Talk:The Great American Paradox

Continuing from our discussion on the other talk page...

This essay would probably appeal to a wider audience if you didn't take a shot at 2A in the first sentence. You could omit that part and the essay would still be more or less the same. If you want to appeal to someone's sense of justice, you cannot attack their self-interests or self-determination in the same breath. Do you understand what I'm trying to say here? AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:05, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

@AP295: What's "2A"?

I am NOT attacking anyone's self-interests or nor their right of self-determination. Quite the contrary.

I'm attacking the belief that violence is more effective than nonviolence in advancing freedom and democracy, liberty and justice for all. That seem to be contradicted by my understanding of the evidence I've so far been able to find.

How do you respond to the research summarized in "Effective defense"?

I can find lots of propaganda that claim the opposite of what is contained in "Effective defense" and this Great American Paradox, but I have so far failed to find any substantive research.

I'll also repeat my earlier quote from Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, because I think it's important to keep in mind here: "The colonies would gladly have borne a little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the PRIME reason for the Revolutionary War" AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:09, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Sure. I don't question that Franklin said that nor that it was likely accurate. So what?

Have you seen Ray Raphael (2002), The First American Revolution, The New Press, Wikidata Q59420225?

In 1774, before the "w:Shot heard round the world", angry farmers in Massachusetts met the circuit court judge and made him swear to NOT hold court unless he did so under the w:Massachusetts Charter of 1691 and NOT the substitute charter of 1774, which was an attempted coup, replacing the democratic government of the Massachusetts Charter with rule by appointees of King w:George III, per the w:Intolerable Acts. In that way many farmers were able to prevent the courts from confiscating their land.

That was a huge threat to the elites in the colonies as well as in Great Britain.

Worse, the Massachusetts w:Minutemen elected their officers. George Washington was appalled: He don't want any of those "democratical" ideas.

The colonial elites were squeezed between the colonial peasantry and the the elites in Great Britain. The best hope that colonial elites had for avoiding bankruptcy and other threats to their social status was to convert the nonviolence into violence.

A more contemporary example of this process is Syria in 2011: What started as primarily nonviolent protests against the Ba'athist government led by Bashar al-Assad was converted into a violent disaster that is continuing. Something similar happened in Kosovo, where a nonviolent campaign that began in 1990 was finally converted into a violent confrontation in 1998, to the detriment of all -- except the international elites, who are threatened by nonviolence.

The research by Chenoweth and Stephan analyzes over 200 violent revolutions and over 100 nonviolent campaigns. w:Gene Sharp compared the w:Algerian War, during which a million people died out of a population of roughly 11 million, with the nonviolent w:Mahatma Gandhi#Struggle for Indian independence (1915–1947), during which a few thousand Indians were killed out of a population of between 300 and 400 million. And look at Algeria and India today: Algeria is still mired in authoritarianism and political corruption, while India doing much better. India still has lots of problems, but they've made dramatic progress, unlike Algeria, I think. (I'd have to review the literature on this a bit more before I wanted to put it in an actual article.)

Remember the w:Third Amendment to the United States Constitution: "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law"? What would have happened if the families forced to provide housing for British soldiers had organized an underground railroad for deserters? We don't know, but almost 60% of adult white males in the colonies could vote, vs. less than 5% in Great Britain.

What to do with this article?

Thanks for raising these issues again. If you can find a way to modify this so it's more consistent with the weight of the available evidence, please do so.

We could, for example, change the first sentence so it reads something more like, "Many people believe that the United States got freedom and democracy, liberty and justice for all from the violence of the American Revolution."

We might also move mention of gun control and foreign policy to the end of the section on "Why did the US grow and prosper when other newly independent countries fractured, shrank, and stagnated economically?", converting them into a question, something like, "This is an important question, because a substantial portion of the political debate on gun control and foreign policy seems to be driven by the assumption that the US got freedom and democracy, liberty and justice for all from the violence of the American Revolution."

If we did that, might this article attract a wider audience? DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs)

Thanks for your thoughtful response, I'll write a more complete reply when I have some time. In the meantime, what would have been your non-violent solution to the Currency Act of 1764? In the other talk page, you said, "I do NOT advocate a nonviolent response to every violent attack. However, there are many situations where the use of violence seems be at best wasteful and likely counterproductive." I strongly agree with this, but I don't see how prohibiting civilian gun ownership would follow. If you are opposed to aggressive interventionism/foreign-policy and believe that we can change such policies by educating the public, then why go out of your way to criticize 2A and support gun control? Many of the people who you're trying to convince would stop reading right then and there. More generally, I'm concerned that the public image projected by many academic institutions is utterly repellent to a large subset of the American public. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 19:58, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

I haven't studied the w:Currency Act of 1764, though it's my understanding that a major driver of the American Revolution was a difference in perceptions about relative magnitude of the contributions of the colonists and the aristocracy in Great Britain to the victory over the French in the w:French and Indian War -- and, doubtless, other wars: The colonists insisted they supplied most of the manpower, did most of the fighting, and suffered most of the deprivations of the conflicts with the French and the native Americans. The aristocracy in Great Britain insisted they put up most of the money, and it was time that the colonists paid for their own defense. Neither side could debase themselves to do some fact checking, asking questions like "Under what circumstances might I do what I see them doing?" In fact virtually everyone thinks they know more than they actually do. w:Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, even though he's not an economist. For more on this, see my "Confirmation bias and conflict".

Regarding not advocating a nonviolent response to every violent attack, see "International conflict observatory" and my Spencer Graves (26 February 2005), The Impact of Violent and Nonviolent Action on Constructed Realities and Conflict (PDF), prodsyse.com, Wikidata Q58635572: When people are killed and property destroyed, the apparent perpetrators often make enemies. I claim that the ultimate outcome of almost any conflict that lasts longer than a few days is primarily determined by the actions of people who were not initially involved. Once people have left the sidelines, they are not likely to listen much to the other side.

Re w:2A, I assume you mean the w:Second Amendment to the United States Constitution? It reads, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." What about nuclear weapons? Should federal or state law forbid the right of people to keep and bear nuclear weapons? (For my response to that, see "Time to nuclear Armageddon" and "Forecasting nuclear proliferation".)

And you doubtless saw that I took your advice in changing the lede. I also expanded a little the "Implications" section. Thanks. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 21:03, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

You seem to be very familiar with the war on terror. What about Saddam's rejection of the petrodollar? Do you think that might have had something to do with the Iraq war? Ask the average person about terrorism and you'll get all sorts of opinions. Ask them about OPEC or The Fed and you'll get a blank stare. Do you want people to understand conflict, or do you want to disarm them? It's not a rhetorical question, I never really can tell who I'm talking to. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 21:39, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with "Saddam's rejection of the petrodollar". If you give me a reference, I might be able to say more. [I translated the Wikipedia article on w:Julia Cagé from French into English. There were several French words I didn't understand, but references were provided for the statements that included those words. I read the references (in French) and understand instantly how to translate each such statement.]

As noted in my "Confirmation bias and conflict", the mainstream media drive political polarization of the international body politic to benefit those who control the money for the media. This works, because of defects in human cognition, documented in work for which w:Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, even though he's not an ecoomist.

What is your reaction to my "Winning the War on Terror"?

Regarding your question about, "Do you want people to understand conflict": I'm on the board of an anti-nuke group that advocates non-violent direct action. I routinely hear moral arguments. Hello? There is no morality in watching your child being eaten by a lion if you have the means to resist. If I had a gun and could save my child by killing the lion, I'd do it -- unless the lion was a pet of some potentate, and I was convinced that my entire family and friends would likely be killed as a result of me killing that lion. There is no morality in refusing to defend yourself. However, it's not smart to choose methods of defense that drive people off the sidelines to support your enemy or increase their will to resist in ways that make your "self defense" efforts counterproductive. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 23:03, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

No, there are certain things worse than death. If you can even see straight after watching your kid eaten by a lion, you're no ally of mine. You must fight with tooth, nail, rage and fury. Either you die or they die. The matter is settled either way. That's how it's supposed to be. If everyone were so honorable, those despots would at best end up king of nothing and ruler of nobody, but more than likely they'd be shredded to pieces. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 01:33, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

That sounds plausible, except that we are often wrong. I spent 6 years in the US Air Force during the Vietnam War. I went in believing it was my patriotic duty. I had been on active duty for about 3 months when it came to me that the South Vietnamese should have a "home team" advantage. Why did they need foreign troops when their enemies did not? I later learned that in his 1963 autobiography, former President Eisenhower said, "I have never [communicated] with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting [leading to the defeat of the French in 1954], possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh". That was the universal expert consensus that was not even mentionable in the mainstream media of that day. Ike knew that he might not be reelected in 1956 if honest elections had been held there earlier that year, as prescribed by the Geneva Accords of 1954. He didn't say this, but history records that he took steps to prevent those elections from being held.

A decade later, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed unanimously in the US House and with only two dissenting votes in the US Senate, even though the universal consensus today is that the "unprovoked attacks" named in that resolution were (a) provoked, and (b) not actual attacks but radar snow. The two senators who voted against that resolution lost in the next election. This suggests to me that if Ike had allowed honest elections in 1956, the Communist Ho Chi Minh would likely have won in Vietnam and Ike might have lost his reelection bid. Senator w:Joseph McCarthy had been largely discredited by 1956, but McCharthyism was very much alive -- as it was in the late 1960s, still driving a counterproductive foreign and military policy for the US.

Today, the United States, Russia, and China can each start a nuclear war that will end in the destruction of civilization, over a "Stuxnet" attack on their nuclear command, control and communications divorced from reality that could produce a nuclear winter, during which over 98 percent of humanity could starve to death if they do not die of something else sooner. (I'm quoting here William Perry; Tom Z. Collina (June 2020), The Button: The new nuclear arms race and presidential power from Truman to Trump, BenBella Books, Wikidata Q102046116 and Daniel Ellsberg; Amy Goodman; Juan González (6 December 2017), Daniel Ellsberg Reveals He was a Nuclear War Planner, Warns of Nuclear Winter & Global Starvation, Democracy Now!, Wikidata Q64226035. I'm a compulsive fact checker: I've found that I've been wrong many times. To minimize my risk of further mistakes, I work to remember "How do I know that?" for many things, then check my "facts" repeatedly.)

Every individual and group has a right and an obligation to defend themselves. We should choose methods of struggle that maximize our chances of victory AND of actually getting what we want after the struggle. Otherwise, we could kill 98% of humanity through a misunderstanding. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 03:55, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Hah, a nam vet huh? I never figured you for an old fogy like that. Nonetheless, I don't think you can really be wrong about your kid being eaten by a lion. That seems like an all-or-nothing proposal to me. :P AP295 (discuss • contribs) 05:32, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I suppose you could design some messed-up variation on Schrödinger's cat experiment, but I've never been totally clear on how the interior of the box could be fully isolated from the outside world. Perhaps such things are best left to people who are both experts in physics and man-eating lions. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 11:55, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Anyway, I like to imagine that nuclear arms and the systems that control them are air-gapped and physically secured, but I really have no idea. Unfortunately, most microprocessor designs are closely-guarded trade secrets, so you really never can be certain that they'll behave as documented or as one would expect. Perhaps it's too optimistic, but I like to think that nobody in such a position of authority would attempt to end civilization as we know it for shits and giggles. Even in such an event, humans would not go extinct. Humans are a weedy species. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 12:29, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Lastly, the idea that civilians should be prohibited from owning firearms stills seems like a non-sequitur here. The entire point I'm trying to communicate to you is that polarization has less to do with "confirmation bias" and more to do with socially-engineered conflicts of interest. I'd like a leader who supports public education, healthcare, but also border security and the right to bear arms. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 13:05, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Regarding "humans would not go extinct", I've written about the "extinction of civilization" but NOT the extinction of humanity. w:Daniel Ellsberg said that during a nuclear winter, 98 or 99 percent of humanity would likely starve to death if they did not die of something else sooner. One or two percent would live shorter, more miserable lives, probably close to oceans. See Daniel Ellsberg; Amy Goodman; Juan González (6 December 2017), Daniel Ellsberg Reveals He was a Nuclear War Planner, Warns of Nuclear Winter & Global Starvation, Democracy Now!, Wikidata Q64226035.

Regarding "the right to bear arms":

1. Is there anything in this article that says that says that I'm advocating eliminating "the right to bear arms"? I'm saying (especially in "International Conflict Observatory") that we should not use any method of struggle without being sensitive to the possibility that what we're doing may be counterproductive.
2. I assume you would agree that we should not provide nuclear weapons to just anyone, especially people who might want to initiate Armageddon. If you accept that, then it's not a question of whether we restrict "the right to bear arms", but what restrictions we adopt. For example, are you going to allow someone who has already murdered others with guns to keep his guns or acquire others?

DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 14:00, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Firstly, it's not a matter of provision, it's a matter of prohibition. I think it's reasonable to interpret 2A as being limited to small arms. No, guns should not be sold to violent criminals, and usually they are not. If you walk into any gun store and put down money for a firearm, you're getting a NICS check on the spot. That's not really the problem. The problem is asinine laws like those included in the SAFE act. They serve no real purpose except to make life difficult for well-intentioned gun owners who actually do want to comply with the law. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:18, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

How do those points relate to this article? DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 15:32, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I was addressing the questions in your second point immediately above. No, nowhere in the article is it stated that people should be prohibited from owning firearms. However, you do seem to undermine the second amendment. This is enough to make a large subset of potential readers write off your entire essay. They have been conditioned to react that way by the constant threat of prohibition and "legislative harassment", for lack of a better word (e.g. the SAFE act). AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:39, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

And this is the cause of "polarization" or "balkanization", which you lament in your other essays. Personally, I think of it as a watershed effect. People with similar interests would normally tend to cooperate. Social structures should naturally tend toward a "low-energy state", so to speak. Once you have an idea of what things would naturally look like, then you can draw certain conclusions: If we can truly communicate and educate each other freely, then such a polarized middle class is an aberration. It is not normal, so something must be interfering with this natural tendency of similar people to group up and efficiently act in their common interests. We have to examine whether these apparent conflicts of interest are grounded in reality or not. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:55, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I also mentioned this on my user page, but I think of it as a clustering or min-cut problem. If this sort of thing has already been explored and you know of any relevant literature, please do let me know. Maybe this is just sociology 101, I wouldn't know because I've never taken a course on it. Here's an example, suppose you have a set of of people and some pairwise metric that represents similarity/degree-of-common-interest. If you take for granted that all the individuals generally prioritize non-aggression and prefer to avoid conflict, then the groups/clusters should more-or-less reflect the degree of cooperation between those people in real life. Maybe it's silly or an oversimplification, but it's just something I've been mulling over. To prevent or undermine this cooperation, a bad actor might use a "max-cut" approach by manufacturing conflicts of interest (or the perception thereof) through social engineering. This state could be detected by checking whether the groups that should emerge under some objective metric of commonality actually jibe with the political factions and other social structures we have currently. Naturally this would depend on having such a metric by which to form our expectations of how things "should" be, recognize inefficiencies and needless conflict, and to identify and resolve actual conflicts of interest (e.g. those that might arise from resource scarcity or aggression) as fairly as possible. I imagine google, facebook, etc. (and whoever else has access to their data) are in a much better position to develop such models than you or I. Whether they'll use them to improve the human condition or abuse them to further their own interests, who knows? Fingers crossed I guess. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 18:05, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

In short, I allege that American education and politics have been intentionally sabotaged by private interests, and there is no end of it in sight. Every day is a new low. Our culture has been so severely debased that we no longer have the agency to maintain the liberty and freedom that our forefathers worked so hard to build. It's truly a sad thing to watch. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 20:26, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

The fed forces the world to use the dollar through aggression. The American public grows fat and complacent. We forget how to build and import everything, because it's so cheap for us. Every time you turn on the news it's some petty bullshit that doesn't matter but still gets people way too worked up to think straight. We let people come and go without controlling our borders. We have no pride or decency. God help us if there's ever a run on the dollar. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 20:46, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I agree that there has been substantial debasement of American education and politics, etc., as you indicated. But how can these be reversed?

My current analysis is summarized in "Confirmation bias and conflict". You said above 'that polarization has less to do with "confirmation bias" and more to do with socially-engineered conflicts of interest.' How is that different from what I've said in "Confirmation bias and conflict"?

I'm currently working to develop an irregular series of documentaries on Category:Media reform to improve democracy, being interviews with leading experts cited in my "Confirmation bias and conflict". The first one took place February 23. A video with a transcript is available at "Unrigging the media and the economy". A 29:00 mm:ss extract is available via the Pacifica Radio Network as Media & Democracy: Unrigging the media and the economy. Unfortunately, you currently need to log into that website to access that MP3 file. I need to follow up on my earlier request to make that openly available.

The second episode in this irregular series is scheduled for April 29 (Thursday), 19:00 - 20:00 Central US time, available live streaming world wide from kkfi.org. I'm scheduled to interview Craig Aaron, co-CEO of w:Free Press (organization). I'm currently preparing for that interview.

Regarding 2A, how do you think the world might the world be different today if more people had brought firearms to the w:2021 storming of the United States Capitol? DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 21:19, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure if you'll like my answer to that. I certainly don't, but here it is: they could have sacked the entire place for all I care. I hope no such thing ever happens, but it would hardly seem like any great loss considering the undignified mockery of American principles that I've watched for the past several years. John Swinton, the chief editorial writer of the New York Times around 1860 had the following to say about journalists, and I imagine the same is probably true of most politicians in DC, Trump included: "There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press"! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." Good luck with your project, I hope it's an exception. I think it would be better to frame your theories in terms of conflicting/aligning interests, otherwise you might end up perpetuating this sad state of affairs. Sure, we're trapped in echo chambers, but how exactly did we get there? Is it because humans are irrational and simply prefer to ignore the truth? Maybe to some degree, but we are not given good information in the first place. It's not simply willful ignorance on our part. We are given bad information, and draw strange and incorrect conclusions with that information. What should our social and cultural landscape realistically look like, and why does it currently differ from that expectation? AP295 (discuss • contribs) 22:50, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

The reference I've found most enlightening on that was w:Thinking, Fast and Slow by w:Daniel Kahneman, mentioned above and summarized in my Confirmation bias and conflict. If you think you know about important research not mentioned there, I'd be very interested. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 23:02, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I'll let you know if I come across anything good. I can't find a specific work at the moment but I know there's some evidence that we reason and learn in a manner similar to belief networks, and that has always seemed like a plausible theory. I think the reason people sometimes reject or deny a given "truth" is because they have something to lose or to gain from doing so. It might be useful to examine those conflicts of interest rather than chalk it up to unsound logic or willful ignorance on their part. Sometimes also people are just given bad information, and they have no reason to believe someone who simply insists that their beliefs are false, especially if they suspect an ulterior motive is at play. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 23:25, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I've read some of the wiki article on Thinking, Fast and Slow. I don't quite know what to make of it. For example, the section on substitution:

"System 1 is prone to substituting a simpler question for a difficult one. In what Kahneman terms their "best-known and most controversial" experiment, "the Linda problem," subjects were told about an imaginary Linda, young, single, outspoken, and intelligent, who, as a student, was very concerned with discrimination and social justice. They asked whether it was more probable that Linda is a bank teller or that she is a bank teller and an active feminist. The overwhelming response was that "feminist bank teller" was more likely than "bank teller," violating the laws of probability. (Every feminist bank teller is a bank teller). In this case System 1 substituted the easier question, "Is Linda a feminist?", neglecting the occupation qualifier. An alternative opinion is that the subjects added an unstated cultural implicature to the effect that the other answer implied an exclusive or, that Linda was not a feminist".

First, I don't see how this is an instance of substituting a simpler question. The actual question itself is trivial, obviously feminists bankers are a subset of bankers. That is something that everyone understands (at least at some level) a-priori. So does the answer "feminist bank teller" reflect an error in judgement/reasoning? Instead, could it be a type of (subconscious) "error correction" based on the presumption that the asker is seeking useful information about Linda? It may also be a way for the brain to exercise the recall and articulation of topical information, the asker's exact question be damned. To say that this answer indicates a mistake resulting from cognitive bias or an error in belief is a stretch (and really kind of ridiculous if you ask me) AP295 (discuss • contribs) 00:59, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I think you'd understand better if you read the book, which you can access for free on the Internet Archive. If you did, you might find ways of improving that Wikipedia article so others find it easier to understand. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, even though he's not an economist. He invented many different ways of asking questions that established that people's cognitive processes are different from the traditional models economists have used of the "rational person". In so doing, he invented a field known as w:behavioral economics. Your questions suggest opportunities to improve the Wikipedia article on w:Thinking, Fast and Slow. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 01:36, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I'll give it a look, but I'm sure you understand my point. In what sense is "is Linda a feminist?" any simpler? If anything it's a more salient question and more complicated in that it requires non-trivial probabilistic inference. I'm not trying to say it's bad research, but it does not make sense to me as it is explained. I do think framing is a rather interesting topic though. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 02:26, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

If I were to arrogantly hazard a guess (not being a noble-laureate myself), it's an evolutionary adaptation. There's no point in responding to a trivial query without communicating useful information. That is a waste of energy. When you were a student, have you ever asked one of your professors a question and received an answer that did not address the question exactly as you had posed it? I have, and then later on I understood that their answer was better than my question. They made a (possibly subconscious) judgement call that my question was not useful and instead tried to impress upon me their understanding of the topic at hand. It's not that they couldn't understand me or that they gave me a wrong answer, far from it. Perhaps it's this tendency that keeps our conversations from degenerating into inane-but-semantically-consistent drivel. Yes, know-it-alls like you and I would answer "a bank teller", but really how useful is that? AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:16, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I apologize if I've given you the impression that I think I "know it all". I know I've been wrong many times. I'm a compulsive fact checker, because that reduces my error rate. I try to write from a neutral point of view citing credible sources while treating others with respect. I routinely search for evidence that might contradict my preconceptions, and I adjust what I say based on what I find. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 15:26, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Not at all, I was only speaking tongue-in-cheek. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:27, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd starve if I had to make a living as a comedian ;-) 15:33, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Now this is getting interesting. Kahneman asserts that the statement Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are. is equivalent to the statement The correlation between the intelligence scores of spouses is less than perfect., but that people tend to find the former more interesting. While I don't doubt that most people find the former more interesting, I bet you could tell me why they're not actually equivalent statements. Suppose for a moment that every woman who marries chooses a husband whose IQ is ten points below hers. The correlation would still be perfect in that instance.

Correct. But that would only work if every woman who marries would find a man whose IQ was 10 points below hers and convince that man to marry her.

Indeed, but it's sufficient to refute logical equivalence between statements. I assume by "algebraic equivalence" Kahneman means logical equivalence.

A more correct statement is that the statement Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are. is a special case of w:regression toward the mean, assuming there is no substantive difference in the distribution of IQs between men and women. With that assumption, the statement about highly intelligent women is equivalent to the statement that "really stupid men tend to marry women who are smarter than they are." (And it's not because they plan it that way: It's because they get what's available. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 22:36, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Or suppose that men who marry have a much higher average intelligence than women who marry. The correlation would be imperfect (as correlations usually are) but the first statement would likely be false. Scandalous, I know. Kahneman hints at his assumption of equivalent averages in the next sentence, but not before asserting the logical equivalence of those statements. And even then, he only assumes equal average intelligence between men and women, rather than married men and married women. Wouldn't you technically have to assume the latter to reasonably assert equivalence between the two statements? If only very very highly intelligent men marry, then you could still have equal average intelligence between the total population of men and total population of women, but the first statement would still be false while the second statement could be true. Perhaps neither of my assumptions-for-the-sake-of-argument are true but the statements do not seem equivalent to me. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 21:24, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I suppose if one really wanted to grasp at straws, they could say that the statement Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are. is supposed to mean highly intelligent women tend to marry, and the men they marry tend to be less intelligent than they are. My interpretation is more along the lines of highly intelligent women who marry tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 21:37, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

You are correct: Kahneman's two statements in that instance are not equivalent. Kahneman is not perfect. He's only an expert. And as he notes elsewhere in that book, most experts can be beaten by a simple heuristic developed by an intelligent layperson.

Still, I found his book very profound when I read it in 2015, even though I had known about his work since the 1970s and thought I knew what was in it! DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 22:36, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

He also seems to have very little faith in our ability to responsibly apply or understand statistics and human behavior: "Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: 'Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.' This is a profoundly important conclusion. People who are taught surprising statistical facts about human behavior may be impressed to the point of telling their friends about what they have heard, but this does not mean that their understanding of the world has really changed.",..., "We can’t assume that they will really learn anything from mere statistics. Let’s show them one or two representative individual cases to influence their System 1.",...,"No need to worry about this statistical information being ignored. On the contrary, it will immediately be used to feed a stereotype."

I hate to say this, but this jibes pretty well with the patterns that MacDonald described in the-book-that-shall-not-be-named, e.g. Lewontin rejects reductionistic scientific methods, such as quantitative behavioral genetics or the use of analysis of variance procedures, because they inevitably oversimplify real processes in their use of averages (Segersträle 1986). The result is a hyper-purism that settles for nothing less than absolute certainty and absolutely correct methodology, epistemology, and ontology. In developmental psychology such a program would ultimately lead to rejection of all generalizations, including those relating to the average effects of environments. ... By adopting this philosophy of science, Lewontin is able to discredit attempts by scientists to develop theories and generalizations and thus, in the name of scientific rigor, avoid the possibility of any politically unacceptable scientific findings. Segersträle notes that, while using this theory as a weapon against biological views in the social sciences, Lewontin’s own empirical research in population biology has remained firmly within the reductionistic tradition. Granted, I haven't read any of Lewontin's work myself, so perhaps I'm letting my own cognitive biases get the better of me, but it's a very conspicuous trend in media and education nonetheless.

I'm still reading it and I remain open to the possibility that Kahneman is correct. I certainly do agree with much of what he has to say, but I can't help but feel like his endgame is to pull the wool over our eyes. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 22:42, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Would you please provide more complete citations? I'm not familiar with either MacDonald nor Lewontin or Segersträle. I just spent maybe 30 minutes responding to an email from a friend, subject: "Hexagon pays tribute to Joe Kaplan". No, that was NOT w:Hexagone Balard nor w:Joseph Kaplan. I could spend my entire life doing that and never get anything done. Thanks, DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 22:53, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

The culture of critique, by Kevin Macdonald. I'll warn you in advance that many regard it as "antisemitic pseudoscience", but he makes some very keen observations now and then if you can remain objective while reading it. Before you call me an "alt-right conspiracy theorist", I have studied (as part of general education) anti-semitism in college. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 23:04, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

And it's not a book I generally recommend to people, because it's radioactive. If they read it, started ranting about jews, and men in white coats came and took them away, then I'd feel pretty bad. All that aside, Macdonald seems very candid in his approach, and I don't get that sense from most things. He knocked it out of the park so hard that it's radioactive. I found it profoundly enlightening, as you did Kahneman's work. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 23:34, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

And Kahneman is correct that we do try really hard to look for causal relationships. Perhaps it's because they are extremely powerful, and often well-worth the mistakes we make in "exploration" for the benefits we get by "exploitation" once we discover such relationships. See exploration/exploitation in the context of w:reinforcement learning. There I go, looking for a causal relationship. Am I really so predictable? AP295 (discuss • contribs) 00:21, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Macdonald’s Culture of Critique contains 44 pages of endnotes. However, the Wikipedia articles on w:The Culture of Critique series and w:Kevin MacDonald (evolutionary psychologist) more generally are less than flattering.

On the other hand, we need to be careful of people misrepresenting their research. For example, in w:Fish v. Kobach, w:Hans von Spakovsky, an expert witness for Kobach, cited a GAO study that "'found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration roles over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens.' On cross-examination, however, he acknowledged that he omitted the following facts: the GAO study contained information on a total of 8 district courts; 4 of the 8 reported that there was not a single non-citizen who had been called for jury duty; and the 3 remaining district courts reported that less than 1% of those called for jury duty from voter rolls were noncitizens." Judge w:Julie A. Robinson, who had been appointed to the bench by US President w:George W. Bush, a Republican, noted that Spakovsky did not have one article published in a refereed academic journal, and he testified not as an expert but an advocate. I don't understand why he wasn't prosecuted for perjury: I think it should have been trivial to prove. I checked the GAO report: Those 8 jurisdictions were on two consecutive pages. It was not an oversight, in my judgment: It was a conscious, deliberate conspiracy to deprive many likely democratic voters of the right to vote.

Judge Robinson concluded that "31,089 total applicants ... were denied registration for failure to provide DPOC, ... [which] represented 12.4% of new voter registrations between January 1, 2013 and December 11, 2015". Kobach found 39 non-citizens who had registered to vote. He said it was the tip of an iceberg. Judge Robinson said it was "only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error", especially after finding 400 people in Kobach's Election Voter Information System (ELVIS) with "birth dates after their date of registration, indicating they registered to vote before they were born." (We know dead people vote. Now we have some registered before they were born, some doubtless before they were conceived.)

Macdonald's research may be legitimate and honest, but I can't imaging that Spokovsky was honest: His intent almost certainly was to deceive. He underestimated the plaintiffs: They took the time to check the facts that he claimed. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 00:30, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Sure, it's important to put in the work and not make careless judgements in formal matters. That's somewhat different from what Kahneman's speaking about though. Indeed we are often wrong due to our "biases" and haphazard estimates, but in the everyday setting that's an essential part of learning, not some mental defect or a behavior that must be discouraged. Generalization is learning. It's the entire basis of learning and education itself. That's why I feel very put upon whenever I get some email about "eliminating my subconscious biases" from the university or wherever. I swear these people are trying to lobotomize me. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 00:43, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I got two main points from Kahneman:

1. We have to make most decisions quickly, just to get through the day. (His "fast thinking".)
2. We need to carefully identify a few very important issues and spend time working to improve our understanding of these issues. This is "Sharpen the saw" in Stephen Covey's w:The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and is Kahneman's "slow thinking". Kahneman says few of us do enough of this. I agree.

DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 01:31, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I agree too. By the way, the point I was trying to make earlier about the two 'equivalent' (non-equivalent) statements is this: Kahneman claims that the second statement is uninteresting (which I agree with), and by 'algebraic equivalence' so should be the first. Since people do find the first interesting, he concludes that people arbitrarily favor causal explanations when there is no reason to do so. I argue that we favor them for a damned good reason. The hypothetical drunken party-goer (who he clearly sets up as a strawman) and their "system 1" judgement of salience is in this instance objectively superior to Kahneman's own "system 2" Nobel-prize-winning™ analysis of the problem. I do like his "system 1/2" model, but perhaps he should not underrate intuition so severely. It seems like you caught onto this but I don't want any other readers to think I was suggesting anything about female vs male intelligence (God knows I'm probably on thin ice for mentioning The Culture of Critique), so I'll take my point to the conclusion here. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 02:10, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for having such an extended conversation for me by the way, I'm sure your time is more valuable than mine. One last comment though. While the second chapter of MacDonald's book is to me the most interesting, it's not entirely clear to me exactly how one man (Franz Boas) was single-handedly able to undermine a budding and very promising academic field, which was presumably dominated by gentiles at the time. He makes a pretty convincing argument that it was indeed undermined and that Franz Boas was the progenitor of its shoddy replacement, but why was it allowed to happen in the first place? This is baseless speculation on my part, but perhaps it's that certain people (and not necessarily Jews) realized they could gain a competitive advantage by conducting such research in private and keeping it out of the public consciousness. Corporate research must be so far ahead of public research at this point. Think of all the data amazon, facebook, google, all those please-send-us-your-DNA-by-mail-with-a-fifty-dollar-check "ancestry" companies, etc. possess (and can hand off to other organizations). They have carte blanch in terms of their available research data and being entirely unconstrained by political correctness in private. This is the danger I perceive. If you start to entertain this hypothesis, then MacDonalds book does indeed seem like scapegoating, or something of a red herring. Like a convenient narrative. I'm not saying it is, it's impossible for me to know either way. Just food for thought. Playing the devil's advocate seems to get me in trouble though. I'm indefinitely blocked from Wikipedia itself, but I like it here better anyway as it seems people are more conversational and less defensive. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 13:25, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

One last last comment. I suspect that "explaining away" (the probabilistic concept derived from Thomas Bayes' theorem) is a very frequently used tactic in propaganda, so to counteract that I'm always considering alternative explanations. It may also be a good exercise for making correct judgements, and I don't think people should ever be afraid to entertain a given hypothesis as long as they don't mindlessly internalize it. We're frequently reminded that causation is not equal to correlation. Of course it isn't, but there's no harm (per se) in entertaining various causal relationships as a thought exercise. Kahneman seems to be calling it a cognitive defect or weakness, and the irony was almost palpable when I noticed his mistake about logical equivalence earlier. I guess that about wraps it up. No disrespect intended to Kahneman or his clan. Keep your sticky fingers off my guns though. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 14:05, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Last last last comment. Perhaps I should take this to your talk page since it's more about his book, but I'm getting a sense that Kahneman tends to ignore the concept of sample averages. The section "Can psychology be taught?" The people who saw the two interviews (in which the interviewees who took part in the original experiment were depicted as unremarkable) along with the experiment's statistical results made similar predictions to the people who had only seen the interviews and were told of the experiment but not the results. In no uncertain terms, he concludes that they learned nothing from the statistics. Consider this: if you learned of the experiment and its results, you might conclude that the surprising unwillingness to help is simply due to a biased sample of only fifteen individuals. Then, when you see the typical (and thus in agreement with your preconceived population average) people in the two videos, you'd conclude that they'd more than likely be among those willing to help. What if there were one hundred people, and ninety-five of them laughed and threw fruit at the poor epileptic? That's a 95% base rate. Now suppose that your two interviewees again seemed like unremarkable, well-adjusted people. I would not lose all faith in your ability to apply statistics if you were to guess that the two interviewees did not throw fruit at the man. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 02:11, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

It would make it easier for me to process your comments if you gave me a more complete citation. I assume you are still referring to Daniel Kahneman (25 October 2011), Thinking, Fast and Slow, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, OCLC 706020998, OL 15992072W, Wikidata Q983718. I trust you'll forgive me for not taking the time to see if I can find in that book the example to which you refer; Archive.org says the book is 520 pages (counting the cover, front matter, etc.), especially since I'm way behind on other priorities.

In my copy (which has 533 pages) it's on page 167. Unfortunately the book pages themselves are not numbered so I'm going by the PDF pages. The title is "Can Psychology be Taught?" His conclusion seems to be, and I quote, "that teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time." AP295 (discuss • contribs) 04:17, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I didn't read anything about throwing fruit. I read that students were shown a video of a guy claiming to feel an epileptic seizure coming on and being afraid he would die. Then they saw videos of interviews of two others who might have tried to save the alleged victim and being asked if either or both of them actually went to try to help the victim. Half at random were told that only 4 of 15 participants actually tried to help. Nearly everyone in both groups said they thought the two interviewees they saw went to help the alleged epileptic; the information that the base rate was 4/15 was ignored by those who had it.

Kahneman's conclusion sounds plausible to me: "Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular."

I think the key here is that the particular conclusion to be drawn from the general was distasteful, so subjects tended to avoid it for that reason. I think that physicians and many other experts are more likely to correctly deduce the particular from the general, but they may need more practice than what was provided in that experiment. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 04:53, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

My point is that the information was not simply ignored, but may have been used to establish a sample average different from their preconceived population average. There was nothing about throwing fruit in the book, consider what I wrote as a thought experiment: What if there were one hundred people, and ninety-five of them laughed and threw fruit at the poor epileptic? That's a 95% base rate. Now suppose that your two interviewees again seemed like unremarkable, well-adjusted people. I would not lose all faith in your ability to apply statistics if you were to guess that the two interviewees did not throw fruit at the man. If 95/100 (or something like 8/10 if you want to presume an even smaller sample size) throw fruit, you're clearly dealing with a group of jerks. If the interviewees in that case seemed like normal people, then you'd probably guess they weren't part of the fruit throwers. My point is, you might need more evidence (rather than less) to convince someone of a surprising result, but this does not mean that people won't benefit from psychology or statistics. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 05:49, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

And then, when he tells the second set of people that the two interviewees did not go to help, they get a better sense of the sample average as it relates to their conception of an average person. It's no surprise that they get it right in that instance. The example he gives here in "Can Psychology be Taught?" and the example about logical 'equivalence' he describes in "Understanding Regression" are both used to support the conclusion that we are incapable of understanding statistics and causation. Together they are internally consistent, but based on the tacit and very subtle logical presumption of equivalent averages. These are the only parts of the book I've read, because they were close to the chapter about Linda which is where I started reading. The book is not aimed toward the statistician or scientist, but toward the "intelligent layman", who is unlikely to spot this subtle-but-far-reaching assumption. Putting all of this together, I'll tell you upfront, I do not trust this book. This is a great example of how you can go from a seemingly innocent logical (as opposed to probabilistic) assumption, which does not hold true when universally quantified, to a jeopardizing conclusion like "teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time". His book does contain a lot of useful information, and I'll read more of it in time, but that's what makes it so hard to notice subtle features like the ones I've pointed out. Even you, a learned Doctor of Statistics, who are undoubtedly very familiar with correlation and the difference between population averages and sample averages apparently do not notice these things immediately. But I am not at all questioning your competence or ability to understand statistics, my own baseless conjecture is that it's caused by explaining away. I'm just waiting for the axe to fall and for you to tell me that I'm missing something or that my interpretation is incorrect. It would actually be a load off my mind if you could reassure me that I'm wrong in this case. I hope I am wrong, and I'd gladly eat a slice of humble pie in exchange for some genuine faith in the system. You think I want to be here saying all this crazy shit? Hardly. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:48, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

And to be absolutely clear to anyone else reading, here is how the interviewees are described in the book: "The interviewees appeared to be nice, normal, decent people. They described their hobbies, their spare-time activities, and their plans for the future, which were entirely conventional." ... " However, the videos were carefully designed to be uninformative; they provided no reason to suspect that the individuals would be either more or less helpful than a randomly chosen student. ". But that's not true. Interviewees were "average" not in relation to the original sample of 15 subjects, but "average" in terms of the entire population as understood by the students. The sample itself seems abnormal to students. They were using the general to infer the particular. That is, they were using their general knowledge about the population to infer that the particular sample was biased. A much more interesting experiment would be to figure out how much "evidence" people would need to see in order for it to have a normative effect on their existing conception of the population average (which should not and need not change completely at the drop of a hat). I'd be surprised if there wasn't already some work on that. What if the sample size was 1,000 and students were told that they were randomly chosen from among their own compatriots/peers, or something else to emphasize that the sample is reasonably unbiased and sufficiently large? Who knows? Maybe it would still bear out Kahneman's results. But I'm a bit miffed that he doesn't even hint at any of this, and simply goes on to disparage psychology and the value of teaching people using statistics. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 17:45, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I'll propose an even more obvious example: Suppose that of 10 randomly selected people, you're told that 9/10 were gold medalists in wheelchair racing at the Paralympics. Then suppose you saw a single video interview in which the interviewee was standing and in full view while they talked. An "average" person. If we are to take Kahneman's view to the extreme, you can only conclude that your standing interviewee was in fact a gold medalist wheelchair racer. While it's nice and inspiring to imagine that they overcame paraplegia, a little skepticism is not a bad thing at all. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 18:05, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

One last thing. If a reasonably sized and apparently unbiased sample with a surprising result failed to adjust their understanding of the population average, this could be because the idea of a group as a "random sample" is unnatural. People tend to naturally associate by similarity. Perhaps it would be more useful for us to keep in mind the power of averaging/random-sampling rather than to ignore it. I do think though that emphasizing the size and quality of the sample itself might give people more confidence that it's adequately representative of the population as we're familiar with it. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 20:15, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

But does Kahneman take any of this into consideration? No, he just states that we should not be educated using statistics because it will feed into our stereotypes and we'll learn nothing of value. And most people would probably agree with him because that particular brand of trendy ignorance is the zeitgeist of twenty-first century America. This is why I am upset. Is he interested in edifying us or manipulating us? Look at this quote from the book: " Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. " Whether or not it's true, this is quite a departure from the sort of information we should be basing our decisions on, and proposing a causal relationship may make us less likely to explore other causes. If this is the standard of evidence we become accustomed to, we'll be lied to all the time. We'll be deceived and put to rout because we would require nothing more than an infantile story to believe anything we're told. It's one step forward two steps back. This sort of condescension is exactly what I detest about today's mass media, and no doubt a big contributor to the cultural decay that we're presently experiencing. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 22:38, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I don't have time to respond to all the concerns you've expressed. However, regarding "the cultural decay that we're presently experiencing" and the contribution of "today's mass media" to that decay, I wish to inform you that I'm devoting most of my time currently to trying to understand and help reverse that decay. See, e.g., Category:Media reform to improve democracy. This currently includes only one article: an interview I did Feb. 23 with w:Dean Baker. I'm currently preparing for a second interview on that theme. This one is scheduled April 29 with Craig Aaron, co-CEO of Free Press (organization). A primary task that has been hanging over my head all week is to create a draft announcement for that interview. I plan to create it first on kkfi.org, then on Wikiversity with Category:Media reform to improve democracy. I don't know if you will receive an email notice when an article is added that cites a category you follow. You might check back on that tomorrow or the next day, if you are interested. Free Press (organization) is doing the most important work on this issue that I know.

Regarding Kahneman, you may not like something he wrote, but I think you short change yourself if you reject it too swiftly. Many of his claims have been replicated by other researchers. Replication doesn't mean that there aren't better interpretations for the experimental results they've reported. Some of what he has written is doubtless wrong and will be exposed and refined by other research in experimental psychology and behavioral economics.

However, I think I've benefited immensely from my study of his work, as witnessed by the citations in this article and others, esp. "confirmation bias and conflict". DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 22:58, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

You don't have to respond to it, but do read it. I'm not trying to put you on the spot here. I think it has a lot to do with the public having a very poor (to the point of being entirely defective) conception of self-interest and where their allegiances ought to lie. Public higher education is essentially sold out to private and foreign interests. Things like logic are not taught in primary and secondary education. Their grade-school history and social studies courses are revisionist bullshit that teach students nothing except shame and the origin myth of America as a land of immigrants and freed slaves rather than our actual origins as a land of colonists who carved out a living in the wilderness, built something from nothing, and then fiercely resisted subjugation by foreign powers. Don't get me wrong, some of my ancestors were colonists, and some of them were immigrants. I'm just afraid we're forgetting our origins, and your essay touched a nerve. The blood of Numenor is all but spent, its pride and dignity forgotten. It's fine to be an immigrant. Some of my friends are second-gen immigrants. However we should always keep in mind that it was indeed the violence of the revolutionary war that made us what we are today. Liberty and freedom are the default. They only cease to be when someone else successfully imposes their will upon us. Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils. It's the state motto of New Hampshire, and while I don't live there, I've always liked their motto. But that's the sort of nation we are and that is the sort of nation we should continue to be. Otherwise I want no part in it. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 02:23, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

I, too, support the motto, Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.

I also do not advocate actions that may sound great but may be counterproductive, especially when we can find better alternatives with some research.

That's why I think it's so important to understand what might be called Kahneman's first law of human behavior: Everyone thinks they know more than they actually do.

If we accept that, it encourages us to identify a few really important issues to study more carefully. And there are few issues more important than figuring out the most effective way to promote freedom and democracy, liberty and justice for all.

DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 02:42, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Very well. I do not mean to make light of your experiences in Vietnam or Kahneman's experiences in Nazi-occupied France. You seem to have a streak of pacifism and Kahneman undoubtedly resents the sort of bigotry he experienced. My perspective is that of a white American millennial, so take it for whatever you think it's worth. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 13:48, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

One more question: You said, "we should always keep in mind that it was indeed the violence of the revolutionary war that made us what we are today."

How do you know that?

My reading of history is that we got independence from Great Britain by the violence of the American Revolution. However, to the extent that we have freedom and democracy, liberty and justice for all, we got them all from a long train of other events, most of which were largely nonviolent -- AND the research literature I've seen says that we likely would have gotten faster progress with fewer risks through nonviolence. I will mention here only one other reference, cited in this article, but that I seem not to have mentioned earlier in this discussion:

* Daron Acemoğlu; James A. Robinson (20 March 2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (in en). Crown Publishing Group. Wikidata Q7997840. ISBN 0-307-71921-9. http://whynationsfail.com/. . This book hardly mentions the American Revolution. It provides other explanations for how we came to be "what we are today", including especially the English Bill of Rights 1689 and the Magna Carta of 1215. Acemoglu and Robinson said that the 13 colonies that declared independence in 1776 all attempted to replicate (a) the success of the Spaniards in plundering the wealth of the Aztecs and Incas and (b) the English system of nobility. They all failed until they adopted democratic governance: The choice was starvation or near universal adult white male suffrage. One minor example: The Roanoke Colony founded in 1585 disappeared. A second Roanoke Colony founded in 1587 also disappeared.

DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 14:42, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

"It provides other explanations for how we came to be 'what we are today'" Of course it does. Are you starting to see a pattern here? There was no wealth to plunder. "The Currency Act of 1764 extended the restrictions of the Currency Act of 1751 to all 13 of the American British colonies. While it eased the earlier Act’s prohibition against of the printing of new paper bills, it did forbid the colonies from using any future bills for payment of all public and private debts. As a result, the only way the colonies could repay their debts to Britain was with gold or silver. As their supplies of gold and silver rapidly dwindled, this policy created severe financial hardships for the colonies. " (source) I can't vouch for that website itself, it's just the first source I turned up in a cursory search. They fought off the international banking cartel that has funded both sides of every war for hundreds of years. For a good period of time, we were independent of this global control structure (which is sadly no longer the case). We have forgotten this and now we have good American patriots fighting middle eastern patriots, in the middle east, on behalf of an exclusive cadre of international bankers. Jackson and Washington have been spinning in their graves ever since their portraits appeared on the first federal reserve note. It's a travesty. I'm sure your intentions are honest but this revisionism and the replacement of our actual history with an origin myth will be the final nail in America's coffin. At that point we will have completely forgotten the method to our success and liberty. I have no desire to live in the future that awaits us if that should happen. Here's how I see it playing out: There will be a run on the dollar and the American people will be scapegoated and put to shame by the same moneyed elite who conned Americans into fighting on their behalf. We'll be put to route and gaslighted to think that our misfortune is simply the comeuppance we deserve for decades of aggressive foreign policy. Then they'll take their wealth elsewhere and infest some other poor nation, and nobody will be the wiser. That is the worst-case scenario we must avoid. We cannot allow the truth of our history to turn into a fringe theory or conspiracy theory, but that is exactly what is happening. It's fading from public knowledge. The people who are in a position to prevent this are too fat and happy to even understand what's going on (or they're on the take and helping facilitate it). They're content to vote democrat across the board and go to a BLM rally every now and again. That is their conception of "social justice". They don't have a god-damned clue and probably never will. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 16:51, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

And the moneyed elite are not celebrity billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. You can tax those people all you like but it will make no difference if the money everyone uses is essentially borrowed at interest from central banks. Bankers will always undermine whatever democratic structure you put in place. They will run up debts with war. They will always have the means to do so as long as they control the money supply. They must be amused when they see protestors with signs like "tax the rich". They can pay to have books like the ones you cite written. They put people in education, in government, and very likely in organizations like the Wikimedia foundation. I've not read "why nations fail", but you hear anyone talking about "The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty" and they do not mention banking, they're pulling your leg. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 19:01, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

And I don't want to be here talking about this. I just want to finish my degree without watching my nation go to hell in a handbasket at the same time. It's too much to bear. And conversely, what a tempting fantasy it must be for all those pluralists: "Those old white men got us started, but we're doing most of the work! No borders!" Nobody could orchestrate this without being a complete psychopath and very familiar with human psychology (which according to Kahneman is a waste of time). I don't know what to do. It has taken me a long time to understand this. It's rare that such information is clearly written and credibly represented or organized in any given place. Some people will tell you about central bankers, but they'll also be "conspiracy theorists" or "racist nazis". You probably learned about the revolution, but that its primary cause was about taxes or some such vague "oppressiveness". You'll hear that the civil war was mostly about slavery. You'll hear that Iraq was mostly about WMDs or merely just "oil". Pick your poison. Any type of sympathy you have toward justice or independence will be used to pull you (or push you) into a subversive ideology or "well-managed" group by which your efforts will be shunted and averaged out. It's very hard not to fall into such an ideology or group. Very, very hard. Stare into any such abyss and it will impress upon you more than just what you need to know. There it is, the source of cultural decay here in America. But I'm certainly not the first person to say this or organize such information, and I'm not interested in taking any credit. At some point I'll put together a good set of sources. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 20:54, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Have you seen US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita? DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 20:50, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Interesting article. I'll look it over more when I have time, I have to step away from this for a bit. My point though is not just about banking. Plenty of people have raised those points before. As I see it, the public has a very poor conception of self-interest and where their allegiances ought to lie. The media and our public education system likely play a big role, but perhaps not in the way most people would expect. To be honest, I have very little faith in cultural pluralism. It's a never-ending source of conflicts of interest between various groups, which distract us from bigger problems and render most political activism useless. Various people and groups will do anything for a leg up because nobody has any damned reason to behave otherwise. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 21:20, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Lastly, if you (or anyone else reading) know of any sources that candidly and accurately document the history of central banking without taking on an anti-semitic overtone, please do suggest them. Such sources are rare. No doubt plenty of gentiles are complicit, and plenty of Jews are not. There seem to be many books that contain useful information but are verboten due to the associations they emphasize, which I think is somewhat unfortunate. I'm no historian and it's hard for me to separate fact from narrative. The last thing I want is for places like Wikiversity to turn into propaganda outlets that promote a warped or biased version of history, but I'm no historian and it's disturbing that historians and social scientists don't seem to be minding their pots. If there's any danger to the Jewish people, I imagine it's this. The history people are taught makes no sense, and they all know this on some level. By comparison, books like MacDonald's work, and many accounts of central banking that you'd find if you looked for a bit, must seem very candid. How are people supposed to feel at that point? This is dangerous. I, for one, am not inclined to go out and join the KKK, but many people probably would be. If you call them a Nazi at that point (as I was for simply pointing out a conflict of interest on Wikipedia), then how do you think they'll feel? Would you consider those people ruined for having read "forbidden information"? I can do nothing about any of this except offer my perspective. Again, take it for whatever you feel it's worth. But I really can't imagine a more undignified end to the greatest nation on earth. Today, universities go out of their way to repel people who would otherwise be good, critically-thinking scholars. Seats go to high-bidders and the people who were best suited to navigate the Prussian model of education we currently use. Such people are generally very uncritical and obedient. I have been depressed about this hopelessly bleak situation for some time. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 13:45, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Central banking and anti-semitism

I hope you'll forgive me for repeating the claim that everyone prefers information and sources consistent with preconceptions. There is substantial amount of research behind this, summarized in "w:Confirmation bias".

To reduce my own personal susceptibility to this universal human tendency, I routinely look for documents that cite their sources. And I sometimes check those sources, especially if it's something I think is very important. Sometimes I find different sources saying seemingly conflicting things. By reviewing those sources, I often find a way to interpret things to make the conflict disappear. Or I find one source that is misquoted. Often, a source won't have a credible citation. My time is limited. I tend to avoid such sources.

In this regard, I wish to mention w:Henry Ford's w:The International Jew. Ford was sued for defamation. In the civil trial in 1927 Ford expressed shock at the contents and sought to suppress further publication of the work. However, the book had already persuaded many Germans to support Hitler. And it continues to circulate. Less than two months ago, some editors removed from the Wikipedia article on that book an image of an Arabic-language translation that seemed to have been published in 2001 or shortly thereafter.

In that regard, I think we need some kind of "fairness doctrine". Conservatives claim it would target conservative media. I don't think so: I think it would target unfair media, liberal, conservative, or otherwise. If Jews had been able to challenge notable antisemites like Father Coughlin in the mid-1930s like they challenged Ford, the US might have accepted more Jewish refugees during the 1930s. If that had happened, it would have been harder for Hitler to justify building the death camps. I don't want to suppress contrary views. I want to force major media outlets to honestly present contrary evidence. The rules of evidence in the court of public opinion is whatever will maximize the power of those who control the money for the media. Courts of law sometimes have more sensible rules of evidence. An example is w:Fish v. Kobach.

Regarding references that deal with your question about central banking, I think it's better to look at the serious macroeconomic literature, e.g., my US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and Daron Acemoğlu; James A. Robinson (20 March 2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (in en). Crown Publishing Group. Wikidata Q7997840. ISBN 0-307-71921-9. http://whynationsfail.com/. : There is a substantial body of literature on economic growth and development economics, at least some of which discusses the role of central banks. I don't know any of that serious literature that is seriously anti-semitic.

Well, if you're skeptical of MMT I doubt there's anything I can do to convince you otherwise. This is the first sentence of Wikipedia's lead: "Modern Monetary Theory or Modern Money Theory (MMT) is a heterodox[1][2][3][4][5][6] macroeconomic theory that describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires." This is a similar line of reasoning that one can use to conclude that middle class political polarization is unnatural, as I've done elsewhere. That is, one takes a good theoretical hypothesis along with some empirical observation to draw a conclusion that differs vastly from the common public understanding. I've found this is the best way to discover hidden knowledge, and a great tool for the true critical thinker. Really, it's the only way to do so. Only information that is consistent with the subversive narratives and half-truths the elite feed to the public gets any representation in the media or benefits the people who curate it. Honest information is compiled, written and communicated at risk to one's career, livelihood, and mental health. At best you get nothing. It's a feature of a dying nation with no real community or pride, where being a self-serving jackass is for most people the most rational (and fashionable) option. A carefully orchestrated tragedy of the commons in which leaders throw their people under the bus and escape scot-free. That is the sad truth behind the pluralist zeitgeist of modern-day America. It will be the death of The Union once and for all, they'll have finally killed it dead. But it's not pluralism itself that makes me upset. Rather, it's the undeniable failure of pluralism to maintain our values, culture, and dignity. Hence my despair. And you expect me to feel some sort of self-righteous indignation over the April attack on the capitol and give up my arms? And I can already see all the little cues in the MMT article on wikipedia, to subtly discredit the theory. To me, it's plain as day. Is there any humiliation we will not be made to suffer in this century? Live free or die. If only it were the motto of every state. Who could see all of this and not fall into abject, lifelong despair? It's a living death in itself. But, I suppose I shall carry on for the time being. AP295 (discuss • contribs)

Well, I had a look at your GDP resource. At first I thought you were criticizing MMT but now I don't quite understand. I've moved my comment to its discussion page. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 20:56, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

References