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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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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.

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