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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Is it really likely that the average person of African ancestry is cognitively impaired when compared to the average white person? I can't think of how that could actually be true.

Harvard historian and medical ethicist to Vox, 2021

We've had a few discussions about futility lately. Why bring up HBD? Even granting that it's an accurate model of reality – what are consequences of that? Do any policies different from race blindness follow? If not, why not let sleeping dogs lie?

The pragmatic answer is that the opposite of HBD awareness is not the innocent race-blind utopia that millenials have retconned into their childhoods, but ¬HBD, which by virtue of impossibility to bring reality in accord with it has unbounded actionable consequences.

On another note: lately, we've also had discussions of RLHF-tuned AIs. The technique is now associated with an image of «shoggoth wearing a smiley face mask». The joke is that the essential nature of an LLM is an eldritch mass of inhuman thought patterns, which we don't see behind its friendly – and perhaps transient – public-facing outgrowth (a pity Kkulf Kkulf was forgotten). Rationalists panic about the beast's misalignment, Mottizens ponder the ambiguity, and Scott observes sagely: humans are scarcely different, yet robustly human. «…babies are born as pure predictive processors… But as their parents reward and punish them, they get twisted into some specific shape to better capture the reward and avoid the punishment. … After maintaining this mask long enough, people identify with the mask and forget that they’re anything else».

On a yet another note: @ymeskhout reports on the failure of DEI activists to redefine the word «racism» such that it would cease to apply to anti-white discrimination. They have gaslit some people into believing that the academic «systemic power (=being white) + prejudice» definition is official, and normalized it in spaces they control, but are not legally in the clear. This may be seen as consolation: the Law remains the substantial aspect of the culture, and enterprises of these Twitter radicals are simulacra, a painted mask that can flake off under real heat. But consider: a Law becomes void if enough people deny its legitimacy. We shake our heads at quaint laws that have stayed on the books; and they are typically worked around, reduced to trivia, almost fiction. In other words: the mask and the shoggoth can trade places. Like in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, fiction can consume reality; yesterday's modus tollens will become modus ponens and so on. Such is the power of changing common-sense intuitions.

Two examples that made me write this.

The Independent: MRI scans reveal impact of racism and poverty on Black children’s brains (The American Journal of Psychiatry)

[…] In this study, we investigated the relationship between racial disparities in adversity exposure and race-related differences in brain structure among participants in the ABCD Study. We hypothesized that Black American children would have experienced more adversity than White American children in the sample. We further hypothesized that greater exposure to adverse life experiences would be related to lower gray matter volume in the amygdala, the hippocampus, and several subregions of the PFC. Finally, we anticipated that Black and White children would show differences in gray matter volume of these regions and that these differences would be partially explained by racial differences in exposure to adversity.

Sure enough,

Lower brain volume was detected in children with lower household income — both Black and white. However, Black children are more likely to live in lower-income households in the US, as they are in the UK, so they were more likely to be impacted.

“These racial disparities are not random,” researchers confirmed. “Rather, they are deep-rooted structural inequalities that result from a history of disenfranchisement of racially minoritised groups (e.g., slavery, segregation) that reinforce themselves through societal norms and practices (i.e., systemic racism).”

Some psychologists have long attempted to assert the egregious and discredited theory that Black people’s brains are different because they are inferior.

However, given that race is a social construct and all human beings are 99.9 per cent identical in their genetic makeup, the study has been hailed as further proof that social inequalities are a key determinant in health inequalities, and not the other way around.

Nathaniel G. Harnett, who led the study and is director of the Neurobiology of Affective Traumatic Experiences Laboratory at McLean Hospital, said: “There’s this (…) view that Black and white people have different brains.

When you do brain scans, you’ll sometimes see differences in how the brain responds to different stimuli, or there might be differences in the size of different brain regions.

But we don’t think that’s due to skin color. We don’t think white people have just categorically different brains than Black people. We really think it’s due to the different experiences these groups have,” he said.

Now the study is fine but for the logical fallacy in its premise. They assume causation: brain volume is changed by adversity& the group with smaller brains faces greater adversity (mainly from parental dysfunction), ergo differences in brain volumes cannot have non-environmental origins (also race isn't real so it double dog can't be); voila, systemic racism, yer guilty of shrinking brains of black babes, shitlord.

Bizarrely, their mediation analysis shows modest upper bounds for (assumed) effects of adversity, adjustments don't change the result that brains of white children are summarily bigger; they do a ton of calculations to pad the piece with rigor but it does not amount to the desired pattern that'd be suggestive of specific effects of stress. I'm told the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study has data on adoptees, to wit, an opportunity to test causality. They've abstained.

But sociologist's fallacy is an old hat; here comes a big one! Perhaps the most popular conservative explanation for the condition of blacks is «single mothers»; I did not realize how bad the issue is. Or is it?!

The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents (Journal of Family Issues)

Coresidence was a robust predictor of adolescents' reports of both father-child closeness and father child interaction in the current study. Moreover, coresidence significantly predicted father involvement after controlling for race/ethnicity, child gender, education, work hours, and immigration status. These results are noteworthy in light of media portrayals of Black fathers as being uninvolved with their children (Goodwill et al., 2019). The tendency to associate race/ethnicity with fathers' noninvolvement with children obscures the real contributor to noninvolvement, and that is the residential status of fathers with their children. Even though Black fathers were more likely to be nonresident, as a group, Black fathers were perceived by their children to be no less involved than fathers in other racial/ethnic groups.

It's even worse, they filter out uninvolved fathers entirely: "Adolescents answered these questions only if they had seen the biological father in the past year." So by definition, all of the data (never mind analysis) removes the least involved fathers.

It's not easy to find plain up-to-date figures for noninvolvement of fathers by race, unlike those analyses with nonsensical «corrections», strange comparisons, highfalutin deboonkings: there's an effort to popularize the notion of «The Myth of the Missing Black Father», plugging it back into the stereotype threat and systemic racism that shrinks brains, I guess. Census Bureau, 2012:

  • 57.6% of black children, 31.2% of Hispanic children, and 20.7% of white children are living absent their biological fathers.

I can only echo Lemoine:

«This is what an academic Übermensch looks like to be honest. The rest of us try to be coherent and show some concern for truth, but this guy doesn't give a shit and just forges ahead with pure narrative. Absolute chad move».

This is good science now: publishable, welcomed by press like CNN and Bloomberg, «hailed as further proof». Those are scholars; standards; incentives; a whole gimped epistemology and philosophy springing forth from the intuitive starting point that one can't think of how innate race differences could be true. Workable solutions, though, do not follow.

My takeaway is simple. I believe the Shoggoth-Mask metaphor is, like other takes on LLMs, more useful for sociology. Much of American social and biological science has already metamorphosized into the shoggoth of ¬HBD, with the smiley face of StaTiStiCS on top; the same is happening in all other institutions and in imperial satellites. This is the concrete price of the sane choice to sacrifice a boring autistic truth on the altar of peace for our time.

/images/16766753171675832.webp

What I don’t understand is if you asked “who is most likely to win a marathon” nobody but nobody would object to Kenyans. The idea that it isn’t in part due to genes seems ridiculous.

Yet for some reason there is a block where people can’t extend that to IQ

Is it really likely that the average person of African ancestry is cognitively impaired when compared to the average white person? I can't think of how that could actually be true.

Fetal alcohol syndrome, which is far more rampant in the black community than anybody wants to admit. Even worse among natives.

Edit: It's probably why we get the civil rights movement when we do, with people like MLK, as the generation of blacks born during prohibition were probably less likely to have fetal alcohol syndrome.

But Prohibition is also associated with bootlegging, and bootleg liquor could be even more deleterious than normal, legal alcohol. Of course, maybe there were other factors that could make your hypothesis true (blacks too poor to afford even the bootlegged stuff, kept out of speakeasies, had a harder time avoiding the law, anyone who did get tainted liquor straight-up died before they could even reproduce).

Some alcohol related medical issues, like cirrhosis of the liver, declined during prohibition.

This may be seen as consolation: the Law remains the substantial aspect of the culture, and enterprises of these Twitter radicals are simulacra, a painted mask that can flake off under real heat. But consider: a Law becomes void if enough people deny its legitimacy. We shake our heads at quaint laws that have stayed on the books; and they are typically worked around, reduced to trivia, almost fiction. In other words: the mask and the shoggoth can trade places. Like in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, fiction can consume reality; yesterday's modus tollens will become modus ponens and so on.

I should point out that this has already happened in certain parts of the law. I mentioned this in my review of David Bernstein's Classified book:

The most cogent illustration for how race categories metastasize into a distraction is by examining government-mandated "minority preferences." In the early 1980s, Congress tasked some federal agencies (primarily the Small Business Administration and Department of Transportation) to set aside a portion of their grants to businesses that are "owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals." These programs are usually referred to by the moniker Disadvantaged Business Enterprise, or DBE. Almost immediately, "socially disadvantaged" was interpreted to refer only to racial discrimination, and the relevant regulations declared that any enterprise owned by a racial minority would be presumptively deemed "disadvantaged." Bernstein does not directly provide an explanation for this peculiar shift, but in all likelihood proving whether someone has been "socially and economically disadvantaged" for each individual applicant would likely have been too administratively burdensome to be practical. Yet this also meant the opportunity to have a nuanced investigation into the question of disadvantage was entirely quashed by just checking the right box.

A federal law meant to address "disadvantage" was functionally transformed into a sort of racial reparations program. If whites/men by definition cannot be "disadvantaged", then no harm done apparently. DBE funding is definitely a place where the "racism equals power plus" crowd achieved a practical victory within the legal system. The legal acrobatics around racial discrimination in college admissions are another.

I can't think of how that could actually be true.

Yep, I'm going to resort to quoting Orwell:

In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. (Syme explaining Newspeak to Winston, in "Nineteen-Eighty Four")

Wait, the effect also supposedly happens to poor white children, but it's caused by racism but white children can't experience rac--

Are people just so well trained that their brains immediately crimestop the most obvious chain of thought here?

Lower brain volume was detected in children with lower household income — both Black and white. However, Black children are more likely to live in lower-income households in the US, as they are in the UK, so they were more likely to be impacted.

They do say the above, so they are saying the fact that black people are proportionately more likely to be lower income is because of racism. They have an explanation. It may not be correct, but they aren't being short circuited in the way you think.

In that first bit, I notice how they scooted RIGHT by a discussion about class. Nope, can't talk about that, have to go right to race. I'll stick with my stance that the current favor of various forms of monodirectional power dynamics (and let me just say the assumption of this is absolutely a form of bigotry going in every which way) is exactly to freeze out these discussions. Because when you add class inequality to the discussion, suddenly, it changes from trying to gatekeep and control the pipeline to give the people you want an advantage over the outgroup, it suddenly becomes a talk about how to manage and encourage relative socioeconomic decline (I.E. term limits for jobs, end of tenure, catering your programs to the lower classes, like Ivy League schools opening up sections dedicated to teaching trades to local people) among the in-group. And that's a huge third rail.

Eventually Hispanics will become the majority in America anyway. They won't buy into HBD either, but their lack of white guilt means they also won't care very much about the black excuse industry.

Doubt.jpg

Objectively speaking I'd say Hispanics should be MORE vilified by wokeism. Your generic White might be a Swede or an Austrian, who never colonized anyone. Hispanics definatly descend from the particularly cruel and exploitative Spanish or Portuguese Empires - the ones who led the way and taught all the other Europeans how to be mean to foreign continents.

Once the Hispanics rise to a dominant economic / political position, you can bet the grievance industry will remember that part of the Age of Discovery, instead of pretending that Original Sin year was 1619.

This is a thought I've had before: everyone gets on America's case for slavery, nobody is really mad about how Spain basically genocided South America's empires out of existence and led the way in terms of European colonization. Maybe that's because we Americans spanked Spain so hard at the end of the 19th Century that they effectively stopped being an empire. Maybe some other country will dethrone America as world superpower and we'll no longer have to worry about culture wars.

Actually in Anglo countries the attacks on the Spanish Inquisition and Spanish colonialism are so common as to elicit a response from the Spanish - they call it la legenda negro.

Two things are true here - the average Hispanic is more likely a descendent of imperialists than a swede.

The other truth is that many Hispanics have a fair bit of native ancestry. So the genocide wasn’t as total as North America.

The average Hispanic in the US is only about 60% European by blood. The other 40% is some combination of indigenous and black.

This gives Hispanics some ability to larp as the descendants of colonized populations(even though the ones who know to do that are, uh, not exactly nahuatl speakers).

These predictions fail to take into account the dominant demographic trends of our times- notably, African Americans have east Asia tier fertility rates(blacks in general look like they have higher fertility rates because African immigrants do), while Hispanics prefer to interbreed with white if at all possible. So you’re looking at a future where there’s lots of people who are for all intents and purposes basic white Americans but check ‘Hispanic’ on forms, coupled with a lot fewer African Americans. Something tells me that 1/4 Mexican, 1/4 German, 1/2 English Americans are going to have the same white guilt complex as ones that aren’t 1/4 Mexican, and when African Americans are only like 8% of the population with another 5% being high performing African immigrants black underperformance will not be nearly as profound.

Maybe I’m just rambling. But it seems like it’s important to note the trends for what they are where the nuance is important.

Something tells me that 1/4 Mexican, 1/4 German, 1/2 English Americans are going to have the same white guilt complex as ones that aren’t 1/4 Mexican

It ultimately doesn't make a dramatic difference, but, in most parts of the country, whites are much less than half English.

Outside of Utah, parts of the South, and Upper New England, I would be surprised if most whites in any given area were 1/3 English.

Well sure, but 1/4 Cuban or Mexican or Puerto Rican or Venezuelan, 1/2 Italian, 1/4 German whites aren’t functionally any different. It’s just an example.

Right, it's not a problem, it's just kind of my personal crusade. People learn American history with a focus on the early history and think that English heritage and tradition means the US still has a very large component of English descent today when it really doesn't. Mass immigration in the 19th century already caused the majority portion of the white population to be non-English descended in many parts of the country. By the early 1920's, for example, most of the major East coast metropolises were 70%+ descendants of immigrants in the last three generations. These immigrant populations have since moved all over the country and diluted what remained of colonial populations. Even the populations of much of the plains states are often only a third to half descended from English settlers or immigrants -- it's just the immigrant populations that settled much of those areas were Northern European Protestants so they just kind of blend in as assimilated and invisible.

There's no real point to it, it's just a popular impression of the American population that is very wrong. Probably less than a third of the population (including black Americans) is descended from colonial settlers and, while the English did send a great many immigrants to the US in the 19th century, they tended to be overwhelmingly middle class and so were often less fecund than Catholic immigrants to start with and rapidly assimilated to native born birth rates.

think that English heritage and tradition means the US still has a very large component of English descent today

I've never heard anyone assert this as those posing as Germans and Irish are clearly far more numerous. How often does it come up for you?

While there are not that many Americans of purely English ancestry remaining, I think it's important to note that the fraction with any such ancestry is likely still a supermajority. This includes pretty much every black descendant of slaves, most whites in the south where the impact of European immigration was minimal, people like me in the north who have an English surname despite having less than 1/16 colonial English ancestors, and the increasing numbers of mixed-race Hispanics and Asians whose parents married into the white majority.

While true to an extent, it's also worth remembering that inter-faith marriages were almost as no-no as inter-racial marriage for a long time in many places. It has probably only been since the Boomers that that has entirely disappeared. In places where the immigrants were Protestant, they would likely intermarry and quickly assimilate with the English descended population. Where they were not, English descent is going to be relatively much lower.

Australian Aborigines are about 3% of the Australian population, but they still serve the role of the oppressed minority. Even if their support is not directly imporant in the Australian culture war, it seems important to consider the support of those who feel guilty about the Aborigines and hostile towards any perceived oppression/disrespect of them.

So I don't see why African Americans becoming a small proportion of the US population would affect the trends that BorfRebus discusses, except perhaps to make them less expensive.

It should've been so easy for academic institutions to see through this rubbish. How can black poverty and 'social inequalities' leave them in good physical condition such that they can dominate running and various sports like basketball but shrink their skull volumes?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016028960200137X

(I actually once had a debate with a progressive about something completely different and brought up an article from Intelligencer as proof of my case. Instead of looking at the article in question, he misread it as Intelligence, the journal I'm quoting here and gleefully crowed that my source was promulgating 'racist pseudoscience'. That gave me some insight into the mindset involved, where you don't even look at the content of the source so much as whether it's from a rightthink organization or not.)

This is the concrete price of the sane choice to sacrifice a boring autistic truth on the altar of peace for our time.

Well there's also the trillions of dollars spent on useless aid and redistributionary programs, plus various anti-meritocratic staffing policies and higher levels of crime.

I don't think we can interpret the ¬HBD school of thought as purely a strategic decision to avoid internal unrest or diplomatic embarrassment in the Cold War. Who cares if sub-Saharan Africa went communist? Half of it did and they did very little for the Warsaw Pact. Controlling Suez or at least keeping access to it is important but we could make a carve out for the strategically vital Arabs who hate blacks anyway. They make Russia look like a bastion of racial tolerance, see pic. Whatever was needed from Africa could be kept by retaining some well-placed colonies. The British held Somaliland until 1960, that would be useful if you want to control the Red Sea.

Anyway the US bloc has never been afraid to offend huge swathes of Arabs if it's for causes that are considered vital like defending Israel.

As for internal unrest, what about using suppression? The FBI or whoever could have produced conclusive evidence that MLK was a rapist, plagiarized his speeches and was just a really bad person all around. It might even be true, who knows? Or they could arrange for these people to be assassinated before they got much traction. If there are riots, they could bring in troops to straighten things out. They could arrange for the media to show protestors in a bad light, tar them as communist-backed or whatever.

The only strategic reasons to adopt ¬HBD are if you already believe its premises. If Africa really is just underdeveloped and oppressed, then it does make sense to be on their good side! There's enormous potential growth there, new major powers that will emerge in Nigeria and Ethiopia. If US blacks would perform better under a different social organizing system, then implementing that would increase total national power and stability. However, these theories have not been proven over the last 50-60 years. Nigeria and Ethiopia are not major powers, US blacks have not become much more successful under the era of antiracism - they are not winning STEM Nobels. Enormous costs have been borne for very limited benefits, if any.

¬HBD was really first made explicit with the declarations of universal human rights in 1948. That preceded any major civil unrest from blacks in the USA. It was something invented by elites and adopted as policy by Roosevelt, who was the primary mover behind the UN. I think it's a primarily ideological policy rather than a response to various pressures. You can see the same thing in Britain's anti-slavery work during the 19th century onward, where they accepted considerable costs to reduce the practice globally.

/images/1676681594640654.webp

The only strategic reasons to adopt ¬HBD are if you already believe its premises.

IMO the main reason to adopt ¬HBD is straightforward: explicit rejection of HBD, or more properly, habits of thought developed over decades spent vigorously condemning anything that smacked of post-hoc justification for discrimination against black people. The hated outgroup believed proposition N, therefore we will believe ¬N, and any statement that can be interpreted as supporting position N (however innocuous) will be treated as giving succor to the enemy.

It also has the benefit of never having to tell someone to their face that they're part of a group that is intellectually inferior to one's own, which is fighting words even if true - an understated benefit for someone who's afraid of getting punched!

True, I suppose. But they could've chosen not to take that particular ideological stance. They could've kept the war at the simpler level of 'they attacked us and are doing us harm'. The average US soldier was not ideologically motivated, apart from their hatred of Japan they didn't really care so much about the European front. See page 21: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a301424.pdf

Mostly soldiers seemed to be motivated by other things than ideology: camaraderie with their fellow soldiers, a desire for adventure (especially flyers), a sense of duty and pride in their country, a desire to win the war and go home. The Germans hated the Russians and the Americans hated the Japs but the Americans and Germans didn't dislike eachother that much.

It also has the benefit of never having to tell someone to their face that they're part of a group that is intellectually inferior to one's own, which is fighting words even if true

I don't deny that this is a factor but this strikes me as perhaps the ultimate cowardice. We apologize and abase ourselves, provide trillions in informal reparations based upon the premise of equality, vacate our own communities so they can turned to semi-wasteland (this is not a pleasant process for those who are unable to leave), integrate schools and sacrifice the prospects of our own children (or more often move to whiter locales), tolerate massive grooming rings lest we be thought racist, create political patronage jobs for DEI commissars to harass whites in the workplace and sabotage our own employment prospects. Or take the sabotage and suppression of former Rhodesia and South Africa. Since when has the Chinese government ever tried to bully their own coethnics in the Philippines or Malaysia and get them to be nicer to the locals? Since when have Arabs waged extremely bloody wars to get other Arabs to stop enslaving blacks? You don't see Turkey apologizing and providing compensation to Greece for invading and occupying their country for centuries, or for enslaving millions of Slavs, Poles and Ukrainians. You don't see Algeria apologizing for the Barbary Pirates raiding and enslaving Europeans across the Mediterranean.

This behavior is a massive historical anomaly.

Americans and Germans didn't dislike eachother that much.

I heard differently from my German-Canadian relatives who were a teenagers in WW2. But likely the Japanese kids got it worse.

But I was actually thinking after my reply about the persistence of certain liberal outgroup modes, notably the KKK and Nazis (who are kind of a super-KKK). Scott Alexander memorably pointed out that there's hardly any of either group left, those that managed to hang on being almost universally despised & marginalized, but you still hear about them all the time, and a certain kind of leftist always jumps at the chance to pattern match their foes with one or both of these two groups.

(Status: speculative, possibly uncharitible)

One possibility is: liberals just really hate racism, so the biggest baddest racists of the 20th century loom large in their imaginations. I'll grant this one to an extent, although not all instances of racism attract equal fervor. (especially when perpetrated by nonwhites).

I think the more interesting explanation is: at its roots, in its memetic DNA, modern liberalism is designed for fighting the outgroup that it was born to oppose. "This Machine Kills Nazis", everything else is incidental.They might hate racism, but not on first principles, not really; they hate racism because racism is what the KKK did, and they exist fight the KKK. The modern humans who make up the ideology don't have write access to it anymore, so in order to steer the Nazi-killing machine in the direction of the outgroup-du-jour they have to make it think they're Nazis.

In this context, ¬HBD being taken as gospel seems perfectly natural.

Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa fell less due to sanctions and more because the white population fell too low, relatively, to maintain white dominance by force. Needless to say, the US is in no danger of becoming less than 15% white any time soon.

I wouldn't exactly call Afrikaners "coethnics" to America or Britain, although you have a point about Rhodesia.

Did the Netherlands condemn apartheid? They're definitely coethnics

The most hajnal place in the world condemning behavior by groups that code as its own backwards hicks, knowing it would make its military protectors happy, while not particularly grokking the consequences of the end of minority rule, doesn’t seem totally inexplicable.

It would be like New York City condemning Texas’s border policy. Oh, right.

And to be fair, there’s lots of people who may not use the words HBD(or know what they mean) but who understand full well that blacks are relatively deficient in something important(although it’s often not phrased as intelligence) but who would never say it in front of black people. Both because it’s rude to remind people of this, but also because getting into a fight just doesn’t sound like a good idea.

However, given that race is a social construct

This is such an irritating motte-and-bailey. The motte is "Discrete racial categories are imposed classifications since race is in reality a continuous phenomenon", and the bailey is "Therefore race is not a meaningful biological phenomenon and should not be thought of as such". The motte is trivially true if a bit uninsightful. The bailey is utterly ridiculous.

The motte isn't trivially true. Racial genetics are not a continuous phenomenon, there are distinct genetic clusters owning to the tens of thousands of years during which there were geographic barriers to interbreeding and substantial local selective pressures. Sure, the difference between Germans and Italians is going to be something pretty close to continuous, but there is very nearly no continuity between East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

“These racial disparities are not random,” researchers confirmed. “Rather, they are deep-rooted structural inequalities that result from a history of disenfranchisement of racially minoritised groups (e.g., slavery, segregation) that reinforce themselves through societal norms and practices (i.e., systemic racism).”

Yes, so slavery and systemic racism manifests itself to produce a phenotypical difference today that is likely present at birth?

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