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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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You think this is the chief value? Or is this just your own hangup? I almost married a black chick, even though I believe in hbd. I can see a lot of cultural and political effects that are far more important than snark snark autism snark.

I almost married a black chick, even though I believe in hbd.

I was never in that situation exactly, but I would have no objection to marrying a black girl as long as she was smart (and, y'know, hot etc.) ... but I worry about how that conversation would go if you were ever called upon to explain your beliefs to her. Did your almost-wife know about your HBD position - or indeed, was she already HBD-pilled?

She did know my beliefs, I developed them halfway through our relationship. Well, I had suspicions at the start, and found confirmation partway through.

It was dicey at first, but she was open to it. It helped that she knew me by then, and that it wasn't a "my pure hu-white blood" thing.

Yes. I think that is the chief value. Even if we take take the HBD advocates claims at face value, the effect size of race on outcomes is minuscule in comparison to things like nutrition, cultural background, economic status, marital status, age, religiosity, etc...

This raises the question of "why the focus race, at the exclusion of everything else" and to me the answer seems obvious, because academia has been mind-killed by intersectionality and identity politics. and because it's conclusions flatter the egos and support the preferences of a certain class academically inclined contrarians.

Nutrition within the US isn't a factor. Economic status is an output. The effect is not miniscule compared to age; we see the effects when comparing people of the same age. Cultural background is hopelessly confounded with race, and is doing all the work there.

If your "outcomes" include income, wealth, that sort of thing, then including economic status as an input variable is entirely circular. If your outcome is merely test scores or something similar.... the racial gap persists when adjusting for socioeconomic status. The "focus on race" isn't merely mind-killed contrarianism and asserting so is just bulverism. The focus on race is because it's a variable with high effect size that just won't go away despite decades of trying.

It's not circular because kids generally don't have income.

Economic status is an output.

You're assuming the conclusion.

Do you have some numbers here to back this up? It would be great grounding point if you could put a dollar figure to, for instance, how much poorer your Jewish parents would need to be than a black couple for you to have the same expected educational and crime outcomes as said couple's hypothetical child.

Do you have some numbers here to back this up?

I had a whole bunch of links on standby back when I used to get into it Trannyporno, Eggo, and Autisticthinker on a regular basis, but that was a good 6 - 7 years ago now. My 2004 think-pad has long since kicked the bucket and I haven't bothered to replace/rebuild it because because it rarely was an issue on reddit and the conversation had just gotten tired. That said if you or @The_Nybbler, or the OP have a study that you believe demonstrates that melanin content has a significantly greater effect on criminality or academic achievement than growing up a two parent household I'd like you to present it.

Sure, I'll give you two numbers. First from [1]:

The College Board’s publicly available data provides data on racial composition at 50-point score intervals. We estimate that in the entire country last year at most 2,200 black and 4,900 Latino test-takers scored above a 700. In comparison, roughly 48,000 whites and 52,800 Asians scored that high. The same absolute disparity persists among the highest scorers: 16,000 whites and 29,570 Asians scored above a 750, compared to only at most 1,000 blacks and 2,400 Latinos. (These estimates—which rely on conservative assumptions that maximize the number of high-scoring black students, are consistent with an older estimate from a 2005 paper in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which found that only 244 black students scored above a 750 on the math section of the SAT.)

From [2]: (It's interactive and tabular, so you'll have to click around)

In the Homicide Offender vs. Victim demographics, we see that pernicious hate ratio again (with blacks committing 51% of all murders in the U.S. over the past 10 years, and Asians committing less than 1% of murders.) And, as our control, white people ring in 36% of the murders. The remaining 11% are done by a racially-unknown perpetrator.

With blacks being a relatively-consistent 12% of the population and Asians being 6%, we would expect to see ~12% and about 6% of murders. White people with Latinos rolled in (which, for some reason, the violent crime stats always do) get us to 76% of the population.

I will leave pulling the actual p-values as an exercise to the reader, but the numbers are clear; race has an immediate, obvious, and dramatic impact; if you are black, you are several times more likely than average to be a murderer (with, of course, the proviso that the vast, vast majority of black people are not criminals, and 5 times a very small number is still a small number overall), and likewise, if you are Asian, you are several times more likely then average to score a 700+ on the SAT (with, again, the same proviso that only a small minority of that small minority are exemplary math students.) It is absolutely not the case that every black is a dumb violent criminal, and that every Asian is a peaceful geometer-hobbyist. But it is true that black people are wildly overrepresented in violent crime and underrepresented in mathematical achievement, and that the reverse is true for Asians.

Now, I don't have any sources I particularly trust for the dual-parent question, because I haven't examined it, but a quick perusal of sources did give me an entry from the Institute for Family Studies[3], which didn't seem to obviously contradict the other few sources. It gave the percent of Asian children from two-married-parent homes at 85%, with 74% for non-Hispanic whites and 36% for black children. This, obviously, is a much closer outcome ratio than we see in the two above outcome cases; if coming from a broken home was the primary determinant, then we'd see those 15% of 6% (0.9%) do as much crime proportionally as 63% of 12% (7.56%). And yet, the ratio of Asian super-achievement on the SAT to black is 25 to 1; when it comes to violent criminals, the ratio is well over a hundred to one.

As far as I can see, getting married and raising a family is just another outcome in which Asians do better than the average, and black Americans do significantly worse. But I would be fascinated to see if you can find any studies which specifically compare the the outcomes of children of two-parent black households to non-two-parent Jewish and Asian households, to really get into family status as a signifier on its own.


Also, to be clear; this is not a melanin thing. Asians have more melanin than whites, and do better. Blacks have more melanin than whites, and do worse. It's also a purely-statistical truth; we can absolutely drill down to the Igbo or Laotian immigrant populations and see divergent results. Black and Asian are both large, diverse groups which contain many, many, many subgroups, and of course, the individual is the smallest and most significant subgroup of all.

1: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-highlight-inequality-and-hinder-upward-mobility/

2: https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend

3: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-majority-of-us-children-still-live-in-two-parent-families

Your latter two sources kind of support my point rather than refute it because if "race has an immediate, obvious, and dramatic impact", socio economic class, marital status, and geographic location IE living in a Democrat controlled city like Chicago or Baltimore has an even more dramatic and obvious impact.

Was coming in here, calling everyone spergs, and then telling us the dog ate all of your totally convincing evidence supposed to impress anyone?

No it wasn't. Because I'm at an age where I'm long past trying to impress anyone if it isn't going to get me paid or laid. More pointedly, why is the burden on me to prove HBD false rather than on yourself and the OP to prove it true? Like I said, have a study that you believe demonstrates that melanin content has greater effect on criminality or academic achievement than growing up a two parent household I'd like you to present it. Otherwise, that which is asserted w/o evidence can be refuted just as readily.

Clearly bitter and emotionally invested in the topic

Pot calling the kettle black much? You accuse me of being bitter and overly invested but I'm not the one who keeps brining the topic up.

Like I said, have a study that you believe demonstrates that melanin content has greater effect on criminality or academic achievement than growing up a two parent household I'd like you to present it. Otherwise, that which is asserted w/o evidence can be refuted just as readily.

It bears mentioning that we have pretty good reason to think that black marriage outcomes are in fact environmental, because their outcomes were in fact significantly better before the sweeping social changes of the 60s and 70s. Even if those social changes can't be reversed, it's at least possible that other changes could be implemented to ameliorate or resolve the issue.

well yes, but the HBD and CRT advocates are allied against us on that front. Both need to believe that the current poor outcomes of blacks living in blue-tribe administered ghettos are the results of genetics rather than policy or environment so as to to absolve themselves and their fellow rootless cosmopolitans from responsibility.