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Chrisprattalpharaptr

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Chrisprattalpharaptr


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
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				The Mountain ch. 08: The Mountain
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


A lot of people are clearly downvoting the idea rather than the argument; I've been perhaps too quick to assign you to this general category.




I don't vote on any posts.




Your questions scanned to me as a fairly impressively-polite phrasing of 'are you full of shit' (sincere appreciation there; it's an art) and to be blunt I just didn't experience any desire to satisfy you about that.




The mods generally take a dim view of your phrasing.




What I'm talking about is kind of a broader sense of mutation load. Like, abstract it up a level or three; I'm not sure how many. It's a general concept, and principle, and with yesterday's post I bet you can see where I'm suggesting the pieces might be tied together.




Abstracting it out from something concretely genetic to general 'fitness' implies that you know some (at least for some local maxima) 'wild-type,' which I'm very skeptical of. Both of it's existence, and your ability to understand it in a meaningful way.


More broadly, particularly without references I can follow (feel free to recommend a paper or book), your posts are mostly a series of just-so stories. I could easily write a just-so story how the optimal social structure is a group of genetically superior Alphas ruling over inferior betas-epsilons social strata rather than whatever you propose. Or how Chinese are mathematically gifted but fail to be creative from centuries of curating rice paddies rather than swashbuckling adventures on the high seas (but you beat me to it this week).


And you chronically ignore huge environmental influences on most of the traits you discuss, the inverse error of blank slatists who ignore genetic effects. Any complex trait you study will have significant gene-environment interactions, and the things you want to discuss are almost certainly several levels of abstraction away from genetics. Your core assumption that people with different genetics will necessarily experience the world differently is unsupported, so far as I can tell - the last time I raised it, you didn't convince me. If you want to convince me - write fewer words and less syllogism, and provide more hard data. Every post is rife with all of these issues, and I don't have time to comb through 20,000 words a week to write a reply.




So looking at it that way, I think the divergence comes in line three: "Good times make weak men." Yes, but also no! Good times make new men who are better in some ways and worse in others. Then comes the winnowing. See?




No, I don't see. What is your evidence for this?


Venetians grew obscenely rich relative to their Italian neighbors as a trade hub with the orient, plenty of peoples lived in harsh environments (polar regions, deserts in Australia and Africa, Tibet) without genetically selecting themselves into Fremen ubermensch, indigenous nations given guns conquered others without, many of the strictest selection pressures of the last millennium have been infectious diseases rather than anything you care about. You'll necessarily add epicycles to your argument (Australian aborigines never conquered the globe because you need a harsh environment but not too harsh?), but it doesn't matter, because it's all just made up and I can just as easily make up convincing sounding things as you.


I believe your data in the lab studying butterfly psychology or whatever, but the problem is in the application to human history/genetics/sociology. Even were you an expert in all of those fields, which I don't think that you are, our knowledge is significantly more limited than the absolutely deterministic fable you're telling.




Thank you for the rigour. Please keep it up if you don't mind, even considering that I've been a less-than-stellar host to you thus far.




Are you Russian? I get the same feeling talking to Ilforte/Dase. The Russian genotype and way of experiencing the world seems to favor verbose and beautifully written arguments, and disfavor concision and data. Give me more data, and I'll probably participate more.


For example: I've always wondered what would happen if you could run a Lord of the Flies experiment with 2-3 year olds. How long until they redevelop language? Tools? I presume you think we're genetically superior to the people of antiquity, so would it be significantly faster than the millennia it actually took us? Would they form similar social structures to their parents (per your example of 'Tropicals' giving any surplus to their extended family), or would it be stochastic/determined by their environment and numbers?


For what it's worth - if we could run the experiment above, I don't think it would come out anything like you'd expect. Are you aware of any natural experiments along these lines?