Cleaner fish clean other fish, and expect reciprocation.

Cerberus

It is from an objective point of view; but you need subjective morality in order to formulate a goal that escapes the naturalistic fallacy.

Billare

Anyway, back to my point:

Human, western civilization is very precious.

It is exceedingly rare in the history of our species.

Cerberus

Homo mensura, or else I must diagree.

Billare

If we troublesome trends that would take away from the establishment of civilization, then we would need to take those trends very seriously.

Let's get concrete, because we're too abstract at this point.

IQ is a biggie.

I dunno how deep you want to dive into the rabbit hole, though.

Cerberus

2:31 PM

Heh which rabbit hole? Alice's?

Billare

Arthur Jensen, a professor at UC Berkeley, receive death threats and had protestors following him for talking about IQ, and it's importance.

It's pretty controversial, here in America.

I just want to set up a quick example, to show you how Galton, and other eugenicists ideas weren't so kooky.

The problem with their ideas, and most grand social ideas really, it's that it's virtually impossible for a single man or government to implement them in a moral fashion.

Cerberus

Well, okay, but I think we all agree that those protesters are just not smart people. No need to take into account the ideas of just any random stupid person...

Billare

There's a theory out there: Smart Fraction Theory.

It postulates that for a country to have Western science and Western Facility, 10% of its population must have 130+ IQ.

IQ is strongly hereditary; the correlation coefficient is 0.8 - 0.9

Cerberus

Okay, probably true; so?

Billare

Something that has changed in our modern society, is that less intelligent people are having more children; more intelligent people are having fewer. This has to do with higher education and the cost of raising children in the modern world.

JSBangs

2:35 PM

@Billare, I'm not sure that's actually true

Cerberus

Yeah I know how that all works.

Billare

Research perform by a Steven A. Stearns at Yale found that IQ seems to be decreasing on average, in America.

JSBangs

avg IQ scores have been rising over at least the past 70 yrs

Billare

Slowly.

JSBangs, I'll get to that in a second.

I'm on a roll here.

So, let's combine Smart Fraction Theory and this empirical fact here:

Cerberus

@JSB: True, IQ is based on nurture for a large part. But I think Bill is talking about genetics mostly.

Billare

2:36 PM

Plausibly, with no proactive action, US IQ might slip to some level, where it is impossible to sustain civilization.

This would be bad for BOTH low-IQ people, and high IQ people.

Most countries in the world can't sustain modern Western scientific culture. What's worse, most countries in the world don't have American' ethos of immigrant culture, so they are very...ethnocentric.

What might happen, if, perhaps in some horribly hypothetical world, we let these trends slip too far?

That is a valid question, and not a stupid one.

I'm not arguing for extreme plausibility, at first, but to even broach this sort of question strikes some people as physically impossible, fanciful even!

Cerberus

Okay, so? You are still presupposing underlying moral goals or standards.

Billare

So you don't think important to sustain Western cviilization?

Cerberus

Not apart from some moral concern, no.

Billare

I'm not really a macho cultural supremacist. But Western civilization falling would be a huge loss for most people in the world.

JSBangs

I'm all for civilization, though I'm not entirely convinced that it has to be Western to be worthy of my concern

Cerberus

2:40 PM

I don't see how you could have any "oughts" without either moral or egoistic reasoning. Otherwise it is naturalistic fallacy.

Billare

The East might be able to take up the mantle, but they are far more ethnocentric, and they might not "share" to the same extent as the West currently does now.

JSBangs, perhaps it would comfort you to know that I'm not of Western civilization: I am an immigrant.

JSBangs

i'm also not sure that ethnocentricity is a bad thing, but i think we'd need to define the term better in order to really understand the argument

Billare

Yet I would despair greatly if Western civilization ever fell. It created science, openness, the concept of the citizien ex ethnic identity, things that most places in the world simply haven't replicated.

JSBangs

also, the american approach to immigration is fairly unique, and there have been a great many civilizations that did fine w/o it

the romans had citizenship that was non-ethnic

Billare

IQ is not based on nurture for the most part.

This isn't something that has to be really refuted for the eugenic arguments to really take hold of you as to their importance.

The arguments, not the policy, mind you.

Eugenic arguments are strong; eugenics, as a government policy, could never, ever work.

Cerberus

2:43 PM

Citizenship among the Romans changed a great deal; it was very ethnocentric at first. They only extended it when they needed money... to put it rather crudely.

Billare

Most behavioral traits are heritable to the .7 level.

Most children are simply like their parents; the tabula rosa model has been proven wrong, over and over.

Cerberus

@Bill: I still think you'd need to formulate a reason why it should be desirable that Western civilization or the human race survive at all.

JSBangs

i, for one, am willing to take it as granted that humanity should survive

Billare

Wait, you aren't seriously questioning the latter?

You do think its imperative that the human race survive.

JSBangs

though as stated i'm not sure that western civ is necessary for that fact

also, do i need to point out that behavioral traits can be heritable w/o being genetic?

Cerberus

2:45 PM

I think it matters why it should survive in order to discuss how it should survive.

Billare

It is not Western culture qua Western culture. If there was some other culture, that provided reason, citizenship, industrial science, and a respect for entrepreneurship, I'd want it to triumph to.

JSBangs

learned behaviors can be very effectively transmitted from parents to children

Billare

No, JSBangs, I'm perfectly aware of that.

Robusto

@Billare — I think you give Western civilization too much credit, and denigrate the contributions of Asian and Arab culture and thought.

Billare

But there are studies done to confound such things:

Adoption studies, for example.

Cerberus

2:46 PM

@JSB: Right, just as IQ can be.

Bill: Perhaps it would clarify things for me if you'd state your position or proposition?

Billare

@Robusto I think Asian culture has made substantial, and will continue to make substantial, contributions to world happiness. But I think, based on historical reasons, and conversations with Asian immigrants, that they will not feel the same compulsion to share as much as the West has and will.

Robusto

Besides, it sounds as though you've recently been evangelized by this:

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998 it won a Pulitzer Prize and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book and produced by the National Geographic Society was broadcast on PBS in July 2005. It was also published under the title Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations (in which he includes North Africa) have survived a...

JSBangs

@Robusto, actually Diamond's argument rather goes against @Bill's

Cerberus

Meh that book is old news!

Billare

Yes, Diamond is against me.

JSBangs

2:48 PM

since Diamond states that environmental factors determine civilizational success, not the intelligence of the people there

Billare

He thinks it is "accidents" of geography.

Robusto

@Cerberus — ...

2 days ago, by Robusto

@RegDwight — Newness of news is relative. It was new to me, ergo it was new. None of you really exist, you are all just Turing machines attached to a chat mechanism, so none of your perceptions of time matter at all anyway.

Billare

My position is: Eugenic arguments aren't stupid. They need to be taken seriously, far more seriously than people do today.

Not arguments FOR eugenics as a policy.

PLEASE keep that in mind.

Robusto

@Billare — Now you're officially starting to scare me.

Billare

Arguments made by eugenicists that there IS A DANGER.

And in fact, arguments sort of opposite of eugenicists, that, we need carefully look at mating and heredity so that vast inequalities don't result.

JSBangs

2:50 PM

i'll grant that there is in principle, a danger, though i don't think that it's large enough to lose sleep over

Billare

Let's make it concrete:

You guys know that colleges are a big deal in the US, yes?

Cerberus

@Robusto Well said. I am just Turing you all into confusion.

Billare

Where you go to college and so on. Massive competition for top schools.

Cerberus

> Eugenic arguments aren't stupid. They need to be taken seriously, far more seriously than people do today.

I agree more or less.

Billare

America changed in the '50s and '60s, in a way many people haven't appreciated yet.

It used to be ordinary for outstanding members of society to marry more middling members.

A doctor would marry his secretary or a nurse.

A professor might marry a childhood sweetheart.

When people start going off to college, after World War II, something massive changed in American society.

Smart people started getting married to other smart people. Professors getting married to professors. Musicians getting married to musicians.

Colleges became an elite finishing school for men and women to meet future marriage partners, and not be stuck in "locality" any more.

Cerberus

2:53 PM

It has always been this way in Europe to a degree.

Billare

Moreover, the competition for college spaces has meant that the quality of students at certain top colleges has become a massive sieve for talent.

JSBangs

do you have any actual evidence to support this just-so story? i can tell an equally convincing story about class stratification that would describe, oh, 90% of the human possibility for most of history

* the human population

Cerberus

@JSB: You know you can edit chat lines for about a minute?

JSBangs

ach, no i didn't know that

Billare

So, what's going to happen in the next couple of ~30 - 40 years, is that I personally exceptional members of society are increasingly going to come from the same class of people.

Cerberus

2:55 PM

(It is one of my favourite features of this chat.)

JSBangs

anyway, nobles marry nobles, commoners marry commoners, and so it has been for millenia

Cerberus

Exactly. It never stopped the Old World.

Billare

Right. Don't you think that important! Norman families are STILL dominating England nearly 1000 years after.

Puritans are STILL the Boston Brahmins here.

The South is STILL poorer than the North.

Cerberus

Story as old as human civilization.

Billare

Right. But with all the controversy about massive inequality, this stuff will continue to matter.

JSBangs

2:56 PM

i thing that cultural and social factors are a far more parsimonious explanation that genetics for most of these things

b/c you can also find abundant examples of barbarians or commoners becoming the new nobles, once the conditions are right

Cerberus

+1 for Occam's Razor.

Billare

In South America for example, everybody knows that the rich folks are descended from Spanish and European settlers, and the poorer folk are darker in skin tone.

This causes massive social strife in many countries: Ecuador, with Correa.

They are always trying to elect "Indian" presidents to represent them, because they feel they have no power.

The poorer members of society.

Cerberus

In South America, many women would rather die than shave their legs, because Spanish women have hairier legs.

JSBangs

basically because: in humans, the selection pressure for high intelligence is enormous. individuals that are significantly less intelligent are weeded out with ruthless efficiency

furthermore, human populations are porous enough that i don't believe any ethnic group has been isolated long enough to drift very far from the intelligence mean, species-wise

Cerberus

@JSB: I don't really believe that. Anyone can procreate these days. Food is everywhere.

Billare

2:59 PM

Not "ruthless". Another thing old eugenicists didn't know was how much of a small generational selection advantage could lead to large changes ~100 generations on: only about 1% matters.

JSBangs

inter-racial and inter-ethnic marriage is more than common enough to keep the groups at rough parity

Billare

That is fallacious thinking, JSBangs.

Human beings aren't that porous.

The Sahara Desert was a very effective inhibiter of human cross-pollination between Africa and Europe.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…