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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27875 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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I think there is a lurking leftist middle that probably exists here, at least I am one, and I certainly don't believe in HBD as it's typically used. The difficulty is that the world is complex and it's hard to build and formulate the kind of critique necessary to capture nuance and rebut the plethora of arguments hoarded by the HBD side.

I think the tribal thing is overdone with left v right, the problem is the failure of people to think for themselves. I mean your claim that all blue is pro-immigration seems unlikely, or is evidence of some serious group-think. Immigration is a complex, and contextual issue. If half the population has one view on it, that's stupid.

I'm broadly in favour of diversity and different cultures existing as a plurality but words like multiculturalism and for that matter diversity are ruined for me as they have a monolithic group think sense about them.

I see this site as having plenty of people from the left who escaped from this kind of mindless group think.

HBD isn't mentioned all that much these days.

I think the tribal thing is overdone with left v right, the problem is the failure of people to think for themselves. I mean your claim that all blue is pro-immigration seems unlikely, or is evidence of some serious group-think. Immigration is a complex, and contextual issue. If half the population has one view on it, that's stupid.

I think the problem is that even though there may be widespread nuance in individual thought on issues like immigration, when it comes to rubber-meets-the-road rhetoric and policy, there's a knee-jerk reversion to the unnuanced view. It doesn't matter if someone or a lot of someones in Party A think some combination of B,C,D & E is true when they will only vote for people who say and pursue E as policy because it's the option that makes the best PR-tested battle cry. This is true of both major parties, who are more scared of losing than figuring out a problem, so instead of threading needles, all the front-line warriors are using sledgehammers. And while the nuanced thinkers sit back threading their needles, they're cheering on the sledgehammers.

Yes, I agree, there's a reversion to slogan type simplification thing.

What do you mean by as it's typically used? The thing that annoys me the most about hbd is that I'm never sure if the person mentioning it thinks something obvious like 'genes impact outcome' or something idiotic like 'genes determine outcome'.

Well genes obviously impact outcome but it's whether there is a long term association with a particular ethnicity/culture grouping over time that I need more on. I mean I know there are lineage studies and various IQ research that does show group difference, but culture and socioeconomic factors are confounders presumably.

I know that various people will come on with this paper and that paper which tie the whole thing up, but there's a lot of links and difficult science to think about before I would start to assign attribution to various parts.

Also, like perhaps a lot of issues, it's not framed in a way that lets in much light. It's kind of, 'I've looked into it all and this is the result'. Ive also seen research being misunderstood, so extrapolating an interesting contrast experiment with a rare gene population being mixed with normal population and seeing a change in properties being extrapolated to racial mixing generally.

Finally, when it goes with what looks like basic prejudices and stereotypes one has to ask is their motivated reasoning. How hard has the person thought about complex genetics and statistics to form their view, or have they run with a view they like?

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