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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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There's also the tail end of this article, in which he alludes to transgenderism possibly being a Western culture-bound syndrome.

Hes mentioned it again since, and I think he believes it - but this doesnt mean he is anti trans. This is the guy who was ground zero for the HBD therefore socialism argument. @self_made_human

HBD therefore socialism

Two of these three words feel like a gross misrepresentation of the article.

The most HBD thing he says in that article is that " IQ is 50% to 80% heritable". He does not talk about group differences at all.

The thing you call socialism is likely based on this paragraph:

Ozy once told me that the law of comparative advantage was one of the most inspirational things they had ever read. This was sufficiently strange that I demanded an explanation.

Ozy said that it proves everyone can contribute. Even if you are worse than everyone else at everything, you can still participate in global trade and other people will pay you money. It may not be very much money, but it will be some, and it will be a measure of how your actions are making other people better off and they are grateful for your existence.

Below that, he talks about donating a portion of your income to whatever causes you feel are important. This hardly seems to be a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Fair point about HBD. Is there a simple name I could have used instead? Socialism is not really about the parts you quoted, but about the very extensive discussion of what you "deserve", even if not directly about money. If I had to pick a quote, it would be

The best reason not to say that is that we view Ramanujan as intellectually gifted. But the very phrase tells us where we should classify that belief. Ramanujan’s genius is a “gift” in much the same way your parents giving you a trust fund on your eighteenth birthday is a “gift”, and it should be weighted accordingly in the moral calculus.

HBD therefore socialism argument.

To be fair, I have long been uncertain whether widespread acceptance of HBD (to which I claim no strong opinion) isn't the right-wing slam dunk that I see it occasionally presented as. In particular, a very extreme left view of it is pretty terrifying too: "comrade, we've discovered a way to measure ability. You know, from each according to his (or her, or their) ability, and we've deemed you to have lots."

There's a reason I like to bring up HBD blogger "Jayman" on these discussions, because he was rather forthright about his support for HBD, and hard line hereditarianism (for one, he liked to argue that poor outcomes for children of single mothers are entirely due to genetic differences between the kind of women who end up single mothers and the kind who end up married mothers [and between the kind of men who knock up the former and the kind of men who marry the latter], and have nothing to do with the actual single-parent environment at all), being about justifying racial spoils in perpetuity. He'd argue that the infamous crime stat differentials are entirely due to blacks being genetically predisposed to criminality… and therefore they can't help it, and thus society owes it to them to punish them less harshly and less often than whites to compensate for this genetic disprivilege; and that black-on-white (and black-on-Asian, and black-on-Jewish) crime — which he once characterized in HBDChick's comments section as "a one-way race war" — is simply something that the less criminally-inclined races are obligated to tolerate, even indulge. That the reality of HBD means that the "genetic have" races are morally obligated to redistribute as much of their wealth to the "genetic have-not" races — particularly blacks — as is necessary to "close the gaps" and produce "racial equity" in perpetuity.

Georgism for IQ would be hilarious to suggest just for making that sort of person think about the consequences.
"If you have the IQ to post about Rick and Morty on Reddit all day, you could easily afford your tax payments by working as an investment banker instead. Hurry up: Cleetus's UBI won't pay for itself"

Reminds me a bit of Mankiw's Optimal Taxation of Height parody paper. IQ is observable, inelastic, and correlated with income, and so the government should collect IQ measurements and tax those with high IQ more.

I hadn't thought of that one in years, thanks for reminding me!

Thanks for pointing to the Mankiw, that's a pretty funny idea.

Georgism for virtue, by contrast, is already widespread. The idiom is "ruining it for everyone".

"If you have enough self-control, intelligence, and/or temperance that restricting your freedom is an injury, you're obviously wise enough to find a way to be able to pay the taxes on the licenses and permission slips we deem necessary before you may exercise those freedoms. If it saves just one life taken by the most selfish, nasty person in society, it's worth it."

Hes mentioned it again since, and I think he believes it - but this doesnt mean he is anti trans.

No, but "gender dysphoria is a very recent phenomenon almost entirely parochial to the West" contradicts at least three of the core tenets of gender ideology. I don't think hardcore trans activists (who are a penny a dozen in the circles in which Scott moves) would appreciate the nuances of a statement like "gender dysphoria is probably a culture-bound mental illness, but that doesn't mean trans people aren't deserving of respect and shouldn't be entitled to do with their bodies as they please", and I think Scott knows this better than anyone, which is why he's so cagey and evasive whenever the topic comes up. People have been smeared as transphobic bigots for much less.

This is the guy who was ground zero for the HBD therefore socialism argument.

I think a more accurate gloss of his position as I recall it is "HBD therefore UBI". I appreciate that there's significant overlap between socialism and UBI but I don't think they're interchangeable or that one necessarily implies the other. "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" was a popular slogan in the early Soviet Union, after all.

contradicts at least three of the core tenets of gender ideology

Sure, because they are highly sensitive to any deviation, but you shouldnt take that too seriously in looking forward. The "haha yes we are transing your kids and its good" branch already does pop up occasionally, and if* the cause keeps progressing, its plausible that this could grow more visible, incorporate stuff like

Before anyone gets too excited about this, I want to stress a version of the point Bures got right earlier: there is no neutral culture. Having lots of transgender people is downstream of cultural choices. But having lots of cisgender people is also downstream of cultural choices. There isn’t infinite flexibility - evolution ensures a bias towards heterosexuality, for obvious reasons. But there’s a lot of flexibility - Spartan men married and had sex with women, but they thought this was a dumb annoying thing they had to do to have children, and sex with young boys was the obvious enjoyable satisfying option. Even within evolution’s constraints, culture can do some pretty weird stuff. I think you could probably have a culture where 99% of people were transgender, where it was generally accepted that everyone transitioned on their 18th birthday, and where only a few people (disproportionately schizophrenic) would object or see anything wrong with this.

...and remain accepted/eventually become the standard.

*uncertain in the near future, and independently of current events, I give it a good chance that trans isnt part of the progressive vision long-term.

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