Shiro
12d ago
I see, that sounds much more reasonable, apologies for misunderstanding.
I still can't quite get behind the idea due to details that I won't bother explaining too much (the most important one being that I would hate having "a path" laid out to me, especially if it was my father's), but I can certainly understand why someone could think like you. Either way, thanks for explaining!
Shiro
12d ago
How can you not select for efficiency and not be defeated by an enemy that selects for efficiency unless we all agree to not be efficient which is a classic case of a molochian trap? Unless you don't think being defeated in the long-term is a big deal?
Maybe you think it would be "efficient enough" I guess?
I replied to @erwgv3g34 that had a similar way of thinking and would also be interested to read what you've to say to that if you're willing. In regards to "children of doctors becoming doctors" especifically, how would that work out over generations? Would families of doctors only be allowed to marry other doctors? If the family of doctors married to a family of actors should the kid be able to choose between becoming a doctor and an actor? Would the children of mixed occupation families really be that good in either of their "original" occupations?
Even if we assume that over a long period of term those families wouldn't potentially stagnate or atrophy due to progressive genetic mutation and lack of competition/adversity, it still seems like either a very rigid system (families of a given occupation can only marry their offspring to families of other similar occupations) or a looser system that I would question the efficiency (families, even if only in "high prestige" positions, could mix with not necessarily similar occupations like doctors and actors which may not bring out some of the best doctors or actors especially in the long-term). I'm not sure making the process of selection easier would be a good thing when balanced with my perceived negatives of this system.
It's like, eugenic and functional enough but prone to be overthrown by a system that ensures long-term improvement more assuredly?
Okay, I think I understand the point now, but what I find to be the real issue is that if we were completely honest there's no need for "seventeen fucking years" to determine stuff like who should go to what college and etc. We can determine who is suited for what job with much simpler metrics like IQ, OCEAN personality traits, etc. The whole problem of inefficiency in the current "meritocratic" rat-race is that we lie by saying that "everyone can potentially become anything if they work hard enough for it", therefore subsidizing for example teaching non-basic math to kids that have neither interest or talent for it, making them also suffer through the process. We currently think of "meritocracy" as "giving everyone equal opportunities to compete" rather than "giving those that stand a chance opportunities to compete", the latter being much more efficient and still a "meritocracy" to me.
There's much better aptitude tests we could create if we were willing to throw out of the window two very important principles in the western hemisphere, namely "Everyone is equal" and "Hard work is more important than natural talent". They're very bitter pills to swallow though so I guess we just don't. The current education system is a very long, inefficient and expensive (but "fair") aptitude test, I agree on that.
Competition for resources or general adversity are the main factors that drives improvement not only in economy but in natural evolution too as far as I understand it (improvement in evolution being something like maximizing reproduction/survival efficiency in a given enviroment), a hereditary system removes or undermines those two factors and seems prone to stagnation/atrophy in the long-term.
If you told me then that we would make this "aristocratic caste" a large enough part of the population that it would still allow plenty of competition within it for higher paying positions, I would agree with you that it would be a better system than we've today but it would still feel like "meritocracy" to me, as long as "new aristocratic families" could join the club if they were more fit to compete rather than an "old aristocratic family" that somehow had a downturn in the metrics for consecutive generations. You would also have to ban marriage outside of the "caste" I guess which again also means you need it to be large enough to have enough genetic diversity.
So, on my part I conclude that hereditarism is perhaps a short-term improvement in efficiency but long-term decline in efficiency if we want to maximize results/achievements. Would be interested to see what you think of my logic here.
the consequence of popular meritocracy, which is one of the worst inventions of all time
I usually understand the motivation behind people's opinions here even if I don't agree with it, however I'm utterly lost on this one. Other than fertility dropping, is there any other reasons you're so negative about meritocracy?
Safety-wise? As far as my parents and older people tell me, yes. Economy-wise? Not really, because the military dictatorship still consisted of a bunch of midwits. Good warriors aren't necessarily good kings.
They were still doing pretty okay until the 1973 oil crisis though (that fucked up the economy).
You would need something more like a deeply patriotic high IQ aristocracy with a good ideology for the country to not only function but substantially improve over time...more or less a return to Monarchy or a Technocracy imo. Every improvement would come with great sacrifice though, such is life ever since we were unicellular organisms.
As someone that lives in Brazil I wouldn't wish the world to become more like it at all. Yes we somehow manage to go on and not utterly fail (we still fail) at civilization like certain places in Africa or Middle East (for now, because dysgenic trends also keep going on here), but it involves an insane level of subsidy to lower IQ groups and therefore high taxation that lowers life quality for the middle and upper middle class. It's easy to see how deep the subsidizing goes in Brazil because we've a visible ethnic spectrum going from North-to-South (less euro/more euro), and this is the result (the ridiculous mere 10% return to São Paulo is partially because of how our tax system works but you get the idea, you should expect less than half of what your group pays to return to you, sometimes even as low as 25% or 10%, some northern states literally turn into Africa if we stop sending them free money).
This free money subsidy is repaid with crime, hate, jealousy, etc. I severely doubt that by this point any lower IQ group will simply come to accept that they're getting a bad deal in life because of biological determinism rather than a conspiracy of some other groups keeping them down, even whites aren't that different in this aspect when it comes to the "Jewish Question". No group wants to accept a perceived "inferiority" unless reality kicks them in the face as it happened during the colonization period.
Brazil (especially some parts of it) could be a much better place if we dropped democracy and were tough on crime in similar style to Singapore or El Salvador, along with a new moral system that stops the "everyone is equal" noble lie and lowering the amount of subsidy we engage in, but until then it's nightmare fuel honestly.
At the very least you should assume that if the average IQ decreases, even if assertive mating preserves higher IQ groups, it's a society with a big IQ-gap which will create huge inequality and therefore make democracy pretty much non-viable in the way we do it now (I can see how decentralized democracy could still work but that's a different topic).
True, a substantial portion of the country isn't normally suitable for agriculture but land still has plenty of theoretical value as we go into a future where resources/energy rather than intelligence will be the economic limiter. There's plenty of sun shining in those arid places which you can use to gather solar energy like China is trying to, and although I'm not very knowledgeable in this subject, it seems we cultivate even in not-optimal land through chemical fertilizers and GM crops, not to mention cattle raising or mining. It's not as good as some other countries but vast land is rarely a bad thing to have, I'm always surprised to learn how much fighting there is/was for small pieces of land in other continents. American countries in general (including USA) probably would never be as big as they're if they had a long history of civilizations fighting each other like Europe/Asia.
Shiro
19d ago
I don't understand, how is it a stretch? It seems Brazil is in the top 10 countries with most natural resources given the amount of land it has, and tropical weather is good for agriculture even if hard to live/maintain roads/etc. Maybe I'm missing something but yeah? Please explain?
Yeah, sometimes I daydream about a nonsensical timeline where we gave more power to the Imperial Family rather than take it away from them at all. A completely unrealistic timeline where the Emperor lead us into a civil war and stops the formation of a republic, perhaps even going back to absolutism.
Our last Emperor was a good man but the problem with "good men" is that they cannot be "great men" at the same time given accomplishing "great" things often involve at least some amount of sacrifice, pain and suffering. He said something along the lines of "Not wanting to spill more brazilian blood to keep the throne", but I wonder if he would change his mind knowing the circumstances of today.
I like "freedom of speech" because I enjoy being able to publicly debate certain ideas like the above in an attempt to understand and improve things, but if it wasn't for that I would probably prefer to live in China than most countries in The West at this point (to my younger self surprise), this late-stage of democracy turning into tyranny feels like living in asylum where everyone is demented by propaganda and you are supposed to pretend everything is normal or else be labeled "anti-whatever". Everything turns political.
My problem with the recent turn of events is that given democracy select for the most psychopathic narcissistic liars out there, when they get absolute power they generally don't really have a mindset of trying to build-up a nation, or perhaps it's often this way in Latin America because as a bunch of failed countries of immigrants there isn't a deep sense of patriotism like the Chinese seem to have. America seem to have gained patriotism through their collective great actions in the last centuries which Latin America obviously doesn't share.
If Lula, Alexandre and so on gave me any hope that we would be more like China and less like Venezuela, I wouldn't lose sleep over it, perhaps even welcome it because then a bunch of corrupt-but-technical-enough people would be in power and we could all stop pretending that the opinions of an uneducated 83 IQ population can do a better job, but they seem fully committed to become Venezuela rather than China and...it's just tiresome.
Perhaps China is just really bruteforcing everything because of higher IQ but I do wonder whether there's more factors than nationalism and IQ for this sort of "Totalitarian Technocracy" they seem to have, rather than the "We hate our people and want them to starve" Venezuelan/Soviet model. Any potential insights on that would be welcome.
I'm a brazilian in his 20's. Here's my long-winded commentary on this:
If studying Latin America can help on anything, it's to highlight the pitfalls of "democracy" and everything that was assumed to be universally true by The Enlightenment and still taken as self-evident by some of us today.
Brazil is a straight-up failed state. Despite being blessed with good weather, natural resources, lack of natural disasters due to its position among the tectonic plates, lots of land, large population and since 1985 a "democracy" (that is now dying), it consistently manages to fail in becoming relevant. This deeply troubles many brazilians, including me as a young kid, because as reflected in the joke "Brazil is the country of the future and it'll always be", we look at ourselves and forever wonder "Why aren't we a first-world country?"
There's many crappy usual explanations for why we failed: Colonialization Past, American Imperialism, "Corrupt culture" inherited from the portuguese, Systemic Racism, etc. However the more you look into it, the more you realize that none of those are the real reason. If there was a point where you can point to in Brazil's history and say "only downhill from here", it's the "Proclamation of The Brazilian Republic".
I'm not a monarchist, I believe that in the right conditions democracy (ideally a more decentralized system of government) wins over more centralized systems like monarchies or dictatorships by avoiding the issue that "Philosopher Kings" are impractical, rare and mortal. However it probably really starts there, with the army, the oligarchic farmers and the intelligentsia all supporting getting rid of the Emperor (which had some moderating power although in a constitutional monarchy), the Emperor in turn does something rather uncommon in history (due to many reasons but mostly being tired of "The Paraguayan War" and lacking greed for power) and instantly surrenders the throne even though he had not only the popular support but also the support of the navy.
It's extra funny to me that this moment is still praised today given not only the current state of the country, but also the countless coups that occurred after that, the fact that this was just after and in OPPOSITION to Princess Isabel signing a law abolishing slavery, and better of all that Deodoro da Fonseca (the man who declared The Republic), which by his letters just before the "revolution" normally supported the monarchy, acted in such a way out of jealousy due to rumors that the Emperor had promoted his romantic rival instead of him. That absolute clown-show is taught to us as something we should praise, because it's "democracy" and democracy is inherently good regardless of any result that it brings, including the country becoming significantly worse.
Fast-forward to today and we can see a continuation of the shitshow that this country has been since it stopped being a monarchy, casually switching through history between failed republic and tyranny, with the help of science and history we also have a much better answer for why we fail to become a better country.
"Free Speech" is used by socialists and all kinds of demagogues to fool a 83 IQ poor population that they'll "solve all issues" as long as you give them power, elections select for the opposite it's supposed to select for and the consistent winners are often the most psychopathic greedy liars you can imagine (which eventually result in Venezuela, at least kings were a glorious coinflip), and due to the gap in IQ between people of different ancestries, inequality raises and creates extra social tension/division which fuels political polarization and justification of authoritarian behavior like what Alexandre de Moraes does. It also doesn't help that women as a group consistently vote for whoever tell them nice things (even if by lying) and are the biggest supporters of censoring what they consider "mean people". Brazil is ethnically, politically and economically divided through a spectrum of "North to South", which "coincides" with places where there was recent euro mass immigration and places where there wasn't as many. The Northern regions of course massively supports the people behind all the censorship and it was a key source of votes to them winning the elections through the years (and packing the Supreme Court in the same strategy that Venezuela used and the Democrats want to use in USA too). Countless brazilians right now, in the X platform itself, are celebrating this "Great Nationalistic and Socialist Act" by Alexandre de Moraes striking down an "Evil Right-wing White Billionaire". I don't like Bolsonaro but the whole "he's about to start a coup" was of course, as almost anything in mainstream media, a strawman. I think Bolsonaro actually sort of did want to start a military coup but he and most behind the scenes knew it was impossible because he had little institutional power, the unique side that could realistically start a coup (and ARE STARTING IT) were the socialists that have almost every institution packed with their own tribe by this point.
Therefore, as Padme from Star Wars once correctly said: "So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause."
Tyranny is eventually welcome with open arms by democracy, or at least the current way we "practice" democracy. Do not assume the people aren't complicit with this until it starts to REALLY hurt them, many Venezuelans that came as refuges to Brazil still believe Hugo Chavez was "good for the country", they're often just "confused and indignant" of how things eventually went wrong with Maduro and so on.
I used to despair that not only we're losing democracy, but The West in general is also trending in a similar way although slower. The entire western hemisphere seems to be becoming like Brazil, bit by bit, all sort of places that I used to admire in North America and Europe gradually resembles me of my own country. There's soon gonna be no champion of Free Speech, Small Government and so on in the global stage.
Totalitarianism, A.I Automation, Populational Collapse and Genetic Engineering. What a great combination of incoming catastrophes, I truly think we're entering a new global "dark age". Some still try to clumsily "go back", "restore tradition" and so on, but I ask of you, can we stop this foolish nonsense?
Voting for those that "want to go back" may be a good stopgap, the practical way of delaying the incoming stuff, but those "traditions", "ideals" and so on, they've ultimately got us here. I believe it's a natural progression. The slave morality of Christianity (which modern christians need to creatively reinterpret as to not fall in contradiction given Jesus didn't seem to like rich/successful people just like their average political enemy doesn't), the "Free Speech" that was used by all kinds of destructive people to subvert an entire hemisphere by this point and prepare it for complete Tyranny (because we found out that the average population has little resistance to mass propaganda and aren't as much agents of reason as they're agents of faith), the focus on "empathy"/"morality" as opposed in raw intelligence/IQ (which seems to be the most consistent metric by which societies seem to become "better"/"civilized" from economy, politics to general social cohesion and game theory cooperation).
I believe we're invited to what I consider the "True End of Enlightenment" and the epitome of the consequences of the French Revolution. I believe we're invited to accept the tragic incoming consequences of the nice-sounding beliefs that began to be preached by then, and tear it all down as we contemplate what went wrong.
I believe we need a new system of values, a new political ideology, and a new set of mythos (historical or fictional) to base ourselves in.
It's the Death of God AND Enlightenment. We've killed both, or perhaps we just found out both of their tombs empty when we inched closer to see their full glory. Perhaps we were just delusional to believe in them in the first place.
False promises of "the way" to paradise.
If Vietnam stopped being communist at any point I would eagerly invest there as long as AI hasn't made human intelligence mostly pointless, they have really good PISA scores for their current level of income/education investment and a good rank in math olympiads.
Lynn's data on Vietnam gave it a low IQ score but it was also noted by him that it didn't match up with the academical achievements, there's something weird about the data, perhaps it's the case of heterogenous population like in Latin America. I've read that there's an ethnical difference between North and South Vietnam but I'm not knowledgeable about the topic.
Argentina is also an interesting option if they can stop being so socialistic for a long period of time. Eastern europe also seems like it may shine if it can keep avoiding mass immigration there.
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