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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   25778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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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?

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.

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 am reminded of this thread from a little over a year ago.

I watch the advocates of "innate cognitive differences" stack epicycles upon epicycles trying to explain why teaching methods don't matter, why classroom discipline does not matter, why nutrition, poverty, a tradition of literacy, a stable home-life/two-parent household, and any number of other things don't matter while arbitrarily dismissing any arguments, claims, and evidence to the contrary as "blank-slatism" and can't help but find it just as (if not even more) ridiculous.

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.

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.

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