OMNILIBRIUM
Rational Discussion of Controversial Topics
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VoiceOfRa
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But e.g. in the software industry, "enterprise" sales is a byword for "total bullshit":
Yes, and companies that get to "enterprisy" wind up going bust. Government programs that get too "enterprisy" get to argue for a bigger budget next ... read more |
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It's created by Lockheed Martin which is likely payed cost-plus.
So? Most corporations make a profit. Most of them don't have its problems. Heck, earlier fighters didn't have cost overruns of anywhere near this ... read more |
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| So, how is one supposed to evaluate a politician's ... read more |
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My argument is not about who should have free speech.
Then what is it about? It was originally about what Trump would do as president and how it differs from Hillary? So is your argument that Hillary would stop at letting specially ... read more |
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Hillary doesn't argue that new laws should be passed for that purpose
She wants to appoint Supreme Court Justices to overturn the decisions. I don't see how the distinction matters.
Citizens United wasn't a newspaper.
So? ... read more |
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One article blamed socialism
This is basically the the explanation. Specifically Venezuela's socialist system recently ran out of money, hence it can't afford to properly maintain order. This is the same reason crime spiked in the ... read more |
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who thinks he should be able to sue newspapers for writing hit pieces on him,
And this differs from Hillary, ... read more |
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But he did preside over a large expansion of the health care system just like Obama did.
But Obama's expansion was on top of Reagan's expansion, that still puts Obama to the left of ... read more |
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Barack Obama is to the right of Ronald Reagan on taxes and health care.
So about that time Reagan tried to pass universal healthcare, oh yeah, that didn't ... read more |
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| In the current US political climate, people are regularly subject to calls for denunciations for making similar statements, about figures perceived as "far right wing".
Suppose the comparison had been Hitler rather than Stalin, how do you think ... read more |
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| How was the list of blogs in the blogroll determined and how do we propose ... read more |
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The speech that he's running with talked about rapists?
Yes, for ... read more |
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| What I find most interesting by these attempts to explain Trump away, is that in their focus on style they completely ignore the substance. Look at Trump's most popular position, namely his position on immigration. This position is only ... read more |
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| The problem that any "college equivalency" certification test that actually tested for something resembling ability would have even worse disparate impact then college degrees.
... read more |
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| Well if you're Saudi Arabia you can effectively store oil underground by pumping less of it.
Also, it makes sense to hedge your bets by diversifying your investments.
Oil and phosphates have the adventage of being the limiting factors of ... read more |
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| Note that in principal this would still work if a private entity implemented this test.
The practical problem is that using any such test would be deemed illegal on disparate impact grounds unless the entity making it is sufficiently politically ... read more |
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The next victim will probably skip the police and talk to a different group.
Well, if the police refuse to do their job, someone else needs to do it ... read more |
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As far as the UK and Spain go, I think it's largely about them treating their minorities better. In both countries the last terror act driven with the intention of secession is a while back.
As far as I know the minority currently trying ... read more |
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| How about Hillary's "The Libya attacks, were caused by this guys youtube video disrespecting ... read more |
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Having an Anti-Vaxxer as president will result in a lot of unnecessary deaths.
You do realize that term (probably intentionally) conflates a ton of different positions, some of them, such as my understanding of Trumps, totally ... read more |
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| One explanation I've heard about education outcomes is demographics. Specifically, each individual ethnic group does better in the United States than in their ancestral ... read more |
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That regulation would say what counts as trying to hire natives first.
Yes, and because the underlying concept is economically meaningless, the regulation can't possibly do what it sets out to do. So companies, quite reasonably, wind up ... read more |
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One company hires the programmer and the other company then gets to point to the existing market and note that there aren't any candidates for the position.
Except there are, since the second company could hire the programmer away from ... read more |
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The education myth is just a branch of the blank slate myth. The left won't even consider it - even people that consider themselves model rationalist say things like "too horrible to contemplate" when shown evidence that the blank slate is a ... read more |
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| Ethical to whom? The teachers or their ... read more |
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"we really need the H1-B because there's no native who can do the job equally well"
Well from an economic perspective that statement is not even wrong (lot's of laws have this problem). Consider the following toy model:
Let's ... read more |
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| Why is Income Inequality a problem ... read more |
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| In that case you don't know which research to fund using conventional methods ... read more |
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| And getting existing institutions to rely of your parallel structures. In any case, either way making it unacceptable to criticize your parallel structures is really ... read more |
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| I'm not just talking about running for office. In fact running for office is by no means the most effective way to influence ... read more |
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| Yes, their ultimate goal is to convert Europe to Islam, an intermediate goal is to make to stop criticism of Islam. Once that's done, they can then ratchet Islamic influence into ... read more |
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| Agreed, that "prize fund" idea would be much better than the current ... read more |
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| Well any party willing to have people stuff ballot boxes is willing to oppose laws that make it harder for them to do ... read more |
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| The problem is that it leads to biased science. Large bureaucratic agencies tend to converge on the "right approach" prematurely, and then not fund anyone who disagrees with the approach. Look at the recent history of nutrition in the USA for a ... read more |
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| It would be helpful to start by defining "xenophobia". It literally means "fear of foreigners". Does it matter if the fear is actually rational, e.g., being afraid of large numbers of Muslims many of whom support ISIS is perfectly ... read more |
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Republicans want to prevent people without valid IDs from voting.
More like Democrats what to prevent voter ID laws to make it easier for them to stuff balot boxes. Funny how Democrats don't have a problem with requiring IDs to even ... read more |
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| Also:
3) Use fear to decrease the amount of Europeans willing to openly criticize Islam. (Well, this was working with the murder of Theo van Gogh and the Danish Mohammad cartoons, but now it appears to be ... read more |
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| I would like to point out that motivations of types (2) and (3) are mutually compatible since the parties presumably believe that them getting elected more would be good for the ... read more |
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| Yes:
Think about what it means to be biased. What it means for a selection process to be biased against applicants of type x is that it's harder for them to make it through. Which means applicants of type x have to be better to get selected ... read more |
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| Ah, yes. Good old fashioned abuse of government power to suppress ... read more |
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| Healthcare wait time doesn't just mean that everyone gets the same healthcare, only a year later. It means people put of care or don't both applying at all. Otherwise, the same forces that caused the wait in the first place would cause it ... read more |
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From a perspective of not wanting repeats of world wars, it might make more sense to wiretap AfD politicians and work against them developing political power than wiretapping current German leaders.
What on earth are you talking about. If ... read more |
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| If the government of Saudi Arabia is destabilized, what replaces it is likely to be ... read more |
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That said, we know as a fact that the fastest temperature increases on record are correlated with human production of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide,
So what you're saying is that there was a ton of human produced carbon ... read more |
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| I have read the Koran twice, and various books about Islam.
I'm guessing most of those books are largely devoted to rationalizing why the Koran says X, when just reading the Koran alone, it's clear that it ... read more |
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| In that case, who's in charge of judging predictions true or ... read more |
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Obviously, poverty is real, and there are people in first-world countries who go hungry.
Don't conflate poverty (in the absolute sense), with ... read more |
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| Previous prediction markers failed due to being shut down by the US government under anti-gambling laws. What will Augur be any ... read more |
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| I don't believe it either, however, I don't think the chances of pedophilia becoming accepted using the same top-down methods as homosexual marriage, e.g., judicial fiat, intimidation of amyone who disagrees, etc. In fact, the first steps ... read more |
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in many cases, working together is more efficient than working independently
There is a different term for the arrangement designed to take advantage of that fact, that term is ... read more |
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Do you have the numbers on the exact percentages? Would be interesting to look at.
Well, until the 1950s the British Parliament had university constituencies. Oxford consistently returned Tories. Cambridge was reasonably even until the ... read more |
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| You failed to address, or even acknowledge the question, of who fact-checks the fact-checkers. For example, you mention PolitiFact, it has a acquired a reputation for downplaying some politicians lies, and in some cases even outright classifying ... read more |
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The real reason British resigned control was that they had no more interest in controlling Rhodesia, whether it was ready for self-government or not.
Except they did attempt to control it. After its unilateral deceleration of independence, ... read more |
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| No, Evil AI is a potential future threat in itself. Although, as you note, the underlying processes that could turn AI Evil are similar to the processes that turn big government ... read more |
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This is a valid reason for treating it differently, if true. Maybe I should amend our ideal to "that your demographic traits should not be held against you by the law without a damn good reason", and so our debate is over how damn good the reason ... read more |
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The only cause of disparity I might expect would be through differing propensity to raise children; but if so, this could be more directly addressed by offering different recognition to childless and child-bearing couples,
Um, the idea of ... read more |
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How is it that you think the Supreme Court misread the meaning of the Civil Rights Act?
The civil rights act was supposed to ban discrimination, not institute reverse discrimination.
In contrast, against elected officials I would name ... read more |
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It also doesn't explain why the Supreme Court (another form of technocracy) is so much more effective at their job than Congress.
Are they? What is your evidence for this claim? There are a lot of bad Supreme Court precedents, e.g., ... read more |
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But though I think the relationship between marriage and social utility is more complicated than I fully understand, I do get a nagging sense of doubt about the idea that all the utility is caused by the sex and the romantic love that a couple ... read more |
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Still, I’m not convinced that government funding increased the number of historians or philosophers worthy of notice (even before the culture of political correctness).
Frankly, one could say the same thing about STEM fields.
Concerning ... read more |
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Principal humanities, such as literature and art
I was thinking of things more along the lines of history and philosophy.
However, is there a reason to think that withdrawing government funding or even abolishing the faculties ... read more |
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3) This unawareness and these biases results in a lot of random statistical noise that is frequently very far removed from optimal policy outcomes.
Statistical noise isn't the problem since it cancels itself out in the long term. The ... read more |
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| Personally, I think in principal humanities, have a purpose, and a very important purpose. That said, at least as actually practiced in the west they haven't been serving that purpose since at least the dumping of the Western Canon in the ... read more |
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| The existence of large concentrations of capital (technically) does not preclude the existence of equal concentration of non-capital e.g. luxury consumption goods.
Also, things like art and pure science are luxury goods, and without sufficient ... read more |
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This is not an argument for selective deprivation. The existence of large concentrations of capital (technically) does not preclude the existence of equal concentration of non-capital e.g. luxury consumption goods.
Except in practice it ... read more |
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| How about: Creating socially worthwhile things, e.g., art, science, technology, requires large concentrations of capital. More generally, having a few large concentrations of capital makes it easier for society to coordinate to do important ... read more |
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Associating particular groups with 'bad' has questionable utility
For starters it helps you avoid doing stupid things like going trough black neighborhoods, especially at night.
I'd also add that a particular workplace has ... read more |
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I'd also add that a particular workplace has selected its workers, so the average software engineer at your company will have different traits from the average person in the country
The average company will also not have any black ... read more |
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Of course everyone has biases, and it's possible to live with them. But people vary in how strongly they harbor various biases, and I would find it very surprising if greater unconscious racism/sexism/etc.
What definition of "bias" are ... read more |
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That said I very much doubt that using implicit associations tests would be a good business strategy. Besides my own subconscious biases (the first associations brought to my mind by this idea were “thoughtcrime” and “1984”), I have the following ... read more |
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b) coherence. Multilateral compromises may sometimes induce inefficiency. This doesn't seem necessarily true, but it's easy to imagine cases where pursuing any of several competing visions wholeheartedly would be better than anything in the ... read more |
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Usually polls are collected for statistical purposes. If the answers will not be associated with their identity there would be no motivation to keep appearances. Is there any reason to believe that names were ever even collected?
This is an ... read more |
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| And the proper solution to that problem is to simplify them, not make them even more ... read more |
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For those that others find extreme the meaning might perfectly natural to the one that is making it.
Well in a lot of cases the "extreme" meaning is in fact the natural true meaning. For example, from my limited knowledge of the Koran, ISIS ... read more |
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| In Western Europe family ties were a lot less important than in other parts of the world. See hbdchick's theory of the Hajnal line and exogamy. Basically, the Hajnal line divides areas where cousin marriage was permitted from areas where it ... read more |
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| The reason for Obamacare's length is not the need be precise, but rather the need to give special favors to various interest ... read more |
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Would Silicon Valley be more or less developed if the Traitorous eight hadn't been free to quit?
An AI wouldn't necessarily make the mistakes Shockley made that made it necessary for them to quit in the first ... read more |
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Slaves, however, are very seldom inventive; and all the most important improvements, either in machinery, or in the arrangement and distribution of work which facilitate and abridge labour, have been the discoveries of freemen.
This is true ... read more |
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| Well, look at the parable and see if either of the interpretations would sound reasonable to someone who wasn't desperately trying to rationalize the parable with whatever other beliefs you want to make it consistent with? Also, look at it from ... read more |
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| My point is to avoid stupid straw positions like attempting to take the parables ... read more |
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| That's why I explicitly said to read it the way it was meant to be ... read more |
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"The earth is flat" is a sentence that only has 1 interpretation.
That's because there hasn't been a movement that has motivation to reconcile professing to believe the truth of the sentence "The earth is flat", with believing that it ... read more |
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It doesn't have centralized lawmaking that goes beyond saying: "Obey the sharia." There no parliament that you can attack.
Throughout history most states didn't have parliaments.
Part of Sayyid Qutb thinking that underlies the ... read more |
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| Have you even looked at the Princeton study? Most people, especially leftists, hear "congress consistently passed laws which the wealthy favored even when the majority of voters expressed opposition to those laws" and think issues like minimum ... read more |
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To me, this view presents a logical puzzle. I can well understand how a Muslim who believes in divine origins of his religion may think that it has one and only one correct interpretation. Thus, for instance, the belief of the Shia Muslims that ... read more |
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| That almost sounds like a modern Protestant-influenced development. In medieval Catholicism you have to confess your sins to a Priest and do the prescribed penance. Which depending on the time period might very well consist of giving a generous ... read more |
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| Weren't you trying to argue that the tactical situation ultimately determines the political ... read more |
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I realize that Michael Anissimov has been discredited
What on earth are you talking about ... read more |
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| I know. And what I meant was that a large country fighting an equally sized country can also supplement its professional army with conscripts. And the examples above suggest that the country that does so would win over one that ... read more |
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| If turning most of your men into semi-professional fighters can overcome 20 to 1 odds, what does that say about the effect it would have on an otherwise even ... read more |
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Thanks to the new technology, the professional military is again superior to the conscripted soldiers. Most western countries implicitly acknowledged this fact by abolishing draft and switching to a well-paid volunteer force.
I'm not ... read more |
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| I think you're steelmanning Alice's position. She wasn't just talking about what it is acceptable for teachers to say but what it is acceptable for teachers to believe.
On the other hand, I see how teachers who are outspoken about ... read more |
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You should quit the job in order to scavenge more efficiently.
If nobody would take the job, then why is it necessary to bad offering ... read more |
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Following your logic, teachers with such beliefs are much more likely to discriminate against their black/female students, and so we shouldn't bother with them.
On the other had, teachers with false beliefs, especially false beliefs about ... read more |
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| No, but Alice seems to think we shouldn't even have teachers who know about the relationship between race/sex and IQ.
Also since IQ isn't a perfect proxy for scientific ability by Alice's logic we shouldn't even discourage low IQ ... read more |
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All I'm saying is that regardless of what are the current average achievements of various minorities, every person should be viewed, valued and assessed as an individual, regardless of what group that person belongs to.
So does that imply ... read more |
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The question is whether your views translate into how you treat your students. Anti-theist/anti-creationist views usually don't, because these are views about ideas, not about people.
But anti-Muslim views are about people? Furthermore, ... read more |
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| And if they really are bad at physics why shouldn't they be discouraged from pursuing careers they're likely to be bad ... read more |
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No, it doesn't matter.
So basically what you're saying is that you want teachers who are bad at reasoning and/or deluded.
In fact such prejudices are often part of the reason why one group performs much worse than others in some ... read more |
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| This is hard to answer because it can always be argued that maintaining the system of legitimacy is in the selfish interest of the rulers.
As far as rulers prioritizing legitimacy over (other) selfish interests, one good example is the peace of ... read more |
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