1. For an organization to succeed it helps to have external people who are good bias manipulators of the external world, and good internal people who focus on reducing the inefficiency costs of internal politics.
2. There's a "valid" solipstic hypothesis I don't mention here but that I keep as a reserve when examining certain phenomena in apparent reality. For complete, otherwise irrational or arbitrary passive and/or coordination by everyone else in apparent reality, the solipstic hypothesis is that they're all intentionally trying to retard my power, status, and/or goal advancement. Examples of complete coordination that I think I've blogged about before include the near complete disinterest of comprehensively tackling the low hanging fruit regarding discussing "race" empirically. Similary with discussing persistence maximization/optimizing persistence odds. Those are two that leap to mind, but to those who think I'm race obsessed, I've gathered some informal empirical evidence that there are huge attention costs related to "race". When we look comprehensively at what distracts our attention from existential risk minimization, as we should, I think it'll be counterintuitive how high racial discussion, and its retardant effect on meritocracy/technocracy/competentocracy -and I don't just mean due to affirmative action- factors as a retardant against allocating attention and human and other resources in a more optimized manner.
3. Hanson has a smarter, more rigorous blog. It's his publications in peer reviewed journals and elsewhere. One could look at the writings of experts and research scientists that way generally. I recall when he mentioned combinatorial prediction markets in a blog post or comment, and about the only response was "what is that, robin?" Well, apparently he's written papers about it.
4. I'd like to see more discussions, of the blogging heads variety, between macroeconomists and international legal experts. Also, it would be interesting if Robin Hanson's joint blog was with mindhacks blogger rather than Eliezer. I think Robin would be pushed to more rigorous and higher quality posts by way of competition. And I think he would push the Mindhacks blogger to apply his excellent mind to the excellent topics and existential challenges that Robin comes up with.
5. I'd like to see exploration of evo psych reasons why the dramatic stories of stuff like international human rights crises capture our attention, but costs much more life to focus on it instead of more consequentially beneficial stuff. I put this in the category of stuff that is low hanging fruit in terms of solvability but on which there is near complete embargo on discussion.
6. Based on the most recent bloggingheads science saturday with Spelke, "core social knowledge" is an interesting evo psych idea, basically the social knowledge we're pretty much born with or only need generic social priming to obtain, as opposed to culturally innovated and transmitted social knowledge. Though their discussion of race got predictably sloppy with a quick retreat to majoritarian mythology. An example on how race is one of those myth on first principle topics. All sides "disagreeing" will still nontransparently be agreeing on shared touchstone first principle myths. Which makes it a conspiracy of attention (we're getting attention that would otherwise go to something like existential risk minimization), but what's interesting to me is that there's NO OTHER SIDE pointing out what I think is this fairly obvious observation. Hence the solipstic theory.
7. A tell (poker term) on a secret social war or skirmish: after Dershowitz defended Kudlow, saying he shouldn't be fired, Barnard invided Finkelstein to speak. I could see this as women/feminist (wasp? jewish?) elites firing a warning shot in Dershowitz's, and zionist males generally, direction. Kind of like, you try to promote stigma on us for Kudlow's firing, and we'll promote stigma on you for your defenses of Israel. I think this supports my theory that all other factors relatively equal, stigma may tend to devolve to the least intelligent populations. Two smart populations are playing nontransparent stigma games in this example. Although I acknowledge more diffuse and other populations may work against more of a gradient, and I acknowledge the fallacy of IQ or even cultural capital overreductionism.
8. I watched a speech Dershowitz gave to Houston's holocaust museum last year, and in an interesting aside he mentioned Israel's targetted killing committees incorporate bayesian mathemeticians who look at probability theory.
9. the speech also mentioned saudi donation to the carter center and elsewhere, and how it affected the way receipients spoke on issues. Is there a "secret" money war between Saudis and American zionists? Or are both sides being played by global WASP elites?
10. There are huge economic costs to preserving the status of older, less competent people. I wonder if the bailouts could also be seen in those terms.
11. Are God and the Devil battling each other, or are they battling everything else we could be paying attention theory? That's why I think analysis should often start with, why are we paying attention to this? How much attentions should we be paying attention to this? Why are there only two sides or options being presented? Why did we shift terms from more descriptive, to more salient for evo pysch reasons (e.g. light vs. darkness)?
12. Fake racial heresy: The Watson flap/dustup.
Closer to a real racial heresy: (1) the idea that a substantial number of white americans have recent black ancestry. (2) The idea that black americans are a wealthy population in the world. (3) Holding both ideas simultaneously in the same narrative. Generally, I think we get closer to real racial heresy if we hold things that are heretical to multiple "sides" in the same coherent argument or narrative. Steve Sailor comes closer to doing this than most thinkers, which is why he often comes closer to real heresies and is awarded less representational privilege (which is different than controversy or stigma, a form of absolute representational privilege) by the mainstream media, it seem to me.
okay, that's it for now.
#2: You've just mentioned it here. Pretty funny idea, though I'd imagine not as uncommon or plausible as many other of your ideas.
#4: Vaughan from MindHacks usually just provides links without too much commentary. I haven't read his book, so I don't know how excellent his mind is. I am getting tired of Eliezer's verbose sci-fi stuff.
#6: What "majoritarian mythology" were you referring to? The discussion of white kids as being of the majority culture? It's possible that they replicated these experiments in another culture, perhaps Asians, but I forget whether that was mentioned. What is the first principle myth that disagreers nontransparently agree on?
#7: I don't recall the Dershowitz-Kudlow thing. Googling I get unrelated stuff involving Larry Kudlow.
#8: I might have pointed this out earlier, but the link has since gone dead and you'll have to find it at the internet archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://haganah.org.il/harchives/005011.html
#9: I recall that being a point of contention between Walt/Mearsheimer and their critics. They devote more attention to that issue in their response to critics (which can find from here) than the book itself though. I don't think the Saudis are really fighting against Zionists. It's among the most conservative of Arab states and the longest allied with the U.S and has been at peace with Israel for a while. The anti-Israel stuff Arab regimes engage in is intended for the consumption of their own people. It's likely that they want to privilege a more Saudi-centric variety of Islam though. I've heard that British children of Bengali descent have stopped wearing traditional Bengali clothing in favor of what the British consider more typically "Muslim".
#10: Bryan Caplan has pointed out how the welfare state goes primarily to the elderly rather than the poor:
http://econlog.econlib.org//archives/2005/06/give_me_your_ti.html
#11: God and the Devil don't exist, silly.
#12: What was fake about it? He really did lose his position despite his importance to Cold Springs.
Your heresy 1 and 2 aren't that uncommon. 1 is usually promoted by those who say race is just a social construct. Steve Sailer investigated it here:
http://www.isteve.com/2002_How_White_Are_Blacks.htm
Bryan Caplan and Will Wilkinson are fond of pointing out heresy 2 in their attacks on the Rawlsian welfare state based on national borders. They think third-worlders are much more deserving than the poor in the first world. I think Tyler Cowen has also made that point.
Posted by: TGGP | December 29, 2008 at 09:16 PM
Ilya Somin responds to Bryan Caplan's labelling of the law as "phony":
http://volokh.com/posts/1230688026.shtml
Posted by: TGGP | December 30, 2008 at 07:43 PM
In case you don't feel like going through archive.org, I've mirrored the page here:
http://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/just-talking-about-israel/#more-684
Posted by: TGGP | December 31, 2008 at 10:31 PM