Edge 214: Dangerous Ideas
June 23, 2007 11:29 PM   Subscribe

by Bruce Sterling. A list of supposedly unpopular ideas over at Bruce Sterling's Wired blog. Is he turning into some sort of mutant neo-libertarian?
posted by craniac (29 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: poster's request, a little OMGfilter. -- jessamyn



 
Um...well, he may be, but all he's doing in this post is putting forth dangerous ideas. I don't see anything to the effect that he thinks any of these are necessarily GOOD ideas.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:35 PM on June 23, 2007


He's quoting Steven Pinker.
posted by Guy Smiley at 11:36 PM on June 23, 2007 [2 favorites]


Are Ashkenazi Jews, on average, smarter than gentiles because their ancestors were selected for the shrewdness needed in money lending?

That's not so much dangerous as just really dumb. Even if you accepted the premise, how could you ever come up with the cause? Much less something so specific. And how could you ever test it.

Besides, it suggests that one group of people would have been able to keep dumb people from breeding, after then had come of age, when it seems that most of the time dumb people are the ones who have the least trouble finding mates.
posted by delmoi at 11:48 PM on June 23, 2007


Large blocks of grey are indicative of block quotes in many blog layouts (as do physical indents, ellipsis, lack of contextual introductory paragraphs, etc.).
posted by cowbellemoo at 11:52 PM on June 23, 2007


Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?

I don't see why it would. Even in places where prostitution isn't legal it's always easy to find. Are rape rates lower in Nevada then in other states when adjusting for income, etc?
posted by delmoi at 11:55 PM on June 23, 2007


Also, lets be mindful of not confusing value-neutral sociological brain teasers for unhinged amoral rants.

Context, context, context.
posted by cowbellemoo at 12:01 AM on June 24, 2007


This post may be too much for MeFi to process all at once. Should've maybe broken it down into what, 24 separate posts by topic, spread out over a month.
posted by scheptech at 12:07 AM on June 24, 2007


Good for them.

Putting these ideas into print and acknowledging that they're incendiary from the start is a great route to being able to objectively talk about them. As deplorable or stupid as any of these idea may seem - if it's seriously being considered by someone, so much the better for all of us if it can be given a platform to be discussed and adopted or rejected as we see fit.

Encouring discourse on something that on its surface that appears simplistic, stupid, or downright evil strikes me as being a wonderfully constructive way of taking in / digesting this world we live in.

More of this. Please.
posted by icosahedral at 12:08 AM on June 24, 2007


Some of those "ideas" aren't dangerous because they challenge convention, they are dangerous because their premises are untestable and therefore unanswerable.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:19 AM on June 24, 2007 [1 favorite]


Oh, please. Don't give Bruce Sterling or Wired credit for any of this. Really, how much effort would it take for any one of us to come up with several dozen "dangerous" ideas we've heard over time. It's not like this list is innovative. In fact, it just throws out a bunch of controversial questions without any analysis of any type.

Of course, what such a list encourages is a bunch of arm chair analysis without any real basis in fact. Most of these questions require rigorous scientific testing, but instead they'll receive conjecture.
posted by Muddler at 12:26 AM on June 24, 2007 [1 favorite]




oh, and the Edge questions are always a good read every year. (previously, probably other MeFi posts as well.)
posted by exlotuseater at 12:31 AM on June 24, 2007


Oh, please. Don't give Bruce Sterling or Wired credit for any of this.

Especially since all he did was quote them from another page, along with a link.
posted by delmoi at 12:48 AM on June 24, 2007


I get the feeling this post blames Sterling more than crediting him, and either way, it's wrongheaded to do. As some commenters note, this list isn't Sterling's: It's a summary version of the long, long list at Edge, which does this sort of thing each year, and republishes the conversational results as a book the following year.
posted by cgc373 at 12:52 AM on June 24, 2007


This could be a good post... well, it has been, already, in a couple of ways (I enjoyed what Bruce Sterling was quoting, and I enjoyed some links in the thread) but the post itself is completely misleading and kind of crappy. Not sure what to do about that.
posted by blacklite at 1:13 AM on June 24, 2007


one vote to keep, here.
posted by exlotuseater at 1:17 AM on June 24, 2007


Another dangerous question, because it might be true:

"Do I look fat in this outfit?"
posted by Deathalicious at 1:37 AM on June 24, 2007


Shouldn't this post have a Not Safe For Anything warning?
posted by srboisvert at 1:42 AM on June 24, 2007


Are Ashkenazi Jews, on average, smarter than gentiles because their ancestors were selected for the shrewdness needed in money lending?

Reminds of of the infamous Jimmy the Greek Snyder's observations as to why professional sports teams were dominated by black players. Said Snyder, in public and on camera, "During the slave period, the slave owner would breed his big black with his big woman so that he would have a big black kid -- that's where it all started." That were pretty much his last public statement. Like a lot of people who say "dumb" things perceived to be "dangerous" (i.e., racist, anti-semetic) he was quickly denounced by the thought police, fired from his TV job, and silenced.

The thing with drunken observations like Snyder's is that there is often a kernel of truth to it. I have friends who are tall and blond and they have kids who are tall and blond. There is something to this genetics business. So partly what Snyder says is true and it is must also be partly true that the children of people with great intelligence are also likely to have great intelligence.

The problem is when these smaller truths get wrapped in bigger lies: blacks are intelellectually inferior, jews control all the banks, etc. It seems to me that many of those items on Sterling's list are so tightly wrapped in bigger lies that it is difficult to disassociate them.

It becomes easier to silence the idiot who promulgates the lie than to admit the kernel of truth.
posted by three blind mice at 1:43 AM on June 24, 2007


That were

a kernel of truth to it.

intelellectually inferior

it is must also..


I blame my parents for my intellectual shortcomings and the poor grammar in my post.
posted by three blind mice at 1:51 AM on June 24, 2007


My dangerous question:

Paragraphs, can you use them?
posted by mr. strange at 2:12 AM on June 24, 2007


That kernel is smaller than you think 3BM. As Stephen J. Gould was so fond of pointing out, early in the history of professional basketball the sport was dominated by Jews who were viewed as innately gifted at the sport.

I guess it must have got bred out of them.
posted by srboisvert at 4:06 AM on June 24, 2007


Meh.

Most of them didn't seem so much dangerous as just stupid and easily answerable. As TBL observed the problem isn't the question itself so much as the tendency for people to wrap a dangerous ideology around a skewed version of the question.

Take Jimmy the Greek, for example, TBL held him up as an example of someone who was silenced by the dread Thought Police (horrors) for just innocently expressing the truth that some traits (muscles, height, etc) are genetic. What he left out is that Jimmy the Greek was doing so in the context of a) implying that this also resulted in blacks being dumber and therefore unfit to coach, and b) whining that because of the supposed genetic superiority of blacks (WRT physical traits anyway) if they were allowed to coach then there would be no place for whites in basketball at all (boo hoo). That's what torqued people off.
posted by sotonohito at 4:16 AM on June 24, 2007


Guy Smiley writes 'He's quoting Steven Pinker.'

He's plugging a book.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:23 AM on June 24, 2007



That kernel is smaller than you think 3BM. As Stephen J. Gould was so fond of pointing out, early in the history of professional basketball the sport was dominated by Jews who were viewed as innately gifted at the sport.

I guess it must have got bred out of them.


Making some space for the fighting abilities.
posted by darkripper at 4:33 AM on June 24, 2007


PeterMcDermott, Pinker is sort of promoting a book, an anthology based on a question Pinker asked the Edge people, which John Brockman repackaged and published. Sterling is just making a link on a weblog, although he may have answered the question. In any case, I don't think it's pure shilling on anybody's part, at least, no more than any book review is shilling.
posted by cgc373 at 4:37 AM on June 24, 2007


Yes, but are these "good" questions, where good means answering them (and I mean both the process of answering them and the answers themselves) do anybody any good? Many of them just seem designed to get people riled up.
posted by MarshallPoe at 5:13 AM on June 24, 2007


Hey, I llke Sterling, and totally misread his original post and missed the Pinker/Edge connection. What can I say, it was late and I was on Percoset after a kidney stone decided to find a new place to live. Not a good time to post. So if the mods would like to kill this thread it wouldn't hurt my feelings one bit.
posted by craniac at 6:12 AM on June 24, 2007


This could be a good post... well, it has been, already, in a couple of ways (I enjoyed what Bruce Sterling was quoting, and I enjoyed some links in the thread) but the post itself is completely misleading and kind of crappy. Not sure what to do about that.
posted by blacklite at 1:13 AM on June 24 [+] [!]


I totally dropped the ball on this, missed the link to Pinker, and misformatted the FPP in ways the decontextualize everything, so I asked the mods to delete the FPP. I spent the day on morphine and percoset (kidney stone) and thought I was back from la-la land, but I guess not. Of course, normally when I do something this stupid I don't have any narcotics to blame, but this time I do, so there.

The thing is, I've seen a lot of progressive thinkers mutate into neo-libertarians over time, and it worries me.
posted by craniac at 6:21 AM on June 24, 2007


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