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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5895 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Chicken or egg? The converse is that after spending a few years in east Africa you realize that the dude living in a dirt-floor hut who speaks multiple languages fluently and could run circles around the median ivy-league grad student is the norm rather than the exception because anyone who isn't speaking at least two languages and working three side hustles either emigrated or starved to death decades ago.

Is this a fictional hypothetical or do you seriously believe this? I've read anecdotes from people who have visited the underdeveloped parts of Africa and they don't square with your comment. And then there's IQ results.

I don't think the "dirt-floor hut" part is very applicable to Haiti, and in fact is sort of racist. And as for Africa – at this point, hundreds of millions of Africans are, despite all their problems, not literally premodern tribal savages (who might know languages and stuff). They have nations, schools, institutions, and their urbanization rate is closing in on 50%. These mid-20th century excuses about cultural bias of Western metrics ring hollow when they are increasingly raised in the same universal West-derived culture.

Yeah, we may underestimate two tendencies:

  1. People who are truly uneducated in basic concepts may appear much "dumber" than an educated person would think. I've seen this with coding: I once eavesdropped on an older person being taught coding and things I thought were intuitive like program flow seemed to take too long. Of course, I can't remember how intuitive it was for me in the early days either, because I overlearned it so long ago.

  2. People who are working in impersonal institutions where direct consequences for inefficiency can be deferred or it is hard to identify in the first place can appear very "lazy" and irrational (in terms of just not caring about maximizing their productivity or effort, even if there's low-hanging fruit) to people who've actually been disciplined by the modern workplace with its focus on efficiency and time. This is probably worse in corrupt countries.

I've heard Western-educated Africans complain especially about #2, talking about their own people, in ways that might cause trouble for a white man in a progressive space.

That said...if a person legitimately can't sort things numerically (as opposed to not giving a shit and stonewalling gringos)...I'm inclined to believe that they're actually facing an intelligence deficit.

#2 is absolutely something I've encountered numerous times in the wild and one of the major reasons I think that "culture" is way more important than most commenters here seem to treat it. A somewhat related phenomena I've seen both in countries with major unrest (EG Sudan, the Middle east etc...) and poorer neighborhoods in the states is almost an antipathy towards savings and capital accumulation based on a (largely justified) assumption that if someone does start to pull ahead, someone else will just come a long and steal it from them. A sort of preemptive "crab bucket" effect where instead of being torn down they avoid climbing in the first place lest they make themselves a target. Another one you see in a lot of is the old "honesty is for suckers" trope. IE "Why should I 'cooperate' when I know the game is rigged?". After all being the one honest cop in a otherwise corrupt department, or the one guy in the neighborhood who isn't in on the local organized crime racket generally isn't conducive to one's long term survival.

Local minima and a "defect-defect" equilibrium are a hell of a drug.

Is this a fictional hypothetical or do you seriously believe this?

It's not a fictional hypothetical.

The norm? There are ofc plenty of africans who could succeed in academia, but in a country where average iq is optimistically, ~ 82 (2010) and gdp/capita is 1k - 10k ... how can they compare to a median iq of (from harvard undergrads in 2002, but should ballpark grad students) 128? You aren't just saying 'africans are as smart as random americans', you're comparing africans to americans who are heavily selected for test scores and academic achievement (even the AA-admitted blacks or hispanics are still the best available). (Even if the average white/black iq difference is entirely environmental, that still applies - starving, parasites, malaria, etc as a child does make one dumber).

Yes, "the norm" because mental plasticity, resilience, and ability to recognize and intergrate new information is only tangentially (if at all) related how high one scores on an IQ test. Ditto "academic achievement".

and ability to recognize and intergrate new information is only tangentially (if at all) related how high one scores on an IQ test. Ditto "academic achievement"

Attempts to study this empirically get results more like this,

The correlation between a latent intelligence trait (Spearman's g from CAT2E) and a latent trait of educational achievement (GCSE scores) was 0.81

rather than no relation.

What is "educational achievement" supposed to be a proxy for in this context?

Do you think IQ measures anything of meaning?

Africa has ~1.4B people. If at least 500M of those are as able to recognize and integrate new information as the median ivy-league grad - does that mean, e.g., most of them could learn to code and be productive software engineers? Or be productive research scientists?

If that was true ... bryan caplan guessed open borders would double world GDP. But unlocking the potential of 500M people, who can do complex technical work only done by a few % of the american population would quadruple it, at least. We must abolish borders, and teach all the refugees javascript.

... unless your point was merely a dig at ivy league grads, implying they're just as capable as the average american and african. But that's just facially untrue, observing the technical accomplishments of (some) ivy league grads, even in areas totally unrelated to prestige like 'anonymous internet software development', many of them are much smarter than the average. yud post Competent Elites

(he's generally right, although lmao at "smart enough for your cognitive mechanisms to reliably decide to sign up for cryonics" as a measure of intelligence as an example for "astronomically high threshold of intelligence + experience + rationality before a screwup becomes surprising" - looks like not making mistakes is quite hard)

The use of 'ivy league grads' in that statement just makes it confusing - yeah, it insults the lib elites, but I now have no idea how smart you're implying the african actually is!

Do you think IQ measures anything of meaning?

I think it's positively correlated with things like conscientiousness and academic inclination, but I don't think it actually measures the thing that IQ fetishists like to believe that it measures, IE genuine intelligence or competency. It's Ironic that you should bring up Bryan Caplan because in my view he is perhaps one of the quintessential examples of someone who is academically accomplished, and clearly has a very high IQ, while simultaneously being a fucking moron.

As for how smart I think the average African is, I'd say they're on par with the average used car salesman here in the states and while some might see that as a "diss" that's whole lot smarter than a lot of folks here, especially the gay autistic Bay Area crowd, give them credit for. Fact is that I've met more idiots with prestigious degrees, than I've met idiots in living Africa or working in sales. My theory regarding the mechanism is that societies and trades with less wealth and narrower margins don't have the luxury of tolerating incompetence and/or free riders to the degree that academia does.

Your average car salesman can sort alphabetically.

It appears you use 'intelligence' is sense 'personality which I like'. This is not a useful meaning.

So can the average African, and I could just easily accuse you and the rest of the rat-sphere pf doing the same. Equating Intelligence with nueroticism and holding blue-tribe values rather than ability to think

So can the average African,

Source? Do you think Scott just badmouthed Haitians when wrote they had problem with numerical sorting?

I could just easily accuse you and the rest of the rat-sphere pf doing the same.

Based on which posts?

Equating Intelligence with nueroticism and holding blue-tribe values rather than ability to think

You were just provided with a source that IQ has very weak negative correlation in this comment

https://www.themotte.org/post/327/making-cognitive-enhancement-palatable/56895?context=8#context

and now you repeat this...

Does it tell something to you if a right-winger (are pro-HBD more likely to be right-wing?) says that intelligence correlates with blue-tribe values (which is weak, anyway; I'm lazy, no source)

You are a military man. Does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 tell something to you? Isn't it a real-life experiment confirming vailidity of IQ?

My source is 2 years spent living in East Africa back when I was still working as a contractor for a humanitarian NGO. While I don't want to bad-mouth Scott, I do think he's a very much "on the spectrum", and thus not a reliable source when it comes to this sort of thing. More pointedly, I'm not convinced that he can tell the difference between "mentally incapable" and "can not be bothered".

More comments

Self-deleted original response which expressed the view that cartoonish red tribe's mockery of blue tribe intelligence is seriously challenged by the reality of blue tribe's basically unchallenged rule over red tribe. I apologize for it's boo ?ingroup but not really ingroup...? nature.

Define "rule" because if anything the 30 last years have seen a precipitous decline in both the prestige and de-facto power of blue tribe "experts".

By what metric?

It's a common theme with both tribes. My enemy is both incredibly stupid but also somehow also a giant threat. The cognitive dissonance never seems to register.

But only one accused the other of being the only one to think in such a manner. Eco claimed of facists in his 8th out of 14 points:

Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

Reading Eco is good mental exercise. He is quite smart, capable and well-read, not without fault, but still well-read and smart. I think The Prague Cemetery could be something that wold interest many Motte users just for peeking at the sheer amount Eco has read about the 19th century politics to write it. (Never mind the plot.)

Concerning Eco's definition of fascism. If you read the original, it appears that Eco gets that because something fits his definition is not eternally always equal to Mussolini's fascism. Truncated quotes (apologies, but Eco does not write succinctly)

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. ...

Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? ... [W]hen the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones. ...

So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. ...

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

... (insert the list with explanations) ...

We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

More briefly, I don't think Eco would have had any problem acknowledging that his list does not overdetermine "fascism". He says he is trying to gesture at a syncretic fuzzy ball of ideas but want to argues the fuzzy ball "ur-Fascism" can meaningfully still be called "fascism" in post-Mussolini era. He quite clearly gestures that many of his points are generally unpleasant types of political thought that the free world would be better without and people wearing black shirts do not have a monopoly over them. And what would be "the most innocent of disguises" if not a political ideologue who argues to be antifascist yet deploys the same tactics and ideas?

The uncharitability is more on the people who take a distilled list of his in Wikipedia and choose to apply it like Der Hexenhammer to identify witches they want to identify as witches.

edit. this was intended as a reply to @FistfullOfCrows here edit2 @ not /u/

TBH Eco can go fuck himself with his uncharitable bullshit. One can be both in a position of political and economic power and still be a spineless coward (in a personal way), with weak morals and not enough "will to power".

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