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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32994 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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As former President Jimmy Carter enters hospice care, we are likely to soon see a huge number of stories concerning what an honorable person he was. But keep in mind that in 1971 Carter, then Governor of Georgia "proclaimed ‘American Fighting Men's Day" likely in support of First Lieutenant William L. Calley who had recently been convicted for his role in the Mỹ Lai massacre. The massacre involved the rape and murder of Vietnamese men, women, and even children.

Carter is probably vying with Nixon as the most demonised US president in the 20th century. Maybe Hoover would also qualify for the competition. Hoover seemed to be a fantastic human being but simply inept at the job (despite being highly intelligent). Nixon was likely demonised for ideological reasons with Watergate being the fig leaf. Carter is really the enigma. How much of the economic woes was even his fault, rather than the energy shock(s) that reverberated throughout the 1970s? He pissed off the Israel lobby with his "Peace not Apartheid" book, which didn't help matters for his post-presidential reputation.

Finally, to sell the Reagan revolution you need a bogeyman and Carter was it. I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Carter was a mediocre president, but I'm unconvinced he was as bad as his reputation.

One interesting aspect of his political career I've heard about is that it supposedly disproves the notion of the Southern Strategy. After all, when Carter was running for reelection, Reagan only barely won the Deep South states.

Far more disgraceful is that as a person with a background in nuclear engineering, he failed to support the industry and was instead promoting coal and solar and such nonsense.

His administration also did not defend against a lawsuit that ended examinations for civil servants, thus helping ensure the worse quality of future bureaucrats.

Firstly, that happened late in his term, secondly...

Nothing bad really happened at TMI apart from a massive financial loss, because the design of the reactor was fundamentally sound.

Despite gross negligence, there was no radiation release worth mentioning, just some amount of contamination of the power plant. And this is one of the top 10 power plant disaster, ever.

Had it not been for operator error- a valve was closed off that should have allowed emergency feedwater into steam generators for extra cooling - the reactors would probably still be in operation.

It's darkly funny, as one of the reasons for the meltdown is possibly obesity. An operator did not notice the signal one that a emergency feedwater pump valves was closed because his fat gut blocked the view:

The valve position lights for one block valve were covered by a yellow maintenance tag. The reason why the operator missed the lights for the second valve is not known, although one theory is that his own large belly hid it from his view.[32] The valves may have been left closed during a surveillance test two days earlier.[33][34] With the block valves closed, the system was unable to pump any water. The closure of these valves was a violation of a key Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) rule, according to which the reactor must be shut down if all auxiliary feed pumps are closed for maintenance. This was later singled out by NRC officials as a key failure.[35]

All in all, big fuckup resulting in nothing more than a 2 billion $ of damage.

Still, it does seem like people operating the plant weren't trained properly - e.g. allowing the design to run without back up feedwater pumps, when those are needed to avoid partial meltdown - seems like a very odd decision.

Now, there's plenty of designs that do not even require emergency core cooling systems, for various reasons.

But keep in mind that in 1971 Carter, then Governor of Georgia "proclaimed ‘American Fighting Men's Day" likely in support of First Lieutenant William L. Calley who had recently been convicted for his role in the Mỹ Lai massacre.

Reading that article it doesn't sound like the day was in support of Calley. It was more to affirm the fact that Calley's actions and character were not representative of the us armed forces in general. That's much less objectionable.

If the newspaper doesn't come right out and say that Carter created the day for that reason, don't believe it. They didn't come right out and say it because they didn't have any evidence.

I am going to do what I do every day, and that is not trust the New York Times or other institutional journalists

I sort of wonder if that'd currently and indirectly draw any attention to the the complete farce which resulted in such idiots being accepted into the armed forces, namely Project 100,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000

Obligatory link to Gwern's outstanding review of McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War:

It’s not well-known, but one of the most consistent long-term sponsors of research into intelligence has been the US military. This is because, contrary to lay wisdom that ‘IQ only measures how well you do on a test’ or book-learning, cognitive ability predicts performance in all occupations down to the simplest manual labor; this might seem surprising, but there are a lot of ways to screw up a simple job and cause losses outside one’s area. For example, aiming and pointing a rifle, or throwing a grenade, might seem like a simple task, but it’s also easy to screw up by pointing at the wrong point, requires fast reflexes (reflexes are one of the most consistent correlations with intelligence), memory for procedures like stripping, the ability to read ammo box labels or orders (as one Marine drill instructor noted), and ‘common sense’ like not indulging in ‘practical jokes’ by tossing grenades at one’s comrades and forgetting to remove the fuse - common sense is not so common, as the saying goes. Such men were not even useful cannon fodder, as they were as much a danger to the men around them as themselves (never mind the enemy), and jammed up the system. (A particularly striking non-Vietnam example is the case of one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever, the Port Chicago disaster which killed 320 people - any complex disaster like that has many causes, of course, but one of them was simply that the explosives were being handled by the dregs of the Navy - not even bottom decile, but bottom duo-decile (had to look that one up), and other stations kept raiding it for anyone competent.)

Gregory’s book collates stories about what happened when the US military was forced to ignore these facts it knew perfectly well in the service of Robert McNamara & Lyndon Johnson’s “Project 100,000” idea to kill two birds with one stone by drafting recruits who were developmentally disabled, unhealthy, evil, or just too dumb to be conscripted previously: it would provide the warm bodies needed for Vietnam, and use the military to educate the least fortunate and give them a leg up as part of the Great Society’s faith in education to eliminate individual differences and refute the idea that intelligence is real.

It did not go well.

Going from a dead wiki reference to Calley https://archive.is/ecrlE , he does come across as somewhat stupid in terms of being a community college dropout and screwing up a few jobs, but Project 100k was strictly about getting more enlisted- Calley caused as much harm as he did because he was an officer in charge of others. He was able to go to Officer Candidate School based on his ASVAB [standardized test score].

It seems to me that the work the Carter Center has done to eradicate parasitic diseases in Africa over the past 50 years (among other charitable work) would more than make up for once publicly supporting the killers of 500 Vietnamese civilians, from a utilitarian standpoint at least.

Agreed. He has been an excellent former politician.

hmm...a common narrative is that Carter imposed gasoline price controls, which backfired, but they were initially imposed by Nixon, and towards the end of his term Carter actually rescinded some of them, and the rest were rescinded by Reagan after entering office.

more info https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/a_short_history.html

Complicated by his awful relationship with his own party and Congress, it’s hard to say whether Carter achieved too few or too many of his goals. Reading this book review…could he have possibly done it? Were we spared from even worse policy?

I had no idea rail and air deregulation happened under Carter, not to mention home brewing. Thought that was later (and earlier, for brewing)

You may enjoy an ACX guest book review for his absolutely bizarre presidency.

My reason for disliking Carter is that even though he (a Navy-trained nuclear engineer) understood what was going on during the Three Mile Island accident and could have told the nation that there was nothing to worry about, he apparently didn't want to upset anti-nuclear activists in his own party. While that was only a small part of the PR disaster that TMI was, in my mind that makes him partially to blame for why the US abandoned the adoption of nuclear power for electrical generation, which in turns make him partially responsible for global warming (very partially - it's not like Carter is responsible for what China and India have been doing or will continue to do in the next century).

If you actually look at nuclear development, electricity deregulation made it impossible to do the long-term funding to build nuclear reactors, because the time to get your money back is such a long tail.

It's not a surprise that France, the only country that continued to basically directly control nuke reactors via the gov't were the only ones to continue to really build them. Ironically, in a situation where a New Dealer like Hubert Humphrey was POTUS, nukes might've been better off.

If you actually look at nuclear development, electricity deregulation made it impossible to do the long-term funding to build nuclear reactors, because the time to get your money back is such a long tail.

Depends on whether you look at the cost before or after the government imposed regulations that make it impossible for nuclear to be cheap, specifically the "as safe as possible" standard (as opposed to "meet X bar of safety as cheap as possible").

https://postimg.cc/PLQH3hdn

It's perhaps worth contemplating who was president at the time of the price spike.

Didn’t we just have high interests rates which could admittedly be a problem.

But our economy funds many long term projects in deregulated industries. I’d like to see what your actually referring to but the best I’m guessing it’s based on receiving variable pricing.

Here's a Twitter thread to peruse - https://twitter.com/jmkorhonen/status/1625095305694789632

That can't be true, since the cost of nuclear energy actually increased over time - primarily due to regulations that complicated construction. The US for instance had the capital cost of a plant rise enormously. See figure 7.11: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

The difference between $1000 and $4000 (or even $8,000) per kilowatt of capacity is massive, more than any deregulation effect. There is no such effect in South Korea or India - this proves it must be a regulatory issue.

See the ridiculous regulatory constraints imposed on US nuclear power plants further in the article.

An example was a prohibition against multiplexing, resulting in thousands of sensor wires leading to a large space called a cable spreading room. Multiplexing would have cut the number of wires by orders of magnitude while at the same time providing better safety by multiple, redundant paths.

Another example was the acceptance in 1972 of the Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping as a credible failure. In this scenario, a section of the piping instantaneously disappears. Steel cannot fail in this manner. As usual Ted Rockwell put it best, “We can’t simulate instantaneous double ended breaks because things don’t break that way.” Designing to handle this impossible casualty imposed very severe requirements on pipe whip restraints, spray shields, sizing of Emergency Core Cooling Systems, emergency diesel start up times, etc., requirements so severe that it pushed the designers into using developmental, unrobust technology. A far more reliable approach is Leak Before Break by which the designer ensures that a stable crack will penetrate the piping before larger scale failure.

A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained.

The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial.

The new rules would be imposed on plants already under construction. A 1974 study by the General Accountability Office of the Sequoyah plant documented 23 changes “where a structure or component had to be torn out and rebuilt or added because of required changes.” The Sequoyah plant began construction in 1968, with a scheduled completion date of 1973 at a cost of $300 million. It actually went into operation in 1981 and cost $1700 million. This was a typical experience.

It's basically racketeering:

Instead, the nuclear companies themselves pay the NRC for the time they spend reviewing applications, at something close to $300 an hour. This creates a perverse incentive: the more overhead, the more delays, the more revenue for the agency.

Ok so this isn’t deregulation bad. It’s nuclear was not economical unless government gave them pricing power.

And ignore that a big reason why nuclear got super expensive is excessive regulation after 3 mile/Chernobyl.

I wonder how much better our nuclear power would be if we had continued to develop it. Seems like 50+ years of development, with billions of dollars poured in per year, would lead to much safer, more consistent, cheaper, and more powerful reactors. China and India would certainly switch to nuclear if it were actually the economical option. If we could even get nuclear close in price to coal we could bribe them to switch over by subsidizing the costs. Seems highly plausible to me.

There has been quite a bit of development of reactor technology, even just within what are now seen as the boring, old and busted design of Pressurized Light Water Reactors. So-called Gen III+ Reactors have substantial improvements in safety and operational efficiency (how much time they spend generating electricity (and thus $$$) vs. time spent shut down for maintenance).

The main way to subsidize costs would be guaranteed zero- or low-interest loans, combined with some reduction in red tape; the main thing that makes nuclear cost-prohibitive right now is the ridiculous amount of time it takes to go from "we're thinking about building a nuke plant here" to "actually generating electricity". The NRC safety certification process is important and shouldn't be circumvented, but what needs to be stopped is every single anti-nuclear organization being able to file NIMBY-lawsuit after NIMBY-lawsuit that keeps the project tied up, with loan interest accumulating the whole time.

Other more advanced reactor design concepts are interesting but PLWRs have 70 years of design and operational experience behind them now, which makes them quite hard to dislodge from their dominant market position.

China and India would certainly switch to nuclear if it were actually the economical option

Do you mean like this?

from here - At least as of 2021, china's use of nuclear power isn't much larger than its use of other alternative energy sources. They're investing in it, but solar and wind are growing more rapidly.

There's something weird about it, because the chart with absolute numbers shows higher nuclear than wind production, while the relative chart is showing the opposite (and a ridiculously small proportion of gas power for some reason).

If you take the numbers for their planned expansion from my article, and the absolute numbers chart, nuclear production would nearly double. But I guess there's the question of how long it will take them, at what cost, etc.

I think you have it set on 'world', when I click 'change country' in your chart and click 'China' I get this with wind=655 and nuclear=407

Oops, I thought it kept the settings.

Ok, so they're planning to 5x their nuclear production, which would put it above where even hydro is at the moment. Of course the question of will they pull it off remains, and wind and solar will probably grow in the following years as well.

But my original point stands, it certainly looks like they are (at least planning on) switching to it.

China and India would certainly switch to nuclear if it were actually the economical option.

I have no reason to doubt this, but it does seem odd to me to suggest that the lack of a green lobby means a country will default to pragmatism when it comes to energy. Do China and India not have their own set of political challenges (say a fossil fuel lobby) when it comes to nuclear or is really as straightforward as nuclear failing on one or all of cost/skill/payoff?

Of course someone who knows these countries can tell me I'm wrong and I'll accept that, but I worry that the reasoning is along the lines of 'because they don't have the same problems as the West, they don't have a problem', where the 'problems of the West' are the only things we would think to look for.

Not sure about energy policy in those countries in general, but I would be shocked if they had fossil fuel lobbies.

China at least already seems to use more nuclear than us, so my read is that they are already defaulting to pragmatism. Less sure about India I guess. My read in general is that somewhat poorer countries have less qualms with this sort of thing but I could be wrong.

To be clear I was saying less "If we had fewer qualms they would have fewer qualms" and more "they seem to already have few enough qualms that the cost/skill/payoff trade is all that matters"

A lot of Nixon- and earlier-era funding for nuclear power research was kinda spending good money after bad: the institutional views of the major players were focused on a number of specific assumptions (limited uranium availability, funding preferring large single reactor sites, high concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation from power plants) that lead to some really goofy focuses (eg, anything involving molten salt reactors, incoherent positions on breeder reactors, multi-gigawatt PWRs are a mainstay despite decay heat issues).

That said, not turning civil development into a mindfield would have probably allowed far greater private research and development along saner lines. Which I think is far greater an issue than Carter's PR approach to TMI.

You're not cynical enough; American Fighting Men's Day will be suppressed or dragged up depending on how the Egregore feels about Carter. My priors are that few will really care enough to do so, there's little else to pin on Carter other than being kind of a lame duck President who is remembered for little.

Not only is he honorable, he has a proud (healthy!) in-group bias towards his own tribe’s warriors! Based Carter!

William L. Calley made all American warriors look bad. Forgive me for being superficial, but I'm betting that thousands of US soldiers lost the opportunity to have sex with US women because of the transferred disgust these women felt because of the massacre.

but I'm betting that thousands of US soldiers lost the opportunity to have sex with US women because of the transferred disgust these women felt because of the massacre.

This is telling me more about you than anything. And that your mind went in this direction. You have not been with many women?

Forgive me for being superficial, but I'm betting that thousands of US soldiers lost the opportunity to have sex with US women because of the transferred disgust these women felt because of the massacre.

You bet that way if you want, I'm betting that transferred "dangerous bad boy" vibes led to thousands of US soldiers getting more sex from US women.

The median woman loves a man in uniform, and not because she think he's making flower necklaces and rescuing puppies while he's wearing it.

An aging species tries to save itself

We begin with Do It For Denmark. The angle in this ad campaign is sex. Don't you want to have sex? No? Well, do it for your country, or at least your mother, who wants grandchildren. We'll also throw in a travel discount for a romantic holiday getaway, where you will hopefully have sex. Of course, the declining appeal of sex is probably not the main cause of declining birth rates.

Like Denmark, Iran also has a fertility rate of around 1.7, but of course we find a more conservative version of the exhortation to build a family in this ad from an Iranian cultural center. The sell now focuses on the benefits of a tradwife: she'll replace your alarm clock, cook you healthy meals, and give you children. I guess they saw no need for an ad on the benefits of a tradhusband.

For the most direct and honest appeal we turn to Taiwan, whose fertility rate of 1.0-1.2 portends a crisis possibly even worse than the much-discussed demographics of its belligerent neighbor. To a soundtrack that tries to be hopeful, this PSA from the Taiwanese ministry of education, which I recommend watching, pleads its case:

Once upon a time, building a family [/ settling down] meant that the man got a second mother [a wife cooks in the kitchen], while the woman had to leave her parents' home [to join the multigenerational household of her husband]. It took many years for her to realize she could search for her own voice ... outside marriage [they return their wedding rings in a bittersweet farewell].

One upon a time, building a family [/ settling down] meant the man's domain was outside the home, and the woman's inside. So they ended up living in separate worlds [split screen: woman waits on the sofa while the man works late]. But sometimes, all it took to break down conventional roles [man pushing a stroller with his son] ... was a chance. [Text: More and more men are taking paternity leave.]

Once upon a time, building a family meant rushing [to have kids], as if to wait was to waste [her] youth / prime years [pregnant woman hands her boss her notice of leave].

[Text advertises increased government assistance for fertility issues.]

When we've learned to better empathize with others, we've become stronger supporters of each other [happy gay couple]. And behind every step of progress we make [happy lesbian couple] ... are countless clashes and acts of persuasion. [Text: paternal benefits are also open to same-sex couples.]

Although things aren't perfect, over the decades we've seen more and more ways to build a family [group of happy young people at a restaurant]. And of course that includes starting a family while single [woman walks alone at night]. Because in a democratic society, everyone has the right to decide how they want to live their life.

[A couple takes care of their baby. The camera lingers on a pamphlet: "From 0 to 6 years old: raising a kid together with your country."]

With gender education [?] and environmental awareness as our starting point, let's work together as a society to do our "homework": raising the next generation. [Montage of different kinds of families.] We promise to work even harder to take care of more families, and make it normal and comfortable for everyone to ...

[final screen with slogan] choose to build a family, together.

I don't know about you, but the earnestness and sheer desperation in this plea really broke me down. And I have no reason to think the whole project isn't exactly that: an act of desperation.

Denmark had a small upwards bump after the Do It For Denmark campaign in 2015 (nat change per 1000: 1.0 -> 1.5, or some three thousand babies more) but it has since tapered off, and it is difficult tell if it was because of the campaign or other random variation.

ad from an Iranian cultural center

Man that ad seriously made me think for a few minutes that I should get married immediately (I felt seen at the cola and pizza leftovers vs juice and healthy breakfast bit).

Are they confusing having sex and having kids? Or are they implying low fertility rate is the consequence of people not having enough sexual intercouse, and if so, is there any data to support it?

That said, I can just imagine what a field day would people on some alt-right forums will have with the fact that Europeans now apparently need to be convinced to have sex (and the ad seems to place emphasis on the male as the party not wanting to rumble).

That said, I applaud to whoever in the marketing dept thought of this. Tapping into retiree's incomes to sell them active vacations they can't actually do is not an easy task, but they found a way.

all it took to break down conventional roles [man pushing a stroller with his son]

Oh come on, my woke copywriter bro, breastfeeding is breaking down conventional roles for a male, walking with one's son never has been.

paternal benefits are also open to same-sex couples.

Not sure how this is going to help the issue? I imagine the grammatical structure of wokese does not admit any other way of expressing it, though.

Because in a democratic society, everyone has the right to decide how they want to live their life.

But some of the decisions are so wrong, or we wouldn't be doing this ad.

With gender education [?] and environmental awareness as our starting point

It will all undoubtedly prove a huge waste of taxpayer money. But doubleplusgood woke duckspeak, to be sure. Maybe one day they'd be so desperate as to kick out the wokesters, but that day is definitely not today.

Oh come on, my woke copywriter bro, breastfeeding is breaking down conventional roles for a male, walking with one's son never has been.

All the reports of men being harassed for taking their child to the park because people are assuming they're some kind of paedophile kidnapper indicate otherwise.

That's not breaking conventional roles, that's moral panic which has been promoted for years in the press (completely contrary to stats showing stranger child kidnapping is a very rare event, and pedophiles mostly prey on children already close to them). But I don't think it has much to do with gender roles. It used to be normal for a father to play with their kids. I've seen old movies that are full of these tropes. It's not some recent invention, it's very traditional (well, maybe not in the Victorian tradition where kids are meant to be seen rarely and heard never, but in less rigid ones).

"All the reports"? I'm a father. I take my kid to parks. Other dads do also. I've never seen or 2nd hand heard of a dad being accused of anything at a public park. I accept that it must have happened sometime somewhere in a nation of hundreds of millions of people. But I believe such a thing is vanishingly rare.

I once took a teenaged non-blood-relative out to dinner. Given our relative ages and racial differences it should be obvious I'm not her dad and you wouldn't know we are relatives by marriage. I wondered if I looked like a creep. No one cared. No one gives a damn about a 30 year old eating dinner with a teenaged girl.

That's not tradition, that's the remnants of an earlier moral panic.

That said, I can just imagine what a field day would people on some alt-right forums will have with the fact that Europeans now apparently need to be convinced to have sex (and the ad seems to place emphasis on the male as the party not wanting to rumble).

From a Russian (headquartered in Riga, Latvia, ofc) liberal globohomo news portal Meduza.io:

At Berlinale 2023, Manodrome, a psychological thriller starring Jesse Eisenberg, was screened

You immediately recognise the protagonist - not Ralphie himself, but the type he embodies. A frustrated, lonely, struggling to cope with his impulses, obsessed with childhood trauma, a taxi driver in a metropolis at night: a direct descendant of Travis Bickle from Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Nowadays, such a loner drives an Uber. The director brilliantly defines his character in the opening scene: he's looking too intently in the rear-view mirror at a female passenger who has decided to breastfeed an infant right in the car. Calling the driver a pervert, she exits halfway through. In fact, Ralphie's interest can be explained. His girlfriend Sal is pregnant and about to give birth. Struggling with irritation and fatigue, she ploughs on at the supermarket cash register while Ralphie, who has recently lost his job, drives customers around. The only outlet in his life is the gym, where he works out to a deafening heavy metal soundtrack.

[...] The only hope for success comes when the guy is welcomed into their circle by members of the mysterious «Manodrome», an elite fraternity of men. Its members call themselves «sons» and its leaders «fathers». In this phantom club, Trengov has developed the dreams of hundreds of thousands of alpha males, venting their frustrations on the universe in the social networks. He has created the perfect ersatz family of incels, where women are not allowed.

The word «incels», as you can see, is helpfully disambiguated:

From the English "incel", an abbreviation for "involuntary celibacy", meaning "involuntary abstinence" [rus]. These are people who feel unable to find a sexual partner, despite wanting to do so.

Fair enough. However, doesn't this seem at odds with the text around, where incels are simultaneously alpha males who also avoid the company of women? Web archive, yesterday's snapshot:

From the English "incel", an abbreviation for "involuntary celibates". These are people who have completely renounced sex because of their own belief that they are incapable of building a romantic relationship.

I think this is telling. The notion that men can be genuinely not guilty of some failure relating to relations of sexes – whether to score or to sire – is about as far outside the Overton window as HBD. It just feels weird to those progressive journalists and the whole «Cathedral». There must be some mistake, or barring that, a conspiracy of alpha male incels who just refuse to pull their weight... It can't be that the solution lies in any conceivable change to female behavior, except even more emancipation, even greater triumph over toxic masculinity. Так победим.

Haven't heard about the movie, but looks like woke Fight Club, tbh.

As for the whole story, it always boils down to the same thing - in the leftist idpol ideology, the oppression categories are fixed, and only the proper oppressed are allowed to have qualia and have their suffering mean something. If you are not a member, your suffering is a) your own fault for being an evil oppressor and b) does not matter and you have no right to ever mention it, because it's just a cynical manipulation in order to keep your oppressor position. And if you try to make it otherwise, it never ends well - the "tragic finale" is guaranteed. As if you weren't warned by hot iron rituals. Thus, people that are desperate to find love and human connection, or struggling an ages-old struggle for meaning, are always reduced to a one-dimensional universal metaphor for evil.

The notion that men can be genuinely not guilty of some failure relating to relations of sexes – whether to score or to sire – is about as far outside the Overton window as HBD

Interestingly, the fertility rate itself says otherwise: whether they feel it's their fault is immaterial to the fact they're going "well, fuck you then", strapping on the wirehead if they have one, and laying flat. And when the barbarians come to enslave the women... well, they weren't putting out for the men of their own tribe anyway, so what's the difference?

I guess the shy Tory effect applies to the Overton window, too.

I, for one, welcome our new barbarian overlords.

Faustian man is done, the sooner we move on the more will still be around for the next civilization to build upon. This slow agony is almost unbearable.

Declining rates of sexual intercourse, plus a rising percentage of virgins and practical celibates among young people, have been recorded in most Western or Westernized societies (such as Taiwan) for many years. This, the so-called sex recession, has been discussed extensively on the parent subreddits as well, multiple times, and also on this forum here. I can’t be arsed to dig up sources because I’m lazy, and because the sources themselves aren’t much relevant here. But anyway, yes, I’m sure that declining fertility rates can easily be explained in part by this. And I’m also sure that it’s driven by multiple factors that are, in part, mutually reinforcing: obesity epidemic, opioid epidemic, rising rates of prescription drug abuse, rising rates of alcoholism and unhealthy life choices in general among single women and the resulting health problems, chemical pollution, endocrine disruptors in the drinking water, dropping sperm counts, a growing mental health crisis in society due to the consequences of social media use/abuse etc.

I think this belongs squarely in the 'raising awareness' category of government activity. Governments raise awareness about obesity, mental health, cancer and so on - it does basically nothing.

On the other hand, there are actual kinetic, physical actions.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41487443

From the abstract of this article, it cost the government about Aus $ 126,000 per new birth in its fertility spending program (giving $3000 to women who have children). Accounting for inflation, that sums to about US $ 118,417.10 2022.

So if Taiwan wants to double its fertility (which I'll take to be that of 2019 pre-COVID, 177,767) births, it would cost somewhere around $21,050,634,839 per annum, or about 2.5% of GDP. That's more than they spend on defense, so they're at least consistent about ignoring all threats to national existence. Anyway this naively assumes the effect scales, which it probably won't seeing as many Taiwanese women are too old to have children or too rich to care about a few thousand here or there. There'd be some dysgenics too.

Only a massive spending program is going to have any significant effect. Alternately, there are more unconventional options like organizing social credit for parents (such that they're priveliged in education and workforce), suppressing contraception, placing caps on women entering higher education and so on. My suspicion is that the ultra-nerdy East Asian youth would instantly start having children if it meant they'd better be able to get into prestigious universities. The amount of effort that goes into education there is ridiculous. But nobody has bothered trying this. Perhaps it's a case of 'you know who else tried raising their country's fertility by encouraging mothers to have children?'

Real desperation is when states start taking serious action.

'you know who else tried raising their country's fertility by encouraging mothers to have children?'

My guess was gonna be "Communist Romania."

You assume that marginal cost of extra birth will stay flat. There is every reason to expect otherwise. As you buy yourself more births, each additional one will be more and more expensive.

I’m skeptical that even a massive spending program will have any effect. Eventually natural selection will run its course and the USA, France, Japan, Australia, etc will have high TFRs once more. Of course the populations might look very different, but eh, hajnalis shouldn’t have invented the pill.

Eventually natural selection will run its course and the USA, France, Japan, Australia, etc will have high TFRs once more.

... why do you think so? Even if we aren't all converted into biodiesel for use in drone tanks and jets by competing AI armies by 2060, there won't be much 'natural' selection going on within 50 years.

If we don't die out, odds are very high the dream of biological immortality is going to be realised, at that point a high fertility becomes a real problem unless your plan is to dismantle Venus into raw materials for a lot of space habitats.

Since it might not have been obvious immediately from the OP, the Danish ad doesn't belong to this category. It's an ad by a (private) travel company, and their goal is not (at least directly) to increase fertility but to sell vacations. Moreover, it's the travel company originally established by this dude, so using sex and publicity to sell vacations basically runs in their blood, so to say.

You might be the first person on the planet to suggest that Asians are too concerned with not copying Hitler.

I was mostly thinking about the West in that bit, that obviously doesn't come through in what I wrote. Anyway, it's striking how important demography and race was to Hitler's thinking. The whole objective of the war was to acquire land to fit more Germans on, ensure that there were as many Germans as possible. Population is power as far as he was concerned. But today, there's this schizophrenic thinking about demography where some countries like Canada and Australia want to massively increase their populations by immigration even as they artificially restrict and complicate housing, as they propagate memes about overpopulation. It's made out to be virtuous not to have children due to climate change. The notion that population is power seems to be very fringe, there's only that 'One Billion Americans' book.

China goes around calling the West racist for police brutality against blacks. They bring in tens of thousands of Africans to Chinese universities. They actually conducted a mass sterilization/infanticide program of their own people in the One Child Policy. Their rhetoric and their official policy are diametrically anti-Hitler. It's funny since China is probably the closest thing ideologically today to fascism but without any of the racial or eugenic angles. They've got the corporatism, the party-state and the national rejuvenation/revanchism elements.

China goes around calling the West racist for police brutality against blacks.

As did the Nazis, with the same motives.

I remember that Spike Lee movie where some waiting Germans tried a "Berlin Betty" kind of thing on an advancing black troop.

Low effort but CW so it goes here. Its the end of the week anyways.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/115vdud/looking_for_recommendations_on_sources_for_why/

It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified. Of all those comments only 1 mention (hint) of group average IQ on why sub saharan Africa is poor??

Then theres the "woah how did you get here, you dont belong here" as a response to the guy who hinted at IQ. Does that guy even know whose blog he is in the subreddit of.

All I am saying is for those of you who still say /r/ssc is "smart", update your priors, this post is not an isolated case.

E: Ill remove if consensus building.

There looks like there's now a comment there from a mod saying that those topics were removed.

Generally we'd prefer people didn't remove posts unless they really regret posting something.

I don't think this is consensus-building, but it is kind of failing to leave the rest of the Internet at the door. "Look at how stupid SSC has become" isn't exactly a genre of post we want to encourage.

If you're going to argue something outside the mainstream, you're going to have to do the work in explaining yourself. None of the "It's IQ" comments are doing that, even the ones that were removed. They're simply attributing the entire reason to IQ and leaving it at that, as if you can reduce all of SSA's failure to develop strictly on their national IQs.

Even if that were the case, you'd have to do a great deal more to explain that position. The comment about institutions cited multiple published books by respected researchers to illustrate its case.

Not mainstream in... Scott Alexanders blogs subreddit?

It was maybe mainstream in the past. Definitely not now.

Is this outside the mainstream? It’s not something acceptable to talk about but my gut is most people believe it is a primary contributor. Just the whole getting branded racists and talking about differences is a taboo. I put this ideas is the taboo but everyone basically believes them camp.

IQ is generally not in the Western mainstream. I've seen people express genuine shock at the idea that IQ is even heritable.

I strongly suspect that this is a "blue tribe midwit" phenomenon. I would also bet that most of those people think IQ is a fake statistic made up by racists in general, and that most of them would cite the "regatta" example as proof. That idea is much rarer among the people who don't even pretend they read the NYT. "Parents pass down traits like brawn and brains" is the sort of folk wisdom that everyone has... except for the people who've had that scooped out and replaced with something else.

In a freshman class in college many years ago we were basically fed anti-IQ propaganda. Including impuning people as racists. Good educated middling progressives have been inoculated against honestly considering the facts of heritability. That well has been thoroughly poisoned.

The American working class mostly does not think IQ is particularly closely correlated with g, and is fairly likely to deny the influence of IQ on success in education.

The "American working class" has never even heard of Spearman's g.

That is completely antithetical to my experience. They think IQ is the measure of how smart someone is, so they think it obviously factors into success in education... even if that's not necessarily the be-all-end-all of general life success (book smarts versus practical smarts). They have never heard of g, and have also never heard of progressive cope lines around the topic.

Is this outside the mainstream?

Yes. Whatever you want to attribute it to, the prevailing sentiments are like this one:

“Is it really likely that the average person of African ancestry is cognitively impaired when compared to the average white person?” David S. Jones, a Harvard historian and medical ethicist, told Vox. “I can’t think of how that could actually be true. And the assumption that it is true just sounds like white supremacist racism to me. We need to subject any claims like this to really strict scrutiny.”

Not just, "well, that's one explanation" or "I doubt it, that's improbable", but "I can't think of how that could actually be true". Stating that you can't even think of how it could be true that people of different ancestries differ in average cognitive ability is Harvard medical ethicist thinking. Whether he's stating that cynically or honestly, that's where we're at. Do you want to be subject to really strict scrutiny on whether you're a white supremacist?

How many Black friends do you have? Close friends, say minimum "pick you up at the airport" level of friendship on the Seinfeld scale

Two that meet that standard, but I probably wouldn't actually call them, "close friends". Close enough to be part of group get togethers at holidays and such though.

You actually hit on why I’m questioning whether HBD is mainstream accepted. Vox is a blue tribe probably aimed at around the 10-20% Iq area. Harvard is a 1% elitists spot. So people here would call it not mainstream because the people in their intellectual space don’t follow it. If I asked a 50 year old welder his views he would probably admit he thinks there are differences. It’s just that people in your social space don’t adhere to hbd.

The big logic for HBD being important is based on Garrett Jones arguments. A quick simplification is he thinks a nations average IQ is important and not as much being smart yourself. You have a better chance being well off being less intelligent in a high average IQ country than you would be super smart in a low average IQ country. Basically governance improves a lot if you have higher average IQ. All government need to get a consent of the governed to effectively function. Democracy especially is hard to do if the voters can’t understand policy. So that ends up making dictatorship better. But you still need a degree of the populace understanding what your doing to encourage good policy choices. And when things go wrong poorly informed citizens are more likely to turn to their in group leader and having a coup and hopefully sending more of their spoils to their own tribe.

A 50 year old welder may not have a positive view of black people, but it’s the rare blue collar worker who thinks of IQ as the determining factor.

Blue collar workers who think there’s something wrong, genetically, with blacks are usually going to point to laziness, not IQ, being the differing hereditary factor.

Democracy especially is hard to do if the voters can’t understand policy

Countries with low IQs tend to do poorly no matter what system they adopt. The UAE is a possible exception because it pivoted to tourism and westernism in every other respect but government and religion. The quality of people tells you the quality of country. Liberal democracy seems to work best when you have a small, highly productive, high trust population, which pretty much excludes much of the world and even much of the US.

Most of the UAE's revenue is oil and its derivatives (You are confusing Dubai and UAE). The Arab Gulf states are National avg IQ vs GDPPc PPP, outliers. Simar to ex-communist states who are outliers in the opposite direction. Credit where credit is due, it's not like natural resource wealth can't be squandered (or not realized at all), the ruling elite of the UAE is the real deal.

The native modest IQ stock of the UAE is a minority at ~20% of the population. The entire rest of the population is much higher functioning imported expats who do all the serious work (and construction workers).

I don’t know that ‘people with differing ancestries have different IQ’s’ is the sentiment objected to so much as ‘it just doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility that entire countries are made up mostly of actually literally retarded people’ is the objection.

Sigh. A Harvard medical ethicist of all people ought to know the nosological difference between «actually literally retarded» and «very low IQ», because those are, in fact, different conditions.

Then again, maybe it's the opposite and his job is to not know the difference – who am I to tell, not being Harvard material myself? Like the Chinese say,

“We need to teach machines not only how to speak, but also how not to speak.”

And more is expected of experts.

If some people have cognitive impairment and low IQ and some have just low IQ and can function in society, I don't see why the cognitive impairment shouldn't be considered to be part of IQ in the first place. A meaningful measure of IQ would consider the person with cognitive impairment to have a lower IQ, because he has cognitive impairment.

You can also look at it from another angle: "Can learn the skills needed to function in society" should be most of IQ. If a 60 IQ person can function as well as an 80 IQ person but doesn't understand analogies, he should, by definition, have a 80 IQ, especially if the 80 IQ person barely understands analogies either. "Understands analogies slightly worse, but neither of them understands analogies well enough to use them" is not a large IQ gap under any useful definition of IQ.

(I'm not convinced that the whole distinction is even real. Are there studies that show that it's possible to have 60-IQ-with-impairment and 60-IQ-without-impairment for people who are otherwise under similar cultures and circumstances?)

That would defeat the premise of what an IQ score is, a metric trying to capture the latent g factor.

Why not just have a "societal functioning quotient"? The SFQ so to speak. It might even gain popularity over IQ and become the de facto "intelligence" metric (because that will be gameable unlike IQ). Be warned, it's not that easy to make what you are proposing, not to speak on will it be even useful for research or as a signal. There is a reason Academia gave so much weight to the SAT and GRE up until the recent past (It was a useful signal), Half the job openings for ETS (the company that makes the GRE) is for Psychometrics and Psychology PhDs.. I wonder why they need so many psychologists for a primarily Math and English test.

more is expected of experts

By who? I certainly don’t expect experts to speak truth to power, and I don’t expect the general public to be able to catch them lying or confusing terms to mislead or shutting down debate or whatever.

FWIW I made it to my late 20s working in philosophy and cognitive science before I encountered HBD. Most people, especially educated ones, will simply believe some combination of (i) IQ is a discredited old measure of intelligence, (ii) race is a social construct, and maybe (iii) insofar as we give IQ any weight at all, we should recognise it as highly mutable as demonstrated by stuff like the Flynn Effect.

This started to unravel for me when I began poking around and found that (i) was false. But most educated people won’t get to that point.

Well, what I don’t understand is that there are obviously some people who are smarter compared to other people. Just like there are people who are more attractive or more athletic or more consistently drunk. And shockingly these things seem to run in families.

That and we see that in animals we can breed certain outcomes.

Blank slatism just seems so difficult to believe given the above. The simpler solution is that genetics impact life outcomes. Not saying it is 100% but important. Once you accept that, then it seems once you have population A and population B separated by an obvious genetic difference it is perfectly within the realm of possibility to see a difference in group IQ.

Of course, I do think the problem is people oversimplify. There are African sub populations that are reasonably high IQ. Moreover, there is great variability within black populations. And white populations. And Asian populations. We need not abandon colorblindness as principle given HBD. But it can be a refutation of the claim that group differences re a result of oppression.

It is very easy not to see something when your viability within the system depends on not seeing it.

Well, what I don’t understand is that there are obviously some people who are smarter compared to other people. Just like there are people who are more attractive or more athletic or more consistently drunk. And shockingly these things seem to run in families.

People do not seem to follow up on observations about genetics, if they are even making them in the first place. That is, people will accept that you look like your parents, but don't consider if you can be smarter or dumber based on the genes your parents give you.

That and we see that in animals we can breed certain outcomes.

"Humans are different", "evolution stops before it reaches the brain", etc.

This feels like something where education makes you forgot something that was plainly obvious to children or lower educated people.

I knew the points you make were false when I was 8 year olds and saw a lot more people with more melanin playing the sports I liked to play professionally. Just seemed obvious races were not identical. Everyone I grew up knew that blacks people ran faster and jumped higher.

Me and some others tried to speak up. The jannies censored our comments.

If you dislike this, consider organizing a pipeline from there to here, privately or publicly. Bakkot says:

As a reminder, culture war topics are forbidden. That includes "maybe these people are genetically predisposed to be lower IQ or otherwise less suited to build modern economies". I've removed a few subthreads to that effect. Please don't make any more of them. If you'd like to have a discussion about that particular hypothesis you'll need to go elsewhere.

This pissy attitude openly vilifying the very clear and well-argued line of thought in the corpus of writing of the guy he owes the community to is deserving of some pushback. I'm permabanned there (for mocking Kevin Bird's beliefs), but if I were not, I'd have written something like «and if you'd like to discuss whatever hypothesis seems best supported by evidence, you can check out this offshoot of the community». What's he going to do? There are no normie reddit rules against promoting other places, far as I know. Will he remove it as culture warring unto itself?

and if you'd like to discuss whatever hypothesis seems best supported by evidence, you can check out this offshoot of the community

Sounds good probably won't work. "Best supported by the evidence" translates to "The evidence I agree the most with (but is just as shitty, but in the opposite direction)" in the overwhelming majority of cases, anyone who hasn't defaulted to making that translation is less cynical than I. This is assuming you are trying to invite the HBD skeptics along aswell.

A superior advertisement (imo) would be "The theories discussed here are some of the theories but not all of them, visit this offshoot community to read what you read here, and more". This has the advantage of implying that you won't only see a set complement of arguments but a superset of them. However there is a failure mode that any invitation to an alternative discussion can be translated to "come join us at the flat earth society we have alternative theories!".

I honestly can't think of a perfect advertisement for someone who is (rightfully) skeptical and not on the fence already.

Yeah, could be phrased better. I referred not to the evidential superiority of my own opinion, but to the possibility to entertain any opinion you deem better-supported – not just the most plausible thing still allowed by Bakkot. They are explicitly prohibited from discussing HBD to any serious extent, beyond a snarky hint or a perfunctory denunciation. Sure, some of that is community sentiment. Consider such brilliant rationalist logic as:

Jumping straight to an IQ answer is antagonistic and uncharitable to a whole group of people, and more importantly, a thought-ending cliché that's likely making you stop looking for actual answers.

But not all of it. /u/plowfaster, /u/crowstep, /u/Throwaway6393fbrb, /u/uber_neutrino, /u/Possible-Summer-8508, /u/FDP_666, /u/Therncic, /u/Courier_ttf, and perhaps some of those already removed are more or less /ourguys/, I think at least 1 or 2 aren't here already. Why not offer them a way out of that circus. As for the rest... well, pseudo-erudite midwits can probably stay where they are. But wouldn't hurt showing them the other option.

As an aside, I like that jannies do not remove blank slatism as «culture warring». They've entirely redefined Scott's idea to align with their distaste for witches, now «culturewar» = nonwoke, basically.

But not all of it. /u/plowfaster, /u/crowstep, /u/Throwaway6393fbrb, /u/uber_neutrino, /u/Possible-Summer-8508, /u/FDP_666, /u/Therncic, /u/Courier_ttf, and perhaps some of those already removed are more or less /ourguys/, I think at least 1 or 2 aren't here already. Why not offer them a way out of that circus. As for the rest... well, pseudo-erudite midwits can probably stay where they are. But wouldn't hurt showing them the other option.

This got me thinking if a place is sufficiently woke (not sure if it generalizes to all ideological conformity), then most of the modded/removed content won't be by people breaking non-political rules but by people who say something unwoke.

Thus writing a bot that scrapes the usernames off the red comments from unddit.com and sending them an automated message along the lines of

"We saw that your comment was removed from {woke sub}, there is a high probability you didn't break the discourse rules but instead said something unwoke, consider joining us at this { same community but not woke}, {summary of community}"

Might work as an excellent recruiting tool.

As an aside, I like that jannies do not remove blank slatism as «culture warring». They've entirely redefined Scott's idea to align with their distaste for witches, now «culturewar» = nonwoke, basically.

Lack of self-awareness is a hell of a drug. So is confusing aesthetics and morality.

Exactly my point.

Well, @ZorbaTHut, how's that for a recruiting pipeline? I gather you still haven't decided what to do. I foresee your objections along the lines of diversity, but people who still hang around captured subs might well be the closest thing to a leftie you can get.

Sounds like a pretty bad approach honestly :V

Right now recruiting is not the biggest issue I see. Honestly, this thread itself is kind of a bigger problem; note that it's already been mod-warned, but it's entirely "wow, such normie, very woke, what a problem". The thing I'm most concerned about right now is . . .

. . . okay right now it's dealing with the employment tangle I'm dealing with. But after that, the thing I'm most concerned about is tweaking moderation and figuring out a better way to gently-but-firmly shove the tone around, and that's what the volunteer-janitor stuff is for.

Once I've handled that, I plan to go back to recruiting efforts. However, right now the traffic honestly isn't bad - it's lower than it used to be but nowhere near lower enough that I think it's an immediate existential threat.

And I think, if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting. Especially people in that situation who would push the balance of this community further away from diverse-opinions.

Well this went poorly. You look like you are going hard into your bonsai-trimming power trip. Do you plan to monetize this place of what?

but it's entirely "wow, such normie, very woke, what a problem"

Well, what else could we say – that it was a mistake to commit a stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast? I believe such regrets are expressed as silent evaporation.

Are you impressed with the intellectual culture Bakkot et al. have built? Get a load of those mod notes. Be honest. It is objectively a normie culture, a culture of shaming and shooing and unquestionable sanctified priors instead of rational discussion. When the choice is between scholarly epicycles in the manner of Marxist theory and a possibly more parsimonious explanation, they are being told to praise the amazing complexity of the former or shut up and «go elsewhere». Elsewhere where if not here?

I realize that «normie» is just a psychologically healthy normal Hajnali human, and as one of those you too might have a hard time distinguishing between very consistent «shame on you, cringe, do better, imagine your mom reading that, we do not need this, removed» etc. signals and a reason to value one's opinion less. But those are still different things and the former is still poison for any serious rationalist-ish place, and is still far less desirable than «dogpiling» in the form of tonally correct objections. At least that's how I see our value function.

if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting

Really? You would prefer people who «read the room» over people who can't – as in, who believe that «no culture war» should apply fairly and not privilege a side in it? The mods implicitly precommit to a culture war position that requires righteous combat, under the justification of «no culture war». This is a deceptive signal, and a profanation of all that the sub stood for. Are you saying you endorse that? If even we pick people who are adept in reading the room over autistics irritated with inconsistencies and double standards, where are people who are bad at that supposed to go – straight to nazi imageboards?

right now the traffic honestly isn't bad

It's not so much the traffic problem as diversity problem. And I do not mean political compass distribution but even just topic distribution. More people means less banding. For example, nobody has mentioned Turkish earthquake (okay, here) – a NATO state has suffered a major disaster, tens of thousands dead, possibly immense geopolitical ramifications, partially because Erdogan has appointed his fellow right-wing theologian grifters throughout the system. I might do a writeup as a community service and as the resident Turk, but more people could help with such stuff.

Especially people in that situation who would push the balance of this community further away from diverse-opinions.

Have you not understood my argument? People uncomfortable with /r/slatestarcodex modding are leftier than the median user here, and realistically as far left as you will get now, barring a complete reinvention of this place. You will never again get the «diversity» we had on Reddit by virtue of dipping into Scott's captive leftwing audience, unless you ruin TheMotte in the manner not much different from Bakkot's – and then, you'll probably just chase everyone away, like you've repeatedly threatened to do.

It is inevitable that the discussion evolves and some opinions disappear, while others emerge. This is what it means to have a honest non-compelled discussion. If you fetishize access to the frozen equivalent of Scott's captive audience from 2010's, with their particular distribution of opinion, over the value of this community where genuinely all hypotheses can be discussed and the worst that could happen is «dogpiling» – then you, like many people, are a rigid old fart fixed on the object level, unable to recognize the worth of your creation, and should stop wasting our time, much less soliciting our help and money. Pull the plug ASAP.

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Sounds like a pretty bad approach honestly :V

I'm sure the approach is bad for a thousand reasons but if applied very judiciously to very specific places (NOT /r/politics and other stupid places) I don't see how it would run afoul of your concern. E.g users from that ssc thread.

And I think, if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting.

The Motte is not on Reddit because they couldn't read the room. Don't you think that ship has sailed?

I respect your vision and desire to attract "diverse-opinions", but that has never happened. It's not ever going to happen for various reasons.

Not until you fix (not saying you should);

"diverse opinion" haver joins Motte -> expresses opinion -> gets dogpiled -> leaves (after flaming out and letting us know that we are nazi shitlords)

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I just assume no HBD allowed on reddit, full stop.

As @DaseindustriesLtd said, the appearance of incompetence of the opposing side the intended outcome of censorship

Those three deleted top comments are really low effort. A drive by punchy one line comment is bound for deletion.

Other comments more thoughtfully discuss IQ and have not been deleted.

I feel like "Haiti's problems are caused by the masses preventing the mulatto elite from holding power" elides an important detail, which is that the instability and massacres weren't a bottom-up noir-peasant rebellion, they were driven by the mulatto elite themselves - generally by one faction (often financed by the Germans) hiring mercenaries to take out one leader and install their favored candidate instead. President's Sam massacre against leading mulatto families, however and barbaric and unjustified, wasn't due to racial animosity but to credible fears that this would happen again (as it had happened numerous times before) due to another incipient caco revolt fomenting around the opposition leader. From Max Boot's "Savage Wars of Peace":

Of 22 rulers between 1843 and 1915, only one served out his term of office. During those years there were at least 102 civil wars, coups d'etat, revolts, and other political disorders. The period between 1908 and 1915 was particularly chaotic. Seven presidents were overthrown during those seven years.

Most of these coups followed a familiar pattern. They were orchestrated by the mulatto elite that ran the black republic . . . A cabal of mulatre (mulatto) plotters in port-au-Prince, the capital, would become unhappy with the incumbent. They would select an alternative candidate - usually a noir (black) - and line up financing for him from the German merchant community, which expected to make a tidy profit on the investment out of public funds once the usurper came to power. The would-be president would journey to the wild, mountainous north of Haiti, where he would recruit to his cause tatterdemalion soldiers of fortune and part-time bandits known as cacos (after a local bird of prey) with promises of loot. The cacos would march south toward Port-au-Prince, plundering coastal towns as they went. Since the Haitian army was corrupt and ineffectual, there was little to slow their progress. Upon the cacos' arrival at the outskirts of the capital, the incumbent president would go quickly and quietly into foreign exile, taking a portion of the treasury with him. His successor would be elected by the National Assembly at gunpoint. The cacos would be paid off from the public treasury and happily return home, until a fresh revolutionary leader invited them to march again. It was, boasted one Haitian in 1915, "an efficient revolutionary system . . . the most intricate and elaborate system in the world"

If the elites were so elite, why did they lose, time and time again? You'd think that an elite class would catch on.

Isn't, this, rather, an argument that Haiti is «HBD played straight»? This is how a democratic, or perhaps ochlocratic, nation with an average IQ of 67 functions: it doesn't.

It's those other nations which are deviations from the natural path, thanks to introgression of some elite material and its ability to withstand the pressure of the demos, which is not a given when eldritch powers side with the latter. And accordingly, African nations which have succeeded in humbling their elite castes – be those local Africans of another tribe, like with Tutsis, or Indians, or Arabs, or colonial remnants – are nations where the genetic factor is playing out in its purest form.

The obvious question for me as a libertarian republican is, how was free-market capitalism treated in the school lessons learned by the children who grew up into the gangsters now dividing up the island? Were they taught to respect others’ property? Were they taught to deny a single one of their emotionally-driven urges to have and thus to take?

I’m “friends” with an autistic woman with an IQ of less than 100. She was raised by a WEIRD progressive mother in a highly permissive home. She was thoroughly educated about her rights as a human, a citizen, and a person with disabilities, but not her responsibilities as an economic unit. She is now a want-monster who argues until she gets her way, because she believes the world owes her, and money is just an excuse for people to reject her. She treats her help-staff as garbage and complains when they quit.

Why would you be friends with such a person?

Before I learned about codependency, I thought I could be the friend people needed. That got me four bad friends in a row who could not reciprocate in any meaningful way. They drained me and I suffered immeasurably. She’s the only one I’m still in contact with because she’s the only one with my phone number.

Not OP but, I am friends with a lot of basketcases. Most of them got "grandfathered in" as friends from middle school and my childhood neighborhood.

They are not bad people, if you can dispense your desire to have "deep" conversations with literally everyone you know ( I have other people to do that with), then they are perfectly fine to associate with and do (limited) things with such as play sports, video games, goof about, hold a cookout with, etc.

Also, "bad" people are not always universally bad to everyone. In certain cultures, the more of an asshole one is to "outsiders" the more loyal he is to his "family". My grandfather was one such example, An absolute menace to service workers of all stripes, but a gentleman of the nth order with his family.

Uh, isn’t Rwanda improving rapidly while the rest of the Great Lakes region is perhaps not improving rapidly but still gradually getting better? S Africa is getting worse, true, but Botswana is getting much better.

Rwanda is ruled by Tutsis,no?

Could you explain the distinction between Tutsi and Hutu?

Previously I vaguely remembered colonial authorities basically made them up. So I looked into it a bit. Wiki e.g.:

They defined "Tutsi" as anyone owning more than ten cows (a sign of wealth) or with the physical features of a longer thin nose, high cheekbones, and being over six feet tall, all of which are common descriptions associated with the Tutsi.

which would add any successful people into this, as if making "kulak" an ethnicity.

Both the Tutsi and Hutu had been the traditional governing elite, but both colonial powers allowed only the Tutsi to be educated and to participate in the colonial government.

🤷‍♀️

Is it the case where a few disparate groups were sublimated into either Tutsi or Hutu? Or that the Tutsi were a coherent group? Are "official" takes as distorted as e.g. HBD? I'm more familiar with Central Asia, where Kazakhs, Uzbeks and such were basically invented in the 1920s, almost whole cloth.

Yeah, that's the standard excuse - Belgians did it because they elevated only one group. There was no trouble till whites came.

I don't really believe it in the slightest.

Or that the Tutsi were a coherent group?

They're probably largely descended from a coherent group that originated outside Rwanda.

E.g. from wikipedia:

The ability to digest lactose among African adults is widespread only among desert-dwelling nomadic groups that have depended upon milk for millennia. Three quarters of the adult Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi have a high ability to digest lactose, while only 5% of the adults of the neighboring Shi people of eastern Congo can. Among Hutu, one in three adults has a high capacity for lactose digestion, a surprisingly high number for an agrarian people, which Mamdani suggests may be the result of centuries of intermarriage with Tutsi.[2]

EDIT:

Imo, the clearest reason why Rwanda went bugshit was, that even though it is an unusually fertile region, the population density was extremely high, resulting in privation:

Rwanda's population soared from 1,887,000 people in 1948 to more than 7,500,000 in 1992, making it the most densely populated country in Africa. Poor farmers were forced onto marginal land, where cultivation resulted in severe erosion. Reliance on firewood as a source of energy caused massive deforestation, and farmers were then forced to use straw and other crop residues for fuel, thereby damaging soil fertility. These factors led to a disastrous shortfall in food production, with two-thirds of the population unable to meet even the minimum food energy requirement of 2,100 calories per person per day.

which would add any successful people into this, as if making "kulak" an ethnicity.

From my understanding the categories are remarkably genetically coherent since they measured different cultural groups/ways of life, but it wouldn't shock me if there was also an element of 'everybody doing 8/10 or better at life is now a Tutsi' at the fringes.

There's been a bunch of revisionism on the topic that's very much of the 'ethnic strife didn't exist prior to colonialism whatsoever' brand of hilarity.

The Tutsis are mostly descended from East African Cushitic pastoralists. They have significant Bantu admixture, though. Hutus are almost all generic Bantus genetically. There has been no formal studies on this as the Rwandan government doesn’t allow it, but Razib Khan privately analyzed some samples he got from Rwanda years ago on his blog.

Huh I had no idea. I always bought into the party line of “Belgians invented them” I should’ve known better

I guess It's how Brits supposedly invented Brahmins to delegate them power over the oppressed proletarian masses. Turns out, made them genetically more Aryan too. And of course language families are spread by emancipated women who love traveling and acquainting themselves with fascinating diverse cultures – not with the edge of the battle axe.

Once you notice that those 20th century historians and anthropologists started from a very particular, very self-absorbed theoretical lens, you develop a certain... prior for every time you hear about some clearly hereditary group being a social construct.

That said, @veqq is correct that Soviets, who took that lens as both an explanatory framework for things that work and, logically enough, an instruction manual, did invent a bunch of peoples, or at the very least redefined their distinctions and populations –Tatars and Bashkirs are the most glaring example.

I was under the impression is was a lot less Tutsi dominated than it used to be, but admit that I’m not totally up on my Central African politics.

The opposite is true - although Tutsis were generally richer than Hutus and more important politically, the RPF (Tutsi exiles) takeover of Rwanda during the genocide has led to the creation of an authoritarian government friendly to Tutsis, so overall their position is likely more secure.

I doubt the concept of the Tutsis, like the Igbo, being outliers is Sub - Saharian Africa is common knowledge much less commonly accepted.

There’s clearly more going on in Africa than just low IQ. Europe has had waves of migrants. At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling. And often these migrations were at knife point. For most of history people from places with civilization did not decide to move to Africa.

Most places in sub-Saharan Africa were death sentences for European settlers due to various diseases that there were no good ways of avoiding before the late 19th century.

And "death sentence" often in a very literal sense: some European countries would exile troublesome individuals to their African trading posts / islands as a means of killing them without having to execute them.

At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling.

The parts that weren't that hazardous like e.g. the fortuitously depopulated highlands in Kenya, or South Africa were settled.

By the time the tropical lowlands stopped being hazardous to health (1950s+), the population pressure in Europe had abated, and elite opinion was changed against colonisation.

Specifically, the tsetse fly made it difficult to maintain the herds of livestock euros relied on for agriculture, which meant Islam couldn’t expand southwards either even with lots of subsaharan African blood that granted some resistance to malaria.

Gotta love Wikipedia. After several paragraphs casting shade on the British for their dastardly deeds in stealing the highlands

Today, the region is at the heart of Kenya's economy. It is the country's best served region by road and rail and has many flourishing cities such as Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kitale, Thika, Kericho and Nyeri.[6] Although covering only five percent of Kenya's total land area, it produces most of Kenya's agricultural exports, particularly tea, coffee, sisal and pyrethrum.[6]

Just a coincidence I'm sure.

And that in some form is basically true everywhere. The wealthiest and most culturally influential black group today is where they were slaves. Of course many groups do not notice these correlations when reading these articles.

At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa

You’re probably overstating the attractiveness of South Africa to settler colonists. The boers were settled more to allow Dutch trading ships to the East Indies a convenient source of resupply than because holland had vast numbers of people clamoring to move to Africa.

Fair I said this too strongly. And was more referencing the ancient regimes and movement of people.

Still fairly limited considering Africa is closer than to Europe and the new world was largely settled first.

Still fairly limited considering Africa is closer than to Europe and the new world was largely settled first.

It's about over 2400 miles from northern France to Nova Scotia. The only sane way get to Nigeria would be by sea, which is nearly 5000 miles, which about the same as the distance to New York.

When you arrive in Nigeria, you are facing a land full of unfamiliar diseases, before vaccines. You are competing with many established civilisations. When you arrive in Nova Scotia, you arrive in lands that have already been considerably emptied by European diseases, and with diseases that have not been enhanced by urbanisation, and the nearest civilisations are thousands of miles to the south.

To put some numbers on that, estimates I could find put the African population at a lower figure of 50 million in 1500 (mostly Sub-Saharan, I think) whereas the North American population was 1 or 2 million.

Except the places that were settled quickly in the Americas were farther away and had higher populations like the Caribbean’s, Aztec/Mayan empires. 50 million for all of Africa is about the same estimates for the Americas.

There were special political factors in the case of the Aztecs that made colonisation easier. That's a long story, which you probably already know.

It's actually a very similar distance (by sea, of course) from Europe to the Caribbean vs. Europe to Nigeria. In terms of places where Europeans ultimately settled (South Africa, Zimbabwe) it is much further to Africa.

It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified.

It's Eternal September everywhere, and the SSC modteam barely exists on reddit anymore. Baj hasn't posted on reddit in five months, Cheeze occasionally moderates but was pretty low-participation already by the time I became a moderator, Zorba is busy with this place when he's not busy with life, Scott himself is a token mod to satisfy Bakkot's aesthetic, and Bakkot seems to be one of those people who refuses to ever give up control of anything even when he no longer contributes to its well-being nor even especially pays attention to it. HarryPotter5777 does most of the modding (which is not much) but this appears to be more a small extension of their moderation of other communities.

The topic of exiling the Motte from SSC has been done to death, but I think in retrospect what was exiled was not "the Culture War thread," it was "the spirit of open discourse." Obviously you can't have the CW thread without that spirit, but I am increasingly persuaded that you can't have the spirit of open discourse with topic bans. You can't have Free Speech with an asterisk; the asterisk strangles the life out of the conversation, quickly or slowly. The whole enterprise withers on the vine; if anything does remain, it's mostly just virtue signalling.

It's frankly frustrating, because damned if I'm not tempted to slap some of the more annoying people around here with topic bans, sometimes! And there are still occasionally some good threads that crop up on the SSC sub from time to time, and in other places in the diaspora. But even Astral Codex Ten is a shadow of Scott circa 2015, because he's muzzled himself (or allowed himself to be muzzled) in spite of his increased freedom and wealth (or perhaps because of it--he now has something substantial to lose!). Respectability and stultification seem repeatedly to arrive hand-in-hand.

E: Ill remove if consensus building.

You specified that it "seems to me" and you didn't say "everyone knows," so I think you're good.

In Scott's last linkfest he hinted that he was no longer living in San Francisco. Not that that would help him much with an ability to return to his 2015 self, but I'm curious if he really is no longer in the area.

I also "didn't live in San Francisco" for years. I still lived in the Bay Area, like I believe Scott does.

I lived in Oakland for 10 years but would still see the condition of San Francisco, homeless or otherwise, due to sheer proximity.

I'm in San Francisco proper now, long after I've passed the age where it feels necessary to be here. Would have killed for this at 30 lol.

I would very happily take recommendations for new mods, for what it's worth. It's tricky because we've gotten burned a few times by giving good contributors the mod bit and then having them immediately stop participating, possibly because dealing with the worst posts is sometimes dispiriting (though really it's the edge cases which are more draining to deal with), so we don't want to simply offer the position to any good contributor - that's evidently a good way to get less participation from good contributors, which is the opposite of what we want. And while I'm sure there's lurkers out there who would be a good fit, there's no good way to find and vet them.

I would really like to be responsible for less of the moderating, but there would need to be other, more active mods for that to work.

In the previous two months which are all the mod log shows, I've taken about 600 actions, HarryPotter5777 has taken about 70, and other mods about 6. ("Anti-Evil Operations" has taken 3.) Keep in mind that most of these actions are approving comments which were reported but not quite over the bar of warranting action, removing spam, or otherwise invisible. (I've been unusually busy the last few months, which is reflected in my reduced use of reddit; I think the ratio was even more skewed before that.)

While I'm popping my head in, I should say that I'm not actually the one who added Scott (that was one of the very first other mods, since departed). He uses his mod bit exclusively to sticky and unsticky new threads for posts from the blog when he gets there before I do, so it's correct not to call him a mod in any real sense, though, yes.

I've taken about 600 actions, HarryPotter5777 has taken about 70, and other mods about 6. ("Anti-Evil Operations" has taken 3.)

Thanks for sharing--I apologize for drawing conclusions from limited evidence (your public posting histories; HP5777 has recent mod-hat comments and you do not) but of course I don't have access to anything else.

It's tricky because we've gotten burned a few times by giving good contributors the mod bit and then having them immediately stop participating

Yeah, that's been true of the Motte as well, and I daresay many other places besides.

The topic of exiling the Motte from SSC has been done to death, but I think in retrospect what was exiled was not "the Culture War thread," it was "the spirit of open discourse."

I'm inclining more and more to the notion that what is needed is some of us stickle-backed old dinosaurs with right-wing and conservative views. The Schism was set up to accommodate those who felt they were being dog-piled by the righties, and to be more sympathetic to the left-wingers who were leaving, and it has settled down to being rather flat, in my opinion. Comment threads there don't get to the length as on here. Everyone pretty much murmurs "yes, how true" to the original post. SSC, from the rare times I dip back in, has gone the same way. The Culture War was purged, now it's comfortably leftie-progressive in its views. And stagnating, I regret to say.

(All opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and are not to be taken as representative of The Motte).

Now, before anyone wants to remind me, I am very well aware of the danger of getting our own little right-wing echo chamber going here, and certainly there are opinions expressed that I do vehemently disagree with. But I think that is the benefit here - for whatever reason, be it that we're accustomed to seeing right-wing/conservative views decried as the most evil of evil, or whatever, I do think that (a) there is a spectrum, not a monolith, of conservative views and (b) right-wingers are a bit more thick-skinned when it comes to debate/argument. So where someone on the left of the centre might flounce off because "you are personally attacking me, this is hate speech and violence", I think someone to right of centre is more inclined to stick around and fight it out. I mean, I know I have views that would get me hanged as a bigot and a transphobe and a racist and I can't remember the entire list of badness, on other places on the Internet where any divergence from the current orthodoxy is pure evil (see Jesse Singal's travails, and he's more liberal than I am).

There is also the benefit that as an off-shoot of the original SSC, Scott's rules about niceness and charity are still being followed. This keeps things from degenerating to the level of just shouting insults at each other. If I want to express my full-flowing bosom about the likes of Felker-Martin, I'll head over to CultureWarRoundup (a very useful safety valve to vent). I'll try and keep on the civil side on here.

Everyone pretty much murmurs "yes, how true" to the original post.

This is not at all true, there have been substantive debates where people have made it clear they disagree with a top-level post for a variety of reasons.

Now, before anyone wants to remind me, I am very well aware of the danger of getting our own little right-wing echo chamber going here

It's not "get going here", that echo chamber is already happening. Almost every comment in this whole chain of comments, starting from the very top with OP, is people complaining that leftists are controlling the ssc subreddit because they want to banish any inconvenient truth that clashes with their ideology. We're not getting an echo chamber here, we're literally sitting in one right now.

Almost every comment in this whole chain of comments, starting from the very top with OP, is people complaining that leftists are controlling the ssc subreddit because they want to banish any inconvenient truth that clashes with their ideology. We're not getting an echo chamber here, we're literally sitting in one right now.

If the ground shakes, a lot of people will say "Whoa, an earthquake". That doesn't indicate an echo chamber.

If you want to use that analogy, we have people here who hear T-Rex thumps like Jurassic Park 1 and assume it's always an earthquake, and everyone around them agrees.

This is not at all true, there have been substantive debates where people have made it clear they disagree with a top-level post for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes, I agree, that happens. But comment threads don't seem to get going over there and while that may be a function of "not many people were interested in transferring over" and so a smaller commentariat, it does seem to me, the times I drop in to see if anything interesting is going on, that they peter out because of the "yes, that is so" effect.

people complaining that leftists are controlling the ssc subreddit because they want to banish any inconvenient truth that clashes with their ideology

It's been a while since I did wander over to the original (what remains of it) SSC - I hung around The Motte back on Reddit and on here, I dipped in and out of DSL but moved away from there, and I waited for Scott's new place to get up and running, but mostly left with the rest of the diaspora after "we don't want no Culture War no mo" event. I've been very surprised by what it's like now, I have to say. But again, new blood came in after we moved out so it's their house now.

Sometimes, I agree, that happens. But comment threads don't seem to get going over there and while that may be a function of "not many people were interested in transferring over" and so a smaller commentariat, it does seem to me, the times I drop in to see if anything interesting is going on, that they peter out because of the "yes, that is so" effect.

I think you're leaving out the biggest factor - the sheer volume of top-level posts where people come to bring out their axes to grind. Anger drives posting in a way that's difficult for other emotions to do.

Anyone who disagrees with those posts can reply with either evidence to the contrary or just their personal opinion. And unlike on reddit it will not lead to <deleted posts> and the mods locking the entire thread because "y'all can't behave. It's basic human decency. Do better"

Anyone who disagrees with those posts can reply with either evidence to the contrary or just their personal opinion.

Sure, that could happen. But you don't see that happen. The amount of pushback against those positions is dwarfed by the amount that agree with those positions.

I think we are slightly more right here. The Schism was for those liberal/lefties who felt they were being persecuted, DSL ended up as the haven of the very right-wing, ACX is a mix of what the old SSC was like, and on here are the more centrist(?) righties. With the mass migration, I think it did shake out that those who remained on SSC behind after the Culture War thread split off on its own were more inclined to be on the left, and the various dispersions since then have only increased that effect.

It's like the sediment jar test, we've all settled into our various layers, though there is still an admixture.

This is a strange notion of an echo chamber. By this standard, any group that has reached effective consensus on a partisan issue is an echo chamber; in reality this is a necessary (arguably: in my view, 4chan/pol/ is an echochamber despite it being filled with contradictory bullshit of the same genre), but not a sufficient condition.

The only thing keeping those leftists out of here is generic moderation against uncouth tone (and their own disinterest, of course); the thing keeping us out of there is an explicit prohibition on discussing a not particularly fringe scientific hypothesis that's germane to the topic. We see their arguments. They don't see ours and are lost in their own echos.

The only thing keeping those leftists out of here is generic moderation against uncouth tone (and their own disinterest, of course); the thing keeping us out of there is an explicit prohibition on discussing a not particularly fringe scientific hypothesis that's germane to the topic. We see their arguments. They don't see ours and are lost in their own echos.

You're ignoring a pretty important point - the inevitable dogpiling when someone disagrees with this place's mainstream opinions. That has a tendency to drive people out as well, and it began all the way back when it was just a thread in the ssc subreddit.

I don't know about dogpiling. I've always felt that that was an intentional effect, a campaign: everyone is co-ordinated to drive off the heretic. I know I don't think like that when I'm responding to something that seems very egregious, even if there are already several other responses as well. I agree that it can be a problem when someone says X and gets ten replies all saying no, it's Y - but that is different to having a set-up where there is deliberate action to drive someone off. I don't think we have that here.

I agree. But the effect is roughly the same because it's a largely a question of character, not perception, whether you bear repeated criticism. I don't blame any particular person because it's a collective action issue.

I don't know about dogpiling. I've always felt that that was an intentional effect, a campaign: everyone is co-ordinated to drive off the heretic.

When the Motte was still on Reddit, someone (my google-fu is abandoning me) came up with the idea of a distributed Gish Gallop, which I found rather insightful. Also, prospiracies are a thing, IMO.

The effect of a coordinated attack against the heretic, and just members of the majority opinion saying their opinion towards the minority, are identical if you're at the receiving end. And this seems to me the central problem, on /r/SCC and here, just with opposite polarities.

Distributed Gish Gallop

Earliest mention I see via camas.unddit.com is here back on the mothersub by @TracingWoodgrains; the original comment by /u/saladatmilliways is unavailable (Culture War Roundup for the week of June 25, 2018). Maybe there's some way to find a copy but a quick look didn't help.

Checking out that thread was interesting, and of course nostalgic. Much was lost.

I am not a total relativist. What is the difference between dogpiling and fair criticism of intransigence? This depends on merits of the case, and a proper rationalist should at least entertain the possibility that he's egregiously wrong about a subject he has not studied, thus take an apparent dogpiling – or «mansplaining» or any other sin from the list of progressive anti-cognitive memes – in stride.

I just intuited an observation on that. The Triessences of What, How, and Why occur in that order, and are the spirits of Republican, Libertarian, and Democratic discourse, respectively.

If you start with What, you can follow up with discussion on How and Why, but if you start with Why, you’ve already assumed the What and How.

I’ll add an expansion on these thoughts on political discourse dynamics in my Triessentialism thread sometime before Monday ends.

Left wingers are in power; there's no particular need for them to argue with right wingers. They can just boot them out of any place they want to have a 'conversation', except for a few witch's dens which have no outside influence. (And maybe Twitter, for now).

Most people who got to know about HBD didn't look for it, myself included. I stumbled upon it. It did change my view on a lot of things, but I still think liberals have the correct take on a large number of issues. Plus I suppose it's just a matter of socialisation. As a lot of "intellectual heretics" have either departed or been banned off reddit, there is less pushback than ever there. I suppose the same can be said about this place. Ultimately, we're all worse off for it, because intellectual diversity keeps everyone on their toes rather than fragmenting into echo chambers.

Same here, only learned about HBD thanks to the long (long) discussions about it back on the old place. Hasn't changed my mind, since I think there's a heck of a lot of bad data floating around there (and Richard Lynn should be put in the pillory for spreading it around), a lot of environmental influences, and a certain degree of racism to be cleared out of the way before we can get onto "do some populations have lower/higher IQs?"

I think it's possible, indeed. Can we increase IQ by interventions? Once we get things like pollution, malnutrition, lack of access to education, etc. out of the way, if there still is a gap, then we need to think about genetics and how alterable (or not) they are. But the big problem remains a moral one - some people will indeed use HBD as an excuse to be persecutors, to keep people down, because "it's inalterable genetics, they're just inferior by nature, they have to be treated like sub-humans, I don't make the rules".

a lot of environmental influences, and a certain degree of racism to be cleared out of the way

How will we know when it's cleared out of the way?

we can get onto "do some populations have lower/higher IQs?

This is something you do actually have to ask yourself though if you want to reason about these things. If you choose to discard you still have made a choice.

How will we know when it's cleared out of the way?

Probably when we've got to the point of worrying about the Oompa-Loompas.

Who is 'we' to because it seems like we got to that point years ago.

Reddit ban is fairly easy to get now. You have to be quite careful-

I forgot myself for a while and caught a ban on reddit just like that, for mentioning the 30x difference in homicidality in the US between Asians and blacks.

It's funny, I literally just made a post to this effect in last week's Friday fun thread. As I said then, the dumbing down of the space is inevitable given the growth of the subreddit and the number of good posters who have simply moved to other spaces like here or DSL. I'm surprised people are only just noticing though, I'd say the decline has been obvious for 2+ years

For context, OP (Matt Lakeman) is an old ex-regular who has an amazing blog dedicated mostly to international travel, reading on historical stuff and self-experiments. He's been to the Dominican Republic, among other places. He was not impressed. As one can expect, there's a section on the Haiti, with passages like:

Haiti was my first destination choice for this trip. But when I Googled “Haiti,” the top news story was about 17 American and Canadian missionaries being kidnapped by a Haitian gang and held for $17 million ransom. So I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to go to Haiti at the moment.

I don’t know why the two countries have diverged so dramatically. Noah Smith says no one knows the cause of the split, but it’s probably some combination of Haiti starting its independence with enormous national debt (as part of a settlement with former colonial master France), terrible land management policies, the ongoing toll of the U.S. occupation for twenty years (the Dominican Republic was invaded too, but only for eight years), constant regime change, and generally abysmal macroeconomic policy. One Dominican I talked to attributed the country’s success to mid-century dictator Rafel Truillo, who was authoritarian and oppressive (and renamed the capital after himself), but allegedly brought enough order to the country to attract foreign investment and jump start the modern tourist economy. Also, for geographic/climate reasons, Haiti gets hit far more and far harder by natural disasters than the Dominican Republic.

By chance, I spent some time with two European aid workers stationed in Haiti. Their strong consensus was that Haiti was even worse than I had imagined. Worse than anyone imagines. And it has no viable recovery plan. A few interesting things they told me:

[...]

Law and order is non-existent in the cities. There is no point in reporting crimes. The cities are essentially in a state of anarchy.

The lawlessness has gotten worse over the last few years. The two used to be able to go to restaurants and jazz clubs, but now they don’t leave their homes at night.

Taxes are not paid in Haiti (duh). But if for some reason someone wants to pay taxes in Haiti, they first have to bribe the security guards at the doors of the tax offices.

When the Haitian people get pissed off at the government, their only viable means of protest is to block roads. So they’ll cut down trees or light tires on fire and cut off major highways. There is literally no process in place for the Haitian government to clear these blockages.

The Haitian people are consumed by “fake news.” Rival political factions run radio stations and Whatsapp groups, and spread fake news to vilify the opposition and/or foreigners. The fake news is so rampant that the average Haitian seems to have a completely deluded view of politics and the world at large.

It's a mystery indeed!

By the way, Scott's trip to Haiti was what opened his eyes to biodeterminism. (this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative). Maybe Matt should've gone after all and written something in his usual manner.

...But also.

IQ is not a mechanistic explanation. All the politically correct stuff he asks about – governments, [inability to make use of] climate, culture – are in the end products of IQ but can be studied separately. IQ only tells us why it's so inescapably and consistently bad. But then an informed person would ask: why is Russia or Ukraine or Belarus like that? Why is China like that? Why is Iran like that? Sure it's not Sub-Saharan Africa, but aren't these people clearly smart enough to at least do better than what they show? And why are they worse than, like, Portugal? So IQ can't be the full story; and so long as this is the case, one has enough wiggle room to not notice the elephant.

As I've just argued, tabooing HBD destroys a great deal more than understanding of stuff that pertains directly to HBD. It lowers the effective IQ of the group, and much faster than dysgenics. Regarding the normiefication of the sub, you're obviously correct, but barely-challenged mentions of Jared Diamond, who is an utter fraud and a just-so storyteller, are even more telling. AskHistorians link is okay. Here's a good discussion of his GGS by that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective, if anyone is interested, I can... proofread Deepl/ChatGPT translation.

that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective,

Except that Tolkien wasn't thinking about Russia at all, in the slightest. If they really do think that the Orcs are a depiction of what the West thinks of Russia, they're barking up the wrong tree. If they then say "Okay, let's be Orcs! To hell with the West!", they're idiots (not to put a tooth in it): they'd rather cut their nose off to spite their face, and they still don't understand how irrelevant they are to most Western thought historically.

Do you believe we care that much about Tolkien's intentions in particular? Enough to engage in some post-mortem polemic, even? Our ressentiment is more interesting than your escapism, our literature is deeper than your fairy tales. Be flattered when they are used as a starting point, in the way Yudkowsky used Rowling's.

(this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative).

Here it is. CW for, uh, emotional honesty if you follow the link.

Russia and Ukraine and Belarus and Ethiopia and Zimbabwe and Venezuela are like that while Indonesia and Botswana and Costa Rica are not like that because the former set of countries are run by elites with Marxist assumptions that lead to retarded economic policies and general dysfunction, while the latter are run by elites who are normal and where dysfunctional are dysfunctional in predictable self interested ways. Botswana and Indonesia in particular benefit from keeping much of their colonial institutions from very functional countries instead of asking corrupt and ideologically driven marxists to design new ones.

A somewhat fanciful tangent, but that reminds me of the debate over Elon Musk commandeering Twitter on free speech fairness grounds only to end up promoting his own tweets.

I think a social media CEO tilting things in their individual favor is less terrible than abstract ideological shenanigans stacking the decks against rival or suspiciously off-the-grid political notions.

According to Wikipedia, which cites the IMF, Haiti's per capita GDP, in purchasing power parity, is $3,188. Jamaica's is $11,802, and Barbados's is $17,407. Something other than HBD is going on.

And, btw, describing Guns, Germs and Steel as a just-so story seems very odd. The book repeatedly discusses alternative theories, potential weaknesses in its evidence, and avenues for additional research which might confirm or refute his argument, none of which is the norm, especially in books designed for a popular audience. That doesn't mean he is correct, but it certainly isn't a just-so story.

The book is a very good just-so story with an honest author who more or less admits that's what he's telling.

It's particularly visible towards the end when it attempts to explain European dominance as opposed to Chinese, Arab or Indian dominance, but then admits that had one guy made a different choice (the emperor of China and the treasure fleets) then European dominance likely would not have happened.

You've got that backwards: He starts by saying that internal politics led to decisions which meant that China did not end up conquering the world,and then argues that that decision would have had less effect had China been divided into several regional states, and then presents a hypothesis of what role geography might have played in China's high level of political unity. But, regardless, that is basically irrelevant: It is 3 pages tacked on at the end on the subject of potential future avenues of research

Not a complete explanation. I've long objected to Lynn's "the (southern) Irish only have an IQ somewhere in the 90s" because I know by the guy that this is politically motivated (plus, his methodology is crap). But it got touted around, and then regurgitated in articles about "wow, now the Irish test at normal IQ levels, how did the giant increase happen?"

Well, maybe there wasn't a giant leap forward. Maybe it was a combination of other crap (including the Brits doing their damnedest to destroy any entrepreneurship in the country) that meant we tested badly on IQ tests. I agree that there are a lot of stupid Irish people, and that if you give them a test they'll do terribly, but it honestly was not a tidy explanation of "well all the smart ones emigrated so only the stupid ones were left, HBD triumphans".

Me.

Institutions matter.

I guess I'm neutral. Being smart helps with a lot of shit, but at the same time, it doesn't take book smarts to do the right thing. People in the distant past managed to build functioning societies without necessarily being able to rotate shapes in their heads or even being able to play all that many word games.

As to Haiti, I suppose that, besides the genetic stock thing, there's just too much misery in its history. You'd think that being basically the first country made of slaves who freed themselves the hard way would be a sign of something special, but the reality is much darker.

Perhaps, indeed, the Haitians are suffering for lack of a uniting narrative to point to; we Americans get the Revolution and Democracy, Haitians got out from under a European thumb only to find themselves boxed in by the rest of the hand.

Yeah, cursory look at Haiti shows that it has had centuries of really bad luck in all possible ways. It's been a nightmare for centuries, and it's difficult to work out exactly why: how did it get to the state it is in, by comparison with literally the next door neighbours? Part of it has to be down to climate/environmental factors, that it does get hit regularly with natural disasters. San Francisco has it tough, but how much of a chance would it have to develop Silicon Valley if it had the equivalents of the 1906 earthquake and the Great Fire every five years or so?

People in the distant past managed to build functioning societies without necessarily being able to rotate shapes in their heads or even being able to play all that many word games.

This is a really uncharitable interpretation of what intelligence (IQ tests) actually is.

It's not the shape rotating or word games, it's the ability to do those things. Modern people might deadlift an Olympic bar instead of lifting up a log into a wagon, but the ability to do both those things is identical. Similarly, the ability to internalize the principle of modern civil engineering is the same ability to internalize that the columns in the Pantheon are not only there for the aesthetics, it's the same thing as shape rotating ability.

Do you really think if Homer were alive today he couldn't fill out a crossword? Or Al-Khwarizmi wouldn't be able to do matrix multiplication? The amount of intelligence difference to understand something and invent something is the same difference between an ant and a human. I might know more math than Arcemedes, but I am an ant compared to him. Don't confuse standing on the shoulders of giants with being taller than them.

I think Homer would have trouble with a crossword, considering he was blind.

Don't be so confident! He might have required external help, but I still would expect him to give @f3zinker a run for his money.

In general, blind geniuses may have much less of a problem with spatial reasoning than one naively expects.

Antoine’s Necklace is not a mere curiosity and has very interesting properties. One would suppose that constructing such a structure would require considerable visualization, which is indeed true. However one of the most interesting things about this knot is that it was formulated and studied by Louis Antoine, who was blind. After he lost his eyesight, the famous mathematician Henri Lebesguesuggested to him that he study topology.

I have noticed (it is a common observation) that it is almost a rule that mathematicians who are blind are usually geometers/topologists. Such a correlation can not be mere coincidence.

Before reading Sossinsky’s book which also mentions G. Ya. Zuev as another influential blind topologist, the two best examples that I was aware of were L. S. Pontryagin and the great Leonhard Euler. Pontryagin is perhaps the first blind mathematician that I had heard of who made seminal contributions to numerous areas of mathematics (Algebraic Topology, Control Theory and Optimization to name a few). Some of his contributions are very abstract while some such as those in control theory are also covered in advanced undergrad textbooks (that is how I heard of him).

Pontryagin lost his eyesight at the age of 14 and thus made all of his illustrious contributions (and learnt most of his mathematics) while blind. The case was a little different for Euler. He learnt most of his earlier mathematics while not blind. Born in 1707, he almost lost eyesight in the right eye in 1735. After that his eyesight worsened, losing it completely in 1766 to cataract.

“It is not surprising at all that almost all blind mathematicians are geometers. The spatial intuition that sighted people have is based on the image of the world that is projected on their retinas; thus it is a two (and not three) dimensional image that is analysed in the brain of a sighted person. A blind person’s spatial intuition on the other hand, is primarily the result of tile and operational experience. It is also deeper – in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense. […].

recent biomathematical studies have shown that the deepest mathematical structures, such as topological structures, are innate, whereas finer structures, such as linear structures are acquired. Thus, at first, the blind person who regains his sight does not distinguish a square from a circle: He only sees their topological equivalence. In contrast, he immediately sees that a torus is not a sphere […]”

I imagine, in my mediocrity, that crosswords are in fact much easier solved using a visible 2D grid as the foundation. Who knows if that's true. Maybe «seeing» some modular-alphabetic arithmetic, or word embeddings rotating through each other and locking upon letter matches, would make for a faster solution.

Learn something new everyday indeed.

Learn something new everyday. In that case, any other great author or poet could do the hypothetical crossword.

People in the distant past managed to build functioning societies without necessarily being able to rotate shapes in their heads or even being able to play all that many word games.

Ancient Greece and Egypt certainly show evidence of shape rotators (e.g. Euclid, pyramid builders). Rome more on the word (and deed) side; they had Greeks to do the shape rotation. The Babylonians were no slouches at the numbers game either.

Caveat, I have never enjoyed math or life sciences and have no serious training in it, so that will probably mean my opinion will/should be discounted to nothing.

That said, I think HBD is a real, but small input into how societies grow and develop over the long term. But its clearly not a sufficient explanation on its own because historical outcomes are way too varied over time, and the dysjunctions of black swan events loom so large.

I reckon instead it is more or less a difficulty slider on civilization - the less generally capable your population, the better your social institutions have to be about finding ways for them to be productive, and incentivizing longer time preferences. Also, you're going to have a much smaller number of true geniuses who have the capacity to make major developments. Doesn't make development impossible, but it does make it (much) more difficult.

I remain skeptical.

Since you are clearly aware of Jensen's answers on the matter and perhaps of this issue's discussion in e.g. Wade's Facts that need to be explained– how do you figure skepticism is a tenable position? Sure, maybe the genotypic potential of those Sub-Saharans isn't in the 50s or even low 70s like Lynn et all argue, maybe they'd get to 80's with a proper societal infrastructure (which is to say, under a regime they themselves fail to establish). I personally buy that at those low levels, in conditions of scarcity, every minor institutional slip-up can lead to compounding loss on the environmental side: they dumber you are, the more you fail, and the more you fail, the lower your IQ goes, so equilibriums of underperformance of groups separated by a few genotypic points may be more than an SD apart. Okay.

But we have a great control case in the form of American Yoruba-White mixed population, that displays differences which map perfectly onto the HBD framework . Unless one takes seriously the hypothesis that systemic American racism/Black culture degrades environmental conditions of affected American children to the level of a third world nation, in a manner that is resistant to adoptions, educational interventions and so on, and allows some to become billionaires and public darlings and political figures, but exclusively through sports and entertainment and never anything recruiting the extreme right tail of the distribution for legible tasks (and so on, and so on, and so on) – it seems inevitable that HBD explains at least a great chunk of the disparity. I won't even discuss that we've had some progress on education PGS delta since then, because obviously those results are easy to suspect as being underpowered. But... it's really hard to see how HBD could not have a substantial effect.

Even if they simply show more abstract failures like difficulties with planning, at the scale of a ten-year-old's type of planning, this should show up pretty quickly during normal conversation. But for the model to be true, the actual matter has to be yet more abstract still: Equatorial Guinea has more than its fair share of problems and corruption and lackluster decisions, but they're not The Three Stooges.

Have you spoken to a functional adult person who tested below 70? My impression of Haiti stories is that they really have next to no rigorous abstract thinking but have otherwise healthy nervous systems – as would follow from the conjecture that White/Asian IQ advantage is a product or relatively recent selection and not-as-smart but functional peoples have existed and survived in the wild for a long time. They talk like... rather dim but normal people I know. And not to dehumanize anyone, but it doesn't surprise you that animals with literally zero ability to take an IQ test or have their g measured orient themselves in space well enough, does it?

At the weak level, I recognize that the attempts to remove environmental influence are going to unavoidably limited, but I think "the facts that need to be explained" doesn't sufficiently handle other possible explanations and doesn't have the necessary data to persuade me. I don't want to fall into an anti-HBD-of-the-gaps, here: this is a difficult field and it's not exactly subtle how much more funding and effort goes toward research of environmentalist and cultural explanations. But the people doing that research are still awful social scientists, even the easiest research in this domain gets very far from the stuff they're able to accurately study, and they're often looking under lampposts like a drunk searching for his keys. Even if not intended as such, a lot of HBD looks a bit like an HBD-of-the-gaps, where things stop having g-loading or stop exactly at the borders of where other matters have not be conclusively demonstrated, or where anything not explained by often-incompetent mainstream scientists must be genetic. But that's a fairly trivial problem -- and not a disproof, so much as recognizing the limits of available information -- and one that's mostly at a gutcheck level for me.

((I also have the general grab-bag of complaints about social science: insufficient control of confounders, and an acceptance for ad-hoc or post-hoc definitions that aren't intentionally salami-slicing or garden-of-forked-paths but can fall prey to those faults accidentally. However, these are, admittedly, problems most people find acceptable when the social science agrees with their positions, so I'm just including them for completion.))

The animal comparison kinda illuminates the crux of my deeper disagreement, though.

It makes sense that there are animals that have evolved better spatial orientation or reaction times than humans; indeed, some of the simplest insects have faster reflexes than human neurology can support, and this doesn't invalidate the general concept of either spatial orientation or of complex brains. And for humans, there's not much controversy in saying that dyslexia and dysgraphia (which have some genetic aspects) could impact many IQ test scores but don't consistently result in equal disparities on other g-related matters, on spatial orientation, or for reaction times. On the other hand, Jensen used as an example (and developed) the odd-man-out reaction time test as an example of a behavior strongly tied to information processing as a 'cognitively complex' task, and I'm pretty skeptical that if someone trained a cat to play whack-a-mole that this would change the minds of HBD proponents.

I think there's an argument for links between (some subset of) IQ tests and race, and while there's some issues with calling IQ/g/whatever "intelligence" at this granularity, genes are at least a plausible explanation for whatever's going on. ((In this sense, I'd even argue HBD is somewhat optimistic; more environmental or social effects might be more politically acceptable, but even recognizing anti-vaxxers, we are demonstrably far more capable of getting large portions of the population to accept several injections of random science than we are to improve education by the tiniest degree or have lead abatement in poorer cities not be a joke. Slapping "to prevent dysgraphia or dyslexia" on a prenatal therapy would be really, really convenient, and I'd expect the 'bioethicist' issues you see from Deaf or Blind culture would very quickly evaporate here.))

I think there's an argument that some definitions of low IQ could explain a number of common problems, both in the United States and internationally. IF the average person in Sub-Saharan Africa could not tie their shoes without long training or make a bed at all, or understand hypotheticals or the 'symbolic reference' of currency, or do monkey bars, or understand alphabetization, it'd be really easy to understand why so many of these countries have problems running the (sometimes literal) equivalent of a mobile phone stand.

My main problem is that it's easy to come up with an X-factor broad enough to explain the wide berth of problems and disparity present, or closely-defined enough to match the traits we see in the real world, but that trying to achieve a reasonable synthesis gets rough. These traits will necessarily be motioning around the shadow of the thing rather than the true borders, but I'm hard-pressed to believe you'd get the same borders when starting from American test scores, Haitian test scores, Brooklyn politics, or Haitian politics.

If a group did bad enough on some tests in some way that predicted inability to tie their own shoes or understand currency, this could explain Haiti's level of dysfunction. And if you want to talk about how Jensen's tests and manipulation predict LSAT scores, sure, fine.

But it's hard to go from Jensen's tests to Haiti. It's not just that the odd-man-out reaction time test, inspection time test, and Peabody's Pic-Vocab seem a weird cluster when excluding digit-span memory or free recall; it's that it's a really awkward match to the problems present in a lot of these countries. Haiti isn't poor in the "can't build power plants and highways" sense, or the 'agriculture isn't mechanized enough to compete internationally', or even the 'can't follow traffic lights' sense: it's poor in the 'even traditional agriculture is fucked up', 'police are taking the 'stationary bandits' metaphor very literally' sense or in the 'United Nations dumped cholera into the water supply and no one noticed for months' sense. No small number of the horror stories often are problems with things like free recall or digit-span memory or serial rote learning that are outside of Jensen's Level II and closer to the neurological damage problems, combined with a lifestyle that predicts a ton of that neurological damage.

Uganda isn't as much of a basket case, to damn with faint praise, but it's my actual go-to for "can't run a mobile phone stand". And there's an absolute mess of things of things that could be tied to Jensen's predictions, some things can tie to digit-span memory that he's excluding and again is common in people with a background predicting neurological damage, and others don't clearly tie to domains for IQ tests at all. I don't want to overstate personal experience -- it's a large enough country it is possible that the guide industry or the specific industries I got close to were picking from a couple standard deviations above the norm -- but I do have some experience with functional low-IQ adults, and if we're going to appeal to that I didn't get the same feeling from dealing with most native Ugandans.

There were certainly individuals who weren't very bright! But on average, you weren't running into the sort of problems common to non-institutionalized low-IQ adults. I actually had conversations about conditional hypotheticals, not just with tour guides but with randos, and to the point where one was confusing for a lot of people involved, it was confusing for cultural reasons (American 'tribes' and racial identity works a lot different than Bantu actual-tribes and cultural identity). We had a really annoying time trying to build a four-wheel dolly or solder a damaged circuit board, but that's because you can't get caster wheels or not-shit-quality AA-batteries in Kampala, not because anyone had difficulty understanding the construction or processes.

Now, Uganda scores higher than a lot of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and probably has some selection biases making those IQ tests not-representative (testing tends to favor extremes, but also favors people in schools or state-visible institutions, tribal stuff). It's a large enough country I could have (especially given tribal stuff) have only encountered people a standard deviation or two above the norm. And I'm not great at noticing social issues anyway. But it limits the appeal to personal experience pretty seriously.

There's an argument that perhaps all or at least most of the problems of Haiti and Uganda are downstream of this subset of IQ (or g, or another X-factor). Indeed, this is a more convenient explanation for why Haiti and Uganda were temporarily not-basket-cases; despite worse environmental climates in their respective colonial eras, and despite the European state-runners being such a small minority (eg, in Haiti, even many slave-owners were Black affranchi), and often not exactly the best and brightest of Europe. Or compare African-American ghettos of the 1950s with those today. In the HBD model, outside force mandated Correct behavior (modulo those arms), and perhaps g prevents that from happening voluntarily. They're probably not wrong to some limited extent: it's hard to run a power plant if you can't apply math in a generic sense, nevermind do the modeling necessary for load balancing; it's harder still to teach someone to run a power plant, or build the conceptual infrastructure necessary to do that sort of teaching. In Uganda, dysentery was rife and possible to pick up even from some less-reputable bottled waters, would be a plausible 'familial-environmental' cause of low-IQ if rampant during prenatal and early childhood years, and that's def the sorta thing that could be downstream from decisions of previous local generations that are an IQ or g thing. There's definitely an even broader story you can tell where g or this X-factor explains all of the corruption and gang violence because mumble mumble low-time preference.

But we get further and further from the core claim to defend it.

Having dealt with actual working class blacks, they do seem to have cultural habits that plausibly suppress IQ(generally poor nutrition by first world standards, notably, as well as high rates of recreational drug use and injuries). I’m not doubting that there’s an HBD component to their underperformance, but more socially functional African Americans would probably have an IQ above 85, albeit still lower than whites by a noticeable amount.

more socially functional African Americans would probably have an IQ above 85, albeit still lower than whites by a noticeable amount

These are also much more likely to have higher proportions of white genetics.

Why has HBD particularly struck Haiti so hard, but not other Caribbean or west African nations with the same genetic stock? A bit suspicious that these genes so uniquely struck this one subset all within a single nation.

At this point I'm open to considering lack of functioning institutions and Haiti's history of killing off all the people who actually ran their society and the ruinous debt imposed on them by vengeful French.

If you're taking a poll mark me down as unconvinced.

I think it's possibly a factor, I don't think that it's the dominant factor.

GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa varies from the $400s (Somalia, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic etc.) to $6500-9000 (Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, and Botswana). That's higher than some European countries (Albania, Azerbaijan, Armenia). Let's rule out Gabon and Equatorial Guinea as examples of GDP being misleading, since their actual "development" in any normal sense is pathetic. Let's also exclude South Africa as only recently an African-governed society. That still leaves Botswana as a huge outlier. Botswana is (a) overwhelmingly African and (b) its most important resource is diamonds, which is very badly correlated with development elsewhere. So a lot of the variance between Africa and the poorer parts of Europe can be explained by other factors - including Botswana's relatively good economic, political, and social policies.

Africa is a basket case, but so was China until recently, despite high IQs. Additionally, the European or East Asian genetics for IQs have presumably not undergone any massive transformations in the past 500 years, but the discontinuity in the rate economic development with all of previous economic history is huge.

At most, a genetic tendency to high IQ would be comparable to a natural resource. That can be good! For example, Norway has been able to turn its oil into extreme economic development. Venezuela has not. Countries with very limited natural resources have done well. Botswana has done well with a low IQ level by global standards, though IIRC Botswana's IQ is rising relative to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa due to the better childhood nutrition that comes with development.

I don't know of good evidence that the full awfulness of Sub-Saharan African development needs to be explained by IQ, rather than historical factors (it's hard to imagine Liberia ever being a great comparative success when you know its history) or policy factors (Africa had the misfortune to become independent in the heyday of socialism, dirigism, and Cold War power politics that led even the democratic countries to support dictators).

In addition to what @No_one said, China also has to be graded on a curve because before their recent rise the last hundred years or so had been absolutely awful:

*Great Leap Forward: tens of millions starved

*Korean War intervention: ~180,000 Chinese military casualties

*WWII (chinese theater): tens of millions killed, plus huge swathes of the country's vital agricultural instrastructure purposefully destroyed as a military tactic.

*"Boxer" Rebellion: hundreds of thousands killed/displaced

*Taiping Rebellion: tens of millions killed, tens of millions displaced, major portions of southern China depopulated - literally the worst civil war in human history that we know of.

Plus all the internecine fighting between factions, attempted/successful revolutions, several minor wars fought on Chinese soil (Russo-Japanese war, first Sino-Japanese war), and a normal dose of the floodings, droughts, and other natural disasters that have punctuated Chinese history.

China had one of the worst stretches any civilization has ever had, to my reckoning. Getting conquered by the Mongols again probably would have been significantly preferable. Honestly, I'm kindof amazed that there still is a china after all that. A lot of ruin in a nation, indeed.

So there's been a lot of instability, wars, and bad policies in China?

If these are sufficiently retarding to hold back China until the 1980s, then why aren't the instability, wars, and bad policies in Sub-Saharan sufficient to explain more or less all of its backwardness? When Sub-Saharan Africa has had stability, peace, and relatively good policies, it's prospered more than China: see Botswana. And I don't accept Botswana's diamonds as an explanation: if there's one thing that we know about economics, it's that tremendous natural resources are not sufficient for development, and in much of Africa they seem to be a curse (see the DRC or Zimbabwe).

Certain sections of Africa have had some conflict thats comparable - the postrevolutionary Congo comes to mind - but frankly I'm not aware of anything on the horrific, mind-breaking scale of what China consisfently went through from 1850-1970 (often self-inflicted). Other countries tend to get it once or maybe twice if they're really stupid (Russia's period 1905-1955 ranks up there, I'd imagine, as would Paraguay from the War of the Triple Alliance to the Chaco war). Not for a 100+ years.

That certainly could be a failure of my knowledge. Definitely African wars are a bit more difficult to find major sources on in English. Certainly open to learning more if you have suggestions.

The answer is that none of this is true, China was literally never (in historical record) as backward as Africa, despite value judgements of some racist whites who pooh-poohed remarkable Chinese traits as «mere» industriousness and servility or some such. China was in a very bad place very recently; but it has not been barbaric for millenia.

It's disingenuous to compare, say, modern North Korea (73 years life expectancy, universal literacy, zero AIDS, regimented functional society, nukes, ≈$1300 GDP per capita) and Mozambique (61 years life expectancy, 63.42% literacy, 13% AIDS, anarcho-tyranny, no industry, $1300 GDP per capita), and claim this is an argument against HBD. This is an argument against GDP, if anything. Likewise disingenuous, only for more complex reasons, to compare China and Africa as a whole.

When Sub-Saharan Africa has had stability, peace, and relatively good policies, it's prospered more than China: see Botswana. And I don't accept Botswana's diamonds as an explanation

See what?

65 years life expectancy, 86.82% literacy, 20.8% AIDS, all economy runs on a De Beers mining contract. Botswana is maybe a big success by African standards, but that success belies the hypothesis that Africans with unusually good policies would just converge with non-Africans in all other things that matter – matter for maintaining stability, peace and good policies, too. So it will not be a huge surprise if Botswana one day just fails.

Why are you pointing out AIDS? Like, yeah, it's a problem, but I'm not sure it's in the top 10 priorities for nations to worry about. And I'm skeptical that North Korea is at 0% anyways.

China was literally never (in historical record) as backward as Africa

I never said that it was.

It's disingenuous to compare, say, modern North Korea (73 years life expectancy, universal literacy, zero AIDS, regimented functional society, nukes, ≈$1300 GDP per capita) and Mozambique (61 years life expectancy, 63.42% literacy, 13% AIDS, anarcho-tyranny, no industry, $1300 GDP per capita),

Good thing I didn't make that comparison.

claim this is an argument against HBD

Who is arguing against HBD? I never questioned it. The point is that, with respect to economic success or failure, there just isn't a lot or anything for HBD to explain once you account for bad policies and history. Bizzarely, many responses have been "Ah, but those facts you cite are due to bad policies and history."

See what?

My figures were out of date: in terms of GDP per capita, China has caught up with Botswana in the past 10 years. However, at Botswana's independence in the late 1960s, they were the same, and until recently, China was behind:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=10gui

China is ranked 31st for "Ease of Doing Business", Botswana is ranked 87th. So, even in China's catch-up, there just doesn't seem to be much if anything for HBD to explain. That doesn't mean that HBD is false, and AFAIK the evidence for HBD is psychometric rather than macroeconomic (and much the better for that fact). What doesn't do well is trying to explain differences in the wealth of nations in terms of IQ rather than cultural and historical explanations.

*Korean War intervention: ~180,000 Chinese military casualties

Rating the Korean war as a Chinese defeat is just wrong.

They managed to save their North Korean buffer state despite a serious inferiority in heavy weapons. The amounts of Americans killed was also substantial.

I think it's being grouped not as a defeat, but just as a mass Chinese death event.

but so was China until recently, despite high IQs.

Well, communism is known to completely break the IQ / GDP correlation. And before that, China wasn't industrial, and was under very malthusian conditions, with poorer classes in cities literally starving to death if fired from work. (see e.g. Changing Chinese on the conditions in China before it descended into civil war.

At most, a genetic tendency to high IQ would be comparable to a natural resource.

IQ affects performance at every task. It's not a 'natural resource', it's more of a multiplier, an advantage in almost everything.

Well, communism is known to completely break the IQ / GDP correlation.

Communism as a cause is naturally appealing to people in our memespace, which had an unmitigated love for markets even before it was thrown in the right-wing pit, but I don't think there is any certainty that even if this correlation is there, the arrow of causality goes from communism to dysfunctionality rather than the other way around. A story where something was already wrong with the countries in question beforehand and this something facilitated their conversion to communism when that meme was going strong - in other word, communism in the mid-20th century being yet another symptom, and having no explanatory power - seems no less plausible to me.

the arrow of causality goes from communism to dysfunctionality rather than the other way around. A

You need chaos for communism to take root. As much was recognized by bolsheviks themselves. Both China and Russia were in turmoil.

Communism (the planned economy kind) as a system cannot do the job in peacetime, thus leads to stagnation and discontent.

So it's both a product of discontent and chaos, and eventually causes chaos and discontent.

I don't think there is any certainty that even if this correlation is there, the arrow of causality goes from communism to dysfunctionality rather than the other way around.

The best still-extant version of that arrow is near the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula.

I was intending to respond to the common version of the theory that past communism breaks the correlation in the present. For present-day comparisons, NK/SK seems fairly inappropriate since NK is politically isolated and sanctioned to death with barely any outright allies, while SK is tightly integrated in global markets (and in particular with "communist" and at least certainly postcommunist China). On the other hand, I have seen the assertion repeatedly that up until the '70s or '80s or so, NK outperformed SK economically, and in the present day, to compare two countries without extenuating international-politics circumstances, it's not clear to me that for example median human life in Taiwan is actually better than in China.

Well, communism is known to completely break the IQ / GDP correlation. And before that, China wasn't industrial, and was under very malthusian conditions, with poorer classes in cities literally starving to death if fired from work. (see e.g. Changing Chinese on the conditions in China before it descended into civil war.

Yes, this is my point. IQ is a factor, but other things seem more important. And note that the issue is not IQ / GDP, it's a genetic predisposition to higher IQ / GDP.

IQ affects performance at every task. It's not a 'natural resource', it's more of a multiplier, an advantage in almost everything.

I should have been more specific: IQ is comparable to a natural resource that can be leveraged or not leveraged, depending on the circumstances. You gave a good example with China, where communisn stopped the Chinese from leveraging any innate tendency to higher IQs that they might have into exceptional economic success.

The question is too broad. Does "does not think that HBD is an explanation" mean "we are all literal tabula rasas", or "the gaps between groups aren't all down to genetics"?

It's generally understood that /r/ slatestarcodex is to the left of themotte, hence the fork a few years ago.

Second, we talking reddit here. Not exactly friendly to HBD overall. Posting 'red pills' about HBD incurs a non-trivial likelihood of being banned, either the individual or the sub.

The thing is, it's not just left: It's oblivious left. They demonstrate absolutely no awareness of then existence of obvious counterarguments to the ridiculous things they say. After the split, /r/SlateStarCodex didn't just move left. It got dumber. The /r/ : SSC ratio increased.

In terms of IQ, I would say themotte is 1/2 of a sd above /r/SlateStarCodex , surveys be damned. A lot of the smart people left.

It got dumber. The /r/ : SSC ratio increased.

Yes, look at this:

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/116a0hi/the_crowd_gasps_audibly_and_outgoing_governor/j96s71h/

ever hear of google? Embarrassing...

It's censored left. There are HBD posts, most are already deleted is all.

I would like someone to poke Bakkot with a stick on whether it's «Culture War» to mention HBD in a discussion of African dysfunction, if only to see him squirm.

/r/SSC has been bleeding quality contributiors for years.

The vast majority of the really high quality blog posts were made between like 2012-2014, then there were a few years with much lower output but still the occasional high quality post and then almost nothing.

It's almost a decade since 2014, multiple community splits and a general ban on discussion on the topics that made both the forum and the blog popular.

Endlessly fascinating to me how hard the internet has accelerated the life cycle for nostalgia, I've noticed myself pining for the good ol' days of the internet with newgrounds, YTMND, SA, 4chan or even what YouTube used to be. These things disappeared or underwent fundamental changes to them not so long ago (a similar timeframe to paying off a car loan or meeting, courting and marrying a stranger) and yet everybody who remembers the internet before Facebook (at least those I've spoken with) all seem to share a similar sentiment. My favorite quote that encapsulates this was from a post from 2014 on one of 4chan's now-defunct text boards saying "2012 was so long ago, was i even alive back then. who knows."

Further viewing for anyone who cares about the phenomenal acceleration of nostalgia as much as I do. ALERT! YouTube link! (also contains what can be considered a very annoying pop song)

Go ahead and read the comments below; from what I can tell these are actual children, or at the very least young adults, waxing poetic on the halcyon days of their youth. This, to me, is just incredible. Literally! Imagine if you had told just about anyone across history that the unblooded youth of society would reminisce over their shared childhood, before they had even stepped into adult society proper. Maybe my priors on this are skewed by my neophyte-tier Cynicism and a knee-jerk tribal desire for RETVRN, but I can't help but wonder if this is something very, very new.

A fascinating topic to me, and one I don't have the requisite familiarity or ability to trawl through academic literature on this subject, or even know if there's been anything published that would cover this.

I don't know that the older generations aren't guilty of this also. Happy Days was from the 70's, That 70's Show was from the 90's.

But then, I am part of that generation that this video is probably targeting (millennials), and people of my generation have almost certainly done some time in adult society by now. Maybe the timeframes are shrinking, I do find myself longing for the days before social media was all-consuming (one such post here), but maybe we're all just reaching back to the last real big inflection point.

There's certainly a market for nostalgia, I won't deny that - I will say you've perhaps glanced at the decade and not the precise date. Happy Days is for sure a bit of a prick to my balloon, but That 70's Show aired originally in 98, nearly thirty years after the 70's began. Even drawing the time frame in as close as possible, you're comparing a show ostensibly set 18 years and some change before its air date, to a condensed nostalgia trip featuring a song that came out 12 years ago (peaked in popularity around 7-10 years ago) paired with clips from kids shows that aired up until three years ago. My more pressing point is about the audience's self declared ages (found in the comment section, a hoary place where few tread). There are easily dozens of remarks from individuals providing identifying information on their ages. A highly updooted comment explicitly states that nostalgia for this song, these clips means you experienced the best Gen Z had to offer.

While television programs and Online Content™ are admittedly apples and oranges, it's more the turnaround that has me impressed. Your last point is well taken too, part of my fascination with this video (not necessarily this one though I love it for its QED power, a cursory search for similarly themed videos will turn up comparable results, courtesy of the wackily overtuned algo) is the response it evoked in me. It almost grabbed me for a moment before my brain caught up with my reaction, started placing each reference next to the metaphorical calendar and immediately noticed that things weren't adding up.

Anything that tries to catch me on that sort of level without my permission is met with automatic suspicion so I'm not certain this isn't me reading signals from the noise, or if maybe this means they grew up on recycled content from the previous generation. Either way it seems off to me, to canonize your own past before you've even found yourself properly settled in the present.

Haha, it's been that way for ages. Last year there were people saying that there was no crime increase in 2020, the 30% increase was just random statistical noise and Scott was making it all up https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/vn40ma/what_caused_the_2020_homicide_spike/ie5ct2u/

And of course ranting about the fucking pigs deserved their bricks which somehow never triggered the new mods' culture war detectors.

It's been a long time coming, and was preventable at every step if the obvious subversives had been purged instead of being handed the keys. Don't make that mistake again.

Currently, both of those comments are downvoted to -3, while the responses are upvoted. So what are we supposed to conclude about the subreddit as a whole from them?

That the mods are responsible for selectively enforcing the "no violence, waging, or even discussing the culture war" rules to bring /r/communism_memes users into the sub.

Quoting naraburns:

HarryPotter5777 does most of the modding (which is not much) but this appears to be more a small extension of their moderation of other communities.

It's the standard reddit power-jannie entryist story.


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