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 -
People have given you the standard answers of it making your positions defensible, and the real world comes knocking and you find out that merit isn't evenly distributed.
And of course, that I want to believe what's true. I find all the population genetics stuff really interesting in the same way that I find linguistics interesting, and group variation just makes sense as a possibility when you're used to thinking about populations of humans and genetics. (Seriously, read some Razib Khan or something. It's fun! Polynesian navigators, steppe nomads and the spread of the Indo-European languages, the original Americans crossing through Beringia and killing off all the megafauna, neanderthal ancestry, etc. It's a good time, if your interests are anything like mine, and doesn't require that you be a racist or something.)
But I do want to know: what alternative do you prefer? Why are there still disparities? What's your picture of the world? Does the data support that?
(This is not at all to say my picture of the world is complete: I do want to know how much of differences are environmental vs. genetic, as I imagine it's a mix, and I would want to know how different groups ended up with different genetic effects: what cultures and environments shaped things like that, because I don't really have a good picture of that in most cases, and it does seem necessary. But it seems entirely reasonable to me to say that just like variation within-group along many axes has a genetic component, so does variation between-group, and it seems silly to me to confidently assert that it has a 0% effect unless you have data or reasoning as to why that would happen, to back it up.)
I'm not Hlynka- and in fact I believe in HBD even if I don't like it much- but I think that AADOS culture is just uniquely shitty and this is probably a bigger factor than genes. Furthermore, I think that this happened partly because the average black IQ is low, but that that's a minor factor, and a badly managed welfare state just has that effect on the urban poor, which blacks disproportionately are and were, and that one of the few continuing legacies of Jim Crow is, aside from incredibly annoying and pretentious activists, that most American blacks feel like they have more in common with each other on account of their race than they do with their white neighbors and coworkers, even when those other blacks live on the other side of the country and don't share a class background, which destroys the containment mechanism for trailer trash behavior in white communities. I'll also say that I think, but cannot prove, that southern culture is more vulnerable to that kind of undermining than average even if it doesn't have huge amounts of negative cultural memes in it itself, and this is the root of AADOS culture.
I'm pretty sure Hlynka's ideas are broadly similar; the low station of AADOS is mostly due to their own poor behavior, yes, but that poor behavior has mostly non-genetic causes.
I'm pretty sure IQ has a bigger effect than culture on eg the percent of programmers who are black being low. Certainly culture has a bigger effect than IQ on the percent of blacks who commit crime, and even if there's a natural tendency towards that due to low IQ it's very easy to imagine stable social situations where black crime (and for that matter crime in the white underclass, low-IQ whites also generally aren't programmers) is much less frequent.
But most law abiding middle class people in stable two parent households are not programmers, or engineers, or in any other particularly high-IQ demanding career. Working-class whites seem to generally have much better outcomes than blacks do, and while yes they have an IQ advantage, it's a smaller one than whites as a whole, and hispanics are complicated but have very high upwards mobility compared to blacks with an even smaller IQ advantage. Most of the income gap is not a product of underrepresentation in high status careers.
There's a continuous spectrum of how intellectually challenging a job is, though. Managing, accounting, nursing, sales, secretary, plumber, cashier, janitor (not in exact order, maybe see here idk). The ones that are less intellectually challenging (generally) pay less well because they're less productive and because more people can do them. I don't really have any strong evidence either way for whether culture or IQ has a larger effect, but if anything I think the IQ->gap pathway is simpler than the culture->gap pathway. Black people who are employed will have a natural desire to get better employment and higher pay as much as white people do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am reminded of this thread from a little over a year ago.
I mean the answer is that these things do matter(I'm not thinking you disagree here). Catholic schools and no-excuse charters meaningfully improve black performance! And black neighborhoods where the majority of households are two parent families produce upwardly mobile children, not only by black standards but by national standards! The military also massively improves black life outcomes. Wokes don't want to talk about these things, but they have pre-existing biases against things like Catholic schools, the US military, and nuclear families, and they don't want to have to talk about why systemic racism doesn't apply to those blacks. "Hard" HBDers don't like to talk about these things either, with the partial exception of the military because they can point to selection effects as the driving force, because they have no explanation for why black children who receive scholarships to Catholic schools perform so much better than their public school peers, or whose neighbors are stable two parent families are highly upwardly mobile. As I guess you could call me a "soft HBDer"- HBD is a great explanation for why Ben Carson is literally the only black medical pioneer, and it's a decent explanation for why Africa is the poorest continent on average, but it doesn't explain why blacks show such little upwards mobility into the lower middle class, or account for Russia's dysfunction compared to other former communist states- there's a perfectly obvious explanation. To an anti-HBD conservative there's a perfectly obvious explanation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's a very reasonable take. I think I agree.
EDIT: At least, that's probably the largest factor in the dysfunction found in black America. I'm not sure how much of an effect that would have on IQ tests, etc. But in terms of real-world effects, yeah, that's probably the biggest problem.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link