Personally the “hitler mind controlled everyone with his speach” theory that I was told in the 90s just isn’t convincing. Facism was in the zeitgeist around the world.
Mind control was how Yuri helped the USSR win the Cold war in Red Alert 2 (joke ;)
In other words, they believed it. It wasn’t a false manipulation.
It was a motivated belief, thoroughly uninformed by rational thought, and maintaining and spreading that belief took no small amount of blatant lies and cynicism.
-- Stephen Hawking
Together they might suggest a balance between thoughtful reflection and the hope of a rational and progressive world.
To find the balance between emotion and reason for wisdom.
A Vulcan would not say "emotions are illogical." They would say "What does this emotion says and does it make sense in this situation?" Or "how would I feel more appropriately for this situation?". Or "this emotion doesn't make sense for this situation."
Sometime, it's more appropriate for us to rely on intuition and instinct and it would be more rational for us to do that instead. Imagine someone's about to be hit by a car. You have only seconds to move them out of the way. You don't have time to ponder so you just do it.
Thinking and logic is a general problem solving tool that's very useful in certain context, but they are very slow to use. By itself it is not a complete toolkit for dealing with emotional issues. Can't exactly make yourself less angry using just logic alone. You need some emotional tools to dial down counterproductive emotions.
That's bullshit though. You don't think your way to holocaust, you hate and greed and fear your way to it. Those are all feelings. Even indifference to the violence and death of others is a feeling - or at least fear-driven emotional defense mechanism.
The Nazis weren't "machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts", no matter how much it nicely riffs off machine guns being a relatively new experience for most of the world back then. They weren't Vulcans or Skynet. It's important to study how and why they ended up doing what they did, but science and reason is not it, and tarnishing those aspects of being human is not the right lesson to take from that period of history.
It's important to remember that science evolves, and what we "know" to be part of scientific knowledge today might be debunked in the future. Specially with the state of peer review in the social sciences my feeling is many things that are said to be scientific fact today will be proven wrong later, including whole fields.
Easier to trust more fundamental aspects of math and physics, but even in those fields, on the bleeding edge many things can change.
The current zeitgeist is that science is as holy as religion used to be, and because there's so many anti-science people gaining a voice on the internet, it's sometimes easy to forget that we're not perfect at science and we also make wrong turns while we trudge our way through the scientific method.
And if you read that in history, what does that tell you about the present and the possibility of it being the case with some fields today?
My point is obviously not to defend those fields, but to say that pseudoscience maskerading as science isn't a thing that can only happen in the past.
It's a bit strange to learn about the fact that it happened before yet not accept the possibility that some of the things we call science today, aren't.
The former is a question of fact ("is this possible?") though often with a bunch of unspoken subquestions ("can we do this change without causing incidental genetic changes or damaging the egg?") and in the realm of science while the latter is a question of policy and feelings (how much do we want HIV resistance? What is the price we're willing to pay/risk we're willing to take? Does deliberately altering humanity open a can of worms best left unopened?).
Conflation between normative and positive meanings are quite common across a wide variety of domains and can cause substantial confusion as two people can think they're talking about the same thing but actually aren't.
Even in the "should" case there's a bunch of confusion as to what sort of things should count as "eugenics", with some people wanting the term to apply only to coercive measures and others wanting the term to apply to any deliberate changes to a population's gene pool.
Note: A lot of politically fraught words will have a number of similar but different meanings as various interest groups fight over them. From "war" and "violence" to "culture" and "science" to "person" and "rights".
That's the operating phrase though. Throughout history, atrocities were justified using whatever was seen as the higher authority at the moment - the will of a deity, the words of a prophet, the decree of a king, appeal to destiny or legacy, and yes, science too. Especially in the early XX century, when science was kicking into gear, and delivering miracles left and right for everyone to see - it was easy tool to abuse to justify whatever the leaders wanted or needed to.
Doesn't mean the science itself is at fault here.
I didn't read up much on phrenology so I won't comment on it, but RE eugenics, I see it as a mix of good and bad ideas that sprouted in an environment full of aforementioned hatred and otherwise devoid of moral and ethical boundaries[0]. I feel it's more of a historical coincidence of fledging science and then-contemporary zeitgeist, rather than an innate feature of science. The resulting effect is that even the word itself - eugenics - casts a long shadow on research in fields like genetics, medicine and economics. There are whole subsections of those fields you can't discuss in polite company, 'lest someone rounds your thinking off to "eugenics" and therefore paint you as "nazi". This is a bad outcome.
> Easier to trust more fundamental aspects of math and physics, but even in those fields, on the bleeding edge many things can change.
That's true. There's this thing though. I can't put my finger on it, so it might be just a benefit of hindsight, but there's a notably different feeling when you reason from current state of knowledge in a correct way, vs. when you abuse it to justify whatever self-serving or atrocious idea you want. The atrocities committed under the label "eugenics" feel very much like the latter. But again, this may be just hindsight, and we may all be vulnerable to a new flavor of that mistake today.
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[0] - Notably, some of which were developed only after those events. E.g. the Nazis weren't the only ones willing to do brutal, lethal scientific experiments on POWs, and, to my understanding, the consensus and principle to not do that was achieved in response to the atrocities of WWII.
Notably, however, not the Holocaust.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(I'll understand completely if you don't have the time to reply though)
I'd be interested in whether this meets the bar but once again you've got 5 million other users to see to so if you don't have the time you don't have the time.
INFO: I've gone through my last 200 comments on HN[1] trying to figure out what it is I'm trying to promote. Other than the last few comments it seems to be heavily AI and Musk related with nothing related to Nazis, Eugenics or other such things.
I've also done full history searches for various things that could be the "it" you refer to, but my HBD discussion was about three years and several thousand comments ago and I have only a few posts that mention "eugenics" and they're all about word meanings, so I think you are referring to my repeated attempts to lecture people on meanings of words (trying to teach clear thinking about word definitions and ideally teaching people about why Tabooing words[2] is an important rationality technique). But while they are admittedly quite common, they actually seem to get almost no engagement and would be quite ineffective flame bait.
I will still stop as that's what you want though. :(
[1] Up to here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=20&prefix=false&q...
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your...
What if eugenics was ok, actually? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680523
What if race science wasn't a cause for the Holocaust? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38674998
What if LLMs included more race science? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38376438
What if white supremacists weren't so bad? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36068057
What if people of African descent were actually dumber than other people? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835306
That's just in the last few months, it just keeps on going with 'What if we didn't call people with Nazijacent ideologies Nazis' and so forth. Just cut it out.
Every single one of those is either a bold-faced lie about the content or shows no reading comprehension on your part. You're behaving like a phrasal affect model that simply checks for the presence of words and whether the surrounding context is more positive or negative rather than actually reading and understanding sentences.
Aside: They are also from the past 12 months out of 1000 comments in that period.
First one is "eugenics is an ill-defined term that means different things to different people, some meanings such as offering free embryo screening are things that have mainstream debate about whether they are good or not".
Second one is "eugenics was not the reason for the Holocaust", which is basically true as far as I know. It was racism, hatred and jealousy.
Third one is a complaint about confusing "AI not embarrassing corporations" with "AI not killing everyone". With an example of an embarrassing thing to say being answering questions about IQ distributions.
Fourth one is using "supremacist" as an example of a general problem where people conflate every form of bad all together with no nuance or understanding.
Fifth one is about the limits of science and whether some research should be banned.
My most important goal in almost every case is teaching people how to think. To substitute in a word for the specific meaning intended in that instance and stop thinking in terms of word affect and tribal signalling. Sure, I could use less contentious examples but then the lessons lose a lot of impact and people shrug and go "Oh, no one would be so stupid as to confuse being in the same superset with the identity function", but people actually do this all the time whenever politics or tribalism comes into play!
That said, I'm sufficiently unsure on what dang's intent is that I'm going to try to come up with other examples... It's just really bloody hard when the main thing that triggers people to stop thinking clearly is strong emotion and politics, so every example that people will recognize as a real example that I can think of has... strong emotions and politics. Probably something about the word "family" is the best I can do.
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I find it very irksome how you seem to have the idea that anyone who has not subordinated every single principle of honesty, specificity and reason in favor of ensuring bad guys are always labelled maximally bad is also bad. If someone says "Hitler really enjoyed kicking puppies!" and someone else said "That's incorrect, Hitler was a dog lover" you'd probably assume the latter person is a Nazi rather than thinking they're an xkcd 386. An assumption which is very likely going to be factually incorrect (and if it wasn't then the local environment's discourse norms would have degenerated sufficiently that they can no longer self correct, with every statement that signals the right direction/allegiance being perpetuated regardless of accuracy in a manner that will purity spiral aggressively as the body of common knowledge distorts).
I don't know if the fact you're still making these same mistakes is because I'm a bad teacher or because you literally aren't reading what I'm writing. Not assessing sentences for meaning/truth but instead trying to understand motivations and allegiances, rounding every statement to the most similar sounding one you recall seeing before and assuming your models of people's personalities and motivations is correct and complete based on your bubbled experience.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27181222
who nods along to Nick Land's Hyper-racism
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23710962
Your Holocaust thing is entirely ahistorical as anyone can check on Wikipedia or in just about any history book not written by neo-nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics#/media/File:Bund...
The rest is thoroughly transparent and generic 'just asking questions' schtick. You're not owed nuanced understanding for that - just social opprobrium, an insistent request you keep this shit off HN and the earnest hope you outgrow what is not some secret suppressed truth but garden variety bigotry.
I don't want you to spend another hour stressed and trembling so let's stop here.
And yes, Zizek is a charlatan[2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgR6uaVqWsQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5yoqjABeBM
I'm pretty sure we have measured some very spicific things, and found that different races on average have some genetic advantages and disadvantages. Is saying that Asians are disadvantaged in milk drinking competitions making society worse? Also, because humans are diverse, differences between individuals within any racial group can be far greater than differences between races.
And if you compare men and women, the differences are much much bigger, and the comparisons much more frequent - you can barely turn on the TV or open up any social media without seeing them.
So, ultimately - so what?
Too much of any of those is bad. Four year olds are driven by feeling only. Psychopaths are driven by thought only. You don't want the world in the hands of any of those.
It's a good mix of both feeling and reason that we should strive for.