Biden Administration misc. activities

[Indy]

Samuel Benjamin Harris was born in Los Angeles, California, on April 9, 1967. He is the son of actor Berkeley Harris, who appeared mainly in Western films, and TV writer and producer Susan Harris (née Spivak), who created Soap (TV series) and The Golden Girls among other series

[3rdside]

Your prejudice is mind blowing.

[3rdside]

I suppose I can add that privileged white guys can be pretty trying as a whole (or as a stereotype) - which probably counts for double in the increasingly unequal USA - but to lump Harris in there with them is .... mind blowing.

[Indy]

Your prejudice is mind blowing.

Prejudice is prejudging. I am not sure how it is pre-judging him to say he is a privileged white guy. I think he meets all 3 of those adjectives without any debate.

Interesting how I didn't even have to comment--simply a quote detailing his upbringing from the source you referenced.

A rich white kid growing up in LA with two very successful show biz parents, who then went on to Stanford, doesn't meet your definition for privilege. Hmm.

[3rdside]

Of course it meets my definition of privilege, but to say *all* privileged white men aren't capable of making an informed, objective opinion on racism - which is what you're doing - is just dumb, especially in Harris's case.

[Indy]

lol. I said you shouldn't listen to privileged white guys on whether something is racist or not. And you shouldn't. It isn't their call. But you keep propping them up and saying they know what is racist and what isn't. That is just insane.

[3rdside]

Not they, he ... I'm not even sure why I have to spell that out, but here we are.

[Mori Chu]

A shorter version of the same video, you can listen from 3.55 and it’s just a 5.58 video..

And before you say privileged white guy again, I’d read his background:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris

I mean, his PhD was literally on the subject of morality:

“He received a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where his thesis was titled ‘The Moral Landscape: How Science Could Determine Human Values’”.

Calling Harris a privileged white guy is surely a stereotypical statement made in ignorance … reverse racism in full effect, in other words.

Sam Harris believes, among other kooky things, in "race science," which posits that there are statistically significant differences among races, such as that one race is measurably more intelligent than another.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... bell-curve
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/m ... ce-science

The Vox article goes into Harris's public comments on race in detial; several of them are problematic. Here's a quote from Harris:

People don’t want to hear that a person's intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person's intelligence even in childhood. It's not that the environment doesn't matter, but genes appear to be 50 to 80 percent of the story. People don't want to hear this. And they certainly don't want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups.

[3rdside]

Yes, an extension of the 90's book the Bell Curve .. and Ezra Klein misdiagnoses Harris's reasons for following the science on it.

It's not - as Klein would like you to believe - to perpetuate ongoing racial stereotypes etc, it's to understand how policy can be adapted - if necessary - to improve black (and Hispanic) quality of life.

It's a sensitive subject obviously, and how to balance the two is a hugely challenging issue in its own right.

[Indy]

Not they, he ... I'm not even sure why I have to spell that out, but here we are.

Oh, he is the one rich white guy that you can listen to about what is racist and what isn't. Got it. Well, him. And you. And Joe Rogan. OK, I think I understand now.

[3rdside]

We have reached peak juvenile.

[3rdside]

Yes, an extension of the 90's book the Bell Curve .. and Ezra Klein misdiagnoses Harris's reasons for following the science on it.

It's not - as Klein would like you to believe - to perpetuate ongoing racial stereotypes etc, it's to understand how policy can be adapted - if necessary - to improve black (and Hispanic) quality of life.

It's a sensitive subject obviously, and how to balance the two is a hugely challenging issue in its own right.

Here's a deep dive into Harris vs Klein - safe to say it's a pretty controversial topic argued pretty comprehensively by both sides:

https://everythingstudies.com/2018/04/2 ... ntroversy/

[Mori Chu]

Yes, an extension of the 90's book the Bell Curve .. and Ezra Klein misdiagnoses Harris's reasons for following the science on it.

It's not - as Klein would like you to believe - to perpetuate ongoing racial stereotypes etc, it's to understand how policy can be adapted - if necessary - to improve black (and Hispanic) quality of life.

It's a sensitive subject obviously, and how to balance the two is a hugely challenging issue in its own right.

What kinds of adaptations to policy would you propose that would be based on presumed differences in intelligence and capability between races?

[3rdside]

I’m not an expert so I don’t know - I do know that the author of the Bell Curve’s policies were straight up controversial, Harris might propose something different.

I generally lean towards understanding something at face value and going from there, i generally don’t lean towards deliberately ignoring something and going from there, although in this case it may be so controversial it’s best left untouched.

I can’t say I’d definitely go with that notion but I guess I could be convinced, even though being ignorant on anything just feels wrong.

[Indy]

Use of AFQT
William J. Matthews writes that part of The Bell Curve's analysis is based on the AFQT "which is not an IQ test but designed to predict performance of certain criterion variables".[33] The AFQT covers subjects such as trigonometry.[8]

Heckman observed that the AFQT was designed only to predict success in military training schools and that most of these tests appear to be achievement tests rather than ability tests, measuring factual knowledge and not pure ability. He continues:[25][34]

Ironically, the authors delete from their composite AFQT score a timed test of numerical operations because it is not highly correlated with the other tests. Yet it is well known that in the data they use, this subtest is the single best predictor of earnings of all the AFQT test components. The fact that many of the subtests are only weakly correlated with each other, and that the best predictor of earnings is only weakly correlated with their "g-loaded" score, only heightens doubts that a single-ability model is a satisfactory description of human intelligence. It also drives home the point that the "g-loading" so strongly emphasized by Murray and Herrnstein measures only agreement among tests—not predictive power for socioeconomic outcomes. By the same token, one could also argue that the authors have biased their empirical analysis against the conclusions they obtain by disregarding the test with the greatest predictive power.

Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas presented evidence suggesting AFQT scores are likely better markers for family background than "intelligence" in a 1999 study:

Herrnstein and Murray report that conditional on maternal "intelligence" (AFQT scores), child test scores are little affected by variations in socio-economic status. Using the same data, we demonstrate their finding is very fragile.[35]

[Nodack]

I subscribe to the trading places theory. You are more a result of your surroundings.

[Indy]

I agree, for the most part. IQ tests don't test how smart you are. It tests how well you can take an IQ test. SATs have repeatedly shown bias in their development, to the point that many universities in the US are not requiring to determine admission anymore. All test are inherently flawed because they are developed with the biases of their creators.

[Nodack]

If Einstein was born on a deserted island with no books and just learned to survive would he invent the theory of relativity or would he just be some guy good at fishing?

If you took a random baby from a remote villiage in Africa that had no schools and sent him to the best private schools in America and gave him a college education at an Ivy league school he would no doubt have a much higher education level than of he stayed in his home villiage.

Your surroundings dictate how you turn out.

[3rdside]

If Einstein was born on a deserted island with no books and just learned to survive would he invent the theory of relativity or would he just be some guy good at fishing?

If you took a random baby from a remote villiage in Africa that had no schools and sent him to the best private schools in America and gave him a college education at an Ivy league school he would no doubt have a much higher education level than of he stayed in his home villiage.

Your surroundings dictate how you turn out.

And I think right there is the point - if you accept that environmental factors can help improve your IQ (I know for a fact they did in my case - there was, for example, one diagrammatical reasoning test I had no clue how to solve until someone showed me just how simple it actually was), then trying to understand what it is about an environment that's possibly holding sections of society back .. then maybe that's the answer.

Which is what Harris clearly states in the clip below with Rogan (and which Rogan elaborates on a little).

Harris also adds what the studies should mean in the context of social policy, broadly summarising by saying "we need to politically engineer tides that raise all the boats", even though that's a little vague.

[Indy]

If Einstein was born on a deserted island with no books and just learned to survive would he invent the theory of relativity or would he just be some guy good at fishing?

If you took a random baby from a remote villiage in Africa that had no schools and sent him to the best private schools in America and gave him a college education at an Ivy league school he would no doubt have a much higher education level than of he stayed in his home villiage.

Your surroundings dictate how you turn out.

And I think right there is the point - if you accept that environmental factors can help improve your IQ (I know for a fact they did in my case - there was, for example, one diagrammatical reasoning test I had no clue how to solve until someone showed me just how simple it actually was), then trying to understand what it is about an environment that's possibly holding sections of society back .. then maybe that's the answer.

Then that had nothing to do with your IQ. IQ is supposed to be innate. If someone showed you how to solve a problem and that improved your score on any test, especially an 'IQ' test, it wasn't an IQ test. It was a test of knowledge. Those are completely different.