The bourgeoisie in Europe accumulated the capital required to start industrialization through their slave colonies. This isn't up for debate. Stop sanitizing your history it only debases you.
It is indeed the case that the British started supporting abolition when it became clear that they could exploit cheap free labor in their colonies more effectively than slave labor at that time in their development, which they got to by accumulating vast wealth from plunder and slavery.
You can't choose an arbitrary cutoff in history and wash yourself of how the world got there.
Oh my god here, is the same qualification near the top of the article.
> One of the problems the two friends looked at was a version of a century-old unsolved question in geometry.
On every Quanta article there's always someone welching about some gotcha they think they've found that just demonstrates how trash Quanta's popularizations of mathematical topics is. But whenever I read the article in question it always turns out that the writers and editors over there somehow manage to thread the needle in making their material accessible without being mathematically inaccurate. Vague, yes, but that's why they link to the research in question because it's a pop article not a journal publication.
You edited your comment to add another objection. It is equally insubstantial unless you dug through the paper yourself and demonstrated that the transformation applied could not reasonably be called a rotation.
I'm currently reading The Black Jacobins which is about Toussaint L'Ouverture and the revolution in Haiti. Even after having read accounts of the brutality of slavery multiple times before, it always seems to recede into an abstraction after a long time and the descriptions are as gruesome and horrifying as they ever were. And this is a book that spares the details, relatively speaking.
Unfortunately the rationalist community basically engages in sophistry centered around a naive and outdated positivism with Bayes' rule slapped on top.
If one were to examine that subreddit at this moment it would appear that the mods are very strongly against Scott Alexander being doxxed by a reporter and are also handing out bans for anyone gloating about this.
His technical papers are fun to read and based on solid mathematics. He's collecting that work into a book which is about as poorly edited as you would expect but the math is solid. There is no sense in which Taleb is as vapid as JBP.
I think there are unresolved philosophical issues around probabilistic interpretations where it's not clear a priori what the space of possibilities is. Even if we could pin it down in an instant, that space is constantly reshaped in the brain as it adapts to its environment.
"brown dog" surely has some probabilistic content but it's hard to locate where it is because of the enormous complexity of the space of "possible situations in which a brain can perceive a brown dog".
Diversifying police forces does not fix the problem. It's what the police do not who does it. Black individuals can participate in Black oppression. I will not elaborate on the point because it's not my place. I will just refer you to great thinkers like James Baldwin as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
> Right now you have the two political parties and virtually all the S&P 500 corporations, all the universities, and most of the media (including social media) actively supporting BLM and being against "systemic racism".
Saying Black Lives Matter is not even the bare minimum. It is very easy for corporations and politicians to pay lip service to grievances without materially addressing them. In fact, that is usually what they do. There's a reason why the protesters are demanding to defund the police and a reason why the political machine is doing everything but negotiate on those terms. The protesters want concrete, radical reorganization of the police system so they have staked a bold position. Corporations want to protect their PR image and avoid losing profits. Politicians want anything but touching the police apparatus.
Just look at Joe Biden. His response to the protests was a proposal to increase police funding for "community policing" initiatives.
> but where is that "systematic racism" actually coming from, then?
Idk where you've been if you haven't seen the extensive documentation that the police are a big part of systemic racism. But it goes beyond them. It's also companies not investing in black neighborhoods, it's politicians pandering to Black voters in election years and then ignoring them for the rest. It's automated computer systems having bias baked into them [0]. It's a whole lot of stuff and I can't even know where you should begin.