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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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The DA is generally considered to be much more competent. The Western Cape has been doing the least badly of all the provinces. The DA is fairly centrist, economically, and opposes affirmative action and the radical redistribution programs suggested by more extreme elements within South African politics. Unfortunately, it also has something of a reputation of being the "white people's party." Its base is certainly not entirely white, as it has been getting around 20% of the vote, of late, which is more than double the entire white population, but that is not entirely unfounded.

If you're a bayesian reasoner, you might have a hypothesis - "white people have a higher average IQ than black people for genetic reasons, and this is a large contributor to political stability and economic success". You might have other hypotheses with other explanations for poor political and economic conditions in Africa. And, reasoning about history is hard, there's a lot of contingency and it's hard to determine causation, but if you add up all the small updates it the probability for the first hypothesis seems to steadily move up. So, as a genuine question from someone who isn't confident either way - what are some pieces of evidence against that hypothesis? Not about IQ and genes, that's been done to death , but specifically it as a contributor to political and economic stability. Similar anecdotes to the quote are fine.

This isn't evidence, exactly, but it seems pretty plausible that western institutions and culture (e.g. having more individualistic and high-trust societies) made it easier for those of european descent to flourish, making their success greater than the effects of the IQ gap alone?

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