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 -
Except there is no such thing as 100% accurate measurement. People cheat, people bribe their way up, people luck out. Any measurement you use will have a certain margin of error. Within that margin prior probabilities reign supreme. Put simply, most Africans with an IQ of 130 are less intelligent than Europeans with the same score. Because the percentage of the latter with scores ≥ 130 is much higher (2.28% vs. 0.13% for African-Americans, one of the smartest African populations), you are simply more likely to encounter a genuine one vs. a cheat or a one-off compared to the former. You must adjust high African scores down to increase their accuracy, and you must adjust low European scores up. Ditto for men and women etc. This is the only way to do justice to truth and fairness. This applies even more so to immigration policy — because intelligence is not 100% heritable, the genotypic intelligence of high-IQ individuals from low-IQ populations (resp. their descendants) is always going to be lower than the already adjusted scores.
Yet if most people caught you correcting scores in this way they’d be fuming with righteous indignation. This is the result of ideological indoctrination that does not aim for truth or fairness and declares Bayesian reasoning (or more precisely, certain priors) taboo. The idea of ‘not judging people by the color of their skin’ is simply a fallacy, part of deceitful activist propaganda.
I've no education in statistics, but isn't this double counting? The average score for Africans is calculated including the high-achievers and low-achievers. If Africans score an average of say 85, and you then apply a penalty to the high achievers, by doing so you move the average down below 85, in which case a stronger penalty must be applied to future tests and so on, right?. You would improve the average accuracy of any individual test, but you'd skew the whole. I guess it's probably resolvable by keeping nominal and adjusted scores separate.
But really, how much of a concern is the precise accuracy here anyway? An IQ test takes what, an hour? Make people take one every year, or every time they apply for a job, or whatever. If the collective accuracy of 10+ IQ tests isn't good enough for society, then God knows how we've made it this long.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link