puntifex
8mo ago
Serious question - does it actually matter to you, assuming that you yourself are intelligent?
What does the existence of an urban underclass mean to you if you yourself are intelligent, choose an intelligent wife, and have intelligent kids?
Why do other people who have nothing to do with you besides the color of their skin have to do with you, provided that the world is AT LEAST colorblind (and to be quite honest, the world is a lot more favorable than colorblind to talented black kids right now)?
puntifex
10mo ago
That feels impossible. From a quick google:
Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam — two individuals who passed down a portion of their genomes to the vast expanse of humanity — are known as our most recent common ancestors, or MRCAs. But many aspects of their existence, including when they lived, are shrouded in mystery.
Now, a study led by the Stanford University School of Medicine indicates the two roughly overlapped during evolutionary time: The man lived between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, and the woman lived between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.
I think the ~5k-15k number is a theoretical number that one comes up with if one ignores selection, geographical barriers, and anything else that makes mating not some kind of random walk.
puntifex
10mo ago
I think that there are many non-genetic explanations, many of which which exacerbate genetic explanations (for example, generous welfare policies enabling dysgenic selection).
If you don't believe in HBD, may I ask you - do you believe in HBD anywhere? Do you think all 'races' do not differ in height (I am aware of the effect of diet - such as many East Asian countries gaining several inches of average height in the last two generations). Do you think there is no West African advantage in sprinting, or East African advantage in distance running? If not, how do you explain the dominance of people from various 'races' in certain sports? If so, why do you think group differences can only be possible outside of cognition?
Yes, I believe in HBD. I'd really rather not think about it - because intragroup differences are often much larger than inter-group differences. One of the smartest kids I knew growing up was Black. One of the best athletes was Indian. But none of that changes what I see as overwhelming evidence for differences between 'races' (and I understand the fuzziness of the word). The only two defenses I've seen against HBD are "many of the people who've done this research are bad people with bad motives, who maybe use bad methods sometimes", and "hey if you believe this, we're going to tell everyone you're an odious racist".
puntifex
10mo ago
I wasn't actually even trying to use an example where genetics is the main difference. My point was simply that we should understand that disproportionate representation can come about through other reasons than 'racism'. I agree that culture is a big part of it. If kids in Asia didn't spend so much time studying for various exams and more time playing basketball, there'd probably be more basketball talent produced (though note that I'm saying nothing about proportionality).
Having said that, I do think genetics is a part of it though. Other countries are also crazy about basketball - like, say, the Philippines, and you don't see a mass influx of Philippine basketball talent into the NBA every year. I think fast twitch muscles also help in playing defense, for example. Height also helps one be good at basketball, and I'm not sure how many 6'7 Asian dudes there are.
puntifex
10mo ago
I don't disagree! You should read my question as a wistful "why can't we be treat things that non-black Americans do disproportionately well at like we treat things black Americans disproportionately excel at"?
Or, why can't we strive to change our institutions to be less racist (albeit in the opposite direction from what everyone thinks)?
puntifex
10mo ago
I don't know enough about all the points to literally refute every one, but everything I can understand about what's written here is almost complete nonsense.
The very first thing:
Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn't die out
Almost all experts agree that people were in North America 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. There is some evidence that this may have happened even significantly earlier. That someone could claim that ~7000 years would be enough for everyone currently on earth to share an ancestor is self-evidently completely nonsensical.
puntifex
10mo ago
Why can't it be like something like the NBA - where EVERYONE can see that certain groups are vastly over- or under-represented, and it's still understood to be almost completely based on merit?
puntifex
10mo ago
but it's terrible political tool in practice. For one, its radioactive and attracts a high proportion of radioactive supporters.
Because the media portrays anyone who gives the slightest whiff of agreeing with these ideas as being practically indistinguishable from from Nazis. So naturally the only people who talk about agreeing with this stuff are people who don't care about being called literal Nazis.
But really, everyone kinda understands HBD already. It's just that you're not allowed to talk about it. The hundreds of millions of people who watch the NBA or NFL and note the lack of, say, Indians or Chinese, nonetheless don't loudly complain that the NBA must be anti-Indian or anti-Chinese.
puntifex
10mo ago
I'm going to go kinda hard on your comment, not because I didn't wish many of the ideas were true, but because the evidence against them is so overwhelming.
Assuming no genetic racial variance in relevant traits, and assuming no other policy or social interventions of any kind
There has been social interventions - in pro-'oppressed' direction. Affirmative action, government transfers have been helping black families for decades. Yet by many metrics blacks in America are doing worse than they were in the 1950s.
You might also find instructive the experience of the Chinese attempt in the cultural revolution to neutralize richer / more well-educated families by seizing their wealth, or outright jailing and even killing them. Yet just a few decades later, the same surnames who had wealth and status before found themselves overrepresented at the top of society.
[Poverty, minority status, poor education] stick. As someone who came over as a poor immigrant and lived in areas with other poor immigrants - but nonetheless those kids stayed out of trouble, all went to colleges (many 'elite' ones), and are doing extremely well. Of course we were not a random sample - we were all kids who came over with parents who were attending graduate school in the US. But poverty by itself need not. It might tend to stick if the poverty were caused by attributes that were antithetical to the accumulation of wealth - poor impulse control, criminality, laziness.
If minority status is such a burden, why do Jews do so well economically almost everywhere around the world? I would argue that history has been even less kind to the Jews than to African-Americans, yet I don't think they form a permanent underclass in, say, Germany? Similarly, why do Chinese emigres tend to academically and economically dominate in most of the countries they emigrate to?
Regarding the rest of your post - I will agree that racism is keeping back many black American families. Where I DISAGREE is that most of this racism comes from the left, largely via the bigotry of low expectations.
I think you and I can agree that raising children in married, two-parent families is by far the best for them. Are you familiar with the black out-of-wedlock birthrate in America? Over 70% of black kids born in America are to unmarried women. Mostly, people don't talk about this, as it's considered impolite. But every time I've heard of this mentioned as a problem it was by people who were either conservative, or prefaced it first apologizing that they "didn't mean to echo conservative talking points". In other words, it's not conservatives that have put together the system of generous welfare benefits that makes all this possible.
As another example - look at education. I think you and I can agree that disruptive learning environments can absolutely fuck over a lot of kids and significantly impact their chances at a well-paying job in the future. And nothing is more disruptive than kids beating the shit out of others (or even you!) in school. Yet, because the perpetrators are also black, American educators are loathe to actually punish them. This was most evident in the Obama administration's guidance to 1) reduce punishments and 2) have greater rates of equities in punishments.
Look at Oregon governor Kate Brown signing legislation that allows kids to graduate high school without proving they can read, write, or do basic math - explicitly citing that current requirements disproportionately hurt black and brown kids. Look at school boards in San Francisco voting to stop teaching algebra before high school because those classes were disproportionately not-black.
Look at predominantly black cities all around America - how they spend $20, $30k, sometimes over $50k a year on students - and often have schools where not a single student is proficient at reading (or alternatively, math). Look at how they turn a blind eye to institutions that utterly fail their students as long as their motivations sound nice. If you actually cared about black kids succeeding in school, shouldn't you make noises to address the failures of, say, lebron james' school, which throws money at kids and yet is utterly failing them academically?
Look at how the media and government treat charter schools - some of which (Success Academy being a prime example) actually have great track records of helping poor black and latino kids achieve academic success. But because these places have strict behavioral requirements, the media would rather talk about how kids are sometimes being disciplined too harshly.
puntifex
2yr ago
I don't disagree, but I remember for example the most recent Macron vs Le Pen election as being covered a lot more apocalyptically.
Maybe my memory is just wrong though
puntifex
2yr ago
Swedish elections, anyone?
I am far from an expert on this but I found it very interesting and wanted to do a quick post about it. Last Sunday, September 11th, Swedish General Elections were held to elect the 349 members of the Riksdag. There are 8 parties that seem like they were get seats, and it appears that they are broadly split into two coalitions - of course, today we naturally refer to them as the 'left coalition' (Social democrats, Greens, Left, Center), and the 'right coalition' (Moderates, Sweden Democrats, Liberals, Christian Democrats).
If you've followed any European elections in the last few years you won't be surprised that immigration appears to be a huge issue, and the rise of the right-wing, anti-immigration party (the Sweden Democrats, not to be confused with the Social Democrats) will of course mirror the rise in support for Le Pen, Lega Nord, etc.
But this time - it appears they won. Well, sort of. The elections are so tight that as of Monday night in Sweden, they're still counting the votes. But all the recent indications point to the right coalition winning the slimmest of majorities - 175 to 174 seats. Furthermore, while it was expected that the Moderate party (center-right) that would be the biggest in the right coalition, it appears that the Sweden Democrats (I think universally regarded as the farthest right) that will be the largest in the coalition, and the second largest overall, after the Social Democrats.
There's so much to say, though much of it has been said in discussions about France and Italy and so on and so forth. Seriously, I could rant about this shit for hours - about how immigration can be awesome, but not uncontrolled immigration of those who despise your way of life, about how the strategy of hiding data and gaslighting the public ultimately doesn't pay off, about the naivety and hubris of thinking that anyone that you let live near you will automatically adopt your values, and on and on and on. But most of it won't be new.
One thing that does feel... maybe kind of new(?) this time, is that the media reaction also seems somewhat more subdued, both before and during the election. Of course, most traditional / legacy media will still be tell you, or at least hint to you, that the results are a Bad thing[1] and that Bad people just got a lot of votes, but on balance it still feels... a bit more subdued and less histrionic? I wonder if 1) I'm just imagining it, and 2) if not, how much of this is due to Sweden being a much smaller country than France or Italy, and how much of it is due to an underlying sense of unease as having to portray the Swedes of all people as neo-nazis.
[1] To be fair, the Sweden Democrats do have a sketchy history, and a disproportionate number of their MPs do seem to get in unsavory controversies. Not my first choice... except they also seem to be the loudest at addressing the unfettered immigration fiasco [2]
[2] OK fine one small clarification rant. I like immigration. I do! I unironically think multicultural restaurants make an area nicer, and I unironically like meeting people of different backgrounds. But there have to be major caveats here. For one, they have to actually respect me and my society, and our values and how we live our lives. For another, it really helps if they either have valuable skills, or are otherwise productive in some other way. And I sure as fuck do not want violent criminals living anywhere near me.
Sweden isn't trying to import biophysicists or electrical engineers. They're letting in disproportionately young men from countries with poor traditions of women's rights, democracy, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. Are all of them going to share the views of their motherlands? No. But how is it nonetheless not clear that this would be a fiasco?
puntifex
2yr ago
I would like to reiterate that none of her teammates - 20 year old women athletes at an elite American university - have said anything to corroborate her story.
If it truly happened anything like she said, I have an extremely hard believing that none of her teammates would do a quick Instagram post about how bad racism is and how brave ms Richardson is.
Also, that godmother is a piece of work.
puntifex
2yr ago
One of the (many) amazing things is how she fired the CFO... in like 2011. Even back then, she was straight-up lying and doctoring numbers, and the CFO questioned it. She said he "wasn't a team player" and asked him to leave.
Now he proudly puts Theranos on his resume hahaha
puntifex
2yr ago
I read[1] Pilgrim at Time Creek during freshman year of high school - and boy did I not get it hahaha. Thanks for reminding me of it, sounds worth another go.
[1] I did actually read the words, but everything above the surface-level meanings flew right over my head
puntifex
2yr ago
Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou - the hard-to-believe but afaik completely true story of the rise and fall of Theranos - a company poised to completely revolutionize blood testing, with only one problem - they had none of the technological capability they claimed they did. The whole thing was incredible and amazing. Truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes.
Men are going to be more violent, more suicidal, more criminal, and shorter-lived for a long time.
But that doesn't fill me with dread?
In general, why does "my group" need to be those whp share trivial immutable characteristics with me?
Yes, you could say that his blood family is also black. But so what?
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