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Notes -
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.
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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.
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).
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Maybe 80% of the time, which means every generation they will be 20% worse off
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.
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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.
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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.
This Is Not Uncommon
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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.
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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
kingmayor.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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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