I think the problem is not the statement, but the conclusion.

Do we have more physical violence from men towards women than the opposite? I think I saw that the reality is yes. Does it mean that men are biologically coded to be violent, or is it a question of education and culture?

If you conclude the second one, it is not "sexist" (on the contrary, it may even be that the culture that creates the problem is itself rooted in sexism and that acknowledging some reality about its existence may help changing this culture), and does not imply prejudice against men, just acknowledging that we need to be careful in case of bad apples.

It still means that talking about this requires to be very careful.

To react on your example, I think it is a good think to notice if some population have a bigger problem at this subject than others, and we can then identify more easily the places where this problem forms and target these places. But people who concludes "look at violence divided by race, so I can generalise and be prejudicial to everyone in some race and not other" are idiots.

The statistics is a bit more complex and nuanced than giving straight answers. Studies looking at any form of violence in partner relationships shows both women and men having equal amount. When looking at physical violence, especially those that lead to people being charged with a crime, men are over-represented in heterosexual relationships.

However, homosexual relationships has equal rate of partner violence as heterosexual ones. A bisexual woman that has a relationship with an other woman will double her rate of physical violence compare to relationship with a man (statically). A man who has a relationship with an other man will half his rate of violence. This makes no sense at all (unless we believe that sexual orientation is an factor for violent behavior), unless we add a additional factor of sexual dimorphism. Men are on average larger and more muscular, and there seems to be a correlation between being the larger/stronger and using physical strength/fists during a fight. The smaller person is in return more likely to use tools or other means of violence. Statistically, fist also has a higher probability to do damage than improvised weapons, since people are more proficient in using their fists.

Does it mean men are biologically coded to be violent? No. Is it a question about education and culture. Maybe in some countries/cultures, and it wouldn't hurt to use the education system to teach people conflict resolution. Getting people who are physically larger to not exploit that fact during a heated fight is likely a hard problem to solve on a population level.

Not sure what is your point.

I think "any form of violence" is not a constructive direction. First, this ends up being very subjective: between 2 forms of psychological violence, which one is the most violent? Secondly, if indeed it is cultural, it implies that different sub-culture may have different ways of acting, so we can always play the subgroups to make it says whatever we want. But most importantly, it is not very relevant for our context: in the case of the first interactions during heterosexual dating, pretending that men risk as much as women seems a very unconvincing claim, for several reasons (even if under-represented it should be under-represented to an unrealistic level to reach an equal level, and it also does not fit with plenty of cultural tropes (I can find a video explaining explicitly that manly men need to dominate their female partner. I'm sure it exists, but the simple fact that I cannot easily find a video explaining explicitly that womenly women need to dominate their male partner shows it's not that of a trope. On the other hand, I can also easily find videos about "trad wife" that will explain that a womenly woman must be with a dominating man))

For the rest, I think we say the same thing: talking about the visible issues is not a problem in itself, but people instrumentalising these issues to be racist or sexist are the problem.

The technical term of "any form of violence" seems to be Partner Abuse, and the definition is: "violence refers to behaviour within an intimate relationship that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including acts of physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours."

The primary motives are to get back at a partner for emotionally hurting them, because of stress or jealousy, to express anger and other feelings that they could not put into words or communicate, and to get their partner’s attention.

The highest rates are found in high school and college, and the majority of partner violence is bidirectional. (A meta study illustrating this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15248380231193440)

The idea that women are unable of violent behavior, or immune to wanting to take revenge for being emotional hurt or stressed, seems utterly unlikely. Especially young adults who might lack the tools and experience to avoid falling into violent responses.

To quote a different finding: Eight studies directly compared men and women in the power/control motive and subjected their findings to statistical analyses. Three reported no significant gender differences and one had mixed findings. One paper found that women were more motivated to perpetrate violence as a result of power/control than were men, and three found that men were more motivated; however, gender differences were weak

Asking if "men risk as much as women" is a very different question however. If a woman throws a knife at a man, and a man hits a woman in the face, who carry the highest risk? Statically, the fist is going to do significant more damage on average than the knife, as throwing a knife (especially a non-throwing knife), hitting the target, and creating damage is fairly unlikely for a non-proficient attacker. If the attacks was recorded on camera/witnessed, one would be an attack with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill, and the other would be physical assault.

The point is that partner violence is a complex problem, which only simple aspect being that both women and men are humans.

> Not sure what is your point.

If it's almost all about the size of the specific two people in a relationship, it's a terrible terrible idea to aggregate that by gender, leading to completely misplaced wariness and judgement.

Why would it be the size of the specific two people in a relationship?

It looks very clear to me that violent behavior in relationship (and more specifically, in the first few days of dating) is a question of education, not the result of one person being bigger. For example, every parents are stronger than their young children, but only some kind of parent are violent towards their children. If it's a question of education, reducing the problem of the size of the people is a terrible terrible idea: the problem will never go away because you don't understand the source and therefore don't act on the source to fix it.

It feels like some people here are framing the problem in "men vs women" framework, as if it is a competition and they don't want to accept that maybe men behavior is different from women behavior because the way they are raised in our society. I don't really see the point: I'm a man, and yet I don't take it personally. The same way I don't take it personally when someone says "don't accept candy from strangers": I'm a stranger for a lot of kids, and yet I understand why they should be prudent and I understand that, in situation where I have to interact with an unknown kid, I should do things differently (for example not giving them candy), not because I'm a danger for them, but because it is true that there is danger and that they cannot know if I'm a danger or not.

So many men take it uselessly and nonconstructively personally as soon as it is dating.

> Why would it be the size of the specific two people in a relationship?

That's the main argument of the grandparent post. If you're missing that then you're not really responding to what they said.

They went into significant detail so I feel like trying to reword it myself would be worse than suggesting you read the post again.

> If it's a question of education, reducing the problem of the size of the people is a terrible terrible idea: the problem will never go away because you don't understand the source and therefore don't act on the source to fix it.

Nah. Root cause analysis is entirely different from risk analysis. This is about risk analysis. If a woman dates a man that's smaller than her, who should be more worried about violence? That's not the time to worry about why and how to fix society.

> maybe men behavior is different from women behavior

Maybe it is! But then you need a really good explanation for the data in the above post. Or you need to say the data is wrong. But you can't just dismiss it as being defensive.

> That's the main argument of the grandparent post.

Exactly, and I've answered that saying I'm not convinced, so, I've asked you if you had further arguments. I've said at the time why it was not convincing, and I've built even more in my previous comment.

> If a woman dates a man that's smaller than her, who should be more worried about violence?

I still think it's the woman, because not every parent beat their children despite them being smaller, which proves that being bigger does not mean being violent. You need something more. In this case, I think it's a culture that implies that violent men are manly and successful, which is present in the manosphere. Because there is no such culture (I guess you can find anecdotical case, far from being as common as the manosphere) that implies that women beating men is somehow "womenly", I doubt it implies that tall women will beat men at the same rate.

> But then you need a really good explanation for the data in the above post.

All the data adds up, everything is pretty well predicted by this model. Not sure which data you think this model does not explain (unless you think that somehow this model implies 0%-100%, which is of course not the case). On the other hand, I doubt anyone has ever proven that being taller in the relationship is really a strong causal factor (and not just correlation, as the manosphere is also into going to the gym) (but happy to get links if you have some).

> Exactly, and I've answered that saying I'm not convinced, so, I've asked you if you had further arguments. I've said at the time why it was not convincing, and I've built even more in my previous comment.

You never made it clear that you understood the argument, because you went straight from "Not sure what is your point" to "Why would it be". That doesn't look like a request for more convincing, that looks like you never considered it.

> I still think it's the woman, because not every parent beat their children despite them being smaller, which proves that being bigger does not mean being violent.

What. Not every dating relationship involves violence either. We're talking about what's more likely here.

Also children and dates are different in so many ways that even ignoring that factor this doesn't disprove the argument at all.

> Not sure which data you think this model does not explain

If the root cause is culture encouraging men to be physically violent, why would the total amount of physical violence be the same in gay relationships, especially lesbian ones?

I'm simply trying to have an enjoyable conversation where we all learn and understand each other. I was just saying "I'm not convinced by this, but maybe I did not understood" to avoid assuming incorrectly, and to invite non-confrontationally to clarify if I'm wrong and provide more arguments.

I'm not saying that the children example means that "every bigger persons will be violent towards a smaller person", I'm trying to explain that the children example means that "violence is not the result of being bigger, it's the result of the individual propensity to be violent, which itself depends a lot of the individual 'world view'". What I call here 'world view' is how the individual understand the world, their role in this world, what they can or cannot do, ... This is something built based on their parent education, but also their personal experience, what they absorb from the ambient culture and how they identify with different societal messages.

Such influence is taken as obvious in plenty of places: we don't question concepts like "different countries have different cultures and therefore people act differently", or "the education that this person has received had an impact in the way they act now", or ...

I find strange that, when it is a discussion that we can frame as "men vs women", these things that we immediately considered impactful in other situations are suddenly considered as totally non-impactful in this context.

Because of that, it feels unrealistic to pretend that women will obviously be as violent if they were stronger than men and that the only thing that stops them is them being smaller.

> If the root cause is culture encouraging men to be physically violent, why would the total amount of physical violence be the same in gay relationships, especially lesbian ones?

I've mentioned that (when I've said "if indeed it is cultural, it implies that different sub-culture may have different ways of acting"). The propensity of violence depends on the "world view", which itself depends on personal experience, what is the message the society send to the individual their role is, ...

In the case of lesbians:

1) I don't think we can easily say "it's the same". Some studies even say it's more, but then, how do you explain that with your model? But looking into it, it looks like the consensus is that it is a difficult study and that we don't have a good statistical significance: the consensus seems to be that concluding "it's the same" is not scientific right now, all we can say is "it may be the same, but it may also not be the same, we don't know yet".

2) The life experience, the social message they receive, the relationship dynamics, ... are quite different in lesbian couples and in heterosexual couples. And all of this affects the propensity to violence. I can understand that a group where the members grew up in a society that sends the message their sexual attraction is "wrong" or "deviant" does not have, for example, the same self-esteem than a group where it is not the case. It is not fair to pretend that lesbian couples have the same background and the same situation than heterosexual couples.

So, in the case of lesbians, the data you provide is not challenging my model: it can easily be that men may be more violent in heterosexual relationship because of sociocultural message (such as "getting angry is the manly way to deal with frustration") or sociocultural role (such as "men are the breadwinner and are focusing more on their career, so they have more pressure and snap differently than women"), while lesbians may be more violent because of their sociocultural message inside their own subculture (maybe? Maybe for example "in a lesbian couple, we expect to have a butch one and a dominated one") or their life experience (maybe? Maybe for example "low self-esteem of both the victim and the abuser leads to a relationship dynamic that facilitate violence").

I'm also interested to have more information about your view on the phenomenon like the manosphere. I don't think we have a "female manosphere" that promotes the same culture of violence towards the partner (I'm sure there are cases, but that is not at all the same order of magnitude in popularity and mainstreamness). Sure, the people who really fall for the manosphere rhetoric is a minority, but they are the extreme of a Gaussian curve that indicate that the mean value is not at the same place for men and for women. If it's the case, is it really realistic to just pretend it has no impact at all (and if it has no impact at all, why people who defend that it has no impact will also be worried about "the image of the men" when it comes to talking about violence done by men? Why would be one message harmless and the other dangerous?)

> I'm simply trying to have an enjoyable conversation where we all learn and understand each other. I was just saying "I'm not convinced by this, but maybe I did not understood" to avoid assuming incorrectly, and to invite non-confrontationally to clarify if I'm wrong and provide more arguments.

That's reasonable as a goal but I implore you to be clearer next time. You didn't address the evidence they gave so I couldn't tell if you understood at all or if you though other evidence was more compelling.

> I'm trying to explain that the children example means that "violence is not the result of being bigger, it's the result of the individual propensity to be violent, which itself depends a lot of the individual 'world view'".

I don't think that's good enough evidence for such a strong claim. Not at all enough to say the size factor is flat-out disproven by it.

And overall I do think world view is important, but I bet physical size is a significant factor too unless the evidence above is extra bunk.

> I find strange that, when it is a discussion that we can frame as "men vs women", these things that we immediately considered impactful in other situations are suddenly considered as totally non-impactful in this context.

I'm not saying totally non impactful but it's unclear what percentage.

> Because of that, it feels unrealistic to pretend that women will obviously be as violent if they were stronger than men and that the only thing that stops them is them being smaller.

The statistics given are not based on pretending.

> it looks like the consensus is that it is a difficult study and that we don't have a good statistical significance

That is a much better argument.

> while lesbians may be more violent because of their sociocultural message inside their own subculture (maybe? Maybe for example "in a lesbian couple, we expect to have a butch one and a dominated one") or their life experience (maybe? Maybe for example "low self-esteem of both the victim and the abuser leads to a relationship dynamic that facilitate violence").

Edited this line to make it clearer: Maybe but looking at that level of complication still makes it harder to evaluate man versus woman in any random relationship, especially those very individual life experience factors that can affect anyone.

> I'm also interested to have more information about your view on the phenomenon like the manosphere. [...] is it really realistic to just pretend it has no impact at all

I'm not sure how much it impacts violence in particular, shrug. But whatever effect it has is divided by the relative rarity of believers.

> If it's the case, is it really realistic to just pretend it has no impact at all (and if it has no impact at all, why people who defend that it has no impact will also be worried about "the image of the men" when it comes to talking about violence done by men? Why would be one message harmless and the other dangerous?)

Listen, I haven't heard this debate before, and I'm not taking part in it, but your comparison here isn't reasonable. Asking if one message increases violence and asking if the other message hurts someone's image are completely different things. If someone says no and yes respectively there's no hypocrisy.

> but I implore you to be clearer next time. You didn't address the evidence they gave

I did: I even quoted that part in my previous comment: this part is indeed in the first comment (the sentence starting with " Secondly, if indeed it is cultural, ..." that explains why the data does not prove the conclusion they proposed). But it does not matter, I think we cleared this.

> I don't think that's good enough evidence for such a strong claim.

The children example is not an evidence for a claim.

If you say "I only saw black cats, so all cats are black", I can answer "I'm not convinced, maybe you just saw black cats but non-black cats exist, after all, other animals, like dogs, horses, cows, ... have different color". You now say "the fact that dogs have different colors is not a proof". Of course it's not, nobody pretended it was. I just explain why the initial claim is not convincing. I'm not the one making any claim, I'm just saying that this claim is just a guess and that there are different models that explain the situation as accurately (or maybe even more accurately, as they are also compatible with other behaviors, while the presented model still need to explain why some mechanisms exist in some situation and suddenly disappear in others).

> Maybe but looking at that level of complication still makes it harder to evaluate man versus woman in any random relationship

And so is the reality: it is hard to evaluate man vs woman in any random relationship. Is your point that it is not the case? Or that we should reject models that imply that just because you prefer models more convenient? "Sure, quantum mechanism is interesting, but it makes things more complicated, so let's just pretend it is incorrect"

> But whatever effect it has is divided by the relative rarity of believers.

That is not at all what I say. I explain it in the ellipsis you removed from your quote. I'm saying that the extreme of the distribution shows that we cannot simply assume that the mean is at the same place. For example, women lives older than men, and you can also see it by looking at the very old persons: they are extremely rare, but yet, women are more common.

I don't say at all that violence against women is due to manosphere, the same way I'm not saying that if you ignore people older than 100 years, you will not see any life-expectancy difference between men and women.

What I was saying is that, culturally, "men behaving towards women in ways that may lead to violence" is more assimilated as normal in our society than "women behaving towards men in the same ways". The manosphere is the extreme, as is "people older than 115 year old", but the fact that the manosphere is only about "men towards women" and that there no significant equivalent "women towards men" shows that the average assimilation of default behaviors are different.

> but your comparison here isn't reasonable

I'm not comparing the two.

What I don't understand is that on one hand, the claim is that violence is mainly due to a "mechanical fixed parameter" such as the size of the person and that societal messaging has no significant impact. But that on the other hand, these people are also saying that it is very bad that we hurt the image of men, because societal message has consequence.

> "I'm not convinced, maybe you just saw black cats but non-black cats exist, after all, other animals, like dogs, horses, cows, ... have different color".

Well the actual argument wasn't nearly as extreme as "only black fur", and a better (but still messy) analogy would be you citing one other animal and we don't have good stats for any other kinds of animal either. That's part of why I'm saying the child example isn't very good at affecting convincedness.

Also you used the word "proves", I feel like if you say X proves Y then it's not weird for me to call that a "claim". I don't think "I'm not the one making any claim" is valid here; you're responding to the original claim with arguments that include your own claims.

> there are different models that explain the situation as accurately

I'd say that so far none of the models here reach "very convincing" for all the data at hand. They're all big maybes.

> I'm saying that the extreme of the distribution shows that we cannot simply assume that the mean is at the same place.

Well even with a completely isolated size factor, the means are different. I don't think anyone was saying that.

And sure the distributions might have different shapes. There's a lot of analysis here that hasn't been done.

> What I don't understand is that on one hand, the claim is that violence is mainly due to a "mechanical fixed parameter" such as the size of the person and that societal messaging has no significant impact.

That's too binary. One thing can be the main effect while another is still quite significant. Like 75/25 just to toss out a number.

The places I've used "prove" are in totally different contexts that the context in which you pretended I was claiming some proof.

For the rest, it feels like you are moving the goalpost. The initial discussion was about the fact that if there is an impact of the societal messaging, it is smart to acknowledge that (and I insisted that it should still be done carefully). If now you are saying 75/25, then you are still saying that the societal messaging has an impact. Therefore I still think it's smart to acknowledge it.

(I understand the objection that it may be too dangerous, but unfortunately you did not go into this direction. I come back on that on my last paragraph.)

Why this impression? Your initial main argument was initially resting on "lesbian couples have the same amount of violence", but this argument does not make sense if it is 75/25: if there is a 25% effect, what does observing the same rate means? If you observe exactly the same rate, does it mean that we have a societal impact that somehow canceled itself, or does it means that in fact the "natural rate of violence from women" is less than men (the exact thing you pretend this data proves impossible), but that the societal impact increases it up to reach the same value? If indeed you believe in the 75/25, then the "same rate amongst lesbians" cannot prove anything. And on top of that, now, you also need to justify why it is 75/25 and not 85/15 or 65/35, and the whole argument seems to be "it's my gut feeling" (not that it is bad in itself, but then you cannot use that as basis to pretend that the lesbian data proves something).

I can be wrong, but because of that, it feels to me that you were not really agreeing to 75/25 at the beginning of the discussion (otherwise you would not have used the "lesbian rate" argument as you had), but now that the discussion advanced, you are making some concessions but still try to find some reasons why the conclusion you prefer is still valid. If my impression is correct, it means that instead of looking at the arguments first and reaching the conclusion based on the arguments, you start with the conclusion that you prefer, and build arguments in order to defend this conclusion.

(and I understand that you instinctively prefer the conclusion where we avoid acknowledging that there is something specific to men, it's not a comfortable prospect)

I've mentioned that we could have discussed around the danger of acknowledging. Unfortunately, if now we start discussing that, it will just reinforce my feeling that you jump to another thread now that one ran its course because you want to defend the conclusion you like.

So, yeah, I guess there is not much more to add here.

Oh I forgot about this conversation but uh:

> The places I've used "prove" are in totally different contexts that the context in which you pretended I was claiming some proof.

I'm pointing at the specific sentence that has the word prove in it, and using the word prove to mean the same thing. If you think it's a different context you don't understand what I'm saying.

> if there is a 25% effect, what does observing the same rate means

I dunno man you were the one claiming the lesbian rate is not actually the same, that was the biggest reason for the concession, you can't now rugpull me and tell me to explain the concession without the reason for it.

And that's also why I don't need to justify the specific number. The specific number is based on whatever the statistics say.

> If my impression is correct, it means that instead of looking at the arguments first and reaching the conclusion based on the arguments, you start with the conclusion that you prefer, and build arguments in order to defend this conclusion.

I didn't even make the initial argument. I'm going completely based on the evidence cited above. This is not about what I want to believe. I would have guessed something very different. So your instinctual preference assumption is deeply misplaced.

Men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes than women

Yes, primarily by other men as we all know.

Not sure what is your point?

It feels a bit like saying "there is a bug in software X, but there is also a bug in software Y, so let's not fix the bug in software X".

Of course, men also suffer from problems. It even feels that it is usually also due to machismo or something similar. Sometimes, it feels like the majority of men's problem is in fact self-inflicted by the manosphere. They both complain of suicide rate, army draft, violence against men, but they also promote a culture of not-showing-emotion-otherwise-you-are-not-manly, a-man-is-worthless-if-they-dont-succeed, army-is-manly-and-women-are-weak, a-man-should-show-dominence-and-other-men-are-a-threath, ...

People likes to see things in black or white, but the reality is more complicated, and there is no advantages that does not bring also some disadvantages.

The context was a dating app. And yes, men are also victims by men.

I guess tax incentives feel strange because it feels a bit like a thing the government needs to do because of bad behaviors.

As you say, the situation would be 100% identical if the government was receiving directly the tax and then buying these things directly. So why don't they do that? Because people with money will find ways to dodge taxes anyway. Tax incentives is basically admitting that people with money are selfish and cheaters, and that we need to "play their game" to achieve what they should normally and ethically do if they were not detrimental to society.

Interestingly enough, if the person would have paid their taxes normally and that this money would have been used for a government project, then the probability of success would have been higher (I know some government projects are really mismanaged, but so was this one anyway), because the government would have been in better position to 1) get experts opinions/supports, 2) understand the rules and regulations, 3) synchronize different projects for a better complementarity.

I don’t think it’s because anyone has resigned themselves to thinking all rich people are cheaters who will win. I think we use tax incentives in the US primarily because of two beliefs - the first that the private market is often more efficient than public purchasing (which has a pretty poor showing from this article, as you point out!), and the other is that people can choose how to contribute some of their obligations back to society from the set of taxable deductions. We want to softly encourage some behaviors and discourage others, and adjusting taxes work well as a lower risk lower force way to do that.

I think a big fraction (the majority) of people who hold the belief that private market is more efficient are also saying things like "you should not do X or the private companies will just go in another country where they don't impose X", with X being usually a thing beneficial for the community/society (collecting fair tax, protecting the employees, protecting the environment, redistributing the money towards basic infrastructure where people cannot afford them, making sure the market is fair, ...). Trying to avoid any of those X is usually morally questionable (and on top of that there is the fact that they will not hesitate to turn their back to the country that provided the environment were they were able to be successful).

So, a lot of these people who hold this belief are agreeing (not explicitly, they just know it's true but don't want to say it out loud) that rich people are doing what is better for them, not what is better for the society. Which is why people view negatively rich people who profit from government tax incentive.

I think you summarize my understanding on why using tax incentives are seen as a negative trait with the sentence

> We want to softly encourage some behaviors and discourage others

If you have to encourage behaviors that are good for the society and discourage behaviors that are bad for the society, it means that some people, without these incentives, will prefer to do the "bad" behaviors rather than the "good" behaviors. I understand that people will not like these people.

Again, tax incentives are totally useless if the rich people are people with normal moral who will naturally try to do the correct thing. The government, not you, is already choosing the domain where it applies tax incentives. So the argument that you don't want to give tax because you think you will do a better job at choosing the project than the government does not hold: if you are doing something where the government provides a tax incentive, you are doing something that the government wanted to be done. And the government is also more than happy to get good advice and support on such projects, but again, there, those generous rich people are not doing anything despite their nice posture. If indeed they don't trust the government to do "good things", it's funny that they don't do them themselves and instead jump on the first tax incentive opportunity. Posture is cheap, but when it comes to invest extra, without government help, for something that is "good", there is no one remaining from the group of the people who explains that a government collecting tax is not a good way to have nice things done.

But what the list gives are the particularities of fascism.

Your first list is way too broad and does not capture the particularities that makes fascism different from other kinds of dictatorship.

The second list is obviously a ridiculous take, and it is also a good illustration of the hypocrisy that we find too often in these discussion. "Nowadays, all the wokes are saying that everything is racist" followed that "someone pointed that usually in fascist movements, we find appeals to a cult of tradition, so this person is a bad person that says that everyone who like Christmas is a fascist". There is a big big spectrum of possibilities between "liking Christmas" and "appeal to a cult of tradition". Plenty of people like Christmas and yet it is impossible to find in their ideology an appeal to a cult of tradition.

> Your first list is way too broad and does not capture the particularities that makes fascism different from other kinds of dictatorship.

Fair, but tbh, I'd categorize fascism mostly by the combination of Syndicalism and the nationalist approach to overthrowing capitalism.

> The second list is obviously a ridiculous take

Yes, because this author's points were ridiculous, cut up beyond recognition to fit the author's political agenda. SmolLM-135M would have done a more decent job summing up the original 14 points speech. And even some of the points in the original speech were ridiculous. Like:

"Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons, doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise."

> Fair, but tbh, I'd categorize fascism mostly by the combination of Syndicalism and the nationalist approach to overthrowing capitalism.

Oh, so your two first points are 1. people don't like to work, 2. not adopting the radical ideology of self-declared chiefs of industry.

(Don't take it seriously, it is just to show that everyone can do the same lame argumentation than you have done with everything, and that therefore it has no weight at all)

> Yes, because this author's points were ridiculous

Not sure who you are referring to as "author". Eco? The author of the OpenCulture article? Someone in HN comments? 404media?

But it does not really matter, does it? Imagine someone says "all the dogs are purple". Then I say "what they said is ridiculous because the fact that people like Christmas is obvious and not particular". We are BOTH stupid. The first person has said something ridiculous. And me, instead of just using a non-stupid argument to point that it is ridiculous, I made uselessly a fool of myself by talking about people who like Christmas as if I'm too stupid to notice that this argument does not have any grip on the initial sentence. Either I thought it had grip, and in this case I'm an idiot, or I know it had no grip, and in this case I'm an idiot for uselessly choosing to look like one instead of saying the hundreds of other things that could have been constructive.

Advertisement get the source money from the viewers, it does not create any money in itself. So, if advertisement is banned, people will have more money, and this money can be used to finance what they want to consume.

This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise, Y higher than X, otherwise there is no reason for this company to pay for advertisement. Yet everyone is saying "yeah, advertisement, I don't care, I just ignore it". Surely it cannot be true.

Even if it seems like everyone is saying this, it's just statistically not true / in the aggregate, at least in the context of direct online ads. Otherwise the direct ad industry would be totally dead (ad performance is measured to death by companies).

Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel.

Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack.

However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses.

All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.

Thanks.

Would you say that it indeed means that if ads are banned, the money to support news, tv, youtube, ... will still be there? I would think that in fact, there would be even more money for news, tv, youtube, ... as the ad company will not take their cut of the money.

Edit: Now that I'm thinking about it, ad may also work in directing expenses that would have been done anyway. For example, if I have 10 companies A, B, C, D, ... all selling the same kind of product, then it is possible that 1000 persons that want that kind of product will all spend 100£, shared between the 10 companies. So, company A will receive 10000£. But if company A does some advertisement for a cost of 5000£, maybe people will still spend the same amount, but for their brand in majority, so the 1000 persons will still spend the same 100£, but company A will receive 20000£ because some people will buy A instead of B, C, D, ...

> 1000 persons that want that kind of product

I'd say advertising is in good portion what creates the "want" instead of a "need". If we were to rebalance the amount of purchases driven by needs instead of wants, we'd overall reduce the total amount of purchases. Each of them would also not have the extra cost of advertising included in their price.

We’d also benefit from not having unnecessary “wants” generated within us, which so often comes at the cost of our self esteem. So many ads prey on your fear of being too ugly, too lonely, too poor, and they amplify that fear then stick a car on screen masquerading as the solution to these manufactured problems.

"This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise"

You seem to be assuming that, in the absence of advertising, the company will sell as much as it did before -- just with lower overhead costs -- rather than advertising driving more sales and possibly lowering costs because the company has more customers. For some items / things this may be true-ish. I'm going to buy paper towels because I need paper towels, and advertising has little influence on that -- except, maybe, which brand I buy. But I'm going to spill things, and my cats are going to keep barfing on the floor from time to time, so I'm going to need paper towels regardless. And I'm not going to buy a bunch of extra ones just because the ads are so good.

Don't get me started on soda advertising and such because the amount of money those companies spend on ads is mind-boggling and I don't think it moves the needle very much when it comes to Coke vs. Pepsi...

But, would I go see a movie without ads to promote it? Would I buy that t-shirt with a funny design if I didn't see it on a web site? Sign up for a SaaS offering if I don't see an ad for it somewhere?

If a SaaS lands 20% more customers because ads (and other forms of marketing) that's not necessarily going to mean I pay more for the SaaS because ads. It may very well mean that the prices stay lower because many of their costs are fixed and if they have 20% more paying customers, they can charge less to be competitive. If a publication has more subscribers because it advertises, it may not have to raise rates to stay / be profitable.

In some cases you may be correct -- landing customers via ads equals X% of my costs, so my prices reflect that. But it's not necessarily true.

Parent's point about ad being close to propaganda is key: people getting advertised at are often not the ones with the money.

For newspapers for instance, Exxon or Shell could be paying a lot more to have their brand painted in favorable light than the amount the newspaper readership could afford to pay in aggregate.

The same way Coca Cola's budget for advertising greenness is not matched by how many more sales they're expecting to make from these ads in any specific medium, but how much the company's bottling policy has to lose if public opinion changed too much. That's basically lobbying money.

For me, "avoid being dogmatic yourself" is failing to bring home one very important point to avoid being dogmatic: understand that you are equally susceptible from the mistakes/misunderstandings that you blame others for.

An example in this article is the following part

> my angle ... becomes that of opposing their tribalism. Unfortunately ... most people just view me as the opposite of their own tribe

But this part totally fails self-reflection: it talks about your "conservative friends" and your "liberal friends". They are labelled "conservative" or "liberal". How does the author know that the interlocutor did not act exactly like the author: the interlocutor brought a subject, from their point of view their position on it where pretty neutral and sensible, the author reacts by playing the devil's advocate. They therefore see the author as the "conservative" or "liberal" person, and if they follow the author's strategy, they will play the devil's advocate. And then, THE AUTHOR fails to realize they don't actually care about the conclusion.

The lazy answer is: I'm smarter than them, I can tell when it's the case or not. Or: the subject I bring are not political, they are just common sense and sensible position, but they sometimes bring something I disagree with, and this is not common sense and sensible position.

In both case, it's weak and does not acknowledge the possibilities that you may have done the same mistakes as them from time to time (either classifying a "moderate" as "far" just because they were doing the devil's advocate, or presenting opinions that are not "trivially moderate" from the eyes of your interlocutor). It's a detail, but because of that, I'm not sure the author is as "non dogmatic" as they think they are: they are saying what everybody is saying. The large majority of people don't say "I'm dogmatic and my opinions are crazy" (if they believe their opinions are crazy, then it means they don't believe in their opinions and it is not really their opinions).

Absolutely. While I am a person who would avoid politics in most contexts myself, I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable with this attitude in this write up.

If you see others as being "insufficiently equipped" to handle nuance, "because it's hard" or "because they are too resistant" is a judgement I prefer not to pass on others.

> "Because if a desire to seek truth isn't there"

Who defines the truth? As much as I understand there is a need to draw a line somewhere, I also believe that everyone has a right to their truth. And that's my truth. I let everyone have their perspective and don't see a need to impose mine or look down upon them if they don't agree to mine, this included :)

People are entitled to their perspective of course, but it is a hindrance to discussion when people conflate their perspective with truth.

If everyone has their own truth, then how could you know that to be the case? You'd have to appeal to something outside of "your truth" to make that judgement. Meaning, if it were even possible (or coherent) for there to be such a thing as "your truth", then you couldn't know it to be the case. It simply would be "the truth" as far as you are concerned. You can't step outside yourself. There is no "objective POV".

These sorts of claims are as incoherent as the equally intellectually jejune skeptical positions ("there is no truth" or "we cannot know the truth" or variations thereof). It's rare to see anyone outside of first year philosophy students make them.

Why can't you just say we have disagreements about what the truth is?

That's another way to put it. The disagreement doesn't still elevate either party to a moral high ground. That was the only thing that upset me about this write up.

I'm not claiming moral high ground, or that my method is a better or happier way of living life, I'm only claiming it's better for finding out what's true, with the assumption some objective truth exists.

The sentence that covers this in the piece:

"If someone is self-aware enough to consciously acknowledge their choice to remain in the bubble, that’s totally fair. I respect it like I’d respect anyone who chooses to participate in a more traditional religion. My issue is when this view is falsely passed off as an intellectually-driven one."

I think the problem is that everyone is claiming they don't remain in the bubble, including you. Why should I trust you when you say you don't remain in your bubble or that you are motivated in finding the truth, especially when you write an article that checks all the boxes of someone who is satisfied with comfortable conclusions?

It's the problem with this sentence:

> Because if a desire to seek truth isn't there

The behavior of other people makes way more sense if you just consider that people have different values and different interests. If you take your list of values, people that are not aligned with you will, by definition of not being aligned, look to you as they are not desiring to seek the truth. For two reasons: 1) because some of the things you believe being truth are just BS. You are wrong (as we all are sometimes on some topics), and you are just seeing them dismissing something false and, in fact, they are the ones being interested in seeking the truth while you are not, 2) because some of the things you believe being an important truth is not important or relevant for them. I'm pretty sure you don't "display a desire to seek the truth" when it comes to the VIIth century Buddhist philosophy. Sure, if someone talks about it to you, you may say you are interested and follow what they say, but you still will look "not desiring to seek the truth": if they bring a conundrum in this topic to you, you will not drop everything and scream "oh my god, I need to find the answer, nothing else matter now". That's an extreme example, and there is a spectrum, but that illustrates that some of these people who you categorize as "not desiring to seek the truth" are in fact desiring to seek the truth, just not with the same path as you are, so they look like that to you. And, guess what, _you_ look like you don't desire to seek the truth to them.

That sentence is, to me, very very telling: it did not even one second occur to you that maybe they are interesting in seeking the truth but are doing it in a different way or on different subjects. And by doing so, by not carefully considering all the possibilities, you show that yourself you have equally no desire to seek the truth. (if you see what I mean: you see Mr A not exploring all the possibilities on the subject that you like, so you conclude that they have no desire to seek the truth, but then, Mr A sees you not exploring all the possibilities on some subjects that you are overlooking. How is that different?)

That is exactly the same problem with the "consciously acknowledge their choice to remain in the bubble": a majority of them are not in a bubble, but it looks like that you because you are not aligned with them. And you are explaining that moderate like you, some of them are in a bubble, but others are not. The only possibility to your eyes to not be in a bubble is to be aligned with you. The only possibility for them to not be in a bubble is to be aligned with them.

This entire argument is based on incorrect assumptions.

I'm not just inferring this from different values. As I said in the article, people are openly and literally telling me they'd prefer to stay in the bubble:

"I'll often ask: if the opposite of your beliefs were true, would you want to know?

Surprisingly, I've had good friends, who enjoy political debate, explicitly answer ‘no’. And even many who initially answer ‘yes’ will later admit to the answer really being ‘no’."

Desiring to seek truth is not referring to the energy someone is willing to expend, it's related to this^ ignoring, or asking to stop once an exploration proves the fundamental belief their world rests on as false.

edit: punctuation

Hm, not sure it's a convincing argument, though.

For example, how do you correct for the sample bias? You are saying in your article that "moderate" (aka, people aligned with your current evaluation of what is sensible) are the ones that are more prone to get outside of their bubble. You don't evaluate that on a unbiased sample, you evaluate that amongst your friends, with whom you have, according to you, had longer discussion on the subject (and if you did not, then, this question is not very reliable).

So, first, if someone is not aligned with you, the conversation relationship will not be the same as someone aligned with you. You even say that you play the devil's advocate, but playing the devil's advocate with a moderate person or a person with a more particular word view does not lead to the same conversation relationship. For illustration, let's put people on a 1-to-10 scale. The moderate is "5", the "far-left" is "0" and the "far-right" is "10". If you play the devil's advocate with a far-left that says "0 is great", you will say "10 is great", which is 10 distance away in dissidence. If you play the devil's advocate with a moderate that says "5 is great", then you can say "0 is great" or "10 is great", which is just 5.

In other words, it is easier to "alienate" or "put on a defensive" a non-moderate than a moderate. It does not mean that the moderate is more open, just that they are, circumstantially, in a situation where your game is easy for them to play (if the world was -5 to 5, then "5" would answer "no" after you played the devil's advocate by defending the option "-5").

On top of that, you are probably a worst devil's advocate when it comes to play the devil's advocate with someone that you agree a lot with (if you had good argument against being a moderate, then you will probably be yourself convinced by these arguments and not be a moderate).

Also, it's interesting that they say "no", it shows that they care a lot about what is true or not. Basically, what they say is that they care so much about what is true that in the unrealistic case that they are abominably wrong, knowing it was the case would be very sad for them. They also did not form their belief spontaneously: they grow up into it, step by step, each step based on their evaluation of what is true or not. Your question is basically the same as asking "would you be happy to hear it that you personally failed repeatedly during your whole life", which is strongly emotional. Again, the situation is not the same for a moderate, which may just not care much about the truth or be happy to adopt whatever position (or not, but it's a counter-example where answering "yes" may not prove that someone cares about the truth).

After that, you may say "they will not get out of their bubble because of the emotional cost", but you will still have nowhere to conclude if they value the truth less or more than you. Maybe they value the truth more than you, and it is why you failed to reach the same belief alignment than them: they choose these beliefs because they were looking for the truth and they are convinced that these beliefs are better aligned with the truth, while, on your side, you did not care enough about the truth to find the same path. (it is not what I think, but it is a counter-example where someone will say "no" to this question and yet be more interested of the truth than someone who will say "yes")

The hypothetical question should rather be "if you lived in a parallel universe where the opposite of your current beliefs were true, would you grow up to end up believing in the opposite of your current beliefs".

yep exactly

I think of truth like π. Some people say its 3, others 3.14, others 3.1415

There is a trade off between energy expended vs accuracy needed vs accurately communicating, but the de-referenced concept is not a matter of human perspective. Coordinating truth is why we have standards and protocols to build on.

this is actually in the footnotes and addressed by the "thinking in bets" section

"[9] Fully understanding I can be the one in the wrong -- however, when this is the case, the person explaining is usually able to:

understand my argument convey their disagreement in good faith without circular reasoning or rhetorical tricks"

"There's a 40% chance this succeeds because of A, 25% chance of B, 10% of X, and 5% something we haven't thought of"

The footnote is basically saying "I can tell when it's the case or not", which is in fact exactly my problem. That is not the answer that I'm expecting from someone who has self-reflection.

For example: "understand my argument" is assuming that the argument is obviously correct. When someone presents to you an incorrect argument, 1) this person thinks the argument is correct (otherwise they will not present that argument), 2) you will not answer by saying "I've understood", you will argue. From their point of view, you are the one failing to understand. Now the question is: how many time this person was you? How many time you presented a bad argument and then blamed the interlocutor for "not understanding" when they don't accept a faulty argument?

Same with "circular reasoning or rhetorical trick": when I disagree, it is always very easy to convince myself that there is a problem in the interlocutor logic. Especially if I failed to understand or misunderstood the argument. I would even say that for all discussions that are not trivial, there are always elements that can be seen as circular or rhetorical trick.

That's not what this is saying at all.

"Understand my argument" does not imply correctness in the slightest.

It's possible to understand an incorrect argument and show where it's going wrong, plenty of people can detect fallacies. I've both done it to others and had it done to me.

This seems to be a combining of "understanding" and "agreeing", which are separate things.

But you are the one both defending the argument and judging if they understood the argument.

If it is your argument, it means you believe in it, it means you think it is a good argument and not a bad argument. So maybe in fact they are right and they understood the argument correctly, but you are the one mistaken. How can you tell?

Let's, for the sake of discussion, imagine that your argument is bad. You believe it is good, but it is bad. It means that you don't yourself understand your own argument. How can you therefore judge if someone has understood the argument or not?

You were saying that you can see when they use "circular reasoning" and "rhetorical trick". That's exactly the first impression that everyone has when they defend a bad argument and someone points at the flaws in it.

I'm not mixing up "understanding" and "agreeing", I'm saying that you claim that you can tell if someone "understand", and I'm simply saying that it is not possible to tell if someone has understood if yourself you believe the argument is correct and they belief the argument is incorrect.

I’m having a real hard time with this one lately.

The major mistake/misunderstanding I see now is thinking that a stupid, vindictive asshole who failed upwards would be a good person to run the country.

I don’t think I’m susceptible to that. I’ve never viewed anyone the way a lot of these people view Donald Trump. I can’t imagine I ever will. Is it a failure of imagination or is something really different between us?

Trump may be a bad leader but he'd still be just one type of bad leader. I'm not trying to fully relativize Trump either, they're not all equally bad.

I agree with Slavoj Zizek's take on Trump's appeal and why a lot of criticism of him seems to either have no effect or increases his fan appeal: As a general rule, people relate to others by identifying with their weaknesses, not only or not even primarily with their strengths. You aren't susceptible to his appeal because you're of a different class or background which has different sets of strengths/weaknesses which make it hard for you to relate to Trump.

The weaknesses Trump has - his stubborn ignorance, his impulsiveness, his might-makes-right mentality and disdain for rules, his vindictiveness - are deeply shared with his fans. They will forgive his sins because it is their sins too. For example when Trump is attacked for an impulsive comment, they relate to the risk that they could also be cancelled for some comment that is seen as racist or sexist or something. His policy framework is made of the kind of simple ideas you'll find in a pub, I once heard Trump described as "the average guy from Queens" and it made a lot of sense to me. "Nobody knew healthcare was so complicated", "We're going to build a wall".

I belong more to a white collar, professional class. I probably have a blindspot on the weaknesses and sins more endemic to my group, ones that I share with the figures I find appealing. If I had to guess I'd say it's something like an ideological/theoretical zeal, bureaucratic dysfunction, and an exclusionary judginess. When a politician unveils some theoretically elegant project and it largely fails and runs over budget and gets mired in bureaucratic hell, I'm maybe too quick to forgive that as it's a relatable sin.

In short, people like the dumb jerk because they are also dumb jerks? I can't say I disagree, but I don't think that's what cauch's comment was going for.

I think it is. It's one thing to point out dumb jerkiness which often stands out particularly in this administration, but self-reflection is realizing that you have your own blindspots for your equivalent of dumb jerkiness.

I'm not succeeding in that realization. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be, and I don't think there are any attributes that could possibly make me admire anyone the way these dumb jerks admire Donard Trump. Maybe I'm just not aware, but I have no idea how I'd correct that.

I'm very much not convinced "that you are equally susceptible from the mistakes/misunderstandings that you blame others for." People are not the same. I'm smarter than some people, dumber than others. I'm stronger than some and weaker than others. Surely the same is true here. Understand that I am also susceptible to mistakes/understandings? I'm 100% on board with that. But equally susceptible to the same ones? I really don't think so.

It is a problem that so many people thinks that a presidential election is to vote for the guy they relate to and not a competent manager. I guess they are so used to vote for the prom king and the reality tv show candidate that they don't realise that the point is not to vote for the person they like.

Similarly, it is worrisome that people vote for what will profit the most for them instead of what is the more just and fair (sometimes even voting against your own profit). It leads to stupid situations, for example where idiots are for protectionist measures whatever the consequences on other countries, but at the same time are angry when people in another country are voting for protectionist measures that affect theirs negatively. It is quite clear with the Trump supporter: they are furious if someone else treats them like they treat others, and seems to not even realise the absurdity.

It is really hard to live in a society with people like that: it just creates lose-lose situations for everyone.

I don't think most people consciously or explicitly aim to only vote for the guy they relate to. The people they relate to will just naturally be more understandable to them and better match their expectations of what a competent manager looks like.

Realistically, no democracy can really depend on widespread familiarity with the hard skills of civic & political management. It just gets really technical and complicated, voters naturally have to reason about what little they understand, and you understand what you relate to.

I'm not trying to make the point that voting for the reality TV show candidate is good, my point is that the problems with reality TV show candidates are in their blindspot but there are other bad leaders that will fit in your own blindspot.

edit: sorry I just realized that you already made this point in one of your earlier comments! And yes, I personally agree with much of what you say.

The definition of democracy according to Ricœur is: > Est démocratique, une société qui se reconnaît divisée, c’est-à-dire traversée par des contradictions d’intérêt et qui se fixe comme modalité, d’associer à parts égales, chaque citoyen dans l’expression de ces contradictions, l’analyse de ces contradictions et la mise en délibération de ces contradictions, en vue d’arriver à un arbitrage.

In English, more-or-less: > A society is democratic if it acknowledge that it is divided, which means that it contains contradictory interests, and if it creates modality to analyse and debate these contradictions so that we can reach arbitration, with each citizen having an equal share in the debate.

I don't believe that a society is democratic if a majority of the people have decided something that is harmful or unfair to a minority without properly having debated if this decision is fair or not for the minority.

Because of that, no, it's not "whatever the majority decides". In a democracy, the will to guarantee justice and fairness is more important than "the people", and if they say "there is suspicion of fraud from this candidate but let's just close our eyes because we like this person or because it is profitable for us", this is clearly a behavior where they are not trying to reach a just and fair situation.

This is what distinguish democracy from ochlocracy.

And I don't understand how people can really defend that we should ignore the justice/fairness condition: what is the point of following "the people" when these people are not trying to be just and fair? How will it be a good society?

I understand this entry will not stay in the front page long, but this makes me think.

If it would have been any company or org firing IT people who just exercised good security practices, it would have been discussed here.

It feels like the Trump gov has won this: they can get away with things that would not have been accepted in other places, because they either 1) managed to normalize the incorrect idea that any criticism towards them is political and ideological, or 2) managed to create a climate where any criticism will just generate the usual nonconstructive tar pit, so constructive people will not even try.

I think the point of GP is not that media control is new, it is that a big part of media control is right-wing and yet right-wing people keep saying that media are owned by left-wing. And of course, facts and reality are left-wing fake news and misleading info are free speech when it's convenient to them.

I think the point is that a big bunch of studies really point to the fact that if you have two persons with a real merit score of 8/10 (for example), the one from a minority will be considered, due to unconscious biases, as having a score of 7/10 instead.

So, yes, there is a correction and this correction is based on race because this is the correct variable to de-bias the evaluation. But does it mean "preferential"? The point is to correct the evaluation such that this evaluation is not preferential and is neutral with respect to the race.

Except we're seeing the opposite in the real world.

Let me give you a scenario. It's the 1940's, a company has a policy that privileges white applicants. Someone says, "let's remove this policy, and tell the company they have to treat all applicants easily." Someone else replies, "no, because if this company was told they had to treat everyone equally and not privilege white people they would discriminate against white people. I have many studies proving this!"

Does that pass the smell test? A company that's intentionally trying to privilege group X is suddenly going to discriminate against group X if they're told they have to treat everyone equally?

In your scenario, if they indeed have convincing and independent studies proving this, then, yes, they should not remove this policy.

It is also worth mentioning that in real life, we apply such policies. If I remember correctly, black people are more prone to prostate cancer, and therefore there are policies that "discriminate": the process for cancer screening is different between black and white people. Does it mean it is racist? Does it mean it is unfair?

I think the difference is that I focus on equality of opportunity while you focus on equality of outcome. You are targeting "when looking at the process, I want to see everyone treated the same". Others may target "when looking at the opportunities, I want to see everyone with the same merit having the same probabilities of success". It reminds me of the famous cartoon of people wanting to watch a football game over a fence. The drawing illustrates that "treating everyone the same" without considering that not everyone starts from the same situation is stupid.

i’m very familiar with the arguments around DEI/AA. as i said in a different comment, i’m in favor of limited AA.

We have little data from jobs for various reasons - but if we look at the data from universities, the “correction” is clearly far in excess of any bias by race against same score candidates, which is why URM admits typically have significantly lower scores. It is only a correction if you are saying that it is also correcting for a lot more upstream stuff that might be causing the divergence in scores. There might be merit to the claim but it does also mean that the end result is you are picking worse candidates “on paper” on the basis of their skin color.

This is just another justification for discrimination. You can be sure that everyone that discriminates has their own reasoning.

I doubt that studies in this field are less biased for that matter but they certainly lack hard substantial data.

You yourself are free to take a step back for someone you deem disadvantaged. If you demand this from others, you are just as plainly discriminating. I would argue that you overstep your bounds.

The problem is that "let's not apply the correction" is also just another justification for discrimination.

Let's approach the problem theoretically. Let's imagine a distant planet where, by construction of our thought experiment, there are 2 groups, A and B, and when evaluated for a job position, people of group A are scored as "their real score plus a random value sampled from a gaussian centered on 1" and people of group B are scored as "their real score minus a random value sampled from a gaussian centered on 1".

In this world, without correction, just using the evaluated score, there is discrimination: for the same merit (or sometimes even when they merit it more), people of group B will usually not be chosen when competing with a person of group A.

In this world, the corrected evaluation score is not biased anymore, even despite the fact that the correction is based on which group they belong to.

Now, we can come back to our reality. You are saying that these biases don't exist, or are smaller than what I think. Great. I'm saying that these biases exist or are bigger than what you think. Your position is not better than mine.

As for the "overstep your bounds", what you are basically saying is that "if you think there is something unfair, it does not count, I'm the only one allowed to decide what is fair or unfair". I'm pretty sure that it exists things that you find unfair and that you don't accept when you are the victim of the unfair situation. And I'm pretty sure that you can, for each case, find individuals that will argue that they don't find it unfair. In this case, be honest, will you really say "I think you are treating me unfairly, but if you think it's not the case, I cannot demand you to change anything or force anything to get retribution, because it will be overstepping my bounds"?

> The problem is that "let's not apply the correction" is also just another justification for discrimination.

No, that is not true, you have changed the statement. The statement was "let's not apply discrimination". You just reframe your discrimination as something different, in this case a "correction".

> In this world, the corrected evaluation score is not biased anymore, even despite the fact that the correction is based on which group they belong to.

Wrong, you do not "correct" discrimination and instead argue to implement it.

> You are saying that these biases don't exist, or are smaller than what I think.

I did no such thing. You set yourself up to be the judge of which discrimination is justified. I said you are not equipped to do that. You are free to take a step back and give your advantages up for others. That is very commendable and perhaps your deeds bring about the corrected world in your example.

> Your position is not better than mine.

I don't argue anything like that. I just said that you cannot be the judge to determine who deserves discrimination.

Even with applying groups in your hypothetical example you apply discrimination, a group as an abstract representation of the individual. Your whole argument cannot stand on its own without discrimination and the reasoning is inherently circular.

> if you think there is something unfair, it does not count

Again, I am saying nothing like that. I fully support relieves to the poor, financial support for education and several sensible policies. But I don't argue about fairness or what someone deserves and I cannot judge who is up for a bigger part of the pie in the contrast to someone other. And I believe neither are you or some alleged "discrimination experts".

> you have changed the statement

Please don't be so aggressive. I did not take your statement, I was just saying that in the situation where there is a need of a correction, not applying the correction is also a justification for discrimination.

The question is "do we need a correction", and it is a very tricky question, and people who jump on "of course no" usually are just careless and don't realise that they put themselves as "the judge who decide what is fair and what is not", as much as the person who says "yes it needs a correction".

> You set yourself up to be the judge of which discrimination is justified. I said you are not equipped to do that.

My point is that if you judge that it does not need a correction, then you are doing exactly the same as me: you judge which discrimination is justified.

> I just said that you cannot be the judge to determine who deserves discrimination.

But that's exactly my point: if you just say "obviously there is no need for correction, obviously the default value is neutral", you are judging that the needed correction is 0. How is that not as bad as me if I judge that the needed correction is 1.

> I fully support relieves to the poor, financial support for education and several sensible policies.

But you are therefore discriminating: you give advantages to the poor that you don't give to the rich. How is that different?

> And I believe neither are you or some alleged "discrimination experts".

But I haven't said that I support any concrete DEI/AA. For all you know, I'm opposed to all the DEI/AA you have in mind, and just support the same policies as you about the poor and the sensible policies.

I think that in fact we are exactly the same. All I'm saying is that everyone, including you, end up applying "corrections" to reach fairness (decided by them or not, it does not matter). And that the choice "the correction should be 0" is as much a "choice of discriminating to a given level" than the choice "the correction should be 1".

But similarly, for a voter in Kansas, there is no way for them to meaningfully affect US regulation: Kansas people and representatives are a minority when taken at the level of the US, and they will not be enough to pass or block legislation without a lot of non-Kansas assistance. (and, sure, Kansas also has its own laws, the same way being in the EU does not mean each country does not have their own government able to take a lot of decisions independently of the EU decisions)

Sure, but there are important differences.

Kansas is run by officials who are formally affiliated with the national political parties -- the Democrats or Republicans -- and in most cases they'll push the party line. In the UK, if you're an old-school Tory, which is a sizable portion of the national voting demographic, the majority of the political parties in the EU commission and parliament will not reflect, promote, or support many of the positions you feel most comfortable with. The EU commission and parliament are dominated by centrist, pan-European blocs (e.g., EPP, S&D, Renew Europe) that rarely align with Tory priorities.

Kansas itself is not a uniparty state; the current governor is a Democrat, the former was a Republican. The EU, in contrast, had (and still has) an entrenched majority that is to the Tories as the Democracts are to Republicans -- and there's no prospect of that changing. So, de facto, those old-school Tories were like Republicans in Hawaii -- set to lose every contest.

Further, if Kansas were somehow a uniparty state, a Kansas man who feels out of place or unhappy with his local political situation could pack up and move to Texas, or Idaho, or Vermont. Happens all the time. But you can't exactly ask a working-age man from Leeds to pack up and move to Luxembourg or Slovenia. It's a much more difficult proposition, and it almost never happens.

Ok, so the problem is not that the UK representatives in EU was in minority. This was your argument, that you are now admitting is not a good one. You change your argument now, in your previous message, you say nowhere that one condition for being "unelected" is someone to be not culturally integrated with the EU (or something like that). And that is a different discussion, where there is no winner, because the pro-remain people are probably considering themselves close to EU, and therefore, for them, your argument does not correspond to their reality (and "unelected" becomes rather subjective).

But also, if you don't like Kansas as an example, you can take any different example, taking any region, in any country. You often have parties that are located in some part of a country and not the other (Scottish and Welsh for example, but you probably have that in plenty of other places) and that don't align either with the dominant parties. Where do you stop? It looks like you it's just an easy no-true-scotsman argument where you just decide that this specific case is "unelected officials", and you can always find unrelated differences to pretend that other cases are ok.