Great comment. As you say, denying the research outright is playing a similar tune to those who would abuse the research to support pre-existing notions about everyone's rightful places in society.
We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power, which is a typical endpoint for too many discussions of genetics. Using science to validate the status quo and describe certain economic and social classes as superiors/inferiors is a cruel perversion, but outright denying the science is similarly dishonest and not very convincing either.
Genetics are powerful, but only a piece of the great puzzle underlying human traits and behaviors. Especially when considering life at the individual level, you can't easily make any declarative statements about someone's potential, or even clearly discern the total effect of genes on their most basic traits like height without also considering a host of other factors with similar weightings. Beyond the ambiguity surrounding how genes and environment conspire to produce our traits, as Chomsky argues, the traits that are rewarded with wealth and power are often arbitrary: they are certain traits that can be identified in those who already have wealth/power in a self-justification of the existing hierarchy.
So even if we take the science at face value, it is quite a stretch to say that the science supports the current stratification. The two are not casually linked.
They won't be entering the labor force at 40+. Without some kind of disability benefit that keeps them housed and fed, they'll end up living out of a car or a tent, playing games on a phone they charge by running the engine on the camp Winnebago. Bloomberg will run articles about how cars, tents and gasoline are holding them back from participating in the economy.
We ran out of frontier, and are rapidly running out of the sort of high-risk, high-reward opportunities that get young men excited. We need a new gold rush.
No one wants to sit in a cubicle for 35 years, grinding out pennies while having all your value extracted by a cadre of semi-literate, power-tripping middle managers who punish anyone that displays talent. Not only have a series of crashes in 2008 and 2020 firmly demonstrated just how rigged the game is, but everyone can see what everyone else is doing on social media. There's little opportunity to trick these men into believing they should work hard when they can clearly see so many people skating through life without any effort, and watch laborers have their livelihoods stripped from them during crashes while billionaire fortunes double. Bloomberg has lost the plot completely, they don't yet realize that the jig is up.
Want to get people excited about work? Bring back drinking and loud music at the office. Let people be themselves without having to put on a deliriously upbeat, false persona while sitting through endless, pointless meetings about nothing. Stop asking them to constantly fellate the worthless middle management caste. Pay them well.
> First, comparing capitalism to Auschwitz is obscene.
That phrase has been used before and after the holocaust to justify cruelty, but fair enough, it was in bad taste. Any thoughts on the obscenity of sending grandma to work the fields so she can afford her oatmeal?
> Second, nothing in nature is free. It isn't free for animals today: all of their energy is expended just staying alive.
Humans today work harder for their resources than hunter-gatherers did. Something is wrong with that.
> The death rate for children and mothers was horrifically high until fairly recently.
Again, it wasn't as high if you look further back.
> Entire diseases, once deadly or debilitating, have been cured.
One of society's great success, although again, these diseases only really started to spread once we decided to clump together year-round and slave away in the fields.
> It's sad that people instead babble about "slavery" and "sugjugation," things they know nothing about.
Good thing you're here to inform us all about how the people in the article, and forced labor around the world really need to shift their perspective and understand how good they've got it.
They are scarce, and capitalism makes them more abundant at the cost of subjugation. Humans work endlessly to have access to things that, while scarce, were available in nature for free, often in superior forms. The world no longer supports the lifestyle of our ancestors, so there really is no choice but grind for currency in order to survive. There is evidence that nomadic hunter-gatherers had better nutrition, less disease, less violence, fewer children and "worked" far fewer hours per year than those in the agricultural and industrial eras. By comparison, it's not hard to think of those more modern lifestyles as a form of wage slavery. Work will set you free and all that.
It's misplaced anger, but that anger is valid. Not everyone can adapt nor gets the opportunity to adapt. Our society leaves millions behind, a cruelty that keeps the wheels of capitalism lubricated with fear of the same happening to you.
In the absence of actually knowing how youtube tabulates likes/dislikes, this website just substitutes a guess and calls it the "real" number. Surely there could be no other reason why these numbers might change other than a conspiracy involving the deep state colluding with the communist youtubistas over at Google.
Seriously though, who gives a fuck about youtube downvotes? This kind of psychotic obsession over internet noise isn't healthy, and if you are spending a lot of time on this kind of stuff you should seek help.
Life expectancy is dropping like a rock, and that's a number with a little more rigor behind it than PG's moronic hand waving. The guy has no idea what he's talking about and comes across as incredibly desperate to justify obscene hoarding of wealth. He'll draw a line between any two data points you can dig up, no matter how distant and spuriously correlated, if it will allow him to fellate a few billionaires.
We get it, these people pay you. Just say it: "I can see nothing wrong with the current distribution of wealth because the lenses in my eyeglasses are actually solid gold, a gift bequeathed to me by the Duchess of Facebook." The guy needs meritocracy to not be a myth, because he's styled himself as some kind of kingmaker who can selectively pluck only the most deserving young founders from a bubbling vat of Stanford alumni DNA. It's been a good run, but it's just getting gross now.
HN is anti-union because HN is a weird little bubble of people who have bought the idea of meritocracy, mostly by being born wealthy and desperately needing to explain away the growing gap between them and the rest of the world. They have by and large managed to wriggle their way into careers that pay slightly above average (but still well below the actual earners), and need to believe this has some connection to actions or behaviors they personally undertook along the way.
One only need to look back on the last hundred years of industrialization to see how briefly these kinds of professional, middle-class meritocracies can keep up the illusion. If it isn't slave labor abroad that undercuts them, it will be some innovation that makes them redundant. The music will stop, and it will become immediately clear that just because you've been the one building the chairs for the game doesn't entitle you to actually sit in one. This sort of thing is happening all the time, the law profession being one recent example. One day, your skills are valuable and command a good wage, the next, you're competing with thousands for a single position that comes with constant pressure to beat last quarter's results or be replaced by an intern. We could look at colleges and professorships as well for more middle-class devastation.
Programmers, kind of like surgeons, sit in a unique position at the moment in that they are necessary for the imperial goals of the billionaire class and haven't yet been thoroughly replicated by cheap alternatives. That day is absolutely coming though, for both programmers and surgeons, and it isn't hard to find companies out there working full-time on those replacements. All the haranguing about performance and merit will stop, and we'll all be left with whatever table scraps we've managed to gather before the great hand of progress swept us into the trashbin.
Of course, unions can't prevent this from happening, but they can help extract as much money from the sociopaths of industry as possible before our usefulness is over.
We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power, which is a typical endpoint for too many discussions of genetics. Using science to validate the status quo and describe certain economic and social classes as superiors/inferiors is a cruel perversion, but outright denying the science is similarly dishonest and not very convincing either.
Genetics are powerful, but only a piece of the great puzzle underlying human traits and behaviors. Especially when considering life at the individual level, you can't easily make any declarative statements about someone's potential, or even clearly discern the total effect of genes on their most basic traits like height without also considering a host of other factors with similar weightings. Beyond the ambiguity surrounding how genes and environment conspire to produce our traits, as Chomsky argues, the traits that are rewarded with wealth and power are often arbitrary: they are certain traits that can be identified in those who already have wealth/power in a self-justification of the existing hierarchy.
So even if we take the science at face value, it is quite a stretch to say that the science supports the current stratification. The two are not casually linked.