This is exactly it. I looked at doing something like this, ok, I looked at doing this and decided early to forgo CSS because it's so very very complicated.
Truthfully, if my skillset had better matched the task I might have been lured into giving it a go. On another project I considered using CSS as a styling technology and got down to really understand it in detail. I then realized how good my 1,000 yard vision really is.
I can't speak to the forces which inevitably lead to decay but essentially, for some reason every technology tries to eat the world.
CSS is trying to eat the world and HTML5 is trying to eat the world and of course Javascript is famously trying to eat the world.
All these technologies (and here's the part where I see my post begin to fade to gray) are on their way to experiencing technology's version of societal collapse.
I use that analogy because it's so so apropo.
They are overwrought, overly complex systems yielding only marginally better results and being maintained at huge cost in terms of attention, brain power and collateral damage by everyone. The benefits accrue to a smaller and smaller number of people (FANG et. al) who do not have society's best interest at heart at all and are very far from the founding principals which inspired the original vision.
A simple scriptless HTML 1.0 browser minus the blink tag would deliver at least to me nearly 100% of the benefit I get from the web which can be characterized as "seeing what is happening, seeing what other people think, learning new stuff and downloading stuff".
I would love to start a (reactionary) movement away from the current web composed of a privacy-preserving HTML 1.0 browser capable of HTTPS and people dedicated to creating pages and resources for it. I don't know of any such "movement" .
If anyone is aware of anything like this do share.
> If anyone is aware of anything like this do share.
Well, I actually tried to start a movement for that [1].
The idea is to offload as much as possible to trusted peers, and to refine the web with a trust model where the user has to trust a website specifically to deliver expected things from the user's side (e.g. a news website should have no right to shove videos down your throat).
I also think that a lot of web browsers tackle the privacy problem wrong. "User Privacy" is not sending a user-agent to a server, or downloading a resource from it in a statistically easily detectable manner.
Real privacy is not having to download anything from the web server at all, by offloading requests to its peers. In my Browser [2] I'm trying to have every metadata, configuration or observation (and extraction) federated. I believe that the real strength of peer-to-peer is not decentralization; it is federation and liberation.
Except (half kidding but only half kidding here) augmented for things like cat videos; previous generations watched tv for entertainment, and for many people that has been partially or entirely replaced by the internet.
It makes sense to have watchers to watch the watchers because their respective job descriptions are different. One's task is to watch for "bad actors" and the other's job it to watch for bias within rendered judgments. Those are two different tasks requiring two different microskill sets and bodies of experience. Exemplars at each task may also represent two different personality types.
OK I am not a racist. Let me just affirm that. Here is my question- what if the tenets of racism - that race is tied in some fundamental way to a profile of abilities and deficits- is right? It's a possible world. Ethnically Jewish people could just be born with more verbal ability than whites. That is not impossible.
My point is this. By demanding a world in which some things cannot even be spoken of (except by critics) you're amputating our ability to know reality.
If people with your opinion in the 1800s had achieved the type of dominion over others you now seek, there would not be womens right and there would not be gay rights and there would not be equal rights.
The built-in assumption of your post is- we have reached a point of final knowledge about the physical universe and what is and is not possible in it. All further inquiries are a sort of crime.
This is exactly the attitude the old Soviet Union took towards evolution and Mao took towards, well everything really. It's the grand totalitarian error at its core, irrespective of what claims it makes for itself.
Race is a socially constructed category. The idea that someone is a different "race" just because they look different is not supported by biology. In all metrics there is more variation within a group than between groups. So the "tenets of racism" have been decisively disproven many times over.
The problem with defeating these in the marketplace of ideas, so to speak, is that their propagation has nothing to do with logic. People who believe them would find a way to dismiss any logical counterargument. The only way to squash it, arguably, is to prevent it.
Not to mention the fact that people who are targeted by these ideas, which deny their humanity, are going to feel hurt and excluded in any space that allows it. So preventing that from happening is a real-time, concrete concern.
This is Mao telling me I'm reactionary. It's Freud telling me I am going after his theories because I am projecting and have an Oedipal Complex.
You missed the point I was making. When 23andMe tells me I'm Jewish and I share 99% of my profile with fellow Jews whether or not "race is a social construct" used by some people for nefarious ends, the facts remain where they are.
Some ethnicities suffer from certain diseases at a rate far exceeding other ethnicities. That's genetic. That's the action of, in some cases a defect on a single gene. If you want to say those people are not a race, then fine, I'm not inclined to argue with you.
The point is that the possibility that shared genetic profiles are responsible for abilities and disabilities- which is something in the neighborhood of what bad racists are leveraging for effect, is not completely impossible.
I appreciate the anti-racist ethos. All humans are equal in my eyes merely for the fact of being human, full stop, no exceptions. It is still possible that genes control abilities and deficits and that shared genes result in shared outcomes. That is still a reasonable hypothesis and in the cse of outright maladies, more than a hypothesis.
If you want to have good outcomes, including societal outcomes, you need to know what is causing the outcomes you have. You cannot dictate causality; it needs to be discovered. Dictating causality looks like this:
I understand what you're saying, but I'm just telling you it's a scientific fact that race is a social construct in the sense that on all the relevant metrics that are usually talked about, like intelligence, ability, etc, there is more intragroup variation than intergroup variation.
That's not a particularly useful sense. There's more variation in height amongst men and women than between them too, but we're still perfectly happy to say that men are taller than women.
bad analogy. the height variance (not absolute bounds) in each sex is probably smaller than the difference in mean height. whereas this is not true of other metrics like intelligence
And why should that mark the Authoritative Threshold on whether a statistical skew counts as a "social construct"?
And if we crunched the numbers and falsified your assertion? Would you really turn on a dime and accept that okay, it's a social construct that men are taller?
I don't understand your argument. if you look at two bell curves for IQ and they look almost identical except for a slightly different mean, you're really going to go "okay that group is obviously smarter"? height is a different story - the curves are going to look much different. if you really don't want to get that then there's no point in continuing
That's true. There is more intra-group variation because within any group you have geniuses and you have morons, which is the widest spread you can have either intra-group or inter-group.
If every group is a bell curve, then the curves have similar variance and similar mean as well, and the variance within each group is larger than the difference between the means, and the differences are not big enough to say in a meaningful way that one group is smarter than another.
"Race is a socially constructed category" is a semantic argument, not a real debate point. An ethnicity indicates you are descended from some set of people, and share genetics and/or culture with them. A race is a group of people whose membership is almost entirely arbitrary. Just as an example, many (maybe most?) people who are Hispanic have some amount of Spanish heritage (the country, not the language). Spanish people are white in terms of race, though. It's an arbitrary boundary we've drawn. Ethnicities are actually tied to geneology, so they could potentially be useful.
I still get your point, though.
I think you're right in that abilities and disabilities can be genetic. It would make sense that groups that share genes could share abilities and disabilities. There are 2 things to note, however.
The first is that at this point in humanity's progress, I doubt that there are very many people who only belong to a single ethnicity. And each time people of different ethnicities procreate, each gene is effectively randomly taken from one of the two ethnicities. The chances of inheriting an entire multi-gene sequence from one parent is fairly low. That's why many of these genetic disorders are only common in communities that practice endogamy. For the wider population, unless you're descended fairly recently from someone that was a part of those communities, your chances are extremely low. I would expect that same here. If some ethnicity has an ability/disability, it would be common among an endogamous group of that ethnicity, but the chances for someone who split from that group several generations ago to have it is going to rapidly approach 0. One would expect that given random interbreeding between ethnicities, everyone would approach an average.
The second is that human behavior is extremely complex. Finding the causality for a delta in some ability is very hard to do. Most of the things we have traced back to genetics are binary. You have a disease, or you don't. There is no standard deviation on whether you have the disease or not, you either do or don't. Genetic diseases are also effectively immune to social factors. It doesn't matter how rich or poor, or white collar or blue collar you are; you can't get Tay-Sachs because you were discriminated against. Those add up to make it very hard to find the causality behind much of what we consider an ability. If one group ranks 10% higher in IQ tests, it might be because they're wealthy and everyone else is experiencing food shortages. Or they can afford better schools. Likewise, if another group can run 10% faster on average, it might be because they tend to work blue collar jobs and are in better shape than those of us that sit at a desk all day.
There are tons of factors that can affect physical and mental abilities. Genetics are likely one of those. If we can't even establish the causality, we certainly aren't going to be able to gauge the magnitude. Is it a drastic increase/decrease in ability, or is it a small change that is exacerbated by everyone overestimating it? It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we demonstrate some ethnicity can run faster, they'll start getting picked more to be professional athletes. Then more members of the ethnicity will attempt to become professional athletes, thus raising the average running speed and making the delta look more significant than it is.
Overall, I agree that genetics probably plays a role. I just think tracing it to an ethnicity is a) too difficult to be realistic, and b) not targeted enough to be useful. The cost of genetic testing will eventually fall enough to where we don't have to look at ethnicity to guess at what genes you have, we can just test everyone. Then ethnicity is irrelevant, it's entirely about whether you have the gene or not.
The point in saying "race is a socially constructed category" is to counter the ideology that says that "race is a meaningful categorization of people" and, in particular, "it says meaningful things about people's nature and abilities." While ethnicity does pass along, the traits that it carries with it are so scattered and superficial that it's not meaningful in most contexts to categorize people as such, genetically speaking (though of course they can become unified by how they are treated in society).
Analogy: having brown hair is a genetic trait. But it wouldn't make sense if we categorized people as "brown-hairs" because it's just not a meaningful category that says anything much about anything except the color of their hair.
I agree with your post overall. Especially wrt to intelligence I think that it's composed of thousands of microtasks some of which are specific enough, likely coming complete with dedicated brain functions, to be helped or hurt by genetics. If we knew what they were, we could develop compensatory strategies for each distribution of abilities / deficits.
That is one of the (many) reasons I always argue for fearlessly understanding the full measure of reality as opposed to practicing a new form of Lysenkoism called "we're all equivalent and interchangeable, so the problem lies elsewhere...".
In a sense, all pro-social behavior is a kind of learned compensation which counters an innate desire to just club that other fellow over the head. Compensating for a "lack" in your genes is the stuff civilization is founded on.
That said, this is just wrong:
> If we demonstrate some ethnicity can run faster, they'll start getting picked more to be professional athletes.
You aren't picked to excel; you're born to it and other peple observe that fact. If people were picked to excel then just anyone could be in the NBA. We have all run the 100 yd dash. We've all had opportunities to distinguish oureslves there. Not many of us did. Even fewer did and failed to notice this in themselves.
You can't socially engineer raw talent but you can impose conditions which overwhelm it. That is always a tragedy.
> By demanding a world in which some things cannot even be spoken of
Excuse me, I demanded no such thing. I thought it was fairly clear that I was advocating against censorship, which invariably forces people into deeper and less accessible echo chambers. How are we supposed to convince the racists that they're wrong if we can't even see them being racist, or talk to them about it?
I'm genuinely baffled as to how "let's not hide the racists from view" can be interpreted as "ban the racists". But you may not have been the only one, as I earned many downvotes for some reason.
Are these the only two options in the discourse? Turn our backs so that "everyone can get along", or pay "content moderators" to do it for us? Can we not, you know, let em talk and use our words?
The chief wealth generating event that most home owners experience is when the deed is yours. Then you aren't paying the bank "rent" any longer and only have to worry about property taxes and maintainence. Then you have the start of intergenerational wealth and or a hard asset you can sell for example, old people selling homes and buying a smaller they're better able to manage.
Nt saying the article is not contradictory, maybe it is, just pointing out that "wealth" is a flexible concept.
>> leveraged bets on asset prices at taxpayer expense
But doesn't the tax code distinguish between a house which houses its owner and one which doesn't? I don't think investment homes are treated tax-wise the same as normal homes. I am not aware of tax advantages being extended to investments just because those investments are houses, but maybe I am wrong?
If you have been watching California's experiments with homelessness, especially San Fran. you may have learned that homeless people prefer being homeless even when given free accomodations and when i say accomodations I mean nice hotel rooms of their own.
This is because homelessness is a side-effect of mental illness and drug addiction. The later is not all drug addiction, ( I used to live next to an "invisible" heroin addict which we only learned about when he OD'd) it's a certain type of disorganized-thinking and lifestyle which some addicts manifest.
The cost of housing doesn't cause homelessness; it causes roommates and the conflicts and violence and chaos that imposes on people's lives which is significant if under-studied.
The number of people who buy homes to live in them greatly exceeds the number of people who buy homes as investments. That seems obvious to me. The only way most housing could be investment property is if investment vehicles each had so many houses, literally tens or hundreds of thousands, that their total ownership exceeded that of ordinary people .
It's not like the price of sleeping somewhere is going to go down if we assign home ownership to people whose goal is to raise the cost of housing for personal gain.
California found out how little this is tolerated when they tried to turn everyone's house into the government's piggy bank by continually raising property taxes. Their voters, ina rare show of almost total unity, capped property taxes to 1%.
It can only be, then, that not only will we not own housing, but its cost, supply, distribution and asignment to individuals will tightly controlled by the government.
At this point in this exercise either you understand that this is an attempt to get you to accept the implementation of totalitarianism or you're under the age of 15.
For some reason you extrapolated that I support government ownership of everyones houses. My comment was very clear, with the economy being what it is people are better of owning their houses than renting. When you own the house your only cost is maintenance and you don't fear of living in the street one day. And the question is also clear, by transfering the ownership to any agregator, can they guarantee you will not live on the street one day? They answer is no. Let's move on then.
> At this point in this exercise either you understand that this is an attempt to get you to accept the implementation of totalitarianism or you're under the age of 15.
I honestly don't even understand what your point is
Population is going down in the developed world. The housing supply is not. If you can't afford housing where you live, then it can only be because more people are demanding housing where you live, having left where they were previously living.
The solution to the "problem of home ownership" is to stop making areas undesirable places to live. Portland springs to mind but there's San Fran. NYC, L.A. but it's not just the Big Blue cities in the US and elsewhere, it's nations run by totalitarians everywhere.
The solution is to export prosperity around the world. Then we can all enjoy the benefits of the developed world's population crash which translates into cheaper housing, amongst other things, both good and bad.
Since The Economist is looking everywhere for the West's biggest mistake, today's their lucky day, I happen to have it right here.
The West should have demanded of China and every other non-democratic regime in the world, as a condition of receiving manufacturing and industries and the privilege of importing their products duty-free, that they liberalize their political systems in ways which are hard to reverse.
This had the power to transform regions from Mexico and Central America to China.
We could have created a schedule of increasingly substantive requirements composed of democratic institutions, free speech and political assembly, (truly) free markets and anti-corruption metrics which had to be met in order to benefit from trade with the West. But we didn't.
We didn't because a small group of industry beneficiaries made small and large fortunes by outsourcing the West's industrialization. They leveraged the lack of environmental and labor standards endured by the world's poor, living under corrupt and totalitarian regimes, to lower the cost of goods sold then sell back into the first world at first world prices.
That's what the elite have been doing since Clinton gave China MFN status and even before.
Now no one in the West can afford the most basic thing every mammal requires- a place of their own. A home. A burrow. A nest. A place to which they can retreat, which they can control and experience sheer animal comfort and safety. Now even that has to go to satiate the boundless greed of our elites.
The only thing left for them to come after is reproduction. We should probably also start thinking about turning our mates over to them, since they can provide for them better than we can.
RTFA. (written by no-one, literally, no byline).
TLDR: the elites want you to own nothing and like it.
Anyone who doesn't see in this and COVID passports and only electronic money the clear beginning of an elite-driven fascism is beyond help at this point.
Truthfully, if my skillset had better matched the task I might have been lured into giving it a go. On another project I considered using CSS as a styling technology and got down to really understand it in detail. I then realized how good my 1,000 yard vision really is.
I can't speak to the forces which inevitably lead to decay but essentially, for some reason every technology tries to eat the world.
CSS is trying to eat the world and HTML5 is trying to eat the world and of course Javascript is famously trying to eat the world.
All these technologies (and here's the part where I see my post begin to fade to gray) are on their way to experiencing technology's version of societal collapse.
I use that analogy because it's so so apropo.
They are overwrought, overly complex systems yielding only marginally better results and being maintained at huge cost in terms of attention, brain power and collateral damage by everyone. The benefits accrue to a smaller and smaller number of people (FANG et. al) who do not have society's best interest at heart at all and are very far from the founding principals which inspired the original vision.
A simple scriptless HTML 1.0 browser minus the blink tag would deliver at least to me nearly 100% of the benefit I get from the web which can be characterized as "seeing what is happening, seeing what other people think, learning new stuff and downloading stuff".
I would love to start a (reactionary) movement away from the current web composed of a privacy-preserving HTML 1.0 browser capable of HTTPS and people dedicated to creating pages and resources for it. I don't know of any such "movement" .
If anyone is aware of anything like this do share.