site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 16, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Imagine you're Hlynka. Or better, a version of Hlynka that cooperates. I ask you to give examples of individuals or groups that are high in intelligence (rated by you) and have despicable (rated by you) personality. What do you answer?

  • -13

Blues generally. They clearly aren't stupid, by my rating or anyone else's, and their values and tendencies are quite despicable by my rating at least.

This doesn't seem like a hard question to answer.

"Calling out" other posters is something we frown on generally, and starting a thread just to bash someone who's permabanned and can't even answer for himself looks like bad faith trolling to me. If you want to know what Hlynka thinks, go ask him on reddit - he's still there.

The most obvious contenders are the kinds of people who write angry editorials about all the -ists in their country, and complain about how they aren't as wealthy as their parents, despite mostly contributing by spending college partying and deplatforming people and writing angry articles online. Many of these people are, nonetheless, probably smart enough, having come from successful, functional homes that were able to send them to the colleges in question.

As a group, I recall he used Russians as an example of a high-IQ group held back by a terrible culture.

he mentioned many times that IQ isn't intelligence

Ukrainians are surely the best example, given their average IQ and (pre-war) pitiful GDP/capita. Them and North Koreans, I suppose.

Russians have a half-standard deviation IQ advantage on Ukrainians, I thought. And North Korea arguably doesn’t count because government oppression makes it suck as much as cultural stupidity.

I’m very skeptical of that IQ differential.

That’s fairly reasonable, although even with the IQ gap isn’t Ukraine still a worse GDP to IQ ratio than Russia?

Russia is so heterogenous that I think estimates are pretty poor across the board. European Russians are likely higher scoring than Ukrainians, but not by 7 or 8 points.

I thought estimates in Siberia showed ethnic Russians having IQ’s similar to Germanic peoples or western slavs but lower than the Finno-ugrics? That is indeed seven or eight points higher than the national average IQ for Ukraine. But I suspect Ukraine’s national average IQ is understated a bit by shithole country effects, so who knows.

Scott Aaronson seems like the prime candidate.

This question would be way easier to answer if Hlynka were here.

I'm afraid he doesn't want to answer that.

He said that the dysfunctional slavic territories were a good example when I asked him.

Had he said this before, or you asked him specifically (e.g. on reddit)?

I asked him when he was still posting here. He pointed to the Slavic speaking lands.