non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
non_radical_centrist
11hr ago
I have a somewhat alternate theory to the standard HBD concept, one that may not be original but I haven't seen before, although I haven't delved the HBD forums much.
The standard HBD argument is that different races have different IQs, and that is the primary factor leads to all sorts of different outcomes. Instead of IQ causing so many differences, which I think might be true but is a lesser factor, I think different races are domesticated to different degrees. I read the book The Goodness Paradox about a year ago, and it was about how while humans kill each other in vastly larger scales than any other animal, we're also much less likely to try to tear each other's faces off in the woods than any other animal. The author first divides violence into two categories: reactive and pre-mediated. Sometimes violence is pre-planned and calculated, like a sniper watching carefully for the moment to take the shot. Other violence is reactive, like someone punches you or even just insults your mother and you hit back before you even think. The author presents a simple answer: That there is a relatively straightforward evolutionary process through which animals are domesticated, and domestication leads to much lower rates of reactive violence. The mechanism is that the animal is essentially forever childlike mentally. But not just mentally, also physically; that's why dogs look like wolf cubs, and domesticated foxes have converged on similar traits like floppy ears.
I think black people are similar, in that they are a more "adult" human. They tend to be physically bigger and stronger. I often see black women called masculine, and that is the explanation for why they're less attractive and do worse on dating apps- but I think it makes more sense to call them more adult(whatever the opposite of neotony is). Black women are well known for large secondary sexual characterics like big ass and breasts, that's hardly masculine. And east Asian women by contrast, a race widely considered more on the high end of genetics by HBDers, tend to be more neotonous, with smaller secondary characteristics and young looking faces. And their men tend to be smaller and less physically strong. So I think it's quite plausible that that domestication mechanism, while probably not the sole factor, is a sizeable one in making black people have such higher rates of crime and east asians such lower rates of crime.
I think you're actually wrong there- whites are on average more physically imposing
Despite making up 13% of the population, 53% of NFL players are black
Whites and Asians having more domesticated traits also needs a causative mechanism which doesn't run into obvious flaws- eg complex civilization as a domesticating force doesn't account for the middle east today.
I think there are multiple factors at work for different civilizations/races being succesful. I think HBD is part of the reason for civilizational differences, but I buy into the WEIRDest People in the World cousin-marriages leading to clannish honour culture being why the Middle East is behind the West. I know there's a complexity penalty for theories that incorporate multiple factors like this but it still looks the most plausible to me for why the Middle East is so backwards.
I think it seems very likely that all humans have been domesticated compared to our primitive great ape ancestors. Whether some races are more domesticated than others is a more open question. But I think it's quite plausible that they are.
non_radical_centrist
8hr ago
Perhaps the genes for domestication hit their optimal point some time after leaving Africa but well before the Roman era so you couldn't observe them that way. I don't think that's that unlikely, humans had agriculture and large populations for many thousands of years before Rome or other realistic statues. And there's certainly a point where you wouldn't want to be "too" domesticated and be blindly friendly like a puppy to any stranger.
non_radical_centrist
5hr ago
Thank you, corrected
non_radical_centrist
19hr ago
Are there any major bloggers in the rat-sphere who are significantly pro-Palestine, anti-Israel? I think everyone I follow is either pro-Israel or basically neutral
non_radical_centrist
2d ago
I'd like some more details too. President Biden is obviously part of the American ruling class. I couldn't name anyone else who inarguably is though. Is Marjorie Taylor Greene part of the ruling class? Are New York Times journalists? Are American generals? Is Peter Thiel? Is Donald Trump himself? Supreme Court justices? State governors? If you're saying Trump is at risk of being assassinated by the powers-that-be, I want some more details on which powers exactly those are, because there are a lot of powers in America. Many of them hate Trump, many of them hate each other, many of them hate Trump and also hate other people who hate Trump.
non_radical_centrist
2d ago
I think progressives? I browsed the eurovision subreddit and saw some Croatia memes and didn't really get it, although it makes sense in the context that they're being chosen as a semi-random country to make sure Israel doesn't win
non_radical_centrist
2d ago
If these mysterious powers that be really don't want Trump to be president to the point that they're willing to assassinate him
I think the odds of an established power trying to take out Trump is quite low. The odds of a deranged person along the lines of Wilkes Booth or Oswald or any of the other people who've killed American president, much higher, although today security for Presidents is vastly higher and could probably foil most threats. But I'd still put more than 0% chance odds that Trump will be assasinated. Although I doubt having an insane VP would significantly lower his assassination odds, I don't think any would-be assassin is rationally weighing the merits to the nation.
non_radical_centrist
14d ago
I don't have anything to say directly on the content, but writers like Zizek who seem to try to make their writing as difficult to parse as possible in order to show off their vocabulary have always annoyed me. There are times when a big, unusual word captures something that a shorter word doesn't, or is more convenient than using a string of shorter common words to represent the same concept. But when you're having to take a second to understand a phrase, time after time, it's irritating.
non_radical_centrist
12d ago
I think wokism as culture and wokism as law and wokism as anything else are all a positive feedback loop. There isn't a single definitive cause that, if you cut that out, all wokism is gone forever. But the book convinced me pretty well that certain executive orders and judicial decisions and bureaucratic policies played a major role in expanding wokeness.
non_radical_centrist
10d ago
I've heard that in the original days of Israel, just after the Arab war, the ultra-orthodox who spent all day just studying the Talmud were an extreme rarity because they almost all died in the Holocaust. So Israel gave them funding as a sort of living museum piece/out of pity for an almost lost culture. But then they kept growing since they had such a sweet deal, and what was reasonable when they were a few hundred people was not reasonable when they are a few hundred thousand.
non_radical_centrist
10d ago
Hanania is a very political guy, who's willing to make certain sacrifices to achieve ends he thinks is good. He'd want discrimination laws rolled back in general, but as long as they aren't, is happy to see them used against the Left.
non_radical_centrist
10d ago
Hanania says things like "nobody is more pro-Israel than me" and I genuinely do not know if he is being sincere or intentionally outlandish.
I think he is somewhat sincere. I think he looks at all Jews have contributed to civilization, e.g vastly disproportionate numbers of Nobel winners and establishing a democracy in the middle east as two examples, and considers them a culture worth supporting. Meanwhile he looks at the Palestinian culture and Hamas, and sees them as a blight on civilization worth bombing into obliteration.
He apparently hates leftist protestors too and I think a substantial portion of his support is just to "trigger" them. I don't really get that part of his motivation, I don't have any particular fondness of leftist protestors but I don't have any visceral hatred of them, I just consider them a bit dumb.
So the "we should roll back Civil Rights law, but in the meantime let's massively expand the ability of Jews to use Civil Rights law to wage lawfare against their political opposition" is a little bit out of loving Jews, but I think it's mostly out of hatred of leftist protestors. I don't really agree with that myself, but I don't really particularly care either way.
non_radical_centrist
23d ago
I read the Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania a couple weeks ago. I was going to write a more in depth review covering more sections, but got bored after writing my thought process about how employers aren't allowed to use discriminatory tests and never got around to writing more, so I'll post what I did write.
Let’s all people have a factor that you can represent numerically how good they will be at a job. Let’s call it the m, for mystery, because exactly what will make someone good at a job- e.g knowledge, skill, conscientiousness, etc. can be very difficult to measure, and knowing how important proportionally each sub-factor is to the final m factor or even what every sub-factor maybe is also very difficult. But, we can still try to estimate someone’s m. If you have a job that largely involves lifting heavy boxes and moving them around, you can get a decent estimate by having a candidate try to lift a heavy box- if they fall, they almost certainly have low m for that job, and if they succeed with ease, they’ll likely have a high m for that job. If you have a CEO position for a large multinational corporation, you can like at a candidate’s previous job experience- if they’ve previously been in charge of a corporation that hit records profits during their tenure, they’ll likely have high m. If while previously in charge of a corporation, it went from high profits to bankruptcy, or they’ve only ever held a job as a janitor, you can guess that they’d have low m for the position.
We can say with confidence that on average, black people have lower m than white people for most jobs. Whether this is because of genetics, culture, discrimination, or something else isn’t relevant to this discussion, because this discussion isn’t about increasing their m, just about what are fair hiring practices. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed, both Congress and the general population of America overwhelmingly wanted two things: For black people to not be actively discriminated against, but also for people to be able to still select the best employees for a job, even if all the best employees were white. But what is “discrimination”? That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer.
Let’s say an employer has 1000 job candidates, and needs to select 100 to fill a newly created job. The employer wants to get the 100 employees with the highest m- he is unlikely to succeed perfectly, but he still wants to get as close as he can. If the employer asked all potential job candidates to fill out a brief questionnaire as the first stage of the application process, and one of the questions was “Are you black?”, and then the employer threw out every single application where someone answered “Yes”, the average m in the remaining pool would likely be higher, although he also would’ve likely tossed some candidates who did belong in the final pool. Whether it’s a good idea from the employer’s perspective may vary- maybe the employer really has no good ideas on how to figure out which candidates have higher m, and his next step will just be to randomly select 100 candidates from the remaining pool, in which case he’ll have done better in terms of average m score than if he didn’t purge black candidates.
But, I think almost everyone would agree that purging black applications like that is discrimination, in the letter of the ACR, in the spirit of what Congress intended it, and that the majority of Americans don’t want to see that sort of candidate selection happen, not from government employers and not from private employers either. The government would tell any employer that tried to do that something like, “Stop that, rework your hiring practices so that you’re actually more directly testing for m, and not just discriminating against blacks”.
So the employer goes back to the drawing board, and comes up with another test. He will take a pencil, and slide it into the hair of a candidate. After releasing, if the pencil falls out of the hair, the candidate proceeds to the next stage, if it stays in, the candidate is removed from selection. That’s the Apartheid South African Pencil test, and in practice that’d basically be the same as the previous test, although it’s hypothetically possible some black people would pass and some white people would fail. Or maybe the employer tries to be slightly less blatant, and instead does a swimming test(black have worse buoyancy than white people). Unless the job actually involves swimming in some way, I think most people would still agree that such a test is discriminatory, not actually measuring m in any way, at least not more than a generic fitness test does, and would only have predictive power in job performance because it’s managing to exclude blacks.
The employer now comes up with a fourth test. It will be a straightforward algebra exam, the sort you’d see in a 10th grade math course. If the job does not involve algebra in any way, like it’s a job moving boxes around, or maybe it’s a cashier job at a retailer, or even a more high class job like a lawyer that doesn’t really involve math, then this test will also disproportionately fail black candidates, who tend to be worse at algebra. But, is it actually discriminatory? Where the previous tests only would have any predictive power for job performance in so far as they measured whether or not someone’s black, and black people on average did worse at the job, the algebra test might have real predictive power, because it’s not just measuring algebra skill, it’s also measuring general intelligence, and general intelligence would be a major component of m for almost any job.
Whether the test is actually discriminatory now comes down to whether “general intelligence” is real, and also that if it is real, can it be measured by an algebra test? I don’t think that question, in the absence of formal studies, has an obvious answer. I think reasonable people could very easily come to believe that algebra skill is divorced from other intellectual tasks like public speaking, literacy, chess skill, etc. My understanding of the literature is that that is not true- that there is a general intelligence, and skill at all intellectual tasks are relatively closely correlated. And that that general intelligence is also closely correlated with job performance in pretty much every job. But, reasonable judges who aren’t good at parsing scientific studies themselves can be convinced that general intelligence does not work like that.
Richard Hanania, in The Origin’s of Woke, writes that judges and bureaucrats expanding the definition of discrimination to also include tests that really measure future job performance is one of the key origins of wokeness. I wouldn’t disagree. Where I do disagree with him is that I don’t think it’s easily possible to permit real skill tests but ban actually discriminatory test, because they can look very similar. Ultimately I don’t disagree with his conclusion that the laws should be altered to allow for discrimination though, because I think where in the 60’s the Civil Rights Act may have been needed to prevent employers doing discrimination along the lines of a Pencil Test for employees like how the American people wanted, today the vast majority of Americans are no longer anti-black racist, despite what many on the left think. I think you could remove a lot of anti-discrimination protections, and unlike in the 60’s, a combination of few people today being actually racist and non-governmental social pressure to keep the real racists in line will prevent the sort of racism Americans hate.
non_radical_centrist
11d ago
You can't be all those things in the US census system. You can only choose one. It's only Hispanic that's a both ethnicity instead of a race.
That's why Hanania is calling it obviously artificial.
Edit: as /u/toakraka said, that's old news and they've updated the system to reflect less artificial categories. It's still somewhat arbitrary though.
non_radical_centrist
11d ago
Part of what makes it obviously artificial is that hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, in the US census. So someone can be both hispanic and white, or hispanic and black, or even hispanic and Asian American Pacific Islander! And it was chosen like that because black activists didn't want to lose any influence from black spanish speakers choosing to identify as hispanic over black.
non_radical_centrist
8d ago
Richard Hanania has some good ones. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-monogamy-and-incest-taboos-made
That's his review of The WEIRDest people in the World
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
It's annoying how expensive substacks are. I wish there are some sort of bulk deal where I could buy all the ones I'm interested in at a significant discount, because as much as I love the writing of the writers I follow, I can't drop a hundred bucks a year on each of them.
non_radical_centrist
22d ago
If everyone was equal in ability and some groups were being discriminated against for no reason, I would hire them since they cost less money/are more desperate and I would crush the competition with my superior offerings.
There was a problem with racism in the Jim Crow era where, if you were to be colour blind with your hiring practices and what customers you let in in the South, you could get racists making a lot of trouble for you. I think we're well past that era, but that there was a time when things really were nastily racist needs to be kept in mind.
non_radical_centrist
29d ago
Neoliberals were strip mining the economy and the labor market
Neoliberals embraced deregulation and austerity because Keynesian economics and large amounts of the economy being state owned or heavily regulated lead to the stagflation of the 70s.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
I don't read much of Kulak's stuff, I find most of his writing to be wrong in some way. I would call this piece he had pretty racist too, since it implicitly dismisses any possible environmental cause for India's woes. The amount of extreme government disfunction, poor nutrition and poor healthcare many, many Indians receive I think are very plausible candidates for low human capital there, which he doesn't address at all.
non_radical_centrist
13d ago
Sure, but I don't think we're going to ever get to that point anytime soon, because some questions are real hard to forecast. I don't think anyone today knows when say the Israel-Palestine conflict will next have a ceasefire, but that's something a lot of people would like to know. If we get to a point where we can forecast so well everyone agrees on when it's most likely to end, then that's mission accomplished.
non_radical_centrist
13d ago
If it gets really good and really common then how would one extract any value from it?
If there's one answer that everyone agrees on and no one betting against each other, all the value would come from whomever posted the question and sponsored it so that anyone who guesses correctly gets proceeds. If people disagree on the answer, then people who're right also get value from whomever's wrong losing their money to the people who are right.
non_radical_centrist
10d ago
I would expect being alone would massively increase the risk rate. How many people would steal a stack of bills if they were left out in the open but there are people all around who knows they don't belong to the thief, vs how many would steal the stack of bills if they had total anonymity?
I never heard of him before, but I read a couple of his Palestine posts, and a couple on other topics. I wouldn't really call him rat-ty from what I've seen, he seems to really beat around the bush a lot and then not even offer clear conclusions and solutions when he's done. He follows the leftist intellectual playbook of pointing out something terrible, waxing poetic of how we really need to stop that terrible thing, but then not actually offer any alternatives or ways to implement a solution. He had a post where he used Fidel Castro's death as imagery for how the today's state of Cuba is the death of revolutionary socialism, since Cuba today is an example of how even best case scenario socialism has rather pathetic results compared to the average capitalist democracy. But he didn't seem to actually seem to stop being a leftist or start advocating for democratic capitalism, instead the piece was just mourning socialism's death without actually abandoning socialism.
I might be misunderstanding him, but I'd place that entirely on him for not being more clear, I shouldn't have to do literary analysis on a political commentator.
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