GBRK
14hr ago
Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive."
We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.
thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are
Childhood nutrition is a lot more complex than "calories in, IQ out." Culturally variable diets also impact development, and the western diet--particularly concentrated in poor westerners, including blacks-- is particularly bad. Plus, diet has epigenetic effects. It's not enough for your parents to be well-fed; relative to your genetics, you will grow up stunted if your grandparents weren't well fed.
Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials,"
That exact blogpost proves that SES is a confound-- you can see the line going up for higher SES in blacks. Given the explicit and abundant evidence of existing confounds, the null hypothesis shouldn't be "assume blank-slatism by default, and everything we can't explicitly point to as coming from confounds must be because of genetics."
I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.
To be clear, the fact that evidence for hybrid vigor is shaky is evidence against genetic differences in racial IQ. If you'll let me use symbolic logic...
A: There exist race-based differences in genes that code for IQ B: When genetically distinct populations hybridize, hybrid vigor results. C: We observe hybrid vigor
A + B ⇒ C
So ¬C ⇒ ¬(A + B)
Therefore if C is false and B is true, that implies ¬A.
I'm aware that the following could be used as an argument against B:
It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size,
But also, I'm having hard time squaring that with the standard HBD viewpoint where racial differences in IQ are due to differential selection effects-- which presumably lead to roughly equal levels of mutational load overall (barring particularly inbred populations). If racial differences in IQ do exist, it would be as the result of selection for alleles (and novel mutations) that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing, but still bounded by other adaptions to local climate and food variations that sacrifice IQ for survivability in other ways. That's exactly the sort of thing that should cause intra-race susceptibility to heterosis as a function of masking deleterious alleles.
this interesting chart,
Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there. I wouldn't rule out there being some difference in IQ-mediating genes between races because it would be extremely weird if there was net zero selection effects on intelligence everywhere, but I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds. That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage. Someone on the motte once suggested breeding brahmins and Ashkenazi's to see what would happen and I have to admit that it would be the funniest possible twist if actually mass immigration was because some secret society of benevolent galaxy-brained racists decided to take the idea of eugenicizing their way to peak human performance seriously, instead of constraining themselves to nazi dog show fanatic inbreeding retardation.
GBRK
2d ago
And that without skin in the game of some form
The children belongs, from birth, to the united states of america. They cannot renounce their citizenship without paying an exit tax. That is skin in the game. The phrase " entitling the child to benefits that might well be unavailable in the home country" is logically incoherent on its face because america is the child's home country. The child doesn't get any extra special bonus benefit for illegally immigrating-- the child is just an american citizen, and always has been, and gets no more or less liberty or responsibility than any other american citizenship.
And therefore creating benefits for the baby by necessity creates benefits for tge family that created the baby.
No. Not, "by necessity." As a practical measure. There's a difference. From the moment the child is born on American soil the USA arrogates the right to seize the child from their parents, put it in protective custody, and kick its parents out of the country. The USA doesn't usually do that because it rarely makes sense to force taxpayers to raise the child instead of its parent, but the right to do so exists, is sometimes applied, and is uncontroversially constitutional. (There are laws that limit how often the government does this in practice, but the very fact that they are laws, rather than amendments, is the proof in the pudding). Parents are not their children, and children are not their parents. Whether the parent has any right to be in the country has no bearing on whether the child has a right to be in the country-- the child's citizenship belongs to them and them alone. Abrogating someone's rights based on the behavior of their relatives is simply not compatible with an individualist, democratic state.
GBRK
2d ago
I'm aware of that-- pending confirmation that I actually understood Crowstep's position and we weren't just talking past each other, I planned to argue that assigning people special hereditary rights is fundamentally incompatible with democratic civilization and the notion that "all men are created equal".
GBRK
3d ago
The gist of your argument is, "illegal immigration is bad. Receiving the benefits of having a citizen child is good. If we link the latter to the former we are giving people good things for doing bad things. This is unjust." I disagree with the premise (illegal immigration is better than legal immigration because they have to pay taxes but don't get welfare), but admit that it's logically sound. It's also, however, missing the point. Birthright citizenship isn't about the immigrant, it's about the baby. Yes, those children benefit from schools and healthcare-- but so do the children of american citizens. Neither the child by blood nor the child by soil have a "right" to that education or healthcare, but we as a society have pragmatically and compassionately decided to invest in our children in the (well founded) hope that they will one day repay the favor. And in the meantime, we expect our children-- of citizens and noncitizens both-- to earn their rights to vote and run for office, as delimited by the laws that make explicit our social contract.
If you think that education or healthcare are bad investments, you're welcome to argue for that. If you think that illegal immigrants should receive fewer benefits for giving birth to citizen children, you're welcome to argue that too. If you think our social contract asks for too little in return for too much.... well, I'm already pretty sympathetic to that position. But that's all orthogonal to my argument that blood confers no special qualities relative to soil.
GBRK
3d ago
It obviously does and these children legally are entitled to it. I'm saying that they shouldn't be.
I think you believe that citizenship is an entitlement that belongs to the parent, rather than the child, and that they distribute it according to their will. In that model, it would make sense to say that, mechanically, "giving a child citizenship" is equivalent to "giving their parent the right to make their children citizens." Consequently, you perceive birthright citizenship as a reward to illegal immigrant parents.
Is that accurate?
GBRK
3d ago
It's deeply physical.
Implying that dirt isn't? Implied that a people aren't tied together by living together in the same place? This entire argument is 100% special pleading.
GBRK
3d ago
Illegal immigrants (quite rationally) do treat first world citizenship as a prize and lie and cheat their way to getting it.
Even if I were to accept that description of illegal immigrants as being accurate, it still fails to describe the children of illegal immigrants. Babies are not rewarded by citizenship, they are entitled to it.
It's crazy to criticize magic soil when apparently you believe in magic water. Having a particular genetic sequence or ancestral tree doesn't establish responsibilities and liberties any better than touching a particular patch of soil. Actually, it is explicitly, legally worse at transmitting those things.
GBRK
3d ago
Surely, justice demands there must be some quantity of sweat expended over some period of time before we recognize a deep tie of kinship and mutual responsibility?
the way you're asking this question conflates the mother and child, but that's the very point I'm arguing against. Certainly, the mother has only expended a very limited amount of sweat relative to what they've produced over their entire life-- but the child, at that point, has given literally everything they have to america. Even then, it's fair to say that we want another 18 years of sweat out of them before we extend them any greater liberty than the right to exist on our soil, just as we do for the children of legal inhabitants. Dipping my toe into the child-separation debate, I concede that it makes sense to say, "either leave the child with CPS or renounce its American citizenship to take it with you when you're deported." I'd disagree with that policy on practical/utilitarian grounds, but deontologically find the position blameless.
GBRK
3d ago
Framing citizenship as a "reward" is completely nonsensical. Citizenship is the codified form of the chains of responsibility and liberty that bind individuals and their communities together. Whether someone is born to illegal parents has no bearing on whether they dutifully maintain those chains. You're correct that dirt isn't magic, but you're completely ignoring the fact that blood isn't either-- citizens by Jus Sanguis don't have an intrinsically stronger claim. Rather, it's mundane, ordinary, sweat that ultimately cements the body politic together, and the children of illegal immigrants donate plenty of theirs. Understanding that, America grants them their citizenship without regard for the the sins of their fathers. And that would be the right, and just, and honorable way to do things even if illegal immigrants and their children weren't an economic net positive.
(I could accept the argument that America shouldn't extend citizenship to people who don't work or pay taxes in america. But only if you apply it globally and say that at the minimum America should ban dual citizenship for everyone, and at maximum all expats should be given nansen passports.)
GBRK
5d ago
I feel like Aella unleashed a sort of Rule 34 for gimmicks: there is no niche so stupid that some e-thot won't try to exploit it.
In a weird way I kind of respect it. Blogging while being an e-thot is an argument from ethos-- it's the opposite of self-censorship, and presents you as someone with no need to tell reputation-preserving lies. Call it the Milo Yiannopoulos phenomenon: being visibly and openly a member of the "outgroup" of a particular ideology makes you that much more credible when speaking about it.
GBRK
6d ago
A high number of FTMs I've known have at least stated they're autistic
Yeah, that's part of the reason why I'm only assigning a 1-5% probability of this being true. I could come up with an argument along the lines of, "autistic women do better with men than schizoid women" but that has its own problems.
GBRK
6d ago
Part of this satisfaction could also be gaining a new social group.
Yep, that's what I'm addressing with the
and joining a dedicated community
bit. The autism compensation culture is my explanation for why they join the "trans" group specifically. Sure, they can join a wargaming group and have fun with fellow autists, but reinforcing autistic behavior makes the social deficits in the rest of their life worse. trans groups, meanwhile, teach them to be pro-social at least when dealing with LGB people and white liberals.
I think that this "estrogen cures autism" analysis is false, for the simple reason that this reads like confirmation bias and (ironically) an attempt to systematize the effects of estrogen in a way directly counter to any notion of the author becoming less autistic. That being said, I'd assign something like a 1-5% chance that they're onto something, and that something would be really interesting if it was true, so for a bit I'm going to be arguing from that perspective.
Before anything else, let me establish that the "problem" with autism is difficulty communicating .That predictably leads to social deficits and-- guess what-- trans people report high levels of social isolation and loneliness (This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism, but I'll get to that later). Meanwhile, estrogen increases oxytocin and oxytocin reducing autism symptoms and oxytocin decreases the felt impact of social isolation. So immediately, there's a pretty compelling link between autism->feeling lonely->taking estrogen->feeling better that explains the "success" of the trans phenomenon, including the high rates of treatment satisfaction. This blog post goes one level deeper, and proposes an autism-schizoid axis that underlies the taking estrogen-feeling better link... and additionally, explains why trans people feel better even without taking hormones. Namely, if their problem is an excess of autistic traits, even just adopting the cultural behavior of a more schizoid culture is enough to make up for part of their social deficits-- and joining a dedicated community focused on doing the same thing reinforces that effect even further.
FTM trans people don't really make sense if you assume that autism compensation is the mechanism of action for transsexualism, but with the autism-schizoid axis they start to make more sense... being schizoid causes it's own form of social deficits that presumably testosterene helps compensate for. We know that testosterone encourages altruistic behavior under certain circumstances... I'm not sure how that would help it counter schizoid personalities, but it's certainly suggestive of something going on.
Put all that together with the fact that transexualism has increased pretty much in tandem with the simultaneous rise of autism/ADHD diagnoses and hormone disruptors like phthalates, microplastics, high fructose corn syrup, etc. and you can put together a comprehensive, self-consistent explanation for why this entire social movement in happening.
Again, I don't actually believe the article. Even if the author is right, I think their methodology is so wrong as to be useless. But it is interesting, and for that I have to respect it.
GBRK
9d ago
It's worth remembering one critical fact:
Owning nukes changes the strategic calculus away from conventional... But dramatically tilts it towards nuclear war. Because if you have nukes, suddenly it becomes reasonable for any hostile country to perform a counterforce first-strike to destroy your nukes before you could use them. The existing members of the nuclear club have conventional militaries and/or alliance networks of such size as to makke that unappealling... But an isolated, belligerent ghaddafhi might have actually lead to the destruction of libya in nuclear fire.
GBRK
15d ago
Something I've never been clear on is how this dynamic is controversial
The long run dynamics are less clear cut because immigrants also demand goods and services and also start businesses, and density + cluster effects produce economic efficiencies that lead to long-run economic growth and therefore employment. The even longer-run dynamics are even less clear cut... Sometimes thanos-snapping your workforce ends in the economic productivity growth after the black plague. Sometimes it ends in the permanent economic slump of eastern europe.
GBRK
16d ago
Not an argument, but I have a hard time accepting that the "bomb iran" people are working in good faith from solid natsec principles-- because the majority of rabidly pro-israel partisans I've met are republican and therefore at least defacto ukraine-skeptic. Like, I can intellectually understand that there are honest to god neocons out there voting for Holden Bloodfeast whenever possible, and in principle I sympathize quite a lot with them. But they seem to occupy very, very little of the media environment I'm exposed to. Pairing that with my supreme lack of faith in the current administration, I have this kneejerk response that any ammunition we're throwing into the middle east is probably being wasted compared to the alternative option of putting it into Ukrainian stockpiles.
GBRK
16d ago
Naw, I just have the right combination of impatience, paranoia, and astigmatism.
GBRK
16d ago
What do you suppose America's worst and dullest are doing right now
They're in prison, living off welfare that illegal immigrants are ineligible for, or employed in sectors that actually have to check for employment authorization and consequently have pay more as a result. For example, cashiering at big box stores. Walmart actually make an effort to hire people with work authorization (though Warlmar's contractors are a different story.) American citizens have strictly more negotiating power than non-citizens so for the same level of intelligence and conscientiousness, they're eligible for better jobs. Or to restate that in another way-- for an equivalent job and pay rate, the noncitizens are probably going to be smarter and more conscientious (because if they weren't, the employer would just hire a native in their place.) See: every story about attempting to hire americans for farm work instead of illegals.
Actually, I can personally attest to this being true because I spent a few weeks detasseling corn as a teenager. The attrition rate for the program was incredibly high and included myself-- american teenagers just would not stick around. I found out later that the bulk of the work ultimately ended up being done by migrant labor. So self-evidently, the immigrants were more conscientious than the natives.
GBRK
17d ago
- And if you did hire high IQ high conscientiousness people to do the work,
That's the illegal immigrants. Given the same IQ and conscientiousness, they're far more likely to do low-paid farm work than american citizens for what should be obvious economic reasons. If we got rid of the illegal immigrants their likely replacements would be stupider and less conscientious.
edit: I remembered that the electric unicycle community actually keeps a record of every single death (doable since there are so few of us). Looking over the list might be illustrative about what's actually liable to cause fatalities since it's possible to actually know the exact ratio of what causes deaths. Excluding the unicycle-specific stuff (cutouts, battery fires) most of these deaths seem to feature traffic going in a single direction and then things getting squirrely and the rider veering off course. The one big exception is the car that went too fast through a stop sign in a rolling stop. As a consequence I'll amend my opinion of rolling stops to specify that to qualify as a rolling stop the vehicle should be moving at a speed that's strictly unlikely to cause a fatality even if a collision actually happens. I've been hit by a car while on my bike at something like 5-10 mph and just walked it off, no biggie, so that's probably the threshold.
You should turn on your turn signal every time you switch lanes or otherwise would be expected to use it, even if nobody is around.
Yes. Trivial effort and keeps you in the habit.
Stop signs and red lights need to be fully stopped at, even if nobody is around and you know there isn't a red light camera.
This should be two different questions because red lights and stoplights are used in significantly different contexts. Red lights tend to be on busier intersections with faster traffic. If you want to go straight, you should always stop and stay stopped even if there is no other traffic around because the consequences of screwing up are very likely to be death. Though it you want to do a right turn (on a road where it's legal to do so) then it's acceptable to do a rolling stop instead of a full stop, due to that being intrinsically safer-- if traffic hits you, it's unlikely to be a head-on colission, and if they were coming from the opposite side (for example because of a left-turn signal) then an accident will happen in lower speeds.
Stop signs are used more in quieter areas with smaller speed limits. rolling stops are acceptable if no one is around.
Speed limits should be followed to the letter when possible.
No, because speed limits are deliberately set too low with the expectation that they will be moderately violated by even law-abiding citizens, so that cops have a pretext to stop people who are driving at the "optimal" speed for a given area but in an unsafe manner. As proof, in my state you don't even receive any penalties for going up to 5 over, so the speed limit is really "speed posted plus up to 5mph" which is much more reasonable. Going faster than that is also acceptable if done temporarily while passing-- reducing how much time you spend in a truck's blindspot is ultimately safer for everyone.
The left lane is for passing only
No for city roads. Yes for highways with some caveats-- if the road quality is much worse on the right side, or if you're going to an exit that's on the left side, or if no one is around anyway, it's okay to be in the left line.
if you are in that lane and not passing and someone cuts you off
Douchebaggy in proportion to the level of aggression and danger in the cutoff, but acceptable in many cases. Ideally they should have found a safer way to merge in but like... I get it.
or rides your bumper, that is fine.
No. Bumper riding is always unsafe and unnecessary. (And also, illegal-- I got written up for following less than two bumper lengths once. Lawyer got it dropped though, always plead to transfer to a nonmoving violation haha.) That's especially the case when it's at night and your headlights might be shining into their rearview, blinding them and preventing them from safely getting out of your way. People with either eventually figure out that they should move to the right, or alternatively if they're being assholes on purpose being an asshole back is just likely to cause an accident.
If someone does not make room for you and you need to come over (and properly signaled) you can cut them off guilt free.
Ideally, you should slow down instead and merge in behind them. But if that's not possible for whatever reason, and your merge won't require them to slam on the brakes, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. (You should probably still be a little guilty though.)
I can break some of these rules (or others) but other drivers should not.
Everyone should be expected to break these rules in a situation where that maximizes the overall safety of driving. And at the same time, everyone should be driving so as to minimize the need for others to break these rules, and not doing so forfeights the right to complain in inverse proportion to how safe other drivers are while violating these rules.
scissors statements
On quieter streets with good visibility, it's okay to U-turn like a motherfucker at any provocation.
Every driving test should include a LIVE segment on understanding and using hand signals. Aside from cyclists, I've seen cars use these when their turn lights are off.
Motorcyclists should be allowed to legally split lanes. (But if they die, they die.)
GBRK
23d ago
All his modern books have the same plot and the same relatively mediocre writing style but they're still fast, enjoyable reads. Grab on the next time you have a 3 hour flight-- they're peak airplane fiction.
GBRK
23d ago
Deficits aren't free money. You either pay for government spending via mostly property or income taxes now, or via an effective wealth tax-- inflation-- later.
If neiither the republicans nor democrats raise taxes, then the federal reserve will raise them on their behalf. There's no way out of paying the piper.
In point of fact I do support open borders, so I wouldn't strictly rule out everyone else eventually getting citizenship. But citizenship comes with responsibilities as well as rights. Anyone who wants to come to America should. Anyone who wants to stay in America should contribute. The only reason to give any baby citizenship is because we assume that they will contribute to the common project of our nation. Now, I'm pretty darn sure that the median baby-- including the median immigrant baby-- is eventually a net-positive to america. But if I wasn't, I would advocate for increasing the responsibilities of citizenship until we could be confident that they eventually will be.
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