site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There's a bunch of handwringing downthread about how the real problem with low TFR is dysgenics and not shrinking populations. I've got some data to push back on that: https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-relationship-between-income-fertility

The US is a meritocracy, which means that income and IQ are correlated- and we see a dysgenic fertility for native blacks(but they're shrinking as a percent of population and not that high of one to begin with) and a eugenic fertility for native whites. The latter statistic is interesting because we know that the conservative white fertility rate is higher than the liberal white fertility rate, while incomes run in reverse- which indicates either east asia tier fertility for lower middle income blue tribers or african tier fertility for wealthy red tribers(and no, from 10,000 feet red tribe and conservative/blue tribe and liberal are not different things, even if they might be in individual cases. At least not post-Trump). Hispanics look like they have a dysgenic fertility pattern, but anecdotally they do lots of tax fraud so the income statistics might be off, and also I'm guessing recency of arrival leads to a looser income/IQ correlation. Still, it might be dysgenic. Asian fertility is low but broadly eugenic.

That gives an overall picture which is actually relatively encouraging- the largest group has a eugenic fertility pattern, people that are hard to categorize have a eugenic fertility pattern, and two poor minority groups have dysgenic looking patterns, but one of them might not actually be dysgenic.

Realistically concern about dysgenics is concern about either a) the browning of America or b) the likelihood of a majority black world. And I'm not claiming either to be unconcerning, but upwards mobility still exists in Latin America. Latin America manages to filter its higher IQ individuals into roles that are necessary to the functioning of society. There is an industrial society south of the border. It's poorer, produces less innovation, and has higher crime rates, but life is OK by global standards. It sucks a lot worse for an untalented individual to live in Brazil than in the US, that's true. But it is very much not a third world country with third world problems. The browning of America is manageable, and the effect is overstated anyways because blacks(who have the lowest IQ) aren't growing as a percentage of the population.

A majority black world, on the other hand, is likely, but immigration enforcement is getting harsher and Africa is hard to get out of. This is, in other words, likely a mostly African problem- and Africa's fertility is still declining. Particularly if the breeder hypothesis(and Lyman Stone's simulation suggests it tops out at 33% of population- still enough to strongly influence societal direction) turns out to be true, the concern in 2100 will be less about enormous numbers of black migrants reaching Europe and more about the Dutch Calvinists getting enough votes to institute a theocracy. It's true that random African peasants don't contribute much to civilization but keeping them in Africa is eminently doable.

Dysgenics is an overhyped problem, just like overpopulation was in the seventies. The real problem? Pensions, tax receipts, instability in central and west african shitholes that have a surplus of young males and no ability to manage agricultural production, general population contraction.

It sucks a lot worse for an untalented individual to live in Brazil than in the US, that's true. But it is very much not a third world country with third world problems.

They've got more murders there than in the entire rich world + China, Russia, Indonesia and North Africa: https://old.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp1vrd7wr6dy81.jpg

Mostly these are low-lives killing eachother. But I don't want to live in a country full of murders. Even the US murder rate is too high. We should be aiming for perfection, not a bare-minimum. What about Japan or pre-2010s Sweden or Iceland?

I think you are massively over-interpreting the data.

  • There is some correlation between income and IQ (which is in turn correlated with genetics). Likely, there are different effects at play here: Rich caretakers will invest more in educating which will lead both to higher IQ and better paying jobs, but of course a lot of high-paying jobs (STEM, law, medicine, etc) also have some implicit IQ requirements.

  • There is at least some correlation to number of children between generations, parts of it purely cultural. Kids who grew up in large families are more likely to have many children themselves. On the other hand, a significant part of incomes are from inheritance. Most people living in cities spend a huge fraction of their income on rent, and most landlords did not earn their properties through the work of their hands but through inheritance. It stands to reason that a single child whose mother was 40 when she gave birth will on average inherit more money than one born to a five-kids family whose mother gave births between 20 and 35, even if either ones parents owned exactly the same amount.

  • You look at the income to fertility curve of blacks in the US and conclude that they true for blacks in Africa. If the relationship between IQ and fertility in each ethnicity was constant, then 10k years (perhaps 400 generations) ago blacks should have been very smart and whites really dumb given that today their intelligence is roughly similar. This is nonsense.

  • The source in the plot is cited as "American Community Survey". I am not sure if they are affiliated with the IRS and telling them their income is a bad idea if you are cheating on taxes. Just dismissing Hispanics because "anecdotally they do lots of tax fraud" feels epistemically bad, if you believe that tax fraud is significantly affecting the data, then your data is useless, unless you have statistics showing that 99% of the Hispanics cheat on taxes and only 1% of the non-Hispanics.

  • I disagree with your value-loaded adjectives 'dysgenic' and 'eugenic'. All things being equal, a person with a higher IQ is probably more beneficial to society than one with lower IQ in most scenarios. But what you are actually measuring is parental income, which is somewhat correlated to IQ, which then has a strong genetic component. As you use these adjectives, the implications are that a successful drug dealer reproducing is good while a person working an unglamorous job (such as a truck driver) is bad.

As this is the CW thread, we should also discuss how Dobbs will affect this curve. My prediction is that it will mainly increase the fertility of the lower income population. We are selecting not only for parents who were not able to use birth control successfully, but also for people who lack the resources or executive function to travel to another state to terminate their pregnancy. If the IQ 135 math student gets pregnant by accident (not terribly likely, imho), her professor parents will pay for a trip to another state. If the IQ 90 high school dropout raised by a single mom with a substance problem, who discovered sex and booze when she was 14 finally gets pregnant (a more likely scenario), she might not have the financial and executive resources to go on a trip to a blue state.

Your graph shows that non-Hispanic whites don’t have replacement level fertility until the 99th percentile. Meanwhile we are bringing into the country millions of random immigrants, illegal and illegal. This is an apocalyptic case of dysgenics. The dysgenics Black / immigrants will also affect the whites over generations into the future through interbreeding.

The browning of America is manageable

What is manageable? Your grand grandchild will have a very high chance of marrying a “dysgenic” Central American due to the numbers. It is manageable in the sense that you will still be alive but in a less competitive country irrelevant on the world stage?

immigration enforcement is getting harsher

Not sufficiently so, and neither is white racism sufficiently high that you can rest assured that your future ancestors will not be dysgenic. Who did Jeb Bush marry? Your future great grandsons will have the Faustian dilemma of thick latinas or high IQs, to be sure.

Even assuming that today's inhabitants of the Global South are "dysgenic", how certain are we that, a hundred years hence, their descendants will be?

If the poor outcomes among certain ethnic groups are caused by genetic factors, we will soon be able to identify, repair, and possibly improve them beyond what has appeared naturally.

Concerns about "dysgenics" could be regarded by the people of the 26th century as we now look at the predictions of Malthus, or the horse-manure crisis!

You think Jeb Bush's marriage is dysgenic?

Jeb is the son of an elite American political dynasty. His wife is the daughter of a rural Mexican migrant worker he met doing charity work at 17. This is dysgenic if you care about intelligence and eugenic if you favor cute latinas.

Is Mitch McConnell's marriage eugenic because he married an east Asian? Assuming they had chosen to have children.

Is the ultimate hypothetical eugenic melange a mix of the smarter sort of whites, east Asians and Jews?

Ultimate eugenic 'melange' is finding the very best genomes and mating these together. It'd probably be a mix of all these, yes.

McConnell did not find his wife in the backwaters of rural China. They met when she was working a high-level government position. Her father founded a shipping company and she received a degree from Harvard. If anything their relationship might be dysgenic for her. It is not simply that Jeb’s wife is Mexican that makes it dysgenic (after all, plenty of top tier Mexicans), but where in Mexico he located her and how. There was zero selection going on for intelligence and so we can reasonably assume a dysgenic effect (like, if these pairings occurred 100 times, for sure it would be dysgenic on the whole, though there could be a few times where it is non-dysgenic out of chance). The implicit point is that we receive millions upon millions of latin Americans just like Jeb’s wife who will be marrying higher quality Americans and eventually alter the gene pool. You need to be extremely racist and/or track family trees to prevent a deleterious IQ effect as an American, and a lot of Americans will simply select for perceived attractiveness over IQ.

Is the ultimate hypothetical eugenic melange a mix of the smarter sort of whites, east Asians and Jews?

Unquestionably, yes.

Why only factor in IQ? Given that things like moral preferences, health, and a good portion of culture come from genetics as well, doesn’t an IQ-maxing breeding strategy destroy those other three things?

Who said I’m only optimizing for IQ? I think that a genetic intermingling of gentile Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews, and East Asians would maximize the good qualities of all three groups, while dulling some of the problematic extremes of each.

I believe that all three groups have something obvious to be gained by combination with one or more of the other groups. You get Ashkenazi verbal dexterity and high factor of personality, and lose the neuroticism and the propensity for balding and vision problems. You get European creativity and earnestness, and lose the extreme individualism and pig-headedness. You get Asian diligence and orderliness, and lose the extreme conformity and dishonesty.

She might be an exception to the averages. It makes no sense to be convinced that the marriage is dysgenic from an intelligence point of view unless you know something about what her individual intelligence is actually like.

It’s possible that the rural Mexican woman that Jeb met as a 17yo is actually a genius. It’s incredibly unlikely, given the information we know about her and the fact that Jeb selected her from a low number of women in the exact town he was performing charity work in. We can make reasonable assumptions here. As /u/AhhhTheFrench fails to point out, Jeb was honor roll at a prestigious high school, magna cum laude at Yale, then became enormously wealthy as partner of a top real estate firm. His wife’s bio details are just the basic “wife of politician” charity stuff.

Don't bring a knife facts to a gunfight race war! I'm joking about that @coffee_enjoyer, but I see no evidence of JEB! being particularly bright. I'm reading his bio here and it seems like a life of tryhard failing up. The man almost got expelled at the finishing school Andover (repeating 9th grade!) due to bad grades. I did summer soccer camps and stayed in the dorms with Andover kids, not a hard school to stay in... parents tend to send their less exceptional kids there to polish them up a bit, or to get better at a sport with a super senior year and not waste their eligibility years.

Meanwhile Columba Bush managed to marry into one of the most powerful families in the world while coming from basically nothing, has managed to avoid the pitfalls that can come with that, and now has three children that seem smarter than JEB! Who is the dysgenic one here?

Not only that, but she managed to do it without the aid of being really good-looking. She wasn't some kind of gorgeous beauty when younger, she was a completely unremarkable-looking woman.

White red tribe TFR is roughly stable at replacement; that’s a 98 IQ population not going anywhere. Conversely the Hispanic population tends to see declining fertility with time in country.

Whites will decline as a percentage of population, but not by that much.

Very true, but to counter the black pill I will point out it is absolutely possible for even a small minority to retain and improve itself and be relevant on the world stage. But it requires an actual ideology or religion to orchestrate the behavior. Maybe 90% of whites go down the Jeb Bush genetic route over the next several generations. But if 10% don't, because their behavior is coordinated by a unifying ideology or identity, then that is all that would be needed to avoid the Bad Ending.

That's to say- the situation is dire but we are still at an extremely high altitude before impact. There is plenty of time to figure things out but they have to be figured out ASAP.

Your graph shows that non-Hispanic whites don’t have replacement level fertility until the 99th percentile.

which might be still dysgenic, as difference between 99th income percentile and 98th percentile might be luck and not IQ (or whatever we are concerned about).

illegal and illegal

I don't know why but that typo cracks me up. I'm imagining a buddy comedy about a Mexican who gets caught up in the weird intricacies of the American immigration system and his childhood friend who just walked in without a care in the world.

As someone that lives in Brazil I wouldn't wish the world to become more like it at all. Yes we somehow manage to go on and not utterly fail (we still fail) at civilization like certain places in Africa or Middle East (for now, because dysgenic trends also keep going on here), but it involves an insane level of subsidy to lower IQ groups and therefore high taxation that lowers life quality for the middle and upper middle class. It's easy to see how deep the subsidizing goes in Brazil because we've a visible ethnic spectrum going from North-to-South (less euro/more euro), and this is the result (the ridiculous mere 10% return to São Paulo is partially because of how our tax system works but you get the idea, you should expect less than half of what your group pays to return to you, sometimes even as low as 25% or 10%, some northern states literally turn into Africa if we stop sending them free money).

This free money subsidy is repaid with crime, hate, jealousy, etc. I severely doubt that by this point any lower IQ group will simply come to accept that they're getting a bad deal in life because of biological determinism rather than a conspiracy of some other groups keeping them down, even whites aren't that different in this aspect when it comes to the "Jewish Question". No group wants to accept a perceived "inferiority" unless reality kicks them in the face as it happened during the colonization period.

Brazil (especially some parts of it) could be a much better place if we dropped democracy and were tough on crime in similar style to Singapore or El Salvador, along with a new moral system that stops the "everyone is equal" noble lie and lowering the amount of subsidy we engage in, but until then it's nightmare fuel honestly.

At the very least you should assume that if the average IQ decreases, even if assertive mating preserves higher IQ groups, it's a society with a big IQ-gap which will create huge inequality and therefore make democracy pretty much non-viable in the way we do it now (I can see how decentralized democracy could still work but that's a different topic).

Was the situation markedly better during the military dictatorship?

Safety-wise? As far as my parents and older people tell me, yes. Economy-wise? Not really, because the military dictatorship still consisted of a bunch of midwits. Good warriors aren't necessarily good kings.

They were still doing pretty okay until the 1973 oil crisis though (that fucked up the economy).

You would need something more like a deeply patriotic high IQ aristocracy with a good ideology for the country to not only function but substantially improve over time...more or less a return to Monarchy or a Technocracy imo. Every improvement would come with great sacrifice though, such is life ever since we were unicellular organisms.

and Africa's fertility is still declining

This is the big question, how quickly is this happening.

The MICS-2021 survey in Nigeria showed TFR falling from 5.8 to 4.6 in only five years. The 2021 USAID survey showed a drop from 6.1 to 4.8 in ten years. If the MICS trend holds, Nigeria could be below replacement fertility in only ten years.

Combine this with a hypothesised fertility rebound due to Darwinian selection, and the fertilty map 20 years from now could look very different indeed (although obviously massive amounts of fertility will already be baked in, with young populations in Africa and extremely old populations in countries like Korea).

Not directly responding to your point, but it really feels like 2024 is the year that concern about birth rates and pronatalism broke into the mainstream. Looking at Google trends, it looks like news searches for 'birth rate' have increased pretty massively in the past ten years. Web searches for pronatalism have also increased a lot in the last two years.

Is it simply that birth rates have finally dropped so much that more governments are taking notice (outside of Eastern Europe and East Asia)? Is it that future-thinking intellectuals picked it up and the rest of the world is following? Did these guys make it happen?

Maybe fertility doomerism will become the right-wing version of left-wing climate doomerism?

I think this is a case of a very niche interest becoming slightly less niche, but still staying very niche. The vast majority of people do not care in the least bit about the fertility rates of societies.

These surveys suggest that this is changing. I think you're right that it's still pretty low, but the Google Trends links I posted do suggest that awareness is growing, and we can only expect that to increase as birth rates continue to decline and governments become even more panicked.

To your basic question of "why specifically this year", the answer is probably "Elon Musk bought Twitter and this is one of the fruits". Prior to that, this was a banned opinion in mainstream venues, so of course the mainstream didn't hear it much.

I think it's pretty simple, back somewhere in the 70-00s we profited from a short-term demographic dividend as we could forego spending on children, which we could invest in other things (in practice mostly hedonistic endeavours). Now we're starting to see the long-term effects, which is a never-before seen crunch on retirement. As somebody else put it, "now that it's time to reap, I wish I had sown more".

How much of that is reproduction rates and how much of that is the combination of the elderly living longer than ever before + costing significantly more than ever before.

Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000? I see headlines suggesting that they've actually regressed in the US fairly often, largely due to obesity more than countering anti-smoking efforts and such.

Medical expenditure on squeezing out those last few years far greater than the cost of just being elderly, though. Not only is the person not being productive, suddenly they've got a raft of major intervention surgeries and therapies.

Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000?

A little, not much. From 2000–2019 there was a slight increase from 76.7 to 79.1. (Note: more recent data is still screwed up because of bad Covid-19 assumptions).

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

I think that lower smoking rates have played a big part in the increase. If so, health care costs would have increased as well, since lung cancer kills people relatively cheaply compared to, say, Alzheimers.

Prediction: Life expectancy will increase considerably in the next 10 years due to GLP-1 drugs.

The concern over dysgenic spiral isn't the within-group correlation between income and TFR, it's the two things you mentioned: replacement migration and higher TFR of foreign groups in Europe and the United States, and the African population bomb.

Realistically concern about dysgenics is concern about either a) the browning of America or b) the likelihood of a majority black world. And I'm not claiming either to be unconcerning, but upwards mobility still exists in Latin America. Latin America manages to filter its higher IQ individuals into roles that are necessary to the functioning of society.

The problem isn't having a lack of people with an IQ to fill the seat of a middling bureaucrat, or having a high-enough pool of IQ to keep the lights on, it's recognition that the tail ends are sensitive to small shifts in the mean. The high quality leaders, innovators, geniuses, and heroes who have directed Civilization will simply not exist any longer with modest changes in the population-average of these traits. And we will see large growth of the problematic elements on the lowest end of the distribution which, causes decay as well.

Dysgenics is an overhyped problem, just like overpopulation was in the seventies. The real problem? Pensions, tax receipts, instability in central and west african shitholes that have a surplus of young males and no ability to manage agricultural production, general population contraction.

It is exactly the reverse. Dysgenics is an underhyped problem because recognition of HBD is a dependency for assessing the threat. The vast majority of scholars, politicians, and policy-makers don't accept HBD so they have nothing to fear, inherently, from demographic change. Let's say, hypothetically, 100% European admixture no longer exists, and everyone on the continent has a minimum 25% ME and 25% African admixture. You can't recover from that. It's gone forever, and human history is full of many many such cases. You can recover from a tax shortfall.

You might say "that will never happen." But look at how fast demographic change happened in the US, and how you are actually a political pariah if you oppose it! You can't take for granted that Europe will have the resolve to resist migration from the African population bomb, or to even slow down present demographic change of Arab Muslims throughout Europe.

The problem isn't having a lack of people with an IQ to fill the seat of a middling bureaucrat, or having a high-enough pool of IQ to keep the lights on, it's recognition that the tail ends are sensitive to small shifts in the mean. The high quality leaders, innovators, geniuses, and heroes who have directed Civilization will simply not exist any longer with modest changes in the population-average of these traits. And we will see large growth of the problematic elements on the lowest end of the distribution which, causes decay as well.

Replying a second time because it's a totally separate topic.

Assortive mating solves this. Or, more specifically, the US has a repository of high IQ Jews with an ultra high fertility rate. It's likely there are more IQ 160 people in Kiryas Joel than in most African countries.

Assuming that some percentage of these Hassidim secularize each generation, we'll have a reliable supply of new Einsteins.

Of course, this has its own peculiarities. But I have a feeling that other high IQ clusters exist in a less dramatic fashion.

Ashkenazi high IQ genetic stock will continue to exist thanks to ultra-orthodoxy, but the ultra orthodox ain’t gonna be keeping the lights on. They don’t teach their children how to speak English, let alone algebra or any of the million things needed to be competitive in the us economy.

Oh definitely. But what percent of them leak out to the normal community eventually? I don't know that answer, but I think it matters.

An ultra-orthodox apostate is not ready for college, he’s probably not ready for a trade either. He lacks the skills needed to take care of himself in a modern economy and will probably be a charity case until he dies alone.

Haven't you seen Tarzan? You can learn that other stuff quickly as long as you have the genetic substrate.

Really, the more important point is that IQ is not the only cognitive trait that matters. Civilizational achievement of various empires: Rome, Greece, Persia, the British Empire, the American Empire, and so on was a function of much more than the IQ of the ruling elite, but on other qualities which are equally or more important when all taken together. The common ancestry of the Founders of all those Empires points towards a civilizational-bearing cognitive composition that goes beyond IQ alone. In practice, think something like the innate desire of many Europeans to leave their modern, metropolitan cities to settle the American frontier. That quality is not driven by IQ alone.

It also raises the stakes of dysgenic spiral when you accept that IQ is not the only cognitive trait that matters here.

The ultra-orthodox may have the IQ, but do they have the other qualities which would lead towards the thriving of civilization if they were in charge? I certainly don't think so, with Israel being absolute proof of that.

The ultra orthodox are just stuck in a failure mode for civilization. It’s a rare (although I’m not sure if it’s unique) failure mode relative to the usual kind, but it is a failure nonetheless. I’m reminded of our discussion a few months ago on how awful South Korean society seems from the inside, an endless awful, grinding rat race where children are forced to study into the night for endless tests, parents pour all their resources into a single child etc even though all of this is completely unnecessary for the functioning of a country of smart, relatively wealthy people. But they can’t get out of it, seemingly, by themselves.

Similarly, the deep and enduring ugliness and squalor of Chareidi society is impossible to ignore. The ugly, colorless clothes. The lack of concern for architecture, for style, and for art. The adherence to the (secular) styles of dress and music that just happened to exist in Poland 150 years ago for no real reason other than inertia and a lack of care to change. The rejection of material comfort and prosperity, of science. The refusal to fight for their own people and homeland. The parasitic tendency to do whatever it takes to minimize the amount of productive labor done so that they can maximize the amount of pointless, regurgitated religious commentary produced while they wait endlessly for the messiah to come.

The Amish, at least, have a certain (sometimes overstated) folksy, pastoral charm. Squint and - divorced from the fact that they ultimately rely on the world’s most powerful and advanced nation to defend them - they live well, or at least fine. The Chareidim do not. Whatever happens in the current conflict, Israel will either forcibly secularize them or it is doomed, likely the latter. Fecundity aside, they have dug themselves into an aesthetic pit they can’t get out of. If Jewish civilization has any hope of further greatness, and I hope that it does, it must deal with them in the harshest way.

it must deal with them in the harshest way.

Israel is going to be country #110 isn't it.

Expulsion wouldn’t work (they have nowhere to go) and would be unnecessary. The ultra-orthodox just need to be forcibly secularized, which is likely possible (mandating IDF service for all young men and women at gunpoint, closing all kollels, ending all welfare, banning Yiddish in schools, forcibly enrolling them in secular education, killing or imprisoning their leaders if and when they try to rebel, banning their style of dress). It would be spicy, but it’s technically possible, not that it will happen (sadly).

The Amish do fine when the government doesn’t protect them- there are flourishing Amish communities in cartel controlled Mexico. They have to pay taxes to the cartels, sure, but it turns out the things they produce are easy to sell and very fungible, and the cartels literally recruit Mexican soldiers by promising better rations so they can use agricultural products to begin with.

‘Farmer’ is a job that’s literally never going away. Subsistence farming communities aren’t dependent on an industrial civilization having an inexplicable soft spot for them- everyone needs food, and very few people particularly want to grow it themselves because it’s a lot of hard work. They can trade for outside inputs in any conceivable threat environment pretty easily because, again, there is no one on earth who doesn’t need what they produce.

Their society can’t make microchips, but the things they do make are infinitely fungible so it doesn’t matter. If they for whatever reason need microchips the people who do make them need what the Amish have to sell.

‘Farmer’ is a job that’s literally never going away. Subsistence farming communities aren’t dependent on an industrial civilization having an inexplicable soft spot for them

It's already reduced by about 50x, and I'd claim that subsistence farming isn't really feasible in much of North America, or won't be soon, because of high land taxes on all the good farmland.

there is no one on earth who doesn’t need what they produce.

If I were a cartel, I'd rather have at least semi-industrialized farmers on my land than subsistence farmers. "Subsistence" means you don't produce much more than you need to subsist, which means you can't produce much taxes for the local cartel / government.

I don't know why you think this is an either/or, though - there are other insular Amish-like groups with high fertility that are also fully modern when it comes to production, e.g. the Hutterites and Mennonites.

I don’t think you know a lot about Kiryas Joel. First, they are not actual members of your country. They are their own nation. They barely pay taxes. They do not share their wealth with outsiders. Nothing positive that happens to them translates into something positive to you. Kiryas Joel was nominally the poorest town in America because of their tax schemes, they were given a state funded fertility clinic, but had the highest fertility. In cities in the US they don’t even use the state emergency* services but have their own. When they gain power in your town they cut all education spending and take over councils with block votes. You will never be able to join them if you are not Jewish. You are essentially writing, “I feel safe about America because of a totally alien and sovereign nation within its borders whose numbers are increasing at an extreme rate”. You might as well request China to conquer you as that would be better for your interests.

But you’re also confusing Haredi with Europe’s pedigreed assimilated Jewish families. Haredi IQ in America has never been studied. The Haredi do not have a fertility rate that highly favors their rabbis like the historically high class rabbinical families of Europe where a Rabbi may be selected based off meritocracy and have the highest fertility. Instead, all Haredi have a lot of children, including the dysgenic ones.

“I am going to sell out my entire people for an alien group 100% against my interests because of a non-evidenced belief that they may make Einsteins” is not persuasive. We have India and China for recruiting new Einsteins anyway, and they will actually assimilate instead of literally 2000 years of hating assimilation.

But you’re also confusing Haredi with Europe’s pedigreed assimilated Jewish families. Haredi IQ in America has never been studied. The Haredi do not have a fertility rate that highly favors their rabbis like the historically high class rabbinical families of Europe where a Rabbi may be selected based off meritocracy and have the highest fertility. Instead, all Haredi have a lot of children, including the dysgenic ones.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the people living in KJ have the same genetic stock as a typical Ashkenazi Jew and would (it stands to reason) have a similarly high IQ. The selection process which led to this result was in the past.

I never claimed that places like KJ are continuing to select for high IQ people. But neither are they selecting for low IQ people. The overall genetic potential within the community stays constant.

"I am going to sell out my entire people for an alien group 100% against my interests because of a non-evidenced belief that they may make Einsteins” is not persuasive.

This is extra low charity. I mentioned KJ as a counter to the idea that the whole population will become so genetically mixed that high IQ outliers can't exist. Clearly this isn't true. Even ignoring isolated religious communities, smart people marry other smart people and have smart children.

I’m pretty sure Hasidim began as a folk religion among the poorer rural Eastern European Jews. It was detested by the leading educated Rabbis. I don’t think it is correct to say that they are the same genetic stock of a typical Ashkenazi Jew. Assimilated Ashkenazi Jews came from intelligent rabbinical-finance families, whereas many of the starting Hasidic families were the poorest and least educated Jews.

smart people marry other smart people and have smart children

Maybe 80% of the time, which means every generation they will be 20% worse off

I’m pretty sure Hasidim began as a folk religion among the poorer rural Eastern European Jews. It was detested by the leading educated Rabbis. I don’t think it is correct to say that they are the same genetic stock of a typical Ashkenazi Jew.

That depends on the founding stock. Many of the smartest and most successful American secularized Jews of the early-late 20th century were of poor shtetl stock rather than bourgeois Western (eg German) Ashkenazi stock. The insane IQ stats found amongst Jewish kids in Brooklyn schools a century ago were likewise largely capturing Ostjuden rather than more-established Yekkes.

In addition, the founding population of modern Chareidim weren’t necessarily rural peasants, they were often communities that surrounded the few yeshivot whose members survived the war, including the extended families of the leading rabbis, many in the Baltics. They weren’t representative of the most common rural Jewish inhabitants of the pale of settlement.

More testing is needed, I agree, to be sure about the quality of Chareidim. But I’d say the evidence suggests their modern founding population (especially given it was highly selected for the few smart enough to escape the war in time) was probably on par with Ashkenazim in general at that time. Even if the extreme selection that produced the high IQ average then stopped (because as you say they all have 8 kids now), that would not necessarily lead to a strong decline in intellectual performance in the medium term, only maintenance.

In commodities, particularly the wackier side of mining, there are quite a few interesting ultra-orthodox businessmen (perhaps due to longstanding involvement with gemstones etc). Some of their stories are insane, essentially uneducated (formally, at least in the secular sense) men raising a small sums of money from within the community and making some very smart bets that pan out very well, bets hedge funds staffed by great traders and PMs with smart analysts with PhDs in mining engineering or whatever for speculative analysis of exploratory sites would love to make.

I therefore suspect they are indeed very smart, especially when considering that these guys are typically the failed students who get told to spend less time on Talmudic commentary because their analysis isn’t as good as the next guy’s. That they choose to waste their best resources on what is essentially Bible study is, of course, a grander tragedy.

Maybe 80% of the time, which means every generation they will be 20% worse off

I don't think so. Sometimes, by random chance people are smarter than both parents. These people will tend to marry other outliers and concentrate that intelligence. The forces of assortive mating are much stronger than in the past, given that so many highly intelligent people move from all over the world to work at US universities and tech companies.

Over time, I'd expect the number of extremely high IQ people to increase even as the overall IQ decreases.

Does anyone have a link to something explaining how communities like Kiryas Joel and various Amish / Mennonite towns exist in a legal sense?

It seems to me that they would be in constant violation of eveything from the mundane - say, fire code in buildings - to the serious - unreported child abuse etc.

They are in violation of these things and you could write several pages of all their infractions. Everything from declaring a personal dwelling a religious building (a Chabad rabbi does this in my own town and probably your town if you live in NJ, check the property records), to violating agreements on utilities, to simply not teaching English in schools. In Kiryas Joel (“low income”) they have their own private security that will illegally attempt to stop you if you walk through their town as a woman without the proper attire… welfare schemes involving Haredi usually result in sweetheart deals with no jail time…

there’s not really an explanation beyond “Haredi block vote and block-lobby and use all of their money to ensure the illegal flourishing of their group”

A google search on the FLDS would inform you that doing this is a more general habit of cults, and getting away with it is more a matter of general internal cohesion than block voting.

Of course, I don’t disagree. But FLDS is 6k unsophisticated people in the middle of nowhere, and the Hasidic community in Jersey/NY is perhaps ~250k quite sophisticated people who have ties of advocacy to a larger community of fellow travelers. I just looked it up and I see I have been misusing the term “block vote” (I wonder if it morphed into a different colloquial meaning around here) but the Hasidic leaders effectively tell their members who to vote for.

but the Hasidic leaders effectively tell their members who to vote for.

This Is Not Uncommon

The FLDS basically gets away with it- with even other Mormon polygamist groups advocating against them. Geographic distance is probably part of it but it’s also just hard to police groups that don’t want to be.

The Amish are actually exempted from quite a few laws in the parts of Pennsylvania they're in. The Haredi generally take over the government of the towns they dominate; it's good to be the king mayor.

Being exempted from laws because of an adherence to a particular faith seems to be exactly what the constitution wanted to prevent.

I'm not trying to be combative here. I just think it's wild that the US essentially tolerates a few mini-cults within our own borders because ... quilts?

Being exempted from laws because of an adherence to a particular faith seems to be exactly what the constitution wanted to prevent.

You agree with Justice Scalia circa 1990 on this, but it's a nuanced issue that has been going the other way in recent years.

Basically there's tension between the Free Exercise clause, the Establishment clause, and the all-encompassing state. When a general law steps all over a religious practice, it's hard to decide whether exempting the religion violates Establishment, or not exempting them violates Free Exercise.

Yes, actually? The First Amendment is often seen to cut both ways: it prevents the establishment of religion, but also prohibits enforcing secularism on the public.

It was broadly seen to include religious exemptions to generally applicable laws until Employment Division v. Smith in 1990, at which point Congress passed the RFRA near-unanimously, saying "actually, we meant to apply strict scrutiny to laws burdening the practice of religion". At its core, allowing Native Americans to use peyote for their religion, or the Amish to opt out of Social Security (some groups even object to the assignment of SSNs to people!), or Sikh soldiers to grow beards.

In practice, some of the Internet atheism crowd chafe at Christians taking advantage of the RFRA, but I'd say it's general use cases are fairly popular. But it also swings close to self-contradiction in legal arguments, like Trinity Lutheran: the state can't prevent churches from applying to generally available playground improvement funding.

They control the towns they’re in, local government has a lot of power in the US, and statehouses are extremely easily corrupted given most politicians are small-time local people who are never subject to much scrutiny.

If I call a county Sheriff to a home in Kryas Joel, do they have the same authorities they would elsewhere? Can they arrest people, can they enter premises with probably cause / warrant etc?

If the answer is, "Yes", then my assumption would be this doesn't happen much because of the immense social pressure in these communities to not call the police. Would that be accurate?

The FLDS is definitely subject to secular jurisdiction and has had specific laws passed in states they live in to make it easier for law enforcement to obtain probable cause on them. Still doesn’t work because of internal cohesion to not involve the police.

For sure, I think it’s a perennial feature of all highly insular religious communities that they’re suspicious of police and that they tell children from an extremely young age never to involve secular authorities. Even if they knew how, doing so would destroy their entire lives; they don’t even speak English as a first language, they would find it hard to exist in the secular world.

If I call a county Sheriff to a home in Kryas Joel, do they have the same authorities they would elsewhere? Can they arrest people, can they enter premises with probably cause / warrant etc?

Yes, Kryas Joel is not literally an autonomous state immune to US law. Just like the FLDS and Amish communities are not exempt from US laws. In practice, local law enforcement prefers to leave them alone and avoid political shitstorms unless they absolutely have to step in.

99.9% of the population is a nearly identical mixture of African, European, Middle Eastern, and Hispanic and you have 0.001% population of 100% Hassidim that forms the ruling elite. Sounds like hell on earth.

Cool. What should we do about it? You seem to have lots of complaints but few solutions.

Prevent demographic change, promote eugenic mate selection. Deportations, endogamy... There are levers. Those things are going to require some non-conservative ideology that motivates people deeply. That's what Religion does.

What is that ideology/Religion? I don't know, it doesn't exist yet, but it needs to inspire people to do those things. It's not Christianity. It's not Conservatism.

Completely uninvited, I will offer my theory of everything.

What is good: Direct relationships between people

What is bad: Relationships between people and the state, or mediated by the state

With stronger family and community relations, eugenic mate selection will happen on its own. In terms of a direct policy prescription.. school vouchers seem like a good start. And since we can't cut spending, we need to "starve the beast" via tax cuts whenever possible.

That would be the ultimate plot twist, if the thing that ended up saving the white race was.... small gubment and tax cuts. But like I said, conservatives do not have the solution.

The concern over dysgenic spiral isn't the within-group correlation between income and TFR, it's the two things you mentioned: replacement migration and higher TFR of foreign groups in Europe and the United States, and the African population bomb.

Yep. Even if the evolution within each group is eugenic, the overall effect is dysgenic. This is Simpson's Paradox in a nutshell.

At the risk of gatekeeping, this should be table stakes in this forum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

breeder hypothesis

What is that?

The idea that as low TFR drags on, natural selection will push for people who are going to have more kids under any circumstances.

In the west, this is not actually a selection for wanting kids- it's a selection mostly for traits correlated with religiosity and ruralness. I'm not sure about East Asia, but it's probably selection for ruralness. I don't think that Japan's high-for-the-region TFR is due to the breeding hypothesis starting to kick in- I think it's relative social conservatism, same as Italy.

Tangentially related, but I have helped Asian immigrants with their businesses and there was definitely tax fraud. Chinese women dividing stacks of cash and accounting software that tracks credit card purchases.

Once I went to a newly opened Chinese restraunt (a real Chinese restaurant meant for Chinese people, not that gross American "Chinese" food.). They gave a nearly 10% discount for paying cash. They wrote down two numbers on the bill. Saving on credit card fees and illegally undereporting income.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats