OK, I just went and actually read Nelson's essay. It's not nearly as bad as I expected based on your writings. He's basically saying (badly) that because of racism blacks have to work harder than whites for any given level of reward and this changes where the optimum level of work is when you take into account work/life balance.

I don't know if he's right or not, but the idea is conceivably plausible. Suppose a white person can work 40 hours a week and make enough to live in a tier 1 neighborhood with a tier 1 lifestyle when it comes to physical goods, and suppose because blacks get lower pay for the same work, a black person would need 60 hours a week for that lifestyle.

If the black person only does 40 hours, like the white person, the black person can only afford a tier 2 neighborhood. Now what if the black person figures out that if he lived in a tier 3 neighborhood, he'd only need 30 hours a week?

If the gap between the quality of the neighborhood and goods affordable in tier 3 and tier 2 is relatively small, especially compared to the gap between tier 2 and tier 1, then going for tier 3 and trading away a small bit of housing and goods quality for an extra 10 hours to spend with family and friends or personal interests might easily be worth it to many.

For the white person, dropping from 40 to 30 hours would kick them from tier 1 to tier 2, which is a much bigger drop, and might not be worth gaining 10 hours of family and friend time.

So you end up in a situation where whites have a single peak in their work vs happiness curve at 40 hours. Blacks have two peaks: 30 hours for tier 3, or 60 hours for tier 1.

Using the term "lazy" for those who opt for tier 3 was a mistake. He doesn't seem to be trying to use it as a pejorative. I think he was thinking more along the lines of The Dude or Cosmo Kramer style laziness.

>"Now what if the black person figures out that if he lived in a tier 3 neighborhood, he'd only need 30 hours a week?"

Do you really think black people go through such mental calculations like that, when deciding what to spend their time on next? Do you, whatever race you are?

You and Russ are presuming that you have any idea what thoughts and mental calculus goes through a black person's mind when they decide when and how hard to work on what, and that you could even know or deduce it without asking, and that it's the same for all black people, and that there's a difference between how black and white people think, which rules and formula they use, and which numbers they plug into them.

Don't you see how condescending it is for a white man (or anyone) to lecture black people (or anyone) about how they think and why they behave, presuming to know better about the cause of their problems, explicitly calling them lazy as a class, acting like he's doing them a favor by justifying their laziness? That level of patronizing, smug, self righteous condescension directed at black people as a class is racist.

He's backward chaining from his racist foregone conclusion that "blacks are lazy" to a bunch of made-up speculation he pulled out of his ass about how "black people" think and what motivates their behavior, which he can't possibly know.

He purposefully led with as offensive a title as possible just to get attention, and then he tried to demonstrate how clever he is to be able to logically argue himself out of the huge hole he just dug with the click bait blog post title "Blacks are Lazy". And it's not just that his arguments are "badly written", it's also that his assumptions and logic are deeply flawed.

My theory: Russ was just inexpertly trying to ape Eric Raymond's favorite rhetorical tactic, and he failed miserably. But Eric was flattered, and stuck up for him.

“Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle,” Raymond said. “Russ resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down.”

The Dog Whistle Has Sounded: How the Right Talks About 'Thugs' Like Trayvon Martin

http://gawker.com/5899322/the-dog-whistle-has-sounded-how-th...

> Do you really think black people go through such mental calculations like that, when deciding what to spend their time on next? Do you, whatever race you are?

Of course not.

> You and Russ are presuming that you have any idea what thoughts and mental calculus goes through a black person's mind when they decide when and how hard to work on what, and that you could even know or deduce it without asking, and that it's the same for all black people, and that there's a difference between how black and white people think, which rules and formula they use, and which numbers they plug into them.

Nope. I'm presuming that black people make these decisions exactly the same way white people do, which is by observing the outcomes of the decisions of others similarly situated and picking a path similar to the paths taking by those whose outcomes they would like to also achieve.

They can see that blacks living in the tier 1 neighborhoods need to put in a lot more work than the whites living in those neighborhoods. They can see that putting in merely the same level of works that whites do results in at best tier 2. They can see that working less than that results in tier 3. They can see that their friends working less and settling for tier 3 are spending more time with family or personal interests. The can see that tier 2 is only a minor improvement physically over tier 3, and is a long way behind tier 2.

I don't remember that, and a quick google doesn't immediately find a source.

But now you're quoting ESR on witch hunts, not ESR on race.

You're pointing me to the essay, which was written by Russ Nelson. I couldn't find any commentary by ESR on the essay, just on the reaction to the essay.

> My point is that ESR is not a trustworthy source of information.

Then the word to use for that is "untrustworthy". The word you've actually been using is "racist".

Rationalwiki is not a trustworthy source of information. That's not something I can provide a firm citation for, so I don't expect you to start ignoring the place, but personally I try not to believe anything it says without doing the research myself. (And on the subject of ESR, I try not to believe anything anyone says without doing the research myself.) I don't remember the details of ESR on climategate, and don't particularly care to look it up.[1]

I do remember this, however:

> ESR wrote a blog post suggesting that the Haitian people really did summon up the Voudon god Ogun to kill off all the white Frenchmen.

and it's not a fair description. ESR suggested that the Haitians really did attempt to summon Ogun. He suggested that the ritual was valuable for physchological reasons. He did not suggest that they succeeded in summoning Ogun.

[1] There's a failure mode that I sometimes fall into, where I don't care about an object-level discussion, but weigh in on the meta-level, because the meta-level is more interesting to me. Then I get sucked in to the object-level. I'm trying not to do that here.

"making sure we DO discuss race issues"

So... you're saying the only possible opposition to his climate results is distraction via playing the race card, logical fallacies, and sophistry? So you're a strong supporter of his climate claims. Yet you were implying between the lines earlier that his climate claims are perhaps not so good. Which is it? Or is it just the anti-scientific "truth depends solely upon who says it"?

As a meta analysis I'm not sure dramatizing or personalizing a statistical analysis is supposed to improve anything anyway. So how deep does the sophistry go? Is there any reasoned response to the claims other than personal attacks against theoretical semi-libelous attacks against individuals based on unrelated political beliefs? Sadly, there probably is, so you're doing a disservice to that position. Are you are being paid to disrupt scientific reports about climate change by discrediting "supporters"? It is known there are people being paid to do that, although I'd expect hirelings to do a better job for their pieces of silver.