site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 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.

Firstly, I don't know if you can assess intelligence from ancient populations.

We can go to West Africa or Haiti today and see 'ok these people aren't that smart', test genes and compare with other populations today. We can draw upon all kinds of data and observations from real countries, real peoples that exist today.

But 3000 years ago? 8000 years ago? Why was the Bronze Age collapse so good for IQ, such that it took us ages to recover to that peak level of intellect? Were the Sea People the true bringers of enrichment and diversity? We just don't know. Who can say what we're really graphing here, there could be a million confounders we don't know about.

Secondly, call me high-time preference but I'm interested in the here and now. So what if Meds, Hittites and ancient Egyptians had masterful civilizations while the Germanics were carving ugly wooden faces? Ancient Egypt is gone now. The Greece of Plato and Aristotle is gone now. Rome is gone. Byzantium is gone. We see ruins and read stories about peoples who don't exist anymore, places that lost their relevance. We can construct stories about how the dirty Asiatics brought Christianity with them to displace proper European religion but it's all just conjecture, we weren't there at the time. Our knowledge of this period is vanishingly small.

Let's focus on not becoming ancient history for someone else to ponder over.

Firstly, I don't know if you can assess intelligence from ancient populations.

once you analyzed lots of phenotype-genotypes for moderns you can apply these models for ancient, and analyzing population averages is simpler in some aspects than getting a good score for individual: for individual, a trait would depend on non-linear combinations and rare alleles; for comparing between populations, these aren't significant, because a population cannot reliably continue lucky non-linear combinations (we however do in in agriculture with f1 seeds and cloning).

How verifiable is it, though? Where are we getting DNA from, are they outliers trapped in peat bog pits or something? The article says they just found basically anonymous DNA samples from across Eurasia, over thousands and thousands of years. We can't know that this is a balanced sample.

What if they have X genetics and we accurately capture that but some epigenetics are activated/deactivated at the time? As far as I can determine, the methylation pattern is more easily lost (and they didn't cover it anyway).

I like my science as concrete and provable as possible. This is dangerously abstract. Abstraction is fine if we had some real Indo-European farmers or Neolithics to talk to but since we don't, standards for validity should be kept high.

Crises, especially ones with a large risk of death tend to drive evolution. Who got to survive after a collapse? Smart people with a higher time preference survived because they were the ones prepared to survive the collapse and to rebuild afterwards. The ones who die are the ones who are dumb and therefore do stupid things to kill themselves, are unable to plan ahead, and lack a solid work ethic.

Now the reverse is true of High Civilization like Greece and Rome. We say it ourselves — good times make weak men. The Greeks and Romans used slaves for everything and had a pretty decent welfare state in Rome itself. The chief problem for Rome was a large class of unemployed in Rome who had to be entertained. In such a city, one could live a comfortable life and never have to break a sweat doing anything productive. And so if you were lazy, stupid, and uninterested in working or getting educated, not a problem. And so while those people die quickly in a collapse, they didn’t really suffer all that much in Rome. So those types would definitely lower the IQ of classic civilization.

Crises, especially ones with a large risk of death tend to drive evolution. Who got to survive after a collapse?

Have you lived or witnessed close by a collapse? From my experience with the fall of the communism it is not the type of person that you described that thrived.

You mean, smart people with a lower time preference.

Doesn't this risk being a just-so story? It's not clear to me why a civilisational collapse or dark age would necessarily favour smart people with a higher time preference - you can probably argue just as easily that it would favour impulsive and violent people, because short-term aggression is more valuable in a time of instability. Long-term planning and building is more valuable in a time stable enough for generational or intergenerational investment to bear fruit.

Crises tend to favour fast strategies - and surely you could argue that fast strategies will value IQ less than slow strategies, and so you might expect average IQ to go down through a crisis.

To be clear, I'm not asserting that this is definitely the case. It just seems at least as plausible to me as the theory that crises favour people with higher IQs. I have no strong opinion on how crises influence the genetics of IQ.