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Notes -
I was largely onboard with what you were saying until this point.
I actually think this line illustrates (or at least gestures towards) one of the major our differences in our respective worldviews. Virtue is never "effortless". Virtue, by its very nature, requires effort. It requires pain and discomfort. The difference between sincere virtue and empty signaling lies in it's personal in the personal cost. The willingness to put in the work and endure the pain. As I keep saying, a principle that gets discarded the moment it becomes inconvenient to hold was never sincerely held in the first place. It's the same idea.
If anything, it is the belief that virtue is (or ought to be) somehow intrinsic or effortless that lies at the heart of so much of the world's dysfunction.
Much as leadership is not about asking permission so much as stepping up, culture is a choice. You can choose to demean and deride those who put in the effort or you can encourage them. That choice will effect the balance of effort around you. In short your choices matter, because your choices determine your culture and that is a thought that certain people just cannot abide.
I think that there are a lot of people particularly amongst the woke left and so-called dissident right who feel an urgent need to believe that individual choices don't matter and that culture does not matter because so long as these things don't matter, they can not be held responsible for the outcomes their culture creates.
Ironically, I've long viewed the current state of Russia as the most damning evidence against the HBD hypothesis. If I grant for the sake of argument that intelligence is primarily genetic, there's no disputing that Russians have it in spades. Russia has produced a slew of great artists and thinkers over the centuries and as a general rule when Russians get out of Russia they seem to do quite well for themselves. So why did the US end up as world hegemon and not the Soviet Union? I would argue that Russian culture was the chief determinator. As I recall we had an argument a few years back where I accused you of being "a servile and effete European". I also seem to recall getting an entirely deserved warning form @ZorbaTHut about it. My position regarding you has mellowed since, I genuinely value your posts as someone who's views are vastly different from mine, and you've always had interesting takes. At the same time I do still feel like there is some truth to the barb. My Polish friends joke that there is nothing more galling to a Russian than seeing another Russian happy or successful. I don't now how much truth there is in this but it does readily to explain how Russia always seems to be getting caught in defect-defect type equilibriums.
You talk about American culture "lambasting whitness" and the first thought that comes to my mind is "is that really American Culture though?" We're already in a place where anything that is unambiguously pro-american ('Murica) gets coded "Red" by default so what of it? It's no secret that our academic elite are not "American" in any meaningful sense of the word, their whole political platform revolves around making the US more like Europe IE poorer, more class stratified, and more
segregated"multi-cultural". The choice is in going along with them.I might have misspoken. Let me put it another way.
Consider the quote from Dostoyevsky by @Harlequin5942 (I would translate it more literally, but no matter):
Sure, you are right. Virtue not only takes effort, it to a large extent is just a consistent, directed application of effort. But – for the scope of the argument, what is the difference between having the power to sustain effort and the challenge being relatively effortless? Between having the power to lift a weight, and that weight being slight for one's shoulders?
«Unvirtuous» people know the score, they know the required investment and the theoretically optimal payoff matrix. They just fail to keep up, and so give up. Inasmuch as this is due to them facing extra temptations and so on holding them back, that can in principle be rectified through top-down cultural intervention (though as I say, it is hard to reinvent a nation; you folks tried a few times, and patted yourself on the back for succeeding… in Germany and Japan, only to walk away in embarrassment and confusion from the Middle East). But in the end, some people, and peoples on the average, just find the required effort too much.
And it works the same way for virtues and abilities. I argue that recognizing the unequal distribution of innate ability is necessary, not only to tailor interventions and temper expectations, but to be kind to people, to be able to forgive them their shortcomings.
Speaking of, you like to accuse HBDers of thinking that education is wasted on black children. I don't know if you've ever taught; millions of Americans do, and they all have to face the question of education being mostly wasted on some children. The thing is, teachers who ignore or deny innate inequality end up having to choose either to hate themselves, the society, or children who fail to achieve whatever skill level they think their teaching ought to make possible.
This latter mindset is pointless, except to make the naturally able feel better about themselves – after all, they try too, and they achieve more, so supposedly they tried harder and are morally superior for this reason.
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