GBRK
7mo ago
You complain about "poor human capital" and "dysgenics" seemingly ignorant of the fact that if you're right, hinduism-- specifically, any proscriptions regarding caste separation-- must be the direct cause. The very existence of an "upper caste" requires the existence of a lower caste. And once you've created one, you can't turn around and complain that that caste then turns around and wants to become the "upper" caste themselves.
GBRK
7mo ago
It's worth prefacing this post by saying that obviously any government restriction on speech (minus libel, slander, perjury, andtrademark violation) is abhorrent.
But anyways, this is basically how every well-ordered society throughout history has behaved. Powerful, high-status men restrict the use of the mating strategies that lower-status men have a comparative advantage for. Women tacitly or explicitly support them because they don't want weak, low-status men making sexual advances that don't directly renumerate them. Painting anti-catcalling measures with the "feminist" brush is accurate to the point of describing that women benefit from them, but misses the fundamental truth that this behavior reinforces the position of already-powerful men, rather than dismantling it. That being said, it's still perfectly rational for feminists to support this. A matriarchal government would also seek to impede the reproductive success of low-quality vs high-quality men, and an anti-catcalling measure would still be in the cards; it's a rich-get-richer tactic rather than an explicitly patriarchal one.
GBRK
7mo ago
Cherry picking but free lunches are just unironically a good thing. Investing in childhood nutrition has a demonstrably positive return, and it's also pretty basically the sort of coordination problem a well ordered government is designed to solve. Good childhood nutrition improves heath and intelligence with diffuse social benefits extending out well beyond just the parents normally required to pay for it. Maybe you have some implementation bugbear, or just want to complain about the quality of school meals in general, but I'm still pretty sure that free school lunches are both a good idea in principle and a net positive as actually implemented.
GBRK
7mo ago
The old adage that goes, "anything you say should be at least two of: true, kind, useful" accurately encapsulates the tradeoff. The vast majority of communication benefit from being all three of these things... I wouldn't want, for example, and untrue, unkind, useless pasta recipe. But at some point along the optimization curve you start to hit serious tradeoffs. A well-ordered mind know when to make any given tradeoff... For example, It's best to be true and useful when describing gun safety, and it's best to be kind and useful when interacting with a grieving relative. But choosing what to optimize for at any given time is a matter of strategy and deep context, which AI still struggles with.
GBRK
7mo ago
I didn't spell it out, but it should be obvious. If it is appropriate to ban a class of weapons because they are the weapons with which "[m]ost crimes and accidents happen", then a successful ban on that class will result in another class becoming the weapons with which most crimes and accidents happen and are therefore OK to ban. Thus such a principle leads to banning all weapons.
If the slippery slope principle worked on guns, then banning military-grade weaponry would have resulted in banning all guns. But it hasn't. Because anyone who isn't a rabid partisan understands that it makes sense to ban particularly harmful types of weapons while allowing particularly useful kinds of weapons to remain in their owner's hands. My argument isn't fundamentally about banning weapons-- it's about rethinking which harms and uses are statistically greater.
The second part is not empirically true
Are you saying, "you lack empirical evidence" or "I have empirical evidence to the contrary." In the latter case, I want to see it. To pre-register, videos of good samaritans with guns won't convince me of anything, but some sort of statistical analysis pointing to a lower aggregate death rates for robbery + rape + murder victims would convince me. An analysis that only considers people who avoid getting murdered by having a gun wouldn't; due to the base rates of robberies + rapes vs murders, I suspect the reduced likelyhood of getting murdered in a murder would be far outweighed by an increased likelyhood to get murdered in a robbery or rape.
and walking around with an AR-15 all the time is simply inconvenient
Yes, that's part of what would overall reduce gun crimes. Sure, some criminals would still have pistols-- but far fewer, compared to now, because so much of the demand would be absorbed by other kinds of weapons. In a country that bans guns, if you're going to buy a guy anyway, it might as well be the best fit for the job, so black market suppliers have plenty of incentive to exist and offer the right kinds of weapons. In a country that only bans small, concealable weapons, most would-be robbers still have access to larger weapons and would go for those over the hassle of finding a black market and buying a perfect pistol. That would in turn shrink the size of the black market and make pistols even harder to acquire.
GBRK
7mo ago
We do that, gun misuse shifts to larger guns, someone draws a circle around some subclass (e.g. "assault weapons") and moves to ban that one, lather, rinse, repeat.
This isn't actually an argument. If you hold "people asking to ban guns" as an intrinsic evil, then your solution is to ban every gun before they do. If your actual intrinsic evil is "banning guns" then trading a ban on large weapons for a ban on small weapons is at worst net-neutral and at best (as I argued) allows for the better fulfilment of the socially useful properties of guns.
Also, most categories of misuse are linked to specific formats of weapons. A crew served weapon is great in a civil war, but not so great for robbing a convenience store. It's much easier to commit suicide with a pistol than with an M-1 Abrahms.
Personal defense is not.
An assault weapons is a better defense than a pistol against any assailant you can see coming in advance-- and banning pistols makes it much easier to notice and be wary of criminals in the first place. Meanwhile, against an assailant that gets the jump on you, a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless. Trying to pull one out is all too likely to transform a robbery into a murder-- either because the assailant will notice your suspicious motion and shoot you, or because a smaller weapon is easier to take away from you. The deterrent property of having a big, obvious weapons would result in net better outcomes than using cowboy kung fu to quickfire your pistol straight through your pants.
In sum, banning small guns and legalizing big ones would both save lives AND provide a bigger deterrent against government overreach. It's the ideal compromise between 2A advocates and gun control crusaders. I'm not being facetious here, this is my actual position.
GBRK
7mo ago
I might eat a lizard but its never come up.
I've had alligator nuggets before. Tastes just like chicken.
GBRK
7mo ago
We should ban guns below a certain size limit for everyone except police/government agents/licensed bodyguards but otherwise legalize larger guns, including crew-served and mobile weaponry. Most crimes and accidents happen with smaller, easier-to-conceal, easier-to-misuse weapons. Most legitimate uses (hunting, home defense, overthrowing a tyrranical government) are equally or better served by larger weapons, or similarly prevented by less lethal weapons (defending against an assailant who doesn't have a gun of his own.) And of course if someone pulls a gun on you, trying to brandish your own weapon is possibly the stupidest thing you can do. The only two downside to this policy is the specific edge case where A pulls a pistol on B and good samaritan C has no choice but to pull out their concealed weapon and shoot A before A realizes that C has a gun-- but the amount of time C successfully saves A would probably be far outweighed by the amount of times where A doesn't pull out a weapon in the first place because everyone saw the guy carrying an assault rifle from a mile away and everyone already put their shotguns on the table to dissuade any funny business.
"But muh terrorism."
What did you think fighting against a tyrannical government looked like? Essays? Papers? Any measure intended to let agreeable people fight a disagreeable government will equally allow disagreeable people to fight a disagreeable government. The only way to stop a bad guy with a HIMARs is a good guy with a suicide drone.
GBRK
7mo ago
That's an artifact of how we draw the groups. For example: america has pursued a strategy of making sure high-skill manufacturing and the production of prestigious goods happens internally while lower-skill manufacturing and production is exported elsewhere. But you can't do the former without the latter. Drawing the circle around our entire production chain would drop the average IQ and average wealth... and also make it obvious that the people on the higher-paying end of the chain benefit from having lower IQ people available to do more menial jobs.
Perhaps you mean something like, "Self-identified, self-organizing cultural group benefit from having a higher average IQ," but that's of minimal comfort because "American" (or for that matter "French" or "British" or "German") isn't and has never been the primary unifying cultural identity for all the people claiming it as a title. Individual subgroups-- whether ethnic, or religious, or ideological, or class-based, will look out for their own interests at the expense of others.
GBRK
7mo ago
Once we know how genetic variants that Nigerians have affect IQ in f2 hybrids in WEIRD countries, we can get much smaller samples of genomes of Nigerians in Nigeria and extrapolate what IQ they would have if brought to WEIRD countries.
Makes enough sense to me. That's exactly the kind of empirical question I want answered before I start accepting the conclusions of racial IQ science.
No, evolution doesn't work this way.
It doesn't work that way when there's no optimal phenotype. But sharks and dolphins have both converged in bodyplan quite a bit despite a massive disparity in how long they've been in the water. Yeah, there would be some noise-- it's highly unlikely that every population has exactly the same average IQ, and random mutations taking a while to filter out is a plausible source of noise. But if you want to postulate that there are different selection effects on intelligence, then optimal intelligence has to look different for any given group, which rejects the premise of a single "golden brain" that every group is optimizing for.
and had much weaker selection than past,
I'm embarrassed to be citing my dad here, but he is an expert (at least in plant genetics). And he's told me that population growth increases selection effects. Beneficial alleles reach fixation faster. (I used to think otherwise, that selection was strongest when populations shrunk, but he convinced me to believe otherwise.)
Therefore we can assume that the industrial age has been an era of increased selection. That doesn't mean selection specifically for IQ, but I wouldn't rule it out. I'm aware that implies we should find IQ differences between populations who were late or early to industrialize, and I'm not saying we haven't, or wont-- just, as always, I'm being cautious about assuming our data is valid until it starts pointing to a unified theory of how it all works out.
in probably existed at some point in past Poland and Italy had difference because Italy became agricultural earlier. Now effect of agriculture reached saturation.
This claim that "saturation" has or can be reached is predicate on my accepting this "golden brain" thing that I still haven't, and directly contradicts the "cold winter" theory you mention later.
Do you know Madagascar was populated long after agriculture and its population originated from mix of agricultural SE Asians and agricultural Africans?
No, l was more thinking about how it had an era of feudal kingdoms and metalworking, plus trade relations with the far east.
A large part seems to be explained by Cold Winter Theory.
I would be interested in seeing validation with within-ethnicity IQ variation over climate range... whether Southern Whites are actually dumber than Northern Whites, for example. At a glance I can't rule it out-- California and Louisiana have similar average IQs despite very different ethnic distributions.
GBRK
7mo ago
but to an entire population of superhuman Han Chinese
Expecting this to be applied uniformly over an entire population is just entirely wrong. We already have a problem with the overproduction of elites now. There are societal benefits for having widespread high IQ, but the personal benefits are mainly from having a relative advantage. If the current elite class doesn't heavily restrict how proles can use this technology, then a out of the upcoming genetically enhanced generation, ambitious lower-class climbers will seize control of the governing apparatus and then shut the latter behind them. In the "best case" scenario (scare quotes because IVF involves abortion and abortion bad), this technology will be restricted to removing disease-causing variants from the population. (With "diseases" expanded to cover genes that cause aggression and ambition. "Testosterene-linked Psychopathy" or somesuch will be the new "Schizophrenia.") In the "worst" case, this technology will be illegal in a way that remains accessible for only the elites.
GBRK
7mo ago
if you were to estimate the level of care you owe to the following people
That I am obligated to owe? 10. Always 10. God is pretty explicit about this.
That I am physically capable of owing without supernatural intervention?
... admittedly less than ten in all respects.
But I don't think ranking people by how much you "owe" them makes sense. If you're going to rank people, rank them by your ability to help them. If you have a glass of water and a man is about to die of heat stroke, you should give it to him regardless of which of these men he is. You should also take the chance to restrain him, if he is likely to harm innocents, but in any case should help him survive. If you have a glass of water and ten thirsty man, give it to the man for whom it maximizes the chance of survival (plus survival chance multiplied by net good the man will do over his life, to the best of your ability to estimate second-and-third-order effects.) You should help your wife, or a member of your community, over a total stranger, not because the stranger is a distinct, worse class of human, but because you are more capable of helping your wife or community member. Your help goes further, and does more good in the world. But again, that's a matter of maximizing good, not about people being entitled to different levels of brotherhood.
...and that's why I give some, but not all of the money I allocate for charity to the GiveWell foundation. It's a very cost-effective way to do lots of good, but I'm also uniquely capable of targeting "good" when it's aimed toward buying gifts for my family, or drinks for my friends, or donating to my own local parish.
GBRK
7mo ago
He doesn’t care about the pieces of shit.
"Love thine enemy."
I know not everyone is a christian. But aside from the fact that everyone should be, it's just good game theory. A society that has made a pact to be utilitarian still has all the justification it needs to prevent bad individual behavior, but at the same time doesn't risk arbitrarily turning its instruments of judgement against someone without regard for their preferences just because they're doing something someone else doesn't like. But to defect against that is to ask people to in turn defect against you. And as proof for the danger of that, I'd point out that that's what the OP was literally doing against these "pieces of shit"-- presumably, reacting to some prior defection. I know, in turn, that no society can survive unilateral total disarmament... but disarmament need not be total, merely proportional. Spending less of your effort caring about bad people is still better than spending none of your effort.
Plus, it's just good virtue signaling. If a man will give his son a fish, that says little about what he'll give a beggar. But if a man will give a beggar a fish, he must be generous indeed to his sons! I would rather be friends with a generous man than a stingy one, and will therefore work harder to make it into the good graces of the latter man. That's the (nonreligious) essence of being a good person: the ability to gain long-term benefits from your reputation!
GBRK
7mo ago
My school teachers are not trusted to make good judgments.
"X" are not trusted to make good judgments is why any variant of corporal punishment/extra bullying/more police brutality doesn't work in person. We intuitively want to do this because through the vast majority of our evolutionary past we lived in small bands with a smaller population than dunbar's number where the discretion of a few enfranchised elders and warriors was a fair, just, and effective way to police our behavior because they could know everyone under their authority as a fully realized person. But while that remains an effective approach even now, in many small agricultural communities, it's indisputably a bad model for policing a city.
GBRK
7mo ago
We are the primary constraint on Israel's conduct during this war.
Maybe.
Without American restraint there already would be no one alive in the Gaza strip
Definitely not.
In a counterfactual world with full american support for israel, I actually seriously doubt they would genocide the palestinians. It's just bad geopolitics-- they're surrounded by arabs on an sides, and several of those arab nations can very credibly threaten to nuclearize.
I recognize that this was probably hyperbole-to-demonstrate-a-point rather than an actual assement of what israel would do, but it's worth remembering that "kill them all and salt the ashes" is historically not what most empires do with their enemies. that's especially true with succesful empires. A more realistic strategy looks like either "collaborate with local elites to suppress popular sentiment in response for tribute" or "raise up a local minority group to serve as a precarious class of administrators beholden to your own political order." Plus some sort of long-term incentives against childbirth and in favor of out-migration... were I genuinely trying to eliminate a particular ethnic group as a local political force, I would be encouraging late marriage age, spending a long time in foreign countries in guest workers, gating employment behind credentialing, enforcing wealth transfers from the young to the old, increasing the employment rate of women, and so on and so forth.
GBRK
7mo ago
ast Twitter! How often did it turn a profit? Why did these companies keep on getting funding at ridiculous valuations? Maybe it is a way of doing sentiment engineering at scale through various behavior modification tricks with Likes, upvotes, retweets.
TBH I'm kind of inclined to dout that the reddit board as an organism is "smart" enough to do that, except in the broadest sense. Like, with as much data and control as a social media site has, I'm pretty sure I could be way more effective at pushing my own ideosyncratic policies than any existing social media site actually does. Reddit at it's most ruthless just sort of vaguely boosts leftism in the exact same way that tumblr and pre-elon twitter did. Probably because if anyone in particular starts trying to press a view hard, there's too much disagreement on the specifics to get very far. Just imagine a world where, for example, the entire board of higher-ups at facebook were monarchists, including Zuck. They definitely have the power to make monarchism a credible political subcurrent in america... but I think they would sincerely fail to advance the cause of a particular monarch. Zuck would want himself, of course, but members of his board might be crypto-orleanists, or avowed bonapartists. In the process of promoting monarchism more generally, they'd have plenty of latitude to advance their own causes, in the end causing self-interference and averaging out.
GBRK
7mo ago
So a between-sibling GWAS of persons born in WEIRD society and one or both parents are mixed-races would find answer.
It would find a very limited version of the answer. Again, even if you find that the measured relative average IQ difference between groups A and B is caused by genetics, it doesn't necessarily prove that the measured relative average IQ difference between group C versus A and B is due to genetics. Even if you find a result that applies to "nigerian immigrants in america" the selection effects of immigration would invalidate extending the result to "nigerians in nigeria."
Why? Selection eliminates deleterious alleles from population. What constitutes deleterious depends on current environment. So you may find some population where selection for IQ-lowering alleles intensified but selection for bad running (or immune systems) relaxed.
If there's still a single target "golden brain" it doesn't matter how weak or strong IQ selection effects are for it-- every group will aproach it asymptotically over time, though some groups will take longer than other. For IQ to be traded off versus, say, faster running, you need to start thinking in terms of the actual tradeoffs for having big brains-- mainly metabolic, but also head size, injury likelyhood, pregnancy difficulty, etcetera. And when you start thinking about the biological tradeoffs, it becomes obvious that,
- The very recent past has had extremely different selection pressures than the agricultural and hunter-gatherer past
- There is massive intra-race variation between subpopulation lifestyles and when they entered, as a cohort, the agricultural and modern eras
Therefore, at least naively, any aggregate difference between races due to a hypothesized selective effect should be present itself even more sharply within a race. If you want to explain IQ differences between whites and blacks as being caused by earlier or later starts to settled agriculture, feudal societies, democracy, modern medicine, etcenera-- then those same differences should be that much more visible between, say, Italians and Poles, or Madagascarans and Kenyans.
I can't wholly rule out places where this dynamic actually seems to appear-- as in the sharp difference between Azkenazi jews and everyone elser. But at least so far, we've explained only a tiny part of sub-racial and inter-racial IQ differences this way.
Why? I'd agree that non-equal allocation of IQ points can be better, but the premise was to test different IQs.
If we want to test whether IQ is a good measure of individual intelligence, we want to hold as much as possible as a control versus either modern society or some primitive state of man so we can be sure that it's IQ specifically that's making the difference. Putting people with similar test-taking performance may or may not be a confounder. Probably random group allocation (and group sizes) would be ideal for eventually extracting the most interesting observations. Of course doing that on large enough scale to get good data for every possible combination of IQs is combinatorially impossible, but this whole thought experiment is impossible anyway.
Oh, I know for a fact that it was an AI. What's interesting to me is the exact nature of the AI. I can trivially imagine designing an AI moderator to actually promote community health; using strictly existing techniques, for example, you could prompt the moderator to consider previous user posts, and also to make public verdicts that can be upvoted/downvoted to influence future behavior on that user. (Like, if the moderator comments are broadly disagreed with, it self-deletes, but if the moderator "notices" it has a history of commenting specific types of well-regarded warnings to a specific user it's more likely to take action.)
But as I explained, reddit clearly isn't trying to improve community health.
GBRK
7mo ago
If I pick a general hobby discord I expect to find an overrepresentation of trans moderators, pride flags, and progressive mantras.
If that happens, it's because those hobbies are dominated in real life by those kind of politics too. Like if I wanted to get into guns, unless I make a specific effort to find liberal gun owners, any hobby group I join would more likely than not be catered to right-wingers.
The format of voice conversations vs format text posts is very different, but I think that's probably for the best. My local in-person rational group is dominated by progressive ideologies and that makes me hesitate to use particular phrasings. But by the same token, thanks to the social capital I have in the group, if I stick to the right frames I find that people actually give me fairly significant latitude on content because that's the social norm and I end up doing the same in return. I suspect discord will be the same way: you need a greater investment in social capital and respect for the particular social conventions of a given server, but in turn can have much greater relative disagreements than your average text forum without devolving into a flamewar.
GBRK
7mo ago
You have fallen for the intentional lie that White is a non-existent or retrospective categorization.
"White" is not the same thing as "European Descended". And as stated, your argument used the latter and not the former. And that's because White is a non-existent categorization, or at least, it's a fuzzy one, like "red" or "blue" or "heap". If european descent was what mattered, you'd think people would care about either defining an exact threshold at which it becomes meaningful or disambiguating between the relative amount of time ethnic groups have spent in europe. But no one cares about the relative admixture of neolithic DNA or about creating a specific hierarchy of european descent based on how late or recent one's ancestors migration into europe is. The main determinant is literally aesthetic. Whiteness itself was the intentional lie-- a deception against the anglo-french-dutch settlers of north america intended to convince them to expand their circle of concern to include first each other and then traditionally dissimilar groups like the italians, polish, and germans. It's a lie I have some sympathy for, of course. Creating new national identities that concentrically include the old ones is the only way for an expanding empire to survive. But there's nothing special about "whiteness" relative to "americanness" or "being-from-a-particular-part-of-Britain."
GBRK
7mo ago
Basically no one thinks, "the thing I want most is to make lots of money." But making money ultimately ends up being a very consistent vector along which behavior is reinforced. And while it's not going to be the most important vector for any given individual, it's one of the vectors nearly every individual has in common, which makes it a useful simplification for how organizations like corporations work.
GBRK
7mo ago
It tracks both of those things. How were you using that data?
I wasn't, but by my estimation the built in software features accurately figure out the state of my body. Maybe the software has just been updated since you tried your experiment.
Hereditary landowners love love LOVE bringing in exploitable labor from foreign ethnic groups. I can understand why right wing parties are opposed to immigrants. I can't understand why right wing parties aren't opposed to the farming and industrial interests responsible for encouraging their entrance in the first place. If they actually want to stop immigration, they need to eliminate the pull factors. Criminalise paying illegal immigrants. Criminalize accepting non-money payments from illegal immigrants. Lock up the suburbanites using maid services, and the factory and agrobusiness owners, and pretty soon illegal immigrants don't have a reason to stay in america. Even if they're feloniously on welfare... Healthcare, food, education, and housing is still cheaper back home.
Oh well. I like immigration so I guess this works out in my favor.
GBRK
7mo ago
This is actually extremely easy to do, it's European-descended
That's a retrospective categorization that people living in those historical eras might have accepted as descriptive, but wouldn't have felt was particularly accurate. Imagine if someone from 2060 zapped in and started talking about the importance of being a microsoft windows culture and how the decline of america was due to ios and android destroying traditional microsoft-linux values. Even if their argument convinced you, you still probably wouldn't see your OS affiliation as being central to your identity, and you still wouldn't be convinced to create systems of mutual support and intermarriage within your OS denomination.
But what do I know. Maybe you're an Arch Linux user.
To clarify, I'm defining "worse than useless" as "likely to increase your net chances of death on net." I'm aware that there are situations where brandishing a weapon would de-escalate the situation, but virtually all of those situations also apply to having a visible large weapon. Meanwhile, if you get in a stickup because the robber is under the impression that you're unarmed, trying to pull out a weapon is almost guaranteed to escalate, not de-escalate, the situation. Most probably not in your favor, given who starts with a weapon in their face
just-so stories are explanations; this is a prediction based on assuming rational economic behavior. That's not a perfect assumption, but if you want to attack it, you can attack it on its merits rather than by handwaving.
Anyways, robbers can already get concealable weapons that are plenty lethal. Meanwhile, you can't exactly conceal crew-serve artillery no matter how hard you try. I think it's a very safe prediction that concealability would go down, even if weapon lethality would go up, and also that concealability is a larger factor in death rate than weapon lethality. The only exception to that is people starting a revolution or civil war, which I admit is possible, but the whole point of the second amendment is to let people fuck around and find out if they really want to. Having a world full of concealable, low-lethality weapons is just the worst of all possible worlds-- poor security, and no chance of overthrowing a corrupt government.
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