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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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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.

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