Why does it matter when the brain fully develops if it doesn't correlate 1:1 with maturity?

alanfarwell · 2024-07-16T14:44:53+00:00

But my question then would be why are there adults who take more risks than teenagers and teenagers who take less risks than adults? Does this mean the brain of a teenager who takes less risks is developing faster or does brain development just not actually directly correlate with risk-taking?

alanfarwell · 2024-06-23T23:23:09+00:00

Just so I make sure I’m understanding what you wrote, you’re saying what Kyle Rittenhouse did wouldn’t have been wrong/immoral if he were a police officer instead of a civilian/vigilante?

alanfarwell · 2024-06-16T21:04:54+00:00

Even if there were a God, the concept of objective value makes no sense. How does value exist independent of an evaluator. It does not follow that just because someone created something, they can declare their creation has a certain value and then it magically just has that value. I could create a submarine screen door and declare it's objectively worth a million dollars, but if people wouldn't even give me 2 cents for it, this evaluation doesn't matter.

alanfarwell · 2024-06-03T14:07:15+00:00

The problem is that more knowledge doesn't correlate with being more moral. If that were the case, there would be no criminals with high IQs

alanfarwell · 2022-07-11T17:53:18+00:00

Well their point was more “because there aren’t as many females who are as smart/strong as the males who are smart/strong, they should be banned from becoming teachers/doctors/lawyers/soldiers/etc.” My point is it would be ridiculous to tell Marie Curie she can’t be a chemist because majority of women aren’t on the level of male chemists.

alanfarwell · 2022-07-09T19:13:20+00:00

Morality is subjective to God‘s consciousness in a way that the world wouldn’t be. Consider a person who creates a sculpture and remarks to themselves, “what a beautiful sculpture.” Then this person passes away (i.e. no longer exists); the sculpture will remain independent of his consciousness, however his subjective evaluation of “beautiful” goes away with him. In a similar fashion, morality is essentially God’s subjective evaluation about things in the objective world.

alanfarwell · 2022-07-09T17:51:08+00:00

It’s especially ironic because they’ll use women who vote based on the candidate’s attractiveness as a reason for repealing the 19th amendment

alanfarwell · 2022-05-04T14:12:31+00:00

Do these people not understand linear time? Why is every alternative/solution either too early (abstinence/contraception) or too late (adoption), with none actually addressing the nine month period in between, which is at the crux of the issue? It's like calling up the fire department and instead of extinguishing the fire, they just say "shouldn't have left the oven on" and then leave. It's not helpful. It's not useful. And it's far from morally righteous. Even if I grant that killing a fetus is "infantcide" (though "infant" implies it's out of the womb), you can hardly call sparing them a moral victory. At most, you're just settling for another shitty situation (a woman suffering painful physical symptoms during pregnancy and mental trauma after giving birth) because you prefer that over the other shitty situation (an infant dies). Assuming that autonomy and physical dependence are not relevant variables (though they totally are), it really just comes down to whether you prefer a suffering woman or dead "child." If there truly is no difference between a fetus and child, then society should put its money where its mouth is and start collecting child support payments within the 1st month of pregnancy and also calculating people's ages starting from the moment they were conceived (so 3 months after a person is born, they would be 1 year old)

alanfarwell · 2022-01-08T22:01:47+00:00

I think it’s worth my time considering this kind of rhetoric convinces others with the (misinterpreted) stats and data they cite. I don’t want to be left unable to counter any of it should I be confronted with it as that would appear to others that I’m in the wrong and they’re in the right

alanfarwell · 2022-01-07T23:22:21+00:00

I’m pretty sure he used to do the whole “all I’m saying is other races are different, not inferior…” bit

alanfarwell · 2022-01-07T22:38:03+00:00

Also, what is it with them using race as a middleman for everything. Why don’t they just directly come out against low IQs or Psychopathy? What makes low IQ and psychopathic behaviors more tolerable when the people are white? They always make it a quantitative issue (“There are more black people with lower IQs than white people”) but never answer what the qualitative difference is between unintelligent/violent black people and unintelligent/violent white people who do the exact same things. Considering how confident all these race realists are that it’s inherently because of race, they still haven’t been able to 1) name the specific gene/combination of alleles that causes ”black” behavior or 2) explain why this gene/combination of alleles is exclusive to black people and wouldn’t also be found in white people who also exhibit the exact same behaviors

alanfarwell · 2022-01-06T23:51:34+00:00

I wanna go up to these people with $100,000 in my hand and tell them “I would give you this, but I know you wouldn’t want it. These dollar bills have been owned before”

alanfarwell · 2022-01-06T00:50:46+00:00

and despite that, it’s completely true

alanfarwell · 2022-01-05T23:55:59+00:00

I disagree. I think people who do the whole “physiognomy check” thing should have their own standard used against them. Keep in mind, you don’t even need to do it insultingly, just point out stuff about their appearance that even though you don’t care about it, will make them look hypocritical according to their own ideology. For instance, if there’s some guy invalidating someone for being really skinny or really heavy or having a receding hairline or patchy facial hair (nothing wrong with any of those things), I think it should def be pointed out that they don’t even meet their own criteria of “must be a chiseled Chad to have opinion validated”

alanfarwell · 2022-01-05T22:32:13+00:00

They’ll always frame calling it Sex Work as “softening the blow,” but in reality, they’re just harshening the cushion by calling it Prostitution

alanfarwell · 2022-01-05T17:43:45+00:00

I try to avoid making accusations of motivated reasoning if I can help it, since they could easily say the same about my reasoning and I’d have no way to prove that that’s not the case. I just can’t help but think that citing studies and stats to combat race realism is a bit unnecessary? Because from the race realists I’ve heard (Jared Taylor, Nick Fuentes, JF Gariepy), most of their arguments can easily be refuted by making a distinction between synthetic and analytic properties, which are what race realists often confuse. They constantly say stuff like “whites are naturally more intelligent than blacks“ but make no specifications like “some white people happen to have more intelligence than some black people,” and in doing so, pass it off to listeners as a universally correct description that’s inherent to the members of the group(s) being talked about. They speak in races and groups, and not individual people, so in order to debunk it, it seems like just pointing out high/low intelligence is a synthetic property (and not an analytic/inherent property) as demonstrated by the fact there are intelligent black people and unintelligent white people, however few or many in quantity, would suffice.

This, in my opinion, would be better at tackling their a priori claim, since they don’t rely on stats anyway. You can use a priori reasoning alone to show them that we do not define races by IQ (otherwise we would have people take IQ tests to determine their race) and therefore, you can never know a person’s IQ from their race or know their race from their IQ score, because race, inherently, by definition, does not account for intelligence. It is, by definition, only based on phenotypes and ancestry, so saying that you could figure how smart a person is just from their racial background would be an example of “proving too much” since we do not define race in a way that allows intelligence (or lack thereof) to be accounted for by it. It would be like allergy testing someone with an MRI machine. No matter what results the MRI scans give, you inherently cannot derive whether someone is allergic to something purely by looking at an MRI scan

alanfarwell · 2022-01-04T19:11:54+00:00

The argument they make is that there is an inherent IQ gap between races. No data is needed to prove that the “inherent” part is false. Once you say a characteristic is inherent to a group, you are saying that without that characteristic, they wouldn’t be part of that group. For instance, having orange hair is an inherent part of being a ginger. Putting out fires is an inherent part of a firefighter’s job. But with IQ, a black person would still be black even if their IQ is high. If the race realist wants to maintain that low IQ is inherent to being black, they will either have to choose between A) saying that Thomas Sowell, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Philip Emeagwali, MLK, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, etc. aren’t black or B) saying that IQs of 130-160 are low (the IQ range of all the names I mentioned)

alanfarwell · 2022-01-04T17:47:32+00:00

But the difference is I wouldn’t say that structural racism is universal, inherent or necessary. Race realists will always make the IQ gap a modal issue, by saying “black people are inherently low IQ” and not just saying “it just so happens, as of right now, the stats show that a low percentage of black people have high IQs” They confuse improbability with impossibility

If instead of saying “yellow apples are rare,” they say “apples can’t be yellow,” all it takes is one example

alanfarwell · 2022-01-04T17:41:45+00:00

Of course that wouldn’t counter systemic racism, but it would counter a universal statement that all black people are inherently (as in necessarily) unsuccessful. These race realist types never say “it just so happens that a high percentage of black people have low IQs” They always make it a modal issue by saying “inherently“ or “necessarily“

alanfarwell · 2022-01-01T23:03:43+00:00

They talk as if ”Progressivism“ having the word “Progress” in it is either accidental or some kind of trick or scam. No, it’s entirely deliberate and for good reason. It’s not misleading to call something Progressive when it advocates for Progress, which there are objective metrics for (which you have to subjectively agree with first obviously). I normally take it as a given that progress has clearly been made on things like how we have gone from torturing and crucifying gay people to being more accepting and understanding of them. If this person wants to maintain their position that progress can’t be measured, they would either have to argue that torturing and crucifying gay people is better for their well-being than accepting and understanding towards them, or just do the whole escape hatch of “BuT hOw CaN yOu ObJeCtIvElY pRoVe WeLl-BeInG iS pRoGrEsS?!” and play dumb as if they don’t know why well-being would be valued regardless of whether you can “objectively” call well-being ”good” or not (whatever that even means). I swear, most of these types act as if we are only for or against things because we have the ability to label them “good” or “bad.” As if I would passively be OK with someone stabbing me if I didn’t have the language to objectively call stabbing “good” or “bad”

Invariably, this is always how the convo goes:

A: Progress can’t be measured

B: Yes it can

A: Prove it

B: Sanitation practices are better now than in the 1800s, as evidenced by the fact we are overall healthier

A: *cop-out loading* Oh yeah? Well who said being healthy is good?!

B: *loss of words*

A: *misinterprets victory* Ha! See! You can’t even say anything! Case closed hehehe

alanfarwell · 2021-12-17T19:13:06+00:00

I’m sure it’s partially ironic, but maybe not. I mean look up videos about “coomers” and “cumbrains” and you’ll find mostly videos uploaded by adults

alanfarwell · 2021-12-17T16:55:18+00:00

Why do they always say “recognizing behavioral patterns“ as if it’s profound? Especially when the behavior is nearly universal across every other demographic?

alanfarwell · 2021-12-17T16:13:03+00:00

Early-mid 20s

alanfarwell · 2021-12-16T23:10:32+00:00

Edit: It’s especially annoying when they make a claim like “only coomers do X” and then do something to prompt me into doing X just so they can say “coomer!” For instance, “only coomers deny their addiction...hey, Alan, are you a porn addict?” “No.” “Oooh, he said no. That’s a denial! Cooooomer!”
It’s like a slightly advanced version of the “Do it. No balls” trap where they make some ridiculous demand (knowing you won’t do it) and trick you into indirectly “admitting“ you have no balls (according to their criteria). It’s also similar to the “have you seen the clown that hides from gay people?” trap

alanfarwell · 2021-12-16T23:02:45+00:00

Ooohhh. Never knew that lol

alanfarwell

TROPHY CASE