site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

hybrid vigor

I don't think this is a major factor in humans. In fact there's plenty of reason to think the opposite might be the case, since different populations have evolved different complex sets of alleles to solve particular problems and a child with some of each is liable to end up without either being functional. A well-aligned mind is a difficult thing to code for.

But, there's also some reason to think it's true. Emil talks about that a little bit here.

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/04/is-mixed-race-breeding-bad-for-you/

IIRC he thinks that certain recessive alleles may be hurting cognition, and 'outbreeding' would help with that. But as I understand the situation, even where that's the case, it's still most advantageous to mate with someone as genetically close to you as possible given that they don't share your deleterious recessives.

I don't think hybrid vigor would be a factor in every case, but alleles that manage to reach fixation in a particular population group likely make some sort of balanced tradeoff-- not optimizing for any one thing too hard because doing so would confer metabolic costs while producing no competitive advantages (against a population with the same genes.) So if racial IQ science is real* I'd suspect that in the right-tail of IQ distribution we'd see people with heterozygous alleles that were "intended" to perform some balanced function in isolated groups, but combined by crossbreeding lose any limiting factors and produce people exceptional in some way or another.

*To avoid concern trolling, I should be clear here that I do not have any particular faith in the existing racial IQ science. I can't rule out in principle that racial differences between IQ groups exist, but there are too many confounding factors, and in particular people who talk about race-based IQ support their claims with evidence that matches the pop-sci view of what "evolution" looks like, rather than what any plant or animal breeder would say actually happens in practice with genetics.

I mean, the hybrid vigor hypothesis for IQ specifically seems pre-falsified- most of history's greatest geniuses were purebred members of endogamous groups(many specifically Ashkenazi, but the Indian math geniuses as well. And I'd be remiss not to mention that the Meiji restoration was possible because hyper-isolationist Japan had an existing well of underutilized geniuses.). Additionally the heavily mixed populations of Latin America seem underrepresented in scientific and technical achievements compared to the members of high-IQ groups in those countries.

I'd be interested in watching what happens with hapas over the next few decades, but I don't think hybrid vigor is part of the winning formula. I'm not writing off the idea entirely that the key to producing super geniuses is with Ashkenazi/Tamil Brahmin hybrids. I'm just skeptical.