somedude
5mo ago
AFAIK as IQ is deliberately intended to be normalized, the gap is exactly the same 85 to 100 as 100 to 115, and if you think that those two aren't the same, you are also inherently saying that IQ is the wrong tool for the job.
I'm not sure what you're even trying to get at here. A fifteen point gap at the higher end of the distribution isn't likely to be noticeable in everyday casual interaction, but at the lower end it can be the difference between someone who can at least tell you their own name and a total potato.
That's not even getting into the whole "what benchmark do we set 100 at", do we update it year to year or try to peg it to some historical benchmark (though this is not necessarily fatal to IQ as a metric in the same way the first is, it does present a question that must be addressed when using IQ).
The people who want to pooh-pooh the utility of IQ as a metric have had the reigns of society for generations now and their attempts at racial uplift have been a humiliating failure.
somedude
5mo ago
One might watch Civil War and ask why Tony Stark, aka Iron Man is on the side of the government despite being a tech entrepreneur who refused to share his suit tech with the government for years
Because he built an AI that killed people and almost destroyed the world.
and Captain America, an FDR Democrat (aka the closest thing we have had to a dictator since George Washington) is on the side of the libertarians.
Because the government agency he worked for turned out to be a front for a bunch of evildoers.
I've never even seen Civil War but if there's something stupid about it conceptually it's that Cap didn't say "Hey doctor Frankenstein I agree someone should be in charge of making sure you don't blow up the world again but I just club people over the head with a shield so maybe get outta my ass."
somedude
5mo ago
I don’t think most people would be able to tell the difference at a glance between IQ 115 and IQ 100. At lower IQ it makes a difference sure, but for average IQ levels it’s not that much.
How about 100 versus 85, which as far as I know is approximately the gap actually in question?
somedude
5mo ago
you should always pick the lesser of two weevils.
He who would pun would pick a pocket.
somedude
5mo ago
I don't see anything about any violent tendencies there. What, are you suggesting that if society didn't "value the freedom of lunatics more than the safety of innocents" they'd bust down doors and drag away everyone who doesn't follow up on their OCD treatment? Sounds like a great way to make sure no one ever voluntarily visits a psychiatrist ever again.
somedude
5mo ago
while surely some strong parallels exist, you can't seriously tell me with a straight face that literal slavery vs heavy Jim Crow vs segregation and redlining vs our modern setup are at all similar states of being. Things are an absolute fuckton better than they used to be for Black people in the US.
And yet they remain a squalid and hopeless underclass that performs vastly worse than any other ethnic group by almost every conceivable metric. So much "progress" yet so little improvement. This is what I mean when I say it never gets better.
The low-hanging fruit has all been picked and it's accomplished virtually nothing. There isn't anything left on the tree in 2024 that's going to bring black SAT scores up to par, or bring their homicide rate down to less than 500% above average, or anything else you wish could be accomplished.
The idea that we're just waiting for the right high-minded idealist to come up with the right twee little plan and then suddenly we'll finally start seeing all the real progress that's been missing this whole time is a bad joke. I can't imagine taking it seriously.
On top of the whole notion of "blackness" which doesn't make genetic sense, it doesn't make historical sense, it doesn't generalize to the world, and can only be understood in a US context.
I'm not starting an entire HBD tangent deep in the guts of a thread one day from expiry, but you're flatly wrong here. For now I'll just leave you with this NYT article written by a Harvard professor of genetics.
"I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science."
I think there's at least a significant number of people who want to, you know, just be kind. Is that so bad? Is that so evil? Is that so nefarious? Is MLK's dream of kids being judged by the content of their character a bad dream? Jesus fucking christ dude, get some perspective.
If you want to be an altruist, do it with your own fucking kids.
somedude
5mo ago
And remember, the starting point was that Black schools were deliberately designed, funded, and often forcibly maintained as worse quality. The schools themselves, not the people! That's a lot of ground to make up.
"Twenty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
"Forty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
"Sixty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
And all the while, generation after generation, we're supposed to avoid noticing that no ground is ever actually made up.
Most data seems to suggest that desegregation efforts stalled out in the late 70s and ratios flatlined until about the 90s when (arguably organic) re-segregation started happening (though the timing causes one to wonder if this was a negative side effect of War on Drugs-related stuff that started about the same time!!!)
Efforts stalled out because white people decided they would abandon their cities and move as far away as required in order to get the hell away from what they were experiencing.
Liberal anti-racist orthodoxy holds that whites uprooted their communities and fled for no good reason because they just couldn't deal with seeing people with different colored skin, but I consider this nothing but a laughable cope from a social movement discredited by sixty-odd years of abject failure
And I really can't square what you mean about the scale including "continents and generations" without concluding it's a racial dogwhistle -- could you please expand on what exactly you mean by this?
I'm not dogwhistling, I'm just saying it out loud. The more black a system is, the more of a dysfunctional pile of shit it is. There's always an anti-racist liberal standing around somewhere telling us it doesn't have to be this way. That the cities don't have to be cesspits, that the schools don't have to be disasters, that the countries don't have to be starving shitholes, if only we'll enact whatever policies they're pushing this year.
It doesn't work, it never works, it never gets better at any level, anywhere, ever, and the rest of us are expected pretend we have amnesia about it. We're just supposed to repeat this every few years forever without acknowledging the pattern.
Sixty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. Eighty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. A hundred years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. So on and so forth for eternity.
It's a farce. It's our society's version of Lysenkoism or believing in fairies or burying our treasure in pyramids. I can't really do anything about it, but I'll be goddamned if I'll sacrifice my kids to it.
somedude
5mo ago
I think your belief that somehow placing your presumably-white kid in with your thinly-veiled majority Black school has a significant chance of landing them in the hospital or something is unsupported and warped by media perceptions and fearmongering.
The kid may or may not get literally stomped out, but the more black the school is, the worse it will be on pretty much every axis. Just like cities, just like countries, just like continents, and for generations now the high-minded folk telling me we can somehow rectify this have done nothing but fail miserably at every single turn.
Imagine actually staking your child's wellbeing on the idea that pie-in-the-sky intervention #8742 will be the one that finally works, much less believing that the attempt will somehow be good for them. Unthinkable. Laughable.
somedude
5mo ago
For some of us it's more like we just give up. As far as I can tell, virtually every single place on earth where they make up the majority of the population is some kind of dysfunctional shithole and it doesn't seem to matter what continent it's on, what country it's in, or how many generations of effort well-meaning white liberals have squandered trying to fix it. It never gets better, and it doesn't look like it's ever going to.
It's not that we're all ideologically dedicated to the idea of HBD, necessarily, so much as it's the fact that the alternative is a hodgepodge of unfalsifiable just-so excuses that in aggregate strain credulity beyond the breaking point. I just don't really buy that they're equally capable but have coincidentally been kneecapped by one historical mishap or another, everywhere, a hundred percent of the time, forever.
I don't really buy that we just need to eradicate the latest iteration of structural systemic invisible racism and suddenly their homicide rate will plummet by 90%, etc. etc. I just don't buy it. It looks exactly like an ethnic group with lower IQ ending up exactly where you would expect it to while people make up other reasons for it. The idea that they're collectively capable of advanced civilization on their own is, let's say, unevidenced, and it doesn't look like that evidence is ever going to come.
somedude
6mo ago
We're forbidden to talk about anything unless someone writes a 40k word essay about it first. Simple as.
somedude
6mo ago
I'm of essentially the exact opposite opinion. The linear game has almost no reason to exist. If my input has no effect on the outcome, why is it even required? All I'm really getting is a movie, but made objectively worse by the fact that it insists upon repeating a given scene until I complete an arbitrary task.
What's the point? Is there a movie that would be improved by making me win a round of Tetris every ten minutes to stop it from rewinding? Hell, why even have death animations or other displayed failure states in a video game? After all, it's not like the protagonist being eaten by monsters or falling down a hole to their death is what "really" happens.
Those failure states exist to create the illusion of agency. No game advertises itself by telling you the princess can already be considered rescued, because that's the artistic intent, but hey you can come push buttons if you want to see it. No, they want to create at least the pretense of the player's input having consequences.
So stop with the pretense and give me the real thing. Give me actual agency and consequence. Or commit to your singular vision for the story and write a book instead.
somedude
6mo ago
Well that is a pretty uncharitable way to put things.
Anyone who's been around long enough could name names. "I lost an argument about HBD and the mods won't ban anyone for it, time to make a dramatic post about how everyone is Nazis and I quit" was a meme for quite a while in the Reddit days.
somedude
6mo ago
You are nowhere near a good enough poster to adopt this tone and be taken seriously.
Case in point, last week you made statements referring to stay-at-home mothers as breeding machines and house servants. It was the kind of thing that would get updoots on most of Reddit, but you were clearly and utterly unprepared for any sort of pushback.
When asked what it was about an average menial job outside the home that elevates a woman from the status of machine or servant you completely imploded. I personally love the upvotes and downvotes here. They tell me interesting things, like how your claim that I was putting words in your mouth persuaded absolutely no one.
You aren't some hero fighting the good fight, you're an /r/atheism midwit who's out of his league.
somedude
6mo ago
Imagine what the forum would look like if every progressive who flamed out and tearfully quit after losing an argument didn't do that.
somedude
6mo ago
Oh man I just went back and had a second look at the exchange where you guys supposedly banned him for "single issue posting" a few weeks ago. Turns out @self_made_human didn't realize which parts of the mod system were publicly viewable and the listed reason for the ban was actually:
Jew-posting with a boner so hard that the fig leaf fell. Build off Amadan's recommendation to ban him if he did it again.
But gosh golly gee whiz, I thought he was impartially banned not for the content of his existing posts but for failing to post upon a wide enough variety of subjects? You know, that incredibly important rule about the number of subjects one posts about? The one that totally isn't an excuse to punt people who post about the wrong things.
While I'm at it, here's a reminder of how Zorba phrased it:
Just go post about something every week! Here's a nerd making goat noises! Here's some nerds comparing cards in a game they've never played! Here's another nerd taste-tasting AI-created cocktails! this is not hard
Because I figure we're about halfway to the point where "just post a youtube video about goat noises or something" suddenly becomes "ackshually we have to feel like they're good posts with sufficient effort" or whatever.
somedude
6mo ago
Me:
So are stay-at-home mothers mentally deficient breeding machines and house servants, like you just said they were one post prior,
You, one post prior:
Well then it sucks to be the kind of person that would enjoy life as a breeding machine + house servant. Maybe some people love it, but that is pretty close to being dosed with alcohol as a fetus so you'll enjoy being a Delta in a Huxley book.
I seriously can't believe you even tried to play the "putting words in my mouth" card. Like you realize everyone can see all these posts, right?
When you give women the option not to be a stay at home mom...most take it. When they have the option to have fewer children, most take it. Hence the reduction in family formation and lack of children. Revealed preferences.
That's nice, but I didn't ask you about any of that, did I? No, I asked you what it is about a menial routine job like most people have that elevates a mother from a subhuman object of your personal contempt to, presumably, a real human being.
somedude
6mo ago
I think being a parent is cool too, but if you're expected to do all the house work, childcare and also work a job outside the home that is a terrible deal.
So are stay-at-home mothers mentally deficient breeding machines and house servants, like you just said they were one post prior, or did you decide during the intervening three hours that it's actually okay since they don't have to also work outside the home?
Also, can you explain what sort of virtue is conferred by... say... a job schlepping boxes at Amazon, such that it distinguishes real human women from mere broodmare house slaves? What is it you think makes schlepping so much more righteous than maintaining one's own family home? Do you think boxes are more important? Do you think Amazon appreciates it more? Please, by all means, enlighten us.
somedude
6mo ago
If you want I can make up an arbitrary position, ascribe it to you, give you hell for not defending it, and then conspicuously stop responding when you point out that you've literally never said such a thing.
somedude
6mo ago
Sure, once some intelligence utility maximalist comes in and decides that in this scenario the guy has an infinite amount of steak to hand out. Also it goes without saying that our hypothetical intelligent wolves won't be clever enough for any failsafe or contingency on their part to make any difference. Nope, our smart dude will just say something so smart it makes them all want him to hold a gun to their heads.
somedude
6mo ago
How are you on this website without realizing how hard it is to control a superintelligent AI?
By seeing arguments about it that are usually vague and lame. It's always either "just trust me bro it's impossible" or some weird unfounded faith that sufficient intelligence equals infinite capability regardless of circumstance.
According to you guys, a naked human being surrounded by a pack of wolves should be able to just genius his way out of being delicious as long as he's smart enough.
somedude
7mo ago
And let's not forget that USA and UK actually have some obligations towards Ukraine as part of Budapest memorandum where Ukrainians gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity from US, UK and Russia. Of course Russian word is as usual not worth the paper it was put onto and US/UK try to weasel out of it by saying it was actually "assurance" and not "guarantee".
The terms of the agreement are right there in your link, can you please point to the one you think obligates the US to guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine? As far as I can tell this claim is pure /r/worldnews tier cope crossing the line into blatant lying.
somedude
7mo ago
Arm them with what? Europe is a bunch of demilitarized vassals who popped their monocles and scoffed a few years ago when Trump told them to meet their 2% NATO commitment. It's not a video game, they can't magically turn GDP into missiles instantly.
Ukraine was cooked the moment it became clear their last counteroffensive wasn't going anywhere. China is going to go for Taiwan at some point this decade, and the US doesn't want to squander its air defense munitions in a forever war. Otherwise they'd have found a way to arm-twist or otherwise persuade the House GOP holdouts by now.
somedude
7mo ago
Note to @SecureSignals to make sure he posts a bunch of random bullshit he doesn't give a crap about in between real posts. Just go to the Friday Fun Thread and drop some funny cat videos or something and ignore any responses once you've hit your quota. Just make a complete mockery of this stupid ass non-rule until they reach back into their ass and decide that actually total wordcount per subject was the real metric all along.
Horseshit. Banned for posting badthink too cogently, using a rule that doesn't seem to actually exist and which I've never even heard of outside the context of this particular poster. Completely transparent.
You guys can't even invent a reason that this post breaks any actual listed rule, so you've concocted a rationale out of thin air where you can ban someone for not making other posts that you feel they should have.
Like what's the proportion of X to non-X posts someone is allowed to make? Does it matter how often they post? Does it matter how long the posts in each category are? You don't know because you're pulling this out of your ass.
Massive loss of respect. You'd look less ridiculous just banning him for being a wrongthinker.
Funny, I don't think I do. What I think is that we have a testable metric which at the population level correlates reliably and meaningfully with both racial groupings and life outcomes, that this fact has substantial explanatory power, and that these correlations will persist regardless of what you think of that metric.
What I think is that fifty or sixty years of failed racial uplift will in due time turn into seventy, and then eighty, and then ninety, a hundred, so on and so forth indefinitely, barring the apocalypse or some sort of massive sci-fi technological intervention. I think that when you and I are both dead from old age, the exact same group will still be hopelessly behind, and someone somewhere will still be doing this exact same tap dance.
They'll still be just as eager to repeat how racial categories can have fuzzy boundaries, still ever so philosophically uncertain of the value of IQ as a metric. But that uncertainty will never allow them to raise a proportionately equal share of brain surgeons, or what have you, from the population at the bottom of the ranking.
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