This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A major implication of this is that, even if you are able to provide perfect equality of opportunity, groups will still have different outcomes because of their differing inherent ability. As a result, for example, cognitively-demanding (and high-status, high-compensation) professions will never reflect the distribution of groups in society; instead they would be occupied mostly by members of groups with higher ability. The alternative to this is to weigh the scales: to hire based on some attribute other than merit alone, which many find to be unfair.
And these "good" professions are just one example - you would expect to see this phenomenon in every area of human endeavor where ability comes into play.
There are issues associated with what you mention that bother me about the complete anti-HBD stance in the general public. Let's say that groups do not have the same attributes or inclinations on average for higher education and highly cognitively demanding work. Yet most people want "equity". No one wants to hear anything different than "everyone is the same" or a complete non-debate. And let's say that equal opportunities are given. The results are inevitably going to end up skewed due to hereditary (and cultural) reasons. And, given that "everyone is the same" is the accepted truth, someone must take the blame for how a group ended up performing badly. Racism must be the culprit. Professors who were simply doing their job well will be accused. Some will speak up and get cancelled. Others will tip the scales so that their results don't appear "racist". Dumping more qualified students out and including less qualified ones. So there will be false accusations, and dishonesty will reign for others. The grifters who make their living off the existence of systemic racism get to justify their positions. Not to mention the fact that some people who don't have the abilities for doing a demanding job well will get those jobs. Might be dangerous in some cases. And it might be hard to get rid of them, due to the fear of accusations. I wouldn't want my neurosurgeon being an ass-covering, entitled, 100 IQ person.
Right, what you're describing here are major elements of the pro-HBD position. Most people on this forum, including myself, agree with you about this.
Be sure to consider as well the nature of the opposing viewpoint. Many people strongly value what they consider as fairness. The idea that some people are disadvantaged in life, through no fault of their own but only through an accident of their birth, strikes them as being unfair. I agree that it is unfair, though it's unfair on a sort of cosmic level, not in a way that should affect who becomes a neurosurgeon for instance.
But there is a worthwhile question to consider in it, one which I think Freddie DeBoer touches on at times: if there is a group of people who are natively less intelligent, does that mean they are destined to have worse lives? Is it right that they should have worse lives? It is important to bear in mind that intelligence is not equal to humanity. I can understand why, when you see one group of people having lives which appear to be worse in many areas, one would feel called upon to try and help that situation and correct it. But as you can see in the real world, when this desire is also motivated by false premises, it can lead to injustice too.
We accept this for other groups. For example, we accept that people from the Congo are probably going to have a rough go of things compared to Swedes. People born with deformities are going to struggle. And what of the extremely ugly? Why are we not guaranteeing them sex and partnership? Do they deserve it less than the beautiful?
How does one who wants equality deal with these questions? There are two ways.
Yeschad.jpg. We need to institute a totalitarian society to remove all inequalities, whether wealth, national, or genetic. Rich people will be taxed and money given to the poor. No borders. Fat chicks on the cover of every magazine, and beautiful people deformed. Communism but for everything.
People can be unequal, but groups can't. It's okay that some people are stupid, fat, and ugly. But it's not okay for a group to be these things. It's very important that all races are equal, because race is the most important thing in the world.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
Equality is impossible. Doubly so because HBD is true. But to fix the problem involves resorting to the extreme ideology of leveling or race-based nationalism. Better to just deny HBD.
I think the true YesChad option is outright transhumanism.
Don't cut off the the nose to spite the face, give everyone better nosejobs. Or gene editing and cybernetic enhancement such that the playing field is leveled.
In a world of absolute genotypic and phenotypic freedom subsided by the government, everyone has true equality of opportunity, and if we somehow don't get equality of outcome, I guess everyone being better off makes it hard to cry too hard about it.
More options
Context Copy link
You know, a third way would be to simply eliminate the malformed. Not endorsing that but I don't see why it wouldn't work. Societies have been practicing some form or another of this basically forever.
More options
Context Copy link
Dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator is not the only way to achieve leveling; it's just the easiest. We could instead choose to uplift those among us who were born unlucky: subsidize cosmetic surgery for the ugly, ozempic for the overweight, and embryo selection for those traits that can't be altered in a single generation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Leftists are very, uh, fair in mainstreaming the adoption of this new concept of «equity». Because fairness is, of course, more about equality of opportunity, about being able to win «fair and square» – or to lose by the same ruleset and accept the loss. Unless we assume that biological heredity is part of the opportunity endowment that's supposed to be equal, this all works.
Of course, there's a big problem here. One can easily see such an assumption «we hold those truths to be self-evident…»
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is not a true general principle. They do not care about the ugly, or the short, or the introverted. Only certain disadvantages count. If they truly believed that principle they'd go full Harrison Bergeron.
Maybe they show that they care about the ugly by not wanting to explicitly refer to them as ugly and reify it.
I can't buy that, not when talking about the crowd who thinks the 90s/colorblindness approach to anti-racism is something in between a Stephen Colbert joke and a racists' cover story. The modern left-wing approach to fighting inequities is to point them out, loudly, and demand they be specifically and deliberately solved.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think all this stuff about fairness is beating around the bush- the African American community is a little over 10% of the population with low and decreasing HBD potential and a broken culture which prevents them from making the best of it. Their TFR is actually above the American average.
You cannot have a 10%ish percentage of the population be a community that’s just destined to mostly live shitty lives without getting a whole lot more mask off authoritarian than the USA is likely to be anytime soon. It’s very important to maintain the illusion that Jayquan and Lashondra have access to meaningful and aboveboard upwards mobility to prevent the entire community from making things a whole lot worse for the country’s social structure. If that entails a playing field that is not perfectly level, then so be it.
The nonhispanic black TFR is 1.68, while the general American TFR is 1.67. If we assume that black immigrant TFR is higher than that of the ADOS African American community, the TFR of the latter would almost certainly be below the general American average.
This is a good point, but African Americans shrinking as a percentage of the population rather slowly(there’s no evidence they have a TFR as low as Asians or blue tribers) doesn’t meaningfully change things, although it probably alters the political outlook in Georgia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Perhaps it's due to current political and social will that one can't have such a... black... pilled 12%-13%, but it's not some fundamental law of the universe.
"We" in Western countries regularly tell White and Asian men who object to affirmative action, third-world immigration, income and wealth transfers, disproportionate intra-racial violent crime: Be better, sucks to suck, git gud, it's your personal skill issue, a Real Man wouldn't feel threatened by affirmative action, immigration, income/wealth redistribution, or violent crime.
A similar approach could easily be applied to American blacks with respect to a racially level playing field.
White and Asian men, however, generally do pretty ok for themselves relative to their peers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Seems to me that the problem here is looking at them as 'the blacks' (okay you actually said 'the African American community') instead of as individuals. There is a high degree of European admixture in black Americans. The average American black has roughly 20% white genetics. Plenty of 'blacks' are half or even majority-white. One even became President! Treat individuals as individuals and this problem becomes a lot more tractable. Insist on lumping people into groups and those groups must shortly be at each others' throats. (EDIT: And, you know, it's not like they're actually 'a community' by any stretch.)
Besides which, the strategy which I perceive you to be espousing here might work today, and it might work tomorrow, but at some point it becomes untenable sheerly due to numbers. Perhaps a technological singularity will save us. I don't like betting on that.
In the meantime, every major institution is sliding because standards are being lowered to desperately attempt 'equitable' outcomes. The elements of our society which produced this wealth in the first place are precisely those under attack.
Most of them seem to see themselves as a group, though.
A whole lot of non-black entities have a major interest in making this so. I'd suggest that they're a substantial part of the problem.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
At the same time, we can see how 'tax people with good traits to subsidize the reproduction of people with bad traits' might get us into real trouble. It's the humane thing to do right up until the whole system collapses under its weight and we're back to third-world levels of wealth without the social cohesion which allowed us to climb out of that in the first place.
I like the metaphor of an oared galley. At first all the rowers are strong men. But over time, as the rowers tire out, they begin to be replaced by statues of rowers. This can go on for a while, even as it increases the load on the extant rowers. There comes a tipping point, though, where the boat is dead in the water.
Yep, I stand by my prior post up the chain, there's very little information or science to engage with in the last 10 posts, just sweeping generalisations and opinion among people that agree with each other.
Now that may be because you've all 'done the work' already, but a post needs something more than back-slappimg surely?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link