Slavery is much older than the period that the term "scientific racism" refers to. Older slave holders had no trouble justifying slavery.
Interestingly, the many slave rebellions of antiquity (and after) by and large did not seek to abolish slavery, only to switch who's a slave, and who's a slave holder.
> Romans (or whatever) did not treat their slaves as sub-humans
I mean, that's pushing it. Obviously, their concept of slavery wasn't really based on ethnicity, and manumission was generally more common and socially acceptable than it was in American slavery. But the treatment of slaves in Ancient Rome was certainly inhuman by modern standards.
The Romans also had mechanisms to, in practice, suppress the political power of descendants of slaves; in practice almost all freedmen went into one of the urban tribes (the very wealthy could buy into a rural tribe), making their votes largely irrelevant, for instance. It's reasonable to view New World slavery as a special evil, but Roman slavery was Pretty Bad, too.
> The Romans also had mechanisms to, in practice, suppress the political power of descendants of slaves; in practice almost all freedmen went into one of the urban tribes (the very wealthy could buy into a rural tribe), making their votes largely irrelevant, for instance. It's reasonable to view New World slavery as a special evil, but Roman slavery was Pretty Bad, too.
Those mechanisms sound a lot like present day gerrymandering[1][2] coupled with redlining[3][2].
- "modern Europeans and East Asians apparently inherited about 2% of their DNA from Neanderthals"
- "African individuals on average had [...] more Neanderthal DNA than previously thought—about [...] 0.3% of their genome."
So the article seems to confirm a 10x difference in Neanderthals DNA, which might be significant.
It's also unclear what they mean by "Africans, did the same include,
e.g. Egyptians of Greek descent?
The Wikipedia article [1] leads to [2], a RAINN page which links to
itself (quote: "Please visit
https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system for full
citation."), and also (Footnote 1) to the following 'three' alleged
data sources [3, 4, 5]. Note that [4, 5] are exactly, letter for
letter, the same (!) in [2]! Why? Does that sound like serious science to you? Anyway, the RAINN page [2] then claims:
"This statistic combines information from several federal government
reports. Because it combines data from studies with different
methodologies, it is an approximation, not a scientific
estimate.". Let's look at the methodology in [3],
starting on Page 17:
> "The NCVS is a self-report survey that is administered from January
to December. Respondents are asked about the number and
characteristics of crimes they have experienced during the prior 6
months [...] . The survey collects information on threatened,
attempted, and completed crimes. Te survey collects data on crimes
both reported and not reported to police. Estimates in this report
include threatened, attempted, and completed crimes."
Of particular interest is the subsection "NCVS measurement of rape or
sexual assault", starting on page 19. I cannot see any meaningful
attempt at scientific rigour here. Can you explain to me why such
figures should be taken seriously? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! There is no evidence in any meaningful sense here.
In my (considerable) experience of working in large organisation (private and public), whether this works or not depends strongly on the power differential between praiser/criticiser and praisee/criticisee. Basically this is the most likely outcome:
- Powerless praises publicly and criticises privately: criticism will be ignored, praise will be milked.
- Powerless praises privately and criticises publicly: if played right, this is working, since the powerful cannot brush aside the criticism, but this is likely to lead to retaliation!
A way of making public criticism more digestible is to make it very constructive: "You are wrong because XYZ, I recommend ABC instead because <reasons>". Ideally the <reasons> align with the organisation's goals, e.g. "ABC is clearly in the interest of our shareholders / voters / students / environment because <other reasons>.
The phrase "you are wrong" is one of the fastest ways to get someone's back up against the wall. In your example, completely removing that phrase doesn't change the meaning and it eliminates negativity.
That's why publicly saying "you are wrong" is so powerful (and so dangerous). The powerful are not used to be challenged in public. They typically respond by a combination of
- reframing, changing the subject
- attacking, belittling you
You can see this in action in stand-up comedy with hecklers. If you anticipate this reaction, you can turn this around very effectively in a professional context (not in standup-comedy though): "I note you are NOT answering my question, instead ...".
I agree with you. However I'd say leading with, "You are wrong" is risky. Unless you have a very good working relationship with them, always start with empithy and praise. "I think this will really work well for our clients. How do you handle 'reason they're wrong'?"
Obviously, do what the situation calls for, but I pissed many people off, without being wrong, telling them they are. I found really looking at it from their point of view first helps. Usually they're trying to solve a real problem, so at least take the time to understand it and how they see it.
Classical music is fine as it is, no need to change.
Why should being based on improvisation and unique personal expression be the be-all-and-end-all of analysis? Not everybody wants to play / hear improvised music.
> Classical music is fine as it is, no need to change.
Classical music is dying, because the audience is literally dying of old age. Jazz or folk can sustain itself as a niche pursuit, because a small ensemble can profitably play to a small audience; a symphony orchestra has an enormous wage bill and has to fill a large hall week in and week out.
Classical music can renew itself and guarantee a sustained future, but it can't do it without fundamental structural reform. If classical musicians want a secure future for their art form, they need to seriously reflect on what classical music is, what it could be and what it needs to be. It's not enough to offer cheap tickets to under-30s, it's not enough to have the odd pops concert in the park - lip service will not abate an existential threat.
There is an interesting related paper "Copy and Paste Redeemed" [1] that is based on the assumption that a lot of copy/paste happens (and discusses why this is not necessarily a bad thing). [1] investigates how copy/paste can be auto-detected, how similar pieces of code
can automatically be
merged together, and how abstractions can be automatically created from copy/paste code.
I have not used the tool myself, so I cannot comment on how well it works in practise. But I found the idea intriguing.
I'm curious: why and how do you think Exterior Algebra will have such an impact on programming in general? What programming constructs that EA capture that are currently not well-abstracted (apart from graphics/linear algebra)? And can EA not be expressed anyway in modern languages with expressive typing systems such at Haskell/Scala which even have higher-kinded types?
Maybe some admixture of machine learning meets compressive sensing meets logic meets complexity theory, and maybe some new software development tools/paradigms too
Interestingly, the many slave rebellions of antiquity (and after) by and large did not seek to abolish slavery, only to switch who's a slave, and who's a slave holder.