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Despite making up 13% of the population, 53% of NFL players are black
I think there are multiple factors at work for different civilizations/races being succesful. I think HBD is part of the reason for civilizational differences, but I buy into the WEIRDest People in the World cousin-marriages leading to clannish honour culture being why the Middle East is behind the West. I know there's a complexity penalty for theories that incorporate multiple factors like this but it still looks the most plausible to me for why the Middle East is so backwards.
I think it seems very likely that all humans have been domesticated compared to our primitive great ape ancestors. Whether some races are more domesticated than others is a more open question. But I think it's quite plausible that they are.
Blacks are on average shorter and less muscular than whites, but unusually big blacks are way overrepresented in football because 1) they hit puberty earlier, so they are legitimately bigger around the time when football starts separating into the actually-good-or-not tracks, and 2) their parents are more tolerant of them receiving injuries or compromising their educations to pursue athletics.
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???
This is a complete non-sequitur. NFL players are in no way selected purely for how physically imposing they are, and the person you're replying to was actually correct - whites have a higher average height than blacks as well as a lower level of obesity.
I think that there is a significant correlation between being an American football player and being physically imposing. As a proxy for 'this guy looks buff, better not mess with him', you could do worse than football player.
A 'complete non-sequitur' would have been if they had said 'blacks are strongly over-represented in /chess/, hence they are more physically imposing'.
Of course, there are a zillion confounders. Getting into the NFL probably means specializing in football in college, which is a decision hinging not only on other cultural factors. And it is not like most black males end up in the NFL either, so it could be that blacks simply have a larger variance.
There's some correlation to be sure, but using it as the metric is pointless when you have more relevant information available. Sure, you could do worse, but you could also do much better - why inject noise into the conversation for no reason? The political, commercial and social concerns that go into someone being selected as an American football player add so much noise that there's just no point using it for this kind of reasoning. When you look at the actual averages, white men are taller, in better shape and have greater physical function. It isn't even a matter of variance either - when you look at competitions selecting for strength, the top contenders have names like "Hafþór JúlÃus Björnsson", "Benedikt Magnússon" and "Mariusz Zbigniew Pudzianowski".
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Typo. 53% are black.
Thank you, corrected
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15% seems like a typo.
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