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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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I agree that black crime is clearly not a genetic inevitability independent of culture, and is basically cultural. White people of similar incomes or similar IQs commit crime at lower rates. Black crime and crime culture would end quickly if the state/elites were willing to use sufficient force to end it and change the culture (and no democratic constituency successfully opposed it). You could draw a parallel to criminal gangs of other cultures in american history that have since assimilated and now have low crime rates.

I think there probably is an indirect genetic contribution to single motherhood, as lower IQ whites also have higher rates of that, but that is also mostly cultural, and could easily be another way, as it was in the past.

I do think most of the black-white IQ gap is genetic, though. As intuitive evidence - there's a wide variety in black experience of America. Quite a few rich black families, 20% of black households have 100k+ income. Why are there so few high-achieving black scientists (and so many jewish ones)? And white kids in single-parent homes - I haven't seen this, but I'd strongly suspect they score better than black kids in similar single-parent homes with similar incomes. I think poor schools impact white and black kids of similar incomes/IQs in about the same way, and the gap remains between them (and of course IQ impacts income somewhat).

It offers no practical solutions, no path forward, no actual workable plan.

We can do embryo selection right now and add '3-8 points' to the 2% of children already born via IVF (by choosing which embryo to implant based on genetic screens, instead of randomly). As technology improves over the next few decades, this kind of thing will just become better and more widely available. (but AI will improve faster, :|)

(Also, we could just have smarter parents donate sperm or sperm/eggs for surrogacy or adopt out babies. This is obviously unworkable as a general policy, because people want to raise their own children. I agree this has all sorts of bad second-order effects, but you can't just notice them and declare it bad, and I think it is probably net positive if you compare the benefits of 'more very smart people'. With gene editing, we'll be able to do 'intelligence genes of smart person, appearance genes of you' and that may be popular).