site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As a black person...I really really really don't want HBD to be true

This doesn't mean I think it's wrong. It's just that I think that the conclusions you'd have to draw from it being correct are just so awful for me.

I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?

I'll probably have a longer more essay-type post for next week's thread but I just want to get my raw emotions about it out here before then.

It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't want it to be true...I don't want it to be true. It's so unfair

You can simply adopt eugenicism and the desire to improve black intelligence through DNA as your primary worldview, as opposed to nihilism (which I think is also an adequate choice...).

Serious question - does it actually matter to you, assuming that you yourself are intelligent?

What does the existence of an urban underclass mean to you if you yourself are intelligent, choose an intelligent wife, and have intelligent kids?

Why do other people who have nothing to do with you besides the color of their skin have to do with you, provided that the world is AT LEAST colorblind (and to be quite honest, the world is a lot more favorable than colorblind to talented black kids right now)?

Because he will be judged according to his tribe. If you’re a white foreigner in a distant land with only a few white people, and one of your fellow whites becomes embroiled in a huge scandal for committing horrific crimes, you will pay a price for that even if you did nothing. If HBD becomes widely accepted in the West, it will affect in perception all black people, even those who are very smart. If a woman crosses the street before you walk past because of her experience with the ‘urban underclass’, you can’t simply exempt yourself from this insult because you’re not part of it, you are being judged on the basis of race.

And I assume also some sense that these are his people, his tribe.

But part of the truth of HBD is that there is variation within the races even as there are clear patterns of difference between them. It says that a highly intelligent person is much more likely to be jewish than black, not that there are zero intelligent black people. Convincing people of the truth of HBD means getting them to accept that a 99th percentile black person might only equal a 90th percentile jew means there will be way more jews than blacks at high achieving levels, but also that it means the 99th percentile black is EQUAL to the 90th percentile jew.

Honestly, the only reason a black executive or Harvard grad is assumed lesser than any other person with the same qualifications is because everyone knows affirmative action and other DEI interventions exist. If we didn't have them then we would see vastly fewer black Harvard grads, but the ones we did see would be judged more as Harvard grads than as generic black people because the former trait would not be mediated by the later.

Assuming you're not a troll, props to you for the intellectual openness to be willing to even consider this.

I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along.

I don't think this is true. First, there were genuine injustices being suppressing people, and it's good that those are gone. But secondly, there's still a ton of room for growth. At the very least, every axis where things have gotten worse can be at least as good as the previous state, and that's just the minimum. There's plenty of room for growth across the board.

It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient.

I'll note that this is not implied! Even most hereditarian IQ researchers think that the IQ gap is not purely genetic, and all of those other things seem like they can be modified more easily than IQ. They certainly have changed over time, and there's still a long way to go in which things can be improved. (Of course, bringing about large-scale cultural shifts is still no easy matter.)

On a less serious note, I didn't know that intransient was a word. It's a little funny that it's meaning is not super far from intransigent, though it makes sense. in+trans+eo vs in+trans+ago, I think.

I'll also note that there is, of course variation. If what people say is accurate, and the US black mean is one SD below the white one, then that still means that about a sixth of blacks are smarter than the white average. That's definitely not nothing.

I can't disagree with much of the general sentiment, though: it isn't fair, and I certainly understand caring about the people of a group that you identify with more broadly.

I'll also note that following Richard Hanania, white conservatives probably have to accept this too, a little: the liberals have captured education and the universities, and so the average conservative white IQ is lower than the average liberal one. (Again, averages. There's a ton of overlap.)

I'm not sure how this will be change populations in the future, as different groups of people have more or fewer children, or as IVF+genetic screening and selection have effects.

The central thesis of HBD is that differing selection pressures produce divergent results between populations, and intelligence is one of the features that vary in this way. It's a pretty straightforward example of evolution, broadly understood.

The very word evolution means "change." Why would anyone consider a process of evolution to be static, immutable, unchangeable?

HBD does not claim there is no path out of the conundrum you observe. I'm not saying there are easy fixes--though I believe there are a great number of small policy changes that might produce results on the margin--but I'm baffled by the take that "HBD = nothing can change."

The way for average black IQ to rise is for black women to choose intelligent black men to father their children. This is not impossible.

The way for average black IQ to rise is for black women to choose intelligent black men to father their children. This is not impossible.

sounds even less likely that mass genetic editing. Also, making male fertility eugenic might be not enough if female fertility is dysgenic

I don't see that the struggle was fruitless. The way that black people were treated under slavery was abominable, truly awful, and was never justified by HBD.

Second, I think we're close - maybe within a generation - of having the understanding of genetics to very very quickly identify if a gap exists and close it through non coercive means like embryo selection. So I think you should be optimistic.

The cavalcade of replies along the lines of 'don't worry champ, you'll beat the odds!' look, sound and feel... silly.

Sure, if you abstract yourself to the point of just being an idea you'll be fine, but human beings are obviously not ideas. They exist as biological entities. Genes expressed in an environment. We are a 'social animal'. We exist in groups. We interact with groups. You don't exist as an idea. You exist as a part of a greater whole.

Someone saying bad things about your 'whole' looks, sounds and feels bad!

I wish that the individual, reason driven, enlightened and fair minded people could understand and empathize with the emotion being displayed in the OP. Being part of a 'whole' that is in some ways lesser than another is a constant feeling of badness. The aforementioned minded, who want to rise above such silly emotions, or simply lack them, need to understand that they are a minority of a minority. Telling someone who feels to simply not feel is silly. You can't understand what the person is talking about and give such an answer. It's not smart, reasoned or enlightened.

I'm reminded of Joseph Sobran, who hit on a similar type of a fundamental misunderstanding of just why some of the emotional expression that exists continues to persist, to the endless bafflement of the 'enlightened' few.

Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy.”

Well he would say that, while apparently feeling very envious himself over the power of Jews to puppet the US around the world stage like a marionette (according to him).

I am not understanding the relevance of your comment. Why wouldn't he, allegedly, feel 'envious' over "the power of Jews to puppet the US around the world stage like a marionette"? Is there supposed to be a contradiction here?

The contradiction is "towering over the rest of the world is great, as long as it's us doing it, but not when it's the hated Jews".

That's not a contradiction.

The implication of "towering over the rest of the world is great" is that it's based on a principle. Any such principle that doesn't outright say "and no Jews" or equivalent would approve of Jews doing the same.

I have to admit the quotation marks threw me for a loop. That's not what Sobran said so I'm failing to understand where you are drawing these implications from.

Sobran is not saying that towering over the rest of the world is a good or bad thing. He is just stating a fact about the world. The white man does tower over everyone. There is barely a place left on earth that isn't directly impacted by the consequences of his feats. Construction, transport, information. Every element that facilitates the world as we know it is there because a white man, in one way or another, put it there.

How you, or the previous replier, manage to insert jews into the equation is confusing me a lot. How does it relate to the point being made?

Because he puts his western white heritage (unsurprisingly...) at the top of the world hierarchy in your quote, while he spent much of his life writing about the Jews pulling all the strings. That dude just slowly became more bitter at life till it killed him young.

The jews didn't pull strings to get the white man to the top. They pull strings to control the white man because he is at the top.

Beyond that I am starting to see your point. Which is that you don't like Sobran. Which is fine. What I don't get is how your dislike of him is relevant to my comment and the sentiment being pointed out.

Why not?

If your IQ is, say, 130, it's going to be 130 regardless of what the rest of your group's is. It doesn't mean anything for you personally. If anything it means you lucked out harder than otherwise.

The only reason I care for it is as a means of destroying the blank slatist idea that there must be parity of outcomes between groups, and thereby eliminating the unjust affirmative action policies that unfairly hold the brilliant back to promote the mediocre above their competence.

Yes, it massively sucks that so many resources have been wasted on chasing an impossible, pointless mirage. But if the best time to fix the mistake was decades ago, the second best time is now. Any policies founded upon falsehoods will be ineffective compared to ones founded on truth.

I’m guessing OP cares about their community’s well-being, not just their own intelligence.

Why is OP's race his community, however?

I understand that ethnic identity being tied into genetics is an extremely common thing, but it's not obvious that it should always be so.

That was always beyond his influence.

No but "your community and all their future generations are condemned to poverty and violence" is decidedly more depressing than "your community was hurt in the past due to no fault of their own, but is slowly building a better life, generation by generation".

your community and all their future generations are condemned to poverty and violence"

But HBD doesn't imply this. First of all, by most reasonable historical standards, the "black community," at least in the USA, is one of the least violent and certainly one of the least poverty-stricken communities that has ever existed. It's empirically very possible to reduce these things, and the question is how much further can we reduce them, through what methods, at what cost? As I alluded to in my other comment, IF HBD is true and we accept that it's true, then we would realize that treating the "black community" like it's a defective "white community" is a fool's errand that will only be helpful through sheer luck and coincidence and likely quite harmful on net. I don't see why we couldn't come up with creative new solutions to reduce the poverty and violence in the "black community" even further than we have already, but for that, we need the problem solvers to have an accurate perception of the problem.

It's possible that the relational nature of things will mean that the "black community" will always be behind the "white community" and others in things like poverty and crime, but that's a problem only to the extent that people insist on viewing things in a racial/group-based lens. This is a curse that may be with human society as long as we are around, at least until Senator Jay Bulworth's proposal that we all fuck each other until we're all the same color comes about, but it's possible to have more or less of it, much like how poverty and crime will always be around, but it's possible to have more or less of it. I think a few extremist activists bloviating about how 1% of black community are in poverty with a murder rate a whopping 1 out of 100,000/year instead of the 0.5% of the white community in poverty with a murder rate of 0.5 out of 100,000/year would be a better state of things and even acceptable.

Men are going to be more violent, more suicidal, more criminal, and shorter-lived for a long time.

But that doesn't fill me with dread?

In general, why does "my group" need to be those whp share trivial immutable characteristics with me?

Yes, you could say that his blood family is also black. But so what?

Which is a great story for a generation, but what happens when you try to signal clearly that you aren hurting them and they're still mired in poverty and violence?

Now they think you're hurting them when you've stopped and blame you for their poverty and violence.

I'm making the specific point that "Why do you care if HBD if true if you got yours?" is an insane response to somebody talking about how belief in HBD shapes their view of their community.

Imagine if OP was talking about how his family has a heritable disease and half of them die before they're 40. It'd be insanely callous to say "Why do you care? You tested negative for the disease, right?"

If someone is bad at something and you calously tell them they're bad at it it's not the kindest thing.

But if you tell them they're actually really good at the thing and their lack of success is because their opponent was cheating, and you'll help them avoid cheating opponents, that may work for some time But years later when they're still bad at the thing and remain unsuccessful how long will they keep trying before they start blaming you for being part of the whole cheating edifice.

Your heart being in the right place isn't going to help the fact that they still fail and you watching for cheating didn't prevent that outcome.

Where did I endorse affirmative action or lying?

It is very unlikely that all of the issues disproportionately affecting African American communities are the product of HBD. West African and Caribbean countries whose populations are genetically very similar to African Americans have huge variation in violent crime rates, for example, strongly suggesting these are malleable.

More generally, why would the squalor and violence seen in some African countries and diaspora populations be less fixable than the squalor and violence seen in the Europe of centuries past was? According to the New Yorker this week, the homicide rate in medieval Oxford was as high as it is in New Orleans today, some sixty times higher than it is now.

This is probably a troll, but if it isn’t I work regularly with intelligent and capable Africans in finance, here and in Africa itself, who are very bullish on the trajectory of black civilization in the coming years and decades, and who have every reason to be. Despair is certainly unwarranted.

It is really quite amazing how genetics so horribly strikes Haitians but not to remotely the same degree other black Caribbean populations or black Africans or black British people, etc. It does make one suspicious that maybe a second factor could be at play.

why would the squalor and violence seen in some African countries and diaspora populations be less fixable than the squalor and violence seen in the Europe of centuries past was?

The HBD answer would be 'because Europeans have genes conducive to building societies that aren't shitholes and Africans don't'. Now it's a lot more complex than that but a big chunk of Africa's problems are in fact due to the people living there being too dumb to do useful work.

On the flip side there's clearly a lot of non-genetic fruit to be picked, even if it's not exactly low hanging. EG the black tax is a major drag on economic production.

Black tax pretty well might have genetic basis too.

How did they lower the rates in Europe?

Are those pressures being applied to violence prone populations today?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114

The "genetic pacification" hypothesis is such an article of faith among HBD-inclined internet RWers, that I expected it to be, if not accepted by the mainstream, at least a niche topic popular with hereditarian autodidacts, a la Ashkenazi IQ or something like that. So I was surprised to find that it appears to be based solely on this single paper, and that this single paper sucks.

The proposition that there was a huge sea-change in public, ecclesiastical, and official attitudes towards the death penalty in the high middle ages is supported by reference to a single work (La peine de mort by Carbasse), and two or three quotes from prominent theologians. Maybe it's true but the authors haven't done a very good job establishing that.

Later the authors acknowledge that A) they don't know how many of these condemned men procreated before their executions, B) they don't know how many were executed for non-violent offenses, C) they don't know how many murderers escaped detection. They just kind of say 'well our model is imperfect' and keep moving. The authors don't even attempt to quantify any of the aforementioned problems, despite the fact that any one could completely collapse the thesis if the numbers were wrong. Maybe the data for quantification doesn't exist, but in that case the authors shouldn't pretend this papers is anything but idle speculation.

The murder rate dropped all over Western Europe over the time period in question, but the 'execution rate' the authors use of 0.5 - 1% of the male population every generation appears to be based solely on England and Flanders. Was it the same in Germany and France, where the homicide rate also dropped precipitously? The Scandinavian countries? Did they even check? Does the data exist?

a comparable proportion [to those executed, died] through extrajudicial executions, i.e., deaths of offenders at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial.

The above appears to be a case of "I made it the fuck up," or at least the authors don't cite anything to back it up. Nevertheless, it's the justification for boosting the 0.5 - 1% of violent men removed per generation to 1 - 2%, which naturally is better for their conclusion.

They also assume that the heritability of violence was the same in the Middle Ages as it is today. I doubt it, though there's no way to know since no one was doing heritability estimates in 1300. But again, this is necessary for their argument to go through.

Then there's this bizarre section

Eisner’s control theory is vulnerable to another line of criticism. In societies of Western European origin since the mid-20th century, external and internal controls on behavior have weakened, while “bad boys” have become more positively portrayed in popular culture. This cultural change seems to have caused a modest rise in violence among young men of European background, but nothing comparable to what existed a millennium ago (Eisner, 2001; Spierenburg, 2008, pp. 3–4). If strong external and internal controls had alone caused the pacification of social relations, what is to prevent a return to the earlier, less peaceful state once they have been relaxed? This prospect is evoked by Muchembled (2008, p. 8) in his history of violence in European societies. It also comes up repeatedly in works of modern fiction from Lord of the Flies to A Clockwork Orange, whose characters revert to barbarism when freed from the restraints of civilization. In reality, this reversion to barbarism has not happened.

The argument seems to be "We think 'bad boys' are cool now, but murder rates haven't exploded! Could this be because the murder genes were bred out of us????" Sure, why not?

All of the above is besides the point, since we have much firmer historical evidence from much more recent times that very high homicide rates among large populations can collapse quickly enough to rule out genetic explanations. The 19th century Mediterranean littoral, in particular, suffered from homicide rates equal to those of the most crime-ridden American cities today. Southern Italy had homicide rates of 30/100k, Corsica about the same, in Greece this was even higher, up to 50-60/100k. Spain had a homicide rate of about 10/100k in the mid-19th century. By the early 1900s, Mediterranean homicide rates had fallen several times over, down to the 1-3/100k range. Anglo-American homicide rates in the American west were also several times higher than those back east, despite the same genetic stock. I don't have the sources on any of these on hand, but I can go find them if anyone wants. The whole idea of 'genetic pacification,' is entirely superfluous, when there is good evidence that environmental factors are sufficient to produce manyfold reductions in murder rates in much shorter periods of time than the entirety of the middle ages.

This kind of stuff is why, despite being too dumb and lazy (for genetic reasons, surely) to understand the dense statistics that underpin much of the HBD cinematic universe*, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing.

*This paper being an exception, where it's so bad it's obvious even to me.

This kind of stuff is why, despite being too dumb and lazy (for genetic reasons, surely) to understand the dense statistics that underpin much of the HBD cinematic universe*, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing.

This is (a bit) like being skeptical of biology because you read one of the thousand papers about how cinnamon cures cancer or something. Every field had bad papers, and every field has cranks on social media that believe the bad papers, even if the ratio is more like psychology than physics for HBD. If you focus on the good arguments, I don't think this is an issue.

And yet, the replication crisis is real, so much so that 'every field has bad papers' can very well be that bad papers are norm, and good papers the exception, to the degree that 'the field' is based on the bad and not the good and can be routinely disregarded when appeals to academic authority are made.

I am making an explicit and factual claim that the field of biology has established a very large number of undeniably true and useful complex claims. I'm also claiming that the scientific consensus on the heritability of IQ and other traits is strong enough that it's clearly true. Also that, while the scientific consensus isn't there on racial differences in the heritable parts of IQ, the evidence is strong enough that one should believe it. I think that most of the "HBD Cinematic Universe" as in the things people believe on twitter is shoddy and false, but the core results are independent from that!

As are the core claims, because the core claims as much from what people believe on twitter as in the non-consensus-but-valid research.

Skepticism and not deferring belief is as valid against a non-consensus as it is against the replication-crisis-tainted consensus, as the counter-establishment types are operating in the same fundamental ecosystem, with the same underlying incentives: to over-claim, under-demonstrate, and fail to replicate without selective utilization of data.

When the bad research is the norm, and not the exception, skepticism of anything from the field is warranted and sensible. The issue is not that one of a thousand papers are compromised- it's that upwards to 900+ of the 1000 papers are compromised, and if you can't determine which are which, 'look for the good ones' is meaningless admonishment.

I am confident in the core claim that there is a >=50% genetic component to general competence, or a 'general factor' of intelligence, ie IQ, and that potential caveats (gene environment interactions etc) are unimportant. That's also supported by mainstream science. The only remaining core claim is that various races have, on average, significantly different amounts of that. The science there is less strong, primarily I think because researching that topic head on with the millions of individual datapoints you need is something a big biobank might not want to happen. But nevertheless there is some science there, if you take polygenic scores for individual IQ and compare black and white individuals, the average black score is lower, and ... I struggle to think of alternative explanations for the patterns of racial differences in achievement across the world. Say the black/white gap is systemic racism, there remain many large, persistent, and universal-across-subject gaps with no clear environmental explanation.

If you focus on the gaps, you'll see gaping maws everywhere. An incel may see all the reasons why they're undateable. A Black-pilled HBDer may see themselves as inherently slower.

If they can't start with seeing themselves from their strengths, they are unlikely to grow into the best they can be.

I know many retired E-9s of color. The oldest is a Vietnam veteran. He needed help taking the placement test in the way his white peers did. After he got that help, he did the right thing and passed it down to his mentees. It's not just innate intelligence that gets passed down, but also experience. Experience, expectations, and emotions.

There's a strain of community activism called Asset Based Community Development. Like many programs, they started with the initials (ABCD) and made a bacronym. Unlike many other programs, they prefer a bottom-up approach. They assume people, all people - limited though they may be - have put in the work to get good at something. Good enough that they should be valued.

I don't know what your life goals like like. You may not reach the intellectual & career heights of people that we write about. (SPOILERS: most of us here won't either.) But if you can operate in your zone of excellence, and help a brother or two get at least half as good as you are - that's still a life of positive impact.

This doesn't mean I think it's wrong. It's just that I think that the conclusions you'd have to draw from it being correct are just so awful for me.

I have always drawn a sharp distinction between technical questions and political ones. To me, "Is HBD true?" Is distinctly the former, while most any question about actually applying that knowledge is the latter.

I'm not a strict utilitarian: I think we can and should have guiding principles in how we approach political questions, regardless of the technical merits. I can think of plenty of likely true technical facts that, applied, lead to all kinds of evil: "Replacing retirement and social security with mandatory euthanasia centers increases paperclip production long-term GDP" might be true, but I find any attempt to enact such a policy morally abhorrent. But I also don't think we need to willfully blind ourselves to the idea as a whole to avoid enacting reprehensible policies: we simply make a moral choice not to do evil.

There will be disagreements about the morality of some cases, but I think there is a legitimate (near-)universal consensus that killing people at retirement is wrong. Much of the Culture War seems to revolve around the moral edge cases (abortion, for example) and largely binary views on morality.

In short, I don't think you should need to concern yourself with whether or not population-level statistics apply to you, and in return we as a society should agree to, in general, ignore those statistics (willfully, if necessary) when interacting with individuals on principle. Because that's the egalitarian society I would want to live in.

I don’t particularly want HBD to be true, either, but it doesn’t actually say you, personally, are low in intelligence. It says black people are more likely to be low in intelligence compared to other races. That doesn’t mean we think George Washington Carver was secretly a white man pulling a Black Like me. It means that on average there are fewer George Washington Carvers than Henry Fords. I mean this is the motte; our average is a white guy 3 standard deviations smarter than the average White guy.

Nor do I think American blacks are performing near their intellectual limit given America’s context- cultural problems are a bigger factor. And nor are American blacks that badly off right now either. They have a standard of living similar to the average in Western Europe instead of much higher like white Americans. Obviously I think they’d prefer to have a higher one, but having a standard of living similar to France or Germany isn’t a catastrophe. And most of the other problems they face are either hallucinated(many of the claims about police violence) or culturally self-imposed.

Is the average white American actually much better off than the average west European?

Just going off household incomes, yes- the average white American is about 10% wealthier than the average dutchman, and most Western European countries are a bit poorer than the Netherlands. Obviously there’s intangibles but white Americans have a higher standard of living than any major country in Western Europe.

The average American is more affluent than the average west European but how much depends on how you define both affluence and western Europe.

The more striking difference is the level of UMC pay, where Americans really and unequivocally are much better off than their European counterparts.

UMC?

Upper middle class. 95-99.5th percentile.

I was too poor to know what that meant. :(

Upper middle class

By leaps and bounds. At least in my travels. It also depends on the criteria. If you don't like being fat then being born in Europe is much better, if you like having 50%-100% more disposable income, America is better. London was dirt cheap to me when I was there recently, and I don't come from a wealthy state. France and Portugal, even more affordable. I loved Germany, also affordable (bring cash), Prague was not as cheap as expected.

But yeah, generally prices were half or less what I would pay where I live, and salaries were also half, so in the states you make twice as much for the same job and you pay twice as much for food and lodging, hard goods are cheaper in the USA regardless. Best deal is earn in the USA and spend it elsewhere.

It's only unchangeable if we allow the combination of the eugenics taboo and a lack of long-term planning to deny us the use of current technologies like embryo-selection and potential future technologies like polygenetic genetic-engineering. (To say nothing of the possible individual enhancements opened up if we manage to achieve brain emulation.) Remember the general population of whites and asians is also less intelligent than intellectuals tend to assume, because they associate with a highly selected subset. A large fraction of the population struggles with tasks like "interpreting a simple bar graph". It's also getting worse, with current dysgenic trends. Just achieving and maintaining the sort of humanity that many people already assume exists requires transhumanism, for every race.

Afterwards we can look back on the statistics about stuff like intelligence and crime and obesity and depression the same way we currently look back on 50% infant mortality rates and widespread stunting from malnutrition. Though of course the biggest leap would be curing aging, if we ever achieve that I expect a lot of the other improvements would seem like a sideshow by comparison.

Slow clap. So many people on this forum totally ignore the technological tools that we will all be using very soon. They are examining the future through the static lense of history and not taking into account the monumental shift in evolution that bioscience is about to unleash (if we even stay biological). The hot takes about the Hassidic Jews or the Amish taking over using 2,000 years of outbreeding others are wild to me in the face of robotics, computation and genetic manipulation. Even the "please have more kids" crowd that has been so vocal lately is missing the forest for the trees. It just doesn't really matter in the face of the almost unimaginable change coming at humanity over the next 100 years.

Think a bit more deeply, and it will seem far less important. The only reason we fetishize IQ is because it predicts academic performance and we use academia as the filtering mechanism for our elites.

Yes, if we keep using academia as the way we pick our upper classes, IQ is going to be important, and the current black population will be at a disadvantage for a long time. But that's a big "if". If we chose our elites using the olympics, asians would be at a pretty strong disadvantage.

The problem is not relatively minor (but important at the margins) IQ differentials, it's a social system that outsources elite production to an IQ-loaded institution.

Very strongly disagree here. IQ is correlated with performance in all complex intellectual tasks. If you dropped everyone into an every-monkey-for-himself anarchic pre-industrial hellscape, the warlord of the gang that eventually won would be high IQ. The best traders in financial markets are high IQ. People who win in politics are high IQ, whether that's democratic politics or authoritarian elite politics.

If by "high IQ" you mean an SD or two above average, I absolutely agree. Being smarter than the average bear is a big advantage. If by "high IQ" you mean "higher IQ means more success", then it's obviously wrong. There's a bell curve to functionality for IQ too. Everyone who runs an institution is probably above average IQ. But virtually none of the smartest people in the world are in charge of much of anything. Leaders are also all high in ambition, social dominance, that sort of thing as well.

Intelligence is hyper-optimized. Like, for instance, physical skills. Good athletes are not necessarily smart, but they tend to be above average, and at the top of any sport, they are usually quite smart. But at the top end, say, bodybuilding, the proxies being chased are so remote from reality that it ceases to be functional. People who wind up in charge of things disproportionately have some athletic background or pursuit, although not necessarily a high-level one. Does being athletic predict success? Yeah, kinda. Does that mean the strongest person is always in charge? Not even a little. If you could invent a test that would score athleticism, you'd see a good correlation with both sporting success and with life achievement. Should we re-orient society to min-max this AQ?

I'm not bagging on IQ so much as urging people to consider other factors and a wider context. Yes, intelligence is important for a whole lot of things. So is everything else.

The only reason we fetishize IQ is because it predicts academic performance and we use academia as the filtering mechanism for our elites.

how did you get from this to this??

But virtually none of the smartest people in the world are in charge of much of anything.

IQ is a proxy of a proxy. At the top end of the scoring distribution, the proxy stops working, because the sort of people so totally maxed-out on one ability are incapable of living normal lives or talking productively to normal people.

Sort of how height is predictive of NBA ability, but the tallest people can't play sports.

But virtually none of the smartest people in the world are in charge of much of anything. Leaders are also all high in ambition, social dominance, that sort of thing as well.

The absolute highest IQ people- above 160 or so- produce more than their fair share of Ted Kazcynskis. But the 130-150 demographic is actually running things.

If we chose our elites using the olympics, asians would be at a pretty strong disadvantage.

I'm not completely certain that's true. Actually I'd be shocked to learn that Olympic medalists averaged less than an IQ of 110 or thereabouts. Looking at the 2022 Winter Olympics, just to grab a quick example, some events were swept by Asians. Figure Skating, for example, was a near-total victory for Asians. The entire Men's singles podium were Asian, and the Team Event nearly so. Freestyle skiing also had a strong showing from China (three of six Golds medals), and South Korea did very well in Short Track Ski Racing. Similarly in the 2020 Summer Olympics, Japan and South Korea dominated the Archery events, China took silver in both Artistic Swimming events, every single podium in Badminton went to an Asian country, Japan took Gold in Baseball (to the embarrassment of my American chauvinism we only took Silver), and Japan and China took several medals in Boxing.

There’s a bit of a confounding factor on a lot of Olympic sports— which is that especially for those you mentioned, being able to compete requires a lot of training at very early ages. Winter sports have a second cost sink— the equipment and venues needed to train for these events is expensive. Thus for a lot of sports, your ability to even reach a level of competition where it would be worth training you to compete in the Olympics requires tens of thousands of dollars and years of very focus training. And thus if you’re not of reasonably successful stock, including intellectual ability, you won’t get the opportunity to try.

Boxing, running, basketball, soccer and other similar sports are light enough in equipment that it’s at least plausible that you could be from a working class family and be able to try.

The fact that IQ predicts academic performance is because IQ measures something that is genuinely useful, and it’s not limited to book learnin.

If you disappeared everything to do with standardized testing and academia, i.e. explicit measuring and sorting, in any decent meritocracy you would end up with a similar distribution to how things are now.

It’s a cope to think IQ “fetishization” is because of how we use it to sort elites.

We don’t choose our elites using the Olympics because athletic ability is not what tends to matter. Also note that plenty of our elites are not “selected” in even a dysfunctional meritocracy. Talent and ambition rise to the top when it’s not explicitly prohibited from doing so.

Furthermore, you’re overestimating IQ and how it’s used for selecting our elite/upper class. Plenty of people are very smart but don’t achieve wealth/power/influence because they don’t seek it. Which is to say that if you take the top 10% in any domain you care about, they will almost certainly be smarter than average, but not necessarily even top 20% in intelligence. Standardized testing tends to set a “must be this tall to ride” baseline, but it’s far from the only factor institutions select on.

I'm short on time so this is more of a low-effort drive by than I'd like but:

A perpetual irritation to me is how so many people, even in spaces like this, think "HBD" means "IQ differences" while missing the much bigger, much more interesting picture.

Traits such as aggression, impulse control, parental investment, fidelity, industriousness, cleanliness, punctuality, aesthetic preferences, and innumerably more are all present in animal species, vary among subspecies, and are clearly genetic in origin -- especially in species without culture to speak of. Can different branches of humanity, having been split off for hundreds if not thousands of generations, which evolved in very different environments (and very different cultures), and admixed with separate strains of alt-hominids (neanderthals, florensis, etc.) possibly not have some substantial drift here?

Just the last few hundred years alone have had enormous amounts of different selection pressures on different populations.

When I think of HBD, IQ is one of the least-glaring things that stands out to me. There are smart and dumb people in any group, though yes the average and the tails certainly do matter. But the character of a people is also heavily genetic. The societal conditions which will allow them to flourish (or keep them in miserable persistence at best) vary widely. Even if there were no average IQ difference, we are not built to flourish with each other. Attempts to do so only result in sinking to the lowest common denominator and generally curtailing the highest potentials of all groups in the case of xenophilic multiculturalism, or all groups but the dominant one in most historic human societies.

Not that you're necessarily making this mistake, but OP didn't mention IQ and I think it's tragically myopic to think of IQ first when considering HBD. It just happens to be one of the easiest things to measure.

But the character of a people is also heavily genetic.

I don't know how much I should believe this, because culture is certainly also passed on.

Yes, but culture is downstream of genetics. I want to distinguish here between 'culture' and 'incentives' (especially negative incentives) because you can easily get anyone to behave by hitting them enough times.

With that out of the picture, people can only thrive in a culture to the degree that their genetics allow them to. Put another way, genetics is like a foundation and culture is like the house built on it. People who are not suited to the culture will chafe under it and do worse in it and generally fail to participate in the way that those suitable would.

Over time and with selection pressure, this works out because those capable of conforming do, and reproduce, and those incapable of conforming 'drop out' and fail to reproduce.

Alternatively, the culture shifts (generally degrades) to accommodate those less-suited.

Yes, but culture is downstream of genetics.

Sure. But it seems to me like there is a considerable range of expression in cultures for the same population. See, for example, the impacts of the spread of Christianity, well, everywhere. East vs West Germany is probably another good example: lasting differences still show up today, but that started out as just a line on a map drawn by occupying powers.

I don't think I understand your confusion. Yes, culture also has effects. It is comparable to asking whether training affects dogs. Sure it does! It has an enormous impact. But the collie still wishes to herd.

I do wonder if part of the nightmare that is modern courtship stems from wildly incompatible personality types getting involved.

If you lived in a village of people very similar to you, it seems far more likely you'd find a great match.

The great American experiment, though fraught with strife, has produced the most powerful and dynamic technological and economic hegemony the world has ever seen. We take all comers and turn them into God Damn Americans. DON'T BE A SUCKER

Unless our elites are figureheads, we can't use arbitrary characteristics as filters. If they are figureheads, there's still the problem of choosing the men behind the throne.

It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't want it to be true...I don't want it to be true. It's so unfair

A common, characteristic-of-our-time response is "Why should you care? You're an individual. If the portion of your tribe doesn't apply to you, what does it skin off your back?" This is @BurdensomeCount's answer. I think that's fine, but it only works for certain people. The reality is most people do care about their tribe. We're not atomized. The heat map of our moral concern goes from family, to self, to tribe, to confession/creed, to human. We care about tribal welfare only one degree less than ourselves. So it is with you.

So. Let's talk about me. While this may be a luxurious piggyback on your own problem, I'm also dour on my tribe recently. My tribe is a superset of the puritans in Albion's Seed — it doesn't include all 'whites', but neither is it just white americans who descended from those guys with buckles on their hats. It is the group on whom the terrible weight of God's judgement presses. I am talking about blood rather than confession to be clear; this feeling can and has been channeled to a million creeds. How do I know who's in my tribe, then? I just do.

My tribe is currently willing itself to subjugation. They want the destruction of our history, the destruction of our communities, and they're eager for genetic replacement: I don't think we're actually willing ourselves to extinction, as anti-progressives (usually cavalier or borderer white) accuse us. Rather, our tribe wants to place ourselves, we horrible fiends, under a yoke of penance to the fargroup. In practice, this might lead to tribal extinction, but that's just my prediction.

On the dissident right, there are attempts to blame this on (((a certain group of people))). And while it may be that jews are exploiting their curious situation as whites-allowed-to-be-racist to the hilt, on the whole, this explanation is just an offramp. The hard truth is puritan-adjacent whites have a will to self-destruction, and this is probably fundamental to who we are. It's not going away.

I could pray for God (or more effectively CRISPR) to remove this trait from my tribe. (This is what @campfireSmoresEaten just suggested.) But that would be genociding us beyond the wildest dreams of the activist holding an "Abolish Whiteness" sign. We are the people under God's weight. What's worse, the narcissism and greed one centimeter underneath that facade is also who we are.

For you: it may be your tribe's doom is to be a lekking species, wild, stupid, violent, and feral, and that you as a non-central member must watch them destroy themselves. Any attempt you might make to "fix" this problem would also be genocide.

A few thoughts on how to cope:

  1. Aim for better rather than perfect. Lots of people have noticed that black communities used to be more functional. At the very least, they had two parent households and much lower crime. What were the features of this world, and how can you get closer to it?
  2. Look for optimism in history. Your tribe exists for a game-theoretic reason. While it may be maladapted and flailing here, it thrives elsewhere. In this sense, doomerism is a counsel of hope; when the current system either eats itself alive or revolutionizes, there will be another chance for your tribe to flourish.
  3. Focus your mind on eternal or "spiritual" matters. I'm not a christian but this is what they mean when they talk about fallen man and the love of God.

/images/17122411166078324.webp

I don’t think progressive whites actually have a self destructive instinct, I think they would rather cede influence to non-whites than conservative whites and are staring down the barrel of having to cede influence to someone.

What is the gun in this analogy? Because in any interpretation I can draw it is one of their own making. And that's not beating allegations of self destructive instincts.

The same demographic trends that have affected all sorts of other groups. Conservative whites are the odd ones out in having avoided it, not liberal whites for undergoing it.

How do I read your plot? It seems to be intended to communicate a function of one dimension, distance from the center, but it's given as a 2D plot structured to include radius. What other information is present?

How do I read your plot?

It's a well-known graph from this study on the moral differences between liberals and conservatives. (See page 7.) I don't know why they chose a radial graph rather than a sensible line graph, but the brackets represent:

(1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence

and the color heat represents relative moral weight a person puts on that group compared to the average person.

Most people do care about their tribe, but it's really historically weird for your "tribe" to be "a population of millions of people who happen to share some genes in common with you".

Empires are extremely common in history. Arguably a lot more common than independent cities or nation states.

That probably doesn't rise to the level of community as what you're calling a tribe here. But then again neither does a whole race.

"Christendom". "I am a Roman Citizen."

I will say that augmenting human intelligence is one of those things that humanity seems very close to being able to do, either genetically or technologically, and could happen a lot sooner if people were spending as much time and energy on it as they are on perfecting the art of autonomous killing machines for warfare. Although I do hope Ukraine wins.

TO BE FAIR, I don't want it to be 'true' either, in the sense that I wish the truth was something different, even if the underlying idea of humans having diverse phenotypes which have impacts on behavior were true.

Any joy I'd get for being a member of a 'superior' group dissipates when considering how my own capability to effect change is practically nonexistent.

I'd prefer the world where HBD was 'true' but IQ and cognition were a bit more malleable (in the positive direction, hit someone in the head with a hammer and it's malleable downward). Then we could probably cooperate towards a better place on the payoff matrix where the tradeoffs aren't so severe.

There are a ton of failure modes for that world too, don't get me wrong. But the world we're currently working with has molochian incentives that we currently can't budge without committing certain atrocities (which wouldn't guarantee success!) is endlessly frustrating.

Imagine by comparison that we figured out that the laws of physics somehow dictated that it was impossible to get a human-sized payload past the orbit of the moon without investing literal continent's worth of resources to it. To the point where we would have to simply accept that we were stuck on this planet and whatever resources lay beyond are simply not going to be available.

I'd hate that truth, and would rage against it, but ultimately the universe would care just as much about out fate whether it is true or not.

Instead, thankfully, getting past lunar orbit is merely very difficult but affordable.

Kinda like how the potential brainpower we as a species can marshall is limited by our number of geniuses and most humans are just not able to contribute meaningfully to the advancement of the species. If we could reach an intelligence 'takeoff' where we could boost low IQ humans to some reasonable degree then we could be improving our lifestyles a lot faster than we are.

And we're getting to the point where a broad 'uplift' of human intelligence might fall into that 'very difficult but affordable' category. Or it could be a long way off, but at least its visible.

How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?

Reframe your locus of concern to yourself, your immediate family, and your local community, and see what if anything you can do there.

It is entirely possible for a particularly committed (and wealthy, in this case) individual to push back against entropy/moloch in their local environment. Care less about the fate of 'humanity' in the abstract (aside from existential risks) and more about the humans within your personal dunbars number.

Effect change where you can effect change. That's how you avoid nihilism.

I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient.

(Emphasis added) This is the part that sticks out to me as false. Presuming that HBD is true and black people have an average IQ of 85 or whatever, this doesn't imply that these issues you name, i.e. crime, poverty, ignorance, in black communities are necessarily intransient. Even if we want to think of the black community as a "community" in some meaningful sense rather than just a bunch of people who happen to have certain genes in common (something I personally don't want to, for any race, but it seems most people insist that we must), it doesn't imply that that this community must have these problems permanently or in the long run. What it does mean is that attempting to solve these problems the exact same way that we have and do solve these problems for other "communities" such as the "white community" or "East Asian community," but more is pointless.

I'm reminded of something people sometimes say about the gender culture wars, that boys get treated like defective girls (e.g. when they're physically violent, aggressive, or restless in classrooms). Some people insist that we ought to just keep pushing boys to be more like girls even harder and punish them even more when they fail, but there are plenty of people who believe that "HBD" (or perhaps more accurately behavioral sexual dimorphism) in this realm implies that we ought to solve boys' problems and girls' problems in different ways. I don't see why this couldn't be the approach to solving these issues in the various communities if it turns out that HBD is indeed true.

Again, my personal preference would be that we ignore the entire notion of "[race] communities" altogether and summarily execute tar and feather shame ignore anyone who insists on analyzing populations on this basis and allow individuals to navigate a world of individuals forming communities with each other based on other characteristics, but that seems like a non-starter these days.

I think the strong form of HBD as propounded by some - African-Americans are inferior, it's in their genes, nothing to be done about it, it's science - isn't true.

What I think we don't have yet, and buried under the genuine problems from racism and poverty and culture, is a fair assessment of the IQ of the general African-American population, and where their strengths lie.

I think it's accepted that, for instance, women are on more of a bellcurve than men for mathematical ability, so we're all clustered mostly around the middle. Men have more tails - a lot more stupid men but also a lot more brilliant men, relatively speaking.

So it could well be that the unique heritage of current African-American population is clustered around the middle of the bell curve - not so stupid, but also not so brilliant. This would explain why affirmative action of the "jobs must be awarded according to share of the general population, so if 25% in the demographics then must be 25% in academia, STEM, et." don't work out well; that does not mean there are no black geniuses, just that proportionately there are fewer than if measured against Asian and white population. So realistically, without racial bias, you would get (pulling figures out of thin air) 5 Asian guys and 4 white guys and 1 black guy in the Top Ten jobs, instead of "we must have 2.5 black guys so hire on the less able guys to make up the figures".

But since we still do have to grapple with the effects of racism and so forth, we're nowhere near a neutral measurement and data.

What I think we don't have yet, and buried under the genuine problems from racism and poverty and culture, is a fair assessment of the IQ of the general African-American population, and where their strengths lie.

We have standardized tests and we've had them for almost a century. We can sift by poverty, even. At this point "racism and poverty" are pure cope and "culture" is a very thin reed. The mean is lower, it's not just lesser variability (which is somewhat controversial for sex; the PISA tests don't show it, for instance)

Okay, so even accepting that the mean is lower, I think culture does have a very large part to play. Given all the talk about polygenic selection and other interventions to increase IQ, intelligence on its own is not the thing that determines if people are more civil. Would it be better to be smart and vicious rather than dumb and vicious? For the smart vicious person, yes. For the rest of us, no. If you don't work on changing the surrounding culture to "hey, maybe we should have a sense of civic values and not accept that you can be loud, violent, and criminal in public with no consequences", then having smarter babies who grow up with "it is totally your right to swipe expensive goods off shop shelves and anyone who tries to stop you is committing assault and is a racist to boot" as their upbringing is not going to be an improvement.

It's probably that the aggressiveness also stems from genetics. Though I suspect the shoplifting is mostly culture. And yeah, that can be improved, but only if people in charge (whether black or white) insist on holding underclass blacks to the same standards anyone else is held to. Which isn't happening.

That's the tragedy. The fucking white idiots who go "Well, that's their culture" (and I see this with some white underclass in my own country, so it's not confined to black/brown people) ought to get the Lord Vetinari Mime School treatment.

Being loud and exuberant may be part of culture. Being aggressively loud, violent, and threatening in public is nobody's culture except criminals and scumbags. I know it's a meme to say "Democrats are the real racists" but the liberals and lefties who want to excuse Jamal from going to jail for fifteen counts of theft because, you know, it's society's fault and property rights are white supremacy really are being racist - they're saying you can't expect anything better from Jamal because, poor dear, he's stupid, ignorant, violent and criminal by nature, nothing can be done about it. So it's not fair to send Jamal to prison, he's not white, you can't hold him to white standards of behaviour because he doesn't have the intelligence, sense of conscience or self-control of a white person.

That's nonsense. Jamal is a thug not because of his skin colour, because there are plenty of white, Asian, and Hispanic thugs, but because a combination of never expecting anything more from him, never punishing such behaviour, and enabling it, means he learned way too early in life that he can be a thug and get away with it. Jamal may also be stupid, violent and criminal by nature, but again, plenty of white people like that too.

The whole founding myth of our society is egalitarian. There is no world where one race is acknowledged as genetically inferior to another, where said race does not then see it justified to commit any number of terrible acts to tip the scales back in their favor. If HBD is accepted, violent crime often becomes the most logical decision since thanks to genetics you're better equipped for that than most normal work, unless you've got a knack for sports or something. You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?" they're going to say screw it and flip the system.

There is no "changing the culture". Either we keep the equality myth, or we go back to segregation. There is no theoretical America where the "inferior" believe they are inferior and still continue to politely play along with our scheme. This entire myth from the start has been a willful concession. We need it to function.

You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?" they're going to say screw it and flip the system.

Well yeah, if you're telling an entire people "Not one single person of you is smart enough". The Irish got this too, including our friend the infamous Mr. Lynn, about how dumb they were (90 IQ?) and then, gasp, suddenly amazingly in just one or two decades we'd jumped up to being "just as smart as the English". Wow, how could that have happened?

If HBD could be neutral on "Some of you are just as smart, but it's not in the same proportion of the general population as the Asians, who are better than the whites, who are better than you on the raw figures", then we might get somewhere. Jason is going to college, but there will be five Jasons, not fifteen as demanded by proportion of general population, because the top level means only five Jasons as against fifteen Guos as against ten Chaunceys. Not because of racism, because of the bell curve, which does not mean telling an entire people "none of you are good enough".

The expectation "everybody goes to college", because governments saw this as the easy way to raise people up out of low-paying jobs - get a degree, get a white-collar career, be successful in life - has done damage to everyone.

And as a start, we could drop terms like "inferior". 'Not as smart on an IQ test' doesn't mean 'lowly dog whose only purpose in life is to shine my shoes and carry my water'. If you're going around thinking of yourself as "superior", that's a nasty trap. You're not virtuous enough not to be corrupted by it, or understand what the luck of the genetic draw meant for you.

Equality isn't a simple fact based on evidence. It's an ideological cornerstone. Sure, HBD isn't claiming some people are inferior to others in some kind of holistic sense -- what you lose in some area, you usually gain in others. But intelligence IS the golden stat for success, more than ever before. If you're unintelligent, charisma can make up for that. If you have neither, good luck.

The way our current ideology works is that anyone who's failing can blame those in charge for holding them down, it's a consolation. There is no way we can fly directly in the face of that.

If you're unintelligent, charisma can make up for that. If you have neither, good luck.

I would say not charisma, but being a decent human being. That includes a sense of civic and personal responsibility, self-esteem (not in the "I'm great just as I am" sense but in "I'm a human being and I should live like one, not a wild dog" sense), and being willing to keep the rules and work hard.

A 90 IQ person who is naked and screaming out of their mind on drugs in the public streets is much more visible, and much more of a problem, than the 90 IQ guy who gets up every morning and washes his face and goes to work sweeping the streets. Telling the 90 IQ people that "you can't help it, poor darling, so go ahead and smash car windows to steal stuff to sell for your habit, and be loud and violent and aggressive in public" is a hell of a lot worse for them, for us, for everyone.

Telling 100 IQ people the same thing is just as bad. Switching up the laws so they can steal up to $950 and it's a misdemeanour, and then you don't even bother prosecuting misdemeanours, because of the systemic racist incarceration injustice of the past and present, is even worse for everyone - it hurts the people trying to live respectable lives in that community as well as people outside it. Yes, you should have expectations for Jamal and Cletus and Jose to be respectable citizens, not pass them out of school even if they've never learned anything, then tell them if they don't get into Harvard this is discrimination and that means they can do what they want since that's 'your culture'.

The Irish long had a reputation as ignorant, drunken, violent idiots. The Catholic Church gets a lot of stick for trying to play Victorian respectability games and impose a moral agenda on the country, but it would have been ten times worse if we had been permitted, caressed, and encouraged by American and British middle class to upper class liberals that "Poor dears, you can't help yourselves, this is your culture, go ahead and live like that, don't even bother 'acting Anglo' by trying to get sober, get a job, and not fight in the streets".

The Irish long had a reputation as ignorant, drunken, violent idiots. The Catholic Church gets a lot of stick for trying to play Victorian respectability games and impose a moral agenda on the country, but it would have been ten times worse if we had been permitted, caressed, and encouraged by American and British middle class to upper class liberals that "Poor dears, you can't help yourselves, this is your culture, go ahead and live like that, don't even bother 'acting Anglo' by trying to get sober, get a job, and not fight in the streets".

Sure, I agree with all the points you make. That's how it should work. But the dynamic we've (unfortunately) evolved into is a very unhealthy, unrealistic one that works like so: Americans who are not white males or asian males are actively being held back by those in power. There is a glass ceiling put in place via systemic discrimination, and this ceiling is the only thing preventing black men, hispanic men, white women, etc. from making exactly as much money and holding exactly as much power (as a group) as white men and asian men. As the actual, genuine glass ceilings that limit these so-called marginalized groups continue to disappear, this ideology loses its ground and becomes axiomatic: The glass ceilings are disappearing, yet marginalized groups still underperform, which is proof they're being systemically oppressed because all groups are equal. It actually means the racism and sexism must be even worse than we expected, because all those barriers were removed and yet these groups are still underperforming. This is the source of all the systemic racism stuff, it's like dark matter -- it must exist somewhere or the theory falls apart.

Equality of birth is one massive concession, man. We have conceded so, so much to these people and they still aren't happy. Imagine what happens if we say screw it and affirm HBD: total chaos. No, that's never going to happen. What might happen is something suggested up-thread; something like reparations based on HBD, where we start handing out cash to "marginalized groups" on the basis of their assumed oppression, but really it functions as a "sorry you're not smart enough for the white collar world" type thing.

You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?"

What "entire" people? The most black-pilled anti-woke "IQ fits these shifted normal distributions and has unavoidable effects and measures all forms of intelligence and is entirely genetic" theory still only has about a 1SD racial difference, so it makes predictions like "there are only 6 or 7 million African-Americans smarter than the average white person" (41e6*normcdf(-1) in Octave) and "there are only 2 or 3 million African-Americans smarter than the average tech or law worker" (41e6*normcdf(-1.6)). Admitting that those numbers aren't nearly as high as we'd like them to be, so even if we observe them we should really be open to other explanations ... would that be the end of the world? Let's imagine that the most black-pilled pro-woke "Everybody needs role models who are specifically of their own ethnicity" theory is also true, simultaneously ... and we're still generally left with millions of good candidates! Not with the full ten million we'd have liked from a population that size, but it's at least an adequate fallback, no? Even at the top of estimates for college professors an IQ-based meritocracy would give us tens of thousands of high-end African-American candidates, way lower than we'd have liked, but still enough that there'd be no need to tell smart African-American kids aspiring to quantum physics research "try Foot Locker"; you could still just tell them "oh, you mean like those guys? great!"

I get what you mean. The problem is your average Joe will never see it that way. This is ideology we are talking about, its function is borderline spiritual. Only one standard deviation means nothing to the masses, this would be interpreted as an open declaration of war.

This entire myth from the start has been a willful concession. We need it to function.

It's worn through, and we're not getting it back. To maintain its pretense requires pretending such a level of malice on the part of whites (and Asians!), and concomitant punishing of that "malice", that it is no longer acceptable either.

You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?" they're going to say screw it and flip the system.

OK, fine, then we shoot them. It's not a good solution but it's better than tearing the country to shreds because they can't accept reality.

OK, fine, then we shoot them. It's not a good solution but it's better than tearing the country to shreds because they can't accept reality.

When it came down to it, the Boers notably chose not to save their position by genociding the Kafirs.

America will not make a different choice, let's not be stupid here.

One group defending itself from another group trying to "flip the table", even with guns, does not necessitate genocide. You can shoot the attackers until they stop attacking, and then stop shooting.

It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?

The easy solution is to simply reject the idea of "our community". I happen to be an uppity big-lipped nigger myself. But I do my best to refrain from feeling any sense of community with the "urban youths". Rather, I exist primarily online, as a being with no face and no race. When I am forced to exist in meatspace, I think of myself primarily as a competent and diligent employee, not as a black person.

Individualism!

The easy solution is to simply reject the idea of "our community".

This may be an ideal solution, but I do not believe it is an easy solution. A community collectively and instinctively puts people in categories, assigns default characteristics to people in these categories, views the categories as part of the identity of its members, and views the categories as competing factions. If you think you can easily (or totally) escape buying into that factionalism, I think you are under an illusion. The trick is not to eliminate identity groups as functional units of society, but to make the competition between them honest, healthy, and based on furthering interests that are shared among the identity groups.

I feel the OP's pain. But the closer you are to God, the less it will matter to you whether you are a member of a group that happens to suffer from an epidemic of foolishness (whether it is biological or cultural). Moreover, if your people are acting like fools, you dissociate yourself from the foolishness precisely to the extent that you call it out. For example, as a white Christian Republican, my people have a history of irrational and immoral hatred for gays. As a Southerner from Alabama, my people have a history of hypocritically identifying as Christian while also having racist contempt for blacks. If I call those sins out, I am not stained by them. I can actually feel my conscience being freed when I acknowledge them. But, to the extent that I remain silent about those corporate sins of my own people, and at the same time identify as members of those groups, I am truly guilty by association (whether I am individually an offender or not).

The same thing goes for other groups. If you are a Muslim and that is part of your identity, that does not make you part of the problems of Islamic fascism, genocidal antisemitism, and terrorism -- but, if you aren't talking about those problems in the Muslim world and calling them out, then you are part of the problems -- even if you don't advocate for Sharia law, or hate jews, or fly airplanes into buildings. Similarly, if you are black, and you aren't talking about the problems of black supremacy, anti-intellectualism, deadbeat dads, serially pregnant welfare moms, gang violence, or whatever you honestly see as the problems in your community, then you are part of those problems. On the other hand, if you are vocally calling them out and trying to address those issues, then you are not part of the problem -- and also, you are fundamentally part of a bigger identity group called "Honest, caring people".

For example, as a white Christian Republican, my people have a history of irrational and immoral hatred for gays.

Not to derail, and it's possible that you're still right, since I don't know what exactly constitutes hatred for you, but I do think the scriptures are pretty clear that homosexual sex is bad.

Of course, we should not discount the possibility that the scripture might be irrationally and immorally hateful.

As NelsonRushton below pointed out, the condemnation of homosexuality in Christian traditions seems to stem from Mosaic law. If there is a chapter in the gospel where Jesus urges his followers to stone the sodomites, I must have missed it.

Almost no Christians strive to consistently follow Mosaic law. If a person with intact foreskin who likes his bacon and shellfish, talked back to his parents and works on Saturdays complains about gay sex being against the bible, I have a hard time taking them serious.

(Of course, I fully support the right of Christians, Jews and followers of weird atheist joke religions to not engage in gay sex for religious reasons, or for any other reasons for that matter.)

Perhaps I ought to reference this old comment I wrote.

To sum: not every commandment in the Mosaic law is doing the same sort of thing. We can divide them into moral, ceremonial, and judicial commandments.

Only moral laws apply to us today. If you like I can flesh that out more, but really, see the comment I cited above.

In the new testament, there are several passages that speak against homosexual sex:

Romans 1:26-27: "For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error."

1 Corinthians 6:9: "Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God."

Jude 7: "just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire."

Of course, we should not discount the possibility that the scripture might be irrationally and immorally hateful.

You are free to think so, of course, but, given that @NelsonRushton describes himself as a Christian, I think it's likely that he has a higher view of the scriptures than that. Jesus and the apostles, at least, took the scriptures very seriously.

Not to derail, and it's possible that you're still right, since I don't know what exactly constitutes hatred for you, but I do think the scriptures are pretty clear that homosexual sex is bad.

Important enough question for a derail, IMO. What constitutes hatred, for me, is taking carnal delight in the pain and loss (or prospective pain and loss) of another person. This is as opposed to indignation, by which I mean making a judgment that someone's conduct is immoral and, if it rises to a certain level, calls for punishment. In that light, my case is twofold. First (as I think @Felagund anticipated),

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. [Matthew 25: 42-45 KJV]

Jesus doesn't say "I was in prison for something I did not do and ye visited me not", or "I was in prison for a minor offense, and you visited me not". The people who count as the least of our brothers include people who have actually committed a major offense. So I think it is consistent, and indeed only right, to judge an action as a sin without hating the person who committed it. If my brother drove home drunk from a night on the town, or even murdered someone, I could acknowledge that as wrong, or gravely wrong in the latter case, without hating him.

Second, the Bible does condemn homosexual sodomy. Just as strongly, it condemns witchcraft, idol worship, working on Saturday, cursing your parents, eating meat of an animal that been strangled, consuming animal blood (e.g., blood sausage), premarital sex, and many other things which call for the death penalty under Mosaic law. Some of these prohibitions, including idol worship, consuming animal blood, and eating the meat of a strangled animal, carry over explicitly into New Testament law [cf. Acts 15]. Bible believing Christians, as a rule, do not take all of those seriously as sins, let alone call for death by stoning for all of them -- so they have to square with that one way or another.

But of all ways to square with it, to arbitrarily pick one of those alleged sins and lift it up as an abomination on Biblical grounds, while discounting or ignoring the rest, and then to use that capricious choice to justify hating another person, is not only hypocritical but blasphemous -- insofar as it also recklessly puts your bigoted words in God's mouth. Yet, as a group characteristic, that is what Evangelicals [my people] have historically done, and to some degree continue to do, in large numbers by comparison with the general population. I'm not saying we all do it or ever did; I am saying that (1) we did/do it significantly more than our outgroups in the Western world (e.g., white collar Democrats), (2) those of us who do not vocally acknowledge that are part of the problem.

The people who count as the least of our brothers include people who have actually committed a major offense.

Yes, certainly. Jesus associated with prostitutes and tax collectors, etc.

Second, the Bible does condemn homosexual sodomy. Just as strongly, it condemns witchcraft, idol worship, working on Saturday, cursing your parents, eating meat of an animal that been strangled, consuming animal blood (e.g., blood sausage), premarital sex, and many other things which call for the death penalty under Mosaic law.

It's useful to understand what's going on under the mosaic law. Laws are conventionally divided into three sorts: moral laws, which apply universally (e.g. Thou shalt not murder); ceremonial laws, which were for Israel as a church, roughly, and so no longer apply post-Christ (e.g. food laws); and civil laws, which were for Israel as a government (e.g. cities of refuge).

I take it you would argue that the law against homosexual sex is a ceremonial law, and now longer applies, whereas I would argue that it is a moral law. The biggest reason I would argue that is the repeated affirmation of the same in the new testament (Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, Jude 7, 1 Timothy 1). I'll note that I don't think that the prescription of putting them to death is necessary, as we are no longer living under the civil law of ancient Israel.

You bring up the case of the various commands in Acts 15.

I think Paul illustrates that he treats some of those differently from others. 1 Corinthians 10 is illuminating: Paul speaks against partaking of what's sacrificed to idols, but not because there's anything problematic about it itself, but for the sake of others. Compare that to early in the epistle, where Paul talks about sexual immorality as inherently problematic.

So it's at least plausible to me that some of the commands in Acts 15 are intended to be for the sake of peace and people's consciences, but I'm not entirely certain. But I think other parts of the new testament are sufficiently clear that sexual immorality is bad, and homosexuality shows up in lists forbidding things that are clearly considered to be inherently bad, not bad for the sake of others.

But of all ways to square with it, to arbitrarily pick one of those alleged sins and lift it up as an abomination on Biblical grounds, while discounting or ignoring the rest, and then to use that capricious choice to justify hating another person,

Is this really a depiction of what is going on typically?

I'm young, so I can't speak to what was common decades ago, and it's entirely possible my circles are unusual, but in most cases where I've heard people condemn homosexuality, they're usually quick to affirm that heterosexual lust is also bad, lest they be misunderstood.

I take it you would argue that the law against homosexual sex is a ceremonial law, and now longer applies, whereas I would argue that it is a moral law.

Not so much. I don't emphasize the distinction. I think the need to emphasize the distinction arises from a position that the Bible is infallible and that its stated precepts are invariably eternal, which I do not believe. Do you?

The former, not the latter.

@NelsonRushton: But of all ways to square with it, to arbitrarily pick one of those alleged sins and lift it up as an abomination on Biblical grounds, while discounting or ignoring the rest, and then to use that capricious choice to justify hating another person,... Yet, as a group characteristic, that is what Evangelicals [my people] have historically done, and to some degree continue to do, in large numbers by comparison with the general population @Felagund: Is this really a depiction of what is going on typically?

Note that I didn't say "is" and I didn't say "typically"; I said historically in disproportionate numbers. Indeed, I don't see it as much as I used to -- but, then again, I don't hang out with as many old rednecks as I used to. Here is one anecdote. In 1997 a gay nightclub (the "Otherside Lounge") was bombed in Atlanta, Georgia; 5 people were injured, one critically, though no one died. A nominally Christian group calling itself the "Army of God" claimed responsibility. That much is not indicative; there are whackos who identify as everything and their existence in small numbers doesn't necessarily reflect on anything. What is more notable is that I heard someone who was not (viewed as) a whacko, on his regular radio show, minimize and nearly excuse the bombing on the grounds that it targeted gays. Before you read the next paragraph, I invite you to guess whether the speaker was (a) a leftist pundit, or (b) a Christian pastor.

Of course he was a Christian pastor. His words as I remember were, "You may have heard that a gay bar was bombed in Atlanta recently. Well, I wouldn't worry about that too much. God bombed Sodom and Gomorrah." This was 1997 in Athens, Georgia (1 hour from Atlanta). It was not a hot mic moment; it was apparently his planned public remark on the event, which he expected to be assented to en masse by likeminded brethren. Now that was a tail event (that is, strange and unlikely); it surprised me to hear it, and even a person my age (56) from the deep South could have gone their whole life without hearing anything that bad from someone in a position of public authority. But what is more important is that, given that somebody did say it, I think any reasonable person who has been around that block would guess (b) rather than (a) -- because we know which group is more likely to have that kind of tail event, and the tail is indicative of milder tendencies of the same sort in larger numbers, of which I saw many.

So it's at least plausible to me that some of the commands in Acts 15 are intended to be for the sake of peace and people's consciences, but I'm not entirely certain.

It's plausible, but I don't think the Christian rednecks who despise gays in the name of God have thought it out far enough to get off the hook; I don't think any Biblical argument justifies the actual level of focus they put on sexual deviance as a sin relative to others that would be rationally subject to the same argument, and I don't think their animus is targeted wholly at the acts rather than the actors. (Nonetheless, those people would be voting with me on almost every living political issue of today -- and if there is ever another civil war in America we will be on the same side. In fact, if it comes to a shooting war, I wouldn't be surprised if they are about the only ones on that side that actually fight.)

Laws are conventionally divided into three sorts: moral laws, which apply universally (e.g. Thou shalt not murder); ceremonial laws, which were for Israel as a church, roughly, and so no longer apply post-Christ (e.g. food laws); and civil laws, which were for Israel as a government (e.g. cities of refuge).

I think the word "Conventionally" here appeals to a vague and precarious authority. I know that there are Hebrew words for the three sorts of laws, and that the idea of giving them different levels of force in modern times goes back at least to Aquinas -- but his scriptural basis for it [Summa Theologica, Question 99] seems pretty thin to me, and most discussions of the distinction that I see give no scriptural basis at all. Anyway, whether it is Aquinas's argument or not, I would be curious to know if you (@Felagund) know of a Biblical argument for the distinction in force, for us today, between the three kinds of laws.

I'll note that I don't think that the prescription of putting them to death is necessary, as we are no longer living under the civil law of ancient Israel.

This suggests that you believe it was necessary and proper, in ancient Israel, to judicially stone people to death for homosexual sodomy, idol worship, sabbath breaking, adultery, premarital sex (in the case of women), etc. To be clear, is that your view?

So that you know where I am coming from, this is my view of scripture (now in my Motte bio): I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I believe there is noise in the signal.

Yeah, fair. People are too eager to inflict harm on their opponents.

I think the word "Conventionally" here appeals to a vague and precarious authority. I know that there are Hebrew words for the three sorts of laws, and that the idea of giving them different levels of force in modern times goes back at least to Aquinas -- but his scriptural basis for it [Summa Theologica, Question 99] seems pretty thin to me, and most discussions of the distinction that I see give no scriptural basis at all. Anyway, whether it is Aquinas's argument or not, I would be curious to know if you (@Felagund) know of a Biblical argument for the distinction in force, for us today, between the three kinds of laws.

I wasn't aware of there being three Hebrew words, that's interesting. That said, you wished for arguments that they have different levels of force.

Reading Hebrews will make it really obvious that there was a ceremonial system which is no longer in force.

The new testament continues to make commands, which are called the law (see, for example Jesus summarizing the law), so some is still in force in some sense.

That only leaves the question of whether the civil law still applies.

I would think that the commands to live peaceably with all and to submit to those ruling over you would suffice to show that executing the civil law is not necessary, at least for those who are not the ones not in power.

I don't know that I have anywhere to point off the top of my head for those in power, but seeing as it describes what they are doing as for the good of the people, I assume that means it's okay with other sets of laws than the exact set of penalties prescribed in the pentateuch.

Does that suffice? If you have any particular ones of those that you're curious, I could more explicitly cite the passages of scripture I'm gesturing at.

This suggests that you believe it was necessary and proper, in ancient Israel, to judicially stone people to death for homosexual sodomy, idol worship, sabbath breaking, adultery, premarital sex (in the case of women), etc. To be clear, is that your view?

I'd have to double check for each of those that stoning was what was enjoined, but in the spirit of answering the question in the sense in which it was meant, yes.

So that you know where I am coming from, this is my view of scripture (now in my Motte bio): I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I believe there is noise in the signal.

I think it's worth noting that Jesus and the apostles seemed to treat the scriptures as of incredible authority, even in minute matters. Assuming Jesus knew something about what he was talking about (seems reasonable, if you think he's God and all that), and assuming that was conveyed to us accurately (seems reasonable, as it wasn't super long, and was by eyewitnesses), then we probably should be taking scripture pretty seriously.

Yeah, fair. People are too eager to inflict harm on their opponents.

I don't think this admits enough. I do not believe that Gays, especially gays who are not gay/trans activists, are "opponents" of Christians; they are people who many conservative Christians view as wrongdoers (for example, I think it would be very strange to call, say, Douglas Murray, an "opponent of Christians"). More importantly, "People" at large do not profess a sacred precept of loving their enemies, so it is not egregiously hypocritical of "people" to be eager to inflict harm on wrongdoers.

I'd have to double check for each of those that stoning was what was enjoined

Here you go:

  1. homosexual sodomy: If there is a man who sleeps with a male as those who sleep with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they must be put to death. They have brought their own deaths upon themselves. [Leviticus 20:13, NASB]

  2. idol worship: If there is found in your midst, in any of your towns which the Lord your God is giving you, a man or a woman who does what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, by violating His covenant, 3 and that person has gone and served other gods and worshiped them, or the sun, the moon, or any of the heavenly lights, which I have commanded not to do, and if it is reported to you and you have heard about it, then you shall investigate thoroughly. And if it is true and the report is trustworthy that this detestable thing has been done in Israel, then you are to bring out to your gates that man or woman who has done this evil deed, that is, the man or the woman, and you shall stone them to death. [Deuteronomy 17: 2-5, NASB]

  3. sabbath breaking: “For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy day, a sabbath of complete rest to the LORD; whoever does any work on it shall be put to death." [Exodus 35:2, NASB]

  4. adultery: If a man is found sleeping with a married woman, then both of them shall die, the man who slept with the woman, and the woman. [Deuteronomy 22: 22, NASB]

  5. premarital sex (in the case of women): “But if this charge [of premarital sex] is true, and they did not find the girl to have evidence of virginity [on her wedding night], then they shall bring the girl out to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death, because she has committed a disgraceful sin in Israel by playing the prostitute in her father’s house; so you shall eliminate the evil from among you. [Deuteronomy 22:20-21, NASB]

More comments

So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too? What does that life even look like? We're not all born to be sin eaters for our ingroups or large targets for our outgroups, and that shouldn't be an expected life trajectory. Most people are just humans trying to get by, and that is alright.

So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too?

Of course not. This all-or-nothing, fall-on-your-sword straw man was first thing the Devil ever said: "Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”"

Most people are just humans trying to get by, and that is alright.

It might be "alright", whatever that means, but it makes them lesser men. We (Americans) live in a relatively free, safe, and prosperous society because the founding fathers and continental soldiers answered the call of duty to a higher purpose than minding their own business. We owe them a monumental debt that we can never pay back. We can only pay it forward by living up to their legacy of duty and sacrifice.

"We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all." [Pericles]

"Of course not. This all-or-nothing, fall-on-your-sword straw man was first thing the Devil ever said: "Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”"

This is kind of the opposite of my statement. I'm not guilty because I don't stand up for every cause every time. The Devil also never said anything, because it isn't a real thing.

This is kind of the opposite of my statement.

These are the statements I am comparing:

  1. @AhhhTheFrench: So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too?
  2. The serpent: Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?

They are both phrased as questions; notably both use some version of "actually"/"really", and both suggest a narrative that, in order to do right, you have to go to onerous extremes -- which makes a great excuse to do as you please. Generally, I think it is a common pattern when someone is confronted with a duty, that they respond by saying, "What am I supposed to do, Give away all of my stuff? go around jumping in every time someone is getting bullied? Starve myself so kids in Uganda can eat? Never have any fun? Fall on my sword over every little thing? etc. etc. etc.

Your statements of "duty" were very declarative, should I not have taken that at face value? Perhaps they were only vague suggestions of possible prosocial behavior, but they were not phrased thusly.

Your statements of "duty" were very declarative,

I cannot tell which "statements of 'duty'" this refers to.

It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it.

This is where already being a depressive is useful: I've become depressed about much less substantial things, so I simply told myself that this was just my latest excuse.

I'm still depressed, but I don't have this totem in my head I can blame. Tomorrow I may not be depressed, regardless of how we do on Raven's Progressive Matrices tests.

If the worst version of HBD is true (I believe some version is but am agnostic about how unfixable some problems are), if the "crazy" Lynn numbers that even some DR folks seem to be squeamish about are accurate...fuck it.

In a sense, nothing "changed". We all knew growing up that Africa had a disproportionate share of failed states, as kids we believed Asians were better at math and like the two Asians we knew were and I honestly think the older, less educated generation believed in HBD and would just nod along here.

If anything, all it means is that I don't have to spend time reading the huge "it's not HBD it's..." corpus or feeling like I have to do something about it (my father is still fighting the good fight and laments that his constant complaints* have made his children cynical about joining him and trying to help the old country). Just move on and live the best life you can. Even if it was malleable, I'd probably have a minimal-at-best role in changing fate anyway. If it isn't...why the consternation?

If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink. Not because it doesn't matter and we can all be individuals. But because there's nothing else.

* One of his confessions was he felt embarrassed because he goes to the Westerners and asks them to take African agency more seriously, meanwhile even basics don't seem to be done and I quote "our economy doesn't amount to a hill of beans".

Are you African?

As far as I know he is.

I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?

There were many hundreds of African societies pre-Colonization with their own codes of conduct and methods for enforcing it. Genetic descendants from these societies may have a harder time conforming to English Common Law, but that doesn't mean that crime and poverty follow necessarily from a lower average IQ score.

I don't view it as a racial thing. Take race out of it and we can have more productive conversations with people outside the Very Online Right. Everyone knows that some people are smarter than others (even if someone believes everyone is smart in their own way, they have to admit that the child with Down Syndrome has less than most.)

How do we as a society accommodate this? How do we provide everyone with a role that challenges and interests them, while providing for their needs? How do we include everyone in the social contract, so that breaking the law becomes offensive to everyone? How do we ensure that top talent goes into the positions that need it, and these positions are rewarded enough to encourage the smartest people to do their best? How do we do this without screwing everyone else?

I'm not talking about changing laws, but first societal attitudes. We first have to agree that these are good things. Right now, the conversation shys away from acknowledging differences and puts everyone into the same grind together.

There were many hundreds of African societies pre-Colonization with their own codes of conduct and methods for enforcing it.

You don't need to tell me this. Pre-colonial Africa has been my main focus of study as an aspiring historian. I admit that even as a HBD-convert that one of the fallacies that the majority of that crowd seems to subscribe to is the idea that literally all of Black Africa was in the Stone Age pre-European contact which I know for a fact is wrong.

one of the fallacies that the majority of that crowd seems to subscribe to is the idea that literally all of Black Africa was in the Stone Age pre-European contact which I know for a fact is wrong.

I’m as deep into that “crowd” as anybody here, and I can say confidently that I have heard nearly nobody make anything close to such a claim. The existence of large-scale agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is well-known, as is the Bantu Expansion and the fact that the Bantu were able to achieve the level of dominance they did partly because of their mastery of metalworking. So no, your characterization of the “HBD crowd” is uncharitable and misinformed.

What is usually claimed is that nowhere in Sub-Saharan Africa do we find any evidence of written language, of the invention of the wheel, or of two-story buildings. Do you dispute these claims?

What is usually claimed is that nowhere in Sub-Saharan Africa do we find any evidence of written language, of the invention of the wheel, or of two-story buildings. Do you dispute these claims?

If your claim is that these things were not widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa or were more "primitive" than they were in another places then no I don't dispute that.

But to claim that those things were non-existent in Black Africa is just inaccurate. See Ajami, Nsibidi, Adinkra, etc.

/images/171234563718316.webp

So, how archaeologically well-attested are these? I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but I’ve also encountered a number of hotep-adjacent spaces where tendentious claims are presented as “facts that YT doesn’t want you to know* and then it turns out to be a massive exaggeration or an outright fabrication. (Or to be claiming for black Sub-Saharan the accomplishments of non-black peoples like the Egyptians, etc.)

I appreciate you engaging. My views on race and my generally unfavorable attitude toward blacks are well-attested and easily searchable in this community, but I’d be quite happy to have some intelligent and open-minded black individuals to engage fruitfully with here. I’m cognizant of the effect that spending as much time in the dissident-right echo chamber as I do can have, and if you can provide valuable correctives to any shortcomings in my knowledge, I would appreciate it.

Ethiopia did have a pre-colonial writing system, but Europe didn't independently invent writing either so this isn't really a win for whites. Even Amerindians have Europeans beat on the "invent written language" score. Europeans did probably invent the wheel, though it was invented only one time (not counting its invention in the Americas; score another for the Maya), and spread from there. I don't know where the idea that it's some super basic, easy "bare minimum" invention came from, to the point that "they didn't even have the wheel!" is a ubiquitous dunk on blacks from your crowd.

Not sure about two story houses.

EDIT: Here's a meme I've seen thrown around pretty regularly which implies that pre-colonialism, blacks didn't have roads, farms, or houses so it seems like somebody on your side thinks SSA was stone age prior to European contact.

Frequently when people feel this way about HBD, especially as it relates to themselves on a personal level, it's based on a misconception. A common caricature of HBD is that there's an identifiable property of "blackness" that has causal powers; almost as though black skin itself were some foreign organism exerting a downward pressure on your IQ, and if you could only shed your skin then you would unlock the full potential of your inherent abilities. This is completely incorrect.

The mechanisms that determine your IQ and other psychological traits are the exact same mechanisms at work in every other human, and at a purely physical level they have nothing to do with race. "Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race.

That being said. It is a corollary of HBD that the pervasive dysfunction seen throughout Africa and black communities worldwide is in part caused by genetic factors. You are within your rights to think that this is a tragedy - but what of it? We live in a world that's filled to the brim with tragedies great and small. People die of disease, accidents, and violence every day, rich and poor alike, wise or foolish, virtuous or ignoble. HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.

You may be interested in the emerging possibilities of genetic engineering to increase intelligence and other eugenic psychological traits; but this is fraught with its own philosophical quandaries.

"Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race...HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.

I think these are the sorts of things Westerners say because they have an atypically low focus on group honor. No man is an island, we all have a tribe and that tribe and its success matters.

"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters. Both in that the first affects individuals and that we can easily see it being otherwise. We know how to vaccinate groups, we don't know how to raise IQ.

All of this Coleman Hughes "focus on individuals" stuff is essentially an ameliorative tactic to save individualism and group agnosticism, but that only makes sense if groups are the broadly same. As the dissident right joke goes: "individualism and freedom for all (* obviously for 130 IQ Anglos)". On this view, "equality" and not caring about groups works because they just assumed power would be limited to those capable of handling it. And then everyone forgot range restriction and became optimists.

Once we actually accept that blacks can't be "130 IQ Anglos" all sorts of group judgments can flow from this that should concern any individual. For example: I'm African (my post history goes back so I can't be accused of being a troll - and you can probably find me on reddit with minimal effort too tbh). There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds. That argument has historically worked against me (which is why Western nations mainly took white people and didn't even consider African migration) and may again, if people come to believe it again.

Am I supposed to go "well, as an individual, this is not my concern"? Are my opponents supposed to say "oh, okay then"? I cannot escape my race except under the very system HBD destroys.

"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters

Most black people in america live perfectly fine lives by any standard, and would continue to do so under the policies suggested below because they're neither career criminals nor people who benefit from upper-class affirmative action. Nobody's "fucked".

There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds

I think it's very likely you'd pass the IQ test / be able to buy your way in under a better immigration system. Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?

Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?

Shit, that is a good point.

You absolutely raise valid points. I didn't have the time to treat the issue with the nuance it deserves, so I tried to find something brief that approximates my overall view. I do think that at some point you have to find a way to accept the things you can't change and carry on anyway. But there are still many possible attitudes that someone might take towards HBD, and I don't want to diminish the complexity of the issue.

I do understand the feeling of group honor (racial or otherwise), and I understand how it can matter even in cases where you're not "directly" impacted as an individual.

This is the sort of thing that's best worked out in an extended dialogue with the person in question, rather than me or anyone else pontificating about how you should feel.

People here have pegged me as a HBD supporter, but actually I think a lot of HBD is exaggerated or worse. A prime example is HBD supporters claiming that African countries have such low IQ that by Western standards most of them would be mentally retarded. That's a violation of common sense and shows that something's obviously wrong with the HBD idea. The only explanation I've seen is "well, retarded people do poorly for reasons other than IQ" which is also a violation of common sense.

As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians. If they're not going to do that, then they don't have the excuse 'we don't want smart black people to immigrate because regression to the mean'."

That's a violation of common sense and shows that something's obviously wrong with the HBD idea.

Why? Beyonce owns a sweatshop in Bangladesh that makes clothes and shoes. There are lots of modern industrial productions, including state of art modern electronics, in poor South East Asian countries. AFAIK there are none in sub-Saharan Africa. It's all minerals and crops. When intl megabrand grows something in Kenya, they don't really need local workforce, they need soil and climate. My common sense says that "mentally retarded" is accurate if they can't even sew shoes.

As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians.

The 5 IQ point advantage for East Asians is much smaller than 20 point IQ genotypic gap with most Africans. It makes entire sense to ignore 5 points gap while consideing 20 points gap. Also, East Asians countries strangely underperform in scientific output compared to their IQ. The 5 IQ gap is about Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. Malaysia, Philipines and Indonesia are much lower.

The only explanation I've seen is "well, retarded people do poorly for reasons other than IQ" which is also a violation of common sense.

Here is a blog post by Kirgegaard arguing this:

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/10/african-iqs-and-mental-retardation/

When people think of retarded people, they mostly have in mind someone who has Down syndrome, or a similar severe genetic disorder. … They usually suffer from some kind of syndrome, which is why it’s usually called syndromic retardation. But the more important point is that Down syndrome does not just make your intelligence very low, it also causes other behavioral defects. As such, people with Down syndrome are not representative of people with <70 IQ.

It was noted by Jensen:

Many of the latter [minority lower-class children], despite IQs below 75 and markedly poor scholastic performance, did not seem nearly as retarded as the white middle-class children with comparable IQs and scholastic records. […] EMR [educationally mentally retarded] children who were called ‘culturally disadvantaged’, as contrasted with middle-class EMR children, appeared much brighter socially and on the playground, often being quite indistinguishable in every way from children of normal IQ except in their scholastic performance and in their scores on a variety of standard IQ tests. Middle-class white children diagnosed as EMR, on the other hand, though they constituted a much smaller percentage of the EMR classes, usually appeared to be more mentally retarded all round and not just in their performance in scholastic subjects and IQ tests. I asked myself, how could one devise a testing procedure that would reveal this distinction so that it could be brought under closer study and not depend upon casual observations and impressions.

So in a sense HBD is exaggerated, because we have a (mis)conception of what a person 25 IQ points below the norm is like, which is skewed by those with quite heavy mental problems. Thought experiment: Imagine you are the person 2 standard deviations below the norm, simply because you are a 100 IQ person who stumbled into a neighborhood full of extremely bright Caltech/MIT students. There are things in which you notice a difference, like everyone seems to do math in their head quicker than you can tap on your phone to open the calculator app. Maybe you browse funny Instagram stories, instead of wasting your free time in obscure internet boards where users post walls of text about arcane topics. But in most ways you wouldn't seem "retarded" to the genius egg-heads, but them and you would socially interact quite normal.

As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians. If they're not going to do that, then they don't have the excuse 'we don't want smart black people to immigrate because regression to the mean'."

Can I translate this as "in an anti-HBD West, people don't cite arguments specific to HBD in their immigration policy"?

I'm pretty sure that the West wouldn't give Asians preferences over whites in immigration whether the West was anti-HBD or not. Exactly who the immigration benefits is far more important than any sincere concerns about how smart the immigrants are. For that matter, you don't even need HBD to say that current immigrants should be Asian because they're higher IQ, and nobody supports that, either.

The desirability of selective immigration follows from HBD, but the desirability of race-based selective immigration does not. It does mean it's a shortcut that can be beneficial, but that's all; skimming the cream of populations has generally worked for the US.

If you take migration to be about short-term goals like getting engineers, sure. If populations have different mean IQs and will trend towards them then no? Yes, your Nigerian quantum physicist is going to work great, what's going to happen in three generations? Especially given they might (almost certainly, in some countries like the US) assimilate into the existing non-migrant population of the same race...

That is the killer.

In any case, it doesn't need to follow in some absolute way. Historically what happened when the majority of Westerners had these beliefs is clear. That alone makes being concerned rational, and that alone makes the "focus on the individual" refrain unconvincing. People are not failing to understand individualism as the Harrisian-Hughesian argument goes. It's not confusion, it's experience.

Uh, if Nigerian engineers with a 115+ IQ are intermarrying with AADOS women(I don’t think they are; I believe they get mail order brides from the same tribe, and prefer their children to intermarry with whites over AADOS) then it would boost the AADOS IQ. Regression to the mean doesn’t happen that quickly.

then it would boost the AADOS IQ.

Yes. However, for some cases it will increase AADOS IQ but decrease USA IQ.

Regression to the mean doesn’t happen that quickly.

All (or most) regression happens in 1st generation.

If populations have different mean IQs and will trend towards them then no?

Not really, no. Regression towards the mean says a 120 IQ person from a race with a low-mean-population IQ probably has a lower genetic contribution towards IQ than a 120 IQ person from a higher mean IQ population, but they're still going to have a higher genetic contribution towards IQ than their population mean.

Historically what happened when the majority of Westerners had these beliefs is clear.

Historically, skimming the cream has worked out well for the US. Our problem populations are where there was probably selection for currently undesirable qualities (American descendants of slaves), and fairly unselected populations (overland migrants who get a LOT of help)

I don't know that regression to the mean is all that much stronger for African geniuses than non-African geniuses. It might not be stronger at all, for all I know.

Also: in three generations the human race will be either extinct or so radically changed as to make such considerations irrelevant. Or we will be ruled by hyperintelligent but benevolent marmots. (It's the first one)

I'll be honest, I agree with @Ben___Garrison below that this post is just a little too pat, reads just a little bit too much like someone trying to flatter the preconceptions of certain Motters, and indicates just a little too much awareness of those issues to be someone new here. And there are a few other flags I won't discuss publicly that make me suspect you are a return guest.

That said, we prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, and if you are sincere and who and what you say you are, I apologize for the suspicion, but understand that we deal with trolls and LARPers regularly. But I would earnestly encourage you to engage and talk more.

As to your actual point, as someone who believes HBD has much explanatory power (but I'm not a "hard HBDer," meaning I don't believe black people are just genetically predestined to always be an underclass or that it's evidence we should divide and segregate ourselves racially), I would echo what other people below say, that first of all, being a member of a group that is, on average, disadvantaged does not necessarily say anything about you as an individual, and that secondly, there's no reason to think that average gap can't be narrowed over time, and third, even if it is permanent and unfixable, we are all human beings and the goal should be to give everyone the opportunity to live their best lives, with equal justice under the law. Sounds hokey, I know, but I really believe it.

I've commented before (much to the derision of the some of the other HBDers) that I think one problem with HBD is that even if it is true to the fullest extent, it does not present a clear course of action, because "push all the races apart and create bantustans for the inferior ones" is morally repugnant, and also it would be nearly impossible to get the "inferior" ones to just accept that yes, they suck and it sucks to suck and they should accept their lot.

So, as an (alleged, sorry, I am still suspicious) black man, what would you suggest should be the message to the black community, if you really believe that the worst implications of HBD are true?

I'll be honest, I agree with @Ben___Garrison below that this post is just a little too pat, reads just a little bit too much like someone trying to flatter the preconceptions of certain Motters, and indicates just a little too much awareness of those issues to be someone new here. And there are a few other flags I won't discuss publicly that make me suspect you are a return guest.

I swear I'm not a troll, and I'm genuinely new here. I came here mainly because I know it's a forum where most users seem to be pro-HBD but not in a 4chan racist way

So, as an (alleged, sorry, I am still suspicious) black man, what would you suggest should be the message to the black community, if you really believe that the worst implications of HBD are true?

I don't know, and that's the problem

My essay for next weeks thread is mostly going to be about racial sociology, black existentialism, the origins of "wokeness", why this HBD-realization is so devastating to me, and why it can often be hard for us (black people), to separate facts about the group we belong to from assessments of our individual self-worth. So stay tuned for that ig

As advice, one thing that is not explicitly banned but somewhat frowned upon and which makes people suspect a troll is writing a top-level post and then not engaging at all with the comments. You can't answer everything, but most regular people would at least be reactive for a short while after writing the OP.

it does not present a clear course of action

  1. cease race-based affirmative action (and affirmative action more generally)

  2. smart people should have more kids

  3. embryo selection (possible today), more direct genetic engineering (possible within a few decades)

None of these necessarily follow, though I agree that they are all things that one is more likely to think if it is true.

because "push all the races apart and create bantustans for the inferior ones" is morally repugnant

It's morally repugnant socially (I can't speak on the roots of your personal belief) because we believe that the bantustans are the outcome of white neglect and oppression (even if we place the blame far back in the past or through some dubious logic : e.g. "white flight" where white people just ruin neighborhoods by...leaving)

If tomorrow we just accepted that Black neighborhoods aren't bad because white people took the secret suburb sauce but because low-IQ blacks (disproportionately large group compared to other races) ruin them in a variety of ways then the entire situation changes.

Even if white people were not inclined to abandon blacks, it would be a totally different relationship - certainly there'll be less apologizing for enforcing the law. And things like desegregation and white flight can now be reframed - white people were simply trying to escape the predictable consequences (violence, destruction of legitimately earned wealth) and so on.

White people are then victims, and the fact that the entire federal apparatus is causing excess deaths and loss of opportunity for white people for simply being genetically lucky is what's morally repugnant.

This is exactly the argument the DR makes.

That's the motte.

The bailey is something more like literal bantustans which are kept in a state of immiserated oppression and subjugation, with little chance of escape even for the hardworking and conscientious, because "they deserve it" and because you despise them.

That is what I think all DR projects would actually lead to, no matter how high-minded and reasonable they pretend they want to be.

The bailey is something more like literal bantustans which are kept in a state of immiserated oppression and subjugation, with little chance of escape even for the hardworking and conscientious, because "they deserve it" and because you despise them.

On the understanding that I am vehemently opposed to the end-state you describe here, it's worth asking how much worse that end-state is than the status quo. "immiserated oppression and subjugation" seems like a reasonably applicable description for the current black underclass environment, and we are probably losing a fair fraction of the hardworking, and probably not a few of the conscientious too.

The current situation is very, very bad.

What does DR stand for? Sorry

"Dissident Right", generally perceived to be white-identitarian.

I don't think it's going to be good (because many normal people have their own spiteful ideas) but if we ever hit this hypothetical (re)acceptance of this theory, it won't be DR Twitter accounts running the show.

YMMV by region I suppose.

Eh, it really shouldn't matter to you all that much if you are personally smart, that's suggestive that your family is also relatively smart and that (assuming you pick a good partner), your descendents will also be decently smart (regression to the mean notwithstanding, unfortunately the influence of your family on your children doesn't "factor through" you completely).

It's just so unfair

Life is what life is. There are highly intelligent people rotting away in the third world while 80 IQ clueless imbecilles in western welfare states who only have it in them to take out more than they put in live decent and comfortable existances. No amount of rage from me or anyone else at this injustice is going to change this so I've come to accept it and move on. I have extended family in the former situation too so it's not like this is just a theoretical problem for me.

(I also believe intelligence gives rise to moral worth, I'd happily eat a chicken - provided it was slaughtered in a Halal way - I very much would not eat a chicken that had human level intelligence and would be horrified if such a being was treated like how we treat chickens today)

Eh, it really shouldn't matter to you all that much if you are personally smart, that's suggestive that your family is also relatively smart and that (assuming you pick a good partner), your descendents will also be decently smart (regression to the mean notwithstanding, unfortunately the influence of your family on your children doesn't "factor through" you completely).

I could see it mattering to someone if they have groups that they identify with that are more extensive than their family.

I also believe intelligence gives rise to moral worth, I'd happily eat a chicken

I technically agree, but there's such a huge difference between even the least intelligent 1% of humans and chickens that it doesn't matter. Everest is a lot higher than Ben Nevis, but they're both obviously mountains and not molehills.

I mean, I don't want HBD to be true either dawg, but I have to face the facts.

The most credible studies for average IQ in India peg it in the upper 70s or low 80s. We have a very heterogeneous population with some groups having significantly higher IQs than others, and no end of drama surrounding it, because in the absence of knowledge about HBD, it's inevitably attributed to classism, casteism, historical privilege yada yada. Hence almost 80% AA quotas in many things.

I don't come from an upper caste background, far from it, we just skirt above the borderline for being so low caste that I'd get some gibs from it, as opposed to just being fucked in the ass for no good reason.

The primary reason Indians have such a reputation for wits abroad is because the majority who have the ability to cross several oceans and settle there have some unusual combination of intelligence, entrepreneurship and courage. They're almost certainly more likely to be upper caste, to the point that Silicon Valley is beginning to notice™. For the wrong reasons, of course. Do you know why a lot of upper caste Indians in the West have such virulent disdain for lower cast FOBs? It isn't all rank casteism, many of them even from the more reputable places like the IITs are AA hires, and they represent a form of persecution or discrimination against the upper castes. As I must reiterate, I'm not upper caste for crying out loud, and my family were war refugees fleeing a genocide, but in this manner, all Indians who aren't lucky enough to be scooped up by AA are equally screwed in academics and even government employment, so I empathize more with the upper caste guys despite not being one.

But so what if my particular caste or ethnicity isn't the smartest? My family has no shortage of talent, and that's genetic too. They made the mistake of being conscientious professionals and deferring childbirth, which how you end up with high mutation load and thus me. It's not like there aren't any smart people in the black community, even if the odds are stacked against them from before birth. A lot of the dysfunction is cultural as well, how much, I have no idea. My main beef is with people who say it's all cultural and/or intentional discrimination, the latter being farcical in the US, given how much money is poured into attempts to uplift them, to no avail, which is in turn taken as a sign that the Bottomless Hole needs to filled with more $$.

While I mostly agree with @FeepingCreature, except on the issue of values, where I genuinely consider smarter humans to have more moral worth (though you have to be VERY retarded for me to think you have none, or undeserving of a life with minimum dignity), my primary issue with HBD denial is aggressive redistribution and racism of the gaps, but I've long advocated for genetic engineering to help solve the disparity. It's doable, without compromising whatever physiognomic features are dear to you if you really care. Iterated embryo selection is enormously promising, it could be even better if national genetic databases in the US and UK weren't so leery of letting researchers do IQ research on them, because of the implications. Still, that's largely moot, since we likely won't have time to deal with it before AI replaces even the most cognitively talented natural human and thus makes dick or brain measuring a bit redundant.

I've come to accept that India will probably never catch up to China. They're just smarter. But that's not much skin off my back. And it'll all be ogre soon enough.

Do you really trust those numbers? 70s is can’t tell left from right putting on shoes is a struggle range. That implies literally half the population is literally retarded.

https://www.themotte.org/post/898/smallscale-question-sunday-for-march-10/192964?context=8#context

While I can't speak as to the validity of the numbers in any rigorous manner, as my comment illustrates, not all people with low IQ are made the same.

India is really interesting. I just looked up a map of rich/poor Indian states, but for example Tamil Nadu, which is shown as quite wealthy, has relatively low Brahmin but high Dalit demographics. I would have expected the reverse.

Funny you should mention that, I recently went on a date with a psychologist whose doctor boyfriend was Tamil Brahmin, and was forced to breakup with her because his family threatened to disown him because he dared date outside the community.

In her words, his parents were adamant about upholding their tradition of marrying from very specific sub-castes within the wider TamBram community. If they chose their specific sub caste, then he'd end up marrying cousins, and so they threw a wider net.

Which turned up precisely one girl in all of India who met the criteria. And who was earmarked for marriage with him, regardless of what he had to say on the matter.

Anyway, despite being a dude who was apparently into examing her back and pointing out the perfect places to extract bone marrow, he lacked a spine himself. Either way, they take their endogamy fucking seriously, and thus have a lovely combination of incredible thalassemia rates and also very high IQs.

This post really gets my troll senses tingling. An account that's less than a week old posting about HBD, which is probably the most offensive topic a leftist would come across. Then starting said topic with "as a black person". Then not really saying much but vague agreement. I could easily see this post being the result of a leftist forum user from some other site saying "Hey guys, I'll go to that place where Nazis justify racism, and pretend to be a black man agreeing with them. Then they'll show us what they REALLY think!!!"

If this isn't the case then I'd suggest posting that essay type post sooner rather than later, as you'll get more interesting answers that way.

This post really gets my troll senses tingling. An account that's less than a week old posting about HBD

Doesn't help that he hasn't responded since...

he had a bunch of posts in the filter. I've approved them.

There was a "as a black guy worried about my low-IQ genes contaminating my white girlfriend and our future kids" post on the reddit SSC culture war roundup thread shortly before it was permanently canceled. I didn't bother responding to it, but it was so clearly bait. Just the perfect example of intolerable wrongthink.

This place is more rightwing than it was on Reddit

Agreed. We seem to somehow be undergoing reverse Conquest's second law...

reverse Conquest's second law...

I suggest we call it "Scott's Law of Witches" after this post. The outgroup refer to it as the "Nazi Bar Problem" but we don't want to promote "Nazi" as an epithet for right-wing views in the large gap between Mitt Romney and the actual NSDAP.

As far as I can tell, the motte is mostly pro-HBD and anti-equal protection laws. That makes us at least fellow travelers to what Nazi means in practice.

As far as I can tell, the motte is mostly pro-HBD and anti-equal protection laws. That makes us at least fellow travelers to what Nazi means in practice.

I think that a majority of mottians might agree with Scott Alexander that it is likely that the Ashkenazi Jews have some genetic intelligence advantage compared to most other ethnic groups.

"Pro-HBD" seems a weird term to describe that, it makes it sound like people pick their beliefs to signal group membership instead of what they perceive to be true. Like they are fanboys of some sports team.

I believe that the surface gravity on Earth is roughly 9.8m/s^2. I don't like this fact, and think it would be amazing if earth was less dense and had only 2 m/s^2 surface gravity. I would thus be annoyed to be called "pro-gravity".

My relationship to HBD is similar, except that I believe it to be more of a minor quirk than a driving force of history. What we should do about it is that we should try very hard to identify the relevant genes and then CRISPR the hell out of the next generation.

"anti-equal protection laws" can mean many different things. I am broadly for colorblindness and meritocracy, which means I am broadly against affirmative action.

To the degree that the state makes it hard to fire employees for stuff, I think it is probably more consistent to add ethnicity to other criteria like sex/gender, sexual orientation or even political leanings.

Being treated equally for these things by the state is non-negotiable. There might be a few mottians dreaming of turning the US into a "white ethnostate", and I don't particularly object to calling them fellow travelers of the Nazis, but I would be surprised to learn that it is a majority of them. "We should not hand out driving licences / passports / concealed carry licences / permissions to have kids to Males / Republicans / Lesbians / Blacks" sounds fucking un-American to my European ears.

I think one effect is that people with moderate opinions are much less likely to comment on a thread than people with strong opinions. People who argue about gender until the comment depth reaches 20 are likely either feminists or men's rights people. People who argue about class relations ad nauseam are likely to be Marxists. People who thrive on HBD discussions are more likely to be (prescriptive) racists than people who thrive on discussions about economics are.

I don't like this fact, and think it would be amazing if earth was less dense and had only 2 m/s^2

Earth would have had no air, then.

Any organization that is structurally committed to letting rightists speak freely (such as this forum) is, in some sense, already an explicitly rightist organization, and would therefore be exempt from Conquest’s second law.

I miss when Free Speech was a heavily left-wing-coded principle. I expected more right-wingers to start adopting it as they realized they were losing control of the culture and could no longer be confident of not getting the short end of the stick, but I was way too naive about how many left-wingers I expected to avoid doing the opposite.

Some points:

  • Equality of treatment and moral worth still holds and is still valid, even in this world. One does not become deserving of human rights by virtue of capability.
  • All of Douglass' argument still holds. Intelligence does not justify dominance, especially given past experiences. We may all one day hand over governance to a being of superior intellect in the knowledge that it will rule us with greater wisdom than ourselves, but oh boy, white people ain't it.
  • Related: the more AI grows, the less IQ matters. Who cares if you're smarter or dumber than somebody else? The Singleton is smarter than all of us put together at any rate.
  • If we get a positive takeoff, IQ doesn't matter at all. You can just ask for more!

American slavery and Jim Crow might be relevant.

Assuming this is not just a troll, and so taking an opportunity to stand on a soapbox.

What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.

Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.

And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.

Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.

People can stand what is true,

for they are already enduring it.

If it is true, it does not mean it has to continue to be true, and knowing it is true is the fastest way to fix it. That's how you deal with it without becoming nihilistic.

Further, racial differences in IQ, if true, really shouldn't impact your (or anyones) assessment of you. Maybe you're top 1/1000 in iq, maybe you're top 1/100, but either way your actual intelligence is what it is. The ball you drew is red, regardless of it it came from a bag with 99% red balls or 1% red balls.

Assuming this is not just a troll, and so taking an opportunity to stand on a soapbox.

Hey, about what follows below. That's my line. I don't object harder only because I think its a genuinely important message, about having the courage to face reality being a necessity for fixing it, heh.

And I agree, group differences in IQ doesn't mean you can't assess individuals. If a black guy scored above average in an IQ test, why would I care that he's black? That's the toxic thing about AA and diversity hires, they make it difficult for the genuinely talented to stand out, and the people discriminating against them are correct to do so, in the absence of any way for them to prove that they're better than their compatriots.

Even if the Aitchbeedee hypothesis is true, that does not make black people's condition hopeless; nor does it justify slavery or Jim Crow laws.

It means that nature herself is racist, and reparations are owed in the form of IQ-increasing genetic engineering disproportionally paid for by white people and East Asians.

It means that nature herself is racist, and reparations are owed in the form of IQ-increasing genetic engineering disproportionally paid for by white people and East Asians.

I genuinely think that if it were presented in these terms far more white people would be open to the idea of reparations: "Gnon was cruel to you, and to atone for our slavery we are going to raise you to the same level as ourselves" <- Very few people could reasonably object to this.

I have no problem presenting it in those terms, and would far prefer it to handouts or AA. It's just that we're gonna have to wait a bit longer until it's an option.

If every African-American woman was paired with an average IQ 'white' breeder, and the offspring selected for behavior and darkness, it would only take a couple generations to close the gap.

Nobody really wants to solve the problem.

Sperm is almost infinitely scalable, just use Clarence and a hundred other high-iq black people.

Clarence Thomas? He is noticeably more light-skinned than average US black. So the result would be whitening, too.

wait a bit longer until it's an option

What are we waiting for? The filters that are likely responsible for the disparities evident today are still available, they're not used.

What filters?

It's much harder to deny that individual genetic differences in IQ exist than that group differences exist - the science on the former is, in fact, settled. And if one views race as little more than different distributions of genes caused by ancestry, what's truly different about being low IQ because your two parents were vs being low IQ because you're of a certain race? In either case, an identifiable group of people is noticeably dumber. So, race HBD or not, the moral problem persists anyway, replace "race" with "class" in your post and little changes.

And "fruitless all along" - not at all, few hereditarians claim blacks didn't benefit significantly from desegregation and civil rights, few claim the IQ gap didn't close at all. And genetic enhancement is coming!

Also, just a guess, decent chance OP is a troll.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats