ResoluteRaven
No bio...
User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
A repeat of the Spanish Flu seems unlikely to me given the particular circumstances that led to that strain disproportionately affecting young and healthy individuals i.e. an adaptation period among soldiers on the western front who were immunocompromised from extreme stress and injuries, in addition to close promixity and lack of hygiene. A more prototypical bad influenza pandemic is the 1957 Asian Flu outbreak, which is hardly a blip in the history books.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
people kept getting sanskritized and it was no longer Aryan in anything but name
Were the Aryans not the ones who brought Sanskrit to India in the first place? Or are you talking about attempts to diminish the influence of the Persian high culture of the Mughals?
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
Not Indian, but I grew up around enough of them to observe and ask about such matters.
1. It's possible for someone to be light-skinned enough that they are almost certainly North Indian or dark-skinned enough that they are almost certainly South Indian, but in between it's difficult to tell.
2. If they are from one of the communities that tend to migrate to the US I can do this pretty well e.g. Seetharaman is Tamil, Ravi is Telugu, Bose is Bengali, Jagtap is Marathi, Portuguese names are from Goa, English Christian names indicate someone is from Kerala, the aforementioned Singh and Patel, etc.
3. Among recent migrants, language and religion are probably the two main barriers between communities. For the second generation, religious differences may persist and there is some inertia around food (which correlates very strongly with North vs South), but ancestral language is no longer relevant and most folks just identify as Brown.
4. Absent any other information, not well at all.
5. If they have a surname I am familiar with in the Indian-American community I would guess that they are Brahmin and be right the majority of the time. Otherwise I would have no idea.
6. Discrimination, at least for things like who you are supposed to marry, is not really by geography, but by Jati, which is basically your particular endogamous community. The part of the caste system that Westerners are usually familiar with is Varna e.g. Brahmin, Kshatriya, and so on, and this defines the role that your Jati is supposed to play in society (priest, warrior, merchant, etc.). As an example, Iyers and Iyengars are both Tamil Brahmins, but they are separate Jati. Discrimination along other axes includes "people darker-skinned than me are inferior," "people from [other state] talk funny and eat weird food," and "[other religion]'s men are coming to steal and forcibly convert our women." Basically none of these differences matter to second generation immigrants except for the rare few who let their parents arrange a marriage or are devoutly religious (usually Muslim).
7. I can tell if their native language is North or South Indian, but usually not more than that. I can probably distinguish North Indian languages like Gujarati, Hindi, and Bengali by hearing better than I could those same accents in English.
8. If it's a group of international students playing cricket on the college quad, they probably all came from the same state and are of similar caste backgrounds. Among the second generation this may still happen if it's a group of friends who all grew up together because their parents were in the former sort of group and moved to the same part of the US (I know a lot of Telugus from Northern Virginia, for instance), but they won't go out of their way to exclude others on those lines.
9. The communities I'm familiar with basically have no lower-caste people in them at all, at least if we're talking about Dalits and such, so it's hard to tell.
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
While I think Bryan Caplan, Noah Smith, and co are correct that with reasonable economic policies India could climb above the deepest rungs of poverty i.e. no more shitting in the street, basic literacy, and an end to chronic child malnutrition, and that this is something the rest of the world ought to encourage and celebrate, they are far too bullish on its long-term convergence with industrialized nations.
Caplan's last point in particular strikes me as either willfully ignorant or completely insane:
Even if you have cultural fears about immigrants in general, what exactly is culturally objectionable about Indians? I live in one of top centers of Indian migration in the United States, and no one here even claims that they’re clinging to their native culture of crazy driving and rampant littering. They’re definitely not unleashing stray cattle on us. Yes, I know Indian Americans are self-selected from high castes and top schools. But after ten days in India, I confidently declare that the children of randomly-selected Indians would do well here. Like the Indians who are already here, they’d adopt almost everything good about modern U.S. culture, while retaining the strong family values that Americans have been foolishly forgetting.
First off, this man has apparently never told an Indian Uber driver that he's in a hurry to get to the airport. And as a supporter of elite Indian immigration (we can certainly quibble on what "elite" means, since that's really the crux of the issue here), I must strenously oppose the claim that we can just import randomly-selected(?!) people from any country and expect a good outcome, economic, cultural, or otherwise. We in fact have a pretty good idea of what importing random Indians looks like, in the form of Guyana and Trinidad, and it isn't pretty.
As for North Korea, I think the fact that in their current state they are still able to build and test nuclear missiles and field an impressive IMO team, among other achievements, is a testament to the inherent biocapital of the Korean people, and something we don't see in other nations with similar regimes like Eritrea or Turkmenistan. With nations as with individuals, you may sabotage someone with the potential to be intelligent and successful by starving them as a child or hitting them in the head with a hammer, but I have yet to the see the opposite.
ResoluteRaven
6d ago
I found it notable that a Mexican corrido has already been written about him.
ResoluteRaven
6d ago
I think there is a distinction to be made between the Asian work model as institutionalized through a network of cram schools, tiger parents, and autistic focus on maximizing a small set of quanitifiable parameters, and the more generalized immigrant striver mindset that can be observed in everyone from Mexicans to Nigerians and is probably closer to what Vivek was trying to articulate. The former is almost always unhealthy, while the latter combination of grit, frugality, and focus on education and getting a good job seems to me like a much more reasonable thing to promote. Of course, the descendants of immigrants will eventually regress to the mean, and despite the fact that their parents and grandparents would describe this as "becoming lazy Americans," it is really at this point that it becomes more relevant what their origins are.
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
I think your peer group in childhood and adolescence plays a greater role in who you are attracted to than your own or your parent's race, though perhaps with some weighting according to the hierarchy observed anecdotally and in the OkCupid dataset i.e. East Asian women and White men being considered slightly more attractive by everyone. Looking at the edge cases, none of the Asian adoptees I knew who grew up in White supermajority communities or the single digit number of Black students who attended my elite high school seemed romantically interested in their co-ethnics.
There is a confounding factor here in many cases though, which is that the kind of person likely to move to an ethnically diverse community or one where they will be a tiny minority is likely higher in openess to experience to begin with, which would correlate with a willingness to date or marry outside their race. To the extent that this trait is heritable they will pass it on to their children who grow up in such an environment.
ResoluteRaven
8d ago
I think it's worthwhile to be introspective about what you like and why, but trying to shame other people into being attracted to someone they're not, as some black and trans progressives do, is worse than useless.
ResoluteRaven
8d ago
Your physical security would actually be substantially impacted - just go look at what happens to crime rates in areas with high levels of immigration.
Areas with high concentrations of Indian tech workers in California or the northeast don't seem particularly prone to crime. I can't speak to whether there's more white collar crime going on, but that isn't particularly relevant to physical safety. Canada may be a different story, but they have a separate set of (idiotic) policies and problems they spawned.
Your income would actually be substantially lower in real terms, because you've just introduced hundreds of millions of competitors for your labour.
human prosperity and flourishing is not particularly advanced by having a gigantic population of incompetent and low-human capital peasants whose consumption of food, medical services and housing pumps up the GDP while suppressing wages.
For these immigrants to be meaningful competitors for the labor of anyone posting here, they would presumably have to be highly-skilled and therefore not incompetent and low human capital. I don't see how they could be both.
ResoluteRaven
8d ago
This analysis assumes that there is a single Indian population whose traits are normally distributed, but it seems pretty clear that there are in fact dozens of genetically and culturally distinct subpopulations that differ in average g and h by at least 1 or 2 SD's. This plays havoc with any tail-end estimates and there is an unfortunate lack of data in this area.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
Americans (of any non-indian ethnicity) lose the biological competition regardless of whether intermarriage occurs 100%, 50%, or 0%. Because Indian genes will still make up 99% of India if +200mil were dropped in America.
Why should it matter to us how many total Indians there are in the world? There could be two or three billion people on the subcontinent and they would still be living in miserable squalor and unable to influence global affairs. Countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia have populations in the hundreds of millions and can be freely ignored or bullied by more powerful states a fraction of their size.
If this continues, the genes of that organism will go extinct. Their genes are reduced by half per iteration.
Given the fact that the urban areas where such people tend to live are fertility shredders, the proportion of Asian ancestry in their descendants will be lower than you might expect (cf. the mixed urban population of the Roman empire left hardly any genetic trace in modern Italians and yet they did leave behind many cultural and literary works of value).
Humans did not evolve to be cloned, they evolved to live in somewhat small bands where 3rd-4th degree cousin marriage was common.
That is true, and yet I am still different from a Papuan tribesman not simply by culture or upbringing, but because my ancestors underwent thousands of years of genetic pacification and adaptation to living in settled agricultural communities with higher population densities. The software may not yet be out of beta, but I have no desire to scrap it all and return to the jungle. Thankfully, there are no countries with millions of hunter-gatherers for mindkilled liberals to suggest we take in, but if there were I would oppose it in the strongest terms.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
Let's say that if we import 200 million Indians, our economy would be the best in the world forever. If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success.
This would only be true if Indian immigrants and their descendants never married into the existing American population and remained a culturally and genetically distinct population indefinitely, which is clearly not the case. The children of elite Indian immigrants marry their White, Jewish, and East Asian peers all the time and have children who are about as Indian as Japanese curry powder. There are other countries where this is not so e.g. the UK where British-born Indian Muslims and Pakistanis seem to often get arranged marriages with peasant girls from back home, leaving their children in a perpetually unassimilated state, but even the few arranged marriages I know of in the US occur between two second generation immigrants who themselves are detached from the social networks that would allow them to continue the practice.
Is a person who has mixed-race children less biologically successful than one who has an equal number of children of the same race? From the perspective of a single gene perhaps, but from that point of view the optimal outcome would be to field an army of clones rather than engaging in sexual reproduction at all. I'm reminded of Roman naming conventions here, to wit: "The ideal Roman family was, in effect, one Appius Claudius after the next, each one quite a lot like his father, on and on forever." With all due respect to the Romans, who I, like any man, remember fondly at least once per day, the mere thought of such stultifying monotony makes me want to fedpost.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
I mean, when the alternative is that your society ceases to exist, none of these sound like particularly big tradeoffs to me. One more meta-level consideration is the balance between different family structures, with the nuclear family probably reducing fertility rates relative to more communitarian/multi-generational systems, but perhaps producing a more independent-minded and creative citizenry.
The structure of PMC families as they exist in the US nowadays in particular i.e. move far away from home at 18, get married late and have one or two children, either spend a lot of money on childcare services or expend a lot of time and energy as a helicopter parent, your children have minimal exposure to extended relatives growing up, etc. seems designed to maximize the expense of raising children (e.g. grandparents are too old or far away, can't usually ask your neighbor to watch all the kids for the day for free) while minimizing the childcare experience of prospective parents (e.g. no more leaving 10 year olds alone at home to watch their younger siblings, if they even have any). Imagine throwing someone who had never even ridden in a car before behind the wheel on the highway; all the talk in the world about the wonders of car ownership would do little to soothe their anxiety.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
I don't see why we can't allow for the existence of states founded on different principles, whether they be nation-states, empires, theocracies, multiethnic city-states, or transhumanist online network states. Let Europe reassert the primacy of blood and soil if they have the stomach for it. Let Arabs or Turks reform the Caliphate if they can. Let wealthy elites carve out little Singapores of their own in Africa and Latin America. And let America be the un-nation whose tradition is to oppose tradition. If one of these forms is so much better than the others then the choice between them will be as obvious in the end as the choice between East and West Berlin. Online nationalists may say it's already so as they rush to post comparisons of downtown SF and some medieval village in Germany, but the smartest and most ambitious Europeans are still flocking to the former, so I would say the outcome is still uncertain.
As for Chinese immigrants specifically, I'll just point out that one notable Cold War blunder was the FBI's mistreatment and detention of Qian Xuesen under false allegations of being a communist agent, which led to his actual defection and establishment of the Chinese rocketry and ballistic missile program. It has also always baffled me that Iran hasn't been able to build nuclear weapons, despite the fact that I've met enough brilliant Iranian graduate students that I could probably put together a nuclear program of my own. The answer as near as I can tell is, apart from Israeli and American sabotage, that all the Iranians smart enough to build an atomic bomb simply hate the government and would rather live literally anywhere else. Sending such people back home to be drafted or tortured into making WMDs would be a massive self-own.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Anti-Indian sentiment within the Anglosphere seems mostly confined to Canada and the UK, increasing in the former noticeably in the last few years because of the enormous ongoing immigration wave and diplomatic disputes over the relict Khalistan movement-in-exile. Indian-Americans are a cut above most other immigrant groups as far as education, income, and general "merit" go, even compared to Indians in other countries, so they don't tend to draw a lot of flak. Perhaps if India achieves a similar global status as China, Indians here will go from being ignored all the time to occasionally being harassed due to geopolitical events before being ignored again.
Is the whole race and dating thing really that fucked?
In the last few years the gender imbalances in interracial relationships seem to have evened out a bit in the US, at least with respect to Asians. I assume the increased prominence of Korean music and pop culture around the world had something to do with this. It will probably take popular perceptions a while to catch up and the stereotypes that were validated by the old OkCupid data are still alive and well, usually played for laughs but sometimes tinged with real resentment, particularly from the groups at the bottom of the totem pole i.e. Asian men and Black women.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
At the end of the day, the number of Americans with deep (white) nationalist convictions is much smaller than the number that will gravitate towards arguments couched in blood and soil because they are angry about something else, usually crime, and can be placated by increased policing and a reduction in public disorder, regardless of the actual demographics of their community. Even if Trump succeeds at deporting 15 million illegal immigrants and ending birthright citizenship, which is unlikely to say the least, that still leaves tens of millions of legal immigrants, many of whom have just started voting for Republican candidates because of the Democrats' mishandling of identity politics and will be key to winning future elections.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
She was raised Hindu. You can't convert to Hinduism. No Indian would be able to explain what that even means.
Gabbard has no Indian ancestry and her mother does not appear to have known anything about Hinduism prior to moving to Hawaii and getting involved with the Hare Krishna sect there, being herself a white American from Indiana. For whatever reason, this rather unorthodox religious background did not seem to bother the Hindu community in the US, who claimed Tulsi as one of their own when she was first elected. Not that I would fault anyone for believing her family aren't real Hindus, but certainly it was also possible to convert to Hinduism in the past, otherwise Southeast Asia wouldn't be full of beautiful Hindu temples.
That aside, what's her reason for opposing gay marriage? I know Christians and Muslims have a scriptural disgust for it. I'd like to know where young Tulsi's strong opposition to it comes from.
Her father is a conservative Catholic whose only claim to fame has been being stridently opposed to gay marriage for the past 30 years.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The average height in the US has fallen over the past several decades due to immigration, but I know of no mechanism by which the gender height gap could be closing except in cases where girls start off more malnourished than boys because of parental favoritism, as they do in a few of the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
In addition to what others have pointed out downthread with respect to food, crime, relative status, etc. another thing I've noticed is that people in developing countries are generally free from most of the mental health issues that plague North Americans, and often have a refreshing combination of optimism due to recent economic improvements and a sort of Daoist willingness to go with the flow however things turn out i.e. "Isn't it great we have all these shiny new cars and computers? Maybe it will all go to shit someday but we've dealt with that before and we'll get through it like we always do." I'm not sure if the latter is just a poor people thing or a non-Western country thing, but I suppose we'd have to take a closer look at places like Japan, which has been rich for a while now, to find out.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I'm a bit confused by what you mean here, unless you're using a very specific definition of meetup. You would presumably still have to ask out any girls you met at such an event yourself, just as you would those you meet at work/school/etc. and you're not really the one calling the shots or setting things up in those situations either. If you only want to get a girlfriend by cold approaching women in the street or at bars and clubs, that seems like an unnecessary imposition on yourself and one that will make your life infinitely harder, but I wish you the best of luck.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
For a moment I thought Poland was being flooded by Belarusian citizens fleeing Lukashenko's government and was wondering why they were complaining about what was clearly some divine plan to make Poland great again by heaping ruin on its neighbors one by one and rejuvenating the Polish population with millions of their Slavic brethren, but I see now that these are in fact the usual migrants.
The way I see it, we can group people who want to move to a new country into three main categories: highly-skilled individuals that basically everyone agrees should be let in, people fleeing active warzones that a majority (albeit a smaller one) agrees should be let in for humanitarian reasons, and then economic migrants who are neither highly-skilled nor in imminent danger but just happen to live in poor places and would rather move someplace better (you probably want a few of these people around to do certain low-skill jobs). The latter group is by far the largest and is what causes the most problems, since if allowed to move freely with open borders they will demographically swamp your population in a way the first two groups will not.
Since any reasonable immigration policy would be able to distinguish between "real" and "fake" refugees, I support maintaining a list of "ongoing conflicts from which people fleeing may claim asylum" (most likely at the national level, allowing for variation depending on financial ability and local tolerances) and deporting anyone who can't prove they are from one of those places, ideally in an interview with some other former refugee from that area hired to screen them and who would be justifiably mad at e.g. some Nigerian trying to pass themselves off as a Syrian. Perhaps some version of this has been tried locally in the past, but clearly not at a scale commensurate with the challenges we face nowadays.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I don't think anyone could have ended up posting here without being a reflexive contrarian by nature. When I was younger, if you told me that the sky was blue I would pull out a physics book and start arguing with you about Rayleigh scattering and about the arbitrary definition of colors with respect to wavelengths of light. At a certain point it just becomes an inconvenience when you get nerdsniped by every offhand remark that people around you make and find yourself looking up rebuttals in the wee hours of the night.
Land acknowledgements are, of course, stupid, and it's fine to tell people that you think that, but I find the idea of waiting around hoping someone gives you an excuse to verbally destroy them vaguely distasteful, in the same way I would the idea of, for instance, an MMA fighter who went through life hoping someone tries to mug him so he has a reason to beat them up.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
If you buy loose-leaf tea I would suggest you store it in a vacuum-sealed container like this one. Oolong tea is my favorite, particularly the stuff grown at higher elevations (usually called something like "high mountain tea"), but I get it when I travel to Asia or from friends and family, so I don't know what it costs to order online or where else they sell it. If you want something a bit different you can get some Kirkland brand green tea and cold-steep it in the fridge overnight for a refreshing drink the next day, and if you ever want something caffeine-free you can try barley tea (although if I remember right this was an acquired taste for me).
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Answering the question as stated, though perhaps not as intended, the vast majority of the people in the world have seen substantial improvements in their material standard of living over the past two decades. In some places that might just mean going from being desperately poor, sick, and starving, to being desperately poor, malnourished, and overworked, but China went from being a source of cheap plastic knockoffs to a maker of electric cars and smartphones on par with anything Western companies can produce, there's now high-speed rail in Indonesia, Morocco, and Uzbekistan, and countries like Malaysia and Poland have more or less converged with the developed economies.
Limiting ourselves to the US, Gwern has a good writeup on the subject, though it's pre-pandemic and so misses things like anti-obesity drugs. Obviously nothing on the scale of first getting access to cars or the internet, but that's a pretty high bar to expect to clear every generation, and even then there's a decent chance AI has you covered in that department. In the end though, whether we're born into a time of progress or decline (or material progress coupled with moral decline, or any combination thereof) is never under our control to begin with, so it's just something we have to learn how to accept and live with, whichever way the dice roll.
No one is arguing that the differences between capitalist and communist countries are biological in origin. That the gaps in wealth between North and South Korea or East and West Germany are explained by economic policies alone is self-evident. That does not mean that biological and cultural differences don't exist or matter.
Looking at communist countries alone we can see the difference between those with high human capital (East Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea), which are able to maintain an orderly society with advanced weapons manufacturing and scientific research and pose a credible military threat to their neighbors, and those with lower human capital (Angola, Benin, Cambodia, Ethiopia), which are a threat to no one but their own miserable inhabitants.
More options
Context Copy link