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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2256 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 1, 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.

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I'm trying to think of new ones I haven't done before.

-- The Hur report by the special counsel who described Biden presenting as "as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" was actually just using bitchy language to get back at Biden for using standard answers. The classic way to respond to a politically motivated investigation deposition is to say "I don't recall." "I can't confirm that, I don't remember." "I don't know which day that was, or who was in the room, or what was said." Refuse to confirm anything, don't give them anything. This is a cliche. Biden did that, and then Hur turned around and used it against him passive aggressively. Biden couldn't exactly argue against it and say "No I can totally remember all that, I was LYING in the interview!" Which, fair play to Hur.

-- Musk's Twitter adventure all started with him intending to buy enough shares to get on the board and annoy people and pressure policy, but he quickly found himself in a mess because he purchased the shares without disclosing the purchase properly and under SEC investigation. Twitter corporate management, knowing that Musk wanted to use his power to oppose, harm, and maybe fire them, got in touch with Musk after his purchase telling him that he would have to act in the best interest of the company if he were on the board, essentially telling him all the things he couldn't say without being subject to a lawsuit for betraying the company, which were all things he was saying all the time constantly. Musk, between the SEC and the reality of getting a board seat, decided that the best way out was through and put in an offer for the whole company, figuring there was a good chance that in negotiations he could get out of the whole thing and maybe get Twitter to buy him out. Then the social media downturn hit, and Twitter wasn't going to let him out of it at all, and now he's stuck with it.

-- European universities that are haughty about open American legacy admits do the same thing, just in secret. Too many obvious examples of social immobility to otherwise explain. This isn't actually a bad policy, I think all affirmative action/DEI type stuff would be better if done in secret, but I roll my eyes when Brits lecture us about Legacy admissions in American universities. Ok, buddy, every old Oxbridge family just has superior genetics.

-- The entire car industry is secretly confused by the fact that the car is close to being a solved engineering problem. We've converged on solutions that answer basically every question that car companies competed on from 1980 to 2010. Essentially any small AWD CUV with a 2.0 liter turbo four is basically better than 90+% of cars made during that period on acceleration, handling, fuel economy, comfort, convenience, reliability. They all kind of look the same because they've converged on the optimal layout for most users and wind resistance. But nobody can admit this because the whole industry is based on planned obsolescence, brand loyalty and distinction, constant improvement. Car company execs are increasingly concerned with a future in which cars are a commodity product not purchased for any particular reason, but most often on price. Cars are going from deeply personal purchases, like homes, to impersonal and random purchases, like microwaves or non-stick pans or men's undershirts. The flailing around by so many brands that we see today reflects the reality, occasionally acknowledged by Akio Toyoda and Bob Lutz, that the car as we understood it is dead, because it has been perfected. The urge to electrification is both an effort to produce actually-noticeable improvements in acceleration and economy, but doomed to make the problem worse as electrification flattens all those properties.

-- The Serbia-USA game proved conclusively that the racial makeup of the NBA is mostly the result of racism. An all white team played the USA all star team to the fourth quarter, a USA team that didn't feature a single white player. There wasn't a single white American who was even particularly close! Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball: the USA has vastly more Slavic citizens than Serbia. You have to play serious genetic gymnastics to come out with a logical genetic explanation for American slavs relative lack of talent compared to European slavs. We're missing out on a lot of talented players!

-- Celebrity romances aren't real or fake, they exist in a kind of human interaction that is completely foreign to non-celebrities, where the human and the economic mingle to a great degree.

The Serbia-USA game proved conclusively that the racial makeup of the NBA is mostly the result of racism. An all white team played the USA all star team to the fourth quarter, a USA team that didn't feature a single white player. There wasn't a single white American who was even particularly close! Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball: the USA has vastly more Slavic citizens than Serbia. You have to play serious genetic gymnastics to come out with a logical genetic explanation for American slavs relative lack of talent compared to European slavs. We're missing out on a lot of talented players!

Blacks physically mature a bit more quickly than whites, and there is a real bias against white players at the high school level. Tall white kids tend not to get court time on the high school teams and often go over to baseball where being a tall pitcher is a plus.

Ok, buddy, every old Oxbridge family just has superior genetics.

Who are these old Oxbridge families?

The royals themselves are split between St Andrews, Exeter, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Cambridge. Hugh Grosvenor, the archetypical old money aristocrat, went to Newcastle.

But that's besides the point, the fact is that university admissions in the UK are handled by either:

a) disinterested bureaucrats who don't care who your father is and are only looking at your grades

b) academics who care intensely about how smart next year's undergraduate class is going to be

The main reason US universities engage in legacy admissions is to ensure donations from wealthy families. UK universities really only started chasing after donors the way American universities do about ten years ago. There aren't any legacy children to admit because the whole thing of children going to their parents Alma Mater just isn't a thing here.

Oxbridge are in fact more meritocratic than most UK universities, because they interview as well as relying on how well you did in school.

Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball:

IIRC USSR had good basketball teams, many great player were from Baltics. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvydas_Sabonis

I don't think basketball correlates with race in any meaningful way, it's more a social phenomenon in the US. Without racism, in the US you'd still expect more black top players than white because sports as venue for prosperity for black players is culturally supported now and also because other venues are less accessible, but you certainly don't expect homogeneity like there is now. And of course among 300+ million people there would be great white basketball players. Just right now they probably would rather do something else then get into the whole racial issue.

The Serbia-USA game proved conclusively that the racial makeup of the NBA is mostly the result of racism. An all white team played the USA all star team to the fourth quarter, a USA team that didn't feature a single white player. There wasn't a single white American who was even particularly close! Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball: the USA has vastly more Slavic citizens than Serbia. You have to play serious genetic gymnastics to come out with a logical genetic explanation for American slavs relative lack of talent compared to European slavs. We're missing out on a lot of talented players!

It’s not Slavs qua Slavs that overperform- it’s specifically south-west Slavs. I’m not sure there’s as many people from the former Yugoslavia in the US as you think.

Turkey once in a while ends up with pretty good male basketball teams and they are always almost entirely manned by people who (themselves or their families) emigrated sometime in the last ~150 years from western balkans.

Yugoslavia had a very good basketball tradition as well so maybe some of this is simply good sports education. But comparing the physical attributes of your average Anatolian to Bosniak immigrant, it’s not difficult to draw some conclusions.

We also see current NBA stars from Lithuania and Poland. There are more Polish americans than there are Serbians or Lithuanians. There's enough genetic timber that we ought to be developing it, and we clearly aren't.

Balts aren't Slavic.

The two groups that reliably produce an outsized portion of basketball players are balts (specifically Latvians and Lithuanians) and Dinaric Slavs, which both are among the tallest European subgroups, with the latter being literally the tallest group on earth.

You say we see current NBA stars from Poland, there is literally one player. There are more players from Montenegro (a country of some 600k) than Poland.

We see more current NBA stars from either than we see from the white portion of America. There are literally currently none, haven't been in years.

Is this when I note that the one "polish" player in the NBA was born in America, is half black and is not a star?

No this is the part where I admit I got Porzingis' nationality wrong.

Blacks in America are also willing to min/max for athletics. You're right, though, we don't hear slavic names in professional sports in the USA even compared to other whites, which points to a talent pipeline that doesn't cover parts of the population.

Ok, buddy, every old Oxbridge family just has superior genetics.

Definitely true in the UK, definitely not true in Ireland.

Ok, buddy, every old Oxbridge family just has superior genetics.

This is a misunderstanding of how British college admissions work. Unlike in the US, in the UK you apply not only to a college, but to a degree. If you apply to an Oxford college for English, you are competing with the other people who applied to that Oxford college for english literature, and to some extent to other Oxford colleges for english literature (afaik at undergraduate level the college choice is a preference thing). You are not competing with people who applied to Oxford for physics, or math, or medicine.

The failsons and daughters of the upper classes simply know to apply to degrees that either cover subjects the plebs never even learn or develop an interest in (like classics), subjects that don’t lead to a good living (like drama, literature, and theology), subjects designed for rich estate-owning aristocrats and nobody else (land management and agricultural studies) or extremely obscure subjects that only a rich dilettante would care for (niche sub-categories of art like oriental/asian/middle eastern religious iconography or whatever, for example).

If someone says they went to Oxford or Cambridge, it’s not the same thing as saying they went to Harvard or Stanford. Getting into one of the least-subscribed courses at Oxbridge is easier than getting into many degrees at even third-tier British universities. If they did math or medicine it is fair to say they are probably pretty smart.

mostly the result of racism

There are other explanations besides racism even if there is no ethnic difference in propensity to be skilled at basketball.

Getting into one of the least-subscribed courses at Oxbridge is easier than getting into many degrees at even third-tier British universities. If they did math or medicine it is fair to say they are probably pretty smart.

This is a stretch. I'm not aware of any Oxbridge course that will let you in without a minimum of AAA at A-level, while maths at UEA will consider you with ABB if they're the right subjects (and UEA isn't third-tier). You're right about medicine, but that's a bit of a special case.

‘The right subjects’ is doing a lot here. An A* in History is easier than a C in Further Math. And by third tier I meant still within the top grouping of UK universities, where Oxbridge is tier one, the next rung down is like Durham, tier 3 is like Bristol or Exeter or something.

An A* in History is easier than a C in Further Math.

A-level results in 2024:

Percentage of A* grades in History: 5.7%

Percentage of C grades (or above) in Further Maths: 89.8%

There could of course be a selection effect, whereby brighter students take FM than take History (which could explain why 28.7% of FM students get an A*). Still, I don't think that alone is enough to make the argument that History really is that much easier than FM, given the massive difference in grade attainment.

For what it's worth, Oxbridge students are generally very smart IME, regardless of what they study.

And by third tier I meant still within the top grouping of UK universities,

Fair.

You apply for a degree in the usa as well.

Have you read Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons”? He gets into the basketball talent pipeline in some detail.

I haven't, but I love his work so I'll have to check it out!

I should clarify that it discusses college level and below. It is worth reading for its own sake, though.

Very underrated book. Wolfe is so good I remember enjoying Charlotte Simmons immensely.

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